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Joe Galloway: Bush Fulfills a Mencken Prophesy

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
McClatchy - Sep 19, 2007
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/19824.html

Commentary: 

Bush fulfills H.L. Mencken's prophecy

By Joseph L. Galloway

It took just eight decades but H.L. Mencken's astute prediction on the
future course of American presidential politics and the electorate's
taste in candidates came true:

On July 26, 1920, the acerbic and cranky scribe wrote in The Baltimore
Sun: " ...all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most
devious and mediocre " the man who can most easily (and) adeptly
disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency
tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the
office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move
toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks
of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White
House will be adorned by a downright moron."

My late good buddy Leon Daniel, a wire service legend for 40 years at
United Press International, dredged up that Mencken quote several years
ago and found that it was a perfect fit for George W. Bush, The
Decider. MSNBC's Keith Olberman highlighted the same quote this week. A
tip of the hat to both of them, and to Mencken.

The White House is now so adorned by Mencken's downright moron, and has
been for more than six excruciatingly painful years. It wouldn't be so
bad if the occupant had at least enough common sense to surround
himself with smart, competent and honest advisers and listen to them.
But he hasn't.

We inflicted George W. Bush on ourselves " with a little help from
Republican spin-meisters, slippery lawyers, hanging chads and some
judicial jiggery pokery " and he has stubbornly marched to the beat of
his own broken drum year after year, piling up an unparalleled record
of failures and disasters without equal in the nation's long history.

He inherited a balanced budget and a manageable national debt, and in
just over six years has virtually bankrupted the United States of
America and put us in hock to the tune of nine trillion dollars " a sum
larger than that accumulated by all the 42 other presidents we had in
two and a quarter centuries.

The man from Crawford, Texas, stood Robin Hood on his head almost from
Day One, robbing the poor and the middle class so he could give to the
rich and Republican. When the bills for those selective tax cuts, and
his war of choice in Iraq, began coming due our president simply signed
IOU's for a trillion dollars, with those markers now held by our
traditional ally communist China.

Although he titillated the Republican conservative base with talk of
his opposition to big government, Bush has presided over a far more
grandiose expansion of government than even Franklin D. Roosevelt with
his New Deal.

Faced with the tragedy of the 9-11 terror attacks " due in part to a
dense and impenetrable federal bureaucracy which didn't know what it
knew and wouldn't have shared it if it had known " the president
created a far denser, far less efficient and far more expensive
mega-bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security.

Having made one good move, attacking and toppling the Taliban and
running al Qaida and Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan in retaliation
for 9-11, the president and his crowd then turned away, half-finished
with Job One, and decided to "pre-emptively invade" Iraq, which had
precisely nothing to do with the attacks on America.

In one stroke of George W. Bush's pen America went from being a nation
that distrusted foreign entanglements and fought wars only when grossly
provoked to a nation that attacked first and without credible reason.

[Huh?! Joe Galloway, veteran reporter of the Laos-Cambodia-Vietnam
debacle, says this? Surely he also remembers Guatemala, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama.... etc. And those are just a few of the
shooting wars, no covert coups or proxy wars included. -NYTr]

That same stroke " and the ensuing five years of war in Iraq " wiped
out whatever remained of our reservoir of good will with the rest of
the world. The shining city on the hill donned camouflage paint and
went to war in the wrong place at the wrong time against the wrong
people.

Now George Bush could posture and strut as a wartime president; could
style himself The Decider, and could decide which parts of the
Constitution and Bill of Rights bought so dearly by generations of
Americans he would give or take away.

The mills of the military-industrial complex went into high gear, as
the defense contractors jostled for their places at a trough filled
each year with half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money. The
Republican political operatives milked them all like so many Holstein
cows and the Republican lobbyists romped over to Capitol Hill buying
congressmen by the baker's dozen to keep the pumps primed.

When one raison du jour for the war in Iraq failed " and all have
failed " President Bush and his general-of-the-month could always come
up with another to appease the gods of war and keep the machinery
turning.

Throughout this ongoing national catastrophe Bush has kept close around
him a coterie of incompetents and ideologues always on guard to defend
the indefensible and justify the unjustifiable. They brush the lapels
of the emperor's suit of gold and whisper that he is right and God will
make him shine in American history.

Perhaps the crowning blow came when it was revealed that The Decider is
now getting his strategic advice and counsel from none other than Henry
Kissinger, the author of genocide in Cambodia; wholesale slaughter in
Chile; abandonment of American POWs in Laos; betrayal of South Vietnam,
and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

God help us.  

[Joe, Mencken was a staunch atheist. He knew there wasn't any
imaginary friend to help us. -NYTr]



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