Too bad for corporate moguls that they can’t yet patent news events. If they could, they could turn the dedication ceremony for George W. Bush’s presidential library in Dallas last Thursday into one hell of a moneymaker. Big Pharma could market the DVD as an emetic.
That would be strong medicine indeed: those five living Presidents (one of them still serving) along with a motley of more exotic but equally noxious active ingredients: among others, Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, Ehud Olmert, John Howard, and Mikheil Saakashvilli.
If the whole event would make for too powerful or too bitter a pill, a less cruel and unusual variation should be equally “safe and effective”: say, a dialogue on the bunga bunga between Berlusconi and America’s homegrown rapscallion, Bill Clinton.
And for patients for whom other treatments fail, a heartfelt discussion between Blair and the guest of honor on neo-conservative, faith-based aggression should work just fine.
In an age like ours, the profits would be enormous – unless, of course, the fees demanded by the principals ate them up.
In time, of course, the patent would become worthless because memories of the sheer awfulness of Bush’s governance are bound to fade. So it is, for example, that Warren G. Harding nowadays arouses no ill feelings, only retrospective contempt.
But even in our amnesiac culture, it could be years before George W. is similarly regarded, especially if the ambitions of brother Jeb give the House of Bush yet another chance to wreak havoc at home and abroad.
It is not impossible. The fact that the pillars of the Republican establishment are, at this moment, contemplating a Bush candidacy shows that in our time anything, no matter how preposterous, can come to pass – even a third President Bush.
This is why we must never “misunderestimate,” as George W. might put it, the debased condition of our political culture or the power of moneyed interests to engineer outcomes they desire.
Those interests would probably look with favor upon another Bush in the White House. If they had any sense, they would realize that another Clinton would do them at least as much good.
The spectacle in Dallas was embarrassingly awkward too. Poor Jimmy Carter, always a gentleman and the one former (or still serving) President who would not now be wearing an orange jump suit in a more just world, had to struggle to find something nice to say.
There was a hint of that in Clinton’s ramblings too. One could not help but take pity on the two of them.
No matter how hard they tried and no matter how diligently they avoided Bush’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” and his war crimes, crimes against the peace, and crimes against humanity, they
could barely come up with more than faint praise for a few marginal expressions of “compassionate conservatism” in the Bush record.
I would venture that it was more than just a sense of duty that led them to try to find nice things to say; gratitude must have figured in as well. After all, Bush did all other Presidents a favor just by being there; he made them all look good.
George W. Bush was by far the worst of the lot for reasons more personal than political. Not only was he more incompetent than the others and more inarticulate; he was also indifferent to the harms he caused. To this day, he voices no regrets.
His problem is not just that he believes that being President means never having to say you’re sorry or that, as an over-privileged ne’er-do-well kid, he never learned how. The man genuinely lacks the moral and intellectual capacity to appreciate the harm he caused.
To be sure, for a while, he let neoconservatives call the shots. But this departure from the norm was more superficial than may appear. With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, a man of an earlier, more salubrious age, all the living Presidents assembled in Dallas are, and always have been, on the same page ideologically.
Bush made a bigger mess than the rest because he was in so much out of his depth even in that cesspool. As the lunkhead himself might have put it, he did “a heck of a job.”
No matter how long-lived the emetic powers of the Dallas celebration turn out to be, one thing is sure: it will give future historians a “hook” for anchoring interpretations of American politics in the present era.
When they look back upon that appalling spectacle, they will find the key maladies of our time revealed. It is one of those “grains of sand” in which, as William Blake said, one can see the whole world.
They will see the utter superficiality of the immobilizing differences that distinguish our two semi-established parties and the standard bearers they choose.
No two Presidents could seem more unalike than George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Nevertheless, it has long been clear that, in substance if not in style or tone, the Obama presidency is a continuation of the Bush presidency. Remarkably, this fact has yet to register in the political mainstream.
Republicans deny it for opportunistic reasons; they think that mindless, racially tinged, Obamaphobia works to their advantage. The 2012 election gave them cause to rethink their ways, but their attention span is short. No matter: for the most part, their strategy has worked.
Democrats are in denial because their fortunes rise and fall with Obama’s. Also, some of the people they purport to represent, coming from constituencies they cannot afford to alienate, still can’t get beyond illusions of “hope” and “change.”
With the benefit of hindsight, though, it will be apparent to everyone that, on April 24 in Dallas, Obama definitively settled the question of his Administration’s relation to Bush’s.
It was not just for reasons of decorum that he had nothing bad to say about George W. or that he didn’t even mention Bush’s (and now his) Iraq War — which, in an earlier life, he had famously and unequivocally called “dumb.”
It wasn’t even that he is still “looking forward, not back,” as he said early on, when supporters would question his decision to assure that neither his predecessor nor anyone else associated with the Bush torture regime would ever be brought to justice.
It is that he and Bush are really of one mind.
At first, it didn’t seem possible. However “disappointing” Obama’s early (and subsequent) appointments were and however floundering his first (and later) prevarications and surrenders, it never dawned that it might not be true that at least he would be, as people said at the time, “better than Bush.”
The question then was would he be better than Bill Clinton? The answer to that became clear from Day One: he would not. Instead, he effectively superintended a restoration of the Clinton presidency.
But after eight years of Bush’s wars, including his Global War on Terror (and therefore on civil liberties and the rule of law), and after all the Bush government did to enrich the plutocracy and neuter democracy, there was no going back to the halcyon nineties – when financial bubbles, deregulation, “free trade,” and wanton outsourcing sufficed to keep the plutocrats happy; and when sanctions and bombs were enough to keep the empire from imploding and the military-industrial complex sated.
Under Bush, the country changed – for the worse. It changed so much that, for a while, anything but Bush seemed good enough, and the Clinton years seemed like a Golden Age. Only lately has it become clear that changed circumstances, not changed politics, account for the ostensibly palpable differences that affected perceptions earlier on.
The same goes for the other living Presidents except perhaps Carter: they were all promoting a similar political line. In the United States and everywhere else, except where Margaret Thatcher’s villainy is more salient, we call that kind of politics “Reaganite.”
Dead though he be, Ronald Reagan was present in Dallas; his specter haunted the entire affair. It was George W. Bush whom the miscreants gathered to praise, but it was Reagan that they each, in their own way, had in mind.
The solidarity exuded by the living Presidents for each other underscored the point. Obama all but said it outright: that when it comes to assuring American hegemony abroad and undoing social progress at home, each of the Presidents assembled in the Bush Library had taken up where his predecessor left off.
If Obama gets his way, he will be the one to carry the project they all pursued through to its final consummation.
Bill Clinton tried; and, as a Democrat, he was able to neutralize more of the opposition than any Republican could. This is why, as a deregulator, he did more to implement the Reagan agenda than Reagan himself or than either of the Bushes.
With the 2012 election behind him, Obama is now hell bent on besting Clinton, and making the Gipper proud.
In Dallas last week, a drone President paid homage to a torture President, and the best friends plutocrats have had since the Gilded Age celebrated one another. In so doing, they proved beyond a reasonable doubt that in American politics, for at least the past three decades and a half, there has been more continuity than change – and hope for the one percent alone.
At some future time, if we manage to survive Reaganism and its demise, historians will conclude that Obama’s words in Dallas, and those of the others, were not just polite tributes to a former President but revealing confessions through which this sorry state of affairs becomes painfully apparent.
What they each said will then be plain. Reduced to its core, it comes to this: that if you think Bush was an anomaly, dream on.
All those live Presidents, except maybe Carter, are Bush, each in his own way, because they all read from the same Reaganite script, improvising – for the most part, like Bush, ineptly – to take account of the circumstances they encountered.
The Obama presidency, coming last, reveals this truth with particular perspicuity.
This raises a question: back when Obama was just beginning to disappoint, was it really right to say that, if nothing else, at least he’s better than Bush?
Today, the answer still seems obvious; a turnip would be better than Bush.
But, in the future, when Bush’s moral failings and bumbling incompetence are no longer politically consequential, when differences in style and tone pale in importance, and when the affinities linking the participants in the Bush library celebration are impossible to overlook, what seems obvious now may not seem true at all.
Wittingly or not, Obama more or less said as much in Dallas. This is one time when he should be believed.
In any case, the lesson for us now is plain: they are all Reaganites, Obama above all.
That is the situation we now confront, and we court disaster if we don’t deal with it.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/29/let-us-now-praise-heinous-men/
Obama and Bush, distinct men with policy overlaps
By JIM KUHNHENN | Associated Press – Wed, Apr 24, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite vast differences with President George W. Bush on ideology, style and temperament, President Barack Obama has stuck with Bush policies or aspirations on a number of fronts, from counterterrorism to immigration, from war strategy to the global fight against AIDS.
Even on tax policy, where Bush advocated lower tax rates for all and Obama pushed for higher rates on the rich, Bush's tax cuts for the middle class not only have survived under Obama, they have become permanent.
Obama inherited from his predecessor two military conflicts, a war on terror and a financial crisis. He also inherited, and in time embraced, the means with which to confront them.
On Thursday, Obama will attend the dedication of Bush's presidential library in Texas, a tableau that will draw attention to two distinct men — a Republican and a Democrat from different ends of the political spectrum, political foils with polarized constituencies.
Indeed, Obama ran for president in 2008 as the anti-Bush, critical of the war against Iraq and of the economic policies of the preceding eight years.
But in his more than four years of governing, Obama has also adopted or let stand a series of Bush initiatives, illustrating how the policies of one administration can take hold and how the realities of governing often limit solutions.
Bush's signature education plan, No Child Left Behind, remains the law of the land, though the Obama administration has granted states waivers to give them flexibility in meeting performance targets. A Bush Medicare prescription drug plan, criticized for its cost, is now popular with beneficiaries, and Obama has sought to improve it by providing relief for seniors with high bills. Obama continued the unpopular bank bailouts and expanded the auto industry rescue that Bush initiated in 2008.
Bush authorized a military surge in Iraq in an effort to tame the conflict there. Obama completed the withdrawal of troops from Iraq but also authorized a military surge in Afghanistan before beginning a drawdown of troops that is expected to be completed at the end of 2014.
"The responsibilities of office drive presidents toward pragmatism," said Joshua Bolten, a former Bush chief of staff. Where those policies are effective, he added, "the successor has good reason to adopt them."
Obama, like Bush during his presidency, is seeking an overhaul of immigration laws that give 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally a chance to get on a path toward citizenship. Bush came up short in 2007, but Bolten believes that six years later the nation and its politicians are in a different place.
"President Bush was just ahead of his time and his party in recognizing both the importance of reaching some sort of bipartisan accommodation and on what the elements of that might reasonably be," he said.
Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes on the presidency, says it's not uncommon for presidents to hand off their agendas to another. Even measures or issues that were unpopular under one president can appear different with the passage of time and under the direction of a new occupant in the White House.
"While the names of the problems are the same, the stage of development is usually very different and the public stance of the president dealing with them is often very different," he said. "You have to be sensitive to those things lest you create the false impression that they are mirror images of one another, which I don't think would be accurate."
On no front are the similarities more striking than on counterterrorism. Obama did vow to end the harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding that had been employed during the Bush administration, and he issued an executive order upon becoming president declaring that the United States would not engage in torture.
But other practices continued and, in some case, expanded under Obama.
"The basic similarity is these are the only two presidents that have governed in a post-9/11 era, where the principal threat to the United States comes from terrorism," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser. "President Obama believes that we're at war with al-Qaida and its affiliated groups, has continued to take direct action against al-Qaida networks overseas and has continued to pursue very aggressive intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security measures that have been developed since 9/11."
Jack Goldsmith, who was an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during Bush's first term, says Obama's use of warrantless surveillance, military detentions without trial and increased drone strikes has received less pushback than it would under a Republican president.
Goldsmith, now a law professor at Harvard Law School, argued in a blog post after Obama's election that the public "generally trust the former constitutional law professor and civil liberties champion more than a Republican president to carry out these policies."
He added that "many on the left (in Congress and the NGO community, and perhaps the press) who might otherwise be uncomfortable with these policies will give President Obama a freer hand than they would a Republican president."
Still, Rhodes sees significant differences in Obama's national security approach.
Bush, Rhodes said, had defined the broad conflict as a war on terrorism and included Iraq as part of that war.
"We redefined the war as something more narrow, which was a war against al-Qaida and its affiliates, not against other states, not against nonaffiliated terrorist groups," Rhodes said.
Republican Sen. John McCain has a unique perch to assess both presidents. He ran against both — in 2000 against Bush for the Republican nomination and in 2008 against Obama. He allied himself with both men on immigration and called on them to increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. An early opponent of waterboarding, he has applauded Obama's continued use of other counterterrorism measures.
"I think they both had an appreciation for the threat that we face," he said of the two presidents.
But he faults Obama for not leaving a residual force in Iraq and for creating uncertainty about what the U.S. presence will be in Afghanistan after 2014.
And he distinguishes between the presidents. Under Bush, he said the United States became a nation "that was ready to pursue our enemies."
"Obviously, President Obama viewed this as a time to withdraw and not to make military commitments overseas."
Rhodes makes a similar point, though differently.
"The trajectory under the previous administration was an increased military presence overseas," he said. "President Obama would like his legacy to be the reduction of military presence overseas and having, ideally, zero troops in harm's way."
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http://news.yahoo.com/obama-bush-distinct-men-policy-overlaps-073045083--politics.html