David Michael Green: My Country, Misery
[David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.]
So...
Tom Ridge came clean this week. Woo-hoo.
What a brave and selfless act. Reminds me of Colin Powell completely and totally kinda sorta dissing the Iraq invasion. Great to hear that everything we knew and said and got clobbered for saying at the time was in fact true. Thanks a lot, General. That's really helpful. Not so great about the whole timing thing though.
Colin Powell was probably the only human on the planet who could have stopped the Iraq holocaust, but he waited instead. He seems to think that loyalty to the president is more important than loyalty to the country, loyalty to principle, or loyalty to the idea of preserving lives. Or so he claims. Given what he has said since he sold the war to Americans with his unconscionably despicable Security Council dog-and-pony show, I'm hard-pressed to see how he's been loyal even to Bush. Seems kinda like he's only loyal to Colin, trying to save a place for himself in the history books.
Mr. Ridge, on the other hand, has a book for sale, just in case no one noticed that particular coincidence. Perhaps that explains why he is now revealing the truth about the politicization of the buffoonish ‘terrorism' color-coding system, a mere five years after he claims it was used to justify the Bush administration's continued existence, and almost used – save for the brave interventions of, wait for it now..., one Tom Ridge – to put Bush over the top on the eve of the 2004 election. Once again, a bit of timely honesty from Ridge at exactly that moment would almost certainly have terminated the Bush nightmare at a ‘mere' sickening four years. Imagine the effect on votershad the Little Emperor's Secretary of Homeland Security resigned in protest on the eve of that election, and said exactly why. Alas, Tom seems to think 2009 a more timely year for his revelations. And then, of course, there's the book...
All of this has me thinking – as I'm afraid I've found myself doing pretty much every day for at least the last decade – “What the hell happened to America?” This country seems to have deteriorated mightily over the course of my lifetime, and I know from the email that I get that I'm hardly alone in believing that...
... To begin with, this country has unquestionably drifted to the right over the last thirty years. This is not an entirely simple equation, and indeed, in the domain of social issues such as gay rights or the integration of women and minorities into the economic and political institutions of society, I would even argue that we've witnessed a progressive turn during these last decades. Moreover, it's even possible that we are in the early stages of a leftward turn in other domains as well, given the current crises of American capitalism and foreign policy. Nevertheless, even with all those caveats, who would have imagined in 1970 that America would be far more regressive four decades later, rather than far less?
It's a libertarian sort of regressivism, to be sure, hence the aforementioned drift to the left on social issues, and perhaps even a new isolationist cast on foreign-policy questions, rejecting the worst excesses of imperialist predation. That's hard to say. The Iraq experience provides evidence for both a more optimistic or a more pessimistic interpretation of public opinion when it comes to foreign adventures.
But where you really see the rightward turn is in the economic domain. Once, thirty or forty years ago, it was literally a national project to worry about the poor. So much so, in fact, that we decided to fight a war on poverty. By the 1990s, however, that war was lost through an abandonment of the battlefield equating to unconditional surrender. One of the most profoundly significant, and yet simultaneously most subtle developments of the Clinton years was the new and near total emphasis on the lot of the middle class. Not only had America's poor fallen off the radar screen, but in fact, if they got in the way of the middle class achieving all its bourgeois aspirations and acquiring all its requisite trinkets, then not only would the poor cease to receive additional aid and attention, they would also be cut off from their pathetically minuscule existing forms of relief. This is the true meaning of the welfare reform bill, signed by Clinton in order to guarantee an election he already had in his pocket. The middle class was saying that it wanted tax breaks and a balanced budget, which meant something had to give. There went welfare, and with it the war on poverty...
Read entire article at OpEdNews.com
So...
Tom Ridge came clean this week. Woo-hoo.
What a brave and selfless act. Reminds me of Colin Powell completely and totally kinda sorta dissing the Iraq invasion. Great to hear that everything we knew and said and got clobbered for saying at the time was in fact true. Thanks a lot, General. That's really helpful. Not so great about the whole timing thing though.
Colin Powell was probably the only human on the planet who could have stopped the Iraq holocaust, but he waited instead. He seems to think that loyalty to the president is more important than loyalty to the country, loyalty to principle, or loyalty to the idea of preserving lives. Or so he claims. Given what he has said since he sold the war to Americans with his unconscionably despicable Security Council dog-and-pony show, I'm hard-pressed to see how he's been loyal even to Bush. Seems kinda like he's only loyal to Colin, trying to save a place for himself in the history books.
Mr. Ridge, on the other hand, has a book for sale, just in case no one noticed that particular coincidence. Perhaps that explains why he is now revealing the truth about the politicization of the buffoonish ‘terrorism' color-coding system, a mere five years after he claims it was used to justify the Bush administration's continued existence, and almost used – save for the brave interventions of, wait for it now..., one Tom Ridge – to put Bush over the top on the eve of the 2004 election. Once again, a bit of timely honesty from Ridge at exactly that moment would almost certainly have terminated the Bush nightmare at a ‘mere' sickening four years. Imagine the effect on votershad the Little Emperor's Secretary of Homeland Security resigned in protest on the eve of that election, and said exactly why. Alas, Tom seems to think 2009 a more timely year for his revelations. And then, of course, there's the book...
All of this has me thinking – as I'm afraid I've found myself doing pretty much every day for at least the last decade – “What the hell happened to America?” This country seems to have deteriorated mightily over the course of my lifetime, and I know from the email that I get that I'm hardly alone in believing that...
... To begin with, this country has unquestionably drifted to the right over the last thirty years. This is not an entirely simple equation, and indeed, in the domain of social issues such as gay rights or the integration of women and minorities into the economic and political institutions of society, I would even argue that we've witnessed a progressive turn during these last decades. Moreover, it's even possible that we are in the early stages of a leftward turn in other domains as well, given the current crises of American capitalism and foreign policy. Nevertheless, even with all those caveats, who would have imagined in 1970 that America would be far more regressive four decades later, rather than far less?
It's a libertarian sort of regressivism, to be sure, hence the aforementioned drift to the left on social issues, and perhaps even a new isolationist cast on foreign-policy questions, rejecting the worst excesses of imperialist predation. That's hard to say. The Iraq experience provides evidence for both a more optimistic or a more pessimistic interpretation of public opinion when it comes to foreign adventures.
But where you really see the rightward turn is in the economic domain. Once, thirty or forty years ago, it was literally a national project to worry about the poor. So much so, in fact, that we decided to fight a war on poverty. By the 1990s, however, that war was lost through an abandonment of the battlefield equating to unconditional surrender. One of the most profoundly significant, and yet simultaneously most subtle developments of the Clinton years was the new and near total emphasis on the lot of the middle class. Not only had America's poor fallen off the radar screen, but in fact, if they got in the way of the middle class achieving all its bourgeois aspirations and acquiring all its requisite trinkets, then not only would the poor cease to receive additional aid and attention, they would also be cut off from their pathetically minuscule existing forms of relief. This is the true meaning of the welfare reform bill, signed by Clinton in order to guarantee an election he already had in his pocket. The middle class was saying that it wanted tax breaks and a balanced budget, which meant something had to give. There went welfare, and with it the war on poverty...