The party of family values paraded one of its children in front of the Republican national convention where her out-of-wedlock pregnancy didn't seem to present much of a problem. After giving birth she appeared on Dancing with the Stars and went on to become a spokesperson for sexual abstinence. Her mother in badger-like fury defended her against all critics. That's her right of course but forgive some of us for finding these antics passing strange.
With respect to more pressing matters in terms of the national condition, apologists from the Bush administration popped up on talk shows and in columns this past weekend in an obvious effort to rewrite history. Any positive results achieved from the scatter-shot approach to national security and economic probity on the part of Bush movers and shakers have long since been devalued in the course of our painful descent into massive debt and failed wartime efforts.
It is stunning to see Dick Cheney, his daughter and all manner of administration mouthpieces spin President Obama's decision to go after the Al Qaeda leader as a continuation of a process begun during the Bush administration. For whatever bits and pieces of intelligence gathered in their long, dusty wartime struggles it is ludicrous to suggest that years ago some sliver of information made its way to the upper echelons of intelligence analysis and figured prominently in the assault on Osama's enclave last Sunday. Yet that is exactly what we are asked to believe.
Not only that but a wistful Cheney bemoans the fact that President Obama has decided against using the so-called "enhanced interrogation" methods of which the former vice president and his warriors were so proud. Against all evidence, we are told the country is in a more tenuous place because the current administration has chosen a different path. The voices one might have hoped were silenced at last continue to make the case that torture and restrictive government measures are just what the country needs to keep its homeland secure. Major intelligence operatives, on the other hand, dispute the contention that information attained under extreme duress is either valid or timely.
The fact that President Bush decided to install Condoleezza Rice as his Homeland Security chief was an indication that neither he nor she had the slightest clue as to what the job entailed. Just being a pal is not a job recommendation for a top-level assignment. But there she was in a recent interview with Lawrence O'Donnell filibustering, while she refused to answer questions that pertained to her actual job description. Moreover she insisted on justifying the very most controversial aspects of administration assertions about WMD. And her mindless assertion that 'gee who would ever have imagined anyone would think of flying planes into buildings' still baffles because someone tasked with homeland security should surely have known this was a distinct possibility.
Today we continue to suffer from the effects of policies that were insufficiently fleshed out apparently on the assumption that floating a few inflammatory phrases would carry the conservative mantra across the finish line. And it darn near seems to have accomplished its goal. Watching John Boehner stumble through his speech on Wall Street regarding the need to raise the debt ceiling, one had to wonder why a politician with so much at stake and supposedly such deeply held convictions couldn't get through even one sentence of his remarks without referring to his notes. It was a 'deer-in-the-headlights' performance of some magnitude, a semantic bumbling induced by fear of the Tea Party on his right and angry constituents back home who hadn't anticipated a draconian battering of their beloved programs.
Boehner's proposals for agreeing to raise the ceiling seemed irrational in the extreme and without details. Basically what he was expressing was a the much trumpeted declaration of fiscal rectitude by House Republicans with a little wobbly nod to making a real foray into deficit reduction and budget reform.
One grotesque image remains in the mind's eye - - a costumed Revolutionary Tea Partier who would be well advised to save his tri-cornered hat and feather for Halloween. The country needs to get serious about its failings; fools and rhetorical acrobats have nothing to add to the debate.
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FINDING A VOICE by Ann Davidow
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