A bumper sticker for sale at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Arlington, Va., Jan. 30, 2003 where Vice President Cheney was a keynote speaker http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/02/04/cpac/index.html

They feed the country the drug of righteous indignation and patriotic vitriol and then take us home and have their way with us.

1. Environment
Of course they blame the environmentalists for everything that's wrong, because the environmentalists actually say that just because it lines the pockets of industry bosses doesn't make it a good thing. Gut both the Clean Air and Clean Water acts because industry has hid its head in the sand for over 30 years hoping that somehow they won't have to provide clean power at new plants. And by god, it worked! Poppy's boy will take care of 'em.

Go to any other industrialized country and breathe the soot and foulness in the air, and tell me that the Clean Air Act isn't worth it.

He now pushes hydrogen as his green stamp. Except that all the money is spent on converting natural gas to hydrogen. And where is there mammoth amounts of natural gas? Gee whiz, could it be Afghanistan, where Halliburton has on hold (pending stabilization of the region) a major partnership deal to build a natural gas pipeline into the Indian Ocean, away from that nasty Middle East region that he would so like to ignore?

And it ain't just me. Protection of the environment is a major political issue, and these guys just don't care.

2. Economic deficit and responsibility
Conservative. Conserve. That's why his latest budget runs a deficit that is over 1% of GDP for this year alone, not counting the cost of the presumed war nor the cost of accelerated tax breaks that he proposed.

This surpasses voodoo economics. This falls into the area of "oh, you wanted a FULL accounting of our national budget."

They then talk about how the programs need to be cost-effective and subject to financial accountability. Except, of course, the Pentagon programs. Why? Because their buddies don't make any money off of the "soft" programs like education or social services, so no harm no foul in taking a close look. But not the Pentagon programs -- that's National Security.

3. Future
Add to the budget dance the privatization of both Medicare and Social Security, and there will be nothing left to conserve, because their won't be a future for most Americans. They demonize government-directed "socialized" medicine, but then tout HMOs, which are the same thing only worse -- privately-directed "socialized" medicine with no market or government force to control them. And let's put ALL our retirement programs in the markets so that the slicksters can flimflam even more into their back pockets.

Caveat
I just can't get past what is to me a clear fact that this junta doesn't give a shit for much other than the pocketbooks of the dinosaur industrialists. Theirs is a cynical agenda to do what they want and the people be damned. Like Georgie said, what's nice about being President is that he doesn't have to explain himself to anybody. Just spin the hell out of the rubes, and get on with picking the pockets.

The reality is that the core of Bush's Pentagon team came in committed to regime change in Iraq. September 11 was the flash point they were looking for to energize their agenda. The reality is that Cheney spent at least four years prior to the election, in addition to his post at Halliburton, heading up a think tank studying the foreign and strategic relations of energy supply. And the reality is that Bush's business dealings show a pattern of abusing position for personal gain.

The reality is that the "friendly" governments in both Iraq and Afghanistan would pinch on Iran and would cut the Middle East arab block in two. This would reduce the geopolitical power of that block and would probably lead to compromise and settlement of the Palestinian refugee issue.

The key point is the definition of "friendly". Again, it is clear that the dominant petroleum focus and the anti-islamist agenda of the Bush administration leads to "friendly" meaning subservient if not slavish to western ways and thinking. What is being pushed is not a relationship of nation states, but a relationship like the old-time banana republics.

That's the future we will have to wake up to, once the drug wears off. A privatized government that serves contract vendors, not the people. A dirtier and uglier environment. More addiction to oil. A less stable world and the type of foreign commitment that only insights further terror.

(I wrote the above early in the morning. Later in the day, Sect. Powell presented his case to the UN Security Council. Sect. Powell made a compelling case against Hussein. If his bosses didn't seem to be such yahoo cowboys, I think that the immediate international support would have been great. However, I think that the distrust of the motives of this administration are so widespread that other governments are leery of outright support.

(An unanswered and, to an great extent, an unasked question is what is there to stop the United States from turning on any number of other states and demand regime change because of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. The case Powell presented did not suggest an immediate and imminent threat, unlike the case Adlai Stevenson presented about the installation of missile launchers in Cuba during the 1960s. Because he did not present a case of immediate threat, Powell did not explain why Iraq is fundamentally and irrevocably different than any other country that has nuclear weapons, bacteriological research, and possible dual-use facilities. In such a context as this, nations supporting the invasion of Iraq tacitly acquiesce to the right of the United States to invade any country that the United States deems problematic.

(This administration, for all its alleged foreign policy studiousness, doesn't seem to understand the gravity of the symbolism at play. We are not at a turning point of parochial economic interest. We are at a defining moment of what singular state power means in a highly fluid cybernetic world. This administration has done nothing to reassure the rest of the world that this is not simply a willful, capricious act of vengeance and business positioning, but is a determined and thoughtful move to establish an ordered and coherent context for future flowering of human potential where other worldviews, such as Islam, are embraced and accepted whole and not compared to hitlerian fascism.)

06 Feb 03: from Evan -- Asiad gave me his theory a few years ago: Libya was the first Arab country to develop oil refining capabilities. We bombed them and santioned them. Iraq is the second Arab country to develop refineries. Looks like a pattern starting...

06 Feb 03: from the Artbully --