Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
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Bush's Last Hurrah
by The Nation Editors Senator John McCain, busy pressing his campaign in Florida, didn't bother to show up. The Wall Street Journal reported the speech on page 3. The New York Times relegated the full text to its website. TV chatter focused more on Senator Edward Kennedy's stirring Camelot embrace of Barack Obama earlier that day than George W. Bush's proposals in what was, blessedly, his last State of the Union address.
What happens when a President gives a State of the Union speech and nobody listens?
[Republished at PFP with express Agence Global permission.]
But we must pay attention to the damage Bush has wrought. As he
delivered his seventh State of the Union, we're mired in two bloody and
endless occupations; our economy is cratering; dangers facing the world
-- from global warming to economic instability to terrorism -- are much
worse than they were seven years ago. America is more indebted, more
isolated and more unequal. Our economy is weaker, our military is near
broken, our people are divided.
Instead of forthrightly facing
these problems Bush, unsurprisingly, resorted to duck and cover. "From
expanding opportunity to protecting our country, we've made good
progress," he averred. "Yet we have unfinished business." We can "be
confident about our economic growth" in the long run, he said, despite
the current "period of uncertainty."
To deal with that
uncertainty, the President called for rapid passage of the $146 billion
bipartisan "growth package," from which he has axed the most effective
immediate stimulus measures, according to the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office: bolstering food stamps and unemployment insurance. He
has also refused to send aid to states to curb budget shortfalls and
avert layoffs, and has ignored a longer-term stimulus and a pressing
need in its own right: investment in our dangerously crumbling
infrastructure. Other than this mild package (smaller, it should be
noted, than this year's projected spending on the Iraq War), Bush asks
only for more of the same: making his tax cuts for the wealthy
permanent, passing more corporate trade accords and the old grab bag of
domestic reforms with which even he could barely conceal his boredom.
Bush
focused much of his speech on his disastrous wars. Here the denial is
complete. In Afghanistan, "twenty-five NATO allies and fifteen partner
nations" are building a "young democracy," he claimed. "These
successes" and US allies are so strong that the President is rushing
3,200 marines to that narco-country in response to the urgent pleas of
generals alarmed about the growing strength of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
We
were told that the surge in Iraq has "achieved results few of us could
have imagined just one year ago." The results are so unimaginable, we
can expect "tough fighting ahead," and we can't remove our troops until
a "free Iraq" is able to defend itself, a chimera that Iraq's defense
minister suggests won't happen until at least 2018 -- another ten
years, $3 trillion and tens of thousands of casualties later.
Pack
up the tents; the show is over. The country is ready for Bush to go.
Yet Bush's failures are not idiosyncratic. They are the direct
expression of the right-wing Republican ideology and policies he
systematically pursued. GOP presidential candidates ritually invoke
Reagan, not Bush, but they are wedded to Bush's program. They will run
on continuing his wars, enshrining his tax cuts, touting his trade
agenda. Both candidates for the Democratic nomination know we can no
longer travel this road. This fall, the country will have a clear
choice: keeping to Bush's catastrophic agenda or ending thirty years of
conservative dominance and charting a fresh course.
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