Bush is Che's political heir
All this baloney that's being spun about the "Bush Legacy" (no, not the one that our grnadchildren will still be forking over the interest and principal payments on) made me think that there is one truly distinctive thing George Bush has done in the past 8 years: he made it not only possible, but necessary to our national survival that a black man be elected president, something that almost no one in 2001 could have imagined would come so soon.
The part of Che's political philosophy that Bush inherited was the idea that you could hasten the revolution by "heightening the contradictions" of capitalism, otherwise known as blowing stuff up so that ordinary people's lives became (more) miserable and provoking (more) violent repression so that people's eyes were opened to the callousness and evil of their rulers. Bush has done almost nothing but heighten the contradictions of GOP government. Politicallly-motivated war, corruption and incompetence on a breathtaking scale, apparatchiks inserted throughout the government just like the "political officers" who guarded the ideological purity of Soviet enterprises, stupidly indefensible regulatory decisions, contempt for the very notion of a government of laws -- how much more obvious could someone make it that the current corporatist, christianist, anti-fact incarnation of the republican party is incompatible with the national welfare?
If we get through the next 10 or 20 years more or less okay, Condi may be right. A less ideologically driven, less venal, less box-of-rocks stupid cadre of republicans could have pushed our economy toward feudalism more quietly and effectively, could have stripped us of our civil liberties with less opposition-generating fanfare, could have continued the destruction of our environment less outrageously. And then they'd probably still be in power. If we get through the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have George Bush and his cronies to thank for that.
The part of Che's political philosophy that Bush inherited was the idea that you could hasten the revolution by "heightening the contradictions" of capitalism, otherwise known as blowing stuff up so that ordinary people's lives became (more) miserable and provoking (more) violent repression so that people's eyes were opened to the callousness and evil of their rulers. Bush has done almost nothing but heighten the contradictions of GOP government. Politicallly-motivated war, corruption and incompetence on a breathtaking scale, apparatchiks inserted throughout the government just like the "political officers" who guarded the ideological purity of Soviet enterprises, stupidly indefensible regulatory decisions, contempt for the very notion of a government of laws -- how much more obvious could someone make it that the current corporatist, christianist, anti-fact incarnation of the republican party is incompatible with the national welfare?
If we get through the next 10 or 20 years more or less okay, Condi may be right. A less ideologically driven, less venal, less box-of-rocks stupid cadre of republicans could have pushed our economy toward feudalism more quietly and effectively, could have stripped us of our civil liberties with less opposition-generating fanfare, could have continued the destruction of our environment less outrageously. And then they'd probably still be in power. If we get through the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have George Bush and his cronies to thank for that.
