The Bush Legacy

December 3, 2008
by Cliff Carson

This Thanksgiving day I was musing about all the things I had to be thankful for and especially one thought that persisted, one I just couldn't push out of my mind, that it was my, and America's, good fortune that George W. Bush has only until Inauguration Day, 2009 to bring any more damage to this country. Of course that's still more than a month away and is time enough for some more criminal acts before he goes.

I remember how Bush came in promoting himself as the president who would unite our country. But now eight years later we find that he has wrought a bottomless abyss dividing the citizens of America, and yes, also the people of the world. Proud of his minimum achievements in this world, he sold himself as a common man, one whom everyone could love and identify with as he blew into office. I'm sure you still remember his self-directed jokes concerning his admitted shortcomings. Very few of us at the time could have envisioned the nightmare that was to come. He was just the good old country bumpkin.

The problem was that not many paid attention to the Cowboy mentality of the real George W. Bush, an extremely dense and dictatorial individual who had a thinly concealed fetish as a Julius Caesar wannabe. But the Neo-Cons had him squarely in their sights. Here was their dream president - low wattage, easily corruptible, and they convinced him that with their sage advice he would leave a legacy of greatness. George never knew what happened. It turned out that instead of being good ole George he was molded to became the "If you're not with us, you're against us tyrant".

The past eight years have been the most disastrous in American history, a disaster of such proportions that it might take a couple of decades to recover. The real irony is that during his first six years when most of the damage was done, he had a majority of his Party in both the House and the Senate. He had the opportunity to cause great benefits and a bright future to come to the American people. Instead he used his power to try and intimidate the world and at the same time criminalize the citizens of the United States.

His advisors' War Monger mentality convinced him that one could find a terrorist under ever bed and especially in the American mainstream. Average Americans became the potential enemy of the state and therefore gave rise to a domestic 1984 type Government that was sold as needed to be implemented, in other words to "protect Democracy", Democracy needed to be suppressed. The result was inevitable and the boogey man mentality fed on itself until we began to approach the beginning of the end of Democracy. And finally the Bush Party aided and abetted him in the destruction of this country's morality and ethical behavior.

How was it that the Republican Party helped the destruction of American values? Well during the first six years when George and the Republican Party wanted something , every bill forced thru the House and Senate was signed by George, and if he wanted to exempt himself from that new law, he just wrote on the bills' margins, the one he had just signed, that it, that new law, didn't apply to him and his clandestine organizations.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats raised much of an alarm, one party out of protectionism and the other party out of a fear of political cost. Those bill-signing issues could have been used to rule the bill null and void, that is had the Congress stood up to the blatant hypocrisy, but they weren't so inclined. From this very practice arose the means to shred the constitution. And from that followed Torture, the Death of Habeas Corpus, The Patriot Act, Illegal Surveillance, Gitmo, Abu Gharib, and many other despicable insults to society.

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Yet I am calling for the end of the Republican Party as a viable political force in American politics and giving the Democratic Party a pass. Why? The answer is simple. The Republican Party brought Bush forward and had the wherewithal to control him. After all, the Republican elected majority had pledged a fidelity to the American people, to protect them from all enemies both foreign and domestic. That responsibility did not contain a caveat " except those domestic enemies that are Republican".

And even after the first six years, the Republican Party Congressional Members had sunk so low in Moral and Ethical conduct that they were a given to block passage of any legislation that Bush objected to, irrespective of whether vetoing it was harmful to the country or its people. They were definitely Party First above country.

The Democratic Party gets a temporary pass. They are now in control, having almost the same majorities that George Bush and Republicans had after the Clinton years. It's too late to doom them because of the Clinton years but its not too late to make provisions for when they will be subjected to exile as I'm proposing to have foisted on the Republicans. We need to demand three things from the Democrats:

1) A return to the Constitution as it was intended by our Founders
2) Ethical and Moral Governance as a standard for the people's rights and expectations
3) A dismantling of the Corruptive Structure of the Government/Corporate incestuous relationship

When George Bush came into office the United States was the most respected Country in the world and represented the pinnacle of human rights across all peoples of the world. Our moral principles, based on the Golden Rule had no challenge. Yes there were signs that the image might be cracking and slipping away, mainly because of what previous presidents had done, but there was enough belief in the fairness of the United States among the World's nations that we were usually given the benefit of the doubt. But after 9/11 when most of the world was in sympathy of America, the handlers of President Bush decided this was the opportunity to seize the resources of the third largest oil producer in the world and thus began the Iraqi war.

And everything that followed. Bush just recently promised to a rousing cheer that when the troops came home from Iraq they would come home victorious. He didn't say what victory was or who profits from the victory. There are over a million dead Iraqis and Americans who can't share in the "Victory", and the impoverished survivors, American and Iraqi, have only the fact that its over to cheer, that is when it is really over. The most difficult thing to identify from my viewpoint is "What was it that the people of America won? And the co-question - what did the Iraqis do to have been subjected to the devastation?

Rebuilding things lost, both tangible and intangible, will be the nightmare for Obama and Administration. If the incoming administration doesn't do all three of the things I have mentioned above, and do it in the first four years, my plea to my fellow citizens is - "Lets have their replacements ready and lets get a Constitutional Convention going (as provided by in the Constitution) so that we the people can right the wrongs and incarcerate the criminals."