Bush, McCain Abuse Their Legacy

By Robert Scheer

08/10/08 "Creators Syndicate" -- I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George W. Bush would stop asking God to bless America.

Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president's evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration: a pointless but very costly war over nonexistent Iraqi WMD, the destruction by flood of New Orleans, the betrayal of the nation by the moneychangers - from Enron to Goldman Sachs - who Bush welcomed into the temple of the White House?

What's next? Pestilence, frogs, locusts or incurable boils? Dare we risk four more years of catastrophic misrule by a "W" alter ego? For those indifferent to the serious implications of that question, I recommend Oliver Stone's new bio-flick, which brilliantly captures the "banality of evil" that has controlled our political life these past eight years. The phrase, from Hannah Arendt's depiction of the mundane cruelty that so marked much of the daily experience of European fascism, has a frightening resemblance to the mindset of the Republican leadership that has damaged this nation's reputation for democratic integrity.

Cynicism rules even as ritualistic prayer breaks, as depicted in the film "W," abound. The pretense of piety earns the president and his accomplices a get-out-of-jail-free card; at no point in the film, with scenes captured so accurately and far more depressingly from real life, do any in the top ranks of the Bush administration accept one iota of accountability for how much damage they have wrought. Unrepentant, the same Republican apparatchiks are employing the familiar Rovian tactics of divide and conquer to continue their hold on power. Once again, they seek to focus attention on hot-button social issues and patriotic litmus tests to draw attention from the fact that family values are being destroyed by the loss of jobs and homes.

Perhaps John McCain is not a perfect replica of Bush, but the parallels go beyond the senator's enthusiastic support for the toxic mix of Bush's imperial foreign policy and his arrogant indifference to the travails of our domestic existence. Neither man seems to have a sense of how we actually live or what we need from government. How else to explain their common antipathy to Social Security and Medicare which, after public education, represent the nation's most successful programs? Can you imagine the panic today if McCain and Bush had succeeded in tying Social Security to investments in the stock market? They view government as nothing more than a proud sponsor of the military-industrial complex while ignoring the threat to homeland security from corporate pirates.

Don't say we weren't warned.

Bush came into office fervently believing that what was good for Enron and its CEO Kenneth Lay, Bush's top financial sponsor whom he called "Kenny Boy," was good for the country. So, too, McCain, who chose Phil Gramm as co-chair of his presidential campaign, ignoring the huge loophole in Gramm's Commodity Futures Trading Act that allowed Enron, where his wife Wendy Gramm served on the board of directors, to so shamelessly game the energy market.

Trumpeting the benefits of the legislation he tacked on to an omnibus spending bill the day before the 2000 Christmas recess, Gramm stated: "It protects financial institutions from over-regulation. It provides legal certainty for the $60 billion market in swaps." Those swaps created the toxic investments that U.S. taxpayers are now stuck with in order to save those unregulated financial institutions from bankruptcy.

McCain, who should have learned the cost of radical deregulation from his own involvement in the savings-and-loan scandal as one of the infamous "Keating Five," totally bought Gramm's line. McCain was the chair of Gramm's 1996 presidential bid and, up until major Wall Street firms collapsed, continued to echo the insistence of the former Texas senator-turned banker that there was no real crisis in the financial markets.

McCain evidences all of the distorted priorities of a son of privilege doing battle with the legacy of more gifted and responsible family ancestors, which is the underlying motivator attributed to Bush in Stone's movie. Both Bush and McCain grew up as spoiled screwups, repeatedly bailed out of trouble by their highly accomplished fathers, in McCain's case an admiral, and both assume, as a matter of legacy, that they have a right to rule. What they ignored in their legacy was a Christian's obligation to make the economic system that handsomely rewarded their kin at least minimally responsive to the needs of ordinary folk.

Robert Scheer is author of a new book, "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America."

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