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Bush's Vision For America
David Martin
11/22/04 "ICH" -- With an apparent election victory in hand, George Bush is busy preparing for his second term. It’s his chance to put an indelible stamp on the country. The inauguration is still months away, but his cabinet reshuffling and ominous rhetoric give us an idea of what the next four years will look like. From the early indications, the future of America looks a lot like the old Soviet Union.
We should have known from his campaign. Bush’s Potemkin political rallies were invitation-only affairs limited to loyalty-oath-taking, faithful party members. The script for the rallies allowed only for adulatory comments and softball questions. Any audience member who peeped a dissent was quickly disappeared by the Secret Service. I wonder where they ended up. Perhaps in the American Siberia: Guantanamo Bay.
But Bush’s direction was apparent before then, back when the war drums for Iraq started beating. Anyone who questioned the bogus casus belli we were being fed was shouted down by an amen chorus of knee-jerk patriots. Dissenters lost jobs. Protest signs were destroyed. Questioners were threatened.
The news media was no help in discerning the truth of accusations against the Iraqi bogeyman. Media consolidation had turned our television networks, radio stations, and newspapers into one unified state publicity organ. In the build up for the war, it was all Pravda, all the time.
If Bush’s rallies weren’t enough of an omen, the recent election gives us another telling portent of our electoral future. Building on their 2000 success in Florida, the Republicans further honed their vote rigging skills in 2004. Reports of significant voting irregularities are springing up in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and New Hampshire like toadstools after a spring rain. With a few more elections under their belts, and the wider adoption of computerized voting machines, Republicans ought to be able to generate the kinds of one-sided pluralities that would make Leonid Brezhnev, and Saddam Hussein, proud.
As George II tightens his grip on the reins of government, he is gutting the federal bureaucracy. Skilled, intelligent bureaucrats dedicated to serving their country are out. To take their place, he ushers in party loyalists who make up in zealotry and blind obedience what they lack in competence.
The new CIA director, Porter Goss, is Bush’s point man in this effort. Since his arrival in Langley, he is demanding the heads of all those squishy liberal types who labored under the antiquated assumption that an intelligence service should deliver objective assessments of international situations. In the place of candor, he demands blind allegiance to the Supreme Leader. Under Goss, American intelligence will become a game of Jeopardy. The president will give the answers, and it will be up to the spooks to find the right questions.
The Soviet Union had its religion. It was Marxism, and its adherents believed in the apocalyptical withering away of the state. In its place would emerge a workers’ utopia where no one worked more than forty hours and the profits of one’s labors filled one’s own pockets.
Similarly, the Bushites have their own rigid faith: an evangelical Christianity that wants to turn back the clocks to the Old Testament. Just like the communists, they await a promised apocalypse. The end days are coming, they say, when the faithful will be beamed up to heaven and the rest of us will have to hang with Satan for a really long time.
Let’s add up what we have so far — one party rule; a bureaucracy that rewards loyalty over talent; the suppression of dissent; a rigid orthodoxy of belief; imperial ambitions; a war going badly in a Moslem country, make that two Moslem countries; a news media that can only echo the party line. Yup, sounds like the Soviet Union to me.
Does anyone remember what happened to the Soviet Union?
Copyright: David Martin - <damrtn48@ntplx.ne>
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