Shock and Awe

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Shock and Awe

The 2004 presidential election is almost three months past, and blue-staters are still numb with shock and awe that sixty million citizens cast their vote for George Bush.

What could they possibly have been thinking?

It makes you wonder what a president has to do before Americans get angry, or at least pay more attention. Here are some cases where we have paid attention and even gotten angry. But what they teach us isn't very flattering:

President Clinton, lying about Monica Lewinsky. Yes, that whole sordid affair certainly captured our attention. But let's face it, our interest wasn't focused on the real issue - whether a president violated the rule of law. It was about titillation - sex in the White House, phone sex, the DNA on the blue dress, and the image of a cigar as more than just a cigar.

Maybe if President Bush was caught exchanging naughty emails with Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, aka Dr. Anthrax, the female scientist accused of being a leader of Iraq's biological weapons program, Iraq as a whole might have inspired the same intense scrutiny as, say, the Scott Peterson case. And if a DNA-stained lab coat turned up? The cable stations would be humming, so to speak, with all the lurid details, examined and re-examined from every angle like a Florida chad. All Dr. Anthrax, All The Time.
President George Bush I, vowing Read My Lips - No New Taxes. When forced to choose between keeping that promise and doing what was best for the country, the first George Bush did the responsible thing. In 1990 he signed a bill that raised taxes, helping to offset the huge deficit caused, in no small measure, by his predecessor's voodoo economics.

Taxes. Now that's an issue the American public takes a serious interest in. At election time, America neither forgot nor forgave George the First. And when President Bush was shown the door in 1992, his broken pledge on taxes was a major reason.

President Bush II met no such fate for backing away from his word. Apparently, sending kids (preferably someone else's kids) off to fight a war based on false claims of phantom WMDs doesn't particularly faze Americans all that much. But raising taxes is another matter entirely.

Other events have captured the imagination of America as well: Iran/Contra, although the man ultimately responsible, President Reagan, managed not to remember so much about the whole affair that he escaped with his reputation largely intact. And of course there is Watergate. President Nixon wasn't nearly charming enough to talk his way out of that one.

But none of these transgressions comes even close to what the current administration has done - putting soldiers in harm's way without just cause, the result either of inexcusable blundering or the outright manipulation of the truth.

So again I ask, through the lingering shock and awe of the 2004 election: What…in hell…were those sixty million normal, intelligent Americans…thinking?

What If . . .

There are many theories: Some Americans apparently still believe that WMDs were in fact found, or that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Some feel safer somehow because we invaded Iraq, although clearly articulating why is difficult. Some believe it is America's mission to spread freedom throughout the world, even at the point of a gun. Some simply have an unshakable faith in the goodness and greatness of America. To them, it is unthinkable that we could be capable of so great a wrong.

It's one thing to be wrong or unrealistic or naļve. But what if it's worse than that? What if we just don't care? Are too self-absorbed?

If Howard Beale could step out of Paddy Chayefsky's Network and into 2005, he would probably reinvent himself as a blogger of contemporary America, and his famous taunt might go like this:

"'Please, at least leave us alone on our own laptops. Let us have our cellphones and our SUVs and our HDTVs and above all our credit cards and we won't say anything, just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad."

Sorry, Howard. Not enough of us are angry. Not the sixty million who voted for Bush, nor most of the rest of America who voted for Bush Lite, as least as far as the war in Iraq is concerned.

Who's Next?

I can almost hear you saying, "The election is over. Accept it and move on." But moving on is exactly what I'm afraid of. What will we move on to? Iran? Syria? North Korea?

George Bush claims the election of 2004 ratified his invasion of Iraq, and he's absolutely right. True, the WMDs that might have justified the invasion didn't exist. But the issue is now moot. The American people have provided all the justification the President could ask for, in the only poll that matters.

"Don't vote - it just encourages them." So goes the old joke. But in this case, the joke is hardly amusing. You have to wonder: What might America have encouraged this reckless President to do next?