US Diary: what the hell's going to happen in the next 3 years, since the last 5 years have been such a disaster?

We on the left are soon going to find ourselves in an interesting bind. The Administration is imploding. They cannot be counted on to run the country halfway competently anymore -- not that they've done a good job anyway. But three more years of this incompetence -- heaven help us. It's no use gloating. It's OUR country that has been fucked, is being fucked, and will be fucked.

We should start thinking of ways in which we can help our government get through the next 3 years without screwing everything up worse than they already have. These guys are such fools, they might leave the good old USA worse off than it's ever been for the next 100 years. Already they've saddled us with debt our children are going to be paying for. Already we're in such shit, it'll take a major depression to self-correct things. We may be heading for dire, superbad times, if the past 5 years is anything to go by.

What the fuck can we do to help our current rulers get some kind of act together? Think about this before you enjoy your schadenfreude in the Bush admministration's sea of troubles too much. It's good they're going down, but they might be taking all of us down with them. We've got to get out of the bunker while those inside commit harakiri.


1. Interesting Times, Dangerous Times -- by Joyce Marcel

Until this year, that old Chinese toast - or curse - "May you live in interesting times," was just a clever saying.

"Interesting," of course, meant dangerous, chaotic, terrifying. It meant anarchy. It meant China under Mao. It shouldn't mean America under Bush.

But today our country faces internal dangers on several fronts, and the curse has come closer. It has become personal.

First of all, we face danger from the right - which you'd think had done enough damage already. But no, it's just getting started.

President Bush, his ratings in the toilet, is running scared. There are even rumors that he's been put on medication.

Bush's supposed "brain," Karl Rove, is under investigation. Vice President Dick Cheney, whom many suspect has been the strong arm of this administration all along, has come under full-bore attack at the same time he's stumping in Congress for America's right to torture. In other words, he's lost all sense of right and wrong.

His second-in-command, "Cheney's Cheney," I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has already been indicted.

Even The New York Times, usually a bastion of support for the status quo, is calling the idea of three more years of Bush "unnerving."

"An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front," the paper said in an editorial on Nov. 8. "But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long."

As Susan Page of USA Today said recently, Bush "is not toast quite yet, but he is definitely in the toaster."

The right-wingers may deserve what they get, but the fearful truth is that we are facing three more years with an incompetent and increasingly frantic Bush at the helm. He's already bankrupted the treasury and gotten us into an ugly war, making so many enemies for America that our children's children's children will still be threatened by them. Now he's in China, trying to start up another Cold War.

On the good side, Republicans were thoroughly whipped in the recent off-year elections. What gave many of us special pleasure was the fact that all eight of the nincompoops on the Dover, Pa., school board who wanted to add "intelligent design" to the curricula were voted out of office.

The election results suggest that the mood of the country has changed. Next year's Senate and Congressional races may be up for grabs. Yet the people who hold those offices will not willingly give up power. Things might turn ugly.

The second internal danger we face comes from the left.

Here we have paranoids pushing incredible and unbelievable scenarios as if they were the God's honest truth. Bush is behind the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. (Try greed leading to cheap construction techniques back in the 1970s). Jews knew about the attacks and they all got out in time. (Can you say "Cantor Fitzgerald?") The government is concealing new information about UFO's. (Again? Can you say, "So what?" Can you say, "Why would any intelligent extraterrestrial life want to come here?")

There have always been conspiracy-theory nuts, so why are they a special a danger now? Because over the years, much of what has been scornfully labeled by right-wingers as "left-wing," "lunatic" and "radical" has turned out to be simple unvarnished truth. Finally, people of common sense stand a chance of having their voices heard. Credibility has become a vital issue. We have more than enough real conspiracies to confront without creating imaginary new ones. (Can you say "no-bid contract"?)

The third internal danger comes from the middle - and I'm being truly kind here by calling the Democrats "the middle" instead of "the muddle."

Spineless, whipped and creamed like corn, the Democrats have spent five solid years caving into Bush on every level. Al Gore? We're still waiting for him to protest the first stolen presidential election. John F. Kerry voted for the war in Iraq. John "I was wrong" Edwards voted for the war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq.

Only Howard Dean stood up to the Bush/Cheney warmongers when it counted, and the Democrats are not sure they trust him enough to run their party, much less their country. They're still screaming "centrist" and pretending that "liberal" is a dirty word.

Some people cheer the possibility that we might soon be seeing viable female presidential candidates. At one point, that would have been a thing to lift the heart. But please, Condi Rice against Hillary Clinton - the country's doomed.

To recap: we have no leadership in the White House. We have an angry, brutal and caged Cheney who believes that God has anointed him emperor of the world and will have to be dragged out of office yelling and screaming. We have no one credible on the Democratic side to replace them. The Chinese, who are, for a change, not living in "interesting times," own our assets as well as our asses. We couldn't put together an army on another front to save our lives - and it might come to that.

Because there are external dangers. The weather is out of control. Our currency is faltering. We are hated everywhere. We have virulent enemies in the Middle East who are spreading like wildfire. France. Jordan. London. Madrid. Home?

So as happy as I am that the country might be returning to its senses, this is no time to gloat. It's always darkest before the dawn, and the sun's a long way from rising.

(Joyce Marcel is a free-lance journalist who lives in Vermont and writes about culture, politics, economics and travel. Write her at joycemarcel@yahoo.com)


2. Calling For Truth and Dignity in the Nation's Conduct -- by Floyd J. McKay

Near the end of the Edward R. Murrow movie, "Good Night, and Good Luck," Sen. Joseph McCarthy is confronted by Joseph Welch, civilian counsel for the U.S. Army. McCarthy's personal abuse of opponents had reached a peak in the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.

In his rumbling voice, Welch intoned, "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Where is Welch when we need him? (Or Murrow, for that matter?)

And where is the decency of this nation?

Who built the moral cesspool into which this nation has sunk with its secret prisons and secret prisoners, legalized torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial or counsel?

Is it Vice President Dick Cheney, pleading a CIA exemption from the torture ban that passed the Senate with 90 votes?

Is it Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert who, upon hearing leaked intelligence that the CIA is using secret prisons in other countries, beyond the reach of American torture laws, decided to investigate the leak — but not the prisons?

Is it the military commanders who have escaped reprimand while a series of low-level soldiers take the blame for abuses at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan? Or the White House and Justice Department lawyers who drafted the "soft torture" rules?

Is it the president of the United States, who never seems to take responsibility for anything, doggedly plunging ahead, "working hard" and "doing my job"? Who is in charge here? Is it really Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a corps of hard-core neoconservatives in the Department of Defense and Cheney's office who run the foreign policy of this country?

How are we to find the truth?

We are reminded in "Good Night, and Good Luck" that the combination of a powerful new medium, television, and a powerful old institution, the U.S. Senate, finished McCarthy, although it did not end McCarthyism.

We are reminded that the Senate was Republican at that time — thanks in no small measure to McCarthy's "bad cop" while Dwight D.Eisenhower played "good cop" in the 1952 elections. But Eisenhower and the Senate finally got up the gumption to challenge the bully.

Where is the Senate today? Where are the hearings on failed intelligence and failed decisions of the Iraq war? Where are the hearings on secret prisons and the use of torture?

It is mighty hard to investigate your own party's leadership. Ask the Senate of 1966 and Sen. J. William Fulbright how easy it was to haul President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War into televised hearings that lasted six days and began the unraveling of the Johnson presidency.

Where are Republicans of the stature of the late Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Fulbright? House bully-boy Tom DeLay is under indictment; Frist is being investigated for insider trading.

What independence the party shows seems limited to Sen. John McCain and a handful of back-benchers willing to oppose the leadership on rare occasions.

Bush has had a free run with Congress for five years. We seem to have adopted a parliamentary system of government, where party affiliation is more important than common sense. For the first time since 1881, a president went a full term without casting a veto. Will Bush exercise his first veto on the bill outlawing torture — if so, what does that say about the moralistic White House?

Or will the Congress once again roll over and cave in to Cheney and Bush and the weary old cries of using whatever tactics it takes to defeat our enemies, regardless of what it does to our moral standing at home and abroad?

If this is, indeed, a new form of parliamentary government, where is the "loyal opposition"? Can we find Democrats who have the courage to stand up and shout that the emperor has no clothes, or will they continue to cower for fear of being declared unpatriotic by the virulent voices of talk radio?

What, exactly, is patriotism? Is it a yellow car ribbon or is it calling for truth and dignity in the conduct of this nation?

And, finally, who is ultimately to blame for this mess? Could it be that the answer, again, is found in "Good Night, and Good Luck," in Murrow's closing lines as he exposed McCarthy:

"(McCarthy) didn't create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it and rather successfully. Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.' Good night, and good luck."