Through The Looking Glass

There's a natural tendency, I think, to suppose that most others believe what we believe. (You agree, right? See! I told you!) So maybe I'm mistaken, but I've always thought that most Americans generally agreed that there were some things that were best done by the government, particularly the federal government, and that, conversely, there were some things that the government should stay the hell out of.

Examples: Protecting Americans from attacks or natural disasters, building interstate highways, funding research into national problems such as cancer, HIV, or the need for clean energy are tasks best done by the federal government. Deciding who to marry, whether or not to have children, what religion, if any, to practice, and deciding when and how to die are decisions best left entirely to the people involved and the government, particularly the federal government, needs to carefully avoid trampling on the personal liberties involved in those sorts of decisions.

In fact, there was a time, not too long ago, when it was the conservatives who kept proclaiming that government needed to stay out of people's lives. They'd dig up examples of over-zealous Social Service agents who removed a child from her home because her parents sent her to bed without dinner one night to punish her bad behavior and worry that the next thing you knew, Big Brother would have cameras in everyone's home to monitor them 24/7. (OK, we didn't say "24/7" back then, but if the expression had been invented, they'd have used it.)

Now, in George Bush's America (I unfortunately mean that more literally than I'd like), it's as if we've stepped through the looking glass and everything's backward. Our first big clue was the federal government's failure to pay any attention to a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) entitled "bin Laden Determined to Strike Within US." The president was too busy taking a month-long vacation in a hell-hole in Texas to bother with protecting Americans from attacks by terrorists. Even after it happened, the Bush administration had to be pretty much dragged, pouting and sticking out their lower lips, into attacking the country that had harbored the Saudis who attacked us. Not much fun for them in attacking Afghanistan, even if that's where our attackers had come from.

Our next big clue -- like we needed another one -- was Katrina. Again, Bush and his administration were on vacation and, even with plenty of advance warning, sat around and did nothing to protect Americans from this natural disaster, nor to help them deal with its aftermath. When pushed uncharacteristically hard about its failure to act by the generally lapdogiscal press, Bush & Co. trotted out an idea that should have shocked all Americans even more than it did: it was the State of Louisiana's responsibility to deal with this problem, size and scope of it be damned. It was a particularly amazing statement coming from an administration that had spent millions and millions of dollars "reorganizing" the federal government around the distastefully-named "Department of Homeland Security."

We got our third big clue just this week. Bush announced that, come the avian bird flu epidemic, Americans could count on whatever help they might get from their state governments, but the federal government -- you know, the people who run the CDC -- wasn't going to bother to get too involved, so don't expect it and don't criticize them when they don't lift a finger because, well, they told us a few months ahead of time not to count on them. A coming world-wide pandemic and the federal government of the United States of America says, "Americans, you're on your own."

Coupled with this stunning abdication of traditional federal responsibilities, we've seen an equally stunning intrusion into American's personal lives. Our fist clue should have been "faith-based" funding of religious activities -- something that would have turned the Founding Fathers' stomachs. From that point on, the Bush administration has been more concerned with legislating how Americans live their private lives than any American government ever in the 200+ years of the Republic. Access to birth control of all forms, but especially abortion, is denied, a particularly odious and distasteful brand of xian fundamentalism is shoved down our throats at every opportunity, right-to-die laws are fought all the way to SCOTUS, gay sex is used as a match to ignite the dry timber of Bush's "base," and Bush flies at midnight back from a Texas vacation -- something he wouldn't do for the PDB or Katrina -- to interfere in Michael Schiavo's decision concerning how his brain-dead wife would have wanted to die.

WTF? WTF? Where are all the conservatives of the 1970s and 1980s who wanted a limited role for government? I'm beginning to think they never wanted to limit the government's role in any aspect of American's lives at all. They wanted to limit the extent to which government could regulate corporations. Period. Because, otherwise, I sure as hell would have expected them to be rioting in the street over some of Bush's intrusions into American's lives.

Sure, we're beginning to hear that conservatives are "upset" with Bush over governmental spending -- which has gone up under Bush while taxes on the rich have gone down. They don't want more taxes, but less spending, apparently on the few social services the government still provides because I haven't heard any of them complain about the cost of our illegal war in Iraq coughHaliburtoncough. Recent polls seem to show that some of Bush's losses are due to people who call themselves conservatives being unhappy with him. Not, I guess, for lying us into a war or turning his back on the traditional role of the federal government, but for getting caught lying us into a war and threatening their control of both houses of Congress.

So get ready to start hearing that Bush was never a "real" conservative and that, in 2008, we should elect a "real" conservative who'll do it right this time. It reminds me of a speech that I heard the now-fired CEO of Reliant Energy give after the California energy debacle. (Maybe that should have been our first clue, when Cheney basically told California it was on its own, even though only the federal government could, by law, regulate the energy prices.) Reliant insisted that the problem wasn't that California had deregulated its energy markets, it was that California hadn't deregulated all the way. True, complete deregulation would, he assured his listeners, fix everything. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that Reliant had been manipulating California's energy markets and laughing on tape about it.

When Newt Gingrich says that the Democrats' slogan ought to be: Had Enough? it's because Newt plans to answer that question by saying that Bush was never a real conservative, but that a real, true, honest-to-goodness conservative (who'll cut social spending to the bone) would be a real change and great for America.

Goddess, I hope we're now too smart to buy that tripe. But the marketing campaign is coming. You watch.