Malice, not incompetence
Is why America is in the mess it is right now, says Avedon Carol:
But, look, if “a few bad apples” can be at the bottom, they can certainly be at the top. And it stands to reason that bad people who are interested in power would try to reach the top. And maybe it’s that power corrupts, or maybe it’s that the corrupt reach for power and some of them know how to get it, but it really does happen, it has happened in every nation in history, and it’s silly to think that we just happen to be in a time and place that is immune to it.
So before you fall for the idea that the mess we’re in can be explained away by mere incompetence, just ask yourself why it is that the “mistakes” this crowd makes always seem to profit them and just happen to fit in neatly with their publicly stated agenda. And don’t forget that in the one thing that matters to Bush, he did put a very competent expert in place – Karl Rove. Yeah, Rove may have blown it with Traitorgate, but he made sure Bush was a two-termer – and if Rove has to fall on his sword, well, that’s just fine as long as Bush doesn’t finally have to take responsibility for something.
See, to the conservative movement, improving the lives of a majority of Americans isn’t merely a pipe-dream, a failed liberal project – it’s a mistake. That’s why conservatives have spent the whole of the existence of the United States trying to return us to something resembling monarchy. Everything they do is aimed at strengthening those at the top and weakening the rest of us. They want your life to be hard; they like it like that.
Hear hear.
For several years now I’ve been hammering on the fact that the Bush administration just doesn’t care about America, just about itself. These people from the start were out to enrich themselves and their friends and the September 11 attacks gave them the opening to do so on the grand scale. This is not a question of difference between “liberal” and conservative” politics and policies; it is not that they have the best interests of the country at heart but sadly differ in how to safeguard these; they have no interests other than their own.
Every policy is there to benefit themselves or their cronies: tax cuts to the rich, gutting of environmental and workers safety legislation and every incident is exploited for the same purposes: no-bid countracts to rebuild Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans…
All the rest: the hyperpatriotism, the cretinsm and pandering to the evengalical right, the silly photo-op proposals (trip to Mars, 15 billion to combat aid, “no child left behind) are just means to an end, with the end being the enrichement of their people and themselves.