I admit I am getting swept up in the drama of it all. The way the Bush Presidency is playing out is like a Shakespearean tragedy (ie: a tragedy in which the hero engineers his own downfall, as opposed to a Greek tragedy, in which the Gods just had it in for him all along).
Bush consolidated his power by taking the concept of the anti-Goldwater Republican, first espoused by Reagan’s trickle-down advisors, to extremes. By making sure that the citizenry’s money flowed steadily into the hands of a small number of industrial elites, he pretty much forced the rank-and-file Republicans, even those Libertarians opposed to his big-spending ways, to follow in his shadow.
I remember asking my friends five years ago: “Wouldn’t it be easier to just use taxpayer money to directly pay the friends of Bush and Cheney the billions of dollars they are siphoning off? It seems very inefficient for our nation to lose trillions of dollars of an actual productive economy just so a few people can aggregate mere billions of dollars from an artificial war economy. Sooner or later, given the level of inefficiency of this particular form of graft, our tax base is going to run out wealth supporting these guys.”
Sure enough, we have finally hit that point. Now that his friends no longer have control of the money, Bush’s circle has lost the forced allegience of the Libertarians, who for years have resented being told to tag along with the big-money pre-emptive war profiteers who represent everything they hate.
Now the Republican party lies in pieces. In the massive rush to the exit candidate McCain can’t even get his own party to pay any attention to him, which pretty much demolishes his claim to leadership.
So now it looks as though the Senator from Illlinois will be inheriting one heckuva recession, and we’re not even going to have four years of those delightful Tina Fey sketches to look forward to. I guess that last part, on balance, is a good thing.
These are from 2002, but they’re still valid I guess:
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2002-07-24/
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2002-09-11/