The War That May Have Saved America

President Bush’s approval rating recently hit 28%, the lowest of his presidency and equal to the low point of Jimmy Carter’s. The Republicans lost the Congress in 2006. The two GOP presidential debates were contests between 10 middle-aged white men to see who could invoke Ronald Regan’s name the most and establish their right-wing bonefides the best. Both debates were devoid of any new ideas. Now a majority of American identify themselves as Democrats rather that Republicans. The party that Karl Rove had envisioned as the majority party for a generation is in peril of losing the White House in 2008 and becoming an even greater minority in Congress. What caused this turnaround from just three years ago, when Bush was re-elected and the GOP ruled Congress and, it seemed, the entire country?

Of course, one not need be a rocket scientist to know the answer. It’s the war, stupid, and all aspects of the war: the decision to go to war based on lies; the lack of post-war planning and the resulting debacle; the war profiteering by the administration friends; and the hopeless quagmire that this country is now in.

Bush came into office as a result of the disputed 2000 election with an air of illegitimacy and with no mandate. Despite his claims of being a compassionate conservative (an oxymoron), the real agenda of his administration was to dismantle the social programs of the New Deal. He was the face man, as it were, for the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform et al. These people longed for the golden age of corporate and business rule, no government (except, of course, for the Defense Department), and no taxes, the way the country was before FDR injected a bit of humanity into it. All the talk about social issues was pure bullshit. These people could have given a rats ass about morality or so-called family values. They just used Gays, Guns, and God to get the pure shcmucks on the low end of economic totem pole, those who the New Deal was enacted to help in the first place, to vote against their own economic interests.

9/11 and the fear of terrorism gave Bush, Cheney and Rove the opportunity to advance their agenda. Now, in addition to the Three G's, they could use fear to get votes. And they were well on their way to talking this country back to the 19th Century when their hubris got the best of them. They pushed it too far and invaded Iraq. The rest, as they say, is history.

This war has been their undoing. They lost Congress because of it. Hopefully, they will lose the presidency in 2008 because of it. And, hopefully, their march back to those great days of the Gilded Age, when the country was ruled by a few elite families and corporations for whom the rest of us worked, has been halted. Hence the title of this post. The Iraq war may very well be the war that saved America. Not, however, from Saddam, but from itself. And, as hard as it is to say this, maybe the Americans killed fighting this war have therefore not died in vain.

- Jeff Bloomfield