Farewell Tour
Our president’s handlers have sent him off on a grand tour of the Middle East, killing two birds with one stone.
The nominal focus of the trip, launching a new round of peace talks between Israel and Palestine, is pure fantasy. No one, except perhaps Bush himself, have any illusions about his chances of improving the situation. If he shoots his mouth off, he might even hurt the screw it up further. (Hard to imagine it getting any worse, yes, but we are talking about Dubya.) The fundamental issue, that two people want to inhabit the same land and won’t share—has confounded sharper minds than George’s for decades, even when those minds were bent mightily and for long periods towards producing a peace. Bush publicly wrote off Israeli-Palestinian relations early in his presidency as a waste of his time, and, until now, never brought the subject up again. He turns to it now because, after seven years of failure on every front and approval numbers somewhat lower than those of bubonic plague, he has nowhere else to turn to leave something resembling a positive legacy.
But he has been a good boy, and provided a useful rallying point for the neoconservatives, so he is being indulged, as indeed he has been indulged his whole life. He has read the speeches handed to him, ever more stiffly and less frequently as it became apparent that even reading prepared speeches strained his limited facilities, but he has read them. He has protected his own, pardoning Libby for corrupting the presidential office. He has stuffed the cabinet and the military and the justice department and even the Supreme Court with those who could be trusted to approve authoritarianism and turn a blind eye to corruption, no matter what. He has jettisoned moderate voices and dissenting opinions, ensuring that no voice but the neoconservative was heard. He never quailed at blatant lies when they could be made to serve ugly agenda, never doubted that America does not employ torture, even when the photos hit the front page, never troubled himself over an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution when a friend thought it might be convenient to trammel it now and again. George has been a good boy, and so he will get his sweetie.
If he wants to spend his last year playing at peacemaker, as he has spent the rest of his presidency at playing general, so be it. If, bereft of any other scrap of a positive legacy, he wants to roll the dice on the long, long odds against peace in the West Bank, so be it. If Tel Aviv must go without power for an evening so that he may better see an Israeli sunset, so be it. George has been a good boy, and he will be denied nothing.
And yet…is the trip entirely for the benefit of our president’s boundless ego? I can’t believe so.
We are reaching the end of twenty-eight years of rising power for authoritarians and robber barons, twenty-eight years of emptying the nation’s treasury and mailing it off to the wealthy, twenty-eight years of abridging, curtailing, and outright denying Constitutional law, twenty-eight years of removing accountability from elected office, Bill Clinton’s presidency notwithstanding. Twenty-eight years of corruption has produced some ugly effects; long-term costs are coming due, and the peasants are at last beginning to sense, however dimly, that things are not going well for them. They are angry, and change is in the wind. Bush has overseen the most audacious grab for power since the Sedition acts of 1793; the bastards have taken they could have dreamed. Now it’s time to dig in and prevent anyone from taking it back.
As a lame duck, Bush is now merely a reminder—indeed, the crowning glory—of a generation of pride and corruption. Allowing him to remain in the public spotlight can do nothing but hurt the prospects of his successor to hold the line against public sentiment. Best to shunt him off the national stage, far from the election cameras, and far, far from the GOP campaigns. Somewhere so screwed up that he can do no more harm, which admittedly is awfully hard to find. You’d practically need somewhere that’s been embroiled in war as long as living memory.
Such as…