So, What's Next for Bush?

I had long assumed that George W. Bush was a mere puppet president who got his strings pulled by Cheney and perhaps others in the administration and really didn't have much control over the day-to-day running of the government. Maybe that impression was based in part on excerpts I had read from The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind's book about former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

Who could forget the tale of Bush's eyes glazing over as O'Neill was trying to explain something technical to him, or the time when Bush innocently questioned the need for yet another tax cut for the rich, only to be quickly straightened out by Karl Rove (or was it Dick Cheney?). And then there was O'Neill's description of Bush during a cabinet meeting: "He was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

That's why I was shocked to read the details of how Bush reacted (or failed to react) to Hurricane Katrina. Sure, I knew Bush wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but I figured that if something truly cataclysmic occurred, some adult would be there to show Bush where to stand and to tell him what to say and do. Now, thanks to recent articles in Time and Newsweek, I'm starting to realize that Bush has a lot more power over the people around him than I thought he had . . . and this realization is scaring the hell out of me.

Indeed, I can understand why a lot of right wingers want to ignore the grim realities of modern life with George W. Bush as our president and instead harken back to a kinder, gentler, more peaceful time -- you know, a time when you could pour yourself a nice Jack on the rocks, pick up your well-worn, extensively-highlighted copy of The Starr Report, walk out onto your newly-refinished deck, sit down on your favorite piece of outdoor furniture -- and get a good laugh reading about the wild sexual antics of Bill Clinton whilst enjoying the greatest economy our country had ever experienced.

Do you remember those days? Boy, I sure do. They are only a few years behind us, but they seem like decades ago. I miss them.

After the 2004 election, I started wondering -- along with a lot of my friends (at least those who weren't making plans to relocate to New Zealand) -- if we should simply give in and become right-winged Republican assholes. After all, my friends and I weren't exactly poor -- and the leaders in the Democratic Party had failed us -- so why not consider embracing extreme selfishness, hatred for government, and all the other core Republican principles? Why couldn't we simply drink the GOP Kool-Aid and float around on the same cloud of ultra-obliviousness that 50.73% of the country had sleepily hitched a ride upon?

Sure, the Federal government was more or less teetering on the brink thanks to an idiotic war overseas and all the looting that took the form of tax cuts for the very wealthy, but how did all that really affect us? We weren't in the military; and if there was a draft, we'd be either too old or too beat up to qualify. If there was a recession, why should we really care? We weren't poor. If Bush appointed right-wing activist judges to the Supreme Court and abortion was outlawed, so what? We weren't planning on getting any abortions.

How much trouble could these GOP "ideals" really get us into? OK, Bush's push to privatize social security could affect us in our older years, but the polls were all saying that Bush did not have the support of the people on that issue, so it didn't concern us too much. And who really cares if our kids were taught intelligent design in public school or there was a Ten Commandments monument on every corner? Hell, we'd get used to all that eventually.

Then came Katrina, and now it seems like the election of 2004 -- and all the above-described mind crap that followed -- are also part of some distant, hazy past, even though it all happened less than a year ago. Katrina, it seems, had snapped the country out of a trance.

It is too bad that it took a tragedy like Katrina to do it. The Debacle in Iraq had partially awakened a lot of Americans in the months following Bush's reelection, but I always felt that Bush -- with the help of the Corporate Media, of course -- was just one terror threat color away from coaxing us back into our national coma. Maybe the emergence of another Osama videotape would be all it would take to make us forget about Bush's incompetence.

But everything changed on August 29, 2005. The post-Katrina era was fully upon us a few days later, and it gave us a good look at the real enemy. And guess what -- he's not some dude hiding in a cave in Pakistan (or wherever the hell bin Laden is) or sitting in a jail cell in Iraq, nor is he the guy currently occupying the White House. Our true enemy is the right-wing extremist mindset that permeated post-9-11 America.

Whether George Bush wants to continue to be part of the problem is up to him.

Columnist E.J. Dionne announced yesterday that Katrina has put an end to the Bush Era, and it is pretty hard to argue with him:

The federal budget, already a mess before Katrina, is now a laughable document. Those who call for yet more tax cuts risk sounding like robots droning automated talking points programmed inside them long ago. Katrina has forced the issue of deep poverty back onto the national agenda after a long absence. Finding a way forward in -- and eventually out of -- Iraq will require creativity from those not implicated in the administration's mistakes. And if ever the phrase "reinventing government" had relevance, it is now that we have observed the performance of a government that allows political hacks to push aside the professionals.

As Dionne noted in his column, Bush himself could put the last few nails in the Bush Era coffin if he wanted to. He could fire the bulk of his advisors. Many presidents have done this -- maybe not to the extent required of Bush now, but it has been done in the past.

Bush could announce that he is really a moderate at heart, even though he foolishly surrounded himself with right wing extremists. He could admit what everybody else already knows -- his tax cuts for the wealthy and his war in Iraq were mistakes that need to be corrected immediately.

Yesterday, Bush did the most anti-Rovian thing possible and took personal responsibility for the inept federal response to Katrina. It's a good start, but if he wants to salvage his presidency, he'll need to admit that the Katrina embarrassment occurred not simply because he chose Michael Brown to run FEMA. Bush needs to admit that it was caused by a long line of wrong-headed policy decisions that were made on his watch, and he could then confess that he was indeed way too detached from it all. Once he gets all that out of the way, he could then officially inaugurate the Post-Katrina Era by firing Michael Chertoff.

As much as I dislike Bush, I would really love to see him do something like what was just described. Let's face it: he will not resign, and even if the Democrats did take over the House in 2006 and impeached Bush, the Senate would never convict him. America's only hope is that Bush chooses to re-tool his presidency. If he chooses not to, then we would be stuck with the same president we have had these last five years, which means that history will look back on 2005 as the year the American Empire officially began to unravel.