From: Antony Unruh [unruhboyer@earthlink.net]
Sent:
To:
gsg@sellnext.com;
Cc:
Smith;
Subject: Read this and then vote
This piece from the New Yorker.
This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger-who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war-as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger's adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up "Happy Days Are Here Again."
The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck)
will end on
Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring them-by cutting off the process and installing Bush by fiat-the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism.
A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual
civic equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the
damage would have been far less severe if the new President had made some
effort to take account of the special circumstances of his election-in the
composition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals,
perhaps even in the goals themselves. He made no such effort. According to
The new President's main order of business was to push
through Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the
very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening
environmental protection and cutting off funds for international
family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in
English, not Arabic) as "the base," which is to say the conservative
movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The President's
enthusiastic embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the
Administration, the defection of a moderate senator from
The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities-political and, apparently, ideological-in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and-strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism-incompetence.
In January, 2001, just after Bush's inauguration, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated bounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last year's federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year's will top four hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3 trillion.
Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates
the looming fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that
most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation
that enacted them. However, nobody in
What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq's collapse in April, 2000. It's true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn't make them wise policy. "Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans," Bush said during his final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is false-a lie, actually-though at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller marriage penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly. Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of ninety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-two dollars.
These disparities help explain the familiar charge that
Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a
net loss of American jobs. This Administration's most unshakable commitment has
been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that rewards
wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxation and
Economic Policy, another
Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as "new source review," which requires power-plant operators to install modern pollution controls when upgrading older facilities. The change, it turned out, had been recommended by some of the nation's largest polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was chaired by Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed new rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions from power plants. The E.P.A.'s regulation drafters had copied, in some instances verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing the utility industry.
"I guess you'd say I'm a good steward of the
land," Bush mused dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you'd say nothing
of the kind. The President has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to
allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast stretches
of accessible wilderness have been opened up to development. By stripping away
restrictions on the use of federal lands, often through little-advertised rule
changes, the Administration has potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area
larger than
During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has been excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About others there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for example, permits government investigators to obtain-without a subpoena or a search warrant based on probable cause-a court order entitling them to records from libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and Internet service providers, among other public and private entities. Officials of the Department of Justice say that they have used Section 215 with restraint, and that they have not, so far, sought information from libraries or bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be more reassuring if their record were not otherwise so troubling.
Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the
Justice Department under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven
weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its
investigation had resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The arrests have
continued, but eventually the Administration simply stopped saying how many
people were and are being held. In any event, not one
of the detainees has been convicted of anything resembling a terrorist act. At
least as reprehensible is the way that foreign nationals living in the
President Bush often complains about Democratic
obstructionism, but the truth is that he has made considerable progress, if
that's the right word, toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with
conservative ideologues. The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one of his
judicial nominees, more than the per-term averages for Presidents Clinton,
Reagan, and Bush senior. Senate Republicans blocked more than sixty of
Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it has been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. Like some of the Court's worst decisions of the past four years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its best-salvaging affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for terrorist suspects, striking down Texas's anti-sodomy law, banning executions of the mentally retarded-were reached by
one- or two-vote majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two justices removed from
reversal.)
The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that long antedates 9/11. The President's hostility to science, exemplified by his decision to place crippling limits on federal support of stem-cell research and by a systematic willingness to distort or suppress scientific findings discomfiting to "the base," is such that scores of eminent scientists who are normally indifferent to politics have called for his defeat. The Administration's energy policies, especially its resistance to increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, are of a piece with its environmental irresponsibility. Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind education program, enacted with the support of the liberal lion Edward Kennedy, is being allowed to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding. Some of the money that has been pumped into it has been leached from other education programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year.
Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But this election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education, and the rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect of large-scale terrorist attack. The most important Presidential responsibility of the next four years, as of the past three, is the "war on terror"-more precisely, the struggle against a brand of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that uses particularly ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon.
Bush's immediate reaction to the events of
The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last
month's Presidential election, for which the votes are still being counted, is
clearly a positive sign. Yet the job in
The White House's real priorities were elsewhere from the
start. According to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a
Situation Room crisis meeting on
At all three debates, President Bush defended the
As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have
made plain, Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens
to no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome views
are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-created bubble
of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism been more damaging than in
the case of
The decision to invade and occupy
assumptions: first, that Saddam's regime was on the verge
of acquiring nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with
In Bush's rhetoric, the
By the end of the current fiscal year, the financial cost
of this war will be two hundred billion dollars (the figure projected by
Lawrence Lindsey, who headed the President's Council of Economic Advisers
until, like numerous other bearers of unpalatable news, he was cashiered) and
rising. And there are other, more serious costs that were unforeseen by the
dominant factions in the Administration (although there were plenty of people
who did foresee them). The
When the Administration's geopolitical,
national-interest, and anti-terrorism justifications for the
The damage visited upon
Throughout his long career in public service, John Kerry has demonstrated steadiness and sturdiness of character. The physical courage he showed in combat in Vietnam was matched by moral courage when he raised his voice against the war, a choice that has carried political costs from his first run for Congress, lost in 1972 to a campaign of character assassination from a local newspaper that could not forgive his antiwar stand, right through this year's Swift Boat ads. As a senator, Kerry helped expose the mischief of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, a money-laundering operation that favored terrorists and criminal cartels; when his investigation forced him to confront corruption among fellow-Democrats, he rejected the cronyism of colleagues and brought down power brokers of his own party with the same dedication that he showed in going after Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal. His leadership, with John McCain, of the bipartisan effort to put to rest the toxic debate over Vietnam-era P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for Washington's normalization of relations with Hanoi, in the mid-nineties, was the signal accomplishment of his twenty years on Capitol Hill, and it is emblematic of his fairness of mind and independence of spirit. Kerry has made mistakes (most notably, in hindsight at least, his initial opposition to the Gulf War in 1990), but-in contrast to the President, who touts his imperviousness to changing realities as a virtue-he has learned from them.
Kerry's performance on the stump has been uneven, and his
public groping for a firm expl
--
UNRUH BOYER
(323) 662-3111
(323) 664-9091 F
--
UNRUH BOYER
(323) 662-3111
(323) 664-9091 F