Notes for converts from Huffington Post

Notes for Converts
Jane Smiley
The Huffington Post: 03.21.2006

Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer,
William F. Buckley, Sandra Day O'Connor, Republican voters in
Indiana and all the rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's
faith-based reality seem, right now, to be glorying in your outrage,
which is always a pleasure and feels, at the time, as if it is
having an effect, but those of us who have been anti-Bush from day 1
(defined as the day after the stolen 2000 election) have a few
pointers for you that should make your transition more realistic.

1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes
you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and
support him. No degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no
longstanding friendly intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of
expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no essential importance (Tony Blair,
American voters) makes any difference. There is nothing you have to
offer that makes Bush want to know you once you have come to
disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a world
entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush. You are now just
one of those "polls" that he pays no attention to. When you were on
his side, you thought that showed "integrity" on his part. It
doesn't. It shows an absolute inability to learn from experience.

2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has
dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by
his handlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is
indifferent to what you now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure
and a quagmire? Bush doesn't care. Is global warming beginning to
affect us right now? So what. Have all of his policies with regard
to Iran been misguided and counter-productive? He never thinks about
it. You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question?
It doesn't matter how much you know or how passionately you feel or,
most importantly, what degree of disintegration you see around you,
he's not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to
him. You cannot change his mind. Nine percent of polled Americans
would agree with attacking Iran right now. To George Bush, that will
be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it, because...

3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being
told, even politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is
called a "sense of entitlement". Bush is a man who has never been
anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and
cajoled into being president of the United States through his
connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own
purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of
American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of
perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not
complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a
front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of
Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a
debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted
one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of
this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view,
he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of
entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to reciprocate? He's
never had to before this.

4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court
humiliated itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even
though two of the justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of
interest, you did not object. When the Bush administration adopted
an "Anything but Clinton" policy that resulted in ignoring and
dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist attacks on US soil,
you went along with and made excuses for Bush. When the Bush
administration allowed the corrupt Enron corporation to swindle
California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to
balance their books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and
ignored the links between Enron and the administration. When it was
evident that the evidence for the war in Iraq was cooked and that
State Department experts on the Middle East were not behind the war
and so it was going to be run as an exercise in incompetence, you
continued to attack those who were against the war in vicious terms
and to defend policies that simply could not work. On intelligent
design, global warming, doctoring of scientific results to reflect
ideology, corporate tax giveaways, the K Street project, the illegal
redistricting of Texas, torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the Terry
Schiavo fiasco, and the cronyism that led to the destruction of New
Orleans you have failed to speak out with integrity or honesty,
preferring power to truth at every turn. Bush does what he wants
because you have let him.

5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and
inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the
last generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980.
Whenever I asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China,
he said "Mistakes were made". He could not believe that Marxism
itself was at fault, just as you cannot believe that the ideology of
the unregulated free market has created the world we live in today.
You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have been made", but in fact,
psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes have been made. The
unregulated free market has operated to produce a government in its
own image. In an unregulated free market, for example, cheating is
merely another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces
might eventually "shake out" of the system. Of course, anyone with
common sense understands that cheaters do damage that sometimes
cannot be repaired before they are "shaken out", but according to
the principles of the unregulated free market, the victims of that
sort of damage are just out of luck and the damage that happens to
them is just a sort of "culling". It is no accident that our
government is full of cheaters--they learned how to profit from
cheating when they were working in corporations that were using
bribes, perks, and secret connections to cheat their customers of
good products, their neighbors of healthy environmental conditions,
their workers of workplace safety and decent paychecks. It was only
when the corporations began cheating their shareholders that any of
you squealed, but you should know from your own experience that the
unregulated free market as a "level playing field" was the biggest
laugh of the 20th century. No successful company in the history of
capitalism has ever favored open competition. When you folks
pretended, in the eighties, that you weren't using the ideology of
the free market to cover your own manipulations of the playing field
to your own advantage, you may have suckered yourselves, and even
lots of American workers, but observers of capitalism since Adam
Smith could have told you it wasn't going to work.

And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance
to gain and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the
party of Lincoln and reaching out to disaffected southern racists,
drumming up a backlash against the Civil Rights movement for the
sake of votes, but none of you has been any less vicious. Racism
might have died an unlamented death in this country, but you kept it
alive with phrases like "welfare queen" and your resistance to
affirmative action and taxation for programs to help people in our
country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the
moral high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be
better off without racism, but rather to increase class divisions
and racial divisions for the sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and
profit. You have used religion in exactly the same way. Instead of
strongly defending the constitutional separation of church and
state, you have encouraged radical fundamentalist sects to believe
that they can take power in the US and mold our secular government
to their own image, and get rich doing it. The US could have become
a moderating force in what seems now to be an inevitable battle
among the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions, but you have made
that impossible by flattering and empowering our own violent and
intolerant Christian right.

You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of
the Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent
enough or far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances
were instituted by Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of
them not because of some abstract distrust of power, but because
they had witnessed the screw-ups and idiocies of unchecked power.
You yourselves have demonstrated the failures of unchecked power--in
an effort to achieve it, you have repeatedly contravened the
expressed wishes of most Americans, who favor a moderate foreign
policy, reasonable domestic programs, a goverrnment that works,
environmental preservation, women's rights to contraception,
abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow you thought you could
mold the imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess what--that's
what an imperium is--one man rule. If you fear the madness of King
George, you have no recourse if you've given up the checks and
balances that you inherited and that were meant to protect you.

Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed,
short-term solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked
in the faces of children and denied the existence of a "common
good". You have disdained and denied the idea of "altruism". At one
time, our bureaucracy was full of people who had gone into
government service or scientific research for altruistic reasons--I
knew, because I knew some of them. You have driven them out and
replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses. You have lied over and
over about your motives, for example, making laws that hurt people
and calling it "originalist interpretations of the
Constitution" (conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have
increased the powers of corporations at the expense of every other
sector in the nation and actively defied any sort of regulation that
would require these corporations to treat our world with care and
respect. You have made economic growth your deity, and in doing so,
you have accelerated the power of the corporations to destroy the
atmosphere, the oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and the
climate. You have produced CEOs in charge of lots of resources and
lots of people who have no more sense of reciprocity or connection
or responsibility than George W. Bush.

Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks
of a loser. Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You
think he's made mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that
you taught him and demonstrated for him are bad ideas,
self-destructive ideas, and even suicidal ideas. And they are
immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of yourselves because not only
have your ideas not worked to make the world a better place, they
were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have served to
cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits of
those who profess them.

6. As Bad as Bush is, Cheney is Worse.

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