The Dark View

We are truly messed over. I think Bush is just smart enough to avoid an action in Iran that will get him impeached, but not smart enough to solve any of problems he has already created or the additional problems he is creating with Iran and the rest of the Middle East. He will run the clock out to January 20th, 2009. His successor will have to spend all of her time and whatever political capital she has (no assumptions with the pronoun--just felt like using an EO pronoun) picking up the pieces left behind by the disastrous Bush Administration and continuing to fight a rearguard action against those forces that would send us back to the Gilded Age as far as social justice is concerned--much like what Bill Clinton had to do after the Reagan and Bush I years...Probably true even if Bush and Cheney were impeached and Pelosi took the helm...Perhaps one could argue for a silver lining in that Republican neocon and neoliberal policies should be dead in the water for a generation...except they won't...there will be "stab in the back" theories to account for their failures, but more important I think is simply the absence of Americans' capacity for historical memory...Reagan shouldn't have a video game arcade named after him, let alone an airport or an elementary school, but there you go again...Of course, there's the right wing echo chamber, but why do so many people buy into it...I'm sure there's lots of good counterevidence for all of this negative thinking, but it seems hard to call any of it to mind...perhaps it's because the Bush Administration is such an unmitigated...messup...