Breakin' It Down

They run campaigns telling us that government sucks. When they get elected, they do everything in their considerable power to make it so. And whether it's deliberate or incidental, there will be blood. 

This is kind of a rehash of stuff we mostly already know, but there's no harm in reminding ourselves of the extent to which some of these assholes are willing to go in service to their ambitions &/or delusions.

Vox - Ezra Klein:

The GOP stands for Grand Old Party, but there is no past on display at the 2020 Republican National Convention: No previous Republican presidents, or previous Republican presidential nominees, are speaking. History, for this Republican Party, began on June 15, 2015, when Donald J. Trump descended a golden escalator. That suits both sides just fine. The Bush family, and the Republicans who admire them, view Trump and his followers with horror. In turn, Trump and his allies look upon the Bush wing of the party with contempt.

Trump’s rise has driven a rehabilitation of the George W. Bush brand. Bush’s personal decency, his impulse toward tolerance and inclusivity, glows against the backdrop of Trump’s casual cruelty and personal decadence. But the catastrophic misgovernance in which Bush ended his presidency, and Trump ends his first term, reveals the continuity between the two administrations.

When Bush left the White House in 2009, the Iraq War was a recognized debacle, with thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, casualties of its chaos. The global economy was in collapse, driven by a calamitous void of regulatory oversight of Wall Street, and the disastrous decision to let Lehman Brothers fall. Less than 10 years later, the next Republican president is ending his first term with nearly 200,000 Americans dead of the coronavirus — the worst pandemic performance, by far, of any rich nation — and an economy in shambles.

Bush and Trump are so personally different, and their administrations so temperamentally opposite, that it feels awkward to compare them, like trying to find the symmetries between a car crash and a spontaneous combustion. But in his new book, To Start a War, Robert Draper chronicles the internal deliberations and dynamics that led the Bush administration into Iraq. In doing so, Draper reminds us of the throughline between the two administrations: a toxic contempt for the government itself.

The big fuckups can almost always be traced back to someone who is convinced his own alternate version of reality is perfect while ignoring every piece of tangible evidence to the contrary, and going forward on the Universal Rationalization - "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." (Don Rumsfeld's favorite aphorism, as noted by Klein in the piece)

Draper’s book is full of stories like this, where the catalytic ingredient is contempt for the government employees who actually had the expertise — the State Department officials who knew what it would mean to leave a power vacuum in Iraq, the United Nations weapons inspectors who had scoured suspected WMD sites in the country, the generals who understood that keeping the peace would be harder than routing Saddam’s forces, the foreign intelligence agencies who had discredited the sources the administration was relying on, the regional experts who warned against disbanding Iraq’s army and civil service. Tragically, the Bush team’s contempt for the weapons inspectors was such that when they didn’t find weapons, it became, inside the administration, part of the case for war: It just showed how canny and deceptive Saddam really was, and how little you could trust the UN to contain him.

It's more than just possible that we're living thru (ie: trying to survive) a realtime experiment, where we blow up the model of democratic self-governance that the Free Marketeers see as Deep State Villainy, confident that freedom-loving patriots will rise up and take a firm hand, thus restoring democracy by letting the true spirit of holy fuck I have to stop because I'm making myself sick now.

USAmerica Inc is fucked up on the head and we're going to need years of therapy.