Lucky Us Americans are lucky. We've gotten to witness quite a few unprecedented events under the leadership of the Bush White House. Millions of jobs were lost during a single presidential term, which hadn't happened since the Great Depression. A war was started in which the United States fired the first shot, unheard of since the Civil War. Today's deficits loom like an obelisk over the spending sprees of Ronald Reagan (and he had Democrats crafting his budgets). The result has been the earliest-ever sighting of a lame duck on Capitol Hill. This was unforeseen. Remember the kind of strength that propelled Bill Clinton through the first half of his second term? He was rolling with a diesel engine, and towing a trailer full of Republican opposition from Congress while doing it. Bush's second-term agenda has displayed all the forward momentum of a soapbox racer on flat earth, and that's with like-minded foolishness reigning in the House and the Senate. Yet for all their blustery bravado about mandates, political capital and "will of the people", the GOP's approval ratings (and Bush's in particular) indicate a rather tattered image among the majority of Americans. And no wonder. Gas prices remain high, and it is understood (in a downtrodden way, I'm saying) that the Good Old Days are over when it comes to pump prices. In Arizona, one out of every five dollars that a family spends is compressed by a piston, exploded in a combustion chamber and sent out the pipes to further foul the air. By the way, our Republican Senate President, Ken Bennett, owns a gasoline distribution company. Call it an unrelated factoid, but there it is. Part of the reason for the increased fuel usage is that so many people moved to the newest outreaches of suburbia, from which they must commute for a good many hours each week. How can you blame them for living way out there when new homes are so much cheaper than existing homes, which have increased on par with markets like Los Angeles and Las Vegas over the last two years? Any money we can keep out of our gas tanks goes to the stunning increase in health care premiums, which are due more to poor investment strategies by the insurance companies than to any sort of legal issues. But conservatives, easily tricked on most days, continue to blame "the lawyers" or "activist judges" for spiraling health care costs. They care more about how much water they can flush down their toilets. Adding to the misery of the Bush economy (which is even making the investor class queasy), the war drags on, with two Americans killed per diem in Iraq at a bargain-basement price of a billion dollars a week... And it turns out that even our staunchest allies knew there was no compelling reason for it. While the British are preparing to bring more troops home, we keep rotating our men and women back into combat. It comes as no surprise, then, that Bush is dragging one webbed foot and laying eggs all across the country with his Social Security whistle-stop tour, the result of which was lower approval ratings and heightened skepticism about privatizing the safety net. It could be that the people of our great nation have decided that Dubya is actually a pretty keen barometer on the important issues. Reliably wrong as he has been, Americans can ascertain in which direction the nation should be heading by listening to the president, and then going 180 degrees away from his ideas. And that might well undo much of the damage already done by power-mad red-state Representatives... Except for that pesky GOP domination of the legislature. Now, even that branch is giving way beneath Baby Bush. First, they crafted a bill that would ease restrictions on vital stem-cell research, which conservatives have long stifled in the twisted belief that doing so somehow preserves life. A self-proclaimed compassionate conservative to this day, Bush promised to utilize his veto pen - never before used, another rarity in American politics - if such a thing were to hit his desk. Then they went further. A group of Republicans and Democrats teamed up to propose crafting a law that would require the president to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. This drew the flattest of looks from the neo-conservative power base, and revenge will likely be exacted upon the recalcitrant RINOs ("Republicans In Name Only") who broke bread and made hay with those liberal pariahs. If that didn't get them kicked out of the clubhouse, this will: House Republicans are going squarely against the will of the chief executive in voting to remove some of the anti-liberty portions of the Patriot Act, such as the provision that gives federal spooks the right to swipe your library card. Good for them. It's about time they did something to protect the Bill of Rights from unchecked right-wing abuse. Soon, the move away from Bush-mania is sure to spill out of the House. Many Republicans in the Senate are now distancing themselves from Majority Leader Bill Frist, both for bullying them on judicial nominees and for attempting to diagnose Terri Schiavo from an armchair. But John McCain rode in on his magic fence to steal the filibuster spotlight, and Schiavo's autopsy verified what most Americans instinctively knew - that Frist was absolutely wrong (there's that barometer again). In all of the above instances, a few brave and scrupulous Republicans quietly reached across the aisle, clutching to Democrats for the support they knew they could not find in their own Party, and America is the better for it. If we're not careful, this bipartisan thing could catch on; then where would we be? Paul Heller 6/21/05 << back to the archives
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