Monday, March 08, 2004

The War President

Our nation is currently having a debate about the wisdom of fighting two wars at the same time, particularly when the President has led us into these wars through deceit and dissembling, as a way of diverting attention from this administration’s massive failure.

Of course, I’m talking about the culture war and the class war this time, instead of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush has decided to attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution via an amendment prohibiting gay marriage. For many of us, whether straight or gay, marriage is a civil institution, not a religious one. But in his speech announcing this, over and over, he used the words “sacred’ and “sanctity’. Who elected him Pope? Or President, for that matter?

This is just another salvo in the “culture war”, the never-ending series of battles about who can touch who where, which particular intoxicants are approved or not, who can watch what, whether in public or in the privacy of their homes. Constant attempts to undermine women’s rights, reproductive rights, labor rights, gender rights, the environment, education, and freedom of speech and religion. The drive to replace our democracy with a theocracy.

Much of this is done out of sight via executive orders, often done in the evening at the beginning of a weekend or holiday, when people are least likely to notice. Via amendments to totally unrelated spending legislation and massive sweeping changes like the so-called “Patriot” Act, which most members of Congress were not able to read, or even debate before it was rammed through both houses of Congress and gleefully signed. Via faith-based programs that sneer at the separation of church and state. Via deliberate under-funding of the noble-sounding initiatives he’s announced, after he thinks no one is looking any longer. Via non-enforcement of environmental laws, or by “redefining” what is pollution, or wetlands, or wilderness.

There’s been a lot of whining from the Right in the last year about how the Democrats are stirring up “class warfare” by daring to question Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. After 80% of the tax savings went to the top 5% in income. And since the last tax cut didn’t seem to revive the economy, why then, let’s cut them some more, for those poor down-trodden folks who have to pay such an obscene amount of taxes on inheritances, dividends, capital gains and other things pretty much exclusive to the top few percent. After the massive tax cuts for the already wealthy, Greenspan says that the budget deficits will be so bad in a few years that we’ll have to slash Social Security and Medicare. That the rich won’t need, but you and I will.

How else to describe this, but as “take from the poor and give to the rich”?
How “Reverse Robin Hood”.
How cynical.

For someone who pledged to be “a uniter, not a divider”, he’s done about as well on that pledge as on all the others. This country has been split into diametrically opposed camps that I don’t think will ever be reunited. The repeated use of “wedge issues” to open up cracks in the electorate has succeeded to the point of opening chasms that can hardly be bridged anymore, let alone be healed. It’s tearing the country apart.

Someday, this most uncivil war will be a civil war.
And these are the people you’ll be fighting.

- Bob Woods