http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3922What Bush Has Stolen From UsBy SUSAN J. DOUGLAS
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These are not just policy failures. This has been a spiritual pillaging of any sense that the United States can ever aspire to, or represent, higher principles; that our nation is, or can be, a democracy, however flawed; that the government cares about citizens other than the really rich.
The Bush administration has seized all we hold dear and ground it into the dirt with its boot heels.
Most important has been the nation’s sense of its own morality. Few of us are deluded that the U.S. government was, before the Bush regime, a beacon of moral rectitude and social justice. The United States has overthrown many governments, mostly in secret, and supported repressive rulers. But when have our leaders publicly and adamantly rejected the Geneva Conventions and endorsed torture as a matter of national policy? It’s one thing for there to be a gap between national principles and government practices, and quite another for a president to deride those principles as no longer essential to the nation’s moral compass.
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With Bush’s suggestion that climate change was some imaginary hoax, with his thwarting of stem cell research, and with his FDA’s negligence in applying strict testing to a host of products, he robbed the country of eight years of cutting-edge research on the environmental and medical challenges — if not emergencies — that face us.
Of course, what Bush most wanted to sack was any notion that the government could help or support its citizens. His goal was famously articulated by right-winger Grover Norquist: to “cut government … down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
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While presidents have often lied to us — the secret bombing of Cambodia, Iran-Contra, “I never had sexual relations with that woman” — none has mounted such a full bore, cynical, Soviet-style propaganda campaign against its own people as George “WMDs” and “Mission Accomplished” Bush.
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Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women.MORE AT LINK
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