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The uninspiring devil we don’t know

By G.D. Maxwell Here we go again. The upcoming U.S.

By G.D. Maxwell

Here we go again.

The upcoming U.S. presidential election – it’s not until November if you’re wondering when all this harping is going to go away and we’re going to swing back into the 18 months of bliss between quadrennial elections south of the border – is shaping up to be another in a seemingly endless round of choosing between the lesser of two evils or, as the case may be, the lesser of two banalities.

On the one hand, we have the devil we know. George W. Bush, a/k/a Thief in Chief, Dubya, Bush Lite and my current personal favourite, Heather Mallick’s The Bushling. On the other hand, we have John F. Kerry, a/k/a Flip-Flop and not much else that’s stuck, so devoid of human interest is the candidate he fails to even garner epithets.

The best thing that can be said for the devil we know is this: all the other guys around him are so totally ruthless, so completely devoid of social conscience, so bent on running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution and virtually every major multilateral treaty the U.S. has been signatory to since the end of the second World War, so devoted to systematically transferring both the wealth of the world and the reins of absolute power over to the mighty and corporate, that he, George W. Bush, may be the only thing keeping them from throwing both grasping hands on the controls and declaring democracy a quaint but flawed form of government in the New World Order.

And he continues to refuse to pronounce nuclear correctly even though he seemed miraculously to know how when he travelled to Great Britain to address Parliament and pet the Poodle.

Despite the buffering role I’ve grudgingly decided he plays between what’s left of democracy and the more efficient totalitarianism preferred by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfie, Rove, et. al ., short of being made an offer I couldn’t refuse, there exists no circumstance under which I could bring myself to vote for him. Monetarily, spiritually and institutionally, I’m not sure the USofA will be recognizable emerging from four more years of his presidency.

And it pisses me off no end that the Democrats are so weak-kneed, so philosophically bankrupt, so fearful of their own history and record and so certain the Age of Fear has eclipsed the Age of Reason that they’ve transformed themselves into a paler version of the Republicans. Hell, I’m half expecting Michael Moore to rush an action-packed, G.I. Joe version of John Kerry’s war exploits to the silver screen by late October. Maybe Ahrnie would miss the irony of having him play Kerry.

That the Bush presidency is a failed exercise is abundantly clear and indisputable except to those blinded by dogma and a partisanship bred in the bone. The man entered office with a weakening economy but a budget surplus. He did nothing to shore up the economy and instead began to dig a deficit hole by transferring all the surplus and then some to the very wealthy taxpayers he considers "his people."

When September 11, 2001 happened, everything, as they say, changed. What mostly changed was that reason flew out the window when the jets flew in. The collapse of the World Trade Centre might have been a national tragedy but it was an unprecedented opportunity for the Neo-Conservatives Bush had drawn around him. Here was a tailormade chance to do what they’d wanted to do since the first Gulf War – invade Iraq.

Bush chased al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan, capturing neither, then more or less abandoned the country… again. He cozied up to Pakistan, a rogue state if ever there was one. Having ditched the long-held position that the U.S. would not be an aggressor nation, he invaded Iraq, scaring the U.S. population with tall tales of weapons of mass destruction, looming mushroom clouds and a spurious, non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. He had a half-assed plan for war and no plan at all for peace.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we had anti-Patriot Acts I and II. The U.S. distanced itself from the World Community by repudiating, among others, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations, and breathed life into a plan to weaponize space. The Clean Air Act was gutted, conservation became a dirty word, liberal was almost banished from the language and large parts of the Constitution were swept aside in the name of homeland security.

Now, in any other time and place, the opposition party would have a field day with any incumbent who would dare run on such a record and state proudly, "I am a war president!

So what do the Dems do? They choose a replacement War President who’s actually been to war as opposed to being AWOL from the reserves. Aye Carumba!

I don’t know about you but I’m pretty sure the entire rest of the world – not that the rest of the world’s opinion really matters when you’re that world’s only Super Power and are arrogant enough to think you can go it alone – is sorely convinced what the United States needs more than anything right now is a Peace President. Neither the U.S. economy, nor its allies, nor its friends, nor even its enemies can afford an endless "war" against a faceless, nationless enemy, an enemy rooted in the perversion of a major religion and nurtured in the endlessly boiling cauldron of Arab-Israeli politics.

And so, John Kerry and the Democratic Party believe they can run against George Bush by thumping their collective chest harder than he does. They don’t believe they need a peace plan for Iraq and the Middle East; they don’t believe they need to address the specifics of how they intend to dupe the rest of the world into joining them in the continuing follies of U.S. foreign policy; they don’t believe they need to re-pledge themselves to multilateralism and co-operative effort; they’re silent on how they’re going to turn the U.S. back into a nation of hope instead of fear; and they’re arrogant or ignorant enough to think running against George Bush is enough.

And with any luck, they’ll be right.

After watching the saccharine hero worship of the Democratic Convention last week, I still don’t know what John Kerry is all about. I’m not certain it matters because in the final analysis, I’m willing to give anybody a chance who’ll, at a minimum, give Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the junta-in-waiting their pink slips.

But I sure wish they’d have chosen to do something inspirational rather than simply nominate the devil I don’t know.