America's Hour of the Wolf

Dialogues about the success or failure of Bush's tenure miss the point. Successful governance has a counter-intuitive meaning for Bush, for his family and friends, his cronies, his well-heeled enablers, his cheering section in the corporate kleptocracy, and the ideological mad dogs of the Far Right, still scarred and resentful from enduring the horrors of peace and prosperity under a Democratic president.

Bush and friends didn’t bother to get government down to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub (in the famous formulation of Grover Norquist). Instead, they took a cue from California Governor-by-PR-Coup Arnold Schwarzenegger, and pumped it up.

This process includes the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (an agency urged by Democrats, who probably should have anticipated just what a travesty Bush's implementation would be), the astonishing costs of maintaining the illegal occupation of Iraq, the escalated use of pork-barrel earmarks, unprecedented largesse to the corporate sector and free trade initiatives designed to shaft workers and enrich executives. Bush and his henchmen have turned government into the ultimate Ugly American, a bloated, pasty, pushy hedonist hell bent on buying and doing things it can't afford, crowding out the rest of the world at the buffet table of Creation, all so it can shove the last stale éclair into its quivering, drool-spattered jowls and suck up the crumbs with a straw.

The Bush clique then picked up this behemoth and stuffed it in Grover's bathtub. Their deep-pocketed friends in the transnational, post-democratic elites avidly wait for the water level to rise far enough to cover its nostrils.