Given the past two weeks,
it's tempting to suspect that President Junior's free pass
expired last New Year's Eve. The smoke
and mirrors appear to have quit working.
2003 was supposed to usher in an era of
GOP triumphalism. Instead, it's brought
White House bungling on matters foreign
and domestic, alarming even some of the
administration's admirers in the Washington
press. No wonder Junior's standing in
opinion polls has begun to slip. Unfortunately,
that probably means war.
First, North Korea.
Bush took office expressing contempt for international treaties,
then used 9/11 to vent the kind of whup
ass threats against the blameless North Koreans
normally limited to bad country songs.
(Blameless in 9/11, that is.) If Junior had acted
that belligerent back in his drinking days,
he'd have no teeth left. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld was recently heard boasting
that the U.S. could whip North Korea
with Iraq tied behind its back.
Then, as that country's
cunning Stalinist regime called the White House's bluff and
steadily raised the ante, reality intruded.
Strategically unnecessary, a Korean war would
involve catastrophic casualties win, lose
or (like fifty years ago) draw. The crisis
threatened to spark an East Asian arms
race, with Japan and South Korea tempted to
go nuclear, and China to add to its arsenal.
I heard a Republican
diplomat on NPR opine that Korean dictator Kim Il Jong's timing
was accidental. Please. My golden retriever
Big Red knows that when the sound's cranked
up on the stereo, it's a good time to raid
the kitchen table.
Again dispatched
to clean up a mess cocksure administration "hawks" had made, Colin
Powell began by praising the 1994 treaty
negotiated by Jimmy Carter. "The previous
administration I give great credit to for
freezing that plutonium site," he told the Washington
Post. "Lots of nuclear weapons were not
made because of the Agreed Framework and
the work of President Clinton and his team."
Josh Marshall's
TalkingPointsMemo.com
website, far ahead of the big time Washington
press on this story, predicted all along
"that the Bush administration's awkward climb-down
would end with their embracing a policy
close to, if not identical to, that pursued by the Clinton
administration: i.e., a mix of threats
and offers of aid to induce the North Koreans to
abandon their nuclear program."
Now that it's happened,
Marshall reports that outgoing Clinton officials briefed their Bush
counterparts TWO YEARS AGO that North Korea
was fudging on treaty commitments.
(Although not on the critical plutonium
reactor.) Even while provoking a confrontation they
were unprepared to handle, Junior's team
kept it a secret. "What possible rationale,"
Marshall asks, "could there be for choosing
this moment to blow the whistle?
What other explanation beside incompetence?"
Then came the rollout
of Junior's big Scrooge McDuck economic stimulus. Designed to
raise the bullion level in the cartoon
zillionaire's swimming pool a full two feet, the plan would
also save Bush himself, Bloomberg News
calculated, $43,805 on his 2001 tax return. Vice
President Dick Cheney would net a cool
$220,000.
Asked his plans
for the windfall, Junior turned coy. "My money is in a blind trust," he
said.
"I don't know if I've got any dividends."
Sure he doesn't.
As Joe Conason quipped regarding another GOP pol's blind trust,"
it's more likely Bush's fortune is merely
wearing dark glasses. Vice-president Cheney declined
to answer the question, but did give a
speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that
deficit spending does no economic harm.
The New York Times noted that his speech was
uninterrupted by applause. Meanwhile, Sen.
Blanche Lincoln estimates that 8% of Arkansans
would benefit from eliminating taxes on
stock dividends.
But it's the McDuck
plan's effect on the budget that alarmed normally respectful pundits.
"Forget guns and butter," wrote Los Angeles
Times columnist Ron Brownstein "Bush is now
offering bombs and caviar."
"So Now Bigger
Is Better?" was the headline over Washington Post scribe David Broder's
article detailing how, contrary to his
campaign rhetoric, Bush has presided over huge spending
increases--only a third of which can be
attributed to the "war on terrorism." In an accompanying
column, he quoted an anonymous veteran
of previous GOP administrations calling the McDuck
scheme maybe "the least defensible plan
ever."
The public seems
to agree. Both the CNN/USA TODAY and Ipsos/Reid polls show Junior's
favorability ratings dropping five points
in a single week to 58 percent, his lowest since 9/11.
Support for the McDuck plan measured 25
percent.
Failures elsewhere,
however, appear likely to make the White House even more determined
to invade Iraq. Alas, Bush may have to
go it alone. Thunderous majorities among our European
allies oppose invading Iraq unless U.N.
inspectors find Saddam's fabled weapons of mass
destruction. But should he force
the issue in the absence of that evidence, will Junior still be
president when the troops come home?