How can it be? I wonder. How can the number of egregious, illegal and dangerous actions taken by the Bu$h administration keep growing to a seemingly critical mass and yet he is still free to wield his awful power?
Could it be that the accummulation of bad acts, illegal activities, and bad consequences was making fighting the Republicans or fighting Bu$h more difficult rather than less difficult?
Why? Is it always this way? Is it that the unremitting nature of these offenses revealed in the past year, the series of them, makes it hard to focus on one for long enough before a new one comes along? We cannot get traction? Is that it? The sheer volume of it?
Gorette's Diary:
Listening to the author of the new book,
Fiasco, by Thomas E. Ricks of NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/... summarize the ways in which the war in Iraq had gone wrong due to incompetent and bad policies on the part of Bu$hco....brought this thought to mind. How can this be all so true, so provable, and yet the administration blunders along talking as if they are successful. How?
One would think that the more scandal and the more lies, errors, incompetencies, corruption and failures an administration piled onto its record, the worse things would get for it, to the point of no return. We saw that start to happen. But we were not positive it would continue. We knew new events could change things to some extent, and no one knows the future.
To make it clear, Bu$h and the neocons and the Republicans are able now to do more fear-mongering because of the latest mideast events, yet I do not believe that they will be able to make up lost ground. They will still be sleeping in the bed they have made and it is a bed with a lumpy, hard mattress, broken springs and torn and dirty sheets.
So my premise is simple.
Too much corruption and wrong-doing and stupidity by an administration renders it less vulnerable to immediate upset. One or two big things going wrong due to incompetence and bad policies, that might be more dangerous to an administration.
What are the effects of having an atrocious administration in power for six years as it piles one scandal on top of another?
-- Keeps the opposition responding to new offenses rather than focusing on one or two.
-- Provides us with a belief that there are so many awful things being done by Bu$h that there is no way others will not grasp it at long last.
-- Dilutes opposition because it is spread out among many offenses rather than a few. Instead of pounding away on one or two big scandals the opposition spreads it out among many.
-- Distracts people so they despair of hope and fixing anything. People may wrongly regard the multitude of prolems as evidence that government itself does not work, or that solutions too hard to implement.
-- Drives people to tune out because there are just too many problems and it is all too complicated.
-- Makes some people wrongly conclude that the problems from the Bu$h administration are somehow inevitable because the world is complicated.
What can we Dems do to counter this sort of fallout from the magnitude of the Bu$hco scandals and foul-ups? Ideas?
P.S. If I were a scientist or mathematician I might try to find a clever way to put it that would be downright impressive. It's as if on the edge of consciousness there is some nifty formula or "rule" that is appropos.