It's been eight long years for Americans. Long, difficult years. Internationally shameful years. Environmentally wasted years. And let's face it: it's going to take some time—not to mention a lot of hard work on the local, state and national levels by many individuals and groups—to turn back the policies, procedures, and sociopolitical culture built by The George W. Bush Empire. Chairman of the Board Pelosi, while otherwise saying all the right things, abdicated her responsiblity to call for a vote to oust C.E.O. Bush from his throne of expanded executive power, a power never before wielded so coldly and absolutely by a modern day vice-president, himself an ominous, seemingly sociopathic man who has, like Bush, also amazingly escaped impeachment. But, follow me below the fold as I point out the events and contributions that I believe constitute important blows against the Bush Empire. It's my booster shot of optimism for those who hunger for, work towards and see on the horizon, progressive change.
It was the American people—not so much their elected officials—who started to fight back. Deafened by the GOP's incessant bullhorn wailings about Saddam Hussein's non-existent nuclear weapons threat and his non-existent connection to the ruthless terroristic attack on what set out to be just another September 11th back in 2001, it was the American people who began to take efforts to move their country away from becoming Karl Rove's one-party-designed nation. Some helped with the push-back unwittingly.
The ironically dubbed "War on Terror" invasion/devastation of Iraq is and has always been a heroic moral, political, and military failure (although Blackwater and others have pocketed some handsome, but bloodied money by embedding themselves in the deadly, years-long fiasco). Bush-Cheney were successful in doing four things: (1) Invade a sovereign nation that made no bona fide threats of attack toward us by lying to the American people and to the United Nations about Iraq's dictator, its nuclear capabilities, and 9/11; (2) Hide from the American people the flag-draped coffins of America's Iraqi war dead from being televised; (3) Replace a functioning country (albeit one functioning under the barbaric rule of a paranoid dictator) with at best a barely functioning, traumatized one; and (4) Rack up a huge war debt that future Americans will bear the brunt of paying. With the help of most American journalists—except for some brave souls working for Knight Ridder who actually took the time to do basic, journalistic fact-checking—the Bush Empire turned one country into a shell-shocked crater, and economically amputated another.
While they hid the coffins, the Bush-Cheney Empire couldn't stop the work of those dedicated to show us the ticking price tag of our Iraq War, or the daily bloodshed of the troops with simple, but haunting animation. They couldn't stop Jim Lehrer from showing us nightly the names and faces of America's war dead on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The Empire wanted them invisible; Lehrer not only made our war dead visible, he made them human and he brought them to our dinner table. The GOP couldn't stop small-town, rural, suburban, and big-city America from taking turns grieving their war dead. That grieving, and those who had to show us the truth about the war and its botched aftereffects (thank you Dana Priest), most definately turned this nation against the war in Iraq. And that opposition dented the Bush-Cheney armor significantly.
Then there was Al Gore's movie and his subsequent speaking tour about global warming. It hit a nervous chord for Americans who worry about the planet's ability to sustain humans for the long haul. Although it scared us, it made sense to us—so much more sense than Bush's paternalistic proclamation that global warming is, well, not much of a reality and well-managed by the United States' current, but outdated environmental policy. An Inconvenient Truth began to wake us up and to take action. From an Oregon science teacher, who provided over a half-million viewers a ten-minute lesson in logic about why taking precautions to stave off global climate change sooner than later is the right thing to do, to any of the many non-profit climate change-focused organizations to those in his own administration and in his own party people all over the country began to speak up against the Bush Empire's energy-environmental policies and to take action to move us closer in spirit and in habit to the Kyoto Protocol. While the sitting vice president stood knee-deep in an internationally condemned war he helped to manufacture, our former vice president was accepting a Nobel Peace Prize from the international community. Gore and the growing legion of greenies delivered a mighty blow to the Bush Empire.
On the cultural/moral values frontier there was Terry Schiavo, who unknowingly was the handclap that led to an avalanche of awareness by the American people that the Bush Empire would stop at almost nothing to force itself on the most vulnerable of us. Oh how that woman seemed to unite a diverse nation, including a slew of so-called value voters, against the intrusiveness of the then-GOP led Congress. Of course, Tom Delay and his lobbyist Jack Abramoff contributed handclaps to that avalanche as well. Though polls in his voting district looked bleak for Delay right around the time in 2005 when he was indicted for allegedly violating campaign finance laws, his forced resignation from Congress in June, 2006, was a blow to the Empire. No less important were the non-mainstream news and analysis sources, like DailyKos, that gave us bloggers who would not let the truth about Jack Abramoff and his connection to John McCain go untold. Yet another blow against the Bush Empire occurred when Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior J. Steven Griles pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for his role in the scandal (that President Bush appointed this former mining lobbyist to a position in the Department of Interior still amazes me). Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriages provided a thunderous blow to the Empire too as did the court's decision in California to ban the outlaw of same-sex marriage.
Oh God then there was Hurricane Katrina. The Katrina images, which include those of a baffoon in way over his head (I speak of Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael D. Brown), are seared in my mind. Thank you Spike Lee for your absolutely on-point, meticulously researched film about Katrina, which also delivered a blow to the Empire.
Finally, the 2006 national Congressional election delivered an important blow against the Bush Empire in that the Democrats took control of the House and the Senate, although admittedly replacing a Republican senator with a Democrat hasn't always led to opposition to Bush's attempts to doctor the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. The Bush-Cheney Empire woke up a Nebraska rancher, Scott Kleeb, who has said emphatically that hell yes he can make a difference for the hard-working people of this land, and his journey into public service appears to have just begun. That the middle American farm belt red state of Nebraska is beginning to turn color by creating wise, thoughtful grass-roots progressives like Kleeb ought to tell us this: there is a growing number of blows against the empire.