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Chris Matthews provides a pretty good explanation of what was so horribly wrong with the Bush presidency in this clip from Countdown tonight. Matthew's focus here is on foreign policy, but the general diagnosis of "ignorant delusion" is on the money for all facets of this presidency. It's also why I can't really despise 43. He was, and will forever remain, just too ignorant to know any better.
Bush wasn't the only one to eat up Cheney, Rove and Wolfowitz's neo-conservative delusion like it was communion. The "tragedy," as Matthews put it, is that at least a third of Americans, and nearly all of those who really, genuinely believe in objective "truths" and risen prophets, also drank the Kool-aid Bush poured them daily for the past eight years.
(If you listen to the language of Bush's speech tonight--"good versus evil," "truth and justice," "freedom as God's gift to mankind," "the universality of liberty,"etc.-- it makes sense why the message has caught on as good sermon.)
That neo-conservative ideology just seems to "fit" with many folks brought up in a popular American sub-culture is as benign as it is predictable. The only horrific and deleterious aspect is that our leaders are supposed to know better.
Religion and ideology may be the opiate of the masses, but neither--notwithstanding the two combined!--should ever become the policy of any country, let alone the world's most dominant. This is where shit hit the fan, and hard: neo-conservative dogma was not only made American policy at home, it was decidedly imposed abroad at the point of a bayonet.
In the words of the late Samuel Huntington writing in 1995, imposing one's civilization on another is "false, immoral, and dangerous." Indeed, the last eight years have shown us why.
Even though many of the damages of the Bush years may be irreversible, the forthcoming Obama presidency offers a much needed return to smart and practical optimism in U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
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