Reading notes

One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon for the first time. And he asked the people of Arizona to make sure that it stayed unspoiled. “Leave it as it is,” President Roosevelt said. “Keep it for your children and your children’s children and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American should see.”

It may seem odd to you that a Democratic presidential candidate would quote so approvingly something said by a Republican president. But there’s a reason. When President Roosevelt made that speech, he was exhibiting something that we haven’t seen in this country for a long, long time. And that is a Republican president providing leadership on the environment. …

One hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt saw conservation as not only central to the national social, economic and political health, but as a reflection of basic American values. In the century since he lived in the White House, America has forged a bipartisan consensus on the importance of conservation and the responsibility each of us has to pass along a safe, healthy environment to future generations.

Today, we have a Republican president who seeks to destroy this consensus and reverse decades of responsible environmental policy. We have a president who seems to regard public resources as gifts to be handed out to special interests. Allowing Big Industry to release more pollutants into the air we breathe, President Bush calls it the “Clear Skies” program. Allowing Big Timber to denude our forests, the Bush-Cheney Administration calls it the “Healthy Forests” initiative.

See also Mary’s topically related, thoughtful weblog entry, Bucking Bad Bush Environmental Policies, in which I was struck by this:

One of the more ironic aspects of [the EPA report slighting global warming] is how the White House insists that the evidence for global warming be rock solid before we can act. Would only they require as much concrete evidence before deciding to preemptively start a war against Iraq.

Some attendees [of the 55th biennial College Republican convention in Washington, DC on July 25] were driven by spiritual conviction that seamlessly encompassed faith in two messiahs, Jesus and Bush. For the true believers, Bush is a man of wonder-working powers. Jason Cole, a 22-year-old senior at the University of Iowa, grew enamored of Bush when he heard his earnest, simple talk of God during the 1999 presidential campaign. Cole says he has little interest in working in politics beyond the 2004 election. “I do it,” he explained simply, “because I love President Bush.” …

The College Republican leadership echoed this pious optimism. Paul Gourley, the party’s treasurer, is a chiseled, broad-shouldered 21-year-old from South Dakota. “I am religious, and my religious beliefs steer me towards this party,” he says. Bush is somebody “students can identify with, somebody students can follow. His energy, his passion for America and freedom and his religious beliefs … I think he’s going to be one of history’s great presidents. We’re all honored to live during this presidency.”

I can attest that they’re really like this: I ran into another one last Sunday. Besides amazing me with her immovable certainty based on hardly any command of the facts, she evoked a deep sadness in me —

Participation in College Republicans in my early 20s has become one of my deepest points of shame now that I’m in my 40s. Could I really have been as uninformed, unthinking, and unseeing as the college kids in this article? Good Lord, deliver me. I repent, again and again.

Bush is still beloved by the Republican rank and file, the people who participate in voter drives and turn out on Election Day. Increasingly, though, there’s unease among some of the party’s elders, including veterans of the Reagan and Bush I administration. It’s not principally about Bush’s poll numbers, though they’re going down, or about the 2004 election, though it’s shaping up to be more competitive than most predicted a few months ago. It’s about something more fundamental. Though they don’t like to say it, when they look at the economy and Iraq, they can’t help worrying about where Bush is taking the country.

Bush, with his tax-cutting fervor, Manichean foreign policy rhetoric and disdain for church-state separation, appears to liberals as the apotheosis of Republican conservatism. Yet plenty of Republicans don’t recognize their ideology in Bush’s lavish deficit spending and the grandiose, world-transforming neoconservative foreign policy he’s adopted. …

Radiant with victory right after the fall of Baghdad, Bush and the neoconservatives who dominate his administration had seemed invincible. Yet as the death toll in Iraq and the deficit in America both shoot upward, neoconservativism has been discredited in the eyes of many. And Bush, says [Charles] Peña, is now irrevocably tied to neoconservatism. “There’s no going back for him,” he says.

This article reminds me I have no problem with real conservative values like personal, fiscal, and environmental responsibility, careful thinking, integrity (and so on). I harp on the need for them constantly.

But neoconservatism, which has metastasized throughout today’s Republican party, values none of these things — it only values power, accrued by any means necessary, and it wields its bloody power with clumsy arrogance. IOW, neoconservative thought comes straight from the pit of hell IMO. And, like many emanations from the pit of hell, it’s taking down a lot of good people with it.

Interview with American Nobel Prize laureate for Economics George A. Akerlof, “recognized for his research that borrows from sociology, psychology, anthropology and other fields to determine economic influences and outcomes.”

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the government’s just bad at doing the correct math [on tax cut costs/benefits]?

Akerlof: There is a systematic reason. The government is not really telling the truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If so, why’s the President still popular?

Akerlof: For some reason the American people does not yet recognize the dire consequences of our government budgets. It’s my hope that voters are going to see how irresponsible this policy is and are going to respond in 2004 and we’re going to see a reversal.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What if that doesn’t happen?

Akerlof: Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we’re going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly.

I have to go back to basics. What does God expect of me? As best as I can tell, God wants me to work for justice and peace, to love unconditionally (as best I can in this human form), to give, expecting nothing in return, to seek Christ in all persons, and to be open to learning new stuff.

Those are good kids that we’re sending into the shooting gallery called Iraq, and unless you have the conviction of a Bush or a Rumsfeld or a Bechtel or a Halliburton, you have to be nursing the sick feeling that each death is a tragic waste, and that this conflict is as much of a fool’s errand as the war in Vietnam. …

Why are these kids dying?

The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. But instead of using all the means available to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Bush administration became obsessed with the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the takeover of Iraq.

That is a very peculiar ordering of priorities. …

The credibility of the Bush administration is approaching meltdown. The White House won’t level with the American people on the cost of the war, or the number of troops that are really needed, or the amount of taxpayer money that is being funneled to the politically connected corporations that have been given carte blanche for the reconstruction.

An inescapable corollary:
The credibility of supporters of the Bush administration is approaching meltdown, too.

I wonder if approaching meltdown is accurate. For me, if I’m completely honest instead of playing hem-and-haw wordgames, Bush Administration credibility is really more like the Klondike bars in my freezer three days into the week-long power outage. In theory they were still edible — there’s still room for repentance and redemption — but in reality, nope — I’m past hoping. Time’s up.

[via Left Coaster]