Where Bush went wrong

Back from my holidays, I'm catching up on all my required reading...er, blog browsing. So I apologize for being a bit belated in referring you to a round table discussion on TPMCafe from a week ago that attempted to answer Josh Marshall's question: "Where did the Bush presidency go wrong?"

All the TPMCafe bloggers had excellent answers.

Jo-Ann Mort, for example, posited that it was Bush's commitment to small-government (read: "ineffective-government") conservatism that kept him from being able to respond effectively to Katrina or to manage the Iraq war competently.

Ed Kilgore believes that it was the Bush/Rove political strategy of ignoring the center and playing to the (insatiable) base that committed the administration to policies that drifted ever farther from rationality. Definitely can't argue with this one.

Steve Clemons pins the blame squarely on the bungled Iraq war, and duly warns that Dems shouldn't conclude that the conservative era is over just yet. The beast rose after the fall of Nixon and again after the fall of Gingrich, and it'll rise again after the fall of Bush if Dems don't forge a long-lasting and credible alternative.

Like I said, I agree with all of these interpretations. If you care about American politics, you should definitely read through them to read the blogosphere's best analysts at work. But just for kicks, I'd like to offer my own hypothesis.

It occurs to me that Bush might not have done anything wrong, per se; it's that he was wrong from the start. Throughout his entire life, George W. Bush has been a general failure, relying on family connections to bail him out whenever he failed - at Yale, as an oil exec, and in his drug problems. The fact that the Republican party so easily coronated a man with such a mediocre record speaks to that party's excessive worship of its own aristocracy. And once in power, Bush received absolute support from that same party in anything he attempted, which speaks to the Republicans' rigid hierarchical structure.

So, though it was almost a fait accompli that W. would screw up America as badly as he screwed up Harken Energy, the Republican Party handed him the keys to the car and proceeded to dutifully follow him as he drove it right off a cliff. So who's to blame? Is it the fool, or the fool who follows the fool?

As long as the Republican Party remains a rigidly hierarchical organization in hock to a fairly small cabal of moneyed interests and Baptist groups, it'll keep on giving us George Bushes, and we'll keep on wondering where they went wrong.


Bonus Reading Guide
1. Bashir Goth, my favorite writer at PostGlobal, gave me a whole new outlook on the Somalia crisis with this article. It turns out that two-thirds of Somalia, including the de facto independent state of Somaliland and the autonomous region of Puntland, is quite stable and peaceful. The demise of the Islamic Courts has basically saved these lands from having to fight a war, which makes Ethiopia's intervention look like a good thing despite the current chaos.

2. If you have time, check out this interesting article in the Guardian, urging Britain to adopt Islamic values. The piece reads like a right-wing rant from the 1960s, criticizing Britain's descent into rudeness and sexuality and yearning for a golden age of family values, and citing Islam as the only force that can bring those values back. This basically fits with my thesis that the confluence of religion and politics is all about sex, and that much of our modern Islamist problem is not about Israel or Iraq as much as it's about the difficult transition to a modern, sexually open society.

3. Joe Scarborough sticks it to Bill O'Reilly for being a principle-less Republican shill. I'm not a conservative, but it's still so refreshing to see that there are some honest ones out there after all.