What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

ultralaser:

sixteen years ago i was attending classes at psu and working at the arthouse movie theatre in downtown watching in increasing horror at the cowboy won the presidency

fifteen and a half years ago i bought a copy of the oregonian - even then print was outmoded - because i wanted to record proof for my children, despite what the historical record might say, that the cowboy was letting us all down in his lazy, belligerent way

the main headline was somthing like “scientists prove global warming caused by greenhouse gases”, and the substory, right below, was “bush relaxes coal emissions standards”

fifteen years ago osama bin laden did nine eleven, and for a brief few weeks, the american flag became a symbol of national unity and coming together, and not rural racism

what felt like a week later we invaded afghanistan to ‘get the bastards’ and we bombed what was left of their infrastructure and then started trudging all over the mountains looking for the islamic terror threat we’d been waiting for since, tbh, the end of the crusades - and then hired civilian contractors financially linked to the sitting vice president to rebuild

what felt like a week after //that// but may well have been the same week, bush and cheney started an entirely new government agency, ostensibly dedicated to **keeping us safe** but functionally identical to cointelpro in methodology and purpose - to keep tabs on the ‘radical youth’ who wouldn’t get with the program. ultimately the principle work of this agency was to make it an enormous pain in the ass to get on an airplane

bush had inherited a budget surplus which he used as justification for a vast tax cut, but as soon as nine eleven happened they stopped even trying to pretend not to be spiking government spending in the name of **security**. hr got a new cold war and it was good for business.

now came the modest cuts to social services, a bottom-heavy conceit of balancing the budget, never mind the top heavy tax cut just months prior

the senate, meanwhile, let him do all of this profligate spending without batting an eye or threatening to shut down anything, bc it was good business for them too.

remember that day one of the bush administration was the conservative supreme court handing him the electoral college win, despite gore winning the popular vote. at this point nobody had ever even heard of the elector college, bc the last time it hadn’t matched up with the popuoar vote had been in the 1880s. but this set the precedent for the bush years.

the senate gerrymandered and porked and cheated and locked the democratic minority out of votes, because they could. bush started wars and did whatever he wanted, and never vetoed their excess just as they never outvoted his. it was good for business.

and the conservative court at best looked the other way, at worst radically reinterpeted laws to make it easier for them.

this was all going well for two years - bomb afghanistan, hire cheney’s old company to rebuild, keep looking for bin laden, and use his freedom to justify any level of perpetual emergency powers and war spending - spending the republican house happily participated in

then in 2003 bush decided, as had long been predicted, to finish his dad’s war from the 90s.

like in the 90s, saddam was painted as hitler and stalin all in one - he colluded with tyrants, harbored terrorists, and was sitting on top of the most well trained army in the world, and a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction enough to wipe out the world twice over

forget bin laden, bush said, this guy was the most dangerous man alive

like in the 1990, war was inevitable and senators facing reelection and wanting to look tough on international terrorism, said yolo

and like in 1990, the good, heroic, and vitally necessary war lasted a week

we pulled all our troops out of afghanistan and sent them into iraq, and they knocked over saddam’s entire government in literally eleven days. then we pulled all our civilian contractors out of afghanistan - except the mineral prospectors - and told them to stop rebuilding kabul and start rebuilding baghdad. they just walked away and afghistan descended into chaos.

several things quickly happened. first, bush stood on an aircraft carrier deck a week into what became a decade long occupation, and declared **mission accomplished**

second, the taliban took power in afghanistan

third, the nascent iraqi resistance to the us occupation named themselves “al qaeda in iraq” in dolidarity with the guys then still hiding in afghanistan, who had successfully struck a blow at the americans who had just bombed their entire country into the ground, and now patrolled their streets outside a safe zone walled off from the ppl of baghdad

and bush, under fire for not having found a single solitary wmd from saddam’s massive, world threatening, war justifying arsenal, dodged and said “look, al qaeda! this is why we came here, to stop the ppl who attacked us.”

there’s a scene in 1984 where the crowd chanting against country a is told that we are in fact now at war with country b, and always have been, and that we were just chanting against country a is evidence of a plot by country b to undermine our resolve

smarter minds than i wrote thinkpieces about how this was a lie too far, that it could never work

it did

when bush was reelected was when the rest of the world, who had been loudly derided by our off-the-cuff cowboy president, started really worryingn about us as a nation, one with half the nukes in the world

that was all in his first term

in 2005 hurricane katrina flooded new orleans. did bush respond with nine eleven like speed and dedicate a whole new government agency to rebuild and help the millions of displaced poor, black residents? no. he told the nakedly corrupt and incompetent boss of the cleanup he was going great work and finger-gunned back to his ranch for another vacation.

by year six he was so off the rails that even the gop got tired of his bullshit - his isolationist, imperial tendencies stopped being good for business, and they stopped looking the other way. his approval ratings plummetted to historic lows.

then in his last year in office the economy collapsed and he managed to blame it all on his successor.

the lessons from all this are numerous, but remember these particularly:

in his first year in office everyone believed bush would be the most ineffectual president of our lifetime that he was a frat bro coasting into a job he didn’t care about on his father’s good name

in his last year in office that name was so toxic even the gop candidates debated over how much bush had been a disaster, not whether, and a whole new radical rightwing populist party got so potent mccain had to pick essentially a fox news anchorlady as his running mate

the democrats are a bunch of feckless cowards who collectively can’t manage to muster even a third of the gop’s organization, and spent the last eight years squandering the radical youth that came up under bush and got obama elected

the gop is deliberately trying to sabotage the goverment so they can privatize everything. their ideal governmental system is war profiteering, and gop governance in peacetime leads to flint’s water crisis and the dakota access pipeline - and ferguson and the ninth ward

oh, and they spent the literal entirety of the last eight years obstructing obama at every turn - eight months without even a confirmation hearing for merrick garland but trump’s pick will be seated on the bench same-day - and threatening to shut down the government on a biennial basis

while the new president-elect spent those years demanding to see obama’s birth certificate

(via jhameia)

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