 |  |  | | |
 | ||||
               | Wag the Dog 2: What Price Coattails?
Now we are in a situation eerily similar to that of the summer of 1990. The economy's in the dumpster, the man in charge doesn't know what needs to be done to right it, and wouldn't make the necessary moves to do so (namely, a full-scale repeal of Ronald "Red Ink" Reagan's ruinous tax giveaway) in any event because that would anger his moneyed power base. Furthermore, a hideous scandal in Bush's past, one that has been simmering for some time but which the Republican-friendly media had been willing to downplay for the most part back when times weren't so bleak, has suddenly been revived, and with it a whole bunch of other scandals (for Bush the Elder, it was Iran-Contra; for Bush the Younger, it's Harken). This is dragging on the polls of both the GOP in general and George Bush in particular. And Bush is not quite done with his second year in the White House. The rest of his term is going to be even uglier for him and the Republican Party, unless something can be done, and soon. What to do, what to do? Hey, I know! Iraq's been our buffer against the yahoos in Iran getting too powerful, but ya know, Saddam's just a little too strong for our tastes right now. Cripes, if we don't do something about it, he might be able to start calling a significant portion of the shots in the Middle East, and its oil -- and that means that we would have less influence there than we do now. So here's what we do: create a pretext for going to war against Iraq, then stop just short of actually toppling Saddam or weakening him enough that he couldn't fend off an attack from Iran. Yeah, that's the ticket! Oh, and make sure that we limit the number of US casualties to a bare minimum, by talking our saps -- I mean allies -- into committing most of the ground troops. We'll plow into Iraq, after first softening it up with missiles and stuff, then do some damage for a few months, yell out "We won!" and leave. Not only do we take Saddam down a peg or eight, we also get the benefit of boosted approval ratings -- just in time for the midterm elections! Heck, they'll even carry over into the next Presidential election! And before you say that I'm taking this a wee bit too far, I invite to consider the following timetable for Bush the Dumber's planned attack on Iraq. They want to improve on Bush the Elder's job by getting the invasion wrapped up right before the November mid-terms, just so that the welcome-home parades and patriotic ticker-tape will drown out the sounds of the plummeting stock tickers long enough to get the GOP back in control of Congress. There's only one small problem: our former allies aren't going to play the saps for us any more. Even the British, by far our staunchest allies, are extremely reluctant to lose a few thousand good men and women just so Trent Lott can have his old Senate Majority Leader office back. So, in the meantime, as the Bushies continue to try and change our former allies' minds, they have to have both a fallback option and a continuous distraction from the growing scandals stemming from the 1990s Republican Congress' deregulation of the financial industry. When it was just Bush patron Enron that was in the news because of cooked books and rate-gouging scams, the answer was simple: blame it all on Arthur Andersen. Yupper: Arthur Andersen, those evil cads, they just forced li'l ole Enron to set up thousands of fake offshore partnerships and companies to hide Enron's debt. Uh-huh, and they also _forced_ Enron to set up disgusting schemes like "Get Shorty" that were designed to withhold power from California when the state needed it most, simply to rape the Golden State for every last penny. Oh, yes, and they must have forced Enron to cherry-pick the persons in Bush's cabinet that were supposed to be overseeing companies like Enron to prevent stuff like this from happening. Well, in a country with a free and vigorous press, this would never have succeeded. But the US media is, if anything, more GOP-friendly than ever, with fewer mainstream media outlets, and most of those owned by ever-more-conservative media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, Sun Myung Moon and Conrad Black. So they managed to shift the focus away from Bush buddy Enron (and thus avoided having to examine the myriad of conflict-of-interest issues embedded therein for the Bushies), and everything was peachy keen. And then WorldCom blew up. WorldCom, on whose phone lines is run most of the internet. This might not have been such a big deal for the Bush Junta, but, as it turns out, the Arthur Andersen diversion had not managed to prevent a probe of the actions of Dick Cheney while he was running Halliburton not so long ago. The news of WorldCom's falling apart -- a falling-apart occasioned by the same sort of financial shenanigans engaged in by Enron and Halliburton -- suddenly sent the stock market tumbling, and made the corporate mainstream press a bit less likely to want to cover for the Unelected One's foulups. The final straw was when Paul Krugman, who was celebrating the Fourth of July a day early, cut loose on Usurper Boy in a landmark column, openly mocking the Bush boy's integrity, not to mention his ability to actually set things right -- and he did so by invoking the name of Harken Energy, and Bush's actions in 1990. With Krugman leading the way, other print columnists, and even the broadcast and cable news outfits, got into the act. Commentators started falling all over themselves to get feedback from the once-ostracized "Clinton defender" Joe Conason, whose Harper's article on the Harken and UTIMCO scandals they had studiously ignored when it came out back in February of 2000. What to do? What to do? Especially when we can't start our war with Iraq for another few weeks yet. I know! We'll try to find somebody that gives lots of money to Democrats, and blame THEM for everything! Just like Arthur Andersen! Thus was born the latest GOP distraction, the attempt to link Citigroup to Enron's financial hanky-panky. Never mind that, according to the fine folks in financial mags like Business Week, this is, to put it mildly, not exactly supported by the known facts. But let's face it: since when have the Republicans ever let little things like facts stand in their way?   Copyright © 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Read our privacy policy. Contact us. ISSN No. 1523-1690 | |||
July 23, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- I suppose I should start this off by reminding everyone that the novel "American Hero", on which the movie "Wag the Dog" was based, was a satire on the first Bush's invasion of Iraq, when April Glaspie waved the bait in front of Saddam, he bit, and Bush started up