...Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935. But Bush doesn't need Karl Rove's counsel to know that repealing Social Security for reasons of ideology is a non-starter.
So it's time once more to fabricate a crisis. In Bushland, it's always time to fabricate a crisis. We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health care costs. (In fact, what we have is a president who wants to diminish the financial, and thus political, clout of trial lawyers.) We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush's 229 first-term judicial appointments.
With crisis concoction as its central task -- think of how many administration officials issued dire warnings of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein or, now, by Social Security's impending bankruptcy -- this presidency, more than any I can think of, has relied on the classic tools of propaganda...
While Maximum Leader certainly isn't the first president to govern during a time of crisis, his administration is clearly the most overt in making up crisis that simply don't exist -- or perhaps more on point, blowing solvable problems out of all reasonable proportion to advance specific political or business agendas. More than anything, that's the evil genius of Karl Rove.
Rove understands that to capture the imagination of an increasingly jaded and tuned out public, and to marshall the small (but vocal) minority of activists, it's necessary to cast every issue that's important to the Bush agenda as a TEOTWAWKI* event.
If normal study and reasoned discourse of problematic topics were allowed to occur without the shrieking right wing propaganda machine, alternative compromise solutions could be developed to chronic problems. Indeed, if you think about it, every policy decision made since Bush took office in 2001 has addressed chronic, rather than acute, situations. But to push specific agendas, the situations are manipulated so as to look like our national pants are on fire.
In BushWorld, reasoned discourse just doesn't happen. A problem is identified, a single solution is developed at a conceptual level, and administration minions are left unfettered to flesh out the actions required to arrive at the predetermined outcome. Dissenting voices are either not allowed, or so marginalized as to be ineffective. Once the game plan is finalized, it's then tossed to the administration's snakeoil salesmen for manufacturing of the crisis du jour.
There was a time in the not so distant past when the U.S. government mocked the old USSR for taking an idea that was generated by Soviet aparatchiks, having it championed by the Communist Party leader, and then rubber stamped by the Politburo.
So, tell me, what's the difference between "strongman" type of government operation in the ex-Soviet Union and the management-by-crisis style of the Bush administration (and it's own congressional politburo)? Answer: very little.
Because in BushWorld, as in the communist and fascist governments that preceded it, the ends always justify the means.
*TEOTWAWKI - The end of the world as we know it
