http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1293875,00.htmlThe first of two exclusive extracts from Graydon Carter's new book, What We've Lost
Profile of Graydon Carter
Tuesday August 31, 2004
The Guardian
We've lost lives and allies, liberties and freedoms. In the age of George Bush, we have lost our way .
"I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation" - George W Bush, August 2002
-snip-
But I love this country, its land, its soul, and, above all, its people. So what does it say about us that we let a man of such blind conviction and wilful ignorance lead us?
The sideshow in the Middle East proved in the end to be a convenient diversion for the Bush White House: it distracted Americans' attention from the administration's domestic agenda, its ideological war at home. Iraq also served as a shield for the administration, in the sense that the White House defined any opposition to or criticism of what it was up to in those early days as the work of the unpatriotic or the traitorous.
With the country looking the other way, Bush and Cheney began dismantling decades' worth of advances in civil liberties, healthcare, education, the economy, the judiciary and the environment. The Bush White House inherited a robust economy brimming with jobs and budget surpluses. It may well end its four years with a net loss of jobs during Bush's first term, a feat unsurpassed since the Hoover administration. In its desire to create tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, it created a horizon of budget deficits, crippling debt and trade imbalances.
The Bush White House inherited an education system that, while not perfect, was in many ways the envy of the world. Its unreasonable and underfunded No Child Left Behind programme hobbled state systems by placing rigid demands on school districts but pledging little money to meet those demands.
The Bush White House inherited an environment that had been all but saved by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1970s. The administration, many of whose members were plucked from the oil and gas industries, turned its back on more than 30 years of advances in environmental legislation and global treaties to reward its campaign backers from the petrochemical industry. The Bush administration made it clear that it refused to live with any kind of restrictions on its energy use. When the White House officially pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, it was the first in a series of defiant snubs to allies, trading partners and neighbours that began the dramatic decline of America's reputation around the world.
The Bush White House inherited a healthcare system that favoured the rich, then made it worse, turning it into a complex apparatus that will produce unprecedented profits for another set of major campaign backers - the health and pharmaceutical industries - all at the expense of regular patients, the elderly and the poor.
The Bush White House inherited a government of model transparency and purposefully bent it to the will of the most secretive administration in recent American history. It inherited a judicial system that was America's centrist, if not conservative, legal safeguard and turned it into an ideological, rightwing juggernaut. "
-more-
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