Danusha V. Goska

George W. Bush – A Disaster for Our Country
posted on an internet bulletin board shortly before the presidential election of 2004

I've always been very political. A petition circulator, a phone banker, a sign carrier and demonstration attender and planner. Given that, I've always had people on the fringe of my circle who'd say things like, "We could have a fascist takeover in this country and no one would care ... " And I'd always move a step away from these folks, because they always seemed too fringe for me. Keep listening, but not engage.

I now am one of those folks.

I've never been so politically anxious in my life. George Bush is the worst president we've ever had.

This isn't partisan. I like 1996 Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole's sharpness and integrity and found excerpts from his acceptance speech at the '96 Republican Convention to be quote-worthy. Nixon always fascinated me. His realpolitik expertise was respected around the world. He paid for his first campaign by being a poker card sharp in the Navy. He married Pat Nixon.

I have a crush on Republican political commentator David Brooks and I respect Republican author Kevin Phillips. I agree with George McGovern who has recently written that the conservative and the liberal keep each other sharp. Liberals and liberalism are flawed and always will be and even Rush Limbaugh gets off a good rant every now and then on some real leftist foolishness, and if we are smart, we listen and correct. Look – even Hitler made the trains run on time (or so they say; has anyone ever really done a study?)

But … Bush? Before the presidency, he was a non-entity, as Molly Ivins so carefully outlined in "Shrub." In the presidency? We all know that train of disasters. I mean - JUST what Richard Clarke had to say. Just that. Enough to impeach. Just the film footage of the "My Pet Goat" reading in Florida. Just that. I can't understand anyone wanting to vote for such an intellectually, politically, militarily and spiritually hollow human being.

Do you think for one second that FDR, who couldn't even walk, would have been so passive after learning of Pearl Harbor? Or Alexander or Caesar or Rommel or any military leader worth his salt would have been so passive after learning of an assault on the homeland? Since "Commander in Chief" Bush stuffs himself into strategically stuffed flight suits, he invites such comparison.

Just the economy, which, under Bush, has floundered.

Just the environment. Even Bush's supporters, when polled, say they want a better environment, while Bush has done everything he can to ruin environmental legislation.

I'm a yellow dog Democrat and if a Democratic president had done to the economy, to the environment, or to national security what Bush has done, I'd vote him out.

I'm Catholic and we don't pay much attention to the Apocalypse as Evangelical Protestants do. Their religion does not allow pomp and drama, ours does, and smoke and incense, too, so we don't need four horsemen, and they do, to spice up their stripped down, strip mall ethos.

But, I'm telling you, I'm beginning to be put into an End Times frame of mind. Bush is so inept, and so unchecked, and he is dicking around with such a volatile part of the world, and we, the American people, are sleepwalking so thoroughly through this, that I wonder if God really isn't just plain sick of humanity and if I am not about to meet an airline pilot named Rayford Steele.

When you find yourself thinking things like that, you ask yourself, if you are sane, well, didn't people in other eras also face scary people and events?

Yes, they did. But we telegraph those past times, and we think of the heroes alongside the evil clowns. Where is the heroic Joseph Welch who can, at this moment, ask, of any of them, Dick-Haliburton-Cheney, John-Patriot-Act-Ashcroft, George-My Pet-Goat-Bush, "Have you no decency, Sir?" and be heard?

Where is the equivalent of CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who, legend says, let Lyndon Johnson know that the game was over in Vietnam?

Why didn't Abu Ghraib hit America's conscience as hard as My Lai? Why are there people who call up NPR, in "sane" sounding voices, accusing Ann Garrels of being too "lenient" with the Iraqis, and making Abu Ghraib sound like it was such a bad thing?

Is it all just 9-11? Was that all it took to bring America to this?

I've read a lot about the Holocaust and asked, over and over, what did it? What made a civilized nation like Germany become hell? Germans felt threatened; we know that much. Versailles, the Bolsheviks, WW I. So, push Americans a little and this is what you get? A country that is just about ready to put Bush back in the White House? I am aghast.

I live with this daily anxiety – what if he is re-elected? I can't remember viewing the results of any election with such dread.

Immediately after 9-11, I found my relationship to news broadcasts drastically changed. I would pounce on news like a starving man pouncing on food, even if my last broadcast consumed was a mere moments previous. I did that because, of course, I was so afraid. So afraid that we had been attacked again, in the twenty minutes or so since my last input of news, or afraid that we had done something horrific to retaliate.

I'm doing the same thing now. Pouncing on news. I want to hear the latest polls. I do this with the same panicked impulse that I listened to news in the post 9-11 period. With a sense of dread – "If Bush is ahead in the polls I might as well find out now and get it over with" – and a sense of strangled hope – "Maybe, just maybe, Kerry is making some progress."

Again, as a politically active person, I've always been around people who call America fascist, etc. and the thing is ... I wonder if that rhetoric has not blunted the left's ability to have an impact at moments like this. If you are constantly saying that the sky is falling, once the sky really starts falling, no one is going to hear you if you say it again.

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