Confessions of a former loyal Bushie

See, Gonz, it's not just us flaming liberals.

Up from Texas came a white-hatted cowboy.

Here came the anti-Clinton. Here came a man who promised to restore integrity to the White House. Here came a man who promised to be a uniter, not a divider. A man who promised to be campassionate, and not just conservative. A man who said we needed to be humble in our foreign policy. A man who, I was convinced, would help clear off the table after the last two years of scandal and filth. A man who would paint the walls white again.

Here came George W. Bush.

I had voted Democratic, twice, for the same man. And that man had lied to me and angered me in a way that I never could have imagined about a politician. I didn't just walk back to the Red folds of the Republican flag, I fucking ran....

*snip*

Does anyone remember--in what seems like a thousand years ago--the spy plane incident over China crisis? This was in early 2001, shortly after the President took office. That was handled so inexpertly that it couldn't have been chalked up to mere this-is-my-first-day-on-the-job-so-I-don't-know-where-the-toner-is inexperience. Bush and his team almost jostled that incident into Cuba in October II: Electric Boogaloo, until Colin Powell got in there and got his hands dirty.

That was the last Bush foreign policy success of any measure, and still it planted a seed of doubt in my mind.

Think about the magnitude of what I just wrote: The last real Bush foreign policy success was in 2001, and even then it made people scratch their chins and wonder, Gee, I don't know.....

The rest of 2001 was pretty much vacation time for Bush, but then we got to August 2001, when Bush made his address to the nation on his stem cell research decision.

I watched that address live with my then-fiancee-now-wife, who was also a Republican. After the President detailed in an almost too-painful-to-watch manner the ham-handed decision that pleased no one and did even less to promote scientific research and asked God to bless the United States and signed off, we cut off the TV and sat in silence. Neither said anything, but our looks spoke volumes. We may have elected an idiot, our eyes said. I think we both got drunk that night....

*snip*

I don't need to catalogue the astonishingly perfect series of missteps, bad decisions, stupid moves, acts of jaw-dropping incredulity that followed over the next three years after September 11. But here are just some of the lilypads, in no particular order, that carried this here frog from one bank of opinion about the President to the other:

No Child Left Behind. 6.2% unemployment. Privitazation of Social Security. Cutting the NIH budget. Appointing Elmer Gantry to the FDA. Removing Whitman from the EPA. Withdrawing support for Kyoto. Clear Skies Initiative. NSA wiretaps. Iraq. Going to war with the army you have, not the army you want. Chalabi. Yellowcake. Iran. Heckuva Job, Brownie. Stay the Course. My Pet Goat.

I could go on and on, but there were many other, graver, more dangerous things that convinced me not only had I made a mistake--a massive, egrgious, horrible mistake--but that the man was more than just a bad president. There were things that convinced me that he cared less about the law than Clinton ever did. There were things he did that made lying about sex under oath seem like littering in the park.

Declaring the Geneva Accords a quaint set of norms that had no application to detainees, only a relative handful of whom had even the slightest connection to al Qaeda, the rest of whom had done nothing wrong. This brought us on par with our internment of the Japanese.
Then there was the extraordinary rendition programs that echoed Stalinist gulags. Abu Ghraib, which bore the strong whiff of the Hanoi Hilton, except we were Ho Chi Minh. The NSA wiretaps that take us out of any good historical analogy and right into the realm of Philip K. Dick....