Locked in Abu Ghraib - The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration
It looks like it's game over for the Bush presidency. As Fred Kaplan reports in Slate, if the investigations coming to light this week are true--and it sure looks like they are--then the horrific images of abuse we've been treated to these last few weeks were the result of a program that the administration not only knew about, but ordered. It doesn't matter that what the United States has done pales in comparison to daily life under Saddam. We're supposed to be better than this, whether Senator Inhofe thinks so or not--and most of America agrees. And as the revelations about Bush's refusal to go after Zarqawi when he had the chance, and Zarqawi's subsequent string of violence, including the beheading of Nicholas Berg, make clear, it's hard not to see Bush's hands and imagine the blood dripping from them.
As Kaplan points out, there's precious little Bush can do to stop the onslaught that he has created. Firing Rumsfeld would make Bush the flip-flopper; there goes not only his negative ad campaign against Kerry, but also the only real reason--his resoluteness in the face of circumstances that would make others reconsider--that people, other than his loyal fundamentalist base, still support him.
The last time a presidency crashed and burned, in 1992, most of us were too young to appreciate the spectacle. The time before that, 1980, many of us, including me, were too young even to know who the president was. Take time out, this time, to watch the flames dance. And hope--pray, if you're so inclined--that we never witness a train wreck like this again.
2 comments:
I do think so, yes. For one thing, nothing he's done has ever hit him this hard in the polling data, and the drop we've already seen is without the notion that he might have known what was going on in Iraq and failed to do anything about it. Assuming that story gets traction--and it's hard to imagine how something that's being corroborated in so many ways doesn't get traction--he's only going to lose more support. Secondly, the erosion of confidence in Bush is working cumulatively; people who forgave his first and second and three-hundredth mistake are slowly but surely jumping off the bandwagon. The Bush people can keep shouting that they don't care about polls in May, that they're not surprised to see him so low right now, that only November matters. But they're desperate, lashing out in whatever direction they can to try to cling to support. And they know history; they know what a sinking ship looks like, and they can't help but recognize that they seem to be on one. If Bush wins this election, it will either be a turnaround of epic proportions or a sham. The way things have been going, I'd say the odds of the latter are higher than the former right now.
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