Performance Evaluation

In politics, the "moderate middle" holds sway most of the time. There are subtle differences between parties of course. Mainstream Democrats comprise the conscience of America. Unhampered by "absolute" doctrine, they are responsible for advances in civil and women's rights, environmental protection, and fairness in labor and housing. For a brief period, Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" took us close to the left. It set the machinery for "project" housing and permanent welfare entitlements, costly failures that will take generations to dismantle. Limits on welfare however, along with free trade agreements and balanced budgets are the hallmarks of more recent Democratic administrations. This moderate thinking holds throughout much of the industrial world where various degrees of free enterprise happily compete with each other. The myth of a powerful American left exists primarily on talk radio, where it is fed to the fearful right.

Mainstream Republicans have long kept America's industrial engine humming. Fierce defenders of unfettered trade and practical hard-headed enterprise, they revel in freedom and jealously guard the other half of our greatness. Historically, Republicans rarely held a majority but on social matters they were joined by southern Democrats or "Dixiecrats", and were able to defeat progressive issues. When southern Blacks were given the vote in the 1960's and 1970's, and registered Democrat en masse, many blue-collar Whites switched parties, swelling Republican ranks. The party of wealth and privilege now has a large fundamentalist and useable underclass. Its laboring members are not extremists but they are practiced in believing what they are told. When Joseph McCarthy led the party's hysterical hunt for "godless communists" in the 1950's, its cadre of footmen was relatively small. Today, the party can field a dedicated, flag-waving, cross-carrying army.

When communism was quietly discarded in Russia and China, the extreme right here lost its arch enemy and its reason for being. It did not, however, disappear. Various hate groups imagined and armed themselves against some sinister internal threat. The movement culminated in the fiery and self-fulfilling "Waco" disaster followed by the even more grisly Oklahoma City bombing. Seemingly bizarre, the events are as American as apple pie and are ominously related to our present predicament.

In September of 2001, to protest American troops in their holy lands and to protest our one-sided support for Israel, a tiny group of Saudi religious extremists took down the World Trade Center. We were attacked on our soil and for a brief time we all became extreme patriots. The emotion did not go un-harvested. A skillful fundamentalist "preacher-president" was in office at the time and the strongest nation on Earth again somehow finds itself at war.

The Twin Tower tragedy was used to fan our fears, to negate our civil rights, and as cover for sending our sons and daughters to Iraq, a country not involved but containing a rich oil field. Concerned that we would not remain the only world super-power while China and India (two thirds of the world's population) become industrial powers, American supremacists wanted to maintain our dominance by controlling Mid East oil and the Twin Tower opportunity presented itself. The plan was simple. We would remove a brutal dictator, install a puppet government, and establish permanent military bases in Iraq. Ignoring history and world opinion, and to simplify the ownership of those bases, we rushed in essentially alone.

The "spin" was also simple. With our bloodied backs against the wall America would make a stand against terrorism and free the noble and oppressed peoples of Iraq. Unfortunately, freedom's lonely foot soldiers are finding the deserts there to be no more hospitable than the jungles of Vietnam. Our kill ratio of ten or twenty to one and the sadistic treatment of noble and oppressed Iraqi detainees have made our presence unwelcome. The occupation is poorly planned, unable to maintain security, and beset with every conceivable scandal. At best, the lawless and devastated nation will remain this way for decades. At worst it will disintegrate into repressive fundamentalism, civil war, or dismemberment. America, freedom's richest star, is once again hated, feared, and laughed at around the world.

Of more immediate concern, the situation is increasingly hard to hide. Some Republican leaders are wondering what will happen should their party lose power. Well they should. They had control of congress and the white house long enough to have accomplished any number of meaningful Republican things, and didn't. They could have strengthened our alliances and worked to eliminate oppression and the breeding grounds of terrorism. They could have simplified the tax code, balanced the budget, eliminated pork-barrel spending and made our country more competitive in the world market. Instead, led by extremist keepers of American morality and supremacy, they bickered over prayer in schools, gays in the military, same sex marriages, abortion, and with missionary zeal not unlike the Branch Davidians in Waco, they manipulated the strongest nation on earth into an inept, murderous, and unnecessary war.

On their watch and in a dangerous world, America blundered deeper into debt, created a massive terrorist incubator, made new enemies and lost old friends. The "business party" didn't take care of business. Thus far, the "party line" remains unchanged and few Republican leaders are breaking ranks. Their spin factories however, are working around the clock.

A performance evaluation is scheduled for November. Unprecedented millions are being spent in preparation. Before it's over and all the glitzy spin is swept onto the waste heaps of history, the disgust and quiet common sense of the moderate American middle will be heard.

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