Democrats have a hard time keeping up with the deconstruction of President Bush by his own radical conservative supporters, in the wake of the very mediocre Supreme Court nomination of his den mother, sorry, his personal lawyer from Texas, exponential disenchantment with Iraq, the frantic, feckless post-Katrina posturing, et al. But in today's International Herald Tribune, former Carter National Security Advisor and genuine Washington Wiseman Zbigniew Brzezinski contributes as thorough a demolition of Bush's foreign policy as we've seen to date...reprinted [in the post] below.

 

If politics were a football game, some might feel "Zbig" is guilty of hitting the quarterback after the play.  But politics is real life, and the rules of sportsmanship don't apply. When you win, people ascribe almost superman powers to you (remember the political genius of the century, Karl Rove?) but when you start to lose on a regular basis, suddenly you are the emperor without his clothes (as Bush was portrayed in a recent Washington Post editorial cartoon by Tom Toles).

There is a cumulative effect to being systematically "disrespected", as Bush might say, in his characteristically dyslectic syntax.  A critical, potentially fatal question now arises for political players in both parties, as also for foreign governments trying to plan their interaction with the US: is this man falling apart before our very eyes? If not physically and intellectually...and those questions are starting to be raised, see Dana Milbank in Wednesday's Washington Post, Oct. 12, pg. A-7...but politically?

One of the more revealing lines of Conservative attack against Bush's pick of the hapless Harriet Meirs for the Supreme Court is when we read senior establishment elite players like George Will or David Brooks or Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer laughing at the President's assertion that we should trust his judgment on how brilliant Ms. Miers really is. These former supporters sneeringly ask, in effect, "what the hell would Bush know about personal excellence!?"

This isn't just rude, it's devastating, given where it's coming from.  And we have three more years with Bush in the White House. The implications of such questions even being asked, much less answered in the affirmative, are obvious, and boil down to the risk of political anarchy at home, and increasingly disconnected foreign policy, as per Brzezinski's analysis, overseas.

So the specific question for today is, what are the leadership implications? Even assuming Bush's team can come up with serious, meaningful approaches to the Delphi bankruptcy as a signal of the coming collapse of the Capitalist social contract with Labor (and what do you think the odds are on that? What are YOUR bright ideas?) how can this White House expect to enforce political discipline on a Congress just three months away from an election year, when it's everyone for themselves under the best of circumstances, and when a majority of Republicans remain incredibly uncomfortable voting for something as basic as Trade Adjustment Assistance?

We start with this right here now domestic political and economic crisis not because it's been unfolding for a decade, in slow motion, but because the increasing domestic crisis feeds, irreversibly, foreign policy pressures, and domestic trade policy pressures, to which no one, since NAFTA, has come up with any viable amelioration.  Textile quotas to save the uneducated middle class? Twenty-seven percent tariffs on Chinese goods because we don't all want to end up working at Wal Mart, sans a living wage, sans any benefits, sans weekends off?

Delphi this week...and GM at some point, followed by its millions of suppliers and co-dependents. It's irreversible under the current system.

The industrial middle class of America has been under attack from globalization, and self-induced failures like no national health-care, for a generation. Even if some miracle set of programs arises from some latter day FDR and his New Deal (and remember, it was WW2 which ended the Great Depression here...think on that for a minute) it will take another generation to work out for the population as a whole. And that's if we're lucky and a real Marshall Plan for America can be developed....some way to provide Americans with a European-style "state subsidy" for the social benefits which stockholder-responsive private industry can no longer provide, at a profit, in the face of globalization.

The White House solution to date? Cut back on Medicaid and renege on pledges to Florida and the Gulf Coast for hurricane relief past and present.  Anyone think an election-year Congress will bite on Medicaid cuts as the Big Plan?

Moving to the on-going disaster in Iraq, as US casualties approach 2,000 and the bombings continue unabated, find someone you know with a security clearance and ask them what they really think is happening, and is about to happen?  What do you think the implications of this will be, across the board?  Read Zbig, below, for a quick listing of all the other foreign policy problems we aren't honestly confronting.

To be crass for a moment, does all of the above mean the Democrats have a good chance of taking-back control of the House and Senate next year? Does it look better and better for Hillary in `08?

Maybe, but if they can't come up with any good ideas, is there any reason we should care?  And for now, is it fair to be yelling at the Dems? The United States isn't a parliamentary democracy, we don't have a coherent Opposition, we don't have a Shadow Cabinet, and for Dems, we don't have a Newt Gingrich, with an over-arching philosophy, much less a plan!

Damn...we're going home for a drink...maybe Paul Krugman can come up with something....