BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
Monday, August 11, 2003
Q: Is Bush a moderate or an
extremist? A: Both! Peter
Berkowitz, writing in the
Globe's Ideas section yesterday, wants you to believe that
George W. Bush isn't really a right-wing crazy. His evidence: the
president has been generally moderate on cultural issues such as
religion, abortion, gay and lesbian rights, affirmative action, even
his court appointments. Plus, he's got black people in his Cabinet!
(No link. The Globe's website is in the midst of redesign
hell, but Berkowitz's piece might pop up here
later today.)
Sorry, but this is argument by
straw man. I'm prepared to accept all or most of the above, although
I have some quibbles. Certainly a few of Bush's judicial picks have
been dangerously right-wing, for instance. And the president's views
on homosexuality, although arguably within the mainstream of moderate
conservatism, are ugly nevertheless: no marriage, no civil unions,
not even domestic-partner benefits.
But, still, what Berkowitz does is
raise a whole host of matters on which Bush is moderate in order to
frame the two really important issues -- his budget-busting tax cuts
and his hyperaggressive foreign policy -- in a less threatening
way.
On taxes, Bush really is a
right-wing crazy. For some non-fuzzy math, check out this
chart (PDF format)
put together by Citizens
for Tax Justice. Okay, I
know you're not really going to take a look, so here's the
lead:
As a result of the three
major tax cuts enacted at President Bush's instigation in 2001,
2002 and 2003, taxes on the best-off one percent of Americans will
fall by 17 percent by the end of this decade. For the remaining 99
percent of taxpayers, the average tax reduction will be 5
percent.
The share of total federal taxes
paid by the best-off one percent will fall from 23.7 percent to
21.3 percent in 2010 compared to prior law -- a drop of 2.4
percentage points. The top one percent is the only income group
with a substantial reduction in its share of the total federal tax
burden.
Berkowitz seems to think that
Bush's runaway spending shows that he's not really a conservative
when it comes to budgetary matters. He's right! In fact, it
demonstrates that Bush is a radical who wants to match or even exceed
the borrow-and-spend policies of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, running
up hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, a situation that benefits
wealthy bond-holders, but certainly no one else.
As for foreign policy, what needs
to be said? Here's Berkowitz on the run-up to the war in
Iraq:
Today, Bush's critics,
usually upholders of international law, rarely acknowledge the
manifestly inaccurate and incomplete accounting of WMD that Saddam
submitted to the UN Security Council in December 2002. This put
him in clear material breach of Resolution 1441, which was
unanimously passed by the Security Council one month before. On
the Bush administration's reasonable reading, Saddam's defiance of
1441's terms authorized the use of force to disarm him and
suggested he had WMD to hide.
Who are these critics who refuse to
acknowledge the lies contained in Saddam's December 2002 report?
Berkowitz doesn't say. This is, in fact, another straw man. It was,
after all, UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix who took the lead in
denouncing Saddam's refusal to come clean about the weapons of mass
destruction that he had been known to possess in the past.
But in the absense of the imminent
threat that Bush and Tony Blair talked about so many times, Blix and
most of the rest of the world called for a stepped-up inspections
regime, not war. The Bush administration kept pushing for war,
building
a disingenuous case on not
just those 16 words, but on phony claims about aluminum tubes,
doctored intelligence, and allegations of ties between Saddam and al
Qaeda.
Berkowitz concludes of
Bush:
[A]s his
administration makes its mistakes, rolls with the punches, and
adapts to changing circumstances, the president reveals himself to
be a pragmatic conservative who knows in his gut that it is a
liberal welfare state that he wishes to reform, and to conserve.
This will continue to discomfit purists on both sides. And it may
prove attractive to a majority in 2004, not only in the Electoral
College but in the popular vote as well.
Berkowitz's argument, essentially,
is that Bush is not uniformly extreme in his conservative views.
Rather, he's moderate in some areas and extreme in others -- mainly
the ones that really matter. Berkowitz intends all this as an
endorsement. Seen in a different light, it looks a lot more like an
indictment instead.
posted at 8:20 AM |
|
link
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
