Multiple Choice

by tristero

Okay, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans, no peeking. Which conclusion actually is true regarding Bush Administration policy and rightwing ideology?

(A) Support for blank check funding of the surge in Iraq – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(B) Advocating the privatization of Social Security as a means of resolving a very real but overblown problem – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(C) Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(D) Promotion of faith-based initiatives – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(E) Insistence upon making tax breaks for the rich permanent – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(F) Advocating an amendment to the US Constitution to ban same-sex marriages – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(G) Retaining Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(H) Respecting the judgment and intellectual integrity of Paul Wolfowitz – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(I) All of the above.

(J) None of the above.

Well, that was easy.

And that’s exactly how easy it is these days to grind out editorials about this unbelievably bad presidency and his unbelievably corrupt and dim-witted ideological partners. The tragedy is that it was just as easy to do so much earlier, when they could have made a difference, for example, regarding public willingness to support an utterly idiotic and immoral invasion.

What’s hard is trying to understand why anyone, including the editors of the NY Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the New Republic, every American television station, and so on and so on and so on, gave these fuck-ups a free pass for so long when it was patently obvious from day one that everything they believed or did was, to coin a phrase, “foolish and indefensible.”