Finally, at long last, there exists a precautionary need for George W. Bush to loom front and center in the minds of all Americans. But wouldn't you know it? Now that his presidential "relevancy" is an indispensable key to debating a saner and more sensible future, his wretched national stewardship is slipping from public consideration.
This is due in part to the distracted media. There's a new crop of would-be chief executives to consume their interest, print space and air time. Bush, on the other hand, is merely a lame and limping duck, as outmoded, seemingly irrelevant and nearly forgotten as the Model T. So the media's attitude is to just let his wretchedness be. Who any longer cares?
Well, we all should, more than ever. For Bush has a back-up replay waiting in the wings in the ready personage of John McCain, whose superannuation is rivaled only by the antiquity of his Bushistic thinking. Today the only identifiable policy difference between Bush and McCain -- and this comes at the insistence of McCain himself -- was on the timing of the Iraq "surge." Not the surge itself, nor the war in general, nor its wisdom or advisability, nor what it implies about the future of other armed interventions, military occupations and global calamities.
McCain is an intellectually creaking advertisement for a Bush III presidency, replete with all of W.'s selfsame blunders, excepting that McCain would commit them sooner and more decisively. He is, quite simply, a nearly exact reproduction of the Bushistic "mindset" that Barack Obama has intelligently deplored to such great effect against Hillary Clinton. And it's time Obama began broadening his horizonal targets.
And he can do so, so easily, by keeping George W. Bush in the forefront of the American mind. I realize that Obama has had certain political nuisances to first dispatch, but the principal nuisance is now pretty much history -- a mere mop-up campaign. It's time to engage the next major front, and Obama can grease the skids of his assault by ardently reminding voters of Bush's sustaining relevancy in the form of Mr. McCain.
They're ideological peas in a confused and contradictory pod, and thankfully, Bush is still going out of his way to hammer those abominable curiosities home. At his Thursday press conference, for instance, the president gleefully joined in McCain's game of ridiculing Obama's foreign policy naiveté, passionately condemning even the thought, which Obama has raised, of an American president meeting with the likes of a Raúl Castro.
"What's lost," he asked, "by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs? What's lost is it will send the wrong message. It will send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. I’m not suggesting there’s never a time to talk, but I'm suggesting now is not the time -- not to talk with Raúl Castro. He’s nothing more than an extension of what his brother did, which was to ruin an island, and imprison people because of their beliefs."
OK, there you have it -- a firm, sort of secondary Bush Doctrine that McCain would assuredly uphold.
Not many minutes later, however, Bush also had this to say: "I'm going to the Olympics [in Beijing] because it's a sporting event, and I'm looking forward to seeing the athletic competition. But that will not preclude me from meeting with the Chinese president, expressing my deep concerns about a variety of issues."
Like, say, political prisoners? Or that President Hu's internal oppression is little more than an extension of Mao Tse-Tung's?
Bush's prompt negation of what he had just proclaimed as sagacious, mature foreign policy went uncontested by the press corps. He is, after all, a lame and irrelevant duck. Who gives a rip. Let him prattle. He'll be gone soon enough.
But taking his place could very well be his confused, contradictory ideological twin, John McCain. And in this sense whatever Bush says these days should be treated by Obama as something John McCain might, could and eventually will say. McCain owns Bush and all his monstrous policies. Hence whenever Obama finds himself ridiculed by either, he should return fire against both, as though they're one in the same.
In short, from now till Election Day, Obama should tie McCain to every yahoo utterance that escapes from Bush -- and this linkage, Thursday, I did not hear from the Democratic candidate directly.
Obama should also ask McCain if perhaps he has heard of $4-a-gallon gasoline. Because McCain owns more than just the foreign policy ignorance of George W. Bush.
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NOTE: I am delighted and honored to announce that beginning Monday, March 3, my column will appear exclusively on BuzzFlash.org. You will also be able to access it through BuzzFlash.com, front page, if that's your regular reading habit. So, see you there!
--P.M.
