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Stop Bush Now
The current administration occupying the White House is perhaps the worst since Lyndon Baines Johnson strengthened the power of the bloated welfare/warfare state in the 1960s. With LBJ we got the worst of all possible worlds from a libertarian perspective – a quantum leap in social engineering that went way beyond the excesses of FDR’s New Deal, and an extended military debacle in Vietnam that nearly bankrupted an already fragile economy. Bush the Younger now threatens to make liberal Democrats look like pikers. Spending under the Bush Republicans has risen to a level that makes the Clinton administration a very model of frugality by comparison, and President Bush’s invasion of Iraq is more than a costly misadventure; it borders on criminality if it does not actually cross the line. Would Al Gore have been any worse? As a libertarian who voted for Bush in 2000, I’m sad to say that it will have to go down as the worst vote I have ever cast for any candidate in my lifetime. I didn’t expect much from Bush the Younger, but I did think he would be marginally better than Gore on gun control, taxation, privatization of social security and health care benefits. I did not expect Bush to embark on a pre-emptive war of staggering dimensions, a war that is likely to result in the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, a war that threatens to completely bankrupt our weak economy and run up staggering budget deficits for years, if not decades, to come. It is too easy to call Bush an imbecile who has been manipulated down this dead-end path by a claque of his father’s aging cronies. Bush the Younger was all too willing to follow the path laid down by his mentors, and he has proven himself to be a master manipulator of public sentiment. Bush’s war against the people of Iraq is nothing less than a continuation of the imperialistic, colonialistic policies that have characterized European countries over the centuries, and U.S. foreign policy since the age of Teddy Roosevelt. The danger for the world at large is greater now than ever before because the weapons in use today are the most devastating in history. It is not surprising that the war-mongering conservatives at National Review and the Weekly Standard are the primary architects of Bush’s march to war; they have long dreamed of turning the globe into a Judeo-Christian empire as a prelude to their visions of Armegeddon. What is surprising, however, is the number of libertarians who have jumped on the Bush war wagon on the grounds that Saddam is evil, he hates us and will eventually attack us, so let’s get rid of him and his cronies first. I’m old enough to remember the war mongers of the 1960s who believed that we should launch a pre-emptive strike on Red China before it developed its own nuclear capabilities, since it was only a matter of time before it launched a few missiles in our direction. Fortunately, we did not strike China then, and we seem to experiencing some sort of uneasy alliance with that nation now as it makes an effort to free up its own society from totalitarian control. Nothing changes that much over time. These are the same arguments we have always heard, updated for current events. The war against Iraq is unconscionable, unless we can establish a link between Saddam and the tragedy of September 11, 2001, something the government has not been able to do. Meanwhile, the dream of a low-tax, limited-government society, which conservatives used to talk about as well as libertarians, is fading further into the distance. The U.S. republic is quickly going the way of Republican Rome, and the age of the U.S. Caesars is fast upon us. Thirty years from now, Bush the Younger may well be remembered as the first in a long line of American Regents, who used the trappings of a democratic republic to pave the way for a quasi-dictatorial, theocratic police state.
March 27, 2003 Jerome Tuccille [send him mail] is the author of 21 books, including Alan Shrugged, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, It Still Begins With Ayn Rand, biographies of Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and the Hunts of Texas, and several novels. Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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