This country is still, so to speak, Bushed. We may need a generation or so to recover from the last administration. If you need to refresh your memory of it, you can’t do much better than to read a new book, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, by Stephen J. Sniegoski (Enigma Editions).A mild word of warning: though the book is on the whole very well written, it has been abominably edited, and its index is nearly worthless. But this isn’t the author’s fault.
George W. Bush may not have been the worst American president, but he was surely the goofiest. At least his successor can speak in complete sentences. Not that this is any assurance that we will be governed better over the next four years. Nowadays, as I always say, the government is the wolf at the door — taking our wealth and paying for it with counterfeit cash. And Barack Obama thinks the problem is that the government isn’t taxing us enough — or, in other words, extorting enough from us. (To a liberal, there is no such thing as “enough.”)
The Bush era had a dialect all its own. We got accustomed to such phrases as “regime change,” “rogue state,” “Islamofascism,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “axis of evil,” “pre-emptive war,” and “cakewalk,” to mention only a few. There were also memorable adages: “The risks of inaction are greater than the risks of action” (an argument for invading Iraq), and “The smoking gun may take the form of a mushroom cloud” (ditto).
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