Hang in there, America: Competent leadership is just 600-plus days away
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McClatchy Newspapers

As of May 17th, there were 613 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.

So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass. So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our Founding Fathers, they never talked about.

The American people have turned their backs on George Bush and his dreams of planting the seeds of democracy in Mesopotamia at the point of a gun and seeing them spread like kudzu across the Middle East.

He's failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.

The president's approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.

The war that was never ours to win by military means - the only button this president who never learned war ever learned how to push - is lost. Bush and Cheney and the rest of their cronies and co-conspirators are toast.

The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men - seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest non-political tasks of governing - succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?

With Congress in the hands of the Democrats, and the 2008 election looming dead ahead, the president can't even count on key figures in his own Republican Party to stand behind him as he embarks on a long and painful lame duckhood.

His hopes of crafting meaningful immigration reform and fixing Social Security are dead on arrival. The legacies that George W. Bush will carry into retirement are the war he started, lost and stubbornly refused to end, and the corruption that he and his team visited on our democracy and Constitution.

The president's lawyer, "mi abogado," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, dangles in the wind as we learn, day by day, of how grotesquely this administration politicized the professional staff of the Justice Department.

It was Gonzales, as White House counsel, who provided legal cover for the torture and maltreatment of prisoners and suspects that led directly to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the CIA's secret Kafkaesque prisons scattered around the world where "enhanced" interrogation methods were generously, if unproductively, employed.

It was Gonzales, as attorney general, who hired and gave unprecedented hiring and firing powers to a 33-year-old attorney, Monica Goodling, who'd graduated from a TV evangelist's law school. It was Goodling who resigned and took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that hadn't even been asked. It was Goodling who was Justice's liaison to the White House and Karl Rove.

Meantime, the White House can't find 5 million e-mail messages involving official business and refuses to provide many of those it can find to the congressional committees investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys.

The agencies of government - the CIA, FBI, Treasury, Department of Defense and who knows who else - use secret executive authority to suck up databases of personal information about ordinary Americans, without regard to their privacy rights, in a search for suspected terrorists.

Have they found any using that information? Have they unearthed terror cells with more potential than the ones in Florida and New Jersey that were penetrated and perhaps manipulated by FBI informants? That sort of terrorist isn't half so frightening as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Over in Iraq, 150,000 American troops soldier on, attempting, at the cost of their own lives and limbs, to follow the orders of a president who still thinks he can pull victory out of defeat.

A democratically elected but hopelessly divided Iraqi parliament feuds and dithers and contemplates its summer vacation while Americans and Iraqis die in increasing numbers in the streets outside the Green Zone, and the mortar and rocket fire lands inside that sanctuary with increasing frequency.

Six-hundred-fourteen days, and counting. Nineteen months. It doesn't seem possible or even bearable.

The Bush Administration's
FY 2008 Budget

U.S. Department of Labor Budget

Health Care

Social Security Administration


The newly released Bush budget for fiscal year (FY) 2008 shows that the Bush administration still is not listening to working Americans and, instead, insists on plowing ahead with skewed priorities and misguided policies despite a clear call for a new direction in November’s elections.



While President George W. Bush has called for bipartisan compromise on key economic issues and has finally recognized growing economic inequality as a problem, his proposed budget reflects none of this. His budget preserves expensive tax cuts for the wealthy and boosts military spending dramatically, while cutting crucial programs for the most vulnerable Americans: children, the elderly, the poor and the sick. The president has proposed major cuts in domestic programs over the next five years, starting with $13 billion in cuts in FY 2008, rising each year until FY 2012, when cuts in domestic programs would reach $34 billion.[1]



This administration often talks of preparing America's workers to meet the challenges of competing in the global economy, but his proposed budget contains more than $1 billion in cuts for job training and employment security programs. At a time when America’s workers face the loss of millions of good-paying jobs to flawed trade policies and offshoring and the Bush administration is seeking to renew Fast Track authority, the president’s budget proposes to cut $102.9 million from the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provides income support and training to workers who lose their jobs due to trade.



On health care, the Bush budget also goes in precisely the wrong direction. At a time when nearly 45 million Americans are without coverage and millions more struggle to meet rising costs, the Bush tax proposal would actually make those who have coverage pay more and provide no real help for the uninsured. Unconscionably, it would also cut more than $100 billion over five years from Medicare and Medicaid, shift more costs to the states and limit eligibility for children who now receive coverage under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).



In the important area of occupational safety and health, the Bush budget increases funding in nominal terms. An increase in funding is being requested for Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), particularly the coal enforcement program. But when inflation is factored in, the FY 2008 budget in fact represents a cut in funding compared to FY 2006. The Bush budget also proposes a cut in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) budget, reducing the nation’s commitment to researching and preventing workplace injuries, diseases and deaths. With a combined budget request of $1.056 million for the federal job safety agencies, in FY 2008, the Bush administration proposes to spend $7.32 per worker to protect America's workers from job injuries, illnesses and death.



As further proof that this administration is not listening to, or concerned about, working families, the Bush budget retains the proposal to privatize Social Security, despite its overwhelming rejection by all Americans. The budget includes a placeholder of $29 billion in 2012 as the first year cost of setting up individual accounts and a total cost of $637 billion over the first six years for a proposal that must once again be rejected.



President Bush should put our nation’s pocketbook into building a better future for America’s working families instead of forcing more cuts in much-needed programs in health care, worker training and health and safety. His 2008 budget simply does not work for America’s working men and women.