The Flight of the American Dream

You can't stuff the real world into a cramped ideology. It took the Radicalized Republicans 30 years to put their master plan into operation, underwritten by millions of dollars of patronage by far-right foundations and large injections of private wealth. It's only taken less than two years for the plan to catch fire and burn.

Narrow ideology is no substitute for ideas coupled to action, for minds coupled to heart. George Bush had neither. He knew what he wanted to do on taxes -- cut them for the privileged; on government -- turn it into a piggy bank for his cronies; on Social Security and Medicare -- "reform" them into submission; on what to do with kids -- test them into cookie-cutter conformists. But he just sat there when Al Qaeda slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center. He just sat there when his buddies in the Congress sent the deficit plunging into the depths. He just sat there when Hurricane Katrina destroyed a major American city. He just sat there while his bureaucrats rubber-stamped the Dubai ports deal. His ideology couldn't serve up the ready answers to those crises. Nor could his neocon ideologues. They sit there while Iraq spins into hemorrhage of lives, squandered money, and lost opportunities.