Never Discuss Religion or Politics

Or sex, for that matter. So I am doing well on this blog!

And yes, I am going to talk politics. Partly because I feel so strongly about certain issues that I am going to lie awake at night if I don't vent a little here. And partly because I am truly interested in what my commenters think and they are not going to tell me unless they have something to react to. I just hope that anyone who hates political talk or is offended by my opinions will simply tune me out momentarily and come back when I return to my usual programming.

Surely the Bush administration is going to cop a thrashing in these mid-term elections. Surely.

Firstly, and most importantly, for Iraq. Now, I never supported the Iraq war. I even joined the marches against it, despite the fact that as a veteran's "wife", I am not always so keen on anti-war protesters. I hate war. I know that is a stupid thing to say, because being against war is like being for motherhood - everyone feels that way. But I truly do hate war with my whole being. I hate it like a woman comes to hate a bad husband. Not just in principle, but down to every maddeningly annoying detail, so that the way he clears his throat makes her just as furious as the way he never pays the bills on time and fucks everything with a pulse. I know the impact of war intimately. I have been living with it for years now, and it never looks any better.

And yet, I am not necessarily a pacifist, despite my extreme hatred of all things war-like. It is a sad reality that, much as with individuals, a country has to be strong in order to be safe. Occasionally, very occasionally, under certain circumstances, a pre-emptive move may be warranted.

Part of the reason that the Iraq war looks so bad to me is that it has been such a muddle, right from the beginning. Despite my huge personal objection to wars, the historian in me makes me also somewhat pragmatic about them. If you are going to do it, you have to know why you are doing it, have clear objectives and an exit strategy (unless you plan to be there forever). Your own population needs to be behind you and have obvious reasons to stick with you when things get tough. And I have never seen much sign that the Bush administration was entirely clear on why they were going into Iraq, what exactly they planned to do when they got there, and especially how they planned to get out. There has been something about their vagueness on all these issues that has troubled me almost as much as the fact that they were doing it at all and that Australia was joining in.

And predictably, this war is becoming a debacle. A lot of people are dead, and yet so little is being accomplished. The wastefulness, the confusion and the apparent lack of a coherent plan offends me almost as much as the violence itself. War is a very serious thing and these people are just not up to the job.

And secondly, for Katrina. There is something just so horrifying to me about the way the administration just sat on its hands during that crisis. How is it possible that the people of a great city of world importance, in the richest and most powerful nation on earth, could languish for days with so little action from the central government? What were they all doing - fixing their hair?

If I was an American citizen, I would be so horrified about those two things that I just couldn't bring myself to vote Republican. Even if I believed in everything else that adminstration wanted to do, even if I hated the Democrats, Iraq and Katrina would be enough to make me just stay home out of sheer disgust. The fact that a guy like Ted Haggard, who has lectured other people for years on homosexuality while apparently having monthly appointments with a male sex worker, is part of the Bush scene is just an irritant in comparison. Its not like we haven't seen that kind of garden-variety hypocrisy before. I even feel kind of sorry for him.

And you know what? I don't hate George Bush. But I do think that he is dangerous. I think he is dangerous because he is incompetent.

With a career in government, I have learned that the most dangerous type of person is a person who is fundamentally incompetent. I would even rather work with someone whose ideas I hate, but whose competence I have to respect. Much of the time, in my job, I am working with or for people whose ideas I don't much like. But at least they have the capacity to form an intelligent view of events, formulate a plan and make it happen. In my experience, the people who have created the most chaos, unleashed the worst elements, have not been the "bad" people, but the weak and incompetent people.

This is a President who was such a weak candidate that, even in the beginning, he had to have Dick Cheney standing beside him and holding his hand in order to look passable. Even the Republicans seem to have relied on the fact that he would be taking good advice. Otherwise, he was just a former rich playboy and drug addict whose only apparent assets were his powerful family and an apparently genuine religious faith. Probably a nice guy. But, you know, I would have thought a country like America would require a little more from their President than just being a nice guy.

There seems to be some kind of vacuum in that administration where leadership and a coherent plan should be. I am not a conservative, but I have to agree with Kenneth Adelman, when he says that:

They (have) turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.

I also have to agree with David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who said that the failure lies at the centre: with the President.

I found this article infuriating reading, and I'm not even an American.

Surely at least some heads are going to roll in this election. Otherwise, how will anything change?