September 8, 2004 by lonbud

Safety And Numbers

Safety, security, and prosperity being three of the talking points in the Bush Administration’s sales pitch to American voters, I am stunned to hear any consideration of the presidential election as a close race.

And yet today’s polls call it a dead heat at 47.3% apiece.

With little more than eight weeks to the election, this state of affairs can only mean a few things, none of which, unfortunately, is good.

Forget about the half of the electorate with a preference for the Kerry/Edwards ticket.
An incredibly representative cross section of the very disparate cultures and needs and interests that make this country great all have their reasons for wanting the patrician senator from Massachusetts and the populist senator from North Carolina leading the nation come next January.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But the half that prefers the known quantity? What? I’m sorry; I believe that half of the electorate either doesn’t understand or does not care.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of safety here in the homeland, the world at large is certainly not a safer place since George W. Bush was handed the keys to the kingdom.

Worldwide, deaths from terrorism have increased in each of the four years of his safekeeping, having doubled in the last year alone. Which is not to consider, even, the increased toxicity of the planet, results from his dismantling of American environmental protections and the shifting of industrial production to underdeveloped nations his policies have promoted.

There are now more than one thousand American families and uncounted Iraqi ones whose world Mr. Bush made decidedly unsafe.

Where, exactly, is it safer to live since the Connecticut Cowboy got his boost into the saddle? Israel? Palestine? Afghanistan? Africa? Haiti? Spain? Russia? The Mexican – American border?

Help me out here.

Of course the boardrooms, backrooms, suites, bunkers, and gated communities of this great land -and their counterparts in Europe, Asia, and yes, the Middle East -are safe. For now. The streets surrounding them, the public spaces accomodating them, and the populations beginning to teem in them, however, are not.

I guess it’s hard to measure the prosperity of a nation, or a planet. But George W. Bush has presided over the squandering of a nearly $400 billion surplus and the production of a nearly $500 billion deficit. 1.6 million jobs have been lost “on his watch,” yet he crowed about an economy that produced 140 thousand jobs in August. He’s got us turning a corner, all right.

The President promised to cut the deficit in half in five years. Today the Congressional Budget Office said, uh, no.

There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq!