After Bush

That's the title of the Newsweek issue of June 11, 2007. The table of contents ("Top of the Week") calls it "A Strategy for Life After Bush". The article itself, by their columnist on international affairs Fareed Zakaria, is called "Beyond Bush", and the subtitle for it, "What the world needs is an open, confident America, " pretty much says sums it up.

Now, if I'd written the subhead I'd have added the world "now" after "needs", to get that song reminder going in all our brains, that emotional stimulus that kick-starts us--

What the world--needs now
Is an open--Confident America

in response to the stimulus, my brain says the singer was "Jackie De Shannon", but of course whoever sang it, the song was Burt Bacharach's. And Dyan Cannon's, if I remember the key scene in "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" accurately.

Then it would go on:
Bush's the only thing
That there just can't be--too little of.

But we must take heed of Mr.Zakaria: "In any event, it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush. We must begin to think about life after Bush--...."

After due consideration, I have to disagree with him on both counts.

Cordially, on the first: I've argued the same here on the blog (http://chinshihtang.blogspot.com/2006/12/last-bushite-rant.html), but Fareed argues more from the point of restraining himself and not being distracted than that of actually Moving On "at this point in time" (as the Bushite forerunners used to stipulate in the Nixon era). Contrarily, I argued last December that it must be time to Move On because the company of some of the new anti-Bushites would disturb me.

Still, for most Americans with their gradual buildup of anti-Bushite virulence, activism necessarily takes the form of Bashing Dubyas (great name for a rock group that plays Smashing Pumpkins covers, ya think?) even if the guy's not actually running in '08 (just as he didn't run in 2006). There is no reason to stop bashing Bushite administration all the way through this upcoming election--no matter what face-saving move in Iraq, if any, the Bushites might give their successors to leadership in the party--and for many years to come.

As for the second point by Zakaria, that "we must begin to think about life after Bush", if Zakaria has only now begun to think about post-Bushite reality, he is behind the times (and I do not think that of my man, Fareed, come on now). In Dreamland, my thoughts have been there for years. In Reality, though, post-Bushite life began about 1 a.m. last November 8, give or take a few hours. The Evil Spell of Bushite political power had been broken. There was nothing left for them and their sycophants to do but resign, hide in a Saddamesque spider hole, and/or go to rehab. It's taking some of them a while to realize it, but they will.

Those elected in 2006 and the caretakers left over from before muddle through; that's how post-Bushite life starts. Condi pulls tactical switches in the right directions, and the remaining capital is spent on The Scourge, to provide some military cover for a partial withdrawal (residual bases in Anbar and one in Kurdistan, capacity 30,000-80,000 troops). Congress finds itself unable to legislate anything meaningful; the whole two years of this Congress Kabuki is preparation for the next round in 2008.

Zakaria provides a lot of good sense around a common-sense bipartisan foreign policy which could promote peace instead of permanent, pre-emptive war, and he even brings some sharp criticism of the the debate postures of the Presidential candidates of both parties (though more on the Republican side, and he cites Obama twice with quotes in positive contexts). http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19001200/site/newsweek/

I'll bite: Fareed for Secretary of State!