Shooting straight just isn't their thing

People are warning of the coming Republican electoral strategy: declare "victory" in Iraq and run on it. With some soldiers trickling home and marching in victory parades, will the electorate still be in the mood to hold the Administration and its allies responsible for anything?

This is certainly a suitably diabolical plan, and I'm sure the GOP will try just about anything to keep its slimy grip on the levers of power. But will even state-sponsored propaganda parades be enough to turn the party's rapidly declining fortunes? Polls show a double-digit advantage for Democratic Congressional candidates. Bush is at 39% in some polls despite the State of the Union pushback and the rolling out of yet another terrorism story to make everyone clutch their carebears in horror.

Still, you have to hope that at some point people will realize what an astounding cock-up this administration has made of everything it's ever touched. On the domestic front, Bush managed to alienate all ends of the political spectrum with his idiotic prescription drug plan, which is both a huge economic commitment and a big bottle of champagne and assorted cheeses for the pharmaceutical industry.

Social Security evisceration reform died with the president's fleeting and paper-thin popularity. No Child Left Behind has turned into the cruel joke that its name always promised. The number of uninsured Americans has skyrocketed. Job growth has not kept up with population growth, environmental protections have been gutted, worker's rights have been trampled upon, and to top it off, these humorless clowns decided to make it harder for all these struggling people to declare bankruptcy -- even in the face of crippling medical debt.

All of this might be overshadowed if the Administration had any meaningful international accomplishments to brag about. It would be like the last-place team that still led the league in batting average or something. Unfortunately, the willfully ignorant and deranged people running this country have accomplished nothing in the international arena -- unless you consider destroying the country's good name something of which to be proud. In the Middle East, the Bushies have coolly and disinterestedly presided over the worst five years in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967-73. Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians came to a crashing halt while Bush signed off on the Israeli annexation of vast swaths of the West Bank, undermining nearly 40 years of established diplomacy and making the two-state solution an increasingly dismal prospect.

The administration has also precipitated two entirely needless crises: one with North Korea, which appears to have passed, and one with Iran, which is simmering and may yet spill out into open conflict. Both were caused by Bush's swaggering and his idiot speechwriters, all of whom seem to take a fratboy's delight in pissing people off for no good reason. Bush has alienated a host of traditional allies. And by deliberately and fraudulently lying this country into war, turned the name of the United States into a pile of dirt.

And lest we forget, there is the minor problem of having turned Iraq from a police state that threatened no one except its own weary citizens into a spectacularly failed state and the biggest incubator and training ground for international terrorists since 1980s Afghanistan. All it cost was 2,273 American lives and counting, $2 trillion dollars, and perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis. Meanwhile we threaten and harangue strategically insignificant puppet states like Syria and lecture them about democracy and occupations, whereas the world's largest outlaw occupier state, China, gets warm trade relations and happy tidings. Now, say what you will about Bill Clinton's foreign policy, but it always made more sense than this.

Aside from the quick and clean exit of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan from the world stage (and truth be told, the situation in that country is no longer anything to brag about) this administration can't boast a single meaningful accomplishment. But they know how to win elections, you can't take that away from them. They get their fundamentalist judges confirmed, their illegal wiretappings approved and forgotten, and they sure do know how to illegally redistrict their favorite states. They also do a bang-up job funneling money from lobbyists to officeholders. You might say that the business of the Republicans is taking care of their own dirty business.

But even that would be too charitable.