AND, IT AIN'T SO YOUNG NO MORE
His Only Endearing Young Charm
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.March 29, 2004
Some leading Democrats are just so silly, it makes you wonder. They are so het up, fretting themselves half to death over all those millions in the re-elect Dubya campaign war-chest, that they overlook the most obvious of all facts about the coming election. The leading political issue of 2004, after the onrushing depression, that is, is the question: are the U.S. voters so silly that they would re-elect a President whose one and only endearing charm, is that he is rightly perceived, more or less world-wide, as the dumbest man in the history of the Oval Office? That, in fact, his record of performance in office, is the worst accumulation of sheer bungling incompetence in relations with long-standing allies, in military policy, in economic policy, in budget-balancing, and, excepting weight-lifting, about everything else, including diction and elocution, in recent memory?
Take the way in which poor, dumb Dubya & Co. dealt with the publication of the book by former counter-terrorist chief Richard A. Clarke which the Bush Administration itself, first, held back from publication, and then claimed he had timed the publication to embarrass Dubya's re-election campaign. If Dubya's handlers had had any sense, they would have said as little as possible about the issues of Clarke's book. Their foolish frenzy, in their efforts to deny the undeniable, made a major election-issue of a book which an intelligent administration would have let pass with minimum fuss.
Richard Clarke is not the kindest cherub, nor the most brilliant in the U.S. intelligence constellation of recent times, but he has earned a widely acknowledged professional reputation as a hard-grinding fanatic for getting his job done, as he sees it, over quite a period of time. I, personally, would disagree with him about a number of matters in which I have qualified expertise, but I would hire professionals like him in my administration any day, and be thankful I had them around to do battle with.
I should know. I warned the incoming Administration publicly of the danger of something like "9-11" in January 2001. I do not agree with the simplistic way Clarke himself throws the name of "Al-Qaeda" around; but, that is not the issue. The issue is, and was, that under the strategic economic and related conditions which the incoming President had inherited, combined with the new President's fanatical quality of stubborn incompetence in economic and other matters, something like Goering's setting fire to Germany's Reichstag had to be expected. Clarke has Cheney dead to rights on the security failures of the pre-9-11 Bush Administration.
Clarke's facts sent Dubya's reputation down to the mat. Dubya should have taken a reflective nine-count before trying to stand up to Clarke's blows. Now, Dubya is being pummeled on that front, at the same time his reputation is being hit from seemingly all directions.
Given the monetary-financial crisis rushing to overwhelm the U.S. now, unless the Bush campaign is able to use computerized voting procedures to pull off the most massive ballot-fraud in U.S. history, which seems to be the intention of some Congressional Republicans, Bush is implicitly unelectable. The signs are clear; the big money is shifting its bets, preferring a Democratic administration controlled by them, to a Republican Presidency already up about its waist-line in the quicksand of Dubya's colossal failures. The recent electoral defeat of Spain's Aznar government, and the continuation of the pattern in the opposition electoral victories which have just occurred in France, are signs of the times. With a deep depression coming like an avalanche, incumbent governments must expect to be toppled by the voters time and time again.
All that said about the Republican follies, the Democrats' major challenge is not the White House menu; the cause of their bellyaching is their obsessive attachment to Mother McAuliffe's cooking.
