Welcome to The Eve of Destruction
These are not blunders, but intentional diversions
by Rick Perlstein, The Village Voice

Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, welcome to the Next Four Years: to George Walker Bush's revolutionary second term, where nothing is done by accident, and no sin can be too brazen.

Breaking Social Security is central to passing Bush's "tax reforms," which will remove taxes on investment income and shift the tax burden to wage earners who can't afford to save any money—thereby creating newly outraged tax-hating constituencies bent on decimating government's legitimacy yet further. Absent unrelenting Democratic resistance, in fact, the next four years will establish the leverage to fulfill another of Grover Norquist's coinages: to get the federal government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Public education "is an ossified government monopoly," explains conservative intellectual Chester Finn. So it is time to drown it in the bathtub.

What comes next there? For the subject who fantasizes total control, chaos is only an injunction to more radically confident maneuvers that enlarge the struggle for control. As always, the parallel is Vietnam. "The administration's reluctance to recognize the Iraqi resistance as largely homegrown pushes it to exaggerate the role of foreign terrorists, to blame anti-American feeling on meddlers from abroad," which spells expansion of the conflict into Syria and Iran, according to Thomas Powers in The New York Review of Books. A "radical map change," he convincingly speculates, this American encirclement of the world's productive oil resources could unify all our present allies against us in a conflict that "might last fifty years."

Full story here.