A Prophecy: Bush's Third Strike

There are no more debates. Bush is up in the polls. Unless something goes very wrong in Iraq to pin on Bush, it looks like he'll win. Bush should be feeling pretty good about right now.

So what will I be blogging about in a couple years?

I sure hope it isn't the new war Bush has got us into. Frankly, I think he's learned his lesson no matter what he's saying. Under similar circumstances, he'll wait a lot longer before going to war, especially if the nation in question actually has some weapons to fight us with. Any solicitations for international support will not give him the benefit of the doubt again.

I sure hope it isn't about some dirty bomb that slipped through. I will at least partially blame Bush if this happens, because he got us on a tangential mission in the "war against anyone we can see since we can't get at the real terrorists." While we should have been focusing on securing nuclear material and getting Iran and North Korea out of the nuclear business, we've been bleeding to death in Iraq.

No, I think I'll be talking about the immense social crisis Bush's privitization of social security will create. Now I don't know much about the specifics of how it all works. It wouldn't be the first time I was way off. All I have is Bush's record so far and a clear pattern of operation:

Strike 1: "No Child Left Behind"
Here's the pattern: 1. Bush has a good goal. In this case, his thinking was two fold. First he wanted to make sure our children could read, write, and do arithmetic. Second, he bought the non-educator propagated myth that the problem is all the liberal teaching we're funding and that it's cheap to teach a child to read and write.

[The problem with this way of thinking is that the number one problem in the educational system is not the teachers and their liberal tendencies. The problem is the social background of our kids that creates such immense discipline problems in the schools. The teachers want to teach. Some students want to learn. A great deal of other students come with such baggage that these other two parties can't connect.]

Step 2 in the pattern: Bush implements the goal by force rather than with real understanding of the real issues and without any contingency plan if things don't go right. In other words, he has no real plan for how to make it really happen or to deal with problems.

Step 3: things don't work the way he planned and usually crash and burn in some way. In the case of education, Bush has set the right standards but has not dealt with any of the real problems and obstacles. He has held a gun to our educators heads and said, "You figure it out or I'll shoot you." We may have some success on this one, but not many educators think he knew what he was doing.

Strike 2: "The Iraq Debacle"
Here's the pattern again. In step 1 the goal is to free the Iraqi people from an oppressive regime and create an island of democracy in the troubled Middle East. Great goals!

Step 2: Bush goes in without real international support and tries to force the issue with a pre-emptive war against a nation that was not about to attack us. Bush has no plan to make it happen, expects them to welcome us with open arms, sends neither enough troops nor the right equipment, has no sense of how Iraqi people actually think, etc...

Step 3: The mess you currently see. Looting. Beheadings. Over 1000 soldiers dead. And next year we'll reach the 200 billion dollar mark in expenditure (remember that Iraqi oil was supposed to pay for this war and that the blowing up of Iraqi pipelines have been used repeatedly as an excuse to jack up oil prices this last year). The world is not safer yet. We've created new monsters like Zarkawi (by the way, Zarkawi is making his link to Al-Qaeda today, not revealing one that had existed previously).

So what will Bush's next immense lack of foresight be?

Prophecy: Strike Three, the Privatization of Social Security

I'm betting that he will throw millions of elderly people into massive crisis as he again 1. Aims at a good goal, to reform the social security system.

But you can bet he's not smart enough to pull it off. I wonder if anyone would be, but he in particular doesn't inspire confidence in me. I bet millions of elderly people will be thrown into crisis--maybe even after his administration has gone the way of the Dodo. I can't tell you the specifics. I'm just going on Bush's track record. I'm wondering if it will be the most colossal problem of all.

I bet Congress will have to pass massive emergency spending bills to rescue millions of elderly people who suddenly find themselves without a social security check. At worst, I bet it will throw the Stock Market into a dither and create a recession or depression the likes we haven't seen in almost a century.

Now some may see this as a good thing--the system needed to be done away with. Maybe so, but capitalists who look forward to the ultimate good usually don't think too much about the people who get run over in the process. I bet many elderly people will fall through the cracks. I bet many will even die in the neglect of progress and crisis.

It's the insignificant ones that capitalism and evolution don't care about. I bet our families will have to take in some of our elderly aunts and uncles who no longer have a social security check coming.

I'm probably wrong. But I see a pattern here. Bush is all too willing to "wing it" on things he really doesn't know much about. And every time he wings it, lots of people get hurt.