Bunker Mentality

I’ve been in the bunker, keeping my head low, and listening to the old Merle Haggard holiday season dirge, “If We Make It Through December.”

“I got laid off down at the factory,
And their timing’s not the greatest in the world.
Heaven knows I been workin' hard,
I wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl….

“If we make it through December.
I got plans of bein' in a warmer town come summer time,
Maybe even California.
If we make it through December we'll be fine.”

The stock market crash, bank failures, mortgage foreclosures, credit collapse, Detroit auto industry bankruptcy. Now the Israelis have invaded Gaza. I am afraid to come out of the bunker until Jan. 20.

The diplomatic achievements of the Obama era may begin with a cease fire of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, one of the most densely populated strips of land on the planet, little more than a Palestinian refugee camp, forsaken by everyone but the terrorists Hamas. I expect the Israeli cease fire will begin around 12:00 noon Jan. 20, the way Iran released the American Embassy hostages in 1981. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will still be touring her new offices, and all President Obama will have to do is raise his right hand and solemnly swear. Indeed the Israelis are not the first to take opportunity where it presents, and the Black Hole of American leadership between election day and inauguration has only made the final daze of the Bush administration worse.

Left to ponder for another time: how does Israel defend itself against women and children suicide bombers and rockets launched from the courtyards of schools and mosques? And what will I do for fun when I don’t have George Bush to kick around anymore?

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes that problem is Bigger Than Bush. “Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision,” said Krugman in his New Year’s Day column for the New York Times. “Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country.” The hypocrisy of fiscal conservatism has been discredited by the economic crises and exposed as pure code. According to Krugman, “Government is the problem,” means, “it takes your money and gives it to Those People.” Republicans “need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.”

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter