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	Questions continue to be raised over Bush Presidency by Washington Post / Boston Globe / Toronto Star.. USA   Washington. March 11, 2006   Bid to Give Bush the Boot, by Tim Harper. (The Toronto Star)   Residents of a small Vermont town have joined forces in a growing fight to impeach the U.S. president.   When the townsfolk gathered in the tiny Vermont community of Newfane for their annual meeting, the agenda was daunting. There was the town budget to be approved, then the school budget, plus they needed to approve spending $50,000 on the town"s property reappraisal.   And, oh yeah. Move to impeach the president of the United States.   And so, at the end of a five-hour meeting, the assembled were asked to consider: "Whereas George W. Bush has:   "1. Misled the nation about Iraq"s weapons of mass destruction;   "2. Misled the nation about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda;   "3. Used these falsehoods to lead our nation into war unsupported by international law;   "4. Not told the truth about American policy with respect to the use of torture; and   "5. Directed the government to engage in domestic spying, in direct contravention of U.S. law;   "Therefore, the voters of the town of Newfane ask that our representative to the U.S. House of Representatives file articles of impeachment to remove him from office."   All in favour?: 129. All opposed?: 21. Meeting adjourned.   For a president on the run, cratering at record-low approval ratings, losing battles with Republicans who are beginning to consider him toxic, seemingly having lost his political stride like an aging slugger who can"t catch up to the fastball, impeachment is likely the least of his worries.   More worrisome for Bush is the perception he is so insulated during this second term that he has lost touch with the concerns of the nation, that he is still surrounded by the same top aides in notorious "burnout" positions who came to power with him five years ago, that the "trust me" president has squandered that trust.   But as a barometer of discontent with the second-term Bush presidency in a mid-term election year, the fact that impeachment has moved from angry bumper stickers to dinner party discussion is telling.   Democrats in Congress, probably quite wisely, won"t touch the question.   Michigan"s John Conyers introduced a resolution last December requesting an impeachment inquiry to deal with Bush"s "manipulation" of pre-war intelligence, but only 26 of 201 House Democrats backed him.   But that hasn"t stopped others. ImpeachPAC.org has endorsed and raised funds for three Democrats who vow to push for impeachment if elected in November"s mid-terms.   The organization, led by Democrat Bob Fertik is an offshoot of AfterDowningStreet.org, founded by David Swanson, a former reporter and press secretary who tried to mobilize opposition to Bush after the release of internal memos from the Tony Blair government indicated the White House was intent on crafting the conditions for an invasion of Iraq.   Newfane is one of nine U.S. communities, all in Vermont and California, to pass impeachment resolutions, the largest of which was San Francisco where city supervisors voted 7-3 for impeachment, saying Bush has destroyed civil liberties in his wiretapping program, and failed miserably in his response to Hurricane Katrina.   Lewis Lapham, the outgoing editor of Harper"s magazine and one of the country"s most outspoken Bush critics, makes the case for impeachment in the March issue of his magazine.   It includes this indictment: "We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country"s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instil in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world"s evil; a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation"s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. "In a word, a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous."   Dan DeWalt, the 49-year-old Vermont woodworking teacher, furniture restorer and musician who introduced the Newfane resolution, says he wants to make impeachment a household word.   "We can"t take up arms against our government, so we do what we can," he said."If we stand by and do nothing, we would be complicit in the immoral and illegal activities of the administration. If you do nothing, you are acting illegally and immorally yourself."   The litany of high crimes and misdemeanours in this grim era for Bush are well known. It started shortly after his re-election, at a time when he was crowing about his "political capital" and there was talk of a conservative dynasty in the U.S. But when he spent much of that capital on an overhaul of Social Security, he found it couldn"t be sold, even within his own party.   Then came the CIA leak investigation, a probe that clearly distracted the White House, ending with the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney. It was during this period that it became clear the political radar on Pennsylvania Ave. was down. His nomination of White House legal counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court foundered against opposition from the right and ultimately had to be withdrawn.   His laggardly response to last year"s Hurricane Katrina became a case study of an administration asleep at the switch, bolstered by the recent release of video showing a seemingly disinterested Bush being briefed on the looming catastrophe.   Since December, when it was revealed in The New York Times, Bush has been fighting to justify a wiretapping program that has been denounced as illegal.   There was the tragicomedy shooting of a hunting pal by Dick Cheney, a gun mishap that turned into a week-long crisis for the White House.   That was quickly followed by the Dubai ports controversy. Whether the deal should have been killed may be open to debate, but again the political skills of this White House were tucked away and the ensuing groundswell of opposition to turning port management over to a company from the United Arab Emirates left Bush belatedly sputtering about using his veto to keep the deal alive.   By week"s end, he was in full retreat, having been stared down by a Republican congressional delegation which outflanked him on his vaunted strong suit, national security.   "They didn"t see it coming," said New York Republican Representative Peter King who led opposition to the deal. He told reporters in New York Bush administration officials have "got to get their antenna up much more on issues and bring the issues up in Congress. They need to realize we"re now entering into a complex state of a post-9/11 world."   Against all this, is a war in Iraq nearing its third anniversary with an AP-Ipsos poll released yesterday indicating 80 per cent of Americans - including 70 per cent of Republicans - believe Iraq is heading to civil war.   They call it the six-year itch, the second-term cloud that seems to inevitably envelop any president who doesn"t need to be elected.   Second-term presidents have dealt with sex scandals (Bill Clinton), out-of-control wars (Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman), arms scandals (Ronald Reagan) and political scandals (Richard Nixon).   But only Nixon has had approval ratings as low as Bush"s 38 per cent average on a series of polls released last week.   The mystery in Washington is why Bush will not inject some new blood into his inner circle. Chief of staff Andrew Card and deputy chief of staff and political strategist Karl Rove have been with him since day one.   "You can lose your political instincts, you become less sensitive to the political cross-currents," says presidential historian Robert Dallek. "When you are falling on your face, faltering, stumbling around, it becomes all the more important to move the deck chairs around and bring in some fresh perspective and some fresh hope, plus a little renewed confidence for the country."   Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, says Bush has faced some big "screw-ups" that have cost him. "The question on the street, from people who are not necessarily political, is whether the president is competent," he says.   09 March 2006   Culture of Intellectual Corruption, by Richard Cohen. (Washington Post)   It will be nearly impossible in the next several months to avoid the phrase "culture of corruption." It is of Democratic vintage, coined to take the sins of Jack Abramoff, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham and maybe some others and visit them on all Republicans running for office, especially congressional incumbents. Strictly speaking, it"s a bit of a smear. But if it applies anywhere, and it does, it"s not to corruption having to do with money, it"s to corruption having to do with thought. The Bush administration is intellectually corrupt.   Some of this corruption is induced by the inability to keep religion in its place. The president suffers mightily from this. After just eight months in office, George Bush drew a line between acceptable and unacceptable stem cell research and based it entirely on religious views that had nothing to do with science. Destruction of the cells was likened, as so much is nowadays, to the supposedly overriding issue of abortion or, as it is sometimes put, the "culture of life."   That culture, as applied by the Bush administration, holds that what works is what ought to work. So, for example, the official policy of the United States government is the promotion of sexual abstinence (outside of marriage), which is all right in and of itself but not as a substitute for a workable policy of population control and HIV-AIDS avoidance. The latter should entail sex education and, of course, the use of some sort of contraceptive device, particularly (for AIDS prevention) condoms. The Bush administration eschews that approach, exhorting the young and the randy just to eschew sex. That approach works until it does not. Then catastrophe hits.   Similarly, the Bush administration has somehow bottled up Plan B emergency contraception so that it is not yet available over the counter to women 17 and older. This is the case not because Plan B is dangerous or ineffective or even because it is an abortion agent (it is not), but because it is manifestly something that"s needed if abstinence is, somehow, not practiced. In other words, the scientific basis for this policy apparently comes down to this: A good girl should not need such a pill.   In the same way, the Bush administration for too long virtually insisted that there was no such thing as global warming. It has since changed its tune, conceding some of the case, but the epiphany has come late and not until additional damage was done both to the environment and, with the rejection of the Kyoto treaty, to America"s international standing. "On issues ranging from population control to the state of the environment, and from how science is taught in the classroom to whether Iraq"s research establishment was capable of producing weapons of mass destruction, the administration has repeatedly turned away from traditional avenues of scientific advice," writes Michael Specter in The New Yorker.   Specter is right to link Iraq with everything else, because the debacle there is a product of the same magical thinking that rejected global warming, stem cells and condoms alike. Underlying it all is a commitment to belief over fact, what should be over what is. It is evidenced in the insistence by Bush and others that "intelligent design" is, like evolution, worthy of teaching. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush once said. Yes, and astronomy and astrology, too, and maybe chemistry and alchemy as well. It"s a totally bogus proposition.   It was a chat about a religious moment that purportedly bonded Bush to Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader of increasingly authoritian bent. It"s as if Putin, an ex-KGB spy, read Bush"s file - and conned him. He knew Bush would rather believe than think - and that others in the administration, who knew better, would simply go along.   Intellectual corruption has cost Americans more - much more - than the occasional crooked congressman or lobbyist. Maybe they represent a corrupt system - one in which the Democrats also partake - but they pale in significance to a neoconservative theory that took the country to war to face a threat that did not exist. In the war, as with stem cells, we are talking about unnecessary loss of life - right now on the battlefield, a bit later when the cure for some disease arrives later than it might have.   Corruption of any kind corrupts. It costs us either money or confidence or both. But intellectual corruption is far more dangerous. It ruins and costs lives.   March 9, 2006   At Last, US Neocons are beginning to face the facts they were Wrong, by Rupert Cornwell. (The Independent / UK)   It has taken more than three years, tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, and $200bn (£115bn) of treasure - all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war. But, finally, the neo-conservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words. We were wrong.   The second thoughts have spread across the conservative spectrum, from William Buckley, editor of The National Review to Andrew Sullivan, once editor of the New Republic, now an influential commentator..For Mr Sullivan, today"s mess is above all a testament to American overconfidence and false assumptions, born of arrogance and naïveté. But he too asserts, in a column in Time magazine this week, that all may not be lost.   Of all the critiques however, the most profound is that of Francis Fukuyama, in his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads. Its subtitle is "Democracy, Power and the Neo-Conservative Legacy" - and that legacy, Mr Fukuyama argues, is fatally poisoned.   This is no ordinary thesis, but apostasy on a grand scale. Mr Fukuyama, after all, was the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997 "Project for the New American Century", the founding manifesto of neo-conservatism drawn up by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement.   The PNAC aimed to cement for all time America"s triumph in the Cold War, by increasing defence spending, challenging regimes that were hostile to US interests, and promoting freedom and democracy around the world. Its goal was "an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and values".   The war on Iraq, spuriously justified by the supposed threat posed by Saddam"s WMD, was the test run of this theory. It was touted as a panacea for every ill of the Middle East. The road to Jerusalem, the neo-cons argued, led through Baghdad. And after Iraq, why not Syria, Iran and anyone else that stood in Washington"s way? All that, Mr Fukuyama now acknowledges, has been a tragic conceit.   Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neo-conservatives reckoned they could drive history forward with the right mixture of power and will. However, "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."   But was it not Mr Fukuyama who claimed in his most celebrated work, The End of History and the Last Man, that the whole world was locked on a glide-path to liberal, free-market democracy? Yes indeed. But that book, he points out, argued that the process was gradual, and must unfold at its own pace.   But not only were the neo-cons too impatient. A second error was to believe that an all-powerful America would be trusted to exercise a "benevolent hegemony". A third was the gross overstatement of the post 9/11 threat posed by radical Islam, in order to justify the dubious doctrine of preventive war.   Finally, there was the blatant contradiction between the neo-cons" aversion to government meddling at home and their childlike faith in their ability to impose massive social engineering in foreign and utterly unfamiliar countries like Iraq. Thence sprang the mistakes of the occupation period..   The fact, however, remains that future Bush policymakers who signed the PNAC nine years ago are now mostly gone. Paul Wolfowitz, the war"s most relentless and starry-eyed promoter, has moved on to the World Bank, silent about the mess he did so much to create. Richard Perle, leader of the resident hawks department at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank here, has vanished from the scene. Lewis Libby meanwhile has stepped down as Vice-President Dick Cheney"s chief of staff, to focus his energy on staying out of jail.   Yet another signatory was Zalmay Khalilzad, now the US ambassador to Iraq. This week even he - Afghan born and the one original neo-con who had the region in his blood - admitted that the invasion had opened "a Pandora"s box" that could see the Iraq conflict spread across the entire Middle East.   Those left in the administration - primarily Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, are not so much neo-conservatives as "Hobbesian unilateralists", concerned to protect and advance US national interests in a lawless and violent world, whatever it takes.   As for Condoleezza Rice, never a signed-up member of the movement but mostly sympathetic to it when she was the President"s security adviser - she has metamorphosed from hawk into pragmatist with her move from the White House to the State Department.   It is on George Bush"s lips that neo-conservatism most obviously survives - in the commitment to spreading freedom and democracy that he proclaims almost daily, and most hubristically in his second inaugural in 2005 that promised to banish tyranny from the earth.   But even the extravagant oratory of that icy January day cannot obscure the irony of America"s Iraq adventure. The application of a doctrine built upon the supposed boundlessness of US power has succeeded only in exposing its limits.   Thus chastened, Mr Fukuyama now wants to temper the idealism of the neo-conservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so easy to change, and that the US must cut its cloth accordingly. He calls it "realistic Wilsonianism". A better description might be neo-realism..   06 March 2006   Bush, Lies, and Videotape, by James Carroll. (The Boston Globe)   If George W. Bush were a character in a novel or a play, last week might have been the turning point in the narrative. He was shown on film being explicitly warned, just hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, that the levees in New Orleans were vulnerable.   But everyone knows that after the levees broke, he denied having been warned that such a thing was possible. The broadcast of the film amounted to a terrible epiphany: The president seemed caught in a lie. Grave questions had already been raised about his administration"s manipulations of the truth, especially in relation to the war in Iraq. Does the truth matter in America any more?   Critics of the president (among whom I must be counted) might come to yet another swift judgment of him, finding further evidence of a disqualifying character flaw. Rumbles about impeachment can be heard, despite the unlikelihood of such an outcome, shy of Democratic victories in the fall elections.   But what if our concern with Bush was embedded in literature, not politics? In that case, the conflict we would care about is not the one between a public figure and his critics, but the struggle inside the man himself. Literature unfolds across an inner landscape, and on that terrain the character flaw is essential.   Indeed, the character flaw of the hero is what enables a reader or playgoer to identify with him, even while passing judgment. Last week"s videotape revelation raised public questions about the president"s truthfulness, but the private question - the one a man must face alone, in the crucible of conscience - is a version of the question we all must ask of ourselves.   Consider the possibilities. The fictional character - let"s call him "Bush" - learns that his firm public statement about what he had been told is radically contradicted by incontrovertible evidence. What he told the nation at its moment of crisis was not true, and that contradiction is now exposed.   Learning this, in one narrative line, "Bush" might feel deeply shamed to have laid bare what he has always known was a lie. The character flaw is deception. But in another narrative line, "Bush" might be shocked to realize that, in the traumatic moments of the hurricane crisis, he had blocked all memory of the critical briefing. He hadn"t consciously lied, but had constructed a new reality tailored to personal and political needs. The character flaw, in this case, is not deception, but self-deception.   Whatever "Bush" did in the past, however, the drama that matters adheres in what he does now, at the moment of being exposed. Whether "Bush" is a deceiver or a self-deceiver, the question is: What happens inside him at the terrible moment of judgment? In that instant, will he experience a transformation in awareness, as the truth of his condition shows itself? Or will he descend into a further circle of denial, deepening his predicament?   If this were a novel or a play, we would watch with a certain empathy, alert to revelations of our own inevitable implication in deception and self-deception. None of us is innocent, and it is to wrestle with that fact of our condition that we read books and buy theater tickets.   But the present American story is not a work of literature. From all appearances, the president is not a candidate for the role of "Bush" because a narrative that unfolds across the terrain of an inner life requires an inner life, and Bush shows no sign of having one.   Even a character flaw presumes a depth of character that the president seems to lack. What interior conflict can there be for a man who attributes all failures, all mistakes, all crimes to those around him, as if he himself (alone of all humans) is blameless? Where there is no capacity for shame, there is none for insight, much less transformation. Without the secret struggle against the self, there can be no drama, only pathos.   As for us, the beholders of this narrative, there can be no suspension of disbelief, no identification, and no recognition of our own fate being rescued by a confrontation with the truth. On the contrary, since this is not literature but life, there is only the increased awareness of the danger into which the world is plunged by having such a creature in the position of ultimate power.
	Ten Years of Australian Prime Minister John Howard by The Age & agencies Australia   March 2006   John Howard: an ordinary bloke who feeds a nation"s prejudices, by Hugh Mackay. (The Age)   As he celebrates his 10th anniversary in the top job, John Howard"s grip on the prime ministership appears firmer than ever. No challenger, on either side of politics, comes close to Howard in terms of the respect he enjoys in the Australian electorate.   Respect? For the man who misled us over the children overboard affair; the man who created the infamous distinction between core and non-core promises; the man who used $4 million of taxpayers" money to pay outstanding entitlements to the employees of a failed company of which his brother happened to be chairman?   Respect? For the man who created an admirable set of standards of ministerial propriety and then revised them downwards rather than sack a mate; the man who sent Australian troops to invade Iraq, based on false information about Saddam"s non-existent weapons of mass destruction; the man who never seems to know anything about the kind of scandals (such as the corrupt wheat deals) that would once have had any responsible minister hanging his head in shame, if not actually resigning?   Yes, respect. The grounds for it have changed in the past decade, as earlier perceptions of a kind of gritty integrity have given way to a colder, more pragmatic view of Howard. Yet Howard"s reputation with Australian voters still rests more on respect than any other single factor. We may not like him; we may find it hard to know when he is telling the truth; yet we respect him.   Even the many disillusioned voters who no longer trust Howard speak of their respect for the man"s dogged persistence, his economic credentials, his political cleverness and his powerful instinct for survival.   Howard is widely perceived as the ultimate pragmatist, the arch politician, "the safe pair of hands", the man to weather a crisis, national or personal, without ever appearing to flinch. And in spite of all our disappointment and disillusionment - and, in extreme cases, our disgust and despair - we continue to respect him for those qualities.   When he came to office, Howard made two remarks that have turned out to be prophetic. He declared that "the times suit him" and he spoke of his wish for Australians to be "relaxed and comfortable" under his prime ministership. Against the odds - odds that range from a dizzying rate of change to the threat of international terrorism - many Australians have indeed found a way to be relaxed and comfortable (though, ironically, many have achieved that only by turning their backs on Howard"s political circus).   The key to Howard"s appeal lies in his very lack of charisma. His appearance of ordinariness is perhaps his greatest political asset: he looks and sounds like "an ordinary bloke" and that triggers the almost instinctive feeling that he must be "a decent bloke" as well. Even his harshest critics, people who believe he has actually lied to them, remark that he does it so convincingly and appears so sincere, it"s hard not to be seduced.   Howard acts like one of us. His personal standards are no higher than ours. Although we might yearn for visionary and charismatic leaders, there"s something peculiarly reassuring about a bloke in whom we recognise our own frailties, weaknesses and contradictions.   Some leaders inspire us with the noble idea that we might create a better society; Howard sets our sights on a lower, lesser target. Far from inspiring nobility of purpose, he encourages us to be comfortable with some of the baser aspects of our own ordinariness.   He reinforces our materialism. By conflating politics with economics and by placing emphasis on material prosperity, Howard has encouraged the idea that money is the key to happiness, that share-ownership is a symbol of success and that the rich should be praised and rewarded for being rich.   That, in turn, reinforces our moral laxity, partly because that"s the usual result of an over-emphasis on material values. Howard"s unwavering commitment to the strategy of "toughing it out" also encourages, by example, our thoroughly human tendency to be self-serving and, when it suits our purposes, dishonest.   He reinforces our prejudices. From the moment he appeared to align himself with Pauline Hanson"s sympathisers, Howard has been the master of so-called "dog-whistle" politics - giving people permission to indulge their prejudices without ever quite saying so. Under Howard, we have become less compassionate, less tolerant and more uninhibited in the expression of ethnic and religious prejudice. "Terrorist" has become a convenient new cloak for some very old prejudices.   Howard hasn"t done any of this single-handedly, of course: we have been his partners in this entire enterprise. It is in his ability to reinforce what is already there - dark as it may be -that the true genius of Howard"s prime ministership lies.   (Hugh Mackay is a social commentator).   The past decade has felt like a century, by Phillip Adams.   As a general rule of the political thumb, the greatest battles are within political parties rather than between them. You"ve only to look at the fratricidal conflicts fought by Labor factions or at the bitter disunity within the Blair Government in Britain.   The same applies to religions. Who needs that clash of civilisations between Christians and Muslims when fractures in a single faith are more than enough to get the blood flowing?   Exhibits A through F: decades of murderous conflict between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, the theological thuggery that destroys both the dignity and decency of the Sydney diocese of the Anglican church, the Rwandan-style butchery perpetrated by one Muslim group against another in Darfur and the civil war brewing between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. And don"t forget the conflicts between the ultra-orthodox and their less fundamentalist co-religionists in Israel.   Far lower on the Richter scale of national upheavals but nonetheless significant is the fissure that runs through Australian political and social life. And this is its 10th birthday. A decade ago was the first appearance of a hairline fracture that has become, for many, an abyss.   On one side stand the Howard huggers, jumping up and down in their joy and triumphalism. On the other, looking so glum and defeated that they might at any moment hurl themselves off the cliff, are the Howard haters, an odd alliance of old lefties, progressive liberals and Peter Costello.   As an unapologetic member of this latter group who has always argued that Howard is as bad a PM as Bush is a president, I am still happily celebrating this political milestone – because it marks the approaching end of the Howard millstone.   We will rejoice like slaves freed at the end of the US Civil War (another example of the internecine battle); like the Israelites escaping Egypt. Even if our coalition enemies are not drowned like Pharaoh"s army (though the rising sea levels caused by the Howard/Bush refusal to sign the Kyoto climate change treaty might arrive just in time to sink them), we will know that at long last, after 10 years in the wilderness, we"re at least approaching the Promised Land. A land without Howard.   That"s why we Howard haters are popping the corks along with the Howard huggers. For at least we"re 10 years closer to Howard"s departure from the Lodge and Kirribilli than we were in 1996. Of course, 3650-odd days ago none of us in our wildest nightmares could have imagined that the menace of his mendacity and militant mediocrity would last more than a single term. But we hadn"t factored in Howard"s cunning and his luck, or Labor"s suicidal stupidities and Kim Beazley"s blunderings.   I won"t waste space listing yet again Howard"s sins of commission, omission and emission (all that political flatulence adding to the greenhouse gases) because, of course, the Howard huggers have applauded them all. They"ve clapped the monstrous maltreatment of asylum-seekers, cheered Howard"s repeated playing of the race card, given standing ovations to our involvement in the greatest military fiasco since Vietnam and acclaimed our descent into a bleaker, harder-hearted society. This latter phenomenon is identified in the latest polls where citizens (sorry, customers) acknowledge Howard"s Australia is increasingly mean-spirited. But that"s OK. While ashamed of what Australia has become, they still approve of his performance as PM. It"s the economy, stupid!   Opposing the Howard huggers, in the coalition of the unwilling huddling on the other side of the abyss, are Liberals horrified by what Howard has done to their party, let alone theircountry. Among their numbers are Howard"s predecessors in the Liberal leadership, ministers either shown the door or resigning, some of them their party membership, and those progressives either opposed or deposed in preselection fights every bit as nasty as Labor"s.   What we"ve witnessed, what we"ve lived through, wasn"t a historic inevitability. It was an accident of history. Remember that both the Howard and Bush years were the result of electoral photo finishes.   For both men, first-term victories came despite losing the popular vote. Leave aside the chicanery in Florida and the coup d"etat of the stacked Supreme Court, Bush"s victory in 2000 could have been prevented by a slightly better performance by Al Gore and the Democrats. Ditto for Labor and Kim Gore. Beazley"s verbosities and tactics were eerily like Al"s. Labor could have won if Kim had really wanted to.   But now that we"re 10 years closer to the end of Howard, let us acknowledge that it will take another 10 to repair the damage, to restore the spirit we were celebrating at the approach of the centenary of federation. And when we welcomed the world and its athletes to the Sydney Olympics.   Remember those days? When we"d finally put White Australia to rest? When we could talk proudly about our tolerance? Ten years? Seems more like a hundred.   The success of the politics of division, by Kenneth Davidson.   How often do we hear from the Liberals in response to some felt community need that there is no point in "throwing more money at it" or rationalising cutbacks in some Hawke/Keating government welfare program by arguing that it wasn"t effective because it was "middle-class welfare"?   Overwhelmingly, the charge of public largesse and middle-class welfare is false. The main reason Australia has low taxes and low welfare spending compared with most OECD countries is because welfare is rigorously means-tested in Australia.   This is why the so-called tax reform debate is so mean-spirited. The middle class resents paying taxes to fund residual public health, education and welfare services they would not use in a fit.   By contrast, in industrialised Europe, services are universally provided on the insurance principle. European voters know that politicians promising tax cuts are politicians promising to cut expenditure on their education, health and welfare services.   Prime Minister John Howard"s aspirationals believe - with some justice - that tax cuts for them mean expenditure cuts on education, health and welfare for the improvident or poor who will not or cannot afford the superior private (heavily subsidised) alternative.   There is no mystery about Howard"s political success. The times and circumstances suit Howard. Globally, economic growth has been 12 per cent higher over the past 10 years than the previous 20 and most of the additional wealth has been channelled into an asset price bubble via a distorted tax system instead of nation-building infrastructure.   The "long boom" will continue for as long as the rest of the world is prepared to accumulate United States (and Australian) dollar debts in return for Chinese (and Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese) export surpluses.   The reason for the slower growth in the period up to 1996 was that previous governments in the US (and Australia) believed external balance was important and were prepared to dampen domestic demand to achieve it.   Treasurer Peter Costello"s 1996 election foreign debt truck was put away immediately after the election, never to be seen again. There is now more concern about US foreign liabilities than Australia"s, even though net foreign liabilities in relation to GDP are about 30 per cent in the US and 60 per cent in Australia. We are in the hands of our creditors. The US has sufficient muscle to cut a deal with China. Australia hasn"t. The spectre haunting the Howard Government is the possibility that a financial crisis could wipe out the capital gains of the aspirationals overnight.   In the meantime, we have more exciting things to debate - like the size of the tax cut in the May budget - while Howard"s beneficiaries maintain a po-faced belief that tax cuts (for them) are the way of sound economic reform.   The structural fissures that have been opened up by this Government - the politicised public service, the under-funded public schools, universities, TAFEs, the ABC and CSIRO and public hospitals, plus the privatisation of Telstra, which has shifted its direction from nation-building to profit maximisation - are celebrated as evidence of sound financial management, though the fissures must be repaired if the external financial balance is to be corrected.   Everything is grist to the mill of financial capitalism, which has now escaped effective political control through the privatisation of pensions financed by compulsory superannuation.   Privatised toll roads have become the most expensive way to undermine liveability in Melbourne and Sydney. Now the electorate is being softened up for the injection of private capital into water conservation.   Why? There is no shortage of capital or the ability of government to borrow more cheaply and invest more wisely in the public interest than bankers seeking private profit. The political mindset has changed. Political success used to depend on a perceived ability to manage national development. Now it depends on the ability to read the angst from focus groups in order to divide the community into "us" and "them".   The task of nation-building has been handed over to haute finance because the political process has been corrupted. Politicians are terrified that if they put the public interest ahead of private financial interests they will be branded financially and economically irresponsible.   The politics of division is a race to the bottom. Now Costello and others are seeking to play the race card, albeit sotto voce, for political advantage. Which politician is prepared to make the obvious point that the best long-term breeding ground for fundamentalism is fundamentalist schools, or military adventures that serve no real national purpose but cause collateral damage to social solidarity by inflaming ethnic tensions? This provides the excuse for government to suppress dissent with anti-democratic anti-terrorism and sedition laws that isolate "them" further and could even promote the terrorism they ostensibly attempt to prevent.   It has to be said that Howard is better at this game than any Labor leader in the past decade. But that won"t last forever. The so-called Labor renewal under way in Victoria may produce politicians with the requisite ruthlessness combined with the po-faced rectitude necessary to compete with Howard on his own favoured political terrain.
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