For a man who has benefited so greatly through legacy and inheritance, President Bush seems determined to deprive future generations of Americans of their own.
The birthright of Americans goes well beyond the promise of a new crop of reality TV every fall. We have a national inheritance that has been cultivated through generations and which our leaders are responsible for stewarding. This includes: widely enjoyed prosperity and unalienable guarantees of liberty.
But Bush and his neocon cronies have set a course to undo our legacy. Bush is raiding the corpus of the trust and by the time he's finished, all principal - and principles - will have been depleted.
Bush got to be a rich, successful man thanks to his family connections. All along the way, from his admission to Andover and Yale, to the rescue of his foundering oil business, to the Texas Rangers deal, to his move into politics, Bush was able to rely on paisans to come out ahead.
Now it is payback and he's protecting his own.
Bush has taken to heart the "three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves" warning attributed to Andrew Carnegie. His huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and, particularly, the progressive elimination of estate taxes, are extra insurance that those born with silver spoons in their mouths will exhale an entire English tea service with their dying breath.
But as concerned as he is with protecting the stockpiles of the rich, he is profligate with the resources of the rest of us. Under his direction, what had been revenue surpluses as far as the eye could see has been transformed into record deficits and crushing debt.
The Congressional Budget Office says this year, $401-billion will be added to the national debt and next year add another $540-billion. Projections to 2011 are jaw-dropping. Expect a cumulative deficit of $2.3-trillion, using the most optimistic of scenarios. Then, make the Bush tax cuts permanent, as he seeks to do, and include another $1.6-trillion of debt by 2013.
Bush's tax cuts are not the entire cause of this ocean of red ink but they are a significant contributing factor, as is the Iraqi war. On this current path, Bush will saddle future generations of Americans with enough debt to turn back the nation's prosperity and undermine the promises made to America's workers that they would be cared for in old age. He is squandering the national inheritance of hundreds of millions in order to further advantage the further advantaged. His people at the country club must be so proud - who cares if they may soon have to build concrete walls and electrified fencing to keep out the rabble?
But this is not the worst of it. It is only money, after all. The real damage Bush and his corps are doing is to the American character. In Bush's pursuit of greater unilateral power, he has assaulted those parts of America that make it historically unique and valued.
Our nation is great because we are committed to the separation of powers, individual rights, the rule of law, the separation of church and state and transparency.
Those are also the principles for which Bush has demonstrated the deepest contempt.
One need not do anything more than mention Vice President Dick Cheney's clandestine energy policy meetings with industry executives to illustrate this administration's obsession with secrecy and its disregard for the oversight role of Congress. But the posture is also summed up in a 2001 directive from Attorney General John Ashcroft that encourages all departments of government to resist Freedom of Information Act requests. It promises that the Justice Department will back up any legally sound information denials.
Bush doesn't believe in open, answerable government, he believes in government as Clint Eastwood movie - hunker down, zip your lip, and maybe the varments will go away.
Our born-again president also denies that the Constitution separates church and state, by using the federal treasury to underwrite countless faith-based initiatives.
And, as to rule of law, it is only followed when convenient. For a while, the administration actually claimed that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to review Bush's decision to hold Americans as enemy combatants, incommunicado and indefinitely.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the moment when a true leader would seek to unite the nation, Bush chose to divide us. He essentially called for an expansion of the USA Patriot Act just at a time when many Americans are calling for a rollback of the act - to date, more than 160 communities have passed protest resolutions over the law's excesses.
Part of Bush's plan is to give the FBI free rein to demand personal records held by banks, ISPs, libraries, etc., without the need for a court order.
So much for individual rights.
In the best traditions of a banana republic, Bush is actively concentrating power and wealth. Friends-of-Bill walked away with nothing compared with the Friends-of-Bush. They are being given everything they want on a platter - silver of course - and the spoils include what has been promised to you, me and future generations of Americans.
