Compassionate Conservatives are at it AgainThose wonderful folks in the Bush administration have done it again. According to a story by Greg Winter in today's
New York Times, "Change in Aid Formula Shifts More Costs to Students," :
. . . millions of college students will have to shoulder more of the cost of their education under federal rules imposed late last month through a bureaucratic adjustment requiring neither Congressional approval nor public comment of any kind."
. . .
But they will also have a ripple effect across almost every level of financial aid, shrinking the pool of students who qualify for federal awards, tightening access to billions of dollars in state and institutional grants and, in turn, heightening the reliance on loans to pay for college.
How much more money this may require of students and their parents will vary widely, changing with every set of circumstances that make families unique. Some families may be expected to pay an extra $100 or less each year, while others may owe well over $1,000 more.
Ah, so simple, so direct, so hidden from the public eye. What's worse, this shift in burden comes when state budgets are slashing higher education resources, and state community colleges, four year colleges and universities are
raising tuition at alarming rates.
So let's see, Bush's compassion so far has meant:
- tax cuts for the rich, check.
- increased college costs for those who need financial aid, thus making it harder for folk to work their way up the economic ladder, check.
- fat contracts and favorable legislation to corporation and republican special interest groups that write fat checks to Tom Delay and George Bush, check
- no real reform of corporate accounting laws or significant punishment for those who ripped apart people lives and pensions, check.
- a growing deficit that will continue to erode government services and undermine social security, check
At this rate, by 2008, we'll be living in an America where the government will only supply an army, build interstate highways, and spy into our private lives to make sure we're all as puritan as John Ashcroft. Every paltry sum saved in taxes will more than be eaten up buying the services we need from the private sector. We'll be a country of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich.
Starving the government --what Bush's policies are doing-- really means starving communities, cities and towns and the people who live in them. It forces local taxes to be raised, and it forces poeople to use their paltry tax cuts to pay for other things, such as trash pick up, sewage lines and water rate increases, school bus rides, and other services that cities and towns must cut. And usually increased local costs outstrip any savings most people will see from Bush's tax cuts.
That's just sooo compassionate.
Whither the WMD's and WhyAs debate grows about whether the intelligence on Iraq's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction was twisted, exaggerated, ignored, faked, or simply inept, it helps to remember that this is not news. Well before the war began (and it ain't over), as far back as last fall, when the drumbeat to war began in earnest just before the mid-term elections, reports in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal (summarized at
The Dubya Report) laid out several examples of Bush and his court making claims about Iraq's WMD capabilities and links to Al Qaeda that were not substantiated by intelligence data.
So this is nothing new. The President mislead the nation about the Iraqi threat. Why? If you recall polls from the time, when the drumbeat began, it was clear that the American public was against going to war in Iraq unless there was an immediate threat. A majority of Americans were against the war.
So what happened? Did Bush make a case for war based on Saddam's being a totalitarian dictator who in the past had murdered thousands of his own people, who tortured people still? Well, of course that was mentioned along the way, but less as a primary reason for going to war and more as a way to dehumanize Saddam, to reduce sympathy for him. But in reality, Bush never made a case for going to war to save the Iraqi people, that was an after thought in the arguments made for the war to the American people, a side benefit, not our moral imperative. (And if that is our reason for war -- human rights, when do we go to the Congo?).
And the press knew this back then, but are only exploring the corruption of intelligence now?
Meanwhile, Bush's defenders say two things:
1. Give it time, weapons will be found, but
2. even if they aren't, it doesn't matter -- didn't you see those mass graves and besides, we won!
Writing in the
Washington Times, for example, Donald Lambro typifies this ratoinale when he writes, "I think we will find further evidence of weapons buried in the sands of Iraq. But the news media's obsession with such weapons overlooks one important and overriding reality: Most Americans think the quest for illegal weapons at this juncture is irrelevant."
But that kind of thinking misses the point. The point is, about going to war, Bush mislead the American people, and he mislead the world. And when much of the world questioned his action and march to war, he told them to get on board the war wagon or get out of the way. That we won, and that people backed the effort once the war began misses the point that Bush undermined our democracy by lying about our reasons for going to war. We were just lucky, our soldiers were just lucky, that the army we fought was demoralized, untrained, under-equipped, tactically uncoordinated. We're lucky there was no urban fighting, that worst fears of our war planners were not realized.
But what have we won? We haven't won the peace in Iraq. And we haven't moved quickly or competently enough to restore order and services. Our troops are being harrassed, and to protect themselves, they have to resort to more and more military police tactics -- incursions, roadblocks, searches and other actions that reek of occupation, not liberation. It's too bad we have no mechanisms and systems in place for rebuilding Iraq. It's too bad the rush to war left us with few allies to really help with the reconstruction. It would be nice, as frustrations grow, to have the U.N. on the ground, an international force of arms and resources to keep the peace and rebuild the country. But no. Bush didn't argue for saving Iraq, for rebuilding it. He argued that it was an immediate threat to the U.S. and that he would use his authority as Commander-in-Chief to protect our country from those WMD's getting into Al Qaeda hands no matter what the U.N. said. And so, he rushed us to war for a threat that wasn't rather than building a true international consensus and international support for what will really be the hard part -- peace and democracy in Iraq.
I think the precedent for this war was wrong and dishonest. I think Bush is corrupt and that he lied, and I don't think the end of Saddam's rule in anyway justified the means which brought it about. But I'm glad, for the Iraqi people, that he's out.
And I sincerely hope that their country is rebuilt, that it's a democracy where they can determine their own course, that they aren't robbed of their natural resources. The only way to salvage any of this fiasco -- the culmination of decades of disastrous American foreign policy in the region (Remember, at the height of his killing spree, in the 80's, Saddam was our friend; Dick Cheney visited him.) -- is for us to now make sure that we establish a democracy in Iraq. I hope we do this.
But I don't think Bush really cares. Not if the paltry support we've given Afghanistan is any indication.
So I won't be surprised if we pull up stakes in Iraq and on Iraq after Halliburton cashes it check. I hope I'm wrong. But Bush's credibility leaves me with little hope.
New Blog: Teaching Writing in an Online WorldI began a new blog,
Teaching Writing in an Online World that I started a few days ago as a way to experiment with using a blog in
TechNotes. TechNotes is a newsletter with tips on teaching writing, focusing mostly on technology.
I first created
TWOW because this blog, Odds and Ends, has drifted into being a place for me just to post short essays on, well, odds and ends.
TWOW will be predominately about issues that in some way connect teaching writing in a time when networked computers are increasingly the default writing technology.
