The Weird Turn Pro

Larry Beinhart’s Body Politic

by Larry Beinhart and photographs by Dion Ogust, October 26, 2010

Politics in America has become weirder and weirder, which is fine, because I enjoy Jon Stewart a lot, but not fine, because it’s dysfunctional.

The dysfunction is a product of ideologies.

The Republicans have a clear and vibrant ideology. Smaller government, lower taxes, return to the social mores of the 1950s (though not the progressive economics—strong unions, 90 percent top marginal tax rates, free universities—these have been erased from history like purged Soviet officials), and let’s all be white.

The Republicans have been gaining in power since the Reagan administration and achieved full power under Bush II.

With that power they demonstrated that they were not, in fact, for smaller government; Republicans were for government that used its power to transfer money from regular people to the rich.

They cut taxes and thereby proved that cutting taxes is bad for the economy. This is perhaps the most peculiar fact in our political landscape. It’s as if they dropped Mt. Everest on top of St. Louis and it was invisible, even to Democrats driving down Highway 61.

They showed that they shouldn’t be in charge of our intelligence operations (9/11 happened largely because of Bush and Cheney’s willful determination to ignore warnings).

They proved that they couldn’t run a war, let alone two. They also exposed institutional flaws in our national security.

They proved that America’s intelligence services are astonishingly inept, in spite of a budget of nearly $50 billion a year. The second reason for 9/11 was a simple failure to communicate among those agencies. Also, Osama bin Laden is still at large! In answer to which I reissue the Beinhart Challenge! Give me $50 billion, and I guarantee the capture of bin Laden (even after I take the standard $10 or $20 billion corporate skim off the top). They believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They failed to predict the chaos that followed the invasion of Iraq. They failed to figure out what to do in Afghanistan.

US defense spending is calculated to be somewhere between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion annually. And we can’t win a war.