When Republican Voters Get The Whitehouse They Dream of, We All Have To Live With The Consequences

Turns out, Republican Faithful should have headed the old adage: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

Indeed, with the new book promulgated by Scotty McMessage McClellan, we learn that leadership by faith over facts doesn't work. From the Republican "victories" at the polling stations and from our "Activist" Supreme Court in Y2K we got this:

Team Dubya got caught up in a "permanent campaign," a nonstop propaganda war whose weapons were "the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin," and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.

Indeed, all governments try to control the message, but installation of blinders on the media and the American People has lead us somewhere, that's for certain. They have led us to a place where belief is a surrogate for fact, and faith is more important that truth or proof:

Sure, sure, truth is the first casualty of war, and politics is just war with a smile and a starched collar. But the burgeoning genre of Bush administration tell-alls, of which McClellan's is only the latest, paints a portrait of a White House utterly unconcerned with facts yet fervently attentive to public opinion polls. It is a White House whose solution to every unhappy turn of events -- the Iraqi insurgency, Hurricane Katrina, a moribund economy -- is to treat it not as a real-world problem requiring a real-world solution but as a glitch in the Matrix, "a perception problem" to be handled with the Message of the Day and the Theme of the Week.

The deeper story here is the shift from the Enlightenment worldview, whose commitment to reasoned debate and empirical truth used to be the cornerstone of our little experiment in democracy, to the faith-based worldview of fundamentalism -- not just the fundamentalism of the religious right but fundamentalisms of every sort. The Iraq war came about, in large part, through a harmonic convergence of personal passions, political agendas and ideological crusades, all faith-based rather than fact-driven. Bush, McClellan tells us, is a man who "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment" and who "to this day ... seems unbothered by the disconnect between the chief rationale for war and the driving motivation behind it, and unconcerned about how the case was packaged."

And there are dire consequences for this means of leadership. Indeed, we are witnessing the economy the GOP gave us.

The economy got a triple dose of bad news on Friday, prompting even optimistic forecasters to conclude that a deeper downturn is unavoidable.

The nation's jobless rate posted its biggest single-month jump since 1986 in May, rising 0.5 percentage points to 5.5 percent, the Labor Department reported. At the same time, the price of crude oil catapulted to a new record, raising the threat that economic weakness and unemployment could worsen in the months ahead.

The news unnerved investors, prompting a broad sell-off on Wall Street. The Dow Jones industrial average and other major market indexes tumbled 3 percent.

Friday's developments put in relief the severity of the woes afflicting an economy hammered by a housing crash, tight credit and soaring energy costs.

Is it good for you? Who shall we point the enormous wagging middle finger of blame at here? The W, Rove and Co. has been so busy deflecting blame and confounding the truth with obfuscation, they have become entirely untrustworthy. Indeed, as they ratchet themselves further into lame duck status, Bush, Cheney and pals couldn't wrangle themselves out of the stain of the reality they created.

Indeed, we even witness the wrongheaded leadership (faith over fact) style unfold before us as they proclaim to protect us and see them add another recruiting tool to the terrorists - Martyrdom for Gitmo detainees. They are asking for it, and by god, they will be given the gift if George Bush and Dick Cheney get their wish:

Thursday's arraignment before a military tribunal of five Al Qaeda members accused of planning and assisting the 9/11 terrorist atrocities seemed custom-made to assist the loathsome defendants in achieving exactly what they desire -- an aura of martyrdom...

...when it comes to the handling of these cases, the Bush administration's willful overreaching, contempt for fundamental American values and defiance of basic American notions of due process have set the stage for travesty and further tragedy.

So, as we approach 5 bucks or more a gallon as we march on to November (which it may well be 10 bucks a gallon at that point, which may be well and good to improve our habits revolving around driving and be better for the environment as we reduce our use), whom should we vote for? McSame, or change?