Abstract

The Poisoned Chalice

The author focuses on what the Republican victory in the presidential election means. The Kerry campaign leaves nothing, not a single creative idea, only grim advisories like not running any nominee from the Northeast in 2008, and we all know the probable life span of that piece of useful advice. Before the election a profile of Kerry's manager, Bob Shrum, disclosed that he stood to make $5 million out of the 2004 presidential campaign, win or lose. Here's what my colleague at The Nation Justin Taylor tells me, re the much-ballyhooed youth vote: The consensus now seems to be that the youth vote spiked upward about 9 percent, a considerable lift from one election to another. The neocons are holding on, probably aware that if they quit government they'll live like hunted things, fleeing lawsuits down the years. They'll cling on and then hope Bush will pardon them on his way out of Dodge in 2008, same as his dad did Weinberger and his CIA buddies. Falluja has now supposedly been "won." For how long? Sometimes the parallels drawn between Iraq and Vietnam have seemed a bit theatrical. Not anymore. No hearts and minds have been won in Falluja any more than they were won in the Vietnamese countryside around My Lai. The city has been destroyed in order to save it for democracy. The language of the US military commanders, and of the journalists who relay their press releases, echoes with eerie and horrible fidelity those press releases from US military HQ in Saigon thirty-five years ago. LBJ handed the quagmire on to Nixon. It's Bush's poisoned chalice, bestowed by his first to his second term, the cup he'll be hoisting on Inauguration Day.