Bush's tax cuts & "free market/free trade" policies were supposed to turbo-charge America's economy, while the neo-conservative foreign policy laid out by the Project for a New American Century in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (pdf) was supposed to be a blueprint for extending American hegemony across the globe, indefinitely, with the containment and subordination of China as a key strategic goal. Conveniently, those lofty promises of yesteryear have been entirely forgotten. Otherwise it would have been impossible to cover Obama's recent visit to China without starkly confronting the utter failure of conservative ideology, given its first unfettered shot at power since the 1920s, when it brought us the Great Depression.
It's been a very good decade for China. For the US? Not so much, since the lion's share of that growth went to the top 1%.
What's still missing from American political life is anything vaguely resembling a coherent progressive narrative-or even a coherent criticism of the dominant-hegemonic-conservative narrative. It's not that progressives are individually or organizationally incoherent, it's that they don't share a coherent narrative among all or most of them, so the net result in terms of the liberal/conservative balance of narrative dominance has not changed appreciably despite the de facto total collapse of the conservative ideological project and the election of Barack Obama.
This is why Obama's trip to China failed to register-as it should have-the utter and total failure of the Bush presidency in particular, and conservative ideology/fantasy in general. The Bush Administration has vastly accelerated the decline of American power and influence in the world, guided by three different strands of conservatism that have contributed to that failure: (1) neo-conservative foreign policy built on the fantasy of go-it-alone military world dominance. (2) The "free market" economic fantasy of tax cuts and deregulation as a cure-all for everything and a propaganda front for massive give-aways to powerful elites. (3) Christian identity politics fantasy that as a people white Christian Americans can do no wrong, and that anyone opposed to us is purely and simply an "evildoer", who must either be killed, converted or bent to our will.
It's important to fully expose the depth of these failures, because far from being discredited by their failures, these three fantasy policy frameworks are not just still intact, and still considered legitimate, they are still dominant, still the default condition, still constitute the framework of background assumptions against which specific actions or proposals are judged, and still inform the decision-making of the President, even though he is a Democrat who was elected primarily as a repudiation of all things Bush.
We knew the "what" waterboarding. Now we know the "why" and now we know the "when." When? The Senate Armed Services Committee report: the Bush administration started planning torture before the memos authorizing it, before there were detainees to torture.
Why? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld insisted interrogators had missed something, because no prisoner had yet confirmed any operational link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. We tortured to backfill for a phony war and a nonexistent Iraq-al Qaeda connection.
And Dick Cheney still thinks he is the victim.
That's it in a nutshell, folks. Torture wasn't supposed to save us from a ticking time-bomb. Heck "24" was barely starting its first season. Torture was supposed to get al Qaeda operatives to fess up to a non-existent link with Iraq, so we could have the war the neo-cons had been itching for for years, instead of this unwanted distraction by bin Laden and friends. Others--such as Ron Suskind on Rachel Maddow the same day--have made the same argument, and have explicated recent revelations in more detail-as Countdown itself did in the body of the program-but Olberman's introduction was blunt, powerful and to the point.
Which makes it that much easier to graft it onto a larger narrative, one in which even Iraq was only supposed to be a minor opening act, and in which terrorism played a role so tiny it wasn't even a speaking part. The real enemies were China, any other rising regional power, futuristic weapons deployed by persons unknown, and the American people, who would never spring for such extravagant military spending without benefit of a new Pearl Harbor. This was the future foreseen by the neocon think-tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in its September 2000 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses".
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