The Independent has a pleasingly direct account of some of the terrors which may be in the offing in a second Bush term; I've bolded a few especially important items:
"Where should the United States invade next? Iran, Syria, or Cuba? Will George Bush merely slash taxes on the rich even further in his second term, or will he have the courage to abolish income tax altogether? Will gay marriage simply be outlawed state by state, or will a much-threatened constitutional amendment come into being?
"These might once have been idle questions for conservative Washington think-tanks. But now, with President Bush safely re-elected for another four years and increased Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, such radical right-wing notions are no longer pipedreams. They are the active stuff of policy discussion.
"Grass-roots conservatives, many of them religious fundamentalists who paved the way for President Bush's victory in the suburbs and the rural heartland, are positively salivating at the prospect of having their efforts rewarded.
"'I don't know if we're going to abolish the prescription drug benefit [for senior citizens], but we'd like to. It's just an expansion of government,' the Republican strategist and direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie said over the weekend. [Ed.--that 'benefit' was a gift to the drug industry, so it will probably survive.] 'We'd like to see oil and gas exploration increased in the continental United States. We want a constitutional amendment on marriage. We want the culture of life expanded.'
"This wish list and others like it now face little or no opposition in Congress, in the White House or - as the federal bench is increasingly filled with ideological conservatives - the courts. The rest of the world may have thought the first four years of Mr Bush's presidency were quite radical enough, but they could turn out to be just the hors d'oeuvre to a radical-right beanfeast.
"The New York Times reported yesterday that Vice-President Dick Cheney was supporting the idea of abolishing income tax and replacing it with a flat national sales tax - a highly regressive notion that would effectively shift the tax burden drastically away from the rich to the dwindling middle class and the working poor.
"In Cuban exile circles in Miami, meanwhile, hardline anti-Castro leaders are getting very excited by a pledge President Bush made in one of his last campaign appearances in Florida to liberate their homeland. Career diplomats at the State Department are getting concerned this might be an indication that military intervention - the first since President Kennedy's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 - might be seriously contemplated.
"State Department stalwarts are getting equally alarmed at the prospect - yet to be confirmed - that Colin Powell will depart his post as Secretary of State and open the door to a neo-conservative takeover of foreign and national security policy.
"A senior State Department official, writing anonymously in the online magazine Salon.com last month, laid out a stark future for US policy in the Middle East in a second Bush term, the first part of which appears to be close to fruition already. 'The neo-cons, working in tandem with a similar staff in the office of Prime Minister Sharon of Israel, have a three-part agenda for the first part of Bush's second term,' he wrote. 'First, oust Yasser Arafat; second, overthrow the secular Baathist al-Assad dictatorship in Syria; and, third, eliminate, one way or another, Iran's nuclear facilities.'
"The Republicans' domestic agenda is likely to contemplate the further delegation of social services to religious charities, the further concentration of media ownership in a few corporate, largely pro-Republican hands, further moves to restrict or even outlaw abortion, restrictions on the civil rights of gay couples (for example, their right to bequeath property to each other) and increasing challenges to Darwinian evolution in school classrooms.
"Some of the new faces in the Senate gave a flavour of the kind of politics we can expect out of Washington in the next political cycle. Tom Coburn, newly elected Senator from Oklahoma, is on record saying he thinks doctors who perform abortions should be executed. (So much for the 'culture of life' behind the anti-abortion movement.) Jim DeMint of South Carolina said during his campaign that homosexuals and unmarried pregnant women should not be allowed to teach in public schools."
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The barbarians are no longer at the gates; they are running the castle.
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