- It's a good thing George Bush found a job in the White
House. Though he owns a ranch in Texas, he'd make an inept cowboy. He can't
seem to keep the herd settled in for the night.
-
- All those little calves getting lost in the gullies.
One is Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by someone hanging around the
White House corral. Another is the Afghan war, orphaned by the Iraq campaign.
-
- A third, the cost of the prescription drug programme,
just keeps bleating from the bushes: $40bn a year as the White House promised
eight weeks ago when the bill was being debated? $53.4bn as they say now
that it has become law? $60bn as the administration's own analyst warned
months ago but which his bosses ordered him not to share with Congress?
-
- The president wouldn't do so well in all those small
town saloons either. Too tempting to get all liquored up and then pick
a fight with just about anybody for no good reason, as he's been doing
since he came to Washington. The world's steel industry had to obtain a
protective order to keep Bush from assaulting it.
-
- Who knows why he's taken to beating up on scientists
of every description, not just on global warming but on points that have
been long settled. On evolution, for instance, he believes "the jury
is still out," as he said in the last presidential campaign. Charles
Darwin is damn near pre-deluvian himself, at least in the Christeo-Bush
Calendar, the one that believes time began six thousand years before the
birth of Mel Gibson. Besides, he wasn't even a Democrat.
-
- The president can't even see where he's going. Last week,
he stepped in the middle of Richard Clarke, his one-time terrorism tsar.
Mr Clarke said the president and his staff were tone deaf to the repeated
warnings they received about al-Qaida in the months leading up to September
2001 - and they still are, he added.
-
- The way Clarke tells it, the Bush troop wanted a war
against Iraq no matter how many times the intelligence services tried to
warn them away. A bit reminiscent of General George Armstrong Custer at
the Little Big Horn, considering whether to chase a decoy band of warriors
down a gulch where the biggest army of native Americans ever assembled
was awaiting him. "Should I go down there, Scout?" he asked a
Cheyenne staff member he had arrested on suspicion of betraying him.
-
- "You go down there, General."
-
- "Aha," says Custer. "You think that I
think that because you betrayed me, I won't go down there if you tell me
to. But I know you think that, so I will go down there and find the enemy
unprepared, and I will eradicate him."
-
- That was one fictional version of a conversation the
morning of Custer's Last Stand. True or not, Custer died before sunset.
-
- But we're mixing metaphors here. Back at the cow herd,
even vice president Cheney can act like a stray. When the Clarke revelations
broke, Cheney said the former counter-terrorism chief wasn't "in the
loop". If the czar wasn't involved, no wonder there was no policy.
-
- The Clarke revelations could have been any of a dozen
other pasture pies. Take China. In the last two years China has become
America's favourite credit card issuer. Every month, the US borrows $10bn
from China to go shopping. Sooner or later, America will max out the cards.
When that happens, interest rates could skyrocket and the dollar plummet.
It doesn't sound quite that simple when the Bush administration talks about
it. They talk about trade deficits and balance of payments and the strength
of the dollar. That's so much pidgin.
-
- Here's how it works. The US buys textiles, electronics
and equipment from China and pays for it with dollars. At the end of every
month, there is $10bn more stashed inside the People's Republic than at
the start of the month.
-
- There aren't enough mattresses in China to hold it all,
so the manufacturers take their customers' payments down to the Central
Bank on the corner and exchange it for renminbi, their currency. The bank
collects a mountain of greenbacks in Beijing.
-
- Meanwhile, Washington no longer has much income because
it has cut taxes three times since Bush took office. It doesn't spend much
more, except on war, but it no longer has enough coming in to pay its bills.
It has to borrow, about $40 or $50bn a month.
-
- To raise enough cash to keep going, the government issues
IOUs in the form of bonds. (I just need some help until pay day, says the
Treasury). The Chinese take the bonds and send the dollar bills back across
the Pacific.
-
- This kind of arrangement is usually self-correcting.
The currency of the buyer grows weaker with each passing month, the currency
of the seller rises. Eventually, the debtor nation finds that it needs
much more of its currency to buy the same quantity of goods.
-
- But the Chinese have fixed their currency against the
dollar, so it will not rise - until they let it go. When they do, it will
be like the lightening bolt that touches off the stampede.
-
- Afghanistan, Plame, North Korea, trade war, old Europe,
al-Qaida sleeper cells, the federal debt and all the other unsettled cows
in the herd will take off together. Don't count on Bush waving his hat
at the front of the stampede to turn it. He'll be driving his pony alongside
as fast as it will run, firing his six shooter in the air to spur them
on.
-
- Not exactly, of course, because President Bush isn't
a cowboy. He's the president. To help him stay that way, he'll drop down
to South Carolina, dying textile mill territory, and promise that if re-elected,
he will impose quotas on millions of dollars of Chinese textiles to help
save American jobs.
-
- That's a bit like asking your bank for a $1m mortgage,
then complaining that the rates should be higher because your $100 savings
account isn't paying enough interest.
-
- As they say about some posers in Texas, "All hat,
no cows".
-
- - Albert Scardino is an executive editor of the Guardian
- John Scardino owns a public relations firm and is a former congressional
candidate
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1182105,00.html
|
