Is in Bush or the Neo-Cons
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Personalizing failure
Domestic political "wars" a waged in terms of personal insults or praise while policies actually create the results. Hence the tendency of administration opponents to pile on the President for the Iraq war, deficit spending, social security privatization, the Katrina response, etc. could backfire in the long run as Conservatives define these failures and personal incompetence rather than policy failure. In fact, the problems that confront us are the inevitable result of the long term application of the Conservative policies advocated over the last 20 years. The war derives from the belief that advanced military technology and the ready use of a military threat would result in the retreat by our adversaries. However, the adversaries have their own advantages such as a ready supply of young men from societies with high birth rates.
Similarly, deficit spending results from defense spending combined with massive tax cuts for the rich, the primary plank of conservative platform. Katrina failures result from a belief that government solutions are worthless and FEMA should be replaced by targeted tax cuts to initiate private solutions. Social security, the replacement of health insurance by savings accounts, the elimination of employer paid pensions result in the impoverishment of low and middle income Americans. These have all been ongoing Conservative proposals. So if we simply links these failures to Bush personally, we invite the substitution of a new personality such as any one of the proposed Republican candidates. The new candidate will suggest that they can remedy these problems because they are personally more competent than Bush when the cause lie in the policies themselves.