From the New York Times’ Paul Krugman comes yet another excellent opinion piece: Behind our backs. It describes how the Bush administration’s agenda to gut the country’s social programs and reward the rich on the backs of the middle class is becoming increasingly clear — and how the emerging War Without End may well provide sufficient political cover to let them get away with it. An excerpt:

But back to the amazing spectacle of the war’s opening, when the House voted to cut the benefits of the men and women it praised a few minutes earlier. What that scene demonstrated was the belief of the Republican leadership that if it wraps itself in the flag, and denounces critics as unpatriotic, it can get away with just about anything. And the scary thing is that this belief may be justified.

For the overwhelming political lesson of the last year is that war works — that is, it’s an excellent cover for the Republican Party’s domestic political agenda. In fact, war works in two ways. The public rallies around the flag, which means the President and his party; and the public’s attention is diverted from other issues.

As long as the nation is at war, then, it will be hard to get the public to notice what the flagwavers are doing behind our backs. And it just so happens that the “Bush doctrine,” which calls for preventive war against countries that may someday pose a threat, offers the possibility of a series of wars against nasty regimes with weak armies.

Someday the public will figure all this out. But it may be a very long wait.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, April 15th, 2003 at 9:55 am and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.