How Bush Gets Away With It

The satirical weekly The Onion describes itself as "America's finest news source" — and for the last few years that has been the literal truth. Its mock news story for January 18th, 2001, reported a speech in which President-elect George W. Bush declared, "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."

And so it has turned out.

A lot has happened in this country since Bush took office — stock-market decline and business scandal, energy crisis and environmental backsliding, budget deficits and recession, terrorism and troubled alliances, and now, finally, war. Beyond the headlines, however, there's a political story that runs through much of what has happened: the story of the rise and growing dominance of a radical political movement, right here in the U.S.A. I'm talking, of course, about America's radical right — a movement that now effectively controls the White House, Congress, much of the judiciary and a good slice of the media. The dominance of that movement changes everything: Old rules about politics and policy no longer apply.

Most people have been slow to realize just how awesome a sea change has taken place. During the 2000 election, many people thought that nothing much was at stake; during the first two years of the Bush administration, many pundits insisted that its radically conservative bent was only a temporary maneuver, that Bush would tack back to the center after solidifying his base. And the public still has little sense of how radical our leading politicians really are. A striking example: In the fall of 2001, when focus groups were asked to react to Republican proposals for a retroactive corporate tax cut, members of the focus groups literally refused to believe the group leaders' description of the policy.