Crystal Ball Time: Predictions for W's Second Term

I don't have any particular powers of prediction. I'm not psychic. I don't have well-placed sources. On the other hand, I do read the news. So for what it's worth, I did make some predictions back in late 2000. I told my friends and family exactly what I thought the next four years under George W. Bush were going to be like. My prediction was: "war and recession."

It was clear to anyone who really cared to look that W's inner circle were bent on a war of some sort, probably with Iraq. They hadn't exactly made a secret of it. I have to admit that once 9/11 hit, and the Afghan war happened, I was willing to say that I'd been wrong. I didn't really think my prediction of war was satisfied by Afghanistan, since I really predicted an unnecessary war of choice, rather than one of necessity. Of course, by now we all know what happened: as soon as 9/11 and Afghanistan were off the front pages, W and his pals went right back to planning the war they'd been planning before 9/11, except now they had a rationale they could sell it with. (Remember the WMDs?) Thanks for the war, George!

By the way, did anyone else notice how an additional $25 billion was just sort of snuck into the Iraq war this week? It didn't really garner much notice in the news, since the media was more obsessed with important issues like Teresa Heinz Kerry's language. This brings the total (publicly acknowledged) expenditure for Iraq to roughly 187 billion dollars!! Anyone who thinks American soldiers are going to leave Iraq anytime soon is living in a fantasy. We're in Iraq for at least ten years. You and I, and our children and grandchildren, will pay many thousands of dollars apiece to finance this stupid adventure, over which we had no say whatsoever. So once again, thanks for the war, George!

As for recession -- well, we were probably going to have a recession anyway. It was all a question of how long and how hard the recession would be. Thanks to W's regressive policies -- a "tax cut" that's really a net tax increase on most of us, a massive transfer of money to the super-wealthy, massive spending cuts -- the recession has been longer and harder than it needed to be. I think by now the economists say we're out of recession, but it sure doesn't feel like it. I'm not rich, but I'm not poor either -- I make a decent living -- but W's recession included the only period of extended unemployment I've ever experienced in my life, and it was scary. We lost a lot of financial ground in those months. A lot of other people did a lot worse. A lot of people who were working in 2000 still can't find work. That's just fine for W's super-rich buddies, who like having a lot of people unemployed: it makes it easier to hold the line on wages. So Thanks for the recession, George!

I think I predicted the consequences of W's first term in office just about right. What about a second Bush term?

First of all: call me a conspiracy theorist, but even though the election currently seems to favor Kerry, I think the odds are in favor of Bush getting elected (not "re-elected", as he wasn't elected in the first place), through some combination of three possible events:

1. Osama gets caught just before the election! What amazing timing! The Republicans are good at October surprises, and they will literally try anything. They are currently leaning hard on Pakistan to produce the big guy; of course, for all we know, they already have him and they're just waiting for the right moment to pull him out of their hat.

2. Osama strikes again! They've been talking this one up non-stop, too. You can almost hear the hope in the voices of various Republican shills, because they expect a terrorist attack will make people rally behind Bush; and they might be right about that. (Of course, they have also floated the idea of suspending elections in such a case -- which I wouldn't put past them, if they didn't think they could game the actual results of the election like they did in 2000.)

3. The computer ate my vote! Of course, a lot of us won't actually get to vote in 2004 anyway. Thanks to a combination of tricks, like throwing people off voter rolls for having a name "similar" to a felon, etc., we are poised to have more than one Florida this year (including, naturally, Florida!). And since many states are now using electronic voting machines such as those manufactured by Republican-friendly Diebold, there won't be an opportunity to perform any inconvenient recounts -- because the machines don't actually record votes, they only record totals. There is every possibility that the Supreme Court will deliver this election for Junior, as well.

So unless Kerry opens up a wide margin, and soon, I am currently predicting this election for Bush. What about W's second term? What does that hold in store for us?

War and recession, only much more so.

There will be another war. The Bushies have previously discussed the idea of a war against Syria. Lately, they've been floating the totally fucking insane idea of attacking Iran. While a war in Iran would be a disaster, both for America and Iran, that doesn't mean they won't try.

War serves so many of the current regime's purposes so well, there's every reason to believe they've gotten a taste for it. War is a huge business opportunity, for certain types of businesses: arms manufacturers, private security firms, construction companies, oil-service companies, and so on. Dick Cheney knows all about this. $187 billion is a lot of business! War is also a huge political opportunity, allowing Bush, Cheney, and the politicians around them to prosper at the polls by pretending to be war heroes. (Think flight suit and "I'm a war president"; apparently, that gets votes.) War in the Middle East serves the ideological ends of a certain subset of the New Right, and bizarrely enough, a certain (and influential) subset of the Religious Right, who believe that a general war in the Middle East is necessary to usher in the End Times and the Second Coming. Finally, of course, war serves another important political purpose: it provides a distraction as well as political cover for all the other initiatives the administration advances for destroying civil liberties, environmental protections, labor protections, and anything else the Republicans find inconvenient. It's easy to keep things secret in a war; it's easy to intimidate or silence political opposition in a war. For all these reasons, and for the reason that Bush will not be constrained by the necessity of having to run for another term, it's easy to predict another war.

Expect A Draft. The Selective Service System says it's not getting ready to institute a draft. Rather, it's "...prepared to manage a draft if and when the President and the Congress so direct." Well, that's not exactly a denial, and there are no denials coming out of Congress or the White House.

Our military is stretched really, really thin at the moment. There's no way we can handle another war, certainly not another occupation, without a lot more manpower. If North Korea attacks South Korea, or China invades Taiwan, or if the neocons get the next war they so desperately want, we will simply need more people in the military, and it's hard to see how they could get the bodies they need without a draft. We may not even be able to "stay the course" in Iraq without a draft.

When they do start up a draft, remember who gave it to you: Mister Rich Preppy Draft Dodger Himself, George Bush Junior.

More Recession. All these adventures, unfortunately, cost a lot of money, and we didn't even have the money to pay for the mess in Iraq. Bush had already turned a monster surplus into a monster deficit with his tax cuts for his friends. (Later on, in a perfect example of the kind of useful war can be, Bush would claim that the deficit had nothing to do with the tax cuts -- it was all because of al Qaeda!) Meanwhile, the real economy is sputtering, and there is every indicator that it's about to slump again. Don't expect Bush to help.

You don't need to be psychic to see what's coming. Just read the news. The next four years are going to be bad ones, unfortunately regardless of whether Bush has a second term. Bush has dug a hole for us that will take us a generation to get out of. But if he has a second term, the next four years will be a living hell for ordinary people. You've been warned.