Are We a Nation of Sheep?

Please skip this post and continue on your way to the mall to return that hideous necktie that your mother-in-law gifted you if you don't believe that President Bush has been a bad president, that the war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster, and you don't occasionally lie awake nights fearing for the future of the United States.

Still here? Good.

Given the dire straits that sentient Americans find themselves in, the big questions of New Year's 2007 are:

* Have we become a nation of sheep?

* Can we survive two more years of a Bush presidency?

Let's mull the ovine question first because it gives me an opportunity to mention a dear friend.

BAAA!!! . . .

As I have written early and often, other than the impeachment crowd at the Daily Kos and other liberal-lefty blogs, the silence has been deafening when it comes to Americans demanding that President Bush be accountable for his actions, let alone pull the U.S. back from the brink of myriad disasters.

While other aspects of a post that I put up last month at The Moderate Voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff standing up to the president got plenty of comments, the usually feisty readership of this popular centrist blog was struck dumb (or is it dumbstruck?) when I asked why the U.S. was so different than other countries. Countries where the intransigence of a so-called leader like George Bush in the face of a train wreck like the Iraq war would lead to calls from the body politic for his ouster or even result in a putsch.

Have we become a nation of sheep, so inured to arrogant and inept leadership and a corrupt political culture (yes, both Dems and GOPs) that we would rather retreat to our Barcaloungers than fight?

That aforementioned dear friend, W. Russell G. Byers, would think so.

Russell was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a Republican Party membership card in his diaper. He graduated from Yale the year the president was a freshman and three years after the graduation of another worthy who had two middle names, lifelong friend John H.J. Heinz, the late great moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania.

Like Heinz, Russell could have done almost anything -- or absolutely nothing -- but in the finest tradition of noblesse oblige, devoted his life to public service.

I met Russell in 1989 when this genteel and smartly dressed conservative hired on as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. His editor was Yours Truly, a jeans wearing and bare knuckled liberal Democrat.

Neither of us backed away from a fight and had the conviction of our beliefs, but we deeply respected each other and our relationship thrived.

Ideas flowed from Byers' fertile mind in torrents. Solving the homeless problem. Tax reform. The need for more drug rehab facilities. A makeover of the Philadelphia tourist industry. But the words themselves usually did not come so easily and that's where I came in.

Russell would have burned his Republican Party card in Lafayette Park had he lived to see the disintegration of a GOP Big Tent that once had plenty of room for a John Heinz, let alone the ascendancy of the Christianists who elected a president who championed their culture wars while recklessly starting the kind that has real bullets and bombs.

I can hear Russell now, his face becoming flushed as he chain smoked one Lucky Strike after another:

"Why are people letting George Bush get away with this? Are Americans sheep?"

Like I said, Russell never backed away from a fight, including his last one. He was stabbed to death a few days before Christmas 1999 by a knife-wielding assailant.

. . . AND BAA HUMBUG

I am neither paranoid nor particularly prone to flights of fantasy, yet I find that the answer to my second question is disturbing given the state of world affairs:

Can we survive two more years of a Bush presidency? Maybe not.

With a conspicuous exception, Bush's domestic agenda is not worth the powder to blow it up with. As it is, there's precious little money to fund anything not swabbed in camouflage owing to the enormous drain on the national treasury because of the war, some $345 billion to date and counting.

Where the pyrotechnics could occur is the Middle East.

The president has three options there:

(1.) He continues to drive Iraq toward catastrophe, thereby sealing his legacy as the worst U.S. president in history.

(2.) He picks an unwinnable fight (sound familiar?) with Iran, thereby sealing his legacy as the worst U.S. president in history by igniting a regional war -- and then some as the shockwaves spread to Muslim countries outside the region -- that would make Iraq look like a pillow fight.

(3.) He cherry picks a victory from the jaws of defeat and, say, brokers a peace deal between Israel and Palestine, thereby sealing his legacy with an asterisk. (Save for that peace deal, he was the worst president in U.S. history.)

The first option certainly plays to the notion that Bush would like nothing more than to wait out his days and dump the whole mess on his successor.

The third option is unlikely because the Bush version of diplomacy has been "my way or the highway," and he adamantly continues to refuse to engage Iran and Syria in finding an Iraq "solution."

Where I get chest pains is in contemplating the second option. Sucker punching Iran over its nuclear sites does not seem farfetched when you consider how the world has changed for the worse since March 2003 when Bush sicced the mightiest military on the planet on Saddam Hussein and has seen that military fought to a bloody stalemate by a rag tag assortment of insurgents and other irregulars.

Then there is that aforementioned conspicuous exception: The backwash from the Iraqi war in the form of the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of the War on Terror. Beyond the NSA domestic spying program, how many other clandestine intrusions into Americans' lives are there?

All I know is that it's going to take helluva lot more than a wing and a prayer to get through the next two years.