BUSHWHACKED

To be fair, President Bush I didn't veto the bill. He actually signed it before leaving for vacation and then he refused to sign the emergency funding provision to provide the money for worker benefits. It was a shiftier "Texas Sidestep" than the one the governor dances in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

By the time [Education Secretary Rod] Paige was stunning senators at his confirmation hearing with a magnificently vapid opening statement and his inability to answer in depth any question about education, his successor as Houston superintendent of schools, Kaye Stripling, was already hard at work cleaning up the mess Paige had left behind. But that's another story. Bush nominates figureheads for domestic policy positions. If you don't believe this, try to write a book about the influence labor secretary Elaine Chao has had on labor policy, or EPA director Christine Todd Whitman on environmental policy, or education secretary Paige on education policy. Paul O'Neill got serious about fiscal policy and was sent packing. Larry Lindsey yook a hard look at the cost of going to war in Iraq, came up with $200 billion, and got sacked.

Maybe we're overcome with premillennial-dispensationalism sensationalism, but it worries us when the secretary of defense and a reluctant secretary of state fall in line behind the likes of the Reverend James Hagee. Faith-based domestic policy is scary. Faith-based foreign policy is terrifying–in an apocalyptic way.

Smoot pulls a two-inch-thick Teen Challenge folder from a file cabinet in her small office. The largest single document in the folder is the licensure-inspection report the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse prepared in 1995.

The forty-nine-page report documents an almost complete lack of compliance with requirements that fall into ninety-nine categories, from counselor qualifications to staff training in CPR and first aid, on to electrical outlets and gas lines. Even clients looking for Bible-centered drug treatment can benefit from smoke alarms, emergency-exit lights in dorms, and functioning gas lines, all of which the state found lacking in Teen Challenge's San Antonio campus. (Despite the name, Teen Challenge treats adults, not minors.)

It's unlikely that Bush read the agency's report, or its order to Teen Challenge to comply or surrender its license. However, he did respond. "Teen Challenge should view itself as a pioneer in how Texas approaches faith-based programs," Bush told Marvin Olasky's World Magazine. "Teen Challenge is going to exist. And licensing standards are going to be different than what they are today."

He was right. Teen Challenge continues to operate today–unlicensed and without state supervision.

If you like Texas government, you'll love what this country will look like after two terms of GeeDubya Bush and the man Bush calls "Boy Genius"–or "TurdBlossom" when Rove gets uppity ("Wherever he goes, something is bound to pop up.")

The decision to go ahead with Star Wars, now called National Missile Defense (NMD) or the nuclear umbrella, further upset allies and enemies alike. NMD is not only notoriously expense, but many scientists believe it is barely plausible, the equivalent of trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. Theoretically, if we stay at it long enough and spend enough money, it may work, but this is one project that was never submitted to the cost-benefit analysis of White House efficiency expert John D. Graham.1

Conservatives are fond of observing that there are some problems that cannot be solved by throwing money at them. There are even more that cannot be solved by dropping bombs on them.

How proudly we hailed his announcement in his 2003 State of the Union address that we would spend a magnificent $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa. Oops, turns out that wasn't $15 billion in new dollars; that was just the money we were already contributing (far less than the usual suspects in Europe, of course) switched from multilateral to unilateral efforts, to no one's benefit. And the dying children of Africa thank the highly Christian President George W. Bush for that particular sleight of hand.

The programs that help people are the ones being dismantled by ideological zealots. The programs that help corporations at the expense of the taxpayer are being left in place. "Un-American" is not a word we are given to tossing around, nor is "fascism" — we have spent years making fun of humorless liberals who hear the sound of jack-booted fascism around every corner. But there is something creepy about what is happening here, and the creepiest thing about it is that no one is talking about it. Mussolini said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." That's pretty much what we're looking at here, and the results are not good for the people of this country, no matter what it is called.