Ex-Aide Says He’s Lost Faith in Bush

There may be a temptation to sneer at Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd for his "born again" ideas about creating a political campaign that "appeals to more than 51% of the people" and his statement, now that his enlisted son is going to Iraq, in which he says he feels "a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world."

Surely many are thinking that his loss of faith in President Bush comes a bit late considering the nation has been decimated by partisan politics and destructive leadership for over six years.

So what did it take for this about face?

A few personal tragedies and the probably that his own son will, at the very least, be traumatized by what he experiences in Iraq, if not mutilated or killed there. This combination of personal events has managed to wake him up to the callous inhumanity he helped foist upon us and the world.

But, at least, he has seen the light.

Unlike Karl Rove or Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush himself, not to mention the multitude of the selfish and the brain dead who remain encrusted in the Bush camp, he has seen that things have gone downhill very fast and that the nation is hemorrhaging as a result of the Republican agenda.

In truth, the mishmash of ideologies which the American public was sold as a patriotic and conservative "platform" proved to be a schizophrenic misanthrope - something that has worked to divide citizen against citizen even as it has indebted us beyond belief, shackled us like slaves to corporate desire, worked to eliminate institutions and agencies created for the public good such as public schools, social security, PBS and FEMA, enmeshed us in an unwinnable war and continues to destroy our dollar.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have increased the size of government, spied upon us, shredded our Constitution and put us on Amnesty International's list of nations that employ torture.

Of course we know that the list of all Bush has wreaked upon us goes on and on and on, not the least of which is the 90% of our environmental regulations that have been changed - with just a flourish of Bush's pen - with just one result being the ongoing destruction of the Appalachian Mountains and, so far, about 1000 miles of streams below them.

Forget the increase in the amount of mercury that is being released in the air which has resulted in warnings that most of our fish are too toxic to eat.

Maybe, in the final analysis, Bush will prove to have been the disease that almost killed us, but which woke us up to how we better start living our lives and running our politics.

Raise a glass with me in sincere hope that Matthew Dowd will not be the first, nor the last Republican strategist to decide that dividing the nation to win an election, for the purpose of plundering the nation, isn't quite all it's cracked up to be.