How President Bush Promotes U.S. Moral Decay

Writing about the state of morality in a nation such as the United States and how it reciprocally affects and is affected by political leadership is a challenging task. One may have a point of view as controversial as M3 above, or be a more stalwart conservative such as Jerry Falwell emeritus of the moral majority. The moral situation in the United States is presently precarious.

And the questions about the state of morality run into various walls of reasoning that put pre-defined sets and limits to social understanding of what moral issues are. Globalism seems to be at the center of the decline of moral values in the United States, along with technological and population alterity, while medical advances also contribute to the erosion of American moral integrity.

One may apply quantitative and qualitative yardsticks to moral issues in the micro and macro-social realms. Too much drinking of libations or too little permitted, too much sex outside marriage or not enough, definitions of marriage to corrupt its meaning to include any bilateral relationship involving sex and a contract, too much social violence or not enough...etc. In the United States however, and for western civilization the long haul of liberalism was to create a sense of moral accountability and conscience in the individual who would guide himself freely through life running afoul of moral norm enforcements by the state with it's power of condign punishments only when socially legalized standards are violated. Due process of law and open legal proceedings of a transparent nature would deliberate upon the guilt or innocence of an offender arrested and arraigned by legal enforcers.

The Bush administration has chosen to selectively enforce the law, and not to enforce more than 800 laws, which implicitly corrupts the social contract or constitutional form of law that civil society has selected through tradition and history to apply unto itself. Globalism and the broadcast media have assaulted the basis of American moral values as individuals accountable individually to laws, and as self-regulating independent agents guiding themselves through the vicissitudes of life.

The Bush administration sought and got a promulgation of legislation to allow covert arrest, detention and even execution of American citizens without habeas corpus and other protections. The inclusion of U.S. citizens as enemy combatants was unnecessary and dangerous as they are already covered by legal provisions for sedition, treason and other high crimes. The administrations prefers gross international covert measures in response to a foreign political movement in essence that endangers the security of all U.S. citizens from the terrorist encroachments of the state, which has been the greatest foe and the heart of opposition to liberalism through the ages. From the deepest oppressive pits of tyranny in imperial Rome to the dungeons of the czars liberal has sought to free mankind from the chains of tyranny. The Bush administration seeks to move toward the repressive authoritarianism of the Caliphs it seems in bringing torture to the menu of American politics.

While the administration has moved toward the authoritarian right in the vacuum of intellect about how to address the Muslim movements of the world with positive motivations to change toward a better rapprochement with western civilization, it isn't that which is most corrupting of U.S. moral values...instead it is the loss of individualism as the primary social fact toward groups and classes instead.

Ajami/Khalil in'The Republic of Fear' provided excellent sociological analysis of the mutivarious social formations of Iraq from the 1920's onward. Individualism simply hasn't been the basic social moral formation, nor has it been in many other regions of the globe the United States has been doing more business with in recent decades. Americans are becoming assimilated more toward global moral group values rather than the reverse with globalists becoming assimilated to moral values founded upon individualism and equal protection of the law.
Iraqi's under Saddam Husain had a constitution that hadn't much meaning. Constitutions can be altered to be whatever the ruling class wants them to be in essence. Saddam Husain became the state authority in-himself, for-himself and for-others through terror.

These radical restructuring of moral foundations that can occur to various nations may develop insidiously through invasive, pervasive broadcast media programming of the national populous or it may be quite radical through purging, secret arrests, secret mock trials and so forth as occurred in the Bathist Iraq with the Mukhabarat secret police. The Bush administration has drifted into such a globalist swamp that is reinforcing the group moral accountability values inimical to U.S. values since the foundation of the nation.

A remedy for the broadcast media corrupting of American morality would be to reallocate the wavelength resources to U.S. citizen Internet homepages. Perhaps 300 million homepages and 300 million business pages associated with each citizen would be broadcast and available for low-tech download to cheap led vcd like am-fm receivers.

Americans once formed their own groups and political associations without pervasive broadcast group-thinks saturating them. Tribal groupings and even religious groupings did not serve as the highest moral authority in the United States. Since the 1920s and 30's broadcasts have encroached and essentially conquered as the primary moral agents of change followed by medical innovation utilitarianism in mass production from birth control pills to abortions to morning after abortion pills permitted recently by the Bush administration.

The administration has sold itself out to globalism and globalist values morally predicated upon corporatism and sundry forms of group associations. Group associations as the basis for moral and legal conduct pre-empt and eliminate individual moral responsibility with group values being those that are of the highest value. The reason that is absolutely inimical to the well being of the United States is based in the western tradition of the individual as a free moral agent and inventor par excellence able to follow a golden rule with a direct personal relationship to God through Jesus Christ higher than any corrupting secular political value that might seek to eliminate various groups or individuals with equal legal rights.

The U.S. Government should of course permit global business procedures to continue, however it must take a 180 degree turn for-itself to encourage and support legal and social procedures that protect and advance U.S. national and individual interests instead of tossing them into the global stew pot of corporatist power. While national standards in reading and learning have declined, while the borders are porous to illegal aliens, while the China cost has cut profit potential in U.S. industry more than 30%, the administration is spending billions and billions perhaps less than most effectively in Iraq letting its economy wallow in agony and failing to invest enough in Kurdish education and alternate energy production. It has let the U.S. infrastructure remain dependent upon fossil fuels creating federal deficits with the military spending abroad financed by foreign lenders instead of being paid for in cash from current accounts.... The administration's style of globalist moral corrupt subverting individual rights and responsibilities is as lethal as the traditional forms of moral decay usually decried by various Republicans near election time. The tragedy of Rep Foley from Florida indicates that some aspects of the moral criterion are yet powerful, yet was his quick resignation a result of high individual moral standards or because of group moral values near election time? The difference might seem unimportant, yet group and class moral values supplanting individual moral values set by globalists find partnership with a sort of dulling, insipid national laziness economically acquiescing in a 'well, the unemployment rate is just 4.5% so everything must be perfect' political blindness.

The Bush administration doesn't seem to comprehend the sociological backgrounds of the people of Iraq and Communist China well enough, nor that of other middle eastern peoples either sufficiently to get a better positive or constructive engagement with them in an other than the traditional methods of imperialist or remote control politics unpopular with the locals. Even the United States seems to be in training under globalists to be group-thinking sycophants of some hypothetical global agenda 'out-there' that may be more existent in some places in Europe, feminist planning boutiques and who knows where in the U.S.A.

Khalil noted in 'The Republic of Fear' that the British installed parliament of Iraq was perceived as being an intermediate tool of control, and that after the British left it sort of poofed away...will the present Iraq Parliament fare any better?

The Patriot Act is a nice marketable phrase that know is modified to allow the administration to violate the 4th amendment seemingly at will, and the future dictator will appreciate the tools the Bush administration has innovated if he or she should appear one day either in response to globalism in opposition or support. A review here of the necessity of the Patriot Act is beyond the scope of the question of how the Bush administration has accelerated the moral decay or transformation of the United States.

Moral continuity that is issue-based in American politics need be implemented in the popular realm with the adverse agent of socialization of the global broadcast media being the tribe of 800 pound guerillas home-breaking and taking over the streets of the nation ever-present. Issue-based moral debate politically are for-themselves toward the group-think and group identity side of things rather than developing within individual, private, personal consideration. Advanced intelligence tends to develop individually, personally. The strength of the United States and of western civilization so long as it continues to exist should be in strong individual rights materially permitting privacy and invention to occur.

With Sam Walton long gone the Wal-Mart 'made in America' feature is now a 'made in China' feature. The administration may find Al Qa'eda an overwhelming opponent that takes all of its time to hunt and bay at (is the end of Bin Ladin near?), the nation however can't stand still as moral and economic infrastructure decay proceeds.

President Bush just got congress to spend 70 billion for fear of Al Qa'eda, right M1? Obviously he hasn't got the sense of Winston Churchill who was a cavalry officer in his day, who led the last charge of the British Empire kicking butt and taking names historically in fact and symbolically with the defeat of the axis powers.

'The Republic of Fear' (Iraq), if you have read the book, was an understandably fearful place. The Ba'th party created a deep and pervasive terror in the people as a way of doing politics and reordering society with the goal of creating an Arab nation.

President Bush uses the fear lever as his primary political crutch, and symbolically if not in actuality embodies Ajami's observation that tyrants use violence (9-11) when their authority is slipping (the 200 election result and Democratic intafadah)
I suppose you haven't read the Gulag Archipelago either. Repressive and pervasive state authority is a serious danger. Living in such a state would be quite an evil experience.
A nation such as the United States need not fear perhaps, but rational concern with dangers and threat analysis is incumbent upon any reasonable society. The challenges the United States has before it aren't being met very well by President Bush, whom is shirking his duties for the thrill of the hunt to tree Bin Ladin.

The United States needs to conserve its individual moral tradition/foundations in the new age through a variety of means such as the termination of broadcast ownership and use of the broadcast wavelengths. Politically in the middle east it needs to insure that its words and objects match rightly, that is like an architect or auto-mechanic politicians must ensure that their theories correspond to the actual state of affairs, and aren't the equivalent of political solipsism.
The next President should swiftly move to support U.S. infrastructure product innovations, inventions and developments that liberate the nation from trade deficits by creating better, cheaper local replacements for autos and oil. Driving down the highway one can see Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, Volvo Diesel and so on with the occasional ford or g.m.; even Chrysler and Jeep are Germany autos.

If a nation wants to survive and prosper it needs to have a national will to do so. Winston Churchill wasn't an idiot that believed that Britain existentially had no concerns and should act as if it didn't. He was addressing the specific issue of war with the Reich. The British since the war have taken numerous steps to assure the prosperity and health of their national and international standing. If the United States doesn't elect leaders that also seek to develop an infrastructure that leads in the world and that creates national prosperity, environmental health and that has a strong individual moral condition, it may continue decay. While a nation may not fear failure, it may fail nevertheless. Vince Lombardy said, I believe, that winning is everything. Winning with a moral and intellectual health and justice might be a sort of political equivalent. Winning might be defined as right thinking and living with a sort of Socratic or Christian paradigm of the morally good I would think.

It is necessary to 'put intention on it' and not just have a sort of Doris Day c'est le vie' nothing to fear sort of stoicism in the realm of contemporary global politics. Obviously a polity must get beyond fear, but that isn't the end of the journey, it is only the beginning.