It is the weekend after the inauguration and the snow is piling up on my sidewalk, making it look more like Hibbings, Minn., than South Philadelphia outside my window.
This snow looks as if it will enhance the reputations of the scaremongers who masquerade as meteorologists on our local TV news. Will they rename "Hurricane" Schwartz "Snow Job" Schwartz?
But then, with his lofty inauguration speech, George W. Bush showed that he is the man when it comes to snow jobs.
Let’s give our president credit where credit is due. He has educated his Republican Party to the idea that it matters to America what happens in other lands. No matter how obvious this may be to you, dear reader, the Grand Old Party is treating this idea as a relatively new concept.
It was not so long ago that Republicans, including the Texas cowboy wing of the party, treated the word "foreign," as in foreign affairs, as an obscenity not uttered in polite company. It was also not so very long ago that leading Republicans, including then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, opposed our belated efforts to stop the genocide in the Balkans as an unnecessary entanglement. So let us not trivialize the distance that this president and his party had to travel to reach the Age of Enlightenment.
In his inauguration speech, President Bush’s main theme was that America is safer when there is more freedom in the world. Apparently some media wag discovered that the president’s speech was in some ways similar to a ’60s tune by the Rascals. Somehow the Rascals have morphed into Toby Keith in Iraq in 2005. The result hasn’t been pretty.
While the president kept repeating the word "freedom" as often as he could without sounding like one of those old vinyl recordings when the phonograph needle got stuck, he seemed ignorant of the fact that freedom is not solely won at the end of a gun.
Our failure in Iraq (failure is not too strong a word) is the result of the failure of the Bush administration to learn this valuable lesson. We have lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. That point will be driven home no matter who wins the ultimate struggle for power in Iraq. For, whoever wins, you can be sure they will be anti-American.
And the failure to win over the Iraqis is mirrored all over the Middle East. The Arab media viewed the president’s speech not as sunny idealism but dark cynicism, based on the way we played footsies with Saddam in the ’80s when he was our guy, and based on the way we still vie for the affection of the Royal Saud family because of our addiction to cheap oil.
The president’s snow job was effective enough to blind 52 percent of American voters, but the rest of the world is wearing snow goggles and sees his Iraqi policy for what it is …
While the governor and our mayor have been busy leading Eagles cheers, a crisis of confidence mounts both in Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Successfully spelling "E-A-G-L-E-S" is not going to do much to solve our mass-transit problems.
The mayor did find time between pep rallies to give himself a three-year retroactive cost-of-living raise, so preoccupation with football does have its limits.
The governor and his Republican adversaries, otherwise known as the legislature in Harrisburg, can’t seem to come up with a compromise that will save us from higher fares and reduced service. Rendell does not want to tax gas to pay for mass transit to help a big city that is pretty much hated in the rest of the state. Not the way to get reelected, even though such a tax would provide incentives for drivers to use less gas and, in some small way, wean our dependence from the Middle East cauldron that threatens to consume even more American soldiers’ lives.
The Republicans in the state do not view the riders of mass transit as their constituency. Not many votes there. Mayor Street suggested that one of the problems is that the people who run SEPTA never ride their own system. It is one of the more insightful remarks by the mayor in an otherwise uneventful blizzard of words between the parties concerned (what was that about a blind squirrel eventually finding an acorn?).
I suggest that both the SEPTA brass and our own politicians would benefit strongly by riding a subway or bus once in a while and rubbing elbows with those of us who are normally referred to as "the masses." Democracy in action, if you know what I mean. Waiting on a corner for a bus on a cold winter morning can do wonders for one’s perspective. Would keep the governor from getting another speeding ticket, too.
Unfortunately, my own forecast for the nation’s capital, Harrisburg and Philadelphia is just one big snow job after another.
