Atrios wonders why almost three quarters of the American populace thinks we're all passengers in the Brown Submarine, swirling 'round the Vortex of Porcelain Doom:
I'm fascinated by this 72% wrong track number. I'd like to understand it more. I'm not sure I have sense of the basic reasons why so many people think things are going to hell. We can all come up with various possibilities, and there won't be one single answer, but I still think there's probably a coherent narrative to be teased out. I'm just not sure what it is.
No, there's no one answer, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that 9/11 didn't change anything.
9/11 really was a trauma. Most Americans wanted to regroup from that trauma and find a renewed sense of national purpose, a new sense of unity; nothing seemed quite as petty and small as American politics as usual -- which after the Clinton impeachment nonsense, had seemed to have become particularly squalid.
But the Bushites and wingnuts were and are incapable, grotesquely so, of comprehending this desire for transcendence of ordinary politics in anything except the rawest political terms: 9/11 was for them a tremendous... political opportunity, no more, whatever their rhetoric. And they seized it, and wrung every last drop of electoral opportunity out of it that they possibly could.
And then Iraq turned from Mission Accomplished to Apocalypse Now.
Many, many Americans really did trust in Bush after 9/11. That trust, that belief, was horribly misplaced. But they didn't see it then, because they didn't want to.
Now, they see it.
Bush betrayed the trust of the American people in a deep, powerful way. He squandered their faith. And he won't be forgiven for it.
Me, I always thought he was a useless little fucker. But still, the "I told you so" tastes pretty damn sour.