Is there a Democrat or Republican presidential candidate with the intellectual honesty and political audacity to level with Americans about what lies ahead after George W. Bush and his bungling claque pack up and leave Washington?
Sure, the first order of business would be to quickly end the calamity in Iraq and ignore hollow Republican bleats of "cut and run." The costs—a half trillion dollars so far and tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded—are ghastly reminders of the incompetent think-tank dilettantes President Bush relied on as architects of the Iraq disaster.
The next order: Spell out in painful, excruciating detail the need to rebuild a broken America. The damage inflicted by cynical GOP politicians contemptuous of their oaths and scornful of the constitution is widespread—lost international goodwill, lawlessness in the executive branch, reckless spending and crippling debt, betrayal of public trust, misuse and abuse of a fine military establishment, treachery against civil liberties.
Whatever is required, federal agencies must be purged of ethically barren young disciples of police-state doctrine planted throughout the executive and judicial branches to transform the United States into an authoritarian, evangelical state controlled by an ideology that disparages democracy.
Diplomacy that served the United States so well since its founding, but repudiated by "war president" Bush in favor of swaggering, gunslinger tough talk, must be restored.
Tax policies that created a new American economic underclass and gave corporations incentives to outsource millions of jobs overseas to increase profits must be rigorously overhauled to restore tax justice.
Industries that thumbed their noses at social responsibility and benefited from President Bush's cronyism must be brought back under regulatory policies to end poisoning of the air and water and ravaging of natural public lands.
Federal agencies that have become branch offices of industries they supposedly regulate must be placed in the hands of professionals, not political hacks.
The Department of Justice should be restored to just that—an agency devoted to justice, not to rubberstamping lawlessness of a president and vice president that deprives Americans of liberties and tramples the constitution.
Members of Congress of both parties must install committee chairs by virtue of their ethics and devotion to the public trust, not merely seniority and a clubby wishy-washy willingness to go along to get along.
Funds once earmarked for war should be rerouted to an aggressive modernization of the nation's crumbling infrastructure—dams, schools, roads, bridges and communications.
And, finally, evangelicals with crackpot demands to shape federal policies in the name of God have no place in a rebuilt America.
