The expression "jump the shark" is taken from American pop culture and usually refers to a popular television show that is going downhill. Here I apply it to the Bush administration, which has steadily lost ground with the American public and the US press at least since the Hurricane Katrina disaster in September. We now have the sense that a breakthrough has occurred, and the center has shifted to opposition of the administration and its policies. The latest Wall Street Journal poll shows that Bush has truly "jumped the shark". But as foreign policy blogger Laura Rozen points out, we have lost a great deal over the past five years, and Bush has exposed the fragility of our constitutional democracy:
This administration has been uniquely inclined to treat everything as fair game, to spin a terrible terrorist attack against this country into a kind of marketing campaign for a Hollywood story about a president’s leadership abilities and an administration’s unparalleled right to evade normal Congressional oversight and to savage critics as traitors, to treat even national defense information as raw fungible material for propaganda purposes, for marketing the war and then spinning the post-war and then SwiftBoating critics. The press to varying degrees has tried to maneuver to get at the story through all the various and imperfect ways journalists know how, the front door and the back door, the podium story and the back story, and the triangulated story. There’s a kind of agony play at hand now, and I think it demonstrates among other things how very much this administration was willing to manipulate the truth, the press, and ultimately the American public in some sort of never ending campaign that flickered at its most extreme and excessive into the orbit of something I can only describe somewhat ridiculously as fascism. The threat appears to have receded, but the sense one is left with, of a great democracy that is far more vulnerable than many had realized, is one of shock and tragedy, as well as relief that the worst may be over for now.
A sense of relief, to be sure, that maybe we have turned the corner. Yes, the worst may be over, but the danger is still there, as Daniel Ellsberg – the courageous leaker of the Pentagon Papers – says today in an interview in taz. Another attack by Al-Qaeda in the US could mean the end of our Bill of Rights:
Es wäre ein Polizeistaat – ein extrem autoritärer Staat mit theokratischem Charakter, basierend auf dem Gefühl einer unmittelbaren physischen Bedrohung durch al-Qaida. Dazu muss der Anschlag nicht sehr viel größer sein als das, was wir in Madrid oder London gesehen haben.
Wahlen würde es aber auch in dem von Ihnen prognostizierten Polizeistaat noch geben?
Die Kontrolle der Medien und des politischen Prozesses wäre so, dass wir nicht mehr von Wahlen im alten Sinne sprechen könnten. Die Taktik, Gegner des Präsidenten als Verräter zu diffamieren, würde in solch einer Situation gut funktionieren.
