Much was made of Cheney’s group’s membership and activities, including the extreme secrecy surrounding it. An uproar over the taskforce led Congress to investigate and even file a lawsuit to gain more information, although their efforts were unsuccessful. The Washington Post reported,

“One of the first visitors, on Feb. 14 [2001], was James J. Rouse, then vice president of Exxon Mobil and a major donor to the Bush inauguration; a week later, longtime Bush supporter Kenneth L. Lay, then head of Enron Corp., came by for the first of two meetings. On March 5, some of the country’s biggest electric utilities, including Duke Energy and Constellation Energy Group, had an audience with the task force staff.”

“Jack N. Gerard, then with the National Mining Association, had a meeting with Lundquist and other [Energy Task Force] staffers in February. He urged the administration to give the Energy Department responsibility for promoting technology for easing global warming and to keep the issue away from the Environmental Protection Agency, which could issue regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. The administration adopted that position.”

With a administration run by former energy magnates, and advised by and outsourced to corporate America, it is both unsurprising and no coincidence that now, the economy is the worst it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s, our dependence of foreign energy is at an all-time high, and efforts to fight global warming are all but non-existent. And it is somewhat ironic that today, the same day vice-president Biden announces the creation of his middle-class task force, his predecessor’s beneficiary, ExxonMobil, announces a full-year profit of $45.2 billion, setting a new company and U.S. record.

It took less than eight years for Bush administration policies and ideologies to destroy this nation economically, politically, and morally. President Obama and vice-president Biden have taken appropriate steps on numerous fronts to right the ship of state. It’s time the Right, which is locked in a deep battle for its identity and ideology today, open its eyes and recognize its policies are wrong, and realize it has wrecked America, wounded its people, and begin to apologize.

The punditocracy is swimming in an ocean of its own hysteria, awash with its own failed analysis and prediction, and flailing about now, attempting to make sense of a sea-change in the perception of where the American psyche has landed. Much like a game of “pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey” they are poking the wall, blind-folded. Or, perhaps they imagine themselves as Goldilocks: “Center-Left”? No. Too hot! “Center-Right”? No. Too cold! “Center”? Just right! (Except, it’s not!)

In truth, Americans are far more complex, mired in decades of religious and social branding that has outlived its usefulness, and left us with nameplates that utterly fail and are inconsistent with our current beliefs. Yes, America has changed. Americans have changed. If there’s one thing that America does, it is change. And yet, the Right is tripping over itself today, (and it will be even more tomorrow,) trying desperately to (1) smoke out those it considers to be its inner Benedict Arnolds; (2) stamp out any and all discussion about its failure, and grab this opportunity to immediately move the party as far right as possible; and (3) do what it does best: throw stones at Democrats.

Here we are, one week to the day that America decided not that it wanted a black president, but that it wanted a smart president. After eight years of leadership by the man voted “the guy I’d most like to have a beer with“, America decided this time it would try brains over beer. (We even decided to vote against the husband of a beer-queen!) Every indication, including Obama’s choice of Chief of Staff, his successful first news conference as president-elect, and yesterday’s meeting with outgoing president Bush, says that Obama is on the right track. His team has already put together a plan to undo some of the damage the soon-to-be-former president inflicted on this nation, and his approval ratings are the mirror image of Mr. Bush’s. CNN’s latest poll offers Americans leery of Obama this reassurance:

“So far, Obama seems to be meeting the public’s high expectations. Two-thirds of all Americans have a positive view of what he has done since he was elected president, and three-quarters think he will do a good job as president.”

So, indeed, what does all this say about where we are? Is the a post-partisan period? A post-racial period? Are Americans now officially “Center-Left”? Is, as Pat Buchanan said last week, the Conservative Era dead? Are we, as Bill Kristol seems to still believe, still “Center-Right“? No, to all the above.

The problem America faces is one that manifest destiny began in the 19th century. Back then, we became a big country with not a lot of folks in it. 17.1 million, to be exact. Today, we are a country of 305.6 million, almost eighteen times as many people as we were 170 years ago. And that’s just too many people who are daily flooded with information and mis-information, most of whom are tethered with beliefs about what constitutes “right” and “wrong”, as well as “right” and “left”. And those views and beliefs are, now more than ever, subject to change. 

The question is not “Is America a Center-Right or a Center-Left country?”. The question is, as a country, what parts of those platforms do we want to embrace, and what parts do we want to discard? And then, how do we get there? And finally, who do we choose to make certain we do?

Three thousand six words that crescendoed with thirty four words that, much like the argument about last week’s $700+ billion bailout, was the “slam-dunk” argument convincing Americans that the risk of not going to war far outweighed the risk of going to war:

America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

For many Americans, including myself, the image of a mushroom cloud, perhaps over my home in my beloved Manhattan, was far too compelling to ignore any longer. And Bush did succeed in taking us to war, through fear and intimidation, but with little facts, as it now appears he has succeeded in taking us to the cleaners, through fear and intimidation, but with little facts.

Though early in the race, we are already seeing signs of success similar to those we saw under his calamitous reign over the war: huge drops in the markets, worldwide, loss of confidence, worldwide, loss of personal net-worth, worldwide, loss of jobs, worldwide. Yesterday’s (albeit somewhat recovered but nevertheless historic) 800 point drop in the DOW, Russian markets having to close twice, even the fact that the second most-Googled term right now is “commercial paper”, leads anyone to believe that we are in for a long, cold winter, and unfortunately spring, summer, and fall.

No one is expecting any economy to recover in the near term. Bush’s fear mongering has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, although not in the form he predicted. He has been wrong on every count. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The markets essentially collapsed despite passage of the $700+ billion bailout bill. We learned Friday that another 159,000 jobs were lost in September, the ninth straight month of job losses, adding up to three quarters of a million lost jobs this year alone. Unemployment stands at a staggering 6.1%. On his Sunday talk show, John McLaughlin predicted next year unemployment will go over 11%. 

Have no doubt, Americans now have images of bread lines entering their heads. Right now, 60% of Americans “believe another economic depression is likely“. There is a huge rise in the use of the words “fear” and “panic” in the media. And for all this, we have Mr. Bush’s incompetence, ignorance, and lack of intelligence to blame. Right now, I pray for an “elite president”. 

By the way, President Bush had the audacity to quote John F. Kennedy in the very next sentence of his “Mushroom Cloud” speech.

As President Kennedy said in October of 1962: “Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small.

If only Bush had listened to the words he had repeated. Let me leave you, and President Bush, and Senator McCain with another quote from John F. Kennedy, from his inauguration in 1961:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.