The Warm-Up Battle
Digby writes in his blog about feeling that the President's stumping for social-security "reform" is, well, hard to explain:
I think one of the things that is hurting Bush is the fact that he's putting so much energy into something so abstract and far away. He's supposed to be the dude who deals with bad guys, not some social engineer who's trying to fix some complicated future problem that isn't evidently broken. It's weird. It doesn't fit. … With all the problems we have in this world, does it make sense that the Republicans are so weirdly fixated on this?
I don't have an explanation yet, certainly not something coherent, but I believe that I'm beginning to see the pattern in ideas and analysis that I've been exploring (here and in my head) for the past several months.
The best way in would seem to be Robert Reich's explanation of the Right's notion of evil, and how eradicating evil is the most important thing to do. This notion can motivate invading Iraq, limiting equality for gays, censoring the media, etc. Realize that Social Security is not just a program, but also a symbol: it represents all the worst that was wrong about Roosevelt's New Deal, that abomination of Liberalism and curse on the modern world. Seen this way, Social Security is quite evidently a manifestation of an evil force lose in our society. It has been a thorn in the side of much-suffering reactionaries since the beginning, and they have been biding their time, waiting for an opportunity to kill the program and try to put the evil genie of social programs back in the bottle.
The time is here, and they are siezing the opportunity like there is no tomorrow (there may not be: for some this is all bound up in the effort to prepare the way for The Rapture and the second coming of Jesus). If they lose this battle, which may well be a warm up for Armageddon, much more is lost than just Social Security "reform". The battle itself is symbolic of the upcoming cosmic battle between good and evil, and evil must not be allowed to triumph.
Or something like that.