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What Happened to Those Bush/Cheney Bumperstickers?

 

Has anyone seen a car with one of those 2004 “Bush/Cheney” bumper stickers on it lately? It’s been days since I’ve noticed one.

My community, which is about 50 percent Republican, used to be full of them, mostly pasted on the backs of hulking SUVs and brightly colored Hummers.

Suddenly, I’m just not seeing the things anymore. I suppose it’s possible that they all just fell off, but then why am I still seeing Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers? (And besides, The Bush stickers from the 2000 campaign seemed to hand around on cars for years. I seem to remember seeing some even last year.)

No, I suspect something else is at work: buyers’ remorse, or maybe shame.

At this point, it must be a little embarrassing to have a sticker on your car broadcasting the fact that you voted for those two clowns.

The Zogby poll conducted between Oct. 29 and Nov. 2 found that even among Republicans, 29 percent say that they think Bush should be impeached if he lied about the reasons for going to war against Iraq. The percentage can only have risen since then, as more evidence comes out that there’s no reason for the “if.”

It’s too early to predict how this tectonic shift in political attitudes will play out in the November congressional races across the country, but I’m guessing that my neighborhood is not that different from much of the red and purple parts of America, and that there are going to be a lot more contested House and even Senate races than people were expecting a few months back.

Iraq seems to be going predictably from bad to worse for the military and the administration. The Shiite-led government that Bush and his Neocon advisers placed their bets on is slaughtering Sunnis, who are certain to strike back. Everyone’s getting increasingly pissed at the US occupiers, and if the Pentagon follows through on the Bush/Rumsfeld plan to cut back on ground troops by increasing use of air power, with the resulting increase in “collateral damage” deaths of civilians, America’s popularity in Iraq will only decline over the next year, while Moktada Sadr’s rises.

Meanwhile, the Bush voodoo economic program of massive tax cuts for the rich and massive spending on the military is finally starting to tell. The US economy is slowing, housing prices are slumping, jobs are going south and abroad and, in a sign that inflation is nigh, the price of gold today spiked above $500 per ounce.

What’s missing from this picture?

Oh yeah. The Democrats. They’ve made a few feeble moves in Congress-enough to remind Republicans that they’re there-but so far, they haven’t even decided whether to block the appointment of Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

I’m still waiting for somebody on the left side of the aisle to toss an impeachment or at least a censor resolution into the hopper in the House, just to kick-start some discussion of the president’s crimes and abuses of power. Maybe they could start with Cheney, whose popularity is even lower than the president’s.

If they did that, they might even find some people starting to put “Vote Democrat” stickers on their Volvos and minivans again.

DAVE LINDORFF is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled “This Can’t be Happening!” is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com