Stay the Course?

I was listening to President Bush's press conference today. As an informed citizen, I've always thought it critically important to keep myself up to date on current events, administration policy, etc. In the past few years I've generally avoided listening to him whenever possible, mostly because I end up yelling at the radio. Also, since the administration has been something of a broken record for several years now, I guess I haven't felt it necessary to listen to Bush's misguided, unreflective pronouncements. The president's use of language (dripping, as it is with ideologically-charged words designed to key into emotions but otherwise utterly lacking in substance) seems to me the ultimate catachrestic endeavor. Of course, his choice of words is made to elicit fear amongst voters: fear of change, fear of taking responsibility for our past choices, fear of attack from vague, ill-defined threats.

His urgings to "stay the course" over the past several years have started to fall out of favor in the public. It's about time. The phrase has never made much sense to me, since it implies that self-reflection about the Bush Administration's Iraq policy is off-limits, anti-patriotic, and somehow a bad thing. "Staying the course" also carries with it a host of problems, since it also implies that we Americans supposedly accept the assumptions that Bush does: that it was correct to attack Iraq, that finding/destroying alleged weapons of mass-destruction was the reason to attack Iraq, that it is sound policy to plunge a country into civil war in the name of "taking the fight to the terrorists" (i.e. the terrorists that didn't exist in Iraq before we invaded their country).

It is comforting to see Americans beginning to wake up from their long slumber and recognize that the Bush Administration's "stay the course" policy--along with most of its undergirding assumptions--is a dangerous one. They have an opportunity on November 7th to send a message to the Bush Administration that it has clearly failed the course.