Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Gonzales' Father's Best Days

Throughout his ordeals of the past months and again yesterday at the climax, our outgoing Attorney General kept repeating the mantra, “Even my worst days have been better than my father’s best days.”

In clinging so fiercely to his own achievement of the American Dream, Gonzales was unwittingly evoking one of the nightmares of the Administration he served--reversing two centuries of constant upward progress from one generation to the next.

This spring, the “American Mobility Report” showed young men today worse off financially than their fathers were at the same age, a reversal of the generational advances that have made the “Land of Opportunity” a reality from the start.

In March, three out of every four Americans in a Pew Research Center poll said they believed that “the rich just get richer while the poor just get poorer.”

Gonzales’ benefactor George Bush made it possible for him to outdo his immigrant laborer father but, by widening the gap between rich and poor, has been pulling up the drawbridge for new generations still mired in poverty.

It seems to have escaped the Attorney General’s notice that he was faithfully serving a President who has been busy denying the possibilities that were open to him to millions like him who followed.

1 comment:

dguzman said...

Just found your blog, and I had to agree with you on this post. As a hispanic, it gauls me to see other people of color vote republican; the most infuriating are the ones who vote red because of their "family values." (See Foley, Craig, Vitter, Cunningham, DeLay, and all those other closet-cases/ sex freaks/ all-out thieves)

Bush and his ilk have done everything they can to widen the chasm between the rich and the poor, the white and the "other." And yet millions of people of color will vote republican again, buying into their lies about safety and family and anti-gay and anti-abortion.