Are Republicans victims of battered person syndome?

Here and elsewhere, the long sad story of how the Bush Administration has abused the average U.S. citizen has been well documented and publicized.

• The disastrous war in Iraq is now understood to have been continuously marketed on false pretenses since Bush first proposed it. Opposition to continuing the lie and war is widespread - even among moderate Republicans (except those who are getting rich as private contractors in Iraq). Citizens will pay trillions of their tax dollars and sacrifice the blood of many of the nation's young people for this horrific mistake.
• Even teenagers understand that for the rest of their lives they likely will be paying off Bush's unprecedented, gigantic federal deficits - so far increasing the national debt by more than a four trillion dollars and nearly doubling it. The "free" money people get from Bush's tax cuts and rebates is not free (see my previous post). Today, nearly a tenth of taxes go just toward paying the interest on the national debt, with Bush's deficits responsible for half of that. (Many voters remember that Bill Clinton's fiscal discipline created four years of surpluses. Fewer realize that under Republican Presidents since 1948 we have been subjected to average annual increases in the national debt three times higher than under Democrats.) (Here's an even scarier analysis by a conservative economist.)
• Nearly everyone, except determined hermits, realizes that the Bush promise of getting government out of our lives was a lie regarding civil liberties. Sadly, it was true concerning protecting most of us from the consequences of natural disasters such as hurricanes and global climate change, and from greed and exploitation (a prime example being the subprime mortgage meltdown).

Yet many Republican voters support that party's nominee in 2008, John McCain, who promises very little change from present policies (see my previous post). Could they be suffering from battered person syndrome? A victim of this condition:

becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance. Often sufferers will even seek out their very abuser for comfort shortly after an incident of abuse.

Regulatory corruption and 9/11

There has been much written about how our civil liberties have been irrationally eroded after 9/11, and how burdensome air travel has become. What seems to have been forgotten is that a significant factor in 9/11 was our corrupt regulatory system. The FAA had become another federal agency largely unable to regulate because of industry lobbying. The airlines resisted pre-9/11 FAA proposals to strengthen cockpit doors, for example. Failing to require those doors be strengthened was one of nine fatal mistakes made by the government that could have prevented the tragedy, according to the 9/11 Commission.

The industry also was not following passenger screening rules, and the FAA was not holding airlines accountable for this. Some of the hijackers paid for tickets in cash at the airport just before their flights, which should have triggered additional screening. What's more, the hijackers did this several times before 9/11 as a test, and none were subjected to additional checks. If regulations had been followed, the hijackers might have been caught, since some were already on watch lists and the FBI was trying to find them.

Our safety has gotten worse, not better, since 9/11, because in the name of security, we vote for politicians who simultaneously promise more security and preach that we'd all be better off if government just left business alone. In contrast to the some of the overreaction in airline security, regulation abdication by government has made us less safe in so many other ways. For example, although we may be less likely to die in a hijacked airplane, our kids and our pets are more likely to die from tainted food or dangerous toys.