There is no way to guess what Bush may perpetrate, now that he has been re-elected by his people. His ego has been blown up to giant proportions, reaffirming what the Greek fabulist Aesop said some 27 centuries ago: "The smaller the mind the greater the conceit."
He has kicked out the hapless, feeble Colin Powell (as David Ben-Gurion eliminated Moshe Sharett in preparation for his 1956 onslaught on Egypt) and appointed Condoleezza Rice, his personal servant (as Ben-Gurion replaced Sharett with Golda Meir.)
Now the order is "clear the deck for action". On this deck, Bush is a loose cannon, a danger to everyone around. The results of these elections may be viewed by history as a worldwide catastrophe.
In domestic affairs, he may cause similar disasters. In the name of "American values", he is about to destroy one of the foremost American values: the separation of Church and State. His is the religion of a "born again" convert, a primitive religion without morality and compassion. Imposing this religion on all fields of life – from the prohibition of abortions and same-sex marriages to the revision of schoolbooks – may push society centuries back and void the constitution. After four more years of this, America may be a very different country from the one we loved and admired in our youth.
A friend of mine asserts that there are two souls residing in the American nation, a good and a bad one. That may be true for every nation, including even Israel and Palestine, but in America it is much more extreme. There is the America of Thomas Jefferson (even if he liberated his slaves only on his death), Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, the America of ideals, the Marshall Plan, science and the arts. And there is the America of the genocide perpetrated against the Native Americans, the country of slave traders and the Wild West myth, the America of Hiroshima, of Joe McCarthy, of segregation and of Vietnam, the violent and repressive America.
During Bush’s second term, this second America may reach new depths of ugliness and brutality. It may offer the whole world a model of oppression. I would not want my country, Israel, to be identified with such an America. Any advantage we can derive from it may well turn out to be short-term, the damage long-lasting, and perhaps irreversible.
One of the advantages of the US constitution is that Bush cannot be re-elected for a third term. As the popular Israeli song goes: "We survived Pharaoh, we shall survive this, too." Perhaps this could become an anthem for the whole world.