Please post a comment after you read this, if even to say, "I read it, and was not persuaded by it at all."
-rob
The Case Against George W. Bush
By Ron Reagan
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes
clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it
was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify
such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their
long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt.
Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely
played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones,
you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the
country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The
Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits
asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No
cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people
were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had
always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew
Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian
language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual
channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but
not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly,
everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just
about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age
appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from
people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of
American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom:
dissent.
Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately,
overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper
discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on
the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage
for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were
reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar
balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side
comparison‹Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush‹and it's no surprise who
suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political
gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to
Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free
world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol
rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood‹a portrait of my father and the words NOW
THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.
The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool,
Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush
administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various
commissions and committees‹Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember how
many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John
Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as
if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him‹these were a
continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too‹a reminder of how certain
environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People
noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back
on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide
liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.
Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their
accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua
franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration
have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of
convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they
traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and,
ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And
people, finally, have started catching on.
None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The
far-right wing of the country‹nearly one third of us by some
estimates‹continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid
(liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush
could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their
vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to
genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a
crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a
hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed
by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the
scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats,
intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it
becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe
wackos.
Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One
that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people,
but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so
knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply
cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty
of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's
not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at
the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's
critique of George W. Bush.
THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection‹which the
administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate‹involve our
putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq.
During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more "humble"
foreign policy. "I would take the use of force very seriously," he said. "I
would be guarded in my approach." Other countries would resent us "if we're
an arrogant nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation building." "Our
military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets
overextended, morale drops." International cooperation and consensus
building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration's approach to the
larger world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as
president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off
adventuring in the Middle East.
But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on
September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge
of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and
have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland
again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was
complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the
atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?
Well, no.
As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime "terror
czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the
enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. "From the
start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could
take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the
same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt
with first; that's where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the
Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup
course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our
representatives) that war was justified.
The real‹but elusive‹prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden,
was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News‹the
cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House‹told me a year ago that mere mention
of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded
that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became
International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had
been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less
than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the
first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the
north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and
whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed
or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a
threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth.
Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft,
drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the
nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained,
"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical
weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." We "know" Iraq
possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We
even "know" where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo,
70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the
World Trade Center.
ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since discovered,
were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But
contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war.
Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam
was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.
And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been justified
in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the
envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly
mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of
themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So
were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White
House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the
first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us
have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of
women's panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing
him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet
plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or
merely "sleep management"?
Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the
administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy.
Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant
bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants
would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't "represent the best of
what America's all about." As anyone who'd watched the proceedings of the
9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual
administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The
appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including
the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's
primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for
many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an
entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question
Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?
The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and
occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American
public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and
other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but
were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but
they don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don't trust us
because they don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There
is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is
sovereign, but we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got
him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll
be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place,
only with rose petals and easy coochie.
This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical
"Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA and in the
administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But
the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you
wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own
imagining.
And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the same
place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world
twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and
$32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in
his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various
careers, has never had a job the way you have a job‹where not showing up one
morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it
difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens
who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration
since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to
worry that he couldn't afford the best available health care for his
children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may
be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks
about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is
filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In
Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes.
Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When
the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking
shrimp toast out of the carpet.
ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their
backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political
suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were
simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While
the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the
nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic.
Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps
embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term
self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged
rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit,
perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during
the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His
untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally
acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications
typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was
portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was
a given. None of that "what the meaning of is is" business for him. And, God
knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al
Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained
like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He
would spend valuable weeks explaining away statements‹"I invented the
Internet"‹that he never made in the first place. All this left the coast
pretty clear for Bush.
Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells
two obvious‹if not exactly earth-shattering‹lies and is not challenged.
First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights while governor
of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure,
only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law
without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him
during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These
misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then
quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and
whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha
male."
Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his
team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the
White House, they picked up where they left off.
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was
in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet Goat," was
whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been
entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances‹for all anyone knew at the
time, Washington might still have been under attack‹the appearance was,
shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a
threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief
political advisor, Karl Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence to
that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such
threat.
Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham
Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush
addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in
Iraq‹whatever that may have been‹was far from accomplished. "Major combat
operations," as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans
were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the
questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to
"responsibility and accountability": It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a
bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature
triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.
More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's dishonesty
concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the
country's lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza
Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that "no one
could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact,
terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June
2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning
that "it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near
future, within several weeks." Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in
the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of
hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times,
after the second of these briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack
Inside United States," was delivered to the president at his ranch in
Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent most
of the day fishing." This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as
"historical" in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the
telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to
go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of
security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the
carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first
hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that
stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The
banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a
mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would
have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and
immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some
respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's
White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor
gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth.
But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as
a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be
fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As
Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully inhabited"
the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and
vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush
flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with
the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't speak but because
he doesn't bother to think.
GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for
office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the
focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from
the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a
"base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal
evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and
Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical
Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in the bathtub." That base also
encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and
assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of
them‹"partial birth" abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional
amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to
embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts
about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their
worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy.
But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy,
panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio,
Bush's former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives,
once told this magazine, "What you've got is everything‹and I mean
everything‹being run by the political arm."
This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim
but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the
other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public
dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have
voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to
pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding
global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really
looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?
If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead,
Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a
wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the
horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up
enough to carry him to another term.
UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a
personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One
conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has already
discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former
president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will
not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly
know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully‹once during my
father's presidency and once during my father's funeral. I'll acknowledge
occasional annoyance at the pretense that he's somehow a clone of my father,
but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father,
acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His
Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with
its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its
kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don't look
in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I
write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is
plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current
administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history,
one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the
wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly
grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and
ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his
allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?
Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot
expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House.
Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can
restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper
sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.