[Mb-civic] The Case Against George W. Bush By Ron Reagan Esquire

[Michael Butler]

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    The Case Against George W. Bush
    By Ron Reagan 
    Esquire

     September 2004 Issue

     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 table full 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.

  

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