[Mb-civic] FW: Nancy Reagan to Bush: 'We Don't Support Your Re-Election' (and more)

[Michael Butler]

------ Forwarded Message
From: ean at sbcglobal.net
Reply-To: ean at sbcglobal.net
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 20:54:50 -0700
To: ean at sbcglobal.net
Subject: Nancy Reagan to Bush: 'We Don't Support Your Re-Election' (and
more)



The widow of former President, and Republican icon, Ronald
Reagan has told the GOP she wants nothing to do with their
upcoming national convention or the re-election campaign of
President George W. Bush.
Nancy Reagan turned down numerous invitations to appear at
the Republican National Convention and has warned the Bush
campaign she will not tolerate any use of her or her late
husbands words or images in the President’s re-election effort.
“Mrs. Reagan does not support President Bush’s re-election and
neither to most members of the President’s family,” says a
spokesman for the former First Lady.
Reagan’s son, Ron, spoke at the just-concluded Democratic
National Convention and writes in next month’s Esquire
magazine that “George W. Bush and his administration have
taken normal mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies
of convenience. They traffic in big lies.”
Ron Reagan is joined by his sister Patty in opposing Bush’s re-
election effort. Only brother Michael Reagan, a conservative talk
show host, supports the President and claims Ron is
manipulating his mother.
Unlike the other Reagan children, Michael is not Reagan’s
biological child. He was adopted by Reagan during the actor’s
first marriage to actress Jane Wyman and often complains that
his stepmother, Nancy, likes Ron best.
“He is her favorite,” Michael Reagan told Fox News. “Ron can do
no wrong. I mean, basically that's it, Ron can do no wrong.”
Ron, however, claims George W. Bush has destroyed the
Republican Party his father helped build.
“My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone
but himself,” Reagan writes in Esquire. “His Republican Party,
furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its
cringing obeisance to the religious right.”
The Reagans’ split with Bush and the party centers around stem
cell research which many believe can help find a cure for
Alzheimer’s, the disease that crippled President Reagan in his
final years. Bush and the ultra-conservative wing of the
Republican Party oppose use of new stem cells. The Reagans,
with the exception of Michael, support such use.
There’s more to the feud than that, however. Nancy Reagan has
told close followers she believes Bush and the current Republican
leadership have divided America with their extreme views. She
has told Republican leaders she wants nothing to do with the
party or Bush.
During the week of Reagan’s funeral, the former First Lady “went
ballistic” when she learned the Bush campaign was test
marketing new ads that used Reagan’s photos and speeches in an
effort to show he supported Bush and his re-election. She
personally called Republican Party Chief Ed Gillespie to demand
the ads be destroyed.
Republican strategists admit the ads were produced but never
ran. They were pulled after scoring poorly with focus groups
where viewers found them in “poor taste.”
“Mrs. Reagan doesn’t care why the ads were pulled. She just
wanted to make sure they never went on the air,” says a
spokesman for the First Lady. “She does care about whether or
not the memory of President Reagan is used for political
purposes.”
© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue

-------------------


The Case Against George W. Bush
By Ron Reagan for 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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