BuzzH
Well-known member
Kind of a long article, but worth the read.
THE TRUTH HURTS.
September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3
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 (butnot 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 simplycannot 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
> myfather'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
THE TRUTH HURTS.
September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3
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 (butnot 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 simplycannot 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
> myfather'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