Lots of well written stuff coming out about this election... I liked these articles, People I respect are getting very upset at being portrayed as traitors, idiots, misguided, Anti American and all the rest of the epithets being flung at us by the hate mongers on the TV and radio, not to mention the politicians at the podium trying to pretend they represent all of America...
Nicholas Kristof
Kinda comparison of GW to Henry V
Great goals of 2000 Compares what GW promised in 2000 to what he has actually done Maureen Dowd "It's always amusing to watch Republicans try to get down" Molly Ivins
"Unmitigated gall." Bush as Commander?
"a gross rewriting of history,"
A little Bush History, what all Americans should know about their President
The Missing Year More Bush History, this is very interesting
Purple Heart Bandaids Some remarks by a Vietnam Vet
8 loathsome things about the GOP Wow... Excellent read
Greg Palast A very sobering reality check about "Ownership"
By Brad Kennedy
It's been thirty-seven years since I was lucky and returned from serving in Vietnam. I volunteered for the draft and ultimately served as a forward observer for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. I still feel the horror of that war. Vietnam was like a bad dream where a monster was in control, reaching in and ripping out hearts and heads or pulling off arms and legs--American and Vietnamese. We never knew who was next. To escape its grasp was just the luck of the draw.
The longer we were in that dream, the clearer we saw there were actually four monsters--North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and American. We came to see ourselves as tiny parts of the American monster. Some made up the legs, others the arms and the brain. We forward observers were the eyes. Together, we were perpetrating outrages as surely as the other monsters were. These acts were against our will, for certain. We were a monster run amok.
In our fear and our horror, we had only one thing going for us--each other. No matter where or what unit an American was from, he was our brother. Creed or color or mother country were of no account. Our bonds of brotherhood seemed like they would last forever. Forged of love, they were our best hope for salvation. It was like we all had the same DNA, though that of a monster.
Maybe because I have spent so much time thinking and writing about the war, I've become addicted to its pain. I see Vietnamese smiling in a hootch one moment, shrieking and flailing amid flaming havoc the next. I hear my friends laughing one second, then see them frozen in timelessness forever. But now, only now after all these years, I sense a new pain, a different one but one every bit as mournful. It is the pain of our veterans' bonds of brotherhood being torn apart. Where is the love and hope we prayed would save us from being cast to the wind? The monster stirs in the night when we savor our hard-earned sleep, contriving movements to tear us asunder. All over the country others feel it, too. This is no dream.
Who causes this pain? Some of us say John Kerry is to blame. They say he accepted medals he did not deserve and call him a liar. They tarred him for two weeks with these charges but couldn't make the feathers stick. By now overwhelming new evidence has appeared in support of the official records and against their allegations. The accusers neither apologize nor recant, seemingly because it never was about the award of his medals. Several of them freely admit their actions and allegations have far more to do with what Kerry did with his medals afterwards. Principally, they object to his throwing them over the Capitol building's fence in protest of the war, his public appearance(s) with Jane Fonda, and his raising the subject of war crimes in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. The war crimes statement seems to be the
flash-point issue.
These matters are filled with high-octane emotional charge, especially for Vietnam veterans. But righteous indignation is justified only when it's right. Sincere folks have two reasons to be wary:
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First, the people attacking Kerry already have shown they will make false charges against him by their distortions about how he got his medals. |
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Second, their charges are made in the context of a national election for the purpose of influencing votes. |
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad takes excerpts from Kerry's testimony before the Fulbright Committee out of context in such a way that they easily can be misunderstood. The voiceover for the ad says he accused all Viet vets of war crimes. In truth, Kerry made clear that he was reporting what decorated vets had said about themselves in sworn testimony and that he was not accusing others. He bore testimony to the failures of the policymakers in Washington.
It is also true that supporters of President Bush have advised, assisted, and bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It is they, not John Kerry, who thirty years after the fact have brought up these distortions about war crimes in Vietnam and repeated them over and over and over again. It is these wizards behind the curtain, who were too good to serve in Vietnam, who now manipulate for partisan purpose the pain and grief this issue causes those of us who did. They have no shame and they envy our honor. Fellow veterans, stand your watch.
Why did John Kerry protest the war when he returned home? I can only speak for myself, since I did the same. I became convinced that Vietnam was not necessary to our national security, that we were doing more harm than good there, and that it was only a matter of time before the American people turned on a policy that claimed as many as five hundred American lives every week. Given that view, which history has sustained, it would have been a breach of the bonds of brotherhood I felt for the American troops still in Vietnam for me not to do all I could within our democratic system to correct an errant policy and bring them home alive.
I protested out of love for my brothers-in-arms.
When I visualize a sailor turning his boat back into gunfire to save a soldier from the water, I know that brotherly love steered that ship. One night John Kerry pulled one soldier from dangerous waters, the next he tried to pull hundreds of thousands more back to the safety of our own shores.
Brad Kennedy lives in New Jersey and served in the US Army in Vietnam from August 1966 to July 1967. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Blood and Country: A Soldier's Call.
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<http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?p=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=864>
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
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 SHLAND, Ore. — The most common literary allusion to
President Bush is Shakespeare's Prince Hal, the hard-drinking, wild-living young man who sobers up, reforms and emerges as the great English warrior King Henry V.
So, as the Republicans once again crown Mr. Bush as their nominee, I decided to seek lessons from an expert on King Henry who is also one of the shrewdest analysts of current American politics and international affairs. That's right: Shakespeare. I went to Ashland for my annual pilgrimage to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, then started thinking about what Shakespeare might say if he were speaking at the Republican convention this week.
The paramount lesson in Shakespeare's plays is that the world is full of nuances and uncertainties, and that leaders self-destruct when they are too rigid, too sure of themselves or - Mr. President, lend me your ears - too intoxicated by moral clarity.
You see Shakespeare's passion for nuance in the way he portrays Henry V himself (you also see his prurience, for "Henry V" is Shakespeare's most obscene play, laced with X-rated double-entendres that make it an attractive introduction to the Bard for teenagers).
Shakespeare admires Henry, who, like Mr. Bush, is strong, decisive and funny to be around, as well as a victor in overseas battles that help soothe doubts about his legitimacy. Thus for several hundred years, the play "Henry V" was regarded as a celebration of Henry's invasions of France, and for that reason George Bernard Shaw and other liberal critics recoiled from it.
Yet beginning in the 20th century, critics began to see another subtext in "Henry V": an unblinking examination of the brutality and inevitable excesses of war, even depicting the Abu Ghraib scandal of the 15th century: Henry's order to murder French prisoners at Agincourt. Shakespeare's play can be seen as scorning the empty-headed jingoism that inflicts so much suffering as the ruler wraps himself in the flag. As Shakespeare writes in "Henry V" about wars of choice:
"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such and such a place,' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared there are few die well that die in a battle."
A related lesson for Mr. Bush, if he has time to read Shakespeare, is the inevitability of intelligence failures. In just about every play, characters put their faith in information that turns out to be catastrophically untrue. Lear believes his elder daughters; Romeo believes that Juliet is dead; Othello believes Iago's lies.
Shakespeare begins "Henry IV, Part 2," with the character of Rumor (who could today be played by Ahmad Chalabi), and he shows how kings get in trouble by relying on partial truths or flattery spun by sycophants like Goneril Tenet and Regan Wolfowitz.
"All these figures in Shakespeare suffer from hubris, and that's what W. is suffering from," says Kenneth Albers, a veteran Shakespearean actor who is playing Lear in Ashland.
Indeed, the only person who seems to provide Shakespeare's kings with sound advice is the court fool, who cannot be punished for saying unpalatable truths because jesting is his job. I urge Mr. Bush to appoint a White House fool.
Shakespeare is warning us against rash actions on the basis of flawed intelligence. Hamlet is sometimes seen as an indictment of indecision, but his "to be or not to be" soliloquy is a careful examination of the pros and cons of immediate action - a measured approach that Mr. Bush might have emulated before the Iraq war.
Instead, Mr. Bush emulates Coriolanus, a well-meaning Roman general and aristocrat whose war against barbarians leads to an early victory but who then proves so inflexible and intemperate that tragedy befalls him and his people.
Unless Mr. Bush learns to see nuance and act less rashly, he will be the Coriolanus of our age: a strong and decisive leader, imbued with great talent and initially celebrated for his leadership in a crisis, who ultimately fails himself and his nation because of his rigidity, superficiality and arrogance. (Back to Index)
washingtonpost.com
From His 'Great Goals' of 2000, President's Achievements Mixed
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2004; Page A01
NEW YORK, Sept. 1 -- George W. Bush accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Philadelphia four summers ago with a speech packed full of ambitious campaign promises.
He would overhaul Medicare, Social Security and public education; cut taxes; reinvigorate the military; restore civility to the political system; and help the poor with tax credits for health insurance, assistance buying homes and charitable-giving incentives. "We will use these good times for great goals," he said. "We will confront the hard issues."
Thursday night, President Bush will accept the party's nomination for a second term here with a mixed record on those hard issues. On some -- tax cuts and education -- he made enormous progress toward his goals. On others -- Medicare, the military and his "compassion" agenda -- he made partial progress. And on the rest -- Social Security and attempting to "change the tone" of Washington -- nothing much has changed.
Bush's 2000 acceptance speech was widely seen as having successfully introduced the nation to a leader with strong principles, clear policies and a determination to return dignity to the Oval Office after President Bill Clinton's scandals. The speech's main refrain -- "They had their chance. They have not led. We will." -- neatly encapsulated Bush's message to the largest audience the relatively little-known Texas governor had ever faced.
But the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, made the Bush presidency largely unrecognizable from the one he outlined in Philadelphia. He did not even mention terrorism in that speech, and the speech reflected the country's inward-looking priorities. After promising a "humble" foreign policy on the stump, his main non-domestic proposal that night was for a missile defense system first debated two decades earlier.
Sept. 11, said Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot, "redefined the planet." And it would be impossible to assess Bush's work toward his campaign promises without considering the way the attacks necessitated an entirely new agenda for his presidency: a Department of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against al Qaeda.
Even so, a look at Bush's record on his original promises shows that he was more successful at achieving specific policies such as tax cuts and changes in federal education support than he was at translating into specific achievement the broader promises he used in 2000 to present himself as "a different kind of Republican" -- a promise of bipartisan cooperation and help for the poor and disadvantaged.
This pattern could be reinforced if Bush wins a second term. Bush's hard-fought victories on tax cuts and national security have turned him into a polarizing figure, reducing the chances that he can command the sort of bipartisan majorities needed for ambitious proposals such as restoring Social Security's solvency, according to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said this week that he is "more concerned" about the loss of bipartisan cooperation than any other issue, including terrorism. "This administration made some big mistakes at the front end," he said. "They didn't develop relationships on the Hill." Hagel said he told Bush in early 2001 that "you're going to need the trust and relationships that you build on Capitol Hill. They didn't do that."
Campaign aides to Sen. John F. Kerry, Bush's Democratic opponent, put Bush's vow in 2000 to be a "uniter, not a divider" at the top of a list they have compiled under the title "Bush's Broken Promises."
Other unmet promises on the Democrats' list: Social Security, an HMO patients' bill of rights, a promise to renew the assault weapons ban, and his vows not to engage in nation building or to overcommit the armed forces. "President Bush made a lot of promises during his 2000 presidential campaign. The record shows it was all talk," said David Sirota of the anti-Bush Center for American Progress.
The Bush campaign says that Bush has done his part to encourage bipartisanship but that Democrats have not joined him. "His example has been steady throughout," said Racicot, asserting that Bush has refrained from personal attacks on his opponents.
In its own document, "Promises Kept," the Bush campaign is silent on Social Security and reducing partisanship. Rather, the campaign counters that the president has achieved many other of his promises beyond tax cuts and education: a prescription drug benefit under Medicare, a ban on what critics call "partial-birth" abortions, and progress on matters including homeownership and missile defense.
"Even with what happened" on Sept. 11, said Racicot, "I think you'll find an extraordinarily large number [of promises] have been accomplished."
Social Security Remains Unrepaired
In his acceptance speech four years ago Bush outlined what he considered the hard issues -- "threats to our national security, threats to our health and retirement security, before the challenges of our time become crises for our children. And we will extend the promise of prosperity to every forgotten corner of this country."
Saying he would "write not footnotes but chapters in the American story," Bush memorably dismissed the Clinton years: "Our current president embodied the potential of a generation. So many talents. So much charm. Such great skill. But, in the end, to what end? So much promise, to no great purpose."
First on Bush's list that night was reforming Medicare and Social Security. "We will strengthen Social Security and Medicare for the greatest generation and for generations to come," he promised. He vowed to put Medicare on "firm financial ground" and to make prescription drugs "affordable" for Medicare recipients.
And Social Security, he said, "has been called the third rail of American politics, the one you're not supposed to touch because it might shock you. But if you don't touch it, you cannot fix it. And I intend to fix it."
Four years later, Social Security is untouched and unfixed. And, with the government going from budget surplus to deficit, Bush has also had to retreat on his promise not to spend the Social Security surplus. With Sept. 11 distracting his administration's attention, and bitter partisanship making success unlikely, Bush retreated. He did appoint a commission to study the matter, but the White House did not pursue the restructuring and the private savings accounts for younger workers that Bush proposed.
On Medicare, Bush got half of what he wanted. Last year, he succeeded in getting a prescription-drug benefit through Congress -- the first in the Medicare program's four-decade history. The expansion wound up costing double what Bush projected and produced protests from many of Bush's fellow conservatives. But while the Medicare legislation made nods toward structural changes in the program, it did little to address the program's long-term solvency or to control increasing costs.
Second on Bush's list four years ago was a promise of more accountability in schools, an end to "social promotion" of unqualified students, and making sure all children can read.
The No Child Left Behind legislation passed a year into the president's term with broad bipartisan support requires new reading and math standards in grades three through eight. The legislation also increased pressure on underperforming schools to give new options to students, including charter schools.
But Democrats charge that Bush has failed in his promise to increase education funding, complaining that he has proposed education spending at levels far below those agreed to in the No Child Left Behind legislation. They also say that while Bush promised to "fully fund" the Pell grant program for college students by increasing the maximum first-year grant to $5,100, he has frozen the maximum grant at $4,050 in his 2005 budget. Even so, federal education funding has increased (in large part because Congress approved more than Bush requested) and the Pell grant program has expanded.
Third on Bush's acceptance speech agenda was tax cuts. He promised a major reduction in taxes, including abolition of the estate tax and a reduction in all tax rates, including lowering the bottom rate of 15 percent. Though Democrats complain about the fairness of Bush's tax cut, it is undeniable that he has largely fulfilled his promise. Federal income taxes for most taxpayers have been reduced, the bottom rate is now 10 percent, and the estate tax is set to be eliminated in 2010, albeit temporarily.
On the other hand, Bush has not made good on another promise from Philadelphia -- to reform the tax code -- and he plans to return to the subject in his speech Thursday. And he did not meet his campaign promise -- unmentioned in his acceptance speech -- to keep the budget balanced.
"There is money enough to take care of Social Security," he said in January 2000. "There is enough money to meet the basic needs of our government. And there is enough money to give the American people a substantial tax cut."
With the federal budget now in a record-level deficit, Bush said he made exceptions in the campaign for war, recession, and national emergency -- but there is no record of him mentioning such a caveat during the campaign.
Fourth on Bush's list during his acceptance speech came foreign policy and defense. In retrospect, Bush's promises that night regarding the military were relatively modest: better pay, better equipment, fewer nuclear weapons, and the start of a missile defense system. And the Bush campaign lists many accomplishments in those areas: Libya abandoning its nuclear ambitions, the exposure of a nuclear proliferation ring in Pakistan, and Bush's proposal of an international "Proliferation Security Initiative." In addition, the first components of a missile defense system will go online later this year, and Bush says pay for the troops is up almost 21 percent.
Democrats say Bush has not done enough on nuclear proliferation. For example, despite his professed support for the Nunn-Lugar threat reduction program, which helps to prevent spread of the old Soviet nuclear weapons, Bush's 2005 budget proposes cuts to Nunn-Lugar efforts. Democrats also say the military's engagement in Iraq -- which has forced extended tours of duty and activation of reserves -- violates Bush's promise not to "overextend" the military, which he accused Bill Clinton of doing during the 2000 campaign.
The last item on his list was critical to Bush's success in reaching moderate and Democratic voters -- a range of social policies loosely grouped under what the White House calls his "compassion agenda." These included boosting religious charities, help with housing and health insurance for low-income Americans, a new round of welfare reform and a tax credit that would boost donations to charities.
Bush did create a White House office for "Faith Based and Community Initiatives" and passed modest housing and adoption initiatives. But legislation aimed at increasing the role of religious charities was foiled by disputes over discrimination. And the centerpiece of Bush's effort, a 10-year, $90 billion plan to increase charitable donations by giving deductions to those who do not itemize tax returns, was cut to $ 6 billion by the House in agreement with the White House, and never passed the Senate. Bush's promised welfare legislation has been postponed.
The 2000 Bush campaign faulted Clinton for an expansion in the rolls of the uninsured, to 43 million, and said, "Bush will reverse this trend by making health insurance affordable for hardworking low-income families." But that did not happen, and the number of uninsured continued to grow -- by about 5 million during Bush's presidency -- along with health care costs. The White House, which blames Congress, routinely asked lawmakers for tax credits for health care but never made the issue a top priority.
Bush made good on another of the social-policy promises in his acceptance speech, signing a ban on the procedure known as "partial-birth" abortions after Clinton thwarted years of legislative efforts to do so. But another promise -- "enforcing our nation's gun laws" -- has been undermined by his turnabout on his pledge to renew the ban on assault weapons.
That was not the only instance of Bush reversing course from the policies he endorsed in the campaign. He dropped his opposition to campaign finance reform, nation building, and hybrid-powered cars. And he almost immediately dropped his pledge to put limits on carbon dioxide emissions; the White House said the original promise to do so had been a mistake.
A More Pointed Partisan Tone
Many of the policies Bush has failed to implement -- energy, patients' rights, Medicare, Social Security and welfare reforms, and help for religious charities -- have a common culprit: partisan disputes on Capitol Hill. Some of that was to be expected because of Bush's election controversy and the near-parity of the two parties in Congress.
"I don't have enemies to fight," Bush said in his acceptance speech. "I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect."
Instead, lawmakers in both parties say the tone may be worse than ever. Bush's use of recess appointments to put controversial judges on the bench has inflamed Democrats. The administration's reluctance to share information with Congress has produced bitterness. And the very style that allowed Bush to pass his tax cuts in 2001 -- a refusal to compromise -- made lawmakers reluctant to cooperate on other issues.
After a brief period of bipartisan support following the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush actively campaigned against Democrats in the 2002 elections, charging that they cared more about special interests than about Americans' security. The relationship reached a new low this summer when Vice President Cheney, approached by a Democratic critic during a photo-taking session on the Senate floor, at first recoiled and then dispatched the senator with a vulgar phrase.
Bush campaign senior strategist Matthew Dowd said Wednesday that with the parties at near parity, a new tone is unlikely. "He'd like it to be that way," Dowd said, referring to the president. "It's hard to move that way."
(Back to Index)
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Cutups and Cutthroats
By MAUREEN DOWD
 always enjoy hearing about how a teenage Dick Cheney stood off to the side with buckets of water to put out Lynne's flaming batons.
But there was an even better moment during Claire Shipman's two-part "Good Morning America" interview at the Wyoming ranch this week. Trying to humanize Dr. No, ABC was let into the inner sanctum to watch Mr. Cheney take his 4-year-old granddaughter on her first solo horsie ride and hear how he's teaching his granddaughters fly-fishing.
Ms. Shipman asked the vice president "his greatest guilty pleasure."
His wife quickly interjected that it was fishing. But we all know, of course, it's global domination.
It's always amusing to watch Republicans try to get down. At convention time, they stop bilking Joe Lunchbox to act like Joe Lunchbox.
How awkward in Columbus, when W., hanging with Jack Nicklaus, noted that his grandfather was born there, so they should "send a homeboy back to Washington, D.C." Do they know a homeboy from a Lawn-Boy?
How you livin', dawg?
And speaking of dawgs, whuddup with that video of Barney debating that French poodle Fifi Kerry about taxes? By the time the twins finished their White House Valley Girl routine, and Karl Rove and Karen Hughes went all giddy in the sendup, the convention's arc was clear.
Highly scripted screwball moments designed to soothe fears that the Bushies are bullies alternate with high-octane, turbo moments designed to stir up fears that we won't be safe without the Bush bullies.
Unlike the arrogant Boston Kerry strategists, who focus-grouped and dial-a-metered their convention to death, scrubbing most of the direct attacks on President Bush, the arrogant Austin Bush strategists have encouraged their non-girlie-men speakers to put the pedal to the metal and flatten the poor Democrat who is windsurfing through his free fall.
Despite the fact that the economy is cratering, Iraq is teetering, Afghanistan is reverting to warlords, Dick Cheney is glowering at the world, the war on terror has created more acts of terror, Ahmad Chalabi is an accused spy for Iran and the Pentagon has an accused spy for Israel, Republicans felt so good about themselves that when Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was inspired to become a Republican by Richard Nixon, they exploded. When Tricky Dick is a hot applause line, they're feeling cocky.
Republicans are political killers. They are confident that Americans, in a 9/11 world, are going to be more drawn to political killers who have made some "miscalculations" on Iraq, as W. put it, than with a shaggy-haired Vietnam War protester whom Bush 41 compares to Hanoi Jane.
"I still have great difficulty with his coming back and making those statements before the Congress and throwing medals away," the president's father told Don Imus yesterday.
Republicans know that plunging ahead with a course of action, even if it becomes obvious it's wrong, is an easier political sell than flip-flopping, even if it's right.
When the president slipped, admitting that the war on terror is unwinnable - perhaps recognizing that terror's a tactic, not an enemy - he had to be saved later by Laura Bush, who fixed his stumble into nuance. Then Mr. Kerry made the mistake of responding in Bush black-and-white, calling the war on terror winnable.
While Democrats whined about the meanies and their Swift boat attacks, the G.O.P. juggernaut rolled on.
Zell Miller, playing Cotton Mather behind the cross-like lectern, made Mr. Cheney seem rational, with a maniacal litany of weapons he said Mr. Kerry had opposed that can destroy any mud hut in any third world country: B-1 and B-2 bombers, F-14A Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, Patriot and Trident missiles, and Aegis cruisers.
Just as the "third party" ad effort has been ferocious and misleading, so have some of the attack speeches here. Dick Cheney stomped on John Kerry the way he's stomped on the world. In fact, he stomped on Mr. Kerry for trying to get along with the world: "He talks about leading 'a more sensitive war on terror' as though Al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side." It's nice to know Mr. Cheney remembers Al Qaeda.
As others raged, Mr. Bush flew to New York and went to an Italian community center to eat pizza with Queens firemen. The homeboy was having a ruthless, but effective, week. (Back to Index)
Molly Ivins: 'Unmitigated gall'
Posted on Thursday, September 02 @ 09:57:00 EDT Daily Show hits nail on head with description of RNC
By Molly Ivins, Working For Change
AUSTIN, Texas -- Stephen Colbert, correspondent for "The Daily Show," the only news program to watch during the Republican convention, found the theme of this convention like a homing pigeon: "Unmitigated gall."
This convention alone would be enough to convince me that John Edwards is right about "two Americas," except I don't think he's gone far enough. These folks are in from another planet. They're living in an alternative reality. When is a fact a fact to these people? When did anyone ever find evidence Saddam Hussein had dog to do with Sept. 11?
It's all very well to claim our invasion of Iraq may yet bring about peace and democracy in the Middle East -- hey, miracles happen -- but when Rudy Giuliani assured us this "idealism" is in fact triumphing as he speaks, one must question the man's grip on sanity. Even the president is now claiming the disastrous occupation is the result of "catastrophic success." That seems to mean he thinks we won the war too fast.
Speaking of what Bush means, what a dumb flap over his obviously accidental misstatement that we can't win the war against terrorism. As I have often noted, even when Bush misspeaks you can usually tell what he meant to say. This little doozy was "clearified" the next day -- on that mighty organ of reliable information, The Rush Limbaugh Show -- only to be followed by Democrats chanting, "Flip-flop."
That level of stupefying pettiness over nothing should be legally limited to Republicans. Meanwhile, note that Bush is back to being "a war president." Just a few weeks ago, he was going around claiming to be "the peace president" every 10 minutes, after months of claiming to be "a war president." So that makes the new shift a flip-flip-flop.
One of my favorite moments of non-reality came from Education Secretary Rod Paige, formerly school superintendent in Houston, where the stats on student performance have been so badly twisted it is now a national scandal. It was Compassion Night at Madison Square Garden, so we were celebrating Republican domestic achievements, a short list unless you just make stuff up, such as, "All across America, test scores are rising, students are learning, the achievement gap is closing, teachers and principals are beaming with pride." Now you tell me if this guy is living in Never Never Land.
The party platform, written in large part by Phyllis Schafly and her Eagle Forum, condemns stem cell research, women's right to decide whether to bear a child under any circumstances, and gay people. Just as a historical curiosity, I present the fact that at the Republican Convention in New Orleans in 1988, Mrs. Schafly gave a party with the theme "Let the Good Times Roll," thus proving the enduring role of irony at political conventions.
The real theme of the convention is "George Bush Makes Us Safer," as dubious a proposition as Madonna's virginity. Tom Ridge is not only not speaking in primetime, he's not addressing this convention at all -- he's a non-person. In the current issue of Mother Jones magazine is a must-read by Matthew Brzezinski called "Red Alert." The "pull quote" is: "It was billed as America's frontline defense against terrorism. But badly underfunded, crippled by special interests and ignored by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has been relegated to bureaucratic obscurity."
Brzezinski reports, "... the administration's misplaced priorities --- particularly its obsession with Iraq --- have come at the expense of homeland security." What a mess. What a waste of money. What colossal ineptitude. It's so dispiriting to read about it, one can't even work up a Henry Higgins-like: "Safer? Ha!"
While I was prepared to listen to much rhetoric about Bush's stalwart firmness as he steers the ship of state in the wrong direction, I was startled to hear Giuliani try to make points over our falling out with so many allies.
Look, the Coalition of the Willing is a public embarrassment, a monument to diplomatic witlessness, not to mention open bribery. To blame others for our diplomatic failure is both fatuous and offensive. Then to repeat Bush's obnoxious little bully line, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists," is both stupid and dangerous.
The perception that we lack a decent respect for the opinions of mankind itself contributes to terrorism. Why encourage Americans, many of whom are already dangerously xenophobic, to treat the arguments of other nations with contemptuous dismissal? Especially when so many of them have been proved right?
Loved the Schwarzenegger speech and apologize again for having accidentally misappropriated the wonderful line of Clive James', the Australian journalist: "He looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts."
Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let the Dogs In? (Back to Index)
'Fans fawn, but Bush fails as commander'
Jay Bookman: Posted on Thursday, September 02 @ 09:58:14 EDT 
By Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New York City -- The goal of this week's GOP convention is not merely to nominate George W. Bush for re-election as president of the United States. Its planners have a far greater ambition, seeking to install the president in the pantheon of great wartime leaders alongside historic figures such as Roosevelt, Lincoln and Churchill.
Speaker after speaker, from Arnold all the way to Zell, have come to the podium to laud Bush's virtues as commander in chief, but the most remarkable contribution to the cause came from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In his speech Monday night, Giuliani recalled the horrible moment almost three years ago when he stared up at the burning towers of the World Trade Center and realized that those objects plummeting toward him from the sky were human beings who had hurled themselves from the top. At that moment, he said, he turned to a colleague and thanked God that our president was George Bush.
However, as critics of the president will point out, Bush himself was sitting transfixed in a Florida schoolroom in those minutes, clearly uncertain of what to do next.
So how should the president's performance as commander in chief be assessed? How well has he met the central challenges that confronted him and the nation in the aftermath of Sept. 11?
The most immediate of those challenges was to reassure a nation shaken to its core by the experience of watching thousands of their fellow Americans die on live television. All but the most virulent of the president's critics will concede that Bush met and exceeded that initial test of leadership, exuding an aura of confidence, strength and compassion in those early days that continues to pay political dividends for him even today.
The next challenge for the president was to strike and strike hard at those who had attacked us, both out of justified vengeance and as an act of self-defense. On this test, the record is mixed. We have succeeded in disrupting but not destroying the al-Qaida network, in part because we withheld troops from Afghanistan and hired local militias to do much of our fighting. It seems fair to say that on Sept. 12, 2001, most Americans would have been deeply disappointed and perhaps even shocked if they had known that Osama bin Laden would still be at large almost three years later.
Capturing bin Laden, however, was not the most important challenge facing Bush. The attacks of Sept. 11 taught us that there were no limits on the brutality that terrorists were willing to inflict, a lesson with particularly grim implications in an age when weapons of mass destruction have become more widespread. Recognizing that danger, President Bush publicly identified three rogue countries with the capacity to develop such weapons -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- and made them targets of U.S. efforts to force them to disarm. He eventually decided to invade and occupy one of those countries, Iraq, with consequences that will hound us for a long time.
In an interview Tuesday, Bush told Rush Limbaugh that no American president should ever take his country to war without first exhausting every diplomatic option, and he went on to claim that he had been forced to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had refused to disarm and because diplomacy had proved fruitless.
That is, to be kind, a gross rewriting of history, and it does not become more truthful simply because Bush himself seems to believe it.
Diplomacy had not been exhausted when we chose to go to war. Quite the contrary, diplomacy, combined with the very necessary threat of military action, had succeeded and was continuing to succeed. By the spring of 2003, Saddam had been forced to open up his entire country, including his precious palaces, to U.N. arms inspectors, and as those inspections went on week after week, they produced no evidence of weapons or weapons programs. The inspections ended only when they were pre-empted by Bush's decision to go to war.
If the inspections had been allowed to continue -- if we truly had tried to exhaust our diplomatic options -- we would have learned through peaceful means what we have so far sacrificed almost 1,000 American lives and almost $200 billion to discover: Far from refusing to disarm, as the president continues to claim, Saddam had actually dumped his illegal weapons of mass destruction years earlier.
With its initial justification for invasion rendered moot, the Bush administration has now embraced a larger mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. At best, it will be a generation before we know whether that effort will succeed, but the prospect of catastrophic failure is very real. Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an enthusiastic and early advocate of invasion, asserted Tuesday in New York that even with all of our setbacks in Iraq, "the odds of ultimate success are better than 50-50." When the optimistic outlook is 50-50, that tells you something.
And unfortunately, while we have been preoccupied with Iraq, the other two charter members of the axis of evil have become more dangerous. Over the past three years, Iran has made significant progress toward acquiring nuclear weapons, and North Korea is believed to have expanded its existing nuclear arsenal. If Bush was correct in stating that the biggest danger facing this country is the possession of nuclear weapons by rogue nations, then we are significantly less safe today than we were three years ago. More chilling yet, because of Iraq, we may not be able to muster the diplomatic credibility and military capability we would need to alter the course of events in those countries.
In other words, if we judge Bush's performance by the challenges that he set for himself and this nation in the wake of Sept. 11, he must be deemed a failure as commander in chief. And while his ability to don the external trappings of strong leadership has shielded him from that conclusion in the eyes of many, it cannot shield this nation from its consequences.
Jay Bookman is the AJC deputy editorial page editor.
? 2004 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Reprinted from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/index.html (Back to Index)
'High plains grifter: The life and crimes of George W. Bush'
Jeffrey St. Clair: Posted on Thursday, September 02 @ 09:59:31 EDT
By Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch
Part Two: Mark His Words
Sex and politics often seem to conflate in George W. Bush's mind. In 1975, young George, fresh out of Harvard Business School, followed his father to China, where he was keen testing the receptiveness of the Chinese to infusions of Texas capital. Soon bored by detailed discussions of international finance, Bush began hitting on his translators and other Chinese women. One Yale coed who came into Bush's orbit recalled: "He was always one of the fastest guys on campus in trying to get his hands in your pants." This friskiness didn't set well with the decorous crowd then running China and he was discreetly directed to evacuate the country in order to save his father, the new ambassador to Peking, further embarrassment.
During the 1988 Republican convention, David Fink, a reporter with the Hartford Courant, asked Bush what he talked about with his father when they weren't jawing about politics. "Pussy," George W. quipped. Take that mom.
In 1992, W. famously offered his services to his father's moribund re-election campaign. The younger Bush counseled the president to hire private investigators to rummage through the bedtrails of Clinton's sex life, hoping to ignite "bimbo eruptions." This advice coming from a man who, according to one of his friends, spent the 1970s "sleeping with every bimbo in West Texas, married or not." George Sr. (who was himself desperately trying to suppress talk of an affair with a State Department employee) demurred, patted Jr. on the head and followed the more tactful advice of Robert Teeter, with fatal results.
George W. vowed not to make the same political miscalculations as his father in his own 1994 run for governor of Texas. With the sepulchural Karl Rove as his political Svengali, Bush set his sights on Ann Richards, the gruff Democrat who ridiculed Bush's sense of privilege, "Little George was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." It was a campaign marked by unbridled viciousness, backroom slanders and outright lies. Bush didn't attack frontally; he sent surrogates to hurl the mud for him. Naturally, he won in a romp.
Bush's six-year tenure as governor of Texas was unremarkable by almost any standard. He was kept on a short leash by his handlers, Rove and Karen Hughes, and generally turned over policy-making to the yahoos in the Texas legislature. His resume of those days is familiar by now: he slashed taxes for the rich, injected religion into public schools and social welfare programs, signed a law permitting the carrying of concealed weapons in public buildings and churches, privatized public parks, turned Texas into the nation's most toxic state, sent children to adult prisons and supervised the execution of 152 death row inmates. During an interview with Larry King, Bush chortled about sending Karla Faye Tucker to her fatal encounter with death's needle, saying he had no regrets. Later he joked about the execution with his CNN doppleganger Tucker Carlson. Bush mimiced Karla Faye's pleas for mercy, whining
in a shrill falsetto: "Oh please don't kill me." Somebody give Bushtail a shot of Jack Daniels before he kills again.
The big change in Bush was his dramatic conversion to a messianic form of Christian fundamentalism. The happy-go-lucky cad of the 60s and 70s had withered away, replaced by a doltish and vindictive votary. His rebirth as a Christian zealot was famously midwifed by Billy Graham, who considered young George "almost like a son." According to Bush during a walk on the beach at Kinnebunkport, "Billy planted a mustard seed in my soul." The man has a felicity with metaphor.
The seed sprouted a few months later. In the notorious scene in the bathroom of a Colorado resort, Bush, head pounding from a night of drinking in celebration of his 40th birthday, plunged to his knees before the mirror and pleaded with the Almighty for a heavenly intervention. Lightning struck that morning. Bush, so the family legend goes, kicked the bottle and emerged as a fanatical believer in what he called "the intercessory power of prayer."
A few years later Bush, by then governor of Texas, offered readers of the Houston Chronicle a peek into the stern nature of his faith. "Only those who have accepted Jesus as their personal savoir will be permitted entry into heaven," Bush prophesied. Ten years down the road, Bush would do his best to send thousands of heathens to eternal damnation. Of course, Bush, having been granted the moral amnesty of being born-again, rarely attends formal church services.
* * *
Bush wasn't the early favorite of the Texas king makers to retake the presidency for the Republicans. That role fell to the newt-faced senator Phil Gramm, who had amassed a majestic campaign warchest. But no amount of money could soften Gramm's grotesque image and foul tongue. He was the hissing personification of the Republican ultras, an unrepentant whore for industry who seemed to take delight in savaging the poor, blacks and gays. Here's a taste of the Gramm technique: "Has anyone ever noticed that we live in a country where all of the poor people are fat?"
Gramm's dismal showing in 1996 told the Republican powerbrokers that they needed an image makeover, a candidate with Christian sex appeal coating a hard core philosophy. John McCain was too grouchy, carried the whiff of scandal and might prove uncontrollable. Jack Kemp was perceived as soft on blacks and perhaps even was a real libertarian at heart. So they settled on Bush, the smirking governor with the lofty Q-rating among white middle-aged women who'd been devoted watchers of Dallas and Knots Landing.
As for Bush, he didn't recall being coaxed to run by the RNC power elite. Instead, the green light fell upon him from a celestial source. "I feel like God wants me to run for president," Bush confided to James Robison, the Texas evangelist. "I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."
In a flashy feat of political transvestitism, Bush marketed himself as a "compassionate conservative," a feathery reprise of his father's kinder and gentler Reaganism. It was a ploy to distance himself from the foamy rhetoric of the Republican pit bulls who had nearly self-destructed in their manic pursuit of Clinton. Bush was tight with Tom DeLay, Trent Lott and Phil Gramm, but he didn't want to be tarred with their radioactive baggage while he courted soccer moms. During the 2000 campaign, this grand hoax was rivaled only by Al Gore's outlandish masquerade as an economic populist.
Still Bush, under the lash of Karl Rove, didn't shirk from playing mean, particularly in the bruising inter-squad battle for the Republican nomination. During the crucial South Carolina primary, Bush's campaign goons intimated that his chief rival, John McCain, had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman. Of course, a more dexterous politician than McCain could have turned this slur to his advantage. After all, Strom Thurmond ruled the Palmetto State for decades and he was widely known to have sired at least one child with his black mistress. The Bush attack dogs also made ungentlemanly whispers about McCain's wife, Cindy, suggesting that she might be a neurotic and a drug addict. Of course, it was McCain himself who was slightly unhinged and he wilted under the fire of the Bush sniper teams, which also included an attack on McCain's war record by the same by claque of mad dog vets who
would later fling mud at Max Cleland and John Kerry.
The 2000 campaign itself was unremittingly dull until the final debate, when Gore sealed his fate as he stalked Bush across the stage like he had overdosed on testosterone. As Gore glowered over the governor badgering him with the names of obscure pieces of legislation, Bush merely turned his head to the camera and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, "What's this guy's problem?" It was the first real moment of the campaign and probably kept Bush close enough so that the Supremes could hand him the presidency.
Bush's 534-vote triumph in Florida is an old and tiresome story by now, but it's worth recalling some of the low points. The stolen election was an inside job, although greatly abetted by Gore's incompetence. The state may very well have been secured before a single vote was cast. That's because Jeb, the Bush who always wanted to be president, ordered Katherine Harris to purge the voter rolls of more than 90,000 registered voters, mostly in Democratic precincts.
Then, with the recount underway, the Bush junta sprang into action. Using $13.8 million in campaign funds, they recuited an A-list of Republican fixers, tough guys and lawyers. Roger Stone, the former Republican fixer and body builder of Reagan time who fled to Florida following a DC sex scandal, was summoned to orchestrate gangs of rightwing Cubans to harass election officials in Dade and Palm Beach counties. Marc Racicot, later to be elevated by Bush to chair of the RNC, staged similar white-collar riots, all designed to impede the counting of ballots. Jeb and the haughty Harris did their parts as institutional monkeywrenchers.
Meanwhile, the legal strategy designed by Theodore Olson to fast track the case to the Supreme Court. When Scalia and Thomas refused to recuse themselves from the case despite glaring conflicts of interest (family members worked for the Bush campaign), the electoral theft was legitimized.
The ringmaster of this affair was Bush Sr.'s old hand, James Baker. Baker later boasted to a group of Russian tycoons mustered in London, "I fixed the election in Florida for George Bush." And Gore laid down and took it like a dazed Sonny Liston. He didn't raise a peep about the disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters, as if to say, "If have to be elected by blacks, I don't want the job."
Bush, the Selected One, was anxious to consolidate his power. "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier-- just so long as I'm the dictator," Bush snickered on December 18, 2000, as the Supreme Court prepared to deliver the presidency to his sweaty hands.
Mark those words.
* * *
The contours of the Bush agenda were established by his transition team. This shadowy group picked the cabinet, outlined the budget, sketched the foreign policy, dreamed up the size of the tax cuts and scouted across the sprawl of the bureaucracy for opportunities for self-dealing contracts.
None had a sharper nose for scenting opportunities to cash in on federal contracts than Dick Cheney, the man who recruited himself as Bush's running mate. Although Cheney flunked out of Yale (he was a working class kid without the academic passes afforded the legacy admittees), he shares several other traits with Bush. Twice Cheney has been arrested for drunk driving. And, although he fervently supported the war, he had no desire to actually go to Vietnam and do battle. Saying he "had other priorities," Cheney sought and received five draft deferments. See Dick run. And so it came to pass: others died so that he might prosper. Don't tell Cheney he doesn't understand the meaning of sacrifice.
As a congressman from Wyoming, Cheney established himself as a hardcore rightwinger, gnashing away at everything from abortion to Head Start. Bush Sr. picked this top-flight chickenhawk as Defense Secretary in 1989. He managed the first Gulf War, amassing through bribery and bullying international support like a CEO on a consolidation binge, and later rationalized the decision not to depose Saddam or support uprisings by Iraqi and Kurdish rebels, predicting that the fall of the Ba'athists would destabilize the entire region. How right you were, Dick.
After Clinton steamrolled Bush, Cheney cashed in, landing a top executive position at Halliburton, the Houston-based oil services and military construction giant. Cheney knew all about Halliburton and they knew Dick. In fact, as Defense Secretary, Cheney had devised the privatization scheme which turned over much of the Pentagon's logistical programs (base construction, food and fuel services, infrastructure, mortuaries) to corporations. He also steered some of the biggest early contracts to Halliburton, including lucrative deals for reconstructing Kuwait's oil fields and logistical support for the doomed venture into Somalia.
At Halliburton, Cheney exploited his government and international contacts to boost Halliburton's government-guaranteed loans from $100 million to $1.5 billion in less than five years. He also created 35 off-shore tax free subsidiaries, a feat of accounting prestidigitation that would soon be aped by Kenny Boy Lay and the corporate highwaymen at Enron. The grateful board of Halliburton soon rewarded Cheney by making him CEO and compensating him to the tune of $25 million a year in salary and lavish stock options. By the time he left Halliburton for the White House, he owned $45 million in the company's stock.
Of course, the question presents itself as to whether Cheney ever really left Halliburton. The company had been bruised a bit in Clinton. In 1997, it lost a multi-billion dollar logistics contract with the Army. Yet, soon after Cheney ascended to the Veep's office Halliburton seized the contract back and stood poised to become the prime provisioner for the Pentagon as it embarked on operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Korea, and the Philippines. Within two short years under Cheney, Halliburton cashed in on $1.7 billion in Pentagon contracts. Then, naturally, Halliburton decided to gouge the government, overcharging for everything from gas deliveries to food services.
Then came the big reward: a two-year contract worth $7 billion for rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure, bombed to smithereens by the Pentagon. The no bid contract was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers, who apparently never even considered another company. No surprise here. Halliburton had drafted the Corps' reconstruction plan for Iraq. "They were the company best positioned to execute the oil field work because of their involvement in the planning," explained Lt. Col. Gene Pawlick, a PR flack for the Army.
All the while, Cheney continues to personally benefit from Halliburton's government contracts. He still holds options for 400,000 shares of Halliburton stock and continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from his former company.
* * *
Cheney was not a lone emissary from crude cartel. Of the 41 members of that Bush transition team, 34 came from the oil industry. The mask had slipped off the beast. Not since the days of Warren Harding has big oil enjoyed a firmer stranglehold on the controls of the federal government. Bush's inner circle is dominated by oil men, starting with Bush and Cheney and including 6 cabinet members and 28 top political appointees. Recall that Condoleezza Rice has an oil tanker named after her and that Stephen Griles, the number two man at the Interior Department, was the oil industry's top lobbyist and continued to be paid $285,000 a year by his former firm as he handed out oil leases to his former clients. Griles is the Albert Fall of our time. Fall, the architect of the Teapot Dome scandal, where his crony's oil company was quietly handed the rights to drill in on federal lands in Wyoming, pronounced:
"All natural resources should be made as easy of access as possible to the present generation . Man cannot exhaust the resources of nature and never will." More than 80 years later, this reckless nonsense could serve as a motto for the Bush administration. But see how times have change. Fall went to jail for his self-dealing; Griles got a bonus.
Then came the neo-cons: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Donald Wurmser, Stephen Cambone and John Bolton. This coterie of hawks, many of them veterans of Reagan/Bush I, were deeply marinated in the writings of the darkly iconic Leo Strauss and schooled in the art of political terror by Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic senator from Boeing. After eight years on the outside, they came in febrile for war from the get-go and charged with an implacable loyalty to Israel, nation of the apartheid wall and the 82 nukes. The neo-cons's devotion to Israel was so profound that several of them hired themselves out as consultants to the Israeli government. At the close of Bush's first term, this same nest of neo-cons finds itself under investigation for leaking top secret documents to Israel.
To complete the starting lineup, Bush and Cheney also dredged up from the obscurity of far right think tanks some of the most malodorous scoundrels of the Iran/contra era: Eliot Abrams, John Poindexter, Otto Reich and John Negroponte. Soon enough this merry band of brigands were up to their old tricks. Poindexter, from his den at DARPA, devised a big brother program under the name Total Information Awareness, branded with an Illuminati logo, which sought to keep track of the movements and credit card purchases of all Americans. Later Poindexter, convicted of lying to congress in the 1980s, opened up a futures market for terrorist attacks, where traders would be financially rewarded by the Pentagon for accurately predicting suicide bombings. Meanwhile, Abrams, another Iran/contra felon, was put in charge of human rights in the Middle East-a curious brief for the man who backed the butchers of
Guatemala and El Salvador. Even Hunter S. Thompson blazing away on blotter acid couldn't dream this stuff up.
Tomorrow: Jesus Told Me Who to Bomb Part One: The Ties That Blind
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and, with Alexander Cockburn, Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.(Back to Index)
George W Bush's missing year
'Who was this guy who came in late and left early?' After thirty years of silence, Mary Jacoby finds out what the future President really did in 1972 Thursday September 02 2004 The Guardian
Before Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family's political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George HW Bush phoned his friend and asked a favour: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W Bush?
"The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing,"
Allison's widow, Linda, told me. "And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."
Linda Allison's story, never before published, contradicts the Bush campaign's assertion that George W Bush transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 because he received an irresistible offer to gain high-level experience on the campaign of Bush family friend Winton "Red" Blount. In fact, according to what Allison says her late husband told her, the younger Bush had become a political liability for his father, who was then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the family wanted him out of Texas. "I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him,"
Linda Allison said.
After more than three decades of silence, Allison spoke with Salon over several days before and during the Republican National Convention this week - motivated, as she acknowledged, by a complex mixture of emotions.
They include pride in her late husband's accomplishments, a desire to see him remembered, and concern about the apparent double standard in Bush surrogates attacking John Kerry's Vietnam War record while ignoring the president's irresponsible conduct during the war. She also admits to bewilderment and hurt over the rupture her husband experienced in his friendship with George and Barbara Bush. To this day, Allison is unsure what caused the break, though she suspects it had something to do with her husband's opposition to the elder Bush becoming chairman of the Republican National Committee under President Nixon.
"Something happened that I don't know about. But I do know that Jimmy didn't expect it, and it broke his heart," she said, describing a ruthless side to the genial Bush clan of which few outsiders are aware.
Personal history aside, Allison's recollections of the young George Bush in Alabama in 1972 are relevant as a contrast to the medals for valour and bravery that Kerry won in Vietnam in the same era. An apparent front group for the Bush campaign, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, has attacked Kerry in television ads as a liar and traitor to veterans for later opposing a war that cost 58,000 American lives. Bush, who has resisted calls from former Vietnam War POW John McCain, R-Ariz, to repudiate the Swift Boat ads, has said he served honourably in the National Guard.
Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence. Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way." Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often showed up in the Blount campaign offices around noon, boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before. (Bush has admitted that he was a heavy drinker in those years, but he has refused to say whether he also used drugs).
"After about a month I asked Jimmy what was Georgie's job, because I couldn't figure it out. I never saw him do anything. He told me it basically consisted of him contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support," Allison said.
C Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Red Blount by marriage and a Vietnam veteran who volunteered on the campaign from September 1972 until election night, corroborated Allison's recollections, though he doesn't recall that the Bush name carried much cachet in Alabama at the time. "I say that because the scuttlebutt on the campaign was that Allison was very sharp and might actually be able to pull off this difficult race"
against the incumbent Democrat, Sen John Sparkman, Archibald said. "But then no one understood why he brought this young guy from Texas along.
It was like, 'Who was this guy who comes in late and leaves early? And why would Jimmy Allison, who was so impressive, bring him on?'"
Bush, who had a paid slot as Allison's deputy in a campaign staffed largely by volunteers, sat in a little office next to Allison's, said Archibald, a workers compensation lawyer in Charlotte, NC. Indeed, when Bush was actually there, he did make phone calls to county chairmen. But he neglected his other duty: the mundane but important task of mailing out campaign materials to the county campaign chairs. Archibald took up the slack, at Allison's request. "Jimmy didn't say anything about George. He just said, 'These materials are not getting out. It's causing the candidate problems. Will you take it over?'"
While Kerry earned a Silver Star and a Bronze Star after saving a crewmate's life under fire on the Mekong River in Vietnam, by contrast, the Georgie that Allison knew was a young man whose parents did not allow him to live with the consequences of his own mistakes. His powerful father - whom the son seemed to both idolize and resent - was a lifeline for Bush out of predicaments. After Bush graduated from Yale in 1968, his slot in the Texas Air National Guard allowed him to avoid active duty service in Vietnam. The former speaker of the Texas state House, Democrat Ben Barnes, now admits he pulled strings to get Bush his coveted guard slot, and says he's "ashamed" of the deed. "60 Minutes"
will air an interview with Barnes next Wednesday, but George HW Bush denounced Barnes' claims in an interview aired on CBS. "They keep saying that and it's a lie, a total lie. Nobody's come up with any evidence, and yet it's repeated all the time," the former president said, in what could just as well describe the playbook for the Swift Boat Veterans ads.
Yet, after receiving unusual permission to transfer to the Alabama Guard from Texas, Bush has produced no evidence he showed up for service for anything other than a dental exam. Later, Bush would trade on his father's connections to enter the oil business, and when his ventures failed, trade on more connections to find investors to bail him out.
Linda Allison's story fills in the details about a missing chapter in the story of how George Bush Sr's friends helped his wastrel son. The Bush campaign, decamped to New York for the convention, did not return a phone call by late Wednesday. A graceful blonde with a Texas drawl, Linda Allison now lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in an apartment decorated in the dusky tones of Tuscany with a magnificent view of the high-rises framing Central Park. I visited her there Monday on the opening night of the Republican National Convention as she related publicly for the first time her long and ultimately painful history with the Bush family. On the table between us were two photographs of her late husband -- an elfin man with curly hair, shown in animated conversation. From her drawers she pulled out old letters and notes from Barbara Bush, George HW Bush and even one from George W Bush,
written to Jimmy in 1978 as he was dying of cancer.
Jimmy Allison's family owned the Midland Reporter-Telegram and other small-town newspapers, and they were part of the establishment in the West Texas oil town where Bush senior made his fortune and Bush junior grew up. Still, Allison has been almost completely forgotten in the semi-official stories of the Bush dynasty's rise; his role as political fixer and family friend has been airbrushed out of Barbara Bush's autobiography and other accounts. But he was one of the originators of what evolved into the GOP's "Southern strategy," helping George HW Bush win election to Congress in 1966 at a time when Republicans in Texas were virtually unheard of.
The Blount Senate campaign he ran against the Democrat, Sparkman, in
1972 was notable for a dirty racial trick: The Blount side edited a transcript of a radio interview Sparkman had given to make it appear he supported busing, a poison position at that time in the South. When Sparkman found an unedited script and exposed the trick, the Blount campaign was finished. But it was an early introduction for Bush to the kinds of tricks that later Republican strategists associated with the Bush political machine would use against Democrats, often to victorious effect.
After Bush won a House seat in 1966, Allison followed his patron to Washington as the top staffer in his congressional office and served as deputy director of the Republican National Committee in 1969 and 1970 under President Nixon. It was Allison who advised George W Bush to return to Midland after Harvard Business School to seek his business fortune in the booming oil industry, advice that Bush recalled fondly in a 2001 speech in Midland. When Allison died at age 46, after an agonizing battle with lymphoma, both George HW Bush and George W Bush served as pallbearers.
"Aide, confidant, campaign manager, source of joke material, alter ego - Allison and Bush were bonded by an uncommon loyalty," former Reagan White House deputy press secretary Peter Roussel, who got his start in politics when Allison invited him to work for Bush's 1968 congressional reelection campaign, wrote in a 1988 newspaper column dedicated to Allison.
Linda, too, had a long, though not as close, relationship with the Bushes. She remembers watching Bush in 1964 at a campaign appearance at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, when she was 32 years old and he was running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. "He was so appealing to me. He said all the things that I believed in, and he wasn't like all the other Republicans running in Texas at that time, who were real right-wingers. He had a bigger vision of what the Republican Party could be. I volunteered for his campaign that day, and that's how I ended up being his Dallas County headquarters chairman." Over the years, Linda kept volunteering with the local Republican Party. "And they gave me bigger and bigger things to do. They appreciated me. And I felt like I belonged to something," she said.
But it was also this sense of being connected to a larger, more powerful force that seduced the Allisons - a trap that many aides and friends of important politicians fall into. The dynamic allowed the Bushes -- Barbara especially, Allison said -- to manipulate the friends and supporters they needed to further their ambitions, a lesson she says could not have been lost on the young George. "They had a way of anointing you, then pushing you out," she said. "It was like a mind game. It was very subtle, very hard to describe. But when you were out, you wanted desperately to be let back in." It was how she and Jimmy felt when, in 1973, they experienced a strange and, to Allison, never fully explained rupture with the Bushes, which took place against the backdrop of boorish behaviour by their son that persisted during the time he was nominally under the Allisons' care.
The break happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John Sparkman. Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers encountering George W Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he'd yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he'd rented in Montgomery trashed - the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February. "He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people's possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid. And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents' home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano," as has often been reported.
Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club.
Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past,"
Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too." Jimmy, meanwhile, had larger issues on his mind. According to Linda, he was hoping to use the visit in Florida to convince Bush to turn down the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee because he didn't trust Nixon or his palace guard. "He had been so appalled at the Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Colson group, and he thought they'd sacrifice George. He just wanted to warn him, as a friend," Allison told me.
Apparently, Jimmy Allison's advice was not appreciated. In Hobe Sound, Bush senior kept trying to avoid talking with Jimmy about the RNC, Allison said. Then later, as the Allisons took their leave, Barbara "thanked" them for their Christmas present with unexpected cruelty. "She said, 'I'm so sorry, but we've been so busy this year that we didn't have time to do anything for our political acquaintances.' I swear to God, I'll never forget those two words as long as I live. For her to say that was absolutely appalling. Mind you, Jimmy was an old, old friend.
And I had stayed as a houseguest with the Bushes, been invited in my pyjamas into their bedroom to read the papers and drink coffee while Bar rode her exercise bicycle.
"Big George was just stricken by this," Allison continued. "There was a wet bar in the hall on the way to the front door. He grabbed this mouldy bottle of Mai Tai that he said had been given to him by the president of China, and he said we just had to have it. Then he plucked this ostrich egg in a beaded bag from a shelf that he said had been given to him by the ambassador to the UN from Nigeria or someplace, and gave it to us.
Can you imagine how embarrassing that was?"
The Allisons found they were no longer being invited to the Sunday cookouts the Bushes held to chew over the week's political events. And though Jimmy had once been deputy chairman of the RNC, when Bush chaired the committee, he "couldn't even get invited to a cocktail party there,"
Allison said. The freeze-out was subtle and surgical. "It took us some time to realise we'd been lopped off," she said. At home, the Allisons once decided to try that dusty bottle of Mai Tai from China that Bush had thrust into their hands in Hobe Sound. They were unable to drink the liquor. "It was so foul. The smell that came out of that thing! We just looked at each other," Allison said.
By 1978, Jimmy was dying. Whether out of guilt, genuine affection for old times or a desire to maintain appearances with a revered member of the Midland establishment, the Bushes responded with warmth. Jimmy's heart soared, Allison said.
George W Bush, then running unsuccessfully for Congress, wrote his old mentor a letter. "Every person I see in Midland asks about you and sends their regards," Bush wrote. "Like a younger brother, I have treasured your advice, your guidance and most importantly your never selfish friendship." And shortly before he died, George HW Bush - by then an executive at a bank in Houston after having served as head of the Central Intelligence Agency - invited Jimmy back to his home. Elated, Jimmy persuaded the doctors to discharge him for the visit, Linda said.
But Linda, who was not consulted, was incensed. Though she drove him to the Bushes, she refused to go in. "I was so furious. I had no way to take care of him. He was so weak, and they had taken him off the morphine, and he was in great pain," she said.
In a letter to the editor of Allison's newspaper in Midland after his death, Bush recalled that day: "He swam and relaxed. He was very weak but the warm water soothed him. He gave us hope. 'I'm going to make it,'
he said."
But soon after Linda picked him up, Jimmy crashed. "He was in so much pain. It was unreal." At the emergency room, he waited 10 hours for medical attention. "I begged them to do something. I begged," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "He was in so much pain. I was so angry."
Jimmy died about a week later.
More than a quarter century later, George W Bush is running for reelection as a "war" president. At the Republican Convention, delegates pass out Purple Heart stickers mocking Kerry's Vietnam wounds as "a self-inflicted scratch," and George HW Bush, speaking on CNN, lauds the Swift Boat Veterans' claims against Kerry as "rather compelling." Karl Rove tells the Associated Press that Kerry's opposition to a war that Bush avoided had served to "tarnish the records and service of people who were defending our country and fighting communism." Barbara Bush tells USA Today: "I die over every untruth that I hear about George - I mean, every one."
Linda Allison watches it all from her New York apartment. About George W Bush's disputed sojourn in Alabama, she asks simply: "Can we all be
lying?" Mary Jacoby is Salon's Washington correspondent.
This article has been provided by Salon through a special arrangement with Guardian Newspapers Limited. © Salon.com 2004
Visit the Salon site at Salon.com
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Jack Dalton: 'Bush, O'Neill, Swifties and Purple Heart band-aids'
Posted on Thursday, September 02 @ 10:05:11 EDT
By Jack Dalton
More than a few of us that served in Vietnam some 35 years ago (I was there from 9/65 -- 5/67, Marble Mountain) openly opposed that war when we came "home" (and I use that term loosely -- it's difficult to call someplace home that keeps turning it's back on those it sent to war, as what has taken place with Vietnam veterans, and is once again). There were a lot of reasons we stood in opposition to what we had participated in.That was a period of time many of us would rather forget, and leave forgotten, than to be forced, in a manner of speaking, to relive all that, again -- what we saw, what we heard, what we did while we were in the Nam, what we stood by and just watched, and then, if that wasn't enough, what we went thru when we came back. We caught hell from all sides when we came back.
Thanks to Bush and the Chickenhawk Mayberry Machiavelli's he has surrounded himself with, once again Vietnam veterans are being smeared and our service being called into doubt -- you call one into doubt and you call us all into doubt, my loyalty is to my fellow Vietnam veterans. At least to those that understand loyalty and do not allow themselves to be used for anyone's political purposes.
O'Neill, Thurlow, Swift Boat Veterans for (un)"Truth" have broken the faith and have show themselves to be men of no honor with the distortions and lies they have perpetrated. The Bush silence speaks volumes. The "Purple Heart" band-aids Morton Blackwell is passing out at the RNC also speaks volumes. He now mocks those that served in uniform, something he never did -- how dare he!
They want to elect George W. Bush -- the man that went AWOL (some call it desertion during a time of war, as do I) -- by smearing Vietnam veterans and demeaning the commendations, awards and medals we received. To simply call this an outrage is an over simplification and a gross understatement.
John Kerry did not betray this country or any of us that went to Vietnam -- unlike Bush, that didn't go anywhere but AWOL and who now betrays the nation, Vietnam veterans and his oath of office by standing mute on the actions of O'Neill, Thurlow, Swift Boat Vets and now Blackwell, ?just to name a few.
Thirty years ago there was a big wedge that divided us veterans -- Vietnam. Some strongly supported the war, others like myself, strongly opposed the war.
Some saw little to no combat while there, others saw more than anyone ever should. As always, war can and does bring out the worst in people. It does things to you; how you think, how you feel, how you look at the world and people around you -- and a lot of that is anything but good.
Too many rules made up as you go. To easy to de-humanize other people and then to look upon them as sub-human. It's a lot easier to pull the trigger that way. That happened a lot in Vietnam. Many atrocities, war crimes if you will, were committed -- as is happening in Iraq currently.
After 3 ? decades some of the divisions between veterans dissipated -- all was at least less angry in the valley. At least until George W. Bush entered the picture 4 years ago. Now in the push to get him elected, all stops have been pulled. And in the quest for the veterans vote, it's back to pitting veteran against veteran.
By these people -- BushCo, Blackwell, O'Neill, Thurlow, Swift Boat vets for un-Truth, et al -- calling into question John Kerry's service in Vietnam and his anti-war stance after coming home, they have called into question all that served in Vietnam.
John Kerry betrayed nothing by his words or actions including his testimony in Congress in 1971, period, end of story! He did not betray his fellow veterans by articulating things that were actually taking place there. There were a lot of people that just flat out went nuts over there and a lot of senseless things happened as a result.
The Swift Boat people, O'Neill, Thurlow, Blackwell and the rest of that crew can denounce Kerry all they want with their distortions and lies, but they do not change the truthfulness of John Kerry's statements, nor any of the rest of us that have made similar statements concerning Vietnam and some of what happened over there.
If anyone has betrayed the nation and Vietnam veterans, it is George W. Bush and those surrounding him that have adopted the "alls fair in love and war" mantra, and that seems to include lies and distortions on a grand scale.
While people like O'Neill, Thurlow, Blackwell, Swift Boat for (?) and a few others choose to allow themselves to be used to further the political ambitions of Bush & Co. it is they that have betrayed the nation. It is they that have betrayed their fellow veterans by their words and actions.
The same person they are supporting is the man responsible for this current obscene, wrong and totally un-acceptable invasion/occupation of Iraq-- which also was based on lies, misinformation and disinformation just as was Vietnam. In taking the position they have, they have taken a stand for wrong over right and no "Purple Heart" band-aids will ever cover this betrayal.
What has happened to truth, justice and the "American" way? It seems it no longer is the nations call sign -- now it's win, win, win, and by any and all means necessary. Even that has been elevated to new heights since the Bush cabal took over the nation's government. God help us all if Bush and his chickenhawk buddies stay in power.
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Michael Manville: 'Staying angry: Eight loathsome things about the GOP'
Posted on Thursday, September 02 @ 10:09:10 EDT
Here are eight loathsome things about the GOP to keep you going.
By Michael Manville, Freezerbox
If the title hasn't given it away already, what follows is an exercise in naked partisanship. Normally I pride myself on my evenhandedness, but there comes a time when you have to give up the ghost, and the ghost now is gone. I feel I have to join, as Brad Delong would say, the "ranks of the shrill." I do not do this out of allegiance to the Republicans' chief opponents; I am not and have never been a registered Democrat. I'm old enough to have voted in three presidential elections, and in only one of those I voted for a Democrat--Clinton in '96. My other two votes were for third party candidates (and in 2000 I lived in Massachusetts, so anyone about to yelp that my Nader vote handed the country to Bush can shove it.)
The Democratic Party has exhibited, in the years I've been paying attention, an almost ceaseless ability to disappoint me. Its representatives are too often spineless, too often lukewarm facismiles of Republicans. They fundraise whorishly, and the only backhanded compliment that can be paid to their venal pursuit of money is that they aren't very good at it (the Republicans are much better). Most of all the Democratic Party's willful ignorance--its mendacity and prevarication--in the face of Rwandan genocide will stain forever its claim to being the party of internationalism. On a final, personal note, back when I was more of a working journalist I interviewed John Kerry and found him, frankly, annoying. Nevertheless, absent some unforeseen circumstance (for instance, my getting a lobotomy) I plan to vote for him in the fall.
I'll vote for Kerry because for all that is wrong with the Democrats, the Republican Party is something else altogether. What was once the Party of Lincoln has become the party of obstreperous children, alternately pouting and bullying, dismissive of complicated problems that aren't easily resolved and fixated instead on the simplistic and the irrelevant. Abraham Lincoln grabbed a backward portion of our country and tried to drag it by force into the future, but the future is not where today's Republican Party--or at least the faction of the party that sets its agenda--finds its strength or inspiration. The Republican Party of the early twenty-first century is history's hostage but not its student; it panders to a past whose details are often wrong or invented; opposes science and secularism; longs for a world of absolutist morality, and wages a cultural war of attrition against any behavior that
falls outside its narrow conception of what is decent.
Thus we have a party whose domestic policies, rather than meaningfully addressing issues like health care or unemployment, include a bigoted constitutional amendment to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry (the sort of law in existence today in only the most benighted of nations); another consitutional amendment that would prohibit the destruction of an American flag (an ordinance, again, that is most often the hallmark of totalitarian, idolatrous and theocratic regimes); and a desire to return prayer to schools while at the same time expelling science. We have a party whose romance for the Confederacy betrays both an appalling insensitivity to African-Americans and an ignorance of what the Confederacy actually was.
This is not the party of William Weld and John DiIulio, nor of Herbert Stein or William F. Buckley Jr.--a party of honorable and intelligent conservatism that believed in nuance and give-and-take. It is instead the party of Tom Delay and Ann Coulter, of character assassination first and engagement with the issues second. This is a party determined to paint Hilary Clinton--who, let's be honest, is at most a center-left liberal--as some sort of raging communist. It is the party that houses Sean Hannity, a man who equates liberalism with "terrorism" and "despotism." It is the party of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, whose hissing opinions often contradict the facts uncovered by its excellent reporters, and whose "journalism" throughout the Clinton years consisted of dark insinuation that the president and his wife had murdered a number of people.
And yet, come election time, it is a party that lacks even the courage of these convictions. Look at the list of speakers scheduled to talk at the Republican National Convention; what you will find is a festival of moderates: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Guiliani, Michael Bloomberg. All urban Republicans, all pro-choice, most in favor of gay rights, a number of them in favor of gun control. And none with any influence whatsoever on the national Republican Party; they disagree outright with the leadership on most social issues. So why are they there? Why does the Convention not include remarks from Trent Lott or Tom DeLay? Where is Dick Armey? Where is the vicious homophobia of Rick Santorum, or the evangelism of Pat "Gays and feminists caused 9/11" Robertson? The Democrats gave Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton their moments before the cameras; both are quite extreme in their own way, and both, for
better or worse, have almost no say in their party's platform. But the Republicans' extremists control their party, and are nevertheless hustled into the closet when the time comes for a parade in front of the American people.
This false face of moderation is one of two grand lies perpetuated by the national GOP. The second lie is victimhood, capital-V Victimhood, forever, victimhood. The party of big money and big business laments endlessly that it is marginalized and persecuted, that the government works continuously against it, that the press distorts and ignores its positions. Only sheer repetition could make this scenario plausible. Never mentioned is that the party of big business accounts for most of the money pumped into the government, or that it owns most of the press, or that there is an explicitly and rabidly conservative news network but no explicitly rabid and liberal one. No matter: the facts should never be allowed to obstruct the narriative. Thus a spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert says with a straight face, "it's extremely difficult to govern when you control all three branches of government."
Thus in the New York Times, that ultra-liberal newspaper that lets him trumpet his opinions twice a week, David Brooks makes the bizarre and completely unsubstantiated assertion that anyone opposed to neoconservative policies is actually anti-Semitic. Thus Ann Coulter writes a best-selling book, heavily laden with name-calling, which accuses liberals of always calling Republicans names.
And I can't take it anymore. It is a silly clich頴o say that all politicians lie, and it is naﶥ to be outraged when elected officials act in their own interests first and in the interests of those they represent second. It can be no other way--a politician can accomplish nothing without first being elected, and so on the list of priorities being elected must always rise to the top. But there are, within this depressing calculus, varying degrees of behavior, varying degrees to which the truth gets manipulated, and we are governed now by people who lie as a first or second rather than a last resort. Our presidential campaigns, which have for a long time been shallow contests in misdirection, have careened into newer and lower depravities. An honest analysis of this situation would find no one innocent, but would also apportion blame far more to one side than the other. Yes, both parties have poisoned
the barrel, but it is the Republicans who consistently scrape against its bottom. Willie Horton. Liberals hating the pledge of allegiance. Liberals coddling crime. Fuzzy math. Inventing the Internet. All are actors in this theater of the irrelevant, all have made our electoral dialogue that much dumber, and all have emerged from the Grand Old Party's machinery of falsehood.
Anyone who cares to look can find at least a hundred reasons not to return the Republican Party to power in November. In the interest of brevity, and just as a start, I'm going to list eight. Bear in mind, when reading, all that I'm leaving out: the war in Iraq; the abandonment of Afghanistan; the support of Ahmad Chalabi, who was an Iranian spy; the destruction of Valerie Plame, who was an American one; "Curveball"; the storming of the Dade County courthouse; the chicanery surrounding the costs of the Medicare bill; the attempt to further consolidate media ownership; the comprehensive rollback of environmental regulations; the unjust imprisonment of immigrants and American citizens; the legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay; the farming out of torture to Syrian surrogates; the casual lies about previous statements (Donald Rumsfeld insisting he never said Saddam was an imminent threat, the Administration
saying the "Mission Accomplished" banner wasn't its idea). I am anything but an idealist, but even I expect something better from my government than the disdain these people have heaped on us. It's time for them to go.
1. The "Southern Strategy" and the Urban/Rural Divide
Barry Goldwater was the first to give it a whirl, but it was Richard Nixon who really made it work. In retrospect, it was simple enough: emphasize the cultural differences between the North and South, use the rhetoric of "states' rights" to veil an ugly appeal to race prejudice, and watch the former Confederacy defect to the Grand Old Party. This was in 1968, which political scientists now call a "re-aligning" year, because its presidential campaign brought the South into the Republican fold, and showed Abraham Lincoln's legacy the door. The South has stayed Republican ever since, and the Republican Party--for all its contempt for "class warfare"--has stayed afloat through polarization and divisiveness.
When Ronald Reagan kicked off his general election campaign in 1980, he did so by travelling to Philadelphia, Mississippi--site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers in the 1960s--and giving a speech in which he praised states' rights. Some critics of Reagan see this as a sign of his racism, a charge that I think is both inaccurate and unfair. I don't think Reagan was racist, and I know he was a sincere believer in the more benign definition of states' rights, which is the idea of a weaker federal government and increased local control. But I also think that Reagan and his handlers were well aware of the symbolism in his speech and its location, and I think they were willing to let the ambiguity of his meaning play on the fears and prejudices of his audience. In that, we have a fine example of the southern strategy.
Today, fortunately, most of the more naked appeals to race prejudice are gone* (especially since Jesse Helms retired--after graciously accepting the thanks of a woman, on Larry King Live, who called to commend him for all he'd done to "help keep down the niggers"). But race-baiting has been replaced by an equally effective strategy of cultural warfare. Now Republicans emphasize the "differences" between urban and rural America. The rural residents are Good Country People who believe in God, Nation, Hard Work and NASCAR, while the urbanites are latte-swilling members of a Jewish/communist/homosexual/hate-America conspiracy.
You can find this nonsense in the infantile and sociologically incompetent writings of David Brooks; in the deranged ravings of Ann Coulter (who not only "loves Kansas City" but wishes that Timothy McVeigh had blown up the New York Times headuarters instead of the Oklahoma Federal Building); and in the cheesy "family values" speeches of countless conservatives.
What the folk of Red America who buy into this don't realize is that they've been given a bait-and-switch. The Bible is not coming back to school. Abortion is not going away. Affirmative action will not be permanently undone. And despite the railing of Senator Rick Santorum, gays, sooner or later, will be able to get married (and the sky will not fall when that happens). In the meantime, the Republicans will yell, and scream, and quietly cut the taxes of the decadent wealthy urbanites they've convinced Middle America to hate.
* Republican race-baiting is not altogether extinct. In 2000, Bush loyalists in South Carolina started a whispering campaign against John McCain, suggesting that McCain had fathered an illegitimate daughter with a black prostitute. The "evidence" for this slander was McCain's daughter Bridget, whom the Senator and his wife had adopted from a Bangladeshi orphanage. Eleven years old at the time of the 2000 campaign, Bridget's dark skin, visible as she waved from stages with the rest of her family at events across South Carolina, became the stimulus for a host of vile lies. In the days before the primary Bush supporters push-polled likely Republican voters, asking if McCain's black baby would influence their vote. If that isn't gutter politics, nothing is.
2. The Tax Cut
It's because the surplus is too big! No, it's because there is no surplus, and we need to stimulate the economy! No, it's because terrorists have attacked and we need to restore confidence! No, it's because it cures acne and impotence!
Rarely has one law had so many justifications, none of them true. Almost every competent and honest economist that has looked at the Bush tax cut has come to the conclusion that it is a way to move a massive amount of wealth to the very rich from everyone else. Ronald Reagan did the same thing, but he at least had the decency to be honest about it. This current crop of Republicans can't quite bring themselves to match his candor. The tax cut, we are told, is for "working Americans." Getting rid of the "death tax" will "save family farms."
Let's cut through the bullshit: the tax cut was about people already drowning in money getting a whole lot more of it. When House Speaker Dennis Hastert held a press conference in support of it, he had to get lobbyists to dress up in hard hats to create a "working class" audience. (A memo about the rally from the National Manufacturer's Association read: "the Speaker's office was very clear in saying that they do not need people in suits. If people want to participate -- AND WE DO NEED BODIES -- they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types, etc.") As for the "death" tax: no one has ever lost a family farm because of the estate tax. Never ever. Can I be clearer about this? The people who say otherwise are liars.
The ideological foundation of the tax cut lies in supply-side economics, the charlatan subdiscipline of economics that casts aside the free market and chooses instead to believe in the free lunch. Supply-siders argue that if you cut taxes enough, investment will rise and the government will still have plenty of revenue to function--that you will, in other words, get something for nothing. There is no reason not to believe in supply-side economics; the only two places it fails are in theory and in practice. Yet despite its inconsistency with all other economic logic and its failure of every empirical test, supply-side lives on. Its most ardent proponent remains Jude Wanniski, the former editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal who laid out its logic in a book he modestly titled The Way the World Works.
Wanniski has a talent for avoiding those advances in economic theory (read: all of them) that undercut his own ideas. He still believes, for instance, that gold is the only valid measure of wealth. This leads him in turn to other, weirder beliefs. Consider a juvenile tirade he launched against Paul Krugman, which ended when he summed up America's problems as follows: "The poor have become fat and happy, the rich impoverished. This is why we are in the fix we are in. Everyone wants to be poor, because it has so many more advantages!"
Would you buy an economic policy from that man? The White House has. Actually, supply-side is less an economic policy than it is a religion, where the answer is always the same regardless of the question. Cut taxes. If the surplus is too high or too low, if job performance is weak or strong, cut taxes. Like snake oil from the back of the wagon, a tax cut is the tonic the nation requires. We have the cure, just name your disease. "Nothing is more important in a time of war," Tom Delay said after 9/11, "than cutting taxes." Have we ever cut taxes during a time of war? No. Does the strategy seem to be working out well? Absolutely not. But again--we are dealing here with children, and childhood is the kingdom where facts can be pushed aside, where temper tantrums can replace rational thought, and where things are just because we want them to be.
3. Dick Cheney
I'm not even sure I can be serious about this one. Originally sold as the steady hand in a team that would "restore dignity and honor to the White House" (remember that promise?), Cheney has instead become a leering caricature of himself, a Strangelovian zombie-warrior who transitions seamlessly between his roles as President, dark puppet master, minion of Satan, and dour old white guy. His heart beats once every seven minutes, he's spent three of the last four years in an undisclosed location, and when he emerges he makes statements that defy all logic and empirical evidence. Dick Cheney thinks deficits don't matter; Dick Cheney says conservation has no role in public policy; Dick Cheney sees nothing wrong with letting people from Enron write our national energy strategy; Dick Cheney is the last person on earth who thinks the Iraqis attacked us on 9/11. A walking symbol of war profiteering and
corporate malfeasance, he remains bound up with Halliburton, a company guilty of voluminous "accounting irregularities" while he was its CEO. Halliburton landed all manner of lucrative contracts as a result of the Iraq war and then--not satisfied with regular government largesse--proceeded to defraud the military at seemingly every opportunity.
No portrait of Cheney would be complete without mention of his firebreathing wife, a shrewish culture warrior determined that U.S. students should learn nothing more controversial than "America rocks!" and convinced that college exists to churn out robotic adherents to her own jingoistic brand of patriotism. In the aftermath of 9/11, her American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a strange report saying that the "weak link in the war on terrorism" was the nation's professors (as opposed to, say, its utterly incompetent intelligence agencies). The report documented 117 instances of "unpatriotic" rhetoric from our colleges; examples include a professor who said "ignorance breeds hate", and another who said Osama bin Laden should be tried for crimes against humanity in an international court. Subversion! Insubordination! Off with their heads! I think the Cheneys should relocate immediately to
Iraq, where he can drive a truck for Halliburton and she can craft their new educational curriculum.
4. George W. Bush
In July, shortly after his overlong and self-serving memoir was published, Bill Clinton went on Larry King Live. A caller--clearly a fan--phoned in and asked why he wouldn't be John Kerry's running mate. This was Clinton's response:
There's a conflict of opinion. The law says -- the 22nd amendment says that the president can only be elected twice or if you succeed as vice president you can only serve if you serve like a day more than 18 months or day more than 2 years, then you can only be elected once.
So arguably, a former president could become vice president. However, I disagree with that for the following reason. It's an elemental principle of constitutional construction that you should treat every part of the constitution consistent with every other part. The part that gives you the qualifications for president and vice president early on in the constitution says that basically the vice president, the qualifications for vice president are the same as those for president. So I think a reasonable reading is that the 22nd amendment modified the original provision and that a former president can't run for vice president. So I don't think that will happen.
Stop for a minute. Imagine that it's 2012 and George W. Bush, now four years out of the White House, is on Larry King and has been asked a similar question. Can even the most ardent Republican argue that his answer would be remotely as literate as Clinton's? Does Bush ever think about constitutional construction? Does he even know what the 22nd Amendment is? Or would he break into a half grin, look warily at the camera, look warily at Larry King, and then mumble something about Laura killing him if he ever got into another campaign?
Have we ever had a duller and more duplicitous President? A man less knowledgeable and more obviously disinterested in the workings of government? In a deft trick of rhetoric, Bush passes off his disdain for policy as a sign of his down-to-earth, to-hell-with-the-eggheads persona, but if there's one thing George W. Bush is less likely to be than a policy wonk, it's a blue-collar everyman. It's hard to imagine a man less in tune with what everyday people actually endure, and yet so insistent he's a regular guy. Ronald Reagan was dumb as a stump, but at least he grew up in a small town and worked for a living part of his life. John F. Kennedy never worked for a living but also never pretended otherwise. Not so George W. Bush, he of the frat-boy smirk and the affected strut, who portrays himself as a working class hero, thinking that because he wears boot-cut jeans and likes to "clear brush" on his
"ranch" (which he purchased in 1999 as preparation for his campaign) he somehow isn't a child of absurd privilege.
Let's run down the life and times of "Texas" George. Son of blueblood aristocracy, his grandfather was a wealthy Connecticutt Senator and his father was a congressman, a CIA director, a Vice-President and a President. None of that stopped W., when he decided to run for President, from calling himself a "Washington outsider" and saying (in an outright lie) that he'd never lived in Washington in his life.
He grew up rough and tumble, spending exactly one year in a public high school before being whisked off for a career of mediocrity in Andover Academy (where he was head cheerleader) and then to more mediocrity as a legacy at Yale. A proponent of the war in Vietnam, he did his part by getting moved to the front of the line for a spot in the Texas Air National Guard. In the Guard he ignored direct orders to show up for duty, skipped a physical and was barred from flying, and finally just disappeared. Somewhere in here he also developed a bad drinking habit and got arrested for drunk driving.
After military service and a stint at Harvard (where, the campaign biographies breathlessly tell us, he wore his cowboy boots to class) it was time for baptism in the brutal but meritocratic free enterprise system. Using money from his grandmother and his father's friends, he founded Arbusto, an oil company that generated little oil and no profits, but did serve as a nice tax shelter for his Dad's pals. In 1982 he changed Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration Oil, but the company continued to ride the edge of bankruptcy while his Dad's buddies bailed it out. Bush Oil later merged with Spectrum 7, which then merged with Harken Energy, which then spiralled into insolvency, although not before Bush did some insider trades and sold off his stock for $850,000.
The $850,000 went toward paying down his debts from buying a two-percent share in the Texas Rangers. Yes, two percent. Bush did not own the Rangers; he was a figurehead. (A figurehead who had his own baseball cards made. What kind of loser does that?) The Rangers, also swashbuckling market capitalists, got the state of Texas and city of Arlington to hand them free land and build them a new stadium. After Bush was elected governor, his partners increased his share in it before they bought him out--essentially skirting the law and giving a massive donation to an elected representative.
And then all his rich friends--not least among them Enron's Ken Lay--poured money into his run for the White House. He lost the popular vote and quite possibly the electoral one, but governs as though he has an unprecedented mandate. To summarize: George W. Bush, who passes himself off as an entrepreneur and Texas everyman, is a New England blueblood who went to an elite Northeastern prep school and two New England Ivy League universities. He ducked out of military service and may well have gone AWOL. He failed consistently in business but was bailed out consistently by his parents' friends. He never owned a baseball team but pretended he did. He sings the praises of the free market but his baseball team's major accomplishment was lobbying for government money and public subsidies. He calls for a national work ethic but has a mystifying gap in his CV where he doesn't seem to have been working at
all--and he has spent an unprecedented amount of his presidency on vacation. He pays lip service to education but by his own admission doesn't like to read. He talks about family values but raised daughters who act like drunken harlots. He mocks people who think social security is a "federal program." He doesn't know what "sovereignty" means (see http://kontraband.com/show/show.asp?ID=1525) He calls Jesus Christ his personal hero but ardently supports the death penalty (one suspects he and JC feel differently on that topic). He can't pronounce "nuclear" but really likes the idea of it.
Let's face it: our President is a spoiled chump, and we have no right to be disappointed in him. No, he's not much good at governing, but he's never been much good at anything. We knew--or should've known--and we made him President anyway.
5. The Impeachment
Did we really have nothing better to do in the 1990s? Fueled by Rush Limbaugh, the American Spectator magazine, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and an assortment of other crackpots and loons, our fine Congress plunged the nation into a Constitutional crisis because President Clinton got a blowjob and lied about it.
If the impeachment served any good purpose, it was to reveal the boundless hypocrisy of the Republicans and their media outlets. Ostensibly the guardians of law, order, and family values, they showed themselves to be just as devoid of ethics as anyone they were chasing. Ken Starr's office spent $48 million and regularly broke the law by leaking grand jury information to the media. Starr also refused to take a leave of absence from his firm, Kirkland and Ellis, when he was appointed Independent Counsel, even though his firm was representing Paula Jones.
Rush Limbaugh railed against the President's immorality, lack of respect for the law, and inabilty to control himself. Rush Limbaugh is addicted to illegal drugs, which he had his maid score for him because he didn't have the guts to go get them himself.
R. Emmet Tyrell Jr., editor of the American Spectator, more than once accused the President (wrongly) of not paying his fair share in income taxes; meanwhile Tyrell used his magazine's tax-exempt funding to help pay for his house, his apartment, his club memberships and his frequent flights to Europe, where he vacationed with convicted cocaine smuggler Taki Theodoacopulus.
New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who had already earned himself the nicknames "Senator Sleaze" and "Senator Shakedown," led the Senate's fruitless investigation into Whitewater. D'Amato, who refused to make public any of the proceedings of the Senate Ethics Committee's massive investigation into his own shady activities, had no problem demanding "full disclosure" from the White House. D'Amato had also been involved in a Long Island land deal that looked a lot like Whitewater.
In Congress, the impeachment was overseen by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Illinois), whose own eight-year affair had ruined another woman's marriage. Hyde brushed this off as a "youthful indiscretion"; it happened when he was in his forties. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana) also led calls for Clinton's head; he once called the president a "scumbag." Burton advocated the death penalty for drug dealers and helped push mandatory minimum sentences for drug dealing through Congress. He steadfastly supported mandatory minimums until his son was arrested--twice--for possession with intent to distribute. At that point Burton forgot about law and order and got his son a polite slap on the wrist. To be clear, I'm talking about Burton's "real" son. He also has an illegitimate son from a long-term affair.
Bob Dole. Newt Gingrich. Bob Livingston. All moralizing impeachment supporters; all adulterers. John Fund, the Wall Street Journal editorial writer who crusaded for Clinton's impeachment, got himself into a weird love triangle with a woman and her daughter, and after impregnating the daughter helped her get an abortion. And let's not forget Bob Barr, another Bible-thumping impeacher. Barr's second wife was his secretary; he had her unknowingly arrange his trysts with his mistress, who later became his third wife. This was after he encouraged the second wife to get an abortion. But Bob Barr never committed perjury! At his divorce proceedings, confronted with repeated questions about the abortion and his affair, he simply refused to answer.
And how many criminals were put away as a result of this circus? Zero. With the exception of Webster Hubbell, who was convicted for an embezzlement he'd committed before coming to Washington, no Clinton official was ever convicted of anything. Why not? Because they didn't commit any crimes. Whitewater was just a land deal. Travelgate was a clumsy but not illegal personnel move. Vincent Foster was clinically depressed. Bill Clinton was horny.
Just for fun, let's compare Clinton's administration to Reagan's. In eight years of Reagan rule, 32 officials were convicted of felonies. Three of these were overturned on appeal, but over 30 more Reagan officials resigned or were fired following charges of legal or ethical misconduct. And Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's defense secretary, was indicted on five counts but pardoned by George H.W. Bush before he could face trial. Bush also pardoned Elliot Abrams, Reagan's assistant Secretary of State, and Robert MacFarlane, his National Security Advisor, before they could face charges. In all, over 130 Reagan officials were indicted, convicted or investigated. Strange that we never hear about that on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
6. Stalling the 9/11 Commission
Republicans like to blame 9/11 on Bill Clinton (Republicans like to blame everything on Bill Clinton) but Clinton happily turned everything he had over to 9/11 investigators, and willingly sat for extended interviews with them under oath. Our fearless leaders in the White House--including our "War President"--did something a bit different.
Inquiry of any sort, the Administration made clear, would not be acceptable unless it conformed to strict parameters. In the days immediately following 9/11, this seemed to mean that any explanation other than that the hijackers had been sent by the Fallen One, the Devil Himself, would be considered anti-American.* After comedian Bill Maher made an admittedly foolish wisecrack on his show and lost his job as a result, White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer said this at a press conference: "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remark like that." Flesicher's statement, which is easy to construe as an attempt to chill open discussion of 9/11, was excised from the official White House web-site transcript of the press conference. When reporters noticed its absence, the Administration attributed it to a "transcription
error," but didn't fix it for days. Orwell, anyone?
As for figuring out what had happened on 9/11, the Administration first said it didn't want any investigation at all, either by Congress or an independent commission. Both Bush and Cheney said an investigation would hurt the War on Terror (apparently it would be detrimental to the war effort know how the attack against us was planned and executed.)
This didn't wash with survivors and victims' families, who made clear that only an independent commission would do. At that point the Administration said it would support a Congressional inquiry. This position didn't last long either. In November 2002 Bush signed legislation creating the 9/11 commission, and appointed Henry Kissinger, of all people, to lead it. Kissinger--an accused war criminal, known liar, and uber-secretive consultant--soon resigned, partly due to loud protests and partly because he didn't want to comply with conflict of interest laws that would have required him to divulge his confidential client list. Bush replaced him with former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, and then gave the 9/11 Commission a budget of $3 million; by way of comparison, the Republicans spent $50 million investigating Monica Lewinsky and the other real-and-imagined improprieties of Bill Clinton. Of
course, fellatio with an intern is by any logic more important than a devastating attack on America that killed 3,000 people. The White House rebuffed Kean's attempts to get more money, although Congress finally gave it to him.
The White House then stalled the commission, refused to turn over documents related to Saudi Arabia, and finally--after all the delays--refused to extend the commission an extra two months for its investigation (the Administration later backed down).
It gets worse. By February of 2004 the commission had been trying for a year without success to get access to 360 of the White House's Presidential Daily Briefs. The Administration granted access to 24 of them, then said only four commission members could read them. One member was allowed to read all 360, but forbidden to talk about them to other members. That same month, Bush and Cheney said they would only testify before the Commission for an hour, only testify together (together?), and only in the Oval Office. Condoleeza Rice outright refused to testify (she, too, later backed down).
Clinton, meanwhile, had granted the Commission full access to his papers in the National Archives. But the Bush Administration obstructed the Commission here as well, releasing only a quarter of the 11,000 Clinton-era documents the Commission had requested. When Bush and Cheney finally testified (for just over three hours) they did so without being under oath and without being tape-recorded. Commissioner members were searched before they entered the Oval Office, and their notebooks were confiscated and reviewed before they left.
As for the man responsible for 9/11, the Amdinistration has chosen to quietly forget him. Since the beginning of 2003, Bush has mentioned Osama bin Laden's name ten times, six of which were in response to a direct question. On four other occasions Bush was asked about bin Laden but managed to answer without using his name. None of these instances involved a lengthy or substantive discussion of bin Laden; in the same period he mentioned Saddam Hussein by name more than 300 times. In a news conference in March of 2003, when CNN reporter Kelly Wallace asked Bush why he discussed bin laden so infrequently, the President rambled a bit and then had this to say:
I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you... I truly am not that concerned about him.
Well, I've got to be honest too. Considering that Bush's Administration regularly initiates dubious (and suspiciously timed) terror alerts based on threats from bin Laden's organization, it's a little disconcerting that the President pays the man no mind. He certainly seems to want the rest of us to worry about Osama. Why doesn't he worry about him?
* Republicans were also quick, in the aftermath of 9/11, to accuse anyone who associated the attack with American foreign policy of being in the "blame America" crowd. By this definition, America-bashers would include Susan Sontag, Oliver Stone, neoconservative Reagan-worshipping scholar Derek Leebaert, and the former CIA operative Anonymous, who has written two coldly pragmatic books of realpolitik about terrorists and their hatred of America. Anonymous says that American foreign policy is largely to blame for the rise of Al Quaeda, and he calls for both strategic disengagement from the Middle East and a "savage" war against terrorism. What a liberal wussy! He definitely hates America. Also, the only people who ever explicitly "blamed America" for 9/11 were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who said 9/11 was the result of America's turning away
from God and embracing gays, feminists and the ACLU. Thanks, guys. Way to think it through.
7. The "Patriotism" Lie
How long are we going to have to listen to Republicans who didn't go to war calling Democrats who did wimps? Ronald Reagan spent his time in World War II making movies, which didn't stop him from later telling Yitshak Shamir and Simon Wisenthal that he'd helped liberate the Nazi death camps (or mystifyingly blaming Democrats in Congress after he bollocksed up the mission to Beirut). Richard Nixon managed to miss out on combat but lambasted decorated World War II bombardier George McGovern for his "cowardice" in not supporting the war in Vietnam.
Should we go on? Cheney. Perle. Wolfowitz. Somehow they all had other things to do while the country waged wars they supported. Cheney got a draft deferment (one of his five) because his first child was born nine months and two days after the Selective Service Administration publicly revoked its policy of not drafting childless husbands. John Ashcroft received seven draft deferments. In 2002 Saxby Chambliss (also no military service--four deferments and a "football injury") unseated Max Cleland (who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam) from a Georgia Senate seat by running an ad that didn't just call Cleland weak on terrorism, but accused him of being a terrorist. A picture of Cleland was shown, and then Osama bin Laden's face was superimposed over it. Tasteful, no?
And of course there's our fearless leader, George W. Bush, whose entire service seems to have involved getting a physical. This has always been an uncomfortable aspect of W's past, but it has become more so this year since he's chosen to make national security (and his hawkish stance on it) a centerpiece of the presidential campaign, and since John Kerry happens to be a decorated war veteran. The Bush White House (which has also, by the way, whacked a number of Veterans' Benefits in the last few years) has responded to this dilemma by sliming Kerry as a criminal and liar.
Anyone who was paying attention could see it coming. In December of 2003 the Financial Times quoted senior Republicans saying, "By the time the White House finishes with Kerry, no one will know what side of the war (Vietnam) he fought on." Eight months later the attack is on. And coming primarily from a GOP front group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which presents itself as a group of aw-shucks God-and-Country old soldiers who're just determined to set the record straight. SBVT is bankrolled largely by John Perry, a wealthy Republican operative, friend of Karl Rove, and generous donor to Bush's campaigns, and coordinated by Merrie Spaeth, a Republican PR executive in Houston who served as Ken Starr's flack during the impeachment process. The group's main charges--among them that Kerry faked his wounds, never came under enemy fire, and murdered Vietnamese civilians--are documented in
TV commercials and in a book called Unfit for Command.
Unfit for Command was written by John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi. O'Neill is a former Swift Boat captain and, perhaps more importantly, a creature of Richard Nixon's propaganda machine. On his return from Vietnam O'Neill was tapped by the Nixon Administration to act, in the words of Chuck Colson, as a "counterfoil" to Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War. After debating Kerry on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 (a debate arranged by the Nixon White House) he went to law school, clerked for William Rehnquist, and then became a practicing attorney and active Republican. He has had an axe to grind with Kerry for over thirty years; on the Kerry issue, his own PR advisor once described him as sounding like a "crazed extremist."
But "crazed extremist," is probably a better label for his co-author. Jerome Corsi has a PhD from Harvard. He is also a homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic--well, he hates just about everyone. He has called Muslims "ragheads"; described Islam as "worthless, dangerous, Satanic"; said Hilary Clinton is a "lesbo"; accused John Kerry of secretly practicing Judaism (presumably this was an insult); and labeled the Democratic Party the "Sodomizer Protection Association of America."
Unsurprisingly, most of the Swift Boat Veterans' claims fall apart under any sort of scrutiny, as do scurrilous Republican charges about how Kerry "repeatedly voted against funds to supply our troops with the best equipment." This canard, when chased back to its source, refers to a bloated 1991 spending bill that was so laden with pork that it was opposed not just by Kerry but also by the then-defense secretary--none other than Dick Cheney.
Cheney and Bush supported Vietnam but didn't go. Kerry went, developed doubts, and came home a protester. This, apparently, is the height of anti-Americanism, which is why Tom Delay ripped into Kerry for it in 2003. "If we had had the leadership of a George W. Bush in those days," Delay said, "we probably would not have lost that war." And why was DeLay at home during Vietnam? Here's the explanation he gave back in 1988: "So many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks."
Now that's convincing. This might be a good time to note that you can be patriotic without being belligerent, and that there's nothing "tough" about having other people do your fighting for you. It would also be a good place to say that the events of 35 years ago really shouldn't play a role anywhere near as large as they do in today's campaign, since we have problems more pressing than Vietnamese communism (for instance, Iraqi insurgency). Nevertheless, it was the Republicans who chose to play the patriotism card, and no matter what sort of trash they truck out, they cannot obscure the fact that John Kerry was, in fact, on a Navy boat on a river in Vietnam--even his enemies acknowledge that. Where was George? Ostensibly he was serving in the Air National Guard, but why then can't anyone seem to remember him being there?
Despite the many connections between the Bush campaign and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Bush Administration continues to deny any links to the organization. Maybe that's true. But certainly the President can forgive people for wondering; this wouldn't be the first time he let other people go into the trenches for him.
8. There Is No Number 8
By now do you really need a number 8? If you do, fine. I'll take a page from the Republican playbook: a vote for George W. Bush is a vote for Osama bin Laden. And Saddam Hussein. And rickets. And Satan. Like, triple-Satan. Could you live with yourself if you voted for a triple-Satan? I didn't think so.
Copyright ? 2004 Infocrat Systems, Inc.
Reprinted from Freezerbox:
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=304 (Back to Index)
President Declares "Ownership Society"
Tells Convention He's Ordered Invasion of Social Security Trust Fund by Greg Palast
September 2, 2004 17:06 [New York] Of all the bone-headed, whacky, breathtakingly threatening schemes George W. Bush is trying to sell us in his acceptance speech tonight is something he and his handlers call, "the Ownership Society." Sounds cool, "ownership." Everyone gets a piece of the action. Everyone's a winner as the economy zooms. All boats rise. Sure. Behind the hooray-for-free-enterprise crapola is that dog-eared game-plan to siphon off Social Security revenues to pay for making Bush's tax cuts for the rich permanent. Here's what the President has in mind. Social Security is an insurance plan. You pay in, you get back. But it's hard to get your money back when there's a war where the Clinton surplus used to be. It's not the war on terror, or the war in Iraq, though Lord knows those have cost us a bundle with nothing to show for all the lost loot. I'm talking about the class war that Dubya and his Dick Cheney have waged on the average working person.
We're talking an economic Pearl Harbor here. While firemen and policemen went running into falling buildings, the Bushmen were preparing to relieve some gazillionaires, such as say, the Bush family, of the need to pay the taxes that the rest of us pay. Work as a teacher, you pay Social Security and income taxes on every darn penny. Sit on your yacht and speculate in the stock market casino and you are off the hook on taxes on the "capital gains." Bill Clinton proposed putting his big surpluses into a Social Security "lock-box" for that predictable rainy day. But tonight, Bush instead proposes to give the stock-options class a boost by lopping off a chunk of Social Security insurance revenue for gambling in the stock market. He had this same idea in 2000. If he'd had his way on his inauguration day, the average "owner" in America, investing in the stock market, would be 7% poorer, many flat busted. Some "security." Happy elderly "owners" would be hunting for lunch in the garbage cans under Madison Square Garden.
Here's the latest report from the front lines of the class war: The World Bank reports the USA has more millionaires than ever -- we'll see them at the Garden tonight. Median household income's down -- most of us are median -- while the bottom has fallen out for those at the bottom. Our poorest 20% have seen incomes drop by a fifth. America's upper one percent now own 53% of all the shares in the market. And now the uppers want to crack open your retirement piggy bank, cut some of your retirement benefits, then "allow" you to give them the remainder of your money to fund their latest stock float schemes. If betting trillions on stock market ponies doesn't produce a big win, what does Mr. Bush propose to do with all the hungry old folk? I think I heard George say, "Let them eat Enron certificates." And the future market fall, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk certainty. Let's do the math. OK, class, we all buy stock this afternoon to fund our retirement. In fifteen years, baby-boomers are ready to kick back, take it easy and retire on the stock they're about to sell. Did I say, "SELL"? And HOW. Around 2020, tens of millions of "owners" will be selling their shares … to whom? CRRRRASH!
A deliberate policy of aiming for another 1929 is appropriate for the top-hat and pinky-ring party of Herbert Hoover. The big problem is that supposedly non-partisan and even Democratic poobahs are rushing to "reform" Social Security. We have Alan Greenspan, who has barely a word to say about the multi-trillion dollar deficit wrought by Mr. Bush's tax cuts, yet is already warning about some disaster in Social Security based on "trends." Well, if we go by his own trend, the Fed chief will soon be marrying a 12-year-old Girl Scout. Hey, Alan, back to Economics 101 for you. As the boomers hit retirement age, we're going to need added borrowing for transfer payments like Social Security to maintain purchasing power to keep the economy alive while millions of old folk dump assets. Listen, Mr. President, we had an "ownership" society once before. Luckily, it came to an end when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
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