[lit-ideas] The Case Against Bush, by Ron Reagan

(The Republicans are seriously split among themselves. -- andreas)

The Case Against George W. Bush
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/040729_mfe_reagan_1.html
By Ron Reagan
September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3

The son of the fortieth president of the United
States takes a hard look at the son of the
forty-first and does not like what he sees. He is
as articulate as Bush isn't.

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

It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on
the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or
smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it
was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered
lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The
grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from
their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in
cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron
audiotapes and their celebration of craven
sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of
all these displays and countless smaller ones,
you could feel, a couple of months back, as
summer spread across the country, the ground
shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene
in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in
which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this
was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly
tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet
something was in the air, and people were
inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from
friends whose parents had always voted
Republican, "but not this time." There was the
staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian
language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word
spread through the usual channels that old hands
from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but
not too quietly) appalled by his son's
misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you
went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have
had just about enough of what the Bush
administration was dishing out. A fresh age
appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound
of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt
something like a demonstration of that highest of
American prerogatives and the most deeply
cherished American freedom: dissent.

Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed.
Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week
in early June, items would appear in the
newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness
to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the
outpouring of affection for my father and turn it
to Bush's advantage for the fall election. The
familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were
reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like
(subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably,
this backfired. People were treated to a
side-by-side comparison-Ronald W. Reagan versus
George W. Bush-and it's no surprise who suffered
for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set
aside old political gripes for a few days and
remembered what friend and foe always conceded to
Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the
role of leader of the free world. A sign in the
crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the
Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood-a
portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS
A PRESIDENT.

The comparison underscored something important.
And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her
grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush
administration can't be trusted. The parade of
Bush officials before various commissions and
committees-Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite
remember how many young Americans had been
sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John
Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious,
fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe
Biden might just come over the table at him-these
were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps,
too-a reminder of how certain environments and
particular habits of mind can erode common
decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been
reached. The issue of credibility was back on the
table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the
tired old bromide liberal. That's so 1988. No,
this time something much more potent: liar.

Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll
exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over
their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua
franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush
and his administration have taken "normal"
mendacity to a startling new level far beyond
lies of convenience. On top of the usual
massaging of public perception, they traffic in
big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic
small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody
dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people,
finally, have started catching on.

None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a
one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the
country-nearly one third of us by some
estimates-continues to regard all who refuse to
drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists,
Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush
could show up on video canoodling with Paris
Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing
talking heads continue painting anyone who fails
to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and
therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist
car bomber. But these protestations have taken on
a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone.
It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore.
But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the
scientific community, and a host of current and
former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and
military officials line up against you, it
becomes increasingly difficult to characterize
the opposition as fringe wackos.

Does anyone really favor an administration that
so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously
clings to secrecy, not to protect the American
people, but to protect itself? That so willfully
misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly
misleads the people from whom it derives its
power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to
the same conclusion does not make you guilty of
swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush
presidency, because that's not what this is. This
is the critique of a person who thinks that lying
at the top levels of his government is abhorrent.
Call it the honest guy's critique of George W.
Bush.

THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and
misdirection-which the administration even now
cannot bring itself to repudiate-involve our
putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray
into Iraq.

During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush
pledged a more "humble" foreign policy. "I would
take the use of force very seriously," he said.
"I would be guarded in my approach." Other
countries would resent us "if we're an arrogant
nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation
building." "Our military is meant to fight and
win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended,
morale drops." International cooperation and
consensus building would be the cornerstone of a
Bush administration's approach to the larger
world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was
hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a
stiff middle finger at the world and charging off
adventuring in the Middle East.

But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing
everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on September 12,
2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad
guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an
entirely new and grave threat to us and have to
be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the
American homeland again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein
rushed to the front of the line because he was
complicit with the hijackers and in some measure
responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D.
C., and at the tip of Manhattan?

Well, no.

As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul
O'Neill, and his onetime "terror czar," Richard
A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with
the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was
contemplating action against Iraq from day one.
"From the start, we were building the case
against Hussein and looking at how we could take
him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an
excuse. Clarke got the same impression from
within the White House. Afghanistan had to be
dealt with first; that's where the actual
perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was
a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who
knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter
of convincing the American public (and our
representatives) that war was justified.

The real-but elusive-prime mover behind the 9/11
attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated
to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News-the
cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House-told me a
year ago that mere mention of bin Laden's name
was forbidden within the company, lest we be
reminded that the actual bad guy remained at
large) while Saddam's Iraq became International
Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose
economy had been reduced to shambles by
international sanctions, whose military was less
than half the size it had been when the U. S.
Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war,
that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it
in the north and south as well as constant aerial
and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal
weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had
been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN
inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a
threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful
nation on earth.

Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were
introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been
built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told
the nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be
a mushroom cloud," National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush
maintained, "Iraq could decide on any given day
to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a
terrorist group or individual terrorists." We
"know" Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even "know"
where they are hidden. After several months of
this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had
embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the
World Trade Center.

ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless
and, we've since discovered, were regarded with
skepticism by experts at the time they were made.
But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or
covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this
writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion
that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a
worldwide terror network.

And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war
president" may have been justified in his
assumption that Americans are a warrior people.
He pushed the envelope in thinking we'd be
content as an occupying power, but he was sadly
mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans
would tolerate an image of themselves as
torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to
be secret. So were the memos justifying such
treatment that had floated around the White
House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more
than a year before the first photos came to
light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few
of us have the stones to practice the New
Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's panties
over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while
forcing him to masturbate? What would you say
while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is
keeping someone awake till he hallucinates
inhumane treatment or merely "sleep management"?

  Most of us know the answers to these questions,
so it was incumbent upon the administration to
pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not
policy. Investigations, we were assured, were
already under way; relevant bureaucracies would
offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of
miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After
all, they didn't "represent the best of what
America's all about." As anyone who'd watched the
proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have
predicted, what followed was the usual
administration strategy of stonewalling,
obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of
investigators was stalled; documents were
withheld, including the full report by Major
General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's
primary investigation into the abuses at Abu
Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John
McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and
an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to
answer the simple question Who was in charge at
Abu Ghraib?

The Bush administration no doubt had its real
reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They've
simply chosen not to share them with the American
public. They sought justification for ignoring
the Geneva Convention and other statutes
prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of
prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much.
They may have ideas worth discussing, but they
don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation.
They don't trust us because they don't dare
expose their true agendas to the light of day.
There is a surreal quality to all this:
Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but
we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but
we've got him; we'll get out as soon as an
elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be
there for years to come. Which is what we counted
on in the first place, only with rose petals and
easy coochie.

This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue
in the perversely cynical "Clear Skies" and
"Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA and
in the administration's irresponsible tax cutting
and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush
administration has always worn strangely tinted
shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush
himself lives in a world of his own imagining.

And chances are your America and George W. Bush's
America are not the same place. If you are dead
center on the earning scale in real-world
twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less
than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum
that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by
in his world. Bush, who has always managed to
fail upwards in his various careers, has never
had a job the way you have a job-where not
showing up one morning gets you fired, costing
you your health benefits. He may find it
difficult to relate personally to any of the
nearly two million citizens who've lost their
jobs under his administration, the first
administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a
net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry
that he couldn't afford the best available health
care for his children. For him, forty-three
million people without health insurance may be no
more than a politically inconvenient abstraction.
When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not
talking about your economy. His economy is filled
with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in
their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his
world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying
taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not
a friend. You're the help. When the party Mr.
Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left
picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.

ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or
outright lie when their backs are against the
wall, when honesty begins to look like political
suicide. But this administration seems to lie
reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest
option for busy folks with a lot on their minds.
While the big lies are more damning and of
immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is
the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be
diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to?
When the simple truth, though perhaps
embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in
one's long-term self-interest? Why would a
president whose calling card is his alleged
rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for
penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an
inability to admit even small mistakes.

Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds
of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but
was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His
untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon
narrative. While generally acknowledged to be
lacking in experience, depth, and other
qualifications typically considered useful in a
leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a
decent fellow nonetheless, one whose
straightforwardness was a given. None of that
"what the meaning of is is" business for him.
And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded
fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on
the other hand, was depicted as a dubious
self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue
dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions.
He would spend valuable weeks explaining away
statements-"I invented the Internet"-that he
never made in the first place. All this left the
coast pretty clear for Bush.

Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While
debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious-if not
exactly earth-shattering-lies and is not
challenged. First, he claims to have supported a
patient's bill of rights while governor of Texas.
This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted
such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to
political reality and allowing it to become law
without his signature. Second, he announces that
Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The
opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These
misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major
press outlets, which then quickly return to the
more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and
whether a certain feminist author has counseled
him to be more of an "alpha male."

  Having gotten away with such witless falsities,
perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above
day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in
the White House, they picked up where they left
off.

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11,
Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida,
conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet
Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air
Force One. While this may have been entirely
sensible under the chaotic circumstances-for all
anyone knew at the time, Washington might still
have been under attack-the appearance was, shall
we say, less than gallant. So a story was
concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force
One that necessitated the evasive maneuver.
Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited
"specific" and "credible" evidence to that
effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth,
there was no such threat.

Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op
landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his
subsequent speech in front of a large banner
emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner,
which loomed in the background as Bush addressed
the crew, became problematic as it grew clear
that the mission in Iraq-whatever that may have
been-was far from accomplished. "Major combat
operations," as Bush put it, may have technically
ended, but young Americans were still dying
almost daily. So the White House dealt with the
questionable banner in a manner befitting a
president pledged to "responsibility and
accountability": It blamed the sailors. No
surprise, a bit of digging by journalists
revealed the banner and its premature
triumphalism to be the work of the White House
communications office.

More serious by an order of magnitude was the
administration's dishonesty concerning pre-9/11
terror warnings. As questions first arose about
the country's lack of preparedness in the face of
terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was
dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the
nation that "no one could have imagined
terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact,
terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just
such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director
George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report
warning that "it is highly likely that a
significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near
future, within several weeks." Two intelligence
briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001
specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent
danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons.
According to The New York Times, after the second
of these briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined
to Attack Inside United States," was delivered to
the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in
August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent
most of the day fishing." This was the briefing
Dr. Rice dismissed as "historical" in her
testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

What's odd is that none of these lies were worth
the breath expended in the telling. If only for
self-serving political reasons, honesty was the
way to go. The flight of Air Force One could
easily have been explained in terms of security
precautions taken in the confusion of momentous
events. As for the carrier landing, someone
should have fallen on his or her sword at the
first hint of trouble: We told the president he
needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was
gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a
mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would
appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake.
Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11
warnings would have entailed more than simple
embarrassment. But done forthrightly and
immediately, an honest reckoning would have
earned the Bush team some respect once the dust
settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing,
Bush's White House squandered vital credibility,
turning even relatively minor gaffes into telling
examples of its tendency to distort and evade the
truth.

  But image is everything in this White House, and
the image of George Bush as a noble and
infallible warrior in the service of his nation
must be fanatically maintained, because behind
the image lies . . . nothing? As Jonathan Alter
of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never
fully inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists
can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and
vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of
action, but watching Bush flounder when
attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one
is left with the impression that he is ineloquent
not because he can't speak but because he doesn't
bother to think.

GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in
Washington" and ran for office as a moderate, a
"compassionate conservative," in the
focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign.
Yet he has governed from the right wing of his
already conservative party, assiduously tending a
"base" that includes, along with the expected
Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who
talk openly of doing away with Social Security
and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size
where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's
phrase, "drown it in the bathtub." That base also
encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice
zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted
purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones
to all of them-"partial birth" abortion
legislation, the promise of a constitutional
amendment banning marriage between homosexuals,
federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell
research, even comments suggesting presidential
doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's not that
Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview;
indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any
coherent philosophy. But this president, who
vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound
policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of
political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's former
head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based
Initiatives, once told this magazine, "What
you've got is everything-and I mean
everything-being run by the political arm."

This was not what the American electorate opted
for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin
of more than half a million votes, they chose . .
. the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate.
Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction
with his domestic priorities. How many people
would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place
had they understood his eagerness to pass on
crushing debt to our children or seen his true
colors regarding global warming and the
environment? Even after 9/11, were people really
looking to be dragged into an optional war under
false pretenses?

If ever there was a time for uniting and not
dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs
as if by divine right, seeming to actually
believe that a wise God wants him in the White
House and that by constantly evoking the horrible
memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public
anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another
term.

UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's
will believe I harbor a personal vendetta against
the man, some seething resentment. One
conservative commentator, based on earlier
remarks I've made, has already discerned
"jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son
of a former president, now occupies that office
himself, while I, most assuredly, will not. Truth
be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at
all. I hardly know him, having met him only
twice, briefly and uneventfully-once during my
father's presidency and once during my father's
funeral. I'll acknowledge occasional annoyance at
the pretense that he's somehow a clone of my
father, but far from threatening, I see this more
as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles
excepted, never pretended to be anyone but
himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems
a far cry from the current model, with its
cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its
kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts.
Believe it or not, I don't look in the mirror
every morning and see my father looming over my
shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or
less than an American citizen, one who is plenty
angry about the direction our country is being
dragged by the current administration. We have
reached a critical juncture in our nation's
history, one ripe with both danger and
possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom
to prudently confront those dangers and the
imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities.
Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and
ill-advised militarism, there is a question of
trust. George W. Bush and his allies don't trust
you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust
them?

Fortunately, we still live in a democratic
republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of
right-wing justices to once again deliver the
White House. Come November 2, we will have a
choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a
measure of integrity to our government. We can
choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle
put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.


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