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Citizendium
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How
Bad is He? |
Bush ran as a moderate, tacked right and governed ineffectually --
before 9/11. Since then he's become the most radical American president
in history -- and arguably the worst.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Sep. 12, 2006 | No one predicted just how radical a president George W.
Bush would be. Neither his opponents, nor the reporters covering him,
nor his closest campaign aides suggested that he would be the most
willfully radical president in American history.
In his 2000 campaign, Bush permitted himself few hints of radicalism. On
the contrary he made ready promises of moderation, judiciously offering
himself as a "compassionate conservative," an identity carefully crafted
to contrast with the discredited Republican radicals of the House of
Representatives. After capturing the Congress in 1994 and proclaiming a
"revolution," they had twice shut down the government over the budget
and staged an impeachment trial that resulted in the acquittal of
President Clinton. Seeking to distance himself from the congressional
Republicans, Bush declared that he was not hostile to government. He
would, he said, "change the tone in Washington." He would be more
reasonable than the House Republicans and more moral than Clinton.
Governor Bush went out of his way to point to his record of bipartisan
cooperation with Democrats in Texas, stressing that he would be "a
uniter, not a divider."
Trying to remove the suspicion that falls on conservative Republicans,
he pledged that he would protect the solvency of Social Security. On
foreign policy, he said he would be "humble": "If we're an arrogant
nation, they'll view us that way, but if we're a humble nation, they'll
respect us." Here he was criticizing Clinton's peacemaking and
nation-building efforts in the Balkans and suggesting he would be far
more restrained. The sharpest criticism he made of Clinton's foreign
policy was that he would be more mindful of the civil liberties of Arabs
accused of terrorism: "Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's
called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something
about that." This statement was not an off-the-cuff remark, but
carefully crafted and presented in one of the debates with Vice
President Al Gore. Bush's intent was to win an endorsement from the
American Muslim Council, which was cued to back him after he delivered
his debating point, and it was instrumental in his winning an
overwhelming share of Muslims' votes, about 90,000 of which were in
Florida.
So Bush deliberately offered himself as an alternative to the divisive
congressional Republicans, his father's son (at last) in political
temperament, but also experienced as an executive who had learned the
art of compromise with the other party, and differing from the incumbent
Democratic president only in personality and degree. Bush wanted the
press to report and discuss that he would reform and discipline his
party, which had gone too far to the right. He encouraged commentary
that he represented a "Fourth Way," a variation on the theme of
Clinton's "Third Way."
In his second term, Clinton had the highest sustained popularity of any
president since World War II, prosperity was in its longest recorded
cycle, and the nation's international prestige high. Bush's tack as
moderate was adroit, shrewd and necessary. His political imperative was
to create the public perception there were no major issues dividing the
candidates and that the current halcyon days would continue as well
under his aegis. Only through his positioning did Bush manage to close
to within just short of a half-million votes of Gore and achieve an
apparent tie in Florida, creating an Electoral College deadlock and
forcing the election toward an extraordinary resolution.
Few political commentators at the time thought that the ruthless tactics
used by the Bush camp in the Florida contest presaged his presidency.
The battle there was seen as unique, a self-contained episode of high
political drama that could and would not be replicated. Tactics such as
setting loose a mob comprised mostly of Republican staff members from
the House and Senate flown down from Washington to intimidate physically
the Miami-Dade County Board of Supervisors from counting the votes
there, and manipulating the Florida state government through the office
of the governor, Jeb Bush, the candidate's brother, to forestall vote
counting were justified as simply hardball politics.
The Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, by a five to four margin,
perversely sanctioned not counting thousands of votes (mostly
African-American) as somehow upholding the equal protection clause of
the 15th Amendment (enacted after the Civil War to guarantee the rights
of newly enfranchised slaves, the ancestors of those disenfranchised by
Bush v. Gore). In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia argued
that counting votes would cast a shadow on the "legitimacy" of Bush's
claim to the presidency. The Court concluded that the ruling was to have
applicability only this one time. By its very nature, it was declared to
be unprecedented. Never before had the Supreme Court decided who would
be president, much less according to tortuous argument, and by a one
vote margin that underlined and extended political polarization.
The constitutional system had ruptured, but it was widely believed by
the political class in Washington, including most of the press corps,
that Bush, who had benefited, would rush to repair the breach. The
brutality enabling him to become president, while losing the popular
majority, and following a decade of partisan polarization, must spur him
to make good on his campaign rhetoric of moderation, seek common ground
and enact centrist policies. Old family retainers, James Baker (the
former Secretary of State who had been summoned to command the legal and
political teams in Florida) and Brent Scowcroft (elder Bush's former
national security adviser), were especially unprepared for what was to
come, and they came to oppose Bush's radicalism, mounting a sub rosa
opposition. In its brazen, cold-blooded and single-minded partisanship,
the Florida contest turned out in retrospect to be an augury not an
aberration. It was Bush's first opening, and having charged through it,
grabbing the presidency, he continued widening the breach.
The precedents for a president who gained office without winning the
popular vote were uniformly grim. John Quincy Adams, the first president
elected without a plurality, never escaped the accusation of having made
a "corrupt bargain" to secure the necessary Electoral College votes.
After one term he was turned out of office with an overwhelming vote for
his rival, Andrew Jackson. Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison,
also having won the White House but not the popular vote, declined to
run again. Like these three predecessors Bush lacked a mandate, but
unlike them he proceeded as though he had won by a landslide.
The Republicans had control of both houses of the Congress and the
presidency for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was elected. But
Eisenhower had gained the White House with a resounding majority. He
spent his early years in office trying to isolate his right wing in the
Congress, quietly if belatedly encouraging efforts to censure Senator
Joseph McCarthy. Eisenhower greeted the Democratic recovery of the
Congress in 1954 with relief and smoothly governed for the rest of his
tenure in tandem with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. The
outrageous behavior of the Republicans during the brief period in which
they had held congressional power and unleashed McCarthy was a direct
cause of their minority status for 40 subsequent years. But the
Republicans who gained control of the Congress in 1994 had not learned
from their past.
The Republican radicals in charge of the House of Representatives
remained unabashed by their smashing failures of the 1990s. They were
willing to sacrifice two speakers of the House to scandals of their own
in order to pursue an unconstitutional coup d'état to remove President
Clinton. (It was unconstitutional, strictly speaking, because they had
rejected any standards whatsoever for impeachment in the House Judiciary
Committee in contradistinction to the committee's exacting standards
enacted in the impeachment proceedings of President Nixon.) Now these
Republicans welcomed the Bush ascension as deus ex machina, rescuing
them from their exhaustion, disrepute and dead end. They became Bush's
indispensable partners.
Immediately upon assuming office, Bush launched upon a series of
initiatives that began to undo the bipartisan traditions of
internationalism, environmentalism, fiscal discipline, and scientific
progress. His first nine months in office were a quick march to the
right. The reasons were manifold, ranging from Cheney and Rumsfeld's
extraordinary influence, Rove's strategies, the neoconservatives'
inordinate sway, and Bush's Southern conservatism. These deeper patterns
were initially obscured by the surprising rapidity of Bush's determined
tack.
Bush withdrew from the diplomacy with North Korea to control its
development and production of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin
Powell, after briefing the press that the diplomatic track would
continue, was sent out again to repudiate himself and announce the
administration's reversal of almost a decade of negotiation. Powell did
not realize that this would be the first of many times his credibility
would be abused in a ritual of humiliation. Swiftly, Bush rejected the
Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming, and
presented a "voluntary" plan that was supported by no other nation. He
also withdrew the U.S. from its historic role as negotiator among
Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs, a process to which his father had been
particularly committed.
In short order, Bush also reversed his campaign promise to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants and canceled the federal regulation
reducing cancer causing arsenic levels in water. He joked at a dinner:
"As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water.
To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed
to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for
participating." He appointed scores of former lobbyists and industry
executives to oversee policies regulating the industries they previously
represented.
As his top priority Bush pushed for passage of a large tax cut that
would redistribute income to the wealthy, drain the surplus that the
Clinton administration had accumulated, and reverse fiscal discipline
embraced by both the Clinton and prior Bush administrations. The tax cut
became Bush's chief instrument of social policy. By wiping out the
surplus, budget pressure was exerted on domestic social programs. Under
the Reagan administration, a tax cut had produced the largest deficit to
that time, bigger than the combined deficits accumulated by all previous
presidents. But Reagan had stumbled onto this method of crushing social
programs through the inadvertent though predictable failure of his
fantasy of supply-side economics in which slashing taxes would magically
create increased federal revenues. Bush confronted alternatives in the
recent Republican past, the Reagan example or his father's responsible
counter-example of raising taxes to cut the deficit; once again, he
rejected his father's path. But unlike Reagan, his decision to foster a
deficit was completely deliberate and with full awareness of its
consequences.
Domestic policy adviser John DiIulio, a political scientist from the
University of Pennsylvania, who had accepted his position in the White
House on the assumption that he would be working to give substance to
the president's rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism," resigned in a
state of shock. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for
what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,"
DiIulio told Esquire magazine. "What you've got is everything -- and I
mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the
Mayberry Machiavellis ... Besides the tax cut ... the administration has
not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous
administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual
absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a
fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called
compassionate conservatism."
After just four months into the Bush presidency, the Republicans lost
control of the Senate. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who had served
for 26 years as a moderate Republican in the House and the Senate, left
his party in response to Bush's radicalism. "In the past, without the
presidency, the various wings of the Republican Party in Congress have
had some freedom to argue and influence and ultimately to shape the
party's agenda. The election of President Bush changed that
dramatically," Jeffords said on May 24, 2001. Overnight, the majority in
the upper chamber shifted to the Democrats.
Bush spent the entire month of August on vacation at his ranch in
Crawford, Texas. His main public event was a speech declaring federal
limits on scientific research involving stem cells that might lead to
cures for many diseases. Bush's tortuous position was a sop to the
religious right. On August 6, three days before his nationally televised
address on stem cells, he was presented with a Presidential Daily Brief
from the CIA entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S." CIA
director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission on Terrorist
Attacks on the United States "the system was blinking red." The
Commission reported: "The President told us the August 6 report was
historical in nature ... We have found no indication of any further
discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers
of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United
States."
By September 10, Bush held the lowest job approval rating of any
president to that early point in his tenure. He appeared to be falling
into the pattern of presidents who arrived without a popular mandate and
lasted only one term. The deadliest foreign attack on American soil
transformed his foundering presidency.
The events of September 11 lent Bush the aura of legitimacy that Bush v.
Gore had not granted. Catastrophe infused him with the charisma of a
"war president," as he proclaimed himself. At once, his radicalism had
an unobstructed path.
Bush's political rhetoric reached Manichaean and apocalyptic heights. He
divided the world into "good" and "evil." "You're either with the
terrorists or with us," he said. He stood at the ramparts of Fortress
America, defending it from evildoers without and within. His fervent
messianism guided what he called his "crusade" in the Muslim realm.
"Bring them on!" he exclaimed about Iraqi insurgents. Asked if he ever
sought advice from his father, Bush replied, "There's a higher Father I
appeal to."
After September 11, the American people were virtually united in
sentiment. Support for the Afghanistan war was almost unanimous. "The
nation is united and there is a resolve and a spirit that is just so
fantastic to feel," said Bush. But two weeks after he made this
statement, in January 2002, his chief political aide, whom he called
"The Architect," Karl Rove, spoke before a meeting of the Republican
National Committee, laying out the strategy for exploiting fear of
terror for partisan advantage. "We can go to the country on this issue
because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting
and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting
America," said Rove. His strategy was premised on the idea that
Republicans win elections by maximizing the turnout of their
conservative base; his method was to polarize the electorate as much as
possible. Rove's tactic was to challenge the patriotism of Democrats by
creating false issues of national security in which they could be
demonized. September 11 gave his politics of polarization the urgency of
national emergency.
Bush's politics sustained his remaking of the government that had been
the agenda of his vice president from the start. Even before September
11, when "wartime" was used to justify secrecy, Bush resisted
transparency. He fought in the courts the disclosure of the names of the
participants on Vice President Dick Cheney's energy panel. Kenneth Lay,
Enron's chief executive officer, was among them. Enron was the biggest
financial supporter of Bush's political career, before that had been a
partner in Bush's oil ventures and provided its corporate jets to the
Bush campaign for its Florida contest. Bush, who referred to Lay as
"Kenny Boy," claimed he didn't get to "know" him until after he became
governor and then hardly at all.
Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were the
prime movers behind the concentration of power in the executive. Their
experience going back to the Nixon presidency had imbued them with
belief in absolute presidential power, disdain for the Congress ("a
bunch of annoying gnats," Cheney called its members, of which he had
once been one), and secrecy.
Executive power was rationalized by a radical theory called the "unitary
executive," asserting that the president had complete authority over
independent federal agencies and was not bound by congressional
oversight or even law in his role as commander-in-chief.
Bush constructed a hidden world of his "war on terror" consisting of
"black sites," secret CIA prisons holding thousands of "ghost" detainees
deprived of legal due process and approved methods of torture. Cheney
insisted it was necessary to go to "the dark side," as he called it.
Attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice
wrote numerous memos to justify the "unitary executive" and the
president's unfettered right to engage in torture and domestic spying.
Bush's White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales (appointed Attorney
General in the second term) derided the Geneva Conventions against
torture as "quaint" and Bush overruled strenuous objections from the
military, Secretary of State Powell and senior officials in the
Department of Justice in abrogating U.S. adherence to them. Indeed, Bush
signed a directive stipulating that as commander-in-chief he could
determine any law he wished in dealing with those accused of terrorism.
At Gonzales's request, on August 1, 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel at
the Justice Department sent him a memo on torture. It was signed by
OLC's director Jay Bybee (later appointed a federal judge) and written
by an OLC deputy, John Yoo, who drafted at least a dozen crucial memos
justifying absolute presidential power. In this memo, the president's
authority to conduct torture without any oversight and by rules he
determined was asserted as fundamental to his power: "Any effort by the
Congress to regulate the interrogation of battlefield combatants would
violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander in Chief
authority in the President." The memo defined torture specifically and
broadly: "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent to
intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as
organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
Revelations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the tip of
the iceberg of the vast network of the detained and disappeared. The
International Committee of the Red Cross was forbidden access. Those at
the top of the chain of command were shielded from legal accountability
while a few soldiers and the female general in charge at Abu Ghraib were
offered up as scapegoats. After FBI agents witnessed gruesome spectacles
of torture at Guantánamo, the Bureau issued orders that it would not
participate in this netherworld.
At the same time, Bush ordered the National Security Agency to conduct
domestic spying dragnets outside the legal confines of the Foreign
Surveillance Intelligence Act and without seeking warrants from the FISA
court. Conservative lawyers within the Justice Department wrote memos
justifying the practice on the same grounds as they had rationalized
torture -- the right of the commander-in-chief to do as he saw fit. Once
again, the presidency was construed as a monarchy. Bush and Cheney
argued publicly that operating outside the FISA court might have
prevented the terrorist attacks of September 11, though nothing stopped
the administration from getting warrants to eavesdrop on calls from the
United States to al Qaeda before or after.
Foreign policy was captured by neoconservative ideologues, a small group
of sectarians rooted in the hothouse environment of the capital's
right-wing think tanks. Its principals had been fired from the Reagan
administration after the Iran-contra scandal and banished from the elder
Bush's administration, but Bush rewarded them with positions at the
strategic heights of national security. These cadres operated with a
Leninist sensibility following a party line, engaging in fierce
polemics, using harsh invective, and showing equal contempt for
traditional Republicans and liberal Democrats. Cheney acted as their
sponsor, protector and promoter. Under his aegis, they ran foreign
policy from the White House and the Pentagon. Secretary of State Colin
Powell was sidelined. The Undersecretary of State John Bolton, inserted
by Cheney, blocked Powell's initiatives and spied on him and his team,
reporting back to the Office of the Vice President. National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice made a separate peace and turned the National
Security Council into an augmented force for Cheney and the neocons.
Meanwhile, Republican realists, including elder Bush's closest
associates such as Brent Scowcroft, were isolated or purged.
The 60-year tradition of bipartisan internationalism was jettisoned.
After the Afghanistan war against the Taliban, the administration
elevated into a "Bush Doctrine" the policy of preemptive attack,
previously alien to the principles of U.S. foreign policy and expressly
rejected as dangerous to the nation's security by presidents Eisenhower
and Kennedy during the Cold War.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, an internal campaign was waged against
professionals of the intelligence community and diplomatic corps who
still upheld standards of objective analysis and carrying on the
traditions of U.S. foreign policy. Intense political pressure was
applied to them to distort or suppress their assessments if they
contained caveats and to give credence to disinformation fabricated by
Iraqi exiles favored by the neoconservatives. A special operation of
neocons was set up at the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans, to
"stovepipe" information directly into the White House without passing
through the analytical filter of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies. Cheney made several unprecedented personal visits to CIA
headquarters to try to intimidate analysts into certifying the
disinformation. The caveats and warnings of the State Department's
Intelligence and Research Bureau, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the
Department of Energy, and the intelligence services of Germany and
France were all ignored.
In making its case for war the administration stampeded public opinion
with false and misleading information about Saddam Hussein's possession
and development of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear
weapons. Later his National Security Adviser Rice (promoted to Secretary
of State in the second term) admitted that President Bush had made a
false statement in his 2003 State of the Union address about Iraq's
seeking uranium to produce nuclear weapons. Yet Bush, Cheney, Rice and
other officials had constantly suggested that Hussein was linked to
terrorism and those behind the attacks on September 11. Secretary of
State Powell's best-case presentation before the United Nations was
later proven to contain 26 major falsehoods. Not a single substantial
claim he made turned out to be true. He explained he had been
"deceived." He called it the biggest "blot" on his record. His chief of
staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said it was the "lowest point of my
life." It was certainly the lowest point of U.S. credibility.
After he resigned in 2005, Wilkerson revealed how a "Cheney-Rumsfeld
cabal" controlled national security policy: "Its insular and secret
workings were efficient and swift -- not unlike the decision-making one
would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive
process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of
the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were
reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its
dissenters, obstructionists and 'guardians of the turf.' But the secret
process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous
decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with
implementing them would not or could not execute them well."
Less than a year after September 11, the administration was beset by
disclosures that it had refused to take terrorism seriously before the
attacks and by stories about dysfunction at the FBI. An FBI agent at the
Minneapolis bureau, Coleen Rowley, emerged with documentation of how the
Bureau had ignored warnings of the coming terrorist strike. On the day
that she testified before the Senate, June 6, 2002, Bush suddenly
announced a dramatic reversal of his position against the Democratic
proposal for a Department of Homeland Security. Rowley's story was
blotted out.
Bush now turned the issue of a new department against the Democrats in
the midterm elections, following Rove's script. In Bush's proposal the
department would not recognize unions, and because the Democrats
believed that employees should have the right to form unions they were
cast as weak on homeland security and terrorism. Against this backdrop,
Rove helped direct attacks on the patriotism of Democrats in the 2002
midterm elections. In one Republican television commercial, the face of
Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a Vietnam veteran who had lost three
limbs, was morphed into that of Osama bin Laden, and Cleland lost. The
Republicans captured the Senate by one seat.
The tactics used against Democrats were also deployed to stifle contrary
views within the administration and to taint the motives of those who
had served and become critics. Any loyalist, no matter the egregious
error of judgment, was vaunted; any heretic was burned. Bush's radical
remaking of government demanded a relentless war against professionals
who did not operate according to ideological tenets but objective
standards of analysis.
In 2003, the disillusioned Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, the
former CEO of Alcoa, a traditional business-oriented Republican,
published a memoir, "The Price of Loyalty," recounting that the deficit
was deliberately fostered as a political tool contrary to economic
merits. He disclosed that the invasion of Iraq was raised at a National
Security Council meeting ten days after the inauguration. And he
described the president among his advisers as being "like a blind man in
a roomful of deaf people." The administration's response was to
investigate O'Neill for supposedly unlawfully making public classified
materials. It was a patently false charge, he was exonerated, but it
succeeded in changing the subject and silencing him.
When, in 2003, retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni criticized the
administration's Iraq policy and the neoconservatives' instrumental part
played in its formulation, conservative media retaliated by labeling him
"anti-Semitic." The former U.S. commander of Central Command and Bush's
envoy to the Middle East, who had endorsed Bush in 2000, had told the
Washington Post, "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the
product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going
to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think
tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground ... I don't know
where the neocons came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on."
In July 2003, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed
article in the New York Times detailing that he had been sent on a
mission by the CIA before the Iraq war to Niger, where he discovered
that the administration claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase
enriched yellowcake uranium there for building nuclear weapons was
untrue. Despite his report and that of two others the president insisted
in his 2003 State of the Union that Hussein was in fact seeking uranium
for nuclear weaponry. The counterattack against Wilson was swift. A week
after his piece appeared, the conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote
that "two senior administration officials" had informed him that
Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative, had been
responsible for sending him on his mission. The intent was somehow to
cast aspersions on Wilson's credibility. (For his service as the acting
U.S. ambassador in Iraq during the Gulf War, elder Bush had called him
"a hero.") The disclosure of Plame's identity was an apparent felony
against national security, a violation of the Intelligence Identity
Protection Act, and soon a special prosecutor was appointed, and the
president and the vice president were interviewed, along with much of
the White House senior staff. Cheney's chief of staff and national
security adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted for perjury and
obstruction of justice.
When, in March 2004, Richard Clarke, chief of counterterrorism on the
National Security Council, testified before the 9/11 Commission and
elaborated in a book, "Against All Enemies," that the Bush
administration had ignored terrorism before September 11, his
credibility was attacked by the administration and his motivations
questioned. By then, the smearing of whistleblower career professionals
had become a familiar pattern.
Traditional Republicans emerged among Bush's most penetrating critics,
from O'Neill to Wilkerson, from Zinni to Clarke. They were not hostile
to Bush when he entered office; on the contrary, they were willing and
eager to serve under him. They observed first-hand, more than opponents
on the outside, the radical changes Bush was making within the
government. As Republicans, more than Democrats, they understood which
traditions of their own were being traduced.
Bush's war on terror melded with his culture war at home. Never before
had a president attempted so vigorously to batter down the wall of
separation between church and state. In 2005, Bush proclaimed himself a
votary of the "culture of life" as he signed unprecedented legislation
seeking to reverse numerous state and federal court decisions that the
husband of a woman named Terri Schiavo, in a persistent vegetative state
for years, could end her life support. Political opportunism in the
guise of theology trampled the Constitution.
Bush's appointments to the federal judiciary were an attempt to reverse
the direction of the law for at least 70 years. Nearly all of his
nominees were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative group of
lawyers who seek to propagate certain doctrines and advance each other's
careers. One of these doctrines is called "originalism," the belief that
the intent of the framers can be applied to all modern problems and lead
to conservative legal solution. Yet another is called the "Constitution
in exile," a school of thought that argues that the true Constitution
has been suppressed since President Franklin D. Roosevelt began naming
justices to the Supreme Court and that its hidden law must be revived.
One of Bush's judiciary appointments, Janice Rogers Brown, lecturing
before a Federalist Society meeting, referred to the New Deal as
"Revolution of 1937," and denounced it as "the triumph of our socialist
revolution." It was hardly a surprise that Bush's nominee to the Supreme
Court, federal appellate court judge Samuel Alito, was a proponent of
the theory of the "unitary executive" and a wholehearted supporter of
executive power.
No other president has ever been hostile to science. Russell Train, the
Environmental Protection Agency administrator under presidents Nixon and
Ford, observed, "How radically we have moved away from regulation based
on independent findings and professional analysis of scientific, health
and economic data by the responsible agency to regulation controlled by
the White House and driven primarily by political considerations."
Bush's opposition to stem cell research was just the beginning of his
enmity toward science. The words "reproductive health" and "condoms"
were forbidden from appearing on websites of agencies or organizations
that received federal funds. At the Food and Drug Administration, staff
scientists and two independent advisory panels were overruled in order
to deny the public access to emergency contraception. At the Centers for
Disease Control, scientifically false information was posted on its
website to foster doubt about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing
HIV/AIDS. At the President's Council on Bioethics, two scientists were
fired for dissents based on scientific reasoning. At the National Cancer
Institute, staff scientists were suppressed as the administration
planted a story on its website falsely connecting breast cancer to
abortion. The top climate scientist at NASA, James Hansen, longtime
director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was
ordered muzzled after he noted at a scientific conference the link
between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The president also
suggested that public schools should equally teach evolution, the basis
of all biological science, and "Intelligent Design," a pseudo-scientific
version of creationism. "I think that part of education is to expose
people to different schools of thought," Bush said.
Bush's antipathy to science had an overlapping political appeal to both
the religious right and industrial special interests. Scientific
research was distorted and suppressed at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, the Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection
Agency. The administration censored and misrepresented scientific
reports on climate change, air pollution, endangered species, soil
conservation, mercury emissions, and forests. Scientists were dismissed
or rejected from numerous science advisory committees, from the Lead
Poisoning Prevention Panel to the Army Science Board.
In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, university
presidents, medical experts, and former federal agency directors from
both Democratic and Republican administrations, including 20 Nobel
laureates, issued a statement entitled "Restoring Scientific Integrity
in Policymaking." It declared: "The distortion of scientific knowledge
for partisan political ends must cease if the public is to be properly
informed about issues central to its well being, and the nation is to
benefit fully from its heavy investment in scientific research and
education."
When Hurricane Katrina landed in August 2005 scientific reality and
dysfunctional government collided. Bush had systematically distorted,
suppressed and ignored evidence of global warming, which scientists
believed was responsible for intensifying hurricanes. The director of
the National Hurricane Center had briefed Bush on the devastating impact
on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Katrina before it hit, but the
president disregarded the advance warning. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency, which under President Clinton had been one of the
most efficient and effective, had become a morass of incompetence and
political cronyism. Amid its abject failure, Bush praised its director
Michael Brown, whose previous experience was as the head of the
International Arabian Horse Association, as doing "a heck of a job." New
Orleans, a major and unique American city, was destroyed. In the
immediate aftermath of the storm, Bush traveled six times to the city,
promising to rebuild it to its former glory, but most of the city lay in
ruins a year later. In January 2006, Bush declared that he had received
no rebuilding plan, apparently unaware that he had already rejected it.
During the 2004 campaign, Bush's essential appeal was that he alone
could keep the country safe from terrorists. Before and after the Iraq
war, he implied that Saddam Hussein was in league with those responsible
for September 11. On May 1, 2002, in his speech on the USS Abraham
Lincoln, behind a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," he declared,
"The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on
September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on." This theme was at the core
of his campaign message and stump speech. When under questioning late in
the campaign he admitted Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September
11, he still insisted Saddam was involved with al Qaeda. Bush's closing
television commercial in his 2004 campaign showed a pack of wolves
symbolizing terrorists about to prey on the viewer. The voiceover
intoned: "And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America
harm."
As his supporters saw him, his simplistic rhetoric was straight talk,
his dogmatism fortitude, his swagger reassuring, his stubbornness made
him seem like a rock against danger, and his rough edges were proof that
he was a man of the people. His evangelical religion was central to his
image as a man of conviction and his purity of heart. This persona
helped insulate Bush from accusations that he got things wrong, misled
and had ulterior motives.
Faith was as important in sustaining Bush's politics as fear.
Evangelical ministers and conservative Catholic bishops turned their
churches into political clubhouses. At the behest of Karl Rove,
right-wingers put initiatives against gay marriage on the ballot in 16
swing states that were instrumental in maximizing the vote for Bush
there in the 2004 election.
The White House carefully tended an alternative universe of belief into
which its supporters took a leap of faith. From the Schiavo case to
Intelligent Design, from the morning after pill to abstinence, Bush sent
signals of encouragement to the religious right. His anti-scientific
approach helped arouse suspicion and detestation of "experts." Critics
were tainted as "elitists." Contempt for contrary facts was cultivated
as a psychological prop of the leader's authority.
In 2004, the University of Maryland Program on International Policy
Attitudes issued a study, "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry
Supporters." It reported that 72 percent of Bush supporters believed
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction even after the U.S. Iraq
Survey Group had definitively concluded that it had none. Seventy-five
percent of Bush supporters believed that Saddam Hussein had been
providing help to al Qaeda; 55 percent believed that the 9/11 Commission
had proved that point, though the commission's report had disproved it
and Bush had been forced to deny it. The social scientists conducting
the survey observed that respondents held these beliefs because they
said the Bush administration and conservative media had confirmed them.
Near the end of the campaign, a senior White House aide explained the
"faith-based" school of political thought to reporter Ron Suskind, who
wrote in the New York Times Magazine: "The aide said that guys like me
were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as
people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the
way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now,
and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left
to just study what we do.'"
The method described by the Bush aide was an updated version of the
insight of the philosopher Francis Bacon, who, in 1625, wrote in his
essay "Of Vaine-Glory": "For Lies are sufficient to breed Opinion, and
Opinion brings on Substance."
The "separate realities" of Bush and Kerry supporters studied by the
University of Maryland extended to the facts of their military records,
controversies about which became decisive events in the campaign and
case studies in the manipulation of information. Bush had numerous
mysterious discrepancies in his Vietnam era service in the Texas Air
National Guard, especially being absent without leave for a year. It is
indisputable that he never actually completed his service. How he
entered his unit through special preference and under what circumstances
he was discharged without having finished his requirements was the
subject of an investigation by CBS's "60 Minutes." The program's use of
documents that could not be authenticated, though various witnesses
confirmed the underlying facts, aroused an intense attack from
Republican activists and the White House, and the entire exposé was
discredited because of the journalistic lapse.
The Bush White House had anticipated the potential scandal in his
military background, particularly in contrast to the record of Senator
Kerry, who was a genuine war hero, awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star
and three Purple Hearts. In order to undermine Kerry's strong point and
defend Bush's weak one, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was
created, funded and its public relations handled by Bush allies, and led
by one John O'Neill, who had been selected by the Nixon White House to
hector Kerry during the Vietnam era. The group accused Kerry of having
falsely earned his medals and subsequently lied about his war
experiences. Though the Navy officially affirmed his right to his medals
and those who served directly with him upheld his account, the Swift
Boat Veterans were granted extensive media attention as if their
fabrications were a valid point of view that must be heard. On cable
television especially, and on CNN in particular, a perverse form of
objectivity prevailed in which the news organization abdicated
establishing the facts and allowed defamation to be presented as though
it was just one reasonable side of a debate.
The Bush White House, drawing harsh cautionary lessons from the Nixon
experience, considered the press an extremely dangerous enemy that must
be treated with contempt -- isolated, intimidated, and, if not made
pliable, discredited. The administration favored Fox News and other
conservative media, using them as quasi-official government propaganda
organs. Joining the long project by the conservative movement, the
administration sought to bring the press into disrepute and marginalize
it. If journalists did not support the administration's talking points
or operate from its premises, they were assailed as unfair and biased.
The conservative campaign against journalism as "liberal media" was
Leninist in its assumption that truth and fact were inherently sectarian
and instrumental. Acting on this premise, the press was subjected to
constant and elaborate campaigns of intimidation. The administration
enjoyed unprecedented success. Not a single report in any major
newspaper or on the broadcast news networks covered the campaign of
intimidation, as the press had once readily reported on Nixon's early
effort, progenitor of the current strategy.
As giant corporate conglomerates with extensive holdings in industries
subject to all manner of government regulation, media outlets were
sensitive to pressure from the administration. The effort to make the
mainstream media compliant was so dedicated that even Cheney himself
called corporate owners to complain about individual correspondents and
stories. (In 2005, Time Warner, which owns CNN, hired Republican House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay's chief of staff, Timothy Berry, as its chief
Washington lobbyist.)
After September 11 and in the rush to war in Iraq, a jingoist spirit
infected elements of the press corps and for a long time they largely
abandoned holding the government accountable. The New York Times' news
reports on weapons of mass destruction and the Washington Post's
editorials were indispensable in lending credence to the disinformation
on which the administration made its case for the Iraq war. (The Times
published a lengthy editor's note on the failures of its coverage and
the Times' chief correspondent on WMD, Judith Miller, eventually
resigned from the newspaper. The Post refused to acknowledge how it had
been misled in its editorials before the war.) The long-term damage to
the credibility of the prestige press is incalculable.
Reality was often too radical and threatening for many in the press to
venture covering. Those who dared were frequently thrust into fierce
conflicts. Some were subject to legal investigations by the Justice
Department (for example, the New York Times for reporting on Bush's
warrantless domestic surveillance and the Washington Post for reporting
on secret prisons for detainees). Some were even subjected to innuendo
and invasions of private life (for example, after broadcasting a story
on Army morale an ABC News reporter was outed as gay by right-wing
gossip columnist Matt Drudge, who claimed he was given the information
by a White House source).
A gay prostitute without journalistic background, carrying press
credentials from a phony media operation financed by right-wing Texas
Republicans, was granted access to the regular White House press
briefings and the press secretary employed the tactic of calling on him
to break up the questioning of legitimate reporters. The White House
also funneled federal funds to conservatives posing as legitimate
journalists and commentators. Bush's chairman of the Public Broadcasting
System, Kenneth Tomlinson, drove distinguished journalist Bill Moyers
off the air for his heretical views and approved a show for the Wall
Street Journal editorial board. Tomlinson commissioned an enemies list
of "liberal media" on PBS in order to guide purging the network.
(Tomlinson resigned in November 2005 after the Inspector General of the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting found he had violated PBS rules by
meddling in programming and contracting.)
By containing and curbing the press, Bush attempted to remove another
constitutional check and balance on his power. When President Bush made
an extended joke at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner
about his inability to find WMD in Iraq -- "Not here," he said,
narrating a film depicting him looking under his desk in the Oval Office
-- the 1,500 members of the assembled press corps burst into raucous
laughter like pledges to his fraternity.
Bush's admirers have cast him in the mold of Shakespeare's Henry V, a
wastrel royal son who upon rising to the purple realizes his leadership
in war. Some detractors offered an opposite portrait of the dry drunk.
But these literary and psychological theories failed to assess Bush's
radicalism in the historical and constitutional terms of the American
presidency.
Bush has deliberately sought to institute radical changes in the
character of the presidency and American government that would
permanently alter the constitutional system. He used the "global war on
terrorism" to impose a "unitary executive" of absolute power, disdainful
of the Congress and brushing aside the judicial branch when he felt it
necessary (for example, his domestic surveillance outside the FISA
court). He issued many "signing statements" (a device originally
designed by Samuel Alito when he served as an aide in the Reagan Justice
Department) to express his own understanding of the meaning of enacted
legislation and how the executive branch would or would not enforce it.
The Bush White House concept of the executive was the full flowering of
the imperial presidency as conceived by Richard Nixon.
Operationally, within the White House, the Office of the Vice President
controlled foreign policy, making the National Security Council its
auxiliary, and the flow of information to the president. No vice
president was ever as powerful.
Bush was unusually incurious and passive in seeking facts. He never
demanded worst-case scenarios. His circle of advisers was tightly
restricted. Only a select few of the White House staff were permitted to
see him, much less interact with him. He made no effort to establish
independent sources of information. He never circulated to his staff
articles that sparked a policy interest in him. When his support in
public opinion declined, he soaked up the flattery of his aides that the
people had momentarily lapsed in their appreciation of his heroic
strength and vision.
Accountability was treated as a threat to executive power, not as
essential to democratic governance. No one up the chain of command was
held responsible for the crimes of Abu Ghraib. No one who committed
grievous errors of judgment in the Iraq war was held to account. Instead
they were showered with honors, medals and promotions.
Bush's radical White House depended on one-party control of the
Congress. The Republican Congress supported the consolidation of
executive power, even at the expense of congressional prerogatives.
Oversight was studiously neglected. On any matter that might cause
irritation to the White House, hearings were not held or quashed. When
the White House did not produce requested documents, for example, on its
conduct in response to Hurricane Katrina, there were no repercussions
from the Republican Congress. The intelligence committees and the House
Armed Services, among other committees, covered up administration
malfeasance. The Senate Intelligence Committee skewed and distorted its
report on intelligence leading into the Iraq war to acquit the
administration of responsibility and refused to conduct a promised
investigation into administration political pressures on the
intelligence community.
The Republicans in Congress enforced discipline by creation of a
pay-for-play system. Lobbyists, trade associations and law firms were
told that unless they contributed to Republican campaign funds and hired
Republicans they would be treated with disfavor. House Majority Leader
Tom DeLay developed this political machine, called the K Street Project,
to a high degree of control over Washington, until he was forced to
resign his post due to indictment for criminal campaign fundraising
practices. Jack Abramoff, a super-lobbyist, worked closely with DeLay,
and when Abramoff pled guilty in January 2006 to fraud, tax evasion and
criminal conspiracy he triggered the biggest congressional scandal in
modern history. Abramoff was also plugged into the White House, linked
to Rove, and even attended staff meetings.
Bush's presidency was uniquely radical in its elevation of absolute
executive power, dismissal of the other branches of government, contempt
for law, dominant power of the vice president, networks of ideological
cadres, principle of unaccountability, stifling of internal debate,
reliance on one-party rule, and overtly political use of war. Never
before had a president shown disdain for science and sought to batter
down the wall of separation between church and state. None of it seemed
in the offing upon Bush's inauguration in 2001. Yet these actions were
not sudden impulses, spontaneous reactions or accidental gestures. They
were based on deliberate decisions intended to change the presidency and
government fundamentally and forever. And these decisions had deep
historical roots.
One of the distinctive sources of Bush's radicalism was that he was the
first Southern conservative ever elected to the presidency. Southern
politics has always contained varied and conflicting traditions. Through
Bush, a reactionary Southern political tradition captured the center of
the federal government, a phenomenon that has never occurred before. His
brand of conservatism is the expression of a commodity-based oligarchy
rooted in Texas, deeply hostile to the New Deal, dedicated to neglect of
public services, seeking to maintain class and racially based
hierarchies. Using the rhetoric of limited government and states' rights
these Texas conservatives claim control over government in order to
consolidate power and wealth. Both Bush and Cheney (former chief
executive officer of Halliburton, a Texas based company) come out of the
oil patch background. Bush's language about "compassionate conservatism"
was a simple emollient to ease the way for his harsher political and
policy imperatives.
In method, spirit and goals, Bush's project was the opposite of the New
Deal, which was a great improvisation in the spirit of American
pragmatism, "bold, persistent experimentation," as Franklin D. Roosevelt
put it. The New Deal, in the face of the greatest domestic crisis since
the Civil War, mobilized the capacities of government for the general
welfare. The New Frontier of John F. Kennedy and the Great Society of
Lyndon Johnson extended the New Deal in its social inclusiveness,
reforming immigration policy, ending poverty among the elderly, and
expanding education. Most significantly, on racial justice, the
frustrated legacy of Reconstruction and the great Civil War
constitutional amendments was finally realized.
The three Southern presidents of the 20th century were all progressive
Democrats -- Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. If Woodrow
Wilson were to be counted as a fourth, having been born in Virginia, he
would also fit the profile of progressive (though definitely of the
pre-civil rights era, given his support for segregation within the
federal government). Harry Truman, from the border state of Missouri,
must be categorized as one of the great liberals (including on civil
rights).
In the 19th century, the Southerners in the White House, from Jefferson
through Andrew Jackson, represented expanded democracy. The only
Southern conservative to hold the office before the Civil War was John
Tyler, who acceded to the presidency after the sudden death of William
Henry Harrison, the first Whig president. Tyler was a conservative
Democrat from Virginia and a man without a party whose tenure was an
accidental one term. Zachary Taylor, the last Whig, from Louisiana, a
national hero as the triumphant commander in the Mexican War, was
setting himself against the pro-slavery forces from the South, including
his son-in-law Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, at the time of
his death. Andrew Johnson, another accident and anomaly, was both a
vehement populist and conservative, who used the presidency to attempt
to scuttle Reconstruction in the name of a white man's democracy. Lyndon
Johnson, the first elected Southerner since the Civil War, of course,
was the greatest president on civil rights since Ulysses Grant.
The two great epochal crises in American history after the revolution --
the Civil War and the Great Depression -- were accelerated and deepened
by passive, accommodating or stubbornly out of touch presidents -- James
Buchanan and Herbert Hoover. Political and economic forces they failed
to control or understand overcame them. But neither sought conflict or
courted turmoil, even though they accelerated it. By contrast, Bush
purposefully polarized differences in the country for political
advantage.
In foreign policy, Bush freely appropriated the language of Woodrow
Wilson about freedom and democracy. But Wilson sought to bring the U.S.
into a new international system of law. Bush's unilateralism opposed the
Wilsonian heritage at every turn, exemplified by his appointment of John
Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.
Bush also claimed to stand in the conservative tradition of Ronald
Reagan. Indeed, Reagan sought to overturn longstanding policies of
Democratic and Republican presidents alike in his pursuit of a radical
and often fanciful conservatism. But when he found himself cornered by
realities, Reagan the ideologue gave way to Reagan the old union
negotiator prepared for compromise. Facing reality, he gave up his
rhetoric about privatizing Social Security to join with Democrats to
fund its long-term solvency. After the Iran-contra scandal, he summarily
dismissed his neoconservative aides and forged a détente with Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev that helped lead to the end of the Cold War.
That achievement, which required disenthralling his administration from
the right wing, was his finest moment and the enduring basis of his
presidential reputation. Had he not cast out the right, he would have
remained covered with disgrace in history.
George W. Bush's father, Reagan's vice president and successor, George
H.W. Bush, pointedly blackballed the neoconservatives from his
administration. Yet the son George dusted off Reagan's discredited
zealots and their doctrines to provide him with reasons for a war of
choice in Iraq. His rejection of his father's realism in foreign policy
was pointed and that rejection signaled a larger radicalism.
Nothing like Bush's concerted radicalism has ever been seen before in
the White House. One would have to go back to the Civil War era to find
politics as polarized. But not even the president of the Confederate
States of America, Jefferson Davis, ran as extreme and insulated an
administration. Davis, a former U.S. senator and Secretary of War,
appointed men he knew to be experienced politicians and diplomats to
responsible positions within his government, and kept the radical
Fire-eaters at bay. As soon as the Fire-eaters' vision of an independent
slave republic materialized through secession they were consigned to the
sidelines, where they remained as critics of the Confederate president
for the duration of the Civil War.
Never before has a president so single-handedly and willfully been the
source of national and international crises. The tragedy of September 11
cannot be offered as the sole justification to explain his actions. In
his first inaugural address, Bush cited a biblical passage about an
"angel in the whirlwind." His presidency has been a self-created
whirlwind.
In 1900, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a sympathetic biography of Oliver
Cromwell, the leader of the short-lived English republic of the 17th
century. While Roosevelt admired many of Cromwell's intentions to create
representative government, he described how Cromwell's volatile
temperament undermined his virtuous goals. "In criticizing Cromwell,
however, we must remember that generally in such cases an even greater
share of blame must attach to the nation than to the man." Roosevelt
continued:
"Self-governing freemen must have the power to accept necessary
compromises, to make necessary concessions, each sacrificing somewhat of
prejudice, and even of principle, and every group must show the
necessary subordination of its particular interests to the interests of
the community as a whole. When the people will not or cannot work
together; when they permit groups of extremists to decline to accept
anything that does not coincide with their own extreme views; or when
they let power slip from their hands through sheer supine indifference;
then they have themselves chiefly to blame if the power is grasped by
stronger hands."
The tragedy that Theodore Roosevelt described is not reserved in its
broad dimensions to Britain. Roosevelt wrote his history as a lesson for
Americans, who had been spared the travesties of the English revolution.
Instead of Cromwell, we had had Washington. Ultimately, a people are
responsible for its leaders. Bush's legacy will encompass a crisis over
democracy that only the American people can resolve.
-- By Sidney Blumenthal |
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