New hardcover book by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, “The Book on Bush,” published February, 2004 by Viking Penguin
Chapter 13 – Conclusion – pages 331-342
In January, 2001 George Bush swore the oath of office to lead a country that was at the time was enjoying peace, prosperity and a sense of well-being that 47 percent of voting Americans were willing to take a flier on someone with little experience and only sketchily enunciated views.
And why not? During the Clinton administration, median household income had reached an all-time high; the unemployment rate was at its lowest point in three decades; the rate of violent crime was down; and the once cavernous deficit had become a mountainous surplus. The job-producing capacities of the American economy – though beginning to sputter – remained the envy of the world. Abroad, allied unity had just been strengthened by the successful prosecution of a collective effort to free Kosovo from the yoke of Serbian oppression and without a single combat loss of American life. But candidate Bush, who was to inherit such favorable conditions, was as New York Times editors noted, “a man who was reared in privilege, who succeeded in both business and politics because of his family connections.” The question, never fully answered during his presidential campaign, was “whether he was anything more than just a very lucky guy.”
Today, we have our answer. George W Bush is much, much more than “just a very luck guy. He is, as we have discovered, also a very determined guy. The problem is that he is determined to serve his political base – extremist elements of the Republican Party – the religious right, Fortune 500 CEOs, especially those from the oil patch, and neoconservative ideologues – at the expense of the rest of the nation. While it has become a cliché to observe that President Bush talks “compassion” but governs “conservative,” his more honest supporters can be depended upon to convey the true agenda of the administration. His appointee to oversee the American justice system, for example, Attorney General John Ashcroft, likens civil libertarians to terrorist sympathizers. His education secretary, Rod Paige, lauded private schools with “Christian values” over the public schools his department was created to improve. Meanwhile, the influential Republican organizer Grover Norquist, who meets regularly with Karl Rove to plot political strategy, says that “bipartisanship is another name for date rape.” Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, who gave the invocation at President Bush’s inauguration later called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion” – and he not only met with no presidential rebuke, but was shortly thereafter invited to address the troops at the Pentagon. Even this paled, however, compared to the administration’s unwillingness to fire Lt. Gen. William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and war-fighting support, who gave a speech in an evangelical church in which he portrayed the war in Iraq as one against “Satan,” disparaging all Muslims with his claim that “my God was bigger than his,” and “I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”
What we have sought to do in The Book on Bush is separate the rhetoric from the policy to illustrate the costs to America and the world of allowing hard-right radicals to continue their misrule over the world’s most powerful nation. The great disadvantage the mass media have in covering this administration is that they must take its words as seriously as its deeds; more seriously, in fact, because words are public and deeds are largely private and/or too complex for coverage. Add to this mix an increasingly vocal and well-funded conservative media that dominates cable TV news and talk radio, combined with a dumbing down/tabloidization of so many journalistic enterprises, and we find precious little attention paid to the actual consequences of the Bush administration’s assault on most Americans’ interests and beliefs.
We do not doubt that some Americans have benefited from the priorities of the current presidency. It is clearly “Morning in America” again for the superrich. After two years of declines, Forbes reported in 2003, the total net worth of America’s four hundred richest people rose 10 percent to $955 billion in September, 2003. With the top 1 percent receiving as much as the bottom 60 percent in Bush’s tax breaks this coming decade, the gap between the rich and everyone else will only grow. But the progress that most Americans were making during the Clinton-Gore administration came to an almost immediate halt during the Bush presidency. As chapter 3 discussed, Census Bureau data released in September 2003 show that under George W. Bush, the number of Americans living in poverty saw its largest increase in almost forty years, median household income declined, and the number of Americans living without health insurance spiked upward, together with unemployment. Meanwhile, the government’s fiscal position, which improved every year under Bill Clinton finally reached a record surplus, collapsed into a projected deficit approaching $500 billion, and even this astronomical figure excluded the costs of the Iraq war, already in the hundreds of billions. While a portion of these unhappy trends can be attributed to structural changes in both the United States and the global economy – for instance, the flight of manufacturing jobs to low-wage, low-rights countries – almost all were exacerbated by Bush administration policies.
In the crucial area of security in the post-September 11 era, the administration surely talked tough, but inspired threats to Americans where none existed before. The Bush invasion of Iraq solved no security problems facing the United States; our nation’s homeland remains dangerously vulnerable to potentially catastrophic terrorist attack, especially from containers on entering vessels. Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda cronies remain at large in part because of the administration’s miscalculation when it refused to send in even a fraction of the number of soldiers it later deployed to Iraq, thus allowing the real perpetrators of September 11 to elude capture after being cornered in Tora Bora. Indeed, al Qaeda is armed with fresh recruits inspired by the U.S. invasion and a new base of operations amid the chaos in Baghdad. Bush’s invasion of Iraq may one day be studied by future historians as among the most costly self-inflicted injuries ever to befall a democratic nation.
The Iraq obsession also distracted the administration from addressing genuine threats emanating from Iran and North Korea, where, deaf to Bush’s entreaties, the president’s “friend,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is engaged in helping these “axis of evil” members achieve their nuclear ambitions.
A related international cost of the Bush presidency is the intense hostility it has inspired against Americans in virtually every nation on earth (the only exception being Israel). While Presidents Kennedy and Clinton were usually lionized abroad, and even Ronald Reagan had his overseas admirers, George W. Bush dare not show his face in public on the European continent or, indeed, almost anywhere in public where a large and probably very angry crowd might gather. On the second anniversary of September 11, the New York Times reported that “in Europe overall, the proportion of people who want the United States to maintain a strong global presence fell nineteen points since a similar poll last year, from 64 percent to 45 percent, while 50 percent of respondents in Germany, France, and Italy express opposition to American leadership.” In numerous nations, including many allies, respondents told pollsters they feared George W. Bush more than Saddam Hussein or even Osama bin Laden. “The war has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans,” concluded Pew Research Center director Andrew Kohut, “further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era-the UN and North Atlantic Alliance today.” The White House’s own “Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World” found hostility toward the United States under George W. Bush reaching what it termed “shocking levels.”
The point is not that these more extreme sentiments should be considered in any way sensible; rather they are a clear measure of Bush and Company’s failure. For such hostility will surely be costly when America needs to share military burdens, exchange intelligence data about global terrorism, and arrive at economic policies that strengthen the global economy. The revulsion of the international community to both the substance and style of U.S. policies is already costing American taxpayers, since these nations have no interest whatsoever in helping a Bush, who cried wolf, bear the burden of the occupation of Iraq. As one UN official put it to a Washington Post reporter, “They’re on their own [in Iraq]. It’s just between them and the American taxpayer.”
In documenting the arguments in this book, we have not selected isolated examples of Bush malfeasance. Virtually every area of policy contains the patented Bush administration admixture of false claims, irresponsible policies, a recalcitrance that passes for resolution, and a blind confidence that brings to mind the British aphorism, “Perhaps wrong but never in doubt.”
We leave it to others to explain what factors in Mr. Bush’s biography or past life experiences account for his conversion to and stubborn embrace of so extreme a political path. What interests us are the policies themselves and the manner in which they have been pursued. Indeed, Bush sometimes gives the impression of being willing to say or do almost anything to achieve his political goals. That includes exploiting the understandable fear of terrorism for political gain – “Every day, I’m reminded about what 9/11 means to America,” Bush responded (as previously noted) when asked in July 2003 about the $170 million budget for his unopposed primary campaign, adding “we’re still threatened.” Here Bush is fulfilling the joking observation of E.J. Dionne that Bush’s slogan seems to be “The only thing we have to fear is the loss of fear itself.”
How does he get away with it? Again, this is a topic for another book, but a few explanations strike us as obvious. For much of his presidency – during the early “honeymoon” period and in the aftermath of September 11 and the two wars that followed – most Democrats were disinclined to give Mr. Bush any trouble on almost anything. And the adversarial image of the Fourth Estate glorified in All the President’s Men is about as current as the bell-bottoms Robert Redford wore on-screen. Given the perception of Bush’s “wartime” popularity, few in the mainstream media felt inclined to subject the president to much critical scrutiny without an opposition figure to whom they might attach the story. It was revealing that until his now famous “sixteen words” about Iraq-Niger were shown to be false in 2003, the American media spent far more space writing about the serial dissembling of one reporter named Jason Blair (which was spectacular) than the serial dissembling of one president named George W. Bush (which was far more consequential).
Those reporters who did keep asking tough questions or writing critical stories suddenly found themselves sitting in back rows, not called on or not called back. How many journalists are willing to write an article exposing Bush’s disinformation knowing that an owner or editor may frown on it, the White House may retaliate, Bill O’Reilly may attack it as unpatriotic, and he or she will be unable to keep writing about them in any event because repeated misstatements by definition aren’t “new,” hence not news? Bush’s infrequent press conferences hardly invite candid exchanges. It was so obvious at his pre-Iraq invasion press conference that he was calling on preselected reporters that even Bush joked that “this is scripted.” Journalist Lawrence McQuillam, a veteran of six White Houses, sat in the front rows and quickly understood what was happening. “Eventually futility sinks in,” he told The American Prospect. “I’ve never been to a press conference where the president never looked at the audience to see if anybody was raising a hand to ask a question.”
The predominance of the Bush version of reality was strengthened by the undeniably powerful right-wing attack machine that conservatives have constructed during the past three decades. Should any prominent individual – say Al Gore or Tom Daschle – risk raising his voice to point out that the president said “black” to describe “white,” he could expect to witness an immediate partisan character attack echoing through a dizzying array of media outlets: in print, on network and cable TV, on talk radio, and on the Internet.
It must be added that even though we all know “politics ain’t beanbag,” the Bush team plays awfully dirty. On Washington’s K Street, GOP officials demand that corporations fire their longtime lobbyists and hire loyal Republicans instead. “There is a perception among some business interests that there could be retribution if you don’t play ball on almost every issue that comes up,” Representative Calvin Dooley (D-CA) explains. On issue after issue, the White House and its allies play hardball while others play stickball.
When former ambassador Joseph Wilson went public to reveal the truth about Busch’s discredited claim about Iraq-Niger weapons-grade uranium, two senior Bush administration officials apparently retaliated by leaking the name of his wife, a longtime CIA agent, to six separate journalists, endangering both U.S. intelligence operations and possibly the lives of agents and serving notice as well to those who step out of line. (Revealing the identity of covert officials is a violation of two laws, the National Agents’ Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act.)
After a congressional ally said that the Bush White House’s response to Wilson would be to slime and defend,” John Dean remarked, “If I thought I had seen dirty political tricks as nasty and vile as they could get at the Nixon White House, I was wrong. Nixon never set up a hit on one of his enemy’s wives.”
On Capitol Hill, Democratic senators who opposed Bush’s judicial nominations, some of whom were Catholic, found themselves systematically attacked as “anti-Catholic” by a group set up by C. Boyden Gray with White House coordination. This tack surely surprised such Catholic senators as Edward Kennedy and Patrick Leahy, the latter denouncing it as “religious McCarthyism.” When Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) consistently criticized administration policy in Iraq, the White House floated, said Durbin, a bogus story that he had disclosed confidential information and might be removed from the Senate Intelligence Committee as a result. “If any member of this Senate questions this White House policy,” said an angry Durbin on the Senate floor, “be prepared for the worst.” The worst may well have been how the White House allowed Republican campaign officials to attack the patriotism of Senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee and Vietnam war hero, in pursuit of its goal of a Republican victory in 2002.
The John DiIulio incident also shows how effectively muscular the Bush team can be. After this aide wrote a seven-page, on-the-record letter to a journalist detailing a White House that was all-politics, all-the-time, within days DiIulio had been forced to abjectly apologize. His office at the University of Pennsylvania distributed this statement: “John DiIulio agrees that his criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. He sincerely apologizes and is deeply remorseful.” The same day, press spokesman Ari Fleischer was saying, “any suggestion that the White House makes decisions that are not based on sound policy reasons is baseless and groundless.” Is the use of the same words a coincidence or a show trial?
The politics of vindictiveness also governs international relations. When Bush’s good friend Mexican president Vicente Fox hesitated to support the U.S. resolution in the Security Council to invade Iraq, a U.S. diplomat warned that its demurral could “stir up feelings” against Mexicans in the United States, and, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942, asked whether Mexico “wants to stir the fires of jingoism during a war.” And President Bush said of countries who opposed the final U.S. war resolution (which included a large majority of the Security Council), “there will be a certain sense of discipline.”
Finally, the willingness of so many administration members to lie outright about the most somber – even sacred – matters of state, such as war, caught many Americans and much of the media off guard. “Everyone makes mistakes when they open their mouths, and we forgive them,” said Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Hess, a former Eisenhower speech-writer. “What worries me about some of [Bush’s] mistakes is that they appear to be with foresight. This is about public policy in its grandest sense, about potential wars and who is our enemy, and a president has a special obligation to getting it right.” Indeed, how else to explain the amazing statistic that 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was the cause of the September 11 attack other than W.’s repeated dissembling about Saddam and 9/11?
In September 2003 Bush finally admitted that, “there is no evidence that Hussein was involved with September 11,” an inconvenient acknowledgment that came only after a war and occupation based largely on false pretenses. Previously, when the truth was critically important, the president told the nation: “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” Indeed, Bush even justified the war to Congress on this basis when he asserted his legal right to begin it because of legislation passed by Congress that authorized force against “nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Incredibly, even after President Bush himself had begun discrediting the Saddam – 9/11 link, Vice President Cheney was still trying to sow confusion on this crucial point. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Cheney described Iraq as “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
Perhaps most egregious – at least in the eyes of your authors, both New Yorkers – was the Bush administration’s willingness to lie to the heroic safety workers and traumatized citizens in the aftermath of September 11 about contamination levels near Ground Zero. Can there be a greater violation of public trust to knowingly manipulate data in order to endanger first responders and citizens still reeling from the shock of a horrific terrorist attack?
The Bush administration’s penchant to tell “stretchers,” in Mark Twain’s word, not only puts people’s lives at risk, but it also corrodes and ultimately destroys our democracy’s most precious asset – the public trust. In her 1986 book Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life, the philosopher Sissela Bok wrote:
Imagine a society, no matter how ideal in other aspects, where word and gesture could never be counted upon. Questions asked, answers given, information exchanged – all would be worthless. A warning that a well was poisoned or a plea for help in an accident would come to be ignored unless independent confirmation could be found…. Trust is a social good just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink.
Among the angriest victims of the administration’s dishonesty are America’s soldiers themselves. Told to expect wine and roses from a population cheering its “liberation,” they now find themselves targets of hatred and persistent guerrilla attacks. These men and women are, in the words of reservist Richard Murphy, being asked to “get shot at regularly, endure searing heat and live in less than desirable conditions.” They have been told by their superiors to expect at least one twelve-month rotation in Iraq and possibly more. Because the military is undermanned, and the Bush-Rumsfeld foreign policy underplanned, it is “grunts” like Murphy who, more than anyone, are being forced to bear the brunt of the administration’s failure to prepare for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq beyond any contingency envisioned by its improbably rosy scenarios.
And yet Bush continues on his chosen path, unmoved, unconcerned and perhaps even unaware. The president told Fox News interviewer Brit Hume in September 2003 that rather than read a complete newspaper story, he merely “glance[s] at the headlines just to [get a] kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories.” When Hume asked how long he’d been doing this as president, Bush replied, “Practice since day one” – and Hume emitted a surprised, “Really?” He does so, he said, because “the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.” (Probably without any ironic self-awareness, W. complained in the fall of 2003 about a press “filter” that kept the good news about the American occupation of Iraq from reaching the public without realizing how the word could also refer to staff who “filtered” out news that might displease the boss.) In other words, he lives inside an information bubble, fed only by faithful aides, telling him what he wants to hear, when he wants to hear it.
The problem, ultimately, is a president who is both messianic and radical. Bush himself in the past has shrewdly called the first Tuesday in November “Reality Day” because talk ends when there is a real result. So what happens on Presidential “reality days” when the results are the opposite of wishful assertions – for example, when Iraq has no nuclear weapons or cheering crowds, when tax cuts cause deficits to skyrocket, when there are too few stem cells for scientific research, when global warming heats up, when poor children are left behind in school, when AmeriCorps does not grow by 20,000 volunteers but shrinks by 20,000, when hero cops and firefighters get seriously ill after they were assured that the Ground Zero air was safe, when allies and the UN shuns your call to share the burdens of occupying Iraq because they regard you as a “bungling bully,” or when a Supreme Court of mostly Republican appointees rules that affirmative action is desirable? Does George W. Bush then exit his bubble called denial, and later change course – as Reagan and Bush 41 did when they raised taxes in their third years to avoid ruinous deficits – or keep flying on just a right wing and a prayer?
“My faith frees me,” Bush has claimed in his (ghostwritten) autobiography. “Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like. Frees me to try to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next.” These may be admirable qualities in a parson or a preacher, but for a president of the United States who combines ideological extremism with intellectual laziness, and tops them off with serial dishonesty, this type of “faith” is a recipe for disaster. It is America’s peculiar burden at the dawn of the new century that its citizens – a majority of whom did not even choose to elect Mr. Bush in the first place – must now reap what he has sown.
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