A response to my cousin's defense of G.W. Bush


George W. Bush's resume has been making the rounds of email... I received two copies, from two different relatives. One of my relatives responded with a vigorous defense of Bush; I disagree with most of his points, and give many links to support my views.

When my sister sent Bush's resume around to a wide list of friends and relatives, I noted that many of the people receiving her email would likely not share her views. Shortly afterward, my cousin responded, which I think is his right: stand up for what you believe in. Surprisingly enough, I agree with a few of his points, but I still think Bush is the most flawed and dangerous man to occupy the White House in my memory.

Below you will find his statements in green, and my responses.

He writes

Hello,
I try not to get in the middle of all this, but this Prez never had a chance from the beginning.  Democrat voters were so bitter from the election results that he was crucified from the beginning, more-so than any other president. 

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to examine why they were bitter. See the end of this letter for many links on this topic.

The downturn in the economy had (past tense) nothing to do with Bush.  It had to do with a plan that was in the making 4 years before he was ever elected, to fly 4 airplanes into the financial heart of our economy and country.

Actually, it was more like eight years if you count the fact that the FBI had the hard drives of the planners of project Bojinka in 1995 that detailed precisely the scenario of simultaneously hijacking multiple airliners and ramming them into national symbolic buildings. However, that raises the question of how and why the plan still succeeded, which is a lengthy discussion for another day. Be that as it may, there is absolutely no question whose party has taken that fear and rammed it home to the American public in order to undertake two wars that would have been unthinkable in the pre-9-11 context.

  This combined with the corperate irresponsibilty of Arthur Anderson, and Enron (AA was as much to blame for cooking books), along with several other companies, led to drastic reductions of consumer confidence and reduced consumer spending.  That is what is to blame for our temporary slip in the economy.  It is impossible to blame a president that is only in office for 8 months for all that is going on now.

I agree with you on the economics, mostly, here. The National Bureau of Economic Research has dated the recession back to March 2001, and the 9-11 attacks were a worsening effect, not a triggering effect. Clinton and Greenspan presided over a "hollow boom," in which the stock market increasingly became a factor in the economic health of our nation, as citizens piled up paper wealth. This drove borrowing against this paper wealth, and naturally led to spending to sustain the economy. If you really want to read a very sober analysis of the economics of the last fifteen years, I recommend Robert Pollin's book, "Contours of Descent." In it he methodically exposes the contradictions of the Clinton years, and of course takes some hefty swipes at the ineffective Bush policies that have followed.

As for whether it is temporary, well, I have a much darker view. Short to medium term, I think that the credit bubble has yet to burst, even if the stock market reinflates (see the Prudent Bear Credit Bubble Bulletin, and scroll down about half-way past the dry statistics to the analysis). Longer term, developed nations are incredibly dependent on oil, and the crisis is going to become acute in the next 10 years as U.S. oil runs out (yes, you heard me, runs out) and we have no energy strategy in place other than pumping more faster and invading oil- and gas-producing nations (for more data on this see the letter I sent to my congressman ). Also, Bush's foreign policy is quite likely to result in a backlash against the U.S., as outlined in this article from the Black Commentator.

In summary, on the economy I would say that Bush has taken the bad hand that he was dealt, and skillfully made it worse.

  Now dont get me wrong, he is far from perfect, but what president has ! been?  JFK and Clinton certainly had their troubles

There is a difference that should be recognized, I think, between the private human failings of some men in power, and the public moral failings of other men in power. Clinton (clearly) and JFK (likely) both had extra-marital sex while in office. This may have slightly distracted them from their duties for short periods, and in my opinion was largely a non-event. No one died; a green dress got stained. Contrast that with the public morality lacking in Bush, in which he tells lies and exaggerations for six months leading up to a war that kills thousands of Iraqis (along with hundreds of our soldiers), in what is rightly judged by the rest of the world as a war of convenience, a demonstration of power, a payback for campaign contributors, and a grab for control of 20% of the world's oil reserves.

and in fact Clintons inability to make a tough decision is a huge factor in the 9/11 tragedy.  He was a poll driven president, who would never make a decision that could lower his approval ratings or dare I say even make a difference. 

That is a standard Fox news line, but I believe it is false. For two eye-opening articles on which presidency was asleep at the wheel with regard to 9-11, see "Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly Ambition" and "We Predicted It" . Also see this summary of Clinton's actions regarding terrorism by William Rivers Pitt of www.Truthout.org.

And almost every economic policy that he put forward was a dead ringer for plans that the first prez bush had tried to pass before they were shot down before a democratic house and senate, and thats not my opinion, that is a fact, even their names were similar.

I actually agree completely with you again here, at least as far as Clinton's policies are concerned. Clinton was one of the best Republican presidents we ever had, and yes, his economic policies were a perfect trajectory along the lines of his predecessor, G.W.H. Bush. In fact, Clinton himself said only weeks after the election in 1992, "We're Eisenhower Republicans here... we stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond market. Isn't that great?" (as quoted in The Agenda, a book on the turn-about of Clinton's economics from election to governing, written by Bob Woodward).

  This is a different world we live in today, and our mistakes of the past have made it impossible to peacefully defend ourselves.  How many of you believe that if we pulled all of our interests out of the middle east that they would suddenly not want to blow us all up?  I certainly dont believe that, not even if we did it before the Iraq and Afganistan invasions.

The immediate question is not whether we face a threat, but rather whether Bush is making it worse by his actions . There is also a case to be made that Bush's in-your-face foreign policy actually serves Al-qaeda as well as Bush.

Then there is Robert Kuttner, who writes in the American Prospect ,

"The hallmark of the Bush foreign policy has been a naive radicalism married to an operational incompetence. A small clique with a preconceived blueprint took advantage of a national emergency and a callow president, blowing a containable threat into war while dismissing more ominous menaces. These people are out to remake the world, with little sense of risk, proportion or history. At this writing, the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has seized some authority over the Iraq policy from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who responded with adolescent pique. The long-abused Secretary of State Colin Powell offered new respect for the UN. President Bush even directly contradicted Vice President Dick Cheney's discredited claim of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In a different administration, these shifts would signal that the chief executive, clearly in control, had recognized the misjudgments and costs of a failed policy, demoted those responsible and shifted authority to others. But Bush seems incapable of that kind of decisiveness or discernment. These are mere skirmishes, indicative of the absence of leadership at the top. Bush is as callow as ever. The man even boasts that he never reads the papers."

Or how about this report from the Bush administration itself, reported via the BBC as "U.S. Image Drops Among Muslims: Hostility Has Reached Shocking Levels" :

"The report acknowledges that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the situation in Iraq are impeding good relations. 'Surveys indicate that much of the resentment toward America stems from >>> real conflicts and displeasure with policies <<<<, including those involving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Iraq,' the US report says." [emphasis added] Imagine that, other people in the world have a problem with U.S. policies, it's not the naive view that "they hate our freedoms."

  Here is an example of who we are dealing with.  The car bomb explosions a few days ago killed around 35 people, of which around32 were Iraqis.  If they will kill 32 of there own people just to get 3 of us, do you think that there is any way to make them magically change their minds about us?

Umm, actually, yes: if our government gave up its insistence on total control of the political process and the rebuilding in Iraq, and instead matched its deeds to its rhetoric regarding democracy, I think we might win more hearts and minds in Iraq. But no, we're busy privatizing Iraq's industries and resources , handing them over to charlatans like the felonious Ahmed Chalabi. You might want to consider an essay in which the author argues that less oil development, not more, is the road to true democracy in Iraq . But I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for Bush to see the light on this; the one unchanging constant in the Iraq game has been we control the oil.

Likewise, the U.S. could defuse much of the radical Islam movement were it simply to act as an honest broker in the Mid-East peace process. There is a good case to be made that we should simply walk away from both Israel and the Palestinians . The Muslim world gets inflamed by our blatant unconditional support for Israel, and it is a large part of what is motivating Islamic jihad against America; see "It's the Policy, Stupid" .

Terrorists are made, not born. When people have no other rightful way to act against what they perceive as injustice, they become terrorists. It's that simple. You can talk about staying the course, or not backing down, or whatever slogan du jour Bush tosses out, at the end of the day you have to ask: are we addressing the root causes of terrorism. In this area our country has a poor record of either siding with whatever or whoever furthers the economic interest of U.S. corporations, or turning a blind eye to Israel's atrocities.

  And anyone who is against the eradication of the taliban in Afganistan needs to go back and check their not so squeeky clean record.  When they weren't funding and running terrorist training camps then they took a break in their busy day to slaughter a few women for reading other "appauling" activities.  They did this in the soccer stadium built for them by the international community so that they wouldn't feel isolated from the rest of the world.  Im sure Kofi didn't think that the soccer stadium would get used for that.  Anyway, Im rambling now, sorry.  Hope youll all still talk to me next time we meet. 

The Taliban were not portrayed sympathetically in the Bush resume, in fact they were not even mentioned.

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In one sense, I think that the Bush resume is wrong. It encapsulates a series of sound bite items, mostly true, but which lack the real substance of why Bush represents a very real threat to our economic prosperity and democracy, not to mention peace and justice throughout the world.

The real reasons to oppose Bush, which in my view ought to resonate with true conservatives as well as liberals, are:

1. A continuing and pervasive culture of deception that permeates his entire administration; see, for example, "Yes, Bush Lied" by Paul Sperry of WorldNetDaily, arguably one of the most right-wing news sources on the web; in this article Sperry details explicitly how the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq explicitly pointed the other way from what Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Powell/Rice were slathering on a lapdog American press.

Seymour Hersh has extensively documented the ways in which Rumsfeld and Cheney created their own intelligence analysis team to re-spin Iraq intelligence into a threat . Or how about this article cataloging a small sample of the Bush lies that David Corn gathered and wrote into a book. And here in one place is a massive catalog of lies that got us into Iraq, along with some other whoppers as well.

2. A disastrous and ideologically driven foreign policy: Bush and company have dismantled 50 years of multilateral success under the hubris of "we don't need you." Just last week we saw the result of all this "success": at the Madrid conference on Iraq, other nations reluctantly put up $13bn, in the form of loans, payable through non-US control, less than half of what was requested by the U.S. At this point the international position of allies and enemies alike is "you made the mess, you clean it up." The coalition is a joke; no one, least of all our enemies in Iraq, are under any illusion that anyone other than the US is calling the shots. Correspondingly, the shots of Iraqis are mostly directed at our soldiers. See

The Widening Crusade

A Republican friend at work was incredulous when I suggested in the run-up to the Iraq war that what we were seeing was the first steps of empire-building. Now it doesn't seem so far-fetched .

3. An incompetent approach to domestic economics, in which tax cuts that primarily benefit the upper classes of society are sold as a panacea for everything from budget surplus to economic downturn. The real question is what kind of civil society to we want to live in? Corporate taxes are down two-thirds from their high, and Bush is rolling back individual taxes. Every dollar given out as a "tax cut" now is a dollar borrowed from our children, payable with interest.

David Broder of the Washington Post writes:

"David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, is an appointed official with a 15-year term that gives him complete political security. His staff in the General Accounting Office provides the fullest range of information on government finances. Last month, Walker went to the National Press Club to raise a public alarm where he hoped it would be heard. 'Our projected budget deficits,' he said, 'are not manageable without significant changes in status quo programs, policies, processes and operations.' Last week three organizations that had not previously collaborated joined at the press club to spell out in specific terms what David Walker meant. The Committee for Economic Development, a group of business and education leaders; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research and advocacy group; and the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan organization focused on sound fiscal policy, issued their first joint statement on fiscal policy. They called the current budgetary situation 'the most fiscally irresponsible" in American history'."

4. An administration that is assembling the tools of tyranny, with the goal of one-party rule

a. secret trials
b. secret spying
c. indefinite detention for U.S. citizens without trial
d. rigged elections through computerized voting

Even some conservatives are waking up to the dangers of what Bush and Ashcroft are concocting.

Just to take one little piece of the Patriot Act: much ballyhoo has been made about the ability of the FBI, post-Patriot Act, to seize library records. In fact, the library flap is a red herring. It is much, much worse than that: Section 215 says, and I quote, [the FBI may require] "the production of any tangible thing, including books, records, papers, documents, and other items." At this point the FBI, on its own say-so, can pretty much grab any part of your life that it wants, legally. This country was founded with a Constitution that calls for checks and balances between the various branches of government, and the Patriot Act and its successors are a blatant attempt to circumvent any oversight. This summer Ashcroft was barnstorming around the country trying to drum up support for more draconian provisions; here is a look at his wish list .

One last thing, if you read the paper front to back most days,! you might have caught a little tiny article last year that was tucked away in the depths of the front page, probably around page 8, wedged between ads and obituaries.  I never saw again or on TV, but it said that Al Gore had a company (I believe it was Deloit & Toucche) recount all the ballots his way...He lost by almost a thousand votes more that originally expected, people just need to let it go, it was a long time ago, its over. 


First of all, it is a documented fact that TENS of THOUSANDS of voters, the majority of them Democratic, were denied their voting rights by the Florida secretary of State, who just happened to be the head of the Bush campaign in Florida. Then there are strong indications of outright Republican vote fraud involving electronic voting machines; while it was uncovered and reversed in Volusia county, how many other counties had "irregularities?" Then consider the bizarre ruling of the Supreme Court in which the only logic evident is "Gore can't win".

Finally, I am aware of the D & T study to which you refer. However, if you visit the following page you will find a number of links to >mainstream< newspaper articles with the final say on who "should" have won 2000... not surprisingly, under most scenarios, especially ones in which ALL the ballots in Florida are recounted, Gore wins. I will grant you that Gore made strategic errors; in fact, had the recount been limited to just the four counties that he requested he would have lost. However, those were the four counties that had the greatest number of irregularities, and in a state with a hostile executive branch he chose the most defensible recount request. Bad luck, that. The Florida Supreme Court had the right idea, which was a state-wide recount. But five men wearing black robes in Washington decided that that wasn't the result they wanted to see. Unfortunately, the result of that hypothetical four-county recount scenario is the result that seems to stick in people's minds.

So, yeah, I'm kind of anti-Bush.

Kurt
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I would like to acknowledge that much of what I have written above would not have been possible were it not for a site called www.CrisisPapers.org . Admittedly anti-Bush in the most profound sense, it is a treasure trove of thought-provoking ideas, most of them from outside the narrow range of opinion available from the six companies that control the U.S. broadcast media.

Posted: Fri - November 7, 2003 at 03:13 PM        

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