The Case Against George W. Bush By Ron Reagan

[Guest guest]

Esquire

 

September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3

 

The Case Against George W. Bush

 

By Ron Reagan

 

It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the

stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking

Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy

memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to

justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat

of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that

Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the

Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven

sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all

these displays and countless smaller ones, you could

feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across

the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet.

Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then

in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits

asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything

strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly,

yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling

deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose

parents had always voted Republican, " but not this

time. " There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the

staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the

" Orwellian language " flowing out of the Pentagon. Word

spread through the usual channels that old hands from

the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too

quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq.

Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of

folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the

Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age

appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of

scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something

like a demonstration of that highest of American

prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American

freedom: dissent.

 

Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed.

Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in

early June, items would appear in the newspaper

discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize

(subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection

for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage for the

fall election. The familiar " Heir to Reagan " puffballs

were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like

(subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this

backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side

comparison—Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush—and

it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with

nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a

few days and remembered what friend and foe always

conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in

the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the

crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol

rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood—a portrait of my

father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.

 

The comparison underscored something important. And

the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning

cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush

administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush

officials before various commissions and

committees—Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember

how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the

altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering

as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if

Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at

him—these were a continuing reminder. The Enron

creeps, too—a reminder of how certain environments and

particular habits of mind can erode common decency.

People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The

issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word

was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal.

That's so 1988. No, this time something much more

potent: liar.

 

Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate

their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin

has long been the lingua franca of the political

realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have

taken " normal " mendacity to a startling new level far

beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual

massaging of public perception, they traffic in big

lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies,

and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty

itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have

started catching on.

 

None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a

one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the

country—nearly one third of us by some

estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink

the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et

cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on

video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank

their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting

anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a

" hater, " and therefore a nut job, probably a

crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations

have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate

tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore.

But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the

scientific community, and a host of current and former

diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military

officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly

difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe

wackos.

 

Does anyone really favor an administration that so

shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to

secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to

protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its

true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from

whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so.

And to come to the same conclusion does not make you

guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush

presidency, because that's not what this is. This is

the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the

top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the

honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.

 

 

THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and

misdirection—which the administration even now cannot

bring itself to repudiate—involve our putative " War on

Terror " and our subsequent foray into Iraq.

 

During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush

pledged a more " humble " foreign policy. " I would take

the use of force very seriously, " he said. " I would be

guarded in my approach. " Other countries would resent

us " if we're an arrogant nation. " He sniffed at the

notion of " nation building. " " Our military is meant to

fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets

overextended, morale drops. " International cooperation

and consensus building would be the cornerstone of a

Bush administration's approach to the larger world.

Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine

him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at

the world and charging off adventuring in the Middle

East.

 

But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing

everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on September 12, 2001,

awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in

charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new

and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly

confronted lest they threaten the American homeland

again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of

the line because he was complicit with the hijackers

and in some measure responsible for the atrocities in

Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?

 

Well, no.

 

As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and

his onetime " terror czar, " Richard A. Clarke, have

made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic

encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and

Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq

from day one. " From the start, we were building the

case against Hussein and looking at how we could take

him out, " O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse.

Clarke got the same impression from within the White

House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's

where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the

Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée.

(Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a

matter of convincing the American public (and our

representatives) that war was justified.

 

The real—but elusive—prime mover behind the 9/11

attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a

back burner (a staff member at Fox News—the cable-TV

outlet of the Bush White House—told me a year ago that

mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within

the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad

guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became

International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a

country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by

international sanctions, whose military was less than

half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled

over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive

no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south

as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance,

and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such

weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN

inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, " a

threat of unique urgency " to the most powerful nation

on earth.

 

Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced:

Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions

targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. " We don't

want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, " National

Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN.

And, Bush maintained, " Iraq could decide on any given

day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a

terrorist group or individual terrorists. " We " know "

Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and

Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even " know " where

they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo

jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the

fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.

 

 

ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and,

we've since discovered, were regarded with skepticism

by experts at the time they were made. But contrary

opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the

rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney

clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at

the nexus of a worldwide terror network.

 

And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our " war president " may

have been justified in his assumption that Americans

are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in

thinking we'd be content as an occupying power, but he

was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary

Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as

torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be

secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment

that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and

Justice Department for more than a year before the

first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt

appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice

the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's

panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger

while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say

while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping

someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment

or merely " sleep management " ?

 

Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it

was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that

Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy.

Investigations, we were assured, were already under

way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting

cooperation; the handful of miscreants would be

sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't " represent

the best of what America's all about. " As anyone who'd

watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could

have predicted, what followed was the usual

administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction,

and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was

stalled; documents were withheld, including the full

report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the

Army's primary investigation into the abuses at Abu

Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John

McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an

entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer

the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?

 

The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons

for invading and occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen

not to share them with the American public. They

sought justification for ignoring the Geneva

Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and

inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to

acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth

discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in

the conversation. They don't trust us because they

don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of

day. There is a surreal quality to all this:

Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're

in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got

him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi

government asks us, but we'll be there for years to

come. Which is what we counted on in the first place,

only with rose petals and easy coochie.

 

This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the

perversely cynical " Clear Skies " and " Healthy Forests "

sloganeering at Bush's EPA and in the administration's

irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal

shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always

worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what

extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own

imagining.

 

And chances are your America and George W. Bush's

America are not the same place. If you are dead center

on the earning scale in real-world

twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than

$32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush

has ever associated with getting by in his world.

Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his

various careers, has never had a job the way you have

a job—where not showing up one morning gets you fired,

costing you your health benefits. He may find it

difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly

two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his

administration, the first administration since Herbert

Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has

never had to worry that he couldn't afford the best

available health care for his children. For him,

forty-three million people without health insurance

may be no more than a politically inconvenient

abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he

is not talking about your economy. His economy is

filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in

their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his world,

friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes

are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're

the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his

world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of

the carpet.

 

 

ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or

outright lie when their backs are against the wall,

when honesty begins to look like political suicide.

But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as

if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks

with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more

damning and of immeasurably greater import to the

nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications

that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have

to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing

in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term

self-interest? Why would a president whose calling

card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his

chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or

an inability to admit even small mistakes.

 

Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of

truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was

largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths

simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While

generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience,

depth, and other qualifications typically considered

useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was

portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose

straightforwardness was a given. None of that " what

the meaning of is is " business for him. And, God

knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions

with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was

depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a

certain blue dress by Bill Clinton's prurient

transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks

explaining away statements— " I invented the

Internet " —that he never made in the first place. All

this left the coast pretty clear for Bush.

 

Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating

Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious—if not exactly

earth-shattering—lies and is not challenged. First, he

claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights

while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact,

vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly

bowing to political reality and allowing it to become

law without his signature. Second, he announces that

Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The

opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These

misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press

outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane

issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a certain

feminist author has counseled him to be more of an

" alpha male. "

 

Having gotten away with such witless falsities,

perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above

day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the

White House, they picked up where they left off.

 

 

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11,

Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida,

conducting an emergency reading of " The Pet Goat, " was

whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While

this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic

circumstances—for all anyone knew at the time,

Washington might still have been under attack—the

appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a

story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air

Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver.

Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited

" specific " and " credible " evidence to that effect. The

story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such

threat.

 

Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing

aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent

speech in front of a large banner emblazoned MISSION

ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the

background as Bush addressed the crew, became

problematic as it grew clear that the mission in

Iraq—whatever that may have been—was far from

accomplished. " Major combat operations, " as Bush put

it, may have technically ended, but young Americans

were still dying almost daily. So the White House

dealt with the questionable banner in a manner

befitting a president pledged to " responsibility and

accountability " : It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a

bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and

its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White

House communications office.

 

More serious by an order of magnitude was the

administration's dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror

warnings. As questions first arose about the country's

lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault,

Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas

to assure the nation that " no one could have imagined

terrorists using aircraft as weapons. " In fact,

terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a

calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent

Rice an intelligence report warning that " it is highly

likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the

near future, within several weeks. " Two intelligence

briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001

specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger

of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to

The New York Times, after the second of these

briefings, titled " Bin Laden Determined to Attack

Inside United States, " was delivered to the president

at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush

" broke off from work early and spent most of the day

fishing. " This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as

" historical " in her testimony before the 9/11

Commission.

 

What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the

breath expended in the telling. If only for

self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to

go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been

explained in terms of security precautions taken in

the confusion of momentous events. As for the carrier

landing, someone should have fallen on his or her

sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the

president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and

was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a

mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would

appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we

sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings

would have entailed more than simple embarrassment.

But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest

reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect

once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly

tap-dancing, Bush's White House squandered vital

credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into

telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade

the truth.

 

But image is everything in this White House, and the

image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior

in the service of his nation must be fanatically

maintained, because behind the image lies . . .

nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed

out, Bush has " never fully inhabited " the presidency.

Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms

and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of

action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to

communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the

impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't

speak but because he doesn't bother to think.

 

 

GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to " change the tone in

Washington " and ran for office as a moderate, a

" compassionate conservative, " in the

focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet

he has governed from the right wing of his already

conservative party, assiduously tending a " base " that

includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat

cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing

away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking

government to the size where they can, in tax radical

Grover Norquist's phrase, " drown it in the bathtub. "

That base also encompasses a healthy share of

anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted

purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to

all of them— " partial birth " abortion legislation, the

promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage

between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to

embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting

presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's

not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview;

indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent

philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew

politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless

in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio,

Bush's former head of the Office of Community and

Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine,

" What you've got is everything—and I mean

everything—being run by the political arm. "

 

This was not what the American electorate opted for

when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more

than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other

guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate

broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic

priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr.

Bush in the first place had they understood his

eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or

seen his true colors regarding global warming and the

environment? Even after 9/11, were people really

looking to be dragged into an optional war under false

pretenses?

 

If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing,

this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine

right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God

wants him in the White House and that by constantly

evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he

can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him

to another term.

 

 

UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will

believe I harbor a personal vendetta against the man,

some seething resentment. One conservative

commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has

already discerned " jealousy " on my part; after all,

Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that

office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not.

Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at

all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice,

briefly and uneventfully—once during my father's

presidency and once during my father's funeral. I'll

acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense that

he's somehow a clone of my father, but far from

threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My

father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be

anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore,

seems a far cry from the current model, with its

cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its

kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it

or not, I don't look in the mirror every morning and

see my father looming over my shoulder. I write and

speak as nothing more or less than an American

citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction

our country is being dragged by the current

administration. We have reached a critical juncture in

our nation's history, one ripe with both danger and

possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to

prudently confront those dangers and the imagination

to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of

fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism,

there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his

allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then,

should we trust them?

 

Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic.

The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing

justices to once again deliver the White House. Come

November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a

lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our

government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I

spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.