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Legacy
A retrospective on the Bush-Cheney Presidency
The New York Times reported that a poll of over 100 historians saw 98% of them rate the
Bush presidency a failure. The overwhelming majority went so far as to rate him the worst president in US history. The image panel to the right is a brief visual tour of the Bush-Cheney years, with scandal following
upon outrage in sharp staccato fashion. How odd it seems, when I think of this disastrous presidency, that the Republicans once thought the Clinton affair with Monica Lewinski was such a grave offense that it
warranted impeachment proceedings! Clinton was vilified for squirming to conceal his private love life, and quibbling over the meaning of “is.” Bush squirmed deftly around the FISA laws, the Geneva
Conventions, Habeas Corpus, Posse Comitatus, and quibbled about the meaning of “torture.” He simply ignored laws passed by congress with hundreds of “signing statements” saying he’d do
whatever he pleased instead.
From hanging chad to hanging Saddam to hanging the Middle Class, we’ve endured more scandal, shame, incompetence and sheer corruption under Bush & Cheney than any administration
in history. But thank God... It’s over, and we can say “goodbye to all that...” However painful, let us remember what we just endured, as an initial measure of the full scope of the work ahead of
us.
I recently saw Oliver Stone’s portrait of Bush, “W,” and it left me with a sinking feeling of sadness and regret that we ever elevated a man like this to the highest
office in the world. It wasn’t simply the fact that “W” should not even have been able to make the cut at Yale, but the whole notion of family power and privilege that seemed almost medieval. Of
course it’s naive to think that the wealthy don’t position their offspring to inherit the power they have accumulated over many generations, but it confirmed for me that ours was a system polluted by
this insidious and persistent influence of wealth and power centralized in the hands of a very few, and when we get a “bad king” as with someone like Bush, the results are catastrophic. Stone’s
attempt to show the tormented inner side of Bush, the elder son who could never win daddie’s approval, was a thin tonic. He was no different than millions of other sons struggling with similar issues. Bush
gets no pardon from me on that score.
Perhaps worse than Bush himself was the caricaturized portrayal of the inner circle of the Administration, with Cheney’s grand architecture of strategic empire involving Iraq and
Iran, the dissembling wordsmithery of Rummy, the fawning of Rice, the cop out of Tenet, the neutralized resistance of Powell and the ever present shadow of spin master Rove. Watching them kick ideas around the table
was a sickening reminder of the policies we’ve endured for so long.
Stone’s take on Cheney’s comment that there would be no exit strategy for Iraq, “we’re staying,” was probably not very far off the mark. The movie deftly
avoids any episodic presentation of the 9/11 events. I’ll have to agree with the LA Daily news when it wrote: “Buying the administration's story that Bush really did believe Saddam had WMDs until
well after the Iraq invasion is one thing; making a Bush movie that doesn't dramatize 9/11 nor mention the historic 2000 election controversy is negligent at best - and craven if it was left out in hopes of
dodging partisan criticism.” It also portrays the whole torture policy as something Cheney casually passes Bush to sign over lunch one day. Sorry, I refuse to believe he did not know what he was about with all
that. It shows how Bush gets us locked and loaded into Iraq to “kick Saddam’s ass,” but depicts nothing of the slow grind of the war as it faltered and failed, and little of the ass kicking that
was also meted out to the Iraqi people. And I suppose it was “in the can” long before the dramatic events that will mark the conclusion of this disastrous presidency, the looting of the national
treasury. I’ll note this movie as “not for the faint of heart.” and move on.
The Grim Legacy
Why we put ourselves through a presidency like this is difficult to grasp. The UK Observer put together a wonderful compilation of comments from notable artists and writers concerning
Bush, and I’ll share a few. Novelist Tobias Wolffe characterized the Bush presidency with this string of modifiers: “incompetence, hypocrisy, muddleheadedness, venality, truculence, mendacity,
callousness, zealotry, machismo, lawlessness, cynicism, wishful thinking, and occasional downright evil...we are unable not to remind each other of the fatal character of George Bush's incomprehension, the
thousands upon thousands who have died by his blithe actions and inactions, and his inability to understand at any level - political, moral, emotional - the terrible damage he has done...There - I've stepped in
the trap again. I can't help it. And for many of us that has been a defining condition of life in George W Bush's reign, this unanswerable need to register anew and aloud our shock and dismay, indeed our
disbelief, at finding him at the wheel as we wake each morning.”
And I’ve felt much the same way these last eight years. I found the hanging chad of Florida an outrage, and then stood dumbfounded that the man was actually returned to office after a campaign that successfully vilified his opponent’s military service record and status as a “veteran.” Aren’t those the guys America is supposed to love because they put their country first? Republicans just adore vets in 2008, for they ran the veteran in chief as their candidate. Where were they in 2004 when the swiftboating started on Kerry? Probably in church, at a bake sale, shopping mall, or down at the Home Depot picking out their new granite countertops with all that refi money.
In 2004 the “housing boom” was accelerating toward its peak. “Flip That House” was the major enterprise of the economy, which was largely running on loans made
against equity created by sheer speculation. America was consuming at an unprecedented rate while I was banging out articles on the keyboard warning of the inevitable crash at our doorstep and sounding like a motley
fool. But reality is something that even the most distracted and self-indulgent person must eventually face, and we face it now, collectively, as we read the ruinous headlines that have crossed the news wires these
last months.
Walter Mosley, the noted crime fiction writer characterized this growing awareness in the gut of America this way, as the first glimmering of hope: “Knowing something is wrong is
the first step toward rehabilitation. The war we cannot win, the job we cannot save, the mortgage we cannot afford ... Much of this can be laid at the doorstep of our lame duck, bailout President. But, to be fair,
he has shown many Americans the fallacy of their convictions. We can see now, better than ever before, that business as usual will not see us through.”
This same awareness of something amiss in the nation has been growing and growing with each successive scandal and blunder of the Bush presidency. Let’s face it, this country is
much more shifted to the blue than the red, as these election results clearly indicate, and it has been that way for some time. The only way the Republicans managed to take power was through massive voter
irregularities and malfeasance in the vote count, five weeks of haggling over the chad and a 5-4 cop out by the Supreme Court. Stalin said it best: “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts
the votes.” The point is, they could not win if all the votes were really counted, fairly counted, if the true “will of the people” was actually registered and accurately tallied. This is why
they labor so hard to purge voter rolls and set up obstacles on election day.
Millions of lawfully registered voters were disqualified and discarded in the last two elections, particularly in the key battleground states like Florida and Ohio where the outcome was
decided. This year the shenanigans were no different, but they had no effect. The early stories of vote flipping machines, mangled paper trails, lost ballots, purged voter rolls were all in play again. Greg Palast
of Truthout.org wrote on the eve of the election: “In Colorado two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!...In New Mexico one in nine voters in
this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries...In Florida the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants,
forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process...Here's an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don't count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections
Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: "spoiled," unreadable and blank ballots; "provisional" ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.”
With all this talk about Democracy on the lips of right wingers, they sure have a strange way of going about it. It would seem to me that we would do everything possible to include and
count every vote, and the standard for disenfranchising anyone would be so high that it would almost never happen. It would seem logical to me that we’d give up a holiday like “Columbus Day” to
make election day a holiday instead, so people could vote without squeezing into polls before and after work. And anyone who would set themselves the task of purging voter rolls to weed out potential opposition must
truly hate America, and all it stands for. That they would ever consider themselves patriotic, or value centered, is completely laughable. But this year the voting tide was simply too high for the levees of
obstacles the Republicans threw up to make any difference. They were trailing in too many key states. Did they honestly think we’d give their party yet another four years after they virtually wrecked the
nation in two short terms? Obama flipped 9 red states blue in his dramatic win, including Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio, all the key battleground states. It is not difficult to see why this
happened.
Look at the gallery, a long montage of insult to this nation and its ideals, all served up by this “most Christian” president ever, and dutifully supported by folksy types mouthing the
virtues of God, family and the veterans they’ve largely ignored the last eight years. It amazes me that they ever thought Bush and Cheney were representing their core values. The Republican party was literally
hijacked for the last 8 years while we watched the steady erosion in Bush approval ratings, now also in the range of the most unpopular presidents to ever hold the office.
And it’s amazing how major corporate news organizations such as Fox can be so out of touch with this obvious reality that the nation as a whole does not embrace the ideas, policies,
and values of Bush and his supporters. Thank God for term limits, though there would be no possibility that Bush would ever be elected again, just as there was little chance that McCain could be handed the baton
after a long career that was largely in step with this same Republican majority that peopled the political stage with all the “folks” to the right. Just look at his voting record and this will be obvious. In spite of his untarnished character, it was his policies that could not be returned to office. They were simply too close to those of Bush and Cheney.
The cold freeze of the Bush-Cheney years and the long Republican lock on congress has been breaking like gray ice. The Democrats could not prevent “another four years” with John Kerry, though they managed to take back congress. Yet their edge in the Senate was so razor thin that the Republicans were still able to block most any legislation they did not want. This left the Democrats largely hamstrung, with the Republican nay votes being backed up by a Bush veto, they knew they could not prevail with any legislative agenda that would start us in a new direction. So all we saw from 2004 to 2008 was the typical partisan bickering that secured congress with the lowest approval ratings in history. That will change with the strong Democratic majority in the Senate and house now, backed up by Obama.
Everyone was worried about an “October Surprise,” and boy did we get one. While congress squabbled, Bush and Cheney proceeded with their disastrous foreign policy and corporate serving domestic agenda that has made their friends supremely wealthy, and hobbled the economy as they leave office. The final act was the spectacular failure of our financial system, as one bank pancaked down on another in a pile of smoking rubble. A cool trillion was then levied on the US taxpayer to bail out and buy out the rich, who sat like the Larry Silversteins of the financial world watching the investment houses burn and wondering whether to “pull it” on their own firms and make off with as much insurance money and bailout cash as possible. Like the World Trade Center, the ruin of America’s economy is likely to smolder and burn for some time now. It will take us a very long time to clear away the razor-cut steel and ship it off to China, and to consider what we can now build in place of the nation we once were before Bush & Cheney brought everything down.
Yes, I strain the metaphor, but that’s the way I felt these last eight years—that this was volition, willful, not happenstance, and not simple-minded bungling, though they had
that in abundance. It was an intentional policy of favoring powerful and wealthy backers: arms dealers, oil companies, vendors, suppliers lined up at the government trough in Iraq, and when the feeding got thin
there, they lined up at the Fed—bankers, investors, the Wall Street wizards who left our financial markets in a shambles with their wild speculation while the regulators looked the other way.
So much
has happened that we forget what they have done, with one outrage piled on top of another. The cumulative effect of the Bush-Cheney years leaves me stunned with that same feeling I had when I watched the towers
fall—how could this be happening to America? Consider… An election determined by the haggling in Florida and a 5-4 vote of the right leaning Supreme Court. Within months, New York under a pall of
smoke and ash. The tough talking terror guardians let one get through. Soon after, we launched a much justified invasion of Afghanistan that was bungled by lack of adequate force as Bin Ladin slipped away into
Pakistan. We’re still there… Then we got trumped up charges about WMDs in Iraq that were completely false—and proved to be so the moment we invaded. You think a man like Saddam would have gone down
to his spider hole without using every weapon he had on his enemies? You think he didn’t know Bush had a rope waiting for him? I knew there were no WMDs “east, west, north and south of Baghdad” as
Rumsfeld glibly asserted when asked where they were, because Saddam never used them.
When this became painfully clear to even the most die-hard right wing puppets like Sean Hannity, the talking points were
all re-written and Iraq now became about freedom and democracy. Sorry guys, Abu Ghuraib put an end to any notion that America was fighting for Iraqi freedom. We promised them liberation…In fact the whole plan
was dubbed “Operation Iraqi Liberation” until some astute staffer pointed out the first letter of each word spelled O.I.L. Instead we called it freedom and brought the Iraqi people seven years of war,
violence, torture, suffering, dislocation, hardship and death. That’s a pretty dear price to pay for purple thumbs in the ink pot every four years.
The Iraqis know, deep in their bones, that they are no better off now than they were under Saddam. Just ask the 1.2 million dead, and the millions now living in another country, their
families sundered, lives ruined, livelihood lost. I met one last July 4th, a newly arrived refugee to our shores. His cousins were dead, his home occupied by militias, his life long friends become ethnic enemies,
his mother a refugee in Damascus. And he was here living alone in a suburb tenement with a minimum wage job in the land of the free. Thank you, George Bush. There are 1.2 million others just like this man.
FDR’s America decisively defeated Nazi Germany and Japan, enemies who fielded millions of troops equipped with the best weapons of the day, and we won the war in four years. Tough
talking Bush declared his war on terror and could not defeat two third rate nations with no military to speak of after nearly seven years. Boy, do I miss men like Eisenhower and MacArthur. Instead we got Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Our troops went here, and there, and everywhere, until they were exhausted with their endless rotations through Iraq. We laid waste to cities like Falluja, but still could not prevail
until we finally cut bait with the enemy and made a deal with the Sunnis in Anbar province. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The valor and commitment of our troops was unquestioned, but the
simple fact of the matter was that things finally quieted down in Iraq because the Iraqi’s decided to stop killing each other, particularly Muqtada al Sadr’s order to his militias to stand
down.
If the scandal of the war was not enough, next we got the panoply of personalities, all mired in controversy, a list that liberal talk show host Randi Rhodes urged us to remember before we voted this
year: “Ken Lay, Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, Don Young, Ted Stevens, Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Jeff Skilling, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, Randy
"Duke" Cunningham, and "Scooter" Libby, the Viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of the Neo-Cons. Finally pull up Abu Ghuraib, Signing Statements, Executive Orders,
Blackwater, Diebold, and millions and millions of dollars shaped into footballs being tossed around in "The Green Zone". Then pull up New Orleans.” And don’t forget FEMA and the heck of a job
Brownie did there.
To that I would add sallow recollections of AT&T executives sitting in congressional hearing rooms explaining how they cooperated with the NSA to eavesdrop on all our phone calls, and
the pass they were given by executive orders. Then there was that lovely dance around the FISA laws, and the trashing of the Geneva Conventions. And let’s not forget Habeas Corpus, Posse Comitatus, and other
great tenets of human rights and law quietly set aside for our failed terrorist witch hunt. And remember all those “persons of interest” and “enemy combatants” and Guantanamo Bay?
Remember the “free speech zones” penned off where they could be hidden from TV cameras and closely controlled by police? Remember the military tribunals set up by the Military
Commissions Act? And let’s not forget the fleet of black Lear jets ferrying captives to foreign shores so we could interrogate them with a little more vigor than a routine waterboarding session. Let’s
not forget that “we do not torture,” just one of the many great lies of the Bush presidency. The detention facilities are all in place now on US soil, thanks to Kellog-Brown & Root, FEMA, and a plan
called “Endgame.” Thank God they’ll never get a chance to use them. But bear in mind, the actual name of the FEMA plan is “Endgame 2012”. They’ll be planning their return to power
a day after this election, and we must never let it happen again. Never.
Fear was the primary energy that pulsed though the veins of the nation under Bush & Cheney. We had Orange Days and Yellow Days,
and terror alert scares on a regular basis--all theater while the real terror was quietly being leveraged on Wall Street. The world beyond our shores was filled with evil “enemies” who “wished us
harm.” We had talk about Bird Flu pandemics, and “nookler” terrorism threatening our cities. Novelest Siri Hustvedt echoed this observation: “George W Bush and his administration chose to
appeal to our fears. Playing on the age-old fear of malignant outsiders and foreigners, both those residing on American soil and elsewhere, the administration successfully created an atmosphere of absolutism after
11 September 2001. The exhortation 'If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists' is a form of political speech that makes dialogue impossible. There is no legitimate response because anyone who
counters with another thought has already been lumped with an inhuman enemy.”
These stark contrasts of good vs evil, cowboys vs terrorists were broadly magnified by the right serving media channels like Fox News and the radio talk shows where conservative views
largely predominate. There’s nothing like the Republican right when they get it all cranked up and ‘on message’ in a chorus of fear, hate and political diatribe unlike anything we have seen since
the 1940s. Thank god for the mute button, the second most powerful button on earth. The off button serves even better.
And if all of that wasn’t enough to curdle your blood, we endured added frustration
in the impotence of congress. All these elected representatives and senators were busy fighting their own war on a daily basis as the Rs and Ds continued with endless partisan bickering. We got things like the new
Bankruptcy “reform” legislation pushed through by the Republicans so the little guy could not escape from his crushing debt—all legislated just in time for the great fleecing of America and the
multi-trillion dollar bailout for the wealthy we’ve been watching almost daily now for weeks and weeks.
Then came the systematic assault on American free market capitalism, with all five major investment banks gone, names that had stood for a hundred years now a mere footnote to the ruin on
Wall Street. The housing market was nearly nationalized when Fannie & Freddie fell into the arms of Uncle Sam, adding another 50% increase to our national debt. After that it got personal, as bank after bank
began to totter and fail, WaMu and Wachovia being the largest bank failures in US history. And while home foreclosures skyrocketed, housing values crumbled and the cold hand of recession clamped itself on the neck
of the nation, the wealthy investor bankers were then handed shipments of freshly minted cash, by the billions, a gift from the taxpayers at the behest of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke.
We agonized for years as we spent half a trillion dollars on a useless war in Iraq that has given us nothing in return. Then, in a matter of a few weeks, Hank Paulson
took the reins of power and handed out twice that amount, over a trillion dollars, set aside for big banks, investment houses and insurance companies. The taxpayers got a little $300 check in April to stimulate
them, and then the banks sent them a tax bill for a cool $10,000. Instead of lending their bail out money to try and restart the national economic engine, they used it to bolster their acquisitions portfolios and
pay off executives. Mish Shedlock reported the bonus money pool for the same institutions that received bailout money was now some $20 billion. Merry Christmas!
Thank god we have another center of power
finally ascending in America now. The sweeping mandate voters handed Barak Obama was as clear a message as this bitterly divided nation is likely to ever give—enough is enough! We’re not going to talk about fear any longer. We’re going to talk about hope. Time for a new direction. The men that wrecked the nation are done now. They can retire and write their memoirs to preserve their legacy—like lipstick on so many pigs.
All their cheerleading media foils are irrelevant now, sad echoes of the grinding collapse of the Bush years. Oh, they’ll continue to whine and dredge up hate and division. In fact
they have already started! The LA Times reported: “You have to give Rush Limbaugh a perverse kind of credit. At least when he is demonizing Barack Obama, fabricating Obama policies, blaming Obama for
single-handedly causing the recession and the stock market crash, he doesn't pretend to be fair. Opening his first post-election rant against the president-elect, Limbaugh launched in with a certain relish.
"The game," he told his radio listeners, "has begun." Rush went on: “The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen," Limbaugh told his radio audience of 15 million to 20
million on Thursday. "Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression."
The Obama recession? That’s the plan, you see. Kick out the last supports under the system and let it all fall down. Remember how Saddam set all the oil wells in Kuwait on fire when
the US Army came to evict him? That’s what we are seeing now on Wall Street. The plan, the new “message” from the Right’s most prominent voice, is to blame it all on Obama so the Neo-Cons can
swing back into power in 2012 for their “Endgame.”
But who cares about the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Rusty Humphrey, the shrill immaturity of Ann Coulter and so many others lurking on the radio talk show
airwaves? Their contribution to the pre-election discourse at this grave hour of our history was pathetic. They droned on and on about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Obama’s grandmother,
Obama’s Aunt, his relatives in Kenya. They tried to link him to Arab terrorists, and when that didn’t work they tried to link him to domestic terrorists from… 1960??? They questioned his
patriotism, then questioned his citizenship. They implied he was harboring illegal aliens, claimed he was a reincarnation of Che Guevara, a secret son of Malcom X, and god knows what else. Their contribution to the
rebuilding effort is likely to be equally pathetic--assessing blame to Obama, and contributing nothing of value.
Good-bye to all that.
Good by to George, and Dick and Rummy, and Rove. Good bye to shock & awe, birds with flu, and days of terror, red and blue. Good-bye Fox News—you’ve been blocked from my TV remote for years now anyway. Keep selling your corn to that stubborn, uninformed 27% out there, and I hope your plummeting ratings eventually make the point that the audience you purport to broadcast to is now largely composed of liberal, progressive and middle of the road thinkers who decisively rejected a continuation of your party line. Fair and balanced news? Get a clue.
The rest of the nation must also get a clue now as well. If anyone thinks that we can just wait out the housing slump and then get back to flipping houses in an overheated real
estate market again, they are crazy. Real estate values aren’t coming back for many, many years. They will continue to decline through 2010 or 2011. Commercial real estate collapse is the next wave in that
tragedy. The jobs that serviced the real estate industry aren’t coming back either. And all the laid off investor wheeler dealers on Wall Street will have to find something else to do as well, because flip
that bond is as dead now as flip that house.
The effort in the next six months to a year will be to repair the insolvent banking system, and possibly regenerate a new auto industry producing efficient cars. Down-scaling our lives
and building local economies that don’t rely on diesel trucks traveling 2600 miles to get food to our tables will be essential. A rejuvenation of our anemic rail system is a must, along with high speed trains
and new light rail for inter-city transit.
If Bush and Cheney proved anything in their thoughtless and blundering effort to preserve the old nonnegotiable American way of life, they proved we can no longer maintain that life if we
are to survive. Perhaps it took an administration this bad to clearly demonstrate the bankruptcy of our old consumer society and the endless upward movement of wealth to the hands of a very few. They made their oil
grab, and they failed--now we need an alternative. Their friends all got wealthy and built their thirty room estates. Let them live there. We’ll get on without them all just fine.
And if the Neo-Con Klan thinks they can now begin to plan their return to the White House in 2012, let them know we’ll be making plans of our own. We will never again allow the
politics of fear, of preemptive war, the specter of evil lurking in the caves of the Hindu Kush to drive us along the irresponsible pathways where Bush and Cheney goaded us. We will not live in fear, and we will
never again live with the shame they brought to this nation, or endure the grievous harm and havoc they set loose upon the world.
Their time is over. It’s our country again, and Gawd... It feels good.
Article by: John Schettler, November, 2008
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