Bush Must Go

H S U B T S U M GO

ALSO BY BILL PRESS Spin This! All the Ways We Don’t Tell the Truth

H S BU T S U M GO The Top Ten Reasons Why George Bush Doesn’t Deserve a Second Term

BILL PRESS

DUTTON

DUTTON Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, June 2004 First Electronic edition, October 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Bill Press All rights reserved registered trademark—marca registrada library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Press, Bill, 1940Bush must go / by Bill Press. p. cm. MSR ISBN: 0 7865 5250 6 AEB ISBN: 0 7865 5251 4 Set in Sabon Designed by Leonard Telesca Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability. Visit our web site at www.penguinputnam.com

For newlyweds David and Hez. Congratulations!

Contents

Introduction 1 #1 THE WAR IN IRAQ: He Lied Us into War 7

REASON

#2 THE WAR ON TERROR: He Has Made Us Less Safe from Terrorism 43

REASON

#3 JOBS: He Put 3 Million Americans Out of Work 72

REASON

#4 THE DEFICIT: He Spent Money Like a Drunken Sailor 96

REASON

#5 THE PATRIOT ACT: He Undermined Our Most Basic Freedoms 123

REASON

#6 CRONY CAPITALISM: He Sold America Out to Special Interests 147

REASON

#7 FOREIGN POLICY: He Ruined America’s Standing in the World 173

REASON

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CONTENTS

#8 THE ENVIRONMENT: He’s the Worst President Ever 197

REASON

#9 BROKEN PROMISES: He’s a Divider, Not a Uniter 223

REASON

#10 THE CREDIBILITY GAP: He Never Tells the Truth 246

REASON

BONUS REASON

FLORIDA: He Stole the 2000 Election 260 Conclusion 275 Acknowledgments 279 Bibliography 281 Organizations/Websites 285

H S U B T S U M GO

Introduction “One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end.” George W. Bush January 8, 2003

In our great democracy, elections come and go. Some are more exciting than others. Some are more important than others. But make no mistake about this one. The presidential election of 2004 is the most important of our lifetime. Never before has there been such a dangerous man in the White House. Never before has it been so vital, for the good of the republic and everything we stand for as Americans, to oust an incumbent president from office. Before Tom DeLay lumps me among the “Bush-haters,” I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I do not hate George W. Bush. It’s nothing personal. I just think he’s a sad, sorry excuse for a president. His policies have ruined the economy, pitted Americans against each other, destroyed the environment, taken us into an unwise and unnecessary war and made enemies around the world. Despite losing the 2000 popular vote to Al Gore, George Bush did not walk lightly into the Oval Office. His administration brought more than a change of presidents and cabinet secretaries.

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He acted as if he had a mandate. Both at home and abroad, he has steered this nation in radical and dangerous new directions. He has betrayed our trust. He has adopted policies that are antithetical to our core national values. On the international scene, Bush promised a “humble” foreign policy. Instead, he has delivered the most arrogant brand of foreign relations possible. He abandoned the idea of “containment,” successfully followed for four decades by Republican and Democratic presidents alike—against such enemies as the Soviet Union, Communist China and Cuba—and replaced it with his new policy of “first strike” or “anticipatory selfdefense.” Under the new Bush doctrine, the United States asserts the right to go anywhere, anytime and overthrow any government we think may someday pose a threat. Iraq was Bush’s first preemptive war. Today, over a year later, it is still a war in search of a reason. As it turns out, everything George Bush told the American people to justify going to war in Iraq was a lie. We’ve found no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons, no long-range missiles, no bomb-carrying drones, no connection to September 11, no links to Osama bin Laden and no imminent threat to the United States. The war in Iraq—which has so far claimed over 600 American lives—was both unnecessary and unwise. Bush also reversed course on decades of international cooperation—much of it wisely championed by his father—on global issues. Flying the flag of neo-isolationism, Bush canceled U.S. participation in existing treaties on the law of the sea, biological weapons and missile defense. He pulled the plug on a new treaty on global warming and thumbed his nose at the United Nations. As a result, respect for the United States and for our president has deteriorated around the world. Bush is ridiculed as the “Toxic Texan.” Even among our allies, most people now regard America as an unfriendly and belligerent power. The

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United States could only round up two other countries, Great Britain and Australia, to join in the invasion of Iraq—and then on a very small scale. On the home front, Bush has wreaked even more havoc. He took the country’s economy from A-OK to IOU, turning a projected ten-year, $5 billion surplus into a projected $5 billion deficit and, in the short term, replacing Bill Clinton’s balanced budget with a 2004 budget deficit of $374 billion, the largest in history. According to projections issued by the White House Budget Office in January 2004, Bush will set an all-time new deficit record of $520 billion in 2005. At the same time, Bush rewarded his favorite constituency, those Americans making over $320,000 a year, with two back-to-back tax cuts that they didn’t need and we couldn’t afford. Eight years of the most robust economic growth in history have been followed by three years of Bush recession and the loss of 2.8 million private sector jobs. After ten quarters of decline or stagnation, the economy may be finally starting to rebound. But, even so, it’s a jobless recovery. Nine million Americans are still out of work; George Bush will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with more Americans out of work than when he arrived. The Bush recession hurt all Americans—except those special interests who fueled his election campaign with big contributions. To them, he handed a whole grab bag of federal goodies: giant new subsidies to big agricultural firms; freedom to continue polluting to refineries and utilities; access to national monuments and forests to timber and mining interests; and drilling in Alaska and national parks to oil companies. George Bush paid his friends back, big time. At the same time, he declared war on all the rest of us. George Bush cut funds for student loans and Head Start. He stuck seniors with a prescription drug plan that charges them more for less. He built up a bigger, bloated federal government.

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He caused irreparable damage to the environment. And he unleashed Attorney General John Ashcroft in a direct assault on our civil liberties under the so-called USA Patriot Act. Bush and Ashcroft have violated the due process of law by locking up suspects for months with no access to a lawyer and no chance to prove their innocence. They have also trampled on the Fourth Amendment by requiring law-abiding citizens to open up their bank, medical, credit card, telephone and computer records to the FBI. It’s all part of the war on terror, they argue. Yet George Bush’s so-called war on terror is mostly pure public relations. He has actually left us more vulnerable to terrorism, not less. To be fair, Bush has done a few good things. He stepped up to the plate after September 11 and demonstrated strong leadership. He led a successful campaign against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He refused to brand Islam as a violent religion, or all Muslims as terrorists. He proposed a temporary work permit for undocumented workers from Mexico. That’s it. Trying to be as generous as I can, those are the only four positive things I can think of. And they are completely overshadowed by all the evil he has done. On November 6, 2000—the day before he lost the popular vote to Al Gore—George Bush told a crowd in Bentonville, Arkansas: “They misunderestimated me.” We sure did. He turned out to be a far worse president than we had ever feared. And that’s why this election is so critical. Anyone who follows American politics knows that whenever a president is running for reelection, the election is more about him than his opponent. That’s certainly true this year. The election of 2004 is not about whether you like George Bush better than John Kerry. The election of 2004 is about one thing only: It is a referendum on George Bush’s record. It is a referendum on his disastrous policies. It is our only chance to

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get rid of him before he can do any more damage—to our nation, to our environment and to our children’s future. Two friends of mine, Mark and Susie Buell, took a trip around the world in 2003. They returned inspired by the beautiful sites they had visited, but disheartened at the antiAmericanism they encountered everywhere they traveled. I wanted to know who people blame, Americans in general or George Bush? For now, Mark and Susie reported, they only blame George Bush—because they know we didn’t really elect him in 2000. But if we reelect him in 2004, they warned, then they will start to blame us. We can’t let that happen. I admit that writing this book was tough. There are a thousand reasons why George Bush doesn’t deserve a second term, and didn’t deserve a first one. But, to save time and trees, I had to limit my list to the top ten—and that was hard. So I need your help. Let’s make this a cooperative project. You, no doubt, have your own reasons for dumping this guy. At any time, I invite you to turn to the back of this book and use the space provided for listing “My Own Top Ten Reasons for Getting Rid of George Bush.” Or check out my website at BillPress.com—and sound off. But, please, join the team: Read my top ten reasons, add your own, share them with your friends and neighbors and then—run to the ballot box and send this president back to Texas. We need regime change in America, too. We can’t afford four more years of George W. Bush. If you need any ammunition for voting against George Bush, here they are: the top ten reasons why George Bush must be denied a second term.

REASON # ONE

The War in Iraq: He Lied Us into War “I think war is a dangerous place.” George W. Bush August 7, 2003

What’s the worst thing a president could do? Get drunk on the job? Divert millions of dollars into his own pockets? Ignore his official duties? Prance around naked on the Truman Balcony? That’s all pretty bad. But there’s something a whole lot worse. The worst thing a president could ever do is to take this country to war on false pretenses. And that’s exactly what George Bush did. In the past, only a handful of presidents have led us into war. But George W. Bush lied us into war. He launched a war on terror and then abandoned it for a long, costly and unrelated war in Iraq—which only gave global terrorists more time to regroup and rearm. In Iraq, he sacrificed the lives of hundreds of our sons and daughters—not for a war he had to wage to defend this country, but for a war he chose to wage. Think about it. Nothing could be more despicable. There could be no more important reason for being tossed out of the White House.

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George Bush lied to the American people, and because of that, hundreds of American men and women gave their lives in an unnecessary and unwise war.

The Selling of the War Toward the end of 2003, when it became clear that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq, the White House suddenly changed its tune about why we went to war in the first place. Saddam Hussein was an evil despot, President Bush began to argue. He had gassed his own people. He had ordered the execution of thousands of political prisoners. He had filled Iraq’s prisons and torture chambers with thousands more. The United States had a humanitarian duty to go in and free the Iraqi people from this tyrant. Granted, Saddam Hussein was a thug. One of the most evil men on earth. The people of Iraq, and indeed the whole world, are better off with him out of power and in prison. But there are still two things wrong with this new Bush spin. First, no matter how much George Bush likes to play emperor of the world, the United States has no moral or legal authority to invade any country, anytime, and overthrow any leader we don’t happen to like. We especially don’t have the right to do so alone, outside the legitimate umbrella of the United Nations. Iraq was not a democracy. But neither are Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Cuba, Sudan, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, North Korea, Bahrain, Iran and any other number of countries. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. But so are North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and Burma’s

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Than Shwe. You could make the same case against any one of them that George Bush made against Saddam Hussein. In October 2003, for example, Saudi Arabia ordered the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators in Riyadh who were demanding greater political freedoms. Is King Fahd next on America’s hit list? Probably not. He has too much oil. In February 2004, the BBC reported that North Korea is killing political prisoners in experimental gas chambers and testing new chemical weapons on women and children. Is Kim Jong Il next on America’s hit list? Probably not. He has nuclear weapons. There’s the problem. Once we start down the road of singlehandedly stepping in and overthrowing ruthless leaders, where do we stop? How do we decide who gets bumped and who doesn’t? And why won’t other rogue nations simply learn the lesson of North Korea and Pakistan: Acquire nuclear weapons and the United States won’t touch you? The second thing wrong with the latest White House spin is: That’s not the argument President Bush gave for going to war. Not even close. Maybe he could have persuaded the American people we had to go to war for humanitarian reasons, as his father did in Somalia. But Bush Jr. didn’t even try. In fact, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, considered the intellectual architect of the Iraq war, has said that saving the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein wasn’t reason enough to warrant a war. Outlining Bush’s decision-making process in a May 2003 interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz candidly acknowledges: “We settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.” As for Saddam Hussein’s criminal treatment of the Iraqi people, Wolfowitz adds it “is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.” George Bush hopes we forget what he said at the time, but

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we don’t. American men and women were not sent to Iraq to rescue the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein. They were sent on a mission to defend the United States from Saddam Hussein and his WMD when, in fact, the evidence now proves, there was no threat. Over and over again, President Bush gave six reasons why we had to go war in Iraq: 1. We had tried diplomacy and it had failed. 2. War was the only option. 3. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, in great quantities, deployed to the front lines to be used against our troops. 4. Saddam Hussein either already had nuclear weapons, or was in the process of developing them. 5. Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda and at least indirectly involved in September 11. 6. Saddam Hussein and his WMD were an immediate threat to the United States, which is why we couldn’t give UN inspectors any more time. To this day, there is no evidence to support any one of the six reasons President Bush gave for going to war in Iraq. But, worse yet: There is ample evidence to prove that President Bush deliberately exaggerated available intelligence and lied to the American people about the need to go to war. Now that his original rationale for war has fallen apart, President Bush cannot be allowed to reinvent history in 2004. He must be held accountable for the reasons he gave in 2002 and 2003 for sending our troops into battle. He must face responsibility for every one of his lies.

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Lie #1: Diplomacy Didn’t Work President Bush still insists he went to war in Iraq reluctantly, because he tried diplomacy at the United Nations first, but it just didn’t work. That is so far from the truth, it’s amazing he can say it with a straight face. It’s clear that President Bush went to the United Nations reluctantly, after having already decided to go to war, and only because he was convinced to do so by Secretary of State Colin Powell. And he went to the United Nations after having spent three years deep-sixing at least half a dozen UN initiatives. Thanks to The New Republic’s Peter Beinart for first collecting and publishing these headlines, which illustrate Bush’s utter disdain for any UN initiatives, no matter how worthy the cause: “U.S. Boycotts Nuclear Test Ban Meeting” (Washington Post, November 12, 2001)

“U.S. Scuttles Germ War Conference” (Washington Post, December 8, 2001)

“U.S., Europe Clash at Child Summit” (Washington Times, May 9, 2002)

“European Union Ratifies Treaty Aimed at Curbing Global Warming; U.S. Alone in Opposition” (Associated Press, May 31, 2002)

“U.S. Opposition to New International Court Gets Bad Reviews Abroad” (Kansas City Star, July 13, 2002)

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Having demonstrated his unwillingness to work with the UN, it was no surprise that when President Bush finally appeared before the General Assembly, he did so with a chip on his shoulder. He defiantly told them that if they didn’t join the war he had already decided upon, the United Nations would be irrelevant. “My way or the highway” is what passes for diplomacy in the Bush White House. President Bush also ridiculed the failure of Hans Blix and his UN inspectors to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction— leaving him with egg on his face when David Kay, Bush’s chief inspector, later attributed his own failure to find WMD to the fact that the first round of UN inspectors, in the early 1990s, did such a good job they scared Saddam Hussein into destroying his illicit weapons. Then Bush sent Colin Powell back to the United Nations with a totally flawed case for war. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” he told the Security Council. He then proceeded to describe a frightening array of unmanned drones designed to deliver biological weapons, mobile weapons labs, stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, long-range missiles and an active nuclear weapons program. Taken together, they certainly provided the “smoking gun” everyone was looking for. Except they didn’t. None of the core assertions made by Powell turned out to be true. His reputation for honesty became one of the first victims of Bush’s war in Iraq. It’s obvious now that George Bush was never sincere about seeking the support of the United Nations. He had already deployed troops to the region before approaching the UN. With or without UN backing, he had already made up his mind to go to war. As a final insult, President Bush to this day claims that the war in Iraq was not a unilateral effort. Saddam Hussein, he insists, was overthrown by a “Coalition of the Willing.” He

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brags that his forty-six-member coalition is bigger than the thirty-four-nation coalition put together by his father for the first Gulf War in 1991. That is outrageous. This guy will stop at nothing. He even lies about his own father. Daddy Bush, let’s remember, only went to war in Iraq after securing a resolution from the United Nations—and after Saddam Hussein’s forces had invaded Kuwait. Under the UN banner, the first Persian Gulf War was prosecuted by a thirty-four-nation military force, with each nation contributing troops on the ground, aircraft, ships or medics. Dozens of other nations expressed support for the war or sent money—making the actual number of coalition members over one hundred. And, best yet, coalition members paid 80 percent of the cost. By contrast, George W. Bush really only had two partners in Iraq: England and Australia. But even England sent only forty-five thousand troops and Australia only two thousand— compared to three hundred thousand U.S. forces. And the United States paid the full freight—estimated to reach $200 billion. Except for the Brits and the Aussies, the rest of Bush’s socalled “Coalition of the Willing” didn’t send any troops. Some of them did nothing more than sign a letter saying they supported the war. According to one press report, Morocco volunteered to send two thousand monkeys to help detonate land mines. Put them on the list! The island nation of Palau is a typical Bush coalition member. Palau has a population of twenty thousand, but no military. It did send a letter supporting the war and offered the use of its harbors and airports. Which the Pentagon had to decline, because Palau is five thousand miles from Iraq. Palau joins Costa Rica, the Marshall Islands, Iceland, Micronesia and the Solomon Islands as the six unarmed nations in Bush’s coalition. Rwanda, Uzbekistan, Panama, South Korea, the Philippines,

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Macedonia, Mongolia, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Latvia and Eritrea issued statements of support. And according to a report of the Institute for Policy Studies, many of them did so, under threat of loss of U.S. military or trade assistance. Phyllis Bennis, author of the Institute study, says such nations should be called “The Coalition of the Coerced.” The truth is, George Bush rejected any diplomatic solution to the situation in Iraq, just like he rejected any diplomatic efforts to solve the problems of nuclear proliferation or global warming. He’s a man who doesn’t see any value in even trying to work together with other nations. He prefers to go it alone, no matter the consequences.

Lie #2: No Other Solution but War Even if everything George Bush said about Saddam’s arsenal were true, he was still wrong to assert that war was the only option—and that September 11 had made preemptive war a necessity. There was at least one other option: a formula followed by every president, Democrat and Republican, since World War II, including George Bush’s father. It’s called containment, or deterrence. Here’s how it works. The other side knows that you have overwhelming military might. And they know you won’t hesitate to unleash it at the slightest provocation. So they stay in their box and don’t do anything stupid. Containment worked for fifty years against the Soviet Union. They were a very real and imminent threat to the United States. They had over one thousand ballistic missiles aimed at American cities. Their dictators killed even more people than Saddam Hussein. Yet we never invaded the Soviet Union. We contained them. Containment is what George Bush is using today against

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North Korea. Led by nutso Kim Jong Il, North Korea is clearly in violation of UN resolutions. It may already have nuclear weapons. It has definitely restarted its nuclear weapons program. It has a long-range missile than can reach Alaska, and possibly even the West Coast. But Bush does not propose invading North Korea. Instead, he’s asking for multilateral talks—and deterrence. Containment even worked against Saddam Hussein himself, as none other than Dick Cheney boasted, when he was secretary of defense. He warned in August 1990 that “It should be clear to Saddam Hussein that we have a wide range of military capabilities that will let us respond with overwhelming force and extract a very high price should he be foolish enough to use chemical weapons on United States forces.” In fact, Hussein did not use biological or chemical weapons in the first Gulf War, because of the fear of retaliation. And for eleven years after the end of Desert Storm, deterrence continued to work against Saddam Hussein. He invaded Kuwait. Coalition forces put him back in his box. After that, he never made one false move. Because he knew what would happen if he did. Even in the buildup to war, Cheney acknowledged that containment was working. “Saddam Hussein is bottled up,” he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press on September 16, 2001.

Lie #3: Weapons of Mass Deception Of all the reasons given to justify the invasion of Iraq, one stands out: Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He had them, President Bush insisted, and we had to disarm him. What They Said

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no

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doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Dick Cheney, Speech, VFW Convention, August 26, 2002

“There’s no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons . . . We all know that. A trained ape knows that.” Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon Briefing, September 13, 2002

“He’s amassed large clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including anthrax, botulism toxin, possibly smallpox. He’s amassed large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, Sarin and mustard gas.” Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon, September 19, 2002

“There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons . . . Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between one hundred and five hundred tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill sixteen thousand battlefield rockets. Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. And we have sources who tell us that he recently has authorized his field commanders to use them.” Colin Powell, United Nations, February 5, 2003

“According to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical weapons attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the order were given.” George W. Bush, Rose Garden, September 26, 2002

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“Saddam Hussein is a man who told the world he wouldn’t have weapons of mass destruction, but he’s got them.” George W. Bush, Sioux Falls, November 3, 2002

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” George W. Bush, Address to Nation, March 17, 2003

“We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.” George W. Bush, Interview with Polish TV, May 2003

The Facts

Now please go back and read those statements again—and notice their absolute certainty. They didn’t say Saddam Hussein “may” have weapons of mass destruction. They said there was “no doubt” he had them. They didn’t say, before the war, Saddam Hussein had weapons “programs.” They said he had “actual weapons of mass destruction.” They didn’t say Saddam “once” possessed WMD. They said he had them “now.” They didn’t say they were hidden “underground” in caves. They said the weapons had been moved to the front lines “to use against American troops.”

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And they lied. Every last one of them lied, starting with President Bush. We now know that Saddam Hussein had no biological or chemical weapons. Yes, he had acquired them in the 1980s, from poisonous and disease-producing materials he had purchased from American firms, with the full knowledge and blessing of the United States. Yes, in the Iran–Iraq war, he used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and against the antiSaddam Kurdish population of northern Iraq. When he did so, the United States did nothing. Instead, we continued our support of Iraq against Iran. Donald Rumsfeld, then former secretary of defense, even flew to Baghdad and met with Saddam Hussein to reaffirm our support. But, as several sources now confirm, Saddam Hussein destroyed his stockpile of chemical and biological weapons after Desert Storm, because he feared getting caught by UN inspectors. From then on, he only bluffed about WMD to maintain his status in the Arab world. George W. Bush’s number one reason for invading Iraq was bogus. It was all what Senator Ted Kennedy called a fraud “made up in Texas.” David Kay, Bush’s own chief inspector, the man he sent to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, found none. “I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War,” he told a Senate committee. “A combination of UN inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them.” Kay also said he was sure we would never find any WMD, no matter how long we kept looking. And those famous mobile weapons labs Colin Powell warned the Security Council about? According to Kay, they were used to manufacture hydrogen for use in military weather balloons. The administration’s whole approach reminded David Kay of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” As he told ABC News on February 5, 2004: “There was no wolf.”

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So what happened? How did Bush and Cheney get it so wrong? There are only two possibilities. Either they didn’t understand the intelligence they were given, or they willfully cherry-picked through the intelligence in order to make the strongest possible case for war. In other words, they were either incompetent or dishonest. Either way, Bush is responsible. Trying to shift the blame, President Bush is now trying to lay it all on various intelligence agencies, for giving him bad information. But that won’t wash. Intelligence is never an exact science. But the truth is that CIA and other agency reports were never as black-and-white as members of the administration portrayed them. Many of them expressed reservations about the existence of Saddam’s illegal weapons cache. And many of them actually contradicted the White House. Trying to defend his agents from accusations of botching prewar intelligence, a defensive CIA Director George Tenet insisted in a speech at Georgetown University on February 5, 2004: “They never said there was an imminent threat.” But the White House had no room for nuance. As early as the summer of 1995, Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law and the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect, told the CIA that, after Desert Storm, Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them. Turns out he was telling the truth, but nobody believed him. Okay, that was long before George W. Bush got to the White House. But, later, they had their own fair share of warnings that the worst case scenario they were painting was not based in fact. In September 2002, for example, while the Bush administration was starting to make the case for war, a Defense Intelligence Agency study on Iraq’s chemical weapons program stated that there was “no reliable information on whether Iraq

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is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.” The report also concluded: “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM actions”—the same conclusion later reached by David Kay. In December 2002, three months before the war, a classified report—prepared by a team of U.S. intelligence analysts, military officers and civilian Pentagon officials and sent to the National Security Council—warned of the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction might never be found. In February 2003, as American troops were already massing on the Iraqi border, a CIA report stated: “We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.” No reliable evidence? Destroyed weapons? No direct evidence? You never heard any of those possibilities from Commander Bush, did you? George Bush wasn’t misled. He misled us. Here’s what happened. George Bush and Dick Cheney decided to go to war. Then they went out and “sexed-up” any available evidence to support it. What they couldn’t find, they manufactured. The Bush war team, in fact, never let lack of evidence get in the way. If intelligence agencies couldn’t make a strong enough case, the White House decided it would make it for them. Dick Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters and badgered intelligence operatives into producing reports to support the administration’s drive to war. When the CIA didn’t deliver, Donald Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence operation at the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans, with orders to sift through the information on Iraq, discard the doubtful and highlight the worst. Here’s how far they were willing to go. The CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department, we learned after the war, based

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most of their dire warnings on information provided by Iraqi defectors loyal to Cheney pal Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). His followers, of course, had their own agenda: convincing the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein to pave the way for Chalabi to become the new head of Iraq. So they made up stories about stockpiles of illegal weapons and poison-spreading drones. The frightening report of mobile weapons laboratories, for example, came from a Chalabi supporter and former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, who later admitted he had been “coached by the INC” on what to tell American investigators. It worked. Without checking their sources on what turned out to be wildly exaggerated claims—or without seeking confirmation from our own intelligence agencies—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell believed everything Chalabi’s agents told them. A major part of their case for war—repeated in Bush’s State of the Union address and Powell’s presentation to the United Nations—was based solely on lies told by Chalabi’s defectors. Chalabi, a member of the postwar Iraq Governing Council, today admits that he and his fellow thugs lied about everything. But, he insists, it was all done for a good reason. He even has the audacity to call his followers “heroes in error.” “As far as we’re concerned,” he told reporters in Baghdad on February 19, 2004, “we’ve been entirely successful.” And as of March 2004, on orders of an unrepentant Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon was still paying Chalabi’s operation $340,000 a month. Lies don’t come cheap. Of course, in all of his public warnings about weapons of mass destruction, President Bush never mentioned any of the doubts, caveats or uncertainties expressed in original intelligence reports. Otherwise, Americans might have come to suspect the truth. That’s also why he rejected the request of France, Germany

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and Russia to give Hans Blix and his UN weapons inspectors more time. He was afraid that, if inspectors continued turning up nothing, members of Congress might conclude that Saddam Hussein, in fact, no longer had any weapons of mass destruction—and withdraw their support for his little war. In complete disregard for the truth, President Bush deliberately sorted through the available evidence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, picked out only the worst of it and then exaggerated even that, in order to scare the shit out of the American people and win their support for the war. Why does it matter that there were no weapons of mass destruction found? Because, without WMD, George Bush’s entire foundation for sending our young men and women into battle was fraudulent. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell has, indirectly, conceded that point. In a February 2, 2004, interview, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post asked Powell if he would still have recommended an invasion, knowing Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. “I don’t know,” Powell replied, “because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world.” Without WMD, Powell admitted, the president’s entire case for war collapses. “The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus,” he told the Post. “It changes the answer you get.” So what was President Bush’s response to the growing evidence that he lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? In true political fashion, in February 2004, he named a commission to investigate what happened. Except this is a Soviet-style investigation. George Bush appoints all the members. They report back to him. But they don’t report back until March 2005—six months after the November election. Therefore, there is zero accountability. Isn’t it amazing? As Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily

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Show, Janet Jackson bares her breast on TV and the FCC reacts the next day. President Bush lies about sending young Americans to die and nothing happens for over a year. When asked by Tim Russert on Meet the Press on February 8, 2004, why he didn’t ask for the commission’s work to be completed before November (Tony Blair’s similar inquiry will be completed in July 2004) President Bush had the nerve to say: “We didn’t want them to be hurried.”

Lie #4: Saddam’s Nuclear Weapons As scary as biological and chemical weapons are, they pale in importance compared to the big kahuna: nuclear weapons. I don’t care how big a peacenik you are—nobody wants a madman like Saddam Hussein playing around with a nuclear bomb. It was hard to oppose taking him out if he, indeed, had nukes. And President Bush left no doubt he did. What They Said

“Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a nuclear weapon is when, God forbid, he uses one.” George W. Bush, United Nations, September 12, 2002

“I would remind you that when the inspectors went into Iraq and were denied, finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic—the IAEA, that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.” George W. Bush, News Conference with Tony Blair, September 7, 2002

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“Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” George W. Bush, United Nations, September 12, 2002

“Today Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon with a year. George W. Bush, Radio Address, September 14, 2002

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” George W. Bush, State of Union, January 28, 2003

“Saddam Hussein has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, March 16, 2003

“We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.” Colin Powell, United Nations, February 5, 2003

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The Facts

Once again, note the absolute certainty: We don’t need any more evidence. He’s buying all the stuff necessary to make ’em. And he’s already got ’em. Except that it’s just not true. Every assertion by President Bush about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons has been soundly disputed. Those aluminum tubes he warned about, which he claimed could only be used to enrich uranium? Even before President Bush’s speech to the United Nations, the State Department and the Energy Department had both debunked that idea. The International Atomic Energy Agency also ruled out their potential use in a nuclear program. And Chief Inspector David Kay later confirmed that the aluminium tubes were designed for conventional artillery rockets. Before he made his UN address, Bush had been informed there were serious doubts the aluminum tubes had anything to do with nuclear weapons. He asserted it anyway. How about Saddam’s buying yellowcake uranium from Niger? That was the explosive charge made by President Bush in the now infamous sixteen words of his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, quoted above. But it had long before been proven untrue. Information that Saddam Hussein might be attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program by purchasing yellowcake uranium from Niger was first reported to the CIA by British authorities, who had heard it from Italian intelligence agents. Vice President Dick Cheney demanded that the CIA check it out, so they sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate. Wilson returned and reported it was phony baloney. Dr. Mohammed al-Baradei, head of the IAEA, did his own investigation and concluded the allegation was based on a set of clearly forged documents.

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Armed with this new data, the CIA warned the White House about including the yellowcake charge in the State of the Union. But Bush did so anyway. At which point Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times accusing the administration of ignoring his findings and deliberately misleading the American people. Administration officials later admitted that the accusation about yellowcake should not have been included in the president’s address to Congress, but they blamed it all on the CIA. Meanwhile, Ambassador Wilson paid the price for honesty by having his wife, a top secret CIA operative agent, outed to Crossfire’s Robert Novak by a vindictive, and still unknown, White House staffer. Build a nuclear weapon within a year? That was a figment of George Bush’s imagination. The classified National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 estimated that, even if Iraqi scientists got their hands on fissile material, they were at best five to seven years from producing their first nuclear weapon. Besides, as former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, wrote in the January/February 2004 Atlantic Monthly, it was unlikely Iraq could obtain weapons-grade material from any foreign source, anyway. They’d been trying to do so for twenty-five years, with no success. Iraq’s entire nuclear weapons program? Long ago disputed. Nobody believed it anymore, except maybe George W. Bush— who either believed it, or lied about it. As early as October 1997, the IAEA reported on its on-site inspections: “These verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its program objective of producing nuclear weapons . . . Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.” In fact, the IAEA noted, there were

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much more serious nuclear threats in Iran, Libya and North Korea. In October 2002, the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department publicly disagreed with warnings raised by other agencies, mainly the Pentagon, about Iraq’s nuclear program. “The activities we have detected do not add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons.” In sum, there was no evidence to support the alarmist claims of President Bush about Iraq’s nuclear weapons, and no need to go to war to destroy a weapons program that did not exist. But even if there were no illegal weapons, Bush laid another powerful argument on the table: September 11.

Lie #5: Saddam’s Connection with Al Qaeda Remember September 11! That became George Bush’s rallying cry—and not just for retaliatory attacks against terrorists. As reported by Mike Allen in the Washington Post on September 11, 2003, two years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush invokes 9/11 when talking about almost any issue under the sun. Asked at a July 2003 news conference about plans to spend $170 billion on his reelection campaign, for example, Bush replied: “Every day, I’m reminded about what 9/11 means to America.” And on Labor Day that same year, explaining to union members why there were so many Americans out of work, he said: “I want you to think back to that fateful day, September the 11, and what happened afterwards.” September 11 became George Bush’s excuse for everything.

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But nowhere did George Bush invoke that horrible day more than in making the case for war in Iraq. In order to justify the war, he knew he had to link Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. And so, from the beginning, he painted the war in Iraq as part and parcel of the war on terror—which started on September 12, 2001, and was aimed at al Qaeda and their allies, including Saddam Hussein. What They Said

“This is a man that we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army.” George W. Bush, Dearborn, Michigan, October 14, 2002

“This is a man who has had contacts with al Qaeda. This is a man who poses a serious threat in many forms, but catch this form: He’s the kind of guy that would love nothing more than to train terrorists and provide arms to terrorists so they could attack his worst enemy and leave no fingerprints. This guy is a threat to the world.” George W. Bush, St. Paul, November 3, 2002

“This is a man who cannot stand America, he cannot stand what we stand for, he can’t stand some of our closest friends and allies. This is a man who has got connections with al Qaeda.” George W. Bush, Dallas, November 4, 2002

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“What I have said is a fact—that there are al Qaeda in a number of locations in Iraq.” Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon Briefing, August 21, 2002

“We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time.” Condoleezza Rice, PBS, September 25, 2002

“But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder.” Colin Powell, United Nations, February 5, 2003

The Facts

According to a TIME magazine poll of October 2002, 71 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. No wonder. After listening to President Bush and other administration officials, you could be excused for believing that Saddam Hussein sat down with Osama bin Laden and helped plan the 9/11 attacks—or even flew one of the jets into the World Trade Center. Again, all of the evidence suggests just the opposite. First, there is the fact that, in the Muslim world, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are 180 degrees apart. Bin Laden is a fundamentalist freak who wants to restore the rule

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of Islamic law throughout the Arab world—the kind of Muslim fanatic Hussein wanted nothing to do with. While Saddam was the very type of modern, secular, worldly, profane Arab leader bin Laden wanted to get rid of. They hated each other. There is no record of their having ever met, let alone having collaborated on anything. In one of his recorded messages, bin Laden names Saddam Hussein among the enemies of true Islam. The only “evidence” offered of any Iraq–al Qaeda connection was a meeting—originally reported by Czech officials— that allegedly took place in Prague, in April 2001, between September 11 mastermind Mohammed Atta and a senior member of the Iraqi intelligence agency. However, the Czech government later told the White House there was no evidence to confirm that meeting ever took place. And the CIA and FBI searched all his travel records and determined that Atta was actually in Virginia Beach at that time. Ironically, in his presentation to the Security Council, Colin Powell cited the presence of the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group in northern Iraq as further proof of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist connections. Powell knew better. Ansar al-Islam was a radical Islamist group headquartered in Kurdish territory and under the umbrella of the U.S./British no-fly zones—an area over which Saddam Hussein had no control. Their goal was to establish an independent Islamic state in northern Iraq. And, on one of their training videos, their leader refers to Saddam Hussein as “a real monster and not a real Muslim.” In fact, the evidence of any link between Saddam Hussein and September 11 was so thin that, one by one, every one of the war hawks ran away from it. Tony Blair was the first. He told reporters on January 21, 2003, two months before the beginning of the war: “The truth is, there is no information I have that directly links Iraq to September 11.”

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After the war was over, President Bush followed Blair’s lead. Sort of. “We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks,” he said. Although he still insisted: “There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties.” But he didn’t offer any evidence. Finally, even Colin Powell threw in the towel. Earlier he had warned the United Nations: “Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible.” In January 2004, he admitted that: “I have seen no smoking gun, no concrete evidence about the connection” between the government of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and terrorists of al Qaeda. Now we know the truth: 1. Saddam Hussein was in no way connected to Osama bin Laden and in no way responsible for the September 11 attacks. And we also know: 2. Planning for the war in Iraq had, in fact, begun long before September 11. 3. The war in Iraq was not part of the war on terror—it was a long and costly distraction from the war on terror. Eyes on Iraq Before September 11

When did the United States start thinking about overthrowing Saddam Hussein? There’s no fixed date. But there’s no doubt about this: It started long before September 11. The first public call for overthrowing Saddam Hussein came in 1987—from Richard Perle, shortly after leaving his job as assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.

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For three years, until his resignation in February 2004, Perle also served as a member of President Bush’s Defense Policy Board. In 1996, Perle and fellow neoconservatives prepared a position paper for Benjamin Netanyahu, newly elected Prime Minister of Israel. Their report, titled “A Clean Break,” recommended “removing Saddam Hussein from power” and “weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria.” The road to peace in Israel, they argued, led from Baghdad to Damascus to Tehran—and then to Jerusalem. Joining Perle as coauthors of the report were Douglas Feith, now undersecretary of defense for policy, and David Wurmser, today special assistant to Undersecretary of State John Bolton. In 1997, Zalmay Khalilzad and Paul Wolfowitz argued for the ouster of Saddam Hussein in an article in The Weekly Standard entitled “Overthrow Him.” Wolfowitz is now deputy secretary of defense and Khalilzad is a special envoy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Coincidence? I think not. In 1998, a posse of leading neoconservatives sent an open letter to President Clinton, urging him to take military action against Iraq. American policy, they argued, “should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” Clinton was advised “to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf.” In addition to Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Khalilzad, other members of the Bush administration who signed the letter to Clinton included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton and Undersecretary of Defense Dov Zakheim. Clearly, that cabal of neocons walked into the Bush administration with a fixed agenda: Get rid of Saddam Hussein. And they didn’t waste any time making it official administration policy.

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As first reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, a top secret National Security Council document dated February 3, 2001, instructed NSC staff to cooperate with Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force. The melding of national security and energy staffs was important, said the directive, because the focus of Cheney’s group included “the review of operational policies toward rogue states” such as Iraq—and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” Who knew? Cheney wasn’t just planning on how to drill for oil in Alaska. He was already plotting how to take over the oil fields of Iraq. More evidence. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill—whom President Bush praised as a “straight shooter”—war against Iraq was discussed at the very first meeting of Bush’s National Security Council—eight full months before September 11. In The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill says that from day one the administration decided to remove Saddam Hussein and then looked for the opportunity and reasons for doing so. “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country,” he told author Ron Suskind. “And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’ ” The opportunity came on September 11, 2001. As recounted by Bob Woodward in Bush at War, on September 12, when President Bush met with the National Security Council to decide how to respond to the previous day’s attacks on America—even though not one Iraqi national was among the nineteen hijackers and there was zero evidence Saddam Hussein was involved—Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz recommended an invasion of Iraq.

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It wasn’t just Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who made the early leap to Iraq. According to Bush’s own former counterterrorism czar, it was President Bush himself. In his book Against All Enemies, Clarke tells of meeting the president in the White House Situation Room on the evening of September 12—an exchange first denied, then confirmed by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Clarke says the president grabbed him and a few others, closed the door to the conference room and gave them his orders. Quoting directly from Clarke’s book: “Look,” he told us. “I know you have a lot to do and all . . . but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way . . .” I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. “But, Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.” “I know, I know,” said Bush, “but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred . . .” “Absolutely, we will look . . . again.” I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.” “Look into Iraq, Saddam,” the president said testily and left us. By the following weekend, in a war summit at Camp David, the decision to invade Iraq had already been made. As Paul Wolfowitz related to Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair: “There was a long discussion during the day about what place if any Iraq should have in a counterterrorist strategy. On the surface of the debate it at least appeared to be about not whether but when. There seemed to be a kind of agreement that yes it

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should be, but the disagreement was whether it should be in the immediate response, or whether you should concentrate simply on Afghanistan first.” Clearly, plans for the war in Iraq had been made way ahead of time and left sitting on the shelf—waiting for the right opportunity for Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld to hand them to Bush. The president put them back on the shelf, but only until he had taken care of Afghanistan. Once President Bush was ready to uncork his own plans for invading Iraq, he waited until the perfect moment, September 2002. After all, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New York Times, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” No, from a cynical point of view, you wait until the first anniversary of September 11. Then, for the next six months, Bush barnstormed around the country like a traveling salesman, selling his war. He professed not to know yet what to do about Iraq. But, in fact, he was just trying to drum up support for a decision he had already made, over a year earlier. Time Out from the War On Terror

The vast majority of Americans, myself included, supported the president in his determination to wipe out terrorism. We supported the invasion of Afghanistan. That war was wise, necessary and justified—everything the war in Iraq was not. It was in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, when President Bush suddenly changed the subject. He never once mentioned al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Instead, he singled out Iran, North Korea and Iraq as members of the “axis of evil.” Why Iraq? Again, there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Even President Bush now

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admits that. There were no terrorists hiding in Iraq. There were no training camps in Iraq. There is no evidence Iraq funneled any weapons to terrorists. CIA Director George Tenet indirectly questioned the president’s new focus. Less than a week after the 2002 State of the Union, he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the al Qaeda terrorist network, not Iraq, was “the most immediate and serious threat” to the United States. There is no way the war in Iraq can be considered part of the war on terror. In fact, it may have undercut the war on terror—by draining away scarce resources, by diverting attention from the real enemy and by generating more hatred of America and more terrorist acts against Americans around the world. Not to mention giving terrorists another place to attack American troops: Iraq. Speaking at New York University on August 7, 2003, former Vice President Al Gore raised other problems caused by going to Iraq. Noting that a congressional investigation had just concluded that Saddam Hussein had nothing whatsoever to do with September 11, Gore told his audience: “Therefore, whatever other goals it served—and it did serve some other goals—the decision to invade Iraq made no sense as a way of exacting revenge for 9/11. To the contrary, the U.S. pulled significant intelligence resources out of Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to get ready for the rushed invasion of Iraq and that disrupted the search for Osama at a critical time. And the indifference we showed to the rest of the world’s opinion in the process undermined the global cooperation we need to win the war against terrorism.” That same conclusion was reached by at least one person high up in the Bush White House. Richard A. Clarke, Bush’s point person on terrorism, writes in Against All Enemies: “Many thought that the Bush administration was doing a good

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job of fighting terrorism when, actually, the administration had squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda and instead strengthened our enemies by going off on a completely unnecessary tangent, the invasion of Iraq.” And these critiques were echoed by voices within the very walls of the Pentagon. A report published by the U.S. Army War College in January 2004 accused the Bush administration of taking a dangerous detour from the war on terror into an “unnecessary” war in Iraq. Authored by Professor Jeffrey Record of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, the War College document contends that Saddam Hussein was already contained and did not represent a threat to the United States. The war in Iraq, record concludes, was a “war-of-choice distraction from the war-of-necessity against al Qaeda.” Go figure. Al Qaeda attacked the United States. We started out after al Qaeda. Then we suddenly changed course and made a huge, unnecessary, costly detour to Iraq. This made no sense.

Lie #6: Imminent Threat to the United States The reason George Bush gave for diverting from the war on terror and taking on Saddam Hussein, of course, was that Iraq presented an immediate, serious threat to the United States. What They Said

“The danger is clear: using chemical, biological, or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could . . . kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.” George W. Bush, Address to Nation, March 17, 2003

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“Saddam Hussein is a threat to America.” George W. Bush, Springfield, Illinois, November 3, 2002

“The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency.” George W. Bush, Rose Garden, October 2, 2002

“The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing.” George W. Bush, Rose Garden, September 26, 2002

“Saddam’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction poses a grave danger—not only to his neighbors, but also to the United States.” Dick Cheney, Conservative Political Action Conference, January 30, 2003

“No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world then the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.” Donald Rumsfeld, Congressional Testimony, September 19, 2002

“This is about imminent threat.” Press Secretary Scott McClellan, White House Briefing, February 10, 2003

Today, whenever he is asked about these past statements, President Bush, like some little third-grader, stomps his foot and declares: “I never said imminent! I never said imminent! I never said imminent!” The strongest language he ever used,

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Bush insists, was that Saddam Hussein was a “grave and gathering threat to America and the world.” Nonsense. Whatever word or words he or his top team used—grave, gathering, unique, urgent or imminent—there was no doubt what message they sent to the American people. Saddam Hussein was so serious a threat that we could not allow UN inspectors any more time. We had to act immediately. And that, my friends, is George Bush’s most absurd argument of all. The Facts

What if I told you all this about big bad Iraq . . . 1. In 2001, Iraq spent $1.4 billion on its military. The United States spent $330 billion. 2. Iraq had no navy. 3. Iraq’s air force consisted of a fleet of aging Soviet aircraft that were at best 55 percent combat ready. 4. Those planes that could fly were limited to less than 40 percent of Iraqi territory. Over 60 percent of Iraq’s airspace was contained in “no-fly” zones patrolled by U.S. and UK fighter planes. 5. Iraq’s army consisted of 350,000 troops, the vast majority of whom were poorly trained conscripts. 6. The army was equipped with outdated Soviet arms and tanks, reported at maximum 50 percent combat effectiveness. Would you believe that country to be a threat to the United States? Of course not. No wonder our troops cut through them like butter.

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Okay. Forget conventional weapons. If the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, it might have been a threat to the United States. But, as we have already seen, they didn’t. If they had long-range missiles, as President Bush charged, Iraq might have been a threat. But they didn’t. And what about that fleet of “unmanned aerial vehicles” President Bush warned about? In October 2002, he warned they “could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas.” And, he said, they were aimed directly at the United States. “We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.” Damned right. If they had those long-range UAVs, that would make Iraq a threat to the continental United States. Except they didn’t. American officials later admitted the drones had a maximum range of several hundred miles. There is no way Iraq was a threat, imminent or otherwise, to this country. Now, that was number 6. The last of the six lies George Bush told before the war. But we can’t close this chapter without mentioning the big lie he and Dick Cheney told about what would happen after the war. So here goes . . .

Lie #7: Welcomed as Liberators Leading up to the war in Iraq, a lot of people were asking: “Okay, we now know there’s no turning back. We’re going to war. But what’s the exit strategy? Will we have to keep troops there? How long? And how dangerous will it be?” Senator Joe Biden, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, predicted American troops would have to remain in Iraq as long as ten years. The Bush administration had one response to all of those worry warts: Chill. No problem. Piece of cake. American troops wouldn’t be there long and they wouldn’t be in trouble.

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Dick Cheney went even further. Appearing on Meet the Press on March 16, 2002, he told Tim Russert: “The Iraqis are desperate to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.” The vice president said that because that’s what his buddy Ahmed Chalabi told him. But Cheney should have known better than to trust Chalabi. And so should Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. Because they believed Chalabi—about how warmly Americans would be welcomed, as well about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction—U.S. troops were sent to Iraq without any postwar plan and without proper support or protection. No sooner had the war ended than they became sitting ducks for disgruntled supporters of Saddam Hussein. On May 1, 2003, when President Bush was landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared major combat operations over, the death toll in Iraq was 138. As of this writing, April 2004, over 470 more American troops have been killed by bombs or sniper fire in what was promised to be “friendly” Iraq. For the administration, trusting Chalabi turned out to be a bloody, costly, tragic mistake—and one for which George W. Bush must be held responsible.

A War of Choice One year later, it is clearer than ever. The war in Iraq was not a war George Bush had to fight in order to protect the United States. This was a war George Bush chose to fight. And George Bush made the wrong choice. This war, though not the occupation, is now behind us. And

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any election must be about the future. But we can never go forward with someone who did the worst thing any president could to. We can never trust the future to any president who misled us into war. For lying the United States into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq, GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # TWO

The War on Terror: He Has Made Us Less Safe from Terrorism “We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” George W. Bush, August 21, 2000

In January 2002, White House political chief Karl Rove spoke about the war on terror to a meeting of the Republican National Committee: “We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America.” In his first campaign fundraising letter, May 2003, President Bush wrote: “I’ll be depending on friends and supporters like you to get my campaign organized and operating across our country. We have no more urgent and important duty than to wage and win the War on Terrorism.” In selecting a site for their 2004 convention, the Republican National Committee decided to go to New York City for the first time in their 150-year history. As part of convention activities, there will be a memorial service held at Ground Zero. And they deliberately scheduled the convention later than it’s ever been held, from August 29 to September 4—in order to coincide with the third anniversary of September 11.

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The first Bush campaign commercials, which began airing the first week of March 2004, showed footage of firemen carrying bodies out of the rubble at Ground Zero. And, in his first attack ad against John Kerry, which began airing less than one week later, President Bush said: “Now we face a choice. We can go forward with confidence, resolve and hope. Or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat.” Now, I don’t know anybody who believes that “terrorists are not plotting,” but in any case, the point is clear: George Bush wants the 2004 election decided on the issue of homeland security. In so doing, of course, he is breaking a pledge he made to a bipartisan meeting of congressional leaders at the White House on January 23, 2002: “I have no ambition whatsoever to use national security as a political issue.” He can’t defend his record on jobs, the economy, deficits, health care, education and Social Security. So he is trying to win reelection on the backs of three thousand people killed on September 11. As Bush told Tim Russert on February 8, 2004: “I’m a war president.” He believes the war on terror is the issue voters care most about, and it’s the issue he himself talks and brags about the most: “We learned a lesson on September the 11th,” Bush told reporters in August 2003, “and that is, our nation is vulnerable to attack. And we’re doing everything we can to protect the homeland.” Sounds good. But it’s all bunk. The truth is, even on his self-proclaimed number one issue, George Bush has failed to deliver. In many ways, he has made us less safe—by failing to take necessary precautionary measures at home, and by stirring up more anti-American hatred abroad. He abandoned the hunt for al Qaeda in favor of an illconceived, unwise and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. And he

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did little or nothing to put in place the security measures we need here in the United States to protect the homeland from future attacks. Instead he created a huge new government agency. Because he boasts about it so often, many Americans believe the president is pulling out all the stops to protect us. But, in fact, the closer you look at George Bush’s so-called homeland protection program, the more you realize it is all smoke and mirrors— like one of those old Hollywood western movie sets. Nothing is real. Just phony building fronts, propped up for effect.

Failing to Recognize the Threat Richard Clarke stirred up a firestorm by accusing the Bush administration of not taking terrorism seriously enough prior to September 11. It was an “important” issue for them, he acknowledged, but not an “urgent” one. The White House responded with a campaign of character assassination against Clarke the likes of which had never been seen before, not even in a town that specializes in destroying people. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush and even First Lady Laura Bush all jumped up to tear Clarke down. But they couldn’t refute Clarke’s eyewitness testimony—because he told the truth. Clarke was a bulldog on terrorism. No president, he believed—and he served under four of them—took the threat of terrorism seriously enough. However, Clarke did convince President Clinton to take certain steps. After al Qaeda blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton made terrorism the administration’s number one priority. He sent 60 cruise missiles raining down on an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. He gave the CIA a green light to find and assassinate Osama bin Laden. And, under Clinton’s direction, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger held daily “principal”

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meetings in the White House—with the heads of defense, state, justice, the FBI and the CIA—to chart progress in tracking down al Qaeda terrorists, at home and abroad. As related by Clarke—the man in charge—that focus and that sense of urgency disappeared once George W. Bush arrived. Clarke briefed Cheney and new Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on terror. Nothing happened. He asked to brief the president. He was refused. He pressed Rice to continue Berger’s practice of daily meetings of principals to pursue the Clinton’s administration goal of lessening the threat of al Qaeda. He was told to come up with a new plan, instead—to eliminate al Qaeda. Meanwhile, despite growing warnings during the summer of 2001 about a colossal attack against Americans, there were no meetings held and no action taken—not even when the president was told on August 6 that al Qaeda might hijack a plane and fly them into American buildings. Finally, on September 4—one week before September 11— a meeting of principals was held. They approved the outline Clarke had presented to Rice way back in January 2001 and forwarded the plan to the president. The same day, a frustrated Clarke sent a letter to Rice, urging her and other White House policy makers “to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done better.” Bush and others attacked Clarke so viciously because his testimony undercut the main theme of the president’s reelection campaign: that he walked into the Oval Office tough on terrorism and has been tough ever since. But Clarke’s testimony, as powerful as it is, does not stand alone. There is additional evidence, some made public long before Clarke ever published his book, that the Bush administration initially failed to take terrorism seriously.

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On August 9, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft released the Justice Department’s new “Strategic Plan.” He did not rank fighting terrorism as one of the department’s seven main goals—even though his predecessor, Janet Reno, had called terrorism “the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.” Just weeks before the September 11 attacks, the FBI asked Attorney General John Ashcroft for $588 million to beef up their efforts to fight terrorism by hiring 54 translators and 248 new counterterrorism agents. Ashcroft turned them down, and the White House backed him up. At that time, terrorism wasn’t worth spending more money on. And even after September 11, as shown in documents released to the Washington Post by the Center for American Progress, Bush was still pinching pennies in fighting terrorism. On October 12, 2001, responding to the September 11 attacks, the FBI asked for $1.5 billion in additional funds for counterterrorism. The White House cut their request down to $531 million. Who knows? If only Bush had listened to Clarke, if only Rice had made terrorism a top priority, if only Ashcroft had given the FBI the help it needed—maybe those warnings during the summer of 2001 would have been acted upon—and maybe the horror of September 11 could have been avoided. WAR IN IRAQ—THE BIG DISTRACTION The number one reason why President Bush has failed in the war on terror is that he abandoned the course—and led the country into a huge distraction in Iraq. Think back to the spring of 2002. The war in Afghanistan had been successful. The Taliban was out of power, and American ally Hamid Karzai was in. A worldwide coalition of nations

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supported the efforts of the United States to hunt down and punish the perpetrators of September 11. And al Qaeda’s training camps had already been destroyed. But, most importantly, we had Osama bin Laden on the run. He and his remaining lieutenants were locked down in the mountains of Afghanistan, somewhere along the Pakistani border, and American intelligence agents and military were closing in. Then, suddenly, the Bush administration shifted gears—and shifted both attention and resources to Iraq—which had nothing to do with pursuing al Qaeda. As a result, bin Laden escaped, free to continue his evil ways. And, while the United States was preoccupied with Iraq, al Qaeda has enjoyed a resurgence, recruiting more young terrorists around the world—witness the March 2004 bombings in Madrid. That has created many more clear and present dangers to American lives and freedoms than Saddam Hussein ever did. There have been more bombings by al Qaeda and its terrorist allies in the two and a half years since September 11 than there were in the two and a half years before. As reported by columnist Joe Klein in the February 15, 2004, issue of TIME, the detour to Iraq has generated concern inside U.S. intelligence agencies that our larger campaign against terrorism has actually been retarded as a result. “Our actions in Iraq have caused a net increase in terrorists,” one intelligence gatherer anonymously told Klein. “We’ve gotten better at finding and killing them. But there are a lot more Islamic young people with a desire to fight us.” A point echoed by Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies for the Cato Institute, in a December 2003 position paper: “The U.S. occupation of Iraq makes the radical Islamists’ case that the West is invading Islam, which only encourages the Muslim world to unite against the United States.” Most significantly, those same concerns—about what we

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lost by turning our attention to Iraq—have been expressed by several members of the U.S. Senate and by President Bush’s own former point man on terrorism. Richard Clarke left the White House in March 2003, having also served under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. In his book, Against All Enemies, he laments: “A new al Qaeda has emerged and is growing stronger, in part because of our own actions and inactions. It is in many ways a tougher opponent than we faced before September 11 and we are not doing what is necessary to make America safer from that threat.” Clarke notes the irony of President Bush’s election-year boast of “fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we don’t have to fight them in the streets of America.” “He never points out,” Clarke observes correctly, “that our being in Iraq does nothing to prevent terrorists from coming to America, but does divert funds from addressing our domestic vulnerabilities and does make terrorism recruitment easier.” In the Senate, no one has spoken out more forcefully on this issue than Florida’s Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Are we safer because Saddam Hussein is in jail? Yes,” he told me in an interview for this book. “But what did we give up in order to go after Hussein? We gave up our focus on the areas that are really dangerous. And we gave up our focus on the war on terror.” In effect, George W. Bush took a year out from the war on terror to fight his war in Iraq. And that has had serious consequences. The fact is: The Iraq war has made us more vulnerable to terrorism, not less. Most terrorism experts agree. After crushing al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in weighing what further military action to take in response to September 11, there were three tests: (1) which of the evil forces out there had the capacity to kill Americans, meaning people trained to carry out terrorist attacks, (2) which

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groups had the will, or desire to attack America and (3) which groups were represented by terrorists inside the United States or close enough to be able to strike American soil. Iraq flunked all three of the tests. Even if Saddam Hussein did have WMD and the will to drop them on Atlantic City, Seattle or Topeka, he did not have the means to deliver them. And he had no death squads in or near the United States. Nevertheless, Bush used the events of 9/11 as pretext for putting all his attention on Iraq, rather than focusing on those areas that represented real dangers of proliferation—starting with the former Soviet Union.

Russia and Nunn-Lugar In terms of weapons of mass destruction, the most dangerous threat by far was, and remains, Russia. If there’s any place terrorists might easily get their hands on existing, off-the-shelf, ready-to-go weapons of mass destruction, it’s the former Soviet Union—with its combination of enormous stockpiles of illicit weapons and weak security. President Bush might understand this, if he had only listened to the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana. “I have no doubt that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda will use weapons of mass destruction if they are able to steal, buy, or build them,” said Lugar after September 11, but before the Iraq war. “And where are they most likely to be able to steal or buy them? Russia.” It’s the same warning sounded in January 2001 by a bipartisan task force on security issues headed by former Republican Senator Howard Baker and former Clinton White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler. They called Russia’s unspent and unguarded stockpiles of nuclear weapons “the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today.”

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But the U.S. Senate actually recognized the problem and started dealing with it a decade earlier. In 1991, Congress enacted the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program— named after Republican Lugar and Democrat Sam Nunn—a program designed to lessen the threat posed by WMD by locating, deactivating and destroying existing stockpiles, starting in Russia. By the time George W. Bush took office, it had been hugely successful: dismantling 6,212 Russian nuclear warheads. It had destroyed an additional 520 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 451 ICBM silos, 624 nuclear air-launched cruise missiles, 445 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 408 SLBM launchers, 27 strategic missile submarines. Nunn-Lugar teams had also removed all nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Then George W. Bush took over and stopped Nunn-Lugar dead in its tracks. He cut its budget by $140 million in 2002, and shut down the program for eight months. In January 2003, he reluctantly allowed the program to resume, but with severely reduced funding and still limited to Russia. Despite the progress made so far under Nunn-Lugar, Russia remains the most dangerous place in the world today—the easiest place for terrorists to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Only one-half of Russia’s nuclear missiles have been dismantled. It also has enormous stashes of chemical weapons and biological pathogens, tactical nuclear weapons, stores of plutonium, dirty nuclear reactors and decommissioned nuclear submarines—all protected by minimal security. Senator Graham told me of visiting one former biological weapons lab where vials of anthrax were stored in an old refrigerator. The only security measure in place was a string tied around the refrigerator, apparently to dissuade any potential terrorist from opening it. In February 2004, facing reelection, Bush finally woke up

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and agreed to expand Nunn-Lugar beyond Russia. But, once again, he didn’t put his money where his mouth was. Senator Lugar estimates the cost to get rid of these very real threats at $2 billion a year. The president budgeted only $451 million in FY 2004 and, despite his newfound rhetorical devotion to the cause of cleanup, even less, $409 million, for FY 2005. So there you have George Bush’s ass-backwards program for protecting us from weapons of mass destruction: • In 2004, he’ll spend at least $100 billion in Iraq, where no weapons of mass destruction have been found. • In 2005, he proposes spending only $409 million in Russia, where there are still thousands of known and unprotected weapons of mass destruction. As Senator Graham says, “If we had spent a fraction of what we spent in Iraq on Nunn-Lugar, we’d be enormously safer today.”

Sideshow in Iraq President Bush never mentions the war in Iraq without invoking September 11. Of course not. He’s got to justify his war of choice somehow. But, as we saw in the last chapter, there is simply no connection. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein played any role in September 11. There is no record of terrorist activity inside Iraq. There is no evidence of any significant contacts between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda. To the contrary, there is ample evidence Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein did not trust each other, because one was a secular Arab despot and the other was the most extreme of Islamic fundamentalist bigots.

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But the gang of hardliners around the president—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, if not the president himself— had had designs on invading Iraq ever since the end of Desert Storm. They were looking for an opportunity to take Saddam out, and September 11 provided the perfect cover. When, immediately after the war in Afghanistan, Bush endorsed the invasion of Iraq, he called it the next step in the war on terror and claimed a Saddam–al Qaeda connection. Why? Because he knew that linking the war in Iraq to the war on terror was the only way he could justify it. In so doing, he badly misled the American people. Iraq was not the main arena of terror in the world. It was only a sideshow, at best. There were no terrorist attacks inside Iraq— until George Bush’s war was over.

Terrorists Discover Iraq Yet, unfortunately, Bush’s prophecy of Iraqi terrorism was self-fulfilling. If there was no terrorism in Iraq before the war, there was plenty as soon as the war was over. Iraq suddenly became the terrorists’ favorite new killing field, and would-be terrorists have flocked to Iraq from around the world, eager to take potshots at America’s sons and daughters. On the Senate floor, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd noted the irony: “The president has now stated that the war in Iraq is the central front on the war against terrorism. But it was our invasion of Iraq which has turned that nation into a staging ground for daily terrorist attacks against our occupation forces.” In fact, it wasn’t until after the war that there was actual evidence of an al Qaeda operative in Iraq. Files discovered by U.S. forces showed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—a Jordanian long suspected of ties to al Qaeda—had moved into Iraq and was actively directing terrorist attacks on American occupation

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forces. And that may be the ultimate folly of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Where there were no al Qaeda terrorists before, there are now. And they’re killing American troops almost daily. This is what Bush calls progress in the war on terror. THE HOME FRONT: LOTS OF TALK, NO ACTION But the war in Iraq is not the only way George Bush has fumbled the war on terror. He has also failed here at home—by misdirecting resources or simply abandoning the field. There’s a good reason we don’t feel more secure after 9/11—the domestic war on terror is a hollow promise.

Accountability for September 11 Let’s start with what obviously went wrong before 9/11— and what’s been done to correct it. There was, first of all, a huge intelligence failure. As we learned, there had been warnings, as early as 1995, of al Qaeda plans to hijack airliners and fly them into American buildings. Two of the hijackers were spotted at a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia and traced back to San Diego, then forgotten. In July 2001, FBI agents in Phoenix warned headquarters of several young Arab men taking flying lessons. In August, FBI agents arrested Zaccarias Moussaoui for expressing unusual interest in how to steer a jumbo jet, but not how to take off or land. And on August 6, President Bush was warned in his daily security briefing that al Qaeda might try to hijack airplanes and attack America. It’s pretty obvious that nobody connected the dots. The problem is: Nobody was held responsible. Not one head has rolled at the CIA or FBI because of failure to follow up on all those warnings, track down the potential terrorists and infiltrate their organizations.

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Brian Sullivan, a former security specialist for the FAA, and one of the first to warn of weaknesses in security at Boston’s Logan Airport, laments: “Without accountability, we’ll never achieve a sense of justice for the victims’ families and we’ll never change the culture of bureaucracy which prevented our government from achieving its most important mission—that of protecting its citizenry. Not a single person—no one in the FBI, CIA, DOT or FAA—has been held accountable for the most dismal failure in our history since Pearl Harbor.” George Bush, in fact, continues to express confidence in CIA Director George Tenet. Why? The CIA blew it pre-9/11, and blew it again on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Bush should have fired Tenet a long time ago—and would have, except he’s afraid that Tenet would let the cat out of the bag on how the White House “sexed up” the intelligence on Iraq provided them by the CIA. The second obvious failing before September 11 was that terrorists were able to obtain visas in the first place and, in some cases, enter and leave the country freely on fraudulent visas. Adding insult to injury, ringleader Mohammed Atta’s renewed visa was mailed to him by an incompetent INS—six months after 9/11. So what’s been done to correct this glaring loophole? Nothing. Some authority for visas has been transferred from INS to the new Department of Homeland Security; the rest remains with the State Department. Needless to say, dividing responsibility up between two departments is probably not the best way to achieve efficiency, or accuracy. And our borders remain an open door. Once in a while border agents get lucky, like when they caught the guy with a carload of explosives headed for Los Angeles in 1999. But most of the time our borders, north and south, are an easy and inviting opportunity for those seeking to enter the country illegally.

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Congressman David Obey points out that as late as one year after September 11 there were several northern border crossings that were not staffed twenty-four hours a day. At nighttime, they just placed a traffic cone in the road, advising travelers to seek out another entry point into the United States. Boy, that’ll stop those terrorists!

Department of Homeland Security It’s hard to believe that anybody takes Tom “Duct Tape” Ridge seriously after he told Americans that the best way to protect themselves from terrorist attacks was to seal the windows of their homes with plastic sheeting and duct tape. The terrorists are coming. Quick! Buy duct tape! Nor should anybody take Tom Ridge seriously when he continues to invoke a meaningless system of color-coded alerts. Are we Orange today? Or Yellow? Or Red? And what are we supposed to do about it? No matter what color we are, Tom Ridge’s answer is always the same: Don’t do anything differently. Go shopping. Just be alert. Nobody should take Tom Ridge’s Department of Homeland Security seriously, either. It’s a typical, knee-jerk, big-government response to a problem: Move the boxes around on an organizational chart. Or, in this case, worse yet: Create a whole, new, confusing box: the third-largest federal bureaucracy. Even worse, in a typical Bush move, the administration promised the moon on homeland security, but didn’t put up the money. How big a priority is homeland security for George Bush? Get this. In 2003, George Bush spent more money on tax cuts for the rich than on protecting our homeland. In FY 2003, the entire budget for the new Homeland Secu-

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rity Department was $38 billion. The cost of the Bush tax cuts that year—for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans—was $41 billion. In 2004 and 2005, George Bush plans to spend over three times more on tax cuts for the rich than on protecting our homeland. In FY 2004, the Homeland Security budget was $36.6 billion. The cost of the Bush tax cuts was $124 billion. In the president’s budget for FY 2005, he requests $40.2 billion for Homeland Security. The cost of the Bush tax cuts will be $126 billion. And here’s another indication of how big a priority protecting the homeland is for President Bush. In 2003, the war and occupation in Iraq cost $166 billion. That same year, we spent $38 billion on homeland defense. In 2003, George Bush spent over four times fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq than on protecting our homeland from terrorists. The next time President Bush brags about doing “everything he can” to provide homeland security, somebody should holler: “Put your money where your mouth is!”

First Responders Even with a mammoth new government agency, it’s not federal employees in Washington who are the first line of defense against terrorist attacks. Except, of course, for the Post Office, whose workers were all but ignored during the anthrax scare. In every case, the first ones called in any emergency are the brave men and women who serve in our city, state and county police, fire and rescue departments—like “New York’s Bravest,” and “New York’s Finest” so many of whom gave their lives on September 11.

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The president’s 2005 budget includes $3.6 billion for local police and fire agencies. That may sound like a lot of money. But that’s actually a cut of $805 million from what they received in 2004—and far, far from what is needed to do the job. Bush also cut funds for the Centers for Disease Control by 8.9 percent, the same week letters laced with ricin were sent to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Indeed, the big scandal of George Bush’s homeland security agenda is how many times he stands in front of local police and fire departments, praises their work—and then goes back to Washington and refuses to send the money he promised. In February 2004, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge admitted to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that over half the money allocated since September 11 to help local emergency aid agencies prepare for terrorist attacks had not been disbursed by his agency. In true pre-9/11 Washington style, they were just sitting on the money. In June 2003, a study by the Council on Foreign Relations found local emergency response agencies “dangerously unprepared” for major terrorist attacks—mainly because of inadequate federal funding. Most jurisdictions still don’t have the basic communication equipment that enables local agencies to talk to each other and coordinate their responses. After meeting with first responders across the country and assessing their readiness, former Republican Senator Warren Rudman concluded they would need $98.4 billion over the next five years—on top of the $27 billion budgeted by the Bush administration. “If the nation does not take immediate steps to better identify and address the urgent needs of emergency responders, the next terrorist incident could be even more devastating than 9/11,” Rudman warned.

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Homeland Pork One of the reasons there’s not more money for first responders is that so much of the Homeland Security budget goes to plain old government pork. Hidden in the 484-page legislation creating the department were dozens of special projects that have little, if anything, to do with homeland security. Outgoing Senator Phil Gramm, for example, stuck in funding for an academic homeland security research center at Texas A&M University. There were also homeland security study centers created at New Mexico State University and the University of Tennessee. Among other items funded in the homeland security legislation were these important anti-terrorist projects: • $2 million so the Smithsonian could start constructing a 108,000-square-foot building in Maryland to house its collection of fish, frogs, bugs, birds and other animals preserved in alcohol-filled containers • $5 million to subsidize farmers’ markets and roadside produce stands in thirty-one states • $2.5 million to map coral reefs in the waters around Hawaii • $10 million in aid to farmers along the Rio Grande in Texas Senator John McCain, one of the Senate’s leading critics of pork barrel spending, told reporters the obvious: “These are policy changes which have nothing to do with any national emergency.” Also tucked into the homeland security measure was a provision to limit the rights of parents of autistic children to sue pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. This, of course, had nothing to do with homeland security, but everything to do with the fact

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that the biggest drug companies gave Republicans $16.3 million in campaign contributions in 2002. Another special interest payback. The night after signing the homeland security legislation, President Bush flew to Des Moines, Iowa, to speak at the Fourteenth Annual World Pork Expo! Don’t tell me that was just a coincidence.

What Homeland Security? You would think the Department of Homeland Security was filled with people working on—well, here’s a wild guess— homeland security! Right? Wrong! Many of the functions assigned to the new bureaucracy, from 160 existing departments or agencies, have nothing to do with security at all. So what are all those Homeland Security guys doing, anyway? Here are some responsibilities transferred from other agencies. From the Department of Agriculture: • Regulating the exhibition of animals in zoos and circuses • Eradicating the boll weevil, the fruit fly and the plum pox virus • Maintaining the missing pets network (Now we know what he’s there for. Fido is missing. Orange Alert! Get out the duct tape! Call Tom Ridge!) There’s more. From the Coast Guard: • Breaking up ice on rivers and lakes to allow commercial ship traffic • Making sure pleasure boaters are wearing their life vests

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• Protecting fish and marine mammals (Normally, I’m all for that. But protecting elephant seals is not saving us from al Qaeda.) From the Customs Agency: • Enforcing laws against child pornography (Again, important, but not terrorist-related) • Recovering stolen pieces of art and antiquities From the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): • Administering the national flood insurance program • Providing emergency food and shelter for hurricane victims • Adopting earthquake-safe building codes Now, all of those functions are worthwhile. But they have nothing to do with homeland security. And, of course, while so-called “security” workers are hunting down the boll weevil or trying to track down that oriental carpet stolen from you at Dulles Airport, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing—which is protecting us from terrorists. In fact, outside of harassing passengers at airports, the Department of Homeland Security is doing almost nothing to protect us. And, even there, it’s doing a half-ass job.

Please Take Off All Your Clothes One place you can’t miss Tom Ridge’s security cops is at any airport. You may not get to the terminal without having to stop and open the trunk of your car. You certainly can’t get to the

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gate without running the gauntlet of the Transportation Security Agency, or TSA. Okay, you don’t have to take off all your clothes. But almost. Take off your coat. Take off your jacket. Take off your belt. Take off your shoes. Empty your pockets. Show your photo ID—twice. Show your boarding pass—twice. It sure takes the fun out of flying. It sure is a pain in the ass. But, what the hell, if it makes flying safer, I’m all for it. Does it? In researching this book, I put that question to one of the nation’s most respected experts on airline security. I asked David Forbes, co-chair of BoydForbes, Inc., an aviation security consulting company: Have all the new procedures of TSA made it safer to fly? His one-word answer: “No.” Yes, cockpit doors have been reinforced. Yes, there are armed marshals on some flights. And, yes, if you fly into or out of Washington’s National Airport, you still can’t get up to pee within thirty minutes of takeoff or landing. (One desperate congressman was arrested for peeing in a plastic cup.) But that’s not good enough. As Forbes notes, there’s a phony premise underlying all the increased security at airports: the belief that, the next time terrorists strike the United States, they will do so the same way they did the last time. Fat chance. They aren’t that stupid, as we should have learned on September 11. But the biggest problem, according to Forbes, is that “while they’re doing a good job of locking the front door, they’re leaving the back door wide open.” And he’s right. Sure, you can’t get on a plane anymore with a nail file in your pocket. Grandma can’t board without getting out of her wheelchair and being frisked. And because one idiot in France put explosives in his shoe, millions of Americans every day have to take their shoes off to walk through the metal detectors.

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Meanwhile, there is still almost no screening of checked luggage or freight in the belly of the plane. Why not? As Congressman Ed Markey points out, this is not rocket science. The Israeli airline El Al has been screening checked luggage for decades. They have also developed special “bomb-proof” containers and reinforced the exterior walls of the plane to protect against any device that might escape detection at screening and explode in the hold. The only reason we still don’t do the same in the United States is that airlines and cargo companies don’t want to bear the extra cost or inconvenience. Bottom line: Until every piece of checked luggage on every flight is screened, airport security is a joke. Another big weakness: There is also little increased security around the perimeters of most airports. Next time you fly take a look at the parking lots around airports, the access roads, fuel farms, maintenance hangers, nearby parks and open space. They are all locations from which a terrorist could shoot a shoulder-fired missile and bring down a wide-body aircraft. Yet, even though the technology exists to protect commercial aircraft from Stingerlike missiles, the TSA is doing nothing about it. In 2003, the TSA did introduce a new requirement that all foreign travelers entering the United States be fingerprinted and photographed in order to check for possible terrorists. Which raises the obvious question: If the terrorist is already on board the plane heading for the United States, aren’t we planning on getting his fingerprints—one flight too late? Still feeling safer? But if the TSA is doing too little to increase airline security, it’s doing absolutely nothing to protect other means of transportation.

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Throw Momma from the Train Flying, after all, is only one way to get from here to there. It’s only one choice from an entire menu of transportation options available to us, the friendly travelers—or to them, the unfriendly terrorists. Take Amtrak lately? I do, often, from Washington to New York. It’s great, it’s convenient, it’s affordable—and it’s entirely unprotected. Forty-thousand railroad stations in America, with no guards, no bag checks, no metal detectors. Hell, I think you could carry a bazooka on board a train, stuff it in the overhead compartment, and no one would notice. The horrendous terrorist attack on four trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 190 people, reminded us how vulnerable our own rail system is. And the same is true of every subway and municipal bus system in the country. Take a long drive lately? Hundreds of thousands of miles of interstate highways. Ever wonder what’s inside all those vans or eighteen-wheelers flying by you? Nobody knows. Certainly not the Department of Homeland Security. But Timothy McVeigh can’t be the only terrorist ever to think of a Ryder truck as a delivery vehicle for evil. If you don’t take the plane, train or car, you can always take the boat. Ninety-five thousand miles of coastline. Over threehundred ports, receiving over fifty-thousand foreign ships a year, 70 million cargo containers entering New York harbor alone. Containing what? Don’t ask Tom Ridge. Still today, only 2 percent of all containers entering the United States are x-rayed for possible explosives or other dangerous materials. As was proven, to the great embarrassment of Homeland Security, when ABC’s investigative reporter Brian Ross brought a shipment of active nuclear material halfway around the world and into the United States—twice!—without getting caught.

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In January 2002, the Customs Agency launched the Container Security Initiative, a plan to get the twenty biggest foreign ports to screen all containers before they are shipped to the United States. It’s a program President Bush took credit for while visiting New Jersey on June 24, 2002: “The Customs Service is working with overseas ports and shippers to improve its knowledge of container shipments, assessing risk so that we have a better feel of who we ought to look at, what we ought to worry about.” But, as is often the case with his big public initiatives, he didn’t back it up with any money. His 2003 budget contained nothing for port security grants and no money for the Container Security Initiative. In August 2003, he even vetoed the $39 million Congress had voted for the Container Security Initiative. And, once again, his 2004 budget contained zero funds for port security or the overseas container security program. Funds for container inspection were finally included in the budget for 2005, but the program is already three years behind—and tens of thousands of containers continue to flow unchecked into American ports every day.

Big Fat Targets Our ports aren’t the only areas where we’re vulnerable— and where no protective action has been taken by the Bush administration. Consider also . . .

Nuclear Power Plants We know from documents found among the papers of al Qaeda operatives—and cited by President Bush himself—that terrorists have also set their sights on America’s nuclear power plants. Yet there have been virtually no extra security measures taken to protect them—and us—even after September 11.

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On March 25, 2002, Congressman Ed Markey released a chilling report, entitled “A Hard Look at the Soft Spots in Our Civilian Nuclear Reactor Security.” It examined security measures ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at nuclear installations around the country. Among its chilling findings: • The NRC does not know how many foreign nationals are employed at nuclear reactors. • The NRC does not know what its licensees spend on security or how many security guards are employed at each reactor. • Twenty-one nuclear reactors are located within five miles of an airport. • All but 4 of 103 U.S. nuclear reactors were designed without regard to the potential for impact from even a small aircraft. • The NRC has rejected placing antiaircraft capabilities at nuclear facilities, even though other countries have done so. • Significant quantities of spent nuclear fuel exist at reactors all across the U.S. and are stored in buildings that are not hardened structures. Feeling any safer?

Oil Refineries and Chemical Plants If there’s little extra security at the nation’s nuclear power plants, there’s even less at refineries and chemical plants— despite the danger they pose to the population in case of accident or terrorist attack. Take the Valero Energy Corporation’s refinery, located in New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia International Airport. According to the EPA, it is one of 123 chemical plants in the country containing sufficient amounts of

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toxic materials that, if released into the atmosphere, would create deadly vapor clouds endangering over 1 million people. Yet, as with George Bush’s policies involving oil and energy, security at refineries and chemical installations has been left entirely up to private industry. There is no federal program. There are no federal security standards that must be met. It’s a huge, gaping hole in security. And it makes a mockery of the whole myth of a nationwide umbrella of protection. Adds New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine: “If we can’t deal with something as simple and straightforward a risk to the population as these chemical plants and refineries, I think we’re not taking homeland security seriously.”

Have a Nice Weekend But at least you have to have some kind of identification to enter a refinery or chemical factory. Not so for places where most people hang out on weekends. We don’t want to become a police state. We don’t want to see armed guards everywhere. But, you gotta admit, despite all of George Bush’s tough talk about homeland security, in public areas we are every bit as vulnerable to terrorism today as we were before September 11. For whatever reason, suicide bombers have not yet struck on U.S. soil. God forbid they ever do. There are too many places of opportunity: shopping malls, sports stadiums, churches, restaurants, office buildings, busy intersections and the nation’s electric grid—all with no added protection. It’s only a matter of time. As Congresswoman Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, sadly concludes: “Al Qaeda remains as dangerous as it was before September 11.” Meanwhile, without taking the steps necessary to protect us, President Bush continues to raise the threat of terrorism as

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justification for his entire foreign and domestic agenda. For him, September 11 is an excuse for everything from denying due process to enacting mammoth tax cuts. He exploits 9/11 for his own personal political agenda, while leaving America vulnerable to terrorist attack. He’s trying to get reelected by scaring people to death. NO ULTIMATE MILITARY SOLUTION In the end, the greatest weakness of President Bush’s socalled war on terror is neither the misdirection of the war in Iraq nor the inadequate security measures taken by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s his failure to recognize that terrorism can’t be stopped by military might alone. Of course, that is too complicated for George Bush to understand. He has the worldview of a Wild West sheriff. He even talks like one. Of al Qaeda, he warned: “They can run, but they can’t hide.” Of Osama bin Laden, he ordered: “Bring him back, dead or alive.” Of possible terrorist attacks on American soldiers, he stupidly boasted: “Bring ’em on.” George Bush just doesn’t get it. He thinks terrorism can be wiped out with guns and bombs. He’s wrong. Look at the Middle East. No country in the region has greater military might than Israel. No world leader has unleashed more tanks, planes, helicopters, gunships, missiles, bombs or troops against terrorists than Ariel Sharon. Yet terrorists still strike Israeli citizens. And every retaliatory strike by Israel inspires more young Palestinians to become suicide bombers. It’s not that force has no place in the war on terror. It is an essential and legitimate form of self-defense and retaliation. The invasion of Afghanistan was just and necessary. So is the roundup and arrest of known al Qaeda operatives here and around the world. It’s just that military might alone won’t

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work. The war on terror has to be waged on many fronts. And the most important is not military. It’s ideological. The real evil is not terrorism. Terrorism is but a method. The real evil is Islamic fundamentalism and its believers, who use terror to achieve or advance their ends. Senator Bob Graham uses the analogy of weed-killer. “In getting weeds out of your garden,” he notes, “it’s not enough to just cut down and kill the weeds. You also have to deal with the seeds. Or else the weeds just come back.” In order to be successful in reducing the level of terrorism directed against America, we must also deal with the causes of religious zealotry, the seeds of terrorism. And that requires a reexamination of some policies that generate hatred of the United States. Those policies include: America’s unflinching, wholehearted support for Saudi Arabia, one of the most corrupt and least democratic regimes in the Middle East, and the one from which fifteen out of nineteen of the September 11 terrorists hailed; a refusal to engage in the peace process and the abandonment of our role as honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and foreign aid that builds Arab military machines, but does nothing to improve educational, economic or democratic opportunities for over a billion Arab people who live in poverty and political repression. If only he were a student of history, George Bush could learn a lot from President Harry Truman and General George Marshall. After World War II, they recognized that the best way to frustrate the spread of godless communism was not through military might alone—but through winning the hearts and minds of people through the economic rebuilding of Europe, as proof of what America was really all about. Again, there is zero evidence that George Bush is even capable of understanding this—as Delaware’s Senator Joe Biden learned the hard way. Biden told The New Yorker’s George Packer that

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in December 2001, shortly after the fall of the Taliban, he was asked by President Bush to draft a proposal for winning over young Muslims worldwide. Biden, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went to Afghanistan a month later and came back with a specific plan. The roots of terrorism, Biden explained to Packer, lie in a worldwide struggle “between the values of liberal democracy and the destructive ideologies that fester with dictatorship, misery, and humiliation.” In that struggle, America needed “to expand the conditions for democracy in the most concrete ways, with serious commitments of energy and resources, or risk greater instability.” So Biden wrote a very down-to-earth proposal for President Bush: to build, staff and supply a thousand schools in Afghanistan at a cost of $20,000 each. The schools would employ teachers, many of them women, and would teach a modern curriculum, not the religious zealotry of the madrassas. “It was something concrete we could show the Afghans we’re doing,” Biden told Packer. “It was something other than the butt of a gun.” But the idea went nowhere. By that time, Bush was already planning his war in Iraq—another military campaign. He no longer had time for “hearts and minds.” Instead, he went in the opposite direction, initially referring to the war on terror as a “crusade.” The problem with treating the war on terror as a mere military struggle, of course, is—that means we’ll never win it. Because we’re fighting the wrong war. On this point, President Bush and his advisors are clueless, according to Ivo Daalder, terrorism expert with the Brookings Institution, and author of America Unbound. In an interview for this book on February 18, 2004, he told me: “They don’t get it, because they don’t believe this is an ideology,” says Daalder. “They believe that this is a state-based threat . . . that

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if you get rid of evil people, who are in finite supply, you will have resolved the problem.” And, of course, that’s not the case. Because as long as our policies remain unexamined and unchanged, we will just inspire more and more America-hating young terrorists. The only long-term solution, Daalder argues, echoing Biden, is to give them something to live for: “to provide people in the Islamic world with an alternative that gives them hope in a period where they now have only despair.” The only short-term solution is to replace Sheriff Bush with someone who has sense enough to get the bigger picture. For promising to protect us from terrorism but not doing so . . . For making us less safe from terrorism, not more . . . For his reckless, imperialist foreign policy that generates more anti-Americanism around the world . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # THREE

Jobs: He Put 3 Million Americans Out of Work “I’m a war president.” George W. Bush Meet the Press February 8, 2004

He got that right. George W. Bush waged war in Afghanistan and he waged war in Iraq. And he brags a lot about those two wars—even if, as we have seen, the second one is hardly something to be bragging about. But there’s a third war George Bush never talks about: a war that has meant economic disaster for millions of Americans. I’m talking about the all-out war George Bush has waged on America’s working families. Since day one in the Oval Office, Bush has led a systematic, calculated, broad-scale, relentless campaign to deny hardworking Americans their benefits, their rights, their wages and their jobs. In fact, if you had to choose one single domestic issue on which the 2004 election should be decided, it is this one: JOBS. And if you had to choose one issue, more than any other, for which George Bush should be denied a second term, it is this one: JOBS. He pretends to care about working Americans. He insists

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the economy is improving. He says everything’s rosy and jobs are actually on the rise. When the exact opposite is true.

Jobs Projected, Jobs Lost If you believe President Bush, there are more jobs out there today than workers available to fill them. And even more new jobs on the way. How many new jobs are going to be created in 2004? In early February, speaking in Springfield, Missouri, he predicted 2.6 million—only to back off that prediction just one week later. But that’s the Bush pattern: one phony job prediction after another. He hasn’t got one right yet. In the spring of 2003, Bush predicted that 1,836,000 jobs would be created between June and December. Instead, only 221,000 jobs were produced—about 12 percent of what Bush projected. He was off target by 1,615,000 jobs. Last summer, Bush predicted that 5.5 million jobs would be created between July 2003 and December 2004. According to his plan, that would mean 2,142,000 jobs by February 1. Instead, there were only 296,000 new jobs—about 14 percent of what Bush predicted. He wasn’t even close. He was 1,846,000 jobs short of the mark. Last fall, Bush predicted we would end the year with a bang: 150,000 jobs created in December. Actually, only 1,000 new jobs were created. He was off by 149,000. He delivered less than 1 percent of what he had promised. Then he came back with his Alice-in-Wonderland prediction of 2.6 million jobs for 2004. Meeting that goal would require an average increase of 460,000 jobs a month from February through December 2004. Not likely, when January only produced 112,000 jobs and February only 21,000. March bounced back with 308,000 new jobs.

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No wonder George Bush backed off his 2.6 million job prediction. But it’s also no secret why he continues to crow about new jobs “just around the corner.” He’s trying to change the subject. He doesn’t want anybody to focus on how many old jobs have actually been lost since he took office. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.8 million manufacturing jobs were lost since January 2001. Compare that to Bill Clinton’s record of job gains: • Eight years of Bill Clinton: 22 million new jobs created. • Three years of George Bush: 2.8 million jobs lost. Those jobs were lost across the country. No region was spared the negative fallout from Bush’s economic follies. In fact, between June and December 2003, only three states— Alaska, Wyoming and Kansas—met the Bush projection for job creation. Forty-seven out of fifty states lost jobs. Let’s face it. There is no way the Bush administration will realize 2.6 million new jobs in 2004, as he predicts. But even if it does—do the math—George Bush will still fall 200,000 short of making up the 2.8 million jobs lost since he took office. So there’s no way he can escape what awaits him: • George Bush will become the first president since Herbert Hoover to end his first term with fewer Americans employed than when he took office. That is not the kind of record that begs for a second term.

Blame It on Clinton Like everything else, George Bush tries to blame the loss of jobs and the stagnant economy on Bill Clinton. He inherited a

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“weak economy,” he claims. And, he adds, he took office in the “middle” of a recession that began in November 2000. Like everything else George Bush says, you can’t believe it. Fact: George Bush did not inherit a weak economy. He inherited the strongest economy this country has ever known— eight years of steady economic growth under Bill Clinton—and the longest period of economic expansion in history. As he did with the Clinton budget surplus, Bush turned it upside down. Fact: George Bush did not inherit a recession. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which keeps track of such things, made it official: The recession started in March 2001. George Bush took office in January 2001. From the get-go, this was a Bush recession. He had already spooked Wall Street after only two months in office. I have nothing against Barbara Bush. She strikes me as a nice lady. I like her spunk. But didn’t she ever teach her kids to stand up and take responsibility for their own actions? Apparently not.

War on Working Class Americans Why were so many jobs lost under George Bush? It didn’t just happen. He made it happen, through a series of direct attacks on working Americans. We’ll go into detail about each one of these anti-worker initiatives. But, first, here’s the list—a partial list—of the ways George Bush has shown his utter disregard and contempt for working Americans. Those who, unlike him, couldn’t afford to goof off until they were forty years old, because they had to go out and work for a living—and still do.

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• He tried to eliminate overtime pay for 8 million workers. • He refused to extend unemployment benefits by six months. • He eliminated 140,000 highway construction jobs. • He opposed federal funds for hiring 75,000 new firefighters. • He cut funds for job training and workplace safety. • He canceled collective bargaining rights for 170,000 Homeland Security personnel. • He forced the EPA to lie about air quality at Ground Zero, endangering the health of emergency and construction workers. • He appointed anti-labor, big business cronies to every labor-related post in his administration. • He rescinded tough ergonomic rules protecting workers from repetitive motion injuries. • He tried to destroy unions for federal workers through privatization. • He signed new trade deals in Singapore and Chile, sending still more jobs overseas. • He rolled back tariffs on imported steel, denying protection to American steel workers. • He banned United and Northwest mechanics from going on strike. • He intervened to break up a strike by West Coast dockworkers. • He refused to protect workers’ pension plans from corporate crooks. • His top economic advisor praised the practice of exporting jobs to cheap labor markets around the world. • He stiffed workers by directing his tax cuts to those making over $200,000 a year.

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• He supported “paycheck protection”—more aptly called “paycheck deception”—to get labor unions out of politics and off the backs of Republicans. So don’t ask why working men and women feel so unwelcome in George Bush’s America. They are unwelcome. No other group of Americans has been victims of such a direct siege by Bush and Cheney. Now let’s review each of Bush’s attacks on American workers, as documented by the AFL-CIO on its outstanding website, aflcio.org.

Overtime Protection Here’s the dilemma: As we’ve just seen, with the economy so uncertain, businesses are hesitant to hire new employees. So, instead, they ask existing workers to work longer hours. Which means they have to pay them overtime. Here’s George Bush’s answer: Redefine the legal definition of “overtime” to let businesses off the hook—and screw 8 million healthcare, aerospace, defense, high tech and other workers out of the extra pay they deserve. It’s outrageous treatment, especially coming from a guy who never worked overtime in his life and barely puts in forty hours a week at the Oval Office. New overtime rules proposed by the Bush administration in March 2003 enable employers to get out of overtime by reclassifying certain categories of workers as “managers” or “administrative” staff—and thus exempt from the time-and-a-half overtime pay required by the Fair Labor Standards Act for every hour worked above forty hours a week. The president also vowed to veto the 2004 Labor Appropriations Act if it contained language rolling back his new overtime rules. After howls of criticism from Democrats and Republicans in

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Congress, the administration softened the rules somewhat—by guaranteeing overtime pay to 1.3 million low-wage employees previously ineligible for it. But here’s the kicker. At the same time, the Labor Department issued guidelines for employers, called “payroll adjustment,” on how to get around the new regulations. By shifting low-income employees now eligible for overtime to lower hourly wages and then adding on overtime pay, employers can end up paying, in combined pay plus overtime, no more than what the employee would have earned in the first place. Pretty tricky, huh? For blue-collar workers, that can be significant. The Communications Workers of America estimates that overtime pay can make up one-half the weekly income of those who receive it. “No overtime” means an average pay cut of $161 per week, which adds up to thousands of dollars a year. George Bush is paying for his tax cuts on the backs of lowincome workers.

Unemployment Benefits Americans experienced a double whammy in 2001: September 11 and the Bush recession. We’re still trying to recover from both. The year 2004 began with 10 million Americans out of work. While waiting for the economy to recover and new jobs to appear—all those new jobs that George Bush promises are “right around the corner”—Democrats in Congress proposed a temporary relief measure: extending emergency federal unemployment benefits for long-term laid-off workers by six months—and adding thirteen weeks of benefits for jobless workers in all fifty states. You might think that’s exactly the kind of humanitarian re-

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lief a compassionate conservative would go for. You’d be wrong. George Bush’s response: No way, Charlie. Too bad you’re out of a job—but you’re on your own, pal. Unemployment benefits have run out for millions of working men and women, but Bush refuses to extend them.

Highway Construction It worked in the Great Depression. It’s worked in every other recession. Public work projects are the best way to create new jobs, put people back to work—and build a lot of important public improvements. Not this time around. George Bush took the opposite approach. Instead of setting the example by encouraging federal agencies to hire the unemployed to rebuild America’s roadways, bridges, airports and infrastructure, he acted to put more people out of a job. President Bush proposed cuts of 29 percent in already scheduled highway construction and maintenance repair. That not only made the interstates less safe to drive, it cost the jobs of 140,000 highway construction workers in 2002—and an estimated 380,000 jobs over the next decade.

New Firefighters In addition to police officers, who were the heroes of September 11? The firefighters! And who were the first group of workers George Bush dumped on after September 11? The firefighters! One year after 343 New York City firefighters were killed at the World Trade Center, the International Association of

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Firefighters and the International Association of Fire Chiefs sought a federal grant of $7.6 billion to hire 75,000 new firefighters in cities across the country over the next ten years. President Bush turned them down. Instead, he proposed spending $3.5 billion on training and equipment for existing firefighters, police and emergency responders. But, as Firefighters president Harold Schaitberger noted, “All the right equipment in the world and all the training isn’t really of much value if you don’t have adequate numbers of personnel to perform their mission.” But then, as we saw in the last chapter, Bush cut funds for all first responders. Not for nothing were firefighters among John Kerry’s earliest supporters. The way George Bush screwed them, what do you expect?

Job Training Speaking of job training, what President Bush gives with one hand, he takes away with the other. Just four months after taking over, in April 2001, the Bush administration revoked previously approved federal grants for safety and health training programs. That left immigrant workers and workers in high-risk jobs, like construction, with less on-the-job protection. Two months later, in June 2001, to help pay for the first round of Bush tax cuts, the administration cut $259 million from the dislocated workers program and another $100 million in adult job training. Both programs suffered more cuts in 2002. The onslaught continued. In his 2003 budget, President Bush proposed cutting enforcement of workplace safety and health standards and safety training for workers. He also eliminated eighty-three inspectors from the Occupational Safety

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and Health Administration, or OSHA. And even more cuts in worker training and workplace health and safety were made in 2004 and in next year’s proposed budget. His record speaks for itself. Training workers for new jobs? Protecting the health and safety of America’s workforce? They’re simply not high priorities for George W. Bush.

Collective Bargaining/Homeland Security The last thing George Bush wanted was for workers in the new Department of Homeland Security to take any lessons from flight attendants or dockworkers. He made sure they’d never go out on strike—by denying them the right of collective bargaining from day one. In July 2002—after spending months rejecting calls by Senators Joe Lieberman and Max Cleland, Congresswoman Jane Harman and others for a new, cabinet-level homeland security agency—President Bush suddenly reversed course and proposed his own department. With one big difference: All 170,000 workers in George Bush’s agency would be stripped of their civil service and collective bargaining rights. Denying workers their rights was necessary, said the president, for reasons of national security. Bullshit. All of those workers would be doing the same jobs they had done for years in other agencies, with full worker protection. Nineteen terrorists weren’t able to crash into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because employees in the pesticide division of the Department of Agriculture had civil service protection. George Bush was just exploiting the tragedy of September 11 to try to break the unions. Which he did again in January 2003, when federal employees took over the job of airport security screening at all airports. You know, the guys who make you take off your shoes before you walk through the metal detector.

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Members of the new Transportation Security Agency, or TSA, are doing a good job. But they have no workers’ rights. No civil service protection. No right to bargain for a better deal, or go on strike. Giving them the same rights other workers enjoy, says the Bush administration, would not be “compatible with the nation’s war against terrorism.” There you have it: George Bush’s philosophy about organized labor. In his world, belonging to a labor union is tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Dangerous Air at Ground Zero When I first heard Senator Hillary Clinton complaining about this, I couldn’t believe it. Hillary must be wrong. Not even George Bush could be so coldhearted as to put construction workers at Ground Zero at risk. But, I soon discovered, Senator Clinton was correct. From the beginning, there was a lot of concern about toxic fumes from the burning debris at Ground Zero. But on September 18, 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency put everyone at ease by declaring that the air around the site was “safe to breathe.” With that reassurance, thousands of rescue and construction workers toiled for months at the cleanup site without protection, and residents and workers later returned to the area believing it was safe to do so. Except it wasn’t. In August 2003, the EPA’s own inspector general issued a shocking report. First of all, he charged, the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analysis to make such a blanket statement.” Second, the EPA was required to clear all statements about air quality at Ground Zero with the National Security Council. And, most devastating of all, he reported, the EPA was pressured by the White House to omit cautions about hazards from

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such air pollutants as lead, cadmium, asbestos and smoke from fires, some of which continued to burn for four months. Not even the workers at Ground Zero got any respect from George Bush.

Anti-Labor Appointments In life, you are what you eat. In government, you are whom you appoint to key positions. Looking at his appointments, there’s no doubt George Bush is anti-labor. After failing to get his first choice for labor secretary, the conservative commentator Linda Chavez, Bush settled on the relatively harmless Elaine Chou, the wife of Republican Senator Mitch McConnell (himself a sworn enemy of campaign finance reform). Then he made sure Chou stayed in line by naming as solicitor of the Labor Department Eugene Scalia, a fierce opponent of organized labor and the son of one of the five Supreme Court justices who crowned Bush president. Immediately prior to his nomination, Scalia had led the big business charge to overturn rules protecting workers from ergonomics injuries. In fact, Scalia was so openly anti-labor he couldn’t even get confirmed in a Republican-controlled Senate. Bush had to give him a recess appointment. Most dangerous to American workers, however, was the appointment of John Ashcroft as attorney general. As senator from Missouri, Ashcroft consistently voted against worker safety and health, Social Security and Medicare, the patients’ bill of rights, raising the minimum wage, prevailing wage guarantees, protection of overtime and the forty-hour workweek. This is the man George Bush chose to enforce the nation’s labor laws. But that was just the beginning. Throughout his administration, whenever a special board or commission was created to

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study issues affecting the workforce, George Bush stacked it with pro-business, anti-labor voices. In May 2001, for example, he named a special commission to study whether or not privatization of Social Security was a good idea. All fourteen members said ahead of time they supported privatization. Not one representative of organized labor was included. In December 2002, he named a nine-member panel to study the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service and a thirty-two-member Advisory Commission on U.S. Trade Policy. There was not one representative of labor, environmental or consumer groups named to either. Is there any doubt at this point? George Bush doesn’t care what working men and women think. They have no voice in the Bush administration.

No Protection for Workplace Injuries The workplace can be a dangerous place, and not just for Hollywood stuntmen or deep sea divers. Most workplace injuries, in fact, don’t involve broken bones or loss of limbs. Two million workers a year suffer so-called soft tissue or musculoskeletal injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, caused by repetitive motion, heavy lifting or poorly designed work sites. Ask any supermarket clerk, high tech worker, assembly line worker or software technician. Unless they see blood on the floor, however, big business doesn’t want to pay. Led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and then-private attorney Eugene Scalia, big corporations convinced Congress to repeal stringent OSHA rules on ergonomic injuries. It was the first time that Congress had ever interfered with OSHA’s legal responsibility to protect workers. Of course, Bush signed the legislation. One month later, he sided with business again, instructing

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the Justice Department—headed by labor enemy John Ashcroft— to file an amicus brief on behalf of Toyota Motors and against an assembly line worker who had complained of repetitive motion injuries. In June 2001, Labor Secretary Elaine Chou announced a new set of watered-down ergonomic rules to replace the former tough OSHA requirements. But these new rules—in keeping with Bush’s refusal to demand any responsibility from corporate America—were purely voluntary. And Chou admitted there were no plans to enforce them, anyway. Chou even absolved companies from the requirement to report musculoskeletal injuries. Her theory: If nobody reports them, they must not exist. Which, of course, was just the opposite of the Bush administration theory on weapons of mass destruction: If nobody reports them, they must exist.

Busting the Unions George Bush is not stupid. Even he understood that the best way not to have to deal with unions is simply to get rid of them. Which he tried to do the moment the Supreme Court handed him his job. As previously noted, he denied collective bargaining rights to all 170,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security. He also forbade new federal airport screeners from forming a union. But the union-busting Texas cowboy was just getting started. By executive order, George Bush revoked union representation for workers in five divisions of the Justice Department. He did so, he said, to prevent people working in intelligence or law enforcement from going on strike, even though existing federal law already prohibited them from striking. In another executive order, Bush opened the door to privatization of all air traffic controllers. He proposed eliminating civil

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service protections for all civilian employees of the Pentagon. And he pulled the plug on union representation for thirteen hundred employees of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. But George Bush still wasn’t satisfied. There were a few unions left! He also began the process of turning the U.S. Postal Service over to the private sector, thereby getting rid of 750,000 union employees. And he announced new rules to facilitate privatization of 850,000 additional federal jobs—all now held by union members. It was all part of George Bush’s determination to bust the unions, gut civil service protection and hand over jobs and lucrative contracts to politically well-connected corporate cronies. As he does for everything else, President Bush invoked September 11 as justification for his extreme anti-union initiatives. But, as usual, the war on terror had nothing to do with it. Bobby Harnage, president of the federal employees union, says Bush has it ass-backwards: “The fight against terrorism, in which federal employees have always been on the front lines of the homeland, is about preserving our freedoms—including the right to organize—not destroying them.”

Exporting More Jobs . . . Even before George Bush took office, millions of American jobs had been lost because of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). As president, he accelerated the trend. One of his first acts as president was, in effect, to expand NAFTA by allowing Mexican trucks and buses to enter the United States and do business across the country. Warnings by

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the Teamsters Union of substandard truck, bus and driver safety regulations in Mexico were simply ignored. In April 2001, Bush signed an agreement with thirty-three countries of North and South America and the Caribbean to create a “Free Trade Area of the Americas.” The new trade deal is expected to lure so many jobs overseas it’s already been dubbed “NAFTA on steroids.” And in March 2003, he secretly negotiated new “fast track” trade deals with Chile and Singapore—deals Congress has no authority to amend in order to protect workers or the environment.

Notice the double standard: As we will discover in reason number 7, George Bush has no truck with treaties or global organizations. In fact, he’s pulled the United States out of almost every one of them. The one exception: trade. He’ll sign any international agreement that exports more American jobs.

Now you know why George Bush can’t find those new jobs he’s always talking about. He sent them all overseas—and then said it was a good idea.

. . . And Bragging About It! One thing I’ll give them credit for: The Bush White House has one of the best spin machines I’ve ever seen. They know how to paint tax cuts for the rich as God’s gift to the middle class. And they can find a hundred ways to claim that weapons of mass destruction are really there, when there aren’t any. But

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on one embarrassing occasion the Bush spinmeisters fell down on the job. They let the cat out of the bag: George Bush doesn’t really care about American jobs. It wasn’t Bush himself who told the truth. It was Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and the president’s chief economic advisor. While the president was running around the country assuring audiences he would create 2.6 million new jobs in 2004 and stop the flow of American jobs overseas, Mankiw revealed what the administration really thought about losing jobs to foreign competitors: They loved it. It was good for America. “Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade,” Mankiw told a Washington trade audience upon release of the Council’s 2004 report. “I think outsourcing is a growing phenomenon, but it’s something that we should realize is probably a plus for the economy in the long run.” Mankiw had no sooner left the podium, than Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert called the president and reportedly said: “What, are you crazy?” Chagrined that his top economic aide had punctured his phony, job-friendly, public profile, President Bush tried to back away from Mankiw’s remarks. But it was too late. He had already endorsed the Council’s report and sent it to Congress— with his signature. So now we know George Bush’s official policy on outsourcing. Send the jobs to China, Singapore, India or Nicaragua. He doesn’t give a damn.

Rolling Back Steel Tariffs Even a blind pig can sometimes find a truffle. Even a blindto-labor George Bush can sometime find a good thing to do for workers. George Bush did once—then quickly reversed himself.

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Since 1998, forty-two American steel companies had gone bankrupt, putting fifty thousand steelworkers out of work. And the few remaining companies couldn’t compete with what’s called “steel dumping”—cheap, subsidized imports from Europe, Asia and South America. So, in March 2002, to protect America’s steel industry and give firms a chance to get back on their feet, President Bush imposed tariffs on imported steel for three years. It looked like a bold move for a Republican president—even though it was done only to garner electoral votes in places like West Virginia and Pennsylvania—but he soon got cold feet. In December 2003, only twenty months into the tariffs, Bush did a complete U-turn. He bowed to pressure from the European Union and dropped the tariff protection. It was, said Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, “clear evidence of capitulating to European blackmail and a sorry betrayal of American steelworkers and steel communities.”

Airline Employees—No Right to Strike Only two months into his administration, President Bush let workers know whose side he was on. In March 2001, airline mechanics at Northwest Airlines who had been working without a contract for four and a half years voted to go out on strike. But President Bush stopped them at the gate. He became only the second president in thirty-five years to tell workers they could not exercise their right to strike. Just three months later, he did it again. Bush used his presidential authority to prohibit twenty-three thousand American Airlines flight attendants from going on strike and exercising their collective bargaining rights. By now it had become a bad habit. When fifteen thousand mechanics at United Airlines voted to go on strike in December

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2001—after two frustrating years of trying to reach agreement with management—Bush intervened again, on the side of management, of course, and against the workers.

Dockworkers For George Bush, it doesn’t matter whether workers are on land, in the air or on the sea. He’s against them all. He stopped airline workers from going on strike. He stopped dockworkers, too. In October 2002, he invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to intervene in a lockout of West Coast ports. Ten thousand five hundred dockworkers were ordered to go back to work, without a contract. It was the first time Taft-Hartley had been used since 1978. Earlier, Bush had said he would call out federal troops if necessary to prevent dockworkers from going on strike. As in the Gilded Age, workers don’t have much of a chance at collective bargaining when the White House and the U.S. Army line up on the side of management.

Kiss Your Pension Plan Good-bye Enron. The name will forever stand for shady business deals, phony bookkeeping and corporate crooks, including Bush’s buddy, “Kenny Boy” himself. Thousands of trusting Enron employees believed their bosses and lost every dime in their pension plans. They kept all their retirement funds wrapped up in the company stock. Indeed, in many cases, they had no choice. And they got suckered. But Enron wasn’t alone. Enron was just the first company to sink while unscrupulous executives at many others were taking their money and running, leaving thousands of employees

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empty-handed. In the wake of Enron came Tyco, Global Crossing, Waste Management, Adelphia and others. Those poor workers lost everything. They will never get their money back. But their plight made obvious the need for pension reform to protect other employees from suffering the same fate. And Democrats in the Senate, led by Ted Kennedy and the late, great Paul Wellstone stepped up to the plate. The Democratic plan required companies to offer investment advice to employee/shareholders. Companies were also required to notify employees when executives were dumping their stock. Employees were not only permitted to diversify, they were warned when investments in their own company stock amounted to more than 20 percent of their portfolio. But that was too much worker protection for George Bush. He put forth his own plan, which let companies force workers to remain 100 percent invested in company stock for long periods of time, even as long as they worked for the company. The president’s proposal also denied workers any voice in how their pension plan was run. The Enron scandal shook the world. But it couldn’t shake George Bush from his loyalty to corporate robber barons and his disregard for working men and women.

Tax Cuts Aimed at the Wealthy Working Americans are hurting. They need help. But they didn’t get any from George Bush. As we will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, he had the opportunity. Even if we couldn’t afford it, he successfully promoted two huge tax cuts: $1.3 trillion dollars’ worth in 2001 and another $2 trillion in 2003. He could have used

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those tax cuts to help working families. Instead, working men and women got chicken feed. Actually, working Americans got screwed twice by Bush’s tax cuts. First, because all that money he spent on tax cuts was money not available for improving education, health care, Social Security or Medicare. Second, because they got left behind when the checks were handed out. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, 40 percent of Bush’s tax cuts were handed out to the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans. The bottom 60 percent—made up of working men and women—received only 12.7 percent of the cuts. With his first tax cut, 34 million taxpayers—all working class citizens— got no rebate check at all. President Bush is a reverse Robin Hood. He robs from the poor in order to give to the rich. Yet he insists that all Americans will benefit from his tax cuts, because the rich will spend their extra cash and it will spread out all across the land. We’ve heard that baloney before. It’s Ronald Reagan’s old “trickle down” theory. The problem is, says the ever witty Reverend Al Sharpton, “After all these years, we still didn’t get any down. We just got the trickle.”

Paycheck Deception During the 2000 presidential race, John McCain convinced Americans of the need for campaign reform. He did such a good job selling it that he trounced George Bush by nineteen points in New Hampshire. So, once in the White House, Bush knew he needed to do something about the issue. Otherwise, everyone would think he was in bed with lobbyists and special interests—which, of course, he was. In March 2001, he trotted out his own plan for campaign reform. And guess what? It wasn’t aimed at lobbyists or special

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interest money at all. It was aimed at American workers. In a letter to then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Bush proposed federal legislation to enforce so-called “paycheck protection,” whereby union members can refuse to have any portion of their dues used to support the union’s political activities. This is one of the oldest union-busting tricks known to humankind. It’s more accurately called “paycheck deception.” What it really does is encourage union workers to be freeloaders: enjoying all the benefits unions win for workers without helping to support them. And, by starving unions of funds, it makes them that much weaker and less able to bargain for future benefits. So-called “paycheck protection” is nothing more than the government’s way of joining forces with corporate bosses to bust the unions. And, of course, George Bush is for it.

Trying to Fake It By late 2003, Bush was so desperate to come up with even a handful of new jobs he could take credit for that he tried to fake it. The first thing he did was announce creation of a new position of “Jobs Czar” in the Commerce Department. Now, this was a crazy idea in the first place. There was no way one new bureaucrat could make up for 2.8 million lost manufacturing jobs. But then Bush proved how phony it was, and how low a priority it was for him—by waiting six months before naming anybody to the post. When he finally did get around to naming his jobs czar, Bush blew it again. It turned out that his first choice for the job, Tony Raimondo, the chairman of Behlen Manufacturing Co., a manufacturer of steel buildings, had laid off eighteen hundred employees in 2002 and opened a factory outside of Bejing! That’s

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right. The very man George Bush pretended could stop the flow of jobs overseas was himself the poster boy for exporting jobs. Oops! Raimondo withdrew his name from consideration. You think that was embarrassing? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait till you see how he tried to redefine the nature of work and equate Mickey D’s with General Motors. Declaring that “outsourcing” was good for America was not the only anti-labor provision of “The Economic Report of the President,” which Bush signed and sent to Congress in February 2004. The same report also seriously suggested reclassifying fast-food jobs as manufacturing jobs. That was one way Bush could boast of “new manufacturing jobs created by my administration”—even though there was no guarantee that former steelworkers or autoworkers would be happy flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Bush’s ludicrous proposal prompted Michigan Congressman John Dingell, tongue planted firmly in cheek, to congratulate Bush’s top economic advisor Gregory Mankiw on his innovative approach to job creation. His letter begins: Dear Dr. Mankiw: I noticed in the recently released Economic Report of the President that there was some consternation in the defining of manufacturing. It could be inferred from your report that the administration is willing to recognize drink mixing, hamburger garnishing, French/freedom fry cooking, and milk shake mixing to be vital components of our manufacturing sector. I am sure the 163,000 factory workers who have lost their jobs in Michigan will find it heartening to know that a world of opportunity awaits them in high growth manufacturing careers like spatula operator, napkin restocking, and lunch tray removal.

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“It’s The Economy, Stupid” When all is said and done, that campaign slogan made famous by James Carville in the 1992 Clinton campaign still rings true today. There’s no issue more important than the economy, because it impacts each and every one of us. George Bush’s combined record on the economy—out-ofcontrol federal spending, record budget deficits, 2.8 million jobs lost—leaves him and us in bad shape. Don’t believe me? Listen to a conservative Republican. In September 2002, I spoke to a conference of the International Council of Shopping Centers in Half Moon Bay, California. Great group, by the way. Very smart and very successful businessmen. Preceding me on the program was one of their favorite speakers, Donald Straszheim, head of Straszheim Global Advisors of Santa Monica. Don gave an outstanding and detailed, if somewhat gloomy, picture of the U.S. economy, sector by sector. He told this roomful of largely Republican business leaders: “You won’t like hearing this, but we must face the facts. And I especially hate saying it while Bill Press is in the room, but: The last three years have been the worst economic performance of any president since Herbert Hoover.” Don wouldn’t say the next sentence, but I will—with glee. Based on his dismal economic record, Herbert Hoover didn’t get a second term. And neither should George W. Bush. GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # FOUR

The Deficit: He Spent Money Like a Drunken Sailor “It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.” George W. Bush May 5, 2000

One of the least inspiring public speakers I ever heard was former California Governor George Deukmejian. But he still delivered one of the most memorable political lines I can remember. In his first State of the State address, Deukmejian complained of his predecessor Jerry Brown: “He took the state from A-OK to IOU.” Change one word—state to nation—and that sums up the presidency of George W. Bush. He’s no compassionate conservative. And he sure as hell ain’t no fiscal conservative, either. His latest budget, for 2005, calls for a record $2.1 trillion in federal spending—with a projected deficit of $520 billion, another record. The facts are: • George Bush is the biggest spender in American history. • Federal government spending under President Bush has increased twice as fast as under President Clinton. • Only under Lyndon Johnson did the budget grow faster.

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• George Bush has racked up the biggest federal deficit in history. • George Bush inherited a projected $5.6 trillion, ten-year surplus. He has turned it into a projected $2.9 trillion deficit. That’s a negative swing of $8.5 trillion dollars in only three years. • Non-defense discretionary spending has gone up 14 percent—more than during eight years under Ronald Reagan or eight years under Bill Clinton. In September 2003, three fiscal watchdog groups—the Committee for Economic Development, the Concord Coalition and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities—issued a joint statement calling the current budgetary situation “the most fiscally irresponsible” in U.S. history. I must be getting old, because I can still remember when Republicans used to be the party of smaller government. And the party of fiscal responsibility. No longer. Ronald Reagan cracked the mold and George H. W. Bush broke it, but George W. Bush smashed it to pieces. And it started even before he came to Washington. As governor of Texas, Bush was already a big spender. According to the Dallas Morning News, during his five years in office, the annual state budget catapulted from $73 billion to $98.1 billion—a 34 percent leap in spending which dwarfed the federal government’s 21 percent increase over the same period. That just whetted George Bush’s appetite for big spending— and bigger government—once he set up camp on the shores of the Potomac, a big spending spree that started the day he took office.

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$pending $pree Under George Bush, we’ve suffered from what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls the “budgets of mass destruction.” Here’s Dubya’s most recent spending spree, as calculated by budget analyst Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation: 1. In 2003, President Bush presided over $2.157 trillion in federal spending—with a $374 billion deficit. 2. In 2003, inflation-adjusted federal spending topped $20,000 per household for for the first time since World War II. 3. In 2003, under George Bush, the federal government spent $20,300 per household, taxed each household $16,780 and left each household with a deficit of $3,520. 4. 2004, like 2003, will see the highest level of federal spending since World War II. If Bill Clinton had run the government like that, Republicans would have accused him of fiscal irresponsibility. And rightly so. No doubt you’ve heard the White House spin on all this big spending. It’s not George Bush’s fault, they piously insist, it’s the fault of Democrats in Congress. And, besides, it’s all because of 9/11. Don’t you believe it. Bush can’t blame his spending spree on congressional Democrats, as in: “They made me do it.” Except for a brief interlude in 2001—when Democrats controlled the Senate, thanks to the defection of Republican Jim Jeffords— Republicans have been in charge of Congress for the entire Bush presidency. Nor can Bush blame it all on congressional Republicans.

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He’s the president. It’s his budget, his spending, his tax cuts and his deficit. As a candidate for president, George Bush didn’t promise to cut one single federal program. And since assuming the office, as many conservatives in Congress have pointed out—he hasn’t vetoed one single spending bill. Leading conservative Paul Weyrich, national chairman of Coalitions for America, told a news conference on January 15, 2004: “I complained about profligate spending during the Clinton years, but never thought I’d have to do so with a Republican in the White House and Republicans controlling the Congress.” Arizona Senator John McCain, who accuses Congress of “spending money like a drunken sailor,” says Bush must bear at least part of the blame. “The president cannot say, as he has many times, that I’m going to tell Congress to enforce some spending discipline,” McCain points out, “and then not veto bills.” Not only that, under President Clinton, a Republicancontrolled Congress had passed a rule requiring that all new tax cuts or spending proposals be offset by tax increases or benefit reductions: a plan called “pay as you go.” But even that brake on new spending was allowed to expire in 2002 without a peep from the White House. Congress reinstated it in 2004. Bush can’t blame it on September 11, either. Again, the numbers tell the whole story. From 2001 to 2003, federal spending went up $296 billion. New defense spending accounted for $100 billion, or 34 percent of that increase. Homeland security–related spending took up another $32 billion, or 11 percent. New discretionary spending, totally unrelated to defense or security, captured the largest share: $164 billion, or 55 percent. What did George Bush spend all our money on? Anything he could think of. Including $1.5 billion for federal marriage

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counselors to meet with young couples and advise them on how to have a “happy and healthy marriages.” No, folks, I am not making this up. At a debate in Orlando, when I informed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of this latest Bush proposal, he said it was the craziest idea he had ever heard of. Especially from the president of what used to be the small government party. Here’s another Bush special. Ten years ago, conservatives were crying for elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Why should the government be funding artists?” was the rallying cry of Gingrich, Dick Armey, Jesse Helms and others. For 2005, George Bush gave the NEA, the conservatives’ favorite whipping boy, an additional $18 million—15 percent more than it received in 2004. But, for George Bush, that was just chump change. Not counting the war in Afghanistan, the new Homeland Security Department or the costly war on and occupation of Iraq, here are a few of his bigger ticket items.

Supersize Spending Bill Exhibit A of George Bush’s spending spree is the Omnibus Spending Bill he signed into law in January 2004, just to keep the lights on in government agencies. The total price tag was $820 billion. This supplemental spending bill for 2004 includes $328 billion of new, non-defense related, discretionary spending and $23 billion in projects identified by Citizens Against Government Waste as pure government pork. But Big Spender Bush didn’t hestitate to approve the whole enchilada.

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Subsidies for Rich Farmers The farm bill sent by Congress to President Bush in May 2002 wasn’t just another government handout. Conservative legislators called it the largest non-defense expansion of government since the Great Society. The Congressional Budget Office put a price tag on the bill of $171 billion over ten years. That’s bad enough. But, after reviewing the history of agricultural subsidies, the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl said the full cost of Bush’s program would likely soar to $462 billion over the next decade—more than the government will spend on education and environmental protection combined. At that rate, each of America’s 456,000 full-time farms would receive a windfall of $1 million in subsidies and higher food prices. Which would cost the average American household $1,805 in higher taxes and $2,572 in higher food prices. In other words, somebody has to pay. And that’s you and me. It wouldn’t be so bad if those subsidies went to poor, struggling family farms—as a temporary prop to help them get on their feet. No such luck. Bush’s agricultural payments are like his tax cuts: They go mainly to the rich. Three-quarters of the subsidies go to the top 10 percent of farmers, with an annual average income of over $250,000. Biggest farm subsidies ever? Welfare for the rich? George Bush doesn’t care. He signed the bill anyway. And, one year later, he signed an even bigger one.

Pricey Prescription Drugs In 2003, George Bush broke both his own record and the bank too, with the new “benefit” of prescription drugs—the

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biggest government expansion since LBJ created Medicare in 1965. The mega-pork Medicare bill signed by President Bush was opposed by many liberals because it contained no cost controls, rewarded pharmaceutical companies with windfall profits and would end up costing seniors more for prescription drugs, not less. And because, beginning in 2006, it would stick seniors with higher premiums for less coverage. Bush’s Medicare plan was also opposed by many conservatives, because of its budget-busting cost, which the White House said at the time was $400 billion. But, once again, George Bush pulled the old “bait and switch” on members of Congress. In late January 2004, one month after he had signed the legislation, the White House announced that the cost of the president’s new Medicare plan was actually $534 billion— which increased the projected 2005 deficit to $520 billion. Documents obtained by the Washington Post also revealed that the White House knew months earlier that the actual cost would be over $500 billion—but deliberately lied to Congress and the American people, using the $400 billion figure, until after the Medicare legislation had been enacted by Congress and signed into law by the president. Richard S. Foster, chief actuary of the Medicare program, later told the New York Times that he was aware of the higher price tag, but had been warned by the Bush administration not to tell anyone—or risk being fired. You’re not surprised, are you? If they’ll lie about weapons of mass destruction, why wouldn’t they lie about Medicare? Not all conservatives in Congress rolled over for Bush. Freshman Congressman Tom Feeney of Florida told reporters about a personal call he received from the president, asking him to vote for the Medicare package. “I basically said it was a matter of principle,” Feeney recalled. He told the president: “I didn’t come to Washington to ratify and expand Great Society programs.” “Neither did I, pal!” retorted Bush.

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Nor did all conservative commentators keep their mouths shut either, as the White House had hoped. Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, the leading spokesman in Washington for limited government and unlimited tax cuts, said the Medicare bill proved that “George Bush doesn’t have an anti–Big Government bone in his body.” In the Washington Times, columnist Cal Thomas called Bush’s Medicare bill “a pathetic betrayal of the faith many had put in the Republican Party to reduce the size and role of government in our lives.” Writing in the same conservative rag, Human Events editor Terry Jeffrey uttered a typical conservative lament: “Since when did subsidized drug handouts become a defining issue for the party of limited government?” Answer: Once George Bush took office. Under him, the Republican Party is no longer the party of limited government or fiscal discipline.

Mission to Mars In January 2004, President Bush announced his goofiest and most expensive proposal to date: a manned mission to Mars, following the establishment of a permanent American space station on the moon. No, no. George Bush didn’t say he wanted to send himself to Mars. We should be so lucky. He proposed sending a whole squadron of astronauts to Mars, instead. Even so, it’s too bad he didn’t talk to his daddy first. Bush 41 entertained the same bold stroke. It was one way, he believed, to prove that he did, after all, have a long-term vision for the country. Or, as used to say, it was good for “the vision thing.” But he abandoned the idea when NASA told him the first few missions would cost $400 billion—in 1989 dollars. Obviously, Bush 43 didn’t ask the key question—“How

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much will this dang thing cost?”—before launching his own moon/Mars mission. But others did. And the numbers are out of this world. Literally. The two remote-controlled rovers, “Spirit” and “Opportunity,” which landed on Mars in early 2004 and sent back such remarkable photos, weighed only a ton—and cost $410 million each. According to The New Republic’s Gregg Easterbrook, if the one-thousand-ton equipment necessary to land a team of astronauts on Mars could be launched at the same price per pound, sometime around 2015, the total cost would be $410 billion. Think about that. $410 billion—more than the entire $374 billion budget deficit for 2003—for one single Mars mission. This is nuts! And President Bush himself must have had a bad case of sticker shock. Less than a week later, delivering his third State of the Union address, he didn’t say one word about going to Mars. Nevertheless, some conservatives started calling him “President Moonbeam.” And then there’s the biggest ticket item in George Bush’s reckless spending.

Tax Cuts Okay. Before anybody accuses me of mixing apples and oranges, suddenly switching from spending proposals to tax cuts, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. Don’t believe the Bush propaganda that cutting taxes is different from spending money. In the end, they are one and the same. Sure, they’re different in that money spent goes into a new or existing government program. And taxes cut go into your pocket. Into your pocket, that is, as long as you’re part of the lucky 1 percent of wealthiest Americans who actually benefit from George Bush’s tax giveaways.

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But spending and tax cuts are the same in the most important sense: They’re both money out the door. One minute, you’ve got a trillion in the bank. The next minute—whether you’ve spent it on schools or tax cuts—you don’t. George Bush’s tax cuts are the most costly, most outrageous, most reckless, most unfair, most harmful and most fiscally irresponsible expenditures of his administration. Bush’s obsession with tax cuts has driven even many fiscally responsible Republicans crazy. In his book Running on Empty, Pete Peterson, former commerce secretary under President Nixon, laments: “At a time when the federal government should be building up surpluses to prepare for the aging of the baby boom generation, it is engaged in another reckless experiment with large and permanent tax cuts.” There have been three Bush tax cuts: 2001, 2002 and 2003. (He’s now pushing for another one in 2004.) And they’re all bad. His first tax cut, in 2001, came when there was still a huge Clinton surplus. We’ve got money left over, so give it back to the people, Bush said. Sounds reasonable, except for the fact that there were a lot more pressing needs those funds could have been used for—like shoring up Social Security, for example. Or providing health care for the 43 million Americans who don’t have any. Bush made the call. Instead of taking advantage of a oneterm surplus to fix Social Security or solve the health care crisis, he chose to line the pockets of the rich with a $1.3 trillion tax cut. His second tax cut, in 2002, was equally irresponsible. Since this time there was already a deficit, Bush suddenly changed his tune. A year before he had argued that tax cuts were the perfect solution in times of surplus because we had too much cash lying around. Now he argued that tax cuts were the perfect solution in times of deficits because they would stimulate the economy and create new jobs.

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Of course, that never happened. But the facts never stopped George Bush. One year later, with the economy struggling to deal with a colossal $374 billion deficit, he was back with still another tax cut. And now in 2004, when we’re even deeper in debt, he’s back for more—his fourth proposed tax cut. No matter how deep the hole, George Bush just keeps on digging. He’s spending as if we still have lots of money in the bank. Right there, that tells you something about George W. Bush: He doesn’t have a clue when it comes to fiscal policy. As far as he’s concerned, there’s only one solution to every problem. Surplus or deficit, rain or shine, good times or bad, war or peace, it doesn’t matter. Like some windup doll, George Bush spits out the same two words: tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. But there was another big problem with Bush’s tax cutting zeal. Not only did he spend over $4 trillion dollars on tax cuts when the nation could not afford it, he also deliberately targeted his tax cuts only to the upper crust. The vast majority of American families got little, if any, relief.

Tax Cut 2001: Boondoggle for the Rich When Chief Justice William Rehnquist persuaded four other justices to join him in crowning George W. Bush president of the United States, the nation was enjoying an unprecedented period of economic prosperity: reflected in a balanced budget, an in-the-bank $127 billion surplus and a projected ten-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. Today, it’s all gone—thanks to George Bush’s tax cuts. Just three weeks after he walked into the Oval Office, Bush rolled out his across-the-board cut in income taxes—even though John McCain and Steve Forbes, both big tax cut advocates

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themselves, had argued that Bush’s plan would sink the federal government back into deficit spending. At that time, the federal government faced the kind of choice we would love to face in our own bank accounts, at least once in our lifetime: What’s the best way to use that extra cash on hand? It was a question of priorities. The country still had many unmet needs: 43 million Americans without health care; seniors on Medicare with no prescription drug coverage; a Social Security system about to go broke; and public schools in need of repair. That was one option for using the surplus. The other was to give it back in the form of tax cuts. George Bush made all the wrong choices. He decided to reward his fat cat friends and screw the people. Instead of giving tax cuts to middle class Americans who needed them the most—and would go out and spend the money right away, giving the economy a big shot in the arm—he handed it all to those who don’t need it: the very wealthiest Americans. Now let’s take a minute out to correct a big slice of Republican propaganda: that Democrats don’t like tax cuts. Not true. Democrats are 100 percent for tax cuts. As long as we can afford them. And provided they go to the people who need them. And that’s where George Bush went wrong. You’ve heard the rhetoric. President Bush bragged that his first tax cut—$1.35 trillion over ten years—would grant the average family $1,600 in relief. And that those families at the bottom of the economic ladder would receive the biggest percentage of cuts. Neither was true. Bush’s tax cuts did not help lower income or middle class families. Had he wanted to help working families, he would have cut the highly regressive payroll tax. But by

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cutting income taxes across the board—which means those who pay the most naturally get the biggest tax cuts—he simply further fattened the bank accounts of the already well-to-do.

The White House hates an organization called Citizens for Tax Justice (http://www.ctj.org) because they have blown the whistle on every phony promise Bush has made about his tax cuts. But neither the president nor his economic advisors have ever disproved CTJ’s findings. They can’t. Because CTJ’s numbers are right. According to Citizens for Tax Justice: 1. The average family got nowhere near $1,600. • 90 percent of taxpayers received less than $1,600 in relief. • 27 percent of taxpayers received no relief at all. 2. Most of the tax relief went to families at the top of the ladder. • 40 percent of tax cuts went to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, those struggling souls making over $337,000 a year. • 53 percent of tax cuts went to the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, those making over $147,000 a year. • The lower 40 percent of families, those making $27,000 or less, received only 4.3 percent of the cuts. • Families making between $27,000 and $44,000 received 8.4 percent of cuts. • The typical single taxpayer received only $249 from the Bush plan, after the first-year-only rebate of $300—forced on Bush by Democrats. • The best off one-half of 1 percent of taxpayers received an average $46,000 tax cut.

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Protecting the Family Castle One special feature of the 2001 tax cut best illustrates Bush’s compulsion for making the rich even richer: the gradual elimination of the estate tax. Now, even for Republicans, this was tricky. How to convince the American people that those who inherit huge pieces of property—the equivalent of European castles—should pay no taxes? How to whip up sympathy for America’s nobility, living in luxury on their landed estates? Bingo! Republican focus groups produced the perfect solution: Change the name. Don’t call it the “estate tax.” Call it instead the “death tax.” And don’t call them castles, mansions or estates. Call them “family farms” instead. Parroting this cynical research, George Bush suddenly started talking about “getting rid of the estate tax in order to save America’s family farms.” But it was all a big lie. First of all, it’s not a “death” tax. Dead people don’t pay it. Their heirs do, when they are suddenly handed huge sums of unearned money. Here’s what I don’t understand. If a working person has to pay taxes on every dollar he or she earns by the sweat of his or her brow, why shouldn’t others have to pay taxes on every dollar they simply inherit? Why do people who work for a living get the shaft, while those who inherit their wealth pay no taxes? Isn’t that un-American? Not to George Bush—who, of course, stands to inherit a shitload of money himself. One more thing. Let’s be honest. This has nothing to do with family farms. Under existing law, a farm couple can pass on to their heirs a farm worth up to $4.1 million without paying any taxes—as long as their kids continue to farm the property for ten years. In fact, when queried by reporters, the American Farm Bureau, one of the big supporters of Bush’s attempt to repeal the estate tax, admitted they could not name

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one single farm in the entire country that was lost because of estate taxes. Not one. How many Americans would benefit from repeal of the estate tax? Damned few. The tax only applies to properties worth at least $1 million, or $2 million for couples, and a husband or wife can leave any size estate to their spouse tax-free. As calculated by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the estate tax applies to less than three thousand estates in the entire country, all worth in excess of $5 million. Again, only the extremely wealthy care. And only the extremely wealthy—like the Bushes and the Cheneys—benefit. Saying it helps working families doesn’t make it so. The first round of Bush tax cuts in 2001 was nothing but welfare for the rich. And so was the next big package, round three in 2003.

Tax Cut 2003: The Rich Get Richer You’ve already given the wealthiest people in America a huge bonanza of a tax cut. So what do you for an encore? If you’re George Bush, the answer is easy: You give them another one! And that’s exactly what he did. On May 28, 2003, President Bush signed another mammoth tax cut, this one even bigger than the first: $1.6 trillion over ten years, not counting $400 billion in added interest payments on the federal debt. This plan accelerated some of the tax cuts originally enacted in 2001, but also included reductions in taxes on capital gains and stock dividends. George Bush again sold his tax cut as a gift to the middle class. “These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans,” he stated. “Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money.”

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Nonsense. Like his buddy, Enron’s Ken Lay, President Bush was cooking the books. Say you had a roomful of homeless people—and in walks Bill Gates. Their net worth is nothing; his is $400 billion. Suddenly, the “average” net worth of everybody in the room is $100 million! According to George Bush’s math, those homeless folks just got rich fast. And, according to his math, most Americans got a $1,083 tax cut. Except they didn’t. It’s a bogus statistic. The only true measure of the fairness of any tax relief is the median tax cut, not the average. As the word “median” indicates, it’s the dollar level smack dab in the middle of the tax cuts. Half of Americans receive more than that amount; the other half of Americans get less. For 2003 and 2004, the median tax cut for the Bush plan is $120. That’s a long way from $1,083. But, if George Bush insists on talking about averages, here are some real average figures—as calculated by our friends at Citizens for Tax Justice—numbers never disputed by the Bush administration: • 31 percent of American taxpayers will get absolutely nothing—zip!—from the 2003 Bush tax plan. • In 2003, 49 percent of all taxpayers received $100 or less in tax reduction—for an average tax cut of $19. • By 2006, 88 percent of all taxpayers will receive $100 or less—for an average tax cut of $4. • From 2003 to 2007, the bottom 60 percent of American taxpayers will receive an average $350 total in tax cuts. • During the same period, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans will receive an average total tax cut of $96,634. And, of course, something had to give to make way for Mr. Bush’s tax cuts. Among the items he put on the chopping block in his latest budget: home heating subsidies; job training and employment programs; housing vouchers for the poor; Title I

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funding for the nation’s poorest schools; and health care benefits for veterans. The budget also raises the entrance fees for national forests and parks. Gotta pay for those tax cuts somehow. And, for Bush, tax cuts for the wealthy are a higher priority than money for the homeless or veterans.

Don’t Tax My Portfolio The centerpiece of Bush’s 2003 tax cut package was his demand to eliminate the tax on stock dividends. This idea was not included in his original plan. Nobody in the administration even thought of it until it was suggested to the president in an economic forum by mega-broker Charles Schwab—who, of course, would stand to reap an enormous windfall, both personally and professionally, as head of one of the nation’s largest investment firms. George Bush looked like he was ready to cry “Bingo!” One more chance to help his pals on Wall Street. But, of course, he couldn’t be honest and promote gutting the tax on dividends as payback to Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch and Paine Webber. So he sold it instead as a boon to America’s senior citizens. Does this guy have no shame? In the end, Congress did not eliminate the tax on dividends. It reduced it to the same level as the tax on capital gains, 15 percent—at a cost of $396 billion over ten years. But, even so, how could a cut in dividend taxes benefit most American seniors? Three-quarters of seniors don’t qualify because they don’t own any stock, or they receive less than $1 per year in stock dividends. Most of the rest have their stocks tied up in retirement funds, where they don’t pay any taxes anyway until they withdraw their funds. Of those seniors who do benefit from a lower tax on dividends, the biggest cuts go to only 2.7 percent of America’s el-

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derly, those with annual incomes of over $200,000 per year, hardly the Mom and Pop crowd. Meanwhile, 77 percent of seniors, with annual incomes of $50,000 or less, receive only an average $44 tax cut. Most seniors would have been better off if George Bush had spent that $396 billion shoring up Social Security or Medicare. Like every other one of Bush’s tax scams, the cut in taxes on stock dividends is designed to help those who need it least.

Bush Launches Class Warfare You know as well as I that every time we point out how Bush’s tax cuts are overwhelmingly geared toward helping the wealthiest people in the country, conservatives go bonkers— accusing us of “class warfare,” pitting one class of Americans against another. So let’s get this straight, once and for all. It’s not Democrats who started class warfare. It’s George Bush who started class warfare—by waging war on the poor and middle class. His entire administration so far is nothing but class warfare. He takes care of the top 5 percent—and he leaves the other 95 percent to fend for themselves. Democrats don’t have anything against rich people. In fact, some of the wealthiest people in this country are strong Democrats. Just look at the Kennedys. But Democrats believe that the wealthy should pay their fair share of taxes, and not always be looking for another government handout. That’s the spirit of William H. Gates, Sr., father of the richest man in the world, who spoke out against President Bush’s plan to eliminate the estate tax because, he argued: “Taxing dead multimillionaires is eminently more fair than taxing the not-so-rich living.” That was the spirit of Edward Filene, founder of the great Filene’s department store and bargain basement, who also

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helped organize the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1912. “Why shouldn’t the American people take half my money from me?” he said about taxes. “I took all of it from them.” And that’s the spirit of CNN’s Larry King. During the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, I was chatting outside our work space with Larry. Talk got around to taxes and he told me: “Let me tell you something. Last year, I paid $3 million in taxes. And you know what I say?” I shook my head no, waiting for the standard rant against government’s picking his pockets, but Larry surprised me. “I say, that means I had a damned good year. And I hope I owe even more taxes next year.” What a contrast to George Bush’s fat cat friends, who are motivated by one thing only: pure greed. They want the United States to launch preemptive wars around the world, but they don’t want to pay the taxes to support our military. They want to drive their gas-guzzling, air-polluting Hummers from Houston to Denver, but they don’t want to pay the taxes to maintain the interstates. They want to make millions, but they don’t want to pay taxes to support the best government in the world, without which they wouldn’t be free to make a dime.

Largest Deficits in History Now here’s the problem: When you combine George Bush’s big spending and his big tax cuts, what do you get? Big trouble. I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but here goes: Where’s Ross Perot when we really need him? In 1992, he got the American people so fired up about the budget deficit, he got 19 percent of the vote—and helped elect Bill Clinton president! Now, here’s what’s interesting. In 1992, under the first President Bush, the deficit—even though it was the second largest in history—was only $186 billion. And the national debt was $3 trillion. Today, under Junior Bush, the projected deficit for

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2005 has ballooned to a whopping $520 billion, an all-time record high. And that does not include the cost of the occupation of Afghanistan, or the war with and occupation of Iraq. The national debt is now over $7 trillion and George Bush is seeking authorization to raise it another $1 trillion. I repeat: Where’s Ross Perot when we really need him? If Mr. Perot would come out of his self-imposed exile, there are two points he would make about budget deficits. The first is: If you want a balanced budget, elect a Democrat. If you want a giant budget deficit, elect a Republican. And that’s the God’s honest truth. Not one Republican president has balanced the budget in the last thirty-four years. I checked the history of balanced budgets, starting with President Jimmy Carter. Here are the numbers, which you can find on the website of the Bush White House Office of Management and Budget. Notice how deficits went down, or disappeared, under Democrats. And, despite all their rhetoric, notice how it went up, up, up under Republicans. President

Year

Deficit/Surplus

Carter

1977 1978 1979 1980

−$22 −$34 −$18 −$11

Reagan

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988

−$13 billion −$38 billion −$109 billion −$143 billion −$178 billion −$211 billion −$157 billion −$128 billion

billion billion billion billion

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(continued) President

Year

Deficit/Surplus

Bush 41

1989 1990 1991 1992

−$121 −$124 −$148 −$186

Clinton

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

−$188 billion −$142 billion −$147 billion −$96 billion −$83 billion −$32 billion +$12 billion* +$108 billion*

Bush 43

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Projected

+$106 billion* −$146 billion −$313 billion −$374 billion −$520 billion

billion billion billion billion

The numbers don’t lie. The asterisks indicate the only three years in the last twenty-eight that the federal government has reported a surplus. All three—1999, 2000 and 2001—were budgets submitted by President Clinton. Ronald Reagan ran for president promising to balance the budget. He even promoted the Balanced Budget Amendment. Instead, he racked up more debt than all previous presidents combined. George H. W. Bush became president, promising to balance the budget. And didn’t. Bill Clinton promised to cut the deficit in half. He did more

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than that. He eliminated the deficit and left George W. Bush with a $106 billion surplus. George W. Bush squandered the surplus and delivered the biggest deficits in history. And now he has the audacity to claim that his budget plan will cut the deficit in half in five years. Does anybody really believe that? Remember, this is the same guy who predicted that his first round of tax cuts would actually produce a surplus and create 5.5 million new jobs. Count on the Congressional Budget Office for setting the record straight. According to their analysis, President Bush’s budget will not only not cut the deficit in half over five years, it will run up $2.75 trillion in additional debt over the next decade.

Deficits Do Matter Ever since Ronald Reagan rode into town on his white horse, the conservative mantra has been: “No deficits. The budget must be balanced.” As noted by the Concord Coalition and fellow budget hawks: “For twenty years, there was bipartisan consensus in Washington that large and rising budget deficits were damaging. The budget debate . . . was often rancorous, but it was based on the shared goal of shrinking the large, damaging deficits that loomed.” That changed suddenly with the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush. Fiscally responsible conservatives and liberals still believe in the virtue of not spending more money than you have, but the Bush White House has adopted a different tune: “Deficits don’t matter.” That’s what Vice President Dick Cheney told former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Reading The Price of Loyalty, you get the feeling that having O’Neill present at meetings of the Bush cabinet was like finding the proverbial turd in the punch

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bowl. At one meeting, O’Neill proposed building “triggers” into the tax cuts: provisions that would kick in and prevent some of the cuts if the surplus disappeared. The president wanted no part of such a prudent backstop. At another skull session, O’Neill warned the vice president that the country could not afford the massive tax cuts Bush was proposing because they would surely lead to huge deficits. According to O’Neill, Cheney cut him off with a curt “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Meaning, of course, you can always charge everything to the government’s credit card. It would be wonderful if this were true. But it’s not. The federal government cannot continue to spend over budget, no more than you and I can in our own household. Sooner or later, those bills come due. Someday, somebody has to pay off the credit card. Deficits matter because they have a huge psychological impact on Wall Street. Simply put: Investors have less confidence in the American economy when the federal government can’t manage its own funds. Even President Bush pretended to understand that when he told congressional Republicans on January 31, 2004: “One clear signal we need to send to the American people and the markets is, we’re going to be wise when it comes to the expenditure of the people’s money.” But, of course, George Bush never practices what he preaches. President Clinton, by contrast, both preached and practiced the same lesson. In his own memoirs, In an Uncertain World, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin writes: “In important ways, the deficit had become a symbol of the government’s inability to manage its own affairs—and of our society’s inability to cope with economic challenges more generally, such as our global competitiveness, then much in question. The view that fiscal discipline was being restored contributed to lower interest rates and increased confidence, and that led to more spending and investment, which in turn led to job creation, lower unemployment rates, and increased productivity.”

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Deficits also matter, as we know in our own lives, because more debt means spending more money just to pay interest on the debt. Same with the federal government. Large deficits absorb national savings, crowd out productive investment and suck up money that could be used for other priorities, like defense, education or health care. As the Concord Coalition points out, that’s true whether we owe the debt to American or foreign investors. “If they [deficits] are financed by borrowing from domestic lenders, the economy will have less money available for investing in plant and equipment, education for our children and training for our workers, research and development, and the other building blocks of our economic future. If they are financed by foreigners, we will owe a mushrooming debt to the rest of the world, with growing interest costs that must be serviced very year.”

Note: George Bush would never admit it, but it’s quite possible that he’s purposely running up huge deficits in order to force spending cuts and leave Congress less money available to spend on other programs. This is the old “starve the beast” theory first proposed by Reagan Budget Director David Stockman: that the only way to stop Congress from spending is to put the country so deeply in debt there’s no money left in the till. If true, this would not only make President Bush dishonest, by lying to the American people about the need for deficit spending, it would also make him even more fiscally irresponsible, by saddling future generations with mountains of debt to pay for his refusal or inability to keep spending under control. Especially when it’s Bush himself, not the Congress, who’s responsible for most of the new spending over the last four years.

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In a January 2004 radio address, President Bush told his audience: “My plan reduces the national debt . . . so fast, in fact, that economists worry that we are going to run out of debt to retire.” When he says stuff like that, you have to wonder: Is he deliberately lying or just appallingly uninformed? Budget analysts at the Concord Coalition estimate that interest payments on the national debt will reach $470 billion a year—bigger than the entire defense department budget—by 2013. That is simply money pissed away. Finally, deficits matter because whatever bills we can’t pay, we’re just stacking up for our children and grandchildren to pay. And that’s just downright irresponsible. By 2008, once baby boomers start to retire, the costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be growing faster than the economy. It’s going to be tough enough to pay for that. But President Bush is making it worse, piling on even more debt that future generations will have to deal with before they can solve their own problems. Given today’s huge budget deficits, there’s no other way out. Our kids will face higher taxes, or reduced public services, thanks to George Bush. Which is just the opposite of what he promised in his second State of the Union address on January 28, 2003: “We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations.” Promises made, promises broken. Today, when asked about deficit spending, President Bush gives one of two answers. Sometimes, he makes a joke of it. “You know,” he says, “when I was campaigning in Chicago in the general election, somebody said, ‘Would you ever deficit spend?’ I said, only if we were at war, or if there was a national emergency, or we were in a recession. Little did I realize we’d get the trifecta.” There’s only one problem with that answer. Reporters

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double-checked every statement made during the campaign. He never said it. Bush’s other response is to insist that, facing a huge deficit, more spending and more tax cuts are the answer. We’re already in a hole, he argues, so by going deeper into the hole, we will spend ourselves out of the hole. More spending! More tax cuts! There’s only one problem with that answer. He’s dead wrong. When you’re in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging.

The Deficit and September 11 As he does with everything else, President Bush is still trying to blame the budget deficit on September 11. Don’t you believe it. It’s another big Bush lie. The calendar tells the whole story. In April 2001, the White House predicted the surplus would climb to $125 billion by the end of the year. In May 2001, Bush signed his $1.3 trillion tax cut. By August 2001, one month before September 11, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the surplus had disappeared and we were already back into deficit spending. One-third of the surplus lost, said the CBO, was due to a steadily weakening economy. Twothirds of it was caused by the Bush tax cut. In its latest report, February 2004, the CBO confirmed that 36 percent of the federal deficit is due to the combined Bush tax cuts, 31 percent to new spending on defense and security, and the remaining 33 percent to the continuing economic slowdown. September 11 didn’t create the deficits. George Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts did.

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Bottom Line: Blame It on Bush As noted above, it’s not just liberals who are concerned about Bush’s reckless spending. Many fiscally responsible conservatives are, too—and more and more of them are speaking out. In the December 8, 2003, issue of The Weekly Standard, Executive Editor Fred Barnes writes: “Under Bush, the era of small government is over.” “Want to curb federal spending?” Barnes asks. “Replace President Bush with a Democrat.” Adding: “This is not entirely a joke.” That’s a leading conservative speaking. As a liberal, I second the motion. For uncontrolled spending, unaffordable and unfair tax cuts and historic budget deficits . . . For three years of fiscal mismanagement . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # FIVE

The Patriot Act: He Undermined Our Most Basic Freedoms “If he’s—the inference is that somehow he thinks that slavery is a—is a noble institution I would—I would strongly reject that assumption—that John Ashcroft is an open-minded, inclusive person.” George W. Bush January 14, 2001

Most of us have read George Orwell’s classic 1984. Did you ever think you’d live in an America where people were rounded up, thrown in prison and held for years without a trial and without being allowed to talk to a lawyer? Did you ever think you’d live in an America where cops could search your home first—and get permission second? Did you ever think you’d live in an America where the government could pry into your bank records, e-mails, credit card accounts and drug prescriptions— even though you’d committed no crime? Did you ever think you’d live in an America where every library book you checked out was monitored and reported to the FBI? Well, friends, you live in that kind of America today. Welcome to George Bush’s America, where civil liberties have been seriously undermined in the name of fighting terrorism. We hear a lot of talk about the constitution these days: the new constitution adopted in Iraq. But I don’t know why they bothered to write their own. Why didn’t we just give them ours? After all, it’s a brilliantly crafted document. It’s worked

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for 217 years. And we’re not using it anymore. In fact, we’re abusing it. Correction. We’re not abusing it. George Bush and John Ashcroft are. And we’re letting them get away with it. Let’s start right there. You don’t really need ten reasons to vote against George Bush. You need just one: John Ashcroft. Or, as I call him, J. Edgar Ashcroft. Making him attorney general was one of George Bush’s worst decisions. We knew from his record as a senator what kind of A.G. he’d be. This is the guy who led the opposition to James Hormel’s nomination as ambassador to Luxembourg. A prominent San Francisco businessman and philanthropist, Hormel had strong bipartisan support for his ambassadorial job. But Ashcroft insisted he was unqualified to represent the United States. Hormel happens to be openly gay. This is the guy who deep-sixed the nomination of Ronnie White, respected chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, to the federal bench. Ashcroft accused White of being “procriminal,” simply because he was the sole dissenting vote in one death penalty case—even though, on every other capital punishment case, he voted the same way as the three justices appointed by Ashcroft when he was governor. But White also happens to be black. Which, in Ashcroft’s mind, is almost as bad as being gay. Too harsh? Remember, this is the guy who met with a leader of the Council of Conservative Citizens to discuss the plight of one of their members, imprisoned for conspiring to kill an FBI agent. The CCC are a group of Southerners who consider African-Americans intellectually inferior to whites. Trent Lott got in trouble for meeting with them, too. Ashcroft is also the guy who went to Bob Jones University in 1999, one year before it dropped its ban on interracial dating, to proclaim that “America is unique among nations” be-

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cause “we have no king but Jesus.” In Ashcroft’s America, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and nonbelievers are not welcome. At his confirmation hearing, forty-two senators voted against Ashcroft: a record number of no votes for any attorney general nominee. And these were the people who knew him best, his fellow senators. Still, J. Edgar Ashcroft sneaked by. He soon proved, in the most bizarre way, to be the same moralistic zealot he’d been as attorney general, governor and senator of Missouri. One of his first official acts was to order that a huge statue of Lady Liberty in the Justice Department lobby be draped with blue cloth. Lady Liberty, you see, had bare breasts. In fact, since she was twelve feet tall, she had big bare breasts. J. Edgar was worried that reporters might be distracted during his news conferences—staring at her, instead of inscribing his powerful words. So he had her covered, from head to toe—even though George Bush would soon go to war against countries that forced women to wear a burka. If that doesn’t make Ashcroft a zealot, I don’t know what does. But I digress. Once Ashcroft was confirmed, we knew we were in trouble. We just didn’t know how much. We knew he’d go after criminals. That’s what attorney generals are supposed to do. We just didn’t expect him to go after law-abiding citizens. Hey, folks. That’s you and me. And it all started on September 12, 2001. Now, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t fly any plane into the World Trade Center. And I don’t know any other American who did. Nineteen foreign nationals flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia, one from Lebanon, two from the United Arab Emirates and one from Egypt. But John Ashcroft’s response was to declare war on American citizens—by chipping away at our liberties.

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If you don’t believe me, ask former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr. If Bob Barr didn’t exist, liberals would have to invent him. He called for Bill Clinton’s impeachment two years before Monica Lewinsky ever went to work at the White House. He served on the Board of the NRA—while still a member of Congress. He authored the Defense of Marriage Act, even though he was twice divorced. Around Washington, Bob Barr was known as Mr. Conservative and Mr. Mean. By reputation, he embodied everything wrong with conservatives today: highly partisan, uncompromising, the last person you’d want your mother-in-law to marry. Actually, he’s a nice guy. He and I have become friends. We’ve had drinks together, even though he’s not exactly a barrel of laughs in a bar. He doesn’t drink. He always orders iced tea. Nothing worse than a sober conservative. As I discovered hanging out with Tucker Carlson, conservatives are much more fun when they’re having a few drinks. So when Bob Barr teams up with the ACLU against something—and when the NRA joins People for the American Way against the same—you know it’s gotta be pretty goddamned bad. It is. It’s George Bush’s—and John Ashcroft’s— USA Patriot Act.

Giving Patriotism a Bad Name The USA Patriot Act. Clever name, isn’t it? But it’s more than just a name. It’s an acronym for the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.” Whew! Some Justice Department functionary must have worked his ass off to come up with that one. George Orwell would be proud. But actually, the act has little to do with obstructing terrorism and a lot to do with giving the government more police powers to use against law-abiding citizens—all in the name of fighting terror.

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From its title, you would think the Patriot Act was the result of a long congressional investigation into what went wrong on September 11, how terrorists managed to outwit the FBI and the CIA and what new police powers were needed to prevent such terrorist acts to happen again. Wrong. There was no such congressional investigation until two years later. Nor was there any internal administration investigation. Instead, just three days after September 11, John Ashcroft cleaned off the Justice Department shelves and marched up to Congress with a 342-page grab bag of expanded police powers the FBI had wanted for a long time—and were just waiting for the right opportunity to seize. Shamelessly exploiting the national unity we all felt after being attacked on 9/11, and playing on the fear that still paralyzed all Americans, even members of Congress, Ashcroft lumped the whole list of expanded powers together as the Patriot Act, insisted these new measures were necessary to fight the war on terror—and demanded that Congress enact the sweeping new legislation within three days. But it was obvious from the beginning that these expanded police powers had nothing to do with September 11. Indeed, the more we learned about what government bureaucrats knew prior to September 11—and what countermeasures were not taken—the clearer it became that terrorists were able to attack this country not because federal agencies lacked sufficient police powers, but because they failed to use the powers they had. For example, we learned that German intelligence officials gave American investigators the first name and telephone number of one of the September 11 hijackers two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United States failed to pursue the lead. U.S. officials never contacted German authorities about the tip until after September 11. We learned that the CIA had tracked two of the 9/11 hijackers from a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia all the

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way back to San Diego, where they rented an apartment in their own names and were even listed in the phone directory. The CIA soon dropped their trail, and never notified the FBI of the terrorists’ newly established sleeper cell inside this country. We learned that an FBI agent in Phoenix had discovered a handful of Middle Easterners taking flying lessons in schools around the country and suggested that the bureau launch a national investigation. But headquarters did nothing. We were also told about another agent in Minneapolis who requested permission to search e-mails of a French Moroccan named Zacarias Moussouai, who only wanted to learn how to steer a plane, not how to take off or land. Headquarters refused. We learned that thirteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers had entered this country legally, having been granted visas by the INS. That the INS had no information on the remaining six. That three of the thirteen, including ringleader Mohammed Atta, were still in the country, even though their visas had expired. That Atta, with his expired visa, drove from Boston to Canada on September 10, then flew from Canada back to Boston the next morning to board and commandeer the ill-fated American Airlines Flight 11—all without arousing the suspicions of the INS. And—here’s the icing on the cake—that the INS mailed renewed student visas to Mohammed Atta and fellow hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi—six months after September 11. As first reported by David Corn in his book The Lies of George W. Bush, we learned that a briefing prepared for senior government officials at the beginning of July 2001 contained the following language: “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that Usama bin Laden will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”

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Who says we had no advance warning about September 11? Most shocking of all, we learned that during his daily intelligence briefing on the morning of August 6, 2001, while vacationing on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush was informed that Osama bin Laden and his team of Muslim extremists were studying ways to hijack airliners and use them to strike targets inside the United States. And what did the leader of the free world do? He went fishing! And we learned from his testimony before the 9/11 Commission that counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke repeatedly tried to persuade National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and President Bush to respond to heightened terrorist threats during the summer of 2001—and they did nothing. Having reviewed all the warnings received and ignored, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, told CBS News in December 2003 that the terrorist acts of September 11 could and should have been prevented. “There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed,” Kean said. “They simply failed.” Clearly, the CIA, the FBI, the INS and the president had all the powers they needed before 9/11. They just didn’t use them. They were asleep at the switch. Nor was there any evidence that, had the new police powers demanded by Ashcroft been in place earlier, the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center could have been prevented. There was simply no connection between what happened on September 11 and what John Ashcroft was asking for. There was no need for the Patriot Act. Bob Barr, at least, saw what Ashcroft was up to and had the guts to say so. “You are just trying to use September 11 to get extraordinary new police powers through Congress that you could never get otherwise,” Barr told Ashcroft bluntly. In response, the attorney

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general accused members of Congress who did not agree with his proposal of “giving ammunition to the enemy.” And he warned that failure to act immediately would make the United States vulnerable to another imminent terrorist attack. It worked. Afraid of being painted as sympathetic to terrorists, members of Congress overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act. With only four hours of debate they approved a 342-page bill most of them had never even taken the time to read—and turned this country into as close to a police state as we’ve ever been. In the Senate, the vote was 98 to 1. Only Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold dared vote against it, incurring the wrath of both the White House and fellow Democrats. In his powerful book Dude, Where’s My Country? filmmaker Michael Moore quotes Senator Feingold’s eloquent words on the Senate floor. They deserve a second reading: There have been periods in our nation’s history when civil liberties have taken a backseat to what appeared at the same time to be the legitimate exigencies of war. Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the sears of those events. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans, German-Americans and ItalianAmericans during World War II, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protestors, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during the Vietnam War. We must not allow these pieces of our past to become prologue. Ninety-eight Senators were wrong and Senator Feingold was right. He’s the only one who understood what was really going on. And, besides, he’s got a brass pair of huevos. Too bad he didn’t run for president.

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George Bush and John Ashcroft insist that the Patriot Act is only designed to help catch more terrorists. Not true. Sure, the FBI, CIA, INS and other agencies have sweeping, new powers to use against terrorists and criminals. But, as we shall see, those same new powers can also easily, be turned against law-abiding citizens. There is no distinction in the law.

Go Get Those Terrorists! After 9/11, George Bush acted like a tinhorn dictator. Come to think of it, he talked like one, too. “Bring him back dead or alive!” Thank you, Sheriff George. Nonetheless, at the risk of sounding like George Bush, I still think I speak for all Americans when I say: Whatever it takes to track down terrorists who threaten the lives of Americans—Go get ’em! For those who kill innocent men, women and children . . . For those who blow themselves and others up, just to make a political point . . . For those who attacked us on September 11, and for all those who aided and abetted them . . . It’s War! We’ll give law enforcement agencies whatever powers they need to bring the guilty to justice. Ah, but’s that the key word: GUILTY. And that’s the problem. George Bush and John Ashcroft weren’t satisfied with the guilty. They took a page right out of the KGB. They abused the new powers given them by Congress not only to go after the guilty, but to round up, harass and punish the innocent—throwing all established rules of justice out the window and violating every standard of fair play this country stands for.

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The Great Roundup In the weeks immediately following September 11, the Justice Department rounded up over one thousand young men of Middle Eastern origin whom they “suspected” of possible links to the al Qaeda terrorist network. These young men were charged with no crimes, were provided no lawyer and were given no public hearing—but were detained indefinitely. Not only that, the Justice Department refused to tell their families where they were being held. And, to this day, J. Edgar Ashcroft has released the names of only those twenty-nine individuals against whom the department brought criminal charges. Of course, Bush and Ashcroft could never get away with treating American citizens like that. Until recently, they couldn’t get away with treating visitors like that, either. But, in this case, Bush tried to justify such extraordinary, and perhaps unconstitutional, police action as an unfortunate, but necessary, part of the war on terror. Ironically, there was only one part of the detainees’ civil liberties that Ashcroft refused to violate: their right to bear arms. When the FBI started checking instant background files to determine if any of them had recently bought a firearm, Ashcroft shut them down. That information, he decreed, could only be used at the time of purchase of a gun. Yes, that’s right. Not even the war on terror could justify offending the National Rifle Association. Ashcroft locked up hundreds of innocent men on the pretext that they were terrorists—but forbid his agents from checking gun records to see which ones might have actually been planning violence. Eventually, some detainees were released because not even Ashcroft could find anything on them. Over two hundred others were hauled before top secret, closed-door immigration hearings, found guilty of nothing more serious than an expired

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visa or a jaywalking ticket—and expelled from the country. Charges were filed against only twenty-nine. Many others are still behind bars. But here’s the kicker. Despite Bush’s justifying everything Ashcroft did in the name of “the war on terror,” out of over one thousand young Muslims detained after 9/11, only one case has gone to trial—with decidedly mixed results. In Detroit, four individuals were accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism. Two of them were acquitted of all charges. Two others were initially found guilty, but their convictions are now under review because federal prosecutors failed to reveal that one of their witnesses had lied on the stand. The judge also blasted Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating the trial’s gag order. Ashcroft’s great roundup, in other words, was nothing but one giant fishing expedition. In terms of the war on terror, the whole operation was a bust. But J. Edgar Ashcroft did not let one colossal failure stop him. Those students and workers who were not caught in the big roundup were nabbed in the next phase of the Justice Department’s reign of terror.

The Middle Eastern Dragnet Once again following the KGB playbook, Ashcroft next sent out the word: He or his agents wanted to have a private interview with every foreign student who was in the United States legally. He invited all of them to report to the nearest FBI office for “questioning.” Actually, he didn’t invite all of them in. He invited male students only. He didn’t invite all foreign students, either. He only invited those from Middle Eastern countries—five thousand of them. Actually, he didn’t invite all Middle Eastern natives,

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either. Students from Saudi Arabia were exempted. That’s right. Even though fifteen of the nineteen September 11 terrorists were from the royal kingdom, students from Saudi Arabia were not required to report to the FBI.

Note: Despite its known terrorist ties and its history as a staging ground for Osama bin Laden, this was the second time Saudi Arabia received special treatment by the Bush administration post 9/11. The first was for members of bin Laden’s own family. In the days immediately after September 11, when all commercial flights were still grounded, only one plane was in the air. With special permission from the White House, a charter jet flew around the country, gathering up all twentyfour members of Osama bin Laden’s extended family in the United States and whisking them back to Saudi Arabia. Did any of Osama’s uncles, brothers, nephews or cousins have any information on his whereabouts? When was the last time they had seen or talked to him? Had they given him any financial help? We’ll never know. They were spirited out of the country without being questioned by the FBI—simply because Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar vouched for their character.

Back to the dragnet. Stop and think about what an outrageous abuse of authority this was. These young men were in the United States legally. They had committed no crime. They were not accused of committing any crime. Yet they were forced to surrender to federal authorities for questioning about possible ties to terrorism. If they did not “volunteer” for interrogation, they were arrested. If, while being examined for links to terrorists, they were found to have any problems with immigration documents, they were immediately deported.

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The KGB could not have done it any better. But this is not the old Soviet Union. This is the United States, where innocent people are not rounded up and given the third degree without first doing something wrong. Not even people from other countries. At least, they never were until George Bush took office. Of course, he would never admit to any bias. In fact, at the very time J. Edgar Ashcroft was ordering every male citizen from certain Middle Eastern countries to report to the FBI, President Bush was piously insisting that the war on terror was not a war on Islam, that we did not believe all Muslims were terrorists—and that the Justice Department would never practice racial profiling. But his actions belied his words. What’s the one thing all those rounded up had in common? They were all Muslims. And they were all olive-skinned. No racial profiling? As many pointed out, after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City, we didn’t round up all blond, blue-eyed, Christian Caucasians and investigate them for potential links to his terrorist ring. So why did we round up all Muslims after 9/11? Because, no matter what they said in public, Bush and Ashcroft, in fact, did believe all Muslims were terrorists, or at least potential terrorists, and they treated them as such. Before he goes back to Crawford, Texas, maybe George Bush will explain to all of us why he dragged into FBI offices five thousand students—most of whom had never heard of, let alone met, Osama bin Laden—while U.S. authorities actually helped bin Laden’s own family members flee the country with no questions asked. I’m curious. Aren’t you? Again, as part of the war on terror, the Middle Eastern Roundup was a big bust. Not one of the five thousand questioned was found to have any link with al Qaeda. But as outrageous and un-American as their treatment was,

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it was nothing compared to the reception awaiting alleged prisoners of war from Afghanistan.

Gulag Gitmo President John F. Kennedy imposed a trade embargo on Cuba in 1963 because, he argued, the island nation was a serious danger to our national security. After all, at Fidel Castro’s invitation, the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on Cuba aimed at the United States. Kennedy had every reason to respond to a serious threat to our national security. Today, even though Cuba long ago ceased to be a threat to the United States, the embargo remains in place—but for a different reason. President Bush now insists we will never trade with Cuba as long as Castro is in power because of his political persecutions and abysmal human rights record. What hypocrisy. At the southern tip of Cuba, on the U.S. Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay, the United States treats political prisoners in ways that not even Fidel Castro would approve of—and that would never be allowed or tolerated on U.S. soil. Locked up at Guantanamo are 660 Muslims from fortyfour countries who were arrested in Afghanistan shortly after the war, bound, gagged, hooded and flown halfway around the world to be kept in solitary confinement, with no access to a lawyer or family, for over two years now. They have been given no trial or hearing at which they might prove their innocence. The Defense Department says it plans to keep them there for many years, perhaps indefinitely. It is, writes conservative legal commentator Stuart Taylor in The National Journal, “a betrayal of what America stands for.” Lord Steyn, a judge of England’s highest court, said of the situation at Guantanamo Bay: “As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would

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have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice.” U.S. officials privately acknowledge that at least a third of the Guantanamo inmates, including three teenagers released in Spring 2004, are completely innocent. They include farmers, taxi drivers, cobblers and laborers. Many of them are there simply because they were identified by Afghans and Pakistanis eager to get the generous bounty the American military was tossing around for anybody connected to al Qaeda. What did they care if they fingered an innocent person? They got the money. What does Bush care if he’s locked up innocent people? He doesn’t need a trial. He knows they’re all guilty. “The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people,” he told reporters. Holding prisoners of war with no charges and no chance to clear their name is a clear violation of Article V of the Geneva Convention, to which the United States is a signed member. So how do Bush and Ashcroft get away with it? Here’s how: They refuse to call the detainees prisoners of war. They call them “enemy combatants” instead. And they insist that during wartime the commander in chief has exclusive authority over enemy combatants. Not even the courts, they claim, have any jurisdiction over the actions of a commander in chief in wartime. And since, unlike conventional wars, the “war on terror” will last forever, those so-designated enemy combatants can be held forever. With George Bush’s blessing, this is justice, Ashcroft-style. They label you an “enemy combatant” and anything goes: no formal charges necessary. No lawyer. No trial. You simply disappear. Bush and Ashcroft used the same modus operandi to justify detaining two American citizens, Jose Padilla and Yasser Esam Hamdi. Padilla was arrested in Chicago on suspicion of bringing a “dirty bomb” into the country. No explosives were found, but he was labeled an “enemy combatant” and, as such,

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has been held in military prison in Charleston, South Carolina, for over two years—even though no charges have been filed. Hamdi, arrested in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban, was transferred from Guantanamo Bay to the military prison at Norfolk Air Station. He’s also been held for over two years, even though the Justice Department says it has no immediate plans to file charges against him. Does the “war on terror” empower the president to brand people, even American citizens, as “enemy combatants” and thereby ignore all standards of due process? The Bush administration has no doubt. But two federal courts have found that they are breaking the law. The Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that Ashcroft and Bush were violating Jose Padilla’s civil rights by holding him indefinitely without trial. The Ninth Circuit, in California, ruled that it was unconstitutional for the administration to hold 660 foreigners at Guantanamo Bay without giving them access to legal representation and judicial review. Those two cases will soon be before the U.S. Supreme Court—as well as an appeal by Yasser Hamdi to a decision by the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Virginia, that he is, in fact, a legitimate “enemy combatant,” because he was arrested on foreign soil. These are important test cases, because they speak to the heart of what dictatorial powers a president can grab—and to what extent our basic freedoms are secure—even during wartime. As summed up in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, the issue is whether or not “the Executive Branch possesses the unchecked authority to imprison indefinitely any persons, foreign citizens included . . . without permitting prisoners recourse of any kind to any judicial forum.” Bush’s violation of due process and denial of basic rights to detainees in the United States and at Guantanamo is the kind

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of political tyranny we used to condemn when practiced by dictators like Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet. Even the conservative magazine The Economist called it a policy “unworthy of a nation which has cherished the rule of law from its very birth.” But, of course, all the guys Bush and Ashcroft are persecuting, both here and in Cuba, are foreigners, or foreign-born. And, besides, they’re all Muslims. They would never try the same tactics against American citizens. Right? Wrong! They already are.

John Ashcroft Wants to Know What You’re Reading I remember the first time I read George Orwell’s classic novel 1984: a frightening portrayal of life under a totalitarian dictatorship, where citizens have no right of privacy and Big Brother is free to hear, see and poke his nose into everything people do. You probably had the same reaction. Thank God, I thought, I live in a country where that could never happen. Little did we know: Orwell was prophesying what America would be like under George W. Bush and his Orwellian Patriot Act. As we’ve seen, Bush and Ashcroft are applying the Patriot Act in unprecedented, and perhaps unconstitutional, ways to go after those suspected of having ties to terrorism. That’s bad enough. What’s worse, the Patriot Act gives them the same extraordinary powers to go after us law-abiding citizens. Remember the Fourth Amendment? The right of privacy? We don’t have any left. The Patriot Act took it away. Without cause, without our doing anything wrong, the federal government now has the authority to snoop into every aspect of our daily lives, starting with our:

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Bank records School records E-mail Online transactions Credit card accounts

The FBI can also seize and investigate our medical records— which is why we now have to sign a privacy consent form every time we visit the doctor. They can also go into the local library and demand to see what books we’ve checked out, turning every librarian into a snitch. And, under the infamous “sneak and peek” provision of the Patriot Act, the FBI can even search our homes or offices and listen in on our phone calls— without getting a search warrant first. Ironically, one of the first to complain about the Patriot Act was Bush supporter Rush Limbaugh. After admitting he was a drug addict and checking himself into a detox center, Limbaugh groused that police were looking into his medical and banking records to see if he had broken the law in order to feed his illegal drug habit. It was too late for Rush’s whining. He had already helped give away the store, by enthusiastically backing Bush’s call for the Patriot Act. But, this time, Rush was right. When the government declares open season on our banking, credit card, email and medical records, it’s enough to make you ask: What country are we living in? Whatever happened to the good old U.S. of A.? Even one of the authors of the Patriot Act now says it represents Big Brother at his worst. In November 2003, former Justice Department official Viet Dinh told the Los Angeles Times that the act could, and soon would, be used to deny American citizens due process of law under the Constitution. Of course, Bush administration officials insist federal agents would never use their expanded powers to intrude into the lives

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of law-abiding citizens. They forget that the FBI once planted tape recorders under Martin Luther King’s hotel room bed. And that Republican president Richard Nixon ordered the FBI to raid the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The expanded police powers of the Patriot Act are so intrusive and so unpatriotic, over 150 cities and counties, including Philadelphia, have refused to enforce or comply with them. The National League of Cities passed a resolution asking Congress to repeal parts of the act. And anti–Patriot Act resolutions were also passed by the states of Hawaii, Vermont and Alaska, whose conservative Congressman Don Young calls the legislation the “worst act we ever passed.” His comments were echoed by another prominent conservative, tax reform crusader Grover Norquist. Host of a weekly gathering of conservatives to plot legislative and political strategy, Norquist warned his fellow-travelers against rushing to support Ashcroft’s power grab: “Someday Hillary Clinton’s going to be attorney general, and I hope conservatives keep that in mind.” The Patriot Act is such a gross violation of privacy, it has inspired many jokes by stand-up comics. My favorite is about the day John Ashcroft visited a Washington, D.C., elementary school. After the attorney general offered his standard pitch on the war on terror, little Johnny raised his hand: “I have three questions. Where is Osama bin Laden? Where is Saddam Hussein? And isn’t the Patriot Act a big infringement of our civil liberties?” Before Ashcroft could respond, the bell for recess rang and all the students made a dash for the school yard. When they returned, little Virginia raised her hand: “Mr. Attorney General, I have five questions. Where is Osama bin Laden? Where is Saddam Hussein? Isn’t the Patriot

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Act a big infringement of our civil liberties? Why did the recess bell ring twenty minutes early today? And— where’s Johnny?” The Patriot Act will eventually be subject to litigation. It will be up to the courts to decide whether any president can, as George Bush has done, scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. But the president already has at least one vote on the Supreme Court. In March 2003, Justice Antonin Scalia assured an audience at John Carroll University in suburban Cleveland that he saw no constitutional problem in the government’s scaling back individual rights during wartime. “The Constitution just sets minimums,” Scalia declared. “Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.” For him, and George Bush, the war on terror means we can kiss the Bill of Rights good-bye.

The Pentagon Wages War—on Privacy Now, all along, I know what you’ve been thinking: Where’s John Ashcroft going to store all this information he’s collecting on us Americans? There’s not enough room at the Justice Department. You’re right. There’s not enough room at the Justice Department. So he’s turning it all over to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to store at the Pentagon. It is, after all, the world’s largest office building. Bigger than a Super Wal-Mart. Rummy wasn’t satisfied with freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein. With George Bush’s blessing, he also insisted on helping free the American people—from our right of privacy. His contribution to the war on terror is called the “Total Information Awareness Project,” or TIA. Its goal is to collect

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as much information as possible on 300 million Americans, to store it in a giant Pentagon “supercomputer” and then to sort through it to see if anything points to a possible connection to terrorism. It is what Oregon Senator Ron Wyden called “the most far-reaching snooping program ever proposed against law-abiding Americans.” Yet spineless members of Congress—once again afraid of appearing weak-kneed in the war on terror—gave Rumsfeld $200 million for the project. Adding insult to injury, Rumsfeld then put the TIA under the command of John Poindexter. Yes, that John Poindexter, the same one who convinced President Reagan to sell arms secretly to Iran and use the profits, illegally, to fund the contras in Nicaragua. A grand scheme for which he was convicted of five felonies and only escaped prison because Congress granted him immunity. Would George Bush please explain: Why did he invite such a disgraced American to be part of his administration? Didn’t he promise to “clean up” government, not soil it with yesterday’s criminals? Poindexter quit his Pentagon post in August 2003 after it was revealed that his office had also organized a “futures market” where players could bet on when and where the next terrorist attack would occur. But his Super Snooper was already in operation. And here’s what it means for you and me: No Privacy Left. From now on, the Pentagon will have a dossier on each and every one of us. With one click of the mouse, Big Brother will know: • Every commercial transaction we make: magazine subscriptions, airline tickets, credit card purchases, concerts attended, bank records, telephone calls, plus videotape from surveillance cameras at shopping malls or sporting events.

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• Every government contact we have: tax records, driver’s license, passport application, bridge tolls paid, judicial and divorce records, speeding tickets, plus every book we take out of the library. • Every aspect of our personal lives: medical records, prescriptions we purchase, grades we receive in school, websites we visit, plus e-mails we send and receive. Okay, maybe I’m old-fashioned about this, but here’s what I think. If there’s a good reason to suspect someone of terrorism, then I say: Go ahead and collect every bit of information you can about the sucker. But for you and me, who wouldn’t know a terrorist if we saw one sipping coffee at Starbucks, I say: Keep your cotton-pickin’ fingers, eyes, ears and nose out of my personal life. Big Brother has no right to keep a dossier on me or any one of my fellow law-abiding Americans. If I wanted to live in a country where the government keeps a file on everybody, I’d move to Saudi Arabia.

The Terrorists Are Winning What’s astounding is how easily George Bush could get away with these assaults on our civil liberties, both at the Justice Department and at the Pentagon. He simply said they were necessary tools in the war on terror. And most Americans went along with it. But you and I now know better. And that, my friends, is a key reason why George Bush doesn’t deserve a second term: his bullshit, dangerous and un-American argument that fighting terrorism requires us to sacrifice the basic freedoms that make us so proud to be Americans. We don’t buy it. As columnist Nat Hentoff wrote in The Village Voice on February 27, 2004: “It should take far more than the mon-

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strous brutality of a handful of terrorists to drive us to abandon our core constitutional values.” Freedom of speech. Freedom of assembly. Freedom to express our disagreement with official government policy. The right of privacy. Those cherished freedoms define us as Americans. They were handed down to us by our Founding Fathers and secured by the brave warriors of the American Revolution. They have been defended ever since by millions of courageous men and women in uniform, from World War I to the war in Iraq. They are the reason people around the globe envy us and want to come here to live. We must never let the federal government chip away at our basic constitutional freedoms—not even when nineteen crazed terrorists strike on U.S. soil and kill three thousand. I know, when it comes to Bush’s wholesale invasions of our privacy, some brain-dead conservative commentators argue: “What are you worried about? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.” Too bad those jerks don’t listen to Bob Barr. They don’t deserve the label “conservative.” When it comes to civil liberties, the test is not: Why aren’t we willing to surrender part of our freedoms to the central government? The test is: What right, or what need, does the central government have to take them away from us? Building secret dossiers on you and me is not going to help catch one terrorist. But it does mean we are not as free today as we used to be. General Wesley Clark warned of that very danger when Ashcroft proposed round two of the Patriot Act: “One of the risks you have in this operation is that you’re giving up some of the essentials of what it is in America to have justice, liberty, and the rule of law. I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you abridge those rights to prosecute the war on terrorists.” As Americans, we do not have to choose between fighting terrorists and preserving freedom. That is a false dichotomy.

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We can and we must fight terrorism and remain free at the same time. For once we sacrifice our basic liberties, the terrorists win. Looking at the Patriot Act and the Pentagon’s super computer, it’s clear that the terrorists are already winning. For naming John Ashcroft attorney general . . . for his direct assault on our American freedoms . . . for throwing the Constitution out the window . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # SIX

Crony Capitalism: He Sold America Out to Special Interests “We ought to make the pie higher.” George W. Bush February 15, 2000

One thing you can say for sure about George W. Bush: He remembers his friends. And he rewards them. Big time, as Dick Cheney might add. In fact, if you look carefully at the Bush White House, you might see a special banner hanging over the front door: “Quid Pro Quo.” Which is Latin for “Screw the People, Bless the Special Interests.” Sometimes paraphrased as: “You scratched my back, so now I’ll scratch yours.” But don’t wait for your back to be scratched. The “you” George Bush is referring to on his banner is not you and your neighbors. It’s not average Americans trying to pay their bills at the end of the month. He’s only referring to those who wrote big checks to get Bush and Cheney in the White House. In every area, from health care to environmental protection to jobs in the administration, the story of the first three years of President Bush’s administration is one of “Crony Capitalism.” Special favors done for special interests. During the 2000 campaign, Kayne Robinson, second-in-

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command at the National Rifle Association, raised a few eyebrows when he told NRA members why it was so important to work to elect George Bush. If Bush wins, he bragged, we not only won’t have to fight bad gun control legislation anymore, we’ll be inside the Oval Office, writing the kind of gun legislation we want. And that’s the way it’s been for corporate America under George Bush. From department to department, it’s the same pattern of activity: Executives from coal companies, utilities, pharmaceutical companies, the cattle industry, Wall Street, the NRA and other special interest groups are invited in. First they report on how much money they gave to Republicans in the last election. Then they tell the administration what they want. And then George Bush delivers. Quid pro quo. Bush’s record of crony capitalism must be a major issue in the 2004 campaign. “We face a growing threat to our liberty and justice in America today,” Howard Dean wrote in his campaign pamphlet Common Sense for a New Century. “Thomas Jefferson and James Madison spoke of the fear that economic power would one day seize political power. That fear is now being realized. Under the Bush Administration, pharmaceutical companies draft our Medicare laws. Oil executives sit in the Vice President’s office and write energy bills.” Actually, it’s even worse than that. Because the first thing that George Bush did, across the board, was fill his administration with people from corporate America to service corporate America—starting with his vice president, Halliburton’s own Dick Cheney, and his chief of staff, the automobile manufacturers’ own Andrew Card. That way, when business representatives came knocking, they were guaranteed a friendly reception. Their own cronies opened the door. How convenient. As we will see in more detail below, mining companies show up at the Department of Interior to push for digging mines on protected federal lands and they’re

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greeted by—their former lobbyist. Food processors gather at the Department of Agriculture to protest tougher meat inspections and they get the red carpet treatment from—their former chief lobbyist. Auto manufacturers show up at the White House to argue against higher fuel efficiency standards and their host is—you guessed it!—Andy Card. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but it does seem to me that naming lobbyists to head government agencies that regulate the very industries they once lobbied for is a huge conflict of interest. Didn’t George Bush promise to “restore honor and dignity” to the White House? Apparently, ethical conflicts don’t count. But George Bush wasn’t taking any chances. Before he invited the foxes into the hen house, he put a fox in charge of every hen house. It is no longer government of the people, by the people and for the people. The people have no access and no voice in George Bush’s America. Today it is government of special interests, by special interests and for special interests. Given Bush’s background, it’s not surprising. Big business cronies of his daddy’s set him up as an oilman, then bailed him out of every one of his failed enterprises. Then they planted him up in the baseball business, where he and his corporate pals conned the public into building them a new stadium—on which Bush then cashed in. As governor of Texas, Bush routinely sided with oil, gas and electric utilities. As a result, when he left office, Texas was rated number one among the states— number one in air and water pollution, that is. Bush’s Texas generated more pollution than any other state or any province of Canada. As Molly Ivins points out, the man is “congenitally incapable of checking the excesses of capitalism.” He thinks big business can do no wrong. As he often tells audiences of business leaders, he thinks government’s job is simply “to get out of the way and let business and entrepreneurs do their work.”

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Never would it occur to George Bush that government has a much more important job: To step in and protect the public when corporations do not act in the public interest. The sad reality is that our government will no longer be able to protect us as well, now that Bush has rewarded his corporate contributors by gutting so many of the tough regulations already in place. Fortunately, there are organizations like the Center for Public Integrity, Texans for Public Justice and the Center for Responsive Politics which keep score of government favors for campaign cash. Check out their websites: www.publicintegrity.org, www.whitehouseforsale.org and www.crp.org. All three organizations are religiously nonpartisan. They know that, for the most part, the people who write campaign checks do so only because they want something in return. And they acknowledge that politicians of both parties have always rewarded campaign contributors with big favors. But never before, they report, have they seen so much money given to a presidential candidate—or so many government goodies blatantly and shamelessly handed out in return.

The Bush administration is like one huge, ongoing Sotheby’s auction to which you and I are not invited. Only those who’ve already written a check for at least $100,000 are allowed in the room. George Bush himself is at the podium. And one by one, America’s assets are put on the auction block—“Going, going, gone!”—until there’s nothing left. George Bush has systematically sold America out to the highest bidder. With the help of the Center for Public Integrity and Texans for Public Justice, let’s take a look at George Bush’s selling of America: who gave how much and what they got in return.

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JOBS FOR SALE Before he could rain favors on special interests, George Bush first had to make sure he had the proper rainmakers in place. To fill top government jobs, he turned to three groups of supporters: lawyers who saved his ass in Florida; major campaign fundraisers; and corporate contributors. They are the people who make up the Bush administration.

The Big Florida “Thank You” Even before he could get around to rewarding his campaign contributors, George Bush had another important group to take care of: the phalanx of conservative lawyers who worked overtime in Florida to help him steal the election from Al Gore. Without their legal trickery, George Bush would never have made it to the White House. So naturally he paid them back with the first, and some of the best, jobs in his administration. Four giant law firms did most of the dirty work for Bush in Florida. Here’s how George Bush paid them back with highprofile jobs.

Florida Payback 1. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher: Ted Olson, Solicitor General of the United States Eugene Scalia, son of Justice Antonin Scalia, Solicitor for the Department of Labor Robert Bonnor, U.S. Customs Commissioner M. Sean Royal, Deputy Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition Miguel Estrada, failed nominee to the federal D.C. Court of Appeals

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2. White & Case: Tim Flanigan, Deputy White House Counsel Marcos Daniel Jimenez, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida 3. Greenberg Traurig: Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the Navy Michael P. Socarras, General Counsel of the Air Force 4. Baker Botts: Kirk Van Tine, General Counsel, Department of Transportation Claude Allen, Deputy Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services Angela Styles, Administrator, Office of Federal Procurement Policy Robert Jordan, Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Patrick Wood, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission John P. Elwood, Counselor to Justice Department, Criminal Division With all those Bush cronies in there, what chance do you think the average citizen has to get a fair hearing? A snowball’s chance in hell. But George Bush was just getting started. The next recipients of his White House largesse: those who wrote the big checks.

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Campaign Fundraisers For his reelection campaign, President Bush has announced two categories of major donors: “Pioneers”—those who raise at least $100,000—and “Rangers”—those who raise at least $200,000. The “Ranger” category is new. In 2000, there were only Pioneers. But that was good enough to buy twenty-two of them jobs as U.S. ambassadors. Here’s the list of checkbook Republicans named by George Bush to represent the United States around the world, with no qualifications other than having raised a minimum $100,000 for the 2000 Bush campaign: George Argyros, Ambassador to Spain; Southern California Real Estate, Ex-owner, Seattle Mariners Stephen Brauer, Ambassador to Belgium (resigned September 2003); Automotive Engineering; Part-owner, St. Louis Cardinals Nancy Brinker, Ambassador to Hungary; Brinker International Restaurants W. L. Brown, Jr., Ambassador to Austria; Retired CEO, Brown-Forman Corp. (Jack Daniel’s) Richard Egan, Ambassador to Ireland; Founder, EMC (hightech) Russell Freeman, Ambassador to Belize; Corporate Lawyer Tony Gioia, Ambassador to Malta; Gioia Management (pizza) Hans Hertell, Ambassador to Dominican Republic; Chair, American Builders Corp. Robert W. Jordan, Ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Partner, Baker & Botts Law Firm Frank Lavin, Ambassador to Singapore; Vice President, Citibank

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Howard Leach, Ambassador to France; CEO, Leach Capital Corp.; President, Cypress Farms Jeffrey A. Marcus, Ambassador to Belgium (replacing Steve Brauer); Chairman, JEtN Ventures; Part owner, Texas Rangers John Ong, Ambassador to Norway; Retired Chair, B.F. Goodrich; Former President, Business Roundtable John Palmer, Ambassador to Portugal; Former Chair, SkyTel Communications; Venture Capitalist John Price, Ambassador to Mauritius; Commercial Real Estate; Shopping Mall Developer Mercer Reynolds III, Ambassador to Switzerland (resigned April 2003); Reynolds Plantation Golf Resort; Part owner, Texas Rangers Martin Silverstein, Ambassador to Uruguay; Attorney Clifford Sobel, Ambassador to Netherlands; Former Chair, Net2Phone Craig Stapleton, Ambassador to Czech Republic; Marsh & McLennan Real Estate Investor; Texas Rangers Charles Swindells, Ambassador to New Zealand; U.S. Trust Co. Peter Terpeluk, Jr., Ambassador to Luxembourg; American Continental D.C. Lobbyist Ronald Weiser, Ambassador to Slovak Republic; CEO, McKinley Associates, Real Estate And that’s just the list of ambassadors. Many other Pioneers were rewarded with seats on federal boards and commissions. Pioneer Elaine Chao, wife of Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made it all the way to the President’s cabinet as secretary of labor. And Pioneer Ken Lay of Enron was allowed to select the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For many people, being a Bush “Pioneer” was a two-fer.

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They not only got personal perks, like invitations to White House functions and maybe even a top administration job. In Bush’s account books, every dollar they raised was also credited to the industry they represented—which came in very handy when President Bush got around to making policy decisions.

Policy for Sale Books have been written by Richard Reeves, Michael Beschloss, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and countless other American historians about how presidents make decisions. Exactly why Harry Truman decided to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, for example, or why Lyndon Johnson could not find a way out of Vietnam, took them years to unravel. With George W. Bush, historians will have a much easier job. It’s nowhere near that complicated. There’s only one simple rule. How is policy made by George W. Bush? FOLLOW THE MONEY! Remember the Bush slogan on the banner over the White House door? “Quid Pro Quo.” On almost every major policy decision made by President Bush over the last three years, you can draw a direct line between the quid and the pro quo: how much money the special interests gave—and what they got in return. It is crony capitalism at its worst.

Energy for Sale The poster boy for George Bush’s practice of crony capitalism is Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron. You know Ken Lay: the guy Bush called “Kenny Boy” until Enron collapsed because of all the financial games they were playing. Then “Kenny Boy” suddenly became: “Kenny Who?”

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Lay was one of George H. W. Bush’s finance chairmen. He became a business associate of Bush Jr. and supported him in every one of his campaigns for public office: congressman, governor and president. He provided presidential candidate George W. Bush with a corporate jet and was Bush’s guest for lunch at the White House on the day after his inauguration. In fact, Lay did more than support George W. Bush. He made him. Under Lay’s direction, Enron became, and is still today, the top contributor to Bush’s political career. Nobody gave more and nobody got more in return. As of January 1, 2004, corporate and employee contributions from Enron to candidate George W. Bush added up to $602,625. What did they get in return? Quid pro quo. Until the fall of Enron, they got everything they asked for. So much so, that sometimes it was hard to tell where the Enron administration ended and the Bush administration began. If, indeed, there was any difference at all. Bush’s first reward to Enron was the appointment of Nora Mead Brownell and Pat Wood III, both recommended by Ken Lay, to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—for energy companies, the most important of all government agencies. Then the president dispatched Lay to sound out Curtis Hebert, already named by Bush to chair the FERC in January 2001. Hebert told the New York Times that Lay offered him a deal: Support Enron’s position on electricity deregulation and you can keep your job; otherwise, it’s sayonara. Hebert, with a top staffer listening in on the conversation, refused the quid pro quo. Three months later—surprise, surprise—Bush fired Hebert and replaced him with Lay’s handpicked candidate, Patrick Wood. For Lay, that was just the beginning of extraordinary influence and access. In the White House, George Bush has surrounded himself with no fewer than seventeen former Enron executives or consultants. They include Chief Economic Advisor Larry Lindsay, Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and

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campaign strategist Ralph Reed, all former Enron consultants; Republican National Committee Chairs Marc Racicot and Ed Gillespie, former lobbyists for Enron; and Army Secretary Thomas White, former vice chairman of Enron Energy Services. Ken Lay was also the only businessman granted a private meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney to discuss the administration’s draft energy policy. The meeting paid off. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) identified seventeen policies in Cheney’s final report that directly benefited Enron. When meeting with Cheney, long-range energy policy wasn’t the only item on Lay’s agenda. He also handed the vice president a memo arguing immediate administration opposition to temporary caps on wholesale electricity prices as requested by Governor Gray Davis in response to California’s rolling blackouts. The very next day—mere coincidence?— Cheney told the L.A. Times he was opposed to price caps, for the reasons outlined for him by Enron’s chairman. It was later determined by the FEC that California’s energy crisis was manipulated by Enron and other Texas energy firms. Ken Lay also had enough clout at the White House to get both the vice president and the secretary of state to do some personal lobbying for him. Since 1992, Enron had been pushing to develop a big liquefied natural gas plant in Dabhol, India. Rejected by the World Bank, the project was floundering until 2001, when the new Bush administration quickly adopted it as its own. As reported in the Washington Post, both Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell lobbied for Dabhol in meetings with key Indian officials. The National Security Council even formed a “Dabhol Working Group” inside the White House. And if Indian leaders still had any doubts about the Bush administration’s priorities, they were dispelled when Christine Rocca, the new U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia, told a New Delhi conference on foreign investment: “From an

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American perspective, as I’m sure you’ve all heard before, many of India’s problems in this regard can be summed up in one five-letter word: ENRON.” In other words, take care of Enron and we’ll get off your back. Kenny Boy was well served. But, of course, ever since Enron ran into so much legal trouble, George Bush is taking no more money from them. Right? Wrong! While Enron’s former executives are fighting to stay out of jail, its new CEO Joseph W. Sutton and other executives have already contributed to Bush’s reelection campaign. Bush and Enron are joined at the hip.

Alaska Wilderness for Sale Okay, I know it’s no big surprise. You would expect two oilmen, Bush and Cheney, to get the financial support of fellow oilmen. Still, the amount of their support is stunning. In 1990, oil and gas companies split their contributions 60–40, Republicans getting the larger share. But once Bush was on the ticket, their evenhandedness disappeared. They initiated a power surge toward Republicans. In the 2000 and 2002 campaign cycles, 80 percent of all oil money went to Republicans. Led by Enron, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP Amoco and El Paso Energy, energy firms contributed a whopping $46,597,334 to George Bush and other federal Republican campaigns. Democrats captured only $12,017,376. Oil companies must have wanted something really badly in order to part with all that money. Quid pro quo. Here’s what they got: Alaska! And the entire western United States! Back in the 1950s, when oil companies won the rights to drill for oil in 95 percent of the pristine Alaskan coastline, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower suggested that 5 percent be set aside as permanent wilderness area—so there would al-

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ways be a small piece of original Alaska left undeveloped. He signed legislation in 1958 creating the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWAR. Forty-six years later, George Bush is hell bent on destroying it. Drilling for oil in the ANWAR is the centerpiece of Dick Cheney’s energy policy and the key plank in the Bush energy bill, still pending in Congress as of April 2004. Democrats have blocked it so far, but Bush is still determined to hand the ANWAR over to the oil companies. He’s so determined, that when an April 2002 report of the Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey warned about the impact of oil drilling on caribou, snow geese and other wildlife, the White House told Secretary Gale Norton to tell her scientists to shut up. Yet, as big a prize as the ANWAR is, that’s not all oil companies got for their dollar. Bush’s energy bill also includes a provision limiting liability of manufacturers of MTBE, a gasoline additive identified as a major source of water pollution across the country. That’ll help keep Exxon Mobil happy. Quid pro quo. At the Interior Department, former oil lobbyist Steven Griles has also delivered for big oil: opening up seven national monuments—including Utah’s magnificent Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients National Monument—to oil and gas drilling. The list goes on and on. Other paybacks by George Bush to oil and gas companies include: • Streamlining energy permits. Since 2001, the Bush administration has approved 34 percent more oil and gas permits on federal lands than during Bill Clinton’s first three years. • Drilling in the Rocky Mountains. The White House Task Force on Energy Streamlining—a sub-creature of Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force—has established a Rocky Mountains Energy Council to speed up drilling for gas in the Rocky Mountains.

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• Drilling in a National Park. Interior Secretary Gale Norton okayed drilling for gas in the Padre Island National Seashore, off the coast of Texas, the first time ever that drilling has been permitted in a national park. • Drilling in the Powder River Basin. Over the objections of local ranchers, the Bureau of Land Management proposed 51,444 new coal-bed methane wells in this environmentally sensitive area, covering parts of Montana and Wyoming. • Drilling off the California Coast. The Bush administration tried unsucessfully to allow more oil drilling in federal waters off the coast of California. Republican congressmen from California, worried about their own reelection, shot down that proposal. Bottom line: Big Oil has had a Big Smile on its face ever since Big Oilmen George Bush and Dick Cheney made it to the White House.

Tax Cuts For Sale According to the Center for Public Integrity, seven out of President Bush’s top ten career contributors are financial firms. Which is surprising, since none of them were in the top ten in 2000. But they made up for lost time, once he got to the White House. As of January 1, 2004, here’s what they gave: Merrill Lynch & Co. MBNA Corp. Credit Suisse First Boston Bass Brothers Enterprises Int’l Bank of Commerce

$505,500 $493,291 $444,700 $392,427 $371,200

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$353,350 $342,949

That’s a lot of money for financial firms to be “investing” in politics, especially at a time when the economy’s in the dumps and the market’s in the basement. They must have felt their investment in George Bush would pay off. And it did. Quid pro quo. Here’s what they got in return: 1. Dividend tax cut. Prompting more people to sell more stock, which means more transaction fees for Wall Street firms. 2. Offshore tax shelters. The Bush White House has resisted efforts led by Democrats in Congress to crack down on American companies and high-net-worth individuals, represented by big financial firms, that move money overseas to escape taxes. 3. Bankruptcy “reforms.” MBNA’s baby, making it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy and thus easier for banks to squeeze people just holding on. Clinton vetoed this legislation. Bush, of course, says he’ll sign it. 4. Social Security privatization. Not yet delivered, but long the cherished dream of Wall Street. The more people who take their money out of Social Security and gamble it on the market, the more money for big brokers.

Prescription Drug Plan for Sale Drug manufacturers, who are in the most profitable industry in the United States, also rank near the front of the pack of Bush’s special interest contributors, and have also been handsomely rewarded. They used to bend over backward, trying to look and seem

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bipartisan. In 1992, for example, drug companies together gave a total $2.5 million to Republicans and $2.4 million to Democrats. Even Steven. But no longer. With Republicans now in control of the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, the GOP has benefited from a lopsided share of contributions from pharmaceutical companies. In 2002, all drug companies combined contributed $16.3 million to Republicans—but only $4.4 million to Democrats. Or, take a look at the big five donors to both parties: BristolMyers Squibb, Pfizer, Pharmacia Corporation (now merged with Pfizer), Eli Lilly and Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America. In 2000 and 2002, they gave $11.2 million—87 percent of their total contributions—to various Republican committees, and only $1.7 million to Democrats. Quid pro quo. In return they got a Medicare prescription drug plan they wrote themselves. The final Medicare bill passed by Congress and signed into law gives drug companies everything they asked for. It prohibits the federal government from negotiating with them for lower prices, thereby letting them jack up prices every year. It prohibits importing drugs from Canada, allowing manufacturers to continue to inflate prices Americans must pay. And it forces millions of seniors off Medicare and into HMOs, where they will have to pay even more for drugs and get even less protection. For a $16 million investment, America’s pharmaceutical companies will reap billions of dollars in long-term profits— and America’s seniors simply get screwed. Congressman Dick Gephardt gave the best instant analysis of Bush’s prescription drug plan: “This is a continuation of this administration and the Republican party selling out government to the special interests.” Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly got its own special reward from the Bush administration. Tucked away in the homeland security legislation signed by the president was an amendment

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immunizing Eli Lilly from any lawsuits related to vaccines it produces. Special friend, special favors. That’s how the Bush administration works.

National Monuments for Sale For some industries, a change of administration might not make a lot of difference. New faces, same old gas. But not for the mining industry. For them, the difference between Bill Clinton and George Bush was night and day. As we will see in more detail in “Reason #8—The Environment,” the Clinton administration adopted tough new regulations banning prospecting and mining in most of our national monuments—on the old-fashioned idea that, as public lands, they should be preserved for present and future generations of Americans to enjoy, not gutted for short-term profit. Trusting that such a radical Marxist concept as preservation of natural lands would never clutter the brain of a former oilman, the mining industry placed their bets on George W. Bush—and won big time. More than they ever dreamed. In 2000 and 2002, the five largest mining companies— Peabody Energy, Addington Enterprises, Freeport-McMoRan, Boich Group and the National Mining Association—gave $2.4 million, 89 percent of all their contributions, to national Republican committees. They sprinkled a mere $309,000 on Democrats. Quid pro quo. Here’s what they got in return: They won the lottery! First: Two representatives of Peabody Energy were invited to sit on Vice President Cheney’s energy task force. Second: Marc Racicot, the governor with the worst environmental record in the West, after George Bush, became Republican National Chairman. As governor of Montana, Racicot signed legislation freeing mining companies from having to refill

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all open pits once mines were exhausted. He also opposed a ban on the use of cyanide in new gold mines. After helping Bush out in the Florida recall, he moved to Washington and became a lobbyist for mining, utility, timber and energy companies, including Enron. Third: Washington’s top lobbyist for coal, oil and mining companies was made deputy secretary of interior. J. Steven Griles had served under Ronald Reagan’s notorious Interior Secretary James Watt, where he endeared himself to special interests by championing offshore drilling along the California coast and practically giving away oil-shale leases on federal lands. He left Interior to join United Coal Company and then founded his own lobbying firm, National Environmental Strategies. At Bush’s invitation, he went back to Interior in the number two slot, ready to complete the environmental destruction he had begun under Reagan. Joining Griles at Interior: David Lauriski, a coal industry veteran of three decades, named assistant secretary for mine safety and health. And former Peabody Coal lobbyist Tomas Sansonetti got the job of assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources at the Department of Justice. With Racicot lobbying the White House, Griles and others directing Interior and Sansonetti delivering the Justice Department, the fix was in. Mining rigs were soon, once again, busy drilling on public lands.

Clean Air for Sale As governor of Texas, George Bush became the laughingstock of the country by suggesting there was no need for tough air pollution regulations. Given the chance, he insisted, utilities and refineries would clean up their emissions “voluntarily.” It worked so well that Houston, under George Bush, actu-

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ally replaced Los Angeles as the American city with the dirtiest air. And Texas became the nation’s number one polluter. But now the joke’s on us. Because George Bush has brought that same insane policy to the White House—as payback to the coal companies and electric utilities. In 2000 and 2002, the nation’s top five electric utilities that write political checks— Dominion Resources, Southern Company, Exelon Corporation, Texas Utilities and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association—gave $5.1 million, 74 percent of all contributions, to Bush and fellow Republicans. They gave Democrats $1.8 million. Quid pro quo. Here’s what they got in return: a gutted Clean Air Act—and the right to continue polluting. The original Clean Air Act was signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1972. In 1977, Congress added the so-called “New Source Review” rules, requiring coal-burning utilities to install new pollution control devices on existing plants. By the year 2001, many utilities were coming up against a deadline: Either clean up or shut down. First, they needed a lobbyist. Enter RNC Chair Marc Racicot. Next, they needed a savior. Enter President George W. Bush. And— presto!—the utilities were off the hook. With Orwellian flair, Bush announced his “Clear Skies Initiative,” which gutted the mandatory cleanup requirements of the Clean Air Act and replaced them with a voluntary cleanup wish list. The initiative not only gives companies more time to reduce emissions, it also gives them the right to enter into trade-offs with other factories in order to pollute even more— and it leaves power plants, which contribute 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, totally off the hook. According to his own EPA, Bush’s plan will allow power companies to burn more coal, generate 50 percent more sulfur emissions and millions more tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, allow three times more mercury emissions than current

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law and delay by up to ten years cuts in pollution required by the former Clean Air Act. “Clean Skies,” indeed. Those who write the big checks get to dirty the air. Those of us who don’t, get to breathe it.

America for Sale Financial firms, pharmaceuticals, utilities and energy companies weren’t the only special interests to buy their way into George Bush’s heart. There are countless other cases of special treatment in return for piles of campaign cash. Here are five more examples.

Ergonomics The country’s major retailers—led by Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Sears, Roebuck—gave 66 percent of their contributions to Republicans in 2000, and another 69 percent in 2002. Quid pro quo. In return, the Bush administration killed tough worker protection rules on ergonomic injuries—rules adopted by the Clinton administration after twelve years of public hearings, started under the first President Bush. Bush Jr. held no hearings before canceling the new rules. After all, it’s not as if Bush’s fat cat cronies type their own memos. Carpal tunnel syndrome is somebody else’s problem.

Where’s the Beef? In 2000, the livestock industry showered 79 percent of its campaign cash on George Bush and other Republicans. GOP candidates for Congress also received 75 percent of the industry’s contributions in 2002. Quid pro quo. In return, President Bush named Alisa Harrison, former director of public relations for the National Cattle-

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men’s Beef Association, as spokesperson for Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman; and Dale Moore, chief lobbyist for the same cattlemen’s association, as Veneman’s chief of staff. Under their “leadership,” the department opposed legislation requiring inspection of all sick, or “downer,” cows—like the one discovered with mad cow disease in late 2003. Bowing to pressure from cattlemen to go easy on the industry, department inspectors tested only twenty thousand cattle for mad cow disease in 2003—out of 35 million slaughtered for human consumption.

Tobacco Road Surgeon generals of both Republican and Democratic presidents have come down hard on cigarette smoking. Still, tobacco companies bet on more sympathy from George W. Bush and fellow Republicans than they ever got from Bill Clinton. In 2000—led by RJ Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard—tobacco companies gave GOP candidates 84 percent of their contributions. In 2002, 79 percent. Quid pro quo. In return, they got instant relief from a lawsuit filed against the tobacco industry by the Clinton administration, charging tobacco companies with racketeering and lying about the dangers of smoking. John Ashcroft has put the case “on hold” while he gives it a careful “review.” Take my word for it. It’s only a matter of time before he drops the lawsuit.

Duct Tape We all remember how home owners panicked when Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge suggested how they might protect their families against a future terrorist attack: “You may want to have a safe shelter for four or six hours,” he told Jim Lehrer on PBS. “So you may need that duct tape.” Stores soon ran out of duct tape, of course, and manufacturers had to

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go into overtime to meet the demand. What do you know? Two days after Ridge appeared on PBS, the Washington Post reported that 46 percent of the duct tape manufactured in the country is made in a plant in Avon, Ohio, owned by Jack Kahl—who just happens to be a Bush “Pioneer,” having raised over $100,000 for George Bush’s 2000 campaign.

Fit or Fat? There’s no doubt which side of the aisle the Grocery Manufacturers of America are on. In 2000, 91 percent of their campaign contributions were handed to Republicans, starting with George W. Bush. They upped the ante in 2002, giving GOP candidates 96 percent of all checks written. Quid pro quo. The Bush administration opposed a major World Health Organization initiative to combat obesity, making the United States the only Western nation to do so. In its letter to WHO, Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it does not believe that “energy-dense foods” like candy, colas and higher-fat dairy products “are linked to non-communicable diseases and obesity.” How could the Bush administration denounce a plan unanimously endorsed by health scientists and nutritionists worldwide? Easy. The only opposition came from the Grocery Manufacturers of America and the Sugar Association, led by “Sugar King” Pepe Fanjul, a Bush “Pioneer.” Over the years, Fanjul raised millions of dollars from Florida sugar captains for candidates George H. W. Bush, Jeb Bush and George W. Bush. This was his payback. How sweet it is. The generosity of George Bush to his fat cat contributors knows no bounds. It doesn’t even stop at the water’s edge. If there’s a checkbook Republican who needs help, George W. Bush will go anywhere to answer the call. All the way to the backyards of Baghdad.

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Iraq for Sale President Bush has been accused by some Democrats, even some members of Congress, of going to war against Iraq just to benefit American oil companies. That’s one charge, and maybe the only charge, against George Bush that I don’t sign onto. I don’t believe President Bush went to war in Iraq for the oil. I think he went to war for a whole bunch of phony reasons, starting with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. But there’s no doubt about this: Once the war was over, he took care of his corporate cronies. He made sure they got all the contracts. Bush’s first move was to cut out of competition every country but the UK and other members of his so-called “coalition of the willing.” No contracts for firms from any country that did not support George Bush’s private war and send troops. You didn’t play, so we don’t pay, said Bush. This, of course, was sheer madness, with a huge dollop of arrogance on top. Having pissed off half of the world by going to war without the endorsement of the United Nations, he pissed off the other half by shutting most members of the UN out of the rebuilding of Iraq. Once again, it was Amateur Hour at the White House. Actually, long before that, even before the war began on March 20, George Bush had set the wheels in motion to punish his enemies—like Germany, Russia and, especially, France— and reward his friends—like Halliburton and Bechtel. Six American firms were exclusively invited to submit bids for $900 million in contracts to rebuild Iraq’s water systems, roads, oil pipelines, bridges, schools and hospitals after the war. Here’s what they gave: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, between 1999 and 2002, Bechtel Group, Fluor Corp., Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, Parsons Corp. and Washington Group International offered up

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$3.6 million in campaign contributions, 66 percent of which went to George Bush and fellow Republicans. Quid pro quo. Here’s what they got in return: unlimited federal funding. USAID gave Bechtel Corp. an initial grant of $34 million to begin rebuilding Iraq’s electricity grid, power generation facilities, water and sewer systems and airports. The contract provides for paying Bechtel up to $680 million over the next eighteen months. But Halliburton was Iraq’s big winner. Which, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s former boss. Nor with the fact that Cheney doubled the firm’s contributions to Republicans when he was CEO. Nope, of course not. The Cheney-Iraq-Halliburton link was so obvious that latenight comic David Letterman joked about an urgent telephone call Cheney made to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “When you write out the checks, don’t forget that Halliburton has two L’s!” On March 25, 2003, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown & Root an open-ended contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil fields. No other firm was asked, or given the opportunity, to bid on the project. At first, the Army refused to reveal the price of the contract. They later admitted to California Congressman Henry Waxman that the total estimated cost of the contract could potentially reach $7 billion. That’s right. Up to $7 billion handed out, with no competitive bid. Huffed the New York Times: “This looks like naked favoritism and undermines the Bush administration’s portrayal of the war as a campaign for disarmament and democracy, not lucre.” The New York Times is wrong. It doesn’t look like favoritism. It is favoritism. And it’s made even worse by news reports that, while rebuilding the pipelines, Kellogg, Brown &

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Root was charging the Army $2.27 a gallon for gasoline imported from Kuwait. Local merchants were selling the same gasoline for $1 a gallon. When Pentagon auditors discovered that Kellogg, Brown & Root may have overcharged the government—that’s us!—$61 million for deliveries of gasoline from Kuwait, they canceled the contract. And Halliburton had to fire a handful of employees accused of taking up to $6 million in kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor. Halliburton responded the way any American company in trouble does: They hired a PR firm, ran full-page ads in major newspapers and aired syrupy TV commercials bragging about all the good work Halliburton does and ending with the slogan: “Proud to serve our troops.” They forgot to add: “Even if we do cheat on them.” For George Bush’s fat cat friends, postwar Iraq became the new California Gold Rush. Bush’s 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, even quit his job as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to start his own consulting firm called New Bridge Strategies. Their sole mission: to help American firms friendly to George Bush get contracts in Iraq. With George Bush, nothing is sacred. Even the war in Iraq ended up an exercise in pure political payback.

Crony Capitalism By now, I think you get the point. And I hope you feel the outrage. This is not the way public policy should be decided. For government to do its job well, there has to be a delicate balance between what’s best for business and what’s best for the American people. Sometimes they’re one and the same. Sometimes they’re not. And when they collide, government must

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wisely seek the path that will do the most good for the most people. But, as we’ve seen, both here and abroad, that’s never the way it is under George Bush. For him, whatever special interests want, special interests get—as long as they’ve greased his political palm first. The public be damned. Well, I say: Enough is enough. As Jim Hightower put it, “Before you clean up the water, you’ve got to get the hogs out of the creek.” The only way to get rid of the corporate hogs and clean up this government is to get rid of the man who turned the hogs loose in the first place. For putting special interests over the public interests . . . For putting America on the auction block . . . For selling America off to the highest bidder . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # SEVEN

Foreign Policy: He Ruined America’s Standing in the World “I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.” George W. Bush September 27, 2000

We should have known we’d have a problem with George Bush when it came to foreign policy. After all, before running for president his principal foreign travel experience consisted of slipping south of the border for a cerveza. As a candidate, his obvious lack of foreign travel, experience or curiosity became the fodder of late night comedians. And no wonder. George Bush made Dan Quayle sound like a Rhodes scholar. Governor Bush promised to “keep good relations with the Grecians.” He looked forward to the day when “Kosovians can move back in.” He admitted to a Slovak journalist: “The only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned firsthand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas.” He obviously didn’t learn much. His meeting had actually been with the foreign minister of Slovenia. He said he understood that the world today is more complicated than it used to be. “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us

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versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.” And he vowed to keep us safe: “We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” With that warm-up act, we should have known what to expect. Just what we got. Disaster.

Making Enemies, Not Friends The reason George Bush knows so little about other countries is that he just doesn’t care. Before he became president he had no interest in what other people around the world thought—and he has displayed little interest since. As we will see in Reason #9, George Bush has broken a lot of promises as president. One of the biggest is the promise he made to cooperate with other nations. In a spirit of humility, no less. “I think the United States must be humble, and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out for themselves how to chart their own course,” he said during the primaries. Baloney. This cowboy from Texas is a lot of things. But one thing he’s not is—humble! In fact, in foreign policy, he’s proven to be just the opposite. In place of a “humble” foreign policy, he’s delivered the most arrogant, in-your-face, I-don’tgive-a-shit-what-you-think, stubborn and presumptuous foreign policy this country has ever seen. He promised “purpose without arrogance.” He’s given us “arrogance without purpose” instead. Ironically, it was George W. Bush himself, in a debate with Al Gore, who predicted what would follow if we treated other countries like he has for the last three and a half years. Asked how to deal with anti-Americanism, he replied: “It really depends on how our nation conducts itself in foreign policy. If

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we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.” And what do you know? Under George Bush, we became an arrogant nation, and now the world does resent us. In three short years, under the “Toxic Texan,” the United States has gone from one of the most beloved nations on earth to one of the most despised—despite the enormous reservoirs of goodwill and compassion directed toward the United States in the wake of September 11. A June 2003 poll by the BBC found that 60 percent of Indonesians, 71 percent of Jordanians and even 25 percent of Canadians perceived the United States as a greater threat to world peace than the al Qaeda terrorist network. An October 2003 Gallup poll found that an average 53 percent of Europeans thought the United States “posed a threat to peace.” In that category, the U.S. tied for second with North Korea and Iran. We were deemed more dangerous than Pakistan, Syria, Libya, China, Afghanistan and Iraq. Even in countries whose governments officially supported the war in Iraq, there was widespread distrust of America. In Spain, only 14 percent of the population expressed a favorable view of the United States. In Italy, only 34 percent. In both countries, before the war, it was over 70 percent. According to a March 2004 Pew Research Center poll conducted in nine countries—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United States— only in Britain and the United States did a majority of people believe that the American-led war on global terrorism was sincere. President Bush’s own ratings also tanked. An earlier, August 2001, Pew Research Center poll found only 29 percent approval for Bush in Italy, which supported the Iraq war. Among war opponents, he fared even worse: 23 percent approval in Germany, 16 percent in France.

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But it’s not just the personal reputation of George W. Bush that’s on the line. It’s the image and worldwide standing of the United States of America. “For the first time since World War II,” warns Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow Robert Kagan in the New York Times, “America is suffering a crisis of international legitimacy.” In short, with his cowboy grandstanding and imperial presidency, George Bush has undermined America’s power and credibility.

Insisting on Going It Alone To appreciate how much damage George Bush has done to our standing in the world, you must first understand where we stood when he took office. Since Woodrow Wilson, every president, Republican and Democrat, has entered into treaties and alliances with other countries in order to resolve both national security and human rights issues. At the height of America’s military might, when we led nations of the free world to victory in World War II and the Cold War, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman used America’s power to create and sustain international institutions— because they knew, and experience had shown, that was the only way to spread democratic values around the world, and build a lasting foundation for world peace. Bush doesn’t echo Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman, as some of his supporters suggest. He contradicts them. He disdains international alliances and seems to believe we can force democracy on other nations at gunpoint. What George Bush doesn’t seem to understand is this: His predecessors didn’t enter into global alliances out of weakness, but at the time of our greatest strength. And these other presidents didn’t seek international partners for altruistic purposes

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only. They were sought mainly out of self-interest. They did it because it was good for the United States. In their book American Unbound, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay of the Brookings Institution point out the fatal flaw in Bush’s insistence on the unilateral exercise of American power: “The most important foreign policy challenges America faced—whether defeating terrorism, reversing weapons proliferation, promoting economic prosperity, safeguarding political liberty, sustaining the global environment, or halting the spread of killer diseases—could not be solved by Washington alone. They required the active cooperation of others.” And, course, by working together with fellow nations on some issues, we gain respect, trust, legitimacy and allies—for dealing with others. It’s not complicated. It’s like dealing with your neighbors. If you treat them like scum—never say hello, never ask their advice on common problems, never join the neighborhood cleanup brigades—they probably won’t go out of their way to help you when your car gets stuck in a snowbank. It’s the same way with relations between countries. At one time, it looked like George W. Bush had learned this basic lesson from his old man, who, for all his faults on the domestic side, understood the healthy logic of promoting international goodwill. In his second debate with Al Gore, Bush Jr. said: “It’s important to be friends with people when you don’t need each other so that when you do there’s a strong bond of friendship.” Nice words, but his actions as president prove that they were only scripted: George W. Bush still doesn’t get it. After the end of the Cold War, the United States was recognized as the world’s only remaining superpower. Our military might was well known—and feared. Yet at the same time, until George W. Bush, we were respected as a welcome partner in

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solving many peacetime global problems: nuclear proliferation, global warming, poverty, AIDS, acid rain, endangered species and pollution of the seas, among others. Moreover, worldwide respect for the United States developed into something much deeper after September 11. Once the shocking and indelible images of the World Trade Center towers falling were broadcast around the world, people everywhere reached out to give the United States one huge, international hug. Respect turned to empathy and sympathy, and even to love. A headline in Le Monde, hardly the cradle of positive attitude toward the United States, said it all: “We Are All Americans Now.” All those warm and fuzzy feelings, all that worldwide, positive support, all that love for the United States—has been squandered by the arrogance of George W. Bush. He has canceled almost every treaty the United States had signed. Even before, but especially after, September 11, he has thumbed his nose at other nations. He doesn’t consult with allies, he just informs them of what he’s already decided to do. And he sends them a clear message: “We don’t care what you think. You’re with us or against us. It’s my way or the highway.” Bush’s arrogance is an albatross around our necks. And in the chilling words of the Ancient Mariner, today among nations the United States stands “alone, alone, all, all alone.” With one exception: Tony Blair’s England. But not the English people themselves. They staged the largest demonstration in British history to protest their leader’s coziness with Bush. All the global goodwill toward the United States fostered by Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton has been lost in three years under George W. Bush. What they built up over decades, he has destroyed virtually overnight. In his first two years alone, George W. Bush reneged on more international treaties than any previous administration.

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The agreements he walked away from cover the whole range of problems facing the world today, problems that the United States could never hope to solve alone. As former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke summed it up, the Bush administration has presided over “a radical break with fifty-five years of a bipartisan tradition that sought international agreements and regimes of benefit to us.” George Bush wiped out decades of steady progress in arms control treaties, delivered mainly by Republican presidents. And in many cases, it’s even more serious than that. By canceling or rejecting certain international partnerships, he undermined the very policies, like the war on terrorism, his administration was pursuing at that time.

Biological Weapons Ironically, the first example of George Bush undercutting his own policies involved America’s hidden stockpile of biological WMD. The Biological Weapons Convention was established under President Nixon’s direction in 1972 to thwart the production, acquisition and stockpiling of biological weapons. It was endorsed and honored by 144 countries, including the United States—until George W. Bush took office. In August 2001, the Bush administration withdrew from the BWC, claiming that on-site inspections posed “national security” risks to the government and private industry. Question: If we’re not stockpiling biological weapons and if American companies aren’t manufacturing them—what do we have to fear from on-site inspections? George Bush still hasn’t answered that question. But his unilateral withdrawal did leave the United States in the unusual position of complaining about hidden biological weapons in Iraq while, at the same time, backing out of

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international controls over production and storage of the same weapons. Is consistency too much to expect from George W. Bush?

Star Wars In 1972, by signing the ABM Treaty, President Nixon also committed this country to refrain from building any missile defense system. The logic behind the treaty was clear: What one nuclear power saw as defense—stopping the flow of incoming missiles—its adversary might see as offense—enabling one country to fire off first-strike nuclear missiles without fear of retaliation—and therefore start building more nukes, just in case. Ten years later, President Reagan tried to revive the idea of missile defense, but it was quickly ridiculed by Senator Ted Kennedy as “Star Wars.” Even with Reagan’s starry-eyed lobbying, the idea never took off, for two important reasons. One, because building Star Wars meant scrapping the ABM Treaty. And two, because—despite spending $84.5 billion on research and testing—the damn system just didn’t work. Nobody could figure out how to hit a speeding bullet with another speeding bullet. And they still haven’t. Alas, neither argument means beans to George W. Bush. Had we given our word to the Soviet Union not to build a missile defense system? Oh, well. Too bad. We were going to do it, anyway. And, besides, the old Soviet Union no longer existed. In December 2001, refusing to consult with and ignoring the opposition of most of our European allies, Bush unilaterally pulled the United States out of the ABM Treaty. Would we go ahead and build a missile defense system before we knew it would work? Of course not, Bush insisted. He lied. In December 2002, with scientists still unable to demon-

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strate a successful Star Wars technology, the president announced that the United States was proceeding with construction of sites in Alaska and California. It’s what you might call “faith-based” Star Wars. We’re spending billions of dollars to build the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, based on George Bush’s faith that someday it will work—and that building it will not trigger another nuclear arms race. And, of course, Star Wars will do absolutely nothing against the threat of terrorism. George Bush says he’s leading the war on terror, but spending billions on a worthless missile defense system in Alaska will never protect us from today’s much more likely threat of a terrorist with a bomb in a briefcase or a Ryder truck filled with fertilizer.

Nuclear Weapons Testing Here’s one more treaty. Not yet broken. Simply ignored. In 1996, the United States joined 159 other nations of the world in signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which banned all nuclear testing of any size, anytime, anywhere. It is the most significant step ever taken to prevent nuclear proliferation. In 1999, President Clinton tried to get the treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate, but it was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms. When President Bush took office, he didn’t even try. Complaining there was no way to verify compliance, he simply announced he would never resubmit the treaty for ratification. Which, of course, frees the United States to begin production and testing of “battlefield” nuclear weapons, a pet project of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

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Small Arms Control At least on one point George Bush maintains a semblance of consistency. In his opposition to arms control, he doesn’t distinguish between big weapons or small. For decades, disarmament experts at the United Nations had worked on ways to control the proliferation of small arms. The result was a draft UN Accord on Small Arms, brought before the international community in the summer of 2001. Its goal: to stop the illegal sale of military weapons across international borders. Motherhood. Apple Pie. Nobody could be against it. Except the wannabe Texas gunslinger. President Bush didn’t just cancel U.S. participation in the Small Arms Control Accord. He said he was doing so because it violated the Second Amendment. Which, of course, is nonsense. Whatever the Second Amendment says about gun ownership, it certainly does not guarantee Americans the right to traffic in illegal military weapons. Bush was simply rewarding gun manufacturers who have bankrolled his campaigns and made the United States the world’s largest exporter of small arms.

Land Mines Getting rid of land mines was the favorite cause of Princess Diana. She led worldwide efforts to ban them. But were she still alive, not even Princess Diana’s charm could melt the cold heart of George Bush on this issue. Land mines are a scourge of the earth. Every year, fifteen to twenty thousand people in eighty nations are maimed or killed by land mines left behind by warring forces. As Lieutenant General Hal Moore, former chief of staff for U.S. Army Personnel, told Congress in December 2002: “The United States should

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eliminate from our arsenal this weapon that cannot tell the difference between child and soldier, and that lies in wait to produce grief and death.” Get rid of land mines? Hell, no. President Bush wants more. Here again, the United States stands almost alone. At last count, 142 nations had signed the 1997 Ottawa Land Mine Treaty, which requires countries to eliminate existing stockpiles of land mines within four years and destroy all existing land mines within ten years. Every member of NATO has signed, except the United States. Every country in the Western Hemisphere has signed, except the United States and Cuba. Apparently George Bush and Fidel Castro have more in common than a love of baseball. Of course, President Clinton didn’t sign the treaty, either. But he did issue a presidential directive for acceptance of the treaty by 2006, pending amendments. President Bush isn’t talking amendments. He wants nothing to do with the land mine treaty, period. He’s been convinced by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that the Army cannot defend South Korea without antipersonnel weapons and that it makes no sense trying to develop a less lethal, or “smarter,” alternative. In the first four years of the Ottawa treaty, 30 million land mines were destroyed by fifty-five signatory nations. At this rate, land mines could soon disappear from the face of the earth—except in those territories controlled by the United States. Not every treaty scuttled by George Bush had to do with disarmament. Here are a few others.

Offshore Banks Key to the war on terrorism and the war on drugs is the ability to track down the flow of illicit money through offshore

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banks. That also happens to be the key to tracking down American fat cats and corporations that either incorporate offshore or park their money in offshore banks in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes. So a working group of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development came up with a good idea. There are some thirty-five countries that prostitute themselves as tax havens. Why not pressure them with economic sanctions until they agree to open up bank records so that other nations, like the United States, could crack down on tax cheats and follow the money trail of drug dealers and global terrorist networks? Nab drug kingpins. Cut off funding for terrorists. Catch tax cheats. It’s a win-win-win. Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin enthusiastically signed on for the Clinton administration as part of its effort to break up the al Qaeda terrorist network. Surely, this was one Clinton initiative George Bush would stand up and salute. Nope. Under George Bush’s sophomoric rule of office—“If Bill Clinton did it, it must be wrong”—he yanked the U.S. out of the OECD anti–offshore tax shelter campaign. When you’re supposedly leading the war on terror, how do you justify not joining an effort to cut off the terrorists’ funding? Or how do you justify turning a blind eye to Americans who go offshore to avoid paying taxes? For George Bush, it was easy. He simply echoed the phony complaint of then Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey: “The OECD would create a global network of tax police.” The answer, Bush insisted, was not to chase down tax cheats. It was to lower tax rates so nobody would be tempted to cheat in the first place. Meanwhile, of course, while wealthy Americans enjoy their latest tax cut, terrorists, drug dealers and Bush’s fat cat cronies will continue to thrive in their closed-door, tax-free playpen of the Bahamas. Bush’s public spin on why he opposed the OCED campaign against tax shelters was so curious, reporters went looking for

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a better explanation—and soon found it. The real reason why the Bush administration didn’t want anything to do with cracking down on offshore banks was very simple: Bush and Cheney are old tax cheats themselves. Bush’s own Harken Energy Company had set up an offshore subsidiary in the Cayman Islands to hide potential revenues from its drilling operations in Bahrain. And Dick Cheney’s Halliburton registered as many as forty-four subsidiaries offshore while he was serving as CEO—one of which he used to do business with Saddam Hussein. You just can’t trust tax cheaters to crack down on tax cheaters, even if it does make it easier for terrorists to finance their evil.

International Criminal Court Here’s one thing Americans can agree on: We’re all glad to see former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic behind bars and on trial for war crimes. His trial sends a clear and strong message to other dictators around the world: You are not free to persecute your own people. You, too, can be brought to justice in an international court for crimes against humanity. We all know Milosevic won’t be the last bad egg to come to power. So who could oppose a permanent court to prosecute future Pol Pots or Saddam Husseins? Hard to imagine, but there’s one person I know: George W. Bush. The International Criminal Court is the most important human rights institution established in half a century. It’s a powerful tool in the global war against terror. Yet, from the beginning, the reaction of the United States toward its creation has been an embarrassment. Under George Bush, it’s been a crime. Again, the idea of an International Criminal Court is to establish a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals—not

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nations—accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The United States was one of only seven nations to vote against the Rome Treaty that created the court in 1998. The others were China, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Qatar and Israel. Two years later, under President Clinton, we finally joined 139 other nations in signing. By April 2002, sixty nations of the world had ratified the Rome Treaty, making the ICC official. That’s when George Bush swung into action. Despite its important role in the war on terror, he refused to ratify the treaty. He even threatened to withdraw our earlier signature. He signed legislation prohibiting the American government from cooperating with the court and authorizing the president to use any means to free American servicemen detained by the court. And the Bush administration threatened to withhold foreign aid—no relief when hurricanes strike Honduras and other Caribbean nations, for example— from countries that did not support Bush’s demand that Americans be given immunity from the court’s jurisdiction. What is George Bush afraid of? Why is he on the warpath against the International Criminal Court? He says it’s because it could be used to launch politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of U.S. civilians or military officials. Which is nonsense, of course, since the court has jurisdiction only over genocide, serious war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nobody expects American peacekeeping forces to engage in such atrocities. Besides, if the president is sincere about his concerns, he would talk with ICC leaders about language to protect American citizens. Instead, he’s sworn to have nothing to do with the court at all. Which just proves that George Bush’s real problem with the International Criminal Court is his disdain for any arena which the United States does not totally control. To him, anything that smacks of international cooperation or partnership is instantly suspect.

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So, once again, George Bush makes us all look like hypocrites in the eyes of the world. We beg other nations to join us in a global war on terror. Yet we reject the very tribunal created to bring international terrorists to justice.

Global Warming On January 4, 2004, in its travel section, the Sunday New York Times reported a major problem for Argentina’s tourism industry: The glaciers in Patagonia are melting at an alarming rate of ten cubic miles a year. On January 8, on its front page, the Times reported the results of a study of wildlife habitat decline by a team of nineteen international scientists. If it continues at its present rate, they concluded, global warming will drive 15 to 36 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century. On January 14, in its science section, the Times reported a serious new obstacle for oil companies hunting for oil in Alaska. As a practical matter, Arctic tundra must be frozen and snow-covered for seismic vehicles to search for underground oil reserves. But because of rising temperatures, the tundra no longer remains frozen enough, long enough. All of which leads to one of two conclusions: Either global warming is real, or the New York Times is part of a worldwide conspiracy to con everybody into believing it’s real. Only George W. Bush could buy the conspiracy theory. And he has. As discussed in more detail in our next chapter, along with nuclear proliferation, global warming is one of the most serious problems facing humankind today. We’re either going to blow ourselves up or pollute ourselves to death. Every scientist not on the payroll of the coal companies or utilities agrees on what’s happening. In a report released in

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February 2004, even Pentagon scientists agreed: the polar caps are melting. Human activity, especially the release of greenhouse gases, is contributing to the problem. Global warming is real, and steps must be taken now to avoid environmental and economic disaster. As the number one producer of greenhouse gases—with only 5 percent of the world’s population, we produce 30 percent of the emissions that cause global warming—the United States has a particular responsibility to clean up its act. Which is why President Clinton signed the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, calling on all developed nations to cut industrial emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2012. Well aware of Republican opposition in Congress, Clinton never sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Nevertheless, George Bush took office with two of his cabinet members— Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and EPA Director Christie Whitman—publicly warning of the dangers of global warming and urging immediate government action. President Bush took action, all right. He told O’Neill and Whitman to shut the hell up. And he announced that the United States would no longer have anything to do with Kyoto. We need more study, Bush insisted. So he commissioned a new study by the National Academy of Sciences. When that report confirmed the existence of global warming and the need for government action, Bush promised to again take action—and did so in the most cynical fashion. He unveiled a plan asking utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions voluntarily. After all, no problem is serious enough for Bush to require his corporate pals to do anything. Under George Bush, we remain the world’s biggest polluter, yet continue to do nothing. The future of the planet be damned. Do you see a pattern here? Do you understand why other nations are getting pissed off?

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But wait. George Bush was just getting started. Next came the announcement that really turned most of the world against the United States: Imperial Bush’s doctrine of unilateral warfare.

Preemptive War President Bush’s speech at West Point in June 2002, outlining a new national security strategy, was the most arrogant act of any occupant of the White House in our history. In declaring a new American doctrine of preemptive war, Bush did more than just abrogate one treaty. He rejected the wisdom and experience of every president before him. As if he alone knew better than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt or even his own father. From that June date on, America’s relationship to the world was divided into two eras: BGW and AGW: “Before George W.” and “After George W.” As evolved during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the basic principles guiding foreign policy “Before George W.” were twofold: Sovereign nations had a right to conduct their own affairs, as long as they did not interfere with the rights and territory of their neighbors—or, a new cause embraced late in the last century, practice genocide against their own people. When they did so, and when diplomacy failed to correct the situation, friendly nations had the duty to band together and restore order. America helped shape that foreign policy, and vowed to set the example for the rest of the world. Never again, it was understood, would the United States go to war alone. We would opt for war only as a last resort and only in partnership with other nations: with NATO in Kosovo, with the United Nations in Bosnia and Desert Storm. Preemptive war was not prohibited, but it was limited to very special circumstances: When

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one country was under direct, clear and imminent threat and there was no other way to meet the danger. It was the grand exception, not the rule. “After George W.,” the world is turned upside down. At least as far as the United States is concerned. According to the new Bush doctrine, preemptive war is now the rule, not the exception. We are the United States, says Imperial President George Bush. We are the only superpower. We were attacked on September 11, so that makes us special. From now on, we can do whatever we want. We can go anywhere, anytime, and overthrow any regime we think may someday be a threat to the United States. “You’re either with us or against us.” And, of course, if necessary, we will go it alone. We don’t want, and we don’t need, anybody else’s support. Adding insult to injury, Bush insisted that toppling other regimes was the way to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Get it? Send in the Marines. Overthrow a dictator. Everyone will love the United States for doing so and immediately show their love by adopting our American form of government. War is Bush’s way of making a thousand democracies bloom. That expression of presidential ignorance and arrogance is enough to make even some conservatives shudder. In the pages of his magazine, The American Conservative, my MSNBC colleague and thrice presidential candidate Pat Buchanan lamented that “The conservative movement has been hijacked and turned into a globalist, interventionist, open-borders ideology, which is not the conservative movement I grew up with.” But if it caused concern at home among liberals and conservatives alike, Bush’s egregious doctrine inflicted serious damage abroad, among friend and foe. The new Bush doctrine generated more hostility among Arab nations, who knew that preemptive war was almost exclusively aimed, and would soon be used against, Muslims. It also drove a wedge between the

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United States and our oldest European allies—who had experienced terrorist attacks long before we did—but never felt it gave them the right to flout international law. As many pointed out at the time, there was another serious problem with the doctrine of preemptive war: If it works for the United States, it works for everybody else. Otherwise, there is one law for the United States and another law for the rest of the world. Imagine the consequences of the Bush principle whereby a unilateral strike is justified only by suspicion about what a hostile regime might someday do: India invades Pakistan, Israel invades Syria, China launches an attack on Taiwan and South Korea declares war on North Korea. Charles Pena, senior defense policy analyst at the Cato Institute, argues that Bush’s assertion of the right to launch preemptive wars will make the world less safe, not more. “The Bush Doctrine fails on two counts,” he wrote in a Cato position paper. “It might work against countries such as Iraq that have no real military capability that threatens the United States, which, of course, begs the question of why they are threats to begin with. But it does not work against countries that actually acquire nuclear weapons. And that is the lesson North Korea has taken away from U.S. policy and actions against Iraq. Rather than dissuading countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Bush Doctrine actually creates incentives for countries to get nukes as quickly as possible.” And, of course, the argument of preemptive war, or “anticipatory self-defense,” is what Japan claimed as justification for its attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the day that President Roosevelt declared would “live in infamy.” Today, says presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger, because of Bush’s first strike policy, it is the United States that lives in infamy. “The Bush doctrine converts us into the world’s judge, jury and executioner,” Schlesinger wrote in the Los Angeles

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Times in March 2003, “a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership.” As historian Paul Schroeder warns in The American Conservative: “We cannot want a world that operates on this principle, and therefore we cannot really want to use it ourselves.” If we don’t want preemptive wars all over the globe, we need to get rid of the man who started them here.

The War in Iraq President Bush applied his new doctrine for the first time in Iraq. We have already discussed how he misled this nation into war and failed to protect our troops during a long and deadly occupation. What must be stressed again here is the damage done to American foreign policy by the way Bush conducted the war in Iraq. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, George Bush damaged our standing in the Arab world. True, Saddam Hussein didn’t have many friends, even among Arab leaders, and they’re not sorry to see him out of power. But the questions remain: Why are American bombs dropping only on Muslim nations? And why wouldn’t George W. take the time to get other Arab nations on board, like his father did, before unleashing war on Iraq? Arab leaders were further insulted when Bush hired Madison Avenue whiz Charlotte Beers to lead a public relations campaign aimed at Muslims. To them and the rest of the world, Bush’s clear message was: Selling war is like selling soap. There’s nothing wrong with our policies, we’re just not doing a good enough job selling them. We don’t need a better product, we just need a better TV commercial. Nobody bought it. Beers quit.

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George Bush also damaged our standing in the United Nations. He brazenly claimed the United States was helping establish the legitimacy of the United Nations by punishing Saddam Hussein for violating sixteen different UN resolutions. In fact, he did just the opposite. He undermined the United Nations and insulted the intelligence of the rest of the world by attacking its inspectors, by refusing to consider the request to allow inspectors more time to uncover illegal weapons and by sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to deliver a pack of lies to the Security Council. George Bush also destroyed the mutual respect that had long existed between the United States and most of our European allies. He didn’t just regret their lack of support, he resented it and made no effort to understand it. As historians Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay write in their important study of Bush foreign policy, America Unbound, President Bush’s worldview “simply made no allowance for others’ doubting the purity of American motives.” In fact, in his first state visit to Europe, after listening to the complaints of fifteen European leaders about his new, go-it-alone foreign policy, Bush told them to get lost. As Bush himself related the discussion to former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, his response was: “I appreciate your point of view, but this is the American position because it’s right for America.” The war against “Old Europe” was led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The vilification of France was coordinated out of the White House, which banned French fries on Air Force One. Some wanted to ban sauerkraut also, to punish Germany. And Bush’s newest pal, Vladimir Putin, suddenly became an outcast. Among opponents of the war, only Pope John Paul II was not held up for ridicule. And, of course, once the war was over and the occupation begun, George Bush made matters worse by keeping countries

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that did not support the war from bidding on contracts to help rebuild Iraq. At first, he even blocked Canada from participating. It was one more application of his guiding principle: “It’s my way, or the highway.” Then he turned around and asked the very same nations he had just poked in the eye to forgive the debt owed to them by Iraq. In the end, Bush went to war in Iraq with only one significant ally, Great Britain. But, compared to three hundred thousand U.S. troops, Bush’s long-suffering poodle dog Tony Blair sent only thirty-thousand troops—and no money. As a result, American taxpayers got stuck, unnecessarily, with the entire bill for the $200 billion cost of the war in Iraq, and the openended cost, sure to exceed $200 billion, of reconstruction. What a contrast to the first Iraq war, Desert Storm, under the first President Bush. He admitted to the American people: “We have more will than wallet.” So he not only put together a bona fide coalition of partners to undertake the task of routing Iraqi forces from Kuwait, he persuaded them to pay 80 percent of the costs. One thing for sure: The closer you examine the foreign policy disasters of George W. Bush, the more you admire the wisdom of his father. Too bad some of it didn’t rub off. This apple didn’t fall anywhere near the tree. It wasn’t long before Bush Jr.’s cocky, we-don’t-need-youwe-don’t-want-you attitude began to backfire. And not just among historically testy and not always dependable allies, like the French. In November 2003, Bush couldn’t even visit England, our one major ally, without generating massive protests. Security forces were forced to shut down downtown London. Bush was able to cross the city only by helicopter. And he had to cancel a speech to Parliament, for fear of getting booed. The president was a prisoner within the walls of Buckingham Palace. But even there, Queen Elizabeth, perhaps unintentionally, had the last laugh. In her toast to Bush at the State Dinner, the British monarch effusively praised the United States for its

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history of joining the UK in transatlantic partnerships such as NATO, the Marshall Plan and the United Nations. “At the very core of the new international and multilateral order, which emerged after the shared sacrifices of that last terrible world war,” said the Queen, “was a vital dynamic trans-Atlantic partnership working with other allies to create effective international institutions.” She made this toast to a man who hasn’t met an international alliance yet he didn’t try to weasel out of. Did she confuse son with father? Was the Queen trying to send the son a message? If so, she failed. Sitting awkwardly in his rented white tie and tails, President Bush appeared not to hear the monarch. Perhaps her message got lost in translation. Two months later, Pope John Paul II delivered the same message in a Vatican meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney: “I encourage you and your fellow citizens to work at home and in the world for the growth of international cooperation.” The pontiff should have saved his breath. Cheney wasn’t listening, either.

Alone on Top of the World There is no disputing the facts. We no longer live in a bipolar world. In this new unipolar world, the United States is the sole superpower. This is the age of American hegemony. The question is: How does the United States conduct itself as the world’s only superpower in order to best serve our own interests and, since American foreign policy has always had a dual purpose, to advance America’s values around the world? In his unilateral assertion of American military might and his disdain for international alliances, George W. Bush could not have chosen a more destructive path if he tried. His new American order has generated a tsunami of anti-American sentiment around the globe.

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That’s bad enough. But it gets worse. George Bush’s erratic, if not downright hostile, behavior toward our traditional allies is not only juvenile, it’s dangerous. Because those nations are the very ones we need to fight the war on terror. Sometimes, listening to Bush, you have the feeling he believes terrorism was invented on September 11, 2001. Not so. Not by a long shot. Terrorism has been around for centuries. And several of our allies—especially Spain, Russia, Italy, France, Germany and the UK—have endured longer terrorist campaigns than we have. These are the countries with expertise. These are the friends whose assistance we most need in tracking down global terrorists and bringing them to justice. Yet just when our national security, more than ever, depends on close working relationships with our allies, George Bush flips them the international bird. According to the Brookings Institution’s Daalder and Lindsay, that’s the fatal flaw of the Bush go-it-alone foreign policy. It’s not just his style that turns people off, they conclude. “The deeper problem was that the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution—that America’s security rested on an America unbound [from foreign alliances]—was mistaken.” It will take decades for future presidents to repair the harm George W. Bush has done to America’s image around the world. Which is why we must get rid of him now, before he can do any more damage. For turning back the clock . . . For squandering over fifty years of goodwill toward the United States . . . For making millions of people around the world hate and mistrust us . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # EIGHT

The Environment: He’s the Worst President Ever “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.” George W. Bush September 29, 2000

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, Republican, Green or Independent—liberal, conservative or libertarian—if you care about the environment, if you appreciate clean air, clean drinking water and an occasional landscape uncluttered by billboards, strip malls or oil rigs—and if, like me, you want to leave our kids with a healthier planet than the one we inherited from our parents—then you should definitely vote against George W. Bush. Why? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of the nation’s leading environmental stewards, said it best: “George Bush will go down in history as America’s worst environmental president.” In its 2004 Presidential Report Card, the League of Conservation Voters gives President Bush “an overall grade of F.” Of course, George Bush professes just the opposite, painting himself as a latter-day John Muir. On the first Earth Day of his presidency, he declared: “Each of us understands that our prosperity as a nation will mean little if our legacy to future

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generations is a world of polluted air, toxic waste, and vanished forests.” Yet that’s exactly what he has delivered. Time and time again, George Bush chose protecting corporate profits over protecting the environment. Indeed, one word sums up his environmental policy: payback. Payback to the oil companies, developers, timber companies, utility executives and mining companies that financed his campaign. For them, at least, it was money well spent. For the breathing public, it was a disaster. The environment wasn’t a big issue in the 2000 election. Even though Governor George Bush left Texas with the dirtiest air and the weakest environmental rules in the country, most of us figured there was little damage he could do in the White House. After all, we were protected by the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act— all signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon and all honored, more or less, by every president since. Boy, were we wrong. George Bush has proceeded to dismantle every one of those legislative triumphs. In three and a half years, he has rolled back all the progress made in environmental protection over the last thirty-four years, ever since the first Earth Day, in 1970. His environmental record is so bad, it’s become a serious political liability for him and his party. In a confidential memo leaked last year to the New York Times, GOP consultant Frank Luntz warns: “The environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general—and President Bush in particular—are most vulnerable.”

Appointments Our first clue to George Bush’s disdain for the environment was the people he brought with him to Washington. This, of

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course, showed a lot of hard work on his part. It wasn’t easy to round up every American who didn’t give a shit about the environment. But George Bush kept turning over rocks and draining sewers until he’d found a whole herd of them, enough to fill most of the top jobs in his administration. They operate today as leaders of the Polluters Club—the exact opposite of the Sierra Club—out to destroy the environment, not protect it. And here they are: Name

Qualifications

Job

Dick Cheney

chair of big energy company, Halliburton

Vice President

Andrew Card

auto industry lobbyist

White House Chief of Staff

Condoleezza Rice

board member of Chevron

National Security Advisor

Gale Norton

protégé of James Watt Interior and cofounder of Secretary Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy—underwritten in part by the chemical and mining industries

J. Steven Griles

lobbyist for coal, natural gas and oil industries

Deputy Interior Secretary

Mike Leavitt

governor of Utah; worst environmental record of fifty governors.

EPA Administrator

Don Evans

CEO of Tom Brown, oil and gas company

Commerce Secretary

Ann Veneman

board member of Calgene, biotech company specializing

Agriculture Secretary

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(continued) Name

Qualifications

Job

in genetically engineered foods James Connaughton

lobbyist for ARCO, Alcoa and General Electric

Chair, White House Council on Environmental Quality

And those are just the top jobs. In scores of powerful but largely invisible positions today, scattered throughout the ranks of the EPA, Interior, Agriculture and Justice Departments, are anti-environmental zealots who spent their entire pre-Dubya careers fighting against the very laws and regulations they are now sworn to protect. Here are just a few examples: • Mark Rey, former lobbyist for the timber industry, is now agriculture undersecretary for natural resources and environment. • Linda J. Fisher, former lobbyist for Monsanto Chemical Company, is now deputy administrator of EPA. • Thomas Sansonette, former lobbyist for the coal industry, is now assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources. • Camden Toohey, former lobbyist for oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is now special assistant for Alaska in the Department of the Interior. • Rebecca Watson, former lawyer for the mining and timber industries, is now assistant secretary of the interior for land and minerals management. • P. Lynn Scarlett, former president of the Reason Foundation, an antiregulation think tank funded by the oil,

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chemical and munitions industries, is now assistant secretary of the interior for policy, management and budget. In fact, it was Lynn Scarlett who articulated the administration’s Alice-in-Wonderland defense of opening up public lands to mining and drilling: “We’re looking at them as working landscapes.” There is not one representative of any environmental organization in the entire Bush lineup. Not one. All environmental protection jobs have been given to anti-environmental lobbyists. Okay, to be fair, there was one—brief—exception. In the beginning, George Bush did appoint one solid environmentalist: former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman. But she was soon muzzled—and drummed out of town. In New Jersey, Whitman had earned a reputation as one of the nation’s leading pro-environment elected officials. She didn’t just hop on her bike and pedal around the countryside. She helped preserve and protect the Garden State’s most beautiful places. She created new parks, cracked down on polluters, offered incentives to keep farm lands in production and preserved more open space than any governor in the Garden State’s history. Imagine the delight of environmentalists when she was named the new administrator of the EPA under George W. Bush. But tree-huggers, starting with Whitman herself, were soon disappointed. Her first instructions from the White House were to reverse a Clinton administration order reducing the amount of arsenic in drinking water. Clinton had ordered the allowable amount of arsenic reduced from fifty to ten parts per billion. George Bush said: If Clinton did it, it must be wrong. He demanded the arsenic level be kept at fifty. And poor Christie Whitman had to deliver the news: Arsenic is good for you! Neither she nor Bush expected the public uproar that followed. Denouncing the EPA’s suspension of the Clinton standard as “a craven capitulation to the mining industry and other

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corporate interests at the expense of the health of millions of Americans,” the Natural Resources and Defense Council sued to block the move. Responding to Whitman’s lame excuse that more study was needed, public health officials pointed out that the previous level of 50 ppb dated back to 1942; that there had been decades of scientific review and public hearings on the issue; and that in 1999 the National Academy of Sciences had concluded that arsenic in drinking water causes bladder, lung and skin cancer, and might also cause kidney and liver cancer. Ten months later, stung by criticism, George Bush did an about-face and agreed to stick to the Clinton ruling of ten parts per billion. Of course, he never admitted that Bill Clinton was right and he was wrong. George Bush’s attempt to poison us with arsenic was a bad omen for what lay ahead.

Breaking His One Environmental Promise As a former oilman running for president, George Bush knew he needed at least one green stripe on his sleeve. And as a former oilman, he knew he had to prove, somehow, he wasn’t just the representative of big bad business—or “big bad bidness,” as they say in Texas. So candidate Bush stunned environmentalists by calling for a major reduction in U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, a leading contributor to global warming. As president, he promised, he would “establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury and carbon dioxide.” That was stronger than anything Al Gore had proposed. Environmentalists were cautiously ecstatic. Bush’s big corporate

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contributors, who rejected the very notion of global warming, were depressed. This was not what they expected from the man upon whom they had showered millions of dollars in contributions and who, until then, had never even acknowledged a problem with carbon dioxide, let alone expressed any intention to deal with it. Both groups responded prematurely. In the end, environmentalists were right to be cautious and business leaders were wrong to despair. They all should have known better. George Bush didn’t mean a word of it. Of course, he didn’t tell poor, hapless Christie Whitman. On March 3, 2001, with the blessing of the White House, she outlined Bush’s plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions at an international conference of environmental ministers, held in Italy. She and the president received high fives for their leadership. One week later, Bush called Whitman to the Oval Office and gave her the bad news. The coal industry wasn’t happy. Neither were a handful of Republican senators. He had decided to reverse course. How did Bush justify breaking the one environmental promise of his campaign so early in his administration? He didn’t even try hard. “We’re in an energy crisis now,” he told reporters. A sudden energy crisis? Barely two months from the time he took the oath of office? Nonsense. The only energy crisis were the complaints of energy company CEOs. It was only the first of countless times, under the Bush administration, that they would win the day.

Rolling Back the Clock No president, not even Bill Clinton, racked up a 100 percent environmental record. Clinton, in fact, ignored a lot of environmental issues until the closing days of his administration—when

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he went out of office in a blizzard of eleventh hour executive orders. He was criticized by Republicans for trying to fatten up his environmental legacy. He was criticized by Democrats for waiting so long to act. But, late or not, the combination of lastminute Clinton decisions produced a remarkable series of badly needed new measures to protect the environment. Nevertheless, in the end, Clinton’s executive orders came to naught. Soon after he walked into the Oval Office, George Bush canceled every one of them. We already talked about Bush’s trying to spike our drinking water with arsenic. As documented by the Sierra Club, here are a few other early actions taken by George Bush to roll back executive decisions made by Bill Clinton: • Regulations limiting raw sewage discharges from pig farms and cattle lots and requiring public notice of overflows. Suspended by George Bush in January 2001. • A rule prohibiting the federal government from awarding contracts to companies that violate federal laws, including environmental regulations. Suspended by George Bush in March 2001. • National Park Service rules phasing out environmentally damaging snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Suspended by George Bush in June 2001. • A provision allowing the Secretary of the Interior to stop new mines from being created on federal lands if they would result in “substantial irreparable harm” to people or the environment. Revoked by George Bush in October 2001. • Requirements that mining companies protect waterways and clean up mine-related pollution. Revoked by George Bush in October 2001.

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• Army Corps of Engineers regulations mandating the replacement of destroyed wetlands and banning the destruction of seasonal streams. Revoked by George Bush in January 2002. • A 1989 federal law requiring states to test all children on Medicaid for lead poisoning. Gotcha! George Bush didn’t revoke that one yet. But give him time. He already has arsenic and raw sewage discharges under his belt. Can lead poisoning be far behind? And, folks, that’s just for starters. Wait till you see how much environmental destruction George Bush caused once he got organized. I document here only his most reckless, shortsighted and damaging anti-environmental actions. Check with the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund or the Wilderness Society for the complete, disheartening list.

Public Lands I know this is hard to believe, but, once in a while, even I try to be fair. And trying to be as fair as I can, I understand how a timber company has every right to cut down all the trees on its own land. Or a mining company to cut off the top off a mountain it owns outright. Even though both actions are short-sighted. But what about all that land you and I own? You know what I mean: “This land is your land, this land is my land.” All those national forests, national monuments, national parks and wilderness areas. We own them. Isn’t it the government’s job, using our hard-earned tax dollars, to protect them? George Bush doesn’t think so. In its first year, the Bush

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administration increased the number of leases for oil and gas development and coal mining on public lands by 51 percent. There goes the summer fun. Maybe you’re one of those people afraid to fly after September 11. So, for this summer’s vacation, you decide to take the family to see America’s natural wonders. You load the kids in the car and head to Utah. You pull into Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and what are you likely to see? A drilling rig! An oil derrick! Earth movers chopping off the top of hills! Thank you, President Bush. To him, no place is sacred. As noted by the New York Times, “from the beginning, President Bush has been far more interested in exploiting the public lands for commercial purposes than in protecting their environmental values.”

Wilderness Protection If you ever really want to “get away from it all” today, wilderness areas are the only place you can do so: no roads, no cars, no motorbikes, no mountain bikes, no boom boxes, no electricity, no plumbing, no helicopters overhead and damn few people. For many of us, it’s as close to heaven as you can get here below. But there soon won’t be much wilderness left. In 1996, Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt directed the Bureau of Land Management, the nation’s biggest landlord, to set aside 6.2 million acres for new wilderness designation. And he ordered the BLM to assess all federal lands for wilderness potential before opening them up to any future mining, drilling, road building or off-road vehicle use. Fast forward to 2003. Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton cut the new wilderness areas from 6.2 to 3.2 million acres and rescinded the order to review lands for possible wilderness status prior to allowing new development. Not only that, she re-

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stricted the total amount of wilderness areas nationwide to 15 million acres—a mere 6 percent of the BLM’s total 261 million acres. Kiss those wilderness areas good-bye.

National Forests Most people are surprised when they first visit one. It’s not the virgin forest they expected. It’s crisscrossed with roads, clear-cutting, mining, oil and gas development, gravel pits and all kinds of other commercial uses. Trying to save what’s left, the U.S. Forest Service spent years working on new protection plans. In early January 2001, their efforts finally paid off. The outgoing Clinton administration adopted the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, banning new road building on 58.5 million acres of national forests in thirty-eight states. Well, you guessed it. In late January 2001, the new Bush administration quashed the new rule—and instead invited more comment from the oil, mining and timber industries. Bush’s Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth decreed that, from now on, he alone would decide what roads are built and where. Gentlemen, rev up your bulldozers.

National Monuments They’re not quite national parks, but they’re still mighty special. Natural areas so unique and so beautiful, they’ve been set aside so that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren can enjoy them, too. Treasures of nature that every American wants left unspoiled—every American, that is, except George Bush and Dick Cheney. Once again dancing to the tune of his corporate buddies and contributors, Bush has opened up eleven national monuments, parks and forests to resource extraction. The list reads like what Robert Kennedy, Jr., calls “a blueprint for plunder.”

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• Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area, Montana—silver mining • Lewis and Clark National Forest, Montana—oil and gas development • Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, Montana—oil and gas development • Little Missouri National Grassland, North Dakota—oil and gas development • Powder River Basin, Wyoming and Montana—oil, gas and coal extraction • Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyoming—oil, gas and coal extraction • San Juan National Forest Roadless Areas, Colorado—oil and gas development • Dome Plateau and Lockhart Basin, Utah, adjacent to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks—oil and gas development • Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, Utah— gas, oil and coal extraction • Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon—gold mining • Los Padres National Forest, California—gas production If you were thinking about visiting one of those national treasures anytime soon, you may want to change your plans. And I remind you: These are our lands. Paid for with our tax dollars. And George Bush is auctioning them off to the highest bidder. Does he harbor just the tiniest bit of remorse? No. “There are some monuments where the land is so widespread, they just encompass as much as possible,” Bush tried feebly to explain. “And the integral part of the precious part, so to speak, I guess all land is precious, but the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil, will not be spoiled.” Translation (you often need a translation when George Bush is speaking): Trust me to save the best parts, while I let developers destroy all the rest.

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George Bush is so thirsty for oil, he’ll never be content with digging up the lower forty-eight. Next thing you know, he’ll want to drill for oil in the Arctic. Oh, that’s right, I forgot. He’s already trying to do that.

Drilling in Alaska You can bet on it. Long before they got to the White House, George Bush and Dick Cheney had set their eyes on every big oilman’s wet dream: Alaska. Especially one tiny, pristine part of Alaska. It’s called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWAR. It was created by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower way back in 1958, with one simple goal: While 95 percent of Alaska’s undeveloped territory was opened to oil exploration, a tiny 5 percent of the tundra should be permanently protected for future generations. True, most of us will never go there for Easter break. But at least we knew that one small corner of Alaska would not be covered with oil rigs. And we could feel good about saving an important breeding ground for polar bears, musk oxen, wolves, migratory birds and some 129,000 head of caribou. But pragmatically speaking, saving the caribou is not the main reason for leaving the ANWAR intact. The fact is, there’s so little oil there, it’s not worth all the time and expense. According to the United States Geological Survey, the economically recoverable oil from the Arctic Refuge—3.2 billion barrels—would only keep the lights on for six months. And it would take ten years to bring that oil to market. Even at the peak of production, in 2027, oil from the ANWAR would supply only 2 percent of U.S. consumption. There must be a better way, and there is: increasing the fuel efficiency of American cars. Technology exists to manufacture

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cars getting forty miles per gallon. Japan does it today. Detroit could do it tomorrow. And by 2012, we would have saved fifteen times more oil than the ANWAR could ever produce. From an environmental, economic or energy point of view, drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge makes no sense. But the facts never stopped two big oil guys with dollar signs in their eyes. Even with such little promise for production and such great risk for environmental disaster, George Bush and Dick Cheney made drilling in the ANWAR the centerpiece of their energy strategy. Bush even went so far as to claim that you could turn the wildlife refuge into an oil field “without leaving a footprint.” Fortunately, so far, the U.S. Senate has blocked Bush’s plans for despoiling Alaska’s last wilderness area. But Interior Secretary Gale Norton vows the administration will not give up until the caribou are forced to learn how to leap over pipelines.

Energy Of course, Bush’s proposal to drill for oil in Alaska didn’t stand alone. It was the centerpiece of the national energy policy that George Bush asked Dick Cheney to prepare—with the help of their buddies in the energy business. Get it? One oilman asks another oilman to get another bunch of oilmen to come up with the nation’s energy policy. Whatever else you say about these two, you gotta admit, they do have a perverse sense of humor. Okay, I admit. I don’t know for sure that Enron lobbyists wrote the Bush/Cheney energy plan. In fact, nobody knows. And that’s the problem. Because, to this day, the Bush White House refuses to release the records of whom Cheney met with and when. How times change. In 1997, when he was CEO of Hallibur-

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ton, Dick Cheney wrote a personal letter to Vice President Al Gore, complaining about the Clinton administration’s proposal for tougher air standards. Any change in environmental standards must “be addressed in full and open debate,” he said in the letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Center for Public Integrity. What a hypocrite. He insisted on full and open debate when he was outside the White House, but he refused to provide it himself, once he was on the inside. You want more hypocrisy? Republicans raised holy hell— and rightly so—when First Lady Hillary Clinton held all the meetings of her health care task force behind closed doors. But now they turn around and defend Dick Cheney, when he does the exact same thing. No, we don’t know for sure who wrote Cheney’s plan, but it sure looks like Enron did. You don’t need the CIA to figure that out. Enron and other big energy companies simply told Bush and Cheney what they wanted. And Bush and Cheney delivered. CEO Ken Lay and two other Enron officials were the only ones to get a private meeting with Cheney on drafting the energy plan. Cheney and his aides held at least five other meetings with Enron executives. And as we saw in “Reason #6: Crony Capitalism,” Congressman Henry Waxman compared the want list Enron gave Cheney with the final White House report and discovered seventeen policy recommendations that were advocated by Enron or directly benefited Enron. But let’s be fair. It wasn’t just Enron. We know that sixtytwo out of sixty-three members of the Bush/Cheney energy advisory council had ties to the coal, nuclear or oil industry. Who was the mysterious sixty-third person? My sources tell me it was a cleaning lady who walked into the room by accident. She hasn’t been seen or heard from since. We also know that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met with 109 energy industry officials—including executives from the American Coal Company, Exxon/Mobil, BP/Amoco, Shell,

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Chevron/Texaco and half a dozen nuclear power companies— while preparing the report. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, eighteen of those groups had contributed a combined $16.6 million to the Republican Party over the previous two years. Surprise, surprise. When the final Cheney plan was released, it called for the construction of hundreds of new power plants, a big increase in coal production, bringing back nuclear power plants and drilling for oil in the Rocky Mountains and, as noted above, in the Alaskan wilderness. Enron, the oil companies, the utilities and the coal companies sure did get their money’s worth. They got, in fact, the best national energy policy their money could buy. When it was introduced as legislation in Congress, even Republican Senator John McCain dubbed it: “The Leave No Lobbyist Behind Act.” Meanwhile—isn’t it sad?—Abraham and Cheney were so busy huddling with energy industry lobbyists that neither had “time on his schedule” to meet with environmentalists. No environmental voices were heard in preparation of the energy policy until the vice president finally met with representatives of fourteen groups in June 2001—six weeks after the administration’s energy plan had already been released. Yet to this day, Bush and Cheney still brag about the fact that they consulted both industry and environmental leaders in putting together their energy strategy. But, of course, that little white lie about meeting with environmentalists was nothing compared to their preposterous claim that they were leading the way in solving the problem of global warming.

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Hot Air On June 11, 2001, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and told the world: “My administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change.” It sounds like he’s out in front, saying he knows there’s a big problem with global warming and he’s going to convince other countries to get together and do something about it. The truth is just the opposite. Bush was leading, all right. Leading us in the opposite direction: refusing to do anything about global warming. Refusing, in fact, even to admit that global warming existed. As we’ve already learned, one of Bush’s first official acts in office was to renege on his campaign promise to crack down on emissions of carbon dioxide—one of the major greenhouse gases and contributors to global warming. That alone didn’t demonstrate much of a “leadership role on the issue of climate change.” But his next move was even worse. In March 2001, Bush announced that the United States was abandoning the Kyoto Treaty—signed by President Clinton in 1997—under which industrialized nations agreed to cut greenhouse emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2008. Given that the United States is the world’s number one polluter—with only 4 percent of the world’s population, we produce 30 percent of all greenhouse gases—America’s withdrawal from Kyoto meant, in effect, that the treaty was dead. Why suddenly ditch a treaty that every other Western industrialized country had agreed to? Because, Bush insisted, the world’s scientists aren’t even sure there is such a thing as global warming. Say what? True, there are a couple of crackpot pseudo-scientists who deny the existence of global warming. When I was co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, we actually uncovered two of them: One worked for an oil company; the other, for a coal company. Go

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figure. Both had an obvious bias against finding evidence of global warming. Every other scientist, including thousands assembled by the United Nations as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agrees that global warming is real, is caused in great part by human activity and will only get worse unless steps are taken to reduce greenhouse emissions. But Bush demanded still another study. So he appointed his own panel of scientists to research the issue and report back to him. They did, in June 2001. Here’s what they said: “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising.” There you go. His own handpicked scientists confirmed that global warming is a serious problem that demands immediate action. And what did Bush do? Nothing.

Note: This would not be the last time George Bush ignored or twisted the findings of respected scientists. In 2001, for example, the White House barred researchers at the Agriculture Department from publicizing findings that harmful bacteria float in the air surrounding industrial hog farms. And in 2002, it scuttled an EPA report that 8 percent of women from sixteen to forty-nine had dangerous blood levels of mercury. Dubya’s disdain for science is so bad that in February 2004, a panel of sixty distinguished scientists and researchers— including twenty Nobel laureates and several advisors to former Republican presidents—wrote an open letter charging the Bush administration with “suppressing, distorting or manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies for partisan political purposes.” They said “the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the administration is unprecedented.”

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On February 14, 2002, Bush finally unveiled his own longawaited global warming plan, “Climate Leaders,” which did not require greenhouse polluters to do anything. It simply asked major polluters to voluntarily curb their greenhouse emissions. It was totally meaningless. Pure puffery. Pure George W. Bush. Four months later, Bush’s own EPA sent a report to the United Nations warning that the United States in the decades ahead would experience heat waves, massive flooding, loss of wetlands and valuable croplands, destruction of coastal communities, loss of shrimp and coastal fisheries, water shortages, increased air pollution and outbreaks of serious disease—all because of global warming. President Bush’s response? “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy,” he sniffed. His diplomatic partner Tony Blair— the only world leader who still pretends to have any respect for George Bush—sees things differently: “There will be no general security if the planet is ravaged.” Sir David King, chief scientist in the Blair government, has said that global warming is a greater threat to the world’s long-term security than terrorism. More bad news for Bush. On January 1, 2004, the Washington Post reported that Bush’s voluntary cleanup plan had turned out to be a joke. Big utilities with the worst pollution problems had refused to “volunteer.” In fact, only fifty of thousands of U.S. companies that pollute the air had signed up. And only fourteen of them had come up with a plan to reduce emissions. Still more bad news for Bush. In February 2004, a Department of Defense study concluded that global warming could become a global security nightmare and was as worthy of advance planning as the collapse of the Soviet Union was in 1983 or the possibility that terrorists could someday fly planes into the World Trade Center. Bush can hardly dismiss the Pentagon as another bunch of environmental wackos. So here we sit, stewing in our own juices. The polar caps are

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melting. The glaciers of Patagonia melted twice as fast from 1995 to 2000 as they did from 1975 to 1995. An international team of scientists reported in Nature magazine that, at present rates, global warming will drive 15 to 37 percent of existing species out of existence by 2050. George Bush’s old oil buddies are complaining that the Alaskan climate is getting so much warmer in winter, they can’t drive their oil-prospecting rigs over the tundra. Around the globe, temperatures have been getting hotter and hotter for the last fifty years. And every year, haven’t you noticed, the climate gets weirder and weirder. In December 2000, a study ordered by Congress concluded that global warming could cause average temperatures to rise between five and ten degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. Because of rising temperatures and rising tides, scientists warn of serious consequences for the United States, including: • The loss of the Louisiana shrimp harvest • Disappearance of miles of Florida beach and beach properties • Disappearance of barrier islands off Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia • The end of sugar maple trees in the Northeast • The loss of alpine meadows in the Rocky Mountains • Significant decline in the harvest of coastal fisheries • Loss of salmon and trout from 40 percent of their native habitat • Major loss in yields for wheat, cotton, corn and other crops • Outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis and other tropical diseases You simply can’t deny the facts. We are already experiencing the most serious environmental crisis of our lifetime. And we’re doing nothing about it.

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Why? Because, to use the Texas vernacular, Dubya doesn’t give a shit.

Oh, Say, Can You See? George Bush does pretend to care about clean air. Just ask him. He’ll tell you all about his “Clear Skies Initiative.” Don’t believe a word of it. If truth in advertising laws applied to White House pronouncements, the Bush administration would be shut down for lying to the public. It’s an old trick he learned from Ronald Reagan. When you want to do something bad, just give it a good name. Call it the opposite of what it really is and does. And, if you’re lucky, most Americans will fall for it. Remember the MX missile? Designed to kill military and civilian targets from a long distance away. With no shame at all, Reagan called it “The Peacekeeper.” George Bush has applied the same big lie technique to the environment. Before George Bush took office, we already had tough air quality rules. They were contained in the Clean Air Act, signed into law in 1972 by Republican President Richard Nixon (for all his faults, by the way, Nixon is probably the best environmental president ever) and in the “New Source Review” rules added later by Congress. And they were working. The air’s been getting clearer. Smog days in most major cities occur less often. Factories are cleaning up their smokestacks. Smog control devices are required on new cars. And we were approaching the deadlines in the Clean Air Act when the worst of the corporate polluters would either have to clean up or shut down. Everybody was happy with the way the Clean Air Act was working. Everybody, that is, except coal and utility industry leaders. They never ceased complaining that air quality rules

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would put them out of business. And they never ceased coughing up campaign contributions to any candidate who would gut the Clean Air Act. They found their man in George W. Bush. His so-called “Clear Skies Initiative” replaces the mandatory cleanup requirements of the Clean Air Act with a voluntary cleanup wish list. It gives companies more time to reduce emissions. It allows them to trade with other factories for the right to pollute even more. And it leaves power plants, which contribute 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, totally off the hook. Nobody saw through Bush’s phony plan better than his own EPA—before he fired white hat Christie Whitman and replaced her with black hat Mike Leavitt, that is. According to the Whitman EPA, the Bush air quality plan would allow power companies to burn more coal, generate 50 percent more sulfur emissions and millions more tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, allow three times more mercury emissions than current law and delay by up to ten years cuts in pollution required by the former Clean Air Act. George Bush’s answer to air pollution, in other words, is more air pollution. Choke on that, fellow Americans: Clean Air, George Bush style. The Clear Skies initiative was such a dangerous farce that fifteen northeastern states, which suffer the most from dirty air from coal-fired power plants, filed a federal lawsuit against it. New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer led the pack. He called the Bush plan “a betrayal of the right of Americans to breathe clean, healthy air.” Amen. Thanks to Spitzer, Bush’s “Clear Skies” initiative has been temporarily blocked by the courts.

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Healthy Forests Here it is. I saved the worst till last. The one story that proves, more than any other, how devious George Bush is when he claims to be an environmentalist: what he trumpets as his “Healthy Forests Initiative.” Healthy forests? Sounds good, doesn’t it? That’s just what we want to see: big, green, birdsong-filled, healthy forests. Trees, trees and more trees. Now here’s what George Bush’s chainsaw-filled “healthy” forest looks like: stumps, stumps and more stumps. Bush wants to cut down more trees than the bad guy from The Lord of the Rings. Like the “Clear Skies” plan, this was another case of deliberately calling something the exact opposite of what it is. The dilemma facing the White House was: How do we undo the tough forest protection measures adopted by Bill Clinton and reward timber companies with a license to cut down our national forests, without generating howls of protest? The answer was easy: Just call it the “Healthy Forests Initiative.” That’s how cynical they are. They believed that most Americans are suckers and would fall for the theory that the way to save trees from being destroyed in forest fires was to let timber companies cut them down first. (Which, you must admit, does have a kind of logic: No trees will be lost in fires if there aren’t any trees left.) But, this time, they were wrong. Most Americans were not fooled. They saw right through Bush’s latest scam. Like most of George Bush’s anti-environmental crusades, this one was an attempt to undo strong protective action taken by the outgoing Clinton administration—in this case, as noted above, the creation of 58.5 million acres of “roadless” areas in our national forests. Timber companies didn’t like those rules for one reason: no

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roads, no lumber trucks—and no opportunity to exploit the forests for a quick profit. After the election, George Bush asked his fat cat cronies: What do you want in return for your millions of dollars in campaign contributions? And they answered: Open up the forests. And he said: Let’s roll! Bush quickly reversed the Clinton policy, reopening major portions of forests to road-building—including 300,000 acres in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest—all in the name of “healthy forests.” The Healthy Forests initiative was sold as a way for timber companies to save trees and homes by going in and weeding out the forests, removing younger trees that crowd the forest floor and provide fuel for costly forest fires. The pitch was: No fuel, no forest fires, no homes destroyed, no problemo. The truth is: Bush’s plan was a free ticket for big timber companies to wipe out the last of America’s virgin forests. The forests spelled out in the plan are not adjacent to existing communities at all. They are in remote wilderness areas, where there are no homes to save. Once roads are built into those forests and the timber trucks roll in, they will be gone forever. Like the plan to drill for oil in Alaska, this is simply one more case of selling America’s resources off to the highest bidder. Bush’s plan should be called: “The Disappearing Forests Initiative.” Save trees by destroying them. You think that’s bad? Wait a minute. It gets even worse. Remember those disastrous forest fires that ravaged Southern California in the summer of 2003? Three separate fires, simultaneously raging out of control, burned 739,000 acres, consumed 3,631 private homes and left billions of dollars in damages. And even while firefighters were working to contain the fires and homeowners were searching for whatever they could salvage from burned-out homes, George Bush cynically seized upon the opportunity to resurrect his Healthy Forests

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Initiative, which had been languishing in Congress for lack of support. “This proves our point,” he declared. “This is why we need the Healthy Forests Initiative. Had this plan been in place, these forest fires would never have happened—and all these homes would have been spared.” He’s lucky lightning didn’t strike him dead on the spot. The Healthy Forests Initiative had nothing to do with preventing the fires in Southern California for one simple reason: Relatively few trees were involved. Southern California hills are covered with dense, low-lying coyote brush, or chaparral—not trees. So those were not forest fires. They were chaparral fires. When someone pointed that out to Pat Buchanan, in our discussion of the California fires on MSNBC’s Buchanan and Press show, Pat innocently asked: “What’s chaparral?” Apparently, George Bush didn’t know, either. This Bush doesn’t know a bush from a tree. Nevertheless, a rubber-stamped Republican Congress— with the help of a handful of Democrats—panicked. “Oh my, oh my, we don’t want to be held responsible for forest fires.” They approved Bush’s “Healthy Forests Initiative” and he signed it into law on December 2, 2003.

How Does He Get Away with It? I’m glad you asked. I think there are four reasons: 1. Republicans in Congress will slavishly do whatever the White House wants. 2. Too many Democrats in Congress don’t have any backbone. 3. Almost nobody in the media dares take on George Bush (or they might not get invited to the annual White House Christmas party).

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4. And hardly anybody in the media cares about the environment. In 2003, the networks devoted only 4 percent of their news coverage to environmental issues. Okay, let’s be honest. There’s a fifth reason, too: 5. George Bush gets away with it because we let him get away with it. And that’s gotta change. Shame on George Bush for his direct assaults on the environment so far. But shame on us if we give him four more years to continue to destroy the planet. Again, Robert Kennedy, Jr.: “If they knew the truth, most Americans would share my fury that this president is allowing his corporate cronies to steal American from our children.” Well, now we know the truth. So, let’s get to work. Save the environment by sending George Bush back to Texas. For four years of crimes against nature, GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # NINE

Broken Promises: He’s a Divider, Not a Uniter “I’m the master of low expectations.” George W. Bush June 4, 2003

If you believe that an elected official should do what he says he’s going to do . . . If you believe a promise made is a promise to be kept . . . If you believe politicians should be held accountable for what they say . . . George W. Bush is not your man. In many ways, it’s the same old story. Candidates run for office making a lot of promises. Which they hope we’ll buy. But which, once they get into office, they hope we’ll forget. But of course, we don’t. We actually expect them to deliver on their promises. And when they don’t, we’re not only disappointed. We tend to get angry. We want to get even. Which is why so many Americans across the political spectrum have given up on George W. Bush. We’ve learned we simply can’t trust him. After all, he ran for president on a whole string of promises. And he ends his first (and only!) term with a whole stack of broken ones. Except for cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans—the one promise he should have broken, but didn’t—George Bush

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has broken every promise he made while running for president, and every promise made as president. In the preceding chapters, we’ve already discussed several of Bush’s biggest broken promises. Just to review, here’s a list of what we’ve seen so far.

Bush Broken Promises His Promise

His Record

To balance the budget

Amassed the biggest deficits in history

To cut federal spending

Spent three times faster than Clinton

To shrink the federal government

Expanded federal government

A “humble” foreign policy

An arrogant, go-it-alone policy

No nation-building

Nation-building in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti

To uphold the Constitution

Waged war on civil liberties

To create jobs

Put 9 million Americans out of work

Tax cuts for the middle class

Tax cuts for only the wealthy

To tell the truth

Lies, lies, lies

This list is bad enough, to be sure. But George Bush didn’t stop there. The list of his broken promises goes on and on. Here are a few more big ones, broken promises he made to the left and the right. From “uniting” America, to “leaving no child behind,” to “helping” seniors get prescription drugs, Bush has shown time and time again that his word means less than nothing.

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“I’m a Uniter, Not a Divider” After eight years of partisan vitriol during the Clinton years, all Americans were eager for a political cease-fire in Washington. Candidate George Bush correctly sensed this during the 2000 campaign and promised to change the tone, to reach out to the other side, to bridge the partisan divide, to seek compromise, to bring people together, to end bitter partisanship. “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” he said, over and over. That was Bush’s biggest promise. And, it turns out, his biggest lie of all. Sure, in the beginning, he made a few positive gestures. He invited Senator John Breaux and Congressman George Miller out to Texas to talk policy. He welcomed Teddy Kennedy over to the White House for a movie and a burger. But after Grover Norquist, conservative guru and Bush advisor, strangely and offensively branded bipartisanship as just another word for “date rape,” the president quickly changed his tune. In sum, George Bush has turned out to be the most partisan and the most divisive president in modern times. Whether dealing with members of Congress or our international allies, he never bothers to seek common ground. To one and all, his message is the same: “You’re with me or against me. It’s my way or the highway.” There was one magic moment, after the tragedy of 9/11, when Republicans and Democrats did come together. Democratic leaders Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi stood shoulder to shoulder with President Bush in reassuring Americans and responding to terrorism. It was a golden opportunity for leadership, the perfect platform for creating a new era of bipartisan cooperation in Washington—but George Bush blew it. He soon returned to his true, trite Texas ways. He refused to consult with Democratic leaders on major policy initiatives. He rejected all attempts

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at compromise. In effect, he told Democrats to go shit in their hats. When the entire country hoped for and needed bipartisan healing, George Bush would offer Democrats nothing in return for standing in solidarity with him. In Washington, not surprisingly, the result was more partisanship, not less. Republicans and Democrats are now at each other’s throat like never before. Even Republicans who don’t march lockstep to the administration’s drummer find themselves ostracized. Colorado’s Tom Tancredo, who opposed the president’s amnesty policy for undocumented workers, was told by Karl Rove he would never again “darken the White House door.” And he hasn’t. Vermont’s Jim Jeffords was treated so shabbily he walked out of the Republican Party. President Bush still claims to be “a uniter, not a divider.” But now that they’ve seen him in action, Americans don’t believe it. In March 2004, pollsters for ABC News and the Washington Post asked voters: “Overall, do you think Bush has done more to unite the country or has done more to divide the country?” The results could not have pleased the White House. Forty-nine percent said divide; 48 percent said unite. Bush has divided the country right down the middle. We could go on and on about the myriad ways George Bush has fostered disunity. But I think there are three areas, especially, where President Bush has shown himself most divisive: his shameful treatment of Max Cleland; his nominations to the federal bench; and his crusade for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages.

Destroying a War Hero Max Cleland is an amazing man, a real, live American hero and a true inspiration. He volunteered for service in Vietnam— where, in 1968, an exploding grenade cost him both legs and

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his right arm. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Silver Star. He came home, not to feel sorry for himself, but to excel. He was elected the youngest member of the Georgia State Senate. He was named by President Jimmy Carter the youngest ever director of the Veterans Administration. He returned to Georgia to win election as secretary of state and then was elected to the U.S. Senate. After September 11, Cleland joined Senator Joe Lieberman, Congresswoman Jane Harman and others in proposing the creation of a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. But, for months, the White House shot it down. “Creating a cabinet office doesn’t solve the problem,” sniffed Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Then, suddenly, in June 2002, Bush did a 180-degree turn. Total flip-flop. He proposed the creation of a new agency for homeland security, just like Cleland and company had been asking for. But—here’s the difference—Bush insisted that its employees could not have the same worker benefits other federal employees enjoyed. As noted earlier, Bush was exploiting 9/11 in an attempt to bust the unions. But Bush did more than that. He accused Democrats who did not support his version of a Homeland Security Department of being unpatriotic—even though they were the ones who proposed creation of such a department in the first place, over his opposition. Max Cleland, up for reelection in Georgia, was one of those he went after and destroyed. Cleland’s opponent, Representative Saxby Chambliss, who never served in the military, accused Cleland of “breaking his oath to protect and defend the Constitution.” His TV commercials—get this—flashed a photo of Cleland, a man who lost three out of four limbs in defense of his country, alongside photos of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein—accusing Cleland of voting against homeland security. Simply put, it was one of the most vile political campaigns

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in history. And Bush was a knowing participant. He appeared at a Georgia rally alongside Chambliss, blaming Cleland and other Democrats for trying “to tie the hands of this president and future presidents to be able to carry out one of our most solemn duties, which is to protect the homeland.” What a despicable thing for George Bush to do—this man who admits he went into the National Guard to get out of going to Vietnam and then spent most of his time in the Guard working on a political campaign. How many limbs did Max Cleland have to leave on the battlefield to prove his love for his country? Here’s the kicker. When Chambliss won, Bush said it was because he ran such a positive campaign. Everybody has his or her favorite reason why George W. Bush should be tossed out of the White House. Mine is very simple: what he did to Max Cleland. For me, that alone makes him unworthy to sit in the Oval Office.

Cloning Clarence Thomas One more area where George Bush has consistently proved himself a divider, not a uniter, is in his choice of judicial nominees. In fact, you can learn a lot about President Bush himself by looking at the kind of people he has nominated to the federal bench: some of the least qualified, most conservative, most intolerant, right-wing, agenda-driven judges in modern history. Take Leon Holmes, nominated for an Arkansas district court. He is typical of Bush’s choices for the federal bench: white, middle-aged, extremist. In 1980, Holmes stated in writing that abortion should not be available to rape victims because conceptions from rape occur with the same frequency as snow in Miami. When Holmes

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appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, New York Senator Charles Schumer put that in perspective. “We checked the almanac,” Schumer informed committee members. “It snowed in Miami once in the last hundred years. Thirty-two thousand women became pregnant last year because of rape.” But the Republican majority, without recommendation, still sent Holmes’s nomination to the Senate floor for a vote. President Bush complains that Democrats have played politics with the courts and unfairly blocked his judicial nominations in the Senate. Not so. The truth is that Democrats have been a lot kinder to President Bush’s nominees than Republicans were to President Clinton’s. At one point, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch refused to hold votes on any Clinton picks, regardless of their qualifications, until one of his cronies from Utah was named to the bench. According to People for the American Way, who keep track of such things, 95 percent of President Bush’s judicial nominees have been confirmed. He’s ahead of Clinton in almost every category. During his first three years, for example, Clinton had twenty-eight nominees confirmed to the Appellate Courts. Bush had twenty-nine. So what’s he whining about? The best way for George Bush to get more judges confirmed is not for Democrats simply to rubber-stamp his nominees. It’s for him to appoint better judges—and stop appointing turkeys like Leon Holmes, Charles Pickering, William Pryor, Miguel Estrada and Janice Brown. Pickering may be the most controversial of Bush’s nominees, and with good reason. To put it mildly, as a Mississippi judge he didn’t show a lot of sensitivity on racial issues. He fought against application of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to Mississippi. He once intervened to reduce the sentence of a man convicted of burning a cross on the lawn of an interracial family. And, according to papers housed in the University of Mississippi Library, he switched political parties, becoming a

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Republican in 1964 to protest the Democratic Party’s support for civil rights. With that record, there was no way Pickering could win Senate approval—unless there were one hundred Trent Lotts in the Senate. In January 2004, Bush showed how much of a “uniter” he is. While senators were out of town, he planted Pickering on the bench, temporarily, through what’s known as a “recess appointment.” After Pickering, Pryor stirred up the most dust. Rightfully so. As attorney general of Alabama, he lobbied in opposition to the Violence Against Women Act. He said there should be no federal involvement in “education or street crime.” And he called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.” With such inflammatory statements, it’s no surprise he could not get one Democratic vote on the Judiciary Committee. Again, in February 2004, Bush “united” Democrats and Republicans by giving Pryor a recess appointment to the federal bench. Estrada, Bush’s highest-profile nominee, was proposed for the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which often serves as a first step to the Supreme Court. Bush cynically nominated him as the nation’s number one Latino appellate judge in order to get him on track to become the first Latino on the Supreme Court. But, ethnicity aside, Estrada failed to make the grade. He had never been a judge. He had written no articles in legal journals. The administration refused to release copies of memos on legal matters he had written as assistant solicitor general in the Justice Department. And, appearing before Congress, Estrada refused to divulge his views on Roe v. Wade, gay rights or affirmative action—telling senators that, never having studied such landmark issues, he simply had no opinion on any of them. Senators were not about to put such a blank slate on the express train to the Supreme Court. Estrada eventually withdrew his name from consideration.

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To replace Estrada, Bush nominated an African-American woman, Janice Brown, justice on the California Supreme Court. Unlike Estrada, she does have a long judicial and written record—and it’s an extreme right-wing agenda record. Her positions on civil rights, affirmative action, privacy, free speech, gun control, consumer protection and workers’ rights are clear. She’s against them all. The NAACP, in fact, charges that Janice Brown’s judicial philosophy is even more extreme than that of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the most conservative members of the Supreme Court. Now, here’s what’s really scary. George Bush says that Scalia and Thomas are the Supreme Court justices he admires the most—and would most like to duplicate. Because they serve for life, there is no more lasting impact of any president’s term than his appointments to the Supreme Court. And if reelected, God forbid, George Bush might get to name as many as three. Still in relatively good health, but already past retirement age, are: Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 79; Justice John Paul Stevens, 83; and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 73. Conservatives Rehnquist and O’Connor might well see a Bush reelection as a good and safe moment to step down. The Rehnquist court is, without doubt, the most conservative in our lifetime. But, even so, it has split 5–4 on many cases and has broken with hard-line conservatives on several key issues: upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan; overturning Wisconsin’s restrictions on late-term abortion; refusing to intervene in Alabama’s debate over the Ten Commandments; and declaring illegal a Texas anti-sodomy law. Many more controversial issues—including new restrictions on abortion, gay unions, school vouchers and challenges to the Patriot Act—will be considered in the court’s next session. It’s one more important reason to vote against George W.

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Bush. He must not be given the opportunity to name to the Supreme Court the same kind of radical right-wingers he’s named so far to the lower courts.

Till Death Do Us Part Of all of the cynical or divisive actions George Bush has taken as president, nothing compares to his call for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. It is, first of all, hardly one of the most important problems facing this country. With 9 million Americans out of a job and 43 million Americans having no health care, the fact that two men in San Francisco who love each other want to commit to stay together as a couple until death do they part doesn’t even register on the scale of issues “worth dealing with.” It is also contradictory to what Republicans are supposed to believe in, which is—leave issues like this up to the states. That, in fact, was the official Republican Party position, as articulated by Vice President Dick Cheney: “That matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area.” But, of course, Cheney—whose daughter Mary is a lesbian—spoke before Karl Rove told Bush he had to throw an election-year bone to so-called Christian conservatives. And that’s exactly what this constitutional amendment is all about: pure, partisan, premeditated pandering to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Lou Sheldon and other preachers of the radical religious right. George Bush knows his amendment will never even get out of Congress. He doesn’t care. He just wants it to help him get through November. George Bush knows his amendment is discriminatory. He doesn’t care. He’d rather discriminate than lose reelection. George Bush knows his amend-

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ment is the antithesis of compassionate conservatism. He doesn’t care. That was 2000. This is 2004, where his new motto is dispassionate conservatism—whatever it takes to win. This, of course, is not the first time George Bush has willynilly endorsed an amendment to the Constitution. He has already signed on to amendments to ban flag-burning and require a balanced budget. But this is the first constitutional amendment he himself has championed and, in many ways, it is the most offensive of all. As proposed in Massachusetts, California, Oregon and other states, gay marriage must be recognized by the state—but not by churches, which are still free to set their own rules. Even so, there is still room for legitimate debate. Should it be called “marriage” or “civil union?” Does one state have to accept as legitimate gay marriages performed in another state? What is not debatable is the cornerstone of the American Constitution: that all Americans enjoy the same rights and privileges, simply by virtue of being American. The Constitution doesn’t say: only white Americans, or only male Americans, or only Protestant Americans or only straight Americans. It says all Americans. That’s what this country is all about. That’s what makes us the great country we are. And George Bush’s proposed amendment would shatter that. Stripped of all the bullshit rhetoric about “preserving the institution of marriage,” what George Bush’s proposal would do is create a category of second-class citizens. Contrary to the universality of rights enjoyed by Americans today, Bush would say there are two classes of Americans: first-class, or straight Americans, who can get married; and second-class, or gay and lesbian Americans, who cannot. And that is nothing but outright discrimination. That’s what so divisive about George W. Bush’s constitutional amendment. For the first time since Plessy v. Ferguson, which embraced racial segregation, it would amend the Constitution

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not to expand human rights, but to limit human rights. It would take this country a giant step backward. You expect these kind of tactics, pitting one group of Americans against another, from someone like Jerry Falwell. But we should expect better from a president of the United States. If George W. Bush is really going to push his constitutional amendment, he should at least have the guts to drop by the vice president’s residence and tell Mr. and Mrs. Cheney that, in his twisted vision of America, their daughter is a second-class citizen. So, in three diabolical ways, George Bush broke his number one promise—to be a uniter, not a divider. But that was just the first of many, many broken promises.

“No Child Left Behind” Until the war on terror, education was the issue George W. Bush most identified himself with and talked most about. Running for president, he bragged about the education reforms he had introduced in Texas—and continued to brag about them even after Steve Forbes and others pointed out that those reforms were already in place when he became governor, thanks mainly to the innovative leadership of none other than Ross Perot, appointed by Democratic Governor Ann Richards. Still, education was apparently George Bush’s baby. Even today, when his handlers can’t think of anything else to do with him, they send him to an elementary school to read children’s books to kids. So, you’d be willing to bet that education was one area where George Bush would deliver on his promise. Nope. Save your money. He broke that promise, too. But he broke his promise on education in the most diabolical way of all. Call it the Texas Two-faced Two-step: putting on a good face in public, while gutting the program in private.

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He’d used this same technique before. In April 2001, he visited the Wilmington, Delaware, Boys and Girls Club and, while the TV cameras were rolling, promised to donate all the royalties from his campaign book, A Charge to Keep, to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The evening news pulsated with glowing reports of his generosity. But when the cameras were turned off, the very next day, his administration announced it was eliminating all $60 million the clubs received each year in federal funding. Only veteran budget readers noticed. The newspapers didn’t report it.

Note: Here I must confess a conflict of interest. I grew up in Delaware City, Delaware. And I graduated from Salesianum High School, in Wilmington. So Bush pulling this con job in Delaware especially pisses me off. We Delawareans deserve more respect.

As a political issue, education traditionally belongs to the Democrats. It’s clearly one issue on which Republicans and Democrats disagree. Republicans want to abolish the Department of Education, Democrats want to keep it. Republicans want to cut federal funding to schools, Democrats want to expand it. Republicans want to give federal money to private and religious schools, Democrats don’t. At least it used to be that way. Until George Bush came along and did something very clever. You might even call it “Clintonesque.” Knowing how much education appealed to women voters, he stole the issue from the Democrats. Breaking with other leading conservatives, he refused to abolish the Department of Education. Instead, he proposed increasing its budget, offering more federal dollars to schools—but expanding testing requirements and setting tough standards for

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schools, teachers and students, in return. He packaged his proposals in 666 pages of legislation that some PR genius labeled the “No Child Left Behind Act.” Bush was such a good salesman that staunch Democrats Teddy Kennedy in the Senate and George Miller in the House cosponsored his “No Child Left Behind” program and stood alongside him in January 2002 when he signed the bill. But— here comes the Texas Two-Faced Two-Step—no sooner were the klieg lights turned off than Bush broke his promise. He failed to deliver the funding. Less than one month after signing the bill, Bush cut $90 million from school funding. What’s more, he’s underfunded his own education program ever since. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration reneged on its commitment to American schools by $6 billion in 2003 and $7.5 billion in 2004. The president’s budget for 2005 falls $7.16 billion short. And, sadly, those cuts are mainly in Title I funding, money directed to the poorest kids and those needing most help. It was supposed to be the single largest program in the No Child Left Behind Act. Congressman George Miller says the 2004 cuts alone will: • Deny 4.6 million eligible poor children additional help with reading and math, as provided through Title I • Deny training to fifty-four thousand teachers to help insure that they are fully qualified • Deny afterschool programs to 1 million children The National Education Association reports that school districts across the country are making up for Bush budget cuts by cutting programs or making students pay for them. For example, middle school students in Gurnie, Illinois, must now pay $145 to play a team sport and $60 to join the school band or choir. In Collier County, Florida, school officials considered sell-

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ing advertising on school buses to generate new revenue. An elementary school principal in Millis, Massachusetts, doubles as a school nurse in the morning. And students at Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, are now reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the image of a flag on classroom televisions because their school cannot afford to purchase flags and flag holders. In addition, many school districts across the country have voted not to comply with the onerous new law—refusing to jump through the hoops required, since the promised federal funds aren’t being delivered anyway. In January 2004, the Republican-dominated Virginia House of Delegates voted 98–1 to ask Congress to allow it and other states to withdraw from the No Child Left Behind Act because it undermined, not assisted, the delivery of quality education. Declared the Virginia legislature, the law “represents the most sweeping intrusions into state and local control of education in the history of the United States.” And two months later, fourteen states— including California, Alaska, Connecticut, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Washington—asked permission to drop out of the Bush program because it wasn’t working. So the next time you hear George W. Bush say “no child left behind,” don’t believe it. He has left almost 5 million children behind this year alone—by cutting funds and leaving educational reforms high and dry. Another big promise made. Another big promise broken.

Phony Prescription Drug Plan Get ready. President Bush is going to barnstorm around the country this year claiming he delivered on his promise to provide a prescription drug plan for seniors. And he did, sort of. Remember the Texas Two-Faced Two-Step? On prescription

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drugs, he repeated the same fakery he employed in dealing with education. Once again, this had long been a Democratic issue. The cost of prescription drugs is a huge problem for millions of seniors on Social Security who depend on those drugs for survival, but can’t afford them. There are real horror stories of retirees cutting their pills in half, or taking them every other day or even being forced to choose between paying for food or paying for their medication. Democrats came up with the answer. There’s no doubt that, were Medicare enacted today, it would include coverage for prescription drugs. The reason it did not, back in 1965, is that surgery, not medication, was the preferred first line of medical treatment at the time. The logical solution, said Democrats, is to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare. Republicans went bananas. No, no, no, they shouted. To them, this was simply another form of welfare (for Democratic voters). They wanted to privatize Medicare, not expand it. And they certainly didn’t want to enlarge the size of the federal government. Under Bill Clinton, they blocked every attempt to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare. Enter George Bush. As detailed above in our chapter on how he sold out to special interests, the president once again stole an issue from the Democrats. Much to the consternation of his conservative allies, he suddenly embraced prescription drugs as part of Medicare. And in November 2003, with great fanfare, he signed into law a $530 billion Medicare prescription drug plan: the biggest non-military expansion of the federal government since—well, since Lyndon Johnson signed the original Medicare legislation in 1965. Now President Bush claims credit for delivering prescription drug coverage to seniors, but he doesn’t deserve it. Read the fine print. His plan isn’t worth a damn. It’s a bonanza for drug companies—and a poison pill for seniors.

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Here’s one reason. Where can Americans find the cheapest prescription drugs today? Canada. According to the organization Results for America, an American consumer who takes the pain relief drug Vioxx once a day for osteoarthritis would spend $524.16 less at Canadian prices. A person taking Lipator, for high cholesterol, would save $338.52 per year. Prices are so low that hundreds of Americans drive across the border every day just to refill their prescriptions and governors of several states are negotiating to purchase all drugs for state health plans from Canada. Of course, that drives drug companies crazy. George Bush to the rescue: His prescription drug plan prohibits importing drugs from Canada. For George Bush, exporting jobs is okay; importing drugs is not. Here’s another reason. Other than Rush Limbaugh or Sam’s Club, who’s the biggest buyer of drugs today? The federal government. It’s about to become even more so, once prescription drug coverage is added to Medicare. That gives the government tremendous bargaining leverage. Again, drug companies don’t like that. Again, George Bush to the rescue: His drug plan prohibits the federal government from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. There are three other ways the Bush Medicare plan hurts seniors: • Starting in 2006, the Bush plan forces millions of seniors out of Medicare and into HMOs, where private insurance companies will determine who is covered, what is covered, and what prescription drugs are provided at what price. • The plan includes incentives for employers to drop health care coverage they now provide to retirees. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that will cause 2.7 million seniors to accept less coverage, and pay more for it. • It also requires many seniors to go without drug coverage for several months. Under the plan, once beneficiaries

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spend $2,200 for drugs, they would receive no assistance until they had spent a total of $5,000. That’s a $2,800 coverage gap seniors would simply have to eat—a big, and often unaffordable, expense for those on fixed income. Several states, in fact—including Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Illinois—now offer more assistance to seniors than Bush’s plan provides. Rush Limbaugh was fortunate. He could afford all the pills he was popping. Most seniors can’t. Bush may not keep his promises, but you have to admit that, when it comes to politics, he’s a skilled operator. His prescription plan doesn’t take effect until 2006. Which means he will campaign in 2004 as the man who delivered prescription drug coverage to seniors—but seniors won’t experience sticker shock until two years later. That way, Bush will get all the political pleasure out of so-called Medicare reform, but none of the pain. Only America’s seniors will experience the pain, once the higher bills start rolling in. So much for Bush’s broken promises made to the left. You’d expect him to sell Democrats down the river. But Bush hasn’t just lied to his opponents. On many issues, he’s left his friends and conservative supporters high and dry as well.

Losing Faith For starters, remember his much-ballyhooed “Faith-based Initiatives” program? This was supposed to be his reward to the religious conservatives who worked so hard in his 2000 campaign. Bush promised to ignore the separation of church and state and give federal funds directly to churches. Once in the White House, he even named Professor John Dilulio, a respected public policy expert from the University of Pennsylvania, to head the program. “Hallelujah,” shouted ministers and religious activists all over

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the country, thinking they were at last going to get a seat on the federal gravy train. Poor deluded souls. Bush left them stranded when the train never left the station. A frustrated Dilulio soon quit and Bush seldom mentioned the program again.

School Choice Another promised gift to religious conservatives was school vouchers. One of his first pieces of legislation, candidate Bush promised over and over, would be to make vouchers available to public, private and religious schools. He wanted to give parents a choice in where their children went to school, he said. Again, private school administrators—either forgetting or not understanding there are strings attached to every federal dollar—quivered with high expectations of greenbacks falling from Bush heaven. They should have known better. With White House approval, even though Republicans controlled both houses of Congress at the time, vouchers were soon dropped from the president’s “No Child Left Behind Act.” The only voucher program approved in Bush’s first term was a very limited experiment in the District of Columbia: a program initiated by Congress, not the White House. At the same time, Bush did funnel more than $125 million in public education funding to groups that promote private school vouchers. Some education lobbyists see this as an indication he plans a full-court press for vouchers in his second term—that same second term we are bound and determined to deny him.

Social Security If the 2000 Bush campaign is remembered for anything— other than the last-minute news that he’d been arrested for

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drunk driving at the “youthful” age of thirty—it was his novel proposal to privatize Social Security. That idea certainly set George Bush apart from all the other candidates, largely because it was so wacky. When arguing that workers would be better off investing their own money in the market rather than counting on Social Security, Bush didn’t seem to realize the elementary fact that the market doesn’t always go up. Sometimes it comes down. Hard. As it started to before he was elected. And as it crashed as soon as he got to the Oval Office. Once the market had suddenly lost one-third of its total worth, and American investors had lost over $5 trillion of personal wealth, the folly of Bush’s plan soon became apparent to all. Had Joe Lunchbucket sunk his meager life savings in Enron, for example, he would have lost every penny. And there would be no federal government bailout for him. That’s why they call it Social “Security.” It may not pay much, but it’s “Secure.” Whether the market’s up or down, Social Security is there for every retired American worker—on top of whatever other retirement investments he or she makes. And that’s the key point: Investing in the stock market is a great idea in addition to Social Security, not instead of it. Even President Bush apparently recognized this, although he never publicly admitted he was wrong. He simply never mentioned privatization of Social Security again.

Power from the States Here’s an issue that cuts both ways. For the past few decades, Republicans have generally argued for “federalism:” a smaller central government and more power to the states. Democrats, for the most part, have argued just the opposite. It was not unusual, then, that George Bush, Republican and

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former governor, ran for the White House as a champion of states’ rights. What is unusual is that he has proven to be just the opposite, starting with his rejection of Florida’s right to run its own elections. President Bush has expanded the powers of the federal government in the schoolroom, the courthouse, the home, the doctor’s office and online—to a degree called “breathtaking” by the head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Ironically, by beefing up Washington and undercutting state capitols, Bush has alienated both liberals and conservatives, though not on the same issues. Many conservatives bristle at the new federal powers contained in the president’s “No Child Left Behind Act,” explored earlier, and the “Patriot Act,” discussed in a previous chapter. Thanks to George Bush, the federal Department of Education now tells states what tests schools must give students, or risk being shut down—a responsibility heretofore left to states and local school districts. Also thanks to George Bush, the FBI can now override local law enforcement in investigations and prosecutions of criminal activity, anytime it believes it’s necessary to do so for reasons of national security. And Texas, Arizona and California will soon no longer be able to deport illegal aliens—as long as they have one of George Bush’s work cards. That’s enough to make conservatives worry whether or not George Bush is still a true believer. But liberals have even more reason for concern about his running roughshod over states’ rights: • Clean air. The Bush administration EPA issued new rules allowing coal-burning utilities to ignore state law and expand without installing more pollution controls. Fourteen states have sued to stop EPA. • Tort reform. As requested by the White House, Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation to move class-action lawsuits from state to federal courts, where

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damage awards are usually smaller—thereby helping big business and hurting consumers. Republican leaders are also attempting to put federal ceilings on how much money state juries can award for damages in medical malpractice lawsuits. • Internet taxes. With White House support, Republicans in Congress are pushing a federal ban on taxes on all online purchases, over the objections of many states—which, historically, control sales taxes. • Medical marijuana. John Ashcroft says the Justice Department will override any state law and prosecute any doctor or clinic offering marijuana to cancer or AIDS patients. What all this means, of course, is a bigger, more powerful federal government—at the expense of both states’ rights and individual rights. It is a strange legacy for a Republican president: the idea that Washington knows better than the states how to solve problems. But is a dangerous legacy, too. Because, as George Bush knows as well as anyone, once the federal government grabs more power, it’s almost impossible for states to get it back. He seems to have forgotten everything he learned as governor.

King of Flip-Flops George Bush must have a short memory. Or else he thinks we have no memory at all. Because after breaking all his promises, he kicked off the 2004 campaign by accusing Senator John Kerry of flip-flopping on the issues. Big mistake on his part. Whatever changes of heart he may have had over the course of his twenty years in the Senate, Kerry can’t hold a candle to George W. Bush, the king of flipflops. In just three years, Bush has been on both sides of every issue he’s faced as president.

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First he was against campaign finance reform, then he was for it. First he was against a Homeland Security Department, then he was for it. First he was against an investigation into Iraq’s WMD, then he was for it. First he was against nationbuilding, now he’s for it. First he was against deficits, now he loves them. First, he was against tariffs, then he was for them— then he was against them again. First he was against a 9/11 Commission, then he was for it. With George Bush, it’s like the weather in Florida. If you don’t like what you see, wait five minutes. It—and he—will change.

Lost Our Trust Politics is never without its disappointments. No politician, Republican or Democrat, ever delivers 100 percent of what we voted for. But most of them, at least, break their pick trying. With George Bush, it’s different. He didn’t break his pick trying to deliver his promises. He simply broke his promises, time and time again. In so doing, he has continually and consistently betrayed the trust of the American people. From war to jobs to education, we simply can’t trust him anymore to keep his word. And without trust, no president can govern. For promising to do one thing and, once in office, doing just the opposite . . . For four years of broken promises . . . And before he has a chance to break even more . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

REASON # TEN

The Credibility Gap: He Never Tells the Truth “Well, I think if you’re going to do something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.” George W. Bush August 30, 2000

By now, I’m sure you’ve noticed a consistent pattern about George Bush throughout this book. Let’s briefly review what we’ve seen so far: • George Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were none. • George Bush said Iraq was part of the war on terror. It had nothing to do with the war on terror. • George Bush said his tax cuts for the rich would create 5.5 million new jobs. Instead, he presided over the loss of 2.8 million jobs. • George Bush said he would cut federal spending. Instead, he set new records in federal spending and racked up the biggest deficits in history. • George Bush said he’d uphold and defend the Constitution. Instead, he chipped away at our fundamental freedoms under the guise of fighting terrorism.

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• George Bush said he’d serve the people. Instead, he showered favors on the special interests who funded his election campaign. • George Bush said he’d conduct a “humble” foreign policy. Instead, he treated other nations, including our closest allies, with total arrogance and hostility. • George Bush said he’d protect the environment. Instead, he turned anti-environmental forces loose on our forests, wilderness areas and national monuments in the name of the Almighty Dollar. • George Bush said he was a uniter. Instead, he’s the biggest divider ever. He’s thrived on sowing discord and division among Americans. You see the theme common to every aspect of his presidency? It’s so obvious it hits you right between the eyes. He doesn’t tell the truth. In fact, while researching Bush’s record in writing this book, I kept saying to myself: This guy reminds me of somebody. At first, I couldn’t get it. I kept asking myself: Who is it? Who’s George W. Bush remind me of? Pinocchio? Richard Nixon? And then it came to me. When I added up all his lies, I remembered his double. The two are like peas in a pod. George W. Bush is just like Baghdad Bob! We’ll never forget Iraq’s Minister of (Dis)Information, Mohammed Saeed AlSahaf—who uttered so many ridiculous fabrications about the progress of the war in Iraq that he soon became the laughingstock of the world as “Baghdad Bob” or “Comical Ali.” As live television showed American forces rolling unopposed across the desert on their way to the Iraqi capitol, Baghdad Bob told the world: “We have defeated them. In fact, we have crushed them.” When American cruise missiles started raining

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destruction on Saddam’s palaces, Baghdad Bob insisted it was merely special effects— “Hollywood trickery.” Even after U.S. forces had already entered and occupied key areas of the capital, Baghdad Bob stuck to his story: “Nobody came here. Those American losers, I think their repeated, frequent lies are bringing them down very rapidly . . . Baghdad is secure, is safe.” President Bush once told NBC’s Tom Brokaw he got a kick out of Baghdad Bob: “He’s my man!” The problem is, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was the first to observe, Bush didn’t just get a kick out of Baghdad Bob, he soon became Baghdad Bob. He morphed into him. Just like you couldn’t believe a word Baghdad Bob said, you can’t believe a word Baghdad George says, either. Now, I recognize it’s strong stuff to accuse the president of the United States of mendacity. But the fact is, as we have seen repeatedly: President Bush has lied to us. He’s told some little ones. And he’s told some big ones. Mighty big ones. I’m not talking about spin, either. I know from spin. I wrote a book on spin, called Spin This! (I’m sure it’s still available in your local bookstore.) All politicians spin. It’s part of their genetic makeup. But there’s a big difference between spinning and lying. Spinning is stretching the truth, tweaking or twisting it to make something sound better, or worse, than it really is. Like saying: “I decided it was time to spend more time with my family”—when the fact is, your ass got fired. Lying, on the other hand, is deliberately stating what you know is not true. Like saying: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”—when the fact is, your own CIA had told you it was bogus. And that’s what George W. Bush is guilty of. Lying to the American people. Over and over again. We all remember the old cynicism: “How do you know

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when a politician is lying? When his lips are moving!” But not even I would say that George Bush is lying every time his lips are moving. He never lies when he’s talking about his wife, his daughters, his parents, his dogs or his diet. He only lies when he’s talking about other stuff. Like his tax cuts, his budget deficits, his special interest friends—and his war. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s told so many lies as president. He started not telling the truth long before he got to the White House. In fact, for George W. Bush, aka “Baghdad George,” the road to the White House was paved with lies.

Baghdad George: The Candidate David Corn of The Nation has filled an entire book with examples of untruths Bush has told, called aptly The Lies of George W. Bush. As Corn documents, here are some of the lies told by Bush while running for president. He has repeatedly lied about his record as governor of Texas. He took credit for enacting a patients’ bill of rights. Big Lie. In fact, he had nothing to do with it. He opposed and then vetoed the first patients’ bill of rights passed by the Texas Legislature. In the next session, he also opposed the second attempt to enact a patients’ bill of rights, then finally let it become law—without his signature. He lied about his campaign: “I don’t run polls to tell me what to think.” Big Lie. Oh, yes he did. The Bush campaign, like every other campaign, had an official pollster and conducted focus groups to help decide what issues to run on and even what words to use. Where do you think the phrase “compassionate conservative” came from? Bush’s brain? He lied about not going negative. “I’ll run positive ads,” he promised fellow Republicans. Big Lie. Once John McCain humiliated him in the New Hampshire primary, George Bush’s

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supporters unleashed one of the dirtiest campaigns in memory. Bush surrogates accused McCain of betraying veterans, siring a black love child and being brainwashed as a POW. Major Bush contributor Sam Wyly ran TV ads claiming McCain was actually in favor of air pollution. George W. Bush never condemned the smear campaign. Meanwhile, the Bush campaign itself ran ads stating the senator “solicits money from lobbyists with interests before his committee.” At the time, Bush had raised five times as much money from Washington lobbyists as McCain. He lied about his résumé. He told NBC’s Nightly News: “I’ve never lived in Washington in my life.” Big Lie. Did he forget that he actually lived in northwest Washington for eighteen months as paid advisor to his father’s 1988 election campaign? He even lied about his troubles with the law. In a 1998 interview, Bush told political reporter Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News he had never been arrested. Another Big Lie. That bubble burst when, five days before Election Day 2000, a Maine TV station broke the news that Bush had, indeed, been arrested for drunk driving in 1976, when he was thirty years old.

Baghdad George: The National Guardsman Even though questions about George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard were raised during the 2000 campaign, it never became a big story. And we might never have heard about it again, if Bush and his political attack dogs had not gone after John Kerry’s patriotism. As soon as it looked like John Kerry would emerge as the 2004 Democratic nominee for president, Republican campaign officials started questioning his reputation as a war hero, because he had come home from Vietnam and become a leading spokesman in opposition to the war.

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Big mistake. Once John Kerry’s war record was fair game, then George Bush’s military record again became fair game. And Bush came out on the losing end when it was revealed he told a whole string of lies about his time in the Texas Air National Guard. He said no one pulled any strings to get him into the Guard, and thereby get him out of going to Vietnam. Big Lie. Ben Barnes, former speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, told the New York Times he received a call from Houston oil man Sidney Adger, a friend of Bush Sr., asking him to help find a slot for the young Mr. Bush. He did. In his 2000 official campaign biography, A Charge to Keep, Bush stated that he completed his pilot training in 1970 “and continued flying with my unit for the next several years.” Big Lie. His military record shows he did not fly for the final eighteen months of his service, in 1972 and 1973, because he failed to take the required annual physical. Having received permission to leave Texas and work on a Republican Senate campaign in Alabama, Bush said he regularly reported for Guard duty in Alabama from April 1972 through April 1973, as required by law. Big Lie. Retired General William Turnipseed, Guard Commander, says he never saw Bush. In 2000, a group of Alabama Vietnam vets offered $3,500 to anyone who saw Bush on duty in Montgomery. There were no takers. Again in February 2004, cartoonist Garry Trudeau had Doonesbury offer a $10,000 reward for a verifiable Bush spotting. No credible witness came forward. Bush said he failed to take his required checkup in July 1972 because he couldn’t get back to Houston to see his personal doctor. Big Lie. Pilot physicals are performed only by Air Force flight surgeons, a few of whom were stationed in Alabama. Just a few months before he was due for his physical, the Air Force started requiring drug tests as part of the annual

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checkup. An interesting coincidence. Could it be that’s why Bush didn’t show up? Having reopened this can of worms by mistake, President Bush went on Meet the Press on February 8, 2004, in a desperate bid to put the issue behind him. He told Tim Russert that the fact he’d been given an honorable discharge proved he’d fulfilled every obligation. Not so fast. The honorable discharge proved nothing. The next morning, radio talk show host Don Imus told listeners about getting in trouble, including punching a sergeant, while he was in the Marines. His superiors told him they’d give him an honorable discharge on one condition—that he promise not to re-enlist. Many times, Imus pointed out, honorable discharges are given just to get rid of people. In fact, according to Separation and Retirement Procedures for today’s Air National Guard, those eligible for honorable discharge include people who fail to comply with requirements for a medical examination; who abuse drugs; who have unsatisfactory participation; or whom the service is unable to locate. Nobody knows under what rubric Lieutenant Bush was discharged. The White House also proudly released Bush’s entire military file, saying this proved, once and for all, that he did in fact show up for duty in Alabama, as he claimed. Yet the stack of papers only confirmed one appearance by young Lieutenant Bush: on January 6, 1973—at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery—for a dental appointment. According to his own record, the only drill George W. Bush saw in Alabama—was a dentist’s!

Baghdad George: The Nominee By the time George W. Bush got to the Republican National Convention, he had told so many lies, he couldn’t stop—not

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even when accepting his party’s nomination. Standing on the convention floor in Philadelphia, surrounded by twenty thousand wildly cheering Bush supporters, I heard him accuse former President Bill Clinton of undermining the strength and readiness of America’s military. “If called on by the commander in chief today,” Bush told the adoring crowd, “two entire divisions of the Army would have to report: not ready for duty, sir.” Big Lie. Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both said Bush didn’t know what he was talking about. Besides, at that time, American troops were performing valuable peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Convincing proof that Bush was wrong came less than one year later, when Commander in Chief George Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Clinton’s Army performed brilliantly. They did a great job in Afghanistan and, eighteen months later, a great job in Iraq. What are the chances George Bush has ever called Bill Clinton to thank him? Back on the campaign trail, Bush continued his pattern of prevarication. He called for the partial privatization of Social Security. But, he insisted, he would allow workers to take 2 percent of payroll taxes out of Social Security without jeopardizing the benefits received by seniors already in the system. That’s one Big Lie his own staff conceded. Speaking candidly to reporters, Larry Lindsay, Bush’s chief economic advisor at the time, admitted that “Reductions in the guaranteed amounts of benefits that will go to plan participants are absolutely obvious.” During the campaign, Bush’s fundraising prowess became legendary. He had raised $100 million before his campaign even got underway. So it was strange to hear the reason he gave for rejecting Al Gore’s challenge to endorse campaign finance reform legislation. “This man has outspent me,” Bush declared.

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Big Lie. As David Corn reports in The Lies of George W. Bush, at that point, Bush had spent $121 million—more than double the $60 million spent by Al Gore. Now, even if a candidate tells a few fibs on the way to the White House, you’d think he’d mend his ways and tell only the truth once he put his hand on the Holy Bible and took the oath of office. George Bush didn’t. In fact, for George W. Bush, all the lies told on the campaign trail were just the prelude to what Michael Moore dubs the “Big Whoppers” he told once the Supreme Court parachuted him into the Oval Office. In the Introduction to his book full of Bush’s lies, David Corn sums up his propensity to stray from the straight and narrow: “This president has treated the truth in the manner his predecessor treated an intern.”

Baghdad George: The President What amazes and distresses me is how many lies Bush has told from his presidential perch—and gotten away with. Which just proves the Big Lie theory: If you repeat a lie often enough, people will start believing you. Especially when you happen to be president of the United States. There is no need to recount again all the lies President Bush has told in the White House, starting with all the lies he told about the need to go to war in Iraq. We’ve already covered so many of them in great detail. But I can’t resist repeating a few of his more recent “Big Whoppers” because, on the face of it, they’re so outrageous and so far from the truth. When the administration promised to create 475,000 new jobs a month, yet only produced 29,000 in February 2004, President Bush crowed: “Jobs are on the rise.” After producing the three biggest deficits in history and projecting record spending and a record-shattering $521 billion

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deficit for fiscal year 2005, President Bush had the gall to promise: “We can cut the deficit in half over the next five years.” When we have lost credibility around the world because our government insisted Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and must be disarmed—when, in fact, he had none— President Bush blindly boasts: “No one can now doubt the word of America.” At a time when Washington is torn with more bitter partisan rivalry than anybody can remember and the White House has alienated itself from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, President Bush pretends: “I’ve been changing the tone in Washington.” And even after his first campaign commercials showed footage of firemen carrying bodies out of the rubble of September 11 and he himself campaigned at the groundbreaking of a September 11 memorial, President Bush piously insists: “I have no ambition whatsoever to use national security as a political issue.”

Baghdad George: The Candidate Again Since lying had now become second nature to George W. Bush, it was no surprise that he began his reelection campaign the same way. Historically, incumbent presidents seeking reelection try to stay above the fray as long as possible. The campaign committee might run some TV commercials. Surrogates are sent out to attack and discredit the likely opponent. But, other than raising money, the president himself would typically ignore the opposition and act presidential. Not George W. Bush. He’s more politician than president, anyway. He couldn’t wait to get down and dirty. Before John Kerry had even won enough delegates to make him the

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Democratic nominee, Bush attacked him by name—and told another big fat lie! At a campaign fundraiser in Houston on February 8, 2004, President Bush said that in 1995, “two years after the first attack on the World Trade Center, my opponent introduced a bill to cut the overall intelligence budget by one-and-a-half billion dollars. His bill was so deeply irresponsible that he didn’t have a single cosponsor in the United States Senate. Once again, Senator Kerry is trying to have it both ways. He’s for good intelligence, yet he was willing to gut the intelligence services. And that is no way to lead a nation in a time of war.” An explosive charge—except for the fact that it wasn’t true. On Friday, March 12, the Washington Post told the full story under the headline: “Bush Exaggerates Kerry’s Position on Intelligence Budget.” As reported by Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, Kerry’s legislation was introduced shortly after senators discovered that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) had salted away $1.5 billion in unspent, secret funds. This was a time when the government was so short on cash that then House Speaker Newt Gingrich was threatening to shut it down. And later did. Kerry never rounded up coauthors for his legislation, because an identical bill—taking $1.5 billion back over five years from the NRO—was introduced by Arlen Spector, the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Kerry ended up cosponsoring the Spector legislation, along with Alabama’s Republican Senator Richard Shelby. The Spector-Shelby-Kerry legislation became law. Not only that, during the same session, on top of recalling that $1.5 billion, the GOP-controlled Congress cut the budget of the NRO by $3.5 billion over five years. In other words, Kerry was not gutting intelligence. He was simply joining his Republican colleagues in acting responsibly to trim government fat. But you’d never know that by listening to George W. Bush’s lies.

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By the way, the first President Bush wasn’t gutting intelligence, either, when he ordered a 17.5 percent across-the-board cut in intelligence staffing from 1991 to 1997. As former director of the CIA, he knew there was a lot of overlap and a lot of fat, even in intelligence services. The fact that the Washington Post so quickly punctured George W. Bush’s attack on John Kerry is significant, because it shows that the media won’t let him get away with his lies as easily as they did in 2000. After all his repeated, phony lies about Iraq in particular, reporters don’t trust anything he says anymore. And neither do the American people. The man has a serious credibility gap.

Baghdad George: The Credibility Gap Back when I was a young pup, I signed on as chief of staff in Sacramento to California Republican State Senator Peter Behr. To my astonishment, I watched this moderate Republican join forces with some of the most liberal Democratic members of the Legislature—and some of the most conservative Republican members—depending on the issue. Regardless of party, he soon discovered which ones he could trust, and which ones he could not. It was one of the first, most important and most lasting lessons I learned in politics: In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. What matters is your word. If your word is no good—if people learn that they can’t trust what you say because you’ll say one thing and do another—then you’re no good to anybody. And that’s where George W. Bush is today, and why he doesn’t deserve a second term. Whether it’s health care, or deficits, or weapons of mass destruction, or jobs or his service in the National Guard, his word is no good. As politicians on

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both sides of the aisle have discovered time and time again, you simply can’t believe a word he says. And Bush’s reputation for fudging the truth has only grown worse, every year he’s in office. To the point today where there is, as Senator Ted Kennedy warns, “a widening credibility gap between what the administration says and what it does.” Kennedy points out that the Bush’s administration’s assurances on the economy, education, health care and the war in Iraq don’t match the truth. They don’t even come close. And it’s not just Democrats who notice it. Bush supporter and Republican Christopher Shays of Connecticut told TIME magazine on February 16, 2004: “The thing that this President had going for him before Iraq was, you may not have agreed with Iraq, but you believed what he told you.” That confidence in his telling the truth, Shays agrees, is now gone. For any president, that would be a problem. But for George W. Bush, that’s a particular problem—because he made such a point during the 2000 campaign of saying he would tell the truth and “restore dignity” to the Oval Office. And he has not. Of course, Bush supporters still defend their man. He’s not the first president to tell lies, they point out. As novelist E. L. Doctorow confessed in a speech at NYU way back in December 1998: “I’ve been trying to think of an American president in my lifetime who didn’t lie to the American people.” But there are two problems with that defense of Bush. True, President Eisenhower lied about U-2 surveillance flights over the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy lied about the missile crisis. Lyndon Johnson lied about progress in Vietnam. George H. W. Bush lied about never raising taxes. Richard Nixon lied about just about everything. And Bill Clinton lied about Monica. But that doesn’t make it right. Just because so many other presidents lied doesn’t make it okay for George Bush to lie. That’s the kind of moral equivalency conservatives are sup-

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posed to despise. And, besides, if you can’t believe your president, whom can you believe? As former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan says: “In a president, character is everything.” The other key question is: What did they lie about? Clinton lied, and nobody died. But there’s a big difference between lying about a blowjob—and lying about a war. Bush lied about Iraq and, as of this writing, March 2004, over six hundred Americans and thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens have lost their lives. So now, as Republicans argued during Monicagate, the punishment must fit the crime. If a lie about a blowjob deserved impeachment, then what’s the appropriate punishment for a whole series of lies about going to war? The GOP-controlled Congress will never tell us, so we have to mete out our own punishment, starting by making Dubya a one-termer. If lying about a blowjob is an impeachable offense, then lying about a war is, at the very least, an unreelectable offense. In sum, the only way to close the credibility gap is to get rid of the man with no credibility. For violating the trust we place in our president . . . For lying to the American people . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

BONUS REASON

Florida: He Stole the 2000 Election “As far as the legal hassling and wrangling and posturing in Florida, I would suggest you talk to our team in Florida led by Jim Baker.” George W. Bush November 30, 2000

If you believe that each and every vote should be counted . . . If you believe that an election should not be declared over until all votes are counted . . . Or if you simply believe in the basic principle that the person who gets the most votes wins the election . . . Don’t vote for George W. Bush. There are several famous battle cries in American history. For Sam Houston’s brave volunteers determined to chase Santa Anna out of Texas at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, it was: “Remember the Alamo!” For American troops determined to chase Spain out of the Western Hemisphere in 1898, it was: “Remember the Maine!” For Americans determined to chase George W. Bush out of the White House in 2004, the new battle cry should be: “Remember Florida!” No other single event so aptly sums up the entire Bush presidency. Excessively partisan, hypocritical and borderline illegal. What happened in Florida means that this is an illegitimate administration. And he’s an illegitimate president. Yes, it happened four years ago. Yes, following Al Gore’s

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lead, I bowed to the decision of the Supreme Court and accepted George Bush as my president. And no, it’s not the main reason for denying him a second term. But, nevertheless, we can never forget—nor let others forget—the cold, uncomfortable but incontestable truth: • George Bush did not win the election in 2000. • Al Gore actually got 540,000 more popular votes than George Bush. • An estimated 175,000 legally cast votes in Florida were never counted. • George Bush became president only because a divided United States Supreme Court voted 5–4 to suspend abruptly the Florida vote count, when George Bush was leading by a mere 537 votes. • George Bush was not elected president by the people. He was selected president by the Supreme Court. • George Bush won by one vote: Antonin Scalia’s. In his own independent analysis of the Florida debacle, Too Close to Call, CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin sums it up: “In any real, moral, and democratic sense, Al Gore should have been declared the victor over George W. Bush—in the popular vote, in Florida, and in the Electoral College.” As for Gore’s failure to convince the courts to count all the votes in Florida, Toobin concludes: “It is a crime against democracy that he did not win the state and thus the presidency . . . The fact remains: The wrong man was inaugurated on January 20, 2001, and this is no small thing in our nation’s history.” No small thing, indeed. We held a democratic election in the United States of America and the man who got the most votes lost. The wrong man was inaugurated. The wrong man is still in the Oval Office.

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This wasn’t 1948 in rural Texas where, with little media attention and no cable TV, Lyndon Johnson could quietly steal an election from Coke Stevenson and get himself elected to the U.S. Senate by only eighty-seven votes. This was Florida 2000 in the full glare of the world’s spotlight and twenty-four-hour cable coverage. How could such a basic affront to democracy happen? Because of a combination of four related factors. First, and most importantly, the determination of George W. Bush and his team, led by former Secretary of State Jim Baker, to do whatever it took to win the White House. Even lie, cheat and steal, if necessary. And it was. Throughout the long thirty-six-day recount, Democrats had one pious-sounding message: “Count all the votes.” Who could argue with that? Republicans could. And did, with a much more in-your-face message: “The votes have already been counted and recounted. The election’s over. Bush won.” It wasn’t true, but it was very effective. And they pursued that lie all the way to the Supreme Court and then all the way to the White House. In the end, as former President Bill Clinton suggested, Democrats would have been better off shouting: “We won—and now they’re trying to steal the election!” But Bush’s machinations would never have worked had it not been for amazing factor number 2: the willingness of five conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside the principle of federalism and their own pro states’ rights record, deny Florida the right to conduct elections within its own borders, abruptly shut down an election before all the votes were counted and select the next president of the United States—thereby usurping a power reserved by the Constitution for the people, not the court. Third factor: the incompetence of Florida’s county election officials. Palm Beach County’s Theresa Lepore created the problem in the first place by designing a butterfly ballot so im-

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possible to read that twenty-nine thousand ballots were disqualified and Pat Buchanan ended up with 3,407 votes. This created an unusual category of voters: “Holocaust Survivors for Buchanan.” Even Buchanan admitted: “Yes, I did get thirtyfour hundred votes. But I also agree that many of those very probably and almost certainly were intended for Al Gore.” Other county officials either missed official deadlines or caved in to pressure from Secretary of State Katherine Harris not to count all the votes and thus hand George W. Bush the presidency. Final factor, and it can’t be denied: the ineptitude of the Gore campaign. In a way, as throughout the campaign, they were their own worst enemy. They failed to send popular President Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, a man who could have made the difference in a couple of swing states. They lost West Virginia and Tennessee, thereby setting Florida up as the deal maker. Then, instead of immediately asking for a manual recount in all sixty-seven counties, which was their legal option, they sought a recount only in those four counties where Al Gore ran best—opening themselves up to the criticism of cherry-picking. And, in the end, they didn’t fight hard enough to win, because Gore didn’t want to look like a sore loser. Bush could care less. This is not the place to revisit every twist of the tortuous Florida recount battle. But it is time to remind ourselves how George Bush, Jim Baker, loyal brother Jeb Bush and Bush puppet Katherine Harris—with the help of Bush’s friends on the nation’s highest court—hijacked the election of 2000 from the American people. Time and time again, they blocked lawful actions that would have confirmed the election for Al Gore.

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They Blocked the Recount When all the votes in Florida were tallied, early on November 8, George Bush had a slim lead of 1,784 votes—less than one-half of one percent of 6 million votes cast. According to Florida law, that was supposed to trigger an automatic recount of all ballots—running all ballots back through the counting machines. But that never happened. There was no statewide recount, as required by law, because Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, let eighteen counties get away with simply rechecking their math. At the same time, she did nothing to correct the problem in Palm Beach County, where Gore lost thousands of votes because of the confusing butterfly ballot. To this day, not all the votes cast in Florida in 2000 have been counted. Toobin concludes that Gore might have won right then and there, had there been an accurate and complete statewide recount. Nevertheless, despite Harris’s efforts on his behalf, the partial recount still shrunk Bush’s lead to 327 votes. Only a hand count could tell who really won.

They Blocked the Manual Counts By law, the next step in so close an election was a manual recount, which any candidate had the right to request of each of sixty-seven county election boards. Unwisely, as noted above, the Gore campaign decided to ask for hand counts in only four counties—thereby undermining their own mantra of “Count All the Votes.” In effect, they were now saying: “Count All the Votes—in Four Counties Only.” Dumb move. Still, four counties were four too many for Bush. With their margin now down to 327, Bush and Baker knew any manual

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recount meant trouble. They set out to stop them all. They sent GOP operatives into each county to persuade local officials not to agree to hand counts and to challenge every new Gore vote. They publicly condemned manual counts as untrustworthy, even though they were the official method of recounting votes in Texas. Most notably, in Palm Beach County, Gore country, Bush campaign officials persuaded the canvassing board to ignore the intent of the voter, by rejecting so-called “dimpled” or “pregnant” chads and only counting as valid “hanging” chads. According to the Palm Beach Post, that decision alone cost Gore 784 votes—many more than he needed to overcome Bush’s 327 vote lead. And, once again, Baker pulled Katherine Harris’s puppet strings. The compliant secretary of state, with a top Bush campaign official camped in her personal office, acted like a wholly owned subsidiary of the George W. Bush presidential campaign. At the request of the Republican state chairman—what the hell was he doing advising a state official?—she issued an immediate opinion advising county officials against manual recounts. But the Bush team still wasn’t taking any chances. Instead, they took even more steps to prevent all the votes from being counted.

They Took Power Away from Florida Federalism is one of the bedrock principles of conservatism: the right of states to conduct their own affairs, without interference from the central federal government. The concept dates back to Thomas Jefferson, of course. But, for modern conservatives, it was revived as sacred doctrine by Ronald Reagan. Republican politicians have since raised the

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flag of federalism to defend the right of states to decide such important matters as affirmative action, abortion, school prayer, jury trials, gay rights and guns. But in 2000—in his most audacious attempt to deny Al Gore what was rightfully his—George W. Bush proved that the only principle he believed in was winning. He threw federalism out the window and ordered Jim Baker to ask federal courts to deny the state of Florida the right to conduct its own elections. Baker sent lawyer Ted Olson to federal court in Miami to argue that allowing manual recounts, as provided by law in Florida and as practiced in Texas and many other states, violated the equal protection theory of the U.S. Constitution. The judge summarily rejected that absurd argument, but the Bush camp had successfully planted the seed that would later be swallowed whole by the U.S. Supreme Court. For this twisted accomplishment, Olson was later rewarded by Bush with appointment as solicitor general of the United States. Yet another Bush quid pro quo. Having lost the first round in court, Bush and Baker played their next card: mob rule!

They Sent the Goon Squads into Miami-Dade Miami-Dade is the biggest county in Florida, and traditionally solid Democratic territory. Alarmingly for the Bush team, the first 2000 vote count in Miami-Dade showed 10,750 “undervotes”—or ballots on which the voting machines detected no preference for president. Knowing that a hand count of those votes might easily put Gore over the top, Bush and Baker determined not to let that happen. To GOP operatives around the country, they sent out the word: Get to Miami and shut it down. From Bush campaign headquarters and from Republican

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political organizations, e-mails offered airfare and hotel expenses for volunteers. Underscoring the significance of the mission, one message said in part: “Republicans will be needed to keep a watchful eye on the highly selective and subjective hunt for phantom Al Gore votes that is set to begin in Miami-Dade County, where there are over a million ballots.” In they rushed, several hundred of them crowding onto the eighteenth floor of Miami’s Clark Center, where the MiamiDade canvassing board had gathered to begin the recount. When the board moved to a smaller room on the nineteenth floor to escape the circus, eighty to one hundred protestors followed, banging on the doors and windows and chanting: “Let Us In! Let Us In!” They roughed up county spokesman Mayco Villafana and sheriff’s deputies, who tried to restore order. And the GOP mob prevailed: Their violent disruption cowed the board into temporarily suspending its recount. When the board reconvened, two hours later, they voted unanimously to cancel the manual recount in Miami-Dade. Elections Supervisor David Leahy told the New York Times that the unruly crowd was a factor in his decision to shut down the vote. Spokesman Villafana admitted: “I think the protestors accomplished their goal.” The Republican goons had won. That evening, they held a victory party. The next day, George Bush and Dick Cheney both called to offer their thanks. And no wonder. Had the Miami-Dade recount gone forward and given Gore the lead, the United States Supreme Court could never have ruled as it soon did. Democracy in action? Think again. These were not outraged citizens, protesting the action of their locally elected officials. ABC’s Jake Tapper, then with Salon.com, wrote a detailed account of those thirty-six days of hell, a book called Down and Dirty. In it, he published the names and affiliations of many members of Bush’s goon squad. They include:

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• Marjorie Strayer, aide to Republican Representative Heather Wilson of New Mexico • Thomas Pyle, policy analyst for House Majority Whip Tom DeLay • Michael Murphy, a DeLay fundraiser • Roger Morse, aide to Representative Van Hilleary (RTenn.) • Duane Gibson, aide to Representative Don Young (RAlaska) • Doug Heye, spokesman for Representative Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) • Garry Malphrus, counsel with the House Judiciary Committee • Chuck Royal, aide to Representative Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) • Jim Wilkinson, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee • Rory Cooper, staffer at the NRCC And that’s just for starters. No wonder it became known as the “Brooks Brothers Riot.” These were out-of-town, paid political protestors sent to Florida by the Bush campaign—most of them from Republican congressional offices in the Capitol— for the express purpose of shutting down the Miami-Dade recount and denying Al Gore the election. Next move for the Bush team: to shut down any protests over military ballots.

They Lied About Military Ballots Both sides in Florida were worried about overseas ballots— which were valid, as long as they were received within ten days of Election Day. Because of Clinton’s lack of military service, Democrats feared a surge among military ballots for George

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Bush. Because Jews voted so heavily Democratic, Republicans feared a surge among civilian ballots from Tel Aviv for Al Gore. So, both sides sent out memos to those monitoring the counting of overseas ballots—with the exact same instructions: Overseas ballots must bear a postmark, or a signature; they must be signed by a witness; they must have been mailed before Election Day. And any ballots that did not meet the strictest test must be rejected. Both the Bush staff and the Gore staff went to work applying the same rules. Until Bill Kristol, Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff and publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard, dropped the bomb. In a phone call to his buddy Dorrance Smith, Jim Baker’s communications assistant, Kristol suggested a political gold mine for the campaign: accusing Democrats of stealing votes from soldiers. Presto! Overnight, the Bush campaign reversed course. How could Al Gore aspire to be commander in chief, they thundered, when he was waging war against our brave men and women in uniform? Ignoring their own former memo insisting on strict application of the rules, they now demanded that every overseas ballot from a military voter be counted, whether it complied with state law or not. This, of course, was pure hypocrisy. They rejected similar leniency for overseas civilian ballots. And at the very same time, by blocking manual recounts, they were preventing thousands of citizens, including many veterans, from having their votes counted. But the Gore campaign fell into the trap. Vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and piously pleaded that the benefit of the doubt be given to every military ballot. So, in a sense, Republicans didn’t just steal the election. Joe Lieberman gave it away. The result, a New York Times analysis later showed, was that canvassers allowed not only ballots without postmarks,

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but overseas ballots with domestic postmarks, faxed ballots, and ballots without the signatures of witnesses. Among Democrats, only former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, a war hero himself, had the guts to stand up and tell the world what was going on. “We should not be playing politics with our military,” he told a news conference. “If they have a legal ballot, it should be counted. If it’s not a legal ballot, it should not be counted. Men and women in the military should not expect and do not expect to be treated in some fashion that has them being a pawn in a political argument that’s very tense and very passionate here in Florida.” For Kerrey’s courage, he was harassed by a gaggle of Bush supporters. But nobody was listening, anyway. Once again, the Bush team had snatched victory out of Al Gore’s hands.

They Threatened to Take Over the Electoral College Nowhere did the Bush campaign show its dishonesty more than in its sudden “love and respect” for the Electoral College. It was common knowledge in the last days of the campaign that George Bush expected to win the popular vote, but lose the electoral vote. In which case, his team had already prepared the legal briefs, ready to file, challenging the legitimacy of the Electoral College. We talked all about it on one session of Crossfire. When it turned out just the opposite—Gore winning the popular vote, but Bush clinging to the electoral vote—the Bush legal team shredded their old arguments and hastily wrote a whole set of new ones, defending the Electoral College as if it were God’s gift to the United States that no red-white-andblue-blooded American would ever dare question or challenge. But then they started to worry. Even with Jeb Bush calling the

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shots, they weren’t sure he could deliver Florida to big brother George. And what if all the votes were counted and Gore won? That’s when Jim Baker pulled the ace out of his sleeve. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution reads: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors . . .” With his fine Machiavellian mind, Baker gave that phrase an unusual interpretation: that the Legislature could not only appoint the electors from Florida, it could tell them how to vote. In other words, the Republican-controlled Legislature could appoint all Republican electors and instruct them to vote for George W. Bush, no matter what results the final Florida vote tally might produce. What hypocrisy. First, Baker plans to defy the Electoral College. Then he embraces it. Then he designs a way around it. But Republican legislative leaders were ecstatic. Governor Jeb Bush said he would sign such a bill into law. No matter what mischief the Florida Supreme Court might cause, the stage was quietly set to usurp the expressed will of the people of Florida by hook or by crook. Mainly, of course, by crook. Jim Baker never had to pull the trigger. The fix was in. Bill Rehnquist and the Supremes rode to the rescue.

The Supreme Court Selected George Bush There’s no doubt about it: Bush v. Gore is the worst, the sloppiest, the most blatantly political and the least defensible decision in the history of the United States Supreme Court. And that’s saying something. It’s worse, even, than the Dred Scott decision upholding slavery, or Plessy v. Ferguson upholding segregation. Because at least those decisions can be understood, given the public policies of that era. Not so with Bush v. Gore. It says that not

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every person’s vote counts—after we’ve spent 213 years trying to prove just the opposite. Few observers expected the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in this election. It was, after all, against everything they supposedly stood for. By tradition, the court had always religiously avoided immersing itself in political controversies—especially an election still underway. And, by policy, this conservative court had always firmly upheld the right of states to run their own affairs. Nor was there any “constitutional crisis,” as Bush lawyer Ted Olson claimed. The United States had a sitting president. His term didn’t expire until January 20. There was plenty of time to count all the votes. The world was enjoying an unusual time of peace and prosperity. And Florida’s own Supreme Court was moving decisively, even if not always in Bush’s favor, to resolve the legal issues and wrap up the recount. In fact, under the direction of Florida’s highest court to respect the “clear intent” of the voter, a statewide recount was finally underway—with respected off-duty judges from both parties volunteering as canvassers. (Again, if Al Gore had demanded a full statewide recount from the beginning, he would probably be president today.) Things were progressing smoothly. The recount would have been completed by the court’s deadline. We would soon have known for sure who had really won in Florida—and who should be the next president. There was no reason for the Supreme Court to step in— except to prevent all votes from being counted. After all, the justices watch television like everybody else. It looked like their guy might lose—and they didn’t want that to happen. This was purely a political, not a legal, decision. Bush v. Gore was nothing but five Supreme Court justices choosing to give the 2000 election to George W. Bush. The five pro-Bush justices all but admitted that themselves

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in their majority opinion: “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances . . .” In other words, they applied their absurd argument that because there was no statewide standard for counting votes (as there is not in many states), it was not necessary to count all the votes—only in the case of George W. Bush in 2000. Why? Because his ass was the only one they were interested in saving. Not even trying to hide his partisanship, Justice Antonin Scalia said the court had to act to prevent the “irreparable harm” that might be done to George W. Bush. Irreparable harm? What was the harm, Justice Stevens wanted to know, in counting all the votes? Stevens might have asked, how about the irreparable harm done to Al Gore, who won the election but lost the White House? And, more importantly, how about the irreparable harm done to the American people by having to suffer four years of George W. Bush as president? In the end, Al Gore got 540,520 more votes than George W. Bush. Had all the votes been counted in Florida, Al Gore would most likely have won the Sunshine State by several thousand votes. But Al Gore was denied the prize and the American people were denied their first choice—because five black robes handed the presidency to George Bush. Just a couple of days later, Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy joined Dick Cheney at a Christmas party at the home of former Republican Senator Paul Laxalt, now a bigtime Washington lobbyist. And in January 2004, Scalia flew on Air Force Two as Cheney’s guest to go duck hunting in Louisiana. Pure payola. The Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision is a crime against democracy that the American people should never forgive—and never forget. Nor should we ever forgive or forget George W. Bush, the man who pulled the strings. It’s your

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bonus reason, and one of the most important reasons, why . . . For his role in thwarting the will of the people . . . For his willingness to do anything, even break the rules, to win . . . For his absolute contempt for democracy . . . GEORGE W. BUSH MUST GO!

Conclusion “They have miscalculated me as a leader.” George W. Bush September 13, 2000

George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush are not the only father-and-son team to become presidents of the United States. That honor first went to John Adams and John Quincy Adams. As a great fan of Adams father and son, I hate to draw any comparison between the Adamses and the Bushes. Especially between John Quincy and George W. Before he became president, John Quincy Adams had already made his mark on history as one of America’s most brilliant diplomats. Under our first three presidents, he served as minister to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia and the Court of St. James. He was also elected to the U.S. Senate, before becoming James Monroe’s secretary of state and authoring the Monroe Doctrine. Compare that to the wastrel years of the young and irresponsible George W. Bush. Nevertheless, there are parallels between these two fatherand-son pairs that are worth remarking upon in this election year. Like George H. W. Bush, John Adams served only one term

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as president. In 1800, he was defeated by Thomas Jefferson. In 1992, the first President Bush was defeated by William Jefferson Clinton. And, like George W. Bush, John Quincy Adams became president without actually winning the election. He received almost fifty thousand fewer votes than Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Bush tallied five hundred thousand fewer votes than Al Gore of Tennessee. The election of 1824 was decided by the House of Representatives, when Henry Clay of Kentucky abandoned Jackson and threw his support to Adams. The election of 2000, on the other hand, was decided by the Supreme Court, when five justices abandoned the principle of states’ rights, shut down the Florida recount and made George W. Bush president. But history had a rude surprise in store for John Quincy Adams. And it may also hold one for George W. Bush. In 1828, convinced that the previous election had been stolen from him in a “corrupt bargain,” Andrew Jackson came back with a vengeance, took his campaign directly to the people and trounced John Quincy Adams in the electoral college, 178 to 83—after which he went on to serve two full, actionpacked terms. In 2004, Al Gore himself is not coming back. But Democrats, convinced the previous election was stolen from them in another “corrupt bargain,” are indeed seeking revenge and determined to make George W. Bush the next John Quincy Adams—by denying him a second term and sending him back to Texas. In this election season, some commentators look at John Kerry and ask: Okay, Bush may not be so hot, but what would Kerry do differently? How would he create new jobs? Or how would he deal with the situation in postwar Iraq? Good questions. But this election is not about John Kerry. This election is about George W. Bush. In 2004, as in any re-

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election campaign, the issue is not: What would the challenger do? The issue is: What has the incumbent done? Has he performed well enough, or at least shown enough promise, that he deserves another four years? With George W. Bush, the answer is no, no, no. This presidential election of 2004 is, above all, a referendum on the first four years of President George W. Bush. And by that test, Bush falls flat on his face. As documented throughout this book, in every policy area, George W. Bush has failed to deliver on the promises he made as candidate for president. But even worse, he has moved the country in several unexpected and dangerous directions: back to deficit spending; back to ugly, partisan politics; and on toward a bigger federal government and unilateral, unprovoked, first-strike warfare. This is not what voters expected, wanted, or asked for in 2000. According to a mid-March 2004 Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the United States at this time.” Even after three and a half years at the helm, it is still patently obvious that George W. Bush is not up to the job of president of the United States. He has neither the intellectual curiosity nor the capacity to understand the complexity of the issues he must deal with. On foreign policy, lacking the selfconfidence that comes with more experience, he has abdicated power to the hard-liners he surrounded himself with: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others. On domestic policy, he dropped any pretense of being a compassionate conservative and set back the clock on jobs, the economy, education and the environment. The past is prelude. Based on his record so far, we know what to expect if, God forbid, George W. Bush were to win a second term: more record deficits; more cuts in health care; more attacks by John Ashcroft on civil liberties; more terrorist attacks on Americans and our allies; and maybe two to three

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more flaming right-wingers on the U.S. Supreme Court. The stakes are too high. We can’t let that happen. For only the second time in history, the son of a president who failed to get reelected is trying to win a second term for himself. There is, however, one key difference between the two presidential sons. John Quincy Adams deserved a second term. George W. Bush clearly does not. GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!

Acknowledgments

In the magnificent Cathedral of Chartres is a humorous, yet very meaningful series of stained-glass windows showing the authors of the New Testament perched on the shoulders of the prophets of the Old Testament. It’s the artist’s way of saying that, from the beginning of time, we all depend on those who have plowed the same ground ahead of us. As do I. There were several brave souls before me who dared broadcast the truth about the failed presidency of George W. Bush—including Michael Moore, Molly Ivins, David Corn, Joe Conason, James Carville, Kevin Phillips and Al Franken. Having both benefited and borrowed from their work, I am immensely grateful. Staff members of several organizations assisted me with research over and above what is available on their public websites. I want to thank especially the good people at the AFL-CIO, the Economic Policy Institute, the League of Conservation Voters and Citizens for Tax Justice. I’m particularly grateful to Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity for

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his insights and valuable background information. I also owe a huge thank you to John Podesta and the staff of the Center for American Progress, led by Research Director David Sirota. Once again, I was in good hands with Ron Goldfarb—a good agent, but a better friend. The assistance of research assistant Kevin C. Murphy was invaluable. Someday, I’ll dare write a book without him, but I don’t know how. And, from the beginning, I couldn’t have asked for a more enthusiastic group of supporters and helpmates than the team at Dutton: Carole Baron, Brian Tart, Lisa Johnson, Seta Bedrossian, Hector DeJean and, especially, my creative and patient editor Mitch Hoffman. They made an impossible deadline seem easy. They make bookwriting fun. Throughout the development and writing of this book countless friends reached out with ideas, suggestions, themes, or simply a glass of wine and word of encouragement. Thank you, one and all. A special word of thanks to Susie and Mark Buell and Bonny Wolf and Michael Levy. But, more than anyone else, a very heartfelt word of thanks to my wife, Carol. In the middle of my writing this book, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent major surgery. Yet, during her hospitalization and recovery, her main concern was that she was keeping me from meeting my deadline. Together, we made it. We are now both cancer survivors, as well as book survivors. Thank you, Carol.

Bibliography

If you’re like me, you’re always looking for more facts and more ammunition. These books are full of information and insights into the disastrous Bush presidency. Here are some of the sources I’ve read, referenced and recommend. Alterman, Eric and Mark Green. The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America. Viking, New York, 2004. Begala, Paul. It’s Still the Economy, Stupid: George W. Bush, the GOP’s CEO. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002. Carville, James. Had Enough? A Handbook for Fighting Back. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2003. Clarke, Richard A. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. Free Press, New York, 2004. Conason, Joe. Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2003.

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Corn, David. The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Crown, New York, 2003. Daalder, Ivo H. and James M. Lindsay. America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, 2003. Dean, John W. Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. Little, Brown & Co., New York, 2004. Franken, Al. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Dutton, New York, 2003. Hightower, Jim. They’ve Stolen Our Country, and Now It’s Time to Take it Back. Viking Press, New York, 2003. Ivins, Molly and Lou Dubose. Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. Random House, New York, 2000. Ivins, Molly and Lou Dubose. Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America. Random House, New York, 2003. Kennedy Jr., Robert F. Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy. HarperCollins, New York, 2004. Krugman, Paul. The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2003. Lewis, Charles and the Center for Public Integrity. The Buying of the President 2004. Perennial/HarperCollins, New York, 2004. Moore, Michael. Stupid White Men . . . And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. ReganBooks/HarperCollins, New York, 2001. Moore, Michael. Dude, Where’s My Country? Warner Books, New York, 2003.

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Phillips, Kevin. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. Viking, New York, 2004. Rubin, Robert E. and Jacob Weisberg. In an Uncertain World. Random House, New York, 2003. Suskind, Ron. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004. Tapper, Jake. Down & Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency. Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2001. Toobin, Jeffrey. Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election. Random House, New York, 2001. Weisberg, Jacob (ed.). George W. Bushisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Our 43rd President. Fireside, New York, 2001. (Plus two more collections in 2002 and 2003.) Wilson, Joseph. The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Exposed My Wife’s CIA Identity—A Diplomat’s Memoir. Carroll & Graf, New York, 2004.

Organizations/Websites

After wandering in the wilderness far too long, moderates and liberals are finally starting to get their act together. There are many progressive policy organizations today doing excellent research on issues and offering active, up-to-date websites. Go online anytime and you’ll find a treasure trove of good, factual information on current issues—plus lots of material to rebut the many lies of the Bush administration. Along these lines, here are some of the sources that I consult frequently, if not daily. AFL-CIO. Outstanding website, including “Bushwatch”—an encyclopedic account of all the sins committed by George W. Bush against working men and women since the day he was airlifted into the Oval Office by the Supreme Court. At www.aflcio.org. ACLU. Yes, I’m a proud, card-carrying member. And I think every American should be, because their job is to defend the

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civil rights and liberties of all, even Rush Limbaugh. At www. aclu.org. Americans United. Official title: Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The name says it all. Zealous watchdogs over our First Amendment freedoms. And we need some zeal on our side. At www.au.org. Bush Watch. This site exists for the sole purpose of listing and documenting the lies told by President Bush and other senior administration officials. Needless to say, it is a long, but comprehensive—and shocking!—list. At bushwatch.com. Buzzflash. An outstanding source for daily headlines, breaking news and liberal take on all the current issues. Plus latest columns from liberal pundits. You can find it all here. At www.buzzflash.com. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On top of all the hotspots around the globe, promoting diplomatic solutions to conflict. Strong leader in nonproliferation movement. Published excellent report on Bush administration deceptions over Iraq’s WMD. At www.ceip.org. Center for American Progress. Washington’s hot, new progressive think tank. Sign up for their excellent daily backgrounder, The Progress Report. This is the liberal equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, except ten times smarter. At www.american progress.org. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The best numbercrunchers in the business, period. They tell the truth about the real costs and implications of every budget, tax cut and legisla-

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tive and policy proposal. If only Congress and the White House paid attention. At www.cbpp.org. Center for Public Integrity. A rarity in Washington: a truly nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that keeps on top of, and skewers, both sides. Their investigative team examines everything from corporate crime to civil rights to campaign contributions—and dares to report the truth. At www.public integrity.org. Center for Responsive Politics. There are no secrets in campaign contributions anymore, thanks to this group. They track all contributions to all federal candidates and from all lobbyists. See who’s buying whom. At www.opensecrets.org. Citizens Against Government Waste. Doesn’t matter whether you’re liberal or conservative, these guys are fighting for all of us against wasteful government spending. At www.cagw.org. Citizens for Tax Justice. The very best, most up-to-date and most accurate analysis of all the Bush tax cuts and every tax proposal before the Congress. Take it to the bank. At www. ctj.org. Concord Coalition. A conservative organization, but consistent advocates of balanced budgets, spending limits and responsible fiscal policy. They don’t buy Bush’s baloney that deficits don’t matter. At www.concordcoalition.org. Congressman Henry Waxman. The California Democrat has done a public service by compiling 237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice. At www.reform.house.gov/min.

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Daily Kos. A lively update of political news on the left, with particular emphasis on Democratic attempts to take back control of the U.S. Congress—as seen through the eyes of one man, Markos Zuniga. He’s got a good eye for what’s important. At www.dailykos.com. Economic Policy Institute. Watchdogs over all economic issues, with particular emphasis on jobs, job creation, trade and outsourcing. They do a great job of holding Bush’s feet to the fire on phony job predictions. At www.epinet.org. Factsheet. A non-partisan website run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. They sift through the campaign spin and candidate equivocations on both sides—and try to get the facts on the record. At www. factcheck.org. Institute for Policy Studies. One of the oldest think tanks in Washington, covering a wide range of issues—civil rights, environment, Iraq, economic justice, Latin America, nuclear proliferation—from a progressive point of view. At www. ips-dc.org. League of Conservation Voters. The political arm of the environmental movement. Tracks voting record of members of Congress and actions taken by administration on environmental issues—and hands out an annual report card. In 2004, they gave President Bush an “F.” At www.lcv.org. Move On.Org. A political phenomenon. They call themselves “democracy in action,” and they are. Circulating petitions, organizing events, raising money and raising hell to support all kinds of good causes and candidates. Join the movement. At www.moveon.org.

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Natural Resources Defense Council. Great organization, bringing the best of scientific evidence to work on solving environmental problems. Their website features an excellent, ongoing summary of Bush’s war on the environment, called “The Bush Record.” At www.nrdc.org. People for the American Way. True guardians of the Constitution, they defend our founding document from threats ranging from Ashcroft’s notorious Patriot Act to Bush’s wacky constitutional amendments. Plus, nobody tracks Bush’s judicial nominees better or has done a better job of exposing their all-too-frequent lack of qualifications for the federal bench. At www.pfaw.org. Political Wire. Actual title is Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire. A lively summary of the day’s political news, with strong leanings to the left. At politicalwire.com. Sierra Club. Granddaddy of all the environmental organizations, but still the biggest and strongest with 700,000 members. Online, its “W Watch” keeps tab on the Bush administration’s sad and sorry environmental record. At www.sierraclub.org. Spinsanity. One of my favorite sites. Relentlessly dissects the spin from both sides. They’re not exaggerating when they call themselves “the nation’s leading watchdog of manipulative political rhetoric.” At www.spinsanity.org. Talking Points. Joshua Micah Marshall never sleeps. He watches every newscast, listens to every talk radio show, reads every newspaper—and then cuts through the spin and tells it straight. In between, he writes for The Washington Monthly and The Hill newspaper. Don’t be misled. Get the truth. At www.talkingpointsmemo.com.

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Wilderness Society. Somebody has to protect our few remaining wilderness areas and our national parks—and the Wilderness Society does an outstanding job. Led the fight against drilling in ANWAR and Bush’s assault on national forests. At www.wilderness.org. Then, of course, there is the most valuable website of all . . . Bill Press. The one place to go to read my weekly column, my latest rants, my reading recommendations, schedules for book signings and speeches—plus all the additional reasons why BUSH MUST GO! Check me out at www.billpress.com.

Now you know my top ten reasons for dumping George W. Bush. No doubt, you have your own. So, here’s your chance. Borrow from mine, add your favorites, use this space to put down your own list—then clip it out, make copies and hand it out to friends. Spread the word: Bush Must Go!

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