Fw: Gore on Bush
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Steiner"
To:
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 1:20 PM
Subject: Gore on Bush
Dear All:
This is obviously a long speech, but worth the
time if you know folks who are still on the edge
and are open to input at this late stage in the
game. Most people have certainly made up their
minds and at this point or already voted and very
little anyone will say will change a mind.
However, in the same way that a number of
knowledgeable people predicted that Iraq would
become the disaster it has....
Sincerely,
John
From: INTEGRATIVE MEDICAL-CONSULTING
Al Gore Speaks on Iraq
http://www.moveonpac.org/gore5/
Monday, October 18 , 2004 at 12:30pm
Gaston Hall, Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
Text of the speech, as prepared:
I have made a series of speeches about the policies
of the Bush-Cheney administration - with regard to
Iraq, the war on terror, civil liberties, the
environment and other issues - beginning more than two
years ago with a speech at the Commonwealth Club in
San Francisco prior to the administration's decision
to invade Iraq. During this series of speeches, I have
tried to understand what it is that gives so many
Americans the uneasy feeling that something very basic
has gone wrong with our democracy.
There are many people in both parties who have the
uneasy feeling that there is something deeply
troubling about President Bush's relationship to
reason, his disdain for facts, an incuriosity about
new information that might produce a deeper
understanding of the problems and policies that he
wrestles with on behalf of the country. One group
maligns the President as not being intelligent, or at
least, not being smart enough to have a normal
curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second
group is convinced that his religious conversion
experience was so profound that he relies on religious
faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree
with both of those groups. I think he is plenty smart.
And while I have no doubt that his religious belief is
genuine, and that it is an important motivation for
many things that he does in life, as it is for me and
for many of you, most of the President's frequent
departures from fact-based analysis have much more to
do with right-wing political and economic ideology
than with the Bible. But it is crucially important to
be precise in describing what it is he believes in so
strongly and insulates from any logical challenge or
even debate. It is ideology - and not his religious
faith - that is the source of his inflexibility. Most
of the problems he has caused for this country stem
not from his belief in God, but from his belief in the
infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology
that exalts the interests of the wealthy and of large
corporations over the interests of the American
people. Love of power for its own sake is the original
sin of this presidency.
The surprising dominance of American politics by
right-wing politicians whose core beliefs are often
wildly at odds with the opinions of the majority of
Americans has resulted from the careful building of a
coalition of interests that have little in common with
each other besides a desire for power devoted to the
achievement of a narrow agenda. The two most important
blocks of this coalition are the economic royalists,
those corporate leaders and high net worth families
with vast fortunes at their disposal who are primarily
interested in an economic agenda that eliminates as
much of their own taxation as possible, and an agenda
that removes regulatory obstacles and competition in
the marketplace. They provide the bulk of the
resources that have financed the now extensive network
of foundations, think tanks, political action
committees, media companies and front groups capable
of simulating grassroots activism. The second of the
two pillars of this coalition are social conservatives
who want to roll back most of the progressive social
changes of the 20 th century, including women's
rights, social integration, the social safety net, the
government social programs of the progressive era, the
New Deal, the Great Society and others. Their
coalition includes a number of powerful special
interest groups such as the National Rifle
Association, the anti-abortion coalition, and other
groups that have agreed to support each other's
agendas in order to obtain their own. You could call
it the three hundred musketeers - one for all and all
for one. Those who raise more than one hundred
thousand dollars are called not musketeers but
pioneers.
His seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by
people who see and hear him on television as evidence
of the strength of his conviction - when in fact it is
this very inflexibility, based on a willful refusal to
even consider alternative opinions or conflicting
evidence, that poses the most serious danger to the
country. And by the same token, the simplicity of his
pronouncements, which are often misinterpreted as
evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a
complex issue, are in fact exactly the opposite --
they mark his refusal to even consider complexity.
That is a particularly difficult problem in a world
where the challenges we face are often quite complex
and require rigorous analysis.
The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes
an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of
economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a
phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans
who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the
world. And in the process he convinces them to lend
unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt
their families and their communities. Bush has stolen
the symbolism and body language of religion and used
it to disguise the most radical effort in American
history to take what rightfully belongs to the
citizenry of America and give as much as possible to
the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his
agenda and say, as Dick Cheney said to Paul O'Neill,
"this is our due."
The central elements of Bush's political - as opposed
to religious -- belief system are plain to see: The
"public interest" is a dangerous myth according to
Bush's ideology - a fiction created by the hated
"liberals" who use the notion of "public interest" as
an excuse to take away from the wealthy and powerful
what they believe is their due. Therefore, government
of by and for the people, is bad - except when
government can help members of his coalition. Laws and
regulations are therefore bad - again, except when
they can be used to help members of his coalition.
Therefore, whenever laws must be enforced and
regulations administered, it is important to assign
those responsibilities to individuals who can be
depended upon not to fall prey to this dangerous
illusion that there is a public interest, and will
instead reliably serve the narrow and specific
interests of industries or interest groups. This is
the reason, for example, that President Bush put the
chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, in charge of vetting any
appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission. Enron had already helped the Bush team
with such favors as ferrying their rent-a-mob to
Florida in 2000 to permanently halt the counting of
legally cast ballots. And then Enron went on to bilk
the electric rate-payers of California, without the
inconvenience of federal regulators protecting
citizens against their criminal behavior. Or to take
another example, this is why all of the important EPA
positions have been filled by lawyers and lobbyists
representing the worst polluters in their respective
industries in order to make sure that they're not
inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the laws
against excessive pollution. In Bush's ideology, there
is an interweaving of the agendas of large
corporations that support him and his own ostensibly
public agenda for the government he leads. Their
preferences become his policies, and his politics
become their business.
Any new taxes are of course bad - especially if they
add anything to the already unbearable burden placed
on the wealthy and powerful. There are exceptions to
this rule, however, for new taxes that are paid by
lower income Americans, which have the redeeming
virtue of simultaneously lifting the burden of paying
for government from the wealthy and potentially
recruiting those presently considered too poor to pay
taxes into the anti-tax bandwagon.
In the international arena, treaties and
international agreements are bad, because they can
interfere with the exercise of power, just as domestic
laws can. The Geneva Convention, for example, and the
U.S. law prohibiting torture were both described by
Bush's White House Counsel as "quaint." And even
though new information has confirmed that Donald
Rumsfeld was personally involved in reviewing the
specific extreme measures authorized to be used by
military interrogators, he has still not been held
accountable for the most shameful and humiliating
violation of American principles in recent memory.
Most dangerous of all, this ideology promotes the
making of policy in secret, based on information that
is not available to the public and insulated from any
meaningful participation by Congress. And when
Congress's approval is required under our current
constitution, it is given without meaningful debate.
As Bush said to one Republican Senator in a meeting
described in Time magazine, "Look, I want your vote.
I'm not going to debate it with you." At the urging of
the Bush White House, Republican leaders in Congress
have taken the unprecedented step of routinely barring
Democrats from serving on important conference
committees and allowing lobbyists for special
interests to actually draft new legislative language
for conference committees that has not been considered
or voted upon in either the House or Senate.
It appears to be an important element in Bush's
ideology to never admit a mistake or even a doubt. It
also has become common for Bush to rely on special
interests for information about the policies important
to them and he trusts what they tell him over any
contrary view that emerges from public debate. He has,
in effect, outsourced the truth. Most disturbing of
all, his contempt for the rule of reason and his early
successes in persuading the nation that his
ideologically based views accurately described the
world have tempted him to the hubristic and genuinely
dangerous illusion that reality is itself a commodity
that can be created with clever public relations and
propaganda skills, and where specific controversies
are concerned, simply purchased as a turnkey operation
from the industries most affected.
George Orwell said, "The point is that we are all
capable of believing things which we know to be
untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong,
impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we
were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on
this process for an indefinite time: the only check on
it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up
against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
And in one of the speeches a year ago last August, I
proposed that one reason why the normal processes of
our democracy have seemed dysfunctional is that the
nation had a large number of false impressions about
the choices before us, including that Saddam Hussein
was the person primarily responsible for attacking us
on September 11 th 2001 (according to Time magazine,
70 percent thought that in November of 2002); an
impression that there was a tight linkage and close
partnership and cooperation between Osama bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist group al
Qaeda, which attacked us, and Iraq, which did not; the
impression that Saddam had a massive supply of weapons
of mass destruction; that he was on the verge of
obtaining nuclear weapons, and that he was about to
give nuclear weapons to the al Qaeda terrorist group,
which would then use them against American cities;
that the people of Iraq would welcome our invading
army with garlands of flowers; that even though the
rest of the world opposed the war, they would quickly
fall in line after we won and contribute money and
soldiers so that there wasn't a risk to our taxpayers
of footing the whole bill, that there would be more
than enough money from the Iraqi oil supplies, which
would flow in abundance after the invasion and that we
would use that money to offset expenses and we
wouldn't have to pay anything at all; that the size of
the force required for this would be relatively small
and wouldn't put a strain on our military or
jeopardize other commitment around the world. Of
course, every single one of these impressions was
wrong. And, unfortunately, the consequences have been
catastrophic for our countryä
And the plague of false impressions seemed to settle
on other policy debates as well. For example in
considering President Bush's gigantic tax cut, the
country somehow got the impression that, one, the
majority of it wouldn't go disproportionally to the
wealthy but to the middle class; two, that it would
not lead to large deficits because it would stimulate
the economy so much that it would pay for itself; not
only there would be no job losses but we would have
big increases in employment. But here too, every one
of these impressions was wrong.
I did not accuse the president of intentionally
deceiving the American people, but rather, noted the
remarkable coincidence that all of his arguments
turned out to be based on falsehoods. But since that
time, we have learned that, in virtually every case,
the president chose to ignore and indeed often to
suppress, studies, reports and facts that were
contrary to the false impressions he was giving to the
American people. In most every case he chose to reject
information that was prepared by objective analysts
and rely instead on information that was prepared by
sources of questionable reliability who had a private
interest in the policy choice he was recommending that
conflicted with the public interest.
For example, when the President and his team were
asserting that Saddam Hussein had aluminum tubes that
had been acquired in order to enrich Uranium for
atomic bombs, numerous experts at the Department of
Energy and elsewhere in the intelligence community
were certain that the information being presented by
the President was completely wrong. The true experts
on Uranium enrichment are at Oak Ridge, in my home
state of Tennessee. And they told me early on that in
their opinion there was virtually zero possibility
whatsoever that the tubes in question were for the
purpose of enrichment - and yet they received a
directive forbidding them from making any public
statement that disagreed with the President's
assertions.
In another example, we now know that two months
before the war began, Bush received two detailed and
comprehensive secret reports warning him that the
likely result of an American-led invasion of Iraq
would be increased support for Islamic fundamentalism,
deep division of Iraqi society with high levels of
violent internal conflict and guerilla warfare aimed
against U.S. forces. Yes, in spite of these analyses,
Bush chose to suppress the warnings and instead convey
to the American people the absurdly Polyanna-ish view
of highly questionable and obviously biased sources
like Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted felon and known
swindler, who the Bush administration put on its
payroll and gave a seat adjacent to Laura Bush at the
State of the Union address. They flew him into Baghdad
on a military jet with a private security force, but
then decided the following year he was actually a spy
for Iran, who had been hoodwinking President Bush all
along with phony facts and false predictions.
There is a growing tension between President Bush's
portrait of the situation in which we find ourselves
and the real facts on the ground. In fact, his entire
agenda is collapsing around his ankles: Iraq is in
flames, with a growing U.S. casualty rate and a
growing prospect of a civil war with the attendant
chaos and risk of an Islamic fundamentalist state.
America's moral authority in the world has been
severely damaged, and our ability to persuade others
to follow our lead has virtually disappeared. Our
troops are stretched thin, are undersupplied and are
placed in intolerable situations without adequate
training or equipment. In the latest U.S.-sponsored
public opinion survey of Iraqis only 2% say they view
our troops as liberators; more than 90% of Arab Iraqis
have a hostile view of what they see as an
"occupation." Our friends in the Middle East -
including, most prominently, Israel - have been placed
in greater danger because of the policy blunders and
the sheer incompetence with which the civilian
Pentagon officials have conducted the war. The war in
Iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists
who use it as their damning indictment of U.S. policy.
The massive casualties suffered by civilians in Iraq
and the horrible TV footage of women and children
being pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their
homes has been a propaganda victory for Osama bin
Laden beyond his wildest dreams. America's honor and
reputation has been severely damaged by the
President's decision to authorize policies and legal
hair splitting that resulted in widespread torture by
U.S. soldiers and contractors of Iraqi citizens and
others in facilities stretching from Guantanamo to
Afghanistan to Iraq to secret locations in other
countries. Astonishingly, and shamefully,
investigators also found that more than 90 percent of
those tortured and abused were innocent of any crime
or wrongdoing whatsoever. The prestigious Jaffe think
tank in Israel released a devastating indictment just
last week of how the misadventure in Iraq has been a
deadly distraction from the crucial war on terror.
We now know from Paul Bremer, the person chosen to be
in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq immediately following
the invasion, that he repeatedly told the White House
there were insufficient troops on the ground to make
the policy a success. Yet at that time, President Bush
was repeatedly asserting to the American people that
he was relying on those Americans in Iraq for his
confident opinion that we had more than enough troops
and no more were needed.
We now know from the Central Intelligence Agency that
a detailed, comprehensive and authoritative analysis
of the likely consequences of an invasion accurately
predicted the chaos, popular resentment, and growing
likelihood of civil war that would follow a U.S.
invasion and that this analysis was presented to the
President even as he confidently assured the nation
that the aftermath of our invasion would be the speedy
establishment of representative democracy and market
capitalism by grateful Iraqis.
Most Americans have tended to give the Bush-Cheney
administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes
to his failure to take any action in advance of 9/11
to prepare the nation for attack. After all, hindsight
always casts a harsh light on mistakes that were not
nearly as visible at the time they were made. And we
all know that. But with the benefit of all the new
studies that have been made public it is no longer
clear that the administration deserves this act of
political grace by the American people. For example,
we now know, from the 9/11 Commission that the chief
law enforcement office appointed by President Bush to
be in charge of counter-terrorism, John Ashcroft, was
repeatedly asked to pay attention to the many warning
signs being picked up by the FBI. Former FBI acting
director Thomas J. Pickard, the man in charge of
presenting Ashcroft with the warnings, testified under
oath that Aschroft angrily told him "he did not want
to hear this information anymore." That is an
affirmative action by the administration that is very
different than simple negligence. That is an extremely
serious error in judgment that constitutes a reckless
disregard for the safety of the American people. It is
worth remembering that among the reports the FBI was
receiving, that Ashcroft ordered them not to show him,
was an expression of alarm in one field office that
the nation should immediately check on the possibility
that Osama bin Laden was having people trained in
commercial flight schools around the U.S. And another,
from a separate field office, that a potential
terrorist was learning to fly commercial airliners and
made it clear he had no interest in learning how to
land. It was in this period of recklessly willful
ignorance on the part of the Attorney General that the
CIA was also picking up unprecedented warnings that an
attack on the United States by al Qaeda was imminent.
In his famous phrase, George Tenet wrote, the system
was blinking red. It was in this context that the
President himself was presented with a CIA report with
the headline, more alarming and more pointed than any
I saw in eight years I saw of daily CIA briefings:
"bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S."
The only warnings of this nature that remotely
resembled the one given to George Bush was about the
so-called Millenium threats predicted for the end of
the year 1999 and less-specific warnings about the
Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. In both cases these
warnings in the President's Daily Briefing were
followed, immediately, the same day - by the beginning
of urgent daily meetings in the White House of all of
the agencies and offices involved in preparing our
nation to prevent the threatened attack.
By contrast, when President Bush received his fateful
and historic warning of 9/11, he did not convene the
National Security Council, did not bring together the
FBI and CIA and other agencies with responsibility to
protect the nation, and apparently did not even ask
followup questions about the warning. The bi-partisan
9/11 commission summarized what happened in its
unanimous report: "We have found no indication of any
further discussion before September 11 th between the
President and his advisors about the possibility of a
threat of al Qaeda attack in the United States." The
commissioners went on to report that in spite of all
the warnings to different parts of the administration,
the nation's "domestic agencies never mobilized in
response to the threat. They did not have direction
and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were
not hardened. Transportation systems were not
fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted
against a domestic threat. State and local law
authorities were not marshaled to augment the FBI's
efforts. The public was not warned."
We know from the 9/11 commission that within hours of
the attack, Secretary Rumsfeld was attempting to find
a way to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11. We know the
sworn testimony of the President's White House head of
counter-terrorism Richard Clarke that on September 12
th - the day after the attack: "The president dragged
me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the
door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did
thisäI said, 'Mr. PresidentäThere's no connection. He
came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if
there's a connectionäWe got together all the FBI
experts, all the CIA expertsäThey all cleared the
report. And we sent it up to the president and it got
bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It
got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ...
Do it again.' äI don't think he sees memos that he
doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."
He did not ask about Osama bin Laden. He did not ask
about al Qaeda. He did not ask about Saudi Arabia or
any country other than Iraq. When Clarke responded to
his question by saying that Iraq was not responsible
for the attack and that al Qaeda was, the President
persisted in focusing on Iraq, and again, asked Clarke
to spend his time looking for information linking
Saddam Hussein to the attack.
Again, this is not hindsight. This is how the
President was thinking at the time he was planning
America's response to the attack. This was not an
unfortunate misreading of the available evidence,
causing a mistaken linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda,
this was something else; a willful choice to make the
linkage, whether evidence existed or not.
Earlier this month, Secretary Rumsfeld, who saw all
of the intelligence available to President Bush on the
alleged connection between al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein, finally admitted, under repeated questioning
from reporters, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any
strong, hard evidence that links the two."
This is not negligence, this is deception.
It is clear that President Bush has absolute faith in
a rigid, right-wing ideology. He ignores the warnings
of his experts. He forbids any dissent and never tests
his assumptions against the best available evidence.
He is arrogantly out of touch with reality. He refuses
to ever admit mistakes. Which means that as long as he
is our President, we are doomed to repeat them. It is
beyond incompetence. It is recklessness that risks the
safety and security of the American people.
We were told that our allies would join in a massive
coalition so that we would not bear the burden alone.
But as is by now well known, more than 90 percent of
the non-Iraqi troops are American, and the second and
third largest contingents in the non American group
have announced just within this last week their
decisions to begin withdrawing their troops soon after
the U.S. election.
We were told by the President that war was his last
choice. It is now clear from the newly available
evidence that it was always his first preference. His
former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill,
confirmed that Iraq was Topic A at the very first
meeting of the Bush National Security Council, just
ten days after the inauguration. "It was about finding
a way to do it, that was the tone of the President,
saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.'"
We were told that he would give the international
system every opportunity to function, but we now know
that he allowed that system to operate only briefly,
as a sop to his Secretary of State and for cosmetic
reasons. Bush promised that if he took us to war it
would be on the basis of the most carefully worked out
plans. Instead, we now know he went to war without
thought or preparation for the aftermath - an
aftermath that has now claimed more than one thousand
American lives and many multiples of that among the
Iraqis. He now claims that we went to war for
humanitarian reasons. But the record shows clearly
that he used that argument only after his first public
rationale - that Saddam was building weapons of mass
destruction -- completely collapsed. He claimed that
he was going to war to deal with an imminent threat to
the United States. The evidence shows clearly that
there was no such imminent threat and that Bush knew
that at the time he stated otherwise. He claimed that
gaining dominance of Iraqi oil fields for American
producers was never part of his calculation. But we
now know, from a document uncovered by the New Yorker
and dated just two weeks to the day after Bush's
inauguration, that his National Security Counsel was
ordered to "meld" its review of "operational policies
toward rogue states" with the secretive Cheney Energy
Task Force's "actions regarding the capture of new and
existing oil and gas fields."
We also know from documents obtained in discovery
proceedings against that Cheney Task Force by the odd
combination of Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club that
one of the documents receiving scrutiny by the task
force during the same time period was a detailed map
of Iraq showing none of the cities or places where
people live but showing in great detail the location
of every single oil deposit known to exist in the
country, with dotted lines demarking blocks for
promising exploration - a map which, in the words of a
Canadian newspaper, resembled a butcher's drawing of a
steer, with the prime cuts delineated. We know that
Cheney himself, while heading Halliburton, did more
business with Iraq than any other nation, even though
it was under U.N. sanctions, and that Cheney stated in
a public speech to the London Petroleum Institute in
1999 that, over the coming decade, the world will need
50 million extra barrels of oil per day. "Where is it
going to come from?" Answering his own question, he
said, "The middle east, with two thirds of the world's
oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize
ultimately lies."
In the spring of 2001, when Cheney issued the
administration's national energy plan - the one
devised in secret by corporations and lobbyist that he
still refuses to name - it included a declaration that
"the [Persian] Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S.
international energy policy."
Less than two months later, in one of the more
bizarre parts of Bush's policy process, Richard Perle,
before he was forced to resign on conflict of interest
charges as chairman of the Defense Policy Board,
invited a presentation to the Board by a RAND
corporation analyst who recommended that the United
States consider militarily seizing Saudi Arabia's oil
fields.
The cynical belief by some that oil played an
outsized role in Bush's policy toward Iraq was
enhanced when it became clear that the Iraqi oil
ministry was the only facility in the country that was
secured by American troops following the invasion. The
Iraqi national museum, with its priceless
archeological treasures depicting the origins of
civilization, the electric, water and sewage
facilities so crucial to maintaining an acceptable
standard of living for Iraqi citizens during the
American occupation, schools, hospitals, and
ministries of all kinds were left to the looters.
An extensive investigation published today in the
Knight Ridder newspapers uncovers the astonishing
truth that even as the invasion began, there was,
quite literally, no plan at all for the post-war
period. On the eve of war, when the formal
presentation of America's plan neared its conclusion,
the viewgraph describing the Bush plan for the
post-war phase was labeled, "to be provided." It
simply did not exist.
We also have learned in today's Washington Post that
at the same time Bush was falsely asserting to the
American people that he was providing all the
equipment and supplies their commanders needed, the
top military commander in Iraq was pleading
desperately for a response to his repeated request for
more equipment, such as body armor, to protect his
troops. And that the Army units under his command were
"struggling just to maintainärelatively low readiness
rates."
Even as late as three months ago, when the growing
chaos and violence in Iraq was obvious to anyone
watching the television news, Bush went out of his way
to demean the significance of a National Intelligence
Estimate warning that his policy in Iraq was failing
and events were spinning out of control. Bush
described this rigorous and formal analysis as just
guessing. If that's all the respect he has for reports
given to him by the CIA, then perhaps it explains why
he completely ignored the warning he received on
August 6 th, 2001, that bin Laden was determined to
attack our country. From all appearances, he never
gave a second thought on that report until he finished
reading My Pet Goat on September 11 th.
Iraq is not the only policy where the President has
made bold assertions about the need for a dramatic
change in American policy, a change that he has said
is mandated by controversial assertions that differ
radically from accepted views of reality in that
particular policy area. And as with Iraq, there are
other cases where subsequently available information
shows that the President actually had analyses that he
was given from reputable sources that were directly
contrary what he told the American people. And, in
virtually every case, the President, it is now
evident, rejected the information that later turned
out to be accurate and instead chose to rely upon, and
to forcefully present to the American people,
information that subsequently turned out to be false.
And in every case, the flawed analysis was provided to
him from sources that had a direct interest, financial
or otherwise, in the radically new policy that the
President adopted. And, in those cases where the
policy has been implemented, the consequences have
been to detriment of the American people, often
catastrophically so. In other cases, the consequences
still lie in the future but are nonetheless perfectly
predictably for anyone who is reasonable. In yet other
cases the policies have not yet been implemented but
have been clearly designated by the President as
priorities for the second term he has asked for from
the American people. At the top of this list is the
privatization of social security.
Indeed, Bush made it clear during his third debate
with Senator Kerry that he intends to make privatizing
Social Security, a top priority in a second term
should he have one. In a lengthy profile of Bush
published yesterday, the President was quoted by
several top Republican fundraisers as saying to them,
in a large but private meeting, that he intends to
"come out strong after my swearing in,
withäprivatizing Social Security."
Bush asserts that - without any corroborating
evidence - that the diversion of two trillion dollars
worth of payroll taxes presently paid by American
working people into the social security trust fund
will not result in a need to make up that two trillion
dollars from some other source and will not result in
cutting Social Security benefits to current retirees.
The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, run by a
Republican appointee, is one of many respected
organizations that have concluded that the President
is completely wrong in making his assertion. The
President has been given facts and figures clearly
demonstrating to any reasonable person that the
assertion is wrong. And yet he continues to make it.
The proposal for diverting money out of the Social
Security trust fund into private accounts would
generate large fees for financial organizations that
have advocated the radical new policy, have provided
Bush with the ideologically based arguments in its
favor, and have made massive campaign contributions to
Bush and Cheney. One of the things willfully ignored
by Bush is the certainty of catastrophic consequences
for the tens of millions of retirees who depend on
Social Security benefits and who might well lose up to
40 percent of their benefits under his proposal. Their
expectation for a check each month that enables them
to pay their bills is very real. The President's
proposal is reckless.
Similarly, the President's vigorous and relentless
advocacy of "medical savings accounts" as a radical
change in the Medicare program would - according to
all reputable financial analysts - have the same
effect on Medicare that his privatization proposal
would have on Social Security. It would deprive
Medicare of a massive amount of money that it must
have in order to continue paying medical bills for
Medicare recipients. The President's ideologically
based proposal originated with another large campaign
contributor - called Golden Rule -- that expects to
make a huge amount of money from managing private
medical savings accounts. The President has also
mangled the Medicare program with another radical new
policy, this one prepared for Bush by the major
pharmaceutical companies (also huge campaign
contributors, of course) which was presented to the
country on the basis of information that, again, turns
out to have been completely and totally false. Indeed
the Bush appointee in charge of Medicare was secretly
ordered - we now know - to withhold the truth about
the proposal's real cost from the Congress while they
were considering it. Then, when a number of
Congressmen balked at supporting the proposal, the
President's henchmen violated the rules of Congress by
holding the 15 minute vote open for more than two
hours while they brazenly attempted to bribe and
intimidate members of Congress who had voted against
the proposal to change their votes and support it. The
House Ethics Committee, in an all too rare slap on the
wrist, took formal action against Tom DeLay for his
unethical behavior during this episode. But for the
Bush team, it is all part of the same pattern. Lie,
intimidate, bully, suppress the truth, present
lobbyists memos as the gospel truth and collect money
for the next campaign.
In the case of the global climate crisis, Bush has
publicly demeaned the authors of official reports by
scientists in his own administration that underscore
the extreme danger confronting the United States and
the world and instead prefers a crackpot analysis
financed by the largest oil company on the planet,
ExxonMobil. He even went so far as to censor elements
of an EPA report dealing with global warming and
substitute, in the official government report,
language from the crackpot ExxonMobil report. The
consequences of accepting ExxonMobil's advice - to do
nothing to counter global warming - are almost
literally unthinkable. Just in the last few weeks,
scientists have reached a new, much stronger consensus
that global warming is increasing the destructive
power of hurricanes by as much as half of one full
category on the one-to-five scale typically used by
forecasters. So that a hurricane hitting Florida in
the future that would have been a category three and a
half, will on average become a category four
hurricane. Scientists around the world are also
alarmed by what appears to be an increase in the rate
of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere - a development
which, if confirmed in subsequent years, might signal
the beginning of an extremely dangerous "runaway
greenhouse" effect. Yet a third scientific group has
just reported that the melting of ice in Antarctica,
where 95 percent of all the earth's ice is located,
has dramatically accelerated. Yet Bush continues to
rely, for his scientific advice about global warming,
on the one company that most stands to benefit by
delaying a recognition of reality.
The same dangerous dynamic has led Bush to reject the
recommendations of anti-terrorism experts to increase
domestic security, which are opposed by large
contributors in the chemical industry, the hazardous
materials industry and the nuclear industry. Even
though his own Coast Guard recommends increased port
security, he has chosen instead to rely on information
provided to him by the commercial interests managing
the ports who do not want the expense and
inconvenience of implementing new security measures.
The same pattern that produced America's catastrophe
in Iraq has also produced a catastrophe for our
domestic economy. Bush's distinctive approach and
habit of mind is clearly recognizable. He asserted
over and over again that his massive tax cut, which
certainly appeared to be aimed at the wealthiest
Americans, actually would not go disproportionally to
the wealthy but instead would primarily benefit middle
income Americans and "all tax payers." He asserted
that under no circumstances would it lead to massive
budget deficits even though common sense led
reasonable people to conclude that it would. Third, he
asserted - confidently of course - that it would not
lead to job losses but would rather create an
unprecedented economic boom. The President relied on
high net worth individuals who stood to gain the most
from his lopsided tax proposal and chose their
obviously biased analysis over that of respectable
economists. And as was the case with Iraq policy, his
administration actively stopped the publication of
facts and figures from his own Treasury Department
analysts that contained inconvenient conclusions." As
a result of this pattern, the Congress adopted the
President's tax plan and now the consequences are
clear. We have completely dissipated the 5 trillion
dollar surplus that had been projected over the next
ten years (a surplus that was strategically invaluable
to assist the nation in dealing with the impending
retirement of the enormous baby boom generation) and
instead has produced a projected deficit of three and
one half over the same period. Year after year we now
have the largest budget deficits ever experienced in
America and they coincide with the largest annual
trade deficits and current-account deficits ever
experienced in America - creating the certainty of an
extremely painful financial reckoning that is the
financial equivalent for the American economy and the
dollar of the military quagmire in Iraq.
Indeed, after four years of this policy, which was,
after all, implemented with Bush in control of all
three branches of government, we can already see the
consequences of their economic policy: for the first
time since the four-year presidency of Herbert Hoover
1928-1932, our nation has experienced a net loss of
jobs. It is true that 9/11 occurred during this
period. But it is equally true that reasonable
economists quantify its negative economic impact as
very small compared with the negative impact compared
with Bush's. Under other Presidents the nation has
absorbed the impact of Pearl Harbor, World War II,
Vietnam War, Korean war, major financial corrections
like that in 1987 and have ended up with a net gain of
jobs nonetheless. Only Bush ranks with Hoover.
Confronted with this devastating indictment, his
treasury secretary, John Snow, said last week in Ohio
job loss was "a myth." This is in keeping with the
Bush team's general contempt for reality as a basis
for policy. Unfortunately, the job loss is all too
real for the more than two hundred thousand people who
lost their jobs in the state where he called the job
loss a myth.
In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind
related a truly startling conversation that he had
with a Bush White House official who was angry that
Suskind had written an article in the summer of 2002
that the White House didn't like. This senior advisor
to Bush told Suskind that reporters like him lived "in
what we call the reality-based community," and
denigrated such people for believing that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernable
realityäthat's not the way the world really works
anymoreäwhen we act, we create our own reality. And
while you're studying that reality, judiciously as you
will, we'll act again, creating other new realities,
which you can study too, and that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do."
By failing to adjust their policies to unexpected
realities, they have made it difficult to carry out
any of their policies competently. Indeed, this is the
answer to what some have regarded as a mystery: How
could a team so skilled in politics be so bumbling and
incompetent when it comes to policy?
The same insularity and zeal that makes them
effective at smashmouth politics makes them terrible
at governing. The Bush-Cheney administration is a
rarity in American history. It is simultaneously
dishonest and incompetent.
Not coincidentally, the first audits of the massive
sums flowing through the Coalition Provisional
Authority, including money appropriated by Congress
and funds and revenue from oil, now show that billions
of dollars have disappeared with absolutely no record
of who they went to, or for what, or when, or why. And
charges of massive corruption are now widespread. Just
as the appointment of industry lobbyists to key
positions in agencies that oversee their former
employers has resulted in institutionalized corruption
in the abandonment of the enforcement of laws and
regulations at home, the outrageous decision to
brazenly violate the law in granting sole-source,
no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars to Vice
President Cheney's company, Halliburton, which still
pays him money every year, has convinced many
observers that incompetence, cronyism and corruption
have played a significant role in undermining U.S.
policy in Iraq. The former four star general in charge
of central command, Tony Zinni, who was named by
President Bush as his personal emissary to the middle
east in 2001, offered this view of the situation in a
recent book: "In the lead up to the Iraq war, and its
later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction,
negligence and irresponsibility; at worst lying,
incompetence and corruption. False rationales
presented as a justification; a flawed strategy; lack
of planning; the unnecessary alienation of our allies;
the underestimation of the task; the unnecessary
distraction from real threats; and the unbearable
strain dumped on our over-stretched military. All of
these caused me to speak out...I was called a traitor
and a turncoat by Pentagon officials."
Massive incompetence? Endemic corruption? Official
justification for torture? Wholesale abuse of civil
liberties? Arrogance masquerading as principle? These
are new, unfamiliar and unpleasant realities for
America. We hardly recognize our country when we look
in the mirror of what Jefferson called, "the opinion
of mankind." How could we have come to this point?
America was founded on the principle that "all just
power is derived from the consent of the governed."
And our founders assumed that in the process of giving
their consent, the governed would be informed by free
and open discussion of the relevant facts in a healthy
and robust public forum.
But for the Bush-Cheney administration, the will to
power has become its own justification. This explains
Bush's lack of reverence for democracy itself. The
widespread efforts by Bush's political allies to
suppress voting have reached epidemic proportions. The
scandals of Florida four years ago are being repeated
in broad daylight even as we meet here today. Harper's
magazine reports in an article published today that
tens of thousands of registered voters who were
unjustly denied their right to vote four year ago have
still not been allowed back on the rolls.
An increasing number of Republicans, including
veterans of the Reagan White House and even the father
of the conservative movement, are now openly
expressing dismay over the epic failures of the Bush
presidency. Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato
Institute and a veteran of both the Heritage
Foundation and the Reagan White House, wrote recently
in Salon.com, "Serious conservatives must fear for the
country if Bush is re-electedäbased on the results of
his presidency, a Bush presidency would be
catastrophic. Conservatives should choose principles
over power." Bandow seemed most concerned about Bush's
unhealthy habits of mind, saying, "He doesn't appear
to reflect on his actions and seems unable to concede
even the slightest mistake. Nor is he willing to hold
anyone else responsible for anything. It is a damning
combination." Bandow described Bush's foreign policy
as a "shambles, with Iraq aflame and America
increasingly reviled by friend and foe alike."
The conservative co-host of Crossfire, Tucker
Carlson, said about Bush's Iraq policy, "I think it's
a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I
went against my own instincts in supporting it."
William F. Buckley, Jr., widely acknowledged as the
founder of the modern conservative movement in
America, wrote of the Iraq war, "If I knew then, what
I know now about what kind of situation we would be
in, I would have opposed the war."
A former Republican Governor of Minnesota, Elmer
Andersen, announced in Minneapolis that for the first
time in his life he was abandoning the Republican
Party in this election because Bush and Cheney
"believe their own spin. Both men spew outright
untruths with evangelistic fervor." Andersen
attributed his switch to Bush's "misguided and
blatantly false misrepresentations of the threat of
weapons of mass destruction. The terror seat was
Afghanistan. Iraq had no connection to these acts of
terror and was not a serious threat to the United
States as this President claimed, and there was no
relation, it is now obvious, to any serious weaponry."
Governor Andersen was also offended, he said, by
"Bush's phony posturing as cocksure leader of the free
world."
Andersen and many other Republicans are joining with
Democrats and millions of Independents this year in
proudly supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket. In every
way, John Kerry and John Edwards represent an approach
to governing that is the opposite of the Bush-Cheney
approach.
Where Bush remains out of touch, Kerry is a proud
member of the "reality based" community. Where Bush
will bend to his corporate backers, Kerry stands
strong with the public interest.
There are now fifteen days left before our country
makes this fateful choice - for us and the whole
world. And it is particularly crucial for one more
reason: T The final feature of Bush's ideology
involves ducking accountability for his mistakes.
He has neutralized the Congress by intimidating the
Republican leadership and transforming them into a
true rubber stamp, unlike any that has ever existed in
American history.
He has appointed right-wing judges who have helped to
insulate him from accountability in the courts. And if
he wins again, he will likely get to appoint up to
four Supreme Court justices.
He has ducked accountability by the press with his
obsessive secrecy and refusal to conduct the public's
business openly. There is now only one center of power
left in our constitution capable of at long last
holding George W. Bush accountable, and it is the
voters.
There are fifteen days left before our country makes
this fateful choice - for us and the whole world. Join
me on November 2 nd in taking our country back.
posted by carol wolman @ 5:51 PM
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