Reagan's Views
Bob
The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look
at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees
by Ron Reagan | Sep 01 '04
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes
clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash.
Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers
itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the
neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots
with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration
of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these
displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months
back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath
your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow , then in
theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a
paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age,
admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling
deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted
Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski
on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian
language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual
channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly
(but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq.
Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to
have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing
out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of
scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a
demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most
deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.
Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long,
stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the
newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly,
tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to
Bush's advantage for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan"
puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle,
tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were
treated to a side-by-side comparison—Ronald W. Reagan versus George W.
Bush—and it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with
nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and
remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was
damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the
crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to
sum up the mood—a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A
PRESIDENT.
The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the
stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The
Bush administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials
before various commissions and committees—Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't
quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar
of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious,
fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over
the table at him—these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps,
too—a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind
can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been
reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was
in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That's so 1988. No,
this time something much more potent: liar.
Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their
accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua
franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration
have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies
of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they
traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies,
and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie.
And people, finally, have started catching on.
None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency.
The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some
estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid
(liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush
could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their
vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to
genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably
a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a
hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get
trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of
the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats,
intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it
becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe
wackos.
Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One
that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American
people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true
aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its
power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does
not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush
presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a
person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is
abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.
THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection—which the
administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate—involve our
putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq. During his
campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more "humble" foreign
policy. "I would take the use of force very seriously," he said. "I
would be guarded in my approach." Other countries would resent us "if
we're an arrogant nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation
building." "Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when
it gets overextended, morale drops." International cooperation and
consensus building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration's
approach to the larger world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was
hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the
world and charging off adventuring in the Middle East.
But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr.
Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad
guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave
threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the
American homeland again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of
the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure
responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of
Manhattan?
Well, no.
As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime
"terror czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with
the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one.
"From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking
at how we could take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an
excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House.
Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's where the actual
perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer;
Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a
matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that
war was justified.
The real—but elusive—prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin
Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox
News—the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House—told me a year ago that
mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest
we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's
Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country
whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions,
whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S.
Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive
no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant
aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity
to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN
inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a threat of unique
urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth.
Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft,
drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the
nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush
maintained, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological
or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." We
"know" Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney
assured us. We even "know" where they are hidden. After several months
of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy
that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.
ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since
discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they
were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in
the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad
assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror
network.
And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been
justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He
pushed the envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power,
but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would
tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture
was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that
had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for
more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no
doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice the New
Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's panties over the head of a
naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you
say while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake
till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely "sleep management"?
Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon
the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not
policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way;
relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful
of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't
"represent the best of what America's all about." As anyone who'd
watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted,
what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling,
obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was
stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major
General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's primary investigation into
the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John
McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of
army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge
at Abu Ghraib?
The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and
occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the
American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva
Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment
of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas
worth discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in the
conversation. They don't trust us because they don't dare expose their
true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all
this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're in control;
Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got him; we'll get out as soon as
an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be there for years to
come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only with rose
petals and easy coochie.
This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely
cynical "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA
and in the administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal
shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely
tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a
world of his own imagining.
And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the
same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world
twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year,
and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting
by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his
various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job—where not
showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits.
He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two
million citizens who've lost their jobs under his administration, the
first administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs.
Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn't afford the best
available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million
people without health insurance may be no more than a politically
inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is
not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called
Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his
world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for
chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When the party
Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp
toast out of the carpet.
ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their
backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political
suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were
simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds.
While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import
to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be
diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth,
though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's
long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his
alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante
stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident
during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream
media. His untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While
generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other
qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free
world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose
straightforwardness was a given. None of that "what the meaning of is
is" business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded
fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was
depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress
by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks
explaining away statements—"I invented the Internet"—that he never made
in the first place. All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush.
Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush
tells two obvious—if not exactly earth-shattering—lies and is not
challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of
rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously
resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality
and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he
announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite
is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly
acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the
more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a certain
feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha male." Having
gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team
felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the
White House, they picked up where they left off.
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day
was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet
Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may
have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances—for all
anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under
attack—the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story
was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that
necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief political advisor, Karl
Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence to that effect. The story
quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat.
Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner
emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the
background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew
clear that the mission in Iraq—whatever that may have been—was far from
accomplished. "Major combat operations," as Bush put it, may have
technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily. So
the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner befitting
a president pledged to "responsibility and accountability": It blamed
the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the
banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House
communications office.
More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's
dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose
about the country's lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist
assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure
the nation that "no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as
weapons." In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such
a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an
intelligence report warning that "it is highly likely that a significant
Al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." Two
intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically
connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used
as weapons. According to The New York Times , after the second of these
briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,"
was delivered to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in
August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent most of the day
fishing." This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as "historical" in
her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in
the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the
way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained
in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous
events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or
her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the president he needed
to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the
hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would
appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb
now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple
embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest
reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust
settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's White House
squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into
telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth. But
image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as
a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be
fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As
Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully
inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his
malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action,
but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate
extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent
not because he can't speak but because he doesn't bother to think.
GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for
office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the
focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed
from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously
tending a "base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat
cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social
Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they
can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in the bathtub."
That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots,
homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has
tossed bones to all of them—"partial birth" abortion legislation, the
promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between
homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even
comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's
not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it's
unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president,
who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders
nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's
former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once
told this magazine, "What you've got is everything—and I mean
everything—being run by the political arm."
This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a
slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose .
. . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad
public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people
would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his
eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true
colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11,
were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under
false pretenses?
If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it.
Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually
believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by
constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can
keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.
UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a
personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One
conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has
already discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a
former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most
assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush
at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and
uneventfully—once during my father's presidency and once during my
father's funeral. I'll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense
that he's somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see
this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never
pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore,
seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to
the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts.
Believe it or not, I don't look in the mirror every morning and see my
father looming over my shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or
less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the
direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We
have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history, one ripe with
both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to
prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the
possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised
militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies
don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?
Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team
cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the
White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a
lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can
choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE
FOR PRESIDENT.
--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we."
George W. Bush
8/5/04
Vote for Bush - Prove You Are Uninformed about
the REAL Issues facing the United States.
Bob
which will prove you are ignorant of the following
important issues facing the U. S. right now!
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=557746
Bush by numbers: Four years of
double standards
By Graydon Carter
03 September 2004
1 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security
issued between 20
January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.
104 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security
and defence in the
same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.
101 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security
and defence
in the same period that mentioned missile defence.
65 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security
and defence
in the same period that mentioned weapons of mass destruction.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of
the Union
addresses.
73 Number of times that Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his
three State of the
Union addresses.
83 Number of times Bush mentioned Saddam, Iraq, or regime (as in change)
in his
three State of the Union addresses.
$1m Estimated value of a painting the Bush Presidential Library in
College Station,
Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the
United States
and Bush family friend.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned Saudi Arabia in his three State of the
Union
addresses.
1,700 Percentage increase between 2001 and 2002 of Saudi Arabian
spending on
public relations in the United States.
79 Percentage of the 11 September hijackers who came from Saudi Arabia.
3 Number of 11 September hijackers whose entry visas came through
special
US-Saudi "Visa Express" programme.
140 Number of Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family,
evacuated from
United States almost immediately after 11 September.
14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents
assigned to track
down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries
where
al-Qa'ida is active.
$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to
investigate
the 11 September attacks.
$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.
$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS's existing terrorism budget.
$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia
space shuttle
crash.
$5m Amount a 1996 federal commission was given to study legalised
gambling.
7 Number of Arabic linguists fired by the US army between mid-August and
mid-October 2002 for being gay.
George Bush: Military man
1972 Year that Bush walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas
National Guard,
Nearly two years before his six-year obligation was up.
$3,500 Reward a group of veterans offered in 2000 for anyone who could
confirm
Bush's Alabama guard service.
600-700 Number of guardsmen who were in Bush's unit during that period.
0 Number of guardsmen from that period who came forward with information
about
Bush's guard service.
0 Number of minutes that President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, the
Defence
Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the assistant Defence Secretary, Paul
Wolfowitz, the
former chairman of the Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle, and the
White House
Chief of Staff, Karl Rove the main proponents of the war in Iraq
served in combat
(combined).
0 Number of principal civilian or Pentagon staff members who planned the
war who
have immediate family members serving in uniform in Iraq.
8 Number of members of the US Senate and House of Representatives who
have a
child serving in the military.
10 Number of days that the Pentagon spent investigating a soldier who
had called the
President "a joke" in a letter to the editor of a Newspaper.
46 Percentage increase in sales between 2001 and 2002 of GI Joe figures
(children's
toys).
Ambitious warrior
2 Number of Nations that George Bush has attacked and taken over since
coming into
office.
130 Approximate Number of countries (out of a total of 191 recognised by
the United
Nations) with a US military presence.
43 Percentage of the entire world's military spending that the US spends
on defence.
(That was in 2002, the year before the invasion of Iraq.)
$401.3bn Proposed military budget for 2004.
Saviour of Iraq
1983 The year in which Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's special envoy to
the
Middle East, gave Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs as a gift.
2.5 Number of hours after Rumsfeld learnt that Osama bin Laden was a
suspect in the
11 September attacks that he brought up reasons to "hit" Iraq.
237 Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq made by top Bush
administration officials between 2002 and January 2004, according to the
California
Representative Henry Waxman.
10m Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets on 21
February
2003, in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the largest simultaneous
protest in world
history.
$2bn Estimated monthly cost of US military presence in Iraq projected by
the White
House in April 2003.
$4bn Actual monthly cost of the US military presence in Iraq according
to Secretary of
Defence Rumsfeld in 2004.
$15m Amount of a contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement
factory in
Iraq.
$80,000 Amount an Iraqi firm spent (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to
build the
same factory, after delays prevented the American firm from starting it.
2000 Year that Cheney said his policy as CEO of Halliburton oil services
company
was "we wouldn't do anything in Iraq".
$4.7bn Total value of contracts awarded to Halliburton in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
$680m Estimated value of Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded to
Bechtel.
$2.8bnValue of Bechtel Corp contracts in Iraq.
$120bn Amount the war and its aftermath are projected to cost for the
2004 fiscal
year.
35 Number of countries to which the United States suspended military
assistance after
they failed to sign agreements giving Americans immunity from
prosecution before the
International Criminal Court.
92 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late
2002.
60 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late
2003.
55 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who were unemployed before the war.
80 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who are unemployed a Year after the
war.
0 Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender
in May
1945.
37 Death toll of US soldiers in Iraq in May 2003, the month combat
operations
"officially" ended.
0 Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home that the Bush
administration has
permitted to be photographed.
0 Number of memorial services for the returned dead that Bush has
attended since the
beginning of the war.
A soldier's best friend
40,000 Number of soldiers in Iraq seven months after start of the war
still without
Interceptor vests, designed to stop a round from an AK-47.
$60m Estimated cost of outfitting those 40,000 soldiers with Interceptor
vests.
62 Percentage of gas masks that army investigators discovered did Not
work properly
in autumn 2002.
90 Percentage of detectors which give early warning of a biological
weapons attack
found to be defective.
87 Percentage of Humvees in Iraq not equipped with armour capable of
stopping
AK-47 rounds and protecting against roadside bombs and landmines at the
end of
2003.
Making the country safer
$3.29 Average amount allocated per person Nationwide in the first round
of homeland
security grants.
$94.40 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in American
Samoa.
$36 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in Wyoming,
Vice-President
Cheney's home state.
$17 Amount allocated per person in New York state.
$5.87 Amount allocated per person in New York City.
$77.92 Amount allocated per person in New Haven, Connecticut, home of
Yale
University, Bush's alma mater.
76 Percentage of 215 cities surveyed by the US Conference of Mayors in
early 2004
that had yet to receive a dime in federal homeland security assistance
for their
first-response units.
5 Number of major US airports at the beginning of 2004 that the
Transportation
Security Administration admitted were Not fully screening baggage
electronically.
22,600 Number of planes carrying unscreened cargo that fly into New York
each
month.
5 Estimated Percentage of US air cargo that is screened, including cargo
transported
on passenger planes.
95 Percentage of foreign goods that arrive in the United States by sea.
2 Percentage of those goods subjected to thorough inspection.
$5.5bnEstimated cost to secure fully US ports over the Next decade.
$0 Amount Bush allocated for port security in 2003.
$46m Amount the Bush administration has budgeted for port security in
2005.
15,000 Number of major chemical facilities in the United States.
100 Number of US chemical plants where a terrorist act could endanger
the lives of
more than one million people.
0 Number of new drugs or vaccines against "priority pathogens" listed by
the Centres
for Disease Control that have been developed and introduced since 11
September
2001.
Giving a hand up to the advantaged
$10.9m Average wealth of the members of Bush's original 16-person
cabinet.
75 Percentage of Americans unaffected by Bush's sweeping 2003 cuts in
capital gains
and dividends taxes.
$42,000 Average savings members of Bush's cabinet received in 2003 as a
result of
cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.
10 Number of fellow members from the Yale secret society Skull and Bones
that Bush
has named to important positions (including the Associate Attorney
General Robert
McCallum Jr. and SEC chief Bill Donaldson).
79 Number of Bush's initial 189 appointees who also served in his
father's
administration.
A man with a lot of friends
$113m Amount of total hard money the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign received,
a
record.
$11.5m Amount of hard money raised through the Pioneer programme, the
controversial fund-raising process created for the Bush-Cheney 2000
campaign.
(Participants pledged to raise at least $100,000 by bundling together
cheques of up to
$1,000 from friends and family. Pioneers were assigned numbers, which
were included
on all cheques, enabling the campaign to keep track of who raised how
much.)
George Bush: Money manager
4.7m Number of bankruptcies that were declared during Bush's first three
years in
office.
2002 The worst year for major markets since the recession of the 1970s.
$489bn The US trade deficit in 2003, the worst in history for a single
year.
$5.6tr Projected national surplus forecast by the end of the decade when
Bush took
office in 2001.
$7.22tr US national debt by mid-2004.
George Bush: Tax cutter
87 Percentage of American families in April 2004 who say they have felt
no benefit
from Bush's tax cuts.
39 Percentage of tax cuts that will go to the top 1 per cent of American
families when
fully phased in.
49 Percentage of Americans in April 2004 who found that their taxes had
actually gone
up since Bush took office.
88 Percentage of American families who will save less than $100 on their
2006 federal
taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes.
$30,858 Amount Bush himself saved in taxes in 2003.
Employment tsar
9.3m Number of US unemployed in April 2004.
2.3m Number of Americans who lost their jobs during first three Years of
the Bush
administration.
22m Number of jobs gained during Clinton's eight years in office.
Friend of the poor
34.6m Number of Americans living below the poverty line (1 in 8 of the
population).
6.8m Number of people in the workforce but still classified as poor.
35m Number of Americans that the government defines as "food insecure,"
in other
words, hungry.
$300m Amount cut from the federal programme that provides subsidies to
poor
families so they can heat their homes.
40 Percentage of wealth in the United States held by the richest 1 per
cent of the
population.
18 Percentage of wealth in Britain held by the richest 1e per cent of
the population.
George Bush And his special friend
$60bn Loss to Enron stockholders, following the largest bankruptcy in US
history.
$205m Amount Enron CEO Kenneth Lay earned from stock option profits over
a
four-year period.
$101m Amount Lay made from selling his Enron shares just before the
company went
bankrupt.
$59,339 Amount the Bush campaign reimbursed Enron for 14 trips on its
corporate jet
during the 2000 campaign.
30 Length of time in months between Enron's collapse and Lay (whom the
President
called "Kenny Boy") still not being charged with a crime.
George Bush: Lawman
15 Average number of minutes Bush spent reviewing capital punishment
cases while
governor of Texas.
46 Percentage of Republican federal judges when Bush came to office.
57 Percentage of Republican federal judges after three years of the Bush
administration.
33 Percentage of the $15bn Bush pledged to fight Aids in Africa that
must go to
abstinence-only programmes.
The Civil libertarian
680 Number of suspected al-Qa'ida members that the United States admits
are
detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
42 Number of nationalities of those detainees at Guantanamo.
22 Number of hours prisoners were handcuffed, shackled, and made to wear
surgical
masks, earmuffs, and blindfolds during their flight to Guantanamo.
32 Number of confirmed suicide attempts by Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
24 Number of prisoners in mid-2003 being monitored by psychiatrists in
Guantanamo's
new mental ward.
A health-conscious president
43.6m Number of Americans without health insurance by the end of 2002
(more than
15 per cent of the population).
2.4m Number of Americans who lost their health insurance during Bush's
first year in
office.
Environmentalist
$44m Amount the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and the Republican National
Committee received in contributions from the fossil fuel, chemical,
timber, and mining
industries.
200 Number of regulation rollbacks downgrading or weakening
environmental laws in
Bush's first three years in office.
31 Number of Bush administration appointees who are alumni of the energy
industry
(includes four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful White House
officials, and
more than 20 other high-level appointees).
50 Approximate number of policy changes and regulation rollbacks
injurious to the
environment that have been announced by the Bush administration on
Fridays after
5pm, a time that makes it all but impossible for news organisations to
relay the
information to the widest possible audience.
50 Percentage decline in Environmental Protection Agency enforcement
actions against
polluters under Bush's watch.
34 Percentage decline in criminal penalties for environmental crimes
since Bush took
office.
50 Percentage decline in civil penalties for environmental crimes since
Bush took office.
$6.1m Amount the EPA historically valued each human life when conducting
economic
analyses of proposed regulations.
$3.7m Amount the EPA valued each human life when conducting analyses of
proposed
regulations during the Bush administration.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned global warming, clean air, clean water,
pollution or
environment in his 2004 State of the Union speech. His father was the
last president to
go through an entire State of the Union address without mentioning the
environment.
1 Number of paragraphs devoted to global warming in the EPA's 600-page
"Draft
Report on the Environment" presented in 2003.
68 Number of days after taking office that Bush decided Not to ratify
the Kyoto
Protocol, the international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases by roughly
5.2 per cent
below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States was to cut its level by 7
per cent.
1 The rank of the United States worldwide in terms of greenhouse gas
emissions.
25 Percentage of overall worldwide carbon dioxide emissions the United
States is
responsible for.
53 Number of days after taking office that Bush reneged on his campaign
promise to
regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
14 Percentage carbon dioxide emissions will increase over the next 10
years under
Bush's own global-warming plan (an increase of 30 per cent above their
1990 levels).
408 Number of species that could be extinct by 2050 if the
global-warming trend
continues.
5 Number of years the Bush administration said in 2003 that global
warming must be
further studied before substantive action could be taken.
62 Number of members of Cheney's 63-person Energy Task Force with ties
to
corporate energy interests.
0 Number of environmentalists asked to attend Cheney's Energy Task Force
meetings.
6 Number of months before 11 September that Cheney's Energy Task Force
investigated Iraq's oil reserves.
2 Percentage of the world's population that is British.
2 Percentage of the world's oil used by Britain.
5 Percentage of the world's population that is American.
25 Percentage of the world's oil used by America.
63 Percentage of oil the United States imported in 2003, a record high.
24,000 Estimated number of premature deaths that will occur under Bush's
Clear Skies
initiative.
300 Number of Clean Water Act violations by the mountaintop-mining
industry in
2003.
750,000 Tons of toxic waste the US military, the world's biggest
polluter, generates
around the world each Year.
$3.8bn Amount in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in
1995, the Year
"polluter pays" fees expired.
$0m Amount of uncommitted dollars in the Superfund trust fund for toxic
site clean-ups
in 2003.
270 Estimated number of court decisions citing federal Negligence in
endangered-species protection that remained unheeded during the first
year of the Bush
administration.
100 Percentage of those decisions that Bush then decided to allow the
government to
ignore indefinitely.
68.4 Average Number of species added to the Endangered and Threatened
Species
list each year between 1991 and 2000.
0 Number of endangered species voluntarily added by the Bush
administration since
taking office.
50 Percentage of screened workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from
long-term
health problems, almost half of whom don't have health insurance.
78 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from lung
ailments.
88 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who Now suffer from ear, nose,
or throat
problems.
22 Asbestos levels at Ground Zero were 22 times higher than the levels
in Libby,
Montana, where the W R Grace mine produced one of the worst Superfund
disasters
in US history.
Image booster for the US
2,500 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State
Department to
further the image of the US abroad in 1991.
1,200 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State
Department to
further US image abroad in 2004.
4 Rank of the United States among countries considered to be the
greatest threats to
world peace according to a 2003 Pew Global Attitudes study (Israel,
Iran, and North
Korea were considered more dangerous; Iraq was considered less
dangerous).
$66bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy
in 1949.
$23.8bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and
diplomacy in 2002.
85 Percentage of Indonesians who had an unfavourable image of the United
States in
2003.
Second-party endorsements
90 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his
job as
president on 26 September 2001.
67 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his
job as
president on 26 September 2002.
54 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his
job as
president on 30 September, 2003.
50 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his
job as
president on 15 October 2003.
49 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his
job as
president in May 2004.
More like the French than he would care to admit
28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2003, the second-longest
vacation
of any president in US history. (Record holder Richard Nixon.)
13 Number of vacation days the average American receives each Year.
28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2001, the month he
received a 6
August Presidential Daily Briefing headed "Osama bin Laden Determined to
Strike US
Targets."
500 Number of days Bush has spent all or part of his time away from the
White House
at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, his parents' retreat in Kennebunkport,
Maine, or
Camp David as of 1 April 2004.
No fool when it comes to the press
11 Number of press conferences during his first three Years in office in
which Bush
referred to questions as being "trick" ones.
Factors in his favour
3 Number of companies that control the US voting technology market.
52 Percentage of votes cast during the 2002 midterm elections that were
recorded by
Election Systems & Software, the largest voting-technology firm, a big
Republican
donor.
29 Percentage of votes that will be cast via computer voting machines
that don't
produce a paper record.
17On 17 November 2001, The Economist printed a correction for having
said
George Bush was properly elected in 2000.
$113m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, the most in
American
electoral history.
$185m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign, to the
end of
March 2004.
$200m Amount that the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign expects to raise by
November
2004.
268 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Pioneer status (by
raising
$100,000 each) as of March 2004.
187 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Ranger status (by
raising
$200,000 each) as of March 2004.
$64.2mThe Amount Pioneers and Rangers had raised for Bush-Cheney as of
March
2004.
85 Percentage of Americans who can't Name the Chief Justice of the
United States.
69 Percentage of Americans who believed the White House's claims in
September
2003 that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 11 September
attacks.
34 Percentage of Americans who believed in June 2003 that Saddam's
"weapons of
mass destruction" had been found.
22 Percentage of Americans who believed in May 2003 that Saddam had used
his
WMDs on US forces.
85 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find Afghanistan,
Iraq, or Israel
on a map.
30 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the Pacific Ocean
on a map.
75 Percentage of American young adults who don't know the population of
the United
States.
53 Percentage of Canadian young adults who don't know the population of
the United
States.
11 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the United States
on a map.
30 Percentage of Americans who believe that "politics and government are
too
complicated to understand."
Another factor in his favour
70m Estimated number of Americans who describe themselves as
Evangelicals who
accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour and who interpret the
Bible as the direct
word of God.
23m Number of Evangelicals who voted for Bush in 2000.
50m Number of voters in total who voted for Bush in 2000.
46 Percentage of voters who describe themselves as born-again
Christians.
5 Number of states that do not use the word "evolution" in public school
science
courses.
This is an edited extract from "What We've Lost", by Graydon Carter,
published
by Little Brown on 9 September
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For a former college drop-out from Ontario and, briefly, a lineman
stringing up
telegraph wires on the railways of Canada, Graydon Carter, 55, has risen
to impressive
heights. The editor of Vanity Fair since 1992 after succeeding Tina
Brown he is
one of America's celebrity editors with clout, glamour and a nice line
in suits.
It is hard to imagine Carter doing physical work of any kind, beyond
exercising his
thumb on his silver Zippo lighter. His labour is restricted to rejigging
headlines in his
magazine he is a self-confessed failure at delegation of duties and
swanning to
Manhattan parties. Martini in hand, he cuts an almost princely and
dandyish figure, with
billowing shirts and similarly billowing silver hair.
The spotlight on his activities has never burned brighter. In recent
months he has
transformed the regular editor's letter at the front of the magazine
into less of a chat
about its coming contents the spreads of Annie Leibowitz and rants of
Christopher
Hitchens and more a full-bore diatribe against the world of George
Bush.