Hey it’s Professor Dave, let’s talk about George W. Bush.
George Walker Bush was the second president whose father had also been president.
He was the wild child in the Bush clan; a reckless, drunken, frat-boy who’d gone
AWOL from the Texas National Guard while avoiding the Vietnam War. Unlike his brother Jeb,
the heir apparent, “Dubya” was a poor student at Yale. After college, he drifted aimlessly through
jobs he was given, such as well-paying positions on company boards, and partial
ownership of the baseball team, the Texas Rangers. Texan politician Jim Hightower
observed that like his dad, George had “been born on third and thought he’d hit a triple.”
Eventually, George sobered up, found Jesus, and went into politics, where he proved to have a
fierce competitive streak. He was his father’s enforcer at the 1988 GOP convention and he watched
campaign manager Lee Atwater craft one of the most vicious presidential campaigns in memory.
In 1994, Jeb and George Bush ran for governors of Florida and Texas respectively,
during the tidal wave of discontent with the first two years of the Clinton Administration.
Being governor of Texas is not particularly strenuous since the Legislature is only in session
part-time, but Bush did manage to win points for working with Democrats and being, “a compassionate
conservative.” This government experience primed him for GOP nomination in the 2000 presidential
election, where he faced Clinton’s VP, Al Gore. Gore was an intelligent man but he came off as
a dry and monotonous policy wonk, and he waged a mediocre campaign; alternately trying to keep his
distance from Clinton while also wrapping himself in that administration’s successes. The election
became a referendum about character instead of policy, and while Gore seemed insecure, Bush had
the self-assured confidence of a man who saw the world in simplistic shades of black and white.
The election turned on the question: “Who would you rather have a beer with - Bush or Gore?” The
so-called “liberal media” continually mocked Al Gore for being stiff and wooden while praising
Bush’s Texan good old boy swagger. Ultimately, the election all came down to Florida. Networks
declared Bush the winner even though votes were still being counted and the election was too close
to call. By the next day, Bush’s lead had dwindled to 900 votes, automatically triggering a recount.
Gore had won 255 Electoral College votes and would eventually win 11 more, vs. 246 for Bush.
Gore needed four electoral votes to win while Bush needed 24,
so Florida’s 25 electoral votes were the key to the White House.
There were a number of controversies surrounding the recount. Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris, a Bush campaign surrogate, announced she would not allow an extension of the recount
deadline of November 14th at 5pm, even though the Supreme Court eventually did allow an extension.
When the final vote tally was turned in two hours late at 7pm,
she rejected it. The Florida canvassing board reported to Florida governor, brother Jeb Bush,
on November 28th that George Bush had won Florida by 537 votes, even though several counties did not
carry out the recount as requested. Gore challenged the results in four counties,
asking for a manual recount, which continued until December 9th when the Supreme Court halted it.
A few days later, the Supreme Court ruled in a highly contentious and partisan 5-4 judgment,
that the decision to recount the seventy thousand votes that had been rejected by machines would, in
the words of Justice Scalia, “threaten irreparable harm to petitioner Bush.” Thus, Bush became
president. Years later, appalled at the harm the ruling had caused to the Court’s reputation,
Justice O’Connor said she regretted the decision of the Court to take up the divisive case.
Some media outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald
later demonstrated that Gore had conceivably won Florida,
but he had already conceded the presidency after exhaustive legal challenges, and Bush entered the
White House, by many accounts having pulled off, in plain sight, the theft of the 2000 election.
Bush wasted little time in pushing through his right-wing domestic agenda.
First, he persuaded Congress to pass a massive tax cut for the wealthy,
one that would wipe out the budget surpluses that Clinton’s 1993 tax increase on the wealthy
had created during the last four years of his Administration. In these and all other matters,
Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney had undue influence. Bush had chosen Cheney to head
his search committee for a Vice President and Cheney came back with one name – Dick Cheney,
which Bush accepted. Cheney would arguably become the virtual commander-in-chief,
calling all the shots from the shadows, while Bush acted simply as the face of the administration.
Cheney, having just transitioned back into politics from the private sector as CEO of
Halliburton, a multinational oil corporation, would arguably have ulterior motives in the
specifics of wartime government contracts, proving again that war profiteering is the best way to
make a buck. By the summer of 2001, intelligence agencies around the world were picking up
overwhelming “chatter” of impending terrorist attacks, and Bush had been receiving the CIA’s
Presidential Daily Briefings throughout the spring and summer warning of these impending attacks.
These briefings were ignored, and on September 11th, 2001, two commercial jets struck the
twin towers in New York City. The official narrative pinned the attack on Osama bin Laden,
a wealthy Saudi radical who had bombed American embassies in Africa,
but there is some controversy over this conclusion, with some suggesting that
the event was staged to manufacture consent for pre-planned wars. One thing is certain,
after these attacks Bush’s approval rating soared to 90%. The world rallied in support of the
United States with an outpouring of goodwill not seen since the Kennedy assassination.
Bush exploited the post-9/11 patriotism to take America into war with Afghanistan.
He then used the initial illusion of success with that war to ram through huge tax cuts for the
wealthy. When asked how Americans should respond to the attacks, Bush suggested, “Go shopping.”
After Afghanistan came Iraq. In his memoir of his time as Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury,
Paul O’Neill revealed the astonishing obsession Bush had with invading Iraq,
to show that he could finish what his father failed to do. O’Neill claimed that the war in
Iraq was planned from the first cabinet meeting of the Bush Administration; recalling that the
debate was not, “should we attack Iraq?” but rather “how do we go about attacking Iraq?”
9-11, much like the Gulf of Tonkin or Pearl Harbor, was their golden opportunity.
Again O’Neill did not endear himself to Bush when he issued a report in 2002
suggesting the United States faced future federal budget deficits
of more than 500 billion dollars because of the Bush tax cuts. And this was before the three
trillion dollar price tag of the ill-conceived Iraq War. O’Neill was gone by the end of ‘02.
Like the War in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq went well at first. American forces easily crushed
Iraqi troops, even though there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s secular government was
involved with Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. They never found any weapons of mass destruction, or
WMDs, which was the cause given for the invasion. Hussein had given these up after the first Gulf
War though he refused to admit it for fear Iran would renew its belligerence, or that his people
would rise up and overthrow him. American forces were initially greeted as liberators but when
the U.S. occupation proved poorly planned and inept at governance, riots broke out in Baghdad.
The only building protected by American troops was the Ministry of Oil. Looters
pillaged the unguarded Iraqi National Museum, making off with priceless ancient antiquities.
Diplomat Paul Bremer had been appointed administrator of the Provisional Authority,
permitted to rule by decree. His appointment created the two biggest disasters of the
Occupation: his initial decree banned the Ba’ath party from the government
and his second decree dismantled the Iraqi Army. By doing so, Bremer created vast unemployment
amongst ex-soldiers, who would form the basis for the insurgency against the American occupation
and eventually create the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS.
In one of the greatest moral lapses of the Bush administration,
enemy combatants and suspected terrorists who were taken prisoner were subjected to “enhanced
interrogation,” an Orwellian euphemism for torture. Violating the Geneva Conventions,
the CIA conducted a practice called waterboarding, a kind of near-drowning experience, to extract
confessions and intelligence. In secret “black sites” around the world, prisoners were subjected
to inhumane torture that, in most cases, yielded bad information, since prisoners would confess
to anything or make up stories to stop the process, but the practice was continued anyway.
The scandals that were exposed by the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib in
Iran as well as Guantanamo in Cuba were a stain upon America and drew international condemnation.
In the largest restructuring of the U.S. government in contemporary history,
the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Department of Homeland Security. Congress passed
the USA Patriot Act to help detect and prosecute terrorism while the National Security Agency,
or NSA, was given broad powers as it commenced warrantless surveillance of telecommunications.
Civil liberties groups criticized both the Patriot Act and the expansion of the NSA,
saying they allowed law enforcement to invade the privacy of citizens and eliminated judicial
oversight of domestic intelligence. They further charged that the NSA’s eavesdropping on telephone
and e-mail communications between the US and people overseas without a warrant
was unconstitutional. Additionally, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
permitted an expansion of powers by the Federal government in seeking, obtaining,
and sharing information on U.S. citizens as well as non-Americans from around the world.
Bush prided himself on making quick decisions. “I’m the decider,” he would famously say,
preferring to go with what his gut told him rather than the facts. The arrogance of the
Bush Administration was exemplified by a quote given to a New York Times reporter,
Ron Suskind. An anonymous Bush aide, referring to the actions of the administration,
said: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act
we create our own reality.” The quote was later attributed to Karl Rove, the political mastermind
of Bush’s two presidential campaigns. The Iraq war was only a year and a half old when the 2004
presidential election took place, and as if to demonstrate the veracity of Rove’s statement,
the Democratic candidate John Kerry, who had fought in Vietnam, was tarred as a coward,
while the draft-dodging Bush was painted as a study in presidential leadership. This time
the election hinged upon another key state, Ohio, where the voting machines mysteriously broke down
in Democratic precincts and the electronic Diebold machines were widely believed to have been hacked.
Bush managed to eke out another election victory, but in his second term, reality began catching
up with him. The American occupation of Iraq was turning into a nightmare. There were two strains
of Islamic faith – the Sunni and the Shi’a – that once freed from Hussein’s rule, began vying for
control of the country. Neighboring Iran was Shiite while the other neighbor, Saudi Arabia,
embraced a rigid form of Sunni Islam. During Saddam’s brutal reign, the country was free of
terrorist attacks, but they became frequent as the country descended into civil war.
Back in the US, Bush fared little better as the terrible damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina
revealed an administration that was woefully incompetent in dealing with a natural emergency.
Michael Brown, was the director of response for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA,
whose prior job had been Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association from 1989
to 2001. After numerous lawsuits, Brown resigned and went to work for Homeland Security in 2003.
When Katrina hit, the levees of New Orleans were breached and the city was flooded. Although the
Army corps of engineers had predicted this possibility, Bush ignored their warnings.
FEMA, which had been effective during the Clinton years, was now run ineffectually. The fact that it
was now part of Homeland Security undercut any credibility of competence in the organization.
Nevertheless, Bush publicly professed confidence in Brown,
famously telling him, “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie.” The phrase soon became
sarcastic slang for things done by politically connected cronies or general incompetence.
The NY Times called Brown a “disaster in his own right.” The Katrina fiasco,
with thousands of displaced residents huddled in the Superdome without food or water, became
a metaphor for the gross incompetence of the Bush Administration. Yet, the worst was still to come.
When Bill Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act,
it freed banks to engage in risky financial speculations with federally insured deposits.
While George Bush engaged in risky wars, Wall Street found new ways to make money:
bundling risky home loans into packages and selling them to investment firms. Banks began
enticing customers to take out home loans they could not afford, promising ever-appreciating
properties. It was a bubble fueled by greed and a denial of reality. The banks and investment houses
were playing a kind of musical chairs with these bundled bad loans, as they continued to sell them
to each other, racking up profits while hoping they wouldn’t be the ones left holding the garbage
when the music stopped. The crisis began with the growth and sudden collapse of the subprime market
in 2007, and then as Bush neared the end of his second term, the venerable investment house Lehman
Brothers collapsed in September 2008. When the American housing market went into a free-fall
it took the world economy with it, which plummeted in a market crash not seen since 1929. Thousands
lost jobs and homes as government oversight had become non-existent. The Financial Crisis Inquiry
Commission later concluded that the financial crisis was avoidable and was caused by widespread
failures in financial regulation and supervision, dramatic failures of corporate governance, and
lack of transparency by financial institutions, accompanied by inconsistent action by government
that added to the uncertainty and panic, a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics.
The only thing that saved the world economy from total collapse was infusion of government money
into the world economy. Central banks around the world attempted to avoid a deflationary spiral,
in which lower wages and higher unemployment would lead to a decline in global consumption.
Governments enacted huge fiscal stimulus packages,
borrowing and spending to offset the reduction in private sector demand, which in the US totaled
nearly one trillion dollars. Central banks also purchased 2.5 trillion dollars of government
debt and troubled private assets from banks, the largest monetary policy action in world history.
The presidency of George W. Bush exposed the shaky ground that American society had become. The GOP,
once the party of true conservatism - cautious, prudent and sober-minded; had become reckless. The
partisanship of Nixon, the fantasies of Reagan, dominant right wing talk radio and Fox lies,
had created a polarized society unmatched since the days of the Civil War. George W. Bush was not
the cause of this transformation but the product. It was during his presidency that the corporate
takeover of the American Empire had finally been revealed and its domestic class warfare exposed.