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by Edward Jayne
October 24, 2004

In the opinion of many, including myself, President Bush has been the worst and most divisive president in recent history--also the most reckless. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, he has time and again responded to complex problems by imposing simple solutions that turned out to be wrong. He has assumed that Texas-style macho obstinacy is superior to “flip-flop” indecisiveness, no matter how much damage is produced by staying the course. As a result, just about all of his policies have led to harmful, even disastrous consequences.

Worse yet, as Bush himself boasts, his administrative style depends on “gut decisions” confirmed by prayer. Our nation thus supposedly enjoys genuine “faith-based” executive authority perhaps for the first time in its history. Of course others help such as Karen Hughes, Vice President Cheney and campaign guru Karl Rove, but input is minimized from experts whose “reality-based assumptions” prevent them from going along with decisive steps when these seem necessary. As explained by one of Bush’s advisors, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” As explained by Bush himself perhaps with greater flair, “I am a war president.” Unfortunately, Bush’s arch-inspirational leadership is no way to run a modern nation, and his inadequacy has been obvious in just about every decision he has made additional to his colossal errors linked with the Iraq invasion and occupation.

President Bush has filled his administration with ideological zealots in domestic policy (Ashcroft, etc.) and equally ideological Neocons in foreign policy (Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, Abrams, etc.). Ashcroft has stretched constitutional law about as much as any Attorney General in U.S. history by supposedly defending it. Meanwhile, the Neocons recommend new invasions, probably beginning with Syria and Iran, but perhaps also North Korea and even Cuba or Venezuela, as would be suggested by the coup d’etat engineered in Haiti earlier this year. It does not seem to bother Neocons that universal conscription would be needed for such an ambitious agenda despite Bush’s assurances otherwise. Our troops are now stretched so thin (by a conservative count occupying 725 bases in 38 nations inclusive of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan) that nothing else seems possible, given their obsessive effort shared with Bush to promote U.S.-style “freedom” elsewhere in the world, whatever it takes.

Significantly, high officials who voiced disagreement with Bush’s policies during his first term have been eliminated. These include Paul O’Neill, the Secretary of Treasury, for opposing excessive tax cuts, and Christie Whitman, Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, for taking her responsibilities seriously. Larry Lindsey was sacked as White House economic advisor for suggesting that the Iraq invasion might cost between one and two hundred billion dollars, and General Shinseki, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was forced into early retirement for arguing that a couple hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq. It turns out that both were correct. Secretary of State Colin Powell reportedly intends to retire once Bush is reelected, and this would give even more leverage to Neocons and rightwing zealots.

I. Foreign Policy Difficulties

Regarding Bush’s foreign policy, most of us opposed to his reelection are profoundly disturbed by his invasion of Iraq because of ”cooked” evidence and by his abysmal failure to restore peace in Iraq despite imposing a fully armed military occupation. Nor can we accept the notion that the purpose of the invasion is to “spread democracy” in the Near East, nor the explanation that we’re in Iraq to secure its oil fields in order to improve the world’s oil supply as well as establishing a military presence in the region beneficial to Israel’s effort to subdue Palestinians without the threat of military intervention. Neither of these is sufficient excuse to invade a nation and kill tens of thousands of its citizens. We also realize that the entire operation in Iraq has been illegal since its inception resulting from the refusal of the U.S. and UK to abide by Article 41 in the UN Charter that requires a final vote of support from the Security Council. Without its official sanction, our government may be considered guilty of war crimes, and every death on both sides of the conflict becomes our responsibility.

We are offended by Bush’s contempt for NATO allies and others in the U.N. He dismisses these nations as “irrelevant” because they did not cooperate with the Iraq operation, despite the fact that many of them, including France and Germany, have fully cooperated in the occupation of Afghanistan, since they did in fact approve of its invasion.

It concerns us that approximately 1,100 American troops have been killed in Iraq, while another seven thousand have been injured, many of them severely. And we cannot ignore the fact that between 20,000 and 100,000 Iraqi are now estimated to have been killed, producing as much as a 90-1 kill ratio. We are also disturbed by the failure of our government to track the number of Iraqi killed. High estimates are provided for specific battles to show that we were victorious, but none at all for the total war, as if this is an embarrassment not to be shared with the American public (as in fact it is).

And we are appalled by Bush’s use of torture at abu-Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay as recommended by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales as well as lawyers in the Justice and Defense Departments. This is a willful abuse of the U.N. Charter, Geneva Convention, and the U.S. War Crimes Act justified by the legalistic excuse (described as a finding) that terrorism posed “a new paradigm” that renders the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and irrelevant to the current situation. This is utter nonsense that can be expected of nations engaged in the practice of torture. But what kind of a Christian, one asks, can resort to torture to secure a nation after invading it? What kind of a God does this self-described Christian believe in? How does he expect to escape hellfire?

And of course we are disgusted by Bush having granted extravagant reconstruction contracts without competitive bidding to family-connected corporations such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.pretty much the same corporations that profited the most from the invasion of Iraq.

Why, we ask, has Bush given Prime Minister Sharon maximum freedom to conduct operations against the Palestinians at whatever level he chooses, and why did he reject negotiations with North Korea to carry through the broad understanding obtained by Clinton during the final months of his administration? Significantly, North Korea resumed its development of a nuclear program after Bush ended negotiations, and Bush’s uncompromising support of Israel at the expense of Palestinians probably played a major role in bin Laden’s decision to mount the 9-11 attack, as suggested in both his first and most recent public statements.

And we are amazed that Bush has resumed nuclear science for military purposes, this time toward the development of “usable“ smaller nuclear devices. Depleted uranium-tipped shells are already being used with devastating effectiveness, but soon “bunker buster” nuclear weapons will be available for future invasions.

It also amazes us that Bush has invested many billions of dollars (between $3.7 and 7 billion this year alone) in a missile defense system located in the Aleutian Islands on the assumption that North Korea might eventually develop missiles able to reach the United States. This seems nothing more than an extraordinary boondoggle for U.S. aerospace industries, and undoubtedly with huge kickbacks in political donations. The technology is inadequate, and its funding could have been spent on any number of programs that have been gutted during the Bush administration. Moreover, the primary current threat of an atomic attack against the U.S. is not by rockets launched over the Arctic region, but by land and sea transportation, for example with the use of container ships. Weapons of mass destruction could then be trucked to the cities of choice by agents of hostile nations or terrorist groups. The advantage of this approach is that the identity of attackers would be more difficult to establish.

No less disturbing has been Bush’s refusal to participate in the passage of at least a half dozen international treaties inclusive of the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Kyoto Global Warming Accord, and the International Criminal Court for prosecuting war crimes. Bush also terminated U.S. participation in the Human Rights Commission and the World Court of Law.

Angry public opinion polls against the Bush administration should therefore be no surprise in foreign nations. In Great Britain, our closest ally, 60% of the public (77% of those under twenty-five) have indicated their dislike for Bush himself. More than 90% of the German public prefers Kerry to Bush in the upcoming elections, and 71% of Europeans recently polled consider Bush’s presidency to be the single biggest threat to world peace and security. Well beyond 90% oppose Bush in most Arab nations.

II. Domestic Policy Difficulties

Regarding President Bush’s domestic policy, those opposed to his reelection are disturbed by his tax reductions while engaged in war--the first time this has ever happened. We also oppose his extravagant corporate tax breaks and his emphasis on excessive tax relief for the wealthiest one (and five) percent of the American public. These tax breaks have played a major part in converting the Clinton administration’s $236 billion budget surplus into a $415 billion-plus deficit in less than three years. They have also increased the national debt to something over $7 trillion, a 40% increment since Bush came to office, far exceeding earlier limits imposed by Congress.

It bothers us that Bush has shifted the tax burden as much as possible from corporations and wealthy Americans to the middle class. Today, the federal tax income from dividends and capital gains is 10 percent, as compared to 23 percent from wages and salaries. The Bush administration has also introduced accelerated depreciation for corporations, letting them pay much less than their share of federal taxes, for example with as many as 28 corporations having paid no taxes whatsoever between 2001 and 2003 despite their combined profits of nearly $45 billion. This is not to forget the Bush administration’s energy bill with $23.5 billion in corporate tax breaks. And just last week Bush has signed into law a nearly $140 billion tax cut for U.S. corporations to offset their loss in export subsidies, including $10 billion to tobacco farmers, large tax breaks for U.S. multinational corporations, and a one-year “tax holiday” for multinationals that seek to transfer their foreign profits to the U.S. It may be conceded that a Democratic president would have taken similar steps to offset unfavorable tariff standards, but nothing quite so lavish in its generosity to U.S. corporations. At the stroke of a pen, $20 billion more than the total cost of the Iraq conflict since it began has been subtracted from the federal budget.

And one cannot overlook Bush’s excessive trade imbalances, his willingness to let the dollar float downward without any apparent limit against foreign currencies, and, as the ultimate source of the problem, his letting corporations outsource labor to foreign subsidiaries to such an extent that our recovery from the recession has had little impact on unemployment levels. Bush actually offers tax incentives to corporations that go abroad despite the fact that this arrangement brings chronic trade deficits, currency depreciation, and inflation that even further reduces the “real income” of the American public. Earlier presidents played a role in letting all of this happen, but Bush has intensified the process in order to stretch profitability as much as possible at the expense of the longterm economic health of our nation.

Likewise unacceptable are Bush’s persistent anti-environmental policies. He has benefited industries, especially lumber and utility companies, by minimizing environmental regulations, and he has opened vast stretches of wilderness for development by U.S industries. Also, Bush has deemphasized the pursuit of oil conservation, resulting in oil imports that are now 1.3 billion barrels per day higher than when Clinton left office. Moreover, there seems to be little effort on the part of the Bush administration to control unprecedented oil, gasoline, and heating oil prices for consumers despite Bush’s close connection with the oil industry. As a result, the oil industry now enjoys windfall profits at the expense of the American public.

The close relationship between the Bush administration and public utilities was perhaps the most obvious when Vice President Cheney conducted secret negotiations with Texas utility corporations at the same time as these corporations (most notably Enron, led by Ken Lay, Bush’s personal friend and biggest political donor) were engaged in practices which cheated California of billions of dollars. The connection is also evident with Bush’s mislabeled Clear-Skies Act, which permits increased levels of air pollution by public utilities.

On the other hand American wage earners have not fared well. Since Bush became president, between 600,000 and 800,000 jobs have been lost, the most for any president since Hoover. Also significant, our nation’s wage and salary income adjusted for inflation has increased only 0.6 percent compared to a 2.7 percent increase in real GDP. In other words, the job situation is even worse than employment statistics might indicate. Most terminated employees are forced to accept lower paying positions, and probably with inferior health and retirement benefits, if any at all. Of course they continue to be employed, but at an income level far below their needs and expectations.

All in all, American workers have participated far less in the current economic rebound than U.S. industry and the upper and upper-middle classes. Of course this lag effect is typical of economic cycles, but it seems bigger this time than ever before. Now the Bush administration is trying to prohibit overtime pay for millions of workers at least partly to encourage the recruitment of new workers. However, this expedient compounds the problem by cutting overtime wages for workers who have become dependent on this supplement.

Bush’s intention to privatize Social Security is potentially far more dangerous than he and his economic advisors recognize. Stock market brokerages would certainly benefit, but this would be at the risk of major dislocations in the national budget during the period of transition between the two Social Security plans. In the end the transition could cost trillions of dollars, and there would always be the possibility of widespread poverty among Social Security recipients whose investments collapse during periods of economic decline.

More than 5 million people have lost their health insurance since Bush took office, and he has not taken an effective approach to remedy the situation. Also harmful are Bush’s 17% Medicare reductions and his use of the Medicare Drug Bill to augment the already excessive profits of pharmaceutical industries at the expense of the American public. Bush’s indifference to the medical needs of the American public is also exemplified by the effort of his administration to prevent Medicare recipients from buying cheaper drugs in Canada.

Similarly, Bush has cut the budget for the No Child Left Behind Act by something between $200 million and $9.4 billion, depending on how the money is counted. And he has done this without curtailing its elaborate testing program that causes many more problems than it solves. And what of Head Start? Despite supportive rhetoric by the White House, its projected reductions for 2006 alone will be more than $900 million.

To complete the list, the Bush administration has had the audacity to reduce veteran benefits during wartime, and he has reduced federal mandates to state governments by $175 billion, contrary to his professed support of our nation’s federal system of government. In what might be described as a trickledown pattern of deprivation, state governments have accordingly been forced to cut back their mandates to local governments, so local services have been severely reduced throughout the entire nation. Major reductions have been imposed in police and fire departments, road services, municipal libraries, etc.

Equally disturbing is Bush’s gratuitous effort to merge church and state as much as possible in the governance of our nation. And even more dangerous to American democracy as we know it today is his effort to stack the U.S. judiciary with archconservatives who would be able and willing to reverse decades of progress in civil rights, women’s choice, and environmental, health, and safety standards. Bush claims he simply want to install competent justices, but his recent appointment to a federal appeals court of Jay Bybee, a justice department lawyer among those who advocate torture, is frightening. Also, the average age of the Supreme Court is now in the eighties, and the Chief Justice is now undergoing treatment for cancer. If Bush is reelected, he might be able to appoint as many as three new Supreme Court Justices, imposing an entirely new majority that could rule for decades with a reactionary ideological mission that can only be disastrous to our nation.

III. Faith and Homeland Security

Contrary to Bush’s election promise four years ago to reunite America, he has polarized the public far more than anybody else since Vietnam. He promised reconciliation, but, quite the opposite, there has been severe discord between regions, between social classes, and between neighbors and members of families. We have become a nation at war with ourselves. This alone is sufficient reason to remove Bush from office. So why does half the electorate still support his candidacy? How, possibly, can they find him acceptable? Two of the most often cited reasons are Bush’s indisputable Christian faith and what seems the likelihood that his administration would be better able to defend our nation from terrorists. Both of these arguments may be challenged.

Granted, Bush’s fundamentalist Christian faith is unprecedented for an American president. However, it should also be recognized that he becomes dangerous if and when he considers his policies to be an immutable expression of God’s willas if everything he says or does is sanctioned by sacred authority. According to a recent Sunday New York Times article by Ron Suskind, Bush actually seems to believe in his unique status as a messenger of God able to implement a “faithbased agenda” both at home and abroad. The Iraq invasion can accordingly be understood to have been an “exemplary action” to illustrate our nation’s divine mission to the rest of the world. This is dangerous stuff, reminiscent of the Middle Ages and Seventeenth Century religious wars.

As for the argument that Bush can better protect the U.S. from terrorists than Kerry, his past track record would suggest otherwise. Bush seems to have totally ignored President Clinton’s warning about alQaida at the White House on the day of his inauguration. Also, Bush’s effort to subsidize a nuclear missile shield actually crowded antiterrorism from his agenda, as indicated by Ashcroft’s request on 910, just one day before the attack that would have increased the FBI budget in all departments except for antiterrorism.

No less symptomatic of this lack of concern was Richard Clarke, the U.S. Counter Terrorism Coordinator, having been deprived of direct access to Bush as a result of the reorganization of the White House. Clarke had been scheduled for weekly meetings with Clinton to discuss the specific issue of terrorism, but Bush replaced him in his schedule by George Tenet of the CIA, whose agenda featured many additional considerations. In fact, Clarke had no official contact with Bush until the day after 9-11, when Bush suddenly accosted him in a White House corridor, demanding that he dig up the necessary evidence to prove that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attack. Clarke replied that an exhaustive search had already been conducted and no such evidence could be found. Bush thereupon exited just as quickly, his final words emphasizing his demand. And of course it turns out that there was no such evidence.

On the other hand, there were many warnings of an impending air attack by alQaida for several months before 9-11, all of which were ignored. Most notably Bush attended a small staff meeting to consider such a possibility at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6, approximately a month before the 9-11 attack. The topic of discussion was the title of a memo, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” As Bush insists for all position papers he might scrutinize, the memo was limited to a single page. Nevertheless, it included enough information to suggest the likelihood of an imminent air attack by alQaida. And what was Bush’s response? Amazingly, he is reported to have closed the meeting early in order to proceed with his fishing expedition for the rest of the day, and without having issued any directives to deal with the threat.

So in retrospect it would seem that Bush deemphasized anti-terrorism in favor of a nuclear shield up until 9-11, and one day later, starting on 912, he subordinated antiterrorism to the presumably urgent need to invade Iraq. For the intermediate twentyfour hours, he was mostly in the air over the Midwest, waiting until it was judged safe for him to return to Washington. Much later Bush confided to reporters that bin Laden did not really concern him. How could Kerry, or anybody else, have been any less effective in defending America against terrorism?

Bush was obliged to change his public stance after 9-11, but his administration failed to take the necessary steps to capture Osama bin Laden when he was surrounded in Tora Bora near the border with Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s only escape route, through steep valleys that prevented effective air support, guaranteed the probability of heavy U.S. casualties in any kind of a battle. Therefore, the U.S. military command, undoubtedly with Bush’s full compliance, assigned the occupation of these valleys to newly recruited Northern Alliance troops (many of them recent Taliban deserters), and of course bin Laden and his entire leadership was able to escape. Next there was a sudden switch in strategy to invade Iraq even though Saddam Hussein played no role whatsoever in the 9-11 attack, contrary to persistent misinformation by Vice President Cheney and our nation’s imbedded media. As a result, most U.S. translators who had been assigned to the elimination of bin Laden were transferred to the Persian Gulf for use against Hussein despite the fact that binLaden had not yet been killed or captured. Today, we are told, fewer CIA agents are assigned to the unit dealing with bin Laden than before 9/11.

As perhaps to be expected, an anthrax attack just a couple days after 9-11 has also been almost totally forgotten. At the time the American public was confronted with relentless news coverage that linked the two. However, the story quickly disappeared from the news media once Arabs were eliminated from suspicion because only U.S. government laboratories could have produced the type of anthrax used for the attack. To this day, the identity of the killer(s) remains a mystery aside from their status as government employees. One suspects their exposure might somehow turn out to be an embarrassment to the Bush administration, but nothing yet has been found.

Major problems persist in homeland security. According to Congressional Research Service data, the Bush administration has underfunded security at the nation’s ports, borders, and airports by more than $1 billion in 2005. One particularly disturbing result is that at least 90% of the cargo brought into U.S. ports goes without inspection, thus providing ready access for terrorists. In his second debate with Kerry, Bush explained that this remarkable omission results from federal budget constraints. However, adequate funding would be no problem whatsoever except for the multiple tax cuts, the Alaskan missile shield, and the $120 billion that has already been spent in Iraq, soon to be augmented by a further appropriation of $80 billion. In other words, ample funding would be available if Bush had put homeland security higher on his list of priorities. But he has not done this despite his insistence otherwise.

The Bush administration seems to be cultivating fear and excessive patriotism in order to stir up public support for its policies. It also stretches constitutional interpretation to the limit in implementing these policies. The Patriot Act, for example, includes a number of unconstitutional antiterror provisions to expedite both surveillance and prosecution. Most notably, Section 215 permits investigators to spy on U.S. citizens for “probable cause” without either a search warrant or subpoena. Doctors, libraries, and bookstores, among others, may also be forced to provide records to government agents about particular suspects. And with how much success? It turns out that more than 5,000 foreign nationals have been detained without access to either courts or lawyers of their own, but as yet not one of them has been convicted of terrorism. Amazingly, the touted “rough justice” policies legalized by the Patriot Act have not led to a single conviction.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration emphasizes government secrecy at unprecedented levels (except, it seems, among Israeli spies in the Defense Department). This obsession with security, one suspects, is intended as much as anything to obstruct the disclosure of White House embarrassments. The classification of documents has been expanded by Executive Order 13233 signed by Gonzales (the same White House counsel who advocated torture), supplemented by an Oct. 12, 2001, memo by Ashcroft, and by several provisions in the Homeland Security Act. Last year alone the Bush Administration classified 14 million documents, and, not surprisingly, Bush did everything in his power to stonewall the 9-11 Commission. When mounting public pressure necessitated hearings and a final report, he refused to testify alone under oath, denied key findings, and kept classified the most sensitive (i.e., embarrassing) documents, making them inaccessible to public scrutiny.

Add it all up, and the Bush administration has abysmally failed in its effort to protect the American public from terrorist attacks: (1) neither bin Laden nor the anthrax killer(s) have been caught; (2) the unnecessary Iraq invasion has been totally botched, if anything serving to recruit and train a large international army of Muslim terrorists who can be expected to pose serious difficulties in the future; and (3) not least, our ports have been left almost totally unprotected because of budget constraints necessitated by irresponsible fiscal policies. Meanwhile, government secrecy is rampant at the same time as citizens are exposed to unprecedented levels of surveillance into their private lives. Kerry might be just as bad as Bush in defending America, but one fails to see how he could be any worse.

IV. Future Prospects

Miraculously, President Bush is still neck-in-neck in the presidential race, and in fact chances are excellent he might actually win. However, this is not comforting to those of us who are familiar with his history of incompetence. His thoughtless audacity was evident two decades ago, when he helped to bankrupt three small oil corporations, yet escaped being prosecuted for stock manipulation thanks to his father’s SEC connections. It was also evident when Bush was Governor of Texas, since his tax reductions gutted the state budget and his corporate sponsored revision of pollution policies made Texas the most polluted state in the union. Bush even stumbled in baseball when he traded the superstar Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox.

Now Bush duplicates this ineptitude at the White House on a far more inclusive scale. For after a single term in office he is already the most radical president in recent history--also the most reckless. His foreign policy is a national disgrace, his domestic policy consists of unrestrained class warfare, and his grasp of his appropriate responsibility as president of our nation as a whole seems dubious at best. Captured by Michael Moore’s documentary, “Fahrenheit 9-11,” Bush’s ironic remark to a crowd of wealthy supporters that, though the nation’s elite, they (his audience) were his electoral base provoked hearty laughter. However, it also happens to be true, exposing a plutocratic (and in too many instances kleptoplutocratic) agenda that should be moderated.

If Bush is truly elected president this coming Tuesday, he would have the mandate to pursue this agenda without constraint. He might continue to be plagued by demonstrators wherever he travels in the United States, but, far more important, he would have the full support of both Congress and the Supreme Court once a new and more conservative majority is obtained led by a newly installed Chief Justice. And of course the enthusiastic approval of conservative and archconservative fellow citizens would continue to be guaranteed by an “imbedded” national media willing to promote anything Bush says or does. In other words, four more years of Bush’s presidency just might be more than our nation’s progressive community can risk. And thus the necessity to vote for Kerry.

edward.jayne@wmich.edu

P.S. at 7:25 a.m., November 3, 2004. George Bush has just won the election. One term in office could have been rectified, but with two terms it will be almost impossible to reclaim what has been lost. So this electionthis day, this houris probably a major threshold in the decline of our nation. America is ruined.