Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
by US Senator Robert Byrd
Speech delivered on the floor of the US Senate
March 19, 2003 3:45pm
I believe in this beautiful country. I have studied its roots and gloried in the wisdom of its magnificent Constitution. I have marveled at the wisdom of its founders and framers. Generation after generation of Americans has understood the lofty ideals that underlie our great Republic. I have been inspired by the story of their sacrifice and their strength.
But, today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.
Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.
We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split.
After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe.
The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice.
There is no credible information to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11. The twin towers fell because a world-wide terrorist group, Al Qaeda, with cells in over 60 nations, struck at our wealth and our influence by turning our own planes into missiles, one of which would likely have slammed into the dome of this beautiful Capitol except for the brave sacrifice of the passengers on board.
The brutality seen on September 11th and in other terrorist attacks we have witnessed around the globe are the violent and desperate efforts by extremists to stop the daily encroachment of western values upon their cultures. That is what we fight. It is a force not confined to borders. It is a shadowy entity with many faces, many names, and many addresses.
But, this Administration has directed all of the anger, fear, and grief which emerged from the ashes of the twin towers and the twisted metal of the Pentagon towards a tangible villain, one we can see and hate and attack. And villain he is. But, he is the wrong villain. And this is the wrong war. If we attack Saddam Hussein, we will probably drive him from power. But, the zeal of our friends to assist our global war on terrorism may have already taken flight.
The general unease surrounding this war is not just due to "orange alert." There is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered. How long will we be in Iraq? What will be the cost? What is the ultimate mission? How great is the danger at home?
A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of thousands of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq.
What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?
Why can this President not seem to see that America's true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?
War appears inevitable. But, I continue to hope that the cloud will lift. Perhaps Saddam will yet turn tail and run. Perhaps reason will somehow still prevail. I along with millions of Americans will pray for the safety of our troops, for the innocent civilians in Iraq, and for the security of our homeland. May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us.
At the time of this writing, I am registered as an independent. From 1960 thru 2003 I was a registered Democrat except for a time during the Johnson administration. (political disclosure).
The question is: "Do Democrats Deserve to Win?" The answer is some do and some don't. There have been two very defining votes taken which I believe were votes to allow the President to act illegally. The first vote was to authorize the President to attack Iraq, a sovereign country, without the consent of the United Nations. This vote was clearly illegal. The United States is a member of the United Nations and a signer to the U.N. Charter. As such, the U.N. Charter is "the supreme law of the land" under Article VI of our Constitution. Therefore this vote to authorize war was an unconstitutional event. I would find it impossible to vote for any of the senators who voted to give the President this illegal authority. The only exception I would make is for the senators who have repented. The complete list of Democratic senators who voted for this illegal authorization are listed under the Honor Roll entitled "Roll of Shame." While our list does not contain names of Democrats in the House who voted for the resolution it does contain a list of Democrats who voted against the war resolution. The most important thing is to make your vote count. The time may be approaching when we will have to put more pressure on Democrats to do the right thing. No more business.
There is one smaller group of Democrats who I believe do not belong either in Congress nor in the Democratic Party. These are the Democrats who voted in favor of the Military-Tribunals bill (S3930). This outrageous bill now law is as anti-American as anything that I have seen in my lifetime of 67 years. This law allows our government to torture prisoners and to hold persons in prison without charges, without a lawyer and without any contact with the outside world. In effect, this law does away with the writ of habeas corpus, the foundation of western society, without which the Bill of Rights is worthless. These twelve Democratic senators who are named here are not worthy to be called Democrats and should be purged from the party of Jefferson:
Likewise, the following Democratic House members also disgraced the Democratic party voting in favor of the companion House bill #508:
It should be noted that there were two Republicans who voted against Senate bill S3930 or House bill 508. These courageous Senators and Congress members deserve our support: In the Senate:
Chafee (R-RI)
Special recognition also goes to Independent Senator Jeffords (I-VT).
In the House:
Bartlett (MD-6)
Special recognition also goes to Independent House member Sanders (I-VT).
Let us make it clear where we stand when we vote. Please do not support candidates that are not worthy of our vote. Remember the political coding: Conservative = Right-Wing = authoritarian = un-democratic. Progressive or Liberal = Left-Wing = democratic. Read Why Do They Hate America? for more detail.
Numbers have been flying around the airwaves lately.
How many Republican congresspeople have had to resign from scandals this past year? 4. Randall "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), Bob Ney (R-Ohio), Mark Foley (R-Fla.) and Tom Delay (R-Texas). How many more "R's" are implicated in the scandals that the above four resigned for? Who knows?
How many staff members of the corrupt administration have resigned in disgrace this year? 4. Andrew Card (R), I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (R), Susan Ralston (R) and Scotty "Spokesliar" McClellan (R). (Sorry if I missed any scoundrels.)
How many members of Congress (both houses, "R's" and "D's") should turn in their credentials? All of them who voted to take away our centuries-old right to habeas corpus and who voted to exonerate George and the other Torquemadas for authorizing torture and crimes against humanity.
According to a study by Johns Hopkins University, how many innocent Iraqis have died due to our invasion and occupation of Iraq? 655,000! 655,000! Stop and think about that number. That is roughly the population of one of my favorite cities here in America: Austin, Texas. With the population of Iraq roughly 1/10th the size of the United States, that's like 6,550,000 of our citizens gone. That is larger than the populations of 37 of our states. Millions have fled Iraq; "all the good people," one Iraqi parliamentarian told me. Halliburton is busy taking our tax dollars to not rebuild a country that the bloodthirsty fanatics in power have destroyed.
I have spoken to many Iraqis and everyone in that country has lost a close member of his/her family. Not a "friend of a friend of a friend of a friend," but a son/daughter, mother/father, sister/brother: entire families wiped out for greed of mammon. But they are all our children and one loss is unacceptable. George said that the abominably high number of people killed in Iraq only proves how much they are willing to suffer for "freedom and democracy." Well, here's another number for George, 87% of Iraqis want the occupying forces out of their country. How is that for democracy for you, George? Another one of the disturbing consequences of your "freedom and democracy" is that over 50% of the Iraqi people think that it's okay to target American and coalition of the "wilting" forces to accomplish this complete withdrawal.
How many of our brave young people have been killed because of the lies of the Bush administration and the rubber-stamping of Congress? 2766. Over 50 this month alone. It is monstrous and barbaric that the occupation continues (and was even started in the first place) with Congress giving the irresponsible George ever more and more money to kill our kids.
Besides the needless human cost of this war, how much money does America spend in Iraq every hour? $10,000,000.00! What could we do with ten million dollars if it weren't being dumped into the now-virtual wastelands of Iraq, filtered into the pockets of the war machine? How many people could we have rescued off their rooftops in New Orleans? How many levees could have been repaired? How many young people could we send to college instead of sending them to fight illegal and immoral wars? The thought of the cost of one, two, twenty-four hours in Iraq is staggering, and how long will it take our grandchildren to pay off the trillions of dollars in debt that George is sinking them into?
How many of our troops and Iraqis have been wounded? Who really knows for sure? The physical wounds are horrifying enough, but I believe close to 100% have been wounded emotionally and do not even get the bare help that the obviously wounded do.
How many people live in the United States? 282,000,000. How many people believe that George is telling the truth about Iraq? 17 percent, which is about 48 million people - that leaves us with about 235,000,000 people who know he is lying.
How many members of Congress? 535. How many members of the Executive Branch and cabinet? 17.
We the people who abhor the killing policies of our government are the very silent majority in this country, and we are allowing less than 600 people to control our destinies, run our country into the sewers, tarnish our good name in other countries, kill and torture innocent human beings and imprison them without due process (with the Congressional seal of approval), drain our treasury and put most of our debt in the hands of Communist China, and endanger our own precious lifeblood to boot: while destroying the very planet that we need to live on.
How much of these criminals and their crimes can we stomach? I can't stomach any more, and I call anyone in America who is sick to death of the people we employ to represent us - but who represent their own interests and the war machine's interests - to join Gold Star Families for Peace in front of the White House for a sit-in to surround it and tell the people who mislead us that we want our country back and our troops out of Iraq. We are tired of politics as usual, which mean lies and the stealing of our freedoms. We want honest and brave politicians; i.e., politics as unusual!
Please go to Gold Star Families for Peace for details of our sit-in which will run from November 6th to the 9th.
Also, go to Progressive Democrats of America to sign the petition to support Congressman Jim McGovern's bill, HR4232, which cuts funding for the continuing occupation. Ending the funding is what stopped Vietnam. Let's cut Iraq off before it becomes as bad as Vietnam.
We the people of my generation and older need to put our bodies on the line for our children and grandchildren. I want to be able to look in the eyes of my (hopefully) future grandchildren and say with a clear conscience: "Your grandma did everything she could to make your world a better place."
I hope to heaven that I can utter those words in a world that is truly better than the one that I gave Casey. I hope that war will eventually stop being used as a diplomatic tool and that my grandchildren won't be used as pawns in the war profiteer's avaricious numbers game.
Ex-U.S. Diplomat Says White House is In Full Retreat from Iraq Reality
During the gulf war in 1991, when I was in charge of the American Embassy in Baghdad, I placed a copy of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland'' on my office coffee table. I thought it conveyed far better than words ever could the weird world that was Iraq at that time, a world in which nothing was what it seemed: The several hundred Western hostages Saddam Hussein took during Desert Shield were not really hostages but "guests.'' Kuwait was not invaded, but "liberated.''
It is clearly time to dust the book off and again display it prominently, only this time because our own government has dragged the country down a rabbit hole, all the while trying to convince the American people that life in newly liberated Iraq is not as distorted as it seems.
It is returning to normal, we are assured, even as we are asked to ante up an additional $75 billion and pressure builds to send more troops and extend the tours of duty of those who are there. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz tells Congress that all we need is to project a little confidence. The Mad Hatter could not have said it better.
President Bush's speech last Sunday was just the latest example of the administration's concerted efforts to misrepresent reality -- and rewrite history -- to mask its mistakes. The president said Iraq is now the center of our battle against terrorism. But we did not go to Iraq to fight Al-Qaida, which remains perhaps our deadliest foe, and we will not defeat it there.
By trying to justify the current fight in Iraq as a fight against terrorism, the administration has done two frightening things. It has tried to divert attention from Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the wave of terrorist attacks against American interests from New York and Washington to Yemen, and who reappeared in rugged terrain in a video broadcast last week. And the policy advanced by the speech is a major step toward creating a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts on the ground.
This is an insurgency we're fighting in Iraq. Our 130,000 soldiers in Iraq now confront an angry but not yet defeated Sunni Muslim population who, although a minority in Iraq, had been in power for a century. We are now also beginning to face terrorists there, but it is our own doing. Our attack on Iraq -- and our bungling of the peace -- led to the guerrilla insurgency that is drawing jihadists from around the Muslim world. The "shock and awe'' campaign so vividly shown on our television screens has galvanized historic Arab envy, jealousy and resentment of the United States into white-hot hatred of America.
Where once there were thousands, now there are potentially millions of terrorists and sympathizers who will be drawn into this campaign.
We've seen other examples of the kind of insurgency we're now facing. One was in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, and we all should know the end of that story by now. Bin Laden was one of the outside jihadists drawn into that battle; he emerged as the head of a group of hardened soldiers he called Al-Qaida.
It is perhaps not surprising that the administration is trying to redefine why we went to Iraq, because we have accomplished so little of what we set out to do -- and severely underestimated the commitment it would take to deal with the aftermath of war.
The president told us in his seminal speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons . . . is seeking nuclear weapons . . . has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people.''
He dismissed the concerns raised by critics of his approach as follows: "Some worry that a change of leadership in Iraq could create instability and make the situation worse. The situation could hardly get worse, for world security and for the people of Iraq. The lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power.''
Now we know that even if we find chemical or biological weapons, the threat that they posed to our national security was, to be charitable, exaggerated.
It all but disappeared from the president's speech last week and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the leading proponents of the threat, now tells us that he didn't even ask the chief weapons-of-mass-destruction sleuth in Iraq, David Kay, for a status report during his recent trip to Baghdad, relegating such weapons to the same dark corner as bin Laden, whose name rarely passes the lips of our leaders these days.
Indeed, in the most telling revision of the justification for going to war, the State Department's undersecretary for arms control, John Bolton, recently said that whether Saddam's government actually possessed weapons of mass destruction "isn't really the issue. The issue, I think, has been the capability that Iraq sought to have . . . WMD programs.''
In other words, we're now supposed to believe that we went to war not because Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction threatened us, but because he had scientists on his payroll.
And the cakewalk post-war scenario that had been painted by some in the administration is anything but. More Americans have died since the president announced the end of major combat operations than during the war itself. The cost runs $1 billion per week in military support alone, and some experts say our deployment is already affecting future military preparedness.
Iraqis live in chaotic conditions as crime flourishes in the unpatrolled streets and family squabbles are settled vigilante style; basic services such as electricity remain unavailable to large segments of the urban population.
The truth is, the administration has never leveled with the American people on the war with Iraq.
It is true that many people outside the administration, including me and many leading Democrats, thought Saddam had residual stocks of weapons of mass destruction; disarmament was a legitimate international objective supported unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. But we did not need to rush to war before exploring other, less risky options.
Invasion, conquest and occupation was always the highest-risk, lowest-reward choice. The intrusive U.N. inspections were disrupting Saddam's programs and weakening him in the eyes of his key supporters, including in the Iraqi military. That would explain why the United States, according to reports, was able to thoroughly infiltrate the army before the onset of hostilities and obtain commitments from Iraqi generals to send their troops home rather than have them fight.
The administration short-circuited the discussion of whether war was necessary because some of its most powerful members felt it was the best option -- ostensibly because they had deluded themselves into believing that they could easily impose flowering democracies on the region.
A more cynical reading of the agenda of certain Bush advisers could conclude that the Balkanization of Iraq was always an acceptable outcome, because Israel would then find itself surrounded by small Arab countries worried about each other instead of forming a solid block against Israel. After all, Iraq was an artificial country that had always had a troublesome history.
One way the administration stopped the debate was to oversell its intelligence. I know, because I was in the middle of the efforts to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium "yellowcake'' -- a form of lightly processed ore -- from Africa.
At the request of the administration I traveled to the West African nation of Niger in February 2002 to check out the allegation. I reported that such a sale was highly unlikely, but my conclusions -- as well as the same conclusions from our ambassador on the scene and from a four-star Marine Corps general -- were ignored by the White House.
Instead, the president relied upon an unsubstantiated reference in a British white paper to underpin his argument in the State of the Union address that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programs. How many times did we hear the president, vice president and others speak of the looming threat of an Iraqi mushroom cloud?
Until several months ago, when it came out that the country was Niger, I assumed that the president had been referring to another African country. After I learned, belatedly to be sure, I came forward to insist that the administration correct the misstatements of fact. But the damage had already been done.
The overblown rhetoric about nuclear weapons inspired fear and drowned out the many warnings that invasion would create its own formidable dangers.
Middle East experts warned over and over again that Iraq's many religious and ethnic factions could start battling each other in a bloody struggle for power. Former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd fretted that we would unleash a terrorist-recruiting bonanza, and former U.S. national security adviser Brent Scowcroft warned of a security meltdown in the region.
The U.S. army's top general at the time, Eric Shinseki, meanwhile, questioned the cakewalk scenario. He told Congress that we would need several hundred thousand soldiers in Iraq to put an end to the violence against our troops and against each other. His testimony was quickly repudiated by both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
As we now know, he was close to the mark. Our 130,000 soldiers are failing to stem the violence. Even as Rumsfeld says jauntily that all is going well, Secretary of State Colin Powell is running to the United Nations to try to get more foreign boots on the ground. One of the administration's staunchest supporters, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, says ominously that we risk strategic failure if we don't send reinforcements.
And the infighting that Middle East experts feared could still erupt. The majority Shiite Muslim population, brutalized during Saddam's rule, is content with a tactical truce with our forces so long as they are free to consolidate their control and the United States continues to kill Sunni Muslims so that they don't have to. That truce is threatened not only by Shiite political ambition but also by ongoing skirmishes with the Sunnis.
The recent car bomb at the An-Najaf mosque that killed one of Shiite Islam's most influential clerics and head of the largest Shiite party in Iraq almost resulted in the outbreak of civil war between the two groups. Widespread belief that Sunni elements were behind the assassination and that the United States failed in its responsibilities for security has brought Shiite armed militias back onto the streets, actively seeking to avenge the death of their leader. Such a war within a war would make our occupation infinitely more dangerous.
Some now argue that the president's speech Sunday represents a change of course. Even if the administration won't admit it made any mistakes, the mere call for international involvement should be enough to persuade the world to accept the burden of assisting us, as we continue to control both the military and the economic reconstruction.
That may well be true, but we cannot count on the international community to do our bidding blindly. While the administration scurries back to the United Nations for help, our historic friends and allies still smart from the gratuitous insults hurled at them nine months ago. This is the same United Nations which Richard Perle, a not-so-invisible hand behind the war, recently called an "abject failure.''
As Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's national security adviser, has pointed out, at a time when our military might is at its zenith, our political and moral authority is at its lowest ebb. Essential trust has been broken, and it will take time to repair. At a minimum, we need to jettison the hubris that has driven this policy, the pretensions of moral rectitude that mask a jodhpurs-and-pith-helmet imperialism that cannot succeed.
In the meantime, we must demonstrate that we understand that more than military might is required to tame the anger in the region. This includes both the internationalization of the reconstruction effort and the redoubling of efforts to ease tensions on the Israeli-Palestinian front.
That is the thorn that must be pulled from the side of the region. The road to peace in the Middle East still goes through Jerusalem.
But before we can hope to win back international trust or start down a truly new path in Iraq, the administration has to start playing it straight, with the American people and with the world. Recent administration statements, including the president's speech, suggest that it still prefers to live in a fantasy world.
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Joseph Wilson was deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988 to 1991. In July, he called into question the Bush administration's assertions about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa by revealing that he had been asked by the U.S. government to look into such claims -- and had reported in early 2002 that they were unfounded. He is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. He wrote this article for Perspective.
This war is a lie, a savage and brutal lie, but a lie nonetheless. Each day of loss and devastation forces the liars to revise the words of their deceit. And each destructive day forces a supportive supine press corps to find new ways to avert their eyes from the truth.
Pre-emptive policy is an unholy alliance having its own axis of evil greed, arrogance, and deception.
This week as President Bush and his closest advisors altered stories in an ongoing effort to deflect blame about "intelligence failures," I am reminded of a quote by Oliver North from his Iran-Contra testimony, "I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version."
One cannot help but ask if these false and terrifying depictions of Iraq's destructive capabilities were really the products of intelligence failures, or if they were part of an ongoing and systematic policy on the part of those at the very head of government.
Thirty years ago during the Watergate hearings, investigators asked the simple question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" A more appropriate question to ask today might be "Why didn't the president know before going to war what common people marching in streets all over the world knew?"
For those with Internet, BBC, and world news access, the information about forged Niger uranium documents, UN inspector's assessments on Iraq's unlikely chemical and biological capabilities, the CIA pronouncements that Iraq did not constitute a significant threat, the International Atomic Energy Agency position that no evidence existed of an Iraqi nuclear program, the absence of our CIA finding any credible links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, were all known among many citizens before Bush single-mindedly took the country to war.
Despite this, the president and his advisors repeatedly proffered in speeches and public appearances discredited information and hyped rhetoric linking Iraq to terrorism and 9/11. "Weapons of mass destruction" figured most prominently in arguing to the American people that there was an absolute necessity for ending UN inspections and waging a preemptive attack upon Iraq. This unsubstantiated argument was so persuasive that by the time the invasion began, fully 72 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, without a shred of credible evidence to support such a claim.
Now we are engaged in counting the dead, assessing blame, looking at huge financial burdens, and considering the ongoing loss of young American lives in an unwelcome occupation of Iraq. What is becoming increasingly clear is that if the president and his closest advisors knowingly lied in making the case for a preemptive war based on Iraq constituting an imminent threat to the security of the United States, this is assuredly an impeachable offense of the highest order of magnitude, manifestly greater than the constitutional abuses of Dick Nixon or the sexual lying of Bill Clinton.
We can unfortunately be assured that the Republican-controlled House and Senate will never allow an investigation of this president or his advisors, despite a truckload of incriminating evidence leading straight to the front door of the Oval Office. This leaves us, as citizens, to make assessments on our own without benefit of Congressional hearings or testimony on those who mislead us. In this effort, we can note however, that among those with something to hide, the administration's actions speak louder than words.
Most revealing and scarcely reported, is the crucial change that the Bush Administration initiated in the intelligence community, one which has had severe implications for our constitutional processes and national credibility. Always seeking to demonize Saddam, it appears that sometime in 2002 the tight cabal surrounding the president became increasingly dissatisfied with the CIA and other intelligence data which did not support their hawkish view on Iraq.
To address this, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Special Plans (OSP) within the Pentagon. As Seymour Hersch and other investigative journalists have reported, this small group of OSP analysts was charged with finding evidence of what Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld postulated, and what our intelligence agencies did not endorse; namely that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had enormous arsenals of chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons that threatened the United States.
The OSP group relied heavily on data gathered by the exiled Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, a character whose veracity and integrity were strongly doubted by the CIA and who had little respect from the Iraqi people, but who was nevertheless hand-picked by the Bush Administration to head any new Iraqi regime. (Chalabi had been, among other shady business deals and improprieties, convicted of a $7 million bank fraud in Jordan.)
Unfortunately it appears that Chalabi and the OSP office of the Pentagon became the primary source of the questionable "intelligence" accepted by the Bush White House. The CIA and the State Department were virtually eliminated from the loop.
According to W. Patrick Lang, former chief of Middle East Intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the OSP and the president's advisors manipulated and "cherry-picked the intelligence information to build a case for war."
The OSP provided largely unverified information, but it was the only information the administration wanted to hear. Further, it requires a rather enormous suspension of judgment to believe that George Bush knew nothing of these activities by the Vice President and his closest advisors.
Now Americans and the rest of the world know the truth: that the president took this country to war based on "faulty intelligence." But what does this really mean? It means the country was likely intentionally misled, and this is a prosecutable offense. It is a prosecutable offense because when a president takes the oath of office, he swears to "uphold the Constitution of the United States."
Manipulation or deliberate abuse of national security intelligence data is "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It is also a violation of federal criminal law and the anti-conspiracy statute which considers it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose. "
Richard Nixon faced impeachment for misusing the CIA and the FBI, a serious abuse of presidential power. George Bush and his administration apparently manipulated and misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, a preemptive war to take control of Iraq.
For those who would give George Bush some largely undeserved latitude, let's be clear that this was not a benign act with no victims and no ongoing consequences. This was not a personal impropriety, a sexual tryst or a stain on a blue dress. This was a stain upon American democracy.
Thousands of innocent Iraqis died and many continue to suffer in a lawless war-ravaged country. Millions of civilians, including American servicemen and women are exposed to the health hazards of depleted uranium from U.S. missiles. Every day, more young soldiers die as Iraqis make sitting ducks out of American troops. The cost of war and a long occupation rises into the hundreds of billions of dollars, while our country faces a depleted treasury and deficits as far as the eye can see.
This is demonstrably a misdeed of monstrous proportions. A huge, costly, and deadly lie was foisted on the American public and the Congress. The credibility of the United States was severely damaged and the constitutional powers of the presidency abused.
George Walker Bush deserves impeachment. He deserves impeachment and removal from the office he was never elected to hold. Those who have paid the ultimate price with their lives demand no less. Our democracy demands no less. As citizens, we must clamor for the justice and accountability which our leaders would like to avoid. We must not forget.
Belva Ann Prycel is a resident of Alna, Maine.
George A. Akerlof is a 2001 Nobel prize laureate who teaches economics at the University of California in Berkeley.
BERLIN - American Nobel Prize laureate for Economics George A. Akerlof lashed out at the government of US President George W. Bush, calling it the "worst ever" in American history, the online site of the weekly Der Spiegel magazine reported Tuesday.
"I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign policy and economics but also in social and environmental policy," said the 2001 Nobel Prize laureate who teaches economics at the University of California in Berkeley.
07/02/03: PITTSBURGH--Today's version of the heroic Nathan Hale would fall to his knees, beg for mercy, and swear fealty to the British crown. A 21st century Patrick Henry would no doubt argue that homeland security trumps personal liberty. Benedict Arnold would make the rounds of the TV talk shows, lauded as an "heroic pragmatist." In a land of wimps, the dimwit is king--such is the dismal state of post-9/11 America.
As George W. Bush's aristocorporate junta runs roughshod over hard-earned freedoms, as his lunatic-right Administration loots $10 trillion from the national treasury, as his armies invade sovereign nations without cause, as he threatens war against imagined enemies while allowing real ones to build nuclear weapons, those charged with standing against these perversions of American values remain appallingly, inexplicably silent.
We have become a nation of cowards, and I am ashamed.
Where are the Democrats? Under our two-party system it is their patriotic duty to represent the opinions and beliefs of their constituents, who are mostly liberal. That responsibility becomes an urgent necessity when the GOP, in firm control of all three branches of government, abandons a proud tradition of conservatism in favor of outright fascism. With the exception of a few principled men like Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), leading Democrats have made little or no effort to stymie Bush's agenda, launch a real investigation of 9/11 or appoint a special prosecutor to go after the WMD scandal. To their eternal dishonor 82 Democratic Congressmen and 29 Senators voted for the invasion of Iraq--this despite the pleas of millions of demonstrators. Among the nine leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, only two have made opposition to runaway militarism a staple of their stump speech.
Easily spooked and even more easily fooled, Democratic leaders are neither leading nor acting like Democrats. Thirty years of political duck-and-cover has brought them to the brink of irrelevance. Far more damning, they have abandoned their rightful role as loyal opponents.
Where is the left? The radical theoreticians who provided the intellectual rationale for opposition to the Vietnam War--Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, et al--are touring the nation's universities, each pushing books and promoting their personal "brand" to youthful idealists. Former leftist Christopher Hitchens, who so desperately wanted to fit into the new paradigm that he endorsed attacking Iraq, has been reduced to insisting that weapons of mass destruction will turn up someday. Probably.
Unlike Saddam, Bush needn't cut out his opponents' tongues. They're keeping silent on their own.
It may be naοve to pose the question, but where are the principled Republicans? Not long ago, conservative leaders trudged down from Capitol Hill to tell an embattled Richard Nixon that he could no longer count on their support. Now the moderate, fiscally responsible Republicans one might expect to stand up to Bush's fiscal depredations--men like John McCain, Bob Dole and George Pataki--remain mute as their party and nation are hijacked by fanatics. Bush's rich man's welfare will cost the average U.S. citizen $500,000* over the next decade--isn't that the kind of government waste Republicans are supposed to deplore?
Partisan politics are so dead that the American resistance is entrusted by default into the unlikely hands of the same intelligence establishment that poisoned Fidel's cigars. Every day brings startling revelations from angry CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency spymasters: despite what Bush said over and over again, there was never any proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the trailers Bush claimed were mobile chemical weapons labs were no such thing, and Colin Powell presented, in the UN, evidence on Iraq that he privately considered doctored and unreliable. The recent DIA leak of a November 2002 analysis shows that intelligence experts believed that Saddam Hussein would never use WMDs--even if he had them--unless "regime survival was imminently threatened." The Iraqis would use them only "in extreme circumstances," the report said, "because their use would confirm Iraq's evasion of UN restrictions."
Where is the outrage? Even though it's painfully clear that Bush lied about the WMDs, even though daily ambushes of American troops indicate that the war is far from over, a CBS News poll shows that 62 percent of Americans still support Bush's con job on Iraq. "The president is 99 percent safe on this one," says Newt Gingrich.
Protestors who demonstrated against the war before it began ought to be energized by the WMD scandal, but the streets of Washington are quiet. Editors who parroted the Administration's lies, given the chance to redeem themselves now, downplay the latest Slaughtergate news. An army colonel e-mails, urging me to keep asking questions, yet confesses, "I'm keeping my thoughts to myself and waiting until I retire to get the hell out of here." Daniel Goldhagen's controversial 1996 book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" pointed out an obvious truth: that the Nazis could never have triumphed, retained power or gotten anything done without the explicit complicity of the people they ruled. Therefore, Goldhagen argued--and thoughtful people agree--the failure of the German people to resist Hitler made them just as guilty as he was.
How will history judge us?
* LibertyWorld Editor's note: This includes principal, interest and higher interest rates caused by the huge amount of government borrowing.
(Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism. Ordering information is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.)
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. --Mark Twain
There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action. --Goethe
A Message from People For the American Way
Military encroachment on civilian authority.
Suspension of judicial protections.
Scary times.
So scary, in fact, that grievances against our head of state had to be expressed resolutely.
In a document released on this day, a group of real patriots have done just that.
He is "depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury," "he has...obstruct[ed] the laws for naturalization of foreigners," and people are being transported "beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences," the document reads.
This group of civil libertarians went on to point out that our government's head has abolished "our most valuable laws," and altered, "fundamentally the forms of our governments." They elaborated, explaining, "He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people." Moreover, "he has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power."
"He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws," reads the indictment.
Particular aim is taken at the threat to our judiciary, stating that George "has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers," and has "made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices."
Released today - 227 years ago - the Declaration of Independence made the case for what would later become the United States of America and its guiding Constitution - the model for budding democracies ever since.
On this holiday, let us all remember what our Founding Fathers fought for, and the tyranny they fought against.
It's getting harder to ignore. More and more evidence is emerging to suggest that U.S. intelligence was manipulated to justify going to war with Iraq.
Among the allegations:
Still, Congress, which spent $80 million to prove that, yes, Bill Clinton did have sexual relations with that woman, has yet to order an investigation.
According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."
No endorsement now
Estimated $1.75 million raised in pledges to Democratic contenders
Most votes to Dean, followed by Kucinich, Kerry
Friday, June 27, 12:00pmNo candidate won a majority in this weeks first-ever Democratic online presidential primary, therefore MoveOn.org PAC will not make an endorsement at this time. Howard Dean received the highest vote total with 43.87% of the vote (139,360 votes); followed by Dennis Kucinich with 23.93% (76,000 votes); and John Kerry with 15.73% (49,973 votes).
The rest of the field was in single digits: John Edwards, 3.19% (10,146 votes); Richard Gephardt, 2.44% (7,755 votes); Bob Graham, 2.24% (7,113 votes); Carol Moseley Braun, 2.21% (7,021 votes); Joe Lieberman, 1.92% (6,095 votes); and Al Sharpton, 0.53% (1,677 votes).
MoveOn.org PAC hailed the primary as a tremendous kick-off for the campaign to defeat George Bush next year:
This is only the beginning, continued Boyd. Our most important objectives have been met: early Democratic grassroots involvement; increased contributions and volunteer support for each campaign; and mobilization of the Democratic base to defeat George Bush. We wanted people to have a seat at the table, and they have taken it.
Text of speech to the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for Americas Future.
Thank you for this award and for this occasion. I don't deserve either, but as George Burns said, I have arthritis and I don't deserve that, either.
Tomorrow is my 69th birthday and I cannot imagine a better present than this award or a better party than your company.
Fifty three years ago tomorrow, on my 16th birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what came to be known as the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that here's my favorite part "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage." They hired themselves a lawyer none other than Martin Dies, the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax.
The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on the Associated Press wire. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one Bill Moyers and the paper for the reporting we had done on the "Rebellion."
That hooked me, and in one way or another after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell I've been covering the class war ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas were its advance guard. They were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all. So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities and congregations fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husband's beds, and cooked their family meals these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles; so be it; even on the distaff side of laissez faire, security was personal, not social, and what injustice existed this side of heaven would no doubt be redeemed beyond the Pearly Gates. God would surely be just to the poor once they got past Judgment Day.
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality one nation, indivisible or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
Let me make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy; I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember? Nor do I romanticize "the people." You should read my mail or listen to the vitriol virtually spat at my answering machine. I understand what the politician meant who said of the Texas House of Representatives, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents."
But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy.
Look at our history. All of us know that the American Revolution ushered in what one historian called "The Age of Democratic Revolutions." For the Great Seal of the United States the new Congress went all the way back to the Roman poet Virgil: Novus Ordo Seclorum" "a new age now begins." Page Smith reminds us that "their ambition was not merely to free themselves from dependence and subordination to the Crown but to inspire people everywhere to create agencies of government and forms of common social life that would offer greater dignity and hope to the exploited and suppressed" to those, in other words, who had been the losers. Not surprisingly, the winners often resisted. In the early years of constitution-making in the states and emerging nation, aristocrats wanted a government of propertied "gentlemen" to keep the scales tilted in their favor. Battling on the other side were moderates and even those radicals harboring the extraordinary idea of letting all white males have the vote. Luckily, the weapons were words and ideas, not bullets. Through compromise and conciliation the draftsmen achieved a Constitution of checks and balances that is now the oldest in the world, even as the revolution of democracy that inspired it remains a tempestuous adolescent whose destiny is still up for grabs. For all the rhetoric about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it took a civil war to free the slaves and another hundred years to invest their freedom with meaning. Women only gained the right to vote in my mother's time. New ages don't arrive overnight, or without "blood, sweat, and tears."
You know this. You are the heirs of one of the country's great traditions the progressive movement that started late in the l9th century and remade the American experience piece by piece until it peaked in the last third of the 20th century. I call it the progressive movement for lack of a more precise term. Its aim was to keep blood pumping through the veins of democracy when others were ready to call in the mortician. Progressives exalted and extended the original American revolution. They spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern history, not only here but in aspiring democracies everywhere, especially those of western Europe.
Step back with me to the curtain-raiser, the founding convention of the People's Party better known as the Populists in 1892. The members were mainly cotton and wheat farmers from the recently reconstructed South and the newly settled Great Plains, and they had come on hard, hard times, driven to the wall by falling prices for their crops on one hand and racking interest rates, freight charges and supply costs on the other. This in the midst of a booming and growing industrial America. They were angry, and their platform issued deliberately on the 4th of July pulled no punches. "We meet," it said, "in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin....Corruption dominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the Congress and touches even the bench.....The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced....The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few."
Furious words from rural men and women who were traditionally conservative and whose memories of taming the frontier were fresh and personal. But in their fury they invoked an American tradition as powerful as frontier individualism the war on inequality and especially on the role that government played in promoting and preserving inequality by favoring the rich. The Founding Fathers turned their backs on the idea of property qualifications for holding office under the Constitution because they wanted no part of a 'veneration for wealth" in the document. Thomas Jefferson, while claiming no interest in politics, built up a Republican Party no relation to the present one to take the government back from the speculators and "stock-jobbers," as he called them, who were in the saddle in 1800. Andrew Jackson slew the monster Second Bank of the United States, the 600-pound gorilla of the credit system in the 1830s, in the name of the people versus the aristocrats who sat on the bank's governing board.
All these leaders were on record in favor of small government but their opposition wasn't simply to government as such. It was to government's power to confer privilege on insiders; on the rich who were democracy's equivalent of the royal favorites of monarchist days. (It's what the FCC does today.) The Populists knew it was the government that granted millions of acres of public land to the railroad builders. It was the government that gave the manufacturers of farm machinery a monopoly of the domestic market by a protective tariff that was no longer necessary to shelter "infant industries." It was the government that contracted the national currency and sparked a deflationary cycle that crushed debtors and fattened the wallets of creditors. And those who made the great fortunes used them to buy the legislative and judicial favors that kept them on top. So the Populists recognized one great principle: the job of preserving equality of opportunity and democracy demanded the end of any unholy alliance between government and wealth. It was, to quote that platform again, "from the same womb of governmental injustice" that tramps and millionaires were bred.
But how? How was the democratic revolution to be revived? The promise of the Declaration reclaimed? How were Americans to restore government to its job of promoting the general welfare? And here, the Populists made a breakthrough to another principle. In a modern, large-scale, industrial and nationalized economy it wasn't enough simply to curb the government's outreach. That would simply leave power in the hands of the great corporations whose existence was inseparable from growth and progress. The answer was to turn government into an active player in the economy at the very least enforcing fair play, and when necessary being the friend, the helper and the agent of the people at large in the contest against entrenched power. So the Populist platform called for government loans to farmers about to lose their mortgaged homesteads for government granaries to grade and store their crops fairly for governmental inflation of the currency, which was a classical plea of debtors and for some decidedly non-classical actions like government ownership of the railroad, telephone and telegraph systems and a graduated i.e., progressive tax on incomes and a flat ban on subsidies to "any private corporation." And to make sure the government stayed on the side of the people, the 'Pops' called for the initiative and referendum and the direct election of Senators.
Predictably, the Populists were denounced, feared and mocked as fanatical hayseeds ignorantly playing with socialist fire. They got twenty-two electoral votes for their candidate in '92, plus some Congressional seats and state houses, but it was downhill from there for many reasons. America wasn't and probably still isn't ready for a new major party. The People's Party was a spent rocket by 1904. But if political organizations perish, their key ideas don't - keep that in mind, because it give prospective to your cause today. Much of the Populist agenda would become law within a few years of the party's extinction. And that was because it was generally shared by a rising generation of young Republicans and Democrats who, justly or not, were seen as less outrageously outdated than the embattled farmers. These were the progressives, your intellectual forebears and mine.
One of my heroes in all of this is William Allen White, a Kansas country editor a Republican who was one of them. He described his fellow progressives this way:
"What the people felt about the vast injustice that had come with the settlement of a continent, we, their servants teachers, city councilors, legislators, governors, publishers, editors, writers, representatives in Congress and Senators all made a part of our creed. Some way, into the hearts of the dominant middle class of this country, had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting, that their government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new relationship should be established between the haves and the have-nots."
They were a diverse lot, held together by a common admiration of progress hence the name and a shared dismay at the paradox of poverty stubbornly persisting in the midst of progress like an unwanted guest at a wedding. Of course they welcomed, just as we do, the new marvels in the gift-bag of technology the telephones, the autos, the electrically-powered urban transport and lighting systems, the indoor heating and plumbing, the processed foods and home appliances and machine-made clothing that reduced the sweat and drudgery of home-making and were affordable to an ever-swelling number of people. But they saw the underside, too the slums lurking in the shadows of the glittering cities, the exploited and unprotected workers whose low-paid labor filled the horn of plenty for others, the misery of those whom age, sickness, accident or hard times condemned to servitude and poverty with no hope of comfort or security.
This is what's hard to believe hardly a century had passed since 1776 before the still-young revolution was being strangled in the hard grip of a merciless ruling class. The large corporations that were called into being by modern industrialism after 1865 the end of the Civil War had combined into trusts capable of making minions of both politics and government. What Henry George called "an immense wedge" was being forced through American society by "the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity."
We should pause here to consider that this is Karl Rove's cherished period of American history; it was, as I read him, the seminal influence on the man who is said to be George W.'s brain. From his own public comments and my reading of the record, it is apparent that Karl Rove has modeled the Bush presidency on that of William McKinley, who was in the White House from 1897 to 1901, and modeled himself on Mark Hanna, the man who virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had one consummate passion to serve corporate and imperial power. It was said that he believed "without compunction, that the state of Ohio existed for property. It had no other function...Great wealth was to be gained through monopoly, through using the State for private ends; it was axiomatic therefore that businessmen should run the government and run it for personal profit."
Mark Hanna Karl Rove's hero made William McKinley governor of Ohio by shaking down the corporate interests of the day. Fortunately, McKinley had the invaluable gift of emitting sonorous platitudes as though they were recently discovered truth. Behind his benign gaze the wily intrigues of Mark Hanna saw to it that first Ohio and then Washington were "ruled by business...by bankers, railroads and public utility corporations." Any who opposed the oligarchy were smeared as disturbers of the peace, socialists, anarchists, "or worse." Back then they didn't bother with hollow euphemisms like "compassionate conservatism" to disguise the raw reactionary politics that produced government "of, by, and for" the ruling corporate class. They just saw the loot and went for it.
The historian Clinton Rossiter describes this as the period of "the great train robbery of American intellectual history." Conservatives or better, pro-corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress", "opportunity", and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was hijacked, too, so that conservative politicians, judges, and publicists promoted, as if it were, the natural order of things, the notion that progress resulted from the elimination of the weak and the "survival of the fittest."
This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for the politics and governance of America today.
No wonder that what troubled our progressive forebears was not only the miasma of poverty in their nostrils, but the sour stink of a political system for sale. The United States Senate was a "millionaire's club." Money given to the political machines that controlled nominations could buy controlling influence in city halls, state houses and even courtrooms. Reforms and improvements ran into the immovable resistance of the almighty dollar. What, progressives wondered, would this do to the principles of popular government? Because all of them, whatever party they subscribed to, were inspired by the gospel of democracy. Inevitably, this swept them into the currents of politics, whether as active officeholders or persistent advocates.
Here's a small, but representative sampling of their ranks. Jane Addams forsook the comforts of a middle-class college graduate's life to live in Hull House in the midst of a disease-ridden and crowded Chicago immigrant neighborhood, determined to make it an educational and social center that would bring pride, health and beauty into the lives of her poor neighbors. She was inspired by "an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy," to combating the prevailing notion "that the well being of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many." Community and fellowship were the lessons she drew from her teachers, Jesus and Abraham Lincoln. But people simply helping one another couldn't move mountains of disadvantage. She came to see that "private beneficence" wasn't enough. But to bring justice to the poor would take more than soup kitchens and fundraising prayer meetings. "Social arrangements," she wrote, "can be transformed through man's conscious and deliberate effort." Take note not individual regeneration or the magic of the market, but conscious, cooperative effort.
Meet a couple of muckraking journalists. Jacob Riis lugged his heavy camera up and down the staircases of New York's disease-ridden, firetrap tenements to photograph the unspeakable crowding, the inadequate toilets, the starved and hollow-eyed children and the filth on the walls so thick that his crude flash equipment sometimes set it afire. Bound between hard covers, with Riis's commentary, they showed comfortable New Yorkers "How the Other Half Lives." They were powerful ammunition for reformers who eventually brought an end to tenement housing by state legislation. And Lincoln Steffens, college and graduate-school educated, left his books to learn life from the bottom up as a police-beat reporter on New York's streets. Then, as a magazine writer, he exposed the links between city bosses and businessmen that made it possible for builders and factory owners to ignore safety codes and get away with it. But the villain was neither the boodler nor the businessman. It was the indifference of a public that "deplore[d] our politics and laud[ed] our business; that transformed law, medicine, literature and religion into simply business. Steffens was out to slay the dragon of exalting "the commercial spirit" over the goals of patriotism and national prosperity. "I am not a scientist," he said. "I am a journalist. I did not gather the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis....My purpose was. ...to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride."
If corrupt politics bred diseases that could be fatal to democracy, then good politics was the antidote. That was the discovery of Ray Stannard Baker, another journalistic progressive who started out with a detest for election-time catchwords and slogans. But he came to see that "Politics could not be abolished or even adjourned...it was in its essence the method by which communities worked out their common problems. It was one of the principle arts of living peacefully in a crowded world," he said [Compare that to Grover Norquist's latest declaration of war on the body politic. "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship." He went on to say that bi-partisanship is another name for date rape."]
There are more, too many more to call to the witness stand here, but I want you to hear some of the things they had to say. There were educators like the economist John R. Commons or the sociologist Edward A. Ross who believed that the function of "social science" wasn't simply to dissect society for non-judgmental analysis and academic promotion, but to help in finding solutions to social problems. It was Ross who pointed out that morality in a modern world had a social dimension. In "Sin and Society," written in 1907, he told readers that the sins "blackening the face of our time" were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as such. "The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a 'rake-off' instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor." In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House to write their own regulations.
And here are just two final bits of testimony from actual politicians first, Brand Whitlock, Mayor of Toledo. He is one of my heroes because he first learned his politics as a beat reporter in Chicago, confirming my own experience that there's nothing better than journalism to turn life into a continuing course in adult education. One of his lessons was that "the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the great political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of which was that no one seemed to care."
And then there is Tom Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland in the early nineteen hundreds a businessman converted to social activism. His major battles were to impose regulation, or even municipal takeover, on the private companies that were meant to provide affordable public transportation and utilities but in fact crushed competitors, overcharged customers, secured franchises and licenses for a song, and paid virtually nothing in taxes all through their pocketbook control of lawmakers and judges. Johnson's argument for public ownership was simple: "If you don't own them, they will own you. It's why advocates of Clean Elections today argue that if anybody's going to buy Congress, it should be the people." When advised that businessmen got their way in Washington because they had lobbies and consumers had none, Tom Johnson responded: "If Congress were true to the principles of democracy it would be the people's lobby." What a radical contrast to the House of Representatives today!
Our political, moral, and intellectual forbearance occupy a long and honorable roster. They include wonderful characters like Dr. Alice Hamilton, a pioneer in industrially-caused diseases, who spent long years clambering up and down ladders in factories and mineshafts in long skirts! tracking down the unsafe toxic substances that sickened the workers whom she would track right into their sickbeds to get leads and tip-offs on where to hunt. Or Harvey Wiley, the chemist from Indiana who, from a bureaucrat's desk in the Department of Agriculture, relentlessly warred on foods laden with risky preservatives and adulterants with the help of his "poison squad" of young assistants who volunteered as guinea pigs. Or lawyers like the brilliant Harvard graduate Louis Brandeis, who took on corporate attorneys defending child labor or long and harsh conditions for female workers. Brandeis argued that the state had a duty to protect the health of working women and children.
To be sure, these progressives weren't all saints. Their glory years coincided with the heyday of lynching and segregation, of empire and the Big Stick and the bold theft of the Panama Canal, of immigration restriction and ethnic stereotypes. Some were themselves businessmen only hoping to control an unruly marketplace by regulation. But by and large they were conservative reformers. They aimed to preserve the existing balance between wealth and commonwealth. Their common enemy was unchecked privilege, their common hope was a better democracy, and their common weapon was informed public opinion.
In a few short years the progressive spirit made possible the election not only of reform mayors and governors but of national figures like Senator George Norris of Nebraska, Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin, and even that hard-to-classify political genius, Theodore Roosevelt. All three of them Republicans. Here is the simplest laundry-list of what was accomplished at state and Federal levels: Publicly regulated or owned transportation, sanitation and utilities systems. The partial restoration of competition in the marketplace through improved antitrust laws. Increased fairness in taxation. Expansion of the public education and juvenile justice systems. Safer workplaces and guarantees of compensation to workers injured on the job. Oversight of the purity of water, medicines and foods. Conservation of the national wilderness heritage against overdevelopment, and honest bidding on any public mining, lumbering and ranching. We take these for granted today or we did until recently. All were provided not by the automatic workings of free enterprise but by implementing the idea in the Declaration of Independence that the people had a right to governments that best promoted their "safety and happiness."
The mighty progressive wave peaked in 1912. But the ideas leashed by it forged the politics of the 20th century. Like his cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt argued that the real enemy of enlightened capitalism was "the malefactors of great wealth" the "economic royalists" from whom capitalism would have to be saved by reform and regulation. Progressive government became an embedded tradition of Democrats the heart of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and honored even by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who didn't want to tear down the house progressive ideas had built only to put it under different managers. The progressive impulse had its final fling in the landslide of 1969 when LBJ, who was a son of the West Texas hill country, where the Populist rebellion had been nurtured in the 1890s, won the public endorsement for what he meant to be the capstone in the arch of the New Deal.
I had a modest role in that era. I shared in its exhilaration and its failures. We went too far too fast, overreached at home and in Vietnam, failed to examine some assumptions, and misjudged the rising discontents and fierce backlash engendered by war, race, civil disturbance, violence and crime. Democrats grew so proprietary in this town that a fat, complacent political establishment couldn't recognize its own intellectual bankruptcy or the beltway that was growing around it and beginning to separate it from the rest of the country. The failure of democratic politicians and public thinkers to respond to popular discontents to the daily lives of workers, consumers, parents, and ordinary taxpayers allowed a resurgent conservatism to convert public concern and hostility into a crusade to resurrect social Darwinism as a moral philosophy, multinational corporations as a governing class, and the theology of markets as a transcendental belief system.
As a citizen I don't like the consequences of this crusade, but you have to respect the conservatives for their successful strategy in gaining control of the national agenda. Their stated and open aim is to change how America is governed - to strip from government all its functions except those that reward their rich and privileged benefactors. They are quite candid about it, even acknowledging their mean spirit in accomplishing it. Their leading strategist in Washington - the same Grover Norquist has famously said he wants to shrink the government down to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. More recently, in commenting on the fiscal crisis in the states and its affect on schools and poor people, Norquist said, "I hope one of them" one of the states "goes bankrupt." So much for compassionate conservatism. But at least Norquist says what he means and means what he says. The White House pursues the same homicidal dream without saying so. Instead of shrinking down the government, they're filling the bathtub with so much debt that it floods the house, water-logs the economy, and washes away services for decades that have lifted millions of Americans out of destitution and into the middle-class. And what happens once the public's property has been flooded? Privatize it. Sell it at a discounted rate to the corporations.
It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I'll be frank with you: I simply don't understand it or the malice in which it is steeped. Many people are nostalgic for a golden age. These people seem to long for the Gilded Age. That I can grasp. They measure America only by their place on the material spectrum and they bask in the company of the new corporate aristocracy, as privileged a class as we have seen since the plantation owners of antebellum America and the court of Louis IV. What I can't explain is the rage of the counter-revolutionaries to dismantle every last brick of the social contract. At this advanced age I simply have to accept the fact that the tension between haves and have-nots is built into human psychology and society itself it's ever with us. However, I'm just as puzzled as to why, with right wing wrecking crews blasting away at social benefits once considered invulnerable, Democrats are fearful of being branded "class warriors" in a war the other side started and is determined to win. I don't get why conceding your opponent's premises and fighting on his turf isn't the sure-fire prescription for irrelevance and ultimately obsolescence. But I confess as well that I don't know how to resolve the social issues that have driven wedges into your ranks. And I don't know how to reconfigure democratic politics to fit into an age of soundbites and polling dominated by a media oligarchy whose corporate journalists are neutered and whose right-wing publicists have no shame.
What I do know is this: While the social dislocations and meanness that galvanized progressives in the 19th century are resurgent so is the vision of justice, fairness, and equality. That's a powerful combination if only there are people around to fight for it. The battle to renew democracy has enormous resources to call upon - and great precedents for inspiration. Consider the experience of James Bryce, who published "The Great Commonwealth" back in 1895 at the height of the First Gilded Age. Americans, Bryce said, "were hopeful and philanthropic." He saw first-hand the ills of that "dark and unlovely age," but he went on to say: " A hundred times I have been disheartened by the facts I was stating: a hundred times has the recollection of the abounding strength and vitality of the nation chased away those tremors."
What will it take to get back in the fight? Understanding the real interests and deep opinions of the American people is the first thing. And what are those? That a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age without that help. That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the country. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-of-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it's a sign that opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a great motivator for production and progress, but is amoral unless contained within the framework of community. That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else. That public services, when privatized, serve only those who can afford them and weaken the sense that we all rise and fall together as "one nation, indivisible." That concentration in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is evil. That prosperity requires good wages and benefits for workers. And that our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive "half slave and half free" and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work our work.
Ideas have power as long as they are not frozen in doctrine. But ideas need legs. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources and the protection of our air, water, and land, women's rights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security and a civil service based on merit all these were launched as citizen's movements and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and in the face of bitter opposition and sneering attacks. It's just a fact: Democracy doesn't work without citizen activism and participation, starting at the community. Trickle down politics doesn't work much better than trickle down economics. It's also a fact that civilization happens because we don't leave things to other people. What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there's one candle in your hand.
So go for it. Never mind the odds. Remember what the progressives faced. Karl Rove isn't tougher than Mark Hanna was in his time and a hundred years from now some historian will be wondering how it was that Norquist and Company got away with it as long as they did how they waged war almost unopposed on the infrastructure of social justice, on the arrangements that make life fair, on the mutual rights and responsibilities that offer opportunity, civil liberties, and a decent standard of living to the least among us.
"Democracy is not a lie" I first learned that from Henry Demarest Lloyd, the progressive journalist whose book, "Wealth against Commonwealth," laid open the Standard trust a century ago. Lloyd came to the conclusion to "Regenerate the individual is a half truth. The reorganization of the society which he makes and which makes him is the other part. The love of liberty became liberty in America by clothing itself in the complicated group of strengths known as the government of the United States." And it was then he said: "Democracy is not a lie. There live in the body of the commonality unexhausted virtue and the ever-refreshed strength which can rise equal to any problems of progress. In the hope of tapping some reserve of their power of self-help," he said, "this story is told to the people."
This is your story the progressive story of America.
Pass it on.
In September of 2002, fully six months before George W. Bush attacked Iraq, I published a small book entitled "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know." The essential premise of the book was that the threats surrounding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were wildly overblown by the Bush administration for purely political reasons. In the opening paragraphs, I framed the argument as follows:
According to Bush and the men who are pushing him towards this war-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle.The United States will institute a "regime change" in Iraq, and bring forth the birth of a new democracy in the region. Along the way, we will remove Saddam Hussein, a man who absolutely, positively has weapons of mass destruction, a man who will use these weapons against his neighbors because he has done so in the past, a man who will give these terrible weapons to Osama bin Laden for use against America.
I live and work a very short distance from where the Saudi police raided a suspected terrorist apartment the week before the bombings of western residences here in Riyadh, and not far from the actual compounds. Driving by the Al-Hamra compound last night, I couldn't help but stare as it loomed up in the darkness, a ghostly shell of sadness and tattered stone. Amid the debris and chunks of concrete were the usual bits and pieces of people's lives - a fractured chair, scraps of paper, charred photographs, and burned clothing. That is the thing about ruins, you can see the history of life and death in the piles of rubble.
A month ago I experienced a very small taste of what hundreds of South Asian immigrants and U.S. citizens of South Asian descent have gone through since 9/11, and what thousands of others have come to fear. I was held, against my will and without warrant or cause, under the USA PATRIOT Act. While I understand the need for some measure of security and precaution in times such as these, the manner in which this detention and interrogation took place raises serious questions about police tactics and the safeguarding of civil liberties in times of war.
That night, March 20th, my roommate Asher and I were on our way to see the Broadway show "Rent." We had an hour to spare before curtain time so we stopped into an Indian restaurant just off of Times Square in the heart of midtown. I have omitted the name of the restaurant so as not to subject the owners to any further harassment or humiliation.
We helped ourselves to the buffet and then sat down to begin eating our dinner. I was just about to tell Asher how I'd eaten there before and how delicious the vegetable curry was, but I never got a chance. All of a sudden, there was a terrible commotion and five NYPD in bulletproof vests stormed down the stairs. They had their guns drawn and were pointing them indiscriminately at the restaurant staff and at us.
"Go to the back, go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled.
I hesitated, lost in my own panic.
"Did you not hear me, go to the back and sit down," they demanded.
I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging in age from late-teens to senior citizen. One of the policemen pointed his gun point-blank in the face of the waiter and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen.
The police placed their fingers on the triggers of their guns and kicked open the kitchen doors. Shouts emanated from the kitchen and a few seconds later five Hispanic men were made to crawl out on their hands and knees, guns pointed at them.
After patting us all down, the five officers seated us at two tables. As they continued to kick open doors to closets and bathrooms with their fingers glued to their triggers, no less than ten officers in suits emerged from the stairwell. Most of them sat in the back of the restaurant typing on their laptop computers. Two of them walked over to our table and identified themselves as officers of the INS and Homeland Security Department.
I explained that we were just eating dinner and asked why we were being held. We were told by the INS agent that we would be released once they had confirmation that we had no outstanding warrants and our immigration status was OK'd.
In pre-9/11 America, the legality of this would have been questionable. After all, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."
"You have no right to hold us," Asher insisted.
"Yes, we have every right," responded one of the agents. "You are being held under the Patriot Act following suspicion under an internal Homeland Security investigation."
The USA PATRIOT Act was passed into law on October 26, 2001 in order to facilitate the post 9/11 crackdown on terrorism (the name is actually an acronym: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.") Like most Americans, I did not recognize the extent to which this bill foregoes our civil liberties. Among the unprecedented rights it grants to the federal government are the right to wiretap without warrant, and the right to detain without warrant. As I quickly discovered, the right to an attorney has been seemingly fudged as well.
When I asked to speak to a lawyer, the INS official informed me that I do have the right to a lawyer but I would have to be brought down to the station and await security clearance before being granted one. When I asked how long that would take, he replied with a coy smile: "Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month."
We insisted that we had every right to leave and were going to do so. One of the policemen walked over with his hand on his gun and taunted: "Go ahead and leave, just go ahead."
We remained seated. Our IDs were taken, and brought to the officers with laptops. I was questioned over the fact that my license was out of state, and asked if I had "something to hide." The police continued to hassle the kitchen workers, demanding licenses and dates of birth. One of the kitchen workers was shaking hysterically and kept providing the day's date -- March 20, 2003, over and over.
As I continued to press for legal counsel, a female officer who had been busy typing on her laptop in the front of the restaurant, walked over and put her finger in my face. "We are at war, we are at war and this is for your safety," she exclaimed. As she walked away from the table, she continued to repeat it to herself? "We are at war, we are at war. How can they not understand this."
I most certainly understand that we are at war. I also understand that the freedoms afforded to all of us in the Constitution were meant specifically for times like these. Our freedoms were carved out during times of strife by people who were facing brutal injustices, and were intended specifically so that this nation would behave differently in such times. If our freedoms crumble exactly when they are needed most, then they were really never freedoms at all.
After an hour and a half the INS agent walked back over and handed Asher and me our licenses. A policeman took us by the arm and escorted us out of the building. Before stepping out to the street, the INS agent apologized. He explained, in a low voice, that they did not think the two of us were in the restaurant. Several of the other patrons, though of South Asian descent, were in fact U.S. citizens. There were four taxi drivers, two students, one newspaper salesman -- unwitting customers, just like Asher and me. I doubt, though, they received any apologies from the INS or the Department of Homeland Security.
Nor have the over 600 people of South Asian descent currently being held without charge by the Federal government. Apparently, this type of treatment is acceptable. One of the taxi drivers, a U.S. citizen, spoke to me during the interrogation. "Please stop talking to them," he urged. "I have been through this before. Please do whatever they say. Please for our sake."
Three days later I phoned the restaurant to discover what happened. The owner was nervous and embarrassed and obviously did not want to talk about it. But I managed to ascertain that the whole thing had been one giant mistake. A mistake. Loaded guns pointed in faces, people made to crawl on their hands and knees, police officers clearly exacerbating a tense situation by kicking in doors, taunting, keeping their fingers on the trigger even after the situation was under control. A mistake. And, according to the ACLU a perfectly legal one, thanks to the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act is just the first phase of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment. From the Justice Department has emerged a draft of the Domestic Securities Enhancement Act, also known as Patriot II. Among other things, this act would allow the Justice Department to detain anyone, anytime, secretly and indefinitely. It would also make it a crime to reveal the identity or even existence of such a detainee.
Every American citizen, whether they support the current war or not, should be alarmed by the speed and facility with which these changes to our fundamental rights are taking place. And all of those who thought that these laws would never affect them, who thought that the Patriot Act only applied to the guilty, should heed this story as a wake-up call. Please learn from my experience. We are all vulnerable so speak out and organize, our Fourth Amendment rights depend upon it.
Jason Halperin lives in New York City and works at Doctors Without Borders/Medicins San Frontieres. If you are moved by this account, he asks that you consider donating to your local ACLU chapter.
Recently had an email exchange with a right-winger from my local newspaper, and of course the war with Iraq came up pretty quick. But he said something in defense of George Bush that really surprised me. In defense of the attack on Iraq he said 'between Hussein and Bush, Hussein is the bad guy'.
My first response was ... So your guy is better than a third world dictator, Wow! what an accomplishment! Does he put that on his resume?
And with that in mind, I started wondering ... what would a George W. Bush resume look like exactly?
Listed below is what I came up with,
Kelley Kramer
George W. Bush Resume
Past work experience:
Ran for congress and lost.
Produced a Hollywood slasher B movie.
Bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas, company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.
Bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using tax-payer money. Biggest move: Traded Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox.
With fathers help (and his name) was elected Governor of Texas.
Accomplishments: Changed pollution laws for power and oil companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Union. Replaced Los Angeles with Houston as the most smog ridden city in America. Cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money. Set record for most executions by any Governor in American history.
Became president after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, with the help of my fathers appointments to the Supreme Court.
Accomplishments as president:
Attacked and took over two countries.
Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.
Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.
After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history.
Set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips than any other president in US history.
In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their job.
Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history.
Set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12 month period.
Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history.
Set the record for the least amount of press conferences than any president since the advent of television.
Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history.
Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.
Presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history and refused to use the national reserves as past presidents have.
Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest me (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind. (www.hyperreal.org/~dana/marches/)
Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
My presidency is the most secretive and un-accountable of any in US history.
Members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in US history. (the 'poorest' multi-millionaire, Condoleeza Rice has an Chevron oil tanker named after her).
First president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt.
Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world.
First president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation.
Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.
Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history.
First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission.
First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board.
Removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of congressional oversight than any presidential administration in US history.
Rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.
Withdrew from the World Court of Law.
Refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.
First president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US elections).
All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations.
My biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).
Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.
First president in US history to unilaterally attack a sovereign nation against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1)
First US president to establish a secret shadow government.
Took the biggest world sympathy for the US after 911, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).
With a policy of 'dis-engagement' created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years.
Fist US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
First US president in history to have the people of South Korea more threatened by the US than their immediate neighbor, North Korea.
Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
Failed to fulfill my pledge to get Osama Bin Laden 'dead or alive'.
Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capitol building. After 18 months I have no leads and zero suspects.
In the 18 months following the 911 attacks I have successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States.
Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
In a little over two years created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided the US has ever been since the civil war.
Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down.
Records and References:
At least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available).
AWOL from National Guard and Deserted the military during a time of war.
Refuse to take drug test or even answer any questions about drug use.
All records of my tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away to my fathers library, sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
All records of any SEC investigations into my insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
All minutes of meetings for any public corporation I served on the board are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
Any records or minutes from meetings I (or my VP) attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public review.
For personal references please speak to my daddy or uncle James Baker (They can be reached at their offices of the Carlyle Group for war-profiteering.)
We're in good hands???