"You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth
A Brief on the Bush Presidency
By William John Cox
Progressive Press Joshua Tree, California
You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth:
A Brief on the Bush Presidency
Copyright © May, 2004 by William John Cox www.YoureNotStupid.com
A Progressive Press Book Published by Tree of Life Publications, PO Box 126, Joshua Tree CA 92252 www.progressivepress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for ISBN 0-930852-32-X
First Printing June 2004
Printed in Canada by Friesens Corp., Altona, Manitoba
DEDICATION For Thomas Paine, An American Patriot with Common Sense and For Helen, An Uncommon Wife
CONTENTS
IN SELF DEFENSE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is written for you, a busy person, as a useful compilation of political information and opinion drawn from diverse published sources. INTRODUCTION PREFACE The Bush administration has been running on lies in the belief that we are too stupid to figure it out. The business of exaggeration in politics has gone beyond the usual. It has become a culture of nastiness and downright lies. Is this acceptable? We’re Not As Stupid As They Think We Are Nasty Political Lies WHO’S BUSH? How much do we really know about our president’s life, his background and his character? To understand George W. Bush’s administration better, it helps to become better acquainted with the well-smoothed path he has followed to the top. To the Manner Born “I do not have a perfect record as a youth.” Over the Hill What an MBA Can Do for You Let Them Eat Cake! THE PREVARICATOR I: THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN Republican Senator McCain was tortured for five years in Vietnam as a POW. Democrat Vice President Gore was a man of vision and integrity. Yet Bush managed to destroy the character of each of these men using twisted lies, setting himself up to become president by judicial appointment. 5 8 11 13 17 23 1 2 5 xv 1 xi xiii
vi “John. It’s politics.” The Goring of Gore
You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth 23 26 31
THE THEFT OF THE PRESIDENCY Beyond the philosophical question of whether George W. Bush represents the voters, there are very real questions that linger about the legitimacy, the constitutionality, even the legality of his election. Casing the Joint The Heist A BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Once having been established as president, no matter how questionably, Bush set about thanking the corporate wealthy, his peers who paid the contributions that elected (or selected) him, by putting “his” executive branch at their service. If It’s Bad for Business, It’s Too Bad for the Rest of Us Reversal of Ergonomic Standards Elimination of Overtime Pay The Energy Companies’ Crisis NO CHILD LEFT UNTESTED Bush claims a successful record on education both as governor of Texas and as president, but a closer examination reveals it to be largely a public relations smokescreen. His policies, once the smoke has been blown aside, are revealed to be hostile to public education and to the democratic values on which it rests. Educating Docile Workers for the Corporate State Dropouts Don’t Count Big Brother Knows Best The Test Revolt HAVE I GOT A DEAL FOR YOU It’s been observed that to find who has the most power in a society, you need only look to see who does not pay taxes. The touted Bush tax breaks, once the window dressing is removed, are exposed as a public giveaway to those who already have the most. A Tax Cut for the Wealthy
32 36 41
41 44 46 48 57
58 60 64 69 73
75
Table of Contents Another Tax Break for the Rich and Richer 9/11: WHO KNEW WHAT AND WHEN, AND WHAT, IF ANYTHING, DID HE DO? The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, shocked the nation. But what may be nearly as shocking is how much information the government had beforehand, and how stupendous were the incompetence and chicanery that attended its failure to prevent that catastrophe. Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind Neglect of Duty The Attack The Cover-up The Why THE PREVARICATOR II: THE MIDTERM CAMPAIGN The saga of the midterm elections in 2002 is not a shining hour for American politics. Rather, it’s a tale of new lows in dirty tricks and a corrupt politicization of the war on terrorism. Karl Rove’s Political War A Cowardly Attack on an American Patriot BUSH’S WAR Blood for oil? A closer look at the history of Iraqi-American relations can tell what is really at stake. Just how much have the interests of U.S. oil corporations influenced the government’s policies and actions, including the invasion of Iraq? To whose benefit are we risking our soldiers, our national treasury, and our traditional alliances with other nations? An Ideological History of Bush’s Never-Ending Preemptive War The Propaganda and Politics of Bush’s War A Litany of Lies Milestones Along the Road to Bush’s War The Shifting Mission in Bush’s War The Inhumanity of Bush’s War The Shameful Treatment of American Soldiers
vii 79 83
85 93 104 107 118 135
136 137 141
149 160 162 171 177 181 185
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You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth 203
THE CRIMES OF GEORGE W. BUSH International law establishes standards for national self defense and the treatment of POWs, who are accorded certain rights, but the Bush administration seems to be ignoring the law for political reasons. In the name of national security, is the United States becoming an outlaw state? Illegal Use of Force Illegal Detention of Prisoners of War Impeachment JUSTICE IN AMERICA Superpatriots claiming that our nation is great because of personal freedom say in the next breath that national security demands less of it. America’s top cop, while engaged in a wholesale attack on constitutional rights, has turned a blind eye to administration friends who break the law. Discretionary Justice The Would-Be President and Anointing of Ashcroft Censoring the Freedom of Information Act Patriot Games The Non-Investigation of Corporate Corruption BUSH ON DRUGS Senior citizens must often depend upon prescription drugs to stay alive. Although Bush tells them they have a drug benefit coming from Medicare, the overwhelming benefit will go to the hugely profitable pharmaceutical corporations who contribute so generously to politicians.
203 206 211 219
219 221 224 225 234 241
Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Pills! 244 The Large Print Giveth, the Small Print Taketh Away 249 THE MEDIA ARE NOT LIBERAL, AND THEY DO NOT TELL YOU THE TRUTH! For the last 30 years, right-wing millionaires have funded and led an organized rout of liberal political expression while convincing us that the media are too liberal. In fact, they’ve tried to convince us that liberal is a dirty word. The Attack of the Killer Neocons 260 255
Table of Contents Creating the Myth of the Liberal Media In Fear of the Conservative Media THE PREVARICATOR III: THE CAMPAIGN FOR REELECTION Get ready. In the next election, Bush will use every dirty trick in Rove’s book to win. The ballyhoo of his nominating convention in September 2004 will be an insult to the thousands who died, perhaps unnecessarily, on September 11, 2001. Wired to Win THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES Who is the real George W. Bush? Is he the compassionate conservative, policy-involved politician, and world leader he plays on TV? Or behind the benevolent smile, is he an ignoramus just as cold-blooded, ruthless and paranoid as his personal political Machiavelli Karl Rove? A Reflection of Our Self-Image? The Image We Present to the World The Stealth Co-President The Mayberry Machiavellis The Disappointment of Diogenes NO END IN SIGHT The Iraqi resistance to our occupation is intensifying, we are losing control of the cities and supply lines, more soldiers are dying every day, and our allies are abandoning us. What happened? BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
ix 263 265 273
275 279
283 287 290 294 298 307
313 321
Washington Crossing the Delaware
By Emanuel G. Leutze (1816-1868)
IN SELF DEFENSE
Some of the things you will read in this book are painful truths, and it will be difficult and distressing to acknowledge the reality they portray. As an intelligent, reading public, we must keep our minds open and face these depressing facts, even while supporting our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and responding to the realistic threat of terrorism in our own land. Americans have done this before and we can do it again. Although we sometimes feel powerless, we are not. By joining to support one another, and doing what is good for people, for ourselves, we will take back our country and assure that freedom continues to ring throughout the land! This book is not an attack on our flag and the freedoms it represents; it is, in fact, an alarm bell calling us to rally to its defense by making us aware of how our common interests are being ignored and our human rights violated. Not just the human rights of a few minorities, but all of us. The truth may appear to be an attack on the Republican Party, but it is not. It just happens that a particular group of people who represent the special interests of international corporations have taken over the Republican Party and have overshadowed the millions of Republicans who operate with honesty and integrity, many of whom have themselves been victimized. This is not about Democrats versus Republicans, because there are also Democratic politicians who have sold out and who have ceased to represent the people in their own party. This is about you and me, the ordinary hardworking people in this country, who need to look truth in the face, take a deep breath, draw a line, and take a stand for our own interests, our families, our communities, and our nation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is written for you, a busy person, as a useful compilation of political information and opinion drawn from diverse published sources.
After my mother died when I was four, my father took me to his bed, where each night he would read dime western novels. After I quickly became bored with the pictures on the covers, he taught me to read. Since I was the youngest in the family and my siblings were all in school, there was no one to watch me during the day, so I rode on the tractor beside my father as he plowed the fields. One night, as I listened from another room, he and the school principal conspired at the kitchen table to use my father’s birthday in August, instead of mine in February, to enroll me in the first grade a year early. There was no mandatory kindergarten in Texas back then; there still isn’t. My teachers gave me new books to read and taught me to comprehend the meaning of words. Lubbock County established an extension library in the back room behind Roy’s Café across the highway from the school in Wolfforth, a refuge of knowledge and a window to the world in a barren land for a lonely little boy. Ever since, I have lived in a garden of abundant literature, the bounty of a free society. For those who taught me to read and think, and for those who have shared their labor and creativity, I am indebted beyond words. Back before the 2000 presidential election, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose tried to warn us in Shrub that George W. Bush was “a fixin” (as we say in Lubbock) to mess with us. This year, Ivins and Dubose are back again with Bushwhacked, telling us how he’s pulled it off and the hurt he’s causing. Al Franken made me laugh in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Greg Palast depressed me with The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Both were sources, but the two books that put most of it together were The Lies of George W. Bush by David Corn and The Book on Bush by Eric Alterman and Mark Green. For those of you who want an excellent in-depth report of Bush’s
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politics of deception, stop: go pick up one or both of these books. You’ll be glad you did. The problem is not that there is not enough information. It’s out there in dozens of excellent books and in hundreds of articles, both in mainstream publications and on the Internet. This is an attempt to synthesize and compile this information into a brief overview of the Bush administration and its gross deceptions. In addition to those authors named above, I have specifically relied upon the works of others identified in the bibliography as primary sources and who are entitled to individual recognition for their substantial contributions: Paul Begala; Noam Chomsky; Richard A. Clark, Joe Conason; Jim Hightower; Douglas Kellner; Mark Crispin Miller; Bill Minutaglio; James Moore and Wayne Slater; Kevin Phillips; William Rivers Pitt and Scott Ritter; Sheldon Rampton and John C. Stauber; Christopher and Robert Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry; Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich; and Jennifer Van Bergen. Heroes are defined by their courage in spite of the dangers they face, using the weapons at hand. If we are to take back our country and make the world a safer place, all of these who wielded the pen must be counted among the warriors. David Levinson was a great journalist and an even better friend, who passed along to the great newsroom in the sky a few years ago, where there are no deadlines and every hour is happy. He would have said that this book was a “marvelous idea,” as he always did about my projects, and, as always, I talked to him in my head as I slaved through the prose. Thanks, David; I couldn’t have done it without you. An author couldn’t have asked for an easier book deal or for a more sensitive, knowledgeable and understanding publisher. John Paul Leonard has been a godsend. Finally, thank God for the Internet (and whoever invented it) and Google.com. Our new “Fifth Estate” has been homesteaded in the midst of our free society, and it is here to stay. With it and the Fourth to protect us and as a balance against the power of the other three, democracy will survive, and the voters of America will again rule.
INTRODUCTION
I decided to prepare this book because I became convinced it was needed. Back in 1980, I represented a survivor of Auschwitz and filed a lawsuit against some radical right-wing organizations that feed upon fear and hatred and who deny the Holocaust as a publicity ploy. These were marginal groups largely composed of kooks and nuts, some of whom celebrate the birthday of Adolph Hitler and dream of a new Imperium. Although they were actively seeking to mislead young people through the establishment of a phony “institute” and the publication of a “scholarly journal,” I didn’t believe they were an imminent threat to our freedoms. The matter was resolved when a wise Superior Court judge took judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. However, in the past three years I have watched our government being taken over by another group of far more sophisticated zealots, who have seized extraordinary power and who appear to have engaged us in an unlawful war. It is not terrorism that I fear most, it is the unbridled power that has been assumed by our own government, to our detriment. Next, I decided that I could write the book. One of the skills I have acquired is the ability to absorb and compile large amounts of information into brief, comprehensive documents written in a simple language. Perhaps it’s because I never learned a whole lot of fancy words, but following the ABCs got me by as I wrote the “Policy Manual” of the Los Angeles Police Department and the “Role of the Police in America” for President Nixon’s National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals. This skill has since served me well in drafting legal briefs over the years. Finally, once I concluded that the danger was real and present, I had no choice. As Albert Camus once wrote, “And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.” Thousands of our young women and men are fighting in Iraq and, whether or not we agree with their being there, we
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must give credit to the bravery of our sons and daughters who are being maimed and who are dying. They are the best, the bravest, and the brightest the world has ever seen. They deserve better than to be cynically used to promote selfish corporate and corrupt political interests. They certainly deserve better than to be sneaked back into the country in the middle of the night, once they have given their lives and limbs in Bush’s War. Our soldiers deserve to come home to a country which recognizes and honors their sacrifice by providing them with adequate medical care and veterans’ benefits to compensate them for their losses. Finally, they deserve to come home to a country where the Bill of Rights, which they allegedly fought to defend, has been preserved for them and their descendants. They are dying for us; we have to have the courage to fight for them, though we risk being called unpatriotic and labeled as traitors. The ultimate conclusion of this book was not lightly arrived at. It is not an easy thing to accuse our president of having failed to protect us and to wonder if the failure was intentional or negligent. It is not easy to accuse him of intentionally lying to Congress and the American people and thereby committing felony offenses. It is not easy to accuse him of violating international laws against humanity, the laws of war, the Charter of the United Nations, and the supreme law of the land. It is not easy to accuse him of a wholesale violation of our constitutional rights. It is not easy to question whether he should be impeached and stand trial or be left to the mercy of the voters. However, these things must be said. We can no longer remain silent and hope for a better day. Our freedom is too precious. It is as Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” It is time to hear the evidence and if sufficient, to take action.
In view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they [the masses] more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. —Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Dynasty. In a dynasty, you don’t have to earn anything. —George W. Bush, New York Times, November 4, 1998 The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.” —Theodore Roosevelt, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 1926
PREFACE The Bush administration has been running on lies in the belief that we are too stupid to figure it out. The business of exaggeration in politics has gone beyond the usual. It has become a culture of nastiness and downright lies. Is this acceptable? We’re Not As Stupid As They Think We Are
There’s something going on, and we have to do something about it. Otherwise, they’re going to pull it off. • Something is a movement to shift th..."
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