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April 12, 2001—"The president spoke to a meeting in
Indiana. . . . ," the news said, and I wondered what the Big
Dog was up to now. "And then," as the smug woman says
in the IBM ads, "it hits you"— it's Bush!!! It's
like the difference between House and house, or,
in the teenage horror movies, "the killer is inside the
house." For anyone who cares about the economy, environment,
health care, foreign policy, poverty, or women's freedoms; the
killer is inside the house.
Bush's reign has been unmitigated disaster, worse than I
even imagined it could be. In every field, he's been a
single-minded automaton working to pay off his corporate
debts. Not distracted by logic, science, decency, or
compassion, he has blithely punched the company clock for big
oil, big banks, big electricity—and lo and behold Exxon is the
No. 1 Corporation in the world.
If President Bush's Texas reign is any indication, he will
work tirelessly in the service of his corporate sponsors for a
year and a half, do little else, and then stop. But he might
not have the chance. The honeymoon may already be over.
The opiated jackals of the press seem to have reached their
stupidity saturation point; an accumulation of idiocy that's
simply too great to ignore. First there were the howls of
protest over Bush's mild reneging on global warming, a
priority only the delusional thought Bush had. Of course
global warming was a safe thing to call him on—there is no
absolutely no political will for meaningful
legislation on global warming (p2) and
India's and China's massive use of coal will render it moot
anyway. The great danger for Bush is that the press will go
into a vicious feedback loop like they did about Gore's
imaginary lies and, fed by Bush's steady linguistic
lacerations, will decide the story is that our
president is an imbecile.Since there is ample
evidence for that, the stories, and the drumbeat, could become
a steady roar. Bush's entertaining self-deprecation may not
work for long. His "beloved" quotient is way lower than
Reagan's; we like our presidents to be funny, but not be a
joke.
All one has to do is to study our Loser in Chief's
desperate eyes as he fumbles for some butchered junior high
school cliché and then . . . is simply finished. Once you get
past the mindless hackneyed sound bite, there is nothing else.
He has nothing else to say, because there is nothing in his
head, so he immediately changes the subject or hustles away.
He is an embarrassment to our country. En masse, Europe has
come to the same conclusion—with Mr. Bush's repeated slaps to
the face, punches to the stomach, and knees to the groin over
global warming, missile defense and SALT and ABM treaty
violations, spurning of Clinton overtures to North Korea,
Russia and the Palestinians, reckless piggish tax policy,
isolationism, and love of oil. Of course, they were horrified
when he won anyway.
Bush's raison d'etre seems to be vengeance (once he's
funneled enough billions into his corporate sponsors coffers):
vengeance against California for the audacity to vote for
Gore, vengeance at the Harvard liberals who dared ridicule him
for his retrograde conservatism—him, scion of Poppy,
hard drinking, skirt chasing, fly boy—they laughed at him? Who
were they to laugh at him? He would show them all. Much of
Bush's motivation can be traced back to this humiliation at
the hands of overbred prep school kids. They can be savage to
a West Texas cracker, as my Texan friends have explained to me
(esp. during the 60s). Lacking true physical or academic
gifts, Mr. Bush applied himself to relentless ingratiating and
politicking, which is still the secret of his success. His
primary reason for running for president at all was to avenge
his father's loss, but his vast shame at his father's loss
shows a misplaced sense of entitlement—the presidency isn't a
right—it has to be earned every time and its loss to a
better man isn't greatly shaming or necessarily a personal
rejection.
It is this deep conviction of the Bush superiority—this
business of character, that's so inexplicable, coming from a
15-year nasty drunk who had every door opened for him, every
failure cushioned and reversed; from a man whose preordained
right to win wouldn't be prevented by a little thing like a
half million votes. Any true man of character could never have
assumed the presidency after losing by such a popular margin,
let alone fought so virulently and dishonestly to wrest it
from his opponent. This obsession with cleansing the White
House of Clinton's real and imagined sins is perplexing, when
Bush's nights of debauchery and vomit far surpassed Billy
Boy's (not to mention Bush's girlfriend's alleged abortion).
Maybe it's his born-again religiosity from which he derives
such arrogance, hubris, and hypocrisy.
The Enron palm-greasing (lifting price-gouging controls on
power) has devastated the California economy and bankrupted
PG&E, which since all things roll downhill from
California, will percolate malignantly through the rest of the
economy. Bush may get the full scale recession he's been
promoting. The bankruptcy bill payoff to credit card companies
(his largest contributors) has a particularly bitter irony
coming from a man who would have been forced into bankruptcy
three times without rich family "friends" eager for the cachet
and influence of the Bush name. He directly financially
benefits from most of his legislation, just as he did in
Texas. In these billions of dollars of sleazy corporate
payoffs, Mr. Bush has in only two months become the most
corrupt president in American history.
In the spy scandal, Bush's vast overreaction was
unwarranted and unwise: in our burrowing under the Russian
embassy in Washington we were committing a far greater
transgression. Since they have far more spies than we do,
ejecting 50 of each leaves us at a grave disadvantage. In
fact, it may have been an excuse for getting rid of
Democrats in the Moscow embassy who would oppose Mr.
Bush's idiotic missile defense project and reject a harder
line. Meanwhile Putin has assumed control of the other two
television networks, and is moving
to place the entire press under his thumb.
On the other hand, his weakness and toadying to China after
the downing of our spy plane by an incompetent Chinese fighter
jock is frankly dangerous—if you talk tough, and then act
craven, you embolden your enemies to greater outrages. The
bullying Chinese, who've killed up to one-fifth of Tibet in a
half century of physical and cultural genocide, and constantly
threaten Taiwan (separate since 1897), must be coddled—an
embargo, after all, would force Wal-Mart out of business in
four months. We are now wholly dependent on cheap Chinese
goods, more than foreign oil. For a decade we've allowed a
grubby obsession with trade to obscure our support for human
rights, but even Clinton sent two carrier groups to the
South China Sea when the Chinese lobbed missiles 22 miles from
Taiwan's cities and had 150,000 troop
"exercises" across from Taiwan.
Regarding our wondering at how Bush could graduate from two
Ivy League schools without being able to read (perhaps with
massive donations- It's Only Words), we got an
interesting answer from Herb Epstein:
"How does a "mentally challenged" legacy student like
George W graduate from Yale when he could barely read and
write? I was a graduate student at Yale and did some teaching
while Bush was an undergraduate "legacy student." A certain
number of places were guaranteed to sons of alumni. The short
answer is that it was very difficult to give any Yale student
a failing grade for a course and almost impossible to give
them enough failing grades to prevent their graduating. I'm an
expert on this subject because I tried to give two failing
grades (out of about 75 students) in a course I taught and
graded on Soviet foreign policy. (No, Bush was not one of
them). Suffice to say that even after I proved
plagiarism to the satisfaction of a board of
professors, the university administration reversed my grade
and the board's ruling and allowed the legacy student to pass
with the minimum grade. They didn't dispute that he had
plagiarized. The fact that he had previously been
reprimanded for the same offense somehow had no bearing.
Needless to say this kid's family give big bucks to Yale
before and after the incident.
Next comes the question of how George W got into
Harvard B School. He first applied to U of Texas Law School
and was turned down. Despite the fact that it was his home
state, he had no legacy. He had to compete. Undoubtedly he was
rejected because of his poor undergraduate record and his low
LSAT scores. How could George W, who was a history major, and
who couldn't get into the U of Texas Law School, gain
admission to the most competitive, prestigious grad school in
the country—Harvard B school.?" —Herb Epstein
On another front, Bush is moving against the 'Day After'
pill, because it's use would prevent illegitimacy . . .
because that's how he came to power. |
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