Junior and senior staffers have turned in their card keys, clearances, Blackberries. The long weekend attached the the MLK national holiday has started, which means that they - and senior administration staff - are gone. For all intents and purposes, the Bush administration has left the building. The White House is empty. The stench remains.
Via Coates, Vanity Fair has a 14 page article on online detailing the remarkable, criminal incompetence of the Bush administration - not from the second term, not from the Iraq war, but from day 1. The attempt by the willfully ignorant and a GOP in complete collapse to rehabilitate the Bush years as some kind of success and whitewash away the trainwreck that we’ve all watched for 8 agonizing years has begun. Just yestereday, Janece forwarded me Twitter from a conservative we knew from back in our college days:
“I really love President Bush. A great man with wisdom and vision. I respect him so much and think he dignified and repaired the office.”
The Vanity Fair article is made up of quotes from senior Bush advisors, senators and generals in the know about the horrifyingly bad decision-making processes in the White House from the very beginning of Bush’s term. I urge all of you guys to PLEASE READ the article and forward it around to your politically opinionated friends and contacts. It’s imperative that the American public be reminded of the absolute failure of Bush, his administration and their ideology in the face of the coming attempts to revise our history.
A couple of things stood out for me.
First, it’s extremely clear that for all intents and purposes, the fears were entirely founded about Cheney being the master puppeter. He emerges as our shadow President, the man who firmly established himself and his coterie as the gatekeepers to Bush - a man whose personal likeability, obvious lack of curiosity, and easily triggered hot buttons (being a cowboy, avoiding introspection, hubris, impulsiveness) made him the perfect patsy for Cheney’s political agenda. I wish I could say that’s just conspiracy theory talk, but as you’ll see below, the interviewees basically come right out and say as much.
Second, it’s clear that the Bush team were consummate power manipulators - both in terms of political savvy and bureaucratic ability. They knew exactly how to milk every last political advantage out of the events of the last eight years, how to play Congress and the opposition against itself, how to play on the fears of our leaders and citizens, how to burrow down into the labyrinthine depths of our government to co-opt the workings of the state to forward their political agenda. And for all that savvy, they could not realize one simple truth - Americans elect leaders to govern, not to play politics. They literally concentrated all their efforts on exerting complete political control over the United States government, and in doing so were completely unprepared to actually govern, to meet the challenges of history, our allies, our enemies, nature.
Third, I feel sad for those Evangelical and religious friends and family who voted for Bush’s administration based on his “Christianity”. It’s clear from the evidence that they were used - manipulated by their identification with Bush’s story to vote for administration that loathed them, that the religious wing of the GOP as useful idiots, cannon fodder for campaigns, a constituency to be pandered to on the trail and completely ridiculed and ignored when in office. It’s true that Evangelicals and their leaders should have never sold their souls to the cynical power plays of the political arena, but I’m still sad that after eight years, otherwise good people like that Twitter contact of ours are further marginalized in the public eye, a laughingstock; that their church’s image has been irreparably damaged, and that, incredibly, they are still making excuses for the man responsible for America’s mess (more than that, even voting for Palin - that even more ridiculous Bush knock-off!).
Here’s a rogues gallery from the article.
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The Puppet President
June 1, 2002: Preparations for war with Iraq are not yet publicly acknowledged, but earlier in the spring, as Condoleezza Rice discusses diplomatic initiatives involving Iraq with several senators, Bush pokes his head into the room and says, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
July 9th, 2008: The annual summit of the G-8 nations, held in Japan, concludes with a tepid pledge to cut greenhouse gases by 50 percent by the year 2050. It is the last G-8 summit that Bush attends. He bids farewell to the other heads of state with the words “Good-bye from the world’s greatest polluter.”
December 6, 2006: The independent Iraq Study Group, chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, issues a report setting out 79 recommendations for the future conduct of the Iraq war. The report is brushed aside by the president. Lawrence Eagleburger, one of the group’s members, says of Bush after the report is delivered, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”
“He always gets asked, Have you changed?, and he instinctively recoils at that kind of question.”
~ Dan Bartlett, White House communications director
The Puppeteer
“As my boss [Colin Powell] once said, Bush had a lot of .45-caliber instincts, cowboy instincts. Cheney knew exactly how to polish him and rub him. He knew exactly when to give him a memo or when to do this or when to do that and exactly the word choice to use to get him really excited… He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum… The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails… I think the clearest indication I got that Rich [Armitage] and he both had finally awakened to the dimensions of the problem was when Rich began—I mean, I’ll be very candid—began to use language to describe the vice president’s office with me as the Gestapo, as the Nazis, and would sometimes late in the evening, when we were having a drink—would sometimes go off rather aggressively on particular characters in the vice president’s office.”
~ Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Sec. Of State Colin Powell
February 7, 2002: Bush issues an executive order denying any protections of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees. The order comes after an intense behind-the-scenes battle pitting the State Department against the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the Office of the Vice President.
“I really think it came as a surprise when the February memo was put out. And that memo, of course, was constructed by Addington, and I’m told it was blessed by one or two people in O.L.C. [Office of Legal Counsel]. And then it was given to Cheney, and Cheney gave it to the president. The president signed it.”
~ Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Sec. Of State Colin Powell
“The second difference, and what made their [Cheney and Addington] assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.”
~ Jack Goldsmith, head of the Justice Dept’s Office Of Legal Counsel
The Architect Of Our Iraq Disaster
September 15, 2002: In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the assistant to the president for economic policy, Lawrence Lindsey, estimates the cost of a war with Iraq to be in the neighborhood of $100 billion to $200 billion. Mitch Daniels, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, quickly revises the figure downward to $50 billion to $60 billion, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld calls Lindsey’s estimate “baloney.” Lindsey is fired in December. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill is dismissed the same day. Years later, an analysis by Nobel-laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes will estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be $3 trillion.
December 2, 2002: Donald Rumsfeld signs off on a memo from the Defense Department’s legal counsel, Jim Haynes, permitting the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, including stress positions, isolation, and sleep deprivation. Rumsfeld writes on the memo, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” The memo is eventually rescinded, after strenuous objections from the general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, among others, but policies and practices continue to be influenced by the philosophy outlined in the earlier Bybee-Yoo “torture memo.”
“That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks. And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.”
~ Richard Clarke, special advisor to Bush in the US National Security Council
“When Shinseki said, Hey, it’s going to take 300,000 or 400,000 soldiers, they crucified him. They called me up the day after that, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They called me the next day and they said, Did you see what Shinseki said? And I said yes. And they said, Well, that can’t be possible. And I said, Well, let me give you the only piece of empirical data I have. In 1991, I owned 5 percent of the real estate in Iraq, and I had 22,000 trigger pullers. And on any day I never had enough. So you can take 5 percent—you can take 22,000 and multiply that by 20. Hey, here’s probably the ballpark, and I didn’t have Baghdad. And they said, Thank you very much. So I got up and left.”
~ Jay Garner, retired general and first overseer of the reconstruction in Iraq
“So he says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted… I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces… I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?”
~ Kenneth Adelman, member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board
“When Abu Ghraib happened, I was like, We’ve got to fire Rumsfeld. Like if we’re the “accountability president,” we haven’t really done this. We don’t veto any bills. We don’t fire anybody. I was like, Well, this is a disaster, and we’re going to hold some National Guard colonel responsible? This guy’s got to get fired.”
~ Matthew Dowd, Bush campaign strategist
Turdblossom
(Bush’s nickname for Karl Rove)
November 4, 2008: Barack Obama is elected president in an electoral-college landslide. The Republicans lose at least seven seats in the Senate and a score in the House, dashing Karl Rove’s hopes of a permanent Republican majority. As the administration prepares to leave office, it promulgates a raft of “midnight” orders to weaken environmental, health-care, and product-safety regulations.
“Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good…”
~ Matthew Dowd, Bush campaign strategist
“After the 2004 election they cut the White House faith-based staff by 30 percent, 40 percent, because it became clear that it had served its purpose. There’s this idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of religious conservatives. But what people miss is that religious conservatives and the Republican Party have always had a very uneasy relationship. The reality in the White House is—if you look at the most senior staff—you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders. Now, at the end of the day, that’s easy to understand, because most of the people who are religious-right leaders are not easy to like. It’s that old Gandhi thing, right? I might actually be a Christian myself, except for the action of Christians. And so in the political-affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at everyone from Rich Cizik, who is one of the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals, to James Dobson, to basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.”
~ David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
The Bumbling Enabler
July 22, 2004: The bipartisan 9/11 commission—whose creation was fiercely opposed by the administration—issues its report. It provides a detailed reconstruction of events leading up to the attacks, and of the attacks themselves; an earlier staff report found “no credible evidence” of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The final report also determines that many warning signs of an impending attack were ignored.
“John [Bellinger] and I had to work on the 9/11-commission testimony of Condi. Condi was not gonna do it, not gonna do it, not gonna do it, and then all of a sudden she realized she better do it. That was an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the president had been actually concerned about al-Qaeda. We cherry-picked things to make it look as if the vice president and others, Secretary Rumsfeld and all, had been. They didn’t give a shit about al-Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.”
~ Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Sec. Of State Colin Powell
“In reality, a great deal of what Secretary Rice did seems to have been based as much on a search for visibility as any expectation of real progress.”
~ Anthony Cordesman, national security strategist
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So long, Bush administration. It’s hard to describe my relief at watching you go. The only way we want to see you again is in front of a microphone of a truth and reconciliation commission or a special prosecutor’s investigation for war crimes.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
(Photos by Annie Liebovitz. Quoted content and photos courtesy of Vanity Fair Magazine. All rights reserved.)
More later as I get into this new groove.
Just when you’re starting to get your head and courage wrapped around the Economic Winter Of Our Discontent and end of Western civilization as we know it, along comes 
