My answer remains unchanged: Bush is not my president and never will be. I am 47 and seriously doubt I will ever get over it.
Every time I see Bush's smug smirk - which is way too often - I am reminded of how he enlisted the aid of his right-wing buddies on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the legal counting of votes in Florida in a stunning, partisan decision and hand him the White House that Gore won in the popular vote by more than 540,000 votes. I am reminded of stories that never received serious play in the national media, such as the roughly 10,000 absentee votes in some 26 Republican-leaning Florida counties that were counted on Election Day despite them being spoiled.
Amazingly, with no impartial scrutiny, the county officials drew up new copies of the 10,000 ballots that the machines did not read and marked them for the candidates when they showed "clear intent," according to the Orlando Sentinel, one of the few media outlets that covered this story. Bush dominated absentee balloting in Florida by almost 2-to-1, and this sleight-of-hand by election workers that benefited Republicans was a clear contrast to the position Bush & Co. took against hand recounts following Nov. 7, 2000. 1
I am reminded of many more examples of lies, theft, hypocrisy - and cheating. Many have examined the backgrounds of Bush, Cheney, Rove, and other officials close to them, though few have put them together and presented a clear case of how they have broken the rules and laws throughout their lives so we can begin to understand how we got into our present predicament. Many have examined the lies of Bush and officials around them; I contributed to one such book myself, Big Bush Lies, published in 2004 by RiverWood Books of Oregon. Many of the episodes of cheating and breaking laws away from politics, including Bush's and Cheney's drunk-driving arrests and an insider stock sale when Bush was on the board of Harken Energy, have been widely covered before.
But relatively few know about how long Bush, Cheney, Rove, Bush Sr., and others around them have engaged in political dirty tricks, lowball campaigning, cheating, and outright breaking of laws. In 1972, as the Watergate break-in story broke, Bush coordinated the campaign of an Alabama Republican Senate candidate. Among his acts was to distribute campaign materials that included a "doctored tape" of a radio debate that distorted the Democratic senator's position on bussing, making him look like he favored bussing.
Meanwhile, Rove had been doing worse for a few years by then. In 1970, Rove posed as a supporter of Alan Dixon, a Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois, and stole stationary from the campaign. He then created a flier that lied about offering free beer, food and women at Dixon's campaign opening event on the official stationary and distributed thousands of copies to homeless centers and similar places. Hundreds of the homeless showed up, effectively disrupting the event.
Rove spent the Watergate years in similar actions and even was paid by Republican organizations to lead seminars on college campuses, lecturing young Republicans on how to engage in dirty tricks of their own. You think all the phony fliers and dirty tricks in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 and other places were just coincidences? They were born during Rove's Watergate-era seminars.
Cheney was an actual Nixon aide during this time, and he somehow escaped indictment for his role in the scandals.
Then, take a look at Bush's poppy, the main reason we have another Bush cheater in the White House - there is no way that Bush Jr. would have won the Texas governor's race, much less the White House, on his own. Bush Sr. accepted illegal campaign contributions from none other than Richard Nixon himself during his failed senate campaign in 1970. Some $106,000 came from Nixon's secret campaign slush fund called "Operation Townhouse," with at least $55,000 in cash that was not reported as required by law. 2
During Watergate, Bush Sr. headed the Republican National Committee and did everything he could to keep Watergate quiet. In 1973, Bush even came up with a phony plan to divert attention by accusing the late Carmine Bellino, a committee investigator for the U.S. Senate committee investigating Watergate, of trying to bug the hotel where Nixon stayed preparing for the 1960 debates with JFK. The investigation into that lie and dirty trick went on for more than two months, causing delays in the Watergate committee's proceedings.
Bellino was eventually cleared, of course, but not before Bush almost helped derail the Watergate investigation. He might have succeeded had people like former No. 2 G-man W. Mark Felt not been there to blow the whistle.
This technique of devising a phony story, of blaming the other side for exactly what you are doing to divert attention, was perfected by the Bushes, by Rove, and by Lee Atwater, who ran Bush Sr.'s 1988 presidential campaign. Only one of those people has ever apologized for such dirty tactics - Atwater right before he died.
In its 1992 losing effort, the Bush campaign even used government employees - reminiscent of Watergate - to search passport records of Bill Clinton and other documents to try to dig up dirt, according to records from the National Archives and other sources. 3
Bush Jr. - a more cutthroat campaigner than his father - helped convince Poppy to engage in the infamous negative, misleading, and race-baiting Willie Horton ads in 1988. His campaign engaged in similar negative, whisper campaigns against Texas Gov. Ann Richards in 1994, Vice President Al Gore in 2000, and Sen. John Kerry in 2004. His campaign even maligned fellow Republican John McCain in 2000. Once in the White House, Bush appointed more convicted criminals to his administration than any president in U.S. history. He also broke more international treaties than any president in U.S. history. The list goes on.
A survey of 415 historians released in 2004 and conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that 81 percent already considered the Bush administration a "failure." More than half considered Nixon better and compared Bush with Herbert Hoover, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan. Twelve percent called Bush the worst president in American history. This poll came out before the Bush administration's lame response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame-CIA agent leak scandal, and Bush's treacherous decline in approval ratings among the general public.
As historian Sean Wilentz noted, historians are "generally a cautious bunch" and are "deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent." Bush supporters who dismiss them as "liberals" - as if that term automatically makes the target illegitimate, even though the U.S. founders and Christ were liberals and Americans would have few rights or positive social changes at all if not for so-called liberals - overlook the thorough, professional, detached view most historians take. 4
As Wilentz also says, almost every presidential administration has faced charges of breaking laws and cheating. Relatively few have been impeached or had high-level officials convicted or indicted. One of the worst offenders was Ronald Reagan's administration, which many mistakenly herald as virtuous. Some 29 Reagan officials, including National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra scandal, illegal lobbying, and a looting scam inside the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to Wilentz. Three other Cabinet officials - Attorney General Edwin Meese, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce - left before they could be convicted. While many consider the Clinton administration to be more scandalous than the Reagan one, the record shows that fewer Clinton officials were indicted or convicted related to White House performance, despite all the private and taxpayer-funded, witch-hunt investigations by Clinton's enemies. 5
Bush Jr., unlike Reagan and Clinton, was extremely fortunate in having a lapdog, Republican-led Congress that would not even hint at trying to rein him in, no matter how many times Bush pissed on the Constitution. Even so, several high-ranking Bush officials, such as Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, White House domestic policy adviser Claude A. Allen, Defense Department analyst Lawrence Anthony Franklin, and David Hossein Safavian, chief of staff of the U.S. General Services Administration and federal procurement policy administrator for the Office of Management and Budget, were indicted or convicted on criminal charges.
Libby was indicted in 2005 for his role in leaking to the media that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, and indictments of Rove and others were expected - even Bush himself reportedly authorized leaks of intelligence on Iraq. Allen pleaded guilty to theft in 2006 related to a fraudulent refund scheme and received probation and a fine. Franklin, an Air Force reserve colonel who served in the Defense Intelligence Agency, was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison in 2006 for passing government secrets related to Iraq and Iran to a pro-Israel lobbying group and an Israeli government official. In 2005, Safavian was the first of many officials expected to be arrested in the Jack Abramoff lobbyist scandal. He was accused of making false statements to a federal officer and obstruction of a GSA investigation into Abramoff, who pled guilty to corruption, bribery, and embezzlement charges in 2006.
Beyond these obvious examples of malfeasance, "history may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution," Wilentz wrote.
"Armed with legal findings by his attorney general [and personal lawyer] Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim," Wilentz said. "More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious 'signing statements,' which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress." 6
I haven't always been an avid opponent of Republicans like Bush and Rove. Before the 2000 election, I met Bush on the campaign trail and considered him likable on the surface, although I knew he had a darker side underneath. I considered myself independent during the Clinton years, but I usually voted for Democrats. But after the 2000 presidential heist, my independent stance changed, although I have slacked off from being too aligned with the Democrats, many of whom sicken me in their own ways.
While some friends consider me to be a diehard liberal, I consider myself to be more of a populist in the mode of the late Paul Wellstone. I attempt to work for liberty and justice for all - for the poor, the middle class, the rich, atheists, the religious, people of color, whites, gays, straights, and even for conservative Republicans like right-wing writer Ann Coulter who want to send liberals to prison camps where we have no such rights. I try not to get bogged down in labels. But sure, I'd rather be associated with the so-called liberals than conservatives. To me, being a liberal is to champion for the underdog, to help the poor and oppressed, to advocate for liberty and justice for all, for positive change that will really benefit all Americans, and ultimately, people throughout the world.
In that vein, Christ - someone who has been used by conservative politicians for centuries to further their largely selfish agendas - was a liberal. And the U.S. founders were liberals. Textbooks say that the American War of Independence in the 18th century established the first nation to create a constitution based on the concept of liberal government, particularly the idea that governments rule by the consent of the governed.
That's right, the U.S. forefathers established this nation as a liberal nation, not a Christian nation. George Washington, the celebrated father of the U.S., wrote in a 1792 letter: "I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." 7
Most founders were religious to a degree, though they were not necessarily Christian; many were Deists, some Unitarian, some spiritualists. Most were highly wary of Christianity; for instance, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." 8
That's harsh, but hey, I didn't write it. Don't blame me - I'm just the messenger here. Personally, I think there are a few redeeming features in traditional Christianity - including that it occupies the time of people who might otherwise be committing worse transgressions.
Thus, the founders did not have Christianity in common as many religious right leaders say these days. What they had in common was a belief in a liberal democracy with open and fair elections, equal rights - although it took a while for that to extend to women and people of color - and an equal opportunity to succeed, at least in theory.
The contributions of liberalism to the world are enormous and profound. We have liberals to thank for bringing the world the ideas of individual liberties, personal dignity, free expression, religious tolerance, universal human rights, limitations on government power, popular sovereignty, national self-determination, privacy, the rule of law, civil rights, and free trade, just to name a few concepts. In the U.S., liberals worked to eradicate slavery and child labor practices, allow women and minorities the right to vote and other rights, bring about civil and religious rights, and establish and raise the minimum wage. Liberals helped stop corporations from polluting as much, provided for safer food and water supplies, worked for better public schools, established the national, state, and local parks systems, and brought about employee health benefits.
I give this defense of liberalism mainly to counteract the lies, cheating tactics, and dirty tricks played by Bush, Rove, Cheney, Coulter, and others on the right to malign liberals. As a journalist for more than 25 years, I have been trained to "see both sides" and write in a cold, detached manner, trying as much as possible to eradicate my opinions from my work. This book strives not for journalistic impartiality, but for providing a bit of balance to the blame-Republicans-and-Democrats-equally-for-our-mess trend that permeates much of the mainstream U.S. media. These times are too critical, too important, to smugly sit on the sidelines and blame everyone equally for the mess we're experiencing. Democrats have not controlled Congress since 1994. Democrats have not held the White House since 2000. Democrats have not claimed a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court since 1968. How can you blame Democrats equally for our problems when Republicans have controlled the three branches of the federal government since 2001?
I have tried to see things from Bush's viewpoint, and all I have come away with is that he mostly cares about his wealthy, politically-connected, selfish cronies. And almost everything he does - from visiting Iraq on Thanksgiving 2003 to posing with African-American kids at a Boys and Girls Club - is cynically geared for political gain. Most politicians execute a similar agenda, but Bush takes it to the extreme.
He's a liar. He's a thief. He's a hypocrite.
He's a cheater.
And Rove and Cheney are all of those and more because they spread their evil deeds more under the cover of darkness. They justify their cheating by saying the end justifies the means. And so many Americans seem willing to agree with them.
Even when Bush shows a distant sign of humanity, Rove and Cheney - who John Dean said operated as a co-president who "prefers the shadows" and finds "the sort of pleasure in power that medieval warlords once did" - and others are there to take Bush down the selfish road. One of many examples came during a discussion on the second round of tax cuts for the wealthy shortly after the 2002 elections. Bush, who remained quiet during most of these cabinet meetings, suddenly piped up and said, "Won't the top-rate people benefit the most from eliminating the double taxation of dividends? Didn't we already give them a break at the top?" 9
But after recovering from a slight shock, Rove and others reportedly convinced Bush to remain on the reverse Robin Hood plan. "You should be basing the package on principle," Rove said. And Bush did - whatever shaky, snake-oil principles they were.
During the same meeting, Bush, who claimed during the 2000 campaign to be a "compassionate conservative" - which really meant his compassion was only reserved for conservatives - suddenly threw out this question from left field: "What are we doing on compassion?" Of course, no one in his administration could answer that query. The silence spoke for itself.
These "compassionate" Republicans like to talk the talk about "taking responsibility," but when something goes haywire under a Republican regime, most point the finger at Democrats. While I am inspired by the actions of many people I have met in recent years, more people need to stand up to such hypocrisy. More people need to get mad. More people need to take some action against Bush, Rove, and other Republicans, even if it's just to help circulate some of the points made in this book.
Let me say this as clearly as I can: I was born in Washington, D.C., as an American, I want to die an American, I love my country and planet, and that's why I speak out against the attacks on our constitutional rights and violence done in our names. That's why I work so hard to expose the real stories behind the Bush administration, the real dark side of Bush, Rove, Cheney, and others. Some tell so-called liberals like me to "love it or leave it," in which they really mean "goosestep along with Bush or move to Europe or Canada or some other place because your stance is making me uncomfortable and even down-deep to question my views."
I do not believe in leaving a place when I can have an impact, however small. I do not believe in running away from tough situations; that's partly why I moved back to the D.C. area from Texas in 2003, to more directly confront what I sincerely believe is wrong with U.S. political leadership. I want to teach my kids that when you believe something is wrong, you stand up for what you believe and you work to improve the situation. You don't run away when the going gets tough.
Moreover, I want to preserve this country - which I believe to be a great idea - that so many died for, that Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Paine and many others created. My main contribution to that goal is to help the truth about certain Republicans now in power to become more widely known. After that, let the chips fall where they may.
This book is just one of my contributions to that cause. It grew out of columns, letters, and other writings I authored since 2001 for various media and Internet ezines and sites. Those include Democratic Underground, Oped News, Daily Kos, Smirking Chimp, Democrats.com, American Politics Journal, Online Journal, Buzzflash, AlterNet, BushWatch, Liberal Slant, MikeHersh.com, Information Clearinghouse, Znet, Dream Forge, Moderate Independent, IndyMedia, America Held Hostile, Global Free Press, and others.
It's not easy to write such a book, knowing you will get attacked ferociously by the Bush gang and their usually paid hacks. Kitty Kelley, author of The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, was not just attacked, but she had trouble locating basic records on the Bushes. Kelley wrote that she ran into an "extraordinary number of lost records, misplaced files, and registers that had been mysteriously disrupted by fire over the years. Documents such as bankruptcy records are inexplicably missing from federal court files." 10
It goes beyond Bush Sr. once being director of the CIA, an organization with a dark history of dirty tricks and cheating itself, but which is now filled with many people who detest the current Bush administration for trying to pin the blame for mistakes made in the rush to war against Iraq on the CIA. Taking on the Bushes is a tougher assignment than taking on the U.S. government or General Motors. People who you once talked openly with shun you. Friends stop calling. You get used to threats. You even become the victim of suspicious suicides, such as the cases of J. H. Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son, and Margie Schoedinger, a Texas businesswoman who filed a sexual assault lawsuit against Bush in 2002.
But take them on, I will. I refuse to go quietly into the night. I refuse to follow the lead of Democrats like Bill McBride, the 2002 failed Florida governor candidate who told the Washington Times that he wasn't influenced to run against Jeb by the 2000 recount battle. "I think more people went to the polls to vote for Al Gore than for George Bush," McBride was quoted by the Times as saying. "But to argue it on and on is like arguing a call in a basketball game after the game is over." 11
Well, I am 6-7 and a former small college basketball player. And even when I was more concerned about my slam dunk than voting in a presidential election, I would not dream of comparing the sacred right to vote with something as relatively trivial as a basketball game. Stealing people's right to vote and have their votes counted is not the same thing as being called for double-dribbling. We're not talking petty theft here. We're talking the crime of the millenium, the pilfering of one's most basic democratic rights. Excuse me if I don't just shake this one off in the same manner I shook off missing a potential game-winning jumper.
To those who tell me to "get over" the Republican pilfering of the White House in 2000, let me ask you something. If you had lived in the colonies in the 1770s, would you have been among the majority of American colonists back then who told Paine and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and the rest of the Sons of Liberty to "get over" the Boston Massacre of 1770? To "get over" the Stamp Act? To "get over" other indignities at the hands of the British? Would you have fought with the Patriots, or would you have joined the majority of colonists who remained neutral or opposed them as Tories and fought with the British?
Would you have told Patrick Henry, "Hey, c'mon, Pat, don't get so riled up over this 'liberty or death' stuff. Yeah, we don't like the British treating us like slaves, but hey, it's not good to keep arguing about it. That's like arguing over calls in a game of horseshoes after the match."
As Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and Henry and others roll over in their graves, I know my answer. I refuse to "get over" the Republican-led Florida voting roll purge, the Election Day 2000 counting of 10,000 spoiled absentee ballots in 26 Republican-dominated counties, the Republicans denying African-Americans and others their voting rights even when they had their legal registration cards, the discarding of legal, mostly Democratic votes, the illegal Republican effort to change absentee ballots that had already been mailed to election offices, the polling sites being moved without notice, the voters denied their rights to second and third ballots, the non-English speaking voters who were not supplied with interpreters, the phone lines to central voting databases being blocked, the Democratic voters given misleading instructions by Republican election officials, the carpools taking voters to the polls stopped by police and harassed for not having taxi licenses, the Election Day police checkpoint near a largely African-American voting site, the voters told there were no more ballots, the Republicans forcing military overseas votes that did not have witnesses� signatures or postmarks to be counted but denying mostly Democrats� votes who made similar errors, the U.S. Supreme Court partisan decisions, the Bush campaign�s violation of the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the partisan decisions by Katherine Harris to certify Bush as Florida�s victor in 2000 and by Ken Blackwell to certify the results in Ohio in 2004, the butterfly ballot and other two-column ballots that confused voters, the lies and propaganda that included blaming Gore for delays when Republicans filed the lawsuits blocking and delaying the legal vote-counting process, the smears against John Kerry and other sleazy tactics during the 2004 campaign, and the multitude of other Republican-inspired injustices.
During Clinton's tenure, many Republicans refused to "get over" his outright election victories, simply because he beat their candidate. If Republicans can do that to Clinton when he wins his elections fair and square, I can return the favor to Bush when he cheats and steals his way to the White House and continues to deceive the American people and the world.
I will fight back with the truth uncovered through long hours of research. I will stand up to the Bush administration and venture down back alleys that few may dare to trod. I will keep working towards a society that truly practices "liberty and justice for all" - not just liberty and justice for Bush, Cheney, Rove, and their cronies.
I will keep fighting, believing that someday Bush, Cheney, Rove, and the forces who back them will be driven from power and can continue their cheating ways in a forum that does not so directly and adversely affect so many of us.
Sept. 11, 2006
1. David Damron and Roger Roy Sentinel, "Mangled ballots resurrected; Thousands of spoiled votes were counted - thanks to a helping hand." Orlando Sentinel, May 7, 2001.
2. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 281.
3. Robert Parry, "Bush Family Politics," Consortium News, Oct. 5, 1999.
4. Sean Wilentz, "The Worst President in History?" Rolling Stone, April 21, 2006.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. George Washington in letter to Edward Newenham, Oct. 20, 1792; George Seldes, The Great Quotations. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 726.
8. Franklin Steiner, Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents, 1936.
9. Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 299.
10. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. XXIV.
11. Steve Miller, "Florida ponders surprise challenge; Upbeat McBride races after Reno." Washington Times, April 8, 2002.
Go to Chapter 1 of Born to Cheat