Originally Posted By: Halo82
I suppose some of this is subjective but where there's smoke...

A tragicomedy of errors

In an excerpt from his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, author Craig Unger details how Bush is, well, screwing up the world


By 2005, for tens of millions of Americans, it was increasingly impossible to ignore the realities of what was happening in Iraq — the absence of WMDs, the escalating sectarian violence, the vast expenditures of blood and treasure in pursuit of a mission that was unclear at best, constantly changing, and had never been accomplished at all. Polarizing the nation more profoundly than at any time since the Vietnam era, the war had become a litmus-test issue that defined and linked whole sets of belief systems — red state America versus blue; evangelical Christians, anti-abortion activists, NASCAR dads, and other denizens of the Bible Belt versus the secular, post-Enlightenment America that has long been on the cutting edge of science and the embodiment of modernism. Those who questioned US policies in the Middle East, as their foes saw it, were cut-and-run traitors who aided and abetted the enemy. On the other side were Neanderthals waging a holy war in the Middle East, shredding the Constitution, destroying civil liberties, rolling back not just the New Deal but the Enlightenment, all in the name of God.

Hate filled the air, at times evoking the specter of McCarthyism, the hate and fear mongering of Father Coughlin, and even the assault against reason undertaken by the Puritans. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter expressed her regret that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh “did not go to the New York Times building.” Americans who did not vote for Bush, she said, were “traitors,” her critics, members of the “Treason Lobby.” To Rush Limbaugh, Democrats “had aligned themselves with the enemy” and were “PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda.” To Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, the American Civil Liberties Union were “terrorists” who were almost as dangerous “as Al-Qaeda.” Thanks to the neocons and religious conservatives, the radical right was driving America as never before.

With the Republicans still in control of Congress, Bush’s critics vested their few remaining hopes for retribution in Patrick Fitzgerald, a newly appointed federal prosecutor who had recently taken charge of the Valerie Plame Wilson–CIA leak investigation. But in many respects, it seemed as if the nation had regressed to the era of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Tens of millions of people in the only country that had put a man on the moon, that had unraveled the human genome, now questioned whether evolution was real. A Creation Museum was under construction near Cincinnati, Ohio, to demonstrate that it wasn’t. Tourists to the Grand Canyon were treated to creationist tours assuring them that geologists had been wrong, and that one of America’s greatest wonders had not been formed slowly over millions of years, but was God’s creation dating “to the early part of Noah’s flood.” The Kansas State Board of Education held hearings about redefining the word “science” to remove bias toward “naturalistic” (nontheistic) belief systems. Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum — who believed that states should be able to arrest gay lovers in the privacy of their bedrooms — backed an amendment to allow the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution.

The Bush administration and the religious right declared war on science. Slogans that had once been bumper stickers — JUST A THEORY — became government policy: global warming is a hoax; condoms don’t work; intelligent design is legitimate science. The administration’s initiative to fund AIDS programs in Africa was hailed by the press, but information about the benefits of condoms was removed from government Web sites. The global-warming section of the Environmental Protection Agency was dropped entirely. In deference to the Christian Right, morning-after contraceptive sales were banned, even after having been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and 2004 Democratic presidential hopeful, a National Cancer Institute fact sheet was “doctored to suggest that abortion increases breast-cancer risk, even though the American Cancer Society concluded that the best study discounts that.”

And when it came to dealing with the “liberal” judiciary, Pat Robertson sought help from God during a prayer retreat, and the Lord told him, “I will remove judges from the Supreme Court quickly, and their successors will refuse to sanction the attacks on religious faith.” Asking his television audience to pray that three liberal Supreme Court justices retire, Robertson said, “I don’t care which three, I mean as long as the three conservatives stay on. . . . There’s six liberals, so it’s up to the Lord.”

If the once powerful Christian Coalition had become moribund — and it had — that was because it had been replaced by a far more powerful institution: the Republican Party. Indeed, in 2004, no fewer than 41 out of 51 Republican senators voted with the Christian Coalition 100 percent of the time. When the new Congress took office in early 2005, it included Tom Coburn, newly elected senator from Oklahoma, who believed that doctors who performed abortions should be executed. Asserting that global warming was a hoax, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) compared environmentalists to the Nazis. He argued that American policy in the Middle East should be based on the Bible, that Israel had a right to the West Bank “because God said so.” And on the Senate floor, in a speech about the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, he displayed an enormous photo of his extended family, and told the august assembly, “We have 20 kids and grandkids. I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.”

Meanwhile, the White House sought extraordinary means to get its message across. In late January 2005, a man named James Guckert showed up at a presidential news conference using Jeff Gannon as a pseudonym, and lobbed softball questions to President Bush. “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy. . . .” he told President Bush. “Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

Gannon’s questions were so friendly, critics suspected that they might have been planted, and found out that he worked for Talon News, an apparent front for the conservative website GOPUSA. More titillating, Gannon had appeared naked on several gay-escort sites, such as hotmilitarystud.com, and was reported to be “a $200-an-hour gay prostitute.” More titillating yet were reports that Gannon visited the White House regularly, often on days in which there were no press conferences. Was it possible that he might be part of what was known in Washington circles as the Lavender Bund, the coterie of closeted right-wing gays who helped the religious right and the Republicans advance an agenda that was often explicitly anti-gay? Later came revelations about Congressman Mark Foley and his suggestive e-mails to young congressional pages, and Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had a relationship with a male prostitute.

As the culture and political wars continued, they took a toll on the White House’s credibility. In March 2005, Republican politicians and the religious right — most of whom, theoretically at least, had been proponents of States’ rights — ignited a national controversy when they tried to intervene on behalf of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state, to prevent the removal of her feeding tube.


Bled dry

Meanwhile, two years into the war, America’s all-volunteer military force was being drained. With ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were not enough boots on the ground. To replenish their forces, officials raised the age limit for enlistment from 34 to 40. Tours of duty for soldiers were extended repeatedly, leaving many of them feeling tricked and demoralized. In particular, the military relied on call-ups from the National Guard, many of whom were “weekend warriors,” middle-aged men wrenched away from their families and jobs, at great sacrifice.

And what about Osama bin Laden — the all-but-forgotten villain behind 9/11? “We’re on a constant hunt for bin Laden,” Bush reassured America. “We’re keeping the pressure on him, keeping him in hiding.”

But Bush’s promises were wearing thin. The administration’s practice of transferring prisoners from Guantánamo to other countries where they might be tortured was called into question. There were multiple reports of brutal treatment of detainees by the government. Likewise, attorneys for Guantánamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s driver, argued in court that their client must be afforded the same legal protections that American citizens have. The numbers of wiretaps and secret searches soared.

By late spring of 2005, approximately $200 billion had been spent on the war in Iraq. Tens of thousands of people had been killed. Countless more were wounded or living as refugees. There were no WMDs. Iraq’s oil riches were being destroyed by saboteurs and stolen by terrorists. A report prepared for the UN Human Rights Commission showed that malnutrition rates in Iraqi children under five had nearly doubled since the US invasion.

Yet the administration continued to assert that victory was around the corner. “The level of activity that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline,” Cheney told Larry King in May 2005. “I think that they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”


The biggest blow of all to Bush came on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, killing more than 1836 people and causing more than $81 billion in damage. It was not the storm itself, of course, but the monumental incompetence of the Bush administration and its inability to manage the disaster that devastated New Orleans. Under Michael Brown’s aegis, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to heed warnings that the city’s levees might be breached, failed to evacuate the city, and failed to bring housing and relief to the victims after the storm. Disengaged and ineffective, Bush, most memorably, told the director of FEMA, “Heckuva job, Brownie.”

With Katrina, whatever myths were left about Bush’s presidency had been shattered. His approval ratings plummeted to 38 percent. When New Orleans needed the National Guard, the National Guard was in Iraq. Only 34 percent of the public approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq — roughly the same percentage who had approved of LBJ’s handling of Vietnam in March of 1968.

By this time, any chances that American forces could prevail in Iraq were gone. Less than a year after the marines’ horrific siege, Fallujah had morphed into a police state patrolled by thousands of Iraqi and American troops who lived in its bombed-out buildings. But the Sunni insurgency there had somehow survived. In a 12-day stretch in late summer, 48 Americans died. They would not be the last. Bush’s fate was sealed. His presidency was an irrevocable failure.


Awesome and somewhat dispiriting account of the past seven years. You can find much of this here in the Deep Thoughts section of the RKMB's. Seeing it all summarized like that was overwhelming. What a waste. What a tragedy. What a CRIME.

I dunoo.. The parts I quoted were the hardest to swallow. Iraq and Iran and the misinformation and outright propaganda is one thing but as a civvie, it really didn't affect me like it did you and people you know (with the exception of my wife's nephew who did briefly go to Baghdad as an Air Force mechanic ). But the entire domestic nightmare, all refreshed like that, it's fucking maddening as well as saddening. That such people can still try to poison the atmosphere as well as reason itself is tempered by the fact that they don't have many customers left anymore.

I like the way your piece ended with Katrina. BECAUSE it was so catastrophic and so needless, That was the moment it all turned around and righted itself in this country. Thank God eternally for that. Sanity reemerged in that horrible moment of tragedy. At least some good came of it.