VANITY FAIR EDITOR lambasts Bush the BOZO
We've lost lives and allies, liberties and freedoms. In the age of George Bush, we have lost our way
The first of two exclusive extracts from Graydon Carter's new book, What We've Lost
Profile of Graydon Carter
216.239.57.104
Tuesday August 31, 2004
The Guardian
"I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation" - George W Bush, August 2002
Making his final decision to launch an invasion of Iraq, President George W Bush did not seek the advice of his father, a veteran of the second world war and a former president who had gone to battle with the same foe a decade earlier. Nor did he seek the overall final recommendation of his secretary of defence, or of his secretary of state, the only man in his cabinet who had been decorated for military service in wartime with the medals befitting a national hero. Instead, as Bob Woodward wrote in his book, Plan of Attack, Bush consulted his God, a God who the president presumes takes sides in disputes between peoples.
I am an American by choice rather than by birth. I'm a white, 55-year-old Episcopalian. Born in Canada, I've lived in America for half my life. I've raised four children here, have done reasonably well professionally, and am by most measures a happy man. I've followed politics all my life, but politics has never been my life, if you know what I mean. To be honest, I really never had much truck with politicians of any stripe.
But I love this country, its land, its soul, and, above all, its people.
So what does it say about us that we let a man of such blind conviction and wilful ignorance lead us?
Bush's reckless, unnecessary decision to wage a war of choice with a country that was neither an enemy nor a real threat is at the very root of all we've lost during his presidency. We've lost our good reputation and our standing as a great and just superpower. We've lost the sympathy of the world following September 11 and turned it into an alloy of fear and hatred. We've lost lives and allies. We've lost liberties and freedoms. We've lost billions of dollars that could have gone toward a true assault on terrorism. It could fairly be said that in the age of George W Bush, we have lost our way.
The deceptions that took the United States into Iraq were the work of an administration without care for logic or truth. The aftermath, a war seemingly without end and one that is costing the country tens of billions of dollars and the lives of about 13 young American soldiers every week, is the work of an administration without judgment or foresight.
The sideshow in the Middle East proved in the end to be a convenient diversion for the Bush White House: it distracted Americans' attention from the administration's domestic agenda, its ideological war at home. Iraq also served as a shield for the administration, in the sense that the White House defined any opposition to or criticism of what it was up to in those early days as the work of the unpatriotic or the traitorous. With the country looking the other way, Bush and Cheney began dismantling decades' worth of advances in civil liberties, healthcare, education, the economy, the judiciary and the environment.
The Bush White House inherited a robust economy brimming with jobs and budget surpluses. It may well end its four years with a net loss of jobs during Bush's first term, a feat unsurpassed since the Hoover administration. In its desire to create tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, it created a horizon of budget deficits, crippling debt and trade imbalances.
The Bush White House inherited an education system that, while not perfect, was in many ways the envy of the world. Its unreasonable and underfunded No Child Left Behind programme hobbled state systems by placing rigid demands on school districts but pledging little money to meet those demands.
The Bush White House inherited an environment that had been all but saved by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1970s. The administration, many of whose members were plucked from the oil and gas industries, turned its back on more than 30 years of advances in environmental legislation and global treaties to reward its campaign backers from the petrochemical industry. The Bush administration made it clear that it refused to live with any kind of restrictions on its energy use. When the White House officially pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, it was the first in a series of defiant snubs to allies, trading partners and neighbours that began the dramatic decline of America's reputation around the world.
The Bush White House inherited a healthcare system that favoured the rich, then made it worse, turning it into a complex apparatus that will produce unprecedented profits for another set of major campaign backers - the health and pharmaceutical industries - all at the expense of regular patients, the elderly and the poor.
The Bush White House inherited a government of model transparency and purposefully bent it to the will of the most secretive administration in recent American history. It inherited a judicial system that was America's centrist, if not conservative, legal safeguard and turned it into an ideological, rightwing juggernaut.
At the heart of all of this loss were two unforgivable deceptions embedded in George W Bush's 2000 presidential campaign: that he was a "uniter and not a divider", and that he was a "compassionate conservative". This "uniter" became a president who has divided Americans more than at any time since the civil war. "Compassionate conservative" was a meaningless bit of public relations designed to appease the middle ground of the Republican party and the conservative flank of the Democratic party. Once in office, the Bush administration pursued not a compassionate course but rather a harsh, far-rightwing effort to roll back decades of liberal legislation.
Electing George W Bush was seen in many quarters of the world as a mistake, a voters' aberration. Now the goodwill that poured in from around the world after September 11 has dissolved in the president's hands. America has gone from being loved to being hated. His re-election would send those same quarters a message of intent and hostility on the part of the US that may take decades fully to recover from.
A second term would see more tax cuts for the wealthy. A second term would see further encroachment on civil liberties as the administration pushes for passage of Patriot Act II. A second term would see rightwing ideologues further transform the nation's health, education and environmental departments. A second term would see one, and possibly two, new rightwing justices on the supreme court, skewing the political balance in the US's most important judicial arena for decades to come.
America itself has been rent asunder, more divided along party lines than at any time in recent memory. It is safe to say that history will not be kind to the Bush administration. Long after it is out of office, after the investigations have run their course, after we examine the wreckage to our land and to our fragile but enduring democracy, only then will we fully comprehend all that the Bush presidency has done. And only then will we fully realise what we've lost. |
