A Few Words about George W. Bush

The little diatribe in my profile deserves some explanation.


I am not the type of person who routinely thinks that American presidents are evil. I was once a registered Republican, and I voted for both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton at least once. I may have disagreed with other presidents, but I would not have called them despicable. Only George W. Bush.


It is my contention that something fundamentally changed in America during the Bush administration. Up until that time, we had two major parties that could at least make an argument that they were trying to do what was best for the country, but between the years 2000 and 2008 the Republican Party became a party that no decent, rational, and informed person could support. I write this advisedly and will emphasize it again: not one decent, rational, informed American currently supports the Republican Party, any more than any such Amercan supports the KKK or the American Nazi Party. If you support the current form of the party, you are either ignorant, irrational, morally lacking, or some combination of the three.



That's a strong statement, and I will make the case over time. I will say for now that I would not stick my neck out that far if I were not certain that a mountain of evidence supports the conclusion.



For a start, let's look at a few accomplishments of the Bush administration:

• Lied about the reasons to go to war with Iraq, resulting in the deaths of more than 100,000 people and the maiming of many more.


• Condoned and conducted torture and created their own definition of the word "torture", which simply excluded the types of torture they wanted to perform. George Orwell would have been so proud.


• Deliberately misled the public into thinking that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.


• Exposed a covert CIA agent, then commuted the sentence of the man convicted of lying about it.


• Did precisely what the FISA law prohibits, spying on Americans without a warrant.


• Invented a new class of person, "enemy combatant", that it could then claim had no rights at all.


• Incarcerated people, some of them undoubtedly innocent or guilty of very little, for years without any legal recourse.


• Suspended habeas corpus.


• Used signing statements to indicate that the President did not intend to enforce laws as written.


• Used the Justice Department to try to consolidate Republican power.


• Attempted to limit the right to vote to keep Democrats off the voter rolls.


• Illegally hired government workers based on their political views.


• Claimed enormous unprecedented powers never imagined in the Constitution.
• Told staff not to honor subpoenas from Congress.
• Replaced scientific findings with religious views.
• Increased government secrecy and had a policy of stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests.
• Leaked false information to the press and then cited the resulting stories to bolster their own lies.

And there was much more. I can never make that list without forgetting some important things. And the list is limited to matters that are blatantly dishonest, unconstitutional, illegal, and/or punishable as war crimes. There were other matters of policy and partisanship that were really disgusting as well, but let's be clear: This President, and his administration, did not respect or follow the laws of the United States or the Constitution. Not just once or twice, or in extreme circumstances, but repeatedly and routinely.

I will address right now one item I know some people will quarrel with -- the President and his minions did not lie about Iraq; they were misled by faulty intelligence. This is absolutely, unquestionably, wrong. Incorrect, not true. On, I believe, August 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney said in a speech that we knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and after that other members of the administration, including the President, began to repeat it. Any third grader will tell you, if you know something, it has to be true. It turns out there were no WMDs, so they could not have known. Other people who knew about the intelligence available said that Cheney clearly overstated the case. That's a lie, and a big one, a huge one, and an undeniable one. If you just read that, and you still don't think Bush and members of his administration lied about the war, you aren't thinking rationally.

More on Bush and Republicans to come, but I think the list above is enough to support my disdain for Bush and what is left of the Republican Party.