The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 3: Goals and Successes

Column No. 220

At the end of my column on this subject two weeks ago, I restated my position that “success,” whether in a Presidency or on a Saturday morning errands trip, is to be measured against goals set and the degree to which they have been achieved.  Thus, when one looks at the BushCheney (or CheneyBush --- as I have said, your choice) record, is this a “failed Presidency?”  Hardly.  They set out to achieve what I have on more than one occasion termed a “coup d’etat in slow motion.”  BushCheney did not measure success in terms of polls nor subsequent Republican electoral victories (at least so far).  Forget them.  We must look at what they did with the control of the Executive Branch that they had.   

Upon gaining the Office of the Presidency Bush man first embraced the powers truly vested in him by the Constitution.  Bush was then little challenged by a very weak opposition.  Further, he was strongly supported for most of the first six years by his lock-step Republican Congress, and ongoing, his in-the-pocket Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.  Together, he used them to create an Office of the Presidency with powers that no reading of the Constitution can possibly support.  That’s success, man.  Let’s review some of the policy specifics.  They are well-known to most readers of TPJ, but we shall review them briefly here anyway. 

On the foreign policy side, let’s begin with Iraq.  Is/was it a disaster?  Well, it is, if you measure it on the supposed WMD/al-Qaeda connections, or the “establishment of Democracy” (not an originally stated goal of the US invasion), and certainly on what has happened to that benighted country since.  Ohmigod.  First the Iraqi people suffer under Hussein for 20-plus years.  Then they get Bush and his pro-counsels.  What did they do to deserve that sequence?  But supposing when that pre-invasion intelligence analysis predicting chaos in Iraq following an American invasion (“Analysts’ Warning of Iraq Chaos Detailed,” Pincus and DeYoung, Washington Post, May 26, 2007) came through, you didn’t say “ohmigod, how could we possibly go in there?”  But rather you said “ohmigod, exactly what we are looking for: Permanent War here we come.”   It is becoming ever more clear that the latter was indeed the BushCheney response.  And even though in the end they did not achieve it (at least not yet), why would they want Permanent War?  There are three main reasons. 

First, it was the central part of their campaign to create the atmosphere of Permanent Fear at home, the only way they could have possibly legally kept the Executive Branch in Republican hands after Jan. 20, 2009.  Second, it was a means of keeping one of their two most important backers, the arms industry, in clover even after the end of the Cold War oh-so-many years ago.  Third, it could have created the basis for creating that "terrorist attack" and coup d’etat in Oct., 2008 which would have keep CheneyBush themselves in power after Jan. 20, 2009, about which I and many others viewed as a distinct possibility.  And so, even before his famous-in-advance “September [2007] Report” was issued, Bush’s hand-picked Gen. “Mouthpiece” Petraeus was saying (in statements that appeared to have been written for him by Rove’s staff) “we’ll be there for 10 more years, at least.”  If what you want is indeed Permanent War, that’s success, man.  As a side-car to this main foreign policy thrust, Bush tried as hard as he could to create a mini-Cold War with Russia with his “defensive missiles on your borders” and the “bases on your soft Central Asian underbelly” program.  This would have helped for both the Permanent War strategy and “let’s keep the arms industry going full blast” plans. 

Turning to domestic policy (not necessarily in order of importance), a major goal was to, as Grover Norquist put it in his famous mantra: “Shrink the Federal government to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the bathtub.”  (That is, of course, drown those parts of the Federal that serve the National Domestic Interest, not those concerned with political oppression, domestic and foreign spying, defending the extractive industries from any interference, promoting the depredations of finance capitalism, domestic thought-control [e.g., on abortion rights and gay rights], and so on and so forth.) What happened after Katrina struck was only the most famous example of the Bush/Cheney/Norquist approach to government and governing. 

It was not incompetence, folks.  How the Georgite Federal government acted and continued to act in the aftermath of Katrina and in so many other venues is exactly how the Georgites want it to act, viz. the Norquist prescription.  They want to destroy all the functions of the Federal government, except those that have to do with the military, the prisons, other instruments of oppression and repression, and the use of tax revenues to line the pockets of themselves and their rich supporters.  It is happening exactly the way it was planned to.  The only big target Bush failed to hit was Social Security.  Chalk up another success for Bush. 

Further, Bush secured the dominance of the profit-makers, the drug companies, the insurance companies, and the health-technology companies, in the US health care delivery system.  And with the help of a group of reactionary Democrats, just as were organized against the Clinton Health Plan in 1994, these sectors are once again organizing to defeat the Obama Health Plan.  Bush may well have made sure that there will be no significant reform of the health care delivery system for the foreseeable future, for he has totally entrenched the aforementioned profit-makers.  As Bush made sure that there would be no Federal support for stem-cell research on his watch, the US fell behind in this arena of research as well as many others (e.g., alternative energy supply and how to combat global warming and climate change).  Bush made sure that homophobia would for the foreseeable future be at the centre of the Republican Party’s political attack apparatus (see the success of Prop. 8 in California. 

More successes?  Bush and Rove presided (indirectly to be sure) over the creation of the most powerful propaganda machine since the days of Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, their Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.  Just see how it wheeled into action, with a common agenda, after the Libby Commutation: “there was no crime; everyone knew Valerie Plame was covert; Ambassador Wilson’s findings were false; Libby’s memory was simply faulty.”  All lies, of course, but all reflecting the White House message, and, since it sounded just like him, most likely coming straight from Karl Rove.  Currently the PMP is screaming the lie that THE cause of the major breakdown that has occurred in Third Stage Capitalism (that is Finance Capitalism, succeeding the Mercantile and Industrial Stages) was “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac.”  They were of course supported (you know) by the “evil trio” of The Woman (Nancy Pelosi), the Gay (Barney Frank), and The Black (woman to boot) Maxine Waters.  Trick mortgages from companies required to have virtually no reserves, the “securitization” and “credit default swap” processes, interest-conflicted bond-rating, and market manipulation by totally unregulated “hedge funds,” among other factors, of course had nothing to do with it.

Bush converted (if I may use that term) the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into the “Promotion of Republican Rightist Religion Division” (N.A. Lewis, “Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission, New York Times, June 14, 2007).  Bush placed in the Federal Judiciary at every level an extensive cadre of the most reactionary jurists he could find.  He created a private army of “security contractors” totally beholden to him, and used them both overseas (Iraq) and at home (Katrina and now near the Mexican border, south of San Diego).  Some of them already wear black uniforms.  Since Blackwater has been kicked out of Iraq by the Iraqis, I wonder what their next mission might be.

At Guantanamo and elsewhere  Bush trained a huge cadre of torturers and brutal prison guards for purposes that can only be guessed at (except to say that they went way beyond dealing with a group of unfortunate Muslims caught up in a web that had no purpose except torture-systems development).  Then there was all the environmental stuff, no-to-global warming, and etc. And oh yes, I almost forgot, with his planned fantastical deficits and debt, and tax cuts for his rich friends and backers, even before the crisis of finance Capitalism, Bush tried as hard as he could to cripple fiscally any future Democratic government that would try to do anything positive for the country, along the lines of carrying out the governmental functions as spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution.  So far, Obama and his people seem to be outsmarting him on this one, but the story is far from over.

It has now become clear that Bush, without, then with, and now again without full control of Congress, accomplished many of his objectives, some probably beyond the Georgites’ wildest dreams of success.  He did this primarily because he and Cheney and Rove and their minions had a very well thought-out plan for doing so.  This man is not impotent.  He was highly competent, that is to do what he clearly set out to do.  In terms of his own terms, he was not a failure by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, when you compare what he achieved of the goals that he set out to achieve with what any other US President achieved in terms of his goals, Bush is indeed the most successful President of the United Sates, ever. 

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This column is based in part on my The Political Junkies.net Column No. 157, “The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 3: Goals and Successes”      

The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 2: The Constitution

Column No. 219

Continuing this series, this column focuses on what was the centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney (or Presidency: the destruction of our treasured Constitutional Democracy that (for the most part) has served our nation so well for the 218 years of its existence. 

To start, let’s review the seeming conundrum between this worst, while at the same time most successful, President ever.  An item on AOL News for June 13, 2007 was headlined: “Bush: Does He Have Any Clout Left?" Gosh.  His poll numbers were in the tank and going lower.  The Congress was Democratic (by the thickness of the hair on Joe Lieberman’s head which was not much, and no one could figure out what was going on inside Joe Lieberman’s head anyway until the McCain campaign, but the Democrats had majorities in both Houses).  By a fairly large margin the public disapproved of his major foreign policy initiative, the War on Iraq.  Republican candidates, for the Presidency, the Senate, and the House were beginning to desert him personally, while not so much on policy, except, for some, on the distractive issue of immigration. 

So did have any clout left?  You bet your sweet pitootie he did.  George Bush (and Cheney and Rove), better than any American President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, understood the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution.  And Bush, unlike any other American President ever, understood how to expand his powers way beyond those specified by the relatively limiting Article II of the Constitution, given that there was little real opposition with both the will and the power to challenge him in his campaign.  This campaign was as well planned as it was implemented.  It was obviously in the Bush Administration’s plans since the beginning of his Presidency.  For example, Cheney had been expounding on the theory of the “Unitary Executive,” (a polite term for dictatorship) since well before the Vice-Presidency was a gleam even in his eye. 

The Patriot Act, which clearly gave the President unconstitutional powers to over-ride the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution on his own authority, is 342 pages of complex legislation.  It was introduced to the Congress on Oct. 24, 2001, just 43 days after the 9/11 tragedy.  It is highly unlikely that this text could have been written in that period of time, especially given that first someone has to decide to ask the Dept. of Justice to prepare such a bill, that decision has to be reviewed, the concepts have to be developed, it has to be presented to Justice, writing assignments have to be made, drafts prepared and reviewed, everything has to collated, and so on and so forth, and in those days Bush had not by that time had the opportunity to litter the career ranks of the DOJ with his political appointees.  In fact, that bill had to have been months in the planning, preparation, and writing, with the Georgites just waiting for the right time to send it to Congress.  Then, forgetting all about Committee hearings in both Houses (and in the face of the “terrorist threat,” bipartisanship, anyone?), Congress was then given three days to pass it. 

Once upon a time, Karl Rove was uncharacteristically open and blunt about what he and Bush et al were all about.  As I noted in a TPJ column of mine published on Dec. 2, 2004, in The Guardian (UK) of November 25, 2004 the US political analyst Sidney Blumenthal had a column about the opening ceremonies for the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, AK.  The article was entitled "One gulp and Bush was gone.”  Mr. Blumenthal made a number of fascinating observations.  One of them was most chilling.  In reference to Karl Rove, Blumenthal noted that "offstage, beforehand, Rove and Bush had had their library tours.  According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy.  'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide.  'Yes, I am,' Rove replied.  Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools ...' “On the first, indeed they did.  On the second, they tried their damnedest.

One of Bush’s primary goals upon taking power was to establish this new concept of American government, the “Unitary Executive.”  The lawyer John Yoo, who did much of the leg-work on the “torture-is-more-than-OK” policy before he left the Department of Justice, has trumpeted his work on it in two books.  Cheney talked about it on numerous occasions, and still is, except, of course it doesn’t apply to Pres. Obama: wrong party, wrong color.  Their flacks in the Privatized Ministry of Propaganda, like Bill Kristol, late of The New York Times, but always of Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, spoke admiringly and approvingly of Bush’s “near dictatorial powers.”  And one does have to observe, although many just do not want to face facts, that he did pretty well established a Unitary Executive. 

It was created both by legislation passed by the rubber-stamp Republican Congress Bush had for six years, and other steps he took simply by declaring, unchallenged, his own supposed authority, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.  Just read its Article II, the bulk of which is concerned with the method of electing the President, the power to make treaties and appointments, and the State of the Union Address.  There ain’t nothin’ to be found in it like anything they did.  And oh yes, it does specify that the President shall “take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed.”  So let’s see what all this that is nowhere to be found in Article II has lead to, not necessarily in order of importance. 

There was Bush’s conceit that the Constitution gave him the power to issue “Signing Statements” that in turn gave him the power to ignore statutes passed by the Congress.  His claim to this power was under some imaginary authority of the office that if he thinks that something in an Act of Congress is unconstitutional, by saying so at the time of signing he can just ignore or even break the law.  (It was subsequently revealed by a Government Accountability Office [GAO] study of his “Signing Statements,” that he and a variety of Federal departments did just that.)  In his claim of authority to disobey the law because he “thinks,” late in the game, that it is unconstitutional, he failed to note that he already has the power to reject a bill passed by Congress on any grounds he wishes (like, hey, I just don’t like the idea of stem cell research so to the extent that I can, I am going to prevent its benefits from being of use to those who do), before signing it into law.  That power is called the veto.  He did use that one too with increasing frequency once control of the Congress passed into Democratic hands.  But under the Constitution itself, the veto is the only power of challenge to congressionally passed legislation he has.  No matter.  He changed the Constitution on his own authority. 

There were the aforementioned powers of permanent imprisonment without trial of anyone, foreign or US citizen, that he labeled a “terrorist” or “aider and abettor of terrorism.”  I have written on numerous occasions of these claimed powers and how they violate the Fourth (search and seizure, probable cause), Fifth (due process) and Sixth (fair trial) Amendments to the Constitution.  As I have also noted periodically he “amended” the Constitution’s Article Six on several occasions.  The Geneva Conventions are signed and ratified treaties of the United States.  Under Article VI they are thus classified as part of the “Supreme Law of the Land.” 

No matter.  The then Counsel to the President, Alberto Gonzales, later Attorney General, on the prompting of John Yoo, labeled the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and thus totally ignorable by the President when it came to the matter of torture (which of course they never authorized).  Ignoring provisions of the Geneva Conventions on the grounds of a determination by one of the signatories that they at some point in time will be considered “quaint” is nowhere to be found in the language of the treaties.  Thus the Georgites simply ignored our treaty obligations rather than either abrogating them or attempting to renegotiate them.  So much simpler, you know.  Thus they violated the Constitution, again.  While we are on Article VI, the UN Charter, under its Article 51, prohibits preemptive war.  As a ratified treaty obligation of the United States, it too is part of the Supreme Law of the land.  And so, the War on Iraq, which Bush himself described as a “preventive war,” otherwise known around the world as “pre-emptive war,” among many other things was unconstitutional.  But who cares, as long as the Georgites had their so-called “Unitary Presidency.”

Then there are the unchallenged Executive Orders of a type not provided for by the Constitution.  Two of major importance were National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Directive/HSPH-20.  In them Bush established for himself the power to run all three branches of the Federal government in case of a “national emergency,” as defined and declared by, you guessed it, GW Bush (and/or Dick Cheney?).  Thus the President unilaterally placed himself not only above but also in control of the other two branches of government in a situation, “national emergency,” that he gave himself the power to define and declare. 

A “failed Presidency?”  Hardly.  As I noted last two weeks ago, success is measured against goals set and the degree to which they have been achieved.  Bush set out to achieve what I have on more than one occasion termed a “coup d’etat in slow motion.”  Forget the polls.  This man first embraced the powers truly vested in him by the Constitution.  Then, he was little challenged by the weak opposition, and strongly supported for the first six years by his lock-step Republican Congress, and ongoing, his in-the-pocket Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.  He proceeded to use them, step-by-step and piece-by-piece, to create an Office of the Presidency with powers that no reading of the Constitution could possibly support.  That’s success, man. 

In future columns we shall review policy specifics.

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This column is based in part on my The Political Junkies.net Column No. 156, “The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 2: The Constitution”     

The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 1

Column No. 218

About two years ago, on The Political Junkies.net I published a series of columns under this title. I thought it useful to revisit the argument, and will be doing it over my next several columns here on TPJmagazine.

Under the combined efforts of the GOP and their media Scream Machine and Pres. Obama’s determination to “look forward, not back,” the record of the Bush Presidency is receding quickly from public view. Most observers who still look at it (and future historians will return to it aplenty, we can rest assured) characterize as the worst, or at least one of the worst, Presidencies in American history. But “worst” is a value judgment. In this particular case, given my values, I agree with that assessment. But I am not talking here about an application of my values. I am talking about an application of the values of Bush himself and his principal supporters: the extractive industry, military-industrial complex, and prison/industrial complex segments of the US power elite, the thought/behavior-control legions of the Christian Right, and the Republican Scream Machine in the mass media. In applying their values and measuring against them what of his original true goals (not the advertised ones, almost of them being lies) he accomplished, George W. Bush becomes the Most Successful American President. 

OK, OK, but “How can you, Steve Jonas, give him that appellation,” you might ask?  “Awhile back didn’t you say that he was the ‘Worst American President?’ ” And I would say, “indeed I did, but one thing has nothing to do with the other.  In fact, I began my TPJ column of Sept. 14, 2006 with the following text (edited slightly here):”

“George Bush is the worst President the United States has ever had.  Notice that I did not use the word ‘arguably.’  He is simply is.  For one reason.  He is the first President ever to have as his primary goal the destruction of the Constitutional, Democratic, system under which he took power (notice that I did not say ‘elected’), and under which our country has been successfully governed in the 215-plus years since its founding.  This is for him the absolutely primary goal.  For the nation as a whole his achievement of it would obviously be an unmitigated disaster.

“There have been, to be sure, other bad Presidents.  Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan essentially stood by as the nation slid towards civil war.  Andrew Johnson established the basis for what became the South’s long-term victory in that Civil War in every element other than preserving the legal institution of slavery (see my column, “How the South Won the Civil War, Sunday, November 06, 2005.

“Some of those bad Presidencies shared major characteristics with that of the Second Bush.  Ulysses S. Grant (who was drunk in office), Warren G. Harding, and Ronald Reagan presided over Administrations rife with corruption.  James Polk and Lyndon Johnson essentially lied our country into foreign wars aimed at, in the first case, gaining large swatches of the territory of another county, and in the second preventing the establishment, through the Democratic process, of a system of government in another country that ours did not approve of.  Herbert Hoover was incompetent when it came to dealing with major economic and natural disasters, and had a strong predilection for favoring the rich.  Nixon was paranoid; Clinton was personally irresponsible, and so on and so forth.  But none of them set out to destroy US Constitutional Democracy and replace it with a Dictatorship (otherwise known as the ‘Unitary Executive’).” 

And so, you might say, “If, Steve, you can say that, how can you label him ‘Most Successful?’ ” And I would respond, “because it all depends upon how you define ‘success.’   If you define it as achieving goals and objectives that are in the best interests of the majority of the American people and indeed of the people of the world at large, and as meeting to the best of his ability the terms of the oath of office he has taken twice --- ‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States’ --- then clearly George Bush has not only not been the most successful American President.  He has clearly been the least successful American President.   

However, let us say that you define “success” as achieving what you, yourself, have defined as “successful,” and then set goals and objectives for you to achieve in line with that definition.  Well, this is exactly what George W. Bush has done. He has ignored the Constitution.  His political and policy agendas, both domestic and foreign ran totally against the best interests of the majority of the people who elected him.  Indeed they ran against the interests of virtually everyone in the country, rich, poor and in between, as we are seeing now. However, look at his agenda, and his definition of success, at what he has accomplished since taking office. Why I think that it is a “slam dunk” that indeed he is the most successful President this country has ever had. 

The estimable Zbigniew Brzezinski and Dennis Ross, former senior US diplomats and national security advisors/consultants, have each written books about the disasters of BushCheney foreign policy.  (Mr. Ross now has a top position in the Obama/Clinton State Dept.) They are, respectively, Second Chance: The Crisis of American Superpower and Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World.  They present detail after detail of each foreign policy disaster Bush has created.  Each author then offers a series of recommendations about how the US as a nation can recover, following the end of the Bush Presidency, and they think that it can. 

By anyone’s definition, then the Bush Administration’s foreign policy was a total failure, no?  No.  Not by anyone’s definition.  It is a total failure (or worse) according to the definition of the term used by those of us who believe in: Constitutional Democracy, the Rule of Law, the provisions of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions (which by the provision of Article VI are part of the law or our land), in the role of government as set forth by the Preamble to the Constitution, in the Social Compact established by the New Deal, in the Separation and Balance of Powers and the Checks-and-Balances provisions that are essential elements provided by the Constitution for the effective democratic operation of the Federal government.  For us, whether Republican or Democrat (and yes, there are still Republicans who believe in these principles although their number is dwindling), truly conservative (not Conservative) or liberal or progressive, the Bush Presidency is, to repeat, a failure. 

But for the Georgites, yes for Bush and Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Norquist and Gonzales and Wolfowitz and the whole Neocon Establishment, the Bush Presidency was a resounding success at up until the time of the economy’s collapse.  Even with the economy’s collapse, for some like Grover Norquist the Bush Presidency can still be considered a success. This because the collapse is making it so hard for President Obama and the Democrats in the Congress who are true Democrats to go about fixing the oh-so-many things about our country that need to be fixed and only the Federal government can fix. 

Thus, when we measure the outcomes of the politics, policies, and programs of the Bush Administration in terms of what its original goals and agenda were, a grand success it was.  When we look at what they really set out to accomplish, boy, they are winners.  Not that Bush ever told the American people what his true agenda was, how he was defining success.  In fact, Bush did his very best to conceal his true agenda from the American people, and the Congress too.  Not that a Democratic candidate for anything facing him (much less the Shrum-driven Kerry of 2004) ever had the temerity to flush out and write large what the true goals of the Georgites were and are.  (And for purely political reasons, I am convinced, President Obama chose not to in his campaign, and now in the White House too.) It is not that the true agenda was not there to see, and still is.  It is just that most commentators and analysts who have any significant access to the public airwaves and print media really didn’t and don’t want to talk about it. Politicians with the will and wherewithal to do so are few and very far between. 

In my next column I will begin to look at the record.

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This column is largely based on one I published on The Political Junkies.net on June 27, 2007