Artiles
I Pledge Allegiance to the United States of Sociopathy
By Elizabeth Keyes, February 05, 2019 "Information Clearing House"
In Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller, Shadow of a Doubt, spunky, recent high school grad Teresa Wright discovers her beloved uncle is a serial killer.
Wright's subsequent efforts to protect herself and others from psychopathic Joseph Cotten are continually frustrated by the extraordinary denial of her family and her community lost in the "thrall" of the worldly, smooth-talking Uncle Charlie.
Heartbroken and distraught, she must contend with her uncle's violent agenda while being obstructed by a naive and vulnerable community of his enablers and/or soon to be victims.
Wright's horrifying predicament resonates as I witness my – our – psychopathic uncle – UNCLE SAM, the U.S. government – perpetrate violent crime upon crime against humanity enabled by a maddening, morally mute, over-trusting, under-informed and/or indifferent citizenry.
I don't think I'll ever be able to fully wrap my mind or heart around the profound lack of outrage and empathy among government leaders from both corporate parties, the corporate media, as well as the vast majority of my fellow citizens at the ongoing atrocities of the Global War on Terror (more accurately, the "US Global War of Terror") and the 'regime change' covert and/or overt operations initially and sinisterly described as "humanitarian interventions."
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seemingly justified a "gloves off" bloodlust defiance by the political and military "guardians" of America of the legal and moral pillars of our democracy. All these years since, the mandates for constitutional and moral justice "for all" have gone unheeded.
The Iraq war was launched illegally and with manipulative lies. Bush's torture program was in total opposition to constitutional, international and moral law. Its perpetrators deserved serious prosecution.
The Geneva Conventions were ratified once upon a time by a U.S. Congress. Habeas corpus, in place since 1679, so cavalierly suspended with the GWOT's "anything goes" rationale.
When such gobsmacking evil manifests on such a collective and global level for such a sustained amount of time, it deserves a serious analysis by those of us still spiritually awake enough to protest it.
At this point in my concerned citizenship, I am moving beyond anger into an awe of the scope of the – well – I call it downright and seriously unchallenged EVIL. Looking for a more clinical term than that? How about patriarchal psychopathology?
In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter acknowledged the long trail of U.S. international war crimes as well as the lack of historical and current accountability by this government, corporate media and its citizenry for them.
"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening . . . You have to hand it to America . . . masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Speaking of bottom-line and minimized evil, the specter of torture has reared its ugly head once again with President Donald Trump, an unabashed torture enthusiast, and the confirmation of his choice for Director of the CIA, "Bloody Gina" Haspel, notorious overseer of a secret black prison in Thailand where brutal torture was conducted. She was readily confirmed by a combination of Democratic and Republican senators. Senators, no doubt, who after fearful years of being labeled "oo soft on terror" were not about to stick their necks out for decency and morality.
Too many of my fellow citizens, terminally influenced by an amoral corporate media, I am nonetheless at a loss for their easy acceptance of torture.
A Pew Research poll released in 2017 revealed that 48% of the US citizenry believed that some circumstances could justify the use of torture, and 49% maintained there were no circumstances that would ever justify it.
Every other US citizen is thumb's up for the use of torture!
How disturbing over the last decade for the use of torture to be normalized and decriminalized by the military, citizenry, politicians, media, and those government lawyers who early on cravenly defied the obvious spirit of basic "Golden Rule" morality, the Constitution, and international law, to minimize the savagery of torture with euphemistic labels still parroted by much of the corporate media and or applied as fig leaves over the reprehensible.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques." Thank you, New York Times. They are monstrous methods of inflicting debilitating psychological and physical anguish on victims even at times to the point of death. Techniques that, along with being illegal and immoral, are universally regarded as unreliable. They are reliable only in generating false confessions (which apparently was one of the goals of the original, craven perpetrators).
Torture is wrong. It is evil.
Reading Jacob Weisberg's book, The Bush Tragedy, I learned that the main ego-armature for George W. Bush during his Yale University years was his participation in the fraternity culture.
Weisberg discloses that when "W" finally became head of a fraternity, he "ruled" at one point that lowly pledges be branded with real, Texas branding irons as part of their hazing.
When the Yale Daily News got wind of Bush's sadistic and zealous intention, it disclosed it to the entire university community. The Yale administrative patriarchs immediately huddled together to deal with the negative P.R. (I'm guessing that far outweighed the actual physical or psychological welfare of the targeted pledges.)
The patriarchs solution? Rein in Mr. Bush, whose sociopathy they presumably minimized as an impish, "boys-will-be-boys"-ness. With the proverbial wink and nod, they insisted young Bush forego the branding irons and instead ONLY make use of scalding metal coat hangers or lit cigarettes to burn freshman flesh.
Say what?
Problem solved? This Yale incident foreshadowed and undoubtedly helped foster the ultimate creation of the craven and covert torture program by Bush and cabal, particularly with the ever-Satanic Dick Cheney.
The green-lighting of that more modest degree of torture speaks volumes of a troubling, profoundly unempathetic – sociopathic— macho-mindset within the deepest, most influential halls of America's supposed intellectual and ruling class elite and mentors of said elite. They enabled and abetted young, already morally-deranged Master Bush, instead of role modeling and enforcing boundaries of basic human decency.
Just another rite of male passage? No wonder our American culture is so violent.
Andy Worthington, a prime advocate for victimized prisoners of Gitmo once reminded his audience during a NYC anti-war forum that in 2007 it was Senator Obama who declared:
"In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power."
President Obama posed as a person of character most convincingly. It got him the White House. Twice.
Obama took no responsibility for his breathtaking, 180-degree reversals of golden promises of anti-Bush reform, pre-election.
The most obvious and necessarily immediate reforms that he failed to act on were the restoration of habeas corpus rights and the prosecution of the perpetrators of the clandestine Bush torture program, of those who had most reprehensibly exploited the post-9/11 fear, outrage and vengeance sensibility of much of the citizenry.
Obama's policy decisions instead included deadly drone warfare, assassination kill lists, unlimited due-process-less detentions, military tribunals, countless corporate wars and U.S. military (corporate-opportunistic) garrisoning; and the continuation of Gitmo and God only knows what other black sites.
Obama's posture was of an always rhetorically amiable and faux-reasonable Roman emperor with thumb's up or down power over life and death. Many of his "subjects" adored him.
"We tortured some folks," he finally admitted with a shrug at a press conference. As if it was not a colossally serious deal.
"Folks"? Now there's a friendly word.
This is heart-of-darkness territory. Obama chose to become an enabler of violators of human rights and then a violator of them himself. To add to the horror, Obama so readily was enabled by the media in this, the vast majority of Congress, and the vast majority of citizens.
Does the cult of celebrity in America overwhelm basic human decency? It seems so.
Do U.S. leaders as diverse (but all amoral) as Bush, Obama and Trump, along with callous political cronies, military leaders and media, only need to repeat the word "terror" enough times to have so much of America fall into a "do with us, our money, or anyone else whatever depraved, anti-humanity behavior you want" kind of swoon?
"To torture or not to torture" not only a hot news media topic, but fodder for jingoistic and sensationalized movies and TV shows (as the normalization of torture steamrolls on).
Loyalty and admiration for the troops (no matter what war crimes they may be committing) and/or blind trust in a national administrative and military authority should not override human decency. American "exceptionalism" should not override identifying and ending war criminality. It does.
The status quo establishment in America has us locked into perpetual war with untold mass global deaths and maiming and ever-increasing economic hardship for all humanity except for a tiny percentage of transnational elites.
A paradigm shift from a "profits over people" patriarchy to the humanism of partnership and cooperation is the answer, but that would require decisions based on a U.S. leadership, a U.S. media and a U.S. society that seriously honored empathy, justice and the law.
Ours do not.
Scott Peck asserts in his book, People of the Lie, that mental health is "dedication to reality at all costs." This healthy sense of reality includes an in-touchness with one's inner reality and a respect for the reality of others. It requires the capacity to fully think and FEEL.
This "feeling capacity" – including and especially EMPATHY — seems most vulnerable to dysfunction in our society and world, among both leaders and followers.
Feelings are profoundly under-valued in our U.S. society, and this feeling dysfunction is at the heart (or lack thereof) of the existing suffering and injustice.
Alice Miller, in her book For Your Own Good, refers to a "poisonous pedagogy" that can infect a society. She explains that that was what made the "good" (as in compliant) German population easy prey for the authoritarianism of Hitler.
Miller emphasizes that the capacity for empathy is not linked to one's intelligence. She points out that both Hitler and Stalin had enthusiastic, highly intellectual followers.
If one is not able to respond with authentic feelings and thoughtful consideration to real life situations involving oneself or others, one is susceptible to "enthrallment" to the will of a toxic and controlling leader, asserts Miller.
She also contends that unprocessed trauma in one's childhood, that is, when children are exposed to profound degrees of non-empathy from adult caretakers, will cause a crippling or shutting down of their feeling capacity later in adult life along with the potential of a sudden dismantling of their own will for the will of another. Miller explains that such trauma undoubtedly also happened to the original destructive caretakers during their childhoods in a continuing, generational cycle of dysfunction.
When trauma goes unprocessed by feelings, that is, it stays unfelt and un-grieved, it induces one to over-identify with an aggressor and enter his or her "thrall" later in adulthood. Also, such conditioning can induce one to project one's negative feelings about oneself onto others as scapegoats. People with a disordered feeling capacity cannot handle and take mature responsibility for whatever guilt, shame, anger, frustration gets triggered within them in the present and must deflect it.
In People of the Lie, Scott Peck discusses the experiments of Dr. Stanley Milgram at Yale in 1961 which revealed how people were so readily intimidated by an authority in a white coat that they willingly would inflict what they thought were disabling electric shocks on strangers without question. Six out of 10 of the tested humans were willing to inflict serious harm on strangers from their own over-conditioning to the will of authority figures.
Peck emphasizes how obedience is the foundation of military discipline. "A follower is never a WHOLE person," he maintains. Tragically, most people are far more comfortable in the "follower" role, leaving the responsibility and decision-making to those who step forward as leaders. When ruthless, reckless, immature, even sociopathic persons assume leadership positions, especially in an authoritarian system, the results can be tragic.
He also contends that a lack of conscience in human beings is partly due to "specialization", a detachment from responsibility. One regards oneself as simply playing a role in a group scenario and thus can easily pass the "moral buck" so-to-speak to another part of the group. Troops shooting foreign civilians with a kind of "video-game aloofness", for example will rationalize: "We don't kill the people. Our weapons do. Whoever gave us these weapons and instructions are really responsible for the killing. Not us."
Another example he cites is of how weapons manufacturers, sellers, lobbyists, etc. feel no personal responsibility for the consequences of violence from the weapons they distribute. The moral decision as to the use of the weapons is not part of their "pecialized" roles. (And the financial profits are just too damn juicy to consider otherwise.)
Peck also cites the regressive shutting down of authentic and appropriate feelings in people due to a phenomenon called "psychic numbing." The mind has the ability to anesthetize itself from feelings in the face of trauma. "The horrible becomes normal," he writes.
Finally, he explains that groups bond often within a collectively egotistical groupthink by circling the proverbial wagons against a common, demonized enemy. "The other." Scapegoating occurs when a group collectively projects the "badness" of themselves, too difficult to fathom, onto others.
James Lucas in an article for globalresearch.com back in 2015 declared that the United States has killed approximately 20 million people in 37 countries since the end of World War II.
How many of us can actually begin to feel and process the utter enormity of such a revelation? (One thinks of a quote attributed to the profoundly non-empathetic Joseph Stalin: "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.")
What say you to 20 million, America? Look what our UNCLE SAM has wrought.
Can we as a nation cultivate a collective capacity for "empathy"? A critical mass of us reached a breakthrough of collective conscience during the Vietnam era (though it took us long enough, admittedly).
Can each of us dedicate ourselves to a "reality at all costs" awareness for our individual as well as collective mental health?
The fast hardening of soft fascism seems to be happening with little conscious struggle among the masses who seem convinced we non-elites can get away with staying passive and will be supported by our corporate-captured politicians and media.
Can we face down and acknowledge the relentless criminality of our government and representatives (who are not really OUR representatives).
If such crimes are not acknowledged, called out and then accounted for they will continue and escalate in number and nature. Even more frightening, more and more and more "good" Americans will succumb to this "normalization" of evil.
Confronting evil is daunting. Confronting mass and institutionalized evil all the more so. Sickening. Spiritually exhausting. It even has been said to biologically weaken one's thymus gland that supports the body's immune system.
We must detach from seductive "cronyism" with authoritarians or authoritarian followers and encourage others to do so.
We must explore the details of what is going on in our citizen name, with our tax dollars and especially with our vulnerable, patriotic and earnest young who can become tragically confounded by and induced to perpetrate institutionalized evil policies.
We owe it to ourselves and our world to stay whole and awake as citizens. To speak truth to power. Once again, "a follower is not a whole person" as Scott Peck declared.
"This is why the individual is sacred. For it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost."
It has been said there are three types of people in this world. A smallish group of people who make things happen. A larger group of people who watch things happen. (I am thinking, of those "good people who do nothing.") And finally the third, excessively large and clueless group, exclaiming, "WHAT THE F*CK HAPPENED???"
Let's try to shrink the second and third groups and expand the first by getting up and exercising those consciences.
This article was originally published by "Counterpunch" -
Links
Alien Tort Claims Act "has been used for more than twenty years to sue individuals responsible for egregious human rights abuses"
All the President's Lies "It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president"
An Alternative to War "people in positions of great wealth and power tend not to be good people. Rather they tend to be greedy, ruthless, power hungry, dishonest, cruel—-in short, evil people"
Annals of Outrage The Bush Administration's ten most outrageous scandals -- an orgy of fraud, mismanagement and corruption
Art Spiegelman, cartoonist for The New Yorker, resigns in protest at censorship Art Spiegelman decided to leave The New Yorker in protest at what he calls "the widespread conformism of the mass media in the Bush era." ... "From the time that the Twin Towers fell, it seems as if I've been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island. I no longer feel in harmony with American culture, especially now that the entire media has become conservative and tremendously timid"
ASHCROFT notes and quotes
Brazil Leading Counter Revolution Against U.S. Economic Policies articles on current developments
Bush Administration's Attacks on the United Nations
Bush Doctrine [now a dead link] Bush's reponse to the west coast dock strikes made it clear that he considers any interruption of profit making, including safety measures and worker negotiations, as threats to national security and an excuse to bring in the military
Bush Exit Ramp "George W. Bush's loose tongue is complicating an already dangerous moment for the United States, but he seems unwilling or unable to get his rhetoric under control. Is it a case of a political tin ear that doesn't realize how he sounds to the rest of the world or is it a troubling part of the president's personality?"
Bush Family Archive revealing articles
Bush Family Watch Bush Family Skeletons back to 1918
Bush Lies "George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission. He has misstated facts, knowingly or not. He has misled. He has broken promises, been unfaithful to political vows. Through his campaign for the presidency and his first years in the White House, he has mugged the truth—not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly to advance his career and his agenda. Lying greased his path toward the White House; it has been one of the essential tools of his presidency." (from the Introduction)
Bushiad and the Idyossey two epic poems - "The blood lust that overtakes the minds and bodies of men on a periodic basis continues unabated in our modern age. In The Bushiad, and The Idyossey the Greek gods of old are supplanted by contemporary corporate gods, also immortal and with insatiable needs for increased wealth and power. Like Homer's Greek gods they do all they can to make sure the outcome is fixed" (found by Mary-Ellen Jacobs)
Bush's Resume
Bush Watch critical views on the presidency - "a daily political internet magazine based in Austin, Texas"
Bush Whacked USA critical of Bush administration. Quote of the month: "In the Middle Ages, armies were accompanied by large numbers of prostitutes. In the Iraq war, the American and British armies are accompanied by large numbers of journalists"
Bush's Africa Agenda excerpts from article by Emira Woods and William D. Hartung
Bush's Resume actual as opposed to made up by him
A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America being called by liberals a landmark essay "The new national security strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation"
Conservatives Need Psychological Help new study says
Deception Dollars big hit at demonstrations against the war in Iraq and the war on freedom by the Bush administration
Ethics a short quiz
Expats Against Bush
Fallacies of U.S. Plans to Invade Iraq Foreign Policy in Focus article
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." ---Theodore Roosevelt
Fascism Anyone? defines the fourteen key characteristics of fascism
Free Trade is War article by Naomi Klein
FTAA - Free Trade Area of the Americas
George Bush Channeling George Orwell [link is now dead, but quote is still good] "As President Bush wages his war against terrorism and moves to create a huge homeland security apparatus, he appears to be borrowing heavily, if not ripping off ideas outright, from George Orwell. The work in question is 1984, the prophetic novel about a government that controls the masses by spreading propaganda, cracking down on subversive thought and altering history to suit its needs. It was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism -- not a how-to manual." - Article from Tom Paine.com
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography "..as the Gulf crisis and the war unfolded... [Bush's] enraged public outbursts constituted real psychotic episodes, indicative of a deranged mental state"... the book refers to Bush as an "American Caligula"
George W. Bush stories on Bush from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
George W. Bush's War on Women article from Planned Parenthood - "we admit to being baffled by George W. Bush's seemingly single-minded determination to strip women of reproductive rights and access to the panoply of reproductive health services - not just abortion but even family planning and real sex education"
Global Eye -- Blood on the Tracks how the Bush administration is profiting from the war
The Goony "The essential nature of George W. Bush captured in a high-quality comemerative coin. With Latin and heraldic symbols, hobo signs, and just plain English, the Goony describes W. to a T"
Hanford, Washington "enough dangerous materials were dumped at Hanford to have "the potential to induce cancer in every person currently on the planet, 208 million times over."" - the DOE is proposing to terminate its environmental mission at Hanford, the most contaminated area in the Western Hemisphere, as well as at other sites.
Hiding Mass Layoffs Bush quits reporting the problem
Impending War on Iraq an American Jihad
IRAQ page of links
The Jig is Up "In short, Bush is just another leader -- not even an elected one at that -- who, to disguise his incompetency and true motives, has lived on propaganda and falsification, and now the jig is up. His citizens are beginning to see through the charade -- even many who once supported him, including a good many ordinary, moderate Republicans, appalled at the powers assumed by Big Government and its willingness to eviscerate the Constitution in its push toward more and more authoritarian control"
Keeping It Quiet Critics are growing increasingly concerned about the amount of information released by the White House, says David Teather - article in Guardian..."draws attention to the deliberate obfuscation by the Bush administration that is becoming one of its defining characteristics"
Librarians Against Bush
Misleader "a daily chronicle of Bush Administration distortion" for journalists and citizens from MoveOn
The Most Dangerous President Ever "George W. Bush is much the meaner president (and man). He is far more factional than Reagan was. And he is incomparably more dangerous than Reagan or any other president in this nation's history... What Bush seems determined to extirpate are the basic forms of common security in America" - Medicare, the United Nations, Social Security, the Wagner Act are all under attack
N. Korea Tests a Region's Calm "with the US sending clear signals that its focus is on Iraq, not North Korea, frustration is rising in South Korea, Japan, and China over an increasingly complicated diplomatic mess"
One Thousand Reasons Not to Vote for Bush
Operation TIPS TIPS report TIPS informants - "Not since the East German Stasi have so many people been asked to spy on their fellow citizens"
PLAME SCANDAL
Politics and Science Investigating the Bush administration's promotion of ideology over science.
President Bush: Flip-Flopper-in-Chief examples of Bush's taking opposite positions at different times on many issues
Q&A: Terry Tempest Williams "Whether we like it or not, George Bush is our shadow: arrogance, impatience, entitlement, greed capitalism; we are all complicit in that"
Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, by George Bush Sr. from Time magazine in 1998
| "Bush's comments raise questions about whether Bush may suffer from what psychiatrists call a narcissistic personality disorder. This disorder has the following characteristics: arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes; sense of entitlement; preoccupation with grandiose fantasies; need for excessive admiration; a grandiose sense of self-importance; inability to recognize or identify with feelings of others; exploitation of others; and envy" (Sam Perry, Consortium News, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/012203a.html). |
Reckless Administration Senate floor speech by Robert Byrd
Re-Defeat Bush
Republicans Against Bush
Saying No To War "Last week the International Criminal Court was initiated with the formal election of judges. Next month the court will be official. Its purpose is exactly to deal with offenses like those of which Saddam stands accused... The court intends on the world scene what has already happened within nations -- the replacement of violent force with the force of law. A true alternative to war... But the 139 nations that signed the agreement no longer include the United States, since George W. Bush ''unsigned'' that treaty early in his term... lays bare the world's gravest problem -- an American contempt for the creation of alternatives to war"
See Ya George over 100 anti-Bush items
Seven Reasons to Oppose a U.S. Invasion of Iraq Foreign Policy in Focus article
Too Stupid To Be President quiz on Bush family values, essay on DeBolt, machines that vote so you don't have to, much more
Top Gun at Job Destruction "Bush is poised to become the first President since Herbert Hoover to preside over job destruction rather than job creation?"
Topple Bush "part of the growing grassroots movement to reclaim our government from these global crooks. To help raise money for this effort, we will donate 10% as individuals from each product sold from our site"
A Troubling Speech remarks by U.S. Senator Robert Byrd
U.S. Patriot Act "The Day Democracy Was Put on Hold" - article - "Search warrants, Miranda rights, attorney/client protection, all rights we fought for and have been amended to our Constitution have become null and void within the 342 pages of The U.S. Patriot Act"
U.S. War Crimes excerpts from an article by John Ross
Veterans Against the Iraq War "While other Americans pontificate and theorize about war, we know about its cruel reality. The present Administration is led by men and women who chose not to serve in the military and today have little understanding of war and no comprehension of its consequences"
Veterans for Peace "We know the consequences of American foreign policy because once, at a time in our lives, so many of us carried it out. We find it sad that war seems so delightful, so often, to those that have no knowledge of it"
Veterans for Common Sense "In an age when the majority of public servants [read "politicians"] have never served in uniform" veterans wish to be heard on questions of national security
Vote to Impeach
The War Prayer, by Mark Twain what remains unsaid in a prayer for God's support of a war
War Times being produced to help broaden and deepen the fight against the Bush program by compiling information and analysis, and putting them into the hands of large numbers of readers
A Weekend Full of Shame "..millions of people around the world have reached the conclusion that Bush, not Hussein, poses a threat to the planet"
Why We Don't Trust Bush London Evening Standard - "Cabinet minister regards Bush as "like a child running around with a grenade with the pin pulled out"" - "Across British public opinion, George Bush is seen as the global village idiot"
Bush's Loopholes
Bush creates law loopholes
"President Bush's practice of writing excpetions to legislation as he signs it into law represents a violation of the constitution and a danger to democracy, America's leading lawyers alleged. The American Bar Association, an independent lawyers' organization, issued a report on the president's prolific use of "signing statements"" ("Bush creates law loopholes." Guardian Weekly, Aug. 3, 2006: 2).
"George W. Bush -- the least likely to succeed of Barbara and George Senior's kids -- who overcame mediocre school grades, multiple business failures, alcoholism, verbal incoherence and popular electoral defeat to become President of the United States" (Stanley Aronowitz. "All in the Family?" The Nation, May 24, 2004: 37).
"Then there's Bush's slightly alarming claim to the Amish on July 9 that God speaks through him. That's what he said, God speaks through him. This raises some troubling prospects. First of all, I think God has a better grasp of subject-verb agreement thatn George W. Bush do. Also, when Bush changes his mind, as he frequently does, do we conclude that God had to rethink things after the polls came out?" (Molly Ivins. "The News Hens Get Teresa." The Progressive, Sep. 2004_ 50).
"...a new book... Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, by Dr. Justin Frank, a psychiatrist... Frank's book says Bush "exhibits sadistic tendencies and suffers from character pathology, including grandiosity and megalomania -- viewing himself, America and God as interchangeable...
"...there have also been repeated claims on the Washington website Capitol Hill Blue -- www.capitolhillblue.com -- that President Bush has been taking anti-depressant medication that confuses and disturbs him -- and rattles his staff...
"In London the Guardian...report that Bush "goes in one breath from quoting the Bible to ranting obscenely about the media"..." ("Political Cookbooks." Washington Spectator, Sep. 1, 2004: 4).
"...Bush... governs as a manipulator, not a uniter" (Dave Denison. "What's the Matter With Us?" Texas Observer, 8/13/04: 10-11, 40).
"Rarely in the modern era has the world seen such unchecked power exercised so ignorantly, arrogantly and with such profoundly counterproductive results... As Al Gore told an audience at NYU recently, "The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States"" (Eric Alterman. "Kerry's Dance." The Nation, June 21, 2004: 10).
"McCarthyism is loose on our land again, pushed not by one deranged, malicious senator, but by a self-righteous, slow-witted president who is under the wing of such maniacal, anti-democratic ideologues as Cheney, Rumsfield, and Ashcroft" (Jim Hightower, The Texas Observer, 6/6/03).
"No man is justified in doing evil on grounds of expediency" (Theodore Roosevelt).
"I thought I'd seen political dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong. Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people" (John Dean, reported in The Washington Spectator, Oct. 15, 2003).
Bush is "among the worst presidents in U.S. history" (New Republic, Sep. 29, 2003).
"..the Texas Republican Party platform... calls for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, the Surgeon General, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, and Labor... the Bush Administration is, at heart, just as radical as the Texas GOP platform" (Texas Observer, 10/24/03, 3).
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." ---Theodore Roosevelt
"..there are.. honorable Republicans out there who are appalled by the arrogant, dishonest extremism of the Bush crowd, which they see as a betrayal of real conservatism" (Mark Hertsgaard. "The Once-Green GOP." The Nation, Feb. 9, 2004, 6-7).
"Ralph Nader.. dismissed the President as "a giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being" and castigated the Commander in Chief for committing "high crimes and misdemeanors" when he misled the nation into war on Iraq...
"The bulk of the debt that Bush is creating is merely to cover his giveaway of trillions of dollars from our public treasury to the corporations and millionaires who finance his presidency... George is financing this massive giveaway.. by cutting back on firefighters, his own No Child Left Behind Act, high-school dropout prevention, heating for low-income seniors, disabled students, veterans' health, clean water, prevention of children's lead poisoning, low-income childcare--and even the Office of Domestic Preparedness" ("Candidate Nader." The Nation, March 15, 2004, 3).
"..the Bush family was part of an international white-collar criminal class... [the book American Dynasty] is a scathing indictment of the Bushes. It's also a carefully researched chronicle of ne family's special place in America's plundering class.. a chronicle of unprosecuted corporate crime.." (Lou DuBose. "One Hundred Years of Turpitude." Texas Observer, 3/26/04, 23).
"That child [sent to Iraq] is ours. He does not belong to the neocons. They don't care who these kids are. They demand warm bodies to send into this black hole they created. I will spend every breath of my life working to get that lowlife fratboy dragged out of the White House in chains.." (Letters. The Nation. April 5, 2004, 23).
"..surprising level of anti-Bush sentiment among Repubican primary voters. In New Hampshire, more than 20 percent of voters who took Repubican ballots did not vote for Bush.." ("Comment." The Nation, March 1, 2004, 5).
"..one of the worst aspects of the Bush Administration is its contempt for science. Thanks to Bush, creationist tracts are being sold in national parks.. And faith healers like David Hager, who thinks Jesus will cure your PMS, sit on FDA advisory panels"(Pollitt, Katha. "Lost in Space." The Nation, Feb. 2, 2004, 9).
"...Kerry blasted President Bush for rejecting an invitiation to speak at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention -- the fourth Bush snub in four years" ("Get Ready to Yawn." Washington Spectator, Aug.1, 2004: 1).
"I have become aware of how similar Dubya's character is to Macbeth's. Both are usurpers of power, both are under the spell of witches, both believe themselves invincible--and both are mad" ("Letter." The Nation, July 19, 2004: 2).
"...George W. Bush's Administration is the most secrecy-obsessed regime in American history... an affront to American taxpayers and all who believe in a democratic form of government...
"In late 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft sent a memo to federal agencies that directs them to search for and use any legal authority they have to deny access to documents requested by citizens under the Freedom of Information Act" (Robert Bryce. "Top Secret Bush." Texas Observer, 2/13/04: 10-11).
"It is unclear to me why anyone would believe anything the president says about our fiscal situation. Keep in mind, this is a man who took three Texas oil companies into bankruptcy... Under Bill Clinton, the economy gained an average of 236,000 jobs every month. Under George W. Bush, the economy has lost an average of 66,000 jobs a month" (Molly Ivins. "The Un-Tax and Spend President." Texas Observer, 2/13/04: 14).
"...after 1865... this is Karl Rove's cherished period of American history... From his own public comments and my reading of the record, it is apparent that Karl Rove has modeled the Bush presidency on that of William McKinley... and modeled himself on Mark Hanna, the man who virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had one consummate passion: to serve corporate and imperial power... Great wealth was to be gained through monopoly, through using the State for private ends; it was axiomatic therefore that businessmen should run the government and run it for personal profit... Any who opposed the oligarchy were smeared as disturbers of the peace, socialists, anarchists, or worse...
"The historian Clinton Rossiter describes this as the perod of "the great train robbery of American intellectual history"... making the plunder of America sound like divine right. This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, seemingly exists in the mind of Karl Rove as the age of inspiration... the sour stink of a political system for sale... the prevailing notion "that the well-being of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many"" (Bill Moyers. "This is Your Story. Pass It On." Texas Observer, 8/13/04: 4-9, 38).
"...The pattern of corruption is a very old one, well-known to the Founders of this nation, who had carefully studied the example of Rome: A powerful republic gives birth to an empire, which in turn destroys the republic. The emperor who rules by force abroad develops a taste for ruling his own people in the same manner.
"The [Bush] Administration's across-the-board hostility to the constraints of law, domestic and international, is not accidental. The constitutional structure that is the backbone of the republic is a stumbling block to the empire. The republic requires a single standard, to which all are subject -- the law. But the empire requires a double standard -- one set of regulations for others, and another set, or none, for the imperial ruler. In the imperial conception, "law" is a set of rules dictated by the ruler for everyone else to obey. In this conception, other countries are not permitted weapons of mass destruction, but the United States may have them (and use them to stop the others from getting them). Other countries' troops must obey the Geneva Conventions, but the United States is exempt. Other countries must wage war only defensively; the United States may do so pre-emptively" (Jonathan Schell. "Empire Without Law." The Nation, May 31, 2004: 7).
"...the Bush administration... has forsaken the guiding principles of conservatism --prudence, caution, restraint -- to pursue an agenda that is messianic and radical" (Eyal Press. "Even Conservatives Are Wondering: Is Bush One of Us?" The Nation, May 31, 2004: 11).
"...Bush very quietly zeroed out a request by the IRS to increase by half the number of investigators it has to follow the money trail of terrorism" (Jim Hightower. "Hiding the Bad News." Texas Observer, 5/7/04: 15).
"The Bush administration... advocates democracy in abstraction but fears majority rule in practice" (Mansour Farhang. "How to Get Out of Iraq: A Forum." The Nation, May 24, 2004: 17).
"..just what was so hard to understand about this [Bush] bunch? We knew they were dishonest. We knew they were fanatical. We knew they were purposely ignorant and bragged about not reading newspapers. We knew they were vindictive. We knew they were lawless. We knew they were obsessively secretive. We knew they had no time or patience for those who raised difficult questions. We knew they were driven by fantasies of religious warfare, personal vengeance and ideological triumph. We knew they had no respect for civil liberties. And we knew they took no responsibility for the consequences of their incompetence. Just what is surprising about the manner in which they've conducted the [Iraq] war?" (Eric Alterman. "Hawks Eating Crow." The Nation, JUne 7, 2004: 10).
"George W. Bush... has compiled a record of staggering failure... a reckless abuse of power that has damaged U.S. security, destabilitzed the region and undercut America's position in the world...
"If the war were Bush's only failure, it would be enough to require his departure. But it is not. By withdrawing the United States from international treaties and conventions, mishandling crises in the Middle East and North Korea and diverting resources from the pursuit of Al Qaeda, Bush has left America more isolated and less secure. And the detention camps made infamous by the crimes of Abu Ghraib have stripped America of the pride we once had in our country and the role it played, however imperfectly, as a champion of human rights, economic opportunity and the rule of law.
"At home, Bush's failures are equally manifest. He has amassed the worst jobs record of any President since the Great Depression, the worst budget deficits ever and the most precipitous decline in America's fiscal position -- from $5 trillion in projected surplus to $4 trillion in projected deficit. Bush's administration responds to a corporate crime wave with calls for less regulation, embraces the flight of jobs abroad as good for the economy and exacerbates, with top-end tax cuts, the greatest inequality since the Gilded Age...
"The list of failures goes on. The Bush years have seen a steady increase in the number of Americans without healthcare while drug company profits have soared. Bush's prescription drug bill prohibits Medicare from negotiating a better price for seniors and bars importing cheaper drugs...
"The Bush administration has also failed to protect the environment, giving us new laws written by polluters, oil lobbyists and Enron executives. And it has politicized and distorted basic scientific and medical research" ("A Failed Presidency." The Nation, Sep. 13, 2004: 3-4).
"George W. Bush, in an agreement with Ariel Sharon, accepted Jewish settlements as permanent and renounced Palestinian refugees' right to return, Kerry immediately endoresed it" (Esther Kaplan. "The Jewish Divide on Israel." The Nation, July 12, 2004: 20-24).
"...George W. Bush lives in a "fantasy world of spin"... full frontal repudiation of facts known to all. Faced with the absence of WMDs in Iraq he once simply said, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." Faced with a Presidential Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in the US," he and his spokespersons called it "historical." In his universe, faithfulness to delusion is "consistency" (Jonathan Schell. "Why We Must Leave Iraq." The Nation, Oct. 11, 2004: 10).
"...a direct association exists between the magnitude of a man's femiphobia and his tendency to embrace right-wing political opinions" --from the book The Wimp Factor, by Stephen J. Ducat (Advertisement. The Nation, Oct. 11, 2004: 25).
"One hundred years ago, in the wake of England's ruinous victory in the Boer War, a young Liberal politician excoriated the ruling Conservative Party and its imperial scam: "A party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad... sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the imperial pint, the open hand at the public exchequer, the open door at the public house, dear food for the millions, cheap labor for the millionaire"... these words of Winston Churchill fairly describe the Bush II administration as well (substitute "church" for "public house", of course)...
"...the Reagan administration's "unflagging campaign to exalt the power of the presidency and to undermine the power of the law, the courts, the Congress, and the people"...
"Executive-branch decision-making is increasingly insulated from public scrutiny and comment... showing how the claims of the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions to "get government off the backs of the American people" merely camouflaged their sustained effort to keep the American people off the backs of the government and its corporate principals...
"Carter's method is to quote short, boilerplate statements of noble purpose by the President or other high-level officials, then list scores of facts that show thes tatements to be insincere, even dishonest. It is extremely effective.
"What We've Lost has been criticized as a clip job, a blizzard of hastily culled, bullet-listed facts flung between hard covers. Facts, these critics admonish us,, do not interpret themselves. On the contrary, they often do, which is why the Administration keeps removing inconvenient ones from government publications and websites" (George Scialabba. "Homeland Insecurity." The Nation, Oct. 11, 2004: 36-42).
"The challenge facing Kerry is how to respond to a relentless stream of attacks from GOP hit squads. This is what Bush is good at. He isn't particularly curious about the world, doesn't care much about policy and is AWOL when it comes to running the government. His passion, as a protege of the late Lee Atwater, hired gun of Jesse Helms, is gutter politics" (Robert L. Borosage. "Kerry: Fill in the Blanks." The Nation, May 17, 2004: 2).
"On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.
"In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries... this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother.
"HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar sear-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters" (Greg Palast. "Vanishing Votes." The Nation, May 17, 2004: 6).
"Discounting that he sent American troops into Iraq on false pretenses, a real commander would fight for the welfare of his troops. But Bush has demonstrated a consistent unwillingness to do so, and as a result many high-ranking officers have endorsed Kerry, including retired Navy Adm. William Crowe and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. John Shalikashvili.
"Bush has failed the military on almost every level. While Halliburton and Boeing went to the bank this year with about $10 billion each, undermanned U.S. forces went into Iraq without armored vests and driving unarmored vehicles. The fatal results were hidden from public view as the dead were secreted home and the Department of Defense (DOD) obscured and juggled the numbers of maimed and wounded...
"Even if the war wounded succeed in getting disability pay, in 2003 Bush threatened to veto a bill that allowed veterans to collect disability pay and pensions simultaneously.
"In 2003, his administration also tried to cut combat pay from $225 to $150 a month and the family separation allowance from $250 to $100. And most callously of all, the frat brat who ducked a war that killed 48,000 American troops threatened to veto a proposal to double the $6,000 payment to relatives of soldiers killed in action" (Ian Williams. "Bush's War Against the Military." In These Times. Posted October 27, 2004).
(Jim Hightower and Philip Frazer. "The Hightower Lowdown." August, 2004: 1-4).
|
Bush's Numbers Come Up
| Number of W.M.D. found in Iraq
| Zero
|
| Number of Connections between Iraq and 9-11
| Zero
|
| Progress made combating global warming
| Zero
|
| Number of jobs created
| 1.2 million less than zero
|
| Federal deficit under Bush
| $2.3 trillion
projected through 2011
|
| Americans' ave. income growth under Bush, adjusted for inflation
| -9.2%
|
| 2005 defense budget
| $447 billion
|
| No. killed in Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush
| 1,041
|
| Estimated civilians killed by Bush's war
| 14,673
|
| Number of jobs lost under Bush
| 3 million
|
| No. of state going to lower-paying jobs under Bush
| 48
|
| No. with no healthcare insurance since Bush took office
| 3.8 million
|
Quotes
|
"George's career is marked by a slash of carelessness. He was careless with other people's money, careless about rules, careless about using the Bush name, and careless with the truth... [the Bushes] smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money... and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
"Ron Reagan, Jr., who speaks freely about the Bushes' sense of entitlement...
"Yoshi Tsurumi... recalls very clearly George W. Bush as a young man with "no sense of compassion, devoid of social responsibility." When the professor announced his plan to show the film The Grapes of Wrath... to foster a discussion of poverty, Bush objected: "Why are you going to show us that Commie movie?"
"I laughed because I thought he was kidding," Tsurumi says, "but he wasn't."
"After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss the Depression and how he thought ti affected people. He said, "Look. People are poor because they are lazy."" (Barbara Belejack. "Todo Por Poder." Texas Observer, 10/22/04: 24-25).
"George W. Bush doesn't have time to attend even one of the 500-plus funerals of the troops killed in Iraq. But he went to 100 fundraisers in 2003" (http://www.bushwhackedusa.com).
"You know it's time for a [regime] change when you hear that Kerry and Edwards both wrote their own riveting, galvanizing acceptance speeches at the Democratic National Convention, heartfelt and effective rhetoric that gives you hope not for the quality of polished oratory but for genuine, refreshing political intellect, and verbal acumen, as you offer deep thanks that at least some politicians can still speak coherently and cogently without mangling the goddamn language at every adjectival clause.
"Whereas you just know Dubya isn't capable of writing a single word of his own speeches, and will employ entire squadrons of lackeys to do it for him at the RNC, and will regardless still insist on mispronouncing "nukuler" and "'Murka" and "terrist" and "gin bender at Yale," and will doubtlessly say something like, "We must stamp out evil in all its forms because evil wants to do evil things to us and evil don't know the depths of its own, uh, evilnesses. Praise Jesus."" (Mark Morford. "How Do You Know It's Time for a Major Change in American Leadership? Let us Count the Signs." http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0811-14.htm. 8-12-04).
"President George W. Bush is taking anti-depressant drugs to control his depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
"The prescription drugs were ordered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician. Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a Bush walked off stage on July 7, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.
"Bush’s emotional stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.
"Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad.”..." (Teresa Hampton. "Bush Using Anti-Depressants." Capital Hill Blue, Jul. 28, 2004).
"No previous White House, however tarnished, could approach Bush/Cheney's for the scope or the diversity of its corruption: not McKinley's, not Harding's, not even Nixon's, not Ronald Reagan's (contrary to the rightist propaganda, Clinton's was among the least corrupt administrations in modern history). Nor has any prior leadership – in this country, at any rate – so often said one thing and then done differently, or claimed the opposite of what it actually had done. From the moment they siezed power, just after having posed as "moderate" and/or "conservative" for months, Bush/Cheney hit the ground goose-stepping, making every revolutionary change they could, and just as readily lying about every one. To find a government of comparable perverseness would require that we depart the realm of history altogether, and turn instead to George Orwell's nightmarish Oceania, where Bush's "Healthy Forests" and "Clear Skies," his "Help America Vote Act" and his "culture of life," and all his automatic plaudits for "democracy" and "freedom," would sound just as natural as they sound demented in the world we live in now...
"In the face of so perverse a movement, what can any reasonable person say? While argument against it is essential, arguing with it is impossible, as it does not share with us any premises of rational exchange. To all points of dissent, it says, "Who cares what you think?" To all contrary evidence, it says, "I believe what I believe is right." And to the offer that we might at least agree to disagree, it says: "Go fuck yourself." Rage is finally all there is to it; and so there is more to do than just rage back at it, as that alone will only keep them going and ourselves stuck in an endless shouting match, in which we're always made to sound defensive, although in the right.
"We're forced into this posture because Bush & Co. control the cameras and the microphones, and write the daily scripts, and therefore get to speak out first, and have the last word, too. But it is not just through such institutional advantage that Team Bush keeps its would-be prosecutors up against the wall. The Busheviks forever cloud the issue, and try to sieze the high ground, by projecting onto everybody else the raging evil that they feel within themselves.
"This is, on the one hand, an exquisitely disorienting ploy: the criminals imputing their own criminality to those whom they have robbed and beaten and would surely kill if they could get away with it" (Mark Crispin Miller. "Reality Always Wins." AlterNet. Posted November 1, 2004).
Nicknaming George W: Flubya, Hocus POTUS, George W. Fustercluck, Little Lord Smirkelboy, George 'bin Lyin', Dim Son (Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, eds. "Fables, Flim-Flam, and Urban Legends of Our Time." The Hightower Lowdown, 1-4).
"At kiosks and bus stops all over New York, there are posters for the movie Resident Evil: Apocalypse. And almost on every poster, someone has graffitied a very tasteful P at the beginning of the first word. That about sums up the election for me...
"W stands for War on Women. The administration's policy...
- "proposes a constitutional ban on abortion
- "pledges to support only anti-choice judges
- "enforces a law banning abortion without any exception for the woman's health
- "maintains a law blocking abortion for poor, young, and military women
- "submits a Human Life Amendment conferring personhood on the fertilized egg
- "funds abstinence-only sex education
- "extends the global gag rule on contraceptive education worldwide
"Meanwhile, Bush gets away with all this by "feminizing" some of his rhetoric" (Kate Clinton. "Extreme Makeover." The Progressive, Nov. 2004: 42).
"The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that "the president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagrees to hell"...
"...fact-checking by the nonpartisan Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania found so many twisted fictions and outright falsehoods in both Republican and Democratic campaign speeches and broadcast ads that an inglorious record may have been set. The dreary list can be seen on-line at www.factcheck.org" ("Mission Finally Accomplished--Four More Years of the Political Right." Washington Spectator, Nov. 15, 2004: 1, 4).
"We may never reach a consensus on just what it was about George W. Bush that led so many millions of Americans to ignore his Administration's dishonesty, incompetence, ideological fanaticism and corruption and vote for the guy...
"...like it or not, the perception of "strength" is the sine qua non of American politics. As Bill Clinton famously observed, it is politically safer to be perceived to be "strong and wrong" rather than weak and right" (Eric Alterman. "Big Ideas Need Sharp Elbows." The Nation, Dec. 27, 2004: 10).
"George W. Bush doesn't have time to attend even one of the 500-plus funerals of the troops killed in Iraq. But he went to 100 fundraisers in 2003" (http://www.bushwhackedusa.com).
"You know it's time for a [regime] change when you hear that Kerry and Edwards both wrote their own riveting, galvanizing acceptance speeches at the Democratic National Convention, heartfelt and effective rhetoric that gives you hope not for the quality of polished oratory but for genuine, refreshing political intellect, and verbal acumen, as you offer deep thanks that at least some politicians can still speak coherently and cogently without mangling the goddamn language at every adjectival clause.
"Whereas you just know Dubya isn't capable of writing a single word of his own speeches, and will employ entire squadrons of lackeys to do it for him at the RNC, and will regardless still insist on mispronouncing "nukuler" and "'Murka" and "terrist" and "gin bender at Yale," and will doubtlessly say something like, "We must stamp out evil in all its forms because evil wants to do evil things to us and evil don't know the depths of its own, uh, evilnesses. Praise Jesus."" (Mark Morford. "How Do You Know It's Time for a Major Change in American Leadership? Let us Count the Signs." http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0811-14.htm. 8-12-04).
"President George W. Bush is taking anti-depressant drugs to control his depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
"The prescription drugs were ordered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician. Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a Bush walked off stage on July 7, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.
"Bush’s emotional stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.
"Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad.”..." (Teresa Hampton. "Bush Using Anti-Depressants." Capital Hill Blue, Jul. 28, 2004).
"No previous White House, however tarnished, could approach Bush/Cheney's for the scope or the diversity of its corruption: not McKinley's, not Harding's, not even Nixon's, not Ronald Reagan's (contrary to the rightist propaganda, Clinton's was among the least corrupt administrations in modern history). Nor has any prior leadership – in this country, at any rate – so often said one thing and then done differently, or claimed the opposite of what it actually had done. From the moment they siezed power, just after having posed as "moderate" and/or "conservative" for months, Bush/Cheney hit the ground goose-stepping, making every revolutionary change they could, and just as readily lying about every one. To find a government of comparable perverseness would require that we depart the realm of history altogether, and turn instead to George Orwell's nightmarish Oceania, where Bush's "Healthy Forests" and "Clear Skies," his "Help America Vote Act" and his "culture of life," and all his automatic plaudits for "democracy" and "freedom," would sound just as natural as they sound demented in the world we live in now...
"In the face of so perverse a movement, what can any reasonable person say? While argument against it is essential, arguing with it is impossible, as it does not share with us any premises of rational exchange. To all points of dissent, it says, "Who cares what you think?" To all contrary evidence, it says, "I believe what I believe is right." And to the offer that we might at least agree to disagree, it says: "Go fuck yourself." Rage is finally all there is to it; and so there is more to do than just rage back at it, as that alone will only keep them going and ourselves stuck in an endless shouting match, in which we're always made to sound defensive, although in the right.
"We're forced into this posture because Bush & Co. control the cameras and the microphones, and write the daily scripts, and therefore get to speak out first, and have the last word, too. But it is not just through such institutional advantage that Team Bush keeps its would-be prosecutors up against the wall. The Busheviks forever cloud the issue, and try to sieze the high ground, by projecting onto everybody else the raging evil that they feel within themselves.
"This is, on the one hand, an exquisitely disorienting ploy: the criminals imputing their own criminality to those whom they have robbed and beaten and would surely kill if they could get away with it" (Mark Crispin Miller. "Reality Always Wins." AlterNet. Posted November 1, 2004).
"Comparing our current moment to previous repressive eras, including the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy years, he points out that the press is far more willing to report egregious abuses of power than it once was...
"The ACLU is not rolling over the way it did during the Red Scare...
"University professors are still free to speak out. Courts are willing to stand up to overzealous prosecutors. And, Cole pointed out, local citizens all over the country have formed 367 "Bill of Rights Defense Committees" to oppose the Patriot Act" (Ruth Conniff. "Staying Engaged." The Progressive, Feb, 2005: 16-17).
"Bush Appoints Former Criminals to Key Government Roles:
"John Poindexter [head of the Information Awareness Office].. found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and the destruction of evidence...
"Elliot Abrams [National Security Council (NSC)] plead guilty to withholding evidence from Congress... active in covering up some of the worst [war] atrocities...
"John Negroponte [Ambassador to the U.N.].. is known for his role in the cover-up of human rights abuses by CIA trained paramilitaries...
"Otto Reich [assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs].. was instrumental in the failed Venezuelan coup.. censured by Congress for "prohibited covert propaganda activities".." (147).
"John Poindexter is barred from Costa Rica for drug trafficking... convicted of five felony counts of lying to Congress" (Phillips, Peter, and Project Censored. Censored 2004: The Top 25 Censored Stories. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2003: 149).
"The [Bush] Administration's obsession with "staying on message" is.. reflected in Bush's reluctance to hold press conferences and its insistence on tightly scripting those few conferences it does allow" (Phillips, Peter, and Project Censored. Censored 2004: The Top 25 Censored Stories. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2003: 234).
"All of these tactics fall within the framework of a "propaganda model" of communication, whose strategies and assumptions are fundamentally contrary to a democratic model. Propaganda consists of attempts to manipulate or coerce the thinking of an enemy or captive population. Some scholars refer to propaganda as a "hypodermic approach" to communication, in which the communicator's objective is to "inject" his ideas into the minds of a "target population." This is quite different from the democratic model, which views communications as a dialogue between presumed equals" (235).
"One of PR's dirtiest little secrets, however, is that it often fails... In fact, propaganda is often more successful at indoctrinating the propagandists themselves than it is at influencing the thinking of others" (237).
"Following World War I, Austrian journalist Karl Wiegand made an interesting observation: "How are nations ruled and led into war?" he asked. "Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print"" (Phillips, Peter, and Project Censored. Censored 2004: The Top 25 Censored Stories. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2003: 238).
Disinfopedia collects information on government and industry propaganda campaigns
"If U.S. intelligence agencies did not see the attack coming it was because they were told not to look.. the Bush administration blocked key investigations into allegations that top Saudi Arabian royals and some members of the bin Laden family, not just Osama, funded and supported Al-Quaeda and other terrorist organizations" (Greg Palast. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. NY: Plume, 2003: 92).
"FBI agents had wanted to check into two members of the bin Laden family.. but were told to stay away by superiors" (98).
"Khan Laboratories.. investigators had been tracking the funding for this so-called "Islamic [nuclear] Bomb" back to Saudi Arabia, under Bush.. the inquiry was stymied" (100).
"..the terrorists we are hunting today were trained and armed by the Reagan-Bush administration" (Greg Palast. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. NY: Plume, 2003: 103).
"Congresswoman McKinney.. cited our [BBC and Guardian stories about Bush protecting the Saudis] on the floor of Congress, calling for an investigation... She was labeled a traitor, a freak, a conspiracy nut and "a looney" -- the latter by her state's Democratic Senator, who led the mob in the political lynching of the uppity Black woman... She.. suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known in advance about the September 11 attacks but had done nothing so his supporters could make money in war... Dan Rather had warned her, shut up.. She didn't and it cost her her seat in Congress.
"McKinney's electoral corpse in the road silenced politicians [and] the media" (Greg Palast. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. NY: Plume, 2003: 105-106).
"When tested for the coveted Air Guard get-out, young George W. tested at twenty-five out of one hundred, one point above "too-dumb-to-fly" status, yet leaped ahead of hundreds of applicants to get the Guard slot... Texas's toy army.. a favorite club for warmongers a bit squeamish about actual combat" (107).
"..Ben Barnes--then lieutenanct governor of the Lone Star State--quietly suggested to Air Guard chief Brig. Gen. James Rose that he find a safe spot in the Guard for Congressman George Bush's son... Bush's draft-dodging [was tied] to GTech's exclusive deal with the state" (Greg Palast. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. NY: Plume, 2003: 108).
"George W. Bush has fought to tear apart the one remaining effective control over corporate miscreants: the right of victims to sue corporations and executives that poison workers, kill consumers and cook their books. As Governor, Bush guided such so-called tort reform into Texas law in 1999, a faor to.. Enron's then CEO Ken Lay... [It was] a campaign against victims' rights" (Greg Palast. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. NY: Plume, 2003: 171).
Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?
(Unknown Source: email, 2-18-05)
Subject: Psalm 23, updated
Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war,
I will find no exit, for thou art in office.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they discomfort me.
Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion.
Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.
My health insurance runneth out.
Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the days
of thy term,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.
(Source: email from Irene Scharf, 2/25/05)
"Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent, said William Leonard in March 2 congressional testimony. His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004.
"Yet an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official databases. Once freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred to the public as "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." Less of a goal-directed policy than a bureaucratic reflex, the widespread clampdown on formerly public information reflects a largely inarticulate concern about "security." It also accords neatly with the Bush administration's preference for unchecked executive authority...
"The Pentagon phone book is a useful tool for reporters, students of defense policy, or others who might wish to contact the Pentagon or gauge the size and shape of the bureaucracy. Anyone could buy it at the Government Printing Office Bookstore until 2001, when it was marked "for official use only." A GPO Bookstore notice advises that it is no longer for sale to the public...
"...government agencies took to scrubbing public records at the National Archives and elsewhere, pulling untold thousands of public records for "review" and possible reclassification. Many 30- or 50-year-old archival collections are a shadow of what they were just a few years ago. On a recent visit to the National Archives, American University historian Anna Nelson recalled, "I found four boxes of Nixon documents full of nothing but withdrawal cards," signifying records that had been removed" (Steven Aftergood. "The Age of Missing Information: The Bush administration's campaign against openness." Slate, Mar. 17, 2005).
"The Church of Bush... These are the people who, even in the face of evidence of his casual cruelty, of his unchristian contempt for weakness, of his lying ways, see something angelic in George W. Bush and love him unconditionally" (Rick Perlstein, Village Voice, http://www.alternet.org/, 8-2-04).
"What do Kalamazoo, Evansville, Albuquerque, Stockton, Trenton, Phoenix, Columbia, St. Louis, Knoxville, and Charleston have in common?
"All are among the cities where the secret service or police have jailed people for displaying anti-Bush signs during public appearances by his eminence, King George the W. Is this America, The Land of the Free?" (Jim Hightower. "Is This America?" http://www.alternet.org/, 8/2/04).
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." (H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)).
"No joke. This is serioiusly creepy: The US government is in the covert propaganda business, and it's not aiming this stuff at potential terrorists, it'a aiming it right square at your forehead.
"The New York Times did a huge Sunday take-out on the practice of "pre-packaged news" by government agencies. "The government's news making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration."
"The Bush administration did not invent this practice--it's an adaptation of a corporate public relations ploy. PR firms make what look like normal news segments designed to fit into regular news broadcasts, but they are actually sales pitches...
"It's bad enough that corporate shills burn up journalistic credibility with this cheap trick, but the government has produced hundreds of these fake news segments. The Clinton administration started this vile practice, and the Bush administration has doubled it, spending $254 million on public relations contracts in its first term, twice what the last Clinton administration spent. I suspect it is part and parcel of Karl Rove's mania for "message control."
"So how did something this sleazy become so common? Money. The Times reports: "It is... a world where all participants benefit. Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts wirth millions of dollars. Tha major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting."
"The only patsy in the set-up is you, sitting there thinking you're seeing something real AND paying for the fake news with your taxes...
"...the Government Accountability Office...has held that the government-produced "news" segments may constitute "covert propaganda"" (Molly Ivins. "Stench of Rotting Ethics." Progressive Populist, April 15, 2005: 22).
"The United States Government is currently run by a group of people for whom verifiable truth holds no particular privilege over ideologically inspired nonsense... demonstrating Bush's willingness to mislead the nation in the service of his ideological obsessions...
"...the unhappy fact is that almost everything this Administration tries to sell to Americans is snake oil, and the mere act of reporting it without comment implicates the media in the fundamental dishonesty that is this President's modus operandi. When he says "freedom," he means the freedom of the United States and its allies to jail and torture anyone they choose. When he says "liberty," he means the liberty of other governments to profess to share the alleged aims of US foreign policy and then--like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Egypt--jail and silence all critics without inconvenient criticism from the United States" (Eric Alterman. "Better Red Than Dead?" The Nation, Feb. 28, 2005: 11).
"In the [second] Bush inaugural, that moment came when the presidential motorcade headed down Pennsylvania Avenue enclosed in a phalanx of police vehicles. "It looked like a military occupation proceeding through a hostile city," snapped ABC's George Will. Only after the event did we learn just how martial it was. Along with 13,000 officers, secret commando units were at large in Washington, and sharpshooters with state-of-the-art assault weapons were stationed on rooftops along the parade route. The President was riding in an armored limo with bulletproof tires and, reportedly, an oxygen system that could be activated during a chemical attack. None of this showed on TV. In the new surveillance society, nothing is more important than maintaining the illusion of normalcy... Under the pomp and circumstance, one could glimpse the contours of the coming American security state. Political pageants are like that. They show the future disguised as the past" (Richard Goldstein. "Hail-to-the-Chief Show." The Nation, Feb. 14, 2005: 5-6).
Democracy Redefined many examples of misleading terminology
Bush's terminology: "The War on Terror! – Keeping America Safe!"
Reality: "Terror tactics designed to create a frightened, trusting public willing to believe that we are hated because we are free."
Bush's terminology: "The Patriot Act"
Reality: "Violations of civil rights, due process, habeas corpus and other protections provided by the US Constitution in the guise of security measures. The upset of the vital balance of power in US government, placing unnecessarily greater power in hands of executive branch."
Bush's terminology: "Homeland Security"
Reality: "Selective contracts for the party faithful. Gaping loopholes in cargo, nuclear plant and aviation safety; Chemical industry protected from implementing costly security standards. Cities funded without regard to risk levels."
Bush's terminology: "Operation Iraqi Freedom!"
Reality: "Violations of International Law, Geneva Conventions. Control of Iraq oil reserves and pipelines; prisoner abuse and torture; Indiscriminant killingof civilians; chaos, confusion, continued death and destruction. Construction of largest US embassy in the world; construction of 14 permanent US military bases. Huge profits for Halliburton, Carlyle Group, other US contractors. Note: This product was sold to the public as Operation Protect America from a Threat of WMD yet the public never noticed that the label did not match the sales pitch."
Bush's terminology: "No Child Left Behind"
Reality: "Unrealistic and educationally unsound under-funded testing program; dissatisfied teachers, parents, administrators and students. Huge profits for manufacturers of practice and testing materials. Cuts in state and local funding for implementation of mandated program."
Bush's Terminology: "Clear Skies"
Reality: "More time for power plants, factories and refineries to reduce their air pollution. More pollution than allowed in present Clean Air Act. Increased caps on emissions of mercury, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide."
Bush's terminology: "Healthy Forests"
Reality: "Severe limits on public participation; provisions for logging industry to cut down trees across 31,250 square miles of National Forests. No protection for homes nor for prevention of shrub land fires on private lands in southern California, the site of more than 90% of all fires in the state."
Bush's terminology: "Medicare Reform"
Reality: "Massive taxpayer handout to drug companies; ban on U.S. government to negotiate lower drug prices for senior citizens. Increases of 18%, to be followed by another 12% in contributions to Medicare coverage by seniors. Continued outrageous costs of prescription medications with only minor discounts."
(Source: "Democracy Defined." www.tvnewslies.org, 4-15-05).
"Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such as missile defense can be made openly...
"Your boss [Bush] did not avail himself of a similar opportunity to visit our House of Commons during his visit, fearing, it seems, that there might be some signs of dissent. He preferred to issue his diktat on missile defense in front of a highly controlled, preselected audience.
"Such control-freak antics may work in the virtual one-party state that now prevails in Washington. But in Canada we have a residual belief that politicians should be subject to a few checks and balances, an idea that your country once espoused before the days of empire" (Lloyd Axworthy. "Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice." The Progressive, June 2005: 30-31).
"President Bush... boast[s] of the government's success in prosecuting terrorists... Mr. Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."
"Those statistics have been used repeatedly by the president and other administration officials to characterise the government's anti-terror effots. But the numbers are misleading at best. An analysis of the justice department's list of terrorism prosecutions by the Washington Post shows that 39 people, not 200, have been convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigraiton law and had nothing to do with terrorism. Overall, the median sentence was just 11 months" (Dan Eggen and Julie Tate. "Statistics on terror convictions misleading." Guardian Weekly, June 17, 2005: 7).
"The Bush Administration and its ideological allies are employing every means available to undermine journalists' ability to exercise their First Amendment function to hold power accountable. In fact, the Administration recognizes no such constitutional role for the press...
"As an unnamed Bush official told reporter Ron Suskind, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality"...
"They are taking aggressive action: preventing journalists from doing their job by withholding routine information; deliberately releasing deceptive information on a regular basis; bribing friendly journalists to report the news in a favorable context; producing their own "news reports" and distributing these free of charge to resource-starved broadcasters; creating and crditing their own political activists as "journalists" working for partisan operations masquerading as news organizations...
"...all these efforts are aimed at a single goal: the destruction of democratic accountability and the media's role in insuring it.
"The Bush attack on the press has three primary components--Secrecy, Lies and Fake News...
SECRECY
"Since President George W. Bush entered the office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent...
"In addition, as Aftergood notes, "an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, websites and official databases." These sources were once freely available but are now being withdrawn from view under the classification "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." They include: the Pentagon telephopne directory, the Los Alamos technical report library, historical records at the National Archives and the Energy Department intelligence budget, among many others. Even more alarming is the web of secrecy surrounding the operations of what has become the equivalent of a police state at Guantanamo Bay and other military prisons around the world, where the accused are routinely denied due process and traditional rules of evidence are deemed irrelevant...
LIES
"...the conservative media... refuse to report facts when they conflict with White House spin...
""What's going on here is something like lying by reflex... Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother...
"Nuclear materials: The Los Angeles Times recently reported that government scientists apparently submitted phony data to demonstrate that a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada's Yucca Mountain would be safe...
"IN these two emblematic cases, as it has done so many times before, the Administration simply issued its own pronouncements, ignored reality and went its merry way, damn the consequences both for the reality of its policies and for its own credibility. Those found guilty of deception did not mind the one-day story that would result demonstrating them to be liars...
FAKE NEWS
"The Bush Administration has invested untold millions in video "news releases" that disguise themselves as genuine news reports and are frequently broadcast by irresponsible local news programs. In three separate opinions in the past year, the Congressional Government Accountability Office held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda"...
"The reports are clearly designed to simulate legitimate news programming...
"These phony news reports have much in common with stage-managed "public" presidential events that bar all potential dissenters and script virtually every utterance...
"In addition to creating its own mediated version of reality, the Administration has also invested considerable resources in corrupting members of the media with cash payments...
"Our once noble calling is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry, or entertainment" (Eric Alterman. "Bush's War on the Press." The Nation, May 9, 2005: 11-20).
"Mom, Who Lost Son In Iraq, Talks About 'Disgusting' White House Private Meeting With Bush; Claims He Was Arrogant, 'Totally Detached From Humanity' And Didn't Even Know Her Name" (Greg Szmanski. "Mom Talks" http://www.arcticbeacon.citymaker.com/articles/article/1518131/28661.htm, July 6, 2005).
"The Bushites have become notorious--even by Washington standards--for doctoring, censoring, and otherwise tampering with the facts, science, and findings of official reports" (Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, eds. "The Hightower Lowdown." Nov. 2005.).
"These disclosures bring a new question to the fore: If the Bush outfit is not governing what is it doing? The answer comes readily: It wishes to acquire, increase, and consolidate the power of the Repubican Party. At home the GOP is to become a "permanent majority for the future of this country," in the words of former Republican majority leader Tom DeLay, now also indicted" (Jonathan Schell. "Faith and Fraud." The Nation, Nov. 21, 2005: 11).
"Without question, if we all used the same vocabulary, the neoconservative movement would collapse. That's why the government has to pay columnists, favricate its own news and invent its own language to win the war of public opinion...
"... Bush-speak... touts a culture of lise, this while promoting permanent worldwide war...
"And so rather than rebuking the illegal war culprits, the neocons simply change the meaning of words and reward each other with new appointments...
"Nowadays, military death squad killings in Afghanistan and Iraq have become "targeted assassinations." And the president is completely against torture, as long as he defines its meaning, this while ensuring that US troops act with impunity and are exempt from the International War Crime tribunal.
"At home, politics trumps science and delusion is now the national pastime. There is no global warming. Propaganda promotes freedom. Corruption occurs abroad and pollution-friendly rules are now "clear-air" initiatives. Universal health care is satanic, and bankruptcy is now only an option for big business. And his deficit-inducing tax cuts that favor the rich are propelling the economy...
"...the deceptive use of language by the US government... we are supposed to perceive ourselves not as "savages," but as under siege from savages" (Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez. "The culture of life." Progressive Populist, May 1, 2005: 18).
"...the business costs of this [Bush] approach are already becoming evident. For starters, the new wave of anti-Americanism sweeping the planet goes far beyond KFC bombings in South Asia or widespread hostility in the Middle East. In Asia, the South China Morning Post has noted that a "strong growing hostility" toward the United States has complicated Disney's expansion plans in the area. The Bush imperial foreign policy, moreover, is inspiring consumer backlash even among traditional allies...
"...survey of global elites found that "41 percent of Canadian elites were less likely to purchase American products because of Bush Administration policies, compared to 56 percent in the UK, 61 percent in France, 49 percent in Germany and 42 percent in Brazil...
"...sixty-two percent of executives surveyed by Opinion Dynamics Corp. said the war is hurting America's global competitiveness" (Mark Engler. "Bush's Bad Business Empire." The Progressive Populist, Dec. 15, 2005: 2, 8-9).
"Bush signed the largest corporate tax break package in two decades, $136 billion. After World War II, corporations paid half the cost of running the federal government. Today, they pay 7%...
"House Republicans chopped education programs by $14.3 billion -- the highest cuts ever. College tuition has increased 34 percent since Bush took office...
"Since 2001, average monthly health care premiums have risen from $342 to $603. Annual deductibles have doubled. Today 46 million Americans (including 8.4 million children) have no health insurance, an increase of 6 million since Bush took office...
"The Senate approved the biggest bankruptcy law in a quarter of a century. Republicans voted AGAINST protecting senior citizens, the seriously ill, military members, veterans, and employees.
"In 1983, the Greenspan Commission put Social Security measures in place that created a $1.7 trillion surplus in the system. This administration borrowed against and cut that to $153 billion while blaming citizens for not dying young enough" (Nomi Prins. "Top Ten Ways We Got Jacked by Conservatives." Alternet, http://www.alternet.org/story/41921/, accessed 9/26/06).
"I left [the news conference] with the impression that this [Bush] is a spoiled man whose frustration level when someone disagrees with him is that of a 3-year-old and that he's the last person you want to see operating under a lot of stress because he doesn't handle it well" (Molly Ivins. "The Presidential Three-Year-Old." Alternet. http://www.alternet.org/story/41933/ accessed 9/26/06).
|
|