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The melodrama continues in America, a special counsel playing the role
of lone hero, representing the values of law and order, confronting villains who
have terrorized the locals, broken through boundary fences in the night,
conducting property raids, and avoiding justice. At midday, a Brooklyn blue-collar man who rose by his own intelligence
and efforts to stature as “the best prosecutor in America” confronts the bandits
who thought they were too privileged, too powerful. It’s a new version of High
Noon, the “other” classic American tale. Certainly, given the high expectations on the one hand and dread on the
other, the next scenes may be anticlimactic. But, as others who have lived
these political dramas said this week, this is not the finish line, this is
just the beginning. Even if there
is just one indictment, John Dean said yesterday, that means a trial,
witnesses, new reporting and digging into the past. Paul Begala, recalling the
group tension of the Clinton White House, described a siege mentality, which
contracts more than the ability to work, it weakens the clout of the office. Pres. Bush got here not by innocence. We will soon see whether he has
matured, can take responsibility, has faced reality. - kwc Shipwrecked:
Bush has so
thoroughly destroyed the Republican establishment that no one, not even his
dad, can rescue him now. By Sidney Blumenthal,
Salon.com, Thursday 27 October 2005
There is no one left
to rescue the Republican Party from George W. Bush. He is home alone. The
Republican-establishment wise men whose words were once quiet commands are
shouting unheeded warnings. The Republican leaders of Congress are distracted
and obsessed with their own crises of corruption. Suspended House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay is under indictment for criminal campaign practices
while Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is under investigation by the
Securities and Exchange Commission for insider stock trading in his
family-owned Hospital Corporation of America. The only revolt brewing in the
Senate is on the right against President Bush's nomination of his White House
legal counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court; some Republican senators
fear her potential for secret liberal heresy despite the president's
protestations of her conservative purity. On Aug. 7, 1974, three Republican leaders of Congress made a
fateful journey down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Sen. Barry
Goldwater, tribune of the conservative movement; Sen. Hugh Scott, the stalwart
minority leader from Pennsylvania; and Rep. John Rhodes, the minority leader in
the House, informed President Richard Nixon that as a result of the Watergate
scandals he must resign the presidency in the interest of the country and the
Republican Party. Two days later, Nixon quit. On Nov. 25, 1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese announced at a
White House press conference that tens of millions of dollars from illegal
sales of weapons to Iran had been siphoned to Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua by
a far-flung conspiracy centered in the National Security Council. National
Security Advisor John Poindexter immediately resigned and NSC military aide
Oliver North was fired. Within the next month, President Reagan's popularity
rating had collapsed from 67 to 46 percent; it did not recover until a year and
a half later, in May 1988, when he negotiated an arms control treaty with
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and traveled to Moscow to declare the Cold War
over. After the
revelation of the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan purged his administration of
right-wingers and neoconservatives in particular. The Republican establishment in all its
aspects took control. Former Sen. Howard Baker, who had been the Republican
leader at the Watergate hearings, became White House chief of staff; Colin
Powell was named national security advisor; neocon protector and Secretary of
Defense Caspar Weinberger was forced out and replaced by pragmatic bureaucratic
player Frank Carlucci; and Secretary of State George Shultz was given charge of
foreign policy in order to negotiate terms with Gorbachev. The storm enveloping President Bush is a
consequence of his adoption of the vicious smear tactics of the Nixon political
operation,
learned there by Karl Rove, who was called as a witness to testify about them
before the Watergate inquiry, and of Bush's elevation to power of the
neoconservatives removed by Reagan and excluded from office by Bush's father.
Bush is haunted by the history he insisted on defying. The elements of the
Republican establishment that Bush brought into his first administration as a
sort of symbolic tribute were gone by his second. By their nature, these people
are discreet, measured and private. It is not their impulse to voice
disagreement in public. Their sweeping and emotional jeremiads against what
Bush has wrought are extraordinary not only in their substance but in having
been made at all. Those expressing their disquiet about Bush are more than
simply losers in bureaucratic struggles for primacy of place. Once
representative of the heart and soul of the Grand Old Party, they are historical
castaways. They
stand for another Republican Party that has been supplanted by Bush's version. Paul O'Neill, the
former CEO of Alcoa, was shocked at the degradation of policymaking he witnessed
as Bush's first secretary of the Treasury. He had anticipated that the councils
of government under Bush would be no different from those he had experienced as
an economic aide under Nixon. Nixon had rigorously insisted on objective
analysis, hearing all sides and considering all options. In Cabinet meetings,
O'Neill wrote in his memoir, "The Price of Loyalty," Bush was like
"a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." The White House struck
back at O'Neill by falsely charging him with leaking classified materials and
subjecting him to an investigation, which had the desired effect of silencing
him. In retrospect,
the accusation of leaking classified information can only appear ironic. Christine Todd Whitman,
former Republican governor of New Jersey, was stunned by her denigration and
the suppression of science when she was Bush's first director of the
Environmental Protection Agency. After her resignation, she compared Bush
unfavorably to Reagan, who, she said, "didn't reach out in a way that indicated
that there was no room for others." Whitman's book, "It's My Party
Too," was a meek plea for attention from the "social
fundamentalists" she claimed had seized control of the family firm. She
would not name names, as though she might have another go at riding the tiger
that had already devoured her. John Danforth, for 18
years a U.S. senator from Missouri, served briefly before resigning as Bush's
ambassador to the United Nations. He did not stipulate the reasons for his
departure, but he did publish an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on March 30
of this year decrying how "Republicans have transformed our party into the
political arm of conservative Christians." The GOP, he wrote, has become
"a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has
become the political extension of a religious movement." Danforth, an old
friend of George H.W. Bush's, lamented the loss of the party's heritage:
"Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong
direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots." Danforth
was replaced at the U.N. not with a believer in old-fashioned bipartisan
internationalism but with John Bolton. Lawrence Wilkerson,
the former head of the Marine War College who had served as chief of staff to former
Secretary of State Colin Powell, revealed the inner struggles of the Bush
administration in a speech before the New America Foundation on Oct. 19. A
"Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" ran U.S. foreign policy for a president
"not versed in international relations and not too much interested."
Wilkerson defined the Bush doctrine as "cowboyism." Condoleezza Rice
as national security advisor was "extremely weak" and more interested
in "her intimacy with the president" than in acting as an honest
broker. Cleaning up after Bush's tarnishing of America's image in the world was
an impossible task. "It's hard to sell shit," said Wilkerson. Powell, Wilkerson's
principal, has remained publicly quiet since his September outburst, in which
he said that his speech before the United Nations arguing the case for the
existence of WMD and an invasion of Iraq, which subsequently was revealed to be
filled with disinformation, was a "blot" on his record and continues
to be "painful now." Behind the scenes, however, Powell has been active in
countering the Bush torture policy, which he opposed from the beginning. Powell sent personal letters and made
telephone calls to Republican senators urging them to support the amendment to
the military appropriations bill that would end the torture policy. As a result
of Powell's lobbying, 90 senators voted for it. It was a stinging rebuke to
Bush, who has threatened to veto the entire military appropriations package if
the amendment is attached. Brent Scowcroft,
perhaps more than anyone else, personifies the realist, bipartisan Republican
tradition of internationalism. He is also the former national security advisor
to the elder Bush and among his closest friends. President Bush dismissed him early this year from
the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, having ignored his advice through the
first term.
Scowcroft's candid views appear in an article in the current issue of the New
Yorker, in which he details his rejection by Bush at length. "I don't want
to go there," Scowcroft replied when asked about the difference between
the father and son. He said dismissively of the Iraq policies of a leading
neoconservative, former Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, "He's got a
utopia out there." On Cheney, Scowcroft sounded perplexed: "The real
anomaly in the Administration is Cheney. I consider Cheney a good friend - I've
known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." But Scowcroft the
foreign policy mandarin may not have been exposed to the partisan Cheney when
he served as secretary of defense in the administration of Bush Sr. He may have
missed Cheney's tenure as a representative in the House leadership, where he
compiled a far-right voting record and, as House minority whip during the
1980s, was the hidden hand behind the rise of Newt Gingrich and his band of
radicals. When he was slated to be Bush's running mate, it was widely assumed
that Cheney would act as a stabilizing and moderating presence. Only those who understood his
congressional career knew of his affinities with the radical right, his
vengeful instincts and his mean-spiritedness. His emergence at the center of the
"cabal" now under investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald
should not surprise those who have penetrated his avuncular image to see the
hard man beneath.
Cheney was not the
substitute father figure but the false father. Bush's highhanded
treatment of the few Republican moderates of his first term all but eviscerated
what was left of the establishment that once controlled the party. The story of
the old party's fall from grace and Bush's part in it is a well-known
bildungsroman, a family saga that begins with the father. The son of Prescott
Bush, a patrician moderate Republican senator from Connecticut and a Wall
Street investment banker, George H.W. Bush traveled to Texas to make his
fortune in the wildcat oil industry. He was hardly a roaring success, but he
took up his father's line of work, getting elected to the House from suburban
Houston. It was then that he opened the negotiations of his Faustian bargain. His father had been the head of the
United Negro College Fund; he and his wife were prominent members of the local
chapter of Planned Parenthood. But George Bush Sr., seeking political advantage
in Texas, declared his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bush spent
the next decade advancing himself as a consummate Republican loyalist in
positions ranging from chairman of the Republican National Committee under
Nixon to Gerald Ford's CIA director and United Nations ambassador. After losing
the Republican presidential nomination to Ronald Reagan in 1980, he swallowed
his criticism of Reagan's supply-side nostrums as "voodoo economics"
when he became his running mate. The Faustian
negotiations deepened. In 1988, he ran for president as Reagan's anointed
successor. Faltering on his own, with unenthusiastic backing from Reagan's
evangelical supporters, he ran a series of nativist and racially charged
attacks on his Democratic opponent. Bush won that election with the right-wing
Republican base voting for him but still doubtful of his authenticity. As
president his compromises on taxation and realism in foreign policy led to
their open disillusionment. His son George lost
his first campaign for the House from Texas, tainted by association with his
father, who was tarnished by the right as a member of the Trilateral Commission
international conspiracy. From then on, Bush was never outmaneuvered on his
right flank. His political field marshal, Karl Rove, managed the right wing for
his benefit. The
Faustian bargain of the father became business as usual for the son. Now the old
establishment is faded. Its remnants largely consist of his father's
superannuated retinue. Not even the old Texas establishment in the person of
James A. Baker III, Bush's father's field marshal and the former secretary of
state (among his many official posts), who managed the Florida contest that
gave the presidency to the son, is welcome in this White House. The Republican Party after Bush, minus its
traditional establishment, threatens to become the party of its irreducible
base, the party of the old Confederacy and the sparsely populated Rocky
Mountain states. But this base, however loyal and obsequious to Bush, regardless of any
crisis, does
not offer statesmen to step in to handle his shaken White House. A sharp reversal of
policy and turnover in personnel are the only actions that may enable Bush to
salvage the shipwreck of his presidency, as they did for Reagan. But bringing in the elders, even if they
could be summoned, would be psychologically devastating to Bush, a humiliating
admission that his long history of recklessness and failure, from the Texas Air
National Guard to Harken Energy, with rescue only through the intervention of
his father and his father's friends, has reached its culmination. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102705N.shtml |
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