In a piece in today's
Wall Street Journal, Jeffery Scott Shapiro admonishes Americans for being so irreverent and disrespectful toward the current occupant of the Oval Office, the former Governor of Texas, George W. Bush.
Mr. Shapiro's piece,
The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace: What Must Our Enemies Be Thinking? appeals to the same faux patriotism that conservative and right wing pundits have appealed since Richard Nixon kept trying to prosecute the Vietnam War before finally agreeing to a peace settlement he could have gotten soon after taking office.
Mr. Shapiro cites the case of President Truman, the patron saint of presidential come backs, not for his surprise upset of Governor Dewey in the election of 1948, but rather for his unpopularity as he left the White House in contrast to his shining historical reputation now. Just because it happened to Truman doesn't mean it is going to happen to Bush. Truman's unpopularity was based on his ability to take a middle course, such as the policy of containment, that the right found too soft (they wanted to nuke the Commies then and there) and the left too dangerous (they were uncomfortable with any contemplation of nuclear weapons). Bush did not look for wise middle courses. He looked for way to go further to right to enhance his base and encourage them to turn out to outvote moderates, liberals and the left, and then let crooked elections officials do the rest.
As usual, I take issue with prefixing Bush's name with "President." He never won a clean presidential election. In fact, I'm certain he lost in 2000 in spite of Katerine Harris' best efforts at voter suppression and then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell did such a royal job of fucking up Ohio's voting in 2004 that any objective determination of who actually carried the state is probably impossible.
Says Shapiro:
Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.
To start with the subtitle for Mr. Shapiro's piece, I don't give a two-bit damn what our enemies think, but I'll happily offer up what I think. My first inclination is of offer Mr. Shapiro a counter-question:
Exactly how did Mr. Bush stand by us? He wrecked the federal budget after inheriting a surplus and now we have red ink as far as the eye can see. Am I supposed to be thankful that my children as yet unconceived grandchildren will have to pay it off instead of me? Did he stand by us sending our children to die in a war for oil and corporate profits justified with a pack of lies? In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he was standing by Senator McCain waiting for some birhtday cake, not be the people of New Orleans. Did he stand by us as our jobs were lost and homes foreclosed the way he stood by Wall Street bankers as they sank? Did he stand by us when he seemed to sleep through a briefing about Osama's plans to used hijacked planes as missiles in a torrorist attack on American soil?
Mr. Bush has never stood by us. He has done nothing for us. He has done much to us.
For Mr. Shapiro's benefit, I shall enumerate:
Mr. Bush issued a policy, cited as the
Bush Doctrine, asserting the right of the United States to prevent by use of military force any threat he merely suspects to be planned but not yet materialized in contravention of the Charter of the United Nations, to which the United States is a party.
Mr. Bush used the September 11 attacks as cover to start an unnecessary, illegal and imperialist war of aggression against a nation that had nothing to do with the attacks. Osama bin Laden, the actual perpetrator of the attacks, remains at large to this day.
Mr. Bush used manipulated intelligence and even outright lies to justify invading Iraq. As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he was not a threat and the US had far more important security priorities in the spring of 2003, like finding and capturing or killing the aforementioned Osama bin Laden.
After using the manipulated intelligence and the outright lies, Mr. Bush allowed persons under his authority to publicly identify a ranking agent of Central Intelligence as part of a political vendetta against the agent's husband, who published an article in
The New York Times calling into question the authenticity of intelligence of which he had first hand knowledge.
Mr. Bush, in violation of common Article 3 of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture, approved and implemented a policy of torturing persons detained in the so-called war on terror. Furthermore, in violation of the Convention against Torture, Mr. Bush allowed agents of the United States to secretly detain persons suspected of terrorism and rendition them to foreign countries for the purpose of interrogation by torture.
Mr. Bush approved and implemented a system of justice bereft of due process and rights for the accused to try those suspected of terrorism against the United States.
Mr. Bush, in direct violation of his oath to uphold the laws of the United States and its Constitution, asserted the authority to detain indefinitely any person he suspected of terrorism, actual or planned, against the United States.
Mr. Bush, in direct violation of his oath to uphold the laws of the United States and its Constitution, asserted the authority to and directed the National Security Agency to secretly collect data from the private communications of American citizens.
Mr. Bush suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus without sufficient cause.
Mr. Bush used tax policy to transfer wealth upward with disastrous results for the rich, the middle class and the poor alike.
Mr. Bush promoted tax policies which encouraged American businesses to outsource jobs to foreign countries to the great detriment of American workers and the American economy.
Mr. Bush attempted to destroy social security, which, had he had his way, would have been sucked dry in September's Wall Street debacle.
Mr. Bush ignored the humanitarian disaster in the wake for Hurricane Katrina for several days in callous disregard for the welfare and lives of American citizens.
Mr. Bush allowed those under the authority of his re-election campaign to deliberately distort the military record of his opponent, Senator John Kerry, by suborning false testimony calling into question Senator Kerry's valor while serving in Vietnam.
Mr. Bush ignored the threat to the planet of climate change caused by use of fossil fuels, at first by falsely asserting there was no problem and later, after admitting that such a problem did exist, simply doing nothing.
Mr. Bush allowed those under his authority to fire up to nine US Attorneys for political reasons, to wit, their refusal to prosecute meritless cases of voter fraud.
Mr. Bush allowed the Justice Department to prosecute innocent persons for political purposes, most infamously the case of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who was wrongly convicted of accepting a bribe.
Mr. Bush, in an attempt to cover up several of the misdeeds enumerated here, issued false claims of executive privilege in order to prevent the testimony of aids and former aids before congressional investigators.
Mr. Bush, in direct violation of his oath to uphold the laws of the United States and its Constitution, asserted the authority to modify or simply ignore acts of Congress with signing statements affixed to the act when he signed it into law.
How dare Mr. Shapiro accuse American citizens of "not standing by the one person who stood by us"? The fact that this war criminal and constitutional scofflaw was never impeached and removed from office, that he is still free to come and go as he pleases rather than confined in a federal penitentiary, is ample evidence that too many American citizens stood by him too long.
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