Our Dirty President

By Peter Fredson

December 20, 2005

As we come to the end of 2005, I looked back at the G.W.Bush record to see if it reflected glory or shame. I am forced to the conclusion that he is a dirty President. I don’t mean anything connected necessarily with soap and water, but with morals, ethics, “clean” politics, upstanding behavior, model citizenship, fair play, upholding the laws and respecting the Constitution.

I find his conduct to be less than meritorious. GWB prefers to shroud his activities in secrecy, deceit, lies, exaggerations, skirting the laws, exploitation, and cheating rather than honest, open, candid, straight-forward, and respectful of the laws of our country. He has responded to criticism, not by changing any behavior, but by aggressively assaulting critics by Swiftboating, scandal, imperial disdain, allegations of treason or of damaging his “war” effort, and by grandly ignoring any reflections on his legal authority.

His constant references to 9/11 are designed to impress upon the public the enormous lie that he acted in some sort of heroic manner before the airplane assaults, during the crash into the Twin Towers, and immediately afterwards. He did nothing before the attack, but cut brush on his ex-pig farm, carefree as a cow in clover.

During the attack he sat motionless, then headed to a plane for security along with Cheney to some other bunker. Afterward he went to the crash site, rolled up his sleeves as though he were actually going to pull people out of the wreckage, put his arm around police and firemen as though he too were a valiant hard-working guardian of the public.

He uses impression management to the very hilt to make the public think that he knows what is going on, cares about anything except himself, and tries by photo-ops to polish his self-image with staged craft. He is just about the most incurious President I have ever known.

During Hurricane Katrina he again cut brush on his ranch, had some cake, strummed a guitar, and enjoyed life while people were being ground to paste by Katrina. Only the great outpouring of criticism, some from his own party, and the consequent slump in popularity polls made him suddenly realize he was a superfluous politician.

He has spent billions on security, much of it for his own safety, and has converted Washington into a bunker, or jail. Worse, he appointed Ashcroft as Attorney General the attack on civil rights began. They were designed to ward off terrorists, but succeeded dramatically in converting citizens into suspects.

His personal cowardice is shown by the greatest attacks on civil liberties in our history, since we tossed out another King George. His attacks on the environment, for maximum corporate profits, also made him a dirty President, despite the fact that his relaxing of all safety regulations and renaming some dirty actions “Clean Air” and “Clean Water.” His attempts to privatize social security into the bank accounts of his cronies are reprehensible.

The Bush people are expert in renaming whatever is in their way in order to destroy it. War became Peace, Democracy became Colonialism, Liberty became Wage Slavery, bigotry and racism became God’s punishments, while shamelessly fixing elections and voting machinery without a paper trail, became Republican legitimacy.

I remember vividly the hanging chads, the quick actions of Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, and the consequent selection of GBW by the Republicans on the Supreme Court. I also remember the touch-screen voting machines in 2004, which had no paper trail, and the very strange results.

Dozens of similar falsifications of reality replaced democracy with imperial whimsical reaction, like that actually practiced by Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler when they started their rampages against individual freedom and civil rights.

GWB’s propensity for deceit may be intended to confuse terrorists, but mainly ensnares citizens in a dirty network of spies, jails, indefinite detention, kidnapping, torture, abuse, rendition, and universal snooping to protect the image of the Emperor-President. His lies on all these violations have made most of the citizenry suspicious and even fearful of his actions

His Cabinet has exaggerated the fears, with little Condi Rice piping up that there was no torture, no abuse, no surreptitious flights, no secret jails, no snooping, no illegalities. This was designed to lull the gullible fundamentalists into upholding their heroic leader, but eventually led to a remarkable slide into a loss of faith in Presidential candor, legitimacy, honesty, legality, and compassion.

Anyone who still believes the Black Angel of Death has been lulled into the slumber of undeniably gullible fundamentalists.

Today the bulk of Americans no longer believe that Bush has any credibility or legitimacy. He appears to be a petulant tin-horn dictator, remarkable for dishonesty, stealth, and misrepresentation.

GWB’s remarks that the Constitution which he swore to uphold, with his hand on his Bible, on the Capitol steps, that the Constitution is only a “G...d... piece of paper” have put him up on the road to recall or impeachment. If this imperial President no longer believes that he is subject to the Constitution, but that his personal opinion will override it, then he MUST be relieved of office.

Our nation has become an object of shame and ridicule led by a zealot who uses torture, abuse, stealth, misrepresentation, kidnapping, surveillance of his own citizens as tools of his presidency. All the efforts of our founding fathers and previous presidents to bolster the prestige of our country have been tossed into the garbage by the Bush pirate neocons.

Bush is a useless and incompetent President, despite a flurry of speeches and hundreds of staged photo-ops. He, and his pirate crew, went into Iraq without warrant, killed thousands, imposed their own regime, stole oil and land, and under duress held “elections” approved by our King. We are not one iota safer, more secure, than before Bush began strutting, swaggering and smirking. Bush, in fact, appears to have manufactured much of the terror in the world. For every death he has caused there must be several people with a life-long grudge against our country.

Smiling, kissing babies, staring unblinking at a camera to show sincerity, may make him likeable to many people, but to me a dirty president is an unacceptable leader.

Do the words “Sovereignty”, “Democracy”, and “Liberty” hold any actual meaning for Bush?

Can a nation held captive under the muzzles of guns, tanks and planes be “free?”

Can a nation with a democracy long survive a fascist imperialist regime that has taken it captive?

Violence, deceit and duress must cease before anyone in the world is “safe” from the depredations and degradations of our imitation King George.