The Most Invisible Ex-President
20 June 2009When I first wrote that George Bush the Younger would be the Worst President in United States history, it was before he had taken office. Too many of our members, perhaps used to the give and take of backroom politics, seemed to think I was using hyperbole, or, more likely, just being mean to the guy heading the other, winning team.
Although most humans are not capable of real mental change, I would like to think that our members are smarter and more open-minded than the average human being, and that, as we have gone through all of the increasingly-crazy and damaging results of Bush’s time in office, they have come to see that I was not being unkind, just predicting something true.
Now we know, as much as one can ever know something: George Bush was indeed the Worst President in the history of the country, by any measure. The list is so long, and so impressive: lying to the people to get them into a war which he had literally mapped out with oil company names almost a year earlier, for example. That has to be a capital offense of the most egregious kind. Killing half a million to a million innocent civilians in the process. Wow. Institutionalizing torture in the U.S.; eavesdropping illegally, domestically; vitiating most of the Bill of Rights; stocking the Justice Department three levels deep with hires (and firings) based solely on political litmus tests; stealing elections with compromised votes on the Supreme Court. And destroying the world economy, or nearly so, with a little prior help from Clinton and the banking lobby.
It’s an amazing list, and much longer.
And now George appears to have earned himself one last Legacy Crown. What else will he be remembered for? With Jimmy Carter perhaps the best act in the role of ex-presidency, we now have a new entry: the Most Invisible Ex-President.
Many presidents honor the unwritten rule of not criticizing their replacements; it is more dignified, better politics, and suits the country’s foreign interests more obviously. But what we see today is not reticence, it’s something altogether different. Hopefully we have some excellent historians in our ranks, and I would like to issue this as an academic challenge: if there has been any ex-president who was less visible, starting the minute of his replacement, please let us know who it was. I am not a historian, but it seems unlikely that it would be humanly impossible to pull off a more effective disappearing act.
What caused Bush to vanish? This is not about him “working on his memoirs.” Immediately after leaving office, he put himself on the speaker’s market. There was, in all of the civilized world, only one city that bit: Calgary, the only major oil city in North America outside of Texas. Compare this to Bill Clinton, with all of his PR problems after leaving office, charging $250k+ per speech, and booking speeches several nights per week around the globe for years after his departure from office – while he wrote his memoirs. It’s how he paid off the $12MM or so in legal cost debt he took from public office.
No, this silence is something else. It could be fear of prosecution, internationally for war crimes, nationally for any of a series of crimes laid out for alternative radio by Al Gore, and in print by others. There are no lack of grounds, or prosecutors. Efforts have already begun outside the U.S. to bring him to international justice.
Or it might be something deeper than fear of retribution. Perhaps he is just starting to catch on to what he did to the country and the world, and as it sinks in, he can think of nothing but hiding in shame from public view.
Nah, no way. He’s just scared. The handlers told him to shut up so Jeb could get to work re-framing the family name, in time for his own run at the big job.
3 Responses to “The Most Invisible Ex-President”
June 25th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I am not an American but I have some questions:
1. You say George Bush “destroyed the world economy”. I thought that was done by the banks and the sub-prime mortgages etc. In fact I’m pretty sure that was the reason. Banks lending money ad-lib on rotten deals. Was Bush part of this scam?
2. Your present president Obama talks glibly but has printed far more money than in the whole history of the world till now. Its what countries like Zimbabwe do, and the Weimar Republic did, to totally destroy their economies. This money is not backed by any produce, goods or services, which remain the same or have declined. This is a sure recipe for hyperinflation and disaster.
3. True Bush went to war in Iraq and claimed they had weapons of mass destruction. But he was genuinely deceived by his intelligence services who in turn were deceived by Iraqi dissidents who had their own agenda. Colin Powell was also part of the deal and he is a genuine person. If Bush was truly a deceiver he could have manufactured the evidence that wasnt there. Instead a genuine search was made and they came up with nothing.
4. I do not think the American army carried out any wide scale massacres. The casualties that took place was due to the sectarian fighting and the consequences of this. Saddam on the other hand massacred hundreds and thousands of his own citizens and led his country to two wars before Bush which also led to huge deaths in his own country and Iran.
5. Bush also started a war in Afghanistan which is also bloody. There is no criticism of that from you? In fact Obama wants to expand that war.
6. I dont know about Bush stacking his own people but isnt Obama doing the same? Isnt that what all presidents do?
July 12th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Hi Richard,
Here are a few thoughts, in your order of asking. I appreciate you are not American, which says a lot (most of it probably good) about your media exposure.
1. There are several ways to look at the collapse. The “real” cause, in my mind, was an explosion in global liquidity, itself caused by the Bank of Japan and the Carry Trade, and the huge influx of petrodollars resulting from radical rises in oil pricing. (Our membere/subscribers have been watching this since before these things happened, which no doubt gives them an easier perspective on this than non-members would have. I’ve been writing about it for years.)
My comment re: Bush (and, in the case of one Act, Clinton) is that he intentionally appointed non-enforcers to key financial regulatory positions (like the SEC), and made sure that there was no oversight, no regulation, and no action of any kind that would threaten or temper the moves by commercial and investment bankers that eventually blew up the global economy. These moves (off-sheet liabilities, insurance exposures sixty times the market value of the firm, mis-ranked mortgage packages, etc.) are directly the result of the Bush approach to governing, and I consider him both directly and indirectly responsible.
2. I don’t think Obama is glib; he seems to me to be talking quite thoughtfully about the huge issues he and we were handed.
He and Geithner have save the world from what they both saw on inauguration day: a real global economic abyss, caused by ethical, legal and financial breaches so great and deep that there was no assurance of avoiding real global collapse. People tend to forget this rather quickly, particularly now that we seem to have been saved. One might begin by saying, Thank you.
Next comes the part you, and our eloquent president, are both worried about: when is it time to pull back. He knows its a big issue, you know it, and I know it. I have always felt that the real problem, rooted in the original cause, is too much global liquidity. Just having everyone print and spend more money won’t fix it, rather, it will exacerbate it.
So yes, I, too, am worried about hyperinflation.
3. Bush was NOT deceived by his intelligence services; this is a bit of pastiche served up by the Bush team, after the fact, as a lie to cover their own misdirected activities. People either missed, or have forgotten, that CIA leader George Tenet testifying before the Senate, prior to the Iraq War, that Saddam and Iraq did not pose a threat to the U.S. worthy of war.
You probably didn’t know that. There is a fascinating story of the Bush team manipulating the CIA (and not the other way around), including installing a new agency uber-boss (ODI), arrogating almost all CIA tasks to the Pentagon, and then, when Tenet went along for the ride, giving him a Congressional Medal of Honor – and firing him.
What a joke. And no one seems to have caught the whole tragic / comedic play.
It is, however, very true that Cheney and Rumsfeld appeared to have been completely bamboozled (fooled) by the exiled Iraqi National Congress and the strange, self-serving Mssr. Chalabi. He took them for a real ride, and was only able to do so because they had shut themselves off from the country experts in the State Department and the CIA.
As for Colin Powell: his perfidy in the Iraq War buildup (he was against it, I believe, but went along with the lies and fake evidence to keep his own career on track)was professional suicide. As far as I can tell, a previously-great man self-destructed in front of the world during his goofy UN go-to-war speech.
Bush was more a puppet than a deceiver, but he was a knowing puppet. What is the ethical cost of that position? Cheney was the happy deceiver, as we continue to find out day by day.
There were never any WMDs, but Cheney and others continued to suggest that there were WMDS that got somehow lost or hidden, on Fox (not) News, while also claiming that Saddam really was linked to Al Quaeda. Talk about misdirection.
The best global science today shows that some number between 600K and 1MM Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S. attack began. No one is claiming that the US Army massacred anyone (ie, no one is claiming any My Lai – llike incidents.) But if you are interested, you can go back and review the first full-scale U.S. attack on Anbar, and on the town of Fallujah.
I just picked this video up from a Google search on the town, it is called “The Massacre of Fallujah”.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5axbm_the-massacre-of-fallujah-iraq_news
I don’t believe that, as bad as Saddam was, he was responsible for more Iraqi civilian deaths than Bush. And that is ironic. If the Johns Hopkiins and European research teams are correct, Bush killed more innocents than Saddam.
5. The war in Afghanistan was a direct, and perhaps necessary, result of 9.11. The Taliban had sheltered the terrorists who bombed the Twin Towers, and refused to hand Osama et al over to us. End of story. And yes, it has been a bloody one, wholly self-inflicted. It is a difficult war, but not, in the sense of Iraq, a commercially-driven, or stupid, one.
6. If I understand your question: yes, all presidents are expected to put their own people into top jobs in the government, as part of the changeover. But don’t let this cloud your understand of what Bush did that was strictly illegal: presidents are not allowed to select Department of Justice employees based SOLELY upon party affiliation. I still expect Bush team members to face felony charges over these actions.
Thank you for writing in a thoughtful letter, Richard. I hope these comments help.
July 19th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Hi Mark, Thank you for your reply.
I have one more question:
Why is Obama not going after Bush? I remember reading about him defending Bush and saying that he was a good man.