You've got to admire Nancy Reagan's loyalty. But you have to suspect that
she has acquired her husband's Alzheimer's disease.

"Spanky" <nospam@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:1ceQc.210842$IQ4.113920@attbi_s02...

"Captain Compassion" <res0mp8t@NOSPAMverizon.net> wrote in message
news:ure0h0lmjrod4eh5q2hbbkhdab4ce18ijk@4ax.com...

Nancy Reagan Backing Bush's Re-Election

Maybe the ol' lady is backing Bush but the Gipper's son sees what's

on:

http://tinyurl.com/438bm

The Case Against George W. Bush
By Ron Reagan

It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool,
electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and
her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered
lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic
retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam
was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and
their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a
result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could
feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country,
the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The
Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf
splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly
tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the
air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from
friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this
time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of
the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands
from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly)
appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you
went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about
enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age
appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling
from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that
highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished
American freedom: dissent.
Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long,
stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the
newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly,
tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it
to Bush's advantage for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to
Reagan" puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like
(subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People
were treated to a side-by-side comparison-Ronald W. Reagan versus
George W. Bush-and it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed
with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days
and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan:
He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A
sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol
rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood-a portrait of my father and the
words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.

The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the
stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The
Bush administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials
before various commissions and committees-Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't
quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the
altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a
delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might
just come over the table at him-these were a continuing reminder. The
Enron creeps, too-a reminder of how certain environments and
particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A
tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on
the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide
liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent:
liar.

Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their
accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the
lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his
administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level
far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of
public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of
symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody
dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started
catching on.

None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency.
The far-right wing of the country-nearly one third of us by some
estimates-continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid
(liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan.
Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still
bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who
fails to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut
job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations
have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one
thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a
vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and
former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line
up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the
opposition as fringe wackos.

Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies?
One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American
people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its
true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives
its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same
conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal
critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This
is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of
his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of
George W. Bush.


THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection-which the
administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate-involve our
putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq.

During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more
"humble" foreign policy. "I would take the use of force very
seriously," he said. "I would be guarded in my approach." Other
countries would resent us "if we're an arrogant nation." He sniffed at
the notion of "nation building." "Our military is meant to fight and
win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops."
International cooperation and consensus building would be the
cornerstone of a Bush administration's approach to the larger world.
Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as
president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging
off adventuring in the Middle East.

But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr.
Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad
guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave
threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten
the American homeland again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front
of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some
measure responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at
the tip of Manhattan?

Well, no.

As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime
"terror czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with
the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day
one. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and
looking at how we could take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed
was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White
House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's where the actual
perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer;
Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply
a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives)
that war was justified.

The real-but elusive-prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin
Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox
News-the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House-told me a year ago
that mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the
company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at
large) while Saddam's Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just
like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by
international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it
had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war,
that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and
south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose
lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed
or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's
words, "a threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on
earth.

Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft,
drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the
nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,"
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And,
Bush maintained, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a
biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual
terrorists." We "know" Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even "know" where they are
hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of
Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World
Trade Center.


ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since
discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they
were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up
in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, ***** Cheney clings to his
mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide
terror network.

And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been
justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He
pushed the envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power,
but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would
tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture
was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment
that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice
Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light.
The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to
practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's panties
over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to
masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet
plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane
treatment or merely "sleep management"?

Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent
upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration,
not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way;
relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful
of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't
"represent the best of what America's all about." As anyone who'd
watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted,
what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling,
obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was
stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major
General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's primary investigation
into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured
John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire
tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who
was in charge at Abu Ghraib?

The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and
occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the
American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva
Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane
treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may
have ideas worth discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in
the conversation. They don't trust us because they don't dare expose
their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to
all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're in
control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got him; we'll get out
as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be there for
years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only
with rose petals and easy coochie.

This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely
cynical "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA
and in the administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal
shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely
tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in
a world of his own imagining.

And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the
same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world
twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year,
and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with
getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards
in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a
job-where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your
health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any
of the nearly two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his
administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to
post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he
couldn't afford the best available health care for his children. For
him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no
more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks
about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy
is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own
airplanes. In Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to
avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a
friend. You're the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his
world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.


ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when
their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like
political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively,
as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on
their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably
greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary
prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have
to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short
run, is nevertheless in one's long-term self-interest? Why would a
president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste
his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability
to admit even small mistakes.

Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident
during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream
media. His untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While
generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other
qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free
world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose
straightforwardness was a given. None of that "what the meaning of is
is" business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded
fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was
depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue
dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He would spend
valuable weeks explaining away statements-"I invented the
Internet"-that he never made in the first place. All this left the
coast pretty clear for Bush.

Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush
tells two obvious-if not exactly earth-shattering-lies and is not
challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of
rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact,
vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to
political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature.
Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign.
The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are
briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return
to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a
certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha
male."

Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and
his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once
ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.


IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that
day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The
Pet Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While
this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic
circumstances-for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still
have been under attack-the appearance was, shall we say, less than
gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air
Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief
political advisor, Karl Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence
to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no
such threat.

Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner
emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the
background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew
clear that the mission in Iraq-whatever that may have been-was far
from accomplished. "Major combat operations," as Bush put it, may have
technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily.
So the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner
befitting a president pledged to "responsibility and accountability":
It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists
revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of
the White House communications office.

More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's
dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first
arose about the country's lack of preparedness in the face of
terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit
arenas to assure the nation that "no one could have imagined
terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact, terrorism experts had
warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director
George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that "it is
highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near
future, within several weeks." Two intelligence briefings given to
Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the
imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to
The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled "Bin
Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States," was delivered to the
president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush "broke off
from work early and spent most of the day fishing." This was the
briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as "historical" in her testimony before
the 9/11 Commission.

What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended
in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty
was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been
explained in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of
momentous events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have
fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the
president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we
figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the
sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we
sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed
more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately,
an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once
the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's White
House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor
gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the
truth.

But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George
Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation
must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . .
nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has
"never fully inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly
excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man
of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate
extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is
ineloquent not because he can't speak but because he doesn't bother to
think.


GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for
office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the
focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed
from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously
tending a "base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500
fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with
Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size
where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in
the bathtub." That base also encompasses a healthy share of
anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk
science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them-"partial birth" abortion
legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning
marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to
embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential
doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily
shares their worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any
coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics
in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of
political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's former head of the Office of
Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, "What
you've got is everything-and I mean everything-being run by the
political arm."

This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by
a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they
chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys
indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities.
How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had
they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children
or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment?
Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an
optional war under false pretenses?

If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it.
Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually
believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by
constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can
keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.


UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a
personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One
conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has
already discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a
former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most
assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for
Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and
uneventfully-once during my father's presidency and once during my
father's funeral. I'll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the
pretense that he's somehow a clone of my father, but far from
threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting
roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His
Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model,
with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its
kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don't
look in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my
shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American
citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is
being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a
critical juncture in our nation's history, one ripe with both danger
and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently
confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the
possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and
ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush
and his allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we
trust them?

Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team
cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the
White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a
lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We
can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE
ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.