By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – March 29, 2009
At the end of my column on this subject two weeks ago, I
restated my position that “success,” whether in a Presidency or on a Saturday
morning errands trip, is to be measured against goals set and the degree to
which they have been achieved. Thus, when one looks at the BushCheney (or
CheneyBush --- as I have said, your choice) record, is this a “failed
Presidency?” Hardly. They set out to achieve what I have on more
than one occasion termed a “coup d’etat in slow motion.” BushCheney did
not measure success in terms of polls nor subsequent Republican electoral victories
(at least so far). Forget them. We must look at what they did with
the control of the Executive Branch that they had.
Upon gaining the Office of the Presidency Bush man first
embraced the powers truly vested in him by the Constitution. Bush was
then little challenged by a very weak opposition. Further, he was strongly
supported for most of the first six years by his lock-step Republican Congress,
and ongoing, his in-the-pocket Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.
Together, he used them to create an Office of the Presidency with powers that
no reading of the Constitution can possibly support. That’s success,
man. Let’s review some of the policy specifics. They are well-known
to most readers of TPJ, but we shall review them briefly here anyway.
On the foreign policy side, let’s begin with Iraq.
Is/was it a disaster? Well, it is, if you measure it on the supposed
WMD/al-Qaeda connections, or the “establishment of Democracy” (not an
originally stated goal of the US invasion), and certainly on what has happened
to that benighted country since. Ohmigod. First the Iraqi people
suffer under Hussein for 20-plus years. Then they get Bush and his
pro-counsels. What did they do to deserve that sequence? But
supposing when that pre-invasion intelligence analysis predicting chaos in Iraq
following an American invasion (“Analysts’ Warning of Iraq Chaos Detailed,”
Pincus and DeYoung, Washington Post, May 26, 2007) came through, you didn’t say
“ohmigod, how could we possibly go in there?” But rather you said “ohmigod, exactly what we are looking
for: Permanent War here we come.” It is becoming ever more clear
that the latter was indeed the BushCheney response. And even though in
the end they did not achieve it (at least not yet), why would they want
Permanent War? There are three main reasons.
First, it was the central part of their campaign to create
the atmosphere of Permanent Fear at home, the only way they could have possibly
legally kept the Executive Branch in Republican hands after Jan. 20,
2009. Second, it was a means of keeping one of their two most important
backers, the arms industry, in clover even after the end of the Cold War
oh-so-many years ago. Third, it could have created the basis for creating
that "terrorist attack" and coup d’etat in Oct., 2008 which would
have keep CheneyBush themselves in power after Jan. 20, 2009, about which I and
many others viewed as a distinct possibility. And so, even before his
famous-in-advance “September [2007] Report” was issued, Bush’s hand-picked Gen.
“Mouthpiece” Petraeus was saying (in statements that appeared to have been
written for him by Rove’s staff) “we’ll be there for 10 more years, at
least.” If what you want is indeed Permanent War, that’s success,
man. As a side-car to this main foreign policy thrust, Bush tried as hard
as he could to create a mini-Cold War with Russia with his “defensive missiles
on your borders” and the “bases on your soft Central Asian underbelly”
program. This would have helped for both the Permanent War strategy and
“let’s keep the arms industry going full blast” plans.
Turning to domestic policy (not necessarily in order of
importance), a major goal was to, as Grover Norquist put it in his famous
mantra: “Shrink the Federal government to the size of a bathtub and then drown
it in the bathtub.” (That is, of course, drown those parts of the Federal
that serve the National Domestic Interest, not those concerned with political
oppression, domestic and foreign spying, defending the extractive industries
from any interference, promoting the depredations of finance capitalism,
domestic thought-control [e.g., on abortion rights and gay rights], and so on
and so forth.) What happened after Katrina struck was only the most famous
example of the Bush/Cheney/Norquist approach to government and governing.
It was not incompetence, folks. How the Georgite Federal
government acted and continued to act in the aftermath of Katrina and in so
many other venues is exactly how the Georgites want it to act, viz. the
Norquist prescription. They want to destroy all the functions of the
Federal government, except those that have to do with the military, the
prisons, other instruments of oppression and repression, and the use of tax
revenues to line the pockets of themselves and their rich supporters. It
is happening exactly the way it was planned to. The only big target Bush failed
to hit was Social Security. Chalk up another success for Bush.
Further, Bush secured the dominance of the profit-makers,
the drug companies, the insurance companies, and the health-technology
companies, in the US health care delivery system. And with the help of a
group of reactionary Democrats, just as were organized against the Clinton
Health Plan in 1994, these sectors are once again organizing to defeat the
Obama Health Plan. Bush may well
have made sure that there will be no significant reform of the health care
delivery system for the foreseeable future, for he has totally entrenched the
aforementioned profit-makers. As Bush made sure that there would be no
Federal support for stem-cell research on his watch, the US fell behind in this
arena of research as well as many others (e.g., alternative energy supply and
how to combat global warming and climate change). Bush made sure that
homophobia would for the foreseeable future be at the centre of the Republican
Party’s political attack apparatus (see the success of Prop. 8 in California.
More successes? Bush and Rove presided (indirectly to be sure) over the creation of the
most powerful propaganda machine since the days of Adolf Hitler and Josef
Goebbels, their Privatized Ministry of Propaganda. Just see how it
wheeled into action, with a common agenda, after the Libby Commutation: “there
was no crime; everyone knew Valerie Plame was covert; Ambassador Wilson’s
findings were false; Libby’s memory was simply faulty.” All lies, of
course, but all reflecting the White House message, and, since it sounded just
like him, most likely coming straight from Karl Rove. Currently the PMP
is screaming the lie that THE cause of the major breakdown that has occurred in
Third Stage Capitalism (that is Finance Capitalism, succeeding the Mercantile
and Industrial Stages) was “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac.” They were of course supported (you
know) by the “evil trio” of The Woman (Nancy Pelosi), the Gay (Barney Frank),
and The Black (woman to boot) Maxine Waters. Trick mortgages from companies required to have virtually no
reserves, the “securitization” and “credit default swap” processes,
interest-conflicted bond-rating, and market manipulation by totally unregulated
“hedge funds,” among other factors, of course had nothing to do with it.
Bush converted (if I may use that term) the Civil Rights
Division of the Justice Department into the “Promotion of Republican Rightist
Religion Division” (N.A. Lewis, “Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights
Mission, New York Times, June 14, 2007). Bush placed in the Federal
Judiciary at every level an extensive cadre of the most reactionary jurists he
could find. He created a private army of “security contractors” totally
beholden to him, and used them both overseas (Iraq) and at home (Katrina and
now near the Mexican border, south of San Diego). Some of them already wear black uniforms. Since
Blackwater has been kicked out of Iraq by the Iraqis, I wonder what their next
mission might be.
At Guantanamo and elsewhere Bush trained a huge cadre
of torturers and brutal prison guards for purposes that can only be guessed at
(except to say that they went way beyond dealing with a group of unfortunate
Muslims caught up in a web that had no purpose except torture-systems
development). Then there was all the environmental stuff, no-to-global
warming, and etc. And oh yes, I almost forgot, with his planned fantastical
deficits and debt, and tax cuts for his rich friends and backers, even before
the crisis of finance Capitalism, Bush tried as hard as he could to cripple
fiscally any future Democratic government that would try to do anything
positive for the country, along the lines of carrying out the governmental
functions as spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution. So far,
Obama and his people seem to be outsmarting him on this one, but the story is
far from over.
It has now become clear that Bush, without, then with, and
now again without full control of Congress, accomplished many of his
objectives, some probably beyond the Georgites’ wildest dreams of
success. He did this primarily because he and Cheney and Rove and their
minions had a very well thought-out plan for doing so. This man is not
impotent. He was highly competent, that is to do what he clearly set out
to do. In terms of his own terms, he was not a failure by any stretch of
the imagination. In fact, when you compare what he achieved of the goals
that he set out to achieve with what any other US President achieved in terms
of his goals, Bush is indeed the most successful President of the United Sates,
ever. 
-----------------------------------------
This column is based in part on my The Political Junkies.net
Column No. 157, “The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part
3: Goals and Successes”