Greetings from Boston, Mr. Bush
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday, 1 October, 2002
It is one of the great sins of ego in writing to address
readers in the first person. Better to keep the remoteness of the
third-person, better to be simply a deliverer of information. Best to
not inject yourself into the conversation the reader is having with the
facts.
This time, however, the matter is personal.
Two years ago, on October 3rd, 2000 George W. Bush came to my
home town of Boston for the first Presidential debate of the campaign
with Al Gore. The memory is still very fresh in my mind. I was only a
few weeks into my first year of teaching; the process was still managing
me, instead of the other way around. I had not yet begun to hear the
worried voice in my head, the one that whispered, "Bush might actually
win in November, yes, he might, he could do it." By the end of October,
that whisper had become a banshee scream. But on October 3rd, I was more
concerned with lesson plans than intestinal polling data.
There is no simpler way to put it: All hell has broken loose in
the two years since Bush visited Boston on that night in October. The
democratic ethic of American elections was torn to pieces in Florida,
and by a Supreme Court that should never have gotten involved in the
first place. A President was installed who lost an election but won a
lawsuit. Upon arrival, he proceeded to fill the ranks of government with
a rogues gallery of extremists and slick corporate CEOs:
- Religious fundamentalist John Ashcroft became Attorney
General after losing an election to a dead man;
- Neo-conservative hawk Don Rumsfeld became Secretary of
Defense, backed by appallingly dangerous men like Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle;
- Harvey Pitt became chairman of the SEC, institutionalizing
the idea that conflicts of interest do not matter and that foxes are
perfectly trustworthy when given a key to the henhouse;
- Former Enron vice president Thomas White was made Secretary
of the Army, and when the Enron scandal exploded, we were told he knew
nothing of it, he does not in fact know much about anything, his
staffers call him 'Mr. Magoo' behind his back, and isn't that a
heartwarming thought when one considers the control he has over our
armed forces. Mr. Magoo is riding herd over the army during the War on
Terror. I doubt that will be on the GOP campaign literature in 2004.
A trillion dollar tax cut was fobbed off on the American people
as a boon to the common man, looting a budget surplus that turned out to
be made up of smoke and mirrors - the surplus numbers had been based to
a great degree on expected tax revenues from profitable super-companies
like Enron and WorldCom. When their false profit reports came to light,
the sudden realization that Bush tax cut had bitten through a negligible
surplus and into the guts of the budget sent a shockwave through the
economy.
Someone needed to take George aside and explain the dangers of
not looking before you leap. Circular firing squads are bad for
business. Evidence suggests this conversation never took place.
In the innocent months before September 11th, the Bush
administration rolled back environmental protections, safety regulations
for workers, and laughed in the faces of campaign finance reformers.
Only the sudden defection of Senator James Jeffords kept Bush from
having de facto control over every single branch of the Federal
government. Vice President Cheney sat behind closed, locked doors to
craft a domestic energy policy with the robber barons of the corporate
world. Many, or all, of these men knew full well why California had sat
dark and spoiling for months under disrupted, overpriced power grids.
When Enron was shamed, the substance of these meetings and the energy
plans it spawned were buried by moonlight, and Dick Cheney has since
spent a great deal of his own personal energy avoiding subpoenas on the
matter from the General Accounting Office and Judicial Watch.
Then, on a bright September morning, the mettle of the man was
sorely tested, and found wanting.
Before the smoke had cleared in Washington and New York, the
Bush administration had decided that the best possible way to defend
freedom was to restrict it as much as possible. The PATRIOT Anti-Terror
Act was drafted - the original version carried a provision from Ashcroft
to suspend habeas corpus indefinitely, but was wisely deleted by the
Senate - and in its core lay the tools of a new, fearful domestic
statecraft. Americans could be detained without access to attorney or
trial for an indefinite period. Access to attorneys would be monitored
and recorded. Searches of private homes could be performed without
notification. Religious and political groups could be put under
surveillance with no justification. Mr. Ashcroft proclaimed to Congress
in public testimony in December of 2001 that anyone who disagreed with
these new policies was aiding terrorism, or were terrorists themselves.
The War on Terror was begun, and the might of Mr. Magoo's
military swarmed across Afghanistan. In a very short amount of time the
ruling Taliban regime was scattered and destroyed, and al Qaeda networks
operating there were badly disrupted. Yet the perpetrators of the 9/11
attacks - Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and their lieutenants -
completely escaped capture. Bush, who had demanded bin Laden be brought
in "dead or alive," very quickly reversed course and said the man simply
did not matter in the equation. Osama bin Laden became Osama bin
Forgotten. In the interim, 3,000 civilian lives lost in America were
avenged by the taking of over 5,000 civilian lives in Afghanistan, in
bombing attacks that fell on private homes and on wedding ceremonies.
For a time, the Afghan people celebrated their liberation from the
Taliban. Today, they tremble on the edge of riot as they contemplate the
graves of their wives and children and fathers and sons.
Then came the revelations. American intelligence services had
received a dizzying array of disturbingly specific warnings, received
from FBI agents at home and a variety of foreign intelligence services
abroad, many months before September. These warnings spoke directly of
terrorists planning to use hijacked airplanes as bombs against notable
American targets. The warnings specifically named the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. Nothing, but nothing, was done to act upon this
information.
Humming underneath it all was the tension of dissolution. The
Enron collapse had sabered the stock market through the guts, and there
was blood on the trading floor every single day. A litany of catastrophe
marched across the headlines: WorldCom, Dick Cheney's Halliburton, the
shredders of Enron documents at Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing and a
mob of other companies were forced to 'readjust' their profit reports
and accept prosecution. Bush's umbilical connection to Enron became
standard fare for a time, and journalists were even beginning to tickle
the sordid details of his failed energy company, Harken Oil. It seems
Mr. Bush played as fast and loose with the Harken numbers as his pal,
Kenny-Boy.
In August of 2002, Mr. Bush took a month off from his busy
schedule - which included some 42% of his total time in office on
vacation - to take a vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The
following September, Bush returned to work and prepared to unilaterally
destroy the nation of Iraq, without consent from Congress or the
international community. It seems America and the world had spent the
month of August blithely unaware that the sword of Damocles was
suspended above them. Saddam Hussein was preparing to unleash death and
destruction upon the United States and the world, and Bush was going to
put paid to that.
Suddenly, no one in the media was interested in corporate
criminality anymore. Fancy that.
Facts, as John Adams once said, are stubborn things. No proof
was offered that Hussein was a threat to America or anyone else. No
proof was offered that Hussein possesses prohibited weapons technology.
No proof was offered to support Bush administration claims that Hussein
has connections to al Qaeda. The push for war was based on speculation
and hyperbole, and the American people wanted nothing to do with it. The
unilateral war Bush envisioned in Iraq was thwarted by bad poll numbers
and an increasingly restive Congress, which forced Bush to eat his hat
and bend a knee to the United Nations Security Council. When Hussein
offered, in the aftermath of Bush's speech, to allow weapons inspectors
back into Iraq, Bush's hopes for a UN-backed war fell to ashes.
In the last couple of days, Bush has made some interesting
noises about getting the inspectors back in, saying that the UN needs to
be involved and that combat should be the last option. This is a 180
degree reversal from the bombast we have endured for weeks, and begs the
question: George, were you lying? You seemed so intent upon going to
Iraq, and you were so shrill about the threat. Congress, in the guise of
Daschle and Kennedy and Byrd, has begun to actively resist you, and the
UN wants nothing to do with your plans, so you backed down. But if you
really believed Iraq to be a present threat, you wouldn't back down,
would you? Nor would you have gone on vacation for the entire month of
August, right? What's the deal, George? Where do you stand? What is the
truth of the matter?
Never mind. I think we know.
If you are wondering why I have recapitulated the last two
terrible years of American political history, why this is personal, the
answer is flying into Logan airport on Friday, October 4th. George W.
Bush is visiting Boston two years and one day since his debate
performance. He is coming to lay friendly hands upon the shoulder of
Republican Gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney at the Seaport Hotel, out
by our version of the World Trade Center on the pier by Anthony's
restaurant.
150,000 people protested Bush's war in London this weekend, and
thousands of Americans have been popping up on cities like Denver and
Portland to loudly explain their distaste for his methods and plans. A
few have taken rubber bullets for their troubles.
Yes, it is personal. George W. Bush is coming to Boston. I
would hope that my fellow city dwellers would take time from their busy
schedules to come down and greet him. The last two years have been hard
and wrong, and in the city where the tea went overboard, maybe we need
to remind the man of a few home facts.
Welcome to Boston, George. You're in my yahd now.
-------
William Rivers
Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. He is the author of two books -
"War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter) available now from Context Books, and
"The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available in April 2003 from Pluto
Press.