UPDATED: JUL 17, 2007

 “THE MOST SUCCESSFUL AMERICAN PRESIDENT:
  GEORGE W. BUSH, PART 3”        

At the end of my column on this subject last week, 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.  Bush set out to achieve what I have on more than one occasion termed a “coup d’etat in slow motion.”  BushCheney does measure success in terms of polls.  Forget the polls.  We must look at what he has done and continues to do with the control of the Executive Branch that he has.   

Upon gaining the Office of the Presidency (without, it should be noted, actually winning the election) this man first embraced the powers truly vested in him by the Constitution.  Bush was then little challenged by a very weak opposition.  (If one wants to talk about failure, just consider the Kerry/Shrum Presidential campaign.  It should have been a cakewalk.  But since they allowed Rove, at al, to set the agenda, we are faced with continuing tragedy.)   Further, he was strongly supported for the first six years by his lock-step Republican Congress, and ongoing, his in-the-pocket Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.  Together, he has used them, and continues to use them step-by-step and piece-by-piece, 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 it a disaster?  Well, it is if you measure it on the supposed WMD/al-Qaeda original connections, or the “establishment of Democracy” (not an originally stated goal of the US invasion), and certainly 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 “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 why would they want Permanent War?  There are three main reasons. 

First, it is the central part of their campaign to create the atmosphere of Permanent Fear at home, presently the only way they can possibly legally keep the Executive Branch in Republican hands after Jan. 20, 2009.  (See the campaign of Rudy Giuliani, presently the most likely Republican nominee for 2008).   Second, it is 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 creates the basis for creating that "terrorist attack" and coup d’etat in Oct., 2008 which would keep CheneyBush themselves in power after Jan. 20, 2009, about which I have written in this space and others on more than one occasion.  And so, even before his famous-in-advance “September Report” is issued, Bush’s hand-picked Gen.-in-charge Petraeus is saying “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 is well on his way to creating a mini-Cold War with Russia with his “defensive missiles on your borders” and the “bases on your soft Central Asian underbelly” program.  This will help 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 is 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.”  What happened after Katrina struck is only the most famous example.  It’s not incompetence, folks.  How the Federal government acted and continues to act in the follow-up to 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 has failed to hit so far is Social Security and he ain’t done yet.  Chalk up another success for Bush. 

Further, Bush has 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.  He has made sure that there will be no significant reform of the health care delivery system for the foreseeable future, no matter what the Democratic candidates tell you, for he has totally entrenched the aforementioned profit-makers.  Bush has made sure that there will be no Federal support for stem-cell research.  Bush has made sure that homophobia is at the centre of the Republican Party’s political attack apparatus.  Bush and Rove have 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. 

Bush has 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 has placed in the Federal Judiciary at every level an extensive cadre of the most reactionary jurists he could find.  He has created a private army of “security contractors” totally beholden to him, and has used them both overseas (Iraq) and at home (Katrina and now near the Mexican border, south of San Diego). They already wear black uniforms.  Now all they need is the personal oath of total loyalty that every member of the SS took to Hitler.  

At Guantanamo and elsewhere  Bush is training a huge cadre of torturers and brutal prison guards for purposes that can only be guessed at (except to say that they go way beyond dealing with a group of unfortunate Muslims caught up in a web that had no purpose except systems development).  Then there is 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, Bush has managed 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. 

It now becomes clear that Bush, without, then with, and now again without full control of Congress, has accomplished virtually every one 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 is highly competent.  In terms of his own terms, he is not a failure by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, when you compare what he has 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.  What can be done with this knowledge and insight, if anyone in the political arena has the will to do so, will, of course be the subject of more than one future column. 

And so, Peter Baker in The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/01/AR2007070101356.html?referrer=email) the day after the Libby Commutation says: “At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers.”   Nadir?  One way to describe this Presidency is, as Cheney once famously said to Sen. Patrick Leahy on the floor of the Senate, the “F--- You Presidency.”  The Libby Commutation is the best symbol of that that BushCheney could think of.  Nadir?  Quite the opposite.  This most successful American President has accomplished just about everything on his original agenda, except establishing the "Permanent Republican Majority."  And if they can successfully pull off that "terrorist attack" and coup in Oct., 2008, they will have achieved that too, at least for some time to come.

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