George W. Bush

Stats

Name: George Walker Bush
Known Aliases: Dubya, The Decider, Shrub, Worst President in U.S. History
Occupation: President of the United States of America

Muckmaking History

When a man is representative of literally every single thing you are against, it is extremely difficult to narrow your animosity down to just a few simple paragraphs. For the sake of the average attention span, however, I shall try.

George Walker Bush had a legacy to live up to. His father, George Herbert Walker Bush (possibly one of the most professional-sounding hillbilly names ever conceived), established a robust business of muckmaking through his career as both vice president under Ronald Reagan and as a one-term president thereafter. George W. was determined to inherit and surpass this history of greediness and incompetence, and boy did he ever exceed expectations. Born with a silver spoon jammed straight up his ass, so he wouldn’t have to receive nourishment orally like all those “common” people, George did what most rich kids do – the bare minimum. Sure, he went to Yale, just as his daddy and granddaddy did, but probably only passed because of his last name, as his grades clearly indicated, and then joined the Texas Air National Guard, despite only scoring within the lowest acceptable passing range. While over 10,000 of his fellow Air National Guard corps went off to fight in Vietnam, he was never called upon to serve, instead hanging around the base and getting wasted night after night. His presence was considered “irregular” and he was discharged eight months early to attend Harvard Business School after being rejected from the University Of Texas School Of Law, proving that at least one school out there couldn’t be bought.

By age thirty, one would think he would have begun to grow up and become a man on his own, but instead, he continued to drink and party on daddy’s dime and was arrested for drunk driving, getting his license suspended for a brief time. He replaced it with a license to partake in shady business practices, getting his MBA from Harvard and entering the oil industry, where he helped run both Arbusto Energy and Spectrum 7 into the ground with his lack of experience with anything of consequence. Luckily for him, Spectrum 7 was taken over by Harken Energy, where he used his White House connections to land them lucrative contracts with Bahrain. Meanwhile, he bought a share in the Texas Rangers, where he sat in the stands with fellow fans and played the “everyday Joe.” In reality, he and other owners threatened to pull the team out of Arlington and forced the local government and taxpayers to invest millions in keeping the team there. Because of this and some suspicious real estate dealings involving the team’s stadium, he was able to sell his share of the Rangers years later for about three times what he had paid originally. He performed similar practices with his oil affairs, selling his Harken stock for over $800,000 just before a convenient plummet in Harken assets because of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Considering George’s father was planning the Gulf War by this point, one can safely assume he had some insider information there, but the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) cleared him of any wrongdoing. Little Bush had bigger fish to fry.

A tip of the hat to Big Oil.

His unsuccessful bid for the House years earlier did not deter his thirst for grandeur, so in 1994, he ran for governor of Texas and won by a small margin, due to a campaign run mostly on mudslinging. He served two terms as governor, during which he used a budget surplus to push through his unpopular tax cuts (foreshadowing?) and established “faith-based” programs that used state money to benefit religious organizations, but only organizations of his own faith, of course. Wiping his pampered ass with the First Amendment, he even went as far as to establish June 10th as Jesus Day in Texas. The declaration “challenges people to follow Christ’s example,” so George did just that by executing 152 prisoners during his time in office, because clearly that is what Jesus would have done. In some of the lesser read passages of the Gospels, Jesus put to death a great-grandmother who shot her husband after enduring years of physical abuse. He then executed another woman who begged for her life, mocking her publicly before sending her off to die. He even murdered the mentally handicapped…oh wait, that was all Bush. I sometimes mistake the two because they both claimed to talk to god.

Assumingly, all of this gave him the impression that he was untouchable; that he could basically do whatever he wanted without hindrance because of his name and reputation. This arrogance proved to be correct over the next eight years. By 1999, he had decided to follow in his daddy’s boot-prints and run for president, and little stood in his way, including the popular vote. During the 2000 election, Florida seemed at first to go to his opponent, Al Gore, and then suddenly to him. Several recounts and a Supreme Court case later, the state went to George, a state that just so happened to be run by his brother, John “Jeb” Bush. He still lost the popular vote by over 500,000, but with 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266, he managed to become one of the only U.S. presidents to ever get elected by cheating…I mean, by the electoral college and not its citizens.

Thus, Bush’s presidency began on a very sour note, and the music didn’t get any sweeter from there. As soon as he entered office, he created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which continued his reign of Christian terror on everything his beliefs opposed, like freedom of (or from) religion and basic fundamental reasoning. While using federal funds to support Christian organizations, he started controversy over stem cell research, abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage, introducing all kinds of legislation over the next few years to restrict the rights of anyone not in accordance with his narrow-minded views. This would prove true before and after the events of September 11th, 2001.

Is our children learning?

While the details of everything that led up to this fateful day remain hazy even today, and the years that followed it grow even more scandalous by the minute, there are certain facts that have absolutely been proven to be true. It is a fact, for example, that Dubya and his administration had many months of warning signs right in front of them included in their daily memos. Both Richard Clarke and the FBI specifically stated that al-Qaeda were planning a major attack, most likely involving planes, and their intelligence was ignored (and their funds cut) until the Twin Towers were reduced to piles of rubble. (Ignoring intelligence was old hat to Bush by this point.) I guess one wouldn’t really want to think about all that complicated counterterrorism stuff while on vacation, after all. During his first eight months in office, he spent around 42% of his time of vacation, and would go on to spend more time off than any other president in the nation’s history. The immediate information the American people were fed by the White House was minimal. The official 9/11 Commission Report took years to complete, and there’s little doubt that some people’s asses were covered pretty well before it was published. Testimony by the former director of the CIA was conspicuously left out, for example, and there was plenty of focus in the text on the terrorists and what led them to the attacks, but little on the handling of the situation and the colossal failures by the administration to protect the country in the first place. Conspiracy theories aside, certain details would surface over the next few years that would implicate Bush and his business partners in defending their financial interests over their fellow citizens. All flights were grounded in the days following the attacks, yet 142 Saudis, 24 of them being members of the bin Laden family, were flown out of the country by the government during this time without proper questioning. (Yet the government detained hundreds of no-name Muslims after 9/11 for months without granting them their basic rights.) For a man who spent so much time condemning Osama bin Laden for this heinous act, he did very little to cover up the fact that both he and his father had done business with the bin Laden family for years with the Carlyle Group. Was Bush responsible for the attacks, or did he help plan them? There’s absolutely no real credible evidence of that, despite what you’ll hear, but that doesn’t mean he had any shame in using this tragedy to his advantage.

The Bush family had always been mercilessly shrewd when it came to profiting from other people’s misery, and W. would continue the tradition with great success. He began by establishing the Office of Homeland Security and passing the Patriot Act, both of which would prove instrumental in formulating a propaganda campaign that would keep opposition at bay and in fear. The Office of Homeland Security concocted a color-coded terror warning system that would change daily, scaring citizens into a constant state of paranoia without having to provide real evidence to support their “suspicions.” Everyone was waiting for the next attack to occur, so few really questioned the true intentions of the Patriot Act, which basically gave the government the right to detain anyone suspected of “terrorist activities” for as long as they pleased without a lawyer, phone call, or any other basic rights, and also spy on anyone they wanted with video surveillance, wire taps, or anything else deemed “necessary.” It was passed so quickly that most members of the Senate admitted that they hadn’t even read it in its entirety. With opposition under his thumb and the American people looking for blood, Bush deployed 11,000 troops to Afghanistan, whose Taliban government was supposedly harboring Osama. The invasion was successful, but sure enough, Osama conveniently made a clean getaway. Instead of continuing the search and punishing those who claimed responsibility for the attacks, the real agenda started to become abundantly clear. The aforementioned Carlyle Group had already made hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of days because of defense contracts Bush set them up with (while his father remained on the board), but now he was going for the gold. Using faulty logic and absolutely no credible evidence (a practice called the Bush Doctrine), he hoped to convince the world that the idea of the preemptive strike was justifiable; that anyone who “aids or harbors terrorists” would suffer the same botched fate as Afghanistan. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were dubbed the “Axis of Evil,” and Iraq was first on the preemptive list because of their “weapons of mass destruction” that no one had actually seen. Iraq had never attacked nor threatened to do harm to the United States, but his carefully-worded rhetoric gave people the impression that Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11. Little George had a score to settle. Their leader, Saddam Hussein, made Big Bush look pretty bad just over a decade before, so all Junior had to do was shift the focus from one terrorist (Osama) to another (Hussein). Few could really argue Saddam’s merits as a leader, but would starting another war really keep America safer from future attacks, or would it just help line the pockets of Bush and his cronies? I think the answer is obvious.

See, a lot of people wondered during the election why Bush chose Dick Cheney as a running mate. Cheney seemed to have very little to say, and even less to offer the American people. But his business connections meant a whole lot more to George. The Vice President just happened to be the former CEO of Halliburton, a multi-billion dollar corporation that had made quite a bit of money from the Gulf War, and planned to make a hell of a lot more from the War on Terror. It was already making a chuck of change from pipelines in Afghanistan, but Iraq would afford them many more opportunities. On March 20, 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, despite mixed feelings by U.S. citizens and the United Nations’ clear disapproval; within months, Halliburton had secured no-bid contracts with the U.S. government worth billions. This included control over much of Iraq’s oil, as well as construction of military bases, food for the troops, and other war-related services. It was later discovered that they were overcharging for much of the work and pilfering the rest. At this point, any rational history-lover would assume that a Nixon-esque downfall would ensue for all involved, but this was far from the case.

The biggest fucking hero in the world.

On May 1, 2003, just over a month after the invasion of Iraq, Commander Codpiece had concocted a publicity stunt that would accurately sum up his entire presidency. Landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln in full flight gear, he declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” A huge banner reading “Mission Accomplished” waved behind him. There were a few things wrong with this picture, the first being that the war in Iraq was far from over, and that fighting was clearly going on even as he spoke. The second was that Bush was in a flight suit, again pretending to be “one of the boys,” when it’s obvious that his military experience was the equivalent of watching “The Dirty Dozen” play a dozen times on AMC. And finally, it was just another example of saying one thing and doing the opposite. No deployment was being planned; no brilliant plan for stabilization of this worn-torn country was being assembled. In November, Bush pulled a similar stunt by making a “surprise” visit to the troops in Iraq for Thanksgiving. While it appeared to be a valiant gesture, it was later discovered that all of the troops pictured in this photo-op were not only chosen by their political affiliation, but that even the turkey they stood behind was just a prop. No one could even breathe a word of disapproval near the president; a man who invited the press to take pictures of this but denied them the right to photograph the flag-covered caskets bringing home the dead. So much time and money would be spent on misleading the American people and their perception of the administration that many conservatives celebrated the eventual capture of Saddam Hussein that December as vindication for all the flack they had been taking from dissenters, ignoring that WMDs were never found and Iraq was more unstable than ever. Afghanistan had also long been forgotten.

Dubya would run his re-election campaign in 2004 with the same old dirty tricks. John Kerry’s campaign slogan, “The future doesn’t belong to fear; it belongs to freedom,” proved to be completely untrue. The White House and Homeland Security continued to push an image of impending terror and doom on the nation, warning that if America chose to “change horses” during this war, it would mean weakness to our enemies (that they helped create) and imminent danger to every citizen (whom they failed to protect during 9/11). And despite a war that was quickly getting compared to Vietnam, a badly tarnished international image of the United States, and a consistent pattern of wasteful government spending, the country fell for it…well, at least half of it did. Maybe John Kerry wasn’t going to turn the country around overnight, but a good half of the nation was ready to vote for him anyway. But bullshit and propaganda came through for George once again. A group calling themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth conveniently surfaced during this campaign, claiming Kerry’s military service was greatly exaggerated and he was undeserving of his medals, which is funny coming from a group who obviously supported a guy who never had to fight at all. The debates were a joke, as Bush was not known for his JFK-like eloquence. He sounded mentally retarded every time he opened his mouth, but that’s simply because he’s not a very good liar, and he always seemed to be caught in the middle of one. Even with a hidden earpiece feeding him answers, he continued to stumble over his words and repeat phrases over and over. But it seemed the American people preferred the good ol’ boy, and he was able to actually win the popular vote this time, albeit by the smallest margin of any sitting U.S. president. Much like his first election, he could not have done this without a little bit of foul play, as evidenced by some shady dealings in Ohio, for example, but I guess that was to be expected at this point in his career. After this heated battle, he turned to more pressing matters, like a forty million dollar inauguration ceremony, paid for by Chevron, ExxonMobile, Cinergy, Occidental Petroleum, and the Nuclear Energy Institute, thus proving once and for all that this war was not about oil. The Department of Homeland Security also demonstrated that Bush was “a uniter, not a divider” by having more armed security in attendance than any other inauguration in U.S. history.

The first half of Bush’s reign was plagued with scandal, including probes into his administration’s motivations for war, spreading of false intelligence, and the ongoing, Geneva Convention-ignoring Guantanamo Bay detention camp debacle, which involved the United States in all kinds of human rights violations and torture methods performed on hundreds of unjustified prisoners, similar to the inhumane practices the government claimed Hussein had to be overthrown for. This half would prove just as controversial, but a lot of people were not as eager for notoriety as King George seemed to be. In what came to be known as the White House shakeup, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Education Secretary Rod Paige, and the first Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge all resigned before his new term was even officially over. Over the next few years, many more were to follow, either leaving to avoid further disgrace (Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove) or because they were forced out when scandal could no longer be denied (Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Alberto Gonzales, who was himself a replacement). Twelve out of fifteen cabinet positions ended up being replaced altogether, yet there was very little talk of impeachment of the one man who would continually drive America into the ground.

Katrina wasn’t invited to this birthday party.

By the end of August 2005, the Gulf Coast probably wished they had voted differently as Hurricane Katrina, one of the five deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history, completely annihilated Louisiana and Mississippi and caused close to 2,000 deaths across seven states. It cost millions in damage, but a hell of a lot more injury was done to the Decider’s reputation as a decision maker, who put an ill-equipped FEMA in charge. While matters only seemed to grow worse, with people being migrated to baseballs parks, pillagers facing martial law, and thousands begging for relief as their homes and lives were washed away, Bush declared in his infinite wisdom that Michael Brown, head of FEMA, was doing “a heck of job.” Brown’s response, as was now the trend, was to resign just days after the disaster. It was starting to sink in with the nation that the president who promised to keep his people safe in case of an impending attack could not even assemble enough help and relief for a storm that meteorologists warned the government about days in advance. It also raised awareness of the growing problems at home that were just a tad more important than failing wars overseas.

After ignoring the issue for over a year, Bush finally passed the McCain Detainee Agreement in October of 2005, which, like John McCain, was full of bullshit. This was approved in response to the now infamous pictures of the Abu Ghraib prisoners being tortured and humiliated as smiling U.S. soldiers posed gleefully with their victims, while Guantanamo Bay continued to be a luminous example of the administration’s cultural sensitivity. This “agreement” did basically nothing to really stop torture altogether, which was something they were sure to condemn the terrorists for constantly, and in typical “stay the course” fashion, Bushie continued to deny that anything inhumane was occurring, pictures or no pictures. He obviously had the army’s back, so they continued to get his, reporting consistently that Iraq and the newly installed puppet government was becoming more and more stable by the day as experts, analysts, and journalists continued to report just the opposite, delivering death tolls and footage of looting and devastation that reflected the American economy’s downward spiral.

As more and more money was funneled into the War on Terror, the War at Home escalated. Mr. “Support the Troops” insisted that more soldiers be set over while systematically taking money away from their benefits and those of veterans who continue today to struggle to find employment that doesn’t involve pulling a trigger. While oil companies reported record profits, Americans found themselves unable to afford gas prices that climb a dollar or more every few months with no plan for relief in sight. The surplus that Bush had come into during his first term had now become a several hundred billion dollar deficit. Instead of addressing the issue, he continued to push his personal agenda by unsuccessfully attacking gay marriage, successfully vetoing funding for stem cell research, and stirring up bullshit about immigration that went absolutely nowhere. And while predictably denying that the economy was in a recession, he passed the “Economic Stimulus Act of 2008,” which would supposedly boost the economy with an extra check to every citizen come tax season. That seemed almost visionary until everyone realized that three to six hundred dollars wouldn’t even cover a car or mortgage payment, never mind a national debt that had increased $1.57 billion daily since September of 2007. But that’s George for you in a nutshell – shaking his head at critics while shaking hands with the enemy behind America’s back. As his final term comes to a close and his approval rating reaches even deeper lows, many assume the nightmare may soon be over. But as national debt continues to spin out of control and John McCain comes to the Republican forefront to take the wheel, the Bush legacy may just have another chance at “four more years.”

Final Analysis

You may have noticed that this is one of the longest of the Muckmaker profiles, and as I stated in the beginning; although I did my best to keep it brief while still including enough information to implicate Bush as one of the greatest muckmakers in modern history. In fact, I left quite a bit out I wanted to cover for the sake of brevity, but this profile’s purpose is only to get you started. If you want more data, there is certainly no lack of reading material out there (or documentaries, if you’re lazy). I just wanted to cover some of the main points that force me to grind my teeth every time his name appears in print. With that aside, let me conclude.

I think George W. Bush’s story makes him a contender for the world’s most successful failure. He may have not been able to deliver one campaign promise, but he’s certainly delivered for himself and his business partners. His presidency may go down as a colossal disaster, but his career was far from unprofitable. Every step of the way, he has willfully lied and cheated straight to the top, filled with an arrogance unfitting of a man with such large ears and so little between them. His Christian agenda is predictably as hypocritical as the religion itself; condemning abortion while promoting war, saying Jesus’ ministry is inspiring while attacking homosexuals and other societal outcasts, thanking God for his gifts while letting pollution destroy the earth, and always acting like the “everyman” cowboy while living the life of a wealthy elite. Some may argue that this portrait I have painted doesn’t implicate many of his partners in crime, but fear not – I’ll get to them all in time. While his administration and business associates (many one in the same) do deserve a good amount of blame, that doesn’t mean we should go any lighter on Georgie.

I guess what bothers me most is America’s willingness to defend such a dickhead. It astounds me that as more and more of his own cronies turn their backs on him and write tell-all books of his corruption, more and more complete strangers who no virtually nothing about the president are enthusiastically ready to defend him to the death, just not with facts. I’ve found that most of these “Bushies” vote against their own tax bracket while complaining in the same breath that this country is “going down the tubes.” These “value voters” seem to think that “Christian” just means saying “god” frequently enough for others to hear, and they seem to know as much about religion as they do about the Middle East, although it’s pretty easy to support a baseless war when you assume an entire culture to be “just a bunch of terrorist ragheads.” If you’ve got money, it’s obvious why you’d support a guy with money; it’s called “protecting your assets.” Those not in this situation really need to start reading, unless a certain Act left them behind. Then I’d understand.