The Bush Duck Walk

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PoliAnna.com was founded to provide moral support, guidance and the truth for everyone tired of seeing American ideals getting pushed around by dishonest right wing, loudmouth bullies.

Final thoughts on the election
The Bush Duck Walk

There is a lot of anti-Bush content on the web and on this site. Don’t we have anything positive to say? There is a whole world of positive and innovative policy solutions to today’s problems that we will be exploring, highlighting and advocating in great deal after the election, however it turns out. But for today, we all pray that this legacy of distortion, deception, secrecy and failure, cloaked behind God, country and 9/11, will be put to an end next Tuesday. I don't like to harp negative, but I fear for the future of American democracy if Bush gets re-elected. This is the most dishonest and malfeasant administration in recent history. They have combined rampant corruption, ineptitude and bad judgment with a disdain for openness, and it has produced abject failure abroad and unparalleled deficits and divisions at home. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, the chances are that it’s a duck. And let’s just say that the Bush political strategies and method of governance have left a lot of feathers around. And nobody seems to be calling them on it besides a few columnists, the left side of the web and blogsphere. Bush and Co. continue to get away with stuff that would make Nixon and his cronies blush. The prospect of a second Bush term, in which they never have to face the electorate again, with a Republican House and Senate, after running a campaign based on mobilizing their fundamentalist base, while excluding as much of everyone else as possible, is scarier than any Halloween slasher movie that I can think of.

Let's ponder a few of the abhorrent traits that seem not to bother the God-fearing masses in the red states. Secrecy, deception, cronyism, insularity, all executed with zealous tenacity. This administration has hidden the truth, distorted facts, taken statements out of context, and denied the multitudinous negative consequences of their bad policies and governance. It’s very clear that they have a problem with reality, especially since reality has often contradicted their claims, and infringed on their sense of ruling class entitlement - their "due".

Many readers were shocked a few weeks ago by this passage from the New York Times Sunday Magazine that chronicled the Bush mind set:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

(Without a Doubt. Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004)

This example of the Bush hubris and insanity stands out like a modern remake of Dr. Strangelove in its Machiavellian and Orwellian nature. What if God tells Bush to bomb France? What if Rumsfeld thinks that the Russians have tampered with his precious bodily fluids?

The Machiavellian nature of this administration’s relationship with the public, the press and the real world deserves a lot more attention than the liberal media seems to afford. Kevin Phillips points out how Machiavelli advises that the “great majority of mankind is satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities.” And of course this train of thought is not lost on Karl Rove, the great student of Machiavelli and Lee Atwater. Phillips goes on to instructively note that:

In The Prince, his most famous work, he lauded the success and effectiveness of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, “who did nothing else but deceive men.” He advised that “a prince must take great care that nothing goes out of his mount which is not full of the above-named five qualities, and, to see and hear him, he should seem to be all mercy, faith, integrity, humanity, and religion.” However, because “everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are,” a ruler can ignore the mob and devote himself to the interests of the ruling class, gulling the inert majority who constitute the ruled. Borgia references aside, twenty-first century American readers of The Prince may feel that they have stumbled on a thinly disguised Bush White House political memo. (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of
Deceit in the House of Bush. P 147-8)

The Bush political strategy is to distort the truth, lie outright, and suppress as much of the opposition vote as possible. Doesn't’t this bother anyone? Examples of Bush lies and distortions abound, and I will provide several references below, but the one I will point out here is the line from Bush’s stump speech about how John Kerry would subvert American security to a global test before America could take military action.

Here’s the transcript of what Kerry actually said:

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.
No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.
But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
Here we have our own secretary of state who has had to apologize to the world for the presentation he made to the United Nations.

It is very clear that Kerry said that he would never cede America's right to pre-emptive action, however any pre-emptive action should be done for very sound reasons, that are in fact true, and in a way that doesn’t turn most of the world against us. Like lying, and distorting the truth about weapons of mass destruction to the country and to the world as a pretext for a war, and then having no plan to secure the peace afterwards, for example.

They invented the image of Al Gore as a pathological liar in 2000. How many people realize that he never made the statement that he invented the Internet? Unfortunately, Gore was not politician enough to call them on this. They invented the image of Kerry as a flip-flopper this year, using distortion and lies. They’ve even doctored the audience images in their closing campaign ad. (For a good graphic proof of this see Daily Kos 10/27).

The shamelessness does not stop there. One of their key campaign strategies is suppressing votes. Rove and Co. have every precinct in the country charted, and they know not only how many fundamentalists they need to get to the polls, but exactly how many Jewish Grandparents, Latino immigrants and urban black folks they need to disqualify. All of this talk about record turnout and early voting has them plenty nervous. They claim that they are merely trying to stop voter fraud, but the truth is very obvious. In a very tight race, where it will go down to the wire, they are playing offense and defense. Part of their game plan is to stop the other side from scoring. The current litigation over voter registration challenges in Ohio is ample proof of this. (NY Times: Ohio Court Battles Flare Over Challenges to Voters)

Once again, the liberal media was a little bit lax in investigating the widespread charges of voter suppression in 2000. It is happening again. Here are a few reliable sources:

Secrecy

This has been one of the most secret administrations in history. Perhaps they are shrouded in secrecy because they had something to hide. Their front man is only passable working off of scripted text, to pre-screened audiences, if possible. This explains why Bush has had fewer press conferences than any president in the modern era. His unscripted performances at press conferences and the debates betray this reality.

But it runs deeper. W and company suffer from a reflexive fear of sunlight. A report by Congressman Henry Waxman concluded that that under Bush, laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government.

This is the same administration that went to court to prevent public access to the records of its secret energy policy commission and then went to war and gave lucrative no-bid contracts to the Veep’s company. This fits well into the Machiavellian mold.

Voter Suppression Sources

Voter Purge Lists in Florida Still Contain Inaccurate Information

CivilRights.org

Phone-Jamming Was an Outrage: Republicans Should Speak Out In Anger
By BOB SMITH (Former Republican U.S. Senator), For the Concord Monitor

Long Shadow of Jim Crow

PFAW and NAACP.

Voter Registration Fraud Clearinghouse

Daily Kos

RNC Funds Voter Suppression Efforts

Daily Kos

Deceptive Tactics Inflate GOP Voter Registration

The Oregonian

Vote Watch 2004

eriposte

Election Chief Warns Of Absentee Scam

St. Petersburg Times (FL), 10/22/04

Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State