George Bush has a Rendezvous with Density

George W. Bush is a liar. Worse yet, he’s a poor liar, which makes him a second rate politician. The carpet in the Oval Office was still moist with Billy-the-Kid Clinton’s body fluids when George Bush lied straight-faced to us that the departing Clinton gang hadn’t vandalized the White House.

I took this lie personally because I had published a scrupulously researched essay detailing the damage that the infantile Clintonistas had left in their wake. I had suggested that the Republicans photograph the vandalism and publish the collected photos as a coffee-table book for fund raising purposes. But here was the president of the United States, with all of the imposing credibility of his office, telling the world that I was not to be believed. To preserve my credibility I removed the essay from this website. Mr. Bush’s lie was soon exposed when a General Accounting Office investigation declared that the damage done by Clinton’s brats was even worse than my description. The June 11, 2001 New York Times reported: “The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said today that ‘damage, theft, vandalism and pranks did occur in the White House complex’ in the presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. The agency put the cost at $13,000 to $14,000, including $4,850 to replace computer keyboards, many with damaged or missing W keys.”

It was all there: the glue smeared furniture, the obscene graffiti and voice mail messages, the theft of a presidential seal. The accounting office confirmed that $9,324 had been spent to repair or replace 62 keyboards, 26 cell phones and “professional cleaning.” “Anne Womack, spokeswoman for Mr. Bush, said: ‘The G.A.O. confirmed that damage was done at the White House. We have considered this matter closed for more than a year. Our focus is on moving forward.’”

I understand why Bush lied. The press had been buzzing about the vandalism for weeks and the new president wanted to change the subject; he wanted to talk about something else. So he lied. It wasn’t a big lie and it made him seem compassionate. Nonetheless, it was the sort of easy fib that had earned Bill Clinton the moniker Slick Willie.

George Bush’s biggest whopper is pretending to be a conservative. He’s no such thing. He’s a reformed frat-boy drunkard turned born-again do-gooder. Today he’s possessed by all the reckless utopianism that such a wrenching conversion implies. The self-imposed restraints of his Christian faith should never be mistaken for conservative principles. George W. Bush may be the most conservative person to occupy the Oval Office since Calvin Coolidge but his presidency has encouraged developments that are hostile to conservative values.

Those conservatives who wish to reserve military interventions for reasons of national security are not pleased by Mr. Bush’s extravagant exercise of altruism in Iraq. Those who wish to preserve American sovereignty and freedom of action are disheartened by Mr. Bush’s deepening entanglements with the United Nations and his enthusiastic enforcement of its declarations. Was it wise to march our military chest deep into nation-building commitments that compromise its war-making capacity? Years after invading Iraq, Mr. Bush contends that enforcing the United Nations resolutions was sufficient reason to wage war. His declaration enhances the claim of the United Nations to being the paramount author of international norms of behavior. Mr. Bush’s claim that squashing a tyrant was sufficient reason to embark on an open-ended foreign-nation-building crusade seems far more prideful than classical conservatism would allow. Mr. Bush is a Christian utopian. Once the drugs and alcohol of his Yale years wore off, the spirit of the head cheerleader whom George Bush had been at Andover once again emerged, but this time he was cheerleading for Jesus and for redemption and for a shining path for all humanity. God help us all.

It is an illusion that conservatism is triumphant just because Republicans monopolize power at the federal level – President Bush and the Republican Congress have spent their time in office trashing classical conservatism. Have any of them even hinted at an interest in smaller government, in fiscal frugality, in a preference for decentralized state power and an avoidance of foreign entanglements? Not at all.

Presently the Democrats are too divided and leaderless to pose a threat to the Republican agenda. The only thing the Republicans have to fear is their own predilection for excess. At most, six of 231 Republicans in Congress have abstained from authoring pork-barrel attachments. Early in Bush’s presidency Republicans attached 6,371 pork-barrel “earmarks” to a transportation bill. House Republicans, no longer in the minority after forty long years, were luxuriating in the pleasures of influence peddling as they built political support by gratifying lobbyists.

Three of the five largest spending increases in American history have occurred during George Bush’s presidency. The other two happened during the Second World War – so says the Cato Institute. Bush II signed the biggest farm subsidy bill in history. He also signed a bloated education bill. And there’s the $400 billion prescription drug bill. Kevin Hassett, economic policy studies director of the American Enterprise Institute said “the administration will have promoted and passed a significant expansion of the welfare state in each of its [first] three years” when the prescription drug bill becomes law. According to Stephen Moore, president of the tax-cutting Club for Growth: “Compared to Bush, Clinton was a piker.” Back in Texas, Bush had made appeasement a habit by signing into law most of the spending initiatives of Texas’ Democratic legislature. During his watch spending in Texas leaped up 36 percent.

George Bush promised to be a pork buster. He vowed to trim 40 percent from the record 6,454 pork-barrel projects, totaling $16.8 billion, that legislators slipped into the 2000 budget. His budget director refused to disclose any details. Bush has yet to veto any pork-barrel project. He is, in truth, a cheerleader for our congressional kleptocracy.

The stupid congressional mandate to blend ethanol with gasoline will increase the price of gasoline by $8.4 billion each year for five years during which time the ethanol and corn industry will rake in about $26 billion in farm subsidies. An additional 5.3 cent-per-gallon tax break for ethanol adds $122 million to the booty pile in the first year alone.

Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist co-sponsored this lardfest with then-Minority Leader Tom Daschel. Why? Studies demonstrate that oxygenates such as ethanol have little impact on air quality and require enormous amounts of fossil to produce. The comparatively tiny amount of ethanol to be produced will have little effect on America’s fuel dependency. This boondoggle was just an offering to the Corn Gods of Iowa. In an election year every candidate wants to do well in the Iowa caucuses. George Bush caved in to the corn lobby when he was running against Steve Forbes who had the integrity to just say “No.”

Any law mandating the addition of ethanol to gasoline may drive up the cost of food, thereby diminishing everyone’s standard of living. It may also increase hunger in faraway places. How can an ethanol fad affect food prices? Here’s how: Increasing oil prices tend to pull up corn prices as the value of ethanol is increased by the increasing cost of the fuel it replaces. Ethanol was up to $1.75 per gallon last year, which was a sharp increase from just over a dollar the year before. This trend worries food planners.

“We’re putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling station for the output of the farm,” says Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute. Mr. Brown believes that farms cannot feed all the world’s people and all of its motor vehicles as well. Iowa has 19 ethanol plants now and will have 27 by the end of 2006. Computer modeling by the International Food Policy Research Institute indicates the sensitivity of food prices to ethanol production. The institute’s director, Joachim von Braun remarked: “I do not just expect somewhat higher food prices, but new instability as well. In the future, instability of energy prices will be translated into instability in food prices.” The Corn Gods of Iowa thank you, George Bush.

The omnibus appropriations bill for election year 2004 included $50 million for an indoor rain forest for Coralville, Iowa, which is more than it would cost to send everyone in town on a rain-forest vacation. Also included was $2 million for a golf awareness program in St. Augustine, Florida. The number of such vote-buying federal expenditures quintupled in the five years ending in 2004 to about ten thousand, worth $23 billion for 2004. That same year Republican leaders floated the lie that the increase in federal discretionary spending was a mere three percent that compared favorably with increases of 13% and 12% in the previous two years. The Heritage Foundation put the true increase at at least nine percent.

As a Wall Street Journal analysis explained, the discrepancy between the 3% and 9% figures results from a difference between budget authority and actual expenditures. To quote the Journal: “The increase in budget authority looks smaller only because a lot of money that will actually be spent in 2004 was assigned to 2003. That’s true most importantly of the Iraq war supplemental. But the drive for the appearance of fiscal sanity has also reduced our representatives to gimmicks such as moving the authority for $2.2 billion in education spending back into 2003, after previously voting to push it forward to 2004. When corporations tried accounting like this, Congress gave us Sarbanes-Oxley.”

The result of all this crooked bookkeeping is that discretionary spending exceeded $900 billion in 2004. Bill Clinton’s eight budgets took discretionary spending from $541 billion in 1994 to $649 billion in 2001. Even when we subtract the cost of George Bush’s foreign-nation-building adventures, non-defense discretionary spending jumped up 18.6% under the 107th Congress (2002-2003), the biggest increase in decades. The Journal asked, “Can anybody honestly maintain that working Americans should be coerced to ante up for golf awareness?”

For that matter, should working couples have to work longer hours to fund George Bush’s $300 million pet project to persuade welfare moms that marriage is a good idea? Should your hard-earned wages be spent to explore the habits of Asian prostitutes in San Francisco or the behaviors of Native American homosexuals? What about $400,000 for a parking lot in tiny Talkeetna, Alaska: population 300? Or $176,000 for the obscure Alaska Reindeer Herders Association? You are funding all of these things. In a year when the Seattle Art Museum enjoyed a $60 million surplus, representatives made sure the museum received another half million of the taxpayers’ earnings. Someone earmarked $393,000 in the Agricultural budget for “sustainable agricultural research.” No congressman can explain what it’s for and no research group has claimed it. The list goes on and on: ten thousand discretionary expenditures in the most recent budget. George W. Bush personally made the decision to saddle the American taxpayer with this crushing and unnecessary burden; he personally withheld his veto pen; he chose to behave exactly the way millions of voters expected John Kerry would behave when they cast their votes for George Bush. The taxpayers are being plundered by a mendacious club of millionaires and George W. Bush is complicit in their ruinous assault. Would it be too much to ask him to veto at least one pick-pocket appropriation?

Once upon a time, the President of the United States approached the inaugural podium and declared that “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.” He also quoted from the Bible. That was Jimmy Carter back in 1977. George Bush is keeping Carter’s radiant vision alive. Carter ignited a fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran; now Bush is flirting with a mirror-image revolution in neighboring Iraq. When the average Muslim voter is a person who has been taught since infancy to repress every inclination toward tolerance, the long-term prospects for moderation are dim. In the first year after Carter pulled the rug from beneath the Shah of Iran the triumphant Ayatollah Khomeini slaughtered more Iranians than the Shah had dispatched in decades. Thank you, Jimmy. The 444-day hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran was Carter’s downfall. Carter hadn’t tumbled to the fact that the old Cold War rules no longer applied. Back when gangs of Marxist elitists were imposing their bumbling system from above any democratic movement was anti-Marxist and pro-American. Islamic fundamentalism in the post-Cold War world by contrast, is a mass movement; it is not imposed from above; it is the expression of a popular psychology. Once Carter let that dark genie out of the bottle, he could not put it back in. Carter had “liberated” the fundamentalists to do what came naturally to them: crush all dissenters. The closest thing to democracy in the Islamic world is Turkey and it only comes close because Kemal Ataturk understood that there could not be civil freedom unless the fundamentalists were restrained. George Bush chooses to ignore the Turkish history lesson.

Now imagine for a moment that Al Gore were president and that he had retained Bill Clinton’s CIA director and that he had entangled the United States in a fabulously costly exercise in foreign nation building for the good of the Iraqi people. What would have been the gut reaction of real conservatives, the ones I like to call “the adults”? Next imagine that Gore had proposed an amnesty for the eight million illegal aliens now hiding in America and also that he had chosen to leave our borders wide open during a declared “War on Terror.” Conservatives would be howling. George Bush has done all of these things and the Republican response has been a murmur. They are so infatuated with clinging to the White House that they have been struck dumb.

Less that a year ago Bush insulted us with yet another preposterous whopper. While wearing a border patrol jacket he told a crowd in Tucson: “We want to make it clear that when people violate immigration laws, they’re going to be sent home, and they need to stay home.” On his December 3rd, 2005 Saturday radio address he declared that “Our immigration laws apply across all of America, and we will enforce those laws throughout the land.” He expanded: “I oppose amnesty. Rewarding lawbreakers would encourage others to break the law and keep pressure on our border.” He didn’t mean a word of it.

George Bush wants to fire up a guest-worker program that will dispense guest-worker permits good for six years. That’s an amnesty. His administration is pushing to grant driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. I have one question for the president: “If it’s your intention to send illegal aliens home, then what the hell do they need with driver’s licenses?” It’s been years since the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 and the Immigration and Naturalization Service under George Bush still can’t tell to the nearest million how many illegal aliens are roaming about America. At least 125,000 of them were from the Middle East on the day of the big attack and most of them are still here because of George Bush’s indifference. “Since September 11, the administration has gone out of its way to sort of de-link immigration from terrorism,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. Even now, the INS has no idea where those Middle Eastern illegal aliens are or what they’re doing.

The Constitution requires the president, as chief executive officer, to enforce the law, not to choose which laws he prefers to enforce based on polling numbers. Bush wanted lots of Hispanic votes in 2004 so he urged Congress to pass a de facto amnesty for illegal resident Mexican aliens. To hell with national security, Bush was eager to please Vicente Fox, the meat packers and the big plantation owners. Our personal safety took a back seat to a desire for cheap labor by wealthy corporate contributors. The Bush team is simultaneously telling the INS to enforce the law and to look the other way when the law is broken.

Long stretches of our southern border are protected by nothing more than a decrepit barbed wire fence. George Bush seems to think that all he has to do is grant guest worker status to millions of aliens and all will be well. In November 2004 Bush was pushing Congress to adopt some of the 9/11 commission’s recommendations for restructuring America’s intelligence agencies. Conservatives in Congress insisted that any bill include the commission’s recommendations for immigration law reform, including restrictions on driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. To get what they wanted, the Bush team promised to hire border patrol agents at a rate of 2,000 a year for five years. Little more than a year later Tom Ridge reneged on the deal. That’s how uncommitted George Bush is to border security. The 19 highjackers had 63 driver’s licenses among them so you’d think at the very least there would be an attempt to restrict the acquisition of driver’s licenses. Not a chance.

Somehow George Bush has convinced a lot of people that his odd brand of magical thinking is tough-minded and realistic. Perhaps it was all those side-by-side comparisons with the even-more-confused Al Gore and John Kerry that gave the American people that false impression. The only good reason to vote Bush into the office of chief executive was to keep the likes of Gore and Kerry away from the levers of power. As spendthrift as George Bush has been, Kerry would have been even more lavish. There is some hope that Bush will promote judges who have a deeper commitment to limited government than Bush himself has. The undiminished optimism of our former cheerleader turned Cheerleader-in-Chief may yet lead us into disaster. Two more years of magical thinking is a long time to go without a serious stumble.

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