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News :: Crime & Police : Elections & Legislation : Government Secrecy : Political-Economy : Regime |
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Bush Takes a Hike |
Current rating: 0 |
by Capitol Hill Blue
(No verified email address) |
12 Jul 2004
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The President, visibly upset, stomped off the stage when reporters pressed him about his relationship with Lay and left White House press secretary Scott McClellan to deal with the questions. |
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Bush Takes a Hike
AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards
A clearly-rattled President George W. Bush walked out of a media briefing Thursday, refusing to answer questions about his close relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth Lay, a campaign benefactor Bush nicknamed "Kenny Boy" when the two were up-and-comers in Texas.
The President, visibly upset, stomped off the stage when reporters pressed him about his relationship with Lay and left White House press secretary Scott McClellan to deal with the questions.
It has been "quite some time" since Bush and Lay talked with each other, McClellan said Thursday, brushing off questions about whether the two were friends.
"He was a supporter in the past and he's someone that I would also point out has certainly supported Democrats and Republicans in the past," McClellan said.
Lay clearly favored the GOP. He and his wife, Linda, donated $882,580 to federal candidates from 1989-2001, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. All but $86,470 went to Republicans.
McClellan declined to discuss the federal indictment charging Lay with a wide-ranging scheme to deceive the public, company shareholders and government regulators about the energy company that he founded and led to industry prominence before its collapse.
Instead, McClellan answered questions about Lay by talking about Bush's desire to curb corporate fraud.
"This president has worked to go after those wrongdoers and directed his administration to pursue those who are dishonest in the boardroom," McClellan said.
"The president has made it very clear that we will not tolerate dishonesty in the boardroom. This administration worked to uncover abuses and scandals in the corporate arena. And certainly the president's concern is with those workers and other people who have been harmed by corporate wrongdoing," McClellan said.
Democrat John Kerry's campaign had a different view, accusing the administration of dragging its feet on Enron. "It was three years too late," Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said of the Lay indictment.
Lay's relationship with the Bush family dates from at least 1990 when he was co-chairman of former President Bush's economic summit for industrialized nations, which was held in Houston. Lay also was co-chairman of the host committee for the Republican National Convention when it was held in Houston in 1992.
The Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said the Lays had given $139,500 to George W. Bush's political campaigns over the years.
Those donations were part of $602,000 that Enron employees gave to Bush's various campaigns, making Enron the leading political patron for Bush at the time of the company's bankruptcy in 2001.
In addition to Lay's political campaign donations, he and his wife contributed $100,000 to Bush's 2001 inauguration. Lay also was a fund-raiser for Bush, bringing in at least $100,000 for the president's 2002 campaign. That put Lay in "Pioneer" status as one of the president's top money-raisers.
© Copyright 2004 Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides |
by Capitol Hill Blue
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jul 2004
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By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jun 4, 2004, 06:15
George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq() or at home.
“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”
In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
“We’re at war, there’s no doubt about it. What I don’t know anymore is just who the enemy might be,” says one troubled White House aide. “We seem to spend more time trying to destroy John Kerry than al Qaeda and our enemies list just keeps growing and growing.”
Aides say the President gets “hung up on minor details,” micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.
“This is what is killing us on Iraq,” one aide says. “We lost focus. The President got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al Qaeda. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war but the President insisted the focus stay on those two, tenuous items.”
Aides who raise questions quickly find themselves shut out of access to the President or other top advisors. Among top officials, Bush’s inner circle is shrinking. Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen out of favor because of his growing doubts about the administration’s war against Iraq.
The President's abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.
"Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'that's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now."
Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will."
God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”
“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”
But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”
“The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the record.
Capitol Hill Blue
See also:
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4636.shtml |
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The Media Masking of a 'Deserter' |
by Ian Williams
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Jul 2004
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NEW YORK - George W. Bush loves dressing up in uniform and being called commander-in-chief. You have to look to Saddam or Fidel for another head of state who spends as much media time before military backdrops.
He won't do town halls or even many press conferences, but something like a third of his statements in the previous 18 months have been delivered on military bases or to veterans' groups.
This would be bad enough, but the media is letting him get away with rank hypocrisy and worse.
He is abusing the military as movie extras, as well as car bomb-fodder in a PR campaign designed to show the American public that they need him, big tough W, to protect them from terrorists.
Peter Jennings' outrage over Michael Moore's use of the phrase "deserter" to describe a president who disappeared during his National Guard service is evidence that the charade is working.
Accomplice to a Disappearance
In his posturing, Bush seems to have the media in general as an accomplice. Not individual reporters: many of them have done great work in chipping away at the image, but editorial deference, distorted news values, and a statistically suspicious amount of missing documentation have kept the W "war" record from being properly exposed.
It was an obvious choice to use the epithet as the title for my new book, "Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Own Past."
Actually, it should not be in the least controversial. It's incontrovertible that George W. Bush used his family connections to get entry into a "Champagne Unit" in the Texas Air National Guard, and that in the middle of what Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) has called "the war of his generation" and at the height of the Tet Offensive, he ticked the box on his enlistment form saying "no" to overseas military service -- that is to Vietnam.
Nor can it be seriously questioned that when Bush transferred his duties to Alabama, so that he could campaign for a pro-war Republican candidate, he disappeared off the records. It is true that some of the records seem to have disappeared as well. . . but that should also lead to more questions. The statistical correlation between disappearing National Guard Records and Bush's National Guard Service is easily as strong as that between tobacco use and cancer.
Texas Soufflé
There is not one credible witness who has come forward to say that he ever appeared at the Alabama bases where he was transferred. There were probably a lot of Alabamans who will swear to seeing Elvis in the flesh in the last year so, but no one recalls seeing Bush on a military base back in 1973. And it was not because he was self-effacing either. The ladies on the Republican campaign he joined remember him well -- as the "Texas Soufflé," full of hot air.
His commanding officers back in Texas wrote that they did not see him for a year. He was ordered to take his annual medical and Alabama, and "failed to accomplish" it thereby grounding himself as a pilot. Technically, all that was desertion -- and guardsmen in that era were ordered to Vietnam for failing to do their Guard Service.
Most distressing is to see how effective the White House has been in spinning the press, while covering their own asses. On February 13 this year, 83-year-old Helen Thomas of Hearst tried for the best part of the White House briefing to get a straight answer to the question: Was George W. Bush ever sentenced to community service in 1973? Scott McClellan implacably stonewalled and refused to answer. Indeed, he refused even to ask the president. Did this evasion make the headlines? Not at all!
You just have to look at how the administration actually leaks to the media and then uses the leak as a source, without actually putting its name to it. Just as they referred reporters to Judith Miller's fictional WMD reports, during Helen Thomas's cross examination, they pointed to, for example a Boston Globe story on how a former Texas Air National Guard officer, George Conn, was no longer backing up Lt. Col. Bill Burkett's claim that he saw the Bush records being tossed in the trash after Joe Allbaugh -- who was Governor George W. Bush's chief of staff at the time -- asked Guard commander Maj. Gen. Daniel James to gather Bush's files and "make sure there wasn't anything there that would embarrass the governor."
Burkett said he immediately told Conn about the conversation and noted it in a daily journal he kept. Conn confirmed to mainstream media in 2002 that he had spoken to Burkett about this at that time.
George Conn is now a military contractor and wants to stay in business with a vindictive and politically motivated Pentagon. Even then, his already equivocal retraction would be somewhat tempered by his statement that his friend Lt Col. Burkett who is maintaining his allegations "is an honorable man and does not lie." But most journalists have lost this nuance in the fog of media war.
Similarly, the White House referred reporters to a former Alabama Guard officer who "remembered" seeing Bush reporting for duty. The administration was too clever to put its credibility on the line, since the self confessed Republican supporting officer clearly remembered seeing Bush on bases where he had not even been transferred yet, and on days when he was not called upon to serve. But some of the media took the bait.
Listening for the Silence
The White House knows that evidence exists that could come and bite them in the backside if they made a categorical denial of these stories. But sadly, they do not have to try too hard to throw most of the media off the scent.
One of the essential skills of a journalist who wants to avoid being spun is to listen to the sound of silence. Watch for things that politicians are not saying, issues they are avoiding. There is an outline emerging from the boundaries of what the White House is evading and squirming about.
In 1973, George W. Bush was not available for the service he had wangled to avoid going to Vietnam. He was either willfully absent, or something prevented him from appearing. It has been alleged that cocaine use was involved, and there is a strong possibility that a sweetheart deal got him mandatory community service instead of a punitive sentence. The White House categorically asserts that Bush the Younger has not used drugs since 1974. What was he snorting before? The White House refused to answer, and a press corps that once hounded Clinton for not "inhaling" lets it lie.
The late James H Hatfield in his book "Fortunate Son" claimed that Bush Political advisor Karl Rove confirmed this to him. But short of a working Ouija board, Hatfield is not available to testify, and even his live testimony was compromised because of his failure to declare a murder conviction on his biography. For this the book's publisher, St. Martin Press, pulled the "Fortunate Son" from the shelves.
Normally, of course, liberals think there is always room for rehabilitation. But is this fair game for a group who have successively attacked Bill Clinton for draft-dodging, and even questioned the patriotism and war record of John Kerry with his chest of medals?
Like Senator Joe McCarthy, the people in the White House have no shame. It is the media's job to let the world know.
Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Own Past . |
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