A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  In the 1970s, one of the closest friends of the Bush family was Jimmy Allison, a Texas campaign consultant highly trusted by George H. W. Bush. Allison’s widow, Linda, who had spent substantial time in the company of the Bush family, sat for several days of interviews with journalist Mary Jacoby. Jacoby then published a 2004 article based on those interviews in Salon, in which Linda Allison recounts incidents that capture the younger Bush’s sense of entitlement, as well as his petulance and rage when told “no”:

  The break [between Bush and his father] happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John Sparkman. Leaving the election-night “celebration,” Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he’d yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he’d rented in Montgomery trashed—the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February.

  “He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions,” Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid.

  And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents’ home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go “mano a mano,” as has often been reported.

  To his credit, Bush has candidly acknowledged the disregard for responsibilities and the welfare of others that drove his life until he found God in 1985, at the age of almost forty. In one sense, the authenticity of Bush’s evangelical conversion seems beyond doubt, given the profound life changes it facilitated, most particularly the abrupt and total cessation of what was, by all accounts (including his own), a rather severe addiction to alcohol. But in another, equally significant sense, replacing an alcohol-fueled life of unbridled hedonism with a fervent evangelical certainty can be seen as a lateral, rather than a vertical, move. Both before and after the conversion, Bush evinced a strong sense of certainty, superiority, and elite piety. Pre-and postconversion, Bush’s place in the world was clear, right, secure, unquestioned, and unquestionable. And in both phases, there was little space or tolerance for those who opposed or contradicted him.

  Even now, the president’s own statements frequently reveal this insatiable sense of inborn entitlement—an expectation that his will can and should be transformed into reality without opposition or obstruction. In a December 2001 press conference, the president admonished American citizens as follows:

  The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it [emphasis added].

  There is a parental, even bullying, tone that pervades the president’s outlook. He decrees. Everyone else accepts that he “means it.” And so it will be.

  This self-centered mentality—whereby Bush expects his desires to be fulfilled immediately—has repeatedly manifested in how he governs. After the president announced his “surge” plan for Iraq in early 2007, CBS News recounted the conversation about the plan that ensued between President Bush and newly inaugurated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

  In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.

  “He’s tried this two times—it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’”

  Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, “‘I told them that they had to.’ That was the end of it. That’s the way it is.”

  Even after four years of complete chaos and uncontrolled violence in Iraq, Bush expects that his plan will work. Why? Because he ordered his generals to make it work, and so it shall be.

  Similarly, in the middle of the raging Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006, Bush, unbeknownst to him, was tape recorded while speaking privately to Tony Blair at a dinner of European leaders. Bush, in between bites of food, made clear what the solution was to the war: “What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.” The Decider issues orders. Everyone complies. And problems are solved for the Good, regardless of complexities, obstacles, or realities.

  True to form, Bush’s presidency evinces a pattern whereby he reacts most aggressively when he is challenged or feels powerless. What Bush the president detests most is a feeling of weakness, being told there are limits on his will, on his power as the Decider. In 2000, after being elected only after a 5–4 Supreme Court vote in a judicial battle to resolve one of the closest elections in U.S. history, it was conventional wisdom that Bush would need to be exceedingly restrained and modest in his governance. In light of his precarious claim to the presidency, Bush would have to be more bipartisan than most prior presidents. But Bush did precisely the opposite.

  Vehemently rejecting the notion that his presidency began with questionable legitimacy or on weak footing, he governed as if he had won by a landslide, pursuing his agenda without much restraint and appointing some of the most extreme ideologues to key cabinet posts, including John Ashcroft as attorney general and Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary. Bush’s response to the conventional assumption that he would be a weak president was to exert maximum power.

  Demands that Donald Rumsfeld be fired ensured that Rumsfeld ended up being just days away from becoming the longest-serving defense secretary in history. Complaints, primarily from his own supporters, that Bush had deployed insufficient numbers of troops in Iraq, and that this mistake was the principal cause of the chaos, meant that Bush steadfastly refused for years to send more troops. After Bush squeaked out a victory in the 2004 election, he replaced those officials who had exhibited even minimal independence of mind, such as Colin Powell and John Ashcroft, with the supremely loyal Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales. And when Bush’s Republican Party lost its House and Senate majorities in the 2006 elections, Bush quickly acted not by seeking out different counsel, but by further purging dissent from his inner circle.

  In December 2006, the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin reviewed the post–midterm elections ouster of several key Bush officials and concluded that there was yet another “purge of the unbelievers.” Froomkin cited Harriet Miers as White House counsel (“never a true believer in Vice President Cheney’s views of a nearly unrestrained executive branch”), Iraq Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad (“considered by Cheney to be too soft on the Sunnis”), John Negroponte as national intelligence director (“not alarmist enough about the Iranian nuclear threat”), and Generals George Casey and John Abizaid (“jettisoned for having shown a little backbone in their opposition to Cheney and Bush’s politically-motivated insistence on throwing more troops into the Iraqi conflagration”).

  As demonstrated in the prior chapter, the collapse of the Bush presidency—in both its magnitude and its intensity—has been truly historic. Yet remarkably, this collapse has not really weakened the president himself. Before the ink was even dry on the story of the 2006 midterm elections, the president unveiled his plan for a troop “surge”—escalation—in Iraq, which ensured that he continued to dominate the American political discussion.

  In early 2007, the president remained the dominant figure in American politics, notwithstanding the stinging rejection by the electorate, the Democratic takeov
er of Congress, and his extreme unpopularity, to say nothing of his officially commenced status as a lame duck. His bellicose language toward Iran began to be matched by overtly hostile actions—examined fully in chapter 4—thus bolstering his position as the focal point of political debate. The weaker and more unpopular the president becomes—the more he hears that his presidency has become impotent—the more aggressive and extreme he is with his assertions of his power.

  Jeffrey Smith, in an October 2006 Washington Post article, detailed the dramatic increase in what is known as “intolerance” rhetoric from the president—exactly at the time he has become weakened both by historic levels of unpopularity and world events:

  President Bush finds the world around him increasingly “unacceptable.”

  In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems “unacceptable,” including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea’s claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

  Bush’s decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd time, a phase of his presidency in which all manner of circumstances are not bending to his will: national security setbacks in North Korea and Iraq, a Congress that has shrugged its shoulders at his top domestic initiatives, a favorability rating mired below 40 percent.

  But a survey of transcripts from Bush’s public remarks over the past seven years shows the president’s worsening political predicament has actually stoked, rather than diminished, his desire to proclaim what he cannot abide. Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush’s rising frustration with his declining influence.

  Employing such categorical intolerance language in the wake of such a stinging rebuke is easily understood. For the Post article documenting Bush’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric, Smith interviewed Steven Kull, a political psychologist who directs the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. Kull explained that some individuals respond to failure “by intensifying an authoritarian posture and insisting that their preferences are equivalent to a moral imperative.” Moisés Naím, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, said there is a relationship between “how strident and extreme” the language of many leaders is and how limited their options are. For Bush, Naím said, “this comes at a time when the world is convinced he is weaker than ever.”

  ENTITLEMENT TO POWER

  From the president’s overarching conviction that he is on the side of Good and is waging a vital battle against Evil emerges a relentless pursuit of maximum power and an accompanying sense of entitlement to that power. Because Bush is on the right side of the Manichean battle—the more power he has, the better, given the vital and just ends to which it is applied.

  In a January 2007 op-ed in the Washington Post, Dahlia Lithwick examined several of the most extreme Bush actions—such as José Padilla’s detention, the Guantánamo abuses, and omnipotence-declaring signing statements—and concluded:

  I once believed that the common thread here is presidential blindness—an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the chief executive to believe that these futile measures are integral to combating terrorism; a self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is a chump and Guantanamo Bay is just a holding pen for a jumble of innocent or half-guilty wretches.

  But it has finally become clear that the goal of these efforts isn’t to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo Bay or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terrorism. The object is a larger one: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

  As Lithwick explains, the allegation against U.S. citizen Padilla that he was a “Dirty Bomber” who sought to detonate a radiological weapon has been abandoned long ago, but Padilla continued to be held without charges as an “enemy combatant.” And though Donald Rumsfeld insisted that Guantánamo was necessary to detain and try “the worst of the worst,” more than half of the detainees have been released and very few of them will ever be tried. Yet Guantánamo, despite being one of the preeminent symbolic engines of anti-American resentment around the world, remains open. Lithwick explains why:

  But Guantanamo Bay stays open for the same reason that Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration cannot retreat from that position without ceding ground. The president is as much a prisoner of Guantanamo Bay as the detainees are. Having gone nose to nose with Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts, guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot call off the trials. The endgame in the war against terrorism isn’t holding the line against terrorists. It’s holding the line on hard-fought claims to limitless presidential authority.

  In December 2005, I began writing on an almost daily basis about the Bush administration’s deliberate violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). That lawbreaking was revealed when the New York Times reported that the president had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the telephone calls of Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court, notwithstanding the fact that warrantless eavesdropping is a criminal offense—a felony—pursuant to FISA. What confounded me at first was the sheer pointlessness of the lawbreaking. It was not merely that the FISA court has always allowed the president—all presidents—to do almost any eavesdropping he wanted, and that bypassing FISA was therefore unnecessary.

  That is true. But more significantly, if the president wanted FISA amended, even radically, to vest him with still greater eavesdropping powers, the boundlessly compliant post-9/11 Congress was as eager as could be to grant all of his wishes and to give him whatever new powers he requested. In fact, Congress did amend FISA to grant expanded eavesdropping authority—in complete accordance with the president’s request—at the very same time Bush ordered illegal eavesdropping (in October 2001). As I wrote in my previous book, How Would a Patriot Act?:

  The picture that emerged [from the Times story on NSA eavesdropping] presented a sharply contradictory set of circumstances. A president who commanded the support and loyalty of national politicians in both parties. A president who sought, and was given, expanded powers by Congress to combat terrorism. A Congress that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, repeatedly and with virtual unanimity agreed to every request the president made. And yet a president who chose to secretly order eavesdropping on American citizens, on U.S. soil, in violation of the very law he had just requested.

  Bush violated FISA for the same reason that Lithwick cites to explain his other lawless and extremist measures—because he wanted to violate the law in order to establish the general “principle” that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law. This is a president and an administration that are obsessed first and foremost with their own power and with constant demonstrations of their own strength. Conversely, what they fear and hate the most is their own weakness and submission to limitations.

  In May 2006, the Cato Institute, a think tank devoted to limited government, published an extremely well-documented condemnation of the Bush administration’s multiple abuses of power. Its Executive Summary described the Bush administration’s driving “principle”—radical expansion of its own power in every area:

  Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power.

  In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes:

  • a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;

  • a president who cannot be restrained, through v
alidly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;

  • a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror—in other words, perhaps forever; and,

  • a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave. President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.