With less than 50 days to the U.S. election and some polls reporting a 10-point lead over John Kerry, George W Bush’s re-election as President looks a breeze. Despite his dodgy past, he has successfully sold himself as a ‘hero’ War President and defender of traditional U.S. values. How did he do it? Bush’s people have run riot over Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry’s record, so what about the President’s?

President Bush under fire

Although Time magazine last week reported a double-digit lead for incumbent President George W. Bush — the so-called ‘post convention bounce’ — Newsweek will publish a story this week that shows Bush’s double-digit lead has narrowed to six points following revelations made public in the last few days of cocaine use by the President while vacationing at Camp David, deliberate fudging by the President of his military service in the National Guard, the right-to-life President’s alleged assistance in helping a girlfriend secure an abortion in the 1970s, and the President’s close ties to the bin Laden family.
In a story published yesterday in Great Britain’s Glasgow Sunday Herald, Investigations Editor Neil Mackay explores “Bush’s charge sheet for alleged wrongdoing — sex, drugs, cowardice, cruelty; [as well as other of] his alleged failings and foibles [which] are imperial in stature.”

Bush has wrapped himself in the Stars and Stripes since the horror of Sept. 11. His presidency has pushed a simple message: America is in danger and he’s the man to keep the people safe; he’ll take the fight against the terrorists abroad and he’s proud of U.S. troops.
If that is the case, why is Bush mired in a scandal about his Vietnam-era service, or lack of, with fresh allegations that he was able to sneak out of serving his country overseas because his daddy was famous, powerful and rolling in cash?
Being proved to be a little yellow-bellied about fighting in Vietnam would be mere collateral damage to the Bush campaign compared to the all-out nuclear holocaust which would ensue if the allegations made about Dubya’s cocaine use and abortion-fixing, in biographer and muck-raker Kitty Kelly’s forthcoming book on the Bush family, stand up to scrutiny.
Since his days in Yale, Bush has been strongly anti-intellectual and rampantly pro-business. Until the age of 30, he didn’t really do very much of anything, but by 1977 he started to use his family’s powerful connections to raise money for an oil business.
The most questionable business venture of Bush’s oil career came while he was with the Harken Energy Corporation. Harken made investments in the Middle East in the run-up to the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam. At the time, Bush Sr was the 41st President of the USA and Bush Jr was on the board of Harken. Harken took a pasting on the stockmarket. In June 1990, Harken consultants said only ‘ drastic action’ could save the company. Bush sold his entire stock in Harken before information about the dire state of the company was known publicly — despite a legal requirement on him to notify the Securities Exchange Commission …
When governor of Texas between 1995 and 2000, Bush presided over more than 120 executions — that accounts for about a third of the executions in the entire USA during the same period. Bush objected to a bill to stop the state executing people with mental problems. He also vetoed a unanimous bill by the Texas legislature requiring the appointment of a lawyer to an accused within 20 days.

Neil Mackay asks a series of critical questions, deserving of answers before the American people go to the polls on November 2nd: “Is President George W Bush, who weaves a narrative about himself as a man of God, actually a charlatan? Is he really a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is his faith a sham? Is he more bad boy than born again? More playboy than penitent?”
These are just a few of the issues in debate, as the American people and the world community await answers about Bush’s shrouded past.

In 2002, a group of angry girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen blew a fuse, initiating a vicious attack on a woman who they perceived to be a hooker.
The woman was walking down the street at around midnight, dazed, shoes in hand. One member of the group of girls hanging out decided to punch the woman and knock her to the ground. Gang mentality led to more of the girls becoming involved, and the woman was kicked to the ground, at one point one of the girls even dancing on her face.
The innocent woman was, in fact, the dazed victim of a recent sexual assault. But had she been a prostitute, the actions of the girls would hardly have mitigated the crime. So how should the girls’ crime be addressed?
The three primary offenders, all under the age of sixteen, were handed a unique sentence, which the victim of their crime had a hand in determining. Through the Youth Restorative Action Project (YRAP), the consequence was constructed to foster a little empathy for the prostitutes whom the girls claimed to hate.
YRAP is a justice committee unique to Edmonton, the inspiration of Yasmina Semanac, a teenaged Serbian / Canadian who managed to escape her war-ravaged country. The YRAP panel is comprised of a group of youth who work with the courts to determine sentences for young people involved in “hate crimes and crimes of significant social issues.”
In this case, the panel called on Mark Cherrington, a youth worker involved in YRAP and Youth Menace, a radio show on the University of Alberta’s CJSR, a weekly programme hosted and produced by young offenders who’ve had contact with the criminal justice system. The programme exists to give voice to the young offender population, a group often invisible to the mainstream population.
Programmes often involve Cherrington transferring young offenders directly from the Law Courts to CJSR, where they are given the opportunity to discuss their situations, unedited and live on the air. “Somebody described [the show] as either brilliantly wonderful or a wonderful disaster depending on what show you turn on,” laughs Cherrington.
Youth Menace and YRAP are partners in crime fighting, a collaboration that allows for the opportunity for youth peer justice, which is to say justice outcomes developed and delivered by youth. The only requirement to be a panel member is that s/he is 25 years or younger and that they affirm a belief in the declaration of universal human rights.
In the case of the young women convicted of assaulting the woman on an Edmonton street, the young female offenders involved were instructed to make a two-hour radio documentary about child prostitution in their own backyards. The award-winning documentary, Children and Prostitution: Victims, All of Us, is as honest and provocative a document of child prostitution as you’re likely ever to hear, akin to the work of writer Harmony Korine, a youth himself, on Larry Clark’s film Kids, though here there is not an ounce of fiction or conjecture in the radio documentary.
The voices represented in Victims are all children and all girls. The documentary introduces a 16-year-old pimp who chews unendingly on candy because she’s trying to get off crystal meth; and a child prostitute who met her pimp by naively waving at him across the street from the public library because she thought he was cute. Two days later, she found herself working the streets for drug money.
“This piece is the first piece from the perspective of the child,” says Cherrington. “It’s not a ministerial statement, it’s not mid- to low-level bureaucrats talking about ‘we need to’ or ‘we should’ or ‘this is adequate or inadequate.’”
Peppered with original urban music, explicit songs all written by street kids from ihuman, an inner city arts studio, Children and Prostitution: Victims, All of Us is well-executed, although the voices of the girls couldn’t be more raw and unvarnished.
“It’s a testament, not a message,” says Cherrington. “At the end it goes back to the philosophy of Youth Menace: you may agree or disagree with what’s being said, but the bottom line is that you certainly have to respect it, and it needs to be listened to.”
Reporting by Tash Fryzuk in the May issue of See magazine.