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.
