- by Alan Adaschik

By any measure, George Bush is the worst President that this Nation has ever had the misfortune of enduring. There seems to be no end to the corruption and constitutional atrocities that he is capable of bestowing upon us. His latest abominations are his commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby and his absurd and ridiculous claims of executive privilege for every member of his staff whereby he puts himself and everyone who works for him above the law.

Think about it! For a multitude of absurd reasons, George Bush and his crony, Dick Cheney, ignoring the rule of law, common sense, and the obvious traps and pitfalls, decided to invade Iraq. However, they needed a justification for doing so. Toward this end they cooked the books on the available intelligence and when Joseph Wilson, the former Ambassador to Iraq attempted to set the record straight, the cabal of criminals in the Whitehouse decided to send him and every other government employee a message by wrongfully and illegally revealing the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, who was a CIA officer at the time working under cover for that agency.

As fate would have it, when an investigation into this deplorable and shoddy affair ensued, Scooter Libby, Vice-President Cheney's former Chief of Staff, lied to a Grand Jury to protect his superiors and for so doing was found by a jury to be guilty of committing four felonies. The presiding judged of his trial sentenced Libby to pay a $250,000 fine and serve 30 months in jail. Early on in Libby's trial, his attorneys made it clear that they intended to subpoena Vice-President Cheney as a witness for the defense. Mysteriously, this never happened and as a result, Libby's crack defense team mounted a lackluster and half-hearted defense for him. After all, the key individual who could get Libby off the hook would not be testifying and why worry about defending Libby when his eventual exoneration by pardon was a foregone conclusion.

Of course, the rest is history. Just prior to have to go to jail to serve his sentence, George Bush commuted this part of Libby's sentence supposedly because 30 months was an "excessive" sentence for a person with Libby's record of exceptional public service and prior lack of criminal record. Could it possibly be that the exceptional public service President Bush was talking about was Libby's willingness to lie to a grand jury to protect his bosses? If so, then the commutation of Libby's sentence by President Bush, although falling within his constitutional powers, was really nothing more than the President abusing those powers by protecting someone guilty of felonious crimes in order to protect himself from being accused and charged with felonious crimes.

At this point, it is reasonable to conclude that George Bush is a failed President and if anyone still has any doubts about this, all we have to do to settle the matter is examine his record while in office. This record follows:

• Failed to prevent 9/11 from occurring despite numerous missed opportunities to foil the plot.
• Invaded Iraq for contrived and surreptitious reasons.
• Is needlessly squandering the world's un-renewable resources by fighting a war in Iraq, thus accelerating the effects of global warming and contributing to cost increases for fuel and gasoline here in the United States.
• Established policies that condone and encourage torture in violation of the Geneva Convention.
• Established a gulag of secret prisons where people are held without being charged, tried, or represented by an attorney.
• Established a policy whereby people can be declared enemy combatants and thereby be denied their constitutional and inalienable (God given) rights.
• Established policies whereby people can be kidnapped and sent to foreign prisons to be tortured.
• Authorized and condoned illegal spying on American citizens.
• Sponsored and made permanent the Patriotic Act which wrongfully and unnecessarily takes away the constitutional rights of citizens.
• Established a policy to needlessly reclassify public documents that have been previously declassified. Also, wrongfully encourages subordinates to foot drag or refuse citizen requests for information that is not classified.
• Threatened to imprison reporters under the 1917 Espionage Act for printing leaks in news reports.
• Authorized Vice President Cheney to declassify (leak) information at will irrespective of its reasons for being classified.
• Authorized the military to pay for the publication of articles in foreign newspapers favorable to our war effort without revealing the source of the articles.
• Allowed Vice President Cheney to award reconstruction contracts in Iraq on a no-bid basis to a company he previously worked for and still receives compensation from.
• Established a prescription drug benefit program that is difficult for most elderly people to understand and is of benefit only to the drug companies.
• Initially, did little to aid and assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina and did too little too late after the extent of the tragedy became known.
• Attempted to allow an Arab owned company to manage and run several major United States ports despite the associated terrorism risk.
• Ignored and abandoned more international treaties than any other president in US history.
• Attempted to privatize Social Security in such a manner that it would have weakened and threatened the vitality of the program.
• Implemented tax cuts that benefit the rich while wasting billions of dollars on a wrongful and senseless war in Iraq.
• Turned a national surplus into the largest deficit in the Nation's history and continues to drive us deeper into insolvency.
• Authorized the sell off of public lands to private developers.
• Facilitated the undoing and dismantling of several decades of environmental progress and laws.
• Ignored the intertwined problems of over-population and global warming even though these issues are major threats to the viability of life on this planet.
• Corrupted the United States Attorneys office and other government regulatory agencies such that they are no longer effective and politics is their primary concern.
• Violated our traditional and constitutional bounds of the separation of Church and State.
• Issued more so called signing statements than any other President in this Nation's history. These statements are nothing more than the President telling us and those who work for him that he intends to break the law he just established.

After reading the above list of Presidential accomplishments, one cannot help noting that they are all negative. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to find anything positive or good to say about President Bush. This being the case, several things should be abundantly clear; President Bush is incompetent, is a liar, and believes he is above the law. He will commit any crime, even felonies, to further his interests and designs. All of the foregoing being true, the question comes to mind; how did George Bush become our President?

The obvious answer to the above question is we elected him and as incredible as it now seems, we elected him twice. This says a lot about the nature of our electoral process and the ignorance of the American voter, but in the final analysis, it is unfair to blame people for voting for the wrong candidate when they really do not have the wherewithal or time to find out who a candidate for office really is. Therefore, the real question that should be asked is how did a man like George Bush get nominated for President by the Republican Party? They are the people who should have known better and being the Party which brought him to power, they, more than any other group of people, bear direct responsibility for the situation that this Nation now finds itself in. George Bush's record of non-achievement as President is a matter of record. What the Republicans would like us to ignore is the fact that his record of non-achievement prior to his being selected by them as the leader of their party, was also a matter of record. This record is as follows:

• Was found to be negligent in two automobile collisions.
• Arrested twice for Disorderly Conduct one in 1966 and once in 1967.
• Convicted of Drunk Driving in Maine when he was 30 years old.
• Joined the National Guard during the Viet Nam war to avoid serving there.
• Was AWOL from the National Guard and failed to show up for flight physicals which made him unavailable for flight duty.
• Refused to take a drug test or answer questions about drug use.
• Ran for Congress and was not elected.
• Was a member of the Board of Directors of a company that financed the production of R-rated and B movies.
• Purchased an oil company and drove it $3.1 Million into debt, but realized 1.5 Million from its sale in a sweetheart deal with a Saudi friend of his father.
• Parlayed a $605,000 loan into a $14.9 Million profit using taxpayer money and eminent domain laws to evict homeowners.
• All records of SEC investigations into George Bush's bankrupt companies and insider trading are unavailable for public review.
• All minutes of meetings for public corporations where George Bush served as a member of the Board are unavailable for public review.

Elected Governor of Texas and while he was Governor:

• Relaxed pollution laws making Texas the most polluted state in the Union in 1999 and the city of Houston the most ozone polluted city in the nation for a three year period beginning 1997.
• Cut taxes that brought Texas to the point of bankruptcy and put the state in debt for billions of dollars which are still being paid by Texas taxpayers.
• Executed more people as the Governor of Texas than any other Governor in any other state in the history of this Nation.
• All records of President Bush's service as the Governor of Texas have been made unavailable for public review.

After reading all of the above, it is incumbent upon us to ask ourselves is this the kind of man we as people would want to be our President and the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of this Nation. The answer to this question should be obvious. To be sure, had this information about George Bush been known to the General Public during his first run for office, in all likelihood, he would not have been elected as our President and this being the case, the question that cries out to be answered is why did the Republican party choose George as its standard bearer?

The answer to the above question is straight forward and simple. The Republicans chose George Bush as their candidate because being the son of an ex-president, they knew he could win. Therefore, to a Republican, winning is everything. Competence, character, honor, and integrity mean nothing. Who cares about the consequences of electing a nincompoop to the office of President when it means we will be in power and with us in power, there will be plenty of money to go around for everyone.

George Bush is the most morally bankrupt, corrupt, and incompetent president that this nation has ever had in its history and his failings as a human being and leader were clearly evident throughout his professional career. Therefore, the unavoidable conclusion is that incompetence, corruption, and moral degeneracy are acceptable qualities to the Republican Party in a presidential candidate. Let's not forget this when we vote in the coming national election.