This George Is No Washington
By William John Cox
04/11/06 "MMN" -- -- Each was elected president of the United
States, but George the 43rd possesses none of the courage,
intelligence, or wisdom of the first.
George Washington was born into a respectable planting family in
Virginia. His father died when he was 11, leaving a widow and
seven children. The young Washington received a grade-school
education; however, he was unable to attend college. He had to
go to work at age 16 as a surveyor and ultimately conducted more
than 190 surveys on the Virginia frontier. When Washington was
20 years old, he petitioned the governor for a military
appointment, and began to lead a series of military expeditions
into the Ohio Country, where he engaged in battles with the
French and their Indian allies. He was ultimately appointed a
colonel, and in 1755 he became an aide-de-camp to the British
General Braddock, who was leading an invasion into the
French-held Ohio region. Braddock was killed and his army
defeated during an Indian ambush; however, Washington was able
to rally the troops and saved the lives of many soldiers. Two
horses were shot out from under him, and four bullets pierced
his coat as he maneuvered in the thick of the battle.
Only 23 years of age, Washington was appointed as Commander in
Chief of the Virginia Regiment. He learned lessons from
Braddock’s defeat and trained his troops in both the rigorous
discipline of British troops and the “bushfighting” tactics of
Indian warriors. For the next three and a half years, he led his
thousand “Blues” in constant combat operations on the Virginia
frontier in the war against France. He knew most of his soldiers
personally and was viewed as a father figure, even though most
of the soldiers were older than him. He resigned his commission
in 1758 to get married and to attend to his family’s estate.
George W. Bush was born to high privilege; his
great-grandfathers helped establish and earned enormous profits
from the military industrial complex and, his grandfather helped
finance Hitler’s war machine. His parents were both raised in
wealthy households attended by servants, and they spoiled George
Jr., their first born. He was allowed to abuse his siblings, to
torment and kill animals and to sustain mediocrity in his
education. He required his father’s “legacy” to get into Yale,
where he organized physical hazing described in newspaper
reports as “degrading, sadistic and obscene.” He was arrested
for theft, disorderly conduct, drunk driving and possession of
cocaine.
In 1968, 296,406 American boys were drafted into military
service, and 6,332 came home from Vietnam in body bags. Although
he was 22 years old, a college graduate, and physically fit,
Bush’s father pulled strings to jump him over 500 waiting
applicants and into the Texas Air National Guard, even though he
could only answer 25 of the 100 questions on the pilot aptitude
test. Bush declined to volunteer for Vietnam service, choosing
instead to patrol the skies over Houston, Texas on weekends,
until he grew bored and went AWOL.
In the management of his family’s estate, George Washington
brought to bear the same skills and energy he had used in
creating the Virginia Regiment. Over the next 17 years, he more
than doubled the size of Mount Vernon and, in 1766, to overcome
the planters’ dependence on English merchants, he abandoned
tobacco as a cash crop. He began to grow wheat; he built his own
mill to process it into flour; and he began to spin and weave
locally produced linen and wool to clothe his workers.
Washington built a schooner to harvest fish from the Potomac,
and purchased a larger ship to transport his own products to
European markets. He organized the Mississippi Land Company to
obtain control over 2.5 million acres along the Ohio River, and
he fought for the rights of Virginia veterans to receive land
along the western rivers on the same basis as British regulars.
In 1978, having never worked at a real job, George W. Bush
decided to venture into the oil business. He was 32 years old
and had an uncle who was a wealthy Wall Street banker to give
him a start. Spending more time in West Texas barrooms and on
the golf course than the oil patch over the next 12 years, Bush
was repeatedly on the verge of bankruptcy and was bailed out by
Salem bin Laden, the brother of Osama bin Laden, and by other
individuals and corporations seeking favors from his father, the
Vice President. In 1990, Bush used insider information of
impending losses to dump his corporate stock and illegally
failed to report the sale to the SEC for eight months, during
which time the value of the stock plummeted. Bush used the
proceeds to pay off a half-million-dollar loan he had obtained
the previous year to purchase a two-percent interest in the
Texas Rangers, Dallas’s baseball franchise. Although Bush had
been restricted from having anything to do with managing the
franchise, he ultimately ended up with almost $15 million when
it was sold. Bush bragged that his success was due to hard work,
and he denied he had ever profited from his family connections.
George Washington served in the House of Burgesses, and in 1769
he called for Virginia to boycott English goods and for an end
to the slave trade. In 1774, he was elected as one of seven
delegates from Virginia to the Continental Congress. The
following year he was returned to the Second Continental
Congress, receiving 106 of the 108 votes cast, and he was chosen
to command the Virginia militia. In the Second Congress, after
chairing four committees on military readiness, Washington was
appointed as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army. He
agreed to serve without pay, and for the next six years he was
constantly with his soldiers in the field. During battles, he
would appear on his horse among the front lines as bullets flew
past and others fell dead and wounded by his side.
The war did not immediately go well for the Americans, and
during the battle of Long Island, the siege of Fort Washington,
and the Forage War, the British and Hessian troops often
provided no “quarter” in putting to death all rebels who fell
into their hands. The wounded had their brains dashed out, were
run through with bayonets and their bodies were mutilated.
American prisoners were imprisoned under conditions of great
misery, including the holds of prison ships in New York harbor,
where large numbers died after great suffering. In spite of
these war crimes, Washington never denied quarter to the enemy
and ordered that all prisoners be treated as human beings with
the same rights that the rebels were fighting for. He wrote,
“Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to
Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army
in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.” Washington
particularly ordered that Hessian soldiers were “innocent people
in this war, and were not volunteers, but forced into this war.”
The Hessians were treated with such respect and humanity that
they were allowed to march to the rear without escort, and 23
percent of all Hessian soldiers who survived the war chose to
remain in America.
Following the American victory in Yorktown, Washington retired
to Mount Vernon until he was called upon to attend and chair the
Constitutional Convention. With ratification of the Constitution
and establishment of the United States in 1789, Washington was
twice unanimously selected by all electors and served two terms
as the Nation’s first president. Regarding the government, he
said, “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to
allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of
the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil
government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost
nations of justice and liberality.”
George W. Bush jogged for Congress in 1978 and was decisively
defeated. In 1990, he hired consultant Karl Rove to make him
over from a failed featherweight businessman into a heavyweight
political contender. Relying on policy teams to formulate
positions, Rove reduced them to simple terms and phrases for
Bush to memorize. The plan worked and Bush was elected in 1994
as Governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial job. The same formula
almost succeeded in the presidential election of 2000 when Bush
came within a half million votes of Al Gore in the popular vote;
however, family connections again bailed him out. His father’s
former Secretary of State, James Baker flew into Florida where
Bush’s brother Jeb was governor, the chief vote counter chaired
his reelection committee, and only a few hundred disputed votes
separated the candidates. After the Florida Supreme Court found
for Gore, Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a
majority appointed by President Reagan and his father ruled that
the intent of the Florida voters was irrelevant and Bush was
anointed as president.
Bush presided over a failed presidency and his public approval
ratings were barely above 50 percent when al Qaeda attacked on
September 11, 2001, much like lighting striking the well-insured
building of a bankrupt company. As a “war president,” Bush
established an outdoor prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba
where POW’s were confined in chain-link cages open to the
elements and denied the rights guaranteed by the Geneva
Convention; he illegally held hundreds of undocumented
immigrants in prison without access to counsel; he denied all
due process to American citizens imprisoned as an “enemy
combatants;” he established secret prisons in other countries;
he ordered the kidnaping and “extraordinary rendition” of
individual into other countries where they were brutally
tortured; and he authorized the illegal use of torture in the
questioning of prisoners in places such as Abu Ghraib, as long
as it didn’t produce organ failure or death, or was done in
accordance with “military necessity.” Even when Congress passed
legislation, which he resisted, forbidding the torture of
prisoners, Bush appended a “signing statement” in which he said
he would follow the law only if and as he decided.
Although there is no evidence that George Washington ever
declined as a child to lie about chopping down a cherry tree,
his personal probity is a matter of history. He said, “There is
but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it
steadily." He hoped to possess “firmness and virtue enough to
maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the
character of an honest man.”
George W. Bush says, "I am the president, see? And I do not have
to explain myself to anyone." However, when he does try to
explain, it’s like something from Through the Looking Glass:
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said [to Alice], in a rather
scornful tone, ’it means just what I choose it to mean, neither
more nor less.’” Bush recently said, “when the President speaks,
he better mean what he says.” However, the record is
increasingly clear – his words have no true meaning for the rest
of us, except to signal that great danger lies ahead.
In his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003, Bush
stated that the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed
that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program,
when in fact the IAEA maintained it had destroyed the program;
he stated that Iraq had purchased high-quality aluminum tubes
“suitable for nuclear weapons production,” when the IAEA and his
own Energy Department had already concluded that they were not
suitable for the refining of uranium; and he said, “The British
Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” when in truth
the CIA had informed Bush that the allegations were “highly
dubious.”
On March 17, 2003, Bush told the American people that Iraq
possessed some of the “most lethal weapons ever devised and that
it had “aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including
operatives of al Qaeda.” These were all lies, as was his
statement that “every measure has been taken to avoid war.”
Actually, every step was taken to ensure war. It came, and no
weapons of mass destruction were ever found, or any evidence
that al Qaeda had ever been active in Iraq.
In June and July 2003, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson
informed the media and the public that Bush had “twisted”
intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear program and had not dealt
honestly with Wilson’s findings during his investigation in
Niger that there was no evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney conspired to punish Wilson
and to destroy his credibility by selectively leaking portions
of a classified CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s
efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Acting on their
direct orders, Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby
secretly informed two reporters about those portions which
supported the Administration’s conclusion, while concealing
evidence to the contrary. In a further effort to discredit
Wilson, Libby went on to disclose that Wilson’s wife, whom he
identified by name as an undercover CIA operative, had arranged
the trip. Undoubtedly acting at Bush’s direction, his Deputy
Chief of Staff Karl Rove and National Security Adviser Steven
Hadley also secretly leaked the same information to other
reporters.
CIA officers were furious when the leaks were published and
demanded a criminal investigation. There was a public outcry,
and a special prosecutor was appointed to identify and prosecute
the leakers. Here’s what Bush had to say: “I want to know the
truth. ... I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker
is.” “I don’t know of anybody in my administration who leaked
classified information. If somebody did leak classified
information, I’d like to know it, and we’ll take the appropriate
action.” And finally, “If someone in my administration committed
a crime, they will no longer work in my administration.” When he
was interviewed by the special prosecutor’s investigators, Bush,
accompanied by a criminal defense attorney, denied any prior
knowledge that anyone on his staff had been involved in a
campaign to discredit Wilson or that he had authorized the
leaks. Did these words have any meaning other than a callow
attempt to avoid responsibility?
As Commander in Chief, George Washington’s letters to Congress
always took the form of requests rather than demands, and he
always acknowledged that his authority was granted by Congress.
Once the war was won, there were those who wanted Washington to
declare himself king. He told one such advocate to “banish these
thoughts from your Mind” and said that the idea was “big with
the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country.” King George
III commented that if Washington was able to resist becoming
king he would be “the greatest man in the world.”
Washington sought to expand the powers of Congress, writing “if
the powers of Congress are not enlarged, and made competent to
all general purposes, that the Blood which has been spilt, and
the expence that has been incurred, and the distresses which
have been felt, will avail in nothing.” He said, “The
constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress;
therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be
undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the
subject and authorized such a measure.”
George W. Bush has sometimes quipped that it would be so much
easier to govern in a dictatorship; however, it is increasingly
clear that the real joke is on the American people. Since taking
office, Bush has virtually eliminated the public’s access to
government records; he has issued more than 100 “signing
statements,” upon signing bills of legislation essentially
nullifying any part he does not intend to obey; he has refused
to disclose the membership and deliberations of a secret energy
panel which formulated government policy; he has suppressed any
dissent within government agencies that contradicted his
narrow-minded policies; he has punished “whistle-blowers” for
revealing government corruption and illegal activities; he
deployed the military to spy on non-violent protest groups; he
authorized the secret and illegal wiretapping of the telephone
conversations and e-mails of thousands of American citizens; and
he has lied about it – repeatedly.
In establishing an imperial presidency, Bush seeks to avoid all
accountability and oversight. He has used his “global war on
terror” to expand presidential powers far beyond any grant by
Congress, even denying that Congress has the power to limit him,
if it interferes with his role as Commander in Chief of the
military. More importantly, Bush has sought to deceive the
American people about his crimes over and over and over, and the
risk of harm posed by his criminality continues to increase.
The Reagan administration organized “readiness exercises” which
called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to round up
and detain up to 400,000 “refugees” in the event of
“uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into
the United States. In January 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers
awarded a $385 million contract to a Halliburton subsidiary to
construct detention centers in the United States to cope with
“an emergency influx of immigrants into the US, or to support
the rapid development of new programs.” Each detention center is
designed to hold up to 5,000 detainees, should Bush decide to
declare martial law in the event of another terrorist attack or
a natural disaster, such as another Katrina or an Asian Flu
epidemic.
Bush has authorized the military to become engaged in
“counter-terrorism” operations inside the United States and to
conduct “special access” surveillance programs. The Pentagon’s
national Counterterrorism Center now holds the names of 325,000
“terrorism” suspects. It is unknown how many of these “suspects”
are American citizens defined as terrorist “affiliates.” The
Pentagon’s “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support”
pledges to “transform US military forces to execute homeland
defense mission in the ... US homeland.” The military considers
antiwar protests to be a “threat” and protestors as “those who
would harm us.” The Pentagon’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program
(which provides for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army
installations) was recently revised. Are these the “new
programs?” Should we fear our president?
In the fall of 1789, George Washington undertook a tour of the
North, and the new citizens of the United States turned out in
great numbers to greet their national hero. In the spring of
1791, Washington toured the South continuing to honor his pledge
to visit all the states. One newspaper editorial criticized his
being treated as a canonized American saint at every stop. Any
fears that he would become king were put to rest when, after
eight years in office, Washington quietly retired to Mount
Vernon where he continued an active life, but took little part
in politics. On December 12, 1799, Washington rode all day in a
freezing storm attending to his plantation, but refused to
change his wet clothes to avoid keeping his dinner guests
waiting. He caught a severe throat infection and pneumonia and
died on December 14, 1799. Washington was truly a great man.
George W. Bush’s public approval ratings are now down to 36
percent and falling fast. Americans are increasingly concerned
about the rationality of any decision he makes, particularly as
he is aggressively and obsessively seeking to extend his war on
global terror into an atomic attack on Iran and to further
curtail the freedoms of American citizens. At 30 percent, the
Republican-controlled Congress’s ratings are even lower than
Bush’s, and it is likely that the Democrats will increase their
representation in Congress in the fall elections, perhaps even
achieving a majority. Impeachment and criminal indictment may be
on the horizon. Bush is an ignorant and vindictive little man.
This George is no Washington. George Washington was the Father
of His Country. George W. Bush could be the Destroyer of His
Country. To preserve our freedoms, America must return to the
ideology upon which the United States was founded, and Americans
must demand that our elected leaders adhere to those ideals.
William John Cox, the author of "You're Not Stupid! Get the
Truth: A Brief on the Bush Presidency," is currently a senior
prosecutor for the State Bar of California. As a professional
police officer he authored the Policy Manual of the Los Angeles
Police Department and the Role of the Police in America for a
National Advisory Commission during the Nixon administration.
Acting as a public interest, pro bono, attorney, he filed a
class action lawsuit in 1979 on behalf of every citizen of the
United States petitioning the Supreme Court to order the other
two branches of the federal government to conduct a National
Policy Referendum; he investigated and successfully sued a group
of radical right-wing organizations in 1981 that denied the
Holocaust; and he arranged in 1991 for the publication of the
suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls. He contributed this article to
Media Monitors Network (MMN) from California, USA.
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