life in g.w.bush's america:bushwacked

by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth
by Joe Conason
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 1.
On a recent Friday afternoon, the Interior Department announced a change in
rules for US mining companies. (They always announce the outrages on Friday
afternoon, because few people read the Saturday papers or watch the Saturday
TV news.) Reversing a Clinton-era decision, Interior now says that companies
mining precious metals can appropriate as much federal land as they want to
dump the waste from their operations-and modern mining techniques generate a
great deal of waste. Environmentalists were appalled, not just because of
the direct effect on the landscape, but because chemicals can leach out of
the exposed waste, polluting a much wider area.

To understand why and how officials made that decision-and why we needn't
waste time parsing the administration's claims that it was all about
promoting economic growth-it helps to have read Chapter 9 of Bushwhacked, by
Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. That chapter, entitled "Dick, Dubya, and Wyoming
Methane," tells you all you need to know about the Bush Interior Department.
We learn, in particular, that J. Steven Griles, the deputy secretary-and
probably the real power in the department-has spent his career shuttling
back and forth between being a government official and lobbying for the
extractive industries. And he has never worried much about ethical
niceties-little things like recusing himself from decisions that affect his
former clients. Moreover, Griles isn't likely to be disciplined, even when
he brazenly supports industry interests over the judgments of government
experts. After all, just about every other senior official at Interior,
including Secretary Gale Norton, has a similar résumé.

So it's a very good bet that the new rules on mining-waste disposal don't
reflect a careful economic analysis of the pros and cons. Nor, by the way,
do they represent a general ideological bias in favor of free markets and
private property, since this wasn't a ruling about what companies can do on
their own property. It was a major extension of their rights to make private
use of public land. Or to put it another way, this decision was about
extend-ing corporate privilege, not protecting property rights. Needless to
say, this particular extension of privilege was worth a lot of money to a
select group of mining companies-a very nice return on their prior
investment in the Bush administration, not just through campaign
contributions, but through deals that enriched individual government
officials.

The point about the mining-waste ruling is that it isn't at all exceptional.
Instead, it is typical of the Bush administration-in its callousness toward
the general welfare, in the brazenness with which special interests were
able to buy a decision to their liking, and in the contempt officials showed
toward the public and the press. (Indeed, the ruling received only brief
mention in the national press.) We're living in a replay of the Gilded Age,
in which robber barons openly bought and sold government officials and their
policies. And just as the Gilded Age brought forth a golden age of
muckraking, our modern descent into money politics has brought forth a new
wave of outraged reporters. Ivins and Dubose are worthy heirs of an
honorable tradition.

2.
Ivins and Dubose are, of course, not alone. Indeed, this is the season of
the angry liberal. You might think that with all the books out there-Al
Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Joe Conason's Big Lies,
David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush, and even my own column
collection-there would be a lot of repetition. Yet the Bush era provides, as
my New York Times colleague Thomas Friedman says, a "target-rich
environment." While there is some overlap between the liberal books of this
fall, each book focuses on a different piece of the picture.

In Bushwhacked, Ivins and Dubose spend some time on what we might call the
macro-economics of Bushism-the administration's repeated tax cuts for the
wealthy in the face of exploding budget deficits, its foot-dragging over
such basic measures as extending unemploy-ment benefits in the face of a
prolonged jobless "recovery." But that sort of thing isn't the authors'
forte, and their hearts clearly aren't in it; they're best at the telling
individual example. Even when discussing macroeconomics, they try to frame
it by telling individual stories, and there is a sense of relief when they
turn to more human-scale outrages.

The book's core consists of a series of muckraking case studies, ranging
from ergonomics and toxic waste to food safety and education scams. It's
worth looking at a couple of those cases, just to get a sense of how much
muck there is to rake.

The chapter on ergonomics-i.e., regulations to prevent injuries from poor
working conditions-is startling, not so much for the what and the how as for
the who. There we learn about the career of Eugene Scalia, now the Labor
Department's solicitor general. This is an appointment that should have
raised eyebrows, even if the younger Scalia had a history of labor advocacy.
Just to be blunt about it: here we have a president who reached office
despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent, thanks to a highly
questionable Supreme Court decision -and now a plum job goes to the son of
the justice who muscled that decision through. Wow.

But it's much worse than that. The younger Scalia isn't just another of the
many fortunate conservative sons (and daughters). He's someone to be
reckoned with in his own right, because he is, as Ivins and Dubose say, "the
godfather of the anti-ergonomics movement." As a lawyer representing
business interests-that is, as a lobbyist with credentials-he was a
relentless opponent of rules designed to protect workers from workplace
injuries. More than that, he was tireless in his efforts to debunk the
science of such injuries. And he was, of course, handsomely paid for his
efforts-which did, indeed, succeed in delaying the Clinton administration's
attempt to establish ergonomics rules that would, for example, protect
workers from repetitive stress ailments such as carpal tunnel syndrome,
tendonitis, and serious injuries. Such delays prepared the ground for the
Bush administration's decision to forget about the whole thing. The fact
that Scalia is now the Labor Department's chief lawyer- the man who, in
principle, represents worker interests in court-is the kind of thing a
satirist would never dare invent.


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Another story-one I didn't know -is literally sickening. It's the tale of
health regulation in meat processing. (Echoes of history: one of the great
books of the first age of muckraking was, of course, Upton Sinclair's The
Jungle, about the meatpacking industry.)

Bill Clinton, with his close ties to the Arkansas chicken industry, wasn't
particularly good on food safety issues in the early years of his
presidency. But by the end his officials had devised and were on the verge
of implementing regulations that would have greatly reduced the risk of
Listeria infections from such foods as ready-to-eat turkey. The Bush
administration killed those regulations. It also, Ivins and Dubose's book
suggests, introduced a new culture in the Agriculture Department, one in
which warnings from official inspectors are disregarded, and in which the
health of food consumers is definitely not a priority. "If you must eat
while the R[epublican]s control the White House, both houses of Congress,
and the judiciary," write the authors, "you might want to consider becoming
a vegetarian about now."

And on it goes: toxic waste, insider trading, Enron, and all that. One might
suspect that in order to fill out their book Ivins and Dubose have trotted
out every damning story they could find about the Bush administration- every
story that combines contempt for the public's welfare with unseemly
financial and personal relations between industries that benefit from policy
changes and the officials who made those changes. But while writing this
review I decided to see how many similar or worse stories not covered in the
book I could jot down on a piece of paper without even cracking a book or
going online-and eventually realized that I could do this for quite a while.
A sampler: the elimination of new source review, the provision of the 1977
Clean Air Act that requires older power plants to comply with modern
pollution standards when they update their facilities; the go-ahead for
nuclear waste disposal at Yucca; the corporate welfare in the Cheney energy
plan; the combination of environmental havoc and corporate welfare in the
"healthy forests" initiative ostensibly intended to reduce forest fires; the
retroactive tax cuts for corporations in the 2001 stimulus plan; and, of
course, Halliburton's no-bid $1.3 billion and counting deal in Iraq.

The most striking feature of these stories is the rawness of it all. Never
mind all that stuff you've read in the past about how political
contributions buy "access," which allows interest groups to influence
policy. The companies now riding high don't just contribute to Republican
campaigns, they contribute directly to the personal wealth of future (and in
some cases current) public officials. And they don't influence policy: they
write it, directly.

The big question, of course, is "Why is this happening?" Not why they are
doing this-greed springs eternal- but why they are able to get away with it.
What happened to the outrage the press and the public are supposed to feel
when government ceases to be run for their interests? That brings us to Joe
Conason's complementary book.

3.
Big Lies is a less friendly book than Bushwhacked. This is not a criticism.
To be frank, though I understand why Ivins and Dubose chose to mix their
grim tales of corrupt politics with heartwarming tales of good ordinary
folks, I would just as soon have drunk my coffee without the cream. Conason,
by contrast, gives it straight: his book is a fairly unrelieved tract, whose
theme is the triumph of hypocrisy. His claim is that the right-wing
coalition now ruling our nation hardly ever practices what it preaches: that
we're ruled by self-styled populists whose policies are relentlessly
elitist, by people who declare their fiscal responsibility while breaking
the bank, by people who stress "character" while pursuing private lives no
better than anyone else's, and, above all, by "patriots" who would never
think of making personal sacrifices for their country.

This can sound a bit heavy-handed, but Big Lies is by no means boring to
read. In fact, it's gripping and in some places hilarious. For example, who
knew that Rush Limbaugh, scourge of liberal elitists and hero of the
"ditto-heads," informed Cigar Aficionado that his favorite Bordeaux is
Château Haut Brion '61-a vintage that retails for about $2,000 a bottle?
(That's not just greedy. It's comically pretentious.) And Conason confirms
some stories I thought were too good to be true, like the one about John
Ashcroft and the Crisco:

Like the Old Testament kings of Israel, whose God-given mandate was marked
by anointing their heads with holy oil, Ashcroft would kneel down to receive
a similar blessing from his aging dad. Lacking holy oil on the evening
before Ashcroft was to be sworn in as a senator in 1994, his father [a
Pentecostal minister] instead rubbed the politician's forehead with a few
dabs of Crisco while praying aloud.
More seriously, Conason gives the best accounts yet of the peculiar military
and business career of George W. Bush, from his service-or lack thereof -in
the Texas Air National Guard, to the deals that allowed a repeated failure
in business to emerge as a multimillionaire. Bush, Conason writes, was
admitted to the Texas Air National Guard "ahead of hundreds of other young
men on the waiting list" and "despite his low score on the pilot aptitude
test." More surprisingly, he failed to report for duty for an entire year,
between May 1972 and May 1973. By this point, he had already been suspended
from flight duty and reassigned to an alternative unit because he failed to
show up for an annual physical (Conason points out that a strict
drug-testing policy had gone into effect a few months before Bush was to
have his exam).

Highlights of Bush's business career include his sale of Harken Energy
shares two months before the company announced losses of over $20 million
and its shares fell by 24 percent. "All the information Bush had about
Harken's prospects at that point was negative," Conason writes.

The firm was near bankruptcy. A year earlier, the Harken management had
created a phony profit of $10 million by selling some of the company's
assets, at an inflated price, to Aloha Petroleum, a front company owned by
company insiders. That maneuver, similar to what Enron did on a much larger
scale a decade later, had preserved the Harken stock price for a while by
concealing most of the company's losses.
Bush was investigated by the SEC for insider trading, but no action was
taken. According to Conason, this is no surprise: then SEC chairman Richard
Breeden "was an especially ardent Bush loyalist, and the agency's general
counsel, James Doty, was the same Texas attorney who had handled the sale of
the Rangers baseball team for George W."


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Incidentally, some squeamish liberals have condemned Conason for these
tales, saying that we should limit ourselves to policy, not go after
personality and past history. But I'm completely with Conason on this. After
all, today's right wing flourishes in part by using the personal to distract
voters from policy. Is a conservative politician a reliable friend of the
privileged and well-connected? Never mind, let's talk about his sterling
family life. Is a liberal politician spectacularly successful in his conduct
of economic policy? But he had an affair! Even if you think that public
debate ought to be about policy, not persons, it's necessary to defeat this
strategy-and if exposing the dissonance between personal pretensions and
reality is what it takes, go for