Good-Bye, George W. Bush -- and Good Riddance to Your Right-Wing Rubbish!

At His Final Press Conference on Monday -- and Likely In His Farewell Address Tonight -- a Bullheaded Bush Stubbornly Refuses to Admit That His Policies Have Severely Damaged America's Constitution and Its Standing in the World During His Eight Years in Office



An irritated President Bush reacts angrily to a reporter's question about the nation's damaged international standing under his watch during his final press conference Monday before he leaves office. "I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged," Bush insisted, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- including the outgoing president's pronouncements on the war on terror coming under mounting ridicule abroad, especially in the Muslim world. (Photo: AP)


(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Thursday, January 15, 2009)

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A 'SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL
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Dear Readers,

Five days to go. Just five more days remain before George W. Bush's tenure as the 43rd president of the United States officially comes to an end at 12:00 noon Eastern Time on Tuesday.

Thank God!

These have been the eight worst years that America has ever experienced under one president, bar none. Not even Richard Nixon's scandal-plagued tenure -- which ended with his forced resignation in disgrace -- was this bad.

If anyone had told me on the day Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974 that we would one day have a president more secretive, more power-hungry, more disrespectful of the Constitution and more vindictive than "Tricky Dick," I would have told them they were crazy.

I utterly despised Nixon. So much so that when I cast my first presidential ballot in 1972 after the ratification of the Voting Age Amendment -- which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 -- I voted for George McGovern, even though I and everyone else back then knew that McGovern didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of unseating him. My vote in 1972 wasn't pro-McGovern, it was unequivocally anti-Nixon.

For me -- and for millions of my fellow Baby Boomers -- the number-one issue in the 1972 election was the Vietnam War. I wanted it ended. I wanted our troops to be brought home. There were over a half-million U.S. troops in Vietnam at the time -- a 65 percent majority of whom were involuntary conscripts.

Yes, Generation Xers and Millennials, we had a draft back then; military service was compulsory for men aged 18 to 26. Vietnam was the only war in U.S. military history other than the Civil War in which our fighting force was made up predominantly of draftees. It was also the only war -- which was never formally declared by Congress -- that America lost.

Nixon got elected in 1968 on a promise to get us out of Vietnam. He didn't keep it -- and I vowed to exact retribution at the ballot box. But I also was infuriated by Nixon's wholesale disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law, particularly the First Amendment right of Americans to dissent from his policies without fear of retribution.

When Nixon ordered the mass arrests of over 100,000 people who peacefully exercised their First Amendment right to assemble and protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 1970, he had clearly violated the Constitution he was sworn by his oath of office to "preserve, protect and defend."

Nixon's Justice Department, under Attorney General John Mitchell, spied on anti-Vietnam War protest groups and other domestic dissidents without obtaining court warrants, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. This warrantless spying program was ultimately struck down by a unanimous Supreme Court.

And the Nixon administration actually sued The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and other newspapers to prevent them from publishing a heretofore secret government archive of documents detailing how the U.S. got into Vietnam, in open defiance of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press. The administration was ultimately overruled by the Supreme Court in this case, too.

Does all this sound familiar? It should. And mind you, all of this came about BEFORE the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex by operatives hired by the Nixon White House -- the break-in that led to the scandal that drove Nixon from office.

Thirty-four years and five months later, I can say without fear of contradiction that compared to George W. Bush, Nixon was a Boy Scout.

In the three years since I launched The 'Skeeter Bites Report, I have documented again and again the Bush administration's own disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law.

I pointed out early on the unconstitutionality under the Fourth Amendment of Bush's warrantless electronic eavesdropping program on Americans' domestic and overseas telephone calls and Internet communications.

I documented the bald-faced falsehood of Bush's claim that he has the inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to spy on Americans without court warrants -- despite a passel of court rulings to the contrary and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act passed by Congress in response to the many abuses of power committed by the Nixon administration.

But even Nixon didn't dream of employing interrogation tactics against America's enemies that constituted torture under international law -- tactics the Bush administration has employed with relish, even as it steadfastly denied that they constituted torture.

The Bush administration's embrace of torture is, as The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin wrote in his blog on Monday, "a national disgrace -- a radical departure from our core values."

Abu Ghraib was indeed a national disgrace -- made even more disgraceful by the failure to hold the U.S. commanders responsible for the torture that went on in what was previously Saddam Hussein's torture palace accountable.

Torture, wrote Froomkin, "is an effective tactic for authoritarian regimes that want to obtain false confessions; it is not the behavior of a country that sees itself as the champion of human dignity."

When Bush's claims that the torture techniques "were necessary and are necessary to be used on a rare occasion to get information necessary to protect the American people" are disputed even by the conservative-leaning Fox News, you KNOW you've got a credibility problem.

But the disgrace of America using torture on its enemies pales when compared to another national disgrace that proved far more embarrassing for this country in the eyes of the world, for it occurred on our own soil in full view of television cameras -- and it spoke volumes about Bush's rock-bottom standing among African-Americans.

Nixon wasn't confronted with having to deal with the worst natural disaster to strike U.S. soil in this country's history. On that note, "Tricky Dick" was lucky. The same cannot be said of Bush, who, confronted with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, turned America's worst-ever natural disaster into America's worst-ever man-made disaster -- That is, it WAS the nation's worst man-made disaster before the financial crisis hit last fall.

Yet even with Katrina, bush was unrepentant. "I've thought long and hard about Katrina; you know, could I have done something differently," he said. "Like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge."

But even if he had landed in New Orleans aboard the presidential jet (which he couldn't do anyway, since the airport was shut down), he still praised the incompetent Michael Brown for "doing a heckuva job" as director of Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to the disaster -- which turned out to be a disaster itself, resulting in Brown's dismissal.

Brown struck back in January 2007, when, speaking before a group of graduate students at the Metropolitan College of New York, he charged that partisan politics had played a role in the White House's decision to federalize emergency response to the disaster only in Louisiana, rather than along the entire Gulf Coast region, which Brown said he had advocated.

"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's [Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco] a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,'" Brown said. "'We can't do it to Haley [Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour] because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'"

The White House fervently denied Brown's charges through a spokeswoman and Brown's comments have never been substantiated. And personally, I think Brown said it only to absolve himself from blame for his dismal role in responding to the crisis.

But among many working-class New Orleans residents who lost their homes to Katrina -- the majority of them black -- that perception still persists.

Now we have the latest outrage; the Bush administration's handing of the financial crisis, which has seen the almost instant wipe-out of over $9 trillion worth of wealth -- resulting in the worst economic downturn in 30 years, possibly since the Great Depression, with no end in sight. I can't even begin to comment on that still-unfinished chapter.

The bottom line is that America's longest national nightmare is finally coming to an end with Bush's departure next week. As far as I'm concerned, it should have happened four years ago -- but better late than never.

Sincerely,
Skeeter Sanders
Editor & Publisher
The 'Skeeter Bites Report

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Volume IV, Number 4
Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

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