When, in 2003, retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni criticized the administration's Iraq policy and the neoconservatives' instrumental part played in its formulation, conservative media retaliated by labeling him "anti-Semitic." The former U.S. commander of Central Command and Bush's envoy to the Middle East, who had endorsed Bush in 2000, had told the Washington Post, "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground ... I don't know where the neocons came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on."
In July 2003, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times detailing that he had been sent on a mission by the CIA before the Iraq war to Niger, where he discovered that the administration claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase enriched yellowcake uranium there for building nuclear weapons was untrue. Despite his report and that of two others the president insisted in his 2003 State of the Union that Hussein was in fact seeking uranium for nuclear weaponry. The counterattack against Wilson was swift. A week after his piece appeared, the conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote that "two senior administration officials" had informed him that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative, had been responsible for sending him on his mission. The intent was somehow to cast aspersions on Wilson's credibility. (For his service as the acting U.S. ambassador in Iraq during the Gulf War, elder Bush had called him "a hero.") The disclosure of Plame's identity was an apparent felony against national security, a violation of the Intelligence Identity Protection Act, and soon a special prosecutor was appointed, and the president and the vice president were interviewed, along with much of the White House senior staff. Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice.
When, in March 2004, Richard Clarke, chief of counterterrorism on the National Security Council, testified before the 9/11 Commission and elaborated in a book, "Against All Enemies," that the Bush administration had ignored terrorism before September 11, his credibility was attacked by the administration and his motivations questioned. By then, the smearing of whistleblower career professionals had become a familiar pattern.
Traditional Republicans emerged among Bush's most penetrating critics, from O'Neill to Wilkerson, from Zinni to Clarke. They were not hostile to Bush when he entered office; on the contrary, they were willing and eager to serve under him. They observed first-hand, more than opponents on the outside, the radical changes Bush was making within the government. As Republicans, more than Democrats, they understood which traditions of their own were being traduced.
Bush's war on terror melded with his culture war at home. Never before had a president attempted so vigorously to batter down the wall of separation between church and state. In 2005, Bush proclaimed himself a votary of the "culture of life" as he signed unprecedented legislation seeking to reverse numerous state and federal court decisions that the husband of a woman named Terri Schiavo, in a persistent vegetative state for years, could end her life support. Political opportunism in the guise of theology trampled the Constitution.
Bush's appointments to the federal judiciary were an attempt to reverse the direction of the law for at least 70 years. Nearly all of his nominees were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative group of lawyers who seek to propagate certain doctrines and advance each other's careers. One of these doctrines is called "originalism," the belief that the intent of the framers can be applied to all modern problems and lead to conservative legal solution. Yet another is called the "Constitution in exile," a school of thought that argues that the true Constitution has been suppressed since President Franklin D. Roosevelt began naming justices to the Supreme Court and that its hidden law must be revived. One of Bush's judiciary appointments, Janice Rogers Brown, lecturing before a Federalist Society meeting, referred to the New Deal as "Revolution of 1937," and denounced it as "the triumph of our socialist revolution." It was hardly a surprise that Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court, federal appellate court judge Samuel Alito, was a proponent of the theory of the "unitary executive" and a wholehearted supporter of executive power.
No other president has ever been hostile to science. Russell Train, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator under presidents Nixon and Ford, observed, "How radically we have moved away from regulation based on independent findings and professional analysis of scientific, health and economic data by the responsible agency to regulation controlled by the White House and driven primarily by political considerations."
Bush's opposition to stem cell research was just the beginning of his enmity toward science. The words "reproductive health" and "condoms" were forbidden from appearing on websites of agencies or organizations that received federal funds. At the Food and Drug Administration, staff scientists and two independent advisory panels were overruled in order to deny the public access to emergency contraception. At the Centers for Disease Control, scientifically false information was posted on its website to foster doubt about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV/AIDS. At the President's Council on Bioethics, two scientists were fired for dissents based on scientific reasoning. At the National Cancer Institute, staff scientists were suppressed as the administration planted a story on its website falsely connecting breast cancer to abortion. The top climate scientist at NASA, James Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was ordered muzzled after he noted at a scientific conference the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The president also suggested that public schools should equally teach evolution, the basis of all biological science, and "Intelligent Design," a pseudo-scientific version of creationism. "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said.
Bush's antipathy to science had an overlapping political appeal to both the religious right and industrial special interests. Scientific research was distorted and suppressed at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The administration censored and misrepresented scientific reports on climate change, air pollution, endangered species, soil conservation, mercury emissions, and forests. Scientists were dismissed or rejected from numerous science advisory committees, from the Lead Poisoning Prevention Panel to the Army Science Board.
In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, university presidents, medical experts, and former federal agency directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement entitled "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking." It declared: "The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease if the public is to be properly informed about issues central to its well being, and the nation is to benefit fully from its heavy investment in scientific research and education."
When Hurricane Katrina landed in August 2005 scientific reality and dysfunctional government collided. Bush had systematically distorted, suppressed and ignored evidence of global warming, which scientists believed was responsible for intensifying hurricanes. The director of the National Hurricane Center had briefed Bush on the devastating impact on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Katrina before it hit, but the president disregarded the advance warning. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which under President Clinton had been one of the most efficient and effective, had become a morass of incompetence and political cronyism. Amid its abject failure, Bush praised its director Michael Brown, whose previous experience was as the head of the International Arabian Horse Association, as doing "a heck of a job." New Orleans, a major and unique American city, was destroyed. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Bush traveled six times to the city, promising to rebuild it to its former glory, but most of the city lay in ruins a year later. In January 2006, Bush declared that he had received no rebuilding plan, apparently unaware that he had already rejected it.
During the 2004 campaign, Bush's essential appeal was that he alone could keep the country safe from terrorists. Before and after the Iraq war, he implied that Saddam Hussein was in league with those responsible for September 11. On May 1, 2002, in his speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, behind a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," he declared, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on." This theme was at the core of his campaign message and stump speech. When under questioning late in the campaign he admitted Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September 11, he still insisted Saddam was involved with al Qaeda. Bush's closing television commercial in his 2004 campaign showed a pack of wolves symbolizing terrorists about to prey on the viewer. The voiceover intoned: "And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."
As his supporters saw him, his simplistic rhetoric was straight talk, his dogmatism fortitude, his swagger reassuring, his stubbornness made him seem like a rock against danger, and his rough edges were proof that he was a man of the people. His evangelical religion was central to his image as a man of conviction and his purity of heart. This persona helped insulate Bush from accusations that he got things wrong, misled and had ulterior motives.
Next page: Faith was as important in sustaining Bush's politics as fear