By James Moore
We were somewhere over America at 35,000 feet and moving along at well over 500 nautical miles per hour. I do not remember the location but I do recall the conversation. The flight was out of a western U.S. city and was eastbound with the Republican candidate for president and a fuselage full of reporters and campaign staffers. The dull thrum of the jet engines at altitude and the long day of tramping around chasing after interviews and video and still photos had left most of the passengers tired and dozing.
George W. Bush, though, had not been too stressed. Hands were shaken, a few comments were tossed off to placate the media, and he walked around trying his best to look natural and enthused. The rest of us had to create a journalistic product and meet deadlines, and we were expended. The future president, however, came sauntering down the aisle of the plane with a non-alcoholic beer in his hand, looking for someone still awake. I must have been the only one conscious because he took the aisle seat in the empty row where I was sitting, and began to make small talk.
“What’d you think of today?” he asked. “Pretty good crowd, no?”
“Good turnout wherever we’ve been, Governor.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m trying to get a sense of how this thing is going.”
“Those fund raising numbers you announced in L.A. the other day ought to tell you.”
“True. True. Those are a positive indication.”
I was unaccustomed to small talk with Bush as governor or presidential candidate. He often came back in the plane at the end of the day when reporters were working on deadline and distracted us when he had no further responsibilities. We were hardly strangers since I had reported on his time as governor of Texas and his career in the oil patch and with the Texas Rangers baseball team. I had also been filing Freedom of Information requests regarding his time in the Texas National Guard and had set off alarms in his campaign during a gubernatorial debate with Ann Richards when I asked him about his service. I thought our relationship was always going to be arm’s length but he seemed open to a conversation on this night and I did not hesitate.
“I gotta tell ya, Governor,” I said. “You sometimes don’t look too enthused about winning this election.”
“Oh come on. What do you mean?” He was genuinely surprised by my assessment.
“I know you aren’t just going through the motions but I honestly think there’s something missing from your pitch. I’m not qualified to say these things, I know, but I often find myself wondering why you are running. Being governor of Texas is a pretty great political job, no?”
“Oh, yeah. I love it. I do. More than most folks realize. But I had to do this.”
“What do you mean, ‘You had to?’”
“It was expected, that’s all.”
“By whom? I don’t follow.”
“It’s just my time. My family, the business community, the party, everybody expects me to run for president, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“And you don’t want to?”
He did not answer and looked away from me. I let the question sit for a moment and then asked what he would do if he lost.
“Oh, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Laura and I would go back to Dallas. I’d sit on some boards. Might make a run at baseball commissioner. Laura and the girls and I would have a nice life.”
The man who was about to win one of the most important jobs on the planet was apparently ambivalent about his role and significance to the free world. I was unsurprised. Hard work was not part of what had formed his character. Privilege had handed him a set of tools to work with and he had let most of them lay on the floor. His oil company in West Texas had managed to drill most of the dry holes in the Permian Basin when other production companies were finding crude almost as easily as hammering pipes into the ground and waiting for gushers. His performance in the energy industry did not promise a great future in the White House.
I thought about our airplane conversation again because of the recent speculation that Bush might endorse Kamala Harris. Sure, there is a non-zero chance of that happening, but I suggest you place your bets elsewhere. Bush does not, and has not, stuck his neck out when there is a chance he will regret the risk. He likes the victory dance, not the battle. His grandest performances have always been acting the tough guy as he sends others into distant fields of fire. When he stood on the rubble of the Twin Towers after 9/11 and talked about finding the people who committed the attack, he was a little man acting big, and making poor choices.
In about 18 months, the president who had used family connections to avoid combat in Vietnam, had gotten congress to approve $63 billion dollars to invade Iraq regardless of the fact that Saddam Hussein’s government was not involved in the terrorist acts in New York City. Only a small portion of the allocation was meant for the war in Afghanistan even though the attacks of 9/11 were led by Osama bin Laden, who was hiding out in the mountainous country, and our intelligence agencies had advised the White House of his whereabouts. Instead, Bush was compelled to revenge his father’s failures in Iraq and to take down Hussein, which was really just a bonus since the primary goal of the U.S. invasion was to secure the oil supplies.
“Iraq,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had said, “Simply floats on a sea of oil.”
While he was busy spending tax dollars to build up his profile as a “war president,” Bush was also cutting taxes with his Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, (JGTRRA) which reduced the dividend tax rate from 38.6 percent to 15 and cut the capital gains tax to the same level. Harvard Business School must have taught him a new nonsense that increasing spending while reducing taxes was smart economics, or maybe that was one of the classes he had skipped. The JGTRRA act also dramatically increased the amount of money that could be written off as expenses for investing in businesses.
As the cost for invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan increased exponentially to almost $2 trillion dollars, deficits soared to heights known only by the war president’s ego. The groundwork had been laid for the Great Recession and war spending meant the federal government had little flexibility to respond when the financial crisis arrived. By 2008, when Bush was leaving office, the U.S. national debt had increased from about $5.8 trillion in 2001 to nearly $10 trillion, but, hey, W. looked good in his “Mission Accomplished” flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier. The mission was not, as history records, accomplished, and the Mideast remains restive. The main achievement was waste of resources.
Bush has been without character and principle his entire adulthood. When he finished business school at Harvard and became eligible for the draft in the Vietnam War, he turned to his father’s friend, Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, to get him a cushy pilot’s commission in the Texas National Guard. Barnes placed Bush on what was known as the “political list,” which was sons of well-connected and wealthy Texans determined to keep their progeny out of the meaningless war. The documents I, and a few other reporters received, from military records showed that he had skipped out on a physical exam to keep flying and that he had been grounded for reasons unknown. Any pilot grounding required a Board of Inquiry hearing and report, but Bush’s was missing from his file.
Bush left Ellington Airfield outside Houston for Montgomery, Alabama, to work on a U.S. Senate campaign for a friend of his father’s. Although there were dozens of pilots home from Southeast Asia wanting to keep their certificates up to date with “stick time,” Bush was still given a commission that cost taxpayers a million dollars in a failed attempt to make him competent in fighter jets. The only result was to keep him out of the jungles of Vietnam. As president, however, he got to play brave fighter pilot when he donned a flight suit and joined an actual pilot who landed a jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier. More vacuous performative crap to make him feel the courage he does not possess.
There has been too much historic revisionism around the Bush presidency. Trump’s incompetence and lack of intellect have shifted the paradigm a bit for presidential performance. Bush, his apologists argue, would be great to have around in Trump’s stead; not much of a recommendation since even the waste control manager of Rio Grande City offers more accomplishment than Trump. Bush, unnecessarily set the Mideast to flame, and it is still burning. The Lancet Report estimates that 650,000 Iraqis, soldiers and civilians, died during the U.S. invasion and occupation while around 4500 American soldiers and 3500 civilian contractors all lost their lives. Meanwhile, in the Basra region of Southern Iraq, dust from depleted uranium used in weapons by the U.S., has caused a dramatic increase in congenital birth defects and various forms of cancer among Iraqis. The war president will keep counting casualties for generations.
Bush is a man without conscience, though, who sleeps well at night thinking about the facile paintings he has left on canvas. No thought for Iraqi dead or American soldiers lost in a conflict that only led to continued destabilization of the Mideast. The blood and treasure he wasted on Iraq was not his. The Bush’s were safe, protected from loss of life or capital. No risk existed for him to authorize weapons and facilitate lies about WMD in Iraq when intelligence said there were none and everyone in his administration was involved in cooking the data to make the case for war. I am not sure why a person like Kamala Harris would want, or even accept, an endorsement from a war criminal like George W. Bush. Nothing she should worry about, though.
Cowards do not endorse.
This article was originally published on Texas to the world.
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James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).
His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.
Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”
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Interesting insight into the privileged classes on career autopilot?
Further, that Iraq escpade damaged US and Bush Jnrs credibility (his own father warned him to avoid the neocons) based on imagined WMDs, but it hurt UK Labour much more thanks to Blair et al….no credibility…..
While our own Murdoch chipped in to claim those days, that Iraq War may bring cheaper oil prices…..
That putrid little plop of shrubbery, G W Bush, a coddled clappy, clumsy, cretinous cowardly clot. What dogshittery and dodginess can USA money obtain? Power, pronation, persuasion, prey, pussy even, all can be had, with Dad’s money and the insider’s grin. From Bush the inferior to Trump is a short stumble in time, and it has been worse, poorer, more putridly pungent. We must be OUT.
Bush’s war in Iraq was originally named OIL – Operation Iraqi Liberation, until the PR team prevailed… er, bad look chief, and the idea was dropped.
And here we are, 23 years after 9/11, with a discredited commission of enquiry that conveniently (for the Americans) fingered bin Laden as the architect of that attack, when the real protagonists got away with the heist – an inside job to be sure, authored by a group of people in a tiny piece of contested territory in the eastern Mediterranean, along with sympathetic players stateside.
Shanksville, Pennsylvania plane crash? There was no wreckage. Commercial jetliner into the Pentagon… no wreckage. The hypnotic power of suggestion is truly awesome, as is the fear of speaking the truth.
It’s perplexing to consider the hold that Israel has over the USA… exactly what is the hook that they continually use to their very considerable advantage? There’d be people in high places in the States that know that Mossad operatives were behind the 9/11 attack… why was Israel never brought to account?
An analyst might suggest that the trauma of the Holocaust has in turn birthed a nation that is in the grip of a Death Cult, that murdering ~3,000 people in New York is nothing compared to what happened in Europe nearly 80 years ago.
It beggars the imagination when one reflects on the degrees of evil that the USA exhibits and what it endorses. The most disappointing aspect is that successive Australian governments continue to turn a blind eye to the evil and pretend that all’s well.
Remember when Shrub was president…. he confused Australia with Austria? That’s how much this country means to the Yanks… not a lot… just a place to sell expensive weapons to and use as a forward base to attack Asian countries. Whose the dumb bunnies then?
Canguro:
How do you know there was no wreckage at either the Shanksville site or the Pentagon? Did you actually personally inspect both sites immediately afterwards?
How do you know Mossad was behind 9/11? Again, are you relying on physical evidence you, personally, have unearthed?
leefe, kudos for asking ridiculous questions. Twenty-three years since this crime with thousands of critical reports and a plethora of information put into the public arena by those who know the government lied about 9/11.
Lazy brains accept the de facto so-called ‘official position’ of the government. Critical and sceptical brains take the time to sift through the evidence and evaluate. Join the dots. It’s called forensic investigation. Even the first responders at the Pentagon and Shanksville said ‘jeez, where’s the wreckage?’
Come back and discuss when you’ve had a close look at what those who know the government lied have said. Here’s a tip… start with Larry Silverstein and the companies he employed to do the renovations within the Twin Towers and WTC7.
Here’s a coupla starting points for you, assuming you’re beginning from the cold…
The World Trade Center Demolition
“9-11/Israel did it”
Enjoy your rabbit hole.
None so blind as those who refuse to see…
Just suppose,
Osama fell out with his family, who owned and operated the multi-national construction giant ‘Saudi Binladen Group’, started and headed up by Osama’s father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. It is highly likely that Osama fell out because of the massive hypocrisy of the Binladen Group’s association with the Bush family, whose principal business interests were espoused to be in banking and oil in a convenient conjunction with Saudi-Arabia’s moguls – a situation which persists in the US today, regardless of what transpires.
“Regardless of what transpires” seems to be the m.o. and ethos of the Bush family, as their principal progenitor, Prescott, in 1941 and 1942 had assets frozen and several companies shut down under the Trading with the Enemy Act for involvement with selling oil to the Germans. And so the m.o. and ethos continues ….
Then, unsurprisingly, there’s the pre-9/11 association between the Bush family and the Bin Ladens, the House of Bush and the House of Saud from the 1980s through to at least the mid 90s. It manifested in the Carlyle corporation. Originally established as a private equity fund manager, notoriously difficult to trace and understand its investors, albeit it is understood that the Bin Ladens liquidated their holdings in Carlyle in October 2001, immediately after 9/11 … but did they remain otherwise connected?
Of course Carlyle remained significantly connected to both politics and oil (amongst other critical strategic industries) and the Pentagon, via the ‘revolving door’ of political appointees to its group, and those associated with its group. Since 9/11, and from the time of Uncle Sam’s George dubblya, “You’re either with us or agin us” incursion into Iraq (Gulf War II), much attention has been given to what might be called the death cult and dominion of greed investing in war. And whilst many of the notables involved have pulled their heads in, to suggest they and their power and influence have evaporated would appear to be somewhat naive.
As for Uncle Sam’s neoliberal rhetoric of the political ‘left’ or the political ‘right’, it may have changed its complexion, but its (and other countries’) modern foundations seem to be inextricably tied to the lead up, throughout and subsequent to these circumstances described. Perhaps George W. Bush’s weirdness and apparently bungling fluidity was more of a message of deliberate convenience to his compatriot profiteers and those that needed to know. Perhaps his stories of the Middle East, particularly his positions on the Jews.
Despite the ordinary Jews, and their propensity for brilliance in many fields, could these circumstances go some way to explaining the tentacles and hooks that seem to emanate from the controlling denizens of Israel into the designer paradise fashioned by Uncle Sam for all the ‘West’, and the boldness and hush that go with them?
Who could possible know? It may just all be the result of persistent headaches.
With all of the total incompetence shown by the latest GOP joke, the tangerine traitor/criminal, we tend to forget about the utter failures and embarrassments of their past. Thank you James for reminding me how much of a joke I thought this man was at that time and giving me details I never was aware of.
And Rumsfeld. And Cheney… and the whole malignant Bush administration… https://pazzoredento.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/aznar-gets-the-arse-blair-bush-will-get-the-boot-will-johnny-jump/