Bush-Cheney administration/corruption

Overview

This page is about corruption in the 2000-2007 US Presidential administration of George W. Bush.

Specifics

• Bush's elevation of presidential power: Bush seems to be trying to completely remove the restraints on presidential power.
• Bush's lies: the man has lied repeatedly, on record, with no apology or apparent remorse; he also makes promises and then quietly contradicts them with subsequent actions
• Bush's unapologetic use of torture
• Bush has "consistently advanced policies contradictory to his professed values" (Is George W. Bush a Conservative? by William Frey, M. D.)
• The Bush administration's consistent overlooking of facts which contradict the picture they want to paint:
  • It seems likely that people at the top level knew, or should have guessed from the evidence available, that the Yellowcake documents were inaccurate; see Yellowcake forgery
  • If Bush honestly believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, he was overlooking a lot of reports from his lower-level advisors
• Showed classified map of planned Iraq invasion, marked with a classification meaning that it wasn't to be shown to non-US officials, to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia on 2003-01-11 – two days before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was informed of the plans.[1]
• "As the ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee, Waxman has earned a reputation as the chief Democratic muckraker, obsessively cranking out reports on official misconduct and incompetence. Among them is a lengthy document detailing all of the wrongdoing by the Bush administration that should have been investigated – and would have been, in any other era. The litany of fishy behavior left uninvestigated in the Bush years includes the manipulation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA status, the award of Halliburton contracts, the White House response to Katrina, secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney's energy task force, the withholding of Medicare cost estimates, the administration's politicization of science, contract abuses at Homeland Security and lobbyist influence at the EPA." [2]
• The 2007 US attorney firings were largely unexplained, and would seem to be part of a larger strategy to undermine the legal/judicial process as it affects the power of the presidency

Possible Goals

Bush's goals seem consistent with the idea of converting the United States into a religious (Christian fundamentalist-evangelical) kleptocracy, with the president as a religious leader ("God is in the White House") with absolute power much as in the Nehemiah Scudder scenario (written in 1940 and set in 2016). It is not clear whether he is aware that his actions fit into this pattern or if he is largely being manipulated by others, but it seems quite unlikely that the pattern could have emerged by sheer chance. If it is not deliberate, then his actions at least imply a significant level of incompetence and disregard for the democratic process.

News

• 2007-03-20 Report Faults Interior Appointee "A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions, the department's inspector general concluded."
• 2007-03-19 Blind loyalty led Bush's team into big sinkhole by Leonard Pitts Jr.
• 2007-01-31 Cheney's Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in Plame Affair by Jason Leopold and Marc Ash
• 2007-01-16
  • White House Purging Ranks of US Attorneys; Replacements to Skip Confirmation (with discussion)
  • White House Moved Swiftly to Replace US Attorneys (with discussion)
• 2007-01-15 Congressional Quarterly: Officials Covered Up Oil Lease Problems, Interior Department inspector general Says (with discussion)
• 2007-01-14 Shock and oil: Iraq's billions & the White House connection: "[BearingPoint,] The American company appointed to advise the US government on the economic reconstruction of Iraq has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican Party coffers and has admitted that its own finances are in chaos because of accounting errors and bad management." ... "Its contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan coincide with a big increase in its lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. In 2005, the latest year for which figures have been collated, BearingPoint paid $1m to lobbyists, equaling the record total it paid in 2003. That is five times its average annual bill for lobbyists prior to the war in Iraq."
• 2006-11-03 Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office: Stuart Bowen may have done his job too well
• 2006-09-17 Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post Staff Writer
• 2006-09-15 Rumsfeld's Fake News Flop in Iraq: the US government has recently spent upwards of $50 million on pro-US/military propaganda in Iraq, violating a basic democratic principle while supposedly in the process of trying to build a democratic society. Rumsfeld's response, when asked about this, indicated that he was far more bothered by the program having been discovered than by its existence; he also lied that it had been shut down when it had not, and did not apologize for the error when it was discovered.
  • 2005-12-02 Planting News in the Iraq Media
• 2005-12-05 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy by Jeff Ruch: "Special Counsel Scott Bloch, appointed by President Bush in 2004, is overseeing the virtual elimination of federal whistleblower rights in the U.S. government."
• 2005-08-18 Bush promotes corrupt military leadership: Bush did, in fact, appoint Michael Wynne to be Secretary of the Air Force three months later
• 2005-05-06 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act (item #8) by Michelle Chen
• 2005-03-13 Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged Television News by David Barstow and Robin Stein, The New York Times