Big Lies

Excerpts from Joe Conason's new book...
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Big lies

In the introduction to his new book, Joe Conason explains how the right-wing propaganda machine demonizes liberals and distorts the common-sense politics of America.

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By Joe Conason

Aug. 18, 2003 | Is the United States of America liberal or conservative? So effectively has right-wing propaganda dominated political debate in this country for the past two decades that the question hardly seems worth discussing. Almost without thinking, the majority of Americans -- including many who describe themselves as liberal or progressive or left of center -- would probably answer "conservative."

In my opinion, they would be wrong. But right or wrong, such dull conformity is a warning sign for the world's most enduring democracy. If only one political perspective is heard clearly, there can be no robust debate and no meaningful democratic choice. At a time when highly partisan and extremely reactionary Republicans control every branch of government, our country needs full, fair, and uninhibited debate that encourages participation -- not a loud, monotonous drone that breeds apathetic surrender.

Conservatives enjoy their virtual monopoly over the nation's political conversation, of course. They paid a lot of money for it and they intend to keep it. They dominate the national debate not because their ideas are better (or more popular), but because they have more resources and a vast, coordinated infrastructure that has been built up during three decades. They also tend to dominate because -- unlike the supposedly liberal mainstream media -- conservatives are perfectly willing to stifle opposition. Liberal opinion is hard to find in conservative newspapers and liberal voices are rarely heard on conservative talk radio.

This kind of political imbalance also pervades the "objective" and comparatively nonpartisan media, which too often fall into line under the intense, unrelenting pressures from the right. Conservatives are quite proud of their ability to intimidate mainstream media executives, so cowed by the fear of being labeled liberal that they bend over backward to placate conservatives. The result is that the most familiar political voices are on the right, and they make so much noise that it sounds as if practically everyone agrees with them. The buzz of conservative cant creates an illusion of consensus.

In a book devoted to debunking myths about liberalism (and conservatism), it seems appropriate to begin with the notion that America, and Americans, are fundamentally conservative.

To stake their claim, conservatives can roll out their favorite colored map, with its vast acreage of "red states." They can turn up the volume on talk radio and cable television, where reactionary opinion consumes almost all the airtime. They can boast about the Republican Party's domination of government. They can even point to all the Democratic politicians, from Mario Cuomo to Bill Clinton to the 2004 presidential aspirants, who avoid the liberal label, and snicker at the little band of elected officials who wear it proudly. Finally, and most convincingly, they can cite survey data gathered over the past quarter-century that shows, with great consistency, about 18 percent of Americans identifying themselves as "liberal."

Yet the propagandists of the right are still too quick to brand America "conservative." Despite decades of angry denigration of liberalism, the American people continue to uphold the same ideals that have always been identified with the progressive tradition, from Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Americans believe in fairness, equality, opportunity, and compassion; they reject social Darwinism and excessive privilege.

What do liberals stand for? Their adversaries constantly accuse them of elitism, political correctness, immorality, socialism, communism, even treason. These are standard-issue lies from the right-wing propaganda arsenal. Liberalism is an American philosophy that encompasses a broad variety of ideas -- yet is probably more coherent than the current brand of conservatism, which ranges from atheist libertarianism to theocratic fundamentalism.

The most basic liberal values are political equality and economic opportunity. Liberals uphold democracy as the only form of government that derives legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and they regard the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights as essential to the expression of popular consent. Their commitment to an expanding democracy is what drives liberal advocacy on behalf of women, minorities, gays, immigrants, and other traditionally disenfranchised groups.

Liberals value the dynamism and creativity of democratic capitalism, but they also believe in strong, active government to protect the interests of society. They understand that markets function best when properly regulated, and they also know that unchecked concentrations of private power encourage environmental pollution, financial fraud, and labor exploitation. Liberals see a broad social interest in ensuring real opportunities and decent standards of living for everyone, while requiring basic responsibility from everyone.

Those who regard such ideals as naive today should remember that America in the 20th century was built on liberal policy, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the GI Bill, and the Great Society. The modern economy -- a private enterprise system that relies on government safeguards against depression and extreme poverty -- is the legacy of liberal leadership, from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. (And more recently Bill Clinton, who erased Republican deficits that were sending the economy into a spiral of recession and began to pay down the national debt.) Liberal policies made America the freest, wealthiest, most successful and most powerful nation in human history. Conservatism in power always threatens to undo that national progress, and is almost always frustrated by the innate decency and democratic instincts of the American people.

If Americans have a common fault, however, it's our tendency to suffer from historical amnesia. Too many of us have forgotten, or never learned, what kind of country America was under the conservative rule that preceded the century of liberal reform. And too many of us have no idea whose ideas and energy brought about the reforms we now take for granted.

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism -- with the support of the American people.

Whether they now describe themselves as liberal or not, most Americans remain strongly progressive in their views about taxation, healthcare, education spending, Social Security, environmental protection, and corporate regulation. In fact, despite conservative political advances in recent decades, survey evidence gathered by pollsters of all persuasions suggests that Americans are still more liberal than conservative.

The best way to test that assertion is to shear away the current stigma attached to the L-word itself, and examine popular attitudes about specific issues. For more than 50 years, from Harry Truman's surprise presidential victory in 1948 to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed reform effort in 1994, a signature liberal cause has been to provide every American, regardless of income or social status, with affordable healthcare. Many liberals support universal coverage funded by the national government, like the systems that protect all citizens in Europe and Canada.

The conservative position is equally clear, if not from their rhetoric then from their actions. They and their corporate allies abhor national health insurance. They spent millions to thwart the ambitious Clinton plan of 1994 -- and have fought every incremental step toward universal healthcare, including Medicare and Medicaid. (Those same conservatives now claim to be the protectors of the popular Medicare program while scheming to dismantle it.)

According to nearly every survey taken during the past decade, Americans favor the liberal side of this debate, supporting universal health coverage by very wide margins. The level of support for national health insurance ranges between 60 percent and 85 percent in various major polls. In October 1999, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 67 percent supported a federal guarantee of health insurance coverage for every American. Between 59 percent and 72 percent backed universal, guaranteed coverage in CNN/Time surveys from 1993 to 1995. And a Louis Harris poll in 1994 showed that 86 percent of respondents believed the federal government should provide universal health insurance for all Americans. Smaller but still respectable majorities -- from 60 percent in a 1990 Los Angeles Times poll to 51 percent in a 1998 Zogby poll -- backed a Canadian-style single-payer system when that question was asked.

Liberalism's most enduring domestic achievement is the Social Security system, another popular program that conservatives have always opposed and undermined. Created by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patron saint of liberalism, Social Security embodies American values of community and fairness. Despite enormous publicity campaigns in recent years by right-wing organizations questioning its solvency and urging its privatization, public support for Social Security as a mandatory system of public pensions remains adamant. Asked whether people should or should not be required to pay into the Social Security system in a March 1999 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 70 percent answered "should be required." And in a March 2000 ABC News/ Washington Post poll, 67 percent responded that financing of Social Security should take priority over cutting taxes.

During the midterm elections in 2002, several Republican congressional candidates were forced to abandon the Bush privatization proposal. In fact, the same politicians suddenly pretended that they had never heard of privatization. Asked how they prefer to save the system, a substantial majority of American voters favors raising payroll taxes on the most affluent.

Most Americans echo the liberal concern that the tax system favors the wealthiest few. Responding to a March 1999 Fox News poll that asked registered voters what bothered them the most about the tax system, 21 percent said the large amount they pay, 26 percent said the complexity of the tax system -- and 46 percent said they were most troubled by the suspicion that some rich people get away without paying their fair share. People are especially wary of the Bush administration's overwhelming desire to cut taxes for the richest, tiniest minority of its supporters. A Gallup poll in January 2003 found widespread suspicion about the latest Bush scheme to remove all taxation on stock dividends as yet another sop to the rich.

Despite their professed suspicions about overweening government, Americans have consistently told pollsters by margins of 2 to 1 that they prefer public spending to tax cuts. That view hadn't changed as of late November 2002, when 69 percent of respondents in a CBS/ New York Times survey said they would have preferred devoting the federal budget surplus to Social Security and Medicare. Only 23 percent were happy that the surplus had been squandered on the 2001 Bush tax cut.

Similar figures gathered by every reputable polling organization reiterate the same themes. Americans consistently and indeed overwhelmingly support environmental regulation, consumer protection, spending on infrastructure and education, increasing the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, providing food stamps, and nearly every other liberal priority and program. (The sole important exception to this rule has been welfare, but most Americans also believe that generous childcare and health benefits should be provided to help welfare recipients enter the workforce.) Substantial majorities support stricter environmental regulation -- precisely the opposite of the anti-Green, conservative minority.

The results of recent elections likewise subvert the idea of a conservative majority. No conservative presidential candidate has won a majority of the popular vote since 1988. The most recent presidential election showed a clear popular majority for the center-left and left-of-center candidates: Al Gore and Ralph Nader. The Green Party candidate devoted much of his campaign to attacking Gore and the Democrats -- but their views on national issues were much closer than either of them was to George W. Bush, the Republican corporate conservative who was ultimately awarded the presidency by partisan Florida bureaucrats and the Supreme Court.

The combined Democratic and Green vote in November 2000 exceeded 51 percent, a numerical victory made even more impressive by the mammoth financial advantage of the Republicans. The Bush campaign outspent Gore and Nader combined by nearly $60 million. (The other conservative in the race, rightist commentator and former Reagan aide Patrick J. Buchanan, squandered almost $40 million to garner less than 0.5 percent of the vote.)

Rush Limbaugh indirectly acknowledged the significance of the Gore plurality by trying to erase it. Having declared that America "is not a liberal country, is nowhere near a liberal country," the talk jock was asked by a rare dissenting caller why more Americans voted for Gore than for Bush. "You know," Rush replied, "I would bet you that if we counted all the absentee ballots in California, I will bet you that George W. Bush won the popular vote." That was only true in the alternate reality of right-wing talk radio.

Now conservatives prefer to forget or dismiss the disputes of 2000; they have declared that the midterm election two years later proved their ideological majority. But when all the votes were counted, the national stalemate in Congress remained nearly the same in 2002 as before -- again, despite enormous spending advantages enjoyed by the GOP, a docile press that has promoted Bush's favorable ratings every day since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and a political strategy that succeeded in associating the president and his party with the national struggle against foreign enemies. Even so, only the terrible loss of Paul Wellstone -- who was 8 points ahead of his Republican opponent when his plane crashed in northern Minnesota -- allowed the Republicans to win a single-vote majority in the Senate.

The continuing schism between progressive public opinion and conservative political domination is an indictment of the way we conduct and finance our elections. Yet liberals still face a vexing question: If so many Americans endorse progressive ideas, why are so few willing to call themselves liberal? Why is the L-word anathema to politicians, including undeniably liberal Democrats? Why are liberals constantly on the defensive? Why do self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals by 10 or 20 percentage points in national surveys?

Here is one answer. After decades of relentless disinformation from the right, Americans associate the word "liberal" with a series of negative stereotypes: spendthrift, immoral, unpatriotic, "politically correct" and elitist, among others. Right-wing demagoguery has convinced more than a few people that liberals are essentially no different from Communists or terrorists. Without real Communists around in sufficient number to frighten anyone, the right focused and intensified its attack on liberalism in recent years. The effect of this campaign, bolstered by hundreds of millions of dollars from tax-exempt conservative foundations, has been devastating.

Demonizing liberals is a conscious strategy of the Republican right, where such demagoguery is not only a political style but a career path. It's a vicious technique that dates back to Joe McCarthy and the early Nixon, and it hasn't changed much since then. As a conservative media analyst boasted on Fox TV not long ago, their aim is to make Democrat and liberal synonymous with socialist, Communist and Marxist. Republican strategist David Horowitz urges a form of conservative political warfare based on identifying liberal Democrats with left-wing terrorist sympathizers and totalitarians. Ann Coulter is even more simple-minded: "I think it's time to drop the infernal nonsense about liberals being well-intentioned but misguided," she wrote in a 2002 column. "I will say that there is only one thing wrong with liberals: They're no good."

She's entitled to her banal sputtering, of course. She's even entitled to make millions of dollars by polluting the airwaves and bookshelves with mindless diatribes. What is long overdue, however, is a response commensurate with these right-wing attacks. What is needed, more than ever, is an answer to conservative propaganda that holds the right accountable for its lies and hypocrisy.

The right prefers to demonize liberals and set up fights with "politically correct" straw men rather than debate with real progressives. (That is why, for example, the bully boys and girls of the right-wing media almost never confront a labor leader on television; such a debate would instantly destroy the stereotype of the liberal "elitist.") Stereotypes and caricatures are the most important kind of message delivered by the conservative media. By "defining" and discrediting their opponents, they can substitute invective for argument and images for facts. The technique is unscrupulous and almost foolproof. It's the big lie, repeated and repeated until the truth is obliterated and the lie is legitimated.

Whether the right-wingers who create and disseminate this vicious propaganda actually believe it is unimportant, although I suspect that the smarter conservatives know very well when they are lying. What matters is that their lies have spread unchallenged by facts for so many years.

Are liberals unpatriotic, a favorite conservative canard? No. The record of loyalty (and military service) among liberals equals that of conservatives. Do liberals despise the work ethic? No. Liberals defend the interests of working Americans against the fake populism of corporate conservatism. Don't liberals always tax and spend the economy into ruin? No. The numbers prove that liberal Democrats have been the most competent, fiscally trustworthy stewards of the economy for the past seven decades. Aren't liberals determined to restrict freedom in the name of political correctness? No. In fact, liberals have been the most consistent defenders of the Bill of Rights for the past century. Is "liberal" a synonym for "immoral"? No. Liberals do preach less about "family values," but they're just as likely as conservatives to honor those values.

To debunk conservative mythology about liberals is inevitably unflattering to the right. As might be expected, the most vocal liars often turn out to be hypocrites as well. Comparisons that involve patriotism and morality, for example, are incomplete without examining some unpleasant facts about certain prominent individuals. But conservatives have been making ugly accusations about their adversaries for a long time, without hesitation or regret. If they don't enjoy hearing the truth about themselves for a change, I offer no apologies. They've asked for it many times over.

This book confronts the biggest lies deployed by conservatives against liberals, progressives, and Democrats. Its purpose is not to defend every liberal position or politician. (It also isn't intended to disprove every right-wing myth, some of which are so widely disbelieved as to be irrelevant -- such as the Bush administration's insistence that its goals include cleaner air and water.) It doesn't suggest a conspiracy against liberals, or argue that Democrats haven't brought any of their problems on themselves. And it shouldn't be taken as a blanket indictment of Republicans or conservatives.

That last point is of special importance to me. The spiteful, malignant discourse that became so common during the Clinton era has done lasting damage to democratic participation and civility in our political system. Although as a matter of literary convenience I frequently refer to conservatives and Republicans, I certainly don't believe that every conservative or every Republican is responsible for the offenses discussed in these pages.

Unlike Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, I also don't believe that my political adversaries are uniformly "no good," or un-American, or greedy, or bigoted, or stupid. I shouldn't have to say this, but I know from personal experience that generosity, compassion, and wisdom cross all partisan and ideological boundaries. I married into a family that includes Republican conservatives who happen to be among the finest people I have ever known. My wife's grandfather is an unrepentant right-winger who likes to tweak me with editorials from the New York Post and Internet jokes about dumb Democrats. He is also a true patriot and a gentleman who has treated me with kindness from the first day we met, despite my obnoxious opinions. I would much prefer an atmosphere that encourages friendship rather than hatred among Americans, regardless of ideology and party.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's much chance of that happy outcome until liberals learn to hit back hard. The classic American hero is the underdog who wins respect by fighting back against a bully. Sometimes the bully just limps away to nurse his wounds. Sometimes the bully wises up and mends his ways. Occasionally, the underdog and the bully become best friends.

But the underdog who dares to fight back is always better off.

 

Part II.
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Limousine liberals and corporate-jet conservatives
George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter bash elitist lefties, but their faux populism masks a slavish devotion to the interests and indulgences of the wealthy. Part 2 of "Big Lies."

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By Joe Conason

Aug. 19, 2003 | "Tax-cutting Republicans are friends of the common man, while liberals are snobbish elitists who despise the work ethic." One of the most successful themes of conservative propaganda is the notion that the right, not the left, represents everyday working Americans. Conservatives claim to speak for the silent majority and depict liberals as silly, affluent elitists who despise the work ethic. Promoting envy and resentment of "limousine liberals" is the right-wing version of class warfare. It's an updated, socially acceptable substitute for the traditional prejudices used by the most unsavory right-wingers to distract people from voting in their own interest.

There is no point in denying that limousine liberals exist or that they can be obnoxious -- but any trouble they cause is far outweighed by the depredations of another remote and arrogant elite: corporate-jet conservatives. Recent revelations of that set's incomprehensible greed and callousness make the limo liberals seem like saints. And unlike any clique of left-wing movie stars, they're a real problem.

At the turn of the last century, Theodore Roosevelt denounced such people as "malefactors of great wealth." A hundred years later, there are two very important differences: The rich have indeed gotten far richer -- and the president of the United States is not their foe but their frontman.

For that job, George W. Bush possesses excellent qualifications of personality and temperament. He's a rich guy who enjoys masquerading as a regular guy, and he honestly hates the clever types from New York, Washington and Los Angeles who consider him dumb and vulgar. Ignorant but certainly not stupid, he's an unusually talented politician. He schmoozes and chats at county fairs and fat-cat feasts with an ease that always eluded his father. Moreover, although most voters realize that he will first take care of the wealthy -- the oilmen and the corporate lobbyists -- they like him anyway. He seems charming, approachable, caring and playful. His drawling gaffes sound unpretentious and real. And he can perform for hours at a time, in front of perfect strangers whose background is entirely different from his own.

Bush is a modern master of pseudopopulist style. What that style blurs is the profound Republican cynicism toward the same people he embraces and cajoles.

Bush belongs to the real elite. Yet he appears far more comfortable playing the role of commoner than his father, whose taste for pork rinds always seemed out of character. George W. used to say that the big difference between them is that his father went to Greenwich Day School in that tony Connecticut suburb, while he attended San Jacinto High School in dusty Midland, Texas. He didn't mention that after one year, he left public education behind to attend exclusive prep schools in Houston and Massachusetts, leading inexorably to his Yale matriculation as an underachieving "legacy" admission.

George W. is the kind of "regular guy" who burns through millions of other people's dollars in failed businesses, drinks too much until early middle age, dodges an insider-trading scandal, picks up a major league baseball franchise, and eventually finds himself in the Oval Office as commander in chief of the world's only superpower, thanks to a justice appointed to the Supreme Court by his father.

He likes to talk about helping the average taxpayer. "Average" is the word he used in his 2003 State of the Union message to mislead the public about the effects of his tax cut, saying that "92 million Americans will keep, this year, an average of almost a thousand dollars more of their own money." Doesn't that sound as if Bush is saying each of those 92 million citizens will find a $1,000 check from the Treasury in the mailbox? It does, but the truth is that wealthy taxpayers like Bush himself will get many thousands of dollars, while everyone else will get a few hundred dollars (except for those at the bottom, who will get no tax break at all).

There is a meaningful way to calculate the average effects of the Bush plan: The fortunate 1 percent at the top will receive an average annual tax cut of about $45,000. The less fortunate 20 percent in the middle of the income distribution will have their taxes cut by an average of $265. The least fortunate 60 percent at the bottom will get an average annual tax cut of $95.

It all depends on what the meaning of "average" is.

Voters who regard George W. Bush as a regular guy may also be deluded enough to accept his transparent arithmetical deceptions about the "average" taxpayer. Most of them live in the reddest of Republican states, whose taxpayers are least likely to benefit from Bush's 2003 tax proposals: states like Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Montana, Idaho, and Tennessee, where more than a third of the taxpaying families will get nothing at all.

Right-wing populism is an illusion that hides a fundamental fact of American politics: With very few exceptions, conservative Republicans promote the narrow interests of a tiny minority of our wealthiest citizens. Liberal Democrats, again with certain exceptions, defend the broad interests of working and middle-class Americans. Over the past three decades, as economic inequality has intensified, that partisan and ideological divide has become ever more polarized.

While conservatives may demur, the empirical evidence is beyond serious dispute. The stratification of America's political economy in recent decades has been mapped by three distinguished political scientists: Princeton's Nolan McCarty and Howard Rosenthal, and their colleague Keith T. Poole of the University of Houston (who holds a chair endowed in the name of former Enron CEO Kenneth L. Lay). Among the organizations that have published research papers by these three nonpartisan academics is the very conservative American Enterprise Institute. Their studies and others have established that growing class polarization between the two major parties has coincided with increasing income stratification in American society. Using a complex computerized map graphing congressional voting patterns over the past century, the three professors have found precisely the same polarization between the parties on Capitol Hill. With increasing consistency, Democrats support legislation that helps the middle class and the poor, while Republicans protect their affluent constituency.

In other words, that little Monopoly plutocrat in the top hat is back with a vengeance, grasping bags marked with dollar signs. He's still a Republican, he has a lot more money now, and he has probably become a patron of the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute -- like "Kenny Boy" Lay. He is likely to be a Fortune 500 CEO or a Forbes 400 heir as well as a major Bush fundraiser -- like Maurice "Hank" Greenberg (American International Group insurance), Robert Wood "Woody" Johnson IV (Johnson & Johnson heir), or Lee Bass (Bass family oil interests). He may have flown Bush around the country on a corporate jet during the 2000 primaries -- like Heinz Prechter (American Sunroof) or Alex Spanos (A.G. Spanos real estate). He would surely take a call from Tom DeLay or Bill Frist when they need to funnel money to a candidate or sponsor negative advertising -- like Carl Lindner (American Financial Group, Chiquita Brands) and Sam Wyly (Maverick Capital, Green Mountain Power). His priorities are faithfully reflected by conservative think tanks and Republican politicians, and he is assuredly not one of the little guys.

To deflect attention from this plutocratic elite, the right deploys a barrage of abusive verbiage about the alleged elitism of the left. Somehow those clichés remain perpetually fresh, at least in the minds of those who scream them. There are "limousine liberals" and "Hollywood liberals" and "Eastern establishment liberals" and "liberal eggheads" and "liberal academics" and "privileged liberals" and "upper-class liberals" and "Upper West Side liberals" and "Harvard boutique liberals" and "liberal snobs" -- as well as "liberal elitists" and, of course, "elitist liberals."

It is an old theme that can be traced back to Joe McCarthy's vituperative assaults on the "striped pants" Democratic diplomats and liberal intellectuals from Yale and Harvard. (People who read and think often arouse suspicion on the far right.) It gathered greater force when Richard Nixon vented his enduring resentment of the Kennedy family, which eventually mutated into an attack on his "elitist" opponent George McGovern, a prairie Democrat who was nothing of the kind. It persists in Rush Limbaugh's daily tirades against Hollywood liberals and the "rich Democrat presidential candidates," a "bunch of vastly wealthy multimillionaires" trying to disguise the fact that they, too, are "elitists."

In "Slander," Ann Coulter goes further. She insists that Democrats "actually hate working-class people" and that "all conceivable evidence supports the theory that liberalism is a whimsical luxury of the very rich -- and the very poor, both of whom have little stake in society." Why the very wealthy would have little stake in the society that enriches and idolizes them is an assertion she leaves unexplained, like so many others in her screed. But she expatiates at length on her view that conservatives are "aggressively anti-elitist," the only true friends of the little folk for whom liberals feel only contempt. She supports this assertion by noting archly that four of the wealthiest U.S. senators happen to be liberal Democrats.

No doubt there are frightful liberal snobs to be found in Manhattan, Malibu, and Cambridge (and the Senate), just as there are appalling conservative snobs lurking in Houston, Greenwich, and Virginia's horse country. Like any other human trait, excessive attitude cuts across political, geographic, economic and ethnic boundaries. Having grown up in one of Connecticut's most exclusive and conservative suburbs, Ann Coulter could be expected to know that her own beloved WASP Republicans are hardly free of snobbery -- and she probably does, despite all her tiresome harping on the "veiled class bigotry" of liberals.

The essential fraudulence of such right-wing populism could be glimpsed in Cigar Aficionado's profile of Rush Limbaugh. Interviewed for the luxury magazine by a fellow epicure, the radio talker felt free to drop any pretense of resembling the middle-class "ditto-heads" who worship him. Although his trademark theme is the polarizing struggle between "us" (conservative, hardworking middle Americans) and "them" (liberal Democrat elitists), the private Rush is actually a ridiculous snob in matters of wine, cigars, hotels and all the other pleasures of upper-bracket life.

He informed Cigar Aficionado that his favorite Bordeaux is Chateau Haut Brion '61, although he allowed that he would settle for the '82 vintage. (For those who may not know -- perhaps including the typical Limbaugh fan -- a bottle of the exceedingly rare 1961 Haut Brion retails for around $2,000. That isn't much to a "regular guy" who earns upward of $20 million a year.)

Name-dropping wine vintages is standard if unsophisticated snob behavior. Still, for a xenophobic rabble-rouser from Missouri, Limbaugh's cultural aspirations are very refined. Much as he professes to dislike big-city liberals and perfidious foreigners, he loved living in New York City "for its culture and restaurants." He doesn't vacation at Disney World or Six Flags with his fans, either. When this man of the people takes a few days off, he prefers Paris, San Francisco or London -- and whenever he pops over to London, he stays at the Connaught, one of the oldest, priciest, snootiest joints in town. What he buys in London, Paris and Saint Maarten are Cuban cigars, regardless of legal embargoes and the vileness of Havana's Communist dictatorship. As a cigar snob, he doesn't let principle get in the way of a superior smoke.

Limbaugh shares the tastes and prejudices (as well as the restaurants and hotels) of the same elite that he denounces on the airwaves. But he is no more inconsistent than his friend Coulter. She claims to prefer the wholesome atmosphere of Kansas City, where the "real Americans" live -- but not so long ago she moved from Washington to Manhattan, a place she supposedly despises. With satellite communications and the Internet, there is no professional reason why Limbaugh and Coulter can't live anywhere they like. Despite their populist posturing, both prefer Sodom-on-Hudson to the red-state heartland.

 

Part III.
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Male cheerleaders and chicken hawks
While Republicans smear Democrats as unpatriotic, a look at the war record of many GOP leaders -- including President Bush -- shows a remarkable aversion to the front lines. Part 3 of "Big Lies."

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By Joe Conason



Aug. 20, 2003 | "Conservatives truly love America and support the armed forces, while liberals are unpatriotic draft dodgers." Of all the pernicious claptrap emitted by right-wing propagandists, none is more offensive than smearing liberals and Democrats as unpatriotic. The portrayal of a liberal elite that despises its own country has allowed conservatives to appropriate the flag, the national anthem, and other national symbols -- the heritage of every American -- as their movement's private property, and to misuse those symbols for narrow partisan purposes. To the extremists, anyone who doesn't pledge allegiance to the Republican platform is a "traitor."

Rank-and-file reactionaries out in the red-state hinterland may believe this tripe, but the Republican insiders know better. Living in major cities like New York and Washington, they can't avoid knowing liberals who have proudly served in the military, revere the Constitution and the flag, and share the values of liberty and democracy -- who are, indeed, just as patriotic as any conservative. That knowledge only makes their promotion of this slanderous myth more shameful.

Like so much other rightist cant, "liberals hate America" is a slogan designed to confuse and inflame the ignorant. And like many another successful frame-up, this one grossly exaggerates a small fact. On the far left there does exist a handful of annoying academics and activists -- typified by Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark -- whose ideas about America and the world haven't changed much since the '70s. Their politics hark back to a period when the criminal excesses of the Cold War in Indochina, Latin America and southern Africa had alienated many young Americans from our country. The overwhelming majority of those young people never contemplated any kind of unpatriotic act, and those who remained active in politics took up the challenge of democratic reform.

As for the remnant of ultra-leftists, whether they love America or not is for them to say. What they surely detest -- as they would be the first to affirm -- is American liberalism. That's what conservatives always forget (or pretend to forget) when quoting left-wing literature to prove that liberals hate and blame America.

Distinguishing fringe factions from the progressive majority is essential to wiping away the "anti-American" smear against liberals. It is a task complicated by the fact that, as a matter of constitutional principle, liberals consistently uphold the civil liberties of radicals at both ends of the spectrum. It's simple for conservatives to look patriotic by threatening dissenters or amending the Constitution to ban obnoxious behavior like flag-burning. But what could be more fundamentally American and patriotic than the liberal commitment to defend all of the freedoms symbolized by the Stars and Stripes?

The relentless disparagement of liberal patriotism by right-wing ideologues is an attempt to punish that commitment to free speech, and an abandonment of traditional American values of fair play and civic decency. There is nothing truly conservative about the conservatives' compulsion to divide the nation for their own political gain. There is nothing patriotic about perverting the natural love of country into suspicion, bitterness and hostility. (Strangely, many of the conservatives who seek to inflame hatred against their liberal neighbors would describe themselves as devout Christians -- but then some of our most jingoistic warmongers also claim to be true disciples of the Prince of Peace.)

In an earlier era there were Republican statesmen, such as the senators who initiated the censure of Joseph McCarthy, who considered such smear tactics contemptible. To those outraged colleagues, McCarthy's strategy betrayed real patriotism by falsely impugning the loyalty of innocent Americans for momentary personal advantage. The senators who finally stood up against their fellow Republican did so because they realized that his unfounded accusations of disloyalty were eroding national unity, constitutional authority, and intellectual freedom -- and assisting America's real enemies.

During the months preceding the war in Iraq, conservatives used the same sleazy tactics to disparage liberals, progressives and Democrats. Liberals who preferred inspections to invasion were denounced as unpatriotic. Democrats (and Republicans) who saw through the administration's disinformation and fumbling diplomacy were called appeasers. And the usual Republican suspects sought to paint all critics with the same smear brush, as if patriotism demanded mindless obedience to whatever spin might emanate from the Pentagon.

In their zeal to take partisan advantage of the war, Republican propagandists ignored the real complexities of the national debate over Iraq. The argument ranged across a spectrum that included left-leaning "hawks" such as House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Paul Berman, author of "Terror and Liberalism"; and such prominent right-wing "doves" as Patrick Buchanan, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, and Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute. Not everyone who questioned the war shared Chomsky's hostility to American power, and not everyone who supported the war agreed with Bush's unilateralism. The truth about Iraq was complicated. So was the political lineup on either side of the war debate. But for the purpose of defaming Democrats and liberals, the right-wing bullies must keep their ideological categories simple.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, rhetorical bullying by the self-appointed sentinels has become shrill and continuous: Ann Coulter snarls that liberals must be threatened with execution to deter them from becoming "outright traitors." Andrew Sullivan warns against the "decadent enclaves" of East and West Coast liberals "mounting a fifth column" -- a term that means a group of secret sympathizers with the enemy -- in the war on terrorism. (He later blames "liberal culture" for the disloyalty of the young Californian who joined the Taliban.) The New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy denounces "liberals, whom I regard as traitors," for daring to quote the Constitution in defense of civil liberties.

The modern mini-McCarthys are always eager to form a mob, to trample anyone who resists their immediate partisan objectives. When Vermont's Jim Jeffords went independent and Democrats regained control of the Senate in early 2001, the right found a new target to replace Bill Clinton, their perennial favorite. The conservative hit squad went after Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

At first they denounced the soft-spoken South Dakotan as an "obstructionist" with no agenda except to thwart President Bush. This was a ridiculous overstatement, but not a slur. By the end of the year, however, the campaign against Daschle turned hard and dirty. Newspapers all over his home state suddenly published full-page advertisements with photos of Daschle and Saddam Hussein and a headline shrieking "What do these two men have in common?" The ads were sponsored by American Renewal, a group affiliated with religious right broadcaster James Dobson that works closely with White House political director Karl Rove. Their ostensible reason for aligning Daschle with Saddam was the Democrat's opposition to oil-drilling in the Alaska wildlife reserve (an opinion long shared by most Americans).

What disturbed many observers was that those Daschle-bashing ads appeared at a time when nearly every Democratic elected official in the country had affirmatively answered the president's call for bipartisan unity against terrorism. But the blitz mounted by the Dobson outfit in South Dakota was actually part of a carefully coordinated partisan scheme to make Tom Daschle into a negative symbol. "It's time for Congressional Republicans to personalize the individual that is standing directly in the way of economic security, and even national security," advised a "talking points" memorandum issued to Senate Republicans by political consultant Frank Luntz. "Remember what the Democrats did to Gingrich? We need to do exactly the same thing to Daschle."

Within weeks after Congress returned from the holiday recess, Republican leaders resumed their mugging of Daschle, feigning terrible offense at mild remarks he had made about the progress of the war against al-Qaida and the imperative of capturing Osama bin Laden and the Taliban mullahs. Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, chairman of the GOP's congressional campaign committee, ranted that Daschle's "divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country." House Majority Whip Tom DeLay called Daschle's comments "disgusting."

The Democratic leader shrugged off DeLay and Davis with a thin smile. He wouldn't be provoked, even when Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott refused to repudiate the insinuation of treason against him on national television and instead seemed to endorse it. "How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism?" cried Lott.

Daschle should have pounced on that invitation to compare their respective patriotic credentials, which would hardly have been flattering to Lott -- and would have exploded a widespread delusion about liberals and conservatives. The flag-flapping, ultranationalist Republican had not only avoided the draft with student deferments, but had also had spent the early years of the Vietnam conflict waving pom-poms as a cheerleader at Ole Miss. The thoughtful but determined Daschle, who rarely spoke about his own military service, had served three years in the Air Force after college as an intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command.

It was Sen. John Kerry, not Daschle, who addressed the Republican leaders in the manner they deserved. At a Democratic dinner in New Hampshire, the senator from Massachusetts stood up and said, "Let me be clear tonight to Senator Lott and to Tom DeLay. One of the lessons that I learned in Vietnam -- a war they did not have to endure -- and one of the basic vows of commitment that I made to myself, was that if I ever reached a position of responsibility, I would never stop asking questions that make a democracy strong ... Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops."

Kerry received a standing ovation from the New Hampshire Democrats. Thus encouraged, he repeated his roasting of the Republican leaders at a press conference the following day. As a Vietnam combat veteran who earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star in two Navy tours -- and who later founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War -- Kerry had ample stature to challenge the character assassins.

What the Daschle episode revealed was how routinely Republicans and conservatives resort to the kind of hyperbole that was once heard only from extremists and bigots. The Kerry speech electrified his audience because, like so many other liberals, they were tired of listening to conservatives blast away at their patriotism unanswered. At long last, someone had fired back.

The image of disloyal liberals harks back to the national trauma of Vietnam, when a fragment of the broad antiwar movement drew media attention by burning the American flag, carrying the banner of the National Liberation Front, and indulging in random violence. Profoundly infuriating to most Americans, the revolting conduct of a few privileged students was seized upon by the Nixon administration to discredit the completely loyal dissent of mainstream Democrats, Republicans and independents from places like South Dakota, Oregon, Idaho, Texas and New Jersey as well as liberal New York, Massachusetts and California.

In the Nixon White House, a young conservative named Patrick Buchanan penned many of the harshest attacks on the antiwar liberals. Buchanan's aggressive patriotism didn't extend to wearing his country's uniform, however. He had slipped past the District of Columbia draft board with a "bad knee." But he didn't hesitate to question the loyalty of prominent liberals who had worn that uniform with valor -- including heroic veterans and leaders of the liberal opposition to the war such as George McGovern, a bomber pilot who won the Distinguished Service Cross for flying many dangerous missions over Germany, and John Kerry, a decorated Navy captain wounded in Vietnam.

Among prominent conservatives of the Vietnam generation, the kind of hypocritical posturing symbolized by Buchanan and Limbaugh is so widespread that they have acquired a derogatory nickname: "chicken hawks." Right-wing draft evasion first emerged as an embarrassing issue in 1988, when reporters delved into the personal history of the handsome young senator nominated for vice president at the GOP convention. Thanks to the influence of his father, Indiana's most powerful newspaper publisher and an ardent editorial proponent of the war, Dan Quayle had spent the Vietnam years improving his excellent golf swing, while holding down a desk job at Indiana National Guard headquarters. (Among Quayle's contemporaries in the Senate, incidentally, those who had served in active duty during the Vietnam War included two Republicans -- and five Democrats.) The story of Quayle's privileged berth in the National Guard dominated news coverage of his nomination at the New Orleans convention and provoked much commentary in the weeks that followed.

Twelve years later, little attention was paid to the strikingly similar story of George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, a sojourn that had likewise protected him from the Vietnam draft. About to graduate from Yale and lose his student deferment in 1968, he obviously felt no overwhelming urge to fight in the bloody jungle conflict that his father -- then a Republican congressman -- would someday blast Bill Clinton for avoiding.

Ushered into the Texas Air National Guard ahead of hundreds of other young men on the waiting list for a few coveted places, George W. Bush later insisted that he had never received any "special favoritism." Perhaps he only benefited from the ordinary favoritism that the Texas elite enjoyed during the Vietnam War, when the Air National Guard became one of the primary means of escaping the draft. His father was a mere congressman at the time, but that was good enough to get Dubya in despite his low score on the pilot aptitude test. Pushed to the top of the waiting list, he was also awarded a highly unusual promotion to second lieutenant on completing his basic training, despite his lack of qualifications.

Exactly how all this happened remains a matter of dispute. In a civil lawsuit, former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes testified that he received a call from Sid Adger, a socially prominent Houston oilman and friend of the elder Bush. According to Barnes, Adger wanted to ensure that the unit at Ellington Air Force Base would take care of young Bush. (Adger had already obtained Guard slots for two of his own sons.) Barnes also testified that one of his aides forwarded the request to a Guard general. During the 2000 campaign, both Bush and his father denied using any such influence on his behalf. Pleading a bad memory, the elder Bush told reporters that he was "almost positive" he had never spoken with Adger, who died in 1996, about the Guard matter.

Having made a six-year commitment to the Guard, Bush successfully completed the challenging course of training in the F-102 fighter. In his 1999 autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," he offered lyrical memories of his Guard stint. "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years," he wrote. But that simply wasn't true: Lt. Bush never flew another jet after being suspended from flight duty in August 1972 for failing to take a mandated annual physical. That was a fact he simply couldn't remember when asked to account for the discrepancy in 2000. ("A Charge to Keep" also omits his stint as head cheerleader at Phillips Andover, his old prep school.)

Among the most questionable assertions in his book is that he sought to volunteer for service in Vietnam "to relieve active-duty pilots." In a more candid mood in 1998, Bush had told a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "I don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching to war when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service and I was headed into the service."

Bush also wrote that his military service "gave me respect for the chain of command." Not enough respect, apparently, to report for duty as ordered, since his records show that he ignored two direct orders to do so -- and in fact was absent from duty for a year between May 1972 and May 1973.

By the time he applied to Harvard Business School in 1972, Bush claimed, "I was almost finished with my commitment in the Air National Guard, and was no longer flying because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter." That too was false. According to an interview with his commanding officer that appeared in the Boston Globe, Bush's Guard unit continued to fly the F-102 until 1974, an assertion confirmed by Air Force records. "If he had come back to Houston, I would have kept him flying the 102 until he got out," said retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges.

In 2000 a few journalists asked the Bush campaign to account for his near-total absence from duty during the final two years of the six-year stint he agreed to serve. The Republican candidate and his spokespersons replied that he made up his missed days in an Alabama National Guard unit, but there is scant evidence to confirm that claim. Bush sought a permanent transfer to a "postal unit" in Alabama that didn't require weekend drills or active duty, which was approved by his Texas superiors. In May 1972, National Guard headquarters denied his request -- which would have amounted to a permanent vacation from duty. The following autumn, he was assigned instead to temporary "alternative" training at the 187th Squadron in Montgomery, Ala.

According to two former officers in that Alabama Guard unit, however, Bush never showed up. Retired Gen. William Turnipseed, the unit's former commander, said he was certain that Bush did not report to him, although the young reserve airman was specifically required to do so. The orders dated Sept. 15, 1972, were clear. "Lieutenant Bush should report to Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, DCO, to perform equivalent training."

Bush has insisted, usually through a spokesman, that he did report for duty in Alabama, although his campaign could offer no proof. In late 2000 a group of Alabama Vietnam veterans offered $3,500 to anyone who could verify Bush's claim that he performed service at a Montgomery, Ala., National Guard unit in 1972. No one ever claimed that reward. Nor could his campaign produce a single witness who confirmed that Bush had attended any Guard drills in Houston after he returned from Alabama in late 1972.

According to the Boston Globe, Bush's discharge papers list his service and duty station for each of his first four years in the Air National Guard. After May 1972, there was no record of training on those forms and "no mention of any service in Alabama." The supervising pilots at Ellington Air Force Base wrongly believed that Bush was serving in Alabama. In a report dated May 2, 1973, they explained that they were unable to rate his efficiency because "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of report. A civilian occupation made it necessary for him to move to Montgomery, Alabama. He cleared this base on 15 May 1972 and has been performing equivalent training in a non-flying status with the 187 Tac Recon Gp, Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama."

As for Bush's curious failure to take his Air Force physical in July 1972, his only excuse is that because he was then in Alabama working on a Republican Senate campaign, he was unable to return to Houston for a checkup by his personal physician. That too was untrue. A pilot's physical, required to continue flying, can only be performed by a certified Air Force flight surgeon (as Bush must have known, since he had undergone at least three such exams). An investigation of Bush's military career published in June 2000 by the Times of London noted that the Air Force had instituted rigorous drug testing a few months before he failed to show up for the medical exam.

The commander in chief's official National Guard record shows no evidence of service between May 1972 and May 1973. Although he was certainly in Houston during most of that period, he didn't return to duty at Ellington until the spring of 1973. The records show that he spent 36 days in drills (though not flying) from May through June 1973, apparently to compensate for all the months he had been absent. By then he was preparing to attend Harvard Business School. His final day in uniform was July 30, 1973, and he was officially released from active duty the following October -- eight months before he would have finished his original six-year commitment to the Guard.

The next time Bush strapped himself into a fighter cockpit would be 30 years later, when he was flown to the deck of the USS Lincoln for a triumphal speech marking the American victory over Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Privately, Republican media advisers admitted that they were likely to use the "Top Gun" videotape of the president strutting across the carrier deck in his flight suit for campaign commercials in 2004.

Despite all the remarkable contradictions between his military record and his self-serving stories, and despite the plentiful evidence that he had shirked a year of his service and then lied about it, the "liberal media" never subjected Bush to the searing interrogations inflicted on Quayle in 1988 and Clinton in 1992. Only the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, and a Democratic Web site bothered to explore the curious absences and lapses of duty that resulted in Bush's grounding after two years of fighter training. Nobody insisted that he hold press conferences to explain himself. Pundits dismissed the issue when they mentioned it at all. The cultural assumption that Republicans are paragons of flag-saluting martial virtue is rarely challenged, regardless of reality.

Yet the startling fact is that liberal Democratic politicians are at least as likely to have done military service as their Republican opponents and critics. Among the U.S. senators in the 107th Congress, the percentage of veterans was slightly higher among Democrats than among Republicans (if service in the Vietnam-era National Guard is excluded). That sort of statistic wouldn't matter so much if not for the right's continuing indulgence in venomous attacks on the patriotism of liberals and Democrats. Lining up the conservative civilians alongside the liberal veterans is an unpleasant but necessary exercise in an era when right-wingers and Republicans are inclined to exploit patriotism for partisan advantage.

The long, distinguished list of Republican tough guys who never served descends from Vice President Dick Cheney, who has explained that he had "other priorities" during Vietnam, all the way down to Rush Limbaugh, who frequently impugns the patriotism of liberal veterans like Tom Daschle. It includes former Majority Leader Lott; former Speaker Newt Gingrich and his successor, Denny Hastert; the two Texans who actually ran the House after Gingrich's departure, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey; White House political advisor Karl Rove; and Phil Gramm, the senior senator from Texas who retired in 2002.

John Ashcroft would have been subject to the Vietnam draft when he graduated from law school in 1967, but a family friend swiftly set him up in a job teaching business law to undergraduates at a Springfield, Mo., college. The local draft board deemed this job "essential" and awarded him an occupational deferment, one of eight deferments he received between 1963 and 1969. As attorney general, Ashcroft has been quick to question the patriotism of anyone who protests his evisceration of basic liberties.

Not everyone excused from service was a chicken hawk, but every chicken hawk has an excuse. Few were ever as creatively comical as Tom DeLay, a belligerent politician who loudly maligns the patriotism of his betters. At the Republican Convention in 1988, he explained to reporters that there had been no space in the Army for "patriotic folks" like himself and Dan Quayle during the Vietnam War -- because too many minority youths had joined the service to earn money and escape the ghetto.

His own failure to serve only seems to have made the former exterminator more vociferously obnoxious to those who did. When retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft cautioned against a precipitous invasion of Iraq during the summer of 2002, DeLay denounced such warnings as "a campaign driven by a congenital mistrust of American principles and consistent hostility to American action." Later that year, during an especially shrill appearance on CNN, he insisted that congressional Democrats who dared to raise questions about national security "don't want to protect the American people ... They will do anything, spend all the time and resources they can, to avoid confronting evil." DeLay is simply a cowardly thug in a business suit who abuses patriotic rhetoric to stifle debate.

 

Hardly. Conason does real investigative reporting, checks his facts, and backs up his writing with copious footnotes that are really footnotes. Plus, he's not a dyed-hair harpie.

 

Max--this is the last excerpt... I promise.
____________
Bush Inc.
Understanding the political dynasty that's made crony capitalism a way of life. Part 4 of "Big Lies."

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By Joe Conason



Aug. 21, 2003 | For the Bush dynasty, crony capitalism is rite of passage, way of life, and family business. President Bush, his father, his three brothers, and sundry other relatives all have joined (and sometimes hastily abandoned) enterprises where their chief contribution was the perception of political influence at home and abroad. It would be possible -- although grim and morally exhausting -- to write an entire book about nothing but ethically dingy Bush business deals.

The Bush clan's investments and directorships have ranged across nearly every sector of the modern economy: oil exploration, banking, equities, venture capital, computer software, life insurance, major-league baseball, high-tech security, real estate, cable television, shoe wholesaling, fruit and vegetable imports, irrigation pumps, and airline catering, among others.

Family partners, investors, and benefactors have included former government appointees, present and former campaign contributors, foreign potentates and favor-seekers -- and numerous business executives who benefited from decisions by government overseen by members of the Bush family. Time after time, Bush family members or their business associates have sidled up to the very edge of legality, and perhaps over it -- without being held accountable.

Until the ascendancy of George W. Bush, the most notorious example of that syndrome was his younger brother Neil. He too ran a failed oil company, like those once operated by George W. -- and his oil company, too, was awarded exploration rights from a foreign government while their father was in the White House. Neil's best-known venture, however, was in the savings-and-loan business.

For the benefit of those who don't remember the name Silverado, that was the romantic moniker of the Denver savings-and-loan whose board Neil graced during the eighties. In the gigantic federal bailout overseen by Neil's father's administration, Silverado's failure eventually cost taxpayers about a billion dollars.

Neil Bush's checkered career overshadowed the business activities of brother Jeb, which took him from the Florida swamps to the capital of Nigeria in the years before he first ran for governor in 1994. Jeb earned much of his fortune in partnership with Armando Codina, a Miami real estate baron and politically active Cuban exile. They eventually got in trouble with a savings-and-loan, Broward Federal, which had loaned them $4.5 million via a third party to purchase an office building. Like so many other thrifts, Broward failed. When the loan went into default, federal regulators reduced the liability of Bush and Codina to $500,000 (and considerately allowed them to keep their building). Around this time, Jeb also got involved in a deal with Miguel Recarey, the strange character who ran International Medical Centers, a Miami-based health maintenance organization. IMC and Recarey were eventually indicted for the largest Medicare fraud in history, costing the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars.

Four years later, when his father was president, Jeb visited Nigeria as chief salesman and partner of Bush-El, a firm marketing water pumps to the notoriously corrupt African dictatorship. The water-pump sale went through, conveniently financed by a $74.3 million loan from the U.S. government. Jeb Bush told the Miami Herald that he did nothing to secure the U.S. government loan, and that he turned down a million-dollar commission on the pump-sale after he learned about the taxpayer financing. He did, however, earn $650,000 from Bush-El. In a 1998 letter to the Herald, Jeb responded with the smirking insouciance of the crony capitalist: "Is favorable name recognition helpful in business, as it is in almost every other aspect of life? Perhaps. Is it an 'unfair advantage'? No. It is just a fact of life."

Brother Marvin has rarely caused any negative publicity for his family, with one notable exception. Three months after he left the White House, the first President Bush flew to Kuwait on the emir's private plane to be decorated with the monarchy's highest honors for commanding the Gulf War. Accompanying the former President were his two youngest sons and his former Secretary of State James Baker III. Several months later, the New Yorker magazine revealed that Baker went to Kuwait as a consultant to Enron, which was seeking contracts to rebuild the sheikdom's damaged power plants. Neil Bush was also seeking a share of the fees to operate Enron's power plants. And Marvin Bush was working for a Washington firm that wanted to build an electronic security system for the Kuwaitis. In the eyes of many people there and at home, the grasping conduct of Baker and the Bush sons soiled American honor.

George W. Bush's business career wasn't quite as colorful as those of Neil or Jeb, but the eldest son has also been the most successful in acquiring both power and money. The national media occasionally examined his activities for evidence of influence peddling when his father was still in the White House, but there was no searching scrutiny during his presidential campaign in 2000. Only when the Enron scandal broke did reporters again consider his sojourn in the oil business, especially at Harken Energy, and the baseball deal that made his fortune.

From the outset, the opportunities that eventually led to Bush's eventual baseball bonanza intertwined politics and business, crony capitalist style. The limited partnership that financed Arbusto, his first oil firm, included George W.'s grandmother Dorothy Bush; Rite Aid drugstores chairman Lewis Lehrman, then a rising force in New York Republican politics; William Draper III, a corporate executive and family friend who was later appointed by his father to head the Export-Import Bank; and James Bath, a mysterious Houston aircraft broker who served as a front man for several Saudi Arabian sheiks. About $3 million poured into Arbusto, producing little oil and no profits but expansive tax shelters.

In 1982 George W. changed the infelicitous name Arbusto to Bush Exploration Oil Company. His father by then was Vice President of the United States, but the new company name didn't improve matters. More than once, George W.'s venture was near ruin when wealthy benefactors suddenly appeared with fresh cash. The most generous was Philip Uzielli, an old Princeton buddy of James Baker III, the family friend then serving as Chief of Staff in the Reagan White House. For the sum of $1 million, Uzielli bought 10 percent of the company at a time in 1982 when the entire enterprise was valued at less than $400,000.

Soon Uzielli's million was gone, too. But just as Bush Exploration was heading toward failure, George W. met William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, a pair of Ohio investors with their own small oil firm, called Spectrum 7. After a quick courtship, the Spectrum 7 partners agreed to merge with Bush Exploration, naming George W. as chairman and CEO and awarding him a substantial share of stock. Although the Vice President's son helped Spectrum 7 to raise additional money, catastrophic losses continued. Then George W. attracted yet another financial savior.

That September, Harken Energy Corporation, a midsized firm, stepped in to acquire Spectrum 7. For his worthless company, Harken gave Bush $600,000 worth of its publicly traded stock, plus a seat on its board of directors and a consultancy that paid him up to $120,000 a year. His partners understood perfectly what had happened. As Spectrum 7's former President Paul Rea later recalled, the Harken management "believed having George's name there would be a big help to them."

In 1987 Bush moved his family from Texas to Washington, where he served as "senior adviser" in his father's presidential campaign. Not long before Election Day, he heard from his former Spectrum 7 partner Bill DeWitt that the Texas Rangers were on the market. To make a successful bid, DeWitt would need Texas backers, and the son of the incoming President was perfectly situated to find them. George W. also had a powerful advantage in dealing with the team's owner, an aging oil millionaire named Eddie Chiles, who had been a Bush family friend in Midland, Texas, for more than thirty years.

Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth was eager to help the son of the new President, but wasn't happy that Bush's two biggest investors were the New York film financiers Roland Betts and Tom Bernstein. The indispensable local money came from Richard Rainwater, formerly the chief financial adviser to the Bass brothers of Fort Worth. Little known to the general public, Rainwater was famous on Wall Street for growing the Bass inheritance from around $50 million in 1970 to more than $4 billion by the time he left in 1986 to manage his own investments.

After Bush and Ueberroth met with him in early 1989, Rainwater took effective control of the deal, bringing along Edward "Rusty" Rose, a well-known Dallas investor, to oversee the franchise. Under an agreement worked out by Betts and Rainwater, the President's son would serve as the new ownership's public face while Rose ran the business.

Bush's stake in the team, just under 2 percent, was among the smallest. He purchased his shares with a $500,000 loan from a Midland bank of which he had been a director and eventually scraped together $106,000 more to buy out two other limited partners. Two months after his father's inauguration, George W. Bush called a press conference in Arlington to announce that the Rangers sale had been successfully completed for a price that was later reported to be $86 million. While Rainwater, Rose, Betts, and all the other partners remained in the background, George W. greeted the public as if he were "the owner" of the Rangers. He attended every home game and even printed baseball cards bearing his own picture to hand out from his box.

Meanwhile, he maintained a financial interest in Harken Energy. He had been granted enough additional stock options, at a generous discount, to increase his holdings by more than half. By 1989, however, those shares were falling in value. A series of questionable decisions by Chairman Alan Quasha had jeopardized the company's future, and its losses reached $40 million in 1990. Even the company's CEO admitted that its financial statements were "a mess."

Once more, however, the Bush name provided sudden deliverance -- in the form of a contract with the emirate of Bahrain. Until 1989 the Bahraini oil minister had been negotiating an agreement for offshore drilling with Amoco, a huge energy conglomerate with decades of worldwide experience. Those talks were abruptly broken off. Then, through a former Mobil executive working on retainer for the State Department, Bahraini officials were put in touch with Harken.

Industry analysts were astonished by the announcement in January 1990 that Bahrain had awarded exclusive offshore exploration rights to Harken, a debt-ridden company that had never drilled a well anywhere but Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and had never drilled undersea at all. Harken had to bring in the more experienced and solvent Bass brothers, old friends and political supporters of the Bush family, to begin construction on the $25 million project.

Only the presence of President Bush's oldest son could explain the Bahraini ministers' extraordinary decision. "They were clearly aware he was the President's son," said Monte Swetnam, a former Harken executive who conducted the talks with the emirate's oil ministry. George W. denied any part in Harken's bid. "Ask the Bahrainis," he replied flippantly when journalists asked whether the emirate had been enticed by his name.

Among the other major Harken investors around that time was billionaire financier George Soros, who discussed the company and Bush a decade later with the Nation magazine. "I didn't know him," Soros said. "He was supposed to bring in the Gulf connection. But it didn't come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. He was not much of a businessman." Soros apparently lost patience while waiting for the President's son to arrange matters in the Persian Gulf and unloaded all his stock on July 12, 1989 -- six months before Harken signed its deal with Bahrain.

Billionaires are often lucky as well as smart. Years later, those wells off the coast of Bahrain turned out to be dry holes. By then Bush had long since dumped Harken, too.

On June 22, 1990, six months after the Bahrain contract was announced, George W. quietly sold off 212,140 Harken shares, which grossed $848,560. He used most of the proceeds to pay off the bank loan he had taken a year earlier to finance his portion of the Texas Rangers deal. In early August, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his troops and tanks across the southern border into Kuwait. Saddam's aggression drove down the stock price of every oil company doing business in the Gulf, including Harken, whose shares fell to $3.12.

Although there is no evidence that the president's son was tipped off about the impending Gulf crisis, he certainly had reason to know about Harken's other troubles. He served on the company's three-member audit committee and also on a special "fairness committee" appointed that spring to consider how a corporate restructuring would affect share value.

When Bush's stock dumping was first reported by the Houston Post in October 1990, there were no accusations of insider trading. Then in April 1991, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission had not been notified of his timely trade until eight months after the legal deadline. The regulatory agency commenced an investigation that concluded in 1991 with no action against George W.

That outcome was hardly a surprise. The SEC chairman at the time, 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. and his partners in 1989. During the SEC investigation, Bush was represented by Robert Jordan, who had been a law partner of Doty at the Baker Botts firm in Texas. (In 2001, Bush named Jordan as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.) Bush has insisted that he didn't know about the firm's mounting losses and that Harken's general counsel approved his stock sell-off.

What he didn't say -- and what his lawyers didn't tell the SEC until the day after its investigation officially closed -- was that Harken's lawyers had explicitly warned Bush and other directors against insider trading in a memo issued just before he sold his shares. The memo explained that if directors had any unfavorable information about the company's outlook, their sale of Harken stock would be viewed critically if the price dropped soon after. "Unless the favorable facts clearly are more important than the unfavorable, the insider should be advised not to sell," it said.

All the information Bush had about Harken's prospects at that point was negative. 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.

Two months after Bush sold the bulk of his Harken holdings, the company posted losses for the second quarter of well over $20 million and its shares fell another 24 percent; by year's end, Harken was trading at $1.25. (The current price of Harken shares is around 20 cents -- equivalent to 2 cents a share in 1990, before a reverse stock split that later gave investors one new share for every ten held previously.)

Suspicions surrounding Harken and other dubious enterprises associated with the President's sons -- particularly Neil's Silverado fiasco -- caused the family severe embarrassment during the doomed 1992 reelection campaign. But that unhappy interlude scarcely stalled George W.'s own quest for success. The Rangers partnership needed a new stadium or they would never make any money.

Backed by Rainwater's billions they could have built a new stadium themselves, of course, but that would have violated the crony capitalist methods of the major leagues. In the sports business it's the taxpayers, not the club owners, who pay the construction costs of new facilities. So Rangers management began to hint unsubtly that unless the city government of Arlington, Texas, provided land and financing on concessionary terms, they would be obliged to move the team to nearby Dallas or Fort Worth.

Even by baseball monopoly standards, the capitulation of Arlington Mayor Richard Greene was abject. In October 1990, Mayor Greene signed a contract that guaranteed $135 million toward the stadium's estimated price of $190 million. The city would earn a maximum of $5 million annually in rent, no matter how much the Rangers reaped from ticket sales and television (a sum that eventually rose to $100 million a year). Amazingly, the Rangers could buy the stadium after the accumulated rental payments reached a mere $60 million -- and the property acquired so cheaply would include not just a fancy new stadium with a seating capacity of 49,000, but an additional 270 acres of valuable land.

When Mayor Greene signed on to this giveaway deal, he was simultaneously negotiating with federal authorities to settle a massive lawsuit against him, in yet another savings-and-loan bust. Greene had formerly been president of the Arlington branch of Sunbelt Savings Association, described by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as "one of the most notorious failures of the S&L scandal."

Sunbelt had lost an estimated $2 billion, and cleaning up the mess there cost the feds about $297 million. Around the same time that Greene signed the deal enriching the Rangers syndicate, federal officials agreed to let him pay $40,000 to settle the Sunbelt case -- scarcely enough to cover the costs of the negotiation -- and walk away. "George had no knowledge of my problems; there is no connection," he assured the New York Times in September 2000.

The stadium scheme predictably generated local opposition to "corporate welfare." But together with Mayor Greene, George W. convinced an overwhelming majority of Arlington voters to approve a sales tax hike that would back the stadium bonds in January 1991. The referendum must have impressed Democratic Governor Ann Richards, who quickly signed legislation creating the Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority -- with power to issue bonds and exercise eminent domain over any obstinate landowners.

That legislation represented crony capitalism at its worst. Never before had a municipal authority in Texas been given license to seize the property of a private citizen for the benefit of other private citizens. When a recalcitrant family refused to sell a 13-acre parcel near the stadium site for half its appraised value, their land was condemned and handed over to Bush and his partners. The ensuing lawsuit revealed that prior to passage of the enabling legislation, the Rangers management had planned to wield condemnation as a weapon to drive down the property's price. In a judgment against the city, an outraged jury awarded more than $4 million to the Arlington family whose land had been expropriated.

Long before that verdict came down, however, the shiny new structure George W. had christened The Ballpark in Arlington was finished. With the stadium being readied to open the following spring, Bush announced in November 1993 that he would be running for governor. He didn't blush when he proclaimed that his campaign theme would promote self-reliance and personal responsibility rather than dependence on government. As governor, Bush would find that his personal financial interests meshed with those of his partners and supporters -- and those mutual interests were advanced by his actions in office. In Austin, crony capitalism became a way of life.

On December 6, 1994, George W. received a belated $25,000 campaign contribution from Thomas O. Hicks, whose support Bush had unsuccessfully solicited at the beginning of his campaign. Hicks was easily one of the wealthiest men in Texas, and, more specifically, he was the chief executive of Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, a highly diversified investment partnership.

Bush took his donation and supported the investor's ambitious plan to take control of the financial assets of the University of Texas, then worth about $13 billion. As a UT grad, Tom Hicks frankly believed that his alma mater's investment strategy had been far too cautious. He wanted to move billions out of equities and into "alternative" investments of the kind managed by his firm.

From Hicks's point of view, the chief obstacle in tapping such repositories of public treasure was that their activities were subject to scrutiny from a variety of interested parties, including legislators, newspaper reporters, and public interest organizations. So in 1995 Hicks brought a radical innovation to the UT endowment: privatization. He even paid for his own lobbyist to ensure that the legislature passed his plan to transfer all the university's diverse holdings into a new nonprofit corporation known as the University of Texas Investment Management Company, or UTIMCO.

It was one of the most significant changes in Texas government during Bush's tenure in the statehouse and among the first important bills that he signed. With Bush's support and the sponsorship of legislators associated with the Governor, the UTIMCO bill flew through the capitol in 1995 with very few questions asked. The new outfit would not be subject to state laws that mandate open meetings and public records. After UTIMCO officially took over from the regents' investment committees in early 1996, with Hicks as its first chairman, all its business was done behind closed doors. The directors often gathered for their monthly board meetings at the lavish offices of Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst in downtown Dallas.

Largely freed from public accountability, UTIMCO embarked on a series of deals that raised serious questions about conflict of interest and political favoritism. Friends and longtime associates of Thomas Hicks, and his firm's past and future business partners -- as well as major Republican contributors and political supporters of the Bush family -- received hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of Texas investment funds. There was nothing unlawful about these decisions, all of which were vetted by the powerhouse law firm of Vinson & Elkins, another of Bush's largest lifetime donors.

Named by the Governor to oversee the entire UTIMCO operation, as chairman of the university regents, was oilman Donald Evans. He has raised money for all George W.'s political campaigns, beginning with an unsuccessful congressional race in 1978. For the presidential campaign in 2000, Evans ran the Bush "Pioneers," the team of heavy funders who raised more than $100,000 each. (He is currently serving as Secretary of Commerce.)

Following that first $25,000 contribution to George W. in December 1994, Tom Hicks and his brother Steven eventually gave another $146,000 to the Governor's election war chests. His partners have donated tens of thousands more. Together they are among the biggest donors to George W. Bush since 1995. Total contributions to Republican candidates and causes from Hicks, his family members, and his firm are well over half a million dollars.

In 1996, UTIMCO directors made an investment of $50 million with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Among that firm's founding partners is Henry Kravis, the corporate raider who has consistently been among the country's largest contributors to Republican causes during the past decade. Kravis was a financial cochairman of Bush-Quayle 1992, and he boasted to reporters that he was a personal friend and confidant of George Herbert Walker Bush. Two years later, UTIMCO invested $20 million in a deal with Bass Brothers Enterprises. As Republican donors, the Bass clan in Fort Worth rivals Kravis and his partners in generosity. Lee Bass raised $78,000 as a Bush Pioneer in 2000.

UTIMCO also placed $96 million with Maverick Capital, a relatively new partnership in Dallas. Among Maverick's main investors and general partners are members of the Wyly family, the principal stockholders in Sterling Software -- and, again, longtime friends of the Bushes. Between 1993 and 1998, various Wyly family members gave well over $300,000 to Republican candidates and committees. But investor Sam Wyly is best known for funding a series of harsh attack ads against John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries. (As the Republican Party's leading critic of crony capitalism -- a term he has often uttered on the Senate floor -- McCain made himself into a dangerous enemy of the party insiders. They would have spent much more to defeat him.)

Did George W. Bush understand what his appointee Tom Hicks was doing? "I swear I didn't get into politics to feather my nest or feather my friends' nests," Bush told the Houston Chronicle in August 1998. "Any insinuation that I have used my office to help my friends is simply not true."

On completion of the Rangers deal in 1998, Hicks paid about $250 million for the team -- or three times the price paid by Bush and his partners in 1989. The other members of the Rangers partnership had fattened Bush's payout six times over, by awarding him additional shares in the team that brought his 1.8 percent share up to 12 percent. The then governor made about $15 million on the sale.