[wordup] Why I can't vote for Bush (a conservative version)

[Adam Shand]

Via: Jos Willard <jji_w at ...>
From: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=oQsCgRLoPiBNyggi2gnqhx%3D%3D

WHY I CAN'T VOTE FOR BUSH.
Conscientious Objector
by Robert A. George

Sixteen years ago, just out of college, I volunteered at the Republican 
National Convention as a man named George Bush prepared to begin a fall 
campaign that would see him defeat a Democrat from Massachusetts. The 
sparkling words of an acceptance speech crafted by Peggy Noonan--and 
delivered almost flawlessly--helped him inspire his party and a country 
that saw him as an extension of Ronald Reagan. It fell to that George 
Bush to "close out" the cold war and launch a different one in the 
Persian Gulf. 

Now, sixteen years later, after tenures working for the party and a 
couple of Republican members on Capitol Hill (including a speaker named 
Newt Gingrich) and becoming an earnest fellow traveler of the 
conservative movement, I find it impossible to support the current 
George Bush--whom his party sees as the ideological extension of Ronald 
Reagan--as he faces his own showdown with a Democrat from Massachusetts 
and oversees a war centered in the Middle East. 

At the Republican National Convention, George W. Bush mocked John 
Kerry's claim of having "conservative values." But what are 
conservative values? Two of the core principles at the heart of modern 
conservatism are a belief in the virtue of smaller government and a 
conviction that government must be accountable to the public. Those 
principles were enunciated ten years ago in the Contract with America, 
which helped Republicans take full control of Congress for the first 
time in four decades. That document sought "the end of government that 
is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money." In 
this context, Bush's first term has represented a betrayal of 
conservative values. 

It's not simply a matter of outrageous spending or enlarged government 
programs--both offenses of which this administration is guilty, as 
manifested in a 25 percent domestic discretionary spending hike, a 
half-trillion-dollar Medicare expansion, and the ripping away of 
free-market agricultural reforms enacted over the past decade. The 
president continues to pursue tax cuts, as any conservative president 
would. But a government that cuts taxes and continues to spend 
ultimately becomes as amoral as one that raises taxes and spends. 

Yet the Bush administration's free-spending fiscal record only hints at 
its larger rejection of conservative principles. The more fundamental 
betrayal arises from the administration's central focus: an ill-defined 
"war on terror" that has no determinable endpoint and that is used to 
justify an unprecedented expansion of executive power. To make matters 
worse, this administration shows little inclination to demand 
accountability from those who serve within it. In turn, the Republican 
Congress--ignoring its 1994 vow to "restore the bonds of trust between 
the people and their elected representatives"--appears disinclined to 
check the powers of the executive. Together, these factors endanger the 
long-term health of the republic. 

It is a good thing Bush has an idealistic streak that informs his 
vision of the world. That idealism leads him to a belief that "freedom 
is not America's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty God's gift 
to each man and woman in this world." But, without demanding 
accountability from his administration, that messianic zeal is being 
corrupted, and his policies are lurching out of control. Without a 
defined, limited overall vision of the war on terrorism and a 
corresponding commitment to government accountability, Bush can hardly 
claim to be the champion of "conservative values." 

Speaking about the war on terrorism as the GOP convention kicked off, 
Bush told Matt Lauer on the "Today" show, "I don't think you can win 
it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror 
as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world." The White House 
immediately backpedaled from Bush's apparent gaffe, saying this was 
just a variation of what the president has always said--that the war on 
terrorism is a "different kind of war." But, as a former editor of this 
magazine, Michael Kinsley, once stated, "A gaffe is when a politician 
tells the truth." And that's just what Bush was doing. 

The past four decades have seen "wars" on social conditions 
("poverty"), inanimate objects ("drugs"), and physical states ("teenage 
pregnancy"). (Each has met with limited, if any, success.) What is 
different now is that, this time, a president has asserted that we are 
in an actual war that must be fought with the full wartime powers of 
the presidency. With vague congressional approval, this assertion 
grants the president--and, more importantly, the presidency--powers 
deeply disturbing from a civil liberties perspective. Indeed, this 
expansion of presidential prerogative is anathema to the conservative 
belief in limited government. 

The dangers of this new, unlimited power were plain to see at a tough 
congressional hearing in June. Attorney General John Ashcroft squared 
off against the Senate Judiciary Committee as it looked into whether 
Ashcroft's office provided legal cover to the Department of Defense on 
issues involving torture. The Wall Street Journal and other papers ran 
stories based on a heavily redacted 100-page memo, dated March 6, 2003. 
Written by a Defense Department working group, the memo seemed to 
outline ways to justify the use of aggressive interrogation techniques 
on detainees at Guantanamo without running afoul of international 
treaties forbidding torture. The Journal reported: 

> "In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority 
> to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) 
> must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken 
> pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority," the report asserted. 
> ... 
>
> To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo 
> advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other 
> writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside 
> the laws is "inherent in the president." 

In essence, the authors of the Defense Department memo were arguing 
that, in wartime, getting around inconvenient laws is "inherent in the 
president." The memo's existence raised the possibility that the abuses 
at Abu Ghraib were, in fact, an extension of official policy. 

At the hearing, Ashcroft denied that President Bush approved of 
torture. But, in refusing Democratic senators' demands to turn either 
the full memo or similar ones written by the Justice Department over to 
the Judiciary Committee, he said, "We are at war. And for us to begin 
to discuss all the legal ramifications of the war is not in our best 
interest and it has never been in times of war." Ashcroft was 
essentially asserting that Congress--whose oversight powers give it 
authority to demand accountability from the executive--should not be 
allowed to inquire about the quality of legal advice being given to the 
president. This, even though the apparent result of that advice 
"trickled down" to the abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq, and 
Afghanistan. 

If the answer to every legitimate congressional inquiry concerning 
presidential powers is that "we are at war" and that legislative 
questions concerning executive behavior are inappropriate, it becomes 
impossible for Congress to fulfill its constitutional mandate as a 
co-equal branch of government. At what point do the American people ask 
the obvious: What sort of war is this and exactly how long should a 
president have virtually indeterminate powers to wage it? 

Yes, it is true that past presidents have taken on extraordinary 
wartime powers: In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas 
corpus; in World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the internment 
of Japanese citizens. But, in both cases, there existed a defined foe. 
With each, there was a sense of what victory meant and over whom that 
victory would be won. The Union would defeat the Confederacy; America 
and her allies would defeat the Axis powers. Even in the cold war, the 
ideology of communism had a clear home in the Soviet Union. Those 
conflicts would end with the defined enemy surrendering, being 
defeated, or the motivating ideology collapsing. However long it took, 
the American people knew there would be some sort of definite 
conclusion. 

But, in President Bush's vision, the terrorist enemy remains amorphous. 
After September 11, Osama bin Laden was wanted "dead or alive." Then, 
as the Iraq war developed, Saddam Hussein became the ace of spades in 
the terrorist card deck. Now, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi is the new face of 
evil. The war, we are told, will not end with any one of these men's 
capture or death. It will continue until ... until ... until when, 
exactly? Thus, the comparisons many make to previous U.S. conflicts are 
hardly applicable. Neither are the comparisons to decisions of previous 
commanders-in-chief who put aside civil liberties. For the 40 years of 
the cold war, the United States held off a Soviet enemy that had the 
power to destroy the country several times over--yet civil liberties 
were never curtailed to the extent they are now. In the current 
struggle, which some call World War IV, Americans are being asked to 
sacrifice liberties in the face of an enemy that has less ability to 
damage us than the Soviets did. This is not to minimize the threat of 
Islamist fundamentalism, but it is essential to put the capabilities of 
the enemy in perspective. 

The Supreme Court gave some shape to these questions in a series of 
rulings on the rights of Guantanamo detainees and American "enemy 
combatants" Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. What is broadly at stake 
could be seen in the vociferous end-of-the-spectrum minority statements 
by regular antagonists Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia. 
Scalia found the detention of Hamdi, captured in Afghanistan, 
unconstitutional, but disagreed with how the Court chose to resolve 
it--i.e., by saying that the September 13, 2001, congressional war 
resolution gave Bush the power to declare individuals enemy combatants. 
Scalia asserts that the Constitution provides only two options--either 
Congress could vote to suspend habeas corpus or Hamdi could be charged 
with a crime, such as treason. Otherwise, Hamdi couldn't be held 
indefinitely. "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon 
system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite 
imprisonment at the will of the Executive," concludes Scalia. 

On Padilla, the court declined to hear the case on a 
technicality--Padilla's lawyer sued Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 
in federal court, rather than the warden of the Louisiana jail in which 
Padilla was held. Stevens (who, in a man-bites-dog moment, also signed 
onto Scalia's dissent in the Hamdi case) railed against the Court 
decision not to hear the case: 

> At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free 
> society.... Access to counsel for the purpose of protecting the 
> citizen from official mistakes and mistreatment is the hallmark of due 
> process. 
>
> Executive detention of subversive citizens ... may sometimes be 
> justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of 
> destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest 
> in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado 
> detention for months on end is such a procedure.... For if this Nation 
> is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not 
> wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of 
> tyranny. 

It is cold comfort that the furthest left and the furthest right 
justices on the Court are the ones arguing most vigorously about the 
dangers of an unchecked executive. But neither they nor any of their 
colleagues appear interested in pondering the hard questions of an 
American president with extra-constitutional "wartime" powers that 
could continue ad infinitum. Would these powers be automatically 
transferred to a hypothetical President John Kerry? President Hillary 
Rodham Clinton? President Jeb Bush? Should the American people simply 
take on faith the latest commander-in-chief's definition of who is or 
is not a terrorist? Would the American people have accepted such a 
refined status quo for the 40 years the cold war lasted? Or, in the 
formulation of adviser Karl Rove, the 30 years of Great Britain's 
conflict with the Irish Republican Army? (Even in that conflict, 
bargaining partners eventually emerged to craft an unsteady peace 
agreement, whereas Rove has dismissed the idea of ever signing a peace 
treaty with Al Qaeda.) How can the American people expect to stay on a 
war footing when the commander-in-chief has given them no concept of 
what "victory" would eventually look like? And how can they be expected 
indefinitely to tolerate an expansion of executive power that threatens 
the liberties upon which the nation was founded? 

A permanent war would be dangerous enough if the public could be 
confident in its execution. But we cannot. That's because President 
Bush has failed to live up to the second key tenet of conservative 
government: accountability. 

  Take, for example, the Pentagon's disastrous planning for postwar 
Iraq. The lack of troops for the post-invasion period enabled the 
insurgency to bloom and put American soldiers at risk. Worse, while 
memos from Ashcroft's Justice Department seemingly provided legal cover 
for the abuse at Abu Ghraib, the material causes could be found, again, 
in the underdeployment of troops: "What went wrong at Abu Ghraib 
prison?" asked The New York Post's Ralph Peters, one of the more 
earnest supporters of invading Iraq. Pointing to the two independent 
reports examining the scandal, he concludes: "Woefully deficient 
planning for post-war Iraq, too few troops and inadequate leadership at 
the top." Peters is among the conservatives who believe the Abu Ghraib 
fiasco should have been the final straw for Rumsfeld. 

But it didn't happen. And it won't happen, because accountability is a 
foreign word in this administration. To demonstrate how little he has 
learned, Rumsfeld observed, "Does [the abuse] rank up there with 
chopping off someone's head on television? It doesn't. It doesn't. Was 
it done as a matter of policy? No." Forget that the abuse was far more 
pervasive than just the handful of servicemen that first popped up in 
photographs; when the secretary of defense basically says, "Hey, what 
the terrorists do is much worse," the moral foundation upon which 
America stands begins to crumble. The president's stated goal was to 
try to bring democracy to the Middle East--not to allow us to become 
tainted by the barbarism so prevalent in the region we are attempting 
to liberate. So Rumsfeld stays on--even as the situation rapidly 
deteriorates. 

Then again, this shouldn't come as a surprise: George Tenet remained in 
his position following the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history, 
enabling him to tell the president later that evidence of weapons of 
mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk." The first failure helped 
lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans; the second failure led us 
into a conflict from which there exists no clear exit strategy and that 
has rendered the word of the United States suspect. Yet Tenet stayed 
on, too. 

And no wonder. As Bob Woodward writes in Plan of Attack, "[S]everal 
things were clear from the president's demeanor, his style and all that 
[Colin] Powell had learned about Bush. The president was not going to 
toss anyone over the side.... The president also made it clear that no 
one was to jump ship.... They were a team. The larger message was 
clear: Circle the wagons." The larger message is that loyalty is prized 
above all, regardless of the results and regardless of the effect on 
U.S. standing in the world. 

The same pattern is evident in the other WMD scandal, a.k.a. the 
Wretched Medicare Debacle. As is well-known now, the 
prescription-drug-enhanced Medicare "reform" will cost a full quarter 
more--at least--than the originally announced $395 billion over ten 
years. Within weeks of the president's signing the bill into law, the 
measure ballooned to $534 billion. The re-estimation contributes to a 
record annual deficit for 2004. The Post reported that the larger 
numbers were known for "months" and that "the president's top health 
advisers gathered such evidence and shared it with select 
lawmakers"--while rank-and-file members of Congress were kept in the 
dark. 

The deception on the numbers was combined with raw, hard politics that 
danced right up to the ethical and legal lines that supposedly govern 
the House. The legislation--the largest entitlement expansion in nearly 
40 years--just squeaked by. Republican leaders in the House of 
Representatives kept the vote open for an unprecedented three hours in 
order to twist the arms of reluctant conservatives. Retiring Michigan 
Representative Nick Smith alleged that Republicans threatened the 
political future of his son if he didn't support the bill. Smith held 
his ground, despite the de facto extortion--actions that sparked an 
internal House inquiry that has resulted in House Majority Leader Tom 
DeLay having his hand slapped by the Ethics Committee for improperly 
trying to influence Smith's vote. 

Ultimately, on both foreign and domestic policy, the public's trust has 
been betrayed. Why should the public trust its leaders with future 
policy if those leaders deceive and manipulate the people's elected 
representatives to get a favored policy passed? If the American public 
and the world at large now react skeptically to future presidential 
claims that the United States faces a foreign threat, who can blame 
them? 

Similarly, the president's intent to reform Social Security will now be 
judged by the still-emerging costs of the Medicare reform--to say 
nothing of the political backlash from some seniors incensed at having 
to pay 17 percent more in premiums. The mishandling of domestic 
spending, of which Medicare is the prime example--whether because of 
ignorance, incompetence, or deceit--casts the same pall over Bush's 
domestic agenda that the collapse of Iraq does over his foreign policy. 
The president who dismisses criticism of the cost of Medicare is the 
same one who "miscalculated" the costs for rebuilding Iraq by at least 
$100 billion--and submitted a subsequent budget that omitted even an 
estimate of spending for the current military campaigns. Medicare 
actuary Richard Foster was threatened with firing if he told the truth 
about the costs of the reform bill, while his boss who pushed forward 
the lower numbers, Thomas Scully, departed quietly to a cushy health 
care-related policy job at a Washington, D.C., law firm. That was, of 
course, the same pattern we witnessed with the management of the Iraq 
war. Individuals who got the prewar details right--either in terms of 
troop strength (General Eric Shinseki) or in estimated fiscal costs 
(former National Economic Council Director Lawrence Lindsey)--were 
publicly rebuked or dismissed. Those who got the prewar details wrong 
remain in positions of authority. Conservatives--who fear unchecked, 
unaccountable government--should be especially appalled. 

It would be wonderful to believe the president's promise that the war 
in Iraq will lead to democracy in a troubled region. An immigrant--I 
was born in the West Indies--tends to absorb the earnest, spiritual 
myths of his adopted nation even more than those native-born. Democracy 
is indeed a human value. But initiating a war to "liberate" an entire 
region far from our shores can hardly be called a conservative cause. 
It will be impossible to restrain a government kept on a permanent war 
footing. And, in liberty's name abroad, liberty at home will inevitably 
be compromised. It already has been. 

No, a Kerry administration would not be any conservative's ideal. But, 
on limited government, a Democratic president would, arguably, force a 
Republican Congress to act like a Republican Congress. The last such 
combination produced some form of fiscal sanity. And, when it comes to 
accountability, one could hardly do worse. Of course, a conservative 
can still cast a libertarian vote on principle. 

At crucial points before and after the Iraq war, Bush's middle managers 
have failed him, and the "brand" called America has suffered in the 
world market. In any other corporate structure plagued by this level of 
incompetence, the CEO would have a choice: Fire his middle managers or 
be held personally accountable by his shareholders. Because of his own 
misguided sense of "loyalty," Bush won't dismiss anyone. That leaves 
the country's shareholders little choice.