The Book of Bastards (24 page)

The grandson of a senator, descended from two blue-blooded New England families, and the son of a president, George Walker Bush grew up sucking a Texas-sized silver spoon. Early in life Bush was the picture of the wastrel son of privilege, a failure in business, and initially in politics. During the 1990s Bush used part-ownership of a major league baseball team to pave his way into the governorship of Texas. Less than a decade later, after one of the closest and most bitterly divisive campaigns in American history, he won the presidential election of 2000.

Once in office, Bush set about making radical changes to the U.S. government. He cut taxes several times and relaxed government regulation of everything from environmental protection to lobbying. After the terror attacks of 2001, he and his supporters decided it was time to begin making equally radical changes overseas.

In order to do this, the Bushies reasoned, a rogue nation in the heart of the Arab world needed to be conquered and converted into a showpiece of representative democracy. There seemed no other choice than Iraq, especially since invading that country would be an opportunity to “finish” what Bush's father had started with Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Team Bush began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq at the beginning of 2002. Over the summer, news reports about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs kept trickling in. Ultimately, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. It cited the WMDs, Saddam's alleged harboring of Al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as his sorry human rights record as justification. The die was cast. Whether or not the UN agreed to go along, America was going to invade Iraq.

Seven years later, the Iraq War has cost the United States billions in treasure and thousands of lives, not to mention over 100,000 Iraqi lives as well. Although he has many sins to answer for, this one is surely the darkest stain on the stunted soul of George Walker Bush.

So why didn't he back out when he had the chance? According to former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Bush was “a leader unable to acknowledge that he got it wrong, and unwilling to grow in office by learning from his mistake — too stubborn to change and grow.” McClellan identified several roots of the problem:

• “[Bush]'s fear of appearing weak … a more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure.”
  

• “The personal pain he would have suffered if he'd had to acknowledge that the war against Saddam may have been unnecessary…. [He] was not one to look back once a decision was made. Rather than suffer any sense of guilt and anguish, Bush chose not to go down the road of self-doubt or take on the difficult task of honest evaluation and reassessment.”
  

• “[A]nother motive for Bush to avoid acknowledging mistakes was his determination to win the political game at virtually any cost.”
  

• “Bush's insistence on remaining true to his base…. As far as Bush and his advisers (especially Karl Rove) were concerned, being open and forthright in such circumstances was a recipe for trouble.”
  

“A lawyer in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Korean-born and Pennsylvania-raised John Choon Yoo was the principal author of the Bybee Memos. More formally known as the Interrogation Opinion, the collection of letters to the CIA was named for their signatory, Bush administration lawyer and now U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee.

Yoo wrote them in response to a CIA request for advice on how far interrogators could legally go in their questioning of terrorism suspects. What he wrote was a fifty page memo that claimed to define “torture,” under both United States and international law:

In a later Bybee memo, the OLC expressed its opinion on ten techniques to be used to question “high value detainee” Abu Zubaydah as part of an “increased pressure phase.” These techniques included face slapping; slamming against a wall; sleep deprivation for up to seventy-two hours; stress positions designed to cause muscle fatigue; confinement in a dark box with insects; and waterboarding. The memo concluded that none of the techniques constituted torture.

The memos prompted an investigation by the Justice Department's Professional Responsibility division into whether they could be considered competent legal advice. Many believe they only served to enable the administration to cover itself for actions it had already decided to take. Further, the memos could prove problematic for their authors when they travel abroad. Spain has already launched a war crimes investigation against those involved; it is expected to ask the United States for their extradition.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

As for John Yoo, where the terror memos don't seem to have hurt his former boss's career, his enthusiastic embrace of the legal “rebranding” of the notion of “torture” put a capper on his own career path in the Justice Department. He resigned in disgust at his being passed over repeatedly for promotion, and went back to teaching law.

He continues to argue for the legality of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

We've established that a group of people can be “bastards” collectively, so why not a corporation? Well, if ever there was a “bastard corporate entity,” it was Texan energy giant Enron.

By the year 2000 the name “Enron” became synonymous with fraud and corruption. The company's dramatic rise and stunning fall exposed major faults in America's regulation of the energy and financial services industries.

Enron was founded in the mid-1980s as a power transmission and natural gas company. It later branched out into energy futures and online commodities trading. The company's high stock price and innovative trading methods won it accolades;
Forbes
dubbed it “America's Most Innovative Company” from 1996 to 2001.

At one point there were even rumors that Enron chairman Ken Lay would be named as energy secretary if his personal friend George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election. With its stock soaring and the right friends in the right places, there seemed to be no limit on how high the company could fly.

Too bad it was all an illusion.

The truth is that Enron really never made a dime. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars year in, year out, and it shielded those losses from disclosure with various corporate entities and all manner of what many accountants call Cleverly Rigged Accounting Ploys (use your imagination to figure out that acronym!).

Enron's accounting company Arthur Andersen abdicated its role of watchdog. In fact, the firm actively enabled Enron's fraud by allowing it to utilize market to market accounting. Enron was then able to book the future value of an as-yet unfinished deal as current revenue.

Enron bought real power plants with its artificial money. It then sold the power on the open market for what the market would bear. To this end, it orchestrated power plant shutdowns during periods of high demand, like the summer of 2000 in California. This price manipulation drove California's largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), into bankruptcy. PG&E had to be bailed out by California's taxpayers to regain its solvency.

When Enron finally went bankrupt, tape recordings of phone calls between the company's traders were made public. In numerous profanity-laced conversations, Enron's traders openly bragged about driving energy prices so high that elderly people could not afford to pay their electric bills.

Enron's fake dealings had very real-world consequences for many innocent people. Its employees' retirement fund contributions were not matched with cash but with shares of Enron stock. When the company went under, its employees' nest eggs did too.

After it all came crashing down, Enron Chairman Ken Lay was convicted on ten counts of fraud. He was facing over 175 years in prison, but died of a timely heart attack prior to his sentencing.

So this is a case where one of the principal “bastards” in question actually died before he could begin serving his richly deserved life sentence, and the other has been serving a lengthy jail term in prison!

Now
that
is justice!

Louisiana born and bred, David Vitter is also a product of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar. Unlike fellow Southern politician bastard Bill Clinton, Vitter actually finished his course of study at Oxford University; obviously the guy is one smart cookie. And like his Louisiana Senate predecessor and fellow bastard Huey Long, Vitter has demonstrated himself to be both an opportunist and a “reformer.”

And he likes hookers. A lot.

Vitter rose from the Louisiana state legislature to the U.S. House and Senate on the strength of his solid conservative values. He has fought against abortion rights and for gun rights. He opposes expansion of gambling, called for the repeal of the estate tax, and has worked tirelessly to increase government military spending.

First elected to Congress in 1999 in a special election after House Speaker Bob Livingston's resignation in an adultery scandal, Vitter has always been quick to point out the moral shortcomings of others. Apparently in his frequent readings of the Bible he missed that whole “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” thing. After winning reelection handily in a safe Republican district, Vitter won a Senate seat in 2004.

Allegations that Vitter had repeatedly cheated on his wife with prostitutes began to swirl around him in 2002; they forced him to withdraw from the Louisiana governor's race. These rumors resurfaced in 2007 when the “D.C. Madam” scandal involving Deborah Jeane Palfrey hit the news. Vitter's phone number appeared in records seized by federal agents in connection with the investigation; Vitter acknowledged being Palfrey's customer.

And yet the first time through the list, the Feds actually missed Vitter's number. So who does the public have to thank for catching this sanctimonious bastard in the act?

Hustler
publisher, free speech advocate, and all-around vindictive son-of-a-bitch Larry Flynt. Flynt paid private detectives to comb through the reams and reams of phone numbers in Palfrey's records looking for someone exactly like Vitter. In a fitting irony, if Vitter owes both his Congressional career and his ongoing problems with his infidelity to anyone aside from himself, it's Flynt.

Flynt was also the person behind the revelations that Livingston was having an affair back in 1999. He had done much the same thing in Livingston's case as he had in Vitter's; the only difference seemed to be that he paid operatives to cull through the phone records of a Louisiana cat-house instead of those of a D.C. madam.

Once exposed Vitter copped to his “sin” in the requisite news conference where he asked for forgiveness from everyone, including, of course, his wife. She stood stoically behind him, as have so many other wronged women in the history of modern political sex scandals. Newspapers back in New Orleans began to report that he had once been a client of a since-shut-down New Orleans brothel. Vitter emphatically denies this, but the ex-madam who ran the place insists he did use her services, even recalling him as a nice guy: “Just because people visit a whorehouse doesn't make them a bad person,” she's been quoted as saying. Yeah, and just because someone's a U.S. Senator doesn't make them a good one, either!