This F*cking Guy: George W. Bush

Welcome to another episode of this fucking guy, the series that spotlights one fucking guy making America worse and explains why they suck. I'm Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media's hysteria podcast. And I'm Jane Kostin, host of Crooked Media's What a Day. The Crooked Media collabs will continue until morale improves. And today is my birthday, and I'm so excited that I get a very special gift. Erin, can you tell me what my amazing present is? Well, you've known what the present is for quite some time, but you can pretend to be surprised. Jane, I'm so excited to have you on this episode to get into the life and crimes of George W. Bush. He's the war criminal you'd like to have a beer with or buy a painting from. Now, Jane, both of us are elder millennials, so we remember the star-spangled mania of the post-9/11 era, like a post-concussion hallucination. A truly insane time when Toby Keith was considered cool. We wore whisker wash, low-rise glitter jeans, and going out tops to parties. And George W. Bush was a popular and beloved statesman. There were even books written about how great he was, and how he'd never be forgotten, and how Republicans would need to learn from him, and those books have since been forgotten. I wonder why? In the years since W. departed the White House in a blaze of failure, the litany of monstrosities he ordered or oversaw have faded from memory. At least enough that he's now seen in popular culture as a good-natured pea-paw, sneak in mints to Michelle Obama during funerals. But none of what we're seeing now in the Trump era would have been possible without George W. Bush. He kicked open the big, stupid door. But the phrase regarding the antics of Trump, they're saying the quiet part out loud, implies that there was a quiet part. George W. Bush was the quiet part. George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1946, which makes him two weeks younger than current President Donald Trump. Which, really, that's something to chew on. Weird. W. was born into a family of immense privilege, the oldest son of Barbara Pierce Bush, whose father was descended from the family of President Franklin Pierce, who died of alcoholism, and George H. W. Bush, who was himself the son of Prescott Bush, a Wall Street big shot, who eventually represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate. W's great grandfather was a railroad tycoon. A whole family of Mr. Monopolys. Soon after W. was born, Bush senior moved his family from Connecticut to Texas, where he was outside of his patriarch's shadow, but not so far away, he couldn't take advantage of his family's wealth and influence. In the early 1950s, his uncle George Herbert Walker Jr., Bush senior's uncle Herbie, on his mom's side, wrote, "George senior a check to start his own oil extraction company. Walker would later go on to be one of the original owners of the New York Mets." It's like a nepot baby lasagna. One of the main privileges of the alter-rich is they never need to advance beyond childhood. There's always somebody waiting to pay for you, to absorb your failures, to bankroll whatever super-sweet 16 fantasy you want to live out, until you die of old age. If you're rich enough, male enough, and white enough, you're a boy until your dad dies. You can be an 80-year-old boy. Off his legacy status W went to Andover, sometimes known as Phillips Academy, a fancy boarding school in Connecticut like his daddy. According to a 1999 Texas monthly profile, "For his first English assignment, Bush was told to recount an emotional experience, writing about something that made him cry." He looked up the word "tears," T-E-A-R-S, in at the Soros, hoping to find an impressive synonym. He wrote, "Lacerates ran down my cheeks." Oh, he looked up the wrong hominem, tears, "Lacerates ran down my cheeks." The professor gave him a zero, calling his paper, "disgraceful." End quote. That explains how we wound up in the Iraq War. Anyway, W failed to make the honor roll at Andover, which I'm unsurprising. And his SAT score put him firmly in average territory, which is actually kind of impressive given the "Lacerates" story. But he did appoint himself high commissioner of stickball, which he took very, very seriously, according to Texas Monthly. He also designed stickball team membership cards bearing what appeared to be a school seal and distributed them as fake IDs students used to get into Boston bars. Ah! The accident of his fortunate birth got the average student into Yale. The same school attended by his dad, his grandpa, and several of his uncles. He played on the baseball team like his dad, and like his daddy, grandfather, and check writing baseball team owning Uncle on his mom's side, Bush was a member of the Skull and Bone Society. A real, rory Gilmore about worse. Only 15 members of the Rising Senior Class are tapped to be members of the Elite Fart Sniffing Society, the Skull and Bone's per year. The society did not admit it's first black member until 1965 and did not admit any women whatsoever until 1992, a decision that caused much rump thing and now see hearing among its elite alumni. As a black woman, however, I would say, "I'm good. I'm good on." It's cool. All right, W was unimpressive at Yale, a C student, but he was fun. He once got in trouble for drunkenly climbing on the goalposts after the Yale Princeton football game and refusing to come down. Other time, he and some frat brothers stole a Christmas wreath from a new haven store. Some say W's collegiate imbibing went beyond alcohol. Kitty Kelly's unauthorized biography of the Bush family called The Family, alleges that like many rich dicks who came after him, W was a big fan of the Yale, but then white duke, the disco pixie sticks. According to Kelly's book, which was vociferously denied by the Bush family, Bush dabbled with blow for many years. Kelly cited two unnamed Yale sources in her book that alleged that Bush loved to ski down Mount Gack, one who said he sold Coke to W, another who said he did Coke with W, which has dodged this for years. In the run up to the 2000 presidential election, he was the only one of 12 Republican presidential hopefuls to dodge the question of whether he'd ever taken a nose dive into powderville, saying in typical Bushy fashion, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible." So eventually he stopped being young, but kept being irresponsible. After Yale, W continued to hop from one nepotistic advantage to another. In January 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, Bush took the Air Force officer qualification test. He scored in the 25th percent dial, the lowest possible qualifying score in the pilot aptitude section. Another lucky break for W, though. Just days before his student draft deferment was about to lapse, leaving invulnerable to being called to serve in Vietnam, the commander of the Texas Air National Guard interviewed him and recommended him for pilot training. His application was approved the very same day. It must have been the interview of a lifetime, as Bush leapfrogged a waiting list of hundreds and received a direct commission as a second lieutenant without ROTC, or having attended officer candidate school. The unit didn't even need pilots at the time. The Texas Air National Guard was authorized to carry 29 pilots, and at the time of George W. Bush's entry into the program, 27 were serving and two were in training. At the time, George Bush's senior was a member of Congress. Years later, the then-speaker of the Texas House Ben Barnes would testify that he had called the Brigadier General directly to recommend the fortunate son for the sought-after appointment. At the request of Sydney Adger, an oil man who just so happened to be a close friend of the Bush's. Wow, what a series of extremely lucky breaks and coincidences. W.B.A. committed to six years of military service. What he turned in was about two, two. That's less than six. In 2004, Democrat Terry McAuliffe started bandying about the phrase AWOL, absent without leave, in reference to Bush's military service, and while that can't be established with the facts that we do have. Most people who attended a job as much as Bush attended his job with the Air Force reserves would be fired. Bush went to work on an Alabama Senate campaign in 1972. Another job his daddy's connections got for him, Natch. According to Kelly's book, he would show up to work at the campaign right around noon, put his cowboy boots up on his desk and wax boastful about the previous night's drinking. A reminder, this man is actually from Connecticut. Yeah, he's from Connecticut. W.S. skipped out on his required annual military physical that year. One former guards have been floated the idea to Kelly that one reason a military member might skip out on the physical was because they couldn't pass the drug test. Now we don't know why Bush skipped it. He's never explained what happened. Without physical clearance, W.S. flying status was suspended on August 1st, 1972, which makes it hard to service a pilot in the Air Force, which requires flying a plane. Hmm. The military had spent around a million dollars training him, and after that status suspension, he never flew an aircraft again. Thank God. Money well spent, America. Between May 1972 and May 1973, there were at least eight months for which we simply don't know what George W. Bush was doing for the military if anything. His attendance required military trainings is completely undocumented. But we do know that in January 1973, he turned up in Houston doing community service, a project poll, an inner city youth program in a placement arranged by Say It With Me. His daddy. That fall, W.S. entered Harvard Business School. He was admitted while his father was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Wow. Another dad shaped lucky break. And he was granted an honorable discharge from the Air Force National Guard on October 1st, 1973, well before his six-year commitment was up so that he could traipse off to Cambridge. He was 27. In the five years since he left Yale, George W. Bush had been moved to the front of a line, commissioned without the usual credentials, given a campaign job, excused from a mandatory physical without evident consequence, placed in a community program by his father's friend, admitted to Harvard and released early from a military obligation. Wow. Wow. The drinking continued to pace. On Christmas in 1972, Bush got plowed and drove his 16-year-old brother, Marvin, home. Great decisions. On that trip, W.A. hit the neighbor's garbage bins with his car. And when his dad confronted him about his unruly behavior, W.Challenged Bush senior to a fight. According to members of the Bush family who spoke to the Washington Post in 1999, W challenged Bush senior to go Manu Amano, which I can hear in the voice of Will Ferrell's impression of him. That incident is what led to Bush being sent to Bad Boy Jail, a.k.a. the service project we mentioned in Houston. You'll be stunned to know George should be Bush to not learn his lesson in September of 1976. Bush was pulled over near his family's fancy summer home in Kenna Bunkport, Maine, with three other people in the car. He was 30 years old, which is like barely a teenager in rich years, but he failed a roadside sobriety test and blew the legal limit at the PlayStation. He pled guilty to drunk driving and paid $150 fine. 150 like the 70s really were the golden age of driving drunk. Yeah, the story is about congressman and DC driving drunk are epic, but that's not all. He also lost his main driver's license for 30 days, hmm, how the long arm of the law. Less than a week before the 2000 election, the story of W's old DUI broke. The Bush campaign called it a dirty trick, but Bush wasn't the only one on the 2000 Republican ticket with a propensity for driving drunk. Dick Jani, his running mate, had two previous DUIs under his strained belt. Wow, the Bush campaign complaining about dirty tricks. Wow, what a time we will all have. The DUI didn't stop Bush from purting his way through the 70s and into the 80s, nor did it stem his ambition or at least his dad's ambition for his eldest boy. Bush felt directionless at Harvard Business School. Everybody hated his dad, who was working for a watergate plagued Richard Nixon. One classmate described him as lost and forlorn, but others straight up hated him. One told Kitty Kelly, quote, "I can still see him in his cowboy boots and leather flight jacket walking into macroeconomics." He sat in the back of the class chewing tobacco and spitting it into a dirty paper cup. He was one red-ass Texan who made sure he was in your Yankee face and up your new England nose." He is from Connecticut. After Business School, Bush moved back to Texas to seek more fortune in oil. In 1977, he founded a company called Arbusto Energy and by alacans lived like a disgusting slab living above a garage and relying on his friends' wives to do his laundry. He spent his free time in bars. Yeah, he was just a kid, though. The money from his company was drawn from his trust fund and a Wall Street big shot uncle who cobbled together $4.7 million in investments from the likes of his grandma. And James Arbath, who was the North American representative of Saudi oil billionaires, including Salam Bin Laden. Wow, that name seems familiar. Any relation to it? Yes, Salam Bin Laden was a Salam Bin Laden's half-brother and the effective patriarch of the Bin Laden family after the death of his father in a 1967 plane crash. Salam Bin Laden would go on to die in a freak accident also in a plane crash in 1988 in Texas. The accident was never investigated, but I'm sure there's nothing fishy there. I'm sure it's fine. In 1977, Bush met a 30-year-old school librarian named Laura Welch at a party. She was a registered Democrat who had backpacked across Europe and sounds like she might have been a kind of grubby lady in her youth except for the fact that in 1963, she ran a stop sign and killed somebody with her car. W moved fast. Three months later, they were married. No, W undaunted by his failson resume was running for Texas's 19th congressional district when he tagged the knot, his first race, which he lost. Meanwhile, Bush senior had leveraged a failed 1980 presidential campaign into the vice presidency. This was another lucky break for W.F. turns out it's easy for a shitty businessman to raise money when his dad's Reagan's vice president. In 1982, Bush wisely changed the name of our booster energy to Bush Exploration. Make sure they know who your father is is one of the main lessons they teach you at Harvard Business School. Very important. By 1984, Bush Exploration had made a name for itself in the drilling of dry holes I will not make a joke. All those fancy investors and Bin Laden's got back something on the order of 45 cents in the dollar. Facing collapse, Bush Exploration merged into Spectrum 7, a Cincinnati-based outfit co-owned by William Dwitt Jr, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, and was installed as chairman and CEO. Spectrum 7 lost about $1.5 million in 1985 and was in your bankruptcy by 1986. Hmm, in September 1986, luckily, Harkin Energy bought the failing company and put W. its failed CEO on the payroll. In January 1990, Harkin, which had never drilled offshore or outside the United States, went an exclusive offshore drilling contract from Bahrain somehow. Weird. On June 22, 1990, Bush sold roughly $212,000 Harkin shares for about $848,000 to a Los Angeles broker. Weeks later, Harkin reported a $23.2 million loss. W. filed his required insider sale disclosure months late. The SEC opened in inquiry and closed it in 1991 without action. The SEC chairman was his father's appointee because by this point, George H. W. Bush is president of the United States of America. It's another dad-shaped, lucky break. Yay! The party continued, and sometimes it made the news. Once an intoxicated Bush approached the Washington Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal at a Mexican restaurant where he and his journalist wife were eating with their four-year-old son, the man had predicted in print that Jack Camp would beat George H. W. Bush for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. W. swore at the family and then said, "I saw what you wrote, we're not going to forget this." 13 years later, Bush would apologize claiming he couldn't remember what he had even said that night. But I bet the four-year-old remembers if George W. Bush doesn't. During the 80s, Bush's own mother stopped speaking to him for a spell over a drunken sexual comment he made to one of her friends at a dinner party. About a month later, after a 40th birthday celebration, Bush would decide to get sober, according to the story widely shared during the run-up to the 2000 election. It's not clear whether a single incident led to the decision or if W. just got tired of feeling like shit and going on blacked out of scene tirades in front of preschoolers. But the way he tells it, got off the sauce full of help from a long-haired free spirit named Jesus Christ. Embracing sobriety and at least pretending to embrace Christianity, Bush was able to pivot from drunken fuck-up to sober fuck-up. Enter the Texas Rangers, sentient Ham Hawk and longtime friend Carl Rove had once told W. Bia that the way to endear himself to the public was to own a baseball team. And in 1989, he got his chance. W.'s former partner in the oil business, Red's owner DeWitt, relayed to W. that the Texas Rangers owner was itching to sell. George W. once again used his dad's connections to bring a group of investors together to buy the team. He put in $606,000 of his own money, which is not even enough to buy a single family home in Los Angeles in 2026. But that's when he put in and he was able to buy the Texas Rangers, most of which he borrowed and repaid with the proceeds from the Harkinstock sale that he had that definitely wasn't insider trading. On to the next one, Bush and the new Rangers owners wanted a new stadium, but they do not want to pay for it. Many such cases heard that before. After a pressure campaign, where the owners threatened to move the franchise in 1991, heard that one. The city of Arlington, Texas approved a sales tax and increased meant to fund the construction of a $191 million ballpark for the team. That increase came after a taxpayer funded campaign to convince voters to approve a tax increase. Cool. Cool. The stadium needed a home and the team owners had their eyes on 13 acres owned by the Mathis family. The family was offered $817,220. A price set by a realtor who also happened to be one of the team owners. And we're told that if they did not take the offer, that the Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority, which had been given eminent domain power, would condemn their property and just take it. A judge ruled years later that the family should have been paid much, much more. In total, a judge ruled the Rangers owed the Mathis family $11 million total for underbiting the land's real value. Plus interest. Which the Rangers tried to avoid paying. The agreement with Arlington stipulated that the team owners would put forth $50 million of their own money. They didn't. Instead, they added a dollar surcharge to the tickets. The agreement also declared that rent money paid to the franchise would contribute to purchasing the stadium. So, so, after 12 years of paying a maximum agreed upon amount, the owners outright owned a stadium, bankrolled entirely by taxpayers and ticket surchargers on property seized from locals. I love sports. Anyway, Bush was the managing partner and public face of the team when all this went down, but ClamT had no idea about the jiggery pokery afoot, but he's sober now. So, how could he know? How could he know? So, in 1993, a Houston Chronicle reporter asked W, what he would say to people in Austin, who claimed that he'd never accomplished anything. Well, Bush knew all about the stadium then. He used the stadium as evidence that he knew a lot about, a lot of things. And shortly thereafter, Bush threw his pristine cowboy hat into the ring for Texas governor, despite never having held elected office or achieving anything on his own. In East Texas, a whisper campaign suggested that Bush's democratic opponent, incumbent Ann Richards, was a lesbian. And that her staff was full of lesbian, doing a lesbian thing. No, like rescuing dogs, wearing sensible shoes. Richards later told Texas Monthly that somehow flyers appeared on windshields and church, parking lots depicting two men kissing, alleging that Richards wanted to teach gay in public schools. I endorse teaching gay in public schools. I think public schools should only teach gay. Little more math, just gay. So, it really wasn't a race that could be won on the strength of Bush's resume, but rather on the ugliness of his campaigns behind the scenes and mechanizations. But it worked, Bush defeated Richards in 1994. Now, we're going to have to speed run through the magnitude of what a disaster W's governorship was for Texas, but here goes. Let's start with the environment. When Bush became governor, Texas was a country's largest industrial air polluter, largely because of of a 1971 state law that basically let more than 800 polluters avoid environmental restrictions. In 1997, after his own environmental director warned that something needed to change, Bush asked two oil company executives from Marathon Exxon to design a voluntary cleanup program to remedy this. Oh, great. They're definitely going to help. Bush backed in 1999 law called SB766, which was literally written by a chemical industry lobbyist, named "Our Kinnon Goldman." That's. That's so many names. That's a chemical industry lobbyist name for sure. It was opposed by every single environmental organization in the state. What happened next won't surprise you. Basically no polluters voluntarily complied. Emissions did not decline in any significant way, and while Bush was governor, Houston surpassed Los Angeles in ozone pollution. When Bush ran for president in 2000, he touted the so-called "Texas Miracle." Education improvements he claimed to have masterminded while governor. On paper, it looked impressive between 1994 and 1998, the share of 10th graders passing all three parts of a standardized test went from 52% to more than 70%. Dropout rates fell. Now, white students were doing better. But passing a standardized test doesn't mean students are getting smarter. Texas schools, terrified of losing funding over failing to hit standardized test benchmarks, were holding students back in 9th grade, so that the worst students weren't even taking the 10th grade standardized test. Many of the kids that were held back ended up dropping out of school. Now, how did dropout rates in Texas fall? While students were actually dropping out in droves, easy. Schools were simply not reporting them. The strategy? Leave? Children? Behind. I love it. So the kids that would have brought down the average were just not taking the test at all. An independent analysis didn't back up its shiny stats that the Bush campaign trotted out on the campaign trail. Texas SAT scores, for example, were either flat or slightly dropping relative to scores in other states during the Texas Bush years. And the share of students passing a test that measured college readiness fell from 65% to about 43%. And it turns out that the Houston School District, which was held up as a model for health districts across the country, could succeed, was straight up falsifying its dropout numbers. This will happen again and again and again. Unfortunately, this inconvenient truth didn't come to light until after President George W. Bush made Houston School Superintendent Rod Page Secretary of Education. I've written the so-called Houston approach into the "no child left behind" act. Hmm. Yay! "History is brought to you by Babel." If you're planning to travel this year, here's a real travel hack. Don't wait until you land to start learning the language. That's too late! Don't wait until then, try Babel instead. 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He signed a law allowing concealed carrier handguns that have been vetoed by his predecessor, and he got tough on drugs, especially cocaine. Which he never, ever, ever done. Not even once. Not even once. Even if he had, we should forgive him because he was just a 40-year-old child at the time. Under W.A. Texas made possession of under a gram of cocaine and felony and gave judges the ability to imprison first-time offenders for up to 180 days. Which is rich. Because in Kitty Kelly's book, Bush's former sister-in-law Sharon alleged that W. had been blowing lines with his younger brother, Marvin, Camp David, when George Bush Sr. was president. We have to take this one with a grand assault, though. After Kelly's book came out, Sharon Bush claimed that she'd never said that W. had been doing coke at Camp David. She had been in the middle of an acrimonyist divorce from Neil Bush at the time, so who knows what's true. We're just reporting on what's been printed. Back to Texas, Governor Richards had been open about her status as a recovering addict and had built an ambitious inmate drug rehab system. All stopped, though, when Bush took office in 1995. One state senator claims that Bush told him that inmates didn't need treatment because he had quit drinking on his own. Just a quick note. If you quit drinking out of nowhere, you can die. So, that's cool and fun. Yeah. We love that. Yeah. In 1999, the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force arrested more than 45 people in Talia, Texas, around 15% of Talia's entire Black population, on the word of a single undercover officer named Tom Coleman. There were no photographs, recordings, video evidence, written records, and no witnesses to back Coleman up. But nevertheless, sentences for the people apprehended in that bus ran as high as 434 years. In 2000, then Texas Attorney General John Cornyn gave Tom Coleman the Alamana of the Year award. But whoops, whoops, turns out that Coleman just made it up. In 2003, Coleman was convicted of perjury. In 2003, George W. Bush's successor, Rick Perry, pardoned 35 of the people rounded up in Talia. But G. Wiz did Bush kill a lot of people during his time in office. Texas executed 152 prisoners, which is more than any governor in modern American history. The governor of Texas can't unilaterally pardon someone from death row. That requires the consent of a board of pardons. But Bush never complained about the system or even tested it. Instead, because he hates having to do anything. He had his legal counsel, a Bertel Gonzalez, prepare a memo for him with an identical template. For each scheduled execution, Gonzalez and his staff would hand W up a three or four-page brief. That's good. You don't want too much reading to be required. About the crime committed by the condemned. At the end, there were two checkable boxes. Deny or grant. I'm assuming those boxes were large enough that the governor could comfortably respond in cram. Alan Burlow got a copy of those memos, which she reported on for the Atlantic in 2003. Notably missing from the memos were any considerations for mercy, like mental illness, being a victim of physical or sexual abuse, remorse, rehabilitation, erase history, or incompetent representation. - One of the more noteworthy cases that came across Bush's desk was that of Carlife Tucker. Tucker was sentenced to death for a 1984 double murder, which was grisly, which Tucker said she did under the influence of drugs. In prison, she converted to Christianity, she got clean, she was a model prisoner, everyone, from her own warden to the brother of one of her victims, to the fucking pope, pled for clemency, but Bush refused to even grant a 30-day stay. In 1998, she became the first American woman to be killed by capital punishment since 1984. - Now, the million-dollar question. Did any of this tough on crime, Walker, Texas Ranger, style, posturing work? Short answer. - No. Violent crime fell in Texas during the Bush presidency, but it also fell everywhere else at the same time as it did because of the '90s. - Yeah, it was the '90s. But there's no convincing argument that anything Bush did caused the crime rate to fall. - And for a guy who claimed to be tough on crime, Bush was only tough on some crimes committed by some people. In 1998, James Bird Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to death behind a truck by three white supremacists, an appalling modern-day lynching. In June 1998, a bill named after him failed in the Texas legislature without the support of then-governor Bush. Anti-hate crime legislation could have been an ally for Bush, but for some reason, for some reason, he chose not to push it. - Once again, Texas A&M meet major Rick Perry swoops in to see him like a humanitarian icon next to his predecessor. In 2001, he signed the James Bird Jr. Hate Crimes Act into law. That is my second favorite thing Rick Perry ever did. First is dancing with the stars. - Oh yeah, he was, you can't not like Rick Perry on dancing with the stars. - It's just iconic. - Bush further transformed Texas into the fuck you state by screwing over its kids. In 1997, Congress passed a program that would have allotted states a federal match of $3 to every $1 the state spent on chip, or the Children's Health Insurance Program. This would have been helpful to Texas, which had the most uninsured children in the entire US. - The Texas legislature had just adjourned, but W could have taken advantage of the literal free money from the federal government to fix an ongoing problem facing kids in a state by calling a special session to approve it or doing it on a zone administratively, but he did neither. - And so uninsured kids in Texas in families with incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid, but not high enough to pay for private insurance went without access to medical care until 1999 when the legislature came back into session. Texas forfeited two years of the match. - And then, when it was time to take it up, Bush tried to push down income levels for qualifying families. If Bush had gotten his way, 200,000 fewer Texas kids would have been eligible for the funds, which again, were basically free money from the federal government. - When Bush finally got done dragging his feet, there was no staff to run the program, thanks to the fact that Bush's welfare overall had eliminated hundreds of positions at the State Department of Human Services, whoops. But by May 2000, Bush's ambitions lit a fire under his ass, and he was running for president as a compassionate conservative, a self-designation that wouldn't fly in the face of what he actually did to uninsured kids as governor. So these already overburdened state employees were given a mandate to enroll half a million kids in the program in just 18 months, an impossible pace. All because Bush wanted something on his resume that made it look like he cared after slowing the process down for more than two years. - Is it bad that I'm like, remember when Republicans wanted to look like they cared about things? - Bars and hell, the bars and hell. Now, my lovely, so you may be wondering, did Bush fiscal conservative at least save money? The answer is a resounding no. - W. Inherited a state in comfortable shape, Comptroller John Sharp's revenue estimate for the 1996, 1997 by NEM delivered as Bush took office in January 1995, required no new taxes and no rate increases. The appropriations bill, the legislature, wrote that spring delivered a $200 million surplus. Not too shabby. Let's see what our big boy does with it. - Yeah, let's see. In 1997, W. Enveiled an ambitious plan to cut school property taxes and pay for it by broadening the business tax, claiming that the changes would make up for the shortfall. But according to the state Comptroller's analysis, the plan fell short by $400 million. Then, in 1999, sitting on a surplus of roughly $6 billion, Bush converted about $1.8 billion of it into a tax cut, bringing the two-session total to around $3 billion. Does cutting taxes for the rich lead to an improvement in the economic conditions of the average person? In the words, a brilliant Bush era satire or arrested development, now it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but it might work for us. - Texas has no income tax. Its revenue is leveraged to sales tax and oil, which means good years look better than they are and bad years rye fast. As during the 2000 campaign, what would happen when the Texas economy turned, Bush choked that he hoped not to be there to deal with it. And he wasn't. He left for Washington in December 2000. - Someone else can deal with it. - The state government he left behind faced a shortfall of several hundred million the next year by January 2003, the Texas Comptroller projected that revenue for the coming biennium would fall $7.4 billion short of estimated expenditures. And once you school employee health plan and health and human services costs were added, the gap was $9.9 billion. - That's a big gap for all governor Perry and the legislature closed the shortfall by trimming and slashing and cutting. But the cuts that the Texas government had to make to clean up W's mess landed on exactly the program, Bush hinged his compassion itself designation on chip enrollment fell from 512,986 in 2003 to 326,473 in 2005. - W's 2000 presidential campaign presented a carefully curated image meant to stand in contrast to Bill Clinton's one full ratio enjoying and pot smoking. This was slightly inconvenient given Bush's history of dabbling in an array of illegal substances, but leave it to the dastardly Karl Rove to clean up a reputation as messier as a fret house mudroom. - In 2005, tape secretly recorded by a former Bush aid Doug weed, that's W-E-A-D, but that's a hilarious name for a secret recording about drugs. The recording revealed that Bush admitted during the 2000 campaign that he won't answer questions about marijuana cocaine and LSD because he doesn't want the children to do what he tried to do 30 years prior. There's a lot more to say about the 2000 campaign, but in the interest of everybody's time, let's give a head a little bit to the moment we've all been waiting for slash dreading. Election night, 2000. - I know, I know, but I'm glad you're here with me because you don't want to go through this moment alone. - After a long hard fought campaign and several prolonged on-stage makeup sessions between Al and Tipper Gore, we've arrived at November 7th, 2000, a date which will live in infamy. - Like you, Erin. I was there when the dark magic was written, when the networks called Florida for Democratic Vice President Al Gore only to retract it, call it for W and retract it again. By the time everybody went to bed on election night, it was clear that Gore had likely secured the popular vote. But thanks to the electoral colleges, a colonial era contortions to artificially inflate the voting power of slave owners, it doesn't matter which candidate wins the most votes in American elections. It matters who wins the most electoral votes and whoever won Florida took all the marbles. - On the morning after the election, the Florida Division of Elections reported bush ahead by 1,784 votes out of nearly six million cast. That's a margin that triggered an automatic machine recount. But bush, once again, this is deeply traumatic for me, had some friends up his sleeve. Florida Secretary of State, Catherine Harris, was simultaneously co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign. The governor was Jeb Bush, W's kid brother, and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, no relation to the Bush family. Yes, I'm still mad, took 97,488 votes in Florida. - Yeah, it's very ironic that the Green Party candidate led to the least environmentally friendly president in American history. What a catastrophic miscalculation. The recount met hundreds of lawyers descended on Tallahassee. One bush campaign official called it woodstock for constitutional lawyers. - Or hell. - That sounds like hell. - This is the Brooks Brothers ride, is it not? - Yes, it is. - Ted Cruz, then a 29-year-old domestic policy advisor and former rankwist clerk, assembled the Bush legal operation, which grew to roughly 400 attorneys. - When the Miami-Dade canvassing board moved its recount to a room with restricted press access, dozens of protesters, pasty white GOP staffers, flown in from Washington in suits, violently forced their way toward the election's office. This is a Brooks Brothers ride right here. But it was really a ride. Like several people were trampled or struck. One DNC aid was kicked and punched. The board ended up halting its recount, partly due to the riot that day. - On December 8th, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual tabulation of 9,000 contested Miami-Dade ballots and an immediate statewide manual recount of all under votes. But the Bush campaign wanted the ballot counting to stop while he was ahead. On December 9th, the Supreme Court granted W's emergency application, stayed the Florida Court's order, physically stopping the counting. Currently dead Justice Antonin Scalia's concurrence to the stay argued that continued counting, threatened a reprobble harm to Bush by casting a cloud over the legitimacy of a victory, he might later be found to have won. - On December 11th and 12th, the court heard arguments an issued a five-four ruling in Bush v. Gore, stopping the recounting, granting George W. Bush the presidency by 537 votes. In fucking Florida, Al Gore had received more than 500,000 more votes than Bush nationwide. - The army of becacquied lawyers who made sure Bush got what he wanted, again, were rewarded handsomely. Three of them, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are currently sitting members of the Supreme Court. Roberts was appointed by Bush, while Kavanaugh and ACB were appointed by Trump. Claire, it's Thomas, appointed by George Bush, Senior, of course, voted exactly how Republicans wanted him to vote, like the sexually-proverted toti that he's always been. Speaking of, Match Lab was one of the Brooks His brother's right ring leaders and eventually became Bush's White House political director. For it also was alleged that he's got grabby hands with male subordinates. Gary Malphreus, French and Central and the right photo that's most famous, had been a staffer under a vowed segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. Bush rewarded him by appointing him Associate Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. In 2005, he was appointed to be an immigration judge. He currently runs the Board of Immigration Appeals. Cool! Ted Olson was appointed solicitor general, but he died in 2024 and is currently in hell with Antonin Scalia, Strom Thurmond and George H.W. Bush. Joel Kaplan worked for the Bush White House and metta! Roger Stone was there, of course, fork-founded in kitchen. On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush was inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States. That's right, a second Bush has hit the White House. Shortly after being installed, Bush dispensed with any pretense of whatever it was he promised during his inauguration address and regressed back to the mean. That is, he did what he's always done, rewarded favors with favors, no matter how undeserving the recipient. His cabinet was basically a guest list for his birthday party, Dick Cheney, Defense Contractor Executive, when the Vice Presidential Search and Selected himself. The cabinet filled out with Pollo Niel from Alcoa, another energy company, Don Evans, a friend of 30 years of commerce, Gail Norton and Interior from a Property Rights Litigation Shop, and Spencer Abraham at Energy, a former senator who had sponsored a bill to abolish the department he was now running. Then, there were the appointments that nobody scrutinized until something broke. Julie Myers was confirmed to head immigration and customs enforcement in 2005, with slim enforcement experience at resume that included being the niece of the Joint Chiefs Chairman and the wife of the Homeland Security Secretary Chiefs of Staff. Okay. Harriet Myers, the White House Council, was nominated to the Supreme Court with no judicial experience at all. As with his time in the Texas Governor's Mansion when George W. Bush was sworn in as president, he inherited a budget surplus in January 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected a surplus of 5.6 trillion dollars over the coming decade, including a $313 billion surplus in 2002 alone. By 2011, that number would reach $889 billion. Under that projection, the entire national debt would have been paid off by 2009. On occasion, you do got to hand it to Bill Clinton. You do got to hand it to Bill Clinton. Clinton couldn't wait to try the same thing that didn't work in Texas on the whole country. Bush's tax cuts passed in June 2001 at a cost of $1.35 trillion over 10 years. The success of this budgetary gambit depended on nothing going wrong. But even after something very big had gone wrong, the attacks of 9/11 and the disastrous war in Iraq, in 2003, the Bush government passed a second round of tax cuts on dividends and capital gains. Two concepts that 90% of middle-class taxpayers could not explain because it does not apply to them. In 2003, he'd completely pissed the surplus away. The CBO calculated that the Bush tax cuts added trillions to the national debt. By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Bush had turned a $5.6 trillion surplus into $10.6 trillion in deficits over the ensuing decade. Both of the wars waged under his presidency were financed through emergency supplemental appropriations rather than the regular budget, which meant that they weren't scrutinized like other federal line items; reforms to Medicare Part D added a huge unfunded entitlement. A truly dizzying amount of fiscal mismanagement and bad calls? What were the odds, though? What were the odds? On August 6, 2001, the president's daily brief was headlined with a warning that Osama Bin Laden half-brother of one of the guys that helped Bush get his extraction business off the ground, which may mean nothing, but it's just kind of funny, right? Anyway, Osama Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States. Bush was, on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, days into a break that ran the better part of August, because after six months of hard work, he deserved a little treat. The roughly 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in unincorporated McLean and County had originally been a hog farm, never a working ranch, but it did look like a ranch, and that's perfect for George W. Bush, a man who is from Connecticut and was never a cowboy, but did his best to look like a cowboy. Mark Noller of CBS tracked Bush's trips to the ranch during his presidency, and counted 77 trips spanning 490 total days. That's about 17% of his eight-year presidency. Bill Clinton only vacationed for 174 days total over his eight-year presidency. But Debbie didn't think of it as vacation. He thought of himself as kind of on the clock. He was working from home, working from ranch, as he aimlessly hacked at Cedar Brush with a chainsaw and mountain bike through his own private canyons. The Cedar Brush clearing was such an important component of George W. Bush's presidential duties that the White House issued official photo releases of him doing it. Go back to 9/11, Bush had begun a month-long stay at his cowboy playhouse in early August 2001, and received the August 6 brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S. There." But no documented policy meeting or directive followed in the next 36 days. Then, in case you haven't read this far in history books, spoiler alert. On September 11, 2001, a group of 19 terrorists commandeered four planes, two of which hit the Twin Towers in Manhattan, one of which crashed into the Pentagon, and one of which was crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Several deaths toll, including the hijackers, 2,996 total deaths, 2,753 at the World Trade Center, including 343 FDNY firefighters, 184th Pentagon, 40th from United Flight 93, which passengers crashed on purpose into a Pennsylvania field. When Bush heard the news, he was reading a book called The Pet Goat to a Class in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida. He reacted like a baby bunny freezing in a patch of grass the moment before being consumed by an off-leash dog. Wait, that's it? I don't think I realized the degree to which he just does not register this at all. Wow, wow, yeah. Turns out 9/11 was great for George W. Bush. After the attacks, W.A. received the highest approval rating ever recorded for a president, 90%. 9/11 was also great if you're a fan of America's dissenting fascism. The authorization for use of military force passed Congress on September 14th with a single dissenting vote in the House from California Democrat Barber Lee, who was announced and required police protection. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let's step back for a moment, let's just pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. We stand with you. Barber Lee, if she was 100% right, by the way, that law is still being used to authorize military force decades later, it's why we're still at Iran, it's why we're bombing fishermen off the coast of South America and nobody is in the hagg. JNB optimistic. Nobody is in the hagg yet. Yet? Those who tried to speak out against the war, even those who weren't members of Congress like Barber Lee, were bullied and silenced. Tell me about it. In March 2003, Natalie Mainz of the Dixie Chicks, now known as the Chicks, told her a London audience she was ashamed of the president came from Texas. They were pulled from country radio playlists. Their records were destroyed at organized public events, Mainz received a death threat specific enough that she performed under police protection. And this was pretty much everywhere. Everywhere. This is how everybody talked about people that were in Afghanistan or rock opposing any of this. This is all the time. I was in high school. This is how everybody was and now people lie about it. People were, people went insane. On October 23rd, 2001, the House passed the Patriot Act, 357 to 66. The Senate passed it 98 to 1. It was signed October 26th, three days from introduction to passage for a 342 page comprehensive rewrite of federal surveillance law. Most members who voted for it did not read it. Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold cast the only Senate vote against and spent the next decade being proven right in installments. Want to know why America has transformed into a digital panopticon? Read the Patriot Act. Section 215 is a provision that became known as the Library of Records Provision. And it is the one that under a legal interpretation kept secret from the public and from most of Congress. This later used to justify bulk collection of Americans' telephone metadata. Section 213 authorized delayed notice search warrants, A.K.A. sneak and peak searches, which allow agents to search a home and tell the occupant later. Fourth amendment, what fourth amendment? Section 505 expanded national security letters, administrative subpoenas, FBI issues without any judicial approval, compelling banks, phone companies and internet providers to hand over customer records. When the Patriot Act was passed, it was sold to voters with sunset provisions. Congress would have the chance to renew the law every so often, but Congress opted to renew it. Cue up the team America, world-placed theme music. On October 7th America began striking Afghanistan, where 9/11 mastermind of some have been lined with rumored to be hiding. In November, it came the Military Commission's order. In January 2002, the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, A.K.A. ICE, were created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The largest reorganization of the federal government since 1947, and I don't remember anybody really being upset about it when that happened. Now we've arrived in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. It did have a lot of oil, though. And Laura Bush said something, something, feminism, so. Yeah, that's true. Even before the 9/11 attacks, some members of the Bush administration were trying to sell Iraqi regime change as a foreign policy imperative. Ten days into the administration, Bush official Paul O'Neal told Ron Suskind that removing Saddam Hussein from power was to be discussed during the first National Security Council meeting, and the Bush White House was chock full of people who had been advocating for Iraqi intervention since at least the late 1990s. By September, National Security Advisor Condolez Rice had delivered this line. There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. A significant part of the push to invade Iraq came from an Iraqi trust friend, baby, and Charlotteson named Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi had been part of a prominent Iraqi family that was displaced under Saddam Hussein's regime. And he wanted revenge, understandably. - Yeah, understandably. Back in the 1990s, Chalabee had tried to convince the US government through intelligence channels that attacking Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power was an urgent national security need. But back then, intelligence agencies issued a burn notice about him. That's not good, right? - Nope. - That's bad, right? Which is what intelligence agencies issue when a source burns them. AKA don't trust this bitch. - But years later, Chalabee, the U-magic being salesman found eager customers in the Bush administration. - As the Afghani quagmire quagmired on, in his January 28th, 2003 state of the union, Bush turned Americans blind patriotic bloodlust toward Iraq. - Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq. A brutal dictator with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth, will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States. - 12 years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction. For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement. - The underlying claim traced to documents about Niger that were forgeries. In July 2003, the White House conceded, the line should not have been in the speech, but by then, they were already carried away. What are we supposed to do? Cancel the regime change? We already sent out, save the dates. We already put down a deposit on the venue. - And after that, you just gotta go. Some of the American folly in Iraq was brought to you by our gullibility regarding an intelligence source code named curveball. Curveball was Rafid Ahmed Awan Al-Janabi, and Iraqi defector that American intelligence never spoke to directly because he was talking to the Germans. And at the time, the relationship between the German and American intelligence communities was strained. - Through this high stakes game of intelligence telephone, it was curveball who supplied Secretary of State Colin Powell with information on Iraq's alleged mobile biological weapons laboratories that anchored Powell's February 5th, 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council. - The nexus of poisons in terror is new. The nexus of Iraq and terror is old. The combination is lethal. With this track record, Iraqi denials of supporting terrorism take their place alongside the other Iraqi denials of weapons of mass destruction. It is all a web of lies. - Curveball later admitted he made it up. Powell said he regrets believing him. What a curveball. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - This fucking guy is brought to you by Remy. If you're like me, surrounded by ambient stress at all times and also occasionally needing to sleep and then waking up and being like, why does my face hurt? I was just sleeping for the last several hours. You might want to look into Remy. September reminds us that it's essential to take care of our bodies. Life can get busy. We start to forget about ourselves. Going to the dentist's office can feel like a drag because it is a drag. That's why I trust Remy to protect my teeth using their custom night guard along with over half a million Americans. Remy night guards are the only FDA cleared and clinically tested at home impression kit night guards on the market. Not only did they help prevent teeth damage from grinding, they also help reduce jaw tension and facial muscle strain and improve sleep quality. You'll get the same professional quality and comfort as a night guard from the dentist for 80% less of the cost by taking your own impression from the convenience of your home. Remy saves your impression so you can enjoy the convenience and savings of Remy Club where they'll ship you a new set of night guards every six months. Here's how it works. After you purchase your impression kit comes straight to your door. It's in a really cute box. I know that's not the most important thing, but I appreciate the thought that goes into the packaging. Remy's step-by-step instructions are really easy to follow to get your perfect impression. Then Remy crafts and ships you your custom fit night guard. Then you get your night guard back and you start protecting your teeth because I don't want to go to the dentist more than I have to. You don't want to go to the dentist more than you have to. You've got to protect your teeth. Prioritize your teeth this month with Remy by using code TFG to get 50% off your new night guard with Remy Club. That's 50% off at shoprem.com/TFG with code TFG. Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode. (upbeat music) But America was horny for vengeance. The villains of the Bush White House were horny for a giant wealth transfer from American taxpayers to defense contractors and fossil fuel extractors. And W was horny to not have to do anything but space out and cut brush while wearing a cowboy hat. It was a perfect storm. Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes was presented publicly as proof of a reconstituted nuclear program. The Department of Energy's technical experts in the State Department's intelligence bureau both decented holding the tubes were consistent with conventional rocket bodies but this was conveniently never related to the public when it mattered. Even with the flimsy case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, the Bush administration still needed to manufacture a tie between 9/11 and Iraq. And that came in the form of Vice President Cheney who publicly confirmed that there was contact between alleged hijacker Muhammad Ata and Iraqi intelligence. - Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, no information has come to light. We spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq and the one hand and the al-Qaeda organization and the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Muhammad Ata. It was the lead hijacker. Did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions and on at least one occasion we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. And the debates about, you know, was he there, wasn't he there? Again, it's the intelligence business. - Oh my God. - I'm mad again. - I know. - I'm mad all over again. - It's such a like slippery return. - Oh yeah, just being like, well, I don't want to say this. - I'm not going to do it and then it does it. But it's like, you know, it's intelligence like there's debates. - There's no proof that contact never happened. - The Iraq war was also midwife to propellant screaming into the world by a complicit American media. Administration officials fed claims to reporters and cited the resulting front pages. Independent confirmation on the Sunday shows. The circularity was obvious to everyone inside it, but invisible to viewers. Yes, we're talking about Judith Miller. We're always talking about Judith Miller. Meanwhile, you on weapons inspectors are still working to inspect for weapons. And I found nothing by the time the invasion began. I'm March 19th and 20th, 2003. The fact that they had found nothing was used as evidence that the Iraqis were definitely hiding something. You know, that's how-- - The more nothing you find, the more there is. - The more there is. - Exactly. By mid-April, the Pentagon declared major combat operations over what year was it, 2003? April, 2003. Conveniently, the USS Abraham Lincoln heard of it was heading back from a long deployment full of sailors, jets, and a flight deck, the perfect place to stage a hero photo up for W. So Scott's forza, a former ABC producer running the White House's in-house TV unit, put together a primetime moment. - Officers and sailors at the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations and Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. [APPLAUSE] - This ship was in fact about 30 miles from San Diego. And the segment was shot in such a way that people watching at home couldn't see the California coast in the background. Bush didn't actually need to arrive by airplane. They were close enough to shore for a helicopter but the plane looked cooler. And when this was shot, what would later be called the insurgency? It was already underway in Iraq. Getting Saddam out of there was like kicking down a sand castle. Restoring Iraq's to a functional and modern country was like rebuilding the sand castle grain by grain. Even after American troops left after eight years and seven months, Iraq was still picking up the pieces. - Mission accomplished. - Bush treated the post-mission accomplished Iraq like a goodie bag to give out to kids who attended his Halloween party. Applicants for the Coalition Provisional Authority went through the Pentagon Office of Jim O'bearn, a political appointee. Candidates were asked whether they had voted for Bush and whether they had supported the war on terror. Two said they were asked their views on Rovy Wade. Arabic and post-conflict reconstruction experience didn't matter. - A 24-year-old with no finance background who had applied for a White House job was tasked with reopening the Baghdad Stock Exchange. Six of 10 junior staffers hired to work for the CPA were recruited from resumes and filed the Heritage Foundation and ended up managing Iraq's $13 billion budget with no finance experience among them. Billions of dollars set aside for Iraqi reconstruction are still on account or for it. Overall, the war's resultant from 9/11 have cost the US $8 trillion. - Cool. - In August 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel issued the so-called U-Memo drafted mostly by John U. The memo defined torture so narrowly that it reached only pain equivalent to organ failure or death, basically declaring that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to Americans as long as they were torturing suspected terrorists. - Secret CIA prisons sprung up. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation for days at a stretch, stress positions, confinement in coffinsized boxes and rectal feeding administered without medical necessity to prisoners, many of whom weren't actually enemy combatants. They were just regular people. - W personally authorized the program and defended it afterward in print. - On April 28th, 2004, images of Abu Ghraib first became public, they were grotesque. [BLANK_AUDIO] and service members posing jauntily beside Arab detainees who were being tortured and humiliated. The Army's own investigation had documented the Abu Ghraib abuse. In other words, the military knew the public learned from journalists. Criminal prosecutions reached staff sergeant. The Brigade Commander was demoted administratively. In Fallujah, in November 2004, white phosphorus was used as an anti-personal weapon. That's a war crime, folks. In Haditha, in November 2005, Marines killed 24 civilians, including children, of 8 charged. One was convicted, dereliction of duty. In Mahmoud Yaa, in March 2006, soldiers raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl and killed her family. This was prosecuted in civilian court only because a ring leader had already left the Army. In the Surah Square, in September 2007, black water contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a traffic circle. The convictions that eventually followed were pardoned in 2020. And that's what we know about. But at least Bush showed a sign of solidarity with the soldiers who weren't over there doing war crimes. Early in his tenure, you see, W.A. was really fond of golfing, as seen here. "We must stop the terror. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers." "Thank you. Now what's his drive?" Bush stopped golfing in October 2003 and never golfed again during his presidency. Why? In 2018, he told Politico that it was because he had to be pulled out of a round of golf to be informed of a truck bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed an American. And decided that a grieving mother who had just lost her son in war would not want to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. "I'll give some. Some gave all. W gave golf." Yeah. Wow. What a sacrifice. Yeah. Apart from the mockish absurdity of giving up golf for the troops, W. Story doesn't even line up. The last time he played around of golf as president was in October 2003, the bombing he referred to occurred in August. So if his story is correct, he went ahead and golfed for two more months before the existence of a dead soldier's mom occurred to him. Some have surmised that the troops actually had nothing to do with his absence from the links. W. was having knee problems throughout autumn of 2003. Oh. It's so hard. Over its disastrous course, the Iraq War cost at least half a million Iraqi lives, in addition to the hundreds of thousands injured and millions traumatized and displaced. More than 30,000 American servicemen and women returned to the US with injuries, more than 4,500 died. Nobody was prosecuted for authorizing torture. John U is still teaching at Berkeley Law. The incoming Obama administration decided not to look backward. The Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 study on what we actually did over there, more than 6,700 pages, is still not fully declassified. But let's not forget the disaster that was W's domestic policy. The no child left behind act signed on January 8th, 2002, with Ted fucking Kennedy as a Democratic co-sponsor, used a federal threat of defunding to mandate teaching to the test for students across America. Schools that couldn't meet these impossible standards were faced with escalating sanctions. Kids could leave, consultants would be called in, and eventually funding would be cut. As a result, schools terrified of losing their funding, taught with the only aim of getting as many students as possible to pass the tests. We fell behind another ways too. In the late 1990s, the United States was the world's leading producer of solar panels. But then along came W like a thirsty frat boy at a wine tasting. Once he took office, the US was overtaken by Japan, then Germany, then China in 2008, the last full year of the Bush presidency. George W. Bush's presidency presented an opportunity for the US to solidify its global leadership position in renewables, and we squandered it. Today, China holds over 80 percent of global solar manufacturing. W.A. head campaigned on regulating carbon dioxide is pollutant under the Clean Air Act in March 2001, two months into his term. He reversed it in a letter to four Republican senators and withdrew the United States from the Kyoto process. Cool. Fast forward to late August 2005. W.A. was enjoying another month of letting his four brain cells flutter around his skull like butterflies in the carefree meadows of a Texas play ranch. On Sunday, August 28th, the president sat in front of a video screen in Crawford, while the director of the National Hurricane Center warned that an approaching storm could top the New Orleans levees. His FEMA director echoed these warnings. During the briefing, Bush didn't ask a single question. He told him the federal government was fully prepared and signed off to continue his preferred mode of fucking off in the brush. Hurricane Katrina made landfall at 610 the next morning, and as W.A. was warned, the levees failed. Bush boarded Air Force 1-4, Arizona. John McCain met him on the tarmac at Luke Air Force Base, AIDS wheeled out a cake for McCain's 69th birthday, the two men held it up for photographers, and walked away within seconds, leaving it to melt un-eaten in the 110-degree heat. As the city of New Orleans drowned, Bush went on to Pueblo, El Marage, our V-Resorting Country Club, where he spoke to 400 people about the Medicare prescription drug benefit that afternoon he did a second Medicare event at a senior center in Rancho Cucamanga. By Tuesday, New Orleans was flooded. Bush responded by jetting over to San Diego real quick to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VJ Day, backstage a country singer handed him a guitar, Bush strummed it for the cameras before flying back to the ranch for one more night of brush clearing, I guess? Well, it needed to happen. Wednesday, the president begrudgingly went to Washington where his job was, looking down at the drowned crescent city through the window of Air Force 1 as he flew over it. There's a day he told Good Morning America that he didn't think anybody had anticipated the breach of the levees four days after being told, on tape, that it could happen. Bush's FEMA director was a Gibironi named Michael Brown. Brown came to FEMA through his college friend, Joe Albaugh, Bush's 2000s campaign manager. His previous executive post had been at the International Arabian Horse Association, Friday in Mobile, Alabama, Bush stood beside Brown and told him he was doing a great job. Bush's slow-walking the federal response to Katrina contrasted pretty grotesquely with what had happened a fucking year earlier, when four hurricanes hit Florida amid Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Florida was a state his brother governed and Florida was also a state that Bush had to win. And so every county in the state was declared a disaster area, $5.1 billion in aid right away, six million MREs, 86,000 tarps, 5 million cubic yards of debris cleared whatever you need, Florida. Bush's response to the 2004 Florida hurricanes moved so fast that FEMA paid $31.2 million to nearly 12,900 residents of Miami-Dade County for damage from Hurricane Francis. A county the storm never hit. Our sustained winds reached 43 miles per hour and the emergency operation center reported minimal damage. The same caring consideration was not offered to the people of New Orleans. I rarely say this, and especially not in the last eight years, but I'll let Kanye West sum it up. George Bush doesn't care about black people. What a time we've all had. The most durable damage Bush did that got the least attention at the time was Bush's imprint on the judiciary. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who had cast the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore and handed W the presidency announced her retirement in July 2005. Chief Justice William Renquist died in September. John Roberts originally nominated for O'Connor's seat was re-nominated as Chief Justice and confirmed in September 2005 for more on him. Watch our this fucking guy episode. Bush then named his own White House Council Harriet Myers on October 3rd. Conservative legal activists were pissed about this, but for the wrong reasons. The Myers nomination was withdrawn. Samuel Alito is sitting a pellet judge with the right kind of record of the right wing's wet dreams was nominated four days later. He was confirmed in January 2006. In 2022, he went on to write the majority opinion overturning Roe versus Wade. Below the Supreme Court, the administration filled the pellet bench through the same shadowy right wing vetting network and the consequences. Citizens united. Shelby County, Gonzalez V. Carr Hart, Dobbs and Trump versus the United States plus a whole lot of other fucking shitty rulings, all run through appointments made in a four-month stretch of 2005. I was a senior in high school and my senior year of high school was pretty bad, but it wasn't this four-month stretch of appointments bad. No, no, no, no. Have you ever wondered why health care sucks so much in the US? George W. Bush was a load-bearing asshole in the current hellscape in which we are living. The Medicare Modernization Act of December 2003 created a prescription drug benefit and was straightforwardly the largest expansion of Medicare since its creation. The administration got it through Congress by lying about it. They presented it as though the 10-year cost were coming at under $400 billion in order to appease Congressional Republicans play acting at fiscal conservatism. But Medicare's chief actuary had produced a substantially higher internal estimate and was told by his superior that he could be fired if he gave that number to Congress. The vote proceeded on the lower figure. In addition to costing an arm in a leg and maybe a foot in an eyeball, the law barred Medicare from negotiating prices with drug makers. It left the coverage gap known as the "donut hole" in which beneficiaries paid full price after exhausting initial coverage, but before catastrophic coverage began. One thing that Bush blessedly didn't get his way on was his crusade to privatize Social Security. After his 2004 election victory, Bush toured the country on his 60 stops and 60 days push for individual investment accounts to replace the government-managed Social Security structure. No bill was ever introduced and the effort was dead by late 2005. And thank God. Prime example of getting high on your own supply, which George W. Bush wouldn't know anything. We didn't know anything about. He's never gotten high on anything. But here's what did pass. The bankruptcy abuse prevention and consumer protection act of 2005. Who is that a euphemistic title? It was a long-standing credit industry priority, making chapter 7 discharged substantially harder for individuals. It was enacted two years before a housing collapse that would drive millions towards exactly that remedy. Speaking of the great recession, Thanks to Accelerating. regulation of the banking industry that allowed financial institutions to take on way more debt than they had in assets combined with a laissez-faire approach to regulation that enabled set institutions to lend money to individuals who were not creditworthy and then bundle those loans into securities that could be sold to other giant financial institutions. By 2008, all those bad decisions snowflakes had turned into an economic avalanche and the housing market collapsed under the weight of the greed of the people best positioned to know better. The Bush administration's remedy for those unsafe tax payer backed by out of these toxic assets on the balance sheets of these giant institutions on the auspices that they would use the money to lend to Americans and the Americans would use that money to buy stuff. But the banks didn't lend it out. What did they do with it? They kept it! Oh, the nine banks that got the first $175 billion in tarp, the troubled asset relief program, if you nasty, paid $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2008, the year they were bailed out. Roughly $4,800 individual bonuses of $1 million more. Six of the nine paid bonus pools are larger than their entire reported earnings for the year. Oh boy, this is the longest video we've ever done and we're still not going to hit everything fucking terrible about what George W. Bush did, but we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Bush's impact on public health. Federal abstinence only education funding roughly tripled across W.S. two terms and it was conditioned on curricula that could not present contraception as effective except in terms of failure rates. A 2004 report found that most of the federally funded abstinence curricula reviewed contained bad information about contraceptive effectiveness, abortion risks, and basic reproductive biology. An evaluation released in 2007 found the programs had no effect on the age of first sexual activity or on rates of abstinence. And I hinted at this earlier, Bush was against the gaze after it was cool. The 2004 campaign ran on a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage as a mobilization strategy. Bush endorsed the federal marriage amendment in February 2004. And like everything else, he was handed that he squandered. Bush also squandered the political capital of 9/11. After hitting those nosebleed inducing highs, his approval number then decayed on a near-straight line for seven years, roughly 90% to about 50% by the 2004 election to a gallup low of 25% in October 2008. George W. Bush left office in January 2009, with gallup finding only 34% of Americans viewing him favorably and embarked on a quota of toothless gestures. He announced a rule against criticizing his successor, telling Jay Latton on the tonight show that it wasn't good for the country for a former president to criticize a sitting one, and observed it through both terms of Barack Obama and into the Trump administration, too much consternation from people who wanted better from him. Why would you want better from him? I mean, but like why would you expect it? You took up painting a hobby the public learned about in February 2013 only because, and I had totally forgotten this detail. The Romanian hacker Goosefer had hacked Bush's sister Dorothy's email and published his self-portraits in the bathtub in the shower. They're not bad. They're not great. Nevertheless, in February 2017, Bush published Portraits of Courage, a commander-in-chief's tribute to America's warriors. Paintings of wounded veterans of the wars he started promoted on today with Matt Lauer, followed in 2021 by Out of Many One, Portraits of America's Immigrants. W. Eulogized John McCain at Washington National Cathedral on September 1, 2018, where he was filmed slipping a cough drop to Michelle Obama. October 6, 2019, he sat beside Ellen DeGeneres in Portia, D'Rossi, at Adelaide Cabois, Green Bay Packers game, and when the photograph drew backlash, DeGeneres defended the friendship on her show as a matter of being kind to everyone. Actually, no. That's not the truth, Ellen. You are not kind to everyone. We know that now. We know that now. By June 2017, Americans who responded to polls had forgiven or forgotten Bush, yet a 59% favorable rating, close to former President Barack Obama's 63% approval rating. And for people looking for some kind of contrition for the horror he'd inflicted on the people of Iraq, this is about the best you're going to get. The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, other Ukraine, huh? Correct. Anyway, 75. Yeah, that was in 2022. That little Freudian slip was in. He knows. He knows what he, like, he, he was like, Iraq too. Like, so this is a weird episode, I think, for both of us, because this is a presidency where we both remember it so well. And now we are being gaslit, not just by the right that has done a selective forgetting of their support for him. You saw that with Trump coming in and deciding the Iraq war was bad and everyone getting in on, like, yeah, the Iraq war was bad. And I'm like, I was there. You all loved it. You were all super into it. You can't deny that. But now with some resistance liberals who, I think, due to trauma, now look back at George W. Bush and think, was it really that bad? It was. It was. Well, George W. Bush did a reverse Hitler. He was a war criminal first and then he became a shitty artist. And even though he might be a nice guy, a good neighbor, a fun person to get stuck sitting next to a funeral, probably not someone that you would want to have a beer with, due to his problems with alcohol, he's still a war criminal and a climate goal and a bad person. If there was any justice in the world, he and his oil man buddies would be the ones buried in the flooding in Nepal, not the thousands of innocent civilians who have done nothing to expedite the climate's collapse. In addition to everything Molly Ivans has ever written about George W. Bush, one quote about Bush's post-presidency rehabilitation sticks with me. It's from Seth Rodney who wrote in an essay critiquing The New York Times' "chuckling engagement with Bush's art career." What's insidious? Is it it puts readers in the position of feeling the need to forgive Bush and recognizes current artistic work as somehow redemptive? Otherwise, we see mean-spirited or perhaps worse, unfairly unable to evaluate another person beyond stereotype. But art of this nature is not redemptive. It never is, unless you shut your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, and yell nonsense. Art does not restore a soldier's arms or eyesight or provide them with physical therapy in order to learn to walk on prosthesis. It does not heal their PTSD or bring back innocent Iraqi civilians from the dead. So there you have it, Jane. George fucking W. Fucking Bush. So George W. Bush, who's still a child, to be honest. He's just a baby. He's just a baby. I think we've got a lot of reckless opportunist. Each opportunity he was handed, he fumbled away with the assistance of people who weren't indeed scheming sociopaths and believing zealots. While not really caring about much of anything, I'm wanting to get back to his fake cowboy ranch. I completely agree with you. I have no notes. Perfect assessment. That's great. And that about wraps up the time we have for this episode of this fucking guy. If you like what you've seen, hit the like button, share it with your friends, and leave us a comment if you've got an idea for a future fucking guy subject. And if you're not already subscribed, there is no better time than now. This episode was written by me with a writing assist from Jane Kostin, all the rest of the credits, as well as links to our sources like Molly Ivans' Bushwacked, and the first season of the excellent podcast Blowback can be found in our show notes. It is a great place to spend time if you're looking for a rabbit hole that's gonna make you mad. Take care. Be well. Don't do cocaine. And fuck that guy. Fuck that guy. That little baby. Fuck that little baby. Just a little tiny baby. hysteria is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Caroline Reston, Claire Fogarty, Kendra James, Adrian Hill, and me, Erin Ryan. 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