Enough is enough

28 good reasons to boot Bush from office

Compiled by Newt Briggs and Andrew Kiraly

Illustrations by F. Andrew Taylor

Anyone who saw the first presidential debate Sept. 30 knows President Bush's mantra well: It's hard work! It's hard work! It's hard work! Yes, destroying America is hard work.

Sadly, it's not hard work uncovering what a terrible president Bush has been. He's made the air dirtier. He's lost a million jobs. In education, he's left millions of children behind. He started an unjustifiable war that has plunged the nation into debt and will breed future generations of terrorists. He gave seniors the finger with Medicare "reform" and signed off on an energy bill crafted by industry cronies. And he believes siting a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain is based on sound science.

The list goes on--and now it's all available below, in handy, bulleted form. As a service and a plea to undecided voters, the Mercury compiled a list of the Bush adminstration's worst offenses, from social services to the economy to the environment to the war in Iraq. If you're an undecided voter, we hope this helps you make up your mind. If you're a hard-headed cynic who still believes there's no difference between the parties, we hope this convinces you otherwise. And if you weren't planning to vote in the first place, we hope this lights a fire under your feet. Four more years of Bush is four too many.

We're not the only ones who think so. Heck, Bush himself summed up his adminstration best at an Aug. 4 bill signing in Washington, in one of his more telling Bushisms: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Environment

• Remember clean air? Yeah, that clear, odorless stuff that feels really good to breathe. Bush and his cronies put it one step closer to being a thing of the past when they relaxed a host of clean air enforcement rules, according to the Washington Post. The "New Source Review" rule changes, announced in June 2002, essentially make older, polluting power plants immune from lawsuits and spare them from installing pricey anti-pollution equipment originally mandated by the 1970 Clean Air Act. Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., called the rollback "a victory for outdated polluting power plants and a devastating defeat for public health and our environment." It's enough to make you consider a boycott of breathing.

• Let's get it straight: The greenhouse effect is just a liberal conspiracy intended to sell sunscreen and discourage people from burning tires in their back yard. That's why the Bush administration deleted several major passages from a 2003 EPA report on the state of the environment--including the phrase, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." The administration also added qualifying words like "potentially" and "may" where no qualifications were needed. The changes, says a 2003 story in the Guardian, prompted the EPA to remove "the entire global warming section to avoid including information that was not scientifically credible."

• Who needs biodiversity when we've got cheap gas and hardwood floors? At least that seems to be the attitude of President Bush, who has protected only 26 animal species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 during his four-year term. Compare that with his father, who protected 228 species, and President Clinton, who protected 527 species over two terms, and it's clear that the current administration will take the lobbyist over the spotted owl and the marbled murrelet any day.

• "Wish that I was on old rocky top/ Down in the Tennessee hills/ Ain't no smoggy smoke on rocky top/ Ain't no telephone bills." Oh, wait, did I say "rocky top"? I meant "atomized plateau" created by miners blasting for coal hidden beneath the lush peaks of Appalachia. The process--dubbed "mountaintop removal"--was effectively banned in 1999 after more than 700 miles of mountain streams were buried by debris, but thanks to the Bush administration, it's once again booming.

• Trees are cool. They're a great background for nature pics, help make oxygen and stop floods. They're also fun to climb and serve as, like, little condominium complexes for wildlife and shit. So why does the Bush administration hate trees? According to a March 2003 article in the Washington Post, the Bush administration denied wilderness protection to millions of acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Critics and environmentalists said the closely watched decision dramatically increases logging in the old-growth Tongass, which contains nearly 30 percent of the world's unlogged coastal temperate rain forest. The ruling affects 4 percent of the forest's 16.8 million acres, or about 676,000 acres. At least we'll always have the Rainforest Cafe!

• Bush just loves them photo ops of him fishin', ranchin' and roughin' it, but the Skull and Bones alum is a city boy at heart: The Bush administration has made vulnerable to development millions of acres of wilderness--thanks to an Interior Department decision to limit Bureau of Land Management lands eligible for protection to 23 million acres nationwide. According to an April 2003 Associated Press story, the Interior Department also told Congress it intended to stop reviewing Western land holdings for new wilderness protection and would withdraw 3 million acres in Utah from protected status. Alas, yet another reason for the don't-litter Indian to cry.

Foreign policy

• Bush believes in the sanctity of life, all right--so much that he's withheld $34 million for the U.N. Population Fund to show his distaste for what it said were "coercive abortions" taking place in China. Long pressured by anti-abortion groups and conservative lawmakers, the Bush administration denied the U.N. $34 million, about 12.5 percent of the U.N.'s Population Fund budget. U.N. officials said holding back the money could hurt their prospects of preventing 800,000 abortions and the deaths of 4,700 mothers and 77,000 children. A small price to pay for affirming the sanctity of life, don't you think?

• Bush targeting the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11 was probably the one right thing he did--too bad he doesn't want to clean up the mess he's left behind. According to a February 2003 BBC News article, the Bush administration did not request any money in its budget for humanitarian and reconstruction aid for Afghanistan. Congress finally scraped up about $300 billion for the war-wracked country--$300 million? With a military budget zipping into the stratospheric billions, that should be enough to buy each Afghani a pack of Chiclets and a Gameboy.

• Reagan had "Star Wars." Will George Bush be the star of the Empire Strikes Back? CNN reported in December 2001 that President Bush pulled out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Cold War agreement that specifically banned testing and deployment of a ballistic missile defense system. Proponents of the treaty decried the message this sent to the rest of the world, while others pointed out that, ahem, just three months earlier terrorists took down the Twin Towers using airliners, not missiles. Hope that thing is good against hijacked domestic flights!

• In a world that's fat-free, low-calorie and Atkins-friendly, it's only logical that we should have a Low-Yield Cold War. According to a February 2003 article in the Washington Post, Bush is seeking to revive a program focused on building low-yield nuclear weapons. What exactly are low-yield nukes? Call them Death and Destruction Lite, designed to penetrate bunkers and detonate underground, thereby reducing nasty fallout. It's still lame, though. Even George Bush Sr. had eliminated low-yield nukes as part of an international accord to reduce nuke proliferation overseas. Hm. Low-yield nukes plus a doctrine of pre-emptive war. Hello, international community. You want some of this, bitchez?!

Civil liberties

• The Bush boys have led an assault on open government unlike anything since the darkest days of the Nixon era. On Day One in office, Mr. Bush reversed efforts by the Clinton administration to provide more access to government records. Since then, the number of documents and files deemed "classified" or "sensitive" has blossomed, even ancient records for which there is no plausible reason for secrecy. An embarrassing memo leaked from the Justice Department confirms that the enlightened John Ashcroft advised federal agencies to place whatever administrative obstacles they can to prevent Freedom of Information Act requests from being honored.

At the same time, citizen access to government information has withered, government's access to information about us has exploded. An extension to the PATRIOT Act was signed into law on a Saturday, and on the same day that Saddam Hussein was captured. Needless to say, it didn't get much coverage. It allowed federal lawmen to seize business records from entities such as banks or casinos without a warrant. (Las Vegas was targeted, of course.)

• Remember those bygone days when every patch of dirt from sea to shining sea was considered a free speech zone, a place where the First Amendment was still considered the law of the land? Bush and Ashcroft have now given us a new definition of the term, and if we don't like it, we can all just shut the hell up. Whenever Bush travels to a U.S. city, teams of Secret Service agents precede him and inform local police that they must establish "free speech" or "protest" zones where people opposed to Bush's policies must be penned up. Invariably, these zones are far removed from anywhere the president himself will visit, so he doesn't have to be exposed to opinions different from his own. In St. Petersburg, Fla., for instance, two elderly grandmothers who dared to hold up tiny signs expressing oppositon to Bush were arrested. Hundreds of other arrests have occurrred all over the nation. Anyone who carries a pro-Bush sign is allowed upfront seating at presidential events. Free speech still applies to them.

Education

• Americans are so dumb. All this time we could have been profiting on our children's educations, but we've just been sitting by letting the government run our schools. Now, thanks to the president's No Child Left Behind Act, corporations are taking over schools in record numbers, and with a lot of cost-cutting and accountability, they'll probably eventually be almost as good as the schools they replaced. A recent national study revealed that the test scores of children in charter schools were significantly lower than those of children at regular public schools. Then again, maybe President Bush is right and those childrens really am as smart as the kids in publick school.

Special interests

• So your eyes are bleeding and your feet have swollen into pus-filled flesh balloons, what do you want the drug companies to do about it? According to a July article in the New York Times, the Bush administration has been going to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they've been injured by prescription drugs. Apparently, the administration believes that drug companies should not be liable for consumer injuries if their products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Did we mention that the drug industry has dispensed more than $50 million in campaign contributions during the last four years--the vast majority of it to Republicans?

• Former oilman Dick Cheney was placed in charge of energy policy early in the Bush term. He presided over a hush-hush gathering of energy experts, all of whom were executives at the largest energy companies in the world--Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Nukes. Not a single environmentalist was allowed to participate in the study, and when Cheney emerged from under his self-imposed Cone of Silence, it surprised no one when he announced the results of the gabfest would be tax breaks for energy companies. Despite lawsuits and public pressure, Cheney would not reveal anything about what went on inside the energy meetings. One interesting document has surfaced, however. It is a two-page chart titlted "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfields." It identified 63 oil companies from 30 countries and specified which companies were interested in which Iraqi oil fields. This, of course, was well before the invasion of Iraq, which, as we all know, had nothing to do with oil.

• No, the cows aren't literally mad, but maybe they should be. When a case of mad cow disease surfaced in Washington state last year, federal regulators proposed sharp restrictions on what could be included in animal feed, but after intense lobbying by the cattle and feed industries, the Bush administration put the kibosh on any potential legislative changes. Shortly afterward, the National Cattleman's Beef Association broke with its nonpartisan tradition and endorsed Bush for re-election.

The economy

• Millions of Americans depend on overtime to make extra money. But thanks to the Bush administration, more than 8 million Americans are now ineligible for overtime. According to a June 2003 CNNMoney.com story, liberal think tank the Economic Policy Institute scrutinized the Labor Department proposal to change OT criteria and found it would affect 2.5 million salaried employees and 5.5 million hourly employees. The proposal, which went into effect without congressional approval, will screw those employees in another way, too, the study notes. "Once employers are not required to pay for overtime work, they will schedule more of it," the study said. Now, please place bloody stump of nose back on grindstone. The management thanks you.

• One way of getting a general sense of the nation's economic health is to look at how many people have been laid off. Thanks to the Bush White House, the Labor Department program that tracked such information has been quietly squelched, according to San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus. In a January 2003 column, he reported that the program tracking mass layoffs by U.S. companies was killed by the administration in order to more easily hype a rosy economic picture. According to the bureau's final monthly report covering November 2002, U.S. companies laid off more than 240,000 workers. Lazarus write that the Labor Department made no mention of ending the program, save for one short blurb buried in a November 2002 press release.

• Liberals, liberals, liberals. Tax and spend. Tax and spend. $2 trillion! Or so goes Bush's standard campaign grouse, which conveniently fails to mention that his own economic plan will cost "well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade," according to a Sept. 14 story in the Washington Post. The bloated expenses come from the war in Iraq, his proposed changes to Social Security system and tax cuts, which are expected to "reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion over 10 years." Now that's fiscal conservatism!

• I mean, seriously, what's up with math? It thinks it's, like, so smart with its objectivity and indisputable numerical evidence. Why can't it just be a team player and go along when President Bush insists that the tax cut was really aimed at working-class Americans? According to The State of Working America 2004-2005, a lengthy report issued in September by the Economic Policy Institute: "For households in the top 1 percent of the income scale, the full tax savings from the cuts that were made from 2001 to 2003 was about $67,000; for middle-income families, the cuts amounted to just under $600; and for the lowest 20 percent, the savings was $61." The net result was to redistribute income up the income scale, transferring 0.8 percent of all after-tax household income from the bottom 99 percent to the top 1 percent.

• Judging by the last two debates, President Bush can't help but slobber over the job figures from the last 13 months: "1.9 million jobs, yeah, definitely 1.9 million jobs." What he fails to mention is that the economy is still down a total of 821,000 jobs, according to an Oct. 9 article on Dick Cheney's favorite website, factcheck.org. If, as most experts predict, the economy does not pick up those jobs by January 2005, Bush will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss in jobs during his term. That's bad, definitely, definitely bad.

Nevada

• Thank--gasp!--goodness for President Bush's Clear--wheeze!--Skies Act. As the U.S. Public Interest Research Group reports, smog levels in the Las Vegas metropolitan area exceeded the EPA's eight-hour health standard 27 times in 2003, earning the city 18th place on the agency's list of major U.S. cities with the worst smog pollution. That's bad news for anyone still dependent on lungs to breathe--particularly the 33,500 children in Las Vegas who suffer from asthma. For those with healthy respiratory systems, it just means an increased risk of lung cancer and a few extra phlegm-filled hacks in the morning. Hrrrackkk! Thwip! That's one small goober for man, one giant goober for mankind.

• Damn, neighbor, do I smell mesquite? Thanks to President Bush's generous 2003 tax cut, the average Nevadan had an extra $244 last year to spend on a grill, two shares of Google stock or any of the fine products offered in the Sharper Image catalog. By comparison, the wealthiest 1 percent of Nevadans had $43,079 to spend on, say, a Hummer H2 or a college education. No, that's not mesquite you smell; that's the smoky delicious scent of unprecedented income inequality.

• Ah, those two little words that make our heart gurgle with bile: Yucca Mountain. Don't get us started: Bush's record on the proposed nuclear waste dump is filled with lies, distortions and broken promises, capped by his official recommendation in 2002 of the site as the nation's nuclear trash bin--despite a General Accounting Office report finding 300 problems with the repository design, despite the objections of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, despite a U.S. Appeals Court ruling that the administration's Yucca plans failed to meet National Academy of Science safety standards--despite, well, science. This from man who wrote to Gov. Kenny Guinn in 2002 that the "best science must prevail in the designation of any high-level nuclear waste repository."

Random acts of cruelty

• If the government ends up awarding a multibillion-dollar defense contract to Totally Evil Enterprises Inc., you can thank Bush. In December 2001, the Bush administration junked a rule that would deny federal contracts to companies violating labor, environmental and consumer-protection laws, according the Washington Post. The rule, put in effect by the Clinton adminstration, pressured federal contracting officers to take into account credible evidence of industry wrongdoing when considering doling out government contracts. Rolling back the rule was decried by labor groups such as the AFL-CIO, while those in favor of trashing it said it would put procurement officials in charge of judging whether a company a violate the law. Yeah, why bother with ethics and shit?

• The Bush administration appreciates the sanctity of life--and if that life is one of unmitigated pain, torment and debasement, um, sorry, dude, all I can do is kick the morphine drip up a notch. The long arm of Attorney General John Ashcroft reached across the country to block Oregon's landmark assisted-suicide law, according to a November 2001 article in the Washington Post. Oregon's law, the Death With Dignity Act, mind you, was approved by that state's voters in 1994 and 1997 referenda. At least 70 terminally ill people have committed assisted suicide since passage of the act. Gee, if only Ashcroft had intervened sooner, those 70 people could have been still with us, suffering untold pains and degradation--all while affirming the miracle of life.

• "My administration worked with the Congress to create the Department of Homeland Security." Yeah, and Al Gore invented the Internet. Although President Bush has used the department to curtail personal liberties and manipulate public sentiment, he opposed its creation for nine months after Sept. 11, 2001--largely because it was proposed by Democrats. As Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic, "Bush's record on homeland security ought to be considered a scandal. Yet, not only is it not a scandal, it's not even a story."

• When the president needed someone to head up the FDA's Advisory Committee on Reproductive Health Drugs, he chose Dr. W. David Hager. This committee makes important decisions about what drugs should be used in obstetrics, gynecology, hormone therapy and contraception programs. Why was Dr. Hager selected? Perhaps because of his groundbreaking medical text, As Jesus Cared for Women, which blends biblical accounts of how Jesus healed sick women with case files from the good doc's own patient list. Dr. Hager isn't exactly in the mainstream of reproductive science since in his own practice he refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. He's pro-life, you see.