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A Good Cleaning Saves a Presidency:
Two generations of George Bushes,
working together, used a simple dental exam to cover up the son’s
disappearance from the military during the Vietnam War.
The trick has successfully deflected
inquiry for nearly four decades.
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“A Higher Father”:
George W. Bush’s claim that he didn’t
ask his father for advice on Iraq but rather turned to
a “higher
father” for guidance was a story most of the media found too good to
check.
Reporters also recited faithfully the
supposed generational schism between father and son that cast George
W. as a genuine rough-hewn Texan, unlike his father, whose political
career was hobbled and re-election bid foiled in part because he
could never shed his establishment trappings.
In fact, George W. Bush and
George H.W. Bush were not just close - they were partners
in complex political and intelligence operations that are to this
day completely unknown to the public.
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Oil the Presidents Men:
A close friend of George W. Bush helped
provide cover for W’s disappearance from the Texas Air National
Guard unit in which both served.
He then was rewarded with a lucrative
assignment as middleman between Saudi oil interests and the Bush
family, that included financing of the illegal Iran-Contra operation
and an alliance with a clan called Bin Laden.
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Land of Opportunity:
One of the strangest companies ever to
appear in the oil business, tied to
the CIA, foreign dictators,
money launderers, and illicit caches of gold, helped fund George W.
Bush’s rise to the presidency.
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The Loan (ar)Ranger
A group of individuals seeking favor
with the administration of Bush’s father subsidized George W. Bush’s
stock holdings in the Texas Rangers baseball team. They created a
lucrative virtual no-show job that associated him with a popular
local sports franchise and also with a business success.
Later, Bush sold his Rangers stock at a
big gain to a man he enabled to profit off University of Texas
pension funds - and who ultimately put the Rangers into bankruptcy.
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Back in the Saddle, Temporarily
The Crawford ranch was a favored venue
for photo ops of a president supposedly more at home clearing brush
than behind a White House desk.
Yet George W. - a product of Eastern
establishment pillars such as Philips Andover, Yale, and Harvard -
bought the ranch shortly before he ran for president, and rarely
visits it now that he’s back in Texas.
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Making (Up) The Grade
Bush’s future Education Secretary faked
the Texas school performance numbers that helped persuade voters
that Bush was the man to fix the nation’s schools.
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An Eye for Talent
Bush touted his environmental
convictions during his presidential campaign. Then he turned the
Environmental Protection Agency’s most polluted region over to a car
dealer who had helped Bush earn a fortune off the Texas Rangers
baseball team.
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Lemons Into Lemonade
The Bush forces went into the 2004
campaign with a major vulnerability - evidence that, after a plum
position in the Texas Air National Guard enabled him to avoid
Vietnam, he disappeared from the final third of his obligatory - if
cushy - Guard stint.
With Bush facing media inquiries from an
aggressive CBS News and a daunting threat from John Kerry, a
Democratic opponent with a bona fide war record in the jungles of
Indochina, the then-president’s disinformation machine went into
action.
In the end, John Kerry was politically
wounded and CBS anchorman Dan Rather professionally destroyed. News
organizations abandoned intensive scrutiny of Bush, and he squeaked
through to another term.
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Keyboard Kops
George W. affected a Bubba persona that
the media generally bought, and that gained him slack for gaffes and
incompetencies. But when it came to strategy and tactics, he
actually was sly like a fox. He once confided to an adviser how
naïve journalists are, and how easy to fool.
His example: hide tactical information
“in plain sight” for reporters to “find” and report as inside dope.
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A Bush In Your Future?
Notwithstanding George W. Bush’s
purported Texas isolation and his general silence since leaving
Washington, the Bush family enterprise remains as viable as ever.
Members of their circle work in the
Obama administration, while his brother Jeb gears up for
a possible national campaign of his own - raising the prospect of
a third Bush in the White House.
Meanwhile, through Decision Points, the
upcoming George W. Bush presidential library/democracy “think tank”,
and the active role of his lieutenant
Karl Rove in orchestrating a GOP
comeback, they are already rewriting past history - and defining
history yet to come.
