Who Let the Dogs In?

by Molly Ivins

  President Cognitive Dissonance is here: What you see is not what you get. What you hear is not what you get. What you get is what you get.

  March 2001

  W.’s Splendid Performance

  SO YOU HAD to figure George W. would skate through Europe on “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (the most memorable phrase his speechwriters have yet produced for him). He is not as bad as the Europeans thought he was—quel triomphe! And have our media not saluted “the spring in his step” and the hilarious moment when he greeted Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain as “Mr. Landslide”?

  What a regular guy! Plain-spoken. Straightforward.

  Only Jesse Helms is grumpy.

  I, too, would be enchanted by Dubya’s splendid performance (only one mispronunciation of a world leader and the slight mishap concerning his assertion that Africa is a nation) if only he weren’t so limited. W. Bush is not plain-spoken or straightforward. He is opaque, diaphanous, and so rarely says anything approaching actual meaning that it’s headlines when he does: e.g., “Major league asshole.” You can listen to an entire forty-five-minute speech by this man and still wonder, “Did he just say anything we should have noticed?” He is much given to reiteration of the obvious, as though it were news. This just in: “The cold war is over.”

  Having it both ways is something of a W. Bush signature. For example, when he was governor, he opposed the state’s Patients’ Bill of Rights, first vetoing the bill in ’95 and later letting it become law only after it had been passed by a veto-proof majority, after he had fought it every step of the way, and even then he let the strongest part of the bill become law without his signature. He is apparently about to use the same ploy on the federal patients’ bill: Oppose it every step of the way and then claim credit for it. He just pulled this stunt with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s long-awaited capitulation on price caps for Western energy.

  Some progressives are taking comfort in the news that Bush is sinking in the polls, particularly the acute insight by the American people that he’s more interested in helping large corporate donors than the public. Never did think the people were stupid. But the problem is not public recognition of what Bush is—most of us didn’t vote for him to begin with. The problem is wasted time and money, years and billions being frittered away.

  Time is especially a problem on three fronts—global warming, AIDS, and Russia, a seriously destabilized nuclear power. Putin promptly countered Bush’s proposal for a National Missile Defense (NMD) shield with a promise to increase Russia’s offensive weapons—duh. For those of you who remember your old arms control jargon, they’re going to MIRV their MARVs, put multiple warheads on every missile. Though Putin, who seems to have a strong grip on reality, did remark he thought they had at least twenty years before they had to worry about the NMD.

  The real concern with Russia is not that it is hostile but that it is falling apart. Their radar system is shot: They almost launched a nuclear strike against us in 1995 when they mistook a Norwegian research rocket for an incoming Trident missile. And they’re less likely to lob a nuke at us than they are to sell some of what they’ve got to the usual suspects, or even have it stolen.

  Meanwhile, W. continues his Alfred E. Neuman routine on global warming. The people sitting in the mess of Houston being eaten alive by mosquitoes in the wake of Tropical Storm Allison are not the only ones to notice that untoward weather events are coming more frequently. Even the insurance industry is rapidly passing nervous on the subject.

  But this cheerful report should perk up your day no end: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recently said, “If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good.” This is the kind of positive thinking that makes our country great.

  August 2001

  One Throws Up One’s Hands

  I WAS IN Paris for all of September. After 9/11, at the American Church on the Left Bank and the American Cathedral on the Right, the steps were covered with the most beautiful flowers and the most touching messages. They ranged from “God Bless America” to “Nous Vous Aimons” to “Vive Les New Yorkers.” Many of the messages mentioned ’44, Normandy, or the liberation of Paris. One, in a shaky, spidery hand, referred to the famous American declaration of World War I: “Lafayette, we are here,” and added the assurance that the French would be with America once more.

  All this was even more remarkable in that the French consider George W. Bush a hopeless fathead. The Europeans were much taken aback by W’s language after the attack, but I must confess, I’m such a Texan I didn’t even react. We’ll “smoke ’em out and round ’em up”—sound plan. “Bring him in, dead or alive”—you bet your butt. I did, however, cringe at his use of the word crusade.

  In the first few days, the French papers featured great deluges of prose on the awfulness and the horror of the attack, backed by tender portraits of the survivors. But there was from the beginning a slightly less sentimental tone in the coverage than in the American press, an immediate practicality about the consequences, and a severe avoidance of the bathetic.

  By the weekend of September 15, the French press was pointing out, in the most tactful fashion, that this administration has notably preferred unilateralism to multilateralism but now the great need for fullest cooperation with the allies was revealed. The second point made by the French press was that G. W. Bush must now, surely, recognize the folly of the missile defense shield, it having just been so painfully demonstrated to be not at all what is needed. So when the news came from Washington that actually the missile defense shield was more likely to pass now since no one in Washington was in a mood to deny Bush anything he says he needs, the French press grew impatient.

  In the French language, one is the preferred pronoun for the opinionated individual. The French avoid the egotistical I and the presumptuous everybody. So when the illogical decision on missile defense came down, it forced one to throw up one’s hands and shake one’s head and sigh. One was not happy.

  One was also gravely concerned by the call-up of fifty thousand reservists and bellicose quotes from Bush and Cheney. The problem, one agreed with one along the quai, was the use of the word war. For war, the military forces of one country must attack the military forces of another. Therefore, this was not a war. It was a crime of the most horrible variety. One must find the perpetrators. One must bring them to justice. One is inclined to think an international tribunal, such as for Slobodan Milosevic´, would be a proper forum.

  BACK HOME IN Texas, and the sign outside our neighborhood strip joint says, HOT BABES, COLD BEER, NUKE ’EM, GW.

  My worry is that Bush is painting himself into a corner with his rhetoric. This is not a war; it’s a gigantic police operation in the face of a crime beyond all understanding.

  Fear is at the root of most evil. As Boots Cooper, age eight, said after a close encounter with a chicken snake: “Some things’ll scare you so bad, you’ll hurt yourself.” These dotty proposals to breach the Constitution fall into that category. We cannot make ourselves more secure by making ourselves less free. According to reporting in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, the terrorists got in and stayed through loopholes in the visa system, not some fundamental constitutional flaw.

  When I returned from Paris, I was hoping we’d start thinking outside the box. Now I’m hoping we’ll just start thinking.

  One more Texas sign, in front of a pharmacy: GENERIC PROZAC NOW IN, GOD BLESS AMERICA.

  November 2001

  Civil Liberties Matter

  WHOA! THE PROBLEM IS the premise. We are having one of those circular arguments about how many civil liberties we can trade away in order to make ourselves safe from terrorism, without even looking at the assumption—can we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free? There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.

 
Exactly what do we want to strike out of the U.S. Constitution that we think would prevent terrorist attacks? Let’s see, if civil liberties had been suspended before September 11, would law enforcement have noticed Mohammed Atta? Would the FBI have opened an investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, as Minneapolis agents wanted to do? The CIA had several of the 9/11 actors on their lists of suspected terrorists. Exactly what civil liberty prevented them from doing anything about it?

  In the case of a suspected terrorist, the government already had the right to search, wiretap, intercept, detain, examine computer and financial records, and do anything else it needed to do. There’s a special court they go to for subpoenas and warrants. As it happens, they didn’t do it.

  Changing the law retroactively is not going to change that. Certainly, we had a visa system that had more holes than Swiss cheese. What does that have to do with civil liberties? When we don’t give an agency enough money to do its job, it doesn’t get done.

  As you may have heard, Immigration and Naturalization has been a bit overwhelmed in recent years. In fairness to law enforcement, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have seen this one coming. It’s always easy to point the finger after the fact. It was just a damnable act.

  Absolutely nothing in the Constitution would have prevented us from stopping 9/11, so why would we want to change it? I also think we’re arguing from the wrong historical analogies. Yes, during past wars civil liberties have been abrogated and the courts have even upheld this. We regret it later, but we don’t seem to learn from that.

  But the Bush administration’s rhetoric aside, we are not at war. War is when the armed forces of one country attack the armed forces of another. What we’re looking at is more akin to the nineteenth-century problem with anarchists, the terrorists of their day. And we made some memorable errors by giving in to hysteria over anarchists.

  In the infamous 1886 Haymarket Square affair in Chicago, after a bomb killed seven policemen, eight labor leaders were rounded up and “tried,” even though there was no evidence against them—four hanged, one suicide, three sentenced. Historians agree they were all innocent.

  Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in 1927, were finally exonerated by the state of Massachusetts in 1977. That outbreak of hysteria over “foreign anarchists” led to, among other abuses, a wave of arrests for DWI: “Driving While Italian.” And no one was ever made safer from an anarchist bomb by the execution of innocent people. We all know that other groups, from the Irish to the blacks to the Chinese, have been targeted for legal abuse over the years—all betrayals of our laws, values, and the sacrifices of generations. Let’s not do it again.

  The counter-case was neatly put by David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary: “We can live in a world with airy-fairy civil liberties and believe the best in everybody—and they will destroy us.” Unless, of course, we destroy ourselves first.

  Fascism is not a word I throw around lightly, but what do you think happened in Germany in the 1930s? The U.S. Constitution was written by men who had just been through a long, incredibly nasty war. They did not consider the Bill of Rights a frivolous luxury, to be in force only in times of peace and prosperity, put aside when the going gets tough. The Founders knew from tough going. They weren’t airy-fairy guys.

  We put away Tim McVeigh and the terrorists who did the 1993 World Trade Center bombing without damaging the Constitution. If the laws break into some apartment full of al-Qaeda literature and plans of airports, absolutely nothing prevents them from hauling in the suspects and having a nice, cozy, coplike chat with them. Because there’s evidence. That’s what they call “due process.”

  When there is no evidence, no grounds for suspicion, we do not hold citizens indefinitely and without legal representation. Very airy-fairy of us, to be sure. Foreign citizens have only limited rights in this country, depending on their means of entry—different for refugees, permanent residents, etc. So what’s the problem?

  Attorney General John Ashcroft has been so busy busting dying marijuana smokers in California and doctors in Oregon who carry out their terminal patients’ wishes to die in peace, he obviously has no time to consider the Constitution. But he did swear to uphold it.

  November 2001

  The False War

  THE STATE OF the Union was fairly surreal Tuesday night. We won the war against Afghanistan, but we’re still at war with al-Qaeda, so we have to go attack North Korea.

  The big paper-shredders at Enron are finally coming to a halt, so we should go ahead and pass huge corporate tax cuts to help all the other companies that use aggressive accounting practices and need the dough. They especially need the rebates on the taxes they didn’t pay. We’re a better people than we were on September 10, so let’s all donate four thousand hours to the country, except for those who are too busy stashing their loot in offshore banks so they won’t have to pay taxes.

  To further this noble scheme, the taxpayers will pony up to fund volunteers with religious groups. Does this mean Mormon missionaries will get paid to knock on our doors and persuade us that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are the light and the way?

  I’m clearly confused, but I think some of my colleagues are, too. During the run-up to the State of the Union speech, I heard apparently sane commentators state that since George W. Bush is reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, he would speak out against “the malefactors of great wealth” and possibly even endorse campaign finance reform.

  I may be confused by Bush, but these folks have absolutely no idea who he is. Let’s try this again, team. George W. Bush sides with the malefactors of great wealth not because he is a tool of the rich or because Enron bought him with campaign contributions—that’s who he is, that’s what he really believes, that’s his life experience.

  Here’s one example from his oilfield career. When Bush was in the oil business, his failing company Spectrum 7 was bought by Harken Energy. Bush and his two partners got $2 million in stock in exchange for a company that had lost $400,000 in the six months prior to the sale. Bush himself got stock worth about $500,000 and an annual consulting fee of $120,000, later reduced to $50,000.

  In June 1990, Bush sold two thirds of the Harken stock he had acquired in the Spectrum 7 deal at $4 a share—$318,430 more than it was worth when he got it. A month before Bush sold his stock, the Harken board appointed Bush and another company director, E. Stuart Watson, to a “fairness committee” to determine how restructuring would affect ordinary stockholders.

  Smith, Barney, Harris, Upham & Co., the financial consultants hired by Harken, told Bush and Watson only drastic action could save the company. So Bush sold his stock before the news became public. According to U.S. News & World Report, there was “substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits.” Insiders liquidating large blocks of stock are required to notify the Securities and Exchange Commission immediately. Bush reported the sale eight months after the federal deadline. Although the SEC does prosecute flagrant violators of insider-reporting rules, according to The Wall Street Journal, first-time violators usually get only a warning letter.

  This not-so-ancient history may not strike you as relevant, so let’s move on to a current policy conflict. The Bush administration’s policy on international money-laundering changed after September 11. Bill Clinton, you may recall, was leading the charge by developed countries to go after offshore banks used by terrorists, drug dealers, tax dodgers, and other trash. Bush had called off that effort, but it gained new urgency after the attacks, and part of last fall’s anti-terrorism law contained new provisions against international money-laundering.

  The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing Tuesday on how the new law is working. Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, the committee chair, criticized two new regulations concerning “shell banks”—front operations used by people hiding their wealth. Under the anti-terrorism law, American financial institutions are not permitted to have correspondent accounts—that is, deposit accounts th
at banks have in other banks, with shell banks. According to The New York Times, Sarbanes said the new regulation lets American institutions off the hook if their foreign customers certified they were not fronting for shell banks. Another provision permits correspondent accounts from shell banks if a real bank owns 25 percent of the shell bank’s shares. Sarbanes said it was “a broad loophole,” inviting trouble.

  Another way to launder money is International Business Companies, or IBCs—shell companies not required to file any public notice of who their officers and directors are. There’s no need to reveal the identity of its shareholders; no need to file any financial statements or keep any accounts. No income, capital gains, or inheritance taxes. One pamphlet touting a Bahamian IBC closes with: “ ‘Pinch me! I’m dreaming,’ you may be saying.”