THE FRASER INSTITUTE INVITES YOU TO AN EVENING WITH 'TURD BLOSSOM'

Turd Blossom

Former Trustee Conrad Black

Former Trustee David Radler

Yesterday I had a big surprise. I received an invitation to a reception and dinner from the far right wing Fraser Institute, the Calgary Herald's think tank of choice. The event will be held on September 24th at a tony downtown Calgary Art Gallery. The guests will be treated to a lecture by Karl Rove.

Rove, you will recall, until last year was the loyal and faithful servant of President George W. Bush. He served as the President's Deputy Chief of Staff, and headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. Despite these lofty positions he has been described as 'Bush's Brain,' - not exactly a complement. In fact, Rove is a university dropout. He did attend university for a time - long enough to get draft deferrals until the draft ended in June of 1973.

His boss the President, showing the privileged and Ivy League class for which he is so famous, calls him 'Turd Blossom.' For his part, Rove describes the President as "one of the most intellectually gifted presidents we've had."

Throughout the greater part of Bush II's political career as Governor of Texas and President of the United States, Rove has been his closest political advisor. Thus he has been in on all of the great decisions - like going to war in Iraq and the public misinformation initiative that was its foundation, the woeful lack of preparation for rebuilding Iraq after the invasion, paying little more than lip-service to the war against the Taliban, the feeble response to Hurricane Katrina, public policy that has brought about the near bankruptcy of the United States, the wink-wink approach to torture and rendition, and foreign policy that resulted in the plummeting of American influence throughout the world. And that is only a partial list of the catastrophes of the Bush II years.

Rove's political gifts however, are not something to sneer at. He is an expert in smear tactics and dirty tricks. Rove the draft dodger has been given credit for labelling 1972 Democratic candidate for President George McGovern as a "left-wing peacenik" notwithstanding McGovern's stellar World War II service as a B-24 pilot. Rove has been accused of masterminding a telephone poll to voters in the Texas Gubernatorial contest between Bush II and Democrat Ann Richards, wherein the people being polled were asked if they would be more or less likely to vote for Richards if they knew that her staff was 'dominated by lesbians.'

He has been accused of doing the same thing in the 2000 Republican Primary in South Carolina, a contest between George W. Bush and John McCain. The telephone pollsters asked the question if they were more or less likely to vote for John McCain for president 'if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child."

During his long stint at the President's side, Rove had been up to his neck in other allegations -like being instrumental in the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative, dismissing U.S. federally appointed attorneys for failing to prosecute democrats, and being involved in the 'swiftboating' of John Kerry's military service during the Viet Nam war.

So Mr. Rove is the guest speaker at the dinner to which I was invited. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. If I were to go it is not for free. Tickets are $500 per individual, $900 per couple and $5000 for a table of ten. Mr. Rove does not come cheap these days. However, probably unbeknownst to the Fraserites in Toronto, he comes cheaper in Calgary. On September 23 in Toronto, the Bay Street Harperite cheerleaders will pay $700 for one ticket, $1300 a couple and $7000 for a table of ten. I guess the recent downturn of oil prices from $150 a barrel to $120 or so prompted the better Calgary deal.

The Fraser Institute is a registered charity with Revenue Canada. It is a rabid proponent of competitive markets, less government spending and regulation, less gun restrictions, more privatisation of government services and more private medicine. It opposes government involvement in global warming. Two of its illustrious former members of its Board of Trustees are Conrad Black and David Radler formerly of Hollinger fame, and presently indisposed. The current Board is comprised primarily of Canadian captains of industry, past and present. Among speakers at Institute functions in the coming months are former Socred Preston Manning, fallen Premier Ralph Klein, failed magazine publisher Ezra Levant, and Harper eminence grise Tom Flanagan. Just so you know.

As for me, I'm skipping the Rove banquet.

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S CROOKS AND WEAKLINGS

McClellan

Powell


Tenet

Speer

Former Bush II Press Secretary Scott McClellan has published his memoir of his years in the White House. Surprisingly, it is highly critical of his boss. McClellan now joins a unsavory group of current and ex-officials in the Bush II administration, an analysis of which makes evident some of the reasons why it was the worst in American history.

There was Paul Wolfowitz. The neocon Deputy Defence Secretary was a chief architect of the Iraq War. Like all of the neocon hawks, he studiously avoided serving in the U.S. military. He grossly underestimated the war's cost and did not plan for its aftermath. He left his post in 2005 for his sinecure engineered by Bush II - the Presidency of the World Bank. Faster than you can say Moqtada al-Sadr, he found a girlfriend among the Bank's staff. He gave her a healthy salary increase. When accused of being in a conflict of interest, working through Dick Cheney's daughter he got his gal pal seconded to the State Department. Alas, it didn't work. He was forced to resign in disgrace - but not before he negotiated a healthy severance payment for himself.

There was Bush's first Secretary of State, Colin Powell - the blue chip black Republican General and hero of Desert Storm. He either knowingly or with wilful blindness beat the drum in the UN and elsewhere about Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the security dangers they posed for the world. Soon after, Powell says, he began to have misgivings about the intelligence giving rise to the phony weapons of mass destruction issue. He also disagreed as to the conduct of the War. But he did not resign. He served to the end of the first Bush term. He voiced public criticism of the Iraq war only after leaving office. While he continued to serve Bush despite his state of unease, thousands of Iraqis and American soldiers continued to die. Of course, he wrote a book about his hellish experience and has made millions on the rubber chicken circuit since, dining out on his awful Bush II stories.

Then there is George Tenet. Tenet was a holdover from the Clinton years as Director of the CIA. Big George and his officials provided the faulty intelligence of Saddam's WMDs. Tenet assured his boss that proof of the WMDs was a "slam dunk case." He also approved torture techniques. He mercifully resigned in June of 2004. For his incompetence, the President awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Tenet too has written a book of his experiences which has made money. Like Powell, he is now critical of his former boss but - again like Powell - didn't have the guts to resign in protest when most of the blood was being spilled. Like most of Bush's chicken hawks, Tenet had never served in military service of his country.

Then there was Lewis 'Scooter' Libby. 'Scooter' - such a harmless, upbeat, chipper name. 'Scooter,' had been Bush's Assistant to the President, Chief of Staff to Cheney, and was Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers of five charges including perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame outing affair. For his transgressions, 'Scooter' was fined 250 grand, ordered to do 400 hours of community service and sentenced to three years in the slammer. Following upon his sentencing, his former employer Bush commuted the three years to zero. 'Scooter' also avoided serving his country in uniform as a young man, thus joining the 'chicken hawk' brigade of people like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Tenet and Bush (records of whose military career are mysteriously scant).

Then of course there is former Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, the serial blunderer and bullshit artiste of the war, who incompetently underestimated the manpower and financial demands of the mission, provided inferior equipment and supplies for his men in uniform, and consistently lied to the American people about the war's progress. Rummy also approved torture methods. He used a signing machine to write his letters of condolences to aggrieved families who lost loved ones who were fighting the war. He finally packed it in during Bush's second term amid mounting public criticism and unease about the war. At last report he is seeking a publisher for his memoirs so he can add to his ill-gotten gazillions earned in the private sector pre-Bush II. He is also facing lawsuits and criminal proceedings in several corners of the world that are likely to harass him to his grave.

There is the Vice President Dick Cheney. Joined at the hip was Rummy, he still maintains there were connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam, an allegation akin to the one about the moon being made of green cheese. He too is a supporter of torture and whatever is going on in Guantanamo. Cheney was a heavy duty oil guy and CEO of the renowned Halliburton corporation before going back into politics to become Bush II's Rasputin. Given his oily persona he has taken a keen interest in the Iraqi oil fields and the multinational oil companies' access to them. His dishonesty with the American people about the War in Iraq is only matched by Rumsfeld and the President himself. Cheney too is likely to be hounded by litigation in the years ahead arising from his war time actions, the cost of which - like Rumsfeld's - is likely to be paid by the U.S. taxpayer. Cheney too never wore a U.S. military uniform.

And now an unlikely character emerges out of the shadows. A forty year old cherubic, portly, Texas motormouth, Scott McClellan, a former press secretary to Bush II from 2003 to 2006. Like Tenet and Powell, the frat boy and political groupie has written a book of his White House experience. Its weighty title is 'What happened.' In his oeuvre he claims to have had grave misgivings about Bush's Presidency. Bush, he said, was interested in carrying on a permanent campaign and not thoughtfully and objectively addressing issues. He further opined that the Plame incident, Hurricane Katrina, and the war were all badly handled. McClellan, like Tenet and Powell, did not see fit to quit and publicly criticize the administration. In fact, he was pushed out of his press secretary job. Thus, the mayhem and abuses continued with not a peep from McClellan - until now.

Like Tenet and Powell, McLellan resurrects the memory of Albert Speer. Speer, you will remember, was the brilliant German Nazi architect who masterminded much of the Third Reich's wartime plans and was responsible for maintaining the production of armaments during the war. While he was on trial in Nuremberg after the war, he did a mea culpa and apologized. Thus he, unlike many of his colleagues, escaped the gallows and was out of the Spandau jail after a measly twenty years.

The consequences for the Bush sad cast of characters are not as serious as they were for Speer and his cronys. However, one can see the same process taking place. They are in effect apologizing or making excuses to avoid the wrath of history in the years ahead.

With friends like these running the country, the United States certainly needs no enemies. The Bush years were a perfect storm - a dumb, ideologically driven, uncurious President surrounded by reckless and cowardly ideologues like himself, or weaklings who although they may have known better, did nothing to stop the carnage. So history will judge.