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This is a series of events that shouldn't be forgotten; the details are spelled out in James Bovard's The Bush Betrayal (2004, Palgrave Macmillan) in the chapter "Spending as Caring," pp. 121-128. Some highlights:You can’t have good government without the truth. During the crafting and passage of the Medicare prescription drug bill, the chief actuary of Medicare was told to withhold from Congress the true cost of the bill. He’d be fired if he told the truth.
The bill costs so much, in large part, because the bill prohibits Medicare from negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies on the price of drugs. As a result, seniors now pay on average 44% more than veterans getting the same drugs through the VA which is allowed to use its size to negotiate with the drug companies. To get the bill passed, the vote was held open for three hours. Tom DeLay was later admonished by Republicans on the ethics committee for attempting to bribe, and then extort, Republican Nick Smith of Michigan to get him to change his vote. The chairman of the Commerce Committee Billy Tauzin who ushered the legislation through, soon left Congress for a two million dollar a year job as the chief lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. Obviously, a complete coincidence.
Bush constantly portrayed the issue of new handouts in the loftiest moral terms. In a Florida speech on November 13, 2003, Bush declared, "The Medicare program is a basic trust that must be upheld throughout the generations." And because it was an issue of trust, the Bush team was entitled to use deceit and any means necessary to ram the law through Congress.Bovard's account goes on to describe how the Medicare prescription plan gives the bulk of its benefits to non-needy seniors--75% of recipients already have prescription drug coverage through insurance, and the National Center for Policy Analysis "estimated that only 6 to 7 percent of the expenditures in the Medicare reform bill will pay for additional drugs for the elderly." The beneficiaries are non-needy elderly, insurance companies, corporations ("the Congressional Budget Office forecast that 'at least one-third of all private companies will dump their retirees into the Medicare system as a result of the new bill'"), and, of course, the pharmaceutical companies, since there is no price negotiation under the bill.
The Republican leadership thought they could score victory in the House when the bill was brought to the floor on the evening of November 2, 2003. However, when the initial vote occurred at 3 a.m., the Bush proposal lost by two votes. The Republican leadership violated House rules, which limit votes to a half hour or less, and proceeded to carry out the longest floor vote in House history--dragging out the tally until 6 a.m., when two Republicans switched their "nays" to "yeas" and the bill passed.
Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), a veteran congressman in his final term, caught intense heat for opposing the bill. Efforts to sway Smith's vote focused on his son, who was running for the congressional seat his father held. Columnist Robert Novak reported: "On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat." Smith complained widely about the threats and bribes in the days after the vote. The House Ethics Committee eventually grudgingly launched a bribery investigation.
Barely a month after Bush signed the bill, Bush's budget director, Josh Bolton, informed Congress that the estimated cost had jumped to $540 billion for the first decade, instead of the advertised $400 billion ticket price. The revision infuriated conservative Republican congressmen, but the congressional leadership tried to brush it off as a non-issue. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) declared, "In truth, nobody has any idea what the real figure will be at the end of the day, because we don't know what those assumptions should be as we go further." If Frist actually believed no one had any idea of what the legislation would cost, then he and other supporters were grossly negligent or deceptive in the claims they made to the American people when Congress considered the bill. ...
The Bush administration intentionally deceived Congress over the estimated cost of the bill. Thirteen conservative House members had vowed to vote against any bill costing more than $400 billion. Richard S. Foster, the top actuary at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, privately estimated in June 2003--5 months before the final vote--that the bill would actually cost $550 billion. Foster was contacted by Democratic stafers seeking estimates on the cost of the Bush proposal. By law, Foster was obliged to provide them the information. Thomas Scully, the chief Medicare administrator, reportedly threatened to fire Foster if he provided the information. Foster later commented that "there was a pattern of withholding information for what I perceived to be political purposes." The much higher estimate of the cost of the Medicare bill was apparently known by top officials at the White House. Eighteen Democratic senators requested the GAO to investigate the potential violation of a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay the salary of any official who "prohibits or prevents, or threatens to prohibit or prevent" another employee from communicating with Congress. On April 1, House Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to summon Scully and White House aide Doug Badget to testify before a congressional committee.
On May 3, the Congressional Research service released a legal analysis which concluded that "such 'gag orders' have been expressly prohibited by federal law since 1912." The Supreme Court, in a 1927 ruling on the 1912 law, declared that a "legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information regarding conditions which the legislation is intended to affect or change." But the Bush administration was too astute to fall for such radical notions.
There were times that Dad's pranks bordered on cruelty. One of his oil company workers, a one-legged man he nicknamed "Crip" Smith, complained about everything. Dad and Crip's co-workers got tired of the old man's bellyaching and decided to take revenge. One morning Crip called in sick and Dad volunteered to send by lunch to his grateful but suspicious employee. Dad and his chums caught Crip's old black tomcat, killed it, skinned it, and cooked it in the kitchen of one of Dad's little restaurants. They called it squirrel meat and delivered it to Crip on a linen-covered tray. When Crip returned to work the next morning, Dad and his co-conspirators asked him how he liked his meal. They knew he would complain even about a free home-cooked lunch, and when Crip called it "the toughest squirrel meat" he had ever eaten, they were glad to tell him why.This story immediately follows another story in which Falwell invites his young friend William from the neighborhood, who is afraid of his father, into the house for milk and cookies, after telling his father that William is afraid (p. 49):
William hesitated at the door. He knew my father carried a gun, and there were too many stories circulating about that gun to leave William feeling easy about entering our home. Quickly I pushed my friend inside and closed the door behind us. Dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. Suddenly he looked directly at us and shouted.For additional context, Falwell reports that his father killed his own brother with a shotgun (in self-defense, pp. 22-24), and attributes part of his father's problem to the fact that "After all, Dad grew up in the home of an atheist" (p. 17), even though he had a Christian mother. His book says that his father had a deathbed conversion to Christianity (p. 83).
"Both of you, stop!" William froze in his tracks, and I leaned forward eagerly to see what Dad was up to. William's eyes opened wide as Dad drew his gun and pointed it at the floor just in front of my friend's trembling legs.
"Don't move," he said quietly. Then he took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The shot from the .38 Remington pistol blew a fairly impressive hole in the kitchen floor. Calmly, Dad blew smoke from the barrel and placed the pistol back on the table.
"I've been trying to get that fly all day," he said, looking back down at his paper. "And finally I got it."
There was a moment of silence. Then, with a gasp, William bolted out the door. I never got him back inside our house again, and the legend about my father continued to spread throughout the neighborhood. Later Dad and I laughed ourselves hoarse just remembering William's startled look and sudden exit.
A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case. The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.Via Talking Points Memo.
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