The 'Bush Effect' -- Hopefully for a Third and LAST Time (Mary Lyon)

  Dec. 31, 2008 (World News Trust) -- Third time’s a charm, maybe?

  I’ve compiled three of these lists now. In 2006, I issued the first one, looking back on everything George W. Bush has adversely affected since he first arrived in the Oval Office. Just a damage assessment, really. At the time, I thought it would be instructive to look back, at year’s end, over what many Bush critics have come to refer to as his “Reverse Midas Touch” -- everything he touches turns to something far more foul, germ-laden, and smelly than gold. It ran at least nine pages. Last time I looked, the page count had expanded to 17.

  I say “Third and Hopefully LAST Time” for a reason, at this writing. I’m hoping against hope that we can be done with this list, as we are technically done with George W. Bush, once he FINALLY leaves the White House -- the house The People awarded to Barack Obama -- Jan. 20, 2009. Unfortunately, I know I’m just dreaming, really, because the effect of George W. Bush’s “leadership” over his party and our country for the past eight long, grueling and shameful years will prove to be the “gift” that keeps on giving. It’s probably going to take more than simply an additional eight years to undo all the damage this individual has heaped upon our country, our reputation, our democratic system, our Constitution, our cities, our states, our environment, and our people. The problems are so deep, widespread, systemic, and many-headed by now that it may indeed take decades to solve and reverse them all. And thanks to Bush’s surprisingly vocal and willfully ignorant apologists, some issues may never be properly corrected, or even addressed.

  As with the lists of the past two Christmases, these items appear in no particular order and undoubtedly is STILL incomplete, despite being compiled over at least three Christmases of thought, the repeated ransacking of my memory, and a fair amount of Googling. Especially since many more of the sins of the Bush administration have yet to surface (or be whistle-blown by a partisan who suddenly grows a conscience or an investigative reporter who inexplicably decides to look into the voluminous Bush/Cheney abominations rather than an all-Blagojevich-all-the-time (Keep looking! It’s a Democrat! GOTTA be another blue dress in there or a way to destroy Obama maybe!) orgy. Feel free to add your own. If nothing else, it’s my attempt to offer a little fairness and balance to the spin-mongers who are desperately trying, nonstop, to recast the Bush legacy as that proverbial pig with lots of nice new lipstick. This list is filled with people, places, things, groups, and concepts well worth remembering. They will NEVER be quite the same again. So here goes…

  THINGS BUSH AND THE REPUBLI-CON PARTY HAVE RUINED, INJURED, INSULTED, OR SOMEHOW COMPROMISED, directly OR indirectly:

The truth

America as we knew it

The Constitution of the United States of America

The Congressional Page Program

The presidency

The moral high ground

The presidential oath of office

An independent press

Accountability in government

Republican Redistricting in Texas

Everyone in Congress who voted for the IWR and the Patriot Act

The State of the Union speech

The Democratic Party

The Republican Party

The Bible

The Methodist Church

The Southern Baptists

The evangelical movement

The American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Federalist Society, et al

The CIA

The FBI

Executive privilege

The Presidential Daily Brief

George Herbert Walker Bush

The Bush “family franchise” – its “entitlement” to the White House

Going to Rehab

Tom Delay

Bob Ney

Mark Foley

Tom Reynolds

Don Sherwood

“Mean” Jean Schmidt

Dennis Hastert

John Boehner

Mitch McConnell

Jack Abramoff

Roger Ailes

Rupert Murdoch

Fox News Channel

Bill O'Reilly

The “War on Christmas”

Randy "Duke" Cunningham

Conrad Burns

Larry Craig

Harold Ford

Bob Corker

Saxby Chambliss

Jim Martin

Bill Clinton

Hillary Clinton

Ed Gillespie

Ari Fleischer

Scott McClellan

Jeff Gannon

Talon News

Iraq

Afghanistan

“Scooter” Libby

Douglas Feith

Harvey Pitt

Brent Scowcroft

Richard Clarke

The SEC

Christopher Cox

Ben Bernanke

Henry Paulson

Free market economics

“Compassionate Conservatism”

“Trickle-down” tax policy

Government non-interventionism

Arnold Schwarzenegger

GOP internet consultant Michael Connell

Colin Powell

Michael Powell

The city of New Orleans

Michael "Brownie" Brown

Joseph Albaugh

FEMA

The Department of Homeland Security

Michael Chertoff

The Houston Astrodome

The World Trade Center

The Pentagon (building)

The federal budget

The dollar

American image abroad

The Dixie Chicks

Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, and other celebrity “surrender monkeys”

The “Jersey Girls” - 9/11 widows

Toby Keith

Pat Tillman

Pat Tillman’s grieving family

Judy Miller

Matt Cooper

Patrick Fitzgerald

The New York Times

The Washington Post

The Los Angeles Times

The National Review

The Boston Globe

Human Events

The Washington Times

The Weekly Standard

Bob Woodward

John Kerry

John Edwards

Mary Cheney

Disney/ABC TV

ClearChannel Communications

Bernie Kerik

Christie Todd Whitman

Sandra Day O’Connor

John G. Roberts

Samuel Alito

Dan Rather

Mary Mapes

CBS News

”60 Minutes”

The Purple Heart

Cindy Sheehan

More than four-thousand American soldiers and their grieving families (and that’s strictly battlefield death toll – NOT including serious injury, PTSD, and deaths and suicides off the battlefield http://www.militarycity.com/valor/honor.html

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Hans Blix

Mohammed al-Baradei

Scott Ritter

David Kay

Lower Manhattan

New York City in general (and its air quality)

Kennebunkport, Maine

Crawford, Texas

The Hotel Del Coronado

Stem cell research

The Bill of Rights

Harvard's MBA program

Yale University

The history major

Cheerleading

Misty May-Treanor

The Segway

Workers’ rights (especially during the last month or so)

Environmental protections (especially during the last month or so)

The right to medical care and prescriptions without pharmacists’ personal agendas (especially during the last month or so)

“Healthy” Forests

“Clear” Skies

“No Child Left Behind”

The polar bear

The elderly

Prescription drugs

Social Security

The “ownership” society

“Personal responsibity”

Valerie Plame

Joseph Wilson

Brewster/Jennings & Associates

The CIA

Richard Armitage

Helen Thomas

David Gregory

Nancy Pelosi

The Texas Air National Guard

The Presidential Medal of Freedom

George Tenet

Paul Bremer

Jay Garner

John Poindexter

John Negroponte

John Bolton

The United Nations

The U.N. Security Council

The 9/11 Commission - and its report

The Iraq Study Group - and its report

The swift boat

Legitimate elections

Phil Donahue

The White House Press Corpse

The White House Correspondents Association Dinner

Stephen Colbert

Rich Little

Tom Daschle

Harriet Miers

Terri Schiavo

Michael Schiavo

Arthur Anderson Accounting Firm

Enron – and its thousands of screwed-over employees and stock holders

Kenny-boy

Jeff Skilling

Andy Fastow

WorldCom

WorldCom chief Bernie Ebbers and CFO Scott Sullivan

Tyco International

Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, CFO Mark Swartz and ex-general counsel Mark Belnick

Global Crossing Ltd.

Global Crossing chief Gary Winnick

Adelphia Communications Corp.

Adelphia Chief John Rigas and sons

The Federal Reserve

Lehman Brothers

Bear Stearns

Merrill Lynch

A.I.G.

Morgan Stanley

Washington Mutual

Goldman Sachs

The Dow Jones Industrial Average

The Treasury Department

The US taxpayer

Corporate salaries and bonuses

Fannie Mae

Freddie Mac

The “Big Three” US automakers

Outsourcing

Offshore tax shelters

Habeas Corpus

Ahmed Chalabi

“Curveball”

The White House Iraq Group

The National Security Administration

Henry Kissinger

Richard Perle

Donald Rumsfeld

Paul Wolfowitz

Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman

Karen Hughes

General Anthony Zinni

General Eric Shinseki

The Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad

The World Bank

Shaha Ali Riza – Wolfowitz’s girlfriend

John Ashcroft

James Comey

David Safavian

Susan Ralston

The theory of Evolution

The separation of church and state

The separation of powers

Max Cleland

John McCain

John McCain’s wife and adopted daughter

The Kyoto Accords

The Geneva Conventions

Sibel Edmonds

Private Jessica Lynch

Lynndie England and her boyfriend Charles Graner AND their baby

General Janis Karpinski

British Prime Minister Tony Blair

Retired General Ricardo Sanchez

Vladimir Putin

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard

Former French President Jacques Chirac

Hamid Karzai

The resurgent Taliban

Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf

Osama bin Laden (STILL at large)

Waterboarding and other tortures

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba (and the Taguba Report on Abu Ghraib)

Retired CIA agent John Kiriakou

Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah

Al Qaeda suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

Khalid Sheik Mohammed

CIA Director Michael Hayden

Hugo Chavez

Fidel Castro

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad

The Sunnis

The Shiites

The Kurds

The Framework Agreement with North Korea

Katharine Harris

Rick Santorum

George "Macaca" Allen

Gordon Smith

Ted Stevens

Wayne Allard

Michelle Bachmann

Lincoln Chafee

Chuck Hagel

John Warner

John Sununu (the younger)

Pete Domenici

Heather Wilson

Elizabeth Dole

Norm Coleman

Jim Gilmore

Fred Thompson

Tommy Thompson

Rudy Giuliani

Tom Tancredo

Mike Huckabee

Duncan Hunter

Ron Paul

Sam Brownback

Alan Keyes

Mitt Romney

Sarah Palin

Marilyn Musgrave

Dusty Foggo

Rick Renzi

Harry Reid

Kenneth Blackwell

AIDS funding for Africa

Robert Novak

E. D. Hill

Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and more “Fox & Friends”

James Carville

Tucker Carlson

Charles Krauthammer

Peggy Noonan

Joe Scarborough

Rita Cosby

Joie Chen

Dick Morris

Ralph Reed

Paul O'Neill

John O'Neill - the FBI terrorism expert who died in the WTC, NOT the John Kerry-hater

Morale at the Pentagon

Morale in the military

The PNAC

– a complete list of signatories:

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/charts/pnac-chart.php

Bill Kristol

Dick Cheney

David Addington

Michael Ledeen, etc.

Norm Podhoretz

Karl Rove

Austin attorney Harry “Cheney shot me in the face” Whittington

The Republican Majority in the House

The Republican Majority in the Senate

Saddam Hussein

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki

The Morning-After pill

The right to choose

The right to privacy

NPR

Bill Frist

Trent Lott

Strom Thurmond

Ray Nagin

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour

Former Lousiana governor Kathleen Blanco

Brazil ("I didn't know you had black people in Brazil")

Jeb Bush

Paraguay

Pox "News" Channel

Rush Limbaugh

Oxycontin

James Baker III

Lee Hamilton

Former Gov Thomas Keane

Ken Mehlman

Tom Ridge

Curt Weldon

Bandar "Bush"

Enjoyable flying

Condoleezza Rice (or is that “Contradicta”?)

The State Department

The Defense Department

The Justice Department

The Labor Department

The Transportation Department

The Commerce Department

The Energy Department

The Department of Veterans Affairs

The Interior Department – and every other thoroughly-compromised Cabinet department

Mark McKinnon, “Maverick Media”, “Public Strategies Inc.”

Peter Wehner – White House Office of Strategic Initiatives

Laura Bush

Jenna and Barbara (once renowned as “Drunk and Disorderly”)

General Peter Pace

General Tommy Franks

General Richard Myers

General John Abizaid

"Freedom fries"

Dubai Ports World

OUR port security

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (groped in public by Bush)

Howard Dean

Public education in America

The poor

The homeless

Christiane Amanpour

Jim Jeffords

Joe Lieberman

Ned Lamont

Jim Talent

Dick DeVos

Dino Rossi

The outgoing Clinton Administration ("they trashed Air Force One!")

Michael Steele

The Supreme Court

The FDA

The English Language

The Texas Air National Guard

Thanksgiving dinner with the troops

Ted Haggard

Dr. James Dobson

"Focus on the Family"

Jerry Falwell

Pat Robertson

Alabama Chief Justice Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore

David Vitter

David Vitter’s wife, Wendy

The “D.C. Madam” – Pamela Martin & Associates

The Republicans' Congressional Bible Study room

The space shuttle Columbia

The NASA budget (and its integrity)

Millions of children in Africa

Chicken-fried steak

"Fool me once..."

OB-GYNS who are out there sharing “their love” with their patients

“Bring ‘em on”

“You’re either with us or you’re against us”

Old Europe

Poland

Ouday and Qusay

“Baghdad Bob”

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Fired White House chief chef Walter Scheib III

Argentina (Bush twins trashed the place)

"Mission Accomplished"

"The Path to 9/11"

Ron Silver

Pretzels

Mountain biking

Lance Armstrong

Paul Wellstone

Richard Gephardt

Paul Hackett

Reliable vote counts

Diebold

Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold

Chris Wallace

Michael Moore

The health of the planet

Michael J. Fox

The 2001 anthrax victims

David Kuo ("Tempting Faith")

The Office of Faith-Based Initiatives

The yellow ribbon

The Congressional Black Caucus

Al Gore

Warren Christopher

Accountability

Checks and balances

Tony Snow

Dana Perino

Stephen Cambone

Stephen Hadley

Keith Ellison, D-Minn (new Muslim congressman lambasted for swearing his oath on the Koran instead of the Bible)

Government regulations

Bankruptcy protections

Foreclosure protections

Paul Weyrich

Ann Coulter

Kate O’Bierne

Mona Charen

Michelle Malkin

Michael Savage Weiner

Glenn Beck

Michael Reagan

Roger Hedgecock

Cal Thomas

George Will

Mary Matalin

William F. Buckley, Jr.

Kelly Wallace

Carol Lin

Maureen Dowd

Thomas L. Friedman

Sean Hannity

Alan Colmes

Bill “The Gambler” Bennett

The conservative movement

Free-market conservatives

Alan Greenspan

Flag pins

Going shopping

Christopher Buckley

Donna Brazile

Mary Beth Cahill

Steve Schmidt

Rick Davis

Michael Medved

NPR’s Bob Edwards

NPR’s Gwen Ifill

Wolf Blitzer

Tim Russert

Andrea Mitchell

Paula Zahn

Larry King

Chris Matthews

Norah O’Donnell

Fred Barnes

Morton Kondracke

Pat Buchanan

Bill Schneider

Howard Kurtz

Dana Milbank

ABC newsman Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt

ABC newswoman Elizabeth Vargas

Aaron Brown

Katie Couric

Charles Gibson

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl

CBS reporter Kimberly Dozier, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan

NBC reporter David Bloom

List of all journalists (AND OTHERS) killed in Iraq: http://www.rehumanize.us/journalists.html

Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis also killed (and not counted)

Nick Berg – and family

Hanging chads

The “Help America Vote” Act

F.I.S.A.

Ralph Nader

Scott Reid, senior strategist to then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin – “you got a pretty face”

al-Maliki's short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari

Jason Leopold and Truthout.org

James Hatfield (author of controversial Bush bio “Fortunate Son”)

Air America

Patrick Leahy

Jim Webb

Tim Johnson

“Spamalot”

Ferragamos

Kanye West

The proper pronunciation of  “nuclear”

Elizabeth Hasselbeck

Chuck Norris

Jon Voight

Jay Leno

David Letterman

Jon Stewart

Conan O’Brien

Craig Ferguson

Saturday Night Live

“The View”

Oscar de la Renta

Laura Bush’s social secretary (should have made sure all those other women didn’t turn up in the same designer duds Milady was wearing)

Gay couples who’d like to marry

Gays in general

The flight suit

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln

“The Pet Goat”

Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida – where Bush sat with “The Pet Goat” and the kiddies on the morning of 9/11/01

Plastic sheeting and duct tape

David Paulison (the government’s Fire Administrator who advised the public on the plastic-sheeting-and-duct-tape anti-terrorism strategy)

Queen Elizabeth II

Buckingham Palace gardens

Rachel Paulose, US attorney for Minnesota

Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker

Nancy Nord - acting chair, Consumer Product Safety Commission

The Consumer Product Safety Commission

The Food & Drug Administration

Wang Wei, the Chinese pilot who collided with a A US EP-3 Aries II spy plane on March 31st, 2001

Judith Nathan Giuliani

New York City’s Police Department

The Mormon Church

"Pat" Philbin - Phony FEMA news conference guy

Mark Smith

Steve Scully

Ann Compton

MSNBC

Keith Olbermann

Rachel Maddow

Pat Peale – lovely Texas GOP 2004 convention delegate who modeled the purple heart bandaid to mock John Kerry’s Vietnam service

S. R. Sidarth (George Allen’s “macaca” victim)

The Knight-Ridder news service

John Dilulio and the “Mayberry Machiavellis”

Mark Zachares

The Hatch Act

MZM

Mitchell Wade

Bobby Eberle

John Aravosis

Markos Moulitsas

Arianna Huffington

Bill Moyers

Attorney General Michael Mukasey

Alberto Gonzales

John Yoo – wrote the legal briefs for the White House that helped justify torture

Gonzales's attorney, George J. Terwilliger III of White & Case in Washington

David G. Leitch, a Gonzales friend and general counsel at the Ford Motor Co.

Richard Stickler - Mine Safety and Health Administration

J. Steven Griles - ex #2 at Interior Department (imprisoned for 10 months for lying to Congress in Abramoff scandal)

Daniel Levin - former acting assistant AG (who volunteered for waterboarding to find out whether it was really torture)

Senator Chuck Schumer

Senator Dianne Feinstein

Lt. General Douglas Lute (Pentagon's "war czar")

State Dept. Inspector General Howard J. "Buzzy" Krongard and his brother Alvin

Eric Prince

Blackwater USA

Halliburton

Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc.

The U.S. International Contract Bridge Team - the Venice Cup Bridge Team - USBF - Jan Martell United States Bridge Federation spokesman

Bob Burkett

Barack Obama

Ed Rogers

Ann Richards

Judy Woodruff and Al Hunt

Molly Ivins

David Broder

Dan Bartlett

Andrew Card

Marine Cpl. Matt “gay porn star” Sanchez

Spc. Bryan O'Neal – who was ordered to lie to the Tillman family

O’Neal’s battalion commander, then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey – who told him to lie

Thomas F. Gimble, the Defense Department's acting inspector general

Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich (to the grieving Tillman family: “they’ll never be happy because they’re not Christian.”)

Matt Drudge

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

“Buckhead” and other online Dan Rather haters

Onetime Bush family friend Jimmy Allison

Ben Barnes

C. Murphy Archibald

Kevin Ring

Robert E. Coughlin II

Randall L. Tobias

Fred Fielding

“Fair and Balanced”

The term “Christian”

The term “right”

Judith Regan

Brent Bozell

Tony “Focus on the Family” Perkins

General David Petraeus

MoveOn.org

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman

Leura and Bill Canary

Dana Jill Simpson

Alice Martin

Mark McKinnon, “Maverick Media”, “Public Strategies Inc.” – GOP dirty trickster

Peter Wehner – White House Office of Strategic Initiatives

NAACP

Barbara “Beautiful Mind” Bush (senior)

David C. Iglesias as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico;

Kevin V. Ryan as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California;

John L. McKay as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington;

Paul K. Charlton as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona;

Carol C. Lam as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California;

Daniel G. Bogden as U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada;

Margaret M. Chiara as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan;

Todd Graves as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri;

Harry E. "Bud" Cummins, III as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas;

Thomas M. DiBiagio as U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, and;

Kasey Warner as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia.

J. Timothy Griffin, interim US attorney, Little Rock – Rove assistant

Monica Goodling

Sara Taylor

Lurita Doan, GSA Administrator

L. Scott Jennings, Acting GSA chief

Liberty University and its law school

Regent University and its law school

James Inhofe

Scott Bloch, who "runs" the Office of Special Counsel

Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ chief of staff

Walter Reed Army Medical Center

Walter Reed Army Medical Center Building 18

C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla, and Tom Davis, R-Va, who admitted they hadn’t investigated the Walter Reed scandal to avoid embarrassing the Army

Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, ex-commander of Walter Reed

Francis J. Harvey, Secretary of the Army, resigned

Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, Army Surgeon General and ex-commander of Walter Reed

Britney Spears

Paris Hilton

The Minneapolis Airport men’s room

The 2008 Republican National Convention

Isaac Toussie – the little pardon that wasn’t

Lt. Ehren Watada - http://www.thankyoult.org/

Jose Padilla

Code Pink

Former General Counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora

Iraqi journalist and shoe-thrower Muntadhar al-Zeidi

Barney the dog

Reuters reporter Jonathan Decker (the reporter Barney bit)

The cowboy hat

“Cowboy Diplomacy”

The letter “W”

  I know it’s completely arbitrary, but I’m ending the list here because if I don’t, I’ll probably be collecting list items for the rest of my life. The best Dubya can hope for in his new life as Private Citizen Bush, I suspect, is that the lack of backbone in Congress and/or the new administration remains the status quo. He’s counting on it. I, on the other hand, am praying that SOME Democrat (hey, I’ll take ANY Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, or even Republican at this point) hasn’t been putting together lists of his/her own. With the attempts to rewrite Bushian history running on overdrive in Junior’s last days in the White House, it behooves every one of us American citizens to compile a list like this – for the sake of keeping the record straight. The Bush crowd will continue trying to twist the facts – to their last breath. But we’ll always know the truth.

  Mary Lyon is a veteran broadcaster and five-time Golden Mike Award winner, who has anchored, reported, and written for the Associated Press Radio Network, NBC Radio "The Source," and many Los Angeles-area stations including KRTH-FM/AM, KLOS-FM, KFWB-AM, and KTLA-TV, and occasional media analyst for ABC Radio News. She began her career as a liberal activist with the Student Coalition for Humphrey/Muskie in 1968, and helped spearhead a regional campaign, The Power 18," to win the right to vote for 18-year-olds. She remains an advocate for liberal causes, responsibility and accountability in media, environmental education and support of the arts for children, and green living. In addition to World News Trust, Mary writes for Huffington Post, OpEdNews, Democrats.us, WeDemocrats.org's "We! The People" webzine. Mary is also a parenting expert, having written and llustrated the book "The Frazzled Working Woman's Practical Guide to Motherhood.