The Truth About George W. Bush
This page tells you about just some of the things George W. Bush has done in his life and presidency to prove that he shouldn't have been President in the first place and that we should oppose him now.

As a kid, Bush and his friends "were terrible to animals" according to his childhood friend, Terry Throckmorton. He said they "would get BB guns and shoot [frogs]. Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up."


Bush was an alcoholic. He himself said that there was a period in his life when there wasn't a day he didn't drink. He was a heavy drinker for over 20 years. An article in Newsweek put it this way: "[Bush] went to Yale but seems to have majored in drinking at the Deke House." On September 4, 1976, Bush's car swerved onto the shoulder of a road in Kennebunkport, Maine. State troopers gave him an alcohol test and determined him to be drunk. Bush had his license suspended and was fined after he pleaded guilty to charges of Driving While Intoxicated. When he became the governor of Texas in 1994, Bush got a new license with a new ID number, so his old records were wiped out. We don't know how many other DWI's Bush amassed (the 1976 DWI was discovered by a television station in Maine right before the 2000 election, and Bush himself admitted to it). He said he stopped drinking after his 40th birthday, but...


Bush may have been a cocaine addict. There are many sources that claim this, but all Bush has said when asked is that he hasn't done cocaine after 1974. It's not too difficult to infer that Bush may have done cocaine before 1974.


Bush went into the National Guard instead of volunteering to go to Vietnam after graduating from Yale. On his entry test, he scored only 25/100, just one point above failing. He somehow managed to procure a slot in the Texas Air National Guard, over thousands of others. He only got in because the then lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, secretly told James Rose in the Air Guard to give Bush a space (Barnes only admitted to this under oath in 1999, but says that it wasn't a favor to the Bush family). In May of 1972, he went to work on a political campaign in Alabama, and Bush said he did his Guard work there as well. However, other National Guardsmen in Alabama didn't remember Bush ever showing up for duty. He didn't show up for his yearly physical, and there is nothing in terms of documentation to show that Bush showed up for duty at all in the last 17 months of his six-year commitment to the Guard. In 2004, the Bush Administration released papers to try to prove that Bush wasn't AWOL. While they failed to prove that Bush served his time in the Guard, two of the papers were payroll sheets showing Bush wasn't paid in the second half of 1972. He was also discharged eight months early.

In 1978, Bush made a run for the House of Representatives in West Texas. His Democratic opponent won in a landslide victory. He didn't run for public office again until 1994.


After his failed Congressional run, Bush started Arbusto Energy, an oil company that failed miserably. Some friends of the Bush family organized a merger between Arbusto Energy and another energy company, Spectrum 7; Bush also became CEO of the merger. Four years later, however, Spectrum 7 had $3 million in debt, so the Bush family friends who ran another corporation, Harken Energy, bailed Bush out of his second failure: they gave him stock options and a $120,000 salary for what was officially labeled as a job in the company's audit committee. What Bush really did was schmooze with potential investors; the son of the then-Vice President Bush was an attractive addition to the company. After many shady business deals, Harken inevitably went down as well. A few weeks before, Bush dumped $848,560 in Harken stock, but he didn't tell the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for eight months. Because of the fact that his father was the president at the time, and the Commission was run by family friends, the SEC didn't take action. Bush then invested in the Texas Rangers baseball team, and he became "Managing General Partner" with a $200,000 salary. As with Harken, his main business was the public side of the team; he went to games, signed autographs, and created baseball cards with his face on them. Under his management, the Texas Rangers traded Sammy Sosa away (for those who aren't familiar with baseball, Sammy Sosa was one of the biggest home-run hitters in the Major Leagues). He was eventually convinced by the Republican Party to run for governor of Texas in 1994.


As governor of Texas, Bush had more people executed than any other governor in U.S. history, signing off on 154 death warrants in six years. The only person he personally let off Death Row was Henry Lee Lucas, a dangerous serial killer who confessed to over 600 murders (whether he actually committed that many murders is a mystery, and it's very unlikely that he did). Lucas was found guilty of many crimes and was spending his life in prison anyway, but Bush said, "I believe there is enough doubt about this particular crime that the state of Texas should not impose its ultimate penalty by executing him." It is ironic that Lucas was let off when Bush executed Gary Graham and David Wayne Spence, whose guilt was never really proved beyond reasonable doubt, and Betty Lou Beets, who was sixty years old and was convicted of killing her abusive husband.


On election day in 2000, it all came down to Florida. As it turns out, Al Gore beat Bush by 540,520 votes in the popular vote. However, elections are decided by the electoral college system, in which whoever wins the majority of the nation's 570 electoral votes wins the election. Each state has a number of electoral votes equal to the total number of congressmen and senators representing the state; whichever candidate gets the most votes in a particular state wins that state's electoral votes. (The two states in which this doesn't happen are Nebraska and Maine, which give two electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in the state and one to the winner of each Congressional district.) Al Gore had more electoral votes than Bush (266 for Gore, 246 for Bush) without counting Florida, which had 25 electoral votes. First of all, Bush's brother Jeb was the governor of Florida at the time, and the Secretary of State in Florida was another Bush supporter: Katherine Harris, co-chair of the Florida "Bush 2000" campaign, and the member of the Florida government whose job it was to certify the election results. Secondly, thousands of voters in Palm Beach County were confused by the "butterfly ballot" design, which listed candidates on two pages, with Pat Buchanan smack dab in-between Bush and Gore. Several thousand confused, mostly Jewish Gore supporters accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan, who is a consevative commentator who has made anti-Semitic statements.

But this is just the beginning: Katherine Harris had 57,700 names removed from the voter lists, under pretense that they were convicted felons (there's a law in Florida saying that convicted felons cannot vote, even after they're out of jail). The problem was that many of these people weren't felons; 325 of them had conviction dates in the future and 4,000 had no conviction dates! And there were more problems: "Partial matches of first or last names (the first four letters) counted as a match, even in reverse order: for example, an 'Anderson Christian' could wipe out a 'Chris Anders'... Only four criteria were used for verification: the partial name match, date of birth, gender, and race" (Sterling 24). Since 46% of convicted felons in America are black and African Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats (93% of them voted for Al Gore in Florida in 2000), it's not difficult to figure out why race was a criterion for the list. Greg Palast, a reporter for the Guardian (a British newspaper) researching the debacle, concluded that the list was less than 10% correct. After the U.S. Supreme Court, in a partisan 5-4 ruling, overruled the Florida Supreme Court's decision to allow recounts to continue in certain counties, the official margin of victory in Florida was in favor of Bush by 537 votes. If any of the many glitches in the election hadn't taken place, Al Gore would have been our President, and if we had counted the ballots properly, we would have been saying "President Gore" instead of "President Bush".


You may have heard about the Enron scandal, and the faulty bookkeeping made by Enron's accounting firm, Arthur Anderson. What everyone doesn't know is that the CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, is a good friend of George W. Bush. In fact, Enron had donated a total of $736,800 to Bush from 1993 to 2003. Lay himself donated $283,000 to the Rebublican National Committee, and he raised over $100,000 for Bush between 1999 and 2001. Bush was given use of the Enron corporate jet during his 2000 election campaign, and Lay personally interviewed candidates for positions on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the department that writes laws that affect energy companies. Lay also assisted Vice President Dick Chaney in creating a special "energy task force" that rewrote energy and environmental laws. Yet after Lay and 143 other Enron executives gave themselves $745 million in cash and stocks as compensation while employees with 401(k) plans lost $1 billion when Enron's stock price plummeted, Bush claimed Ken Lay "was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run [for governor] in 1994!" (Moore 153). Enron, by the way, gave $19,500 to Ann Richards and gave Bush $146,500 for his campaign.

September 11, 2001 was, without a doubt, a major tragedy. However, there are many things tied to 9/11 that are very fishy. For example, the terrorists were in American flight schools for years, and they only wanted to learn how to fly the planes, not how to take off or land them; the Bulgarians who worked in the World Trade Center were all told not to show up for work on 9/11; and over two dozen of Osama bin Laden's relatives were picked up and flown overseas days after the attacks, when they could have been material witnesses. That's just the beginning: the Bush family and the bin Laden family have been business associates on and off for over 25 years! The Carlyle Group, a company for which George H.W. Bush is a consultant, has received at least $2 million in investments from the bin Ladens. While Bush says these bin Ladens have cut ties to Osama, they still fund Osama and video footage was found of Osama's mother, two of his brothers, and a sister with Osama at his son's wedding in February 2001. Osama bin Laden had kidney failure and liver problems before, during, and after 9/11; he was on dialysis, and we're expected to believe that we couldn't catch a man hooked up to a dialysis machine who obviously couldn't run from cave to cave! (On March 13, just six months after telling us we had to catch Osama, Bush said, "I don't know where he [Osama bin Laden] is... I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you... I truly am not that concerned about him." [Sterling 36].) Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, but the Bush family has ties to the Saudi Royal Family (they call Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, "Bandar Bush"), so there is an obvious conflict of interest. Bush also censored out 28 pages of a Congressional report on 9/11 because they dealt with the Saudis' role in the attacks.

Worse yet, there's evidence Bush knew about the possibility of this specific type of attack and did nothing; on August 6, 2001, Bush was down at his ranch in Crawford, Texas when CIA director George Tenet brought him a report entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Even though the report warned that al Qaeda might hijack airplanes, Bush did nothing to follow up on the report, except to stay on his ranch for the rest of August.

When Bill Clinton left office, the unemployment rate in the country was 4.0%, the lowest unemployment rate since 1969; 22.5 million jobs were created during the Clinton years. At the end of October 2007, the unemployment rate was 4.7% and 7.2 million people were unemployed. President Clinton also left office with a $230 billion surplus, whereas the deficit for fiscal year 2007 was $163 billion, a difference of $393 billion. What is all this money being spent on? A good chunk is being spent on tax cuts for the rich: Bush created a $1.2 trillion tax cut in 2001 in which 43% of the cut went to the richest 1%, and a $350 billion tax cut in 2003 in which 2/3 of the tax cut went to the richest 10%.

The war in Iraq was officially started on March 19, 2003; however, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O' Neill, ten days into Bush's term at the Administration's first NSC (National Security Council) meeting, after Bush said he wanted to discontinue American involvement in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the officials at the meeting started discussing Iraq! (Keep in mind that this was over two years before we went to war with Iraq.) The Bush Administration told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that he had yellowcake uranium from Africa, that he was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. We haven't found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Africa to check out the yellowcake uranium story, and found that it was false. Since Wilson didn't back the administration's claim, they outed his wife. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a C.I.A. operative who contributed to the Gore campaign in 2000. Karl Rove, Bush's top advisor, was quoted as saying about her, "She's fair game." The Vice President's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was found guilty of obstruction of justice for lying under oath about his involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame.

There are too many problems with the Iraq war to even mention on this site; look on the "Liberal Resources" page for books and movies that will help to give you an idea. Alternatively, read newspapers and watch the news. Being informed is the best way make intelligent decisions about your views on political issues.

In the 2004 presidential election, fraud and voter disenfranchisement ruled the day. After a campaign of lies, deceit, and exaggeration, Bush sailed to victory on the wings of voter supression and computer problems. In Ohio in particular, voters were kept from voting, kept on line for up to ten hours, or had their votes changed from Kerry to Bush right in front of their eyes by electronic voting machines. The Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, was the new Katherine Harris. He was the chair of the "Re-Elect Bush" campaign in Ohio, and he did all he could to stop Democrats from voting. It worked, too; Bush won Ohio, and thereby the Presidency, by 118,000 votes. Congressman John Conyers and his staff, as well as the other Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee compiled a 102-page report of the fraud in Ohio that you can link to here.

One of the first fights Bush decided to get involved in in his second term was the battle over Social Security. He exaggerated the state of the program, telling the country that Social Security was in a major crisis, when in fact the program would stay strong until 2042. Bush pushed for the Senate to vote to privatize Social Security, but the majority of the country, and the majority of Congress, stood against him and blocked his privatization program.

The Bush Administration stepped in on the Terri Schiavo case. Terri Schiavo was a bulimic woman whose heart failed; she became braindead. For fifteen years she was in what doctors call a "persistant vegetative state," meaning that she didn't respond to people and had to be put on a feeding tube. Her husband wanted the feeding tube removed, because doctors couldn't do anything for her. Her parents, on the other hand, wanted her to be kept alive. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that because Terri's husband was her legal guardian, it was his choice. After Terri's feeding tube was removed, Bush signed a bill which allowed federal courts to decide whether the tube should be put back in. After nearly two weeks of political battles, with the Supreme Court holding up previous rulings, Terri Schiavo died of dehydration.

More current information coming soon! For even more information on the currents actions of President Bush, including the disputes over warrantless wiretapping and torture, watch the news or read the newspaper!