The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

EPILOGUE 369◆of Michael Powell, who chaired the Federal CommunicationsCommission. An informal survey of 415 historians conducted byGeorge Mason University’s History News Network found thateight in ten, or 81 percent, of the responding historians ratedBush’s presidency as an overall failure. One respondent to thesurvey wrote that Bush “ranks with U. S. Grant as the worst. Hisoil interests and Cheney’s corporate Halliburton contracts smackof the same corruption found under Grant.” Central to this beliefwere the numerous Bush administration scandals, including thedeceit that preceded the invasion of Iraq; the Abu Ghraib mistreatmentof prisoners; pre-9/11 intelligence failures; the $2.3trillion missing from the Pentagon, announced by Donald Rumsfeldthe day before 9/11; the mishandling of the Katrina disaster,which resulted in the resignation of Bush’s appointee Michael D.Brown as director of FEMA; Bush’s Medicare prescription drugplan that shifted 6.2 million low-income seniors whose medicationshad been covered by Medicare over to private insurers;the noncompetition government contracts to Halliburton, DickCheney’s former employer; and the substitution of political idealsfor science. In 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued astatement blasting the administration’s politicization of science.Ultimately, this statement was signed by 4,062 scientists, including51 Nobel laureates, 63 National Medal of Science recipients,and 195 members of the National Academies. Buzzflash.com,which styles itself as marketplace for progressives, after listingseveral debacles and scandals of the Bush administration, said itoperated in a “culture of cronyism and corruption.”Fraudulent elections.Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion pollswere usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates wereheld, they would, as a rule, be perverted by the power elite to getthe desired result. Common methods included maintaining controlof the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchisingopposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as alast resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.