[Am-info] Who killed the DOJ suit against Microsoft? 2 of 2

[Gene Gaines]

continued ... part 2 of 2

Transcript: The Failed Presidency of George W. Bush


Now, most Americans have tended naturally to give the
Bush-Cheney administration the benefit of the doubt when it
comes to their failure to take any action in advance of 9/11 to
prepare our nation against an attack. After all, we all know
that hindsight always casts a harsh light on mistakes that could
not be nearly as visible at the time those mistakes were made.
And we all know that's true.

But with the benefit of all of the new studies and
investigations that have been made public over the last year, it
is now no longer clear that the administration deserves this act
of political grace from the American people.

For example, we now know from the 9/11 commission that the chief
law enforcement officer appointed by President Bush to be in
charge of counterterrorism, John Ashcroft, was repeatedly asked
by the FBI official in charge of protecting us against
terrorism, repeatedly asked to pay attention to the many warning
signs that were being picked up by the FBI throughout the summer
of 2001.

Former FBI acting director Thomas J. Pickard, the man in charge
of presenting these warnings to General Ashcroft, testified
under oath that Ashcroft angrily told him he did not want to
hear this information anymore and shut down the discussion.

Now, that is an affirmative action by the administration that's
very different from simple negligence. That is an extremely
serious error in judgment that constitutes a reckless disregard
for the safety of the American people.

It is worth remembering that among the reports the FBI was
receiving, that Ashcroft had ordered them not to show him
anymore, was an expression of alarm in one field office that the
nation ought to immediately check on the possibility that Osama
bin Laden was having people trained in commercial flight schools
around the U.S., and another from a field office warning that a
potential terrorist was learning how to fly commercial airliners
and yet had made it clear he had no interest in learning how to
land.

And it was in this period of recklessly willful ignorance on the
part of the attorney general that the CIA was also picking up
unprecedented warnings that an attack on the United States by al
Qaeda was imminent. In his famous phrase, George Tenet wrote
that the system was "blinking red." It was in this context that
the president himself was presented with a CIA report that
carried a headline more alarming and more pointed than any I saw
in eight years of six-days-a-week CIA briefings. The headline
said, as many of you know, "Bin Laden determined to strike in
the U.S."

The only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one
given to George Bush that I recall was about the so-called
millennium threats predicted for the end of the year 1999, and
somewhat less specific warnings about the dangers that might
face the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. And in both cases, these
warnings in the president's daily briefing were followed
immediately, on the same day, by the beginning of urgent daily
meetings in the White House of all the agencies and offices
involved in preparing our nation to prevent the threatened
attack.

By contrast, when President Bush received his fateful and
historic warning of 9/11, he did not convene the National
Security Council, did not bring together the FBI and CIA and
other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation, and
apparently did not even ask follow-up questions later about the
warning.

The bipartisan 9/11 commission summarized, in its unanimous
report, what happened. And I quote: "We have found no indication
of any further discussion before September 11th between the
president and his advisors about the possibility of a threat of
al Qaeda attack in the United States," end quote.

The commissioners went on to report that in spite of all the
warnings to different parts of the administration, the nation's
-- again, I quote -- "domestic agencies never mobilized in
response to the threat. They did not have direction and did not
have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened.
Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic
surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State
and local law authorities were not marshaled to augment the
FBI's efforts. The public was not warned," end quote.

After the attack of 9/11, we know from the commission's report
that within hours, Secretary Rumsfeld was busy attempting to
find a way to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11.

We know the sworn testimony of the president's White House head
of counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, that on the day after the
attack, September 12th, and I quote from Clarke's account, "The
president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people,
shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did
this.' I said, 'Mr. President, there's no connection.' He came
back at me and said, "Iraq. Saddam. Find out if there's a
connection.' We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA
experts. They all cleared the report, and we sent it up to the
president and it got bounced by the national security advisor or
deputy. It got bounced and was sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.
Do it again.' And I don't think he" -- I'm continuing the quote
from Richard Clarke -- "I don't think he, the president, sees
memos that he wouldn't like the answer," end quote. This was the
day after the attack, and the president did not ask about Osama
bin Laden. He did not ask Mr. Clarke, in any case, about al
Qaeda. He did not ask about Saudi Arabia or any other country
other than Iraq.

When Clark responded to that first question by saying that Iraq
was not responsible for the attack and that al Qaeda was, the
president persisted in focusing on Iraq. And again as Clarke
spent his time on this day after the worst attack in the history
of the United States on our soil -- to spend his time as the man
in charge of counterterrorism in the White House, to spend his
time trying to find a linkage between the attack and someone who
had absolutely nothing to do with it. Again, this is not
hindsight. This is the way the president was thinking at the
time he was planning America's response to the attack. This was
not an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence, causing
a mistaken linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq. No, this was
something else: a willful choice to make a specific linkage,
whether evidence existed to support it or not. Think about that.
Think about that, because whoever is elected on November 2nd
will face other questions and we'll face other challenges and
we'll have to make other difficult judgments about how to
protect this nation.

Earlier this month we had an independent report of what
information was presented on the alleged -- the impression of a
linkage. Secretary Rumsfeld, who saw all of the intelligence
available to President Bush that might bear on the alleged
connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, finally admitted
under tough repeated questioning from reporters, and I quote,
"To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that
links the two," end quote.

This is not negligence. When the administration is told
specifically and repeatedly that there is no linkage, and
simultaneously makes bold assertions in a confident manner to
the American people that leave the impression with 70 percent of
the country that Saddam Hussein was primarily responsible for
the attack, this is deception. This is deception.

It is clear that President Bush has absolute faith in a rigid
right-wing ideology and does not feel the same desire that many
of us would in gathering facts relevant to the question at hand.
He ignores the warning of his experts, he forbids any dissent,
never tests his assumptions against the best available evidence.
In fact, he is arrogantly out of touch with reality. He refuses
to ever admit mistakes, which means that so long as he is our
president we are doomed to repeat his mistakes! It is beyond
incompetence! It is recklessness that risks the safety and
security of the American people. We were told also that our
allies would join in a massive coalition so that we would not
bear the burden alone. And it's known by one and all now we are
in fact bearing that burden -- more than 90 percent of those who
are not Iraqis. And, as I mentioned, the second and third
largest contingents in the non-American group have announced
just this week that they will begin withdrawing soon after the
U.S. election.

We were told by the president that war was his last choice. But
it now clear from the newly available evidence that it was
always his first preference. His former secretary of the
Treasury, Paul O'Neill, confirmed that Iraq was topic A at the
very first meeting of the Bush National Security Council just 10
days after the inauguration, and I quote: "It was about finding
a way to do it." That was the tone of the president saying, "Go
find me a way to do this."

His encounter was similar to Richard Clarke's. We the American
people were told that the president would give the international
system every opportunity to function, but we now know that he
allowed that system to operate only briefly as a sop to his
secretary of State and for cosmetic reasons. Bush promised that
if he took us to war, it would be on the basis of the most
carefully worked out plans. Instead, we now know, in sharp
contrast to what he told us at the time, that he went to war
virtually without thought, and certainly without preparation for
the aftermath -- an aftermath that tragically has now claimed
more than a thousand American lives and many multiples of that
among the Iraqis. He now claims he went to war for humanitarian
reasons. But the record shows he used that argument only after
his first public rationale, that Saddam was building weapons of
mass destruction, completely collapsed.

He claimed that he was going to war in order to deal with an
imminent threat to the United States. But again the evidence
shows clearly that there was no such imminent threat, and that
Bush knew that at the time -- or at least had been told that by
those in the best position to know. He claims that gaining
dominance of Iraqi oil fields for American producers was never
part of his calculation. But we now know, from a document
uncovered by the New Yorker magazine, and dated just two weeks
to the day after Bush's inauguration, that his National Security
Council was ordered to meld its review of operational policies
toward rogue states with the secretive Cheney energy task
force's, quote "actions regarding the capture of new and
existing oil and gas fields," end quote.

We also know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings
against that Cheney task force, by the odd combination of
Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club that one of the documents
that was receiving scrutiny by the task force during that same
time period was a highly detailed map of Iraq -- showing none of
the cities, none of the places where people lived, but showing
in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known
to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarking blocks for
promising exploration -- a map which in the words of a Canadian
journalists resembled a butcher's drawing of a steer with the
prime cuts delineated by dotted lines.

We know that Cheney himself while heading Halliburton did more
business with Iraq than any other nation, even though it was
under U.N. sanctions at the time. And we know that Cheney stated
in a public speech to the London Petroleum Institute in 1999
that over the coming decade the world will need, in his words,
"50 million barrels a day of extra oil," and he asked, quote,
"Where is it going to come from?" And answering his own question
he said, "The Middle East" -- with two thirds of the world's oil
and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.

In the spring of 2001, when Vice President Cheney issued the
administration's national energy plan, the one that had been
devised in secret by corporations and lobbyists that he still
refuses to name, the report included a declaration, and I quote,
"The Persian Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international
energy policy." Remember, that in January -- or February of that
same year that policy was directed to be melded with the policy
toward rogue states like Iraq. Less than two months later, in
July of 2001, in one of the more bizarre parts of Bush's policy
process, Richard Perle, before he was forced to resign on
conflict-of-interest charges as chairman of the Defense Policy
Board, invited a presentation to the board by a Rand Corporation
analyst who recommended that the U.S. consider military seizure
of Saudi Arabia's oil fields. Now, the board certainly did not
adopt that recommendation. But the cynical belief by some that
oil played an outsized role in Bush's perception and policy
toward Iraq was later enhanced when it became clear that the
Iraqi Oil Ministry was the only facility in the entire country
that was secured by our troops following the invasion. The Iraqi
National Museum with its priceless archaeological treasures
depicting the origins of human civilization; the electric, water
and sewage facilities so crucial to maintaining a standard of
living for Iraqi citizens during the occupation that was soon to
begin; schools, hospitals and ministries of every kind -- all of
those were left to the looters.

An extensive investigation published today in the Knight Ridder
newspapers uncovers the astonishing truth that even as the
invasion began there was quite literally no plan at all for the
postwar period. Indeed, on the eve of war, when the formal
presentation of America's plan to the military leaders and
intelligence officers and others neared its conclusion, the
slide describing President Bush's plan for the postwar phase,
the Pentagon's plan for the postwar phase, was labeled "to be
provided" -- literally -- because it simply did not exist.

We have also learned in today's Washington Post that at the same
time the president was falsely asserting to the American people
that he was making sure that he was providing all the equipment
and supplies to the soldiers that their commanders said they
needed, at that moment the top military commander in Iraq,
General Sanchez, was pleading desperately -- and repeatedly --
for a response to his request for more equipment and more body
armor, among other things, to protect the troops. And he wrote
that under this situation the Army units he was commanding were
"struggling just to maintain relatively low readiness rates."
Even as late as three months ago, when the growing chaos and
violence in Iraq was obvious to anyone watching the television
news, President Bush went out of his way to demean the
significance of a formal national intelligence estimate warning
that his policy in Iraq was falling apart, and events were
spinning out of control. Bush described this rigorous and formal
analysis as, in his words, "just guessing."

If that's all the respect the president has for reports given to
him by the CIA, then perhaps it explains why he completely
ignored the warning he received on August 6th, 2001, that bin
Laden was determined to attack our country. From all
appearances, he never gave a second thought on that report until
he finished reading My Pet Goat on September 11th.

Iraq is far from the only policy where the president has made
bold assertions about the need for dramatic change in policy,
change that he has said is mandated by controversial assertions
differing radically from accepted views of reality in that
particular policy area. And as with Iraq, there are many other
cases where subsequently available information shows that the
president did actually have analyses he was given at the time
from reputable sources directly contrary to what he was telling
the American people. And in virtually every case, the president,
it is now evident, rejected the information that later turned
out to be accurate, and instead chose to rely on and to
forcefully present to the American people information that
subsequently turned out to be false. And in every case, a flawed
analysis was provided to him from sources that often had a
direct interest, financial or otherwise, in the radically new
policy that the president adopted. And in those cases where that
policy has been implemented, the consequences have been to the
detriment of the American people, often catastrophically so.

In other cases, the consequences still lie in the future but
are, nonetheless, perfectly predictable for anyone who believes
in the rule of reason. In yet other cases, the policies have not
yet been implemented, but have been carefully designated by the
president as priorities for the second term he has asked for
from the American people. At the top of his list is the
privatization of Social Security. Indeed, President Bush made it
clear during his third debate with Senator Kerry that he intends
to make privatizing Social Security a top priority if he has a
second term. In a lengthy profile of President Bush published
yesterday in the New York Times, the president was quoted by
several top Republican fundraisers who were at the same meeting
who said that the president told them that he intends to "come
out strong," these are the president's words as they quoted him,
that he "intends to come out strong after my swearing in with"
-- he mentioned a few things and then said, "privatizing Social
Security." President Bush asserts, again without any
corroborating evidence, that the diversion of $2 trillion worth
of payroll taxes presently paid into the Social Security Trust
Fund will not result in any need to make up that $2 trillion
from some other source, and will not result in cutting Social
Security benefits to current retirees or raising taxes, but the
bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, run by a Republican
appointee, is one of many respected reality-based organizations
that have concluded that the president is completely wrong in
making that assertion. The president has been given facts and
figures clearly demonstrating to any reasonable person that the
assertion is wrong, and yet he continues to make it.

Now, the proposal for diverting money out of the Social Security
Trust Fund into private accounts would generate large fees for
financial organizations that have advocated the radical new
policy, and have provided President Bush with the ideologically
based argument in its favor, and have made massive campaign
contributions to Bush and Cheney.

One of the things willfully ignored by Bush is the certainty of
catastrophic consequences for the tens of millions of retirees
who depend on Social Security benefits and who might well lose
25 to 40 percent of their benefits under his proposal. Their
expectation for a check each month to pay their bills is
reality-based. The president's reckless proposal is not.

Similarly, the president's vigorous and relentless advocacy of
medical savings accounts, a radical change in the Medicare
program, would, according to all serious financial analysts,
have the same effect on Medicare that his privatization proposal
would have on Social Security, and deprive Medicare of a massive
amount of money that it must have in order to continue paying
medical bills for Medicare recipients. The president's
ideologically based proposal originated with another large
campaign contributor, a company called Golden Rule that expects
to make a huge amount of money from managing private medical
savings accounts.

He's also mangled the Medicare program with another radical new
proposal you know about on Medicare drug policy, this one
prepared by the major pharmaceutical companies, also large
campaign contributors, also who presented the policy to the
president and it is a policy contrary to the public interest.
Information they have given, again, turns out to be completely
and totally false. Indeed, the Bush appointee in charge of
Medicare was secretly ordered, we now know after the fact, to
withhold from the Congress the truth about the president's
proposal, and it's real cost, until the Congress had finished
considering and voting on the proposal. When a number of
Congressmen balked at supporting the proposal, the president's
henchmen violated the rules of Congress by holding the 15-minute
vote open for more than two hours while they brazenly attempted
to bribe and intimidate members of Congress who had initially
voted against the president, and forced them to change their
votes in sufficient numbers to cause it narrowly pass.

The House Ethics Committee, as you know, in an all too rare slap
on the wrist, took formal action against Tom DeLay for his
unethical behavior during this episode. But, for the Bush team
it is all part of the same pattern, falsehood, intimidation,
bullying, suppression of the truth, present lobbyist memos as
the gospel truth, and collect money for the next campaign.

In the case of the global climate crisis, Bush has publicly
demeaned the authors of official scientific reports, by
scientists in his administration, that underscore the extreme
danger facing the U.S. and the world. And instead, has preferred
a crackpot analysis financed by the largest oil company on the
planet, Exxon-Mobile. He even went so far as to censor elements
of an EPA report dealing with global warming, and substitute in
the official government report language from the crackpot
Exxon-Mobile report. The consequences of accepting
Exxon-Mobile's advice, that is to do nothing to counter global
warming, are almost literally unthinkable.

Just in the last few weeks scientists have reached newer and
stronger consensuses that global warming is increasing the
destructive power of hurricanes by as much as one half of one
full category on the one to five scale typically used by
forecasters. So in Florida a hurricane hitting in the future
that would have been a category three in the past, will on
average become a category four hurricane. Is that important, Mr.
President? Scientists around the world are also alarmed by what
appears to be an increase in the rate of CO2 build up in the
atmosphere, a development which if confirmed in subsequent
years, could signal the beginning of an extremely dangerous
runaway greenhouse effect.

Yet, a third group has just reported that the melting of ice in
Antarctica, 95 percent of all the ice in the world, has
dramatically accelerated. Yet, President Bush continues to rely
for his scientific advice on global warming on the one company
that most stands to benefit by delaying a recognition of
reality.

The same dangerous dynamic has led the president to reject the
recommendations of anti-terrorism experts, to increase domestic
security, because they're opposed by large contributors in the
chemical industry, the hazardous materials industry, and the
nuclear industry. Even though his own Coast Guard recommends
increased port security, he has chosen, instead, to reject the
recommendation, relying on information provided to him by the
commercial interests managing the ports, who don't want the
expense and inconvenience of implementing new security measures.

The same pattern that produced America's catastrophe in Iraq has
also produced a catastrophe for our domestic economy. So
President Bush's distinctive approach, and habit of mind, is
clearly recognizable. He asserted over and over again that his
massive tax cut would not primarily benefit the wealthy, would
stimulate jobs, would increase economic growth. Now, we face the
largest deficits in the history of our nation. Simultaneously we
face the largest trade deficit and current account deficits in
our history.

He asserted that under no circumstances would such deficits
appear, even though commonsense led most everyone else to
conclude that it certainly would. He asserted confidently that
what has happened in the job market, with massive job losses
would not occur. And yet, just as he relied on private analysis
in Iraq, from people who had self-interest, he here relied on
high net worth individuals and organizations representing them
who stood to gain the most from the lopsided tax proposal, and
chose their analysis over that of respected economists.

As was the case with Iraq policy, the administration actively
suppressed the publication of facts and figures from his own
Treasury Department analysts, that were inconveniently in
conflict with his own. As a result of this pattern, the
president and the Congress adopted the plan, and now the
consequences are clear. We've completely dissipated the $5
trillion surplus that had been projected, and now we have a
projected $3-1/2 trillion deficit. We would have been able to
assist the nation in dealing with the impending retirement of
the baby-boom generation, but instead this tremendous projected
deficit will make it much more difficult for us to deal with the
same period. The largest absolute deficits ever experienced.

So the pattern is very clear. It is not based in religion, it is
based in ideology. Indeed, after four years of this policy, a
time in which the president has had complete control of the
legislative branch of government, and a majority or dominance in
the judicial branch of government, the consequences speak for
themselves. For the first time since the presidency of Herbert
Hoover we have had a net loss of jobs. It's true that 9/11
occurred during this period, but it's also true that economists
quantify its economic impact as small compared with the impact
of Bush's policies. Under other presidents we have absorbed
other disasters, Pearl Harbor, World War II, the Vietnam War,
and others, corrections like the one in 1987, and still ended up
with a net gain of jobs. Only Bush ranks with Hoover.

Confronted with this devastating indictment of a net loss of
jobs, Treasury Secretary John Snow said last week in Ohio said
that the job loss was a myth, and this is in keeping with the
Bush team's general contempt for reality as a basis for policy.
Unfortunately, that job loss is all too real for the more than
200,000 people in Ohio, where he called their job loss a myth.

In yesterday's New York Times, Ron Suskind related a truly
startling conversation with a White House official who was angry
that he had written an article in 2002 that the White House
didn't like. And this senior advisor to Bush told Suskind that
reporters like him live, "in what we called the reality-based
community." And he denigrated such people for believing that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality. He went on to say, that's not the way the world really
works anymore, when we act we create our own reality, and while
you're studying that reality, judiciously as you will, we'll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too,
and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, he
said, and you, all of you will be left to just study what we do.

By failing to adjust their policies to unexpected realities,
they have made it difficult to carry out any of their policies
competently. Indeed, this is the answer to what some have
regarded as a mystery, how could a team so skilled in politics
be so fumbling and incompetent when it comes to policy. The
truth is that the same insularity and zeal that makes him
effective at smash mouth politics, makes him terrible at
governing. The Bush-Cheney administration is a rarity in
American history, it is simultaneously dishonest and
incompetent.

Not coincidentally the first audits of the massive sums flowing
through the U.S. authorities in Iraq now show, not only with
money appropriated by Congress, but also from the Iraqi oil
revenues, that billions of dollars have disappeared with
absolutely no record of where it went, to whom, for what, or
when. And charges of massive corruption are now widespread.

Just as the appointment of industry lobbyists to key positions
in agencies that oversee their former employers result in a kind
of institutionalized corruption and the abandonment of law
enforcement and regulations at home, the outrageous decision to
brazenly violate the law in granting sole-source no-bid
contracts worth billions of dollars to Vice President Cheney's
company Halliburton, which still pays him money every year, has
convinced many observers that incompetence, cronyism and
corruption have played a significant role in undermining U.S.
policy in Iraq.

The former four-star general in charge of Central Command, Tony
Zinni, named by President Bush as his personal emissary to the
Middle East in 2001, offered this view of the situation in his
recent book: Quote, "In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its
later conduct, I saw at a minimum true dereliction, negligence
and irresponsibility; at worse, lying, incompetence and
corruption; false rationales presented as a justification, a
flawed strategy, lack of planning, the unnecessary alienation of
our allies, the underestimation of the task, the unnecessary
distraction from real threats, and the unbearable strain dumped
on our overstretched military. All of these caused me," he said,
"to speak out, and I was called a traitor and a turncoat by
civilian Pentagon officials." Massive incompetence, endemic
corruption, official justification for torture, wholesale abuse
of civil liberties, arrogance masquerading as principle -- these
are new, unfamiliar and unpleasant realities for the United
States of America. We hardly recognize our country when we look
in the mirror of what Jefferson called the "opinion of
humankind." How could we have come to this point?

America was founded on the principle that all just power is
derived from the consent of the governed, and our Founders
assumed that in the process of giving their consent the governed
would be informed by free and open discussion of the relevant
facts in a healthy and robust public forum. But for Bush-Cheney
administration the will to power has become its own
justification. This explains Bush's lack of reverence for
democracy itself. The widespread efforts by Bush's political
allies to suppress voting have reached epidemic proportions.

Some of the scandals of Florida four years ago are now being
repeated in broad daylight, even as we meet here today. Harpers
magazine reports in an article published today that tens of
thousands of registered voters unjustly denied their right to
vote four years ago have still not been allowed back on the
rolls.

An increasing number of Republicans, including veterans of the
Reagan White House, and even including the father of the
conservative movement, are now openly expressing dismay over the
epic failures of the Bush presidency.

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a veteran of
both the Heritage Foundation and the Reagan White House, wrote
recently in Salon.com, and I quote, "Seriously conservatives
must fear for the country if Bush is reelected." He went on to
write, "Based on the results of his presidency, a Bush victory
would be catastrophic. Conservatives," he went on, "should
choose principles over power." He seemed most concerned about
Bush's unhealthy habits of mind, saying, and I quote again, "He
does not appear to reflect on his actions, and seems unable to
concede even the slightest mistake. Nor is he willing to hold
anyone else responsible for anything. It is," he concluded, "a
damning combination," end quote. Bandow described the Bush
foreign policy as, and I quote, "a shambles, with Iraq aflame
and America increasingly reviled by friend and foe alike." The
conservative co-host of "Cross-Fire," Tucker Carlson, said about
Bush's Iraq policy, and I quote, "I think it is a total
nightmare and disaster, and I am ashamed that I went against my
own instincts in supporting him."

William F. Buckley, Jr., widely acknowledged as the founder of
the modern conservative movement in America, wrote of the Iraq
war, and I quote, "If I knew then what I know now about what
kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

A former Republican governor of Minnesota, Elmer Andersen,
announced in Minneapolis that for the first time in his life he
was abandoning the Republican Party in this election because
Bush and Cheney, in his words, "believe their own spin. Both men
spew outright untruths with evangelistic fervor," end quote. He
attributed his switch to President Bush's, quote, "misguided and
blatantly false misrepresentations of the threat of weapons of
mass destruction. The terrorist seat," he said, "was
Afghanistan. Iraq had no connection to this act of terror, was
not a serious threat to the United States, as this president
claimed, and there was no relation, it is now obvious, to any
serious weaponry." Governor Andersen was also offended, he said,
by Bush's, quote, "phony posturing as cocksure leader of the
free world," period, end quote.

Now, Andersen and many other Republicans are joining with
Democrats and millions of independents this year in proudly
supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket. In every way, John Kerry
and John Edwards represent an approach to governing that is the
opposite of the Bush-Cheney approach. Where Bush remains out of
touch, Kerry is a proud member of the reality-based community.
Where Bush will bend to his corporate backers, Kerry stands
strongly with the public interest.

My friends, there are now 15 days left before our country makes
this fateful choice for us and the whole world, and it is
particularly crucial for one final reason: the last feature of
Bush's ideology involves ducking accountability for his
mistakes. He has neutralized accountability by the Congress by
intimidating the Republican leadership and transforming the
Republican majority into a true rubber stamp, unlike any that
has ever existed in American history. He has appointed
right-wing judges who have helped to insulate him from
accountability in the courts. And if he wins again, he will
likely get to appoint up to four Supreme Court justices. He has
ducked accountability from the press with his obsessive secrecy
and refusal to conduct the public's business openly. So there is
now only one center of power left in our Constitution and in our
country capable of at long last holding George W. Bush
accountable, and it is you, the voters. There are 15 days left.
Help me and help John Kerry and John Edwards take our country
back. Thank you.

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