The Texas Observer

At long last, Alberto Gonzales has found a job. While there are some who believe he’s best suited for making license plates in a federal penitentiary, his new gig may not be much better: teaching undergrads in Lubbock, Texas.

Ever since his forced retirement back in September 2007, the former attorney general has busied himself with speaking engagements, op-eds, part-time legal help, and high-school commencement addresses.

Now, however, he seems to have found a more permanent home at the Harvard of the Panhandle. According to a Texas Tech press release, Gonzales will be a visiting professor teaching a junior-level class in “Contemporary Issues in the Executive Branch.”

No word yet on whether those “contemporary issues” will include topics such as the constitutionality of torture, proper grounds for firing U.S. attorneys and whether or not it’s appropriate to badger Cabinet secretaries recuperating from major surgery.

The release also states that Gonzales will “assist both Texas Tech University and Angelo State University with recruiting and retaining first generation and underrepresented students.”

(To find out more about where former Bush officials have ended up, you can read our Sept. 18, 2008, cover story here.)

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the school that hired Bobby Knight as its basketball coach would be willing to offer employment to another controversial public figure.

What is surprising, however, is that a lawyer whose resume includes service as a Texas Supreme Court justice, White House counsel and U.S. attorney general isn’t teaching at Texas Tech’s law school — but rather in its undergrad school of political science.

Then again, maybe that says it all.

George W. Bush left office as the most unpopular president in the history of modern polling, but you’d have never known it from the hero’s welcome he received today at a late-afternoon rally in Midland. Thousands of West Texans waving cardboard W’s packed Centennial Plaza to welcome home the now-former president and first lady.

The Bushes flew to Midland from Washington following today’s inauguration of Barack Obama. Along for the plane ride were Bush’s parents, his two daughters and several current and former staffers, including Education Secretary (and Texan) Margaret Spellings, and the ever-loyal former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The waiting crowd included Gov. Rick Perry, Attorney General Greg Abbott, whom Bush patted on the head as he walked on stage, and former Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick.

Bush received a wild standing ovation when he took the stage. He began his remarks by complimenting his successor: “A good man took the oath of office today, and we all offer our prayers for his success.”

He then offered an unapologetic defense of his two terms in office — mixed with a little reminiscing. “I’m coming home with my head held high and a sense of accomplishment,” he said. History, he said, would render the verdict on his time in office. “Popularity is as fleeting as the Texas wind. … When I get home tonight and look in the mirror, I’m not going to regret what I see.”

Centennial Plaza is the same place where, eight years ago, Bush gave his final speech as governor before heading to Washington.

“The presidency was a joyous experience,” he said. “But as good as it was, nothing compares to Texas at sunset. Today I get to say six words I’ve been waiting a long time to say, ‘It is good to be home.’”

He may have waited a long time to say those words, but it couldn’t be longer than most of us waited to hear them.

St. Paul’s Cathedral is one of the great buildings in Christendom. It is impossible to walk through it and not feel the presence and the glory of God. Its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, is buried there, and over his tomb is this inscription: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice: “If you seek his monument, look around you.”

The Texan departing the White House need not spend tens of millions on a monument to himself and his philosophy at SMU. If you want to see the monument to the conservative philosophy of governing – the philosophy followed so faithfully by George W. Bush — look around you. Men and women who followed the conservative philosophy of President Bush were the architects of so many of the crises we face. The Republican Party has controlled the White House for the last eight years, controlled the Congress for 12 of the last 14 years, and dominated our federal courts. So it is fair to ask folks to look around.

Look at the greed on Wall Street. It was fed by a Bush-conservative architecture of greed and de-regulation, of government siding with quick-buck artists that goes all the way back to the Savings & Loan crisis of the 80’s.

Look at our unemployment woes. Unemployment hit a low of 3.9 percent under President Clinton’s progressive economic policies. It is now 6.5 percent and climbing. Or look at our rising poverty rate, our record rate of home foreclosures, our skyrocketing numbers of bankruptcies.

Look at our pathetic dependence on dangerous and dirty foreign oil. It’s the result Bush-conservative energy policy that subsidized oil companies and de-funded the alternative energy sources that could have made us free.

Look at the debt and deficit. They have skyrocketed because of a Bush-conservative philosophy that rewarded those at the top of the economic pyramid while punishing those who were working hard to climb their way up.

Look at the millions of American families who have been turned down for health insurance, and the millions of small businesses who have been priced out of the market — all victims of a Bush-conservative philosophy that protects big insurance companies and hammers working families whose only sin is wanting to see a doctor when they’re sick.

And then look at what is infecting all of it: a culture of cronyism and corruption under conservatives that has given us government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists.

Most tragically, look at the lives lost, the limbs severed, the families shattered because of this unjust, unwise, unwarranted war. Look at the military families struggling to stay together under the strain of deployments that are too frequent and last too long. Look at the unappreciated heroes battling traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder. Look at the untold thousands of Iraqi families whose tears are never seen and whose cries are never heard.

This is the monument to Bush-style conservatives. They are its architects. Look around you. See what the Bush-conservative philosophy has done to the country we love. The sooner we take a wrecking ball to that monument the better.

It will take time, but I am convinced that President-elect Barack Obama is committed to building something new. Something beautiful and strong. Something that, like that great old cathedral in London, will welcome everyone in, raise their spirits, lift their sights and remind us all that - as President Kennedy said - “here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

–Paul Begala

The news today is that Scott McClellan was just as frustrated while serving three years as Bush White House press secretary as we were watching him.

If you don’t know already, McClellan, an Austin native who first joined Bush’s staff when W was governor of Texas, has written a scathing tell-all memoir about his time in the White House. We haven’t read it, but judging from the title — ““What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” — we’re thinking he is a tad disillusioned. The New York Times has more details here.

Mr. McClellan writes, the decision to invade Iraq was a “serious strategic blunder,” and yet, in his view, it was not the biggest mistake the Bush White House made. That, he says, was “a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

Shocked, simply shocked!

His former colleagues are not happy and seem to be settling on an alien-abduction-like explanation. “It is sad — this is not the Scott we knew,” current spokesperson Dana Perino told USA Today. Rove echoed the refrain saying, “This doesn’t sound like Scott; it really doesn’t.” (It’s true McClellan does have three brothers. Maybe there is something to it. We’ve always had trouble telling them apart too.)

When McClellan announced his resignation from the White House in April 2006, he told the president, in front of a gaggle of reporters: “Our relationship began in Texas, and I look forward to continuing it, particularly when we’re both back in Texas.” (Video footage of the announcement is here.)

Bush responded, “One of these days he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas talking about the good old days of his time as the press secretary.”

Yeah, that kind of “Old Friends” moment, could be a little awk-ward. It will take a mighty big porch. Or maybe the old McClellan will show up  and a new Bush we haven’t seen yet.

President Bush vetoed the bill to renew — and expand — the Children’s Health Insurance Program this morning. Here’s the Washington Post story on the veto. Though the bill has broad support from Democrats and Republicans, it appears the U.S. House lacks the votes to override Bush’s veto.

Congress can continue extending CHIP — which would have expired on September 30 — on a temporary basis. Congressional Democrats have threatened to keep sending Bush the same bill until he relents and signs it. But there’s only so long Democrats can play that game. State governments need to know how much money they will receive for CHIP to budget for the coming year. Unless they scrounge up enough votes to override, Congressional Democrats will eventually have to negotiate a smaller CHIP bill with the White House. That could cause hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of kids to remain uninsured.

Bush seems to think the CHIP expansion — $35 billion over five years — is too pricey. After signing the veto papers, he flew off to Lancaster, Pa., for an event to promote restraint in federal spending. (Keep in mind that CHIP helps kids lead healthier lives, which saves money in the long run.)

Just for comparison, the proposed CHIP expansion of $35 billion (over five years) is about three months’ worth of spending in Iraq. The total allocated funds for the war in Iraq is surging past $600 billion, which would have paid for CHIP expansion 20 times over.

Sure, he’s about to veto an expansion of health care for poor kids, but that didn’t prevent President George W. (how low can you go?) Bush from celebrating Child Health Day on Monday.

The White House did note in its release that, “On this day it is also appropriate to recognize the important role the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) has played in helping poor children stay healthy . To preserve that role and ensure that poor children can get the coverage they need, SCHIP should be reauthorized.”

Sure they want it reauthorized and preserved, but in a smaller, much smaller important role. And if Congress doesn’t make it smaller, the president’s going to stomp his feet and hold his breath until he turns blue and passes out. And then he’ll veto it.

President George W. Bush has declared September 11, “Patriot Day” and asked governors to fly their flags at half-staff. Texas Governor Rick Perry has complied and put out a statement that reads in part:

“September 11th will forever be regarded as a day that changed America,” said Perry. “We were reminded that the evil in the hearts of men can manifest itself in harm to those people and institutions we most deeply cherish, even in places we long regarded as safe.”

When I look at those flags, I feel incredible sadness, not just for the innocents who died in 2001 or the tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans who have perished needlessly from the folly of a war of choice. I feel incredible sadness for our country — that we let this collection of scoundrels in the Bush-Cheney administration use the cover of patriotism to piss all over the Constitution and sully the rights that once separated us from so many other nations.

The most explosive quotation to come out of this administration that I’ve read can be found in the extraordinary new book The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration by Jack L. Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. (An excerpt from the book can be found here.)

The quote comes from David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Addington has bullied his way through the executive branch on a mission for his master to create a unitary executive, a modern-day American dictatorship. In order to do so, the administration has had to wipe away decades of precedent including judicial review of government wiretapping by a special court, first established in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

Goldsmith reports Addington saying, “We are one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court.”

Here you have one of the most powerful officials in the government today wishing for a terrorist attack so the executive will have license to impose its will. This is beyond unconscionable, it’s truly shocking, even from a crew that I thought could no longer surprise. These people are not just incompetent and foolhardy, they are a threat to America.

And as long as they maintain power, Patriot Day must share equal billing with Scoundrel Day.