Restive Republicans

...Over much of the twentieth century, they have been advising America's wealthy on investments, inside deals, and tax shelters...

...The Bush dynasty is the ultimate exemplar of the relentless promotion of the economic interests of the privileged...

...By 1992, only a year after the Gulf War, it became clear that George H. W Bush had for years been involved in a U.S...

...Kevin Phillips, who published "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969, is the author of "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," published by Viking in January...

...Therein lies the limited logic for an independent Nader effort...

...And should boldness remain lacking, he may not find it sufficient to count on GOP and independent swing voters to back "anybody but Bush...

...William Safire of The New York Times, a former Republican White House aide, wrote a column in 1992 saying he couldn't back Bush Sr...

...in 1992, was so caught up in populist themes-Congressional term limits, voter referenda on key issues, campaign finance, electronic town halls-that he ultimately named his new movement the Reform Party...

...Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, still another Republican, captured January headlines with descriptions of the forty-third President as a dunce preoccupied with Iraq from the day he took office...

...In a Smithsonian Institution authors' panel held back on Presidents Day in February, the fiercest critics of George W Bush were the two with Republican pedigrees...

...Ted Koppel led off Nightline on June 9, 1992, by stating, "It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy...

...The third scandal involving Bush and weaponry for the Middle East involved a different country: Iraq...

...Both Perot and McCain criticized the willingness of the Bushes to kowtow to the televangelists and fundamentalists...

...However, a moderate, reformist, and progressive minority within the GOP-counting only a handful in Congress, to be sure, but numbering perhaps a fifth of the usual party Presidential electorate-is restive...

...However, the waywardness has been especially marked among George W Bush and his siblings...

...In the late 1980s, when Bush's second insolvent oil business was bought out, the purchasing firm, Harken Energy, had multiple ties to the infamous (and since dissolved) Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI...

...Neil's standards were most fully displayed in the infamous Silverado S&L scandal of the 1980s...

...Perot, the former Republican who took 19 percent of the vote against George Bush Sr...

...After George H. W Bush served as CIA director in 1976 for roughly a year, he became a member of the board of directors of First International Bancshares and is said to have maintained ties through its London subsidiary with rogue international banks like BCCI...

...Even so, few Democrats dare to make the damning two-generation case against Bush Middle Eastern embroilments and evasions...

...Indeed, from business and financial laxity to political scandal and malfeasance has been no large step...

...Dean and I joked that only the two Republicans on the panel had actually written books critical of the GOP chief executive...

...Restive Republicans by Kevin Phillips illustrated by david gothard Richard Clarke, for a while George W. Bush's terrorism czar, most recently the fierce Jeremiah alleging White House pre-9/11 negligence, was a registered Republican in 2000...

...The October 1992 charge by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh-a Republican former deputy attorney general from the Eisenhower Administration-that George H. W. Bush had been in the loop was a factor in Bush's November defeat...

...If you look at the Bush dynasty beginning with the great-grandfathers on down to the current President and his three brothers, the men in the family have been officers or principals of some twenty-five different banks, brokerage houses, or investment businesses...

...John McCain, the GOP Senator from Arizona, is regarded by some as still open to being the Vice Presidential running mate of his friend John Kerry...

...Indeed, few ties better explain the tax policies of both Presidents...

...Number 43, in turn, successfully promoted phasing out federal estate taxes and cutting the levies on dividends...

...had brothers who prowled and scalped along the ethical frontier, notably Prescott Jr., who drew criticism for influence-peddling ventures in China and Japan...

...Although favoring inheritors is what the Bush family is all about, few mainstream Democrats dare to make the case...

...Number 41 issued a relentless cry for capital gains reduction and established a higher marginal income tax rate for the upper middle class than for the true rich...

...for reelection because of "Iraqgate...

...And Jeb, now the Governor of Florida, was compensated for marketing efforts on behalf of a Florida pump company that was charged by prosecutors in 2002 with using $28 million of a $74 million loan by the U.S...

...I can't imagine that more than 25 to 30 percent of Nader's vote could ever come from Republicans or GOP-leaning independents...

...And a second purpose in attacking Iraq clearly involved trying to focus American voters' post-9/11 anger on Iraq instead of on Osama bin Laden...

...Precious few voters will remember this Middle Eastern deviousness without some help, but these episodes furnish an important precedent...

...For now, at least, it is not clear that Kerry has the political spunk of a McCain, Perot, or Clarke...

...But there is little about the early Kerry campaign that suggests any grasp of how to mobilize the wooable Republicans...

...As for George W himself, one 1977 investor in his first oil company Arbusto, was James Bath, the American representative of the Saudi bin Mahfouz and bin Laden families...

...However, if Nader could force Kerry to give up Senate-speak and wield a cutting sword, then the consumerist lone wolf who got a quixotic 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 could proudly step aside in August before flirting with the greater ignominy of 0.9 percent or 1.2 percent in 2004...

...Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, appearing to discuss his biography of Warren Harding, the twenty-ninth President, plugged his April-published book Worse Than Watergate, an attack on Bush's secrecy and misrepresentations with respect to Iraq and weapons of mass destruction...

...Over the last twenty years or so, intra-GOP voter opposition to the Bush dynasty can be clustered around five basic themes: family corruption, the Bushes' economics of privilege, war-related mismanagement and deceit in the Middle East, the stifling of political reform, and pandering to the Religious Right...

...political scandals pivoting on arms deals with the Middle East...

...And much of it sided with McCain in the 2000 GOP primaries...

...All of this is proven wedge-issue material...

...Since the 1980s, many polls have revealed that even 25-35 percent of self-identified Republicans see the GOP as favoring the rich over ordinary Americans...

...Export-Import Bank to pay bribes to Nigerian officials and grease the palms of company insiders...

...The increased role of the Religious Right in the GOP and in Bush policymaking is yet another burr under the saddle of the 20-25 percent of Republicans who can be thought of as moderates, progressives, and reformers...

...Bush feared embarrassment not only because he hadn't caught Osama but also because of the growing charges that the Administration coddled the Saudis, pre-9/11 and perhaps also afterwards (in the special flight home arranged for members of the bin Laden family resident in the United States...

...While not always appreciated by progressives whose politics are liberal Democratic or farther left, parts of this constituency backed Ross Perot in 1992 against George H. W Bush...

...One is tempted to suggest that the Democratic Establishment has learned to cultivate a tame instinct for the capillaries rather than a controversial one for the jugular...

...George Bush Sr...

...The Bush penchant for crony capitalism, fast bucks, and tax gimmicks seems to have gone hand in hand with a high tolerance for political and financial corruption...

...So what is going on here...

...In 2000, McCain described the Republican establishment as "the Death Star" and called for squeezing big money out of politics through what eventually became the McCain-Feingold Act...

...Such issues are not quite as salient this year, but they tie in with a fundamental Bush dynastic trait: favoritism to the rich and an ability to raise so much campaign money from private donors that reformers sometimes see democracy itself at risk...

...If Nader can spend much of the summer keeping open his option and raising these kinds of issues, he could both shame Kerry and also increase his own candidacy's appeal to maverick Republicans...

...Dozens of preachers praised the attack on Baghdad as the overthrow of the new Babylon, which heralds the Rapture, the End Times, and Armageddon...

...I was there to discuss my study of William McKinley, the Republican twenty-fifth President, but I also noted my new book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush...

...Is the Republican Party cracking up...

...The influence of the Religious Right has only grown over the last four years-to the point where advocates of faith-healing like Kentucky doctor W. David Hager have gotten advisory positions on boards at the Food and Drug Administration...

...policy of providing Iraq with armaments and chemical and biological materiel before Saddam invaded Kuwait...

...was implicated in three U.S...

...Then, during the 1980s, Bush Sr...

...George W. Bush has built his own record of deceit in the Middle East, fibbing about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, partly to justify attacking the same Saddam who had so embarrassed his father...

...Then there was the Iran-Contra scandal that involved some of the alleged 1980 October Surprise participants and essentially the same subject matter: secret arms deals with the same ostensible Iranian enemy...

...The first was the so-called October Surprise of 1980 that allegedly consisted of a Republican deal to give the revolutionary government of Iran arms and money to keep Tehran from releasing fifty-two American hostages before the November Presidential election...