Beating the Bush: how Dubya "helps" business.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: On Political Books

Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose Random House, $24.95

Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose have been watching George W. Bush a long time. Their first book, Shrub, dealt with young Dubya's early political life and his ascent to power. Their new book, Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, examines the first two years of his presidency. They are not fans.

Their essential thesis is that the president is the perfect product of the political culture of Texas, a state where the first and major role of government is to help business. "Help" in that sentence is to he as broadly defined as possible, including perhaps almost all the ways Paulie Walnuts "helps" Tony Soprano. Ivins and Dubose argue that while most of us have been caught up watching the president negotiate the challenges brought on by 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, somewhere in the wings his minions have been industriously implementing a radical pro-business agenda. After reading about how the administration has not enforced regulations and not funded programs while cutting taxes and funneling subsidies to special funds, one might even suspect, if only momentarily, that al Qaeda is a Republican subsidiary designed to distract our attention while these policies are put into effect.

Okay, okay, that's going a little far. But it is true that while the nation has been consumed by the emotional mad intellectual challenges of waging a global war on terror, the Bush administration has acted as though it had won a whopping mandate running on Newt Gingrich's 1994 playbook. Ivins and Dubose describe at length how the administration has eliminated, changed, or ignored a whole host of rules and regulations involving clean air, clean water, and clean food, all of which will make or save Bush campaign contributors a pile of money. They quote a 2002 U.S. Department of Agriculture memo that defines the "fecal

matter" whose presence would be sufficient to stop a company's production line as having" "a fibrous nature"; I'll bet I can name a rancher in Midland, Texas, who knows shit comes in more shapes than that.

Overall, these chapters induce great dismay. You can understand a conservative administration being reluctant to issue new regulations that lengthen the government's reach, but it's just shocking when they contrive to undo long-standing and widely agreed upon social policy by tinkering in the misty netherworld of regulatory agencies. I...