Petrelis Files

Lee Iacocca Is Angry With George Bush & Not Gonna Take It Anymore!

President Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice Longworth once famously quipped that if a person didn't have anything nice to say about someone else, then they should come sit next to her and spill the beans.

Like her, I also can appreciate listening to someone giving me the nasty low-down, more so if it's former titan of the auto industry and a true mainstream all-American hero, Lee Iacocca and he's talking about President Bush.

Iacocca has a new book out, "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?," and in a lengthy passage from it, he has nothing nice or friendly or kind to say about the current occupant of the Oval Office.

I stumbled across this while Googling for blog mentions over the Iraqi parlaiment's recently floating the trial balloon of taking a two-month vacation, an idea attacked worldwide. Iacocca writes nothing about parlaiment wanting a break of sixty-days from their labors of holding the war-torn country together, after all, his book was penned before Iraqi politicians wanted a summer recess, so I'm not clear why a link to something from his new book turned up in a Google search. Maybe it's because he makes mention of our Dear Leader's penchant for long vacations, with members of Congress also setting a fine example of lazy lawmakers shirking their duties to the people who elected them.

What shocks me most about Iacocca's spot-on critiques of George Bush is how his words echo those of my buddies in the SF Green Party. Our nation needs more Iacoccas speaking out against Bush and his delusional politics.

If a business leader like Iacocca is willing to say such things in public, maybe he could go a few steps further and organize a coalition of other business and industry movers and shakers, and together issue a call for a responsible winding down of the Bush war in Iraq and a speedy return home of our troops.

And the next time Iacocca is in San Francisco, I hope he has the time to drop one of my favorite watering holes and tell me more about what he really thinks of George W. Bush!

This is from a much longer excerpt on the web, extracted from his new book:

The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for ...

Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us. Who Are These Guys, Anyway? Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them, or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers.
Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy. And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew ...

We should look at how the current administration stacks up. Like it or not, this crew is going to be around until January 2009 ...

George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping. There's a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty ... Leadership is all about managing change, whether you're leading a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative. You adapt. Maybe Bush was absent the day they covered that at Harvard Business School ...

The war in Iraq has been, among other things, a grand failure of communication. Bush is like the boy who didn't cry wolf when the wolf was at the door. After years of being told that all is well, even as the casualties and chaos mount, we've stopped listening to him ...

George Bush has a lot of power. What does it say about his character? Bush has shown a willingness to take bold action on the world stage because he has the power, but he shows little regard for the grievous consequences. He has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths. For what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he's tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy ...

George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn't mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk ...

Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. President, four hundred and counting. He'd rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake.

It's no better on Capitol Hill. Congress was in session only ninety-seven days in 2006. That's eleven days less than the record set in 1948, when President Harry Truman coined the term do-nothing Congress. Most people would expect to be fired if they worked so little and had nothing to show for it. But Congress managed to find the time to vote itself a raise. Now, that's not leadership ...

Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let's see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we've got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we've run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that's just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner ...

George Bush doesn't have common sense. He just has a lot of sound bites. You know, Mr.they'll-welcome-us-as-liberators-no-child-left-behind-heck-of-a-job-Brownie-
mission-accomplished Bush. Former President Bill Clinton once said, "I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world, and I like it here." I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while ...

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face ...

It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero. That was George Bush's moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he'd regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq, a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn't listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn't scare the crap out of you, I don't know what will.

So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership ...

I get the strong sense, don't you, that Iacocca is channeling the late great gay actor Peter Finch in his final role, that of Howard Beale, the crazy TV anchor who was "made as hell and not going to take it anymore!