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George W. Bush Abortion Scandal that should have been



 
 
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Old August 12th 04, 09:40 AM
Psalm 110
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Default George W. Bush Abortion Scandal that should have been

Sun Myung Moon, the Washington Times, is the proof that Bush is a fake
Christian. No Christian can accept Sun Myung Moon's declaration he is
messiah and "King of Kings". In the context that Moon is NOT SHUNNED
and is not taken to task for selling nuclear sub technology to North
Korea, it means that the Bush abortion story must be considered.
http://www.ecosyn.us/adti/Nukes.html

The gist of the story is Bush drove his underage mexican mistress to
the abortionist and paid the fee. The mistress in question was moved
to an expensive new home during the investigation and now declines to
testify. Friends of the mistress signed affidavits (you know, like the
kind of affidavits the Swift Boat vets signed).


http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/30/news-blume.php

JUNE 18 - 24, 2004

The Texas Abortion Tango
The unproven scandal that could have sunk George W. Bush
by Howard Blume

In the winter of the Clinton impeachment, Larry Flynt, the publisher
of Hustler magazine, was a pornographer on a mission -- determined to
dig up sex scandals on the Republicans who'd come after Clinton. It
wasn't that Flynt was suddenly against sex or even scandalous sex ,
but that he considered the anti-Clinton ringmasters to be cynical,
partisan opportunists -- hypocrites who decried Clinton as morally
unfit while being less fit themselves.

In December 1998, shortly before the impeachment trial, Flynt nailed
incoming Republican House Speaker Robert L. Livingston, who resigned
rather than endure Flynt's public airing of multiple extramarital
affairs. Flynt also contributed to the downfall of anti-Clinton attack
dog Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who was a House manager for the
impeachment. Barr lost a re-election bid after revelations about his
alleged adultery -- and about how he allegedly paid for an abortion
for one of his wives, even though he later referred to abortion as
murder while in Congress.

Flynt helped wound but did not end the political careers of
Representatives Dan Burton (out-of-wedlock child) and Henry Hyde (over
a "youthful indiscretion" -- Hyde's words -- with a married woman that
lasted into his 40s). In some of these cases, Flynt's role was to
publicize information first unearthed elsewhere.

Eventually, Flynt set his sights on the biggest prize, George W. Bush,
once again offering up to a million dollars for definitive dirt. He
sent investigative reporters to the heart of Texas, first in 1999.
They would look into an allegation that in 1971, George Bush, then
about 25 years old, got a girlfriend pregnant and paid for her illegal
abortion. Flynt got tantalizingly close to documenting such an
episode, but never confirmed enough to justify a press conference. He
would have loved to prove it. Flynt's hatred of Bush is both visceral
and principled. He's a bona fide supporter of First Amendment rights
and mainstream Democratic principles, and is commercially pragmatic --
he knows that Bush and his anti-sin crowd would shut down Flynt's
business if they could.

So what was Flynt to do on the eve of the 2000 presidential election?

Lacking proof, Flynt instead dropped broad hints about the alleged
abortion. He didn't name names -- other than Bush's -- because his
lawyer told him he risked a libel suit from the woman in question. The
mainstream press chose to ignore the story -- which is a story in
itself.

Flynt's account finally gets told in the book Sex, Lies & Politics:
The Naked Truth, scheduled to hit shelves late this month. Flynt
avoids risk of libel by keeping the players anonymous and by avoiding
flat-out claims. He offers instead an account of the investigation.
Flynt provided additional information in interviews with the Weekly,
as did people involved in the investigation, who spoke off the record.

The Texas tango remains something of a page turner. In 2000, Flynt
thought the revelation, if true, ought to push some voters away from
Bush based on what it revealed about his character. The alleged events
of 1971 do say something about the privileges and purview of Bush and
his family and, courtesy of Flynt and some of those involved in the
investigation, you get to read it here first.



"Back in 2000, I got a phone call from an attorney from Houston,"
begins Flynt in a passage about two-thirds of the way through his
book. "He represented a woman we'll call ‘Susan,' who supposedly could
prove that, back in the early '70s, George W. Bush had arranged an
abortion for his girlfriend."

Flynt was immediately interested; here was ammunition to sink Bush in
an election too close to call. It would be damning enough for Bush to
have arranged an abortion, but, even worse, abortion was illegal in
1971, before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Laws didn't stop
abortions, of course, though they did make them dangerous and even
life-threatening for most women. The wealthy or well-connected were
frequently luckier; they could often find doctors willing to perform
abortions safely in a hospital or clinic setting. That is what
allegedly happened here.

All of this mattered in the year 2000 because "Bush was successfully
slipping past allegations of cocaine use, drunk driving and being a
useless rich boy," writes Flynt. "But arranging for an abortion was a
more serious matter. Bush's own supporters said that abortion is
murder."

At the time, in 1971, Bush had been living for about two years in the
Chateaux Dijon apartment complex, a Houston gathering place and party
scene for the young and beautiful as well as the offspring of the rich
and politically potent. Bush was three years out of Yale, where he'd
been an unremarkable student. Soon after graduating, he'd joined the
Texas Air National Guard, an escape valve for sons of the powerful
seeking to avoid service in Vietnam.

The National Guard experience has been covered extensively elsewhere;
long-established evidence suggests Bush jumped a lengthy waiting list
to get in, with helpful intervention from friends of his father. The
elder Bush, who became president in 1988, was prominent even then.
He'd been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966 and
served as ambassador to the United Nations from 1971 to 1972, after
losing a 1970 race for the Senate. Papa Bush also had a background as
a Texas oilman.

The young George W. Bush of the 1970s was a partier, a drinker and --
by his own hints in later remarks -- a recreational-drug user. There's
long been speculation that he might have skipped a mandatory National
Guard physical, in August 1972, to avoid a possible drug test. There's
also doubt about whether he actually completed his service in the
Guard.

But that's getting ahead of the story. In 1971, according to the
account, an "agitated" young Bush supposedly called an older family
friend. (Flynt calls the friend by the made-up name "Clyde.") Bush
allegedly confessed that he'd gotten his girlfriend pregnant. It was
natural that Bush would call Clyde, because Clyde had been "loosely
assigned to keep the family black sheep, young W., out of trouble," as
Flynt puts it.

Flynt's source, "Susan," told Flynt's investigators that she was
Clyde's girlfriend at the time. She said she was in the room when the
call came from Bush. Clyde allegedly told Bush he'd take care of it,
which meant arranging for an abortion. Susan named the hospital, and
she named the doctor.

Flynt's researchers found the doctor and confronted him. The doctor
denied having performed an abortion, they reported to Flynt, but oddly
enough, he did remember the woman from his own social visits to
Chateaux Dijon. He described her "as the best-looking woman" who
showed up for parties at the apartment complex.

"My reporters were unable to gain any evidence from the hospital,"
writes Flynt. "The institution had been sold several times over the
years and their records were spotty."

Flynt's account is seconded by some of those involved in the
investigation. Flynt's researchers spent about three months total in
Texas trying to obtain documentary confirmation. In interviews with
the Weekly, sources who took part in the investigation supplied
details not in Flynt's soon-to-be-published account. They told, for
example, how his investigators tracked down Bush's former girlfriend.
They say the woman acknowledged, through her husband, that she had
dated Bush for six months. But she also insisted to a friend (who
spoke with Flynt's investigators) that she and Bush never had sex. She
said to the same friend that she'd been in the hospital for a dilation
and curettage, or D&C, which is surgery involving a scraping of the
wall of the uterus. It was a common form of doctor-supervised abortion
in the early 1970s. But the woman maintained that her D&C was not an
abortion, but for another medical purpose. A D&C is sometimes
performed after a miscarriage or in non-pregnant women who have
abnormal bleeding, fibroids or polyps.

In other words, the researchers found intriguing circumstantial
support, but no proof. The investigators then tried a different tack.
"Susan, in an effort to jump-start the investigation, contacted Clyde,
told him that some reporters were bugging her about the incident, and
asked for his help," writes Flynt. "She told us that he first casually
denied any knowledge of what she was talking about, then in a later
conversation, threatened her and told her to keep her mouth shut."

In interviews with the Weekly, Flynt said he is convinced that the
former Bush girlfriend had been bought off. He said that before his
investigation, the woman had a low-wage job and her husband was
unemployed. After his researchers started poking around, said Flynt,
the husband emerged with a well-paid federal law-enforcement job and
the family moved into an expensive house in a Texas resort area.

That's not exactly how some others involved in the investigation
analyzed the evidence. The husband was a veteran law-enforcement
officer, they said. In other words, it was neither peculiar nor
improper that he would hold a job with a federal law-enforcement
agency. In addition, the couple was not demonstrably living beyond
their economic means. The woman's husband also seemed surprised to
hear about his wife's alleged 1971 trip to the hospital when
confronted, the sources said. This reaction was inconsistent with
having been bought off.

You get the sense that Flynt wanted the story out so desperately that
his own remembering became a bit skewed. He did, however, ask his
researchers to fact-check the details that actually appear in the
book. And the allegation about the woman being paid off is not in
there.

The researchers finally told Flynt they felt they could take the
investigation no further. "They said they didn't want to waste my
money," said Flynt in an interview, "and I appreciated that."

As one person directly involved in this investigation said to the
Weekly, "Circumstantially, the story made a lot of sense, but none of
the major figures were really talking."

Flynt hoped the national media would take the matter further, perhaps
by launching their own probes, or even by just asking Bush a pointed
question during a press conference. Flynt called Tim Russert of NBC
News, which sent a reporter to Flynt's office to look over his
material. This reporter, said Flynt in an interview, was David Bloom,
the same reporter who died of a pulmonary embolism at age 39 while
covering the war in Iraq in April 2003. Flynt said Bloom declined to
pick up the baton. "He said, ‘Larry, I just can't do it. Something
like this could change the outcome of the election.'"

An NBC spokeswoman essentially confirmed Flynt's account in an
e-mailed response to a series of questions. "No discussion about the
substance of the rumor took place with Mr. Russert," said Barbara
Levin. Flynt "contacted Mr. Russert, NBC News' Washington Bureau
Chief, and as is often the case, Russert simply passed the information
on to a reporter to follow up. As you note, David Bloom did follow up
and used his editorial judgment that the rumor was not solid enough to
go with a story." Levin commented that Flynt "called several news
organizations, including NBC News," but she declined to address why
NBC reporters elected not to question Bush about the subject.

An exasperated Flynt decided to get the message out himself, though
time was running short. Howard Stern interviewed him, but the segment
ran only once, writes Flynt, on Stern's live show. He also appeared on
KROQ-FM's Kevin and Bean Morning Show in August.

Then, on October 20, 2000, Flynt appeared on CNN's Crossfire. The
subject of the show concerned porn and the Internet, but Flynt took
advantage of live TV to launch his spiel. Conservative host Robert
Novak challenged Flynt as having "no proof."

"The hell we don't have proof," Flynt retorted. (Of course, Flynt
didn't have proof.) Novak then asked Flynt if he was a Gore supporter.
Flynt responded that he didn't like either candidate and that he'd
vote for the lesser of two evils.

The camera cut from Flynt, never to return. Liberal but skeptical
co-host Bill Press sardonically remarked, "You never know. Live
television." Flynt claims that CNN expurgated this exchange from its
transcript, and at the time, some online wags came to the same
conclusion and quickly posted alerts. Currently, two versions of the
transcript appear on the widely used Nexis database. One version has
the full exchange about the alleged abortion. The other omits the
discussion entirely. It's identified as a "rush transcript" that "may
not be in its final form and may be updated."

Syndicated gossip Liz Smith finally picked up the story, with a few
details off-
kilter, on November 6, the day before the election. She wrote:



Hot on the heels of the George W. Bush DUI revelation (in Maine, it's
called OUI -- Operating Under the Influence), comes word that
porn-king muckraker Larry Flynt is charging that a girlfriend of W.'s,
back in 1970, had an abortion. But that's not the story, as there's no
evidence that Bush even knew about the pregnancy. The real story --
according to the Internet's About.com -- is that Flynt's remarks were
apparently censored from CNN's Crossfire, and the entire transcript of
the show vanished from the CNN Web site. The media has been willing to
crucify Bill and Hillary Clinton with the worst sort of specious
rumor-mongering, so why was this sleazy tidbit too hot for the
"responsible" press to ask about?



Her item on Bush was cut from her column everywhere, in more than 100
papers, except for the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Flynt then contacted
Daily Variety's gossip columnist Army Archerd, who wrote on November
7, the day of the election:



FREEDOM OF THE PRESS? Larry Flynt says his comments about a hush-hush
1970 Houston abortion, on a rumored girlfriend of George W. Bush, have
been stifled by the mainstream media. (Flynt claims knowledge of the
identity of the girl, the hospital, etc. He never printed it, "because
she'd deny it; you'd have egg on your face and you'd face a libel
suit.") Still, he's more concerned with the fact that the media is
ignoring the rumors . . . "My whole focus," said Flynt, "was on the
lack of investigation by the media -- in other words, they never asked
Bush."



The story did get some international play just before the 2000
election in newspapers in England. And that was pretty much the end of
it. Bush claimed the presidency unbesmirched by this particular tale.
Eventually, Flynt decided to include the episode in his book.

The subject first came up at the Weekly, in recent times, when Flynt
stopped by last fall to tout his vanity candidacy for governor during
the campaign to recall Governor Gray Davis. Flynt took advantage of
the interview to promote a proposed initiative that would permit
non-tribal casino gambling -- he owns a casino -- as a way both to get
personally richer and to help solve the state's budget crisis. An
editor asked offhandedly whatever happened to his investigation into
Bush. That got Flynt going:

"We worked that story for six months," he said. "We had everybody,
including the hospital that performed the abortion, the doctor who did
it, you know, affidavits from four of her friends. You know, we, we
had it all. But at the last minute she stopped cooperating, and this
was just about a month before the election."

Flynt was shooting from the hip, without reviewing his own
investigators' files. The Weekly asked for documentation, but Flynt
and his representative never provided it, though Flynt did discuss the
matter at length in a late-April interview, after he reviewed his
documentation. His book publicist said there were still libel concerns
regarding the release of original documents. She said she also didn't
want articles to appear before they could assist book sales. Obtaining
Flynt's files became less necessary after people directly involved in
the investigation agreed to talk freely and separately about their
work, provided that their names not be disclosed. They were willing to
share the real names, confidentially, of all the persons involved. The
Weekly has not independently verified their accounts, which is why
real names aren't used here either. But their chronicles are
believable, especially because they acknowledge that they ultimately
failed to deliver the goods. There could be no hedging the evidence on
a story like this, they said, especially when their employer was
Flynt, whose credibility would be questioned.

Even though his book was still months away, Flynt finally couldn't
contain himself during a February 2004 interview with New York's Daily
News.

"I've talked to the woman's friends," Flynt is quoted as saying. "I've
tracked down the doctor who did the abortion, I tracked down the Bush
people who arranged for the abortion . . . I got the story nailed."

The anecdote got some airing, especially after it was repeated by pop
musician Moby. But the attention came almost entirely from the British
and Australian press. They played it up as an example of mudslinging,
sometimes pairing it with unsubstantiated rumors of a John Kerry
affair.



In 2000, if the story had taken off, would it have mattered? Should it
have mattered?

In the razor-thin 2000 election, it's hard to deny that anything that
could change votes could have made a difference. Flynt hoped the
abortion account would paint W. as a hypocrite. Bush already looked
every inch a hypocrite to critics who saw him ally with rich corporate
interests, while savaging the poor behind a façade of "compassionate
conservatism."

But Bush supporters see the world and Bush so differently. Many are
drawn by his appeal to traditional values and free enterprise,
regardless of his actual policies. And many of Bush's die-hard
religious-right supporters had ample reason to forgive Bush, even for
an abortion. His entire story, from their perspective, is one of a
sinner redeemed, the type of soul who can, in an odd way, sometimes
shine brighter than the less fallible person who never required such
redemption. It didn't matter so much, therefore, if Bush had been a
drunk, if he had used cocaine, if he'd had premarital sex -- if he'd
been the wayward prodigal son. At one level, such behavior made him an
ordinary guy, just like ordinary people everywhere. At another, his
reform underscored his exemplary born-again identity and his
unwavering commitment to conservative Christian values. For many
Christians, Bush stands on the upright side of the before-versus-after
divide intrinsic to a belief system in which a person must be
personally saved from his sins by Jesus. Indeed, to the religious
right, George W. Bush is more the real deal than his better-behaving,
high-achieving father ever was.

How about the fence sitters of 2004? Should the alleged incident
matter to them?

Maybe, but its relevance stacks up weakly compared to that of the Iraq
invasion, the ballooning federal deficit, the erosion of civil
liberties and the ongoing subjugation of environmental protection to
corporate interests. It is with such matters that even Flynt's own
book is primarily concerned, though he does spare a few words to
discuss his boyhood experience of sex with a chicken.



Flynt's investigators weren't bloodhounding this one anecdote alone.
Along the way, they also met with author J.H. Hatfield, who alleged
that, in 1972, George W. Bush was arrested for possession of cocaine
and, with the help of his father, got the charges erased in exchange
for performing community service.

Hatfield cited anonymous sources in his book Fortunate Son: George W.
Bush and the Making of an American President. Hatfield's first
publisher got cold feet and ultimately destroyed its copies of
Hatfield's book.

Flynt's investigators met with Hatfield and repeatedly pressed him for
additional details. They wanted to pursue the story further. But
Hatfield finally stormed out of their meeting. Hatfield died, an
apparent suicide, in July 2001.

The researchers also checked out rumors of a Bush cocaine binge in the
early 1990s that were called into Flynt. If true, it would mean Bush
lied about when he'd given up drugs. When asked in 1999 about drug
use, Bush was quoted as saying, "As I understand it, the current [FBI]
form asks the question, ‘Did somebody use drugs within the last seven
years?' and I will be glad to answer that question, and the answer is
no." He also said, "Not only could I pass the background check of the
standards applied in today's White House, I could have passed the
background check on the standards applied on the most stringent
conditions when my dad was president of the United States, a 15-year
period."

Once again, the researchers came up with nothing that met journalistic
standards of proof, although their entire chasing-Bush experience
would make a heck of a plot for a buddy movie.

"Flynt was interested mainly in two things: pussy and drugs," noted
one researcher, who now considers that preoccupation quaint and
ironic. "Here we were looking at Bush's personal life and the whole
Enron scandal was happening right under our noses."
 




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