by Glynn Wilson

With a new day dawning in Washington, D.C., due to the election of Barack Obama as the first black president in American history, who looks determined to govern like Lincoln and make changes in that corrupt town, is it possible that Bush administration officials will totally escape the long arm of justice for their roles in high crimes and misdemeanors more damaging than any corruption in our history?

While former Bush political adviser Karl Rove is still in defiance of a Congressional subpoena to testify under oath and still faces an investigation for destroying e-mails and other documents, obstruction of justice and other civil and criminal infractions for his role in turning the Bush Justice Department into a political arm of the White House, the Washington Post company actually pays him money to write a column for Newsweek magazine advising the Republican Party on how to get itself out of the political wilderness.

There is something very wrong with this picture. It stands journalism ethics on its head to see a political operative of Rove’s mendacity allowed such a prominent voice in a news publication. Perhaps the magazine should suspend the column until we know whether Rove is going to end up behind bars himself, or simply escape justice.

From reading between the headlines and talking to sources in Washington, I find it is now pretty clear there is an intellectual power struggle going on in the Democratic Party over whether to investigate the crimes of the Bush administration or simply “turn the other cheek” and move on to tackle the major problems facing the country and the world once Barack Obama is sworn in as the new president on January 20.

It looks like a major global warming initiative is at the top of Obama’s agenda after the inauguration that could include a bailout of sorts for the U.S. automobile industry, with caveats that General Motors, Ford, and the rest retool their manufacturing plants to make far more efficient vehicles that run on alternative energy sources such natural gas and a couple of different types of batteries.

While the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a new 60-page report this week that includes a resolution holding Rove in contempt, it is not clear whether this has any chance of even making it to the floor of the current lame-duck session in the Senate for a vote — or whether there will be the political will to bring it back up after the new Congress is sworn in next year. [See pdf version of the report here]

The report cites a host of evidence showing that White House and Justice Department officials focused on the political impact of federal prosecutions and pushed for partisan investigations, and that Rove and others at the White House were involved in the firing of federal prosecutors who did not toe the Bush-GOP line. It also suggests that the reasons for the firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, especially on the part of former Bush yes-man Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has now been indicted in Texas in another case.

The U.S. Justice Department itself already found in an internal report that the White House engineered the firings and that inappropriate political concerns played a role in several of those cases.

But will Rove ever be brought to justice, especially for his role in the investigation of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who was knocked out of the 2006 race for governor by his indictment and spent nine months in prison as a result of a corrupt political investigation?

According to Erica J. Chabot, press secretary to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont has made it clear that he is not willing to “close the door” next year on the work the committee has done on the investigations under this Congress.

“This is not something the chairman has taken lightly,” she said of the U.S. attorney firings, the Siegelman case, and the investigation of Rove.

“But we have to wait and see what that next Congress is going to look like, what the committee is going to look like, where the priorities fall into place in those first few months,” she said. “Obviously, there are going to be a lot of things that need the committee’s attention right away, like an attorney general nominee. That certainly doesn’t move anything off the priority list, but it just might shuffle the order they show up on that list.”

She said it does not have to be a “one-or-the-other” situation.

“There’s a way to have that forward-looking attitude while examining what did happen and determining whether other courses of action need to happen in the next Congress,” she said. “I think there’s a way to do both. I think right now it’s just a little too early to tell what the 111th Congress or Senate Judiciary Committee is going to do.”

She simply said she didn’t know whether there is a possibility of a full-floor vote on the Rove contempt citation in the current Congress, although a prominent Washington, D.C.-based reporter for one of the most influential newspapers in the country told me it would be “dead on arrival” in this Congress and would be “filibustered to death.”

Even if this Congress were to find the time before the holiday recess at the end of the year to take it up, President George W. Bush would then have an opportunity to pardon Rove, much as he commuted the sentence of former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted for his role in leaking the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson to the press after a special prosecutor’s investigation.

It is not even clear at this juncture when Congress will recess for the holidays, Ms. Chabot said. That will depend on the business that has to be done over the next few weeks.

“That’s a question I wish I knew the answer to so I could make some travel plans,” she said, laughing.

Attempts to reach the press secretaries for the House Judiciary Committee and Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis were unsuccessful for this story, perhaps since it looks like Davis is in a fight with state party officials in Montgomery over the future of the Alabama Democratic Party. We’ll have more to report on that later.

Meanwhile, GOP whistle-blower Jill Simpson, the North Alabama lawyer who is largely responsible for the Congressional investigation into the Siegelman case, did have some strong feelings about the investigation when reached at her law office in Rainsville.

“Karl Rove is in complete defiance of Congress and the rule of law by refusing to appear and to turn over all the documents in this case,” she said. “He has withheld evidence and defied Congressional subpoenas. They must get to the bottom of what went wrong at the Department of Justice in order to correct it.”

There is no way they can reach a final conclusion in the case, she said, “until they look in all the drawers and roll up all the carpet and get to the bottom of the facts in this case.”

She also pointed out that the members of the House and Senate “owe a duty to the citizens who have sent them to Washington to uphold the Constitution and show that no man is above the law.”

“King Karl is not above the law,” she said. “They can’t let this go.”

The Case for Why Siegelman’s Verdict Should Be Overturned

by Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was cooking a pizza at his Birmingham home when I got him on the phone Thursday night to talk about his appeal coming up on the ninth of December in Atlanta.

Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery on a break from his sentencing hearing in June, 2007.

I called to ask about the appeal and other things, like his reaction to the election of Barack Obama as president and the somewhat less-than-stellar performance of the Alabama Democratic Party in the same election.

He had some thoughts on how the state party could have done a much better job, and he was disappointed to see another Republican elected to the state Supreme Court. He was surprised the state went so heavily for Senator John McCain, who won Alabama’s nine electoral votes with 60 percent of the overall vote and maybe 80 percent of the white vote.

For now I’ll keep most of his comments private on the problems with the state party and save them for a more detailed analysis in the works for later. Here the focus is mostly on the appeal.

But I have to report that Siegelman got excited when he talked about the Obama landslide, which he called “astounding” and “stunning.” And he talked in the language of a policy wonk on how the campaign did it: A massive and highly effective Web and Internet fundraising campaign, block-by-block nationwide canvassing, educated and dedicated workers at every level, not to mention one of the smartest, most articulate, gracious, and calm-under-fire candidates since John F. Kennedy in 1960.

“It was without a doubt the most impressive and effective campaign in the history of politics,” he said. “Too bad we couldn’t do more with that on the state level.”

He was reluctant to talk in great detail about his hearing before a three-judge appeals court panel in less than a month, especially considering how Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller in Montgomery sentenced him to a number of months of extra jail time last summer for talking about the case to the media.

But he is hopeful the court will find its way to justice and throw out the case and let his co-defendant Richard Scrushy out of prison by Christmas.

While we were talking on the phone and he ate his pizza, he also managed to e-mail me a copy of the Time magazine story about to come out on the Web and in this week’s edition. He had not had time to evaluate it or react to it. After reading the story and my take on it the next morning, Siegelman told the TPMMuckraker on Friday he considered it “another shocking revelation in the misconduct of the U.S. attorney’s offices.”

He called the level of manipulation of the prosecution team by U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, who supposedly recused herself from the case because of her involvement along with her husband Bill Canary in previous political campaigns with Siegelman’s opponents, another example of the “outrageous criminal conduct in the U.S. Attorney’s office and the Department of Justice.”

He said further that what the Time story revealed was “more frightening than anything that has come before.” And he believes that his case is just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of politicized prosecutions by the Bush Justice Department, with the full knowledge and direction of former White House aide Karl Rove and most likely Bush himself.

Solid Arguments

A detailed analysis of the appeals briefs in the case reveal four solid arguments the appeals court panel could stand on to reverse the conviction, order a mistrial, or reduce the sentence.

The first and perhaps most important reason for the court to completely dismiss the case is the lack of substantial proof of an explicit quid pro quo, a Latin and legal term meaning “something for something,” for Siegelman’s appointment of Scrushy to the state hospital regulatory board. This exchange was supposedly for contributions of $500,000 to pay off the debt on an education-lottery campaign, none of which went into Siegelman’s pocket.

The jury in the case heard the prosecution hammer this point about a “tit-for-tat” exchange over and over again during the final weeks of the trial. But in their appeals brief, Siegelman’s attorneys point out that according to precedent, the quid pro quo would have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt among all of the charges — conspiracy, mail fraud, and bribery. And, they argue that in addition to insufficient proof, Judge Fuller’s jury charge did not make this clear. They ask for complete acquittal on those grounds alone.

Glynn Wilson

Scott Horton speaks to a North Alabama media reform group in April.

According to New York attorney Scott Horton, who has followed the case closely and written about it himself for the Harper’s magazine Website and The Daily Beast, the tit-for-tat business the way it was used in this case has “broad consequences for the political world.”

He said in an e-mail interview if the standard that the prosecution argued and Fuller implicitly accepted is correct, “politicians around the country should be in jail right now. Indeed, that number would arguably include Judge Fuller, whose appointment to the federal bench by George W. Bush followed a lifetime of contributions to Republican campaigns.”

He pointed out that it would include the 146 individuals who gave $100,000 or more to the Bush-Cheney campaign who received appointments to federal jobs in return.

Two, on the bribery charge, the appeal brief argues that the statute of limitations had run out. The timing of the alleged bribe was never spelled out in the original indictment, but the judge allowed the prosecution team to nail down the details later. This is a shoddy way to run a prosecution at best.

In an earlier interview, Siegelman’s attorney in the early phases of the case, Doug Jones, said he agreed to wave the statute of limitations on the alleged bribery in the interest of appearing to cooperate fully with the prosecutors in the investigation. But that was at a time when he was being told that the chances of an indictment were slim, well before the “top down review” of the case from Washington he testified about last year before the House Judiciary Committee.

It is clear from the dates looking back now that the alleged crime of passing checks in exchange for the appointment took place in the summer of 1999. Scrushy was appointed to the CON board on July 26, 1999, and the prosecution’s evidence showed the first check from Scrushy was received about that time. The indictment came down on May 17, 2005. For the bribery indictment to be valid, the crimes would have had to take place after May 17, 2000.

The prosecution brought its case too late. Case closed. Charges dismissed, except in a courtroom run by a political opponent of Siegelman with a mandate from the Republican White House to dispatch a brand of political justice only allowed in corrupt, criminal empires.

This should have been dealt with by the judge and should never have made it to the jury. But as we now know, the judge was not acting as an honest broker.

While some newspaper reporters and members of the public may scoff at this notion of dropping the case on appeal based on a technicality, perhaps they should consider the argument that this alleged bribe was nothing more and nothing less than a political contribution. And it’s not like Scrushy needed to give Siegelman money to sit on the board. His role as founder of one of the most innovative health care companies in the state and country at that time would have warranted him a position on the board without the contribution. He sat on the board under previous Republican governors.

Glynn Wilson

HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy and his wife Leslie in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery in June, 2007.

While people have a right to dislike Scrushy for the way he treated people and for cashing in his stock options as the tech bubble was bursting and costing many people great sums of money who had invested in HealthSouth, if the government was going to put him in jail for his role in “cooking the books” in that case they should have convicted him in the Birmingham trial, which was botched by another political appointee, U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, a Republican of questionable qualifications placed in her office for her loyalty to George Bush and the GOP.

Certainly the practice of rewarding loyal political subjects and campaign contributors with jobs should be reformed. But the question people should ask themselves is this: Is the best way to accomplish that throwing innocent people in jail?

Three, on the issue of juror misconduct, the very idea of jurors reading news coverage online and e-mailing each other about the case outside the jury deliberation room would be instant grounds for a mistrial in any honest court. It is clear that the judge and prosecution team in this case did not fully investigate this issue by examining computers and e-mail addresses used by jurors or by questioning the jury or U.S. marshals at length about this.

The new disclosures by Time magazine this week make clear that claims of juror misconduct in the case “are much more substantial than Siegelman or his attorneys knew when they filed their arguments,” Horton says. “In fact, there were improper communications between prosecutors and at least one juror. And it was one of the jurors implicated in the existing misconduct concerns.”

In other words, one of the jurors who was communicating with the prosecution through the U.S. marshals’ service about a romantic relationship with one of the prosecution team was also one of the jurors who read news coverage online and sent e-mails to other jurors trying to get them to find Scrushy and Siegelman guilty.

“Moreover,” Horton says, “the Justice Department hid these facts from the court and the opposing counsel. At this point it seems clear that the jury was corrupted, and that the Justice Department played an active role in that process.”

I have covered many court trials over the past 28 years as a reporter, and I have never seen any judge, Republican or Democrat, who would allow this kind of shenanigans to go on. It is simply outrageous and someone should be held accountable for it.

If the conservative newspapers in Alabama can’t see this, then I have no sympathy for them for their falling circulation numbers. It is irresponsible journalism of the highest order to allow this kind of corruption of the court system — no matter what your political-editorial slant.

Then finally, without citing the affidavit of GOP whistle-blower Jill Simpson or raising the issue of a conflict of interest on the part of the judge themselves, Siegelman’s attorneys adopt all of the arguments in the appeals brief of Richard Scrushy, who does cite Simpson’s claims, and argues that Fuller should not have sat in judgment in the case while he was in the defense contracting business with the federal government. As has been previously reported ad nauseum, Fuller was a lawyer in the defense contracting business in South Alabama when President George W. Bush appointed him to the court — just in time to take up the case and knock Siegelman out of the race for governor.

Doss Aviation, a company in which Fuller owned a controlling interest, received a $117 million contract with the Air Force on the day Siegelman was convicted. If Fuller had been appointed by a Democrat, you would have been able to hear the screams of the conservative newspapers in Alabama on Fox News, all the way to New York.

While some attorneys have expressed skepticism that the appeals court panel will rule favorably on this claim, we think they should consider it, especially since the prosecution team goes to great lengths to tie Siegelman and Scrushy together in an unholy conspiracy. There seems to be plenty of evidence that the bigger conspiracy was on the other side and directed by Karl Rove with the full knowledge of the president himself.

There is an attorney in Montgomery who could shed considerable light on the extent to which George W. Bush was interested in keeping up with developments in the Siegelman case. We won’t name him for now, but we know from talking to other sources who have heard it from him that Bush was in the loop in this case. On top of all the other grounds for impeachment, this would certainly add to the list. Unfortunately, the hierarchy of the Democratic Party refused to pursue this for the past couple of years, and now it is too late.

Then consider what it would be like if you were on trial in a case like this. Would you want to sit in a courtroom and place your fate in the hands of a judge who did millions of dollars in outside business with the U.S. government, the military, and the FBI? Common sense, and basic ethical considerations, should raise red flags in the mind of any honest person on this score — especially appeals court judges.

The Siegelman brief asks for a complete dismissal of the verdict in the case on appeal and for a judgment of acquittal. Short of that, it asks for an order for a mistrial and reassignment to another judge if there is a retrial.

It would be very unusual for an appeals court to “smack down” a district court judge in “quite so harsh a manner,” Horton says. “On the other hand, their ruling setting Siegelman free already indicated what I’d call a lack of patience with Fuller. They clearly suspect something extremely foul and have not acted on it.”

At least not yet.

Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman had clearly lost some weight while he was in prison last year. He is shown here having a little fun at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Birmingham May 2.

In the response brief from federal prosecutors, they counter all these arguments with legal boilerplate language that looks as though it was copied and pasted from a computer program. There is simply nothing in it worth citing or reporting. From an objective point of view, it is simply not believable.

If the court rejects any of the options laid out by Siegelman’s lawyers, they make a detailed case for why he should be released for time served (nine months) because of the unconstitutional addition to his sentence for exercising his First Amendment rights of free speech to talk to the media.

They cite an internal report from the Bush Justice Department itself which said there is “significant evidence of selective prosecution” and “extensive evidence that the prosecution [was] directed or promoted by Washington officials, likely including former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Advisor to the President Karl Rove, and that political considerations influenced the decision to bring charges.”

In other words, the case was political. That’s not the purpose of courts. Case closed.

And then, of course, there are implications for the future of American jurisprudence on how this case comes out, beyond the immediate fate of Don Siegelman, Horton says.

“Leura Canary and her team have been fending off a Congressional probe of their misconduct with claims that the case is still active and they cannot therefore be compelled to testify before Congress,” Horton says. “Canary did, however, submit a representation to Congress to the effect that she had no involvement in the case after major decisions were taken — a claim which has now been objectively established as untruthful. Making false statements to Congress is potentially punishable as a felony.”

In addition, Canary’s office has refused to release more than 600 pages of documents about the case, including e-mails, letters, and memos.

When the court of appeals rules in the case, perhaps by Christmas, the case will be close to its legal conclusion, Horton said, other than an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

“Then their stonewalling tactics will come to an end,” he said. He called the hearing on the ninth of December and their decision in this case a “day of reckoning for the Eleventh Circuit.”

“This is a court overwhelmingly dominated with Republican judges, most of whom have gotten to the bench after a career engagement in GOP politics,” he says. “Will they be able to put their partisan interests aside and deal fairly with a Democrat who has been abused by a Republican administration? We’ll know shortly.”

New Reporting May Show Bush Was ‘In the Loop’

Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery, with Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, wife of Birmingham Civil Rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth, in the background.

by Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy will get another day in court Dec. 9 in Atlanta, when a three-judge appeals court panel will hear oral arguments in a rare hearing that is likely to result in the case being thrown out, perhaps by Christmas.

We are working on a longer news feature about the case as an advance on the hearing, and will go into some detail about the arguments before the court.

But an explosive new story in Time magazine confirms what we have been reporting all along, and reveals critical and startling new evidence about the political, unethical, and, if true, illegal activities on the part of the Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys and career prosecutors in Montgomery.

The Time lede:

Next month in Atlanta, a federal court will hear the high-profile appeal of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman, whose conviction on corruption charges in 2006 became one of the most publicly debated cases to emerge from eight years of controversy at the Bush Justice Department. Now new documents highlight alleged misconduct by the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney and other prosecutors in the case, including what appears to be extensive and unusual contact between the prosecution and the jury.

What the article details are e-mail exchanges between U.S. Attorney Leura G. Canary and the prosecution team instructing them on how to conduct the case, after she allegedly recused herself in that now-famous press release printed in Alabama’s Newhouse newspapers. We have reported before that there was no real evidence or document proving she did recuse herself, no formal recusal motion in the case file.

And from what Time is reporting from a new whistle-blower to emerge and a new letter from John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the powerful House Judiciary Committee, it seems there is a faction in Washington who are planning on probing the “dark side” of the Bush administration after the president leaves office. Other stories of late have hinted that there are some in the Obama camp who might be looking to “turn the other cheek” and not look back at Bush and Karl Rove.

“My understanding is that the focus is first on personnel. Once they’re picked, there will be a turn to dealing with the policy issues,” said Scott Horton, a New York attorney who is following the stories and who covered the Siegelman case on his “No Comment” blog on the Harper’s magazine Website, now largely dormant.

“The policy is neither ‘turn the other cheek’ nor to launch something that looks like a retaliatory vendetta,” he said. “There are pending investigations that will run their course, and there may be a number of new ones. And you can count on it that Alice (Martin) and Leura (Canary) are being encouraged not to let the door hit them on the way out.”

It is clear from the Time story that Conyers is still intent on continuing the probe of former White House aides Harriet E. Miers and Rove in relation to the U.S. attorneys-firing scandal, which tangentially includes the Siegelman case.

But other stories, including one from the Washington Post and another from the New York Times hint at a different story.

And now there is some indication that our push to place George W. Bush himself in the loop in the Siegelman case may be getting some traction.

In the New York Times story, according to Horton, “Savage has learned what I have learned in recent days, namely, the White House is eager to secure recognition of its ability to block disclosure of its dealings with the Justice Department after January 20.”

Horton says the White House is concerned about the U.S. Attorney’s probe.

“As the Inspector General noted, the White House’s refusal to cooperate and turn over documents blocked the conclusion of the Justice Department’s internal probe,” he said.

“But of greater interest,” he said, “is the suggestion now openly aired that the White House is particularly concerned about documents and evidence linking it to the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman. I am told that this involves former White House counsel Harriet Miers, former senior political advisor Karl Rove, and President Bush, himself.”

He asks: “What you may wonder was the President of the United States doing meddling in the prosecution of a Southern governor? That is a very good question. Some significant news on this front will break shortly. Stay tuned.”

The Time story quotes new documents furnished by Department of Justice staffer Tamarah T. Grimes, a legal aide who worked in the Montgomery office where Siegelman was prosecuted, including Canary e-mails, written long after her alleged recusal, offering legal advice to prosecutors working the case.

This burnishes what we have reported before and earlier evidence provided by GOP whistle-blower Jill Simpson about the political nature of the Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of Siegelman, after he announced his run against Republican Governor Bob Riley in the 2006 race. As everyone well knows by now who has followed this story, Canary is the wife of Bill Canary, the head of the Conservative Business Council of Alabama, who worked with Riley and Rove and the Bushes in the past.

In one of Canary’s emails, supposedly dated September 19, 2005, she forwards prosecutors a three-page Siegelman commentary and highlights a single passage showing the results of a poll reporting that 67 percent of Alabamians believed the investigation was politically motivated. She suggests that might be grounds for not letting him discuss the court in the media.

But the fact is, the mainstream newspapers and TV news stations in Alabama were reporting nothing suggesting the case was political, other than reports practially making fun of Siegelman for suggesting it. The masses in Alabama got the message from independent journalists publishing mainly on the Web, including this site and Harper’s magazine’s site, as well as e-mail lists such as the one operated by Pam Miles out of Madison, Alabama.

Prosecutors in the case seem to have followed Canary’s advice, according to Time. A few months later they petitioned the court to prevent Siegelman from arguing that politics had any bearing on the case against him. After trial, they persuaded the judge to use Siegelman’s public statements about political bias — like the one Canary had flagged in her e-mail — as grounds for increasing his prison sentence. The judge’s action is now one target of next month’s appeal.

In his letter to U.S. Attorney Michael Mukasey last week, Conyers wrote: “A recused United States Attorney should not be providing factual information … to the team working on the case…”

The article also provides more evidence of juror and prosecution-team misconduct in passing around e-mails during the trial, a story we reported last year that should have been grounds for a mistrial — in any honest court.

There’s more juice in the Time story, but that should be enough to convince the naysayers — and the appeals court judges — that the case should at least be sent back to Montgomery for a real investigation of juror and prosecutor misconduct and a consideration for a mistrial on those grounds alone.

We will go into more detail soon on the other four reasons the court is likely to toss the case.

Time: More Allegations of Misconduct in Alabama Governor Case

by Glynn Wilson

Some critics will dismiss Oliver Stone’s biographical movie “W.” on the life and times of George W. Bush for a lot of reasons, and it may be his worst film to date. In part, that may be because it was rushed together in 46 days to be released before the Nov. 4 presidential election, not so much to influence the election as some critics have suggested, but because it would have little audience interest and thus economic value after the vote to replace Bush.

But what criticism I’ve seen thus far, including from on high in New York, is typical of the limited sort of media criticism by journalists who pander to audiences in the fake attempt at objectivity who don’t understand film as art, or so-called movie reviewers who tend to focus on the technical details rather than the big picture.

Josh Brolin plays Bush being arrested in college…

This is what they don’t get. Stone is America’s Shakespeare in many ways. He is an artist as well as a storyteller. This is art imitating life. And even though he dropped out of Yale after making A’s while Bush finished making C’s, he’s smarter by a long shot than Bush — or any of his critics.

Since I am sort of famous for doing the definitive Bush AWOL story on that controversial time in his life in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1972, and since an editor in New York had tipped me off that part of my story might have been used in the script, I had to see the film on opening night to judge it for myself. And to complete the cultural experience, I went to see the movie in the suburbs east of Birmingham, expecting the action to be interrupted by the banter of suburban Alabama conservatives who still side with Bush politically.

But I guess the economic depression kept them away from paying the $9.50 ticket price, or maybe they just live in a dark cave and didn’t know about it, or wouldn’t support a “liberal” Stone film for any amount of money. Fewer than 10 people showed up.

I expected to laugh out loud throughout the film, based on what I had seen in the advance trailer and my own well-known views of our dufus president-king. Two teenaged girls sitting on the back row laughed a lot. But I only busted out once, when Bush, played by Josh Brolin, is president in the situation room trying to sell the war on Iraq to his cabinet. He can’t even remember the cliché: “Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.”

He says, and this is based on real episodes from Bush’s life, I kid you not, “Fool me once shame on you, uh me, er … You can’t be fooled again.”

I wonder how many times the American people feel they have been fooled by Bush and his political guru Karl Rove, the spin master of Rosemary Beach. Shame on you?

This is a non-linear telling, where Stone starts out in a cabinet meeting during the discussion of Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, then jumps back to a frat party at Yale in the 1960s. He goes back and forth between the young and older Bush, showing him in the oil business, while he briefly owned part of a Texas baseball team, and at key moments of his presidency, most notably when he has to be “the decider” on torture and spying and whether to invade Iraq based on the intel case for WMDs.

The one jail scene comes early on, but it is for pulling down the goal post after a Princeton football game, not for driving drunk or being busted for cocaine possession.

I did expect Stone to show Bush snorting cocaine and/or smoking pot, perhaps like some of the scenes in “Charlie Wilson’s War.” It is well known that he and Laura Bush smoked marijuana and she is alleged to have sold it in college. Maybe those scenes were left on the cutting-room floor to try to appease the critics and not encourage teenagers to follow in Bush’s footsteps in that regard, or to get that PG-13 rating. Or maybe Stone just didn’t have the time to complete his research as he did for “JFK.”

Either way, Bush is only shown as a pretzel-eating drunk, always downing Jack Daniels at bars and frat parties, when the research clearly shows that Bush’s whiskey of choice was Jim Beam.

Some of the most powerfully accurate material comes during the encounters with “Poppy,” the 41st President George H.W. Bush, who is always disappointed in George Jr.

Stone’s portrayal of Bush’s life makes use of his dreams of baseball in an empty stadium as a literary device, not just to caricature him, as some critics have suggested. And it could be true of many young men of Bush’s generation, so it’s not just about Bush. It’s a timeless statement about America in the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st.

The true story of Bush’s drive to gain the approval of his father is not limited to Bush’s experience, either. It is a real, psychological struggle faced by many young men in all kinds of cultures, as Shakespeare knew and portrayed so accurately and eloquently in Hamlet.

Stone’s “W.,” in other words, is our Hamlet, where the prince and then king is always seeking the favor of his father on one hand and his manly independence on the other.

“To be or not to be. That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them,” King Hamlet laments, after being visited by the ghost of his father and while trying to decide whether to declare a war he thinks his father would support.

There is little doubt that Bush’s own drive to gain the approval of his father motivated him to run for office and then, once there, to declare war and invade Iraq “to finish the job.” That still gives Bush fans — and baseball fans who treat politics as sport — a line to cheer about.

Of course there were other factors, including the neo-con vision of world empire that required gaining control of Iraq’s oil. In the film, Richard Dreyfus as Vice President Dick Cheney shows us this plan better than any single piece of journalism ever could.

The premiere advice in Hamlet, though, comes in a line from Polonius to his son Laertes.

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Bush pursues the first part and ignores the latter, to his own downfall and ours, just as Polonius and Hamlet did in their time and in the play.

That should underscore the main point viewers should take away from the movie — and readers should take away from the Bush AWOL story.

America is not supposed to be a monarchy. If we continue to elect the flawed sons (or dufus princes) of would-be monarchs like those in the Bush family, we will suffer the same downfall as the kingdoms of Europe.

Oh, but wait. It’s too late. We already did.

And now, as Bush is about to be replaced in the White House, the American empire is over. Caput. Dead and gone.

We are about to be in the full grasp of another Great Depression. We brought this on ourselves by allowing the uneducated masses to elect someone so lacking in intellectual competence and curiosity as to allow a political PR man to run the federal government for eight years by press release.

If only we had listened to the journalists who warned of the dangers of reelecting Bush in 2004. . . .

We might not be in this mess today.

If only we had learned from Shakespeare. . . .