Need more examples of cheating by Bush, Cheney, Rove

I'm in the final stages of finishing a book tracing Bush-Rove-Cheney's history of cheating, breaking laws and political dirty tricks. Many books have pointed out for the historical record the accomplished liars these officials are; I'm taking it a step farther by showing what accomplished cheaters they are.

I'm going all the way back to how Bush cheated at sandlot baseball games as a kid, how Rove cheated during high school political debates and how Cheney cheated in college at Yale by somehow passing tests without attending class.

Im looking for other examples of how this gang took shortcuts and engaged in cheating during their younger days. I have a lot of examples of how they did so as adults - I'm looking for more on when they were young.

For instance, does anyone know anyone who can attest to Bush, Rove or Cheney using another student's test to make a better grade in school or getting the test beforehand from a friend or fraternity? Has anyone read about anything like that?

The intro and first chapter of my book is online here.

The following is a brief excerpt from the first chapter:

Even though Bush had so-so grades that should not have allowed him to get accepted to Yale, his father's and grandfather's standings at that Ivy League institution were all he needed. The dean at Phillips even point-blank told Bush he would not get into Yale. But with help from his family, especially his U.S. senator grandfather, Prescott, Bush was allowed to attend Yale. Friends said Bush was "shocked" to get in there.

Rather than try to improve his grades and prove he belonged, Bush lobbied to become president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he conceived the illegal idea to actually brand pledges. Forming the Greek letter "Delta" from a coat hanger, Bush would heat the wire and then burn the backsides of pledges during their initiation rituals.

The Yale Daily News called the frat-house brandings "sadistic and obscene." Despite photographic evidence in the paper to the contrary, Bush, who never had himself branded, told The New York Times that the scarring was "only a cigarette burn."

Several of his victims who were branded said otherwise. One pledge told the Yale newspaper that he was beaten, and the branding was almost a relief. "By that time, my body was so numb that the iron felt good - like a match being held close to my body," he said. "Despite Yale's Ivy sophistication, pledging a fraternity at Yale is often a degrading, sadistic and obscene process."

The 1967 article detailed how pledges had to sit with their heads between their legs for two to five hours and were kicked if they as much as moved or even coughed. The Yale fraternity board fined Bush's frat, and the brandings stopped. In a Yale article in 2005, Albert Evans, president of the Inter-Fraternity Council in 1967 and Bush acquaintance, admitted what Bush did was illegal. "What DKE was doing was clearly outside the rules, and they were sanctioned for that," Evans said.

Bush also lobbied hard to get into the Skull and Bones Society, a secret elite club that practiced weird initiation rituals that included being forced to sit naked in a tomb and reveal sexual histories. Bush received the name "Magog" in the Skull and Bones cult because he had the most extensive sexual experience of all the initiates. Many in the moralistic crowd Bush would later solicit votes from considered premarital sex to be "cheating against God."
On the athletic field, Bush could not live up to his father's prowess. So he apparently took a few shortcuts there, as well. A photo published in a Yale yearbook shows Bush on the rugby field sucker-punching an opponent, as well as illegally tackling above the shoulders and leaving his feet. The caption says, "George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying, right hook to opposing ball carrier."

At Yale, Bush was actually arrested for violating certain laws. In 1966, police nabbed him for stealing a Christmas decoration from a store display that he hung on his frat house. Police booked Bush on a misdemeanor charge but later dropped it after one his father's friends intervened - a familiar pattern in Bush's life.

The following year, Bush was arrested by campus police for pulling down the goal posts at Princeton while celebrating a Yale football win. The campus police let him and others involved go after telling them to leave town.

He also tried to get some frat brothers to help him steal the United Way sign in New Haven, though they did not follow through on that theft. "He was the best at egging other people into schemes, like Tom Sawyer," Robert Beebe, a DKE brother who compared Bush to the John Belushi character in Animal House, told Minutaglio.

Several former Yale students told Kitty Kelley and Erica Jong that they did more than drink with Bush - they sold cocaine or snorted it with Bush back then. One said he did not feel right about "blowing George's cover because I was doing the same thing."

Thanks for any tips......

•  Perhaps this will help

  Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President
  by Justin A. Frank

  From Publishers Weekly

  Bush Administration policies are not only a "great catastrophe" but the products of a disturbed mind, according to this provocative blend of psychological case-study and partisan polemic. Psychoanalyst Frank sifts through family memoirs, the writings of critics like Al Franken and David Corn and the public record of Bush’s personal idiosyncrasies for clues to the President’s character, interpreting the evidence in the rigidly Freudian framework of child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. He finds that Bush, psychically scarred by an absentee father and a cold, authoritarian mother, has developed a galloping case of
  megalomania, characterized by a Manichaean worldview, delusions of persecution and omnipotence and an "anal/sadistic" indifference to others’ pain, with removal from office the only "treatment option." The author’s exegesis of Bush’s personality traits-the drinking problem, the bellicose rhetoric, the verbal flailings and
  misstatements of fact, the religiosity and exercise routines, the hints of dyslexia and hyperactivity, the youthful cruelty to animals and schoolmates, the smirk-paints an intriguing, if exaggerated and
  contemptuous, portrait of a possibly troubled public figure. But Frank’s attempts to translate psychoanalysis into political analysis are unconvincing. Indeed, if Bush’s reneging on campaign promises is a form of clinical "sadism," and his budget deficits an "unconscious attack on his own parents," then Karl Rove, the Cabinet, and both houses of Congress belong in group therapy with him.

  Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
  Inc. All rights reserved.

  Book Description
  "I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure me out... I'm just not
  into psychobabble."
  -- George W. Bush

  For all his simplicity and affability, George W. Bush has remained, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, "a mystery wrapped in an enigma." In
  Bush on the Couch, Dr. Justin A. Frank, a well-respected Washington, D.C.–based psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry, unwraps that mystery, assembling a comprehensive psychological profile of President Bush. Using the principles of applied psychoanalysis -- the discipline of psychoanalyzing public and historical figures pioneered by Freud --
  Frank fearlessly builds his case ... and reaches conclusions that are at once highly persuasive and deeply disturbing.

  Through a close analysis of Bush's public statements and behavior, as well as the historical record provided by journalists, biographers,
  and those who have known the president well, Frank traces the development of Bush's character from childhood to the present day. Examining closely the role of the president's parents -- especially
  Barbara Bush, an acknowledged disciplinarian whose own insecurities may have prevented her from adequately nurturing her son -- Frank finds in Bush's childhood the roots of a dramatic psychic split that remains a dominant influence on his adult worldview. Frank argues that this split has inevitably hampered Bush's ability to manage his
  emotions, charging his psyche with restless anxiety, and conditioning him to view the world in the black-and-white terms that have so
  evidently shaped his administration.

  Among the other subjects Frank explores:

  • Bush's false sense of omnipotence, instilled within him during childhood and emboldened by his deep investment in fundamentalist religion
  • The president's history of untreated alcohol abuse, and the questions it raises about denial, impairment, and the enabling streak in our culture
  • The growing anecdotal evidence that Bush may suffer from dyslexia, ADHD, and other thought disorders
  • His comfort living outside the law, defying international law in his presidency as boldly as he once defied DUI statutes and military reporting requirements
  • His love-hate relationship with his father, and how it triggered a complex and dangerous mix of feelings including yearning, rivalry, anger, and sadism
  • Bush's rigid and simplistic thought patterns, paranoia, and megalomania -- and how they have driven him to invent adversaries so that he can destroy them

  At once a compelling portrait of George W. Bush and a damning indictment of his policies, Bush on the Couch sheds startling new light on an administration whose record of violence and cruelty seems increasingly dependent on the unstable psyche of the man at its center. Insightful and accessible, courageous and controversial, Bush
  on the Couch tackles the question no one seems willing to ask: Is our president psychologically fit to run the country?

  by Randian on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 11:26:22 AM PDT

  •  Thanks

    I've actually met Dr. Frank - his book is good.....

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:12:26 AM PDT

•  this could be him...not sure though..

  

  by Irishkorean on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 11:40:24 AM PDT

•  Dude, that photoshop.....

  ...of Barbara Bush (on front page of your first chapter link) is the creepiest thing I've ever seen!

  Congrats!

  Folks, its worth a look for that alone and likely destined to become a classic.

  by Hells Bells on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 11:42:49 AM PDT

  •  Yes, it brings out Barbra's finer features,

    you think?

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:13:48 AM PDT

•  The very first day of their adminstration.

  Remember the "missing W" scandal, how the Clinton gang totally trashed the White House, and how Bush so magnanimously said to not pursue it or press charges?

  The press asked the GOA  for the figures on the damage, and, quel surprise, there was none. It was a friggin lie. And it hasn't stopped.

  by daulton on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 11:45:45 AM PDT

  •  Yes and meanwhile Bush was committing

    worse acts. Reading Paul O'Neill's account of the first NSC meeting in Jan 2001 is chilling....

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:15:10 AM PDT

•  Nothing to add

  but the question of whether there was academic dishonesty with Bush has been on my mind for a long time. Unfortunately, with the hard core Bush supporters I'm not sure that it would make any difference.

  by mm201 on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 01:00:51 PM PDT

  •  It wouldn't with them, but it would with

    historians. Republicans are already lobbying historians to write the history of the bush administration in a "fair and balanced" way, which means they want historians to overlook any transgressions. I'm trying to get a jump on the historians, many of whom already rate Bush as among the nation's worst presidents, according to a poll earlier this year.

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:18:15 AM PDT

•  The famous unsportsmanlike sucker punch

  can be viewed here.

  Timothy Noah's Slate article on Cheney's draft deferments here.

  Robert Bryce's excellent overview of the Arlington baseball stadium scam from the Austin Chronicle here.

  awolbush.com has a good bit on His Illustrious Military Career, including wearing decorations to which he was not entitled.

  Oh, and everything from Kitty Kelly's book.

  by Crashing Vor on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 01:09:31 PM PDT

  •  Thanks, good links....

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:18:48 AM PDT

•  Cheney - Wyoming citizen or Texas citizen

  Remember how they played this one because otherwise, it was unconstitutional for two Texas citizens to be on the ballot. Wish the Dems had really gone for this one.  And it certainly foretold a lot.

  See Smintheus post here.

  by shirah on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 01:43:36 PM PDT

  •  Yes i was in Dallas at the time.

    I camped out one time in front of Cheney's home after the Nov. 7, 2000 election and actually saw Cheney scurrying inside the home from a car. So he lived there after the election, which was a direct violation of the constitution. Dems did file a lawsuit about it, but of course a Republican judge threw it out.

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:23:52 AM PDT

•  All I Know is Rove Spent a Hell of a Lot of Time

  in college--what, like 8 years?--and never managed to earn even an undergraduate degree.  

  by big spoiled baby on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 01:46:20 PM PDT

  •  Exactly, and he got deferments from

    the draft that way, as did Cheney.  Cheney even got deferments for getting married and fathering a child. That's another reason why chicken hawks support co-called family values.

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:32:06 AM PDT

•  Can't add a great deal, but

  have you read John Dean's book CONSERVATIVES WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE?

  They all fit right into the authoritarian/ social dominator category. And THEY HAVE NO CONSCIENCES!

  Good luck with your book. I will surely read it!

  by RagingDem on Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 02:00:29 PM PDT

  •  Thanks, that one is on my list.

    I quote Dean from a couple of his columns and an earlier book.

    by jacksonthor on Mon Aug 21, 2006 at 09:33:01 AM PDT