When news broke on the eve of the 2000 presidential election that George Bush had been convicted of an OUI in Maine and hidden that fact from the nation and even his own daughters, I was prepared to look the other way. I took at face value that he had changed his ways since a rather reckless and extended “youth” that ran through his 40th birthday.

But today, as I mourn over 1,050 American deaths in George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, as I look at a $200 billion price tag for the invasion thus far, with no end in sight to this growing loss of the lives and fortunes of our children and grandchildren, as I consider George Bush’s rejection of sage advice from a host of experts to consider the consequences before he rashly invaded a nation that had submitted to the desired weapons inspections, and as I fear for the fiscal disaster of record and growing deficits combined with George Bush’s insistence that we run those deficits up even further with unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthy, I see that George Bush’s personal history of recklessness has been replicated on the national and international stage, to the danger of every American.

As a lawyer who has too often been asked to help grieving relatives whose lives have been shattered by drunken drivers, I have never dismissed OUI’s as youthful indiscretions. The alcoholic who abuses his drug in the privacy of his home puts no lives but his own at risk, but the drunken driver puts at risk his own life, the lives of his passengers, and the lives of anyone unfortunate enough to be on the road at the same time. Drunk driving is the personification of recklessness.

In George Bush’s case, he had a chance to disclose that OUI conviction to his daughters, to accept his responsibility, and to use it as a valuable teaching tool. Instead, he pretended that it had never happened and hoped that it was never discovered. He chose to avoid responsibility and engage in denial.

Now, on both the international and national stages, George Bush is showing that same pattern of recklessness, avoidance of responsibility, and denial. General Shinseki warned that the invasion of Iraq would take twice the number of troops upon which Bush planned. He was retired. Brent Scowcroft, his father’s national security adviser, warned of the need to assemble a true global coalition. He was ignored. Larry Lindsey, Bush’s economic adviser, warned that the war could cost $200 billion. He was fired. The intelligence community warned Bush this summer that the Iraq war was going badly. Their detailed analysis was dismissed by Bush as guesswork.

At some point Bush must step back from this denial and avoidance of responsibility for his recklessness. But I see no evidence that he can ever admit that he has made a mistake that continues to cost the nation the priceless lives of its young men and women and the money that might have been spent securing our ports, railroads, cargo planes, chemical factories and nuclear power plants.

His recklessness has made the nation less safe and has become the centerpiece of a recruiting drive by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Osama must wake every day and praise Allah that George Bush has both abandoned his hunt to find him “dead or alive” and quixotically so inflamed the Arab world that al-Qaida’s numbers are rapidly growing.

George Bush defends his recklessness and refusal to change course as leadership. It is leadership of a sort: the type of leadership that the first lemming shows as he leads his pack over the cliff.

Arthur J. Greif is an attorney in Bangor.