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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out
Posted by Jill | 7:45 PM
As a person who did not lose anyone close to me on September 11, 2001, I have felt for the past few years that the annual festival of Let's Enjoy It Again that occurs every year on this day for over a decade is designed to keep people wrapped up in mourning, remembrance, and most importantly, mythology. This national refusal to not just remember but to also move on has an important purpose -- to keep people from asking questions. Because questions are dangerous.

Remember the orgy o'fear that was the 2004 Republican National Convention?



It was so clear that these guys were getting off on the imagery they invoked during their convention that year. Eight years on, and except for the odious Condi Rice, who spoke of remembering 9/11 like it was yesterday as if it were the finest day of her life, not one Republican wants to be reminded of Bush's Free Pass.

If you can watch this footage again and not want to scream, you're a better person than I am:



Most of the media won't touch it, but the August 6 PDB wasn't even the most explosive (so to speak) document that was prepared to warn George W. Bush of what was coming. In a column that was quietly slipped into the New York Times yesterday, Kurt Eichenwald makes allegations that should forever turn George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into objects of loathing, to be shunned like any corrupt leader anywhere in the world.

A sample from the article:


The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action. Officials at the Counterterrorism Center of the C.I.A. grew apoplectic. On July 9, at a meeting of the counterterrorism group, one official suggested that the staff put in for a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place, two people who were there told me in interviews. The suggestion was batted down, they said, because there would be no time to train anyone else.

That same day in Chechnya, according to intelligence I reviewed, Ibn Al-Khattab, an extremist who was known for his brutality and his links to Al Qaeda, told his followers that there would soon be very big news. Within 48 hours, an intelligence official told me, that information was conveyed to the White House, providing more data supporting the C.I.A.’s warnings. Still, the alarm bells didn’t sound.

On July 24, Mr. Bush was notified that the attack was still being readied, but that it had been postponed, perhaps by a few months. But the president did not feel the briefings on potential attacks were sufficient, one intelligence official told me, and instead asked for a broader analysis on Al Qaeda, its aspirations and its history. In response, the C.I.A. set to work on the Aug. 6 brief.


Hell yeah, there is more.

You don't have to come up with theories about controlled demolitions and Jewish bankers to recognize that something about that day has never quite added up. Whether the Bush Administration was hopelessly inept and so obsessed with Saddam Hussein (like Ahab and his great white whale) that they refused to acknowledge what was startig them in the face, or they decided to take a calculated risk that whatever was about to happen would give them the pretext they wanted to go to war against Iraq. Either way, this was a fuckup of massive proportions. And while to turn today into a day of solemn reflection may be comforting to those who lost loved ones that day, those of us who were lucky enough to be relatively unaffected owe it to future generations to not be lulled into a false complacency by succumbing to mawkishness every year on this day, but to remain vigilant and never, ever allow a government to do what the Bush Administration did in the months leading up to September 2001. Republicans like to say that George W. Bush "kept us safe."

Except for the time when he didn't. And now we know that he could have -- and didn't.

*************


UPDATE: Also, too. And too. And too. And too:

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Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Please...not another president whose hypercompetitive pathology masks conflict with his father
Posted by Jill | 6:44 AM
Willard Rmoney and George W. Bush are in one respect two peas in a pod.

George W. Bush on the links and on the tennis court, as recounted by Gail Sheehy in 2000:

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.… It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."
Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. "There was only one problem—my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "O.K., then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you—he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.

It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, 'Play that one over,' or 'I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you go that extra mile or that extra point … you go to a whole new level."


Willard Rmoney, with his own family, as recounted by Philip Rucker in the Washington Post, last weekend:
The Romneys, 30 in all these days, spend their time away from the stresses of everyday life — like, say, wrapping up the Republican nomination for president — by following a highly orchestrated, highly competitive regimen of sports and games known as the “Romney Olympics.”

The Romney Olympics have long included a mini-triathlon of biking, swimming and running that pits Mitt and his five sons and their wives against one another. But after Mitt once nearly finished last, behind a daughter-in-law who had given birth to her second child a couple of months earlier, the ultra-competitive and self-described unathletic patriarch expanded the games to give himself a better shot.

How much of a dick do you have to be to change the rules of what's supposed to be a friendly family sports competition (never mind how pathological it is for a family to be this hypercompetitive with each other) so you can have a better shot at winning over younger people? How much of a core of self-loathing do you have to have where finishing a race behind your daughter-in-law drives you to change the rules?

It could be argued that these kinds of leisure activities are trivial, but after what we saw from eight years of a president chock-full of unresolved daddy issues, I think this account of how the Romneys spend their summer vacation ought to set of massive alarms in Americans' heads as to what they can expect under a Rmoney regime.

(h/t: TBogg)

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Saturday, December 17, 2011

What if they ended a war -- and nobody cared?
Posted by Jill | 5:21 AM
There's something very, very, very wrong when a war that has gone on for nearly a decade ends, and nobody pays attention -- not even the media, who are too busy sucking up to the dead corpse of their fellow Iraq warflogger Christopher Hitchens to notice.

We may want to forget how this country, still stinging from he 9/11 attacks, were willing to lash out at someone....anyone...in order to make ourselves feel better. Afghanistan didn't satisfy the blood lust, and Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both had been flogging the Saddam-as-boogeyman for over a decade leading up to George W. Bush's gleeful decision to both gain his father's favor by avenging an alleged death plot against the old man and simultaneously prove once and for all that his dick was even bigger than Daddy. I mean seriously...if you're going to do that silly Oedipal thing in the context of a war, at least go full-out Jimmy Darmody and be a REAL thug.

Yes, we want to forget. I'm sure Thomas Friedman wishes that this wasn't still out there on YouTube for everyone to see in perpetuity. I'm sure Bill Keller wants to forget all about Judith Miller. I'm sure every pundit that painted this as some kind of noble venture to both avenge our wound and create Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East wants to forget. Even now, it's painful to watch George W. Bush's blink-blink-blink-sure-sign-of-a-liar announcement of the start of the war.

The one person who never wanted to forget was Christopher Hitchens, who while he might have wished that Iraq hadn't been the clusterfuck that it was, was unrepentant about it until the end. Stabler over at Hitchens Watch has a summary of exactly what it waas that Hitchens was supporting.

Perhaps the outpouring for Christopher Hitchens is designed to give people like Friedman and Keller and all the other warfloggers at the time some cover, as his death gives them a reason to engage in verbal diarrhea over his passing instead of having to answer for their failure to engage in journalistic skepticism at the time. We're long past the realization that the talking heads of Washington and the gasbags of the Sunday morning network TV Mouse Circus (™ Driftglass) are a bunch of hacks who'll sell their souls for cocktail weenies and pinot noir at Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee's place. We expect them to want to walk back all their armchair braggadocio. But what of the rest of us? What about all the people still sporting mouldering "Support Our Troops" ribbon magnets on their SUVs and still voting for Republicans who want to slash veterans benefits? What about 54-60% who supported the war before it began? Should millions of people be able to get off the hook so easily, when we have the blood of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on our hands? And what of the families of the dead? What of the mothers, siblings, children and spouses of those who died in this misadventure? How can we make sense of their loss without forgetting the lies that took their loved ones away from them?

Lessons learned? What has been learned, when Newt Gingrich is out there calling for regime change in Iran and announcing that the insane John Bolton would be his Secretary of State? What has been learned when Mitt Romney, a man involved in his own penis size with daddy dilemma, throws red meat to Wall Street Journal editorial page readers and says that unlike that pussy Obama, I won't let Iran get nuclear weapons, and I'll do it by surrounding Iran with military ships, throwing more money at Israel (which has the side benefit of maybe getting me some Jewish votes in Florida), and I'll talk really, really, really tough.

All the GOP candidates are saber-rattling about Iran. It's what Republicans do -- create wars to serve the military contractors that help fill their coffers. And wars in the Middle East also make the oil men who are another sizable source of Republican cash happy. But what you will never hear from any of them is how George W. Bush's misadventure in Iraq has made the very same Iran about which they are saber-rattling now that much more of a concern.

Loren Thompson at Forbes.com:
The one local government run by Shiites that Maliki can turn to for help when the Americans are gone is that of Iran, which is essentially a Shiite theocracy. In other words, what looks like a fledgling democracy in Iraq to some U.S. policymakers looks to the governments in surrounding states more like a huge opportunity for radical leaders in Teheran to expand their influence. I won’t get into how resentful many Sunni Arabs are about the role America played in giving Shiites — a distinct minority in the Arab world — political power in Iraq, but that is likely to be a potent factor in future regional relations.

Concerns about Iranian influence in one of the Arab world’s premier oil-producing states explains why some of the U.S. troops departing Iraq aren’t going any farther away than neighboring Kuwait. Until Washington has a better understanding of Maliki’s intentions and his ability to control Iraq’s many political factions, it is likely to keep a sizable military presence nearby.

[snip]

Local troublemakers know the U.S. electorate has had enough of Iraq, and that our threats to deal forcefully with them if they try to destabilize Maliki’s regime probably are empty (it might de-legitimize him to invite us back).

But it isn’t just perceptions of weakening resolve that have undermined Washington’s ability to influence developments in the region. America’s uneven performance in the Iraq war prior to the removal of Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon’s top post in 2006 eliminated any residual sense of U.S. military omnipotence that survived the 9-11 attacks. CIA analysts turned out to be ignorant about what was happening in Iraq. American soldiers had a devilish time coping with improvised explosive devices and other relatively simple tactics employed by a poorly-equipped and under-resourced adversary. The success of insurgents in pushing America’s vast military machine to the verge of defeat three years into the conflict will undoubtedly inform the efforts of future enemies.

Iran doesn't care about the saber-rattling of armchair quarterbacks like Newt Gingrich, because they've seen what happens when pasty American Republicans talk tough -- they rush into military adventures for the sound bites and the preening alone, without concern for the actual mission. Paradoxically, that makes this group of GOP candidates that much more dangerous, because with George W. Bush having demonstrated that all the money we spend on weaponry doesn't make us competent to wage the 21st century's wars, this bunch of bellicose warwhores won't hesitate to up the ante by dropping nukes on Iran. And then we're all done for.

Perhaps that's why no one wants to look at what we've left in Iraq.

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The Truth: It Isn't Just for the Progressive Blogosphere and Brad Friedman Anymore
Posted by Jill | 8:00 PM
John Thorpe at the financial information site Benzinga agrees with Brad Friedman, with just about the entire progressive blogosphere, and anyone with a brain, that George W. Bush stole Ohio in 2004:

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.

[snip]


SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

More tinfoily-but-true FACTS here.

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Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Osama bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams
Posted by Jill | 4:27 AM
If you didn't see it last night, watch this segment from Rachel Maddow last night, in which she explains that Osama bin Laden's goal wasn't about Islam, or a caliphate, or even about U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. No, like most rich kids whose wealth came from family money (including the one who occupied the White House when he attacked the US), his concern was about money:



Note in particular the Bin Laden quote from October 2004:
We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy ... as for the economic deficit, it has reached astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. The real loser is you. The American people and their economy.

Think about where we are now: deficts as far as the eye can see -- deficits that the very people who used to wear 9/11 around their necks as "wingnut whistles" until a black Democratic president succeeded where THEIR guy failed (or didn't even try, as he ADMITTED barely six months after the attacks, when a visit to lower Manhattan still resulted in burning eyes) now insist have to be paid on the backs of the old and the poor. Think about the cost of two wars, one of which was sold to Americans as being for their safety when it had nothing to do with that. Think about the money shoveled into the pockets of Halliburton executives (including those of the then-Vice President) and other contractors -- unaccountable money resulting from no-bid contracts. Think about the spending for security theatre; for beefed-up patrols, for x-ray scanners at airports designed to make Americans accept being treated like criminals so that they can "feel safe." Think of the society we live in now as a result of a few hundred thousand dollars of expense by a guy who's essentially no different from Paris Hilton, except Paris Hilton buys chihuahuas and lends her name to perfume and likes to go to parties instead of pretending to be a holy man while living in a mansion and cynically recruiting the phony tough and the crazy brave to kill themselves for Allah.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Bill Maher was fired from his Politically Incorrect show on ABC for straying from the "terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center are cowards" line, pointing out that to take control of a jet you don't know how to fly and steer it into a skyscraper is many things, all of them horrible, but one thing it is NOT is cowardly. What IS cowardly is sitting in a Pakistan mansion, or even in an Afghan cave, knowing you can GO TO a mansion any time you want to and take a nice shower and have a good meal, knowing you have millions of dollars at your disposal, and let other people do your dirty work.

George W. Bush decided it was Saddam Hussein who was worth the effort, not Osama Bin Laden. Six months after the attacks, Bush had lost interest in the bright shiny object he'd vowed to "smoke out" "dead or alive" barely six months earlier. That Bin Laden was living in comfort in Pakistan ought perhaps to begin questioning again just what DID happen in Tora Bora, and whether Osama was really the black sheep of the Bin Laden family (which has become more difficult to believe, now that we know that HE was the one they all relied on for money), and why he was able to (or allowed to) escape.

Most of us felt after the 9/11 attacks that Afghanistan was a "just war" designed to bring the mastermind and financier of the attacks to justice one way or another. Over time, as we've installed a corrupt puppet in Hamid Karzai, and wandered in the desert for the last ten years, even that war has become just another American misadventure that is bankrupting us just as surely as the Soviets were bankrupted in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- while fighting Osama Bin Laden's minions, who were called mujahadeen then, and also called "our allies".

Many of us who weren't in thrall to the tough talk of the whiny little faux cowboy in the White House knew that Iraq was NOT a just war, that it was unnecessary, and that it was related to either oil (which has turned out to be true) or to George W. Bush's psychosexual issues with his father.

One war that may have started out just and has turned into a quagmire and another that never should have been fought in the first place. Both are wars from which we seem unable to extricate ourselves. Between the wounded and the dead, the body count of American servicepeople is approaching Vietnam levels. And that is the second great tragedy of 9/11 and what Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush have wrought (and what Barack Obama seems bound and determined to continue).

Captain Shannon P. Meehan writes in the New York Times what it's like to be a veteran of these wars:
As I sifted through the responses of my friends on social networks, I read comments like, “Great news. If only we hadn’t gotten off course with Iraq for so long.” Or things like, “Could have gotten him earlier if we hadn’t wasted our time in the illegal war in Iraq.”

All this made me realize just how disconnected I am from the killing of Bin Laden. The more I reflect upon it, the less I feel a part of it, and the less I feel that I was ever any part of our war against terrorism, in the public’s eye at least.

My war — the Iraq war — is being remembered as quite a different war than the “war on terror.” Its narrative, shaped by the media and the general public, breaks dramatically from that of the war in Afghanistan and the pursuit of terrorists around the globe. The Iraq war has become the “mistake war,” one so many critics feel we should have never been a part of.

I have come to realize that, regardless of my own personal beliefs and opinions, this is how the Iraq war will be remembered. And this brings me to question myself, my efforts and my own worth. How will our achievements and sacrifices in Iraq be remembered? Will all that I did while I served be nothing more than a mistake?

The more I travel and speak about my personal experiences, the more I feel the shifting cultural memory of this war. I’ve felt it devolve over time in those moments when I am thanked not for keeping us safe from terror, but rather shown appreciation mixed with pity for having had to fight in this “illegal”war.

I fear now that we soldiers will be remembered for being in the wrong war, fighting to bring the wrong man, Saddam Hussein, to justice. Consider the difference between the public reception of the killing of Bin Laden and the trial and execution of Hussein, a man responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers as well as years of oppression and systematic degradation of a land. The latter was met with questions and controversy. But the death of Bin Laden, a man who dared to bring horrific violence onto the shores of our country, has been met only with approval. Those differences are telling.

So, as much as I want to feel a part of this moment, to feel some sense that I contributed to it, I do not. As a veteran of the Iraq war, I do not feel entitled to any sort of meaningful connection to this achievement. Years of political and public criticism of the Iraq war has pushed me to believe that I did not fight terror, but rather a phantom.


After Vietnam, we hoped that this country would learn from that mistake and not enter into unnecessary wars ever again. We can still argue about Afghanistan, but as much as we recognize the honor the service and the self-sacrifice of Captain Meehan and others, we cannot face our feelings and our guilt about his feelings by recasting Iraq as some kind of noble cause when it so clearly was not. What we DO owe this man is again, a promise (this time to be kept) that we will not put his successors into a war without reason again, no matter how raw we are emotionally.

Such is the legacy of Osama Bin Laden: His enemy nation is on its knees, wracked by debt and declining standards of living and corporate greed and inequality. A nation whose citizens jump at the mere mention of Al Qaeda to the point that we have become willing to give up all of our privacy just to be able to believe, however falsely, that it won't happen again. A nation in which a Congressman can call McCarthyesque hearings demanding that people who are members of the religion Bin Laden professed to practice to somehow "prove" their loyalty to this country. A nation in which a President whose name is associated with Islam is hounded about what constitutes a valid birth certificate by people with no knowledge of legal documentation.

The demonstration in the street show that while George W. Bush wasn't "all that concerned" with Osama Bin Laden, Americans clearly were. We may be uncomfortable with the precedent of assassination (which may at some point in the future be used indiscriminately by another George Bush trying to prove his manhood to his father), and this does not mean the end of Al Qaeda or even of terrorism coming from the Middle East (as opposed to the terrorism brewing in our own heartland). But if we do not take time out from the celebrations and look at what we have allowed Osama Bin Laden to do to our country, not a decade ago, but in the decade since, then we deserve to continue our slow slog into oblivion.

More from Ezra Klein
.

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Thursday, November 04, 2010

Top 10 Worst Moments in George W. Bush's Presidency

Recently, former President George W. Bush cited rapper Kanye West calling him a racist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as the worst moment of his presidency. The 43rd president also told NBC's Matt Lauer that there were other rough patches in his memoir, Decision Points. But Mr. Bush also cited other bad moments during his administration in his autobiography. What were they?

  • 10) Having to buff out Dick Cheney's heel marks on the resolute desk with torn swatches of the original US Constitution.

  • 9) CIA Director George Tenet telling him after 9/11 that Osama bin Laden had hidden in Camp David for three days.

  • 8) That in July of 2003 Bob Novak was outed by the Wilsons as a GOP operative.

  • 7) The only Thursday night the White House kitchen couldn't serve pork rinds.

  • 6) That Ted Kennedy couldn't die sooner so he could tell at his funeral alcoholism jokes originally told at a Dean Martin roast 32 years ago.

  • 5) Cindy Sheehan "pissing and moaning about some dead feller named Casey" during his vacation.

  • 4) The eight temporary lobotomies he'd suffered through every time Karl "Bush's Brain" Rove went on vacation.

  • 3) Seeing the twins reach their 20's without either of them having killed a gay person.

  • 2) When Brent Scowcroft gave him on his 60th birthday a beanie with "41½ " on it.

  • 1) When a panel of historians determined by late 2008 that he'd had been less effective than William Henry Harrison, who died one month into office.
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    Tuesday, March 09, 2010

    And the swell of the drumbeats continues
    Posted by Jill | 4:54 AM
    Ah, how they miss the codpiece, the broken sentences, the blotched complexion of the drunk off the wagon, the penis-size anxiety of the bantam-rooster swagger, the bluster into wars based on complete lies, the utter certainty that driving the country off a cliff was the right thing to do.

    First it was Chris Matthews broaching the subject of "Bush nostalgia":



    Now it's Stanley Fish in that Public Enemy #1 of teabaggers everywhere, the New York Times:
    Analyses of how this has happened are plentiful and varied, but most agree that it had something to do with the summer of 2009, when the town meetings that seemed a good, nicely democratic idea in the spring turned into a recruiting device for the angry crowds that would become the Tea Party.

    At the same time, Bush profited from the fact that he kept a low profile and didn’t snipe at his successor, a task left to his vice president, who therefore took upon himself the enmity and scorn previously directed at his former boss. Dick Cheney was, in effect, a lightning rod, and he was joined in that function by Sarah Palin, who slid neatly into the slot Bush had occupied in the mind of all good liberals for eight long years. Hatred and contempt of Palin is now the favorite pastime of those who have abandoned the cowboy from Texas and transferred their obsessive animus to the belle of Alaska (who, I say again, is more formidable than many in both parties believe.)

    Meanwhile, Bush’s policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who — yes, that’s right, George W. Bush.

    And now, right on schedule, Bush has resurfaced (just as I imagined him doing a year ago last September ) to join Bill Clinton in a humanitarian relief effort. He is officially a member in good standing of the ex-presidents club, and the longer he lives the more his reputation will be burnished. To be sure, his post-presidency resume is still thin, but we can expect it to be beefed up by good deeds, ceremonial appearances and the activities that will surround the building and opening of his library at Southern Methodist University. We’ll see Bush the tour guide and Bush the patron of historical scholarship and, perhaps, even Bush the seminar leader.

    And the judgment of history? Well, I’m not that foolish, but I will venture to say that it will be more nuanced than anything the professional Bush-haters — indistinguishable in temperament from the professional Obama-haters — are now able to imagine. He will not go to the top of the list, but neither will he be the figure of fun and derision he seemed destined to be only a year ago. You heard it here.

    Yes. George W. Bush's reputation will be burnished, because Americans have notoriously short memories and they care more about who's going to win American Idol than they do about how their country has been turned into an oligarchy in which they don't stand a chance.

    George W. Bush drove the entire country off a cliff, and Barack Obama was allowed to become President because the oligarchs knew that there was nothing he or anyone could do to fix it. And things are going to be so bad in the future that Americans will long for the days when a POS Cape Cod was a half-million dollars because the banks were built on nothing. That three thousand Americans died because George W. Bush was asleep at the switch will be long forgotten in favor of the guy with the bullhorn at Ground Zero. In fact, they'll think 9/11 happened on Obama's watch, because of people like Dana Perino and Rudy Giuliani and Mary Matalin insisting unchallenged that there were no terrorist attacks on Bush's watch. They'll forget about the lies, the surveillance, the remarks about being a dictator. They'll forget about the appalling boorishness he showed overseas, and how he turned this nation into a laughing stock -- a giant bully to be alternately feared for being batshit crazy and loathed for being stupid. They'll forget because things are going to be so bad in the future as a direct result of what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney set in motion, that the years from 2001-2008 will be regarded as the good old days.

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    Wednesday, August 05, 2009

    Three presidents and their emotional baggage
    Posted by Jill | 8:57 PM
    Watching the incredible footage of Laura Ling and Euna Lee arriving home today after Bill Clinton's more successful than any of us could have imagined mission, I realized that while this must be the kind of heady moment for Clinton that has no doubt been in short supply lately, it was an example of how someone's unresolved emotional baggage from childhood can be somehow channelled into good works.

    It's no secret to anyone anymore that Bill Clinton is a need machine who seems to only thrive when he's the center of attention. That his neediness is combined with a nearly unmatched personal charisma is what enabled him to become President of the United States instead of some kind of pathetic stalker. But it's that very neediness of attention that led him to nearly squander his entire presidency on a rather tawdry extramarital dalliance.

    Predictably, Rush Limbaugh and the comedians of late-night TV have been making the obvious young women-in-prison jokes and speculation about Clinton's motives, but it's hard to watch Clinton's man-hug of Al Gore and not see that in the North Korea mission there was far more mea culpa than hubba hubba.

    The disaster that is the presidency of George W. Bush is forever scarred by Bush the Younger's issues with his own father. From well before he was even elected, George W. Bush had planned to find some excuse to go into Iraq and succeed where his father had failed. It was never quite clear whether what Bush wanted was his father's approval, or if his rage at the man after whom he was named was so great that he wanted to outdo his father in every way. What is indisputable, however, is that George W. Bush's father issues, from his Iraq policy to his choice of Vice President, may very well have ruined this country beyond repair.

    And now we get to Barack Obama, the current president for whom many voted with a high degree of hope that he was going to be our Great Progressive Messiah, when HIS reality behind the mask was of a man who had spent his life navigating en pointe between the world of his white mother and grandparents, and the world in which his skin color and hair texture and facial features made him unmistakably black.

    During the campaign, this was said about him in an AP article:
    But it is here in Chicago that Obama learned to put together coalitions, understand the value of compromise and the need to bridge gaps — all things he says will work in the White House.

    It was here that Barack Obama, activist, became Barack Obama, politician.

    He did it by relying on his experience as an outsider, always finding ways to meld with worlds that were not his own.

    "He was a stranger but he made his way," says Mike Kruglik, who worked with Obama as an organizer. "He could see himself in other people."

    [snip]

    Though he had a diverse group of friends, he and two others among Punahou's few black students met weekly for what became known as "ethnic corner."

    "It was more about learning from one another, other than it's the only place we feel safe," says Tony Peterson, one of the three. They discussed interracial dating, education — and, he says, probably "whether we would see a black president in our lifetime."

    Peterson and other buddies say Obama never spoke of the turmoil he revealed in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," in which he wrote about wrestling with his racial identity and using drugs — including marijuana and cocaine — to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."

    This is not a man who ever wanted to have to choose between those with whom he clearly identified and those who had raised him and loved him. As another man with innate leadership skills and nearly unsurpassed personal charisma, he has made his career using that to help him more successfully navigate what seem to be vastly divergent worlds.

    And then he encountered Washington Republicans.

    It is so beyond Barack Obama's nature, like it is beyond Bill Clinton's calculus, to conceive of a world in which his skills can't bring Mike Enzi and Olympia Snowe and Mike Ross to the table to hammer out a health care reform package that really is about reform. He has been so successful at navigating two very different worlds that he simply cannot fathom being unable to navigate Washington Democrats and the Washington Blue Dog/Republican axis. But because the navigation has become as important to him as the goal, he seems alarmingly willing to not just compromise with, but capitulate to, a bunch of people who would happily see him assassinated or disgraced -- anything but see him actually succeed.

    Keith Olbermann discussed Obama's continued insistance on "bipartisanship" on health care reform when the Republicans clearly aren't interested with Chris Hayes this evening:



    Three presidents, prisoners of their childhood traumas. Why can't they just get some good behavioral/cognitive therapy like the rest of us?

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    Monday, May 25, 2009

    Good Gog, it's Magog Brothers
    Posted by Jill | 7:56 AM




    And to think this guy was President for eight years:

    The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

    The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

    In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

    In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

    "And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

    Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

    "This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

    The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

    The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

    In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.


    It would be easy to heave a great sigh of relief that we somehow managed to survive having a delusional religious lunatic in the White House for eight years, were it not for the fact that the man who used George W. Bush's insanity to his own ends is out there on the stump trying to rewrite history -- and almost 4 in 10 Americans are now thinking he makes sense.

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    Sunday, May 24, 2009

    Ask those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks if "We kept America safe after 9/11" means anything to them
    Posted by Jill | 6:01 AM
    No, I don't think we should let up on Dick Cheney's claim that he "kept us safe after 9/11." Closing the barn door after the horse leaves, when you knew that door wasn't secure doesn't qualify you for a medal. An administration that came into power claiming that "the adults are now in charge" and then ignored (perhaps deliberately) warning after warning that something very big and very bad was about to happen has absolutely ZERO claim on "keeping us safe."

    Now, former 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben Veniste, best known for asking Condoleeza Rice for reciting the title of the now infamous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing, has heard quite enough about how Dick Cheney's lunatic view of the universe "kept us safe" AFTER the Bush Adminitration's spectactular level of negligence:
    In the interview with Bush, Ben-Veniste asked the president why he hadn't met with the FBI director after getting the PDB.

    Bush replied that there were concerns predating his administration about politicizing the FBI and interfering in pending cases.

    But "this was no pending case subject to claims of political interference," Ben-Veniste writes in his book.

    The president said he couldn't recall whether he asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to get in touch with the FBI regarding the PDB, according to the book.

    There was no immediate response from a spokesman for the former president to requests for comment.

    Finally declassified by the Bush administration amid public and political pressure in April 2004, the PDB from Aug. 6, 2001 said, "The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden related." The PDB also said that the CIA and the FBI at the time were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates three months earlier saying that "a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."


    It's clear that Dick Cheney is now operating in accordance with his "One Percent Doctrine" -- that if there is a one percent chance that something is true, you proceed as if it were a foregone conclusion. In this case, given his daughter Liz' inadvertent revelation that her dad is crapping his pants at the thought that he might be prosecuted for his crimes, he probably feels that there is MORE than a one percent chance, even though so far the Obama Administration has been loath to even entertain the possibility. But as Cheney makes his Legacy Tour, and keeps repeating his safety claim, at what point do we actually start to look not at the post-9/11 record, when ANY administration would have stepped up to the plate, but at the time period between January 20 and September 10 2001, when warning after warning of an impending attack came in -- and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did nothing.

    Nothing.

    They. Did. Nothing.

    The choice we have in our view of these criminals is simple: Were they simply stupid, utterly incompetent, or did they decide to let things play out so they could invade Iraq? Take your pick. Whichever you choose, it is completely inconsistent with Dick Cheney's public posture as Savior of America™.

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    Saturday, April 04, 2009

    America has not forgotten
    Posted by Jill | 7:12 AM
    Despite the best efforts of Republican guests on cable news shows to rewrite history to erase the Bush years so that the Presidency passed directly from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, with the 9/11 attacks taking place on Clinton's watch and the economic collapse on Obama's, it seems that America's people have not forgotten who ran things for the last eight years:
    Neither George W. Bush's deliberate silence about the Obama administration nor Dick Cheney's ready criticism of it appear to have altered U.S. public perceptions about either man. The former president and former vice president are each viewed unfavorably by 63% of Americans, very similar to where they stood with the public in their final White House years.

    The last reading on Bush's favorability that Gallup recorded during his presidency came in a Jan. 9-11, 2009, survey. At that time, 40% of Americans viewed him favorably and 59% unfavorably. However, this represented an unusual spurt in positive feelings toward Bush, possibly due to changes in media coverage of the embattled president as his term ended, or because of Americans' generally buoyant mood leading up to Inauguration Day. (Barack Obama's favorable reading in the same survey was also higher than in previous and subsequent polling.)

    [snip]

    Despite Bush's seemingly "post-partisan" stance toward the new president, Democrats' reactions to Bush remain overwhelmingly negative. Only 10% have a favorable view of him and 89% an unfavorable view, little different from their views of him in August of last year -- at the height of the rancorous election season.

    Perhaps it's because Americans aren't as enamored of "post-partisanship" as the media (and Gallup, apparently) want to believe -- not when it results in the kind of utter nonsense we've seen coming out of Republicans this year. Americans did not reject "partisanship" at the polls last November, they rejected the Republican policies of endless war and unlimited shoveling of working- and middle-class cash into the pockets of people who already have more money than they, their children, and their grandchildren could spend in a dozen lifetimes.

    For nearly three decades, we tried it their way -- and it has been a miserable failure. The Republicans may have decided they wanted to end both the Great Society and the New Deal, and Americans bought it because they were fat and happy as a result of these programs. But now we have seen what happens when you gut the middle class and tell them that the upper class will "trickle down" a few bucks upon them if you just give them enough. And last November, this country successfully battled its Fear of a Black Planet and elected a man that the opposition had painted as a secret Muslim, a terrorist, and everything else you can name -- just to get out from under these disastrous Republican policies.

    George W. Bush can remain silent until the day he dies, and until Americans can feel confident in their future again, we will remember who it was that did this to us.

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    Sunday, March 15, 2009

    The Grand Unifying Theory of Republican Economics
    Posted by Jill | 2:29 PM
    Steve Benen explains it all for you:
    Just so we're clear, here's a helpful guide to the rules of market watching, as they relate to partisan politics:

    When the market went down on Bush's watch before the 2008 elections, this was Bill Clinton's fault.

    When the market went down on Bush's watch between November 2008 and January 2009, this was Barack Obama's fault.

    When the market went down during Obama's first seven weeks in office, this was definitely Barack Obama's fault.

    And when the market rallies on Obama's watch during the second week in March, George W. Bush deserves at least some of the credit.


    (h/t)

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    Monday, March 02, 2009

    And they said I was paranoid...
    Posted by Jill | 8:45 PM
    For the last four years, until January 20, I frequently expressed concern about the dictatorial ambitions of George W. Bush. Many people thought me paranoid, or crazy. After all, no American president would so brazenly flout the very Constitution he'd pledged to uphold, would he?

    Well, yes, he would have. Given another terrorist attack, or perhaps even another natural disaster on a par with Hurricane Katrina, and he might have:
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military could have kicked in doors to raid a suspected terrorist cell in the United States without a warrant under a Bush-era legal memo the Justice Department made public on Monday.

    The memo, from October 23, 2001, also said constitutional free-speech protections and a prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure could take a back seat to military needs in fighting terrorism inside the country.

    It was one of nine previously undisclosed memos and legal opinions which shed light on former U.S. President George W. Bush's legal guidance as he launched a war against terrorism after the September 11 attacks.

    They depict an administration apparently determined to expand the president's power after the shock of September 11, and add fuel to critics' charges that fundamental constitutional protections were threatened in the process.

    "The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically," Justice Department officials John Yoo and Robert Delahunty wrote White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in the October 23 memo.

    "We do not think that a military commander carrying out a raid on a terrorist cell would be required to demonstrate probable cause or to obtain a (search) warrant," they said.

    The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ordinarily requires a probable cause and a warrant to execute a search. However, the memo said those requirements "are unsuited to the demands of wartime."

    Furthermore, it said, "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."

    When we think of all the "You're with us or you're with the terrorists" rhetoric, and the way antiwar nuns were put on the no-fly list, and Quaker peace groups were infiltrated and put under surveillance, and then you read this, it's hard not to become aware of just how close we came to the dictatorship that Bush had so often expressed he'd like to head.

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    Sunday, January 25, 2009

    The only thing I'm going to miss about the Bush years
    Posted by Jill | 12:40 PM
    Get Your War On is now officially retired.

    Say goodnight, Gracie. Sometimes you have to sacrifice for the greater good.

    (h/t: Skippy)

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    Tuesday, January 20, 2009

    Who better to slam the door than The Rude Pundit?
    Posted by Jill | 6:40 AM
    As we watch George W. Bush, this small, venal little man, this dry drunk, this man-behind-the-curtain whom all to many saw as The Great and Powerful Oz for far too long, walk into the sunset, it would be tempting to take the high road and figure that we are well rid of him, so let's just sit back and have another toke of what's going on even at 6:30 in the morning on the Mall in Washington, DC.

    Naah. Let's not. Let's let TRP have his say:

    There’s one final myth about this President that the Rude Pundit would like to put to rest: George W. Bush is not a man you would want to have a beer with. No, not because if you saw him in a bar, you'd react like you had gone on the sex offender registry in Dallas and discovering that a guy who fucked babies in his basement was now living in the downstairs apartment. It's that, despite any feints at finding him charming, he is not, in his soul, a kind or decent person.

    Check out this exchange from his interview with Larry King the other night:
    KING: Did you read any of Obama's books?

    G. BUSH: No.

    KING: I want to get to something --

    G. BUSH: Trying to figure out this line of questioning?

    KING: Well, I have been told --

    G. BUSH: My favorite color is blue and I love enchiladas.

    Watching Bush beat up on a 400 year-old man for not getting to the point is like watching a teenager drown kittens for being cute. The Rude Pundit doesn't drink with irredeemable dickheads, with self-righteous balls of fuck who think their very existence demands your respect and attention, with privileged cockmongers who can't manage even a moment of self-awareness.

    And he will not drink with crazed, mad sons of bitches who can't be reasoned with when they're half a fifth in the bag, the kind of angry drunk who'll fight you for stepping on his shoes, who'll show up at your house with a group of shithead drunk friends, kick your dog, try to finger your wife's asshole, break your lamps while falling into your houseplants, shit on your front yard, set your porch on fire trying to light your barbecue, puke in your fishtank, read your diary to your whole family, and then demand that you give him a bed so he can just sleep it off, but when you won't, he threatens to cut your kids' throats and jack off in the wounds. Fuck him. He can drink alone for all eternity.


    Amen.

    (h/t)

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    World to Bush: Don't let the door hitcha where the good Lord splitcha
    Posted by Jill | 5:12 AM
    With the exception of Israel, the rest of the world is about as sorry to see George W. Bush leave the stage as we here at home:
    "A weak leader, Bush was just overwhelmed in the job," said Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung under a headline: "The Failure." "He confused stubbornness with principles. America has become intolerant and it will take a long time to repair that damage."

    [snip]

    Canada's Toronto Star was categorical in its condemnation.

    "Goodbye to the worst president ever," it declared. "Bush was an unmitigated disaster, failing on the big issues from the invasion of Iraq to global warming, Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."

    "Bush leaves a country and an economy in tatters," wrote the Sunday Times in London. It said America's national debt and unemployment nearly doubled on his watch.

    Britain's Daily Mail said he entered office with a budget surplus of $128 billion but exits with a $482 billion deficit.

    "He leaves the world facing its biggest crisis since the Depression, the Middle East in flames and U.S. standing at an all-time low."


    More:

    The Scottish Daily Record observed: "America is now hated in many parts of the world. Bush leaves a legacy of wars and the world economy in meltdown. He has been dismissed as a buffoon and a war-monger, a man who made the world a more dangerous place while sending it to the brink of economic collapse."

    [snip]

    "It's hard to find a historian who won't say that Bush was the most catastrophic leader the U.S. has ever known," the French daily wrote. "One success: since September 11, 2001, there was no attack on U.S. soil. But this sits alongside an interminable list of failures, starting with the war in Iraq."

    Germany, ridiculed as "old Europe" by Bush's former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for opposing the Iraq invasion, took aim at Bush.

    "Bush brought great misery to the world with his 'friend-or-foe' mentality," wrote Die Zeit.

    Stern magazine said: "Bush led the world's most powerful nation to ruin. He lied to the world, tortured in the name of freedom and caused lasting damage to America's standing."

    The Pan-Arab al-Hayat newspaper resorted to bitter black humor under the headline: "We cried a lot and the joke was on us." It recalled his controversial election win in Florida and how he once nearly choked on a pretzel, watching television.

    "Perhaps we could say that fate, which let the American people down first in Florida and then with the issue of the pretzel in the president's throat, ultimately helped them by making sure the president would spend half his time on vacation.

    "Indeed, he would have caused twice the damage if he had been more active and focused."

    Austria's Wiener Zeitung wrote Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even ranked higher in one international opinion poll than Bush:

    "The United States was once the symbol of justice in the world but that has been damaged by Bush. A web of manipulation has cost America $900 billion and the lives of 4,000 soldiers -- along with at least 500,000 Iraqis."


    Now of course there are those, largely callers into right-wing talk shows, who think that our reputation in the world means nothing, that we are the world's Big Swinging Dick, bestride the world like a Colossus, so big and badass that we don't have to care what anyone thinks. But these people forget that particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis, we are a paper tiger, and that paper isn't money. But perhaps the most important aspect to Barack Obama's taking of the oath of office today is that he already has the world's respect and its hopes because of a background and understanding that we are citizens of the world that stands in opposition to the incurious, willfully ignorant worldview with which his predecessor came into office.

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    Sunday, January 18, 2009

    David Letterman Sums Up the Last Eight Years
    Posted by Jill | 8:07 PM
    Forget all those Saw movies. THIS, my friends, has been a horrorshow:




    I guess George never realized that "President" was not the same as "Court Jester."

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    Friday, January 16, 2009

    Yeah, he really does mean it...and he always did
    Posted by Jill | 8:46 PM
    Remember this from Captain Codpiece?




    You thought it was just an unfortunate slip, didn't you?

    Well, guess again. He did it again this week, on Monday. Check out what Bush says about minutes into this video:


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    Delusional right to the bitter, bitter end
    Posted by Jill | 5:47 PM
    Microsoft is "seriously exploring significant work force reductions."

    Circuit City is liquidating.

    AMD is cutting 1100 jobs.

    Varian, a maker of scientific equipment, is cutting 240 full time and 80 temporary employees.


    Hertz - 4000 jobs. Wellpoint - 1500 jobs.


    All told, 40,000 job cuts were announced today.

    And what does George W. Bush have to say, as he finishes his Crapapalooza Legacy Tour?
    President George W. Bush said Friday that while the current economic crisis has sent shock waves around the world, he believes steps taken by his administration have "laid the groundwork for a return to economic growth and job creation" early in the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

    "The American economy has consistently proven its strength and resilience" Bush wrote in his final economic report to the nation.

    He said this resilience has continued despite multiple blows to the economy.

    [snip]

    "A measure of stability has returned to the financial system," Bush said.


    Delusional and self-justifying right to the bitter end. And it is to our eternal shame as a nation that we allowed this man to occupy this office for eight years.

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    Tuesday, January 13, 2009

    Captain Codpiece removes the mask
    Posted by Jill | 5:38 AM
    And that's how it ends; not with a bang but with a whimper. A whimper, a whine, a pouted lip, a stamping foot. A whimper by a spoiled brat who has never been held accountable for anything in his entire life. A whimper by an incompetent boob whose life is a stream of one failure after another. A whimper by a sociopath who used the opportunity of his final press conference to take off the mask and show us exactly what we allowed to lead this country for eight years. The sight of this man calling every day of his presidency "joyous" ought to chill us all to the bone, especially when this man's brother comes back in four or eight years to restore what his family believes is their own private throne to its rightful owners.

    Joyous. Fabulous.

    That is what George W. Bush feels when he looks around and sees an intractable war in Iraq, a failed effort in Afghanistan, Israelis and Palestinians at war yet again, an American economy on the brink of collapse, taking the world economy with him. The families who lost their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters? No problem; he feels joyous. The people who have lost their jobs and their health insurance and can't get medical treatment for their kids? No problem, he's having a fabulous time. He gets to go to his new house in the exclusionary community in Dallas, and leave the mess for the black man to clean up like the janitor mopping up after his eight-year-long Deke House kegger.

    It's simultaneously fascinating and horrifying to watch, and makes me wonder if enough idiots in this country would still have voted for him to allow him to steal two elections of they'd seen this. The lowlights, with commentary, can be seen at Break Room Live this morning, or afterwards here.

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