Plunging Towards Gomorrah
Posts tagged George W. Bush
Joe Biden Strikes Again
Feb 11th
Where is Joe Biden? Oh, there he is… on Larry King Live. I would assume that would be a safe venue for Biden; however, I’ve learned that there are no safe venues for Biden.
I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.
Iraq could be one of the great achievements by “this administration?” All this time I thought Iraq was Bush’s war. I guess when news is bad you have to grab on to something. So now the Obama administration blaming Bush for everything except Iraq. Now that is some serious change.
obama’s fox news paranoia continues
Oct 22nd
It’s one thing for liberal bloggers, talking heads, and small time politicians to complain about FOX News, but for the President of the United States to say that FOX is like “talk radio” is insane. Does President Obama really want to go to war with America’s most popular news source? What does he hope to gain? The President is faced with a bad economy, a health care fight and a war. Why is he wasting time bashing FOX?
“I think what our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” Obama told NBC’s Savanah Guthrie. “And if media is operating basically as a talk radio format then that’s one thing, and if it’s operating as a news outlet that’s another but it’s not something I’m losing sleep over.” [Emphasis added]
Oh really? Does anyone truly believe the that White House would be wasting time on FOX if Obama was completely unconcerned? One thing I think Americans are learning about this young presidency is that he can’t take criticism. By any standard Obama has received the greatest coverage from the press in modern history. Yet, he’s upset with FOX? I can see why the White House holds up CNN as the model of centrist journalism. After all it was CNN’s superstar Anderson Cooper who was making jokes about “teabagging” and Wolf Blitzer “factchecking” a skit on SNL. I can see why the White House loves CNN. Just for the record, George W. Bush never said the word “strategery” and Sarah Palin never said that she could see Russia from her front porch. I didn’t know “factchecking” was necessary for sketch comedy.
Corruption we can believe in!
Maybe what Obama is really upset about is his falling approval numbers. If so, he really is a thin-skinned woosie. If I remember my Greek mythology correctly, Narcissus was a thin-skinned woosie. This is part of the job, Mr. President. Even President Reagan had days when he wasn’t so popular. Obama needs to get tough. Quit complaining about FOX News. The leader of the free world needs to start acting like it. Let’s start with making a decision about Afghanistan.
obama and the cia
Apr 22nd
Our new president once promised to unite the country. Any hope of that occurring has gone out the window. Over the past week team Obama has initiated a firestorm that must be stopped. Obama’s actions on interrogation techniques are dangerous, partisan, and ignorant. I have never addressed the “torture” issue directly here because it’s a non-starter. It’s the fueled delusion of a Bush hating mob on the left. To get some perspective let’s think back to 2001. The angry mob on the right demanded that Bush investigate the Chinese influence on the Clinton administration, especially in the area of weapons secrets. To be frank there were a whole list of things Bush could have investigated about the Clintons, but he didn’t for good reason. It doesn’t accomplish anything except serve as a distraction.
There will never be prosecutions over interrogations. Obama knows this, Bush knew this, and everyone who has any common sense knows that no laws were broken.
Contrary to the claim that the memos detail “brutal” techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture. “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms,” wrote then Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury on the very first page of his May 10, 2005 memo. Regarding waterboarding, an August 2002 memo from then Assistant Attorney General (now federal Judge) Jay Bybee stresses that the CIA had informed him that “the procedures will be stopped if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe mental or physical harm.”
The memos also give the lie to a leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), based exclusively on the say-so of KSM and other “high-value” detainees, that “an improvised thick collar . . . was placed around their necks and used by their interrogators to slam them against the walls.”
As the Bybee memo notes, the “wall” was a “flexible false wall . . . constructed to create a loud sound”; that “it is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall”; and that the purpose of the collar was “to help prevent whiplash.” If this is torture, the word has lost all meaning.
Obama is doing this because he’s still running against Bush. Obama was elected due to Bush, he blames the economy on Bush, and he goes around the world blaming Bush for everything. This isn’t the hopeful, unifying, or forward looking Barack Obama from 2008. He’s a divisive, stuck in the past, and borderline incompetent. What sense does it make to release our interrogation techniques? It’s woeful inept act by a president who doesn’t seem to get it.
Obama wants this issue to go to hearings where nothing will be done. The sole purpose is to keep this in the news, to keep Bush in the news, and to keep Obama’s approval rating from sinking like the Titanic. It’s time for this whole thing to be exposed. Since the president caved to the delusional mob the truth needs to get out about how these interrogations kept the nation safe, how key Democrats signed off on them, and why Obama has made a terrible mistake releasing the information.
the ap continues the katrina myth
Feb 19th
I have stated in the past that the media coverage on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the worst in my lifetime. The narrative of that event is so firmly entrenched that it doesn’t even have to be explained. Just look at this story from the Associated Press which is about how the stimulus package ignores New Orleans.
It’s a significant change in tone from the Bush years, when any perceived slight of Katrina victims was met with charges that the Republican president who bungled the initial response to the disaster continued to callously ignore the Gulf’s needs years later.
Huh? The initial response wasn’t bungled. What are the facts from Katrina?
1) The city of New Orleans was missed by the center of the storm. The city itself experienced winds of a category 1 storm.
2) The levees broke and people who failed to evacuate were caught in their homes. Those people had adequate time and resources to leave. If there was any failure at all by government it was city and state governments who failed to evacuate their citizens.
3) The crime reported by the press during the disaster was exaggerated and in many cases didn’t happen at all.
4) The National Guard’s response to the storm was quicker that hurricanes Hugo and Andrew.
5) The state of Louisiana had many opportunities for four decades to fix the levies. The state is corrupt and environmentalists who were more concerned with alligators than humans blocked it.
Apparently Americans have watched too many Michael Bay movies and believe that rescue teams fall out of the sky immediately after a natural disaster. The journalists on the ground were more concerned with blaming Bush than covering the news. Bush’s biggest mistake was telling a crony Michael Brown he was doing a good job when it didn’t fit the media narrative. The press never apologized for all the mistakes they made and never held the local governments accountable for forty years of bad policy. Even the clown that claimed people were eating each other stood by his op-ed in the Huffington Post. There’s a lot of stuff Bush did as president that I don’t agree with, but the bugling of Katrina isn’t on the list. It’s a modern day fabrication.
libby and the rule of law
Feb 17th
One of the more forgettable non-scandals during the Bush administration was the whole Valeria Plame affair. The whole investigation hinged on the fact that the Bush administration illegally leaked outed Plame as a CIA agent. It never happened but the resulting investigation led to the prosecution of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief aid Scotter Libby. Libby’s crime was lying to federal prosecutors. The crime had nothing to do with the investigation, but it was still a crime. It appears that Cheney lobbied hard for Bush to offer a full pardon, but Bush resisted.
Several sources confirmed Cheney refused to take no for an answer. “He went to the mat and came back and back and back at Bush,” a Cheney defender said. “He was still trying the day before Obama was sworn in.”
After repeatedly telling Cheney his mind was made up, Bush became so exasperated with Cheney’s persistence he told aides he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further.
Say what you want about the Bush administration but there was definitely a stricter adherence to the rule of law than during the Clinton administration. President Clinton broke the same law that Scooter Libby served time for committing. It’s worth remember during the Oscar season when there’s a movie about Nixon that he wasn’t the only one who committed crimes as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Nixon at least had the decency to resign. Less could be said for Clinton and his enormous ego.
Economic Analysis + BDS = Bush Tanked the U.S. Economy
Jan 12th
I always love it when pundits try to explain the economy. It’s like hearing Brian Boitano analyze college football. It seems that many have forgotten the business cycle. We had a recession in the early 90′s, and six years of economic growth. It was followed by a small recession at the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush years. Who’s to blame for these ups and downs? No one, that’s right. It’s called market fluctuations. Bonnie Erbe dabbles in economics in her “Bush tanked the U.S. economy” piece.
Here’s a lesson Bush never learned and one that probably could have kept this country out of recession: You can’t fight an expensive war AND cut taxes simultaneously without sending the U.S. economy into the tank. That is just what Bush has done.
After the tax cuts in 2001 the Unites States economy has been in a boom growing for six years. Evidently Bonnie thinks the economy should grow forever. Why does she believe this, I’m not so sure. Maybe she watched too many Disney movies as a child and thinks we should live “happily ever after.” Wait… there’s more.
There are other contributing factors, of course. The housing bust has hurt this consumer-driven economy mightily. Americans felt richer and borrowed heavily against home equity at the height of the boom. These factors kept corporate profits and the economy growing.
But the bust that has now followed was highly predictable. Real estate always runs in cycles. The last real-estate boom lasted an incredibly long five years. The president should not have been piling up irresponsible debt, knowing the crash would come at some point.
Cycles!!! She admits that real estate market goes in cycles, but what about the economy? If the current housing market is the catalyst for the recession (which hasn’t come yet, I may add) then how is this Bush’s fault?
Let’s clear up this one persistent myth. In the 90′s the Clinton administration drastically reduced the US military budget. The Cold War was over and this was an appropriate measure. However, the economy wasn’t booming because of the surplus. The surplus was the result of a gridlocked Congress, internet bubble, Welfare Reform, and lower defense spending (anyone wonder why our intelligence agencies are in shambles). After 9/11 defense spending had to increase, during the recession a lower tax policy was an appropriate response. I am of the mind that the last two administrations deserve none of the credit for economy (good or bad); however Bonnie wants to blame Bush, but ignore the good economy of the last six years.
BDS Bandwagon
May 23rd
I’m real close to jumping on the BDS Bandwagon. And I’m this close (imagine forefinger and thumb a mere centimeter apart) to blaming anything and everything on that bozo in the White House, George W. Bush.
Apparently, when one has BDS, a.k.a., Bush Derangement Syndrome, all problems/catastrophes/near misses are caused by Bush, or Shrub, as those like me who have (or nearly have) BDS call him. This shift in philosophy has been quite liberating for me.
Bad day at work? Simple. It’s that bastard on Pennsylvania Ave. Income static whilst the cost of living rises? It’s that freaking Shrub character. Tornadoes destroy your town? Hurricane gotcha down? It’s Big Oil Texan Guy and his pollutin’ ways. Tsunami? Bush.
The only problem I’m having with joining the BDS Club is that I think he’s too incompetent to cause any real problems. For instance, who in their right mind says, with a straight face, in front of an assembled Congress and millions of fellow Americans, “America is addicted to oil”? No you-know-what, Sherlock. I’m also “addicted to oxygen,” quote end quote, period.
What I don’t understand about the left wing of the BDS Club is why they have it in the first place. The man is simply not conservative. He’s a player, just like Clinton. Problem is, he’s not nearly as smart, smooth, and downright, downhome charming as Clinton. Clinton could feel your pain, bite his lip, eat a Big Mac, say and do strange things with interns, bomb aspirin factories, and deliver the State of the Union, all at the same time, and not miss a beat. The best Bush can muster is a smirk and some Marxist nonsense about guest-worker programs, oil addictions, and not leaving children behind. What a joke.
Better luck in ’08, I suppose, though I have this horrible feeling we’ll be saddled with Mitt Romney. Echoing Alec Baldwin and Co., this really weird co-worker of mine said he’d leave the country if Romney won the Republican nomination. I don’t know if I’ll go that far, but I might just vote for Al Sharpton.
The Cowardly Lion Fury
Jan 31st
The Democrats are not the only party in need of a new mascot. It’s the twenty first century, it’s time for a new kind of icon that depicts who the Republicans really are these days. It has to be something that appears strong, but retreats quickly. There can only be one choice, the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz. Think about it, Republicans promised tons of reforms when coming to power in 1992 and delivered close to zilch. The Elephants talked a good game on term limits, school choice, Social Security reform, and smaller government, but instead we got huge spending, Homeland Security, and no apparent answer for illegal immigration.
Then there’s the Lion King himself, George W Bush. The mightily lion roared loudly after 9/11 and then got bogged into a political conflict in Iraq. By trying to appease everyone, he appeased no one. Fear of causalities meant not enough troops. Not enough troops meant chaos all over Iraq. Chaos has now led to a nightmare where the President has lost so much credibility the United States cannot do anything about Iran, North Korea , and Syria. It’s gotten to the point where there’s more support by France’s leadership for the continued occupation of Iraq than by most of the Left in the United States. Now the United States has to wait for the next 9/11 type attack before there’s a enough political cooperation to deal with the threats abroad. The Cowardly Lion seems scary at first, but once you get to know him you realize it’s just a lot of hot air (not global warming).
