Trump's Big CON: Hate Doesn't Unite

UPDATE II:  Here is Trump's achilles heel.

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s CPAC speech proves it: He’s totally obsessed with the media.

UPDATE:  "Trump’s theory of politics is that it’s okay to offend five voters if seven voters approve. Dividing the country is the name of the game. The object is to create a coalition of the resentful. Polarization is not only the consequence. It also is the underlying purpose and philosophy.

In this strategy, the news media are tempting targets. . .

He likes denouncing journalists as dishonest scum of the Earth. It’s invigorating. Trump can’t be a unifying figure when he’s having so much fun being divider in chief."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump loves to hate the media.

"Fifteen years ago, shoeless, President George W. Bush] walked through the sanctuary of the Islamic Center of Washington.

It was six days after Islamist terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands. War plans awaited Bush back at the White House. But for six minutes that afternoon, he stood between an Islamic altar and a bank of TV cameras and admonished a country in fear. . .

He quoted from the Koran — “The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic,” he said — and then addressed a wave of Islamophobia that had followed the terrorist strikes.

Dozens of attacks on Arab Americans were reported that week, The Washington Post noted at the time. 'Among them is the case of a Pakistani Muslim store owner who was shot and killed in Dallas Saturday evening.'

'I've been told that some fear to leave. Some don't want to go shopping for their families,' Bush said at the mosque, and shook his head. . .

'That's not the America I know.' . .

When President Barack Obama visited a mosque near the end of his presidency, The Post's Aaron Blake reported, he took heat for it.

'Donald Trump said perhaps Obama 'feels comfortable there' — a comment thick with innuendo from a man who championed conspiracy theories about Obama's birthplace,' Blake wrote.

Trump, of course, would go on to win the presidency after calling in a speech to ban all Muslims from the United States. . .

A spokesman for Bush declined to comment on the family's reaction to Trump's rhetoric about Muslims and his executive order last week, which barred visitors and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. . .

On Twitter, [President Bush's daughter Jenna ] Bush Hager explained why she quoted her father: 'Just reinforcing his words that still, sadly pertain to today.'

She's not the only one to think so."

Read the Washington Post, ‘Not the America I know’: George W. Bush’s daughter wants you to remember his speech on Islam. 

H.W. Says Son W. Was a Stupid Puppet of His Evil and Arrogant Warmongers, Marking the Beginning of the End of the Bush Dynasty

"After years of holding back, former President George Bush has finally broken his public silence about some of the key figures in his son’s administration, issuing scathing critiques of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In interviews with his biographer, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Cheney had built 'his own empire' and asserted too much 'hard-line' influence within George W. Bush’s White House in pushing for the use of force around the world. Mr. Rumsfeld, the elder Mr. Bush said, was an 'arrogant fellow' who could not see how others thought and 'served the president badly.' . .

[W.] was responsible for empowering Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld and was at times too bellicose in his language.

[H.W. added] 'I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there — some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him,' Mr. Bush told Mr. Meacham. 'Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve" problems.

Read The New York Times, Elder Bush Says His Son Was Served Badly by Aides.

A former president is rarely publicly critical of another former president — especially by way of a tell-all book. Even more rarely has one president been the father of another. And those categories have never intersected. Until now.

And so begins another round of Bush family drama tied mostly to foreign policy, this time in the pages of an authorized biography of former president George H.W. Bush. While generally supportive of his son's presidency, he criticizes former president George W. Bush, former vice president Richard B. Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for how they responded to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Read the Washington Post, New book spells more family drama for Jeb Bush.

Read also Was It Worth It?

Was It Worth It?

UPDATE XI:  "Washington can provide aid, training, arms, air power — even troops. But it cannot hold together a nation that is falling apart."

Read the Washington Post, Iraq exists only as an idea, not a nation.

UPDATE X:  "The [Iraq] WMD claims were the result of the need to find a case for the war, rather than the other way around. Paul Krugman is exactly right when he says:

'The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that.'

Read The Atlantic, The Right and Wrong Questions About the Iraq War.

Read also Bloomberg, The Iraq Invasion: What We Knew Then, which notes that 2004 and 2008 Senate Intelligence Committee reports outline the numerous lies, not mistakes but lies, of Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice and others to promote the war.

UPDATE IX:  Some people never learn, or admit error.

Read Vox, Jeb Bush learned the wrong lessons from the Iraq War and the Washington Post, Jeb Bush’s Iraq quagmire is just getting started.

Remember what I said, many times before and during the war: what is the objective, what will be the cost, and are Americans willing to pay the cost to achieve the objective.

Pretty prophetic I must say.

UPDATE VIII:  "Iraq’s army looked good on paper when the Americans left [in 2011], after one of the biggest training missions carried out under wartime conditions. But after that, senior Iraqi officers began buying their own commissions, paying for them out of the supply, food and payroll money of their troops. Corruption ran up and down the ranks; desertion was rife.

The army did little more than staff checkpoints. Then, last year, four divisions collapsed overnight in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq under the determined assault of Islamic State fighters numbering in the hundreds or at most the low thousands, and the extremists’ advance came as far as this base [Camp Taji, only a few miles from Baghdad, the Iraqi capitol]."

Read The New York Times, U.S. Soldiers, Back in Iraq, Find Security Forces in Disrepair.  

UPDATE VII:  "'There is no state left. It is a state of militias.'

The state of Iraq has indeed failed. It no longer has the legitimacy or the power to extend control over its whole territory, and the power vacuum is being filled by a multitude of non-state actors, increasingly extreme and sectarian, who will likely continue to fight each other for years to come, supported by regional powers. Whether a new kind of order will finally emerge, with more local legitimacy, remains to be seen."

Read The Atlantic, 'Iraq Is Finished'.

UPDATE VI:  "The proximate cause of Iraq’s unraveling was the increasing authoritarian, sectarian and corrupt conduct of the Iraqi government and its leader after the departure of the last U.S. combat forces in 2011.  The actions of the Iraqi prime minister undid the major accomplishment of the Surge. (They) alienated the Iraqi Sunnis and once again created in the Sunni areas fertile fields for the planting of the seeds of extremism, essentially opening the door to the takeover of the Islamic State. Some may contend that all of this was inevitable. Iraq was bound to fail, they will argue, because of the inherently sectarian character of the Iraqi people. I don’t agree with that assessment." [Of course he can't agree it was inevitable, that would be admitting the war was a mistake to begin with.]

Read the Washington Post, Petraeus: The Islamic State isn’t our biggest problem in Iraq. 

The article notes how in 2008 Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commander, taunted Petraeus that Iran controlled Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. 

UPDATE V:  "Last year saw the highest number of terrorist incidents since 2000, according to the latest Global Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace. Worldwide, the number of terrorist incidents increased from less than 1,500 in 2000 to nearly 10,000 in 2013. Sixty percent of attacks last year occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.

The report suggests that U.S. foreign policy has played a big role in making the problem worse: 'The rise in terrorist activity coincided with the US invasion of Iraq,' it concludes. 'This created large power vacuums in the country allowing different factions to surface and become violent.' Indeed, among the five countries accounting for the bulk of attacks, the U.S. has prosecuted lengthy ground wars in two (Iraq and Afghanistan), a drone campaign in one (Pakistan), and airstrikes in a fourth (Syria)."

Read the Washington Post, After 13 years, 2 wars and trillions in military spending, terrorist attacks are rising sharply.

UPDATE IV:  "During the reconstruction of Iraq, the United States spent about $20.2 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces, about a third of the total funds spent on reconstruction.Today, those same security forces lost control of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. . .

Iraqi security forces still haven’t ousted ISIS from Fallujah, which it captured at the beginning of this year, but Mosul is a much larger and more strategically important city."

Read Slate, The Fall of Mosul and Is the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” a Real Country Now?

UPDATE III:  "It’s been nearly eleven years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which, almost since it began, proved to be the historically fatal element in the war on terror launched by George W. Bush’s White House. His Administration, and its sundry neoconservative wingmen, went so far as to tout the war in Iraq as a means to promote democracy across the Muslim lands. At the same time, there was a growing unease that things might not turn out well. In a 2005 conversation I had with the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, he spoke of his fears: 'I shudder to think what we could face if we don’t fix Iraq.' He foresaw the possibility that an Iraqi civil war between Sunnis and Shiites could infect the entire Middle East.

Where are we today? It seems a good time to take stock."

Read The New Yorker, What the War in Iraq Wrought. 

UPDATE II:  "The proof of how pointless the entire [Iraq war] was—if you even needed more—came Friday morning, with a report . . . in the Washington Post.

'At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,' a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety told Sly. 'The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.'

Fallujah has fallen, and the same scenario is about to happen in the even-larger city of Ramadi."

Read Slate, Tell Me Again, Why Did My Friends Die in Iraq?

UPDATE: "President Obama’s announcement Friday of the withdrawal of nearly all troops from Iraq by Dec. 31 and an end to the U.S. war in Iraq marks a bittersweet moment for many of the families of the more than 4,400 American service members who lost their lives in the conflict.

The organization Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors . . . estimates that 2,465 people lost their spouses and that 3,137 children lost a parent. Some 8,964 parents lost a child, while 13,446 lost a grandchild and 3,675 lost a brother or sister." Read the Washington Post, For families of fallen, a bittersweet day.

As first asked below three years ago, and again in 2010, was it worth the price in blood and treasure?

Robert Kaplan, an early supporter of the war in Iraq, asks "Was the invasion worth it?"

His conclusion, no.

The Price of Fear, Anger and Hatred

UPDATE II:  Says the "first commander of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay . . . 'many of the detainees should never have been sent in the first place. They had little intelligence value, and there was insufficient evidence linking them to war crimes. . . the entire detention and interrogation strategy was wrong. We squandered the goodwill of the world after we were attacked by our actions in Guantánamo, both in terms of detention and torture. Our decision to keep Guantánamo open has helped our enemies because it validates every negative perception of the United States.'"

Read Slate,"A Prison That Should Never Have Been Opened".

Read also Does the Star-Spangled Banner Wave Over the Land of the Torturers?

 

UPDATE:  Who needs due process?  You do.

"For years now, War on Terrorism hawks have been arguing that terrorists -- by which they mean people accused of terrorism -- don't identify themselves like traditional enemies; and that it's foolish to read them their rights, to bring them before a judge, to require that evidence be presented to justify holding them, or to interfere with the judgment calls the executive branch makes in war time. . .

[The case of 'Elvis impersonator Paul Kevin Curtis, who was jailed for a week, interrogated while chained to a chair as the FBI turned his house upside down, with no confession or physical evidence tying him to the ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and other public officials'] is a reminder that being accused of a heinous act, like sending a poison-laced letter to the president, does not mean that the accused is guilty. It is an eye-opening look at an FBI apparently willing to continue holding a man it had good reason to believe innocent. And it is a demonstration of why our system requires appearing before a judge, with evidence, to hold a suspect: to protect innocents from being imprisoned, and to ensure that the real bad guys are found."

Read The Atlantic, What the Framing of a Terror Suspect Says About GOP Attacks on Due Process. 

"[S]even and a half years at Guantánamo, without explanation" and a stain on the U.S. Constitution.

Read The New York Times, My Guantánamo Nightmare.

You Better Watch Out, He's Making a List, He Knows When You've Been Bad or Good, and It Ain't Just Santa

UPDATE X:  How did your Congressman vote on an amendment to "end authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act . . . [and barring] the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records"?

See GovTrack, H.Amdt. 413 (Amash) to H.R. 2397.

UPDATE IX:  On this 4th of July, 2013, we find out that it isn't just Santa making a list.

From The New York Times, U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement: we know know that the "Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images."

Happy day of liberty, whatever that might mean now in the the so-called land of the free.

UPDATE VIII:  Hey, didn't I warn you (in December 2008) it wasn't just Santa:

From the Washington Post, The NSA is doing what Google does:  the "government was doing at least what Google was doing — and Google, I’m convinced, is the new Santa Claus: It sees you when you’re sleeping, it knows when you’re awake. It knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake."

UPDATE VII:  "The problem [in balancing security and liberty] is that we have only one major point of reference when we debate what these trends might mean: the 20th-century totalitarian police state, whose every intrusion on privacy was in the service of tyrannical one-party rule. That model is useful for teasing out how authoritarian regimes will try to harness the Internet’s surveillance capabilities, but America isn’t about to turn into East Germany with Facebook pages.

For us, the age of surveillance is more likely to drift toward what Alexis de Tocqueville described as 'soft despotism' or what the Forbes columnist James Poulos has dubbed 'the pink police state.' Our government will enjoy extraordinary, potentially tyrannical powers, but most citizens will be monitored without feeling persecuted or coerced.

So instead of a climate of pervasive fear, there will be a chilling effect at the margins of political discourse, mostly affecting groups and opinions considered disreputable already. Instead of a top-down program of political repression, there will be a more haphazard pattern of politically motivated, Big Data-enabled abuses. (Think of the recent I.R.S. scandals, but with damaging personal information being leaked instead of donor lists.)

In this atmosphere, radicalism and protest will seem riskier, paranoia will be more reasonable, and conspiracy theories will proliferate. But because genuinely dangerous people will often be pre-empted or more swiftly caught, the privacy-for-security swap will seem like a reasonable trade-off to many Americans — especially when there is no obvious alternative short of disconnecting from the Internet entirely.

Welcome to the future. Just make sure you don’t have anything to hide."

Read the New York Times, Your Smartphone Is Watching You. 

UPDATE VI:  We live in a National Surveillance State, "one that uses bulk information and data techniques to monitor its citizens and draw inferences about their potential behavior in the service of carrying out the responsibilities that it sets out for itself. Like other parts of the state (welfare, national security), the surveillance state provides a type of security for its citizens through the manipulation of knowledge and resources. And like other parts of the state, the surveillance state fights against democratic efforts to provide accountability and transparency.

This name comes from a 2008 paper, 'The Constitution in the National Surveillance State,' by Yale law professor Jack Balkin. He provocatively argues that '[t]he question is not whether we will have a surveillance state in the years to come, but what sort of state we will have.'"

Read the Washington Post, Is a democratic surveillance state possible?

UPDATE V:  The NSA's data collection and analysis program built on similar programs first used by the military in Iraq, then "Afghanistan in 2010, where it assembled and analyzed all the data over a 30-day period on transactions that intelligence officials could get their hands on: phone conversations, military events, road-traffic patterns, public opinion—even the price of potatoes, former officials said. Changes in prices of commodities at markets proved to be an indicator of potential for conflict, they said. . .

Analysts discovered that the system's analysis improved when more information was added, so they moved to merge 90-day batches of data. The result, said a former U.S. official, was an ability to predict attacks 60% to 70% of the time."

Read the Wall Street Journal, Technology Emboldened the NSA.

Then watch/re-watch the movies Enemy of the State and Minority Report.  

UPDATE IV:  Told ya so: 

A "National Security Agency program that apparently has collected the telephone records of tens of millions of American . . . has been underway for the past seven years."

Read the Washington Post, Administration, lawmakers defend NSA program to collect phone records.

The only thing that surprises me is that it started only seven years ago.  I bet there were other 'data mining' (AKA spying) programs that involved the analysis of other types of information, including purchases and web browsing, and more. 

Read The Data Doghouse, Data Mining – From Diapers to Phone Records. (Note the date of the post: May 2005.)

UPDATE III:  "The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April."

Read The Guardian, NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.

This should come as no surprise, it been going on since 2001.  And I first mentioned it several months after starting this blog in 2008.

UPDATE II: Intercepts of Americans’ phone calls and e-mail messages are broader than previously acknowledged. Read The New York Times, E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress.

Another I told ya so from NoBullU.


UPDATE: To a post from December to say I told ya so, they listen to everybody, including a mad Congresswoman.

Read the Washington Post, Harman to Holder: Release the Tapes, and CQ Politics, Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC.

I may be paranoid but . . .

Ever wonder how the NSA electronic surveillance program, nicknamed the Terrorist Surveillance Program by Bush, spies just on terrorist. It doesn't, unless of course terrorist is a euphemism/doublespeak for citizen. Read:

• Newsweek, The Fed Who Blew the Whistle
• Newsweek, Now We Know What the Battle Was About

Welcome to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Bush's Puppet-Master, Bush's War

UPDATE V:  "At the outset of the Iraq war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to oust Saddam."  

Not even close.

Read the Washington Post, Iraq, Afghan wars will cost to $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Harvard study says.  

This estimate says nothing of the lives lost and shattered.

 

UPDATE IV:  There was another casualty of the Bush's war, a sort of poetic justice.

Read the Wall Street Journal, Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?  

UPDATE III:  "We got our war. More to the point, we got Bush’s war, which was, in the end, the only war on offer. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was little real planning for the occupation, which led to a huge and senseless loss of Iraqi life in a quasi-civil war that we did too little, at first, to stop, and arguably helped start through the misguided process of 'debaathification.'"

Read Bloomberg, Mistakes, Excuses and Painful Lessons From the Iraq War.  

UPDATE II:  "On Feb. 26, 2003, President George W. Bush gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, spelling out what he saw as the link between freedom and security in the Middle East. 'A liberated Iraq,' he said, 'can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region” by serving “as a dramatic and inspiring example … for other nations in the region.'

He invaded Iraq three weeks later. The spread of freedom wasn’t the war’s driving motive, but it was considered an enticing side effect, and not just by Bush. His deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, had mused the previous fall that the spark ignited by regime-change 'would be something quite significant for Iraq … It’s going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, but across the whole Arab world.'

Ten years later, it’s clear that the Iraq war cast 'a very large shadow' indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity’s natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.

Bush had been warned. . ."

Read Slate, The Coming Collapse of the Middle East?

UPDATE:  "Judgments rendered by history tend to be tentative, incomplete and reversible. More than occasionally, they arrive seasoned with irony. This is especially true when it comes to war, where battlefield outcomes thought to be conclusive often prove anything but.

Rather than yielding peace, victory frequently serves as a prelude to more war. Once opened, wounds fester. Things begun stubbornly refuse to end. As the renowned strategic analyst F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, 'The victor belongs to the spoils.'"

Read the Washington Post, Ten years after the invasion, did we win the Iraq war?

He was "a misguided powermonger who, in a paranoid spasm, led this nation into an unthinkable calamity."

Read The New York Times, Repent, Dick Cheney. 

You might remember that Cheney 'leaked' a false classified intel report about so-called Iraqi WMDs, then used the leak in press appearances to promote the war.

BTW, today (March 20th) is the 10 year anniversary of that unnecessary war.

Is the Can at the End of the Road?, An Update

UPDATE V: News that is unlikely to comfort the families of Americans who died in Iraq:

"It was one of the deadliest insurgent groups in Iraq in recent years, an Iranian-backed militia that bombed American military convoys and bases, assassinated dozens of Iraqi officials and tried to kidnap Americans even as the last soldiers withdrew.

But now the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is welcoming the militant group into Iraq’s political system, a move that could tilt the nation’s center of gravity closer to Iran. The government’s support for the militia, which only just swore off violence, has opened new sectarian fault lines in Iraq’s political crisis while potentially empowering Iran at a moment of rising military and economic tensions between Tehran and Washington.

The militant group, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, broke away from the fierce Shiite militia commanded by the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has strong ties to Tehran. The American military has long maintained that the group, led by a former spokesman for Mr. Sadr, Qais al-Khazali, was trained and financed by Iran’s elite Quds Force — something that Iran denies."

Read The New York Times, Political Role for Militants Worsens Fault Lines in Iraq.


UPDATE IV: Iraq continues to unravel. Read The New York Times, Attacks on Shiites in Iraq Kill at Least 60.


UPDATE III: "With the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Iraq, we’re finally going to get the answer to the core question about that country: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is — a collection of sects and tribes unable to live together except under an iron fist. Now we’re going to get the answer because both the internal iron fist that held Iraq together (Saddam Hussein) and the external iron fist (the U.S. armed forces) have been removed. Now we will see whether Iraqis can govern themselves in a decent manner that will enable their society to progress — or end up with a new iron fist. You have to hope for the best because so much is riding on it, but the early signs are worrying." Read The New York Times, The End, for Now.


UPDATE II: The end of the road? Read the Washington Post, Iraq war draws to a quiet close and Arc of Iraq war told in images and The New York Times, Ravaged and Remade, Iraq Is on Its Own.

And consider an Iraq what-might-have-been.


UPDATE: As we debate the debt ceiling, it should be asked again, after the all the blood and treasure, was the Iraq war worth the price? Before you decide, read The New York Times, U.S. Report Finds Security Deteriorating in Iraq, which reports:

"Over the past year, security in Iraq has deteriorated and electricity shortages and corruption have continued unabated, according to a report released Saturday by a special inspector appointed by Congress to oversee Iraq’s reconstruction.

The report, released five months before the United States is scheduled to withdraw 47,000 troops from Iraq, paints a bleaker picture of the country’s stability than assessments by diplomatic officials."

As asked before, what good did the can kicking do? Read the Guardian, Fears of al–Qaida return in Iraq as US–backed fighters defect.

After the all the blood and treasure, was it worth the price?

An Iraq What-Might-Have-Been

UPDATE: An article sure to get the Bushies riled.

"Who would have predicted it? Barack Obama has turned out to be so much more adept at implementing George W. Bush’s foreign policy than Bush was, but he is less adept at implementing his own. The reasons, though, are obvious.

In his own way, President Obama has brought the country to the right strategy for Bush’s “war on terrorism.” It is a serious, focused combination of global intelligence coordination, targeted killing of known terrorists and limited interventions — like Libya — that leverage popular forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so that we keep the costs and risks down.

Read The New York Times, Barack Kissinger Obama, which notes:

"No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be like a bad subprime mortgage — a small down payment with a huge balloon five years down the road. They thought they would be able to “flip” the house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome — I hope so, and it would be important — but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.

So let’s be clear: Up to now, as a commander in chief in the war on terrorism, Obama and his national security team have been so much smarter, tougher and cost-efficient in keeping the country safe than the “adults” they replaced. It isn’t even close, which is why the G.O.P.’s elders have such a hard time admitting it."

The remainder of the article is worth reading.

A sad day for our resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators.

"The death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is the latest victory for a new American approach to war: few if any troops on the ground, the heavy use of air power, including drones, and, at least in the case of Libya, a reliance on allies." Read The New York Times, Another Victory for a New Approach to War.

It is also interesting to compare the efforts in Libya to Iraq.

Again, it reaffirms my support for an openly debated and conducted assassination policy for rogue dictators.

You Go to War Based on the Myths You Want

"What Rummy didn’t know could fill his book." But what he did know was that there was no evidence of any current WMD programs in Iraq.

Read The New York Times, Simply the Worst, which quotes a report marked 'SECRET' from "Major Gen. Glen Shaffer, then the director for intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense, responding to Rummy’s request to know the 'unknowns' about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" and dated Sept. 9, 2002 (just as the Bush administration started its P.R. campaign leading to the March 2003 Iraq invasion). The report stated:

"'We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program. . .'

'Our assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence, the evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.'

It added: 'We don’t know with any precision how much we don’t know.' And continued: 'We do not know if they have purchased, or attempted to purchase, a nuclear weapon. We do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear weapon-related facilities. Our knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program is based largely — perhaps 90% — on analysis of imprecise intelligence.'

On biological weapons: 'We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons,' the report said, adding: 'We believe Iraq has 7 mobile BW agent production plants but cannot locate them ... our knowledge of how and where they are produced is probably up to 90% incomplete.'

On chemical weapons: 'We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi sites that produce final chemical agent.' And on ballistic missile programs they had 'little missile-specific data.'"

In other words, there was no evidence Iraq had any nuclear, biological or chemical weapons program!

Is W. The Worst

UPDATE VI: $10+ T national debt, $1.2 T deficit this year, 2.6 M jobs lost in the last year swelling the ranks of the unemployed to more than 11 million people, failing economy, mortgage crisis, incompetent leadership, overstretched military, an unnecessary and disastrous war, politicized government, torture as government policy, Chinese ascension, Russian resurgence, oil addiction (did I miss anything). How soon we forget. Read CNN, Was Bush better president than Obama?

How will history judge George W. Bush's presidency?

Bush certainly has no regrets. Read Washington Post, Regret-Me-Not and watch the interview at Camp David by ABC's Charles Gibson.

There has even been an Oxford-style debate of the proposition "Bush 43 Is the Worst President of the Past 50 Years," in which Karl Rove defended Bush.

See also NPR, Is Bush The Worst President Of The Past 50 Years?

And answer the poll on the right and tell me what you think.

UPDATE: A Wall Street Journal poll (question 27), when asked to compare Mr. Bush with the past several presidents, two percent of respondents said he was one of the best; 18 percent said he was better than most; 30 percent said he was not as good as most; and 48 percent said he was definitely worse than most.

UPDATE, Part II: Certainly some Iraqis aren't happy with Bush. During Bush's surprise visit to Iraq in December, an Iraqi journalist denounced Bush as a 'dog' and threw his shoes at the President, an insult in Islamic society. (You might remember Iraqis beating the statue of Saddam with shoes after it was toppled 5 years ago.)

UPDATE, Part III:






UPDATE Part IV:






































Somebody should have told Bush that the President of the United States takes an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

UPDATE V:



















Don't forget to vote in the poll.

Republi-CONs Broke the Economy, But Naive-crats Now Own It

UPDATE II: As I've said before, fear, anger, and hatred works for the campaign, but is not an effective governing strategy. Call the Republi-con bluff.


UPDATE: Time for a vote of raising the debt limit, and after years of fiscal irresponsibility -- two major tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and two wars, without paying for any of it -- Republi-cons have found religion.

Naive-ocrats should call their bluff, and refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless it is unanimous. Otherwise, Republi-cons will just use it in the next election.

Here is a life lesson from today's headlines: if you cover for your predecessor's incompetence it will soon be your problem. And in politics, not only will it be your problem, but will spin the blame your way. Read the Washington Post, Promise to Trim Deficit Is Growing Harder to Keep.

He's Back

After epic mistakes in war and economic policy, he breaks his silence to speak at the live equivalent of a creepy low budget infomercial:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
George W. Bush Hits the Lecture Circuit
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Did you miss him?

Bush, the Hypocrite-in-Chief

On June 26, 2003, then President Bush issued a proclamation to mark the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. In it Bush said that the United States is "committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example" and vowed to prosecute torture and to prevent "other cruel and unusual punishment."

Not surprisingly, the statement upset members of the CIA, who Bush had authorized to use brutal tactics on members of Al Qaeda.

Read The New York Times, Interrogation Debate Sharply Divided Bush White House.

Can you say hypocrite.

Bush's Legacy

UPDATE II: As I have said before, while Clinton was a great Republican president, in the sense that he united and strengthened the Republi-con party, Bush was a great Democratic president.

The Republi-cons "overreached in interpreting the results of the presidential election of 2004 as a mandate for the party. This resulted in the disastrous elections of 2006 and 2008, which combined for a total loss of 51 Republicans in the House and 13 in the Senate — with a corresponding shift of the Congressional majority and the White House to the Democrats." So says one of the few remaining moderate Republicans. Read The New York Times, We Didn’t Have to Lose Arlen Specter.

Then read the Washington Post, Arlen Specter's Switch for first thoughts by politicians, strategists and political observers. With the exception of Gingrich, the consensus is that the switch does not bode well for Republi-cons.

All hail Bush, God's chosen one to destroy the evil Republi-con party and savior of the Naive-crats.

UPDATE II: From the Washington Post, Arlen Specter's Switch and GOP's Identity Crisis:

"Specter's move is about his own political survival. . .

But there is also something to Specter's public explanation of his decision: "Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans."

Moderates like Specter have been run out of what, as November's election showed, has become a niche regional party in thrall to its far right wing. Just take a look at this map that illustrates how votes shifted between the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections."

If you were a contrarian, you might argue that this is good news for the Republi-cons. Read the Washington Post, Good News for Republicans! Maybe it is good news for the Republi-cons, maybe they are delusional, only time will tell.

One Republi-con has had enough, rumor has it that Senator Arlen Specter will change party affiliation to Democrat AKA Naive-crat. Thanks to Bush the Republi-cons are most a party of angery, old, white guys in the South.

So Long, Farewell

So long, farewell Mr Bush:


















And watch the farewell tribute to "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches" from David Letterman.

BDS Bull

Joe Scarborough writes a weekly column that is published in the local mullet wrapper. Yesterday's column was titled "History will treat Bush kindly." Morning Joe writes:

"This past week proves once and for all that some of America's most elite journalists are infected with the dreaded disease "Bush Derangement Syndrome."

Sadly, BDS has swept through the Washington press corps and caused even the most elite reporters' minds to melt into a boiling stew of bile, intent on beating the president's legacy to a pulp.

Their over-the-top arguments only make me want to defend him that much more.

So today I will write about the single issue on which liberals have claimed George W. Bush's presidency will be judged: Iraq.

Twenty years from now, historians will not rate the president for the mistakes made in 2003. They will place him in the history books based on how Iraq and the Middle East play out.

While we can't predict the future in that chaotic region, we can look at the last two years as a guide.

After Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, George Bush took a tragic situation in Iraq and turned it around. . .

Foreign policy experts tell me daily that Iraq is not Barack Obama's greatest challenge anymore. It is Afghanistan.

And liberals? They just try to change the subject.

We shouldn't let them.

Instead, we should focus on what George W. Bush did right as a lesson to future presidents.

Mr. Bush's greatest insight was understanding Americans should not settle for ties in wars. Our failures in Korea and Vietnam haunted U.S. policy makers for years. And allowing terrorists to run American troops out of Iraq would have empowered al-Qaida and brought about horrific consequences.

So while his generals were begging him to retreat, Bush fought back.

Bob Woodward's latest work on the Iraq War unwittingly paints the president as a courageous leader who stood alone and saved Iraq from failure."

My reply:

"$10+ T national debt, $1.2 T deficit this year, 2.6 M jobs lost in the last year swelling the ranks of the unemployed to more than 11 million people, failing economy, mortgage crisis, incompetent leadership, overstretched military, an unnecessary and disastrous war, politicized government, torture as government policy, Chinese ascension, Russian resurgence, oil addiction (did I miss anything) - it’s not reality, it’s all my imagination, here called the Bush Derangement Syndrome.

It is true that Bush saved Iraq from ‘failure,’ but he was responsible for that ‘failure.’ Would a man who set a house on fire be praised for putting the fire out? I think not.

Bush's record as a student, a military man, a businessman and the so-called ‘leader’ (I thought he was the Decider) of the free world is one of constant failure."

I wonder how Joe might vote in the poll. Email and ask him.

Bush's Place in History - an Example of What Not to Do

After spending hundreds of hours with key Bushies, reviewing thousands of pages of documents and notes, interviewing Bush for nearly 11 hours, writing four books totaling 1,727 pages, all amounting to a very long case study in presidential decision-making, Bob Woodward describes "10 lessons that Obama and his team should take away from the Bush experience." Read Washington Post, 10 Take Aways From the Bush Years.

In other words, Woodward has concluded that Bush is unintelligent (#3) and incurious (#4), doesn't think long term (#9), is passive (#1), thinks he is always right (#5) so he doesn't broker decent (#6) and doesn't want to hear bad news (#2), hides things (#10) and lies to the public (#7), and is delusional (#8). Pretty much sums up the man and his presidency don't you think.

How will history judge George W. Bush's presidency? I think I know how Woodward might vote in the poll. Did you vote yet?

Bush Should Just Leave Quietly

Ever wondered why Bush took 77 vacations but held only 47 press conferences. After watching this, with commentary by Jon Stewart, you'll know why.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Six Days Seven Nights

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Maybe he should have just skipped this last press conference and left quietly.

UPDATE: He refuses to leave quietly. Apparently tonight, in prime time, he'll bid us adieu.

But will anybody watch?

Try the Newest Shoe-ter Game

I'm told that the game, G. W. Bush Ego Shoe-Ter, is all the rage.

What was your score?

And don't forget to vote in the poll.

Bush's Madoff Like Legacy of Malfeasance

Comparing Bush's eight year in office to Madoff's ponzi scheme, read The New York Times, Eight Years of Madoffs.

Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. No wonder:

Lee Iacocca is no fan of President Bush. 'I campaigned for him because I knew his mother and dad for 30 years, and I figured he was from pretty good stock,' the auto-industry legend tells Details magazine. 'But Jeb was being groomed, too. They got the wrong kid. There's something wrong philosophically with how Bush's brain works. I feel sorry for him.'

In an appearance on CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Donald Trump called U.S. President George W. Bush "probably the worst president in the history of the United States."

Even "Cheney is now putting the blame for all the messes squarely on W. shows once more how the bureaucratic master outmaneuvers his younger partner." Read The New York Times, An Extremist Makeover?

Don't forget to vote in the poll.