George W. Bush - Stealing Second

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland brought down the house at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday night with a crack about President Bush -- and John McCain -- that harked back to one of the sharpest verbal stones ever thrown at Bush's father.

"You know, it was once said of the first George Bush that he was born on third base and thought he'd hit a triple," Strickland said. "Well, with the 22 million new jobs and the budget surplus Bill Clinton left behind, George W. Bush came into office on third base, and then he stole second."

As the crowd roar, Strickland added, "And John McCain cheered him every step of the way."

The first version of the line was delivered with a wry smile at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta by the first President Bush's fellow Texan Ann Richards, then the state's treasurer and later its governor.

From the Boston Globe.

Bush Legacy

Click to enlarge

The Frankfurt Stock Exchange's DAX index plummeted 7.2 percent, its steepest one-day decline since Sept. 11, 2001. Fears that the United States might be in a recession sent markets from Germany to India into a tailspin.

Let's see what happens tomorrow when the US markets open. Given the Bush track record, I am not confident.

Pattern Recognition: Representing Failure as Success

Mike Lukovich

Currently, I am reading "Legacy of Ashes" by Tim Weiner. Well, I am not really reading it. Instead, I am listening to it on my iPod having downloaded it from Audible.com. I just listened to the following observation:

"The ability to represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition."

I know from Chalmers Johnson's review of the book that it occurs on page 58.

The Bush administration has the same tradition. The war in Iraq is an obvious failure that the Bush administration keeps representing as a success. And the mainstream media is still happy to report or least repeat the Bush administration representation. Other countries knew even before the occupation that failure was in the offing. Now the entire world - or at least, the entire world outside of the Beltway, is certain of that failure.

Likewise, the intelligence hyped by the administration about WMD leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a complete failure but represented as a success. And now we know that intelligence about Iran's development of WMD is also a failure as was the policy of saber rattling toward Iran. So the pattern would be that Bush will now represent that failure as a success. And, sure enough he is. And we also know that the mainstream media will report, I mean repeat, that representation.

New Orleans: Two Years Later

The Internet Weekly Report

The AP is reporting that Bush will visit New Orleans next week to commmemorate "the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history" as well as the most unforgivable failure of the Bush Administration.

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - President Bush will return to the Gulf Coast next week, where hard times and resentment linger two years after Hurricane Katrina's massive strike.

Bush will fly into New Orleans on Tuesday after giving a speech about the Iraq war to the American Legion convention in Reno, Nev. On Wednesday, the anniversary of the storm, he is expected to examine recovery efforts in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The monster hurricane was the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history. It swamped a beloved city, killed 1,800 people across the Gulf Coast, destroyed or severely damaged more than 200,000 homes and made more than 800,000 people homeless overnight.

In New Orleans today, despite progress, signs of a shattered city abound. Neighborhoods are in ruins. Crime, inadequate health care and faulty infrastructure are pervasive.

The Bush administration is still dogged by charges of an inadequate response - first, for the way it handled the crisis, and more recently, for not spending more time on it.

Into The Valley of Death - To Reason Why

Yesterday, I was thinking about the famous Tennyson poem, "Charge of the Light Brigade", so I googled "Into the valley of death rode the 600." To my astonishment, one of the first sites revealed was a book review from the Time Archive dated 1954.

The book review is called Story of a Blunder while the book in question is "The Reason Why" by Cecil Woodham-Smith. The title, of course, comes from the poem:

Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

Historically, we know that some 700 horsemen made the charge but that only 195 came back. Everyone knew that the tactic was a blunder and the question remained why did it happen? The answer turns out to be that the three main decision makers were all rank amateurs who had "purchased" their officer commissions. They were able to do this because of their position as elite, landed gentry.

Even in Tennyson's day, everyone knew that the order to charge had been a hideous mistake. But publicly, "the reason why" was long a mystery. Mrs. Cecil Woodham-Smith's book is the best untraveling of the old story yet.

Colonelcies by Purchase. To Author Woodham-Smith. who became interested in the subject when she was writing Florence Nightingale (TIME. Feb. 26, 1951), the Charge of the Light Brigade was not an isolated mistake. It was the spectacular culmination of a deplorable British conviction: that any rich aristocrat who wanted to become an officer should be able to buy a colonelcy in a crack regiment. The three aristocrats who may be called the villains of the Charge of the Light Brigade, and whose life stories Author Woodham-Smith traces in fascinating detail:

Lord Raglan, commander in chief in the Crimea at the age of 65, had never led troops into battle in his life... George Bingham, third Earl of Lucan. C. 0. of the cavalry division of which the Light Brigade was a part, who received and passed on Lord Raglan's order, had paid £25,000 to become colonel of the crack Lancers. He had spent half his life pouring money into his Lancers, whose superbly tailored uniforms won them the name "Bingham's Dandies"- and the other half squeezing the necessary money out of his Irish peasants. CJ James Brudenell. seventh Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade, had paid more than £40.000 for command of the 9 Light Dragoons. Brave, handsome, bad-tempered and brainless.

snip

Brave, stupid Lord Cardigan is remembered nowadays only by the button-up woolen sweater he wore in the Crimea.

Lord Raglan is enshrined in the "raglan" - a bulky overcoat with shoulders cut in a sporty, informal slope. As for Lord Lucan, only Irish tradition remembers him: it refers to him as "The Exterminator." Yet all three men would have one thing in common if they were alive today-a sense of horror at the reforms which they unwittingly helped to bring into the British Army. "At the beginning of the campaign, the private soldier was regarded as a dangerous brute," but by the end, thanks largely to the terrible charge, "he was a hero. Army welfare and army education, army recreation, sports and physical training, the health services, all came into being as a result of the Crimea." Moreover, the practice of purchasing commissions was abolished. And that is why, for more reasons than were known to Tennyson, readers of this admirable history may say with him:

Honor the charge they made! Honor the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!

The story is both fascinating and revealing. Then as now, there were unqualified people from privileged backgrounds in positions of leadership. Then as now, we can honor the warriors but not the blundering leaders.

But it is not 1854 and this country is not an aristocracy. George Bush and the neocons have produced an unending sequence of blunders. While our troops may not be permitted to "reason why" it is the obligation of our congress and senate to "reason why."

Cross posted at Daily Kos.

Crosses of Lafayette: The Real Outrage

I have mentioned before that we have a bumper sticker on our car that says "HONOR THE WARRIOR NOT THE WAR." In Lafayette, the impetus behind the project to build the crosses on the hillside that are visable to riders on BART and drivers on Highway 24 is do exactly that. It is possible to honor the soldiers who have died in the war without honoring war itself or the perpetrators of the "war of choice" in Iraq.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Mark Danner has written a chilling critique of the deeply irresponsible behavior of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice.

In a nutshell, after 9/11, Bush was able to appear to be so decisive precisely because he did not concern himself with details, complexities, dissenting opinions or the possibility of Plan A not working. Rumsfeld believed in Plan A: victory (toppling Sadaam) would be swift, U.S. troops would be welcome, Ahmad Chalabi would become the head of the new government, and "by the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq." He had no plan B.

But Bush himself vetoed Chalabi:

So there would be no President Chalabi. Unfortunately, the President, who thought of himself, Woodward says, "as the calcium in the backbone" of the US government, having banned Chalabi's ascension, neither offered an alternative plan nor forced the government he led to agree on one. Nor did Secretary Rumsfeld, who knew only that he wanted a quick victory and a quick departure. To underline the point, soon after the US invasion the secretary sent his special assistant, Larry DiRita, to the Kuwait City Hilton to brief the tiny, miserable, understaffed, and underfunded team led by the retired General Garner which was preparing to fly to a chaotic Baghdad to "take control of the transition." Here is DiRita's "Hilton Speech" as quoted to Woodward by an army colonel, Paul Hughes:

"We went into the Balkans and Bosnia and Kosovo and we're still in them.... We're probably going to wind up in Afghanistan for a long time because the Department of State can't do its job right. Because they keep screwing things up, the Department of Defense winds up being stuck at these places. We're not going to let this happen in Iraq."

The reaction was generally, Whoa! Does this guy even realize that half the people in the room are from the State Department?

DiRita went on, as Hughes recalled: "By the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq."

DiRita spoke these words as, a few hundred miles away, Baghdad and the other major cities of Iraq were taken up in a thoroughgoing riot of looting and pillage—of government ministries, universities and hospitals, power stations and factories—that would virtually destroy the country's infrastructure, and with it much of the respect Iraqis might have had for American competence. The uncontrolled violence engulfed Iraq's capital and major cities for weeks as American troops—140,000 or more—mainly sat on their tanks, looking on. If attaining true political authority depends on securing a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans would never achieve it in Iraq. There were precious few troops to impose order, and hardly any military police. No one gave the order to arrest or shoot looters or otherwise take control of the streets. Official Pentagon intentions at this time seem to have been precisely what the secretary of defense's special assistant said they were: to have all but 25,000 or so of those troops out of Iraq in five months or less.

How then to secure the country, which was already in a state of escalating chaos? Most of the ministries had been looted and burned and what government there was consisted of the handful of Iraqi officials who Garner's small team had managed to coax into returning to work. In keeping with the general approach of quick victory, quick departure, Garner had briefed the President and his advisers before leaving Washington, emphasizing his plan to dismiss only the most senior and personally culpable Baathists from the government and also to make use of the Iraqi army to rebuild and, eventually, keep order.

But then Rumsfeld replaced Garner with Jerry Bremer. Bremer's first move was to dismiss all Baathists from government and his second move was to dismiss the Iraqi army. Bremer got his marching orders from Neocon Dougie Feith. Immediately the US "had at least 350,000 more enemies than it had the day before—the 50,000 Baathists [and] the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers."

Iraq quickly spiraled out of control.

And who paid the price? The soldiers killed in Iraq. The Crosses in Lafayette honor these warriors but not the war and certainly not the pitiful architects of the failed war.

Straight Talk From George W. Bush

Today the President had this to say to a White House audience which included miltary brass and the recently missing in action Donald Rumsfeld. The occaision was the signing into law of a new $417 billion defense appropriation bill.

Reagan on Bush

Ron Reagan blasts George W. Bush here. First he describes the pattern of deceit and lies and then he skewers Bushonomics.

"And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job—where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn't afford the best available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet."

Bush Economic Records

Recently Bush has been claiming that "our economy since last summer has been growing at the fastest rate in 20 years." Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research takes a deeper look at the Bush record on the economy here. You won't be surprised by Bush's use of carefully selected numbers and time periods. Unfortunately, Bush is still likely to be the "first president since the Great Depression to preside over a net loss of jobs for the country." And of course, the actual Gold Medals that Bush has won are for the budget deficit, the fall in "real wages - adjusted for inflation" and Bush policies designed to divide the country by increasing the gap between rich and poor. And remember what republican Peter Peterson says - "tax cuts today are tax increases for out children."

"Less Safe and More Vulnerable To Terrorists"

London’s “Economist” (subscription only) which supported the war in Iraq, now has this to say in its lead editorial:

“To understand, however, is not to forgive. For hyped-up salesmanship brings clear consequences: customers become even more skeptical, once they find they have been gulled. The basic claim made by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair is true: we do live in dangerous times, in which the threat of catastrophic attack by WMD -armed terrorists is real. But the next time politicians call for military action to deal with such threats, on the basis of intelligence warnings, even more people will refuse to believe them. Well-intentioned or not, such salesmanship has made us all less safe, and more vulnerable to terrorists.”

That’s pretty clear – “less safe.” And to drive the point home:

“Mr. Bush still needs to bear the responsibility for having made things harder and more dangerous in several ways. One is the dishonesty already outlined, and its consequence for public trust. Another is his failure to deal with the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by demanding accountability at a senior level, preferably by requiring the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, his defense secretary. A third is the negligent lack of preparation and initial resource-provision for rebuilding Iraq.”

That sums it up pretty well.

Defending The Indefensible

Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive explains why Bush's choice never was to "take the word of madman or defend America" under any circumstances.

Going Negative. BIG TIME!

Go to the Bush/Cheney website and see their new television ad linking John Kerry and Hitler. Click on "This is not a time for pessimism and rage" to see for yourself. I am not making this up. Can they sink any lower? You bet.

I Am Shocked...

...shocked, to find dissembling going on here. The Associated Press has sued the Pentagon and Air Force, seeking access to all records of President George W. Bush's military service, but the news agency wonders why it has come to this.

"It seems a little curious because the president made a pretty forceful presentation that he had nothing to hide," said AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, when asked for his reaction to what the AP considers government stonewalling. "But we are not surprised." Read it here.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Fascinating. Neither Bush nor Cheney care a fig for the facts. Leading up to the war in Iraq, these two worked hard to conflate Saddam and Osama. They are still at it. But I wonder how long voters will hang onto this cherished deception? Check out this classic.

Pattern Recognition

Policies have consequences – both intended and unintended. Either way, patterns can be discerned.

More than 75 years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote these words: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."

The pattern of the Bush Administration includes contempt for International Law. Around the world we are experienced as a bully. The administration boasts that the UN is irrelevant and that the concerns of “old Europe” do not matter. We do not need the advice, counsel or approval of our allies or the International community. Rather, in the Rumsfeld/Cheney universe, “might makes right” and we are accountable to none.

Organizations take on the character and personality of the people at the top – or more graphically, “the fish rots from the head.” Leaders who endorse preemptive war and claim exemption from the Geneva Convention set an example for behavior all the way down the line.

George W. Bush told the Arab world Tuesday that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners "does not represent the America I know.” The Arab world remains unconvinced. Instead, they see evidence of a darker America, of the powerful exploiting the powerless. Perhaps a government that places itself above the law cannot successfully inspire freedom and democracy elsewhere. Certainly young soldiers in Iraq who break International laws and act like bullies are following the example of their current leaders.

Our country is on the wrong track and we need to change direction.