black…MYstory

When I listen to President Bush speak, I don’t know who I believe to be less intelligent, him or the people that (s)elected him to the presidency, twice.  He speaks with a sort of detachment that co-mingles diminished mental capacity with depraved indifference.  Nothing illustrated this more than his final press conference yesterday.  I was nearly horrified to hear his answers regarding his and the government’s response to Katrina.  First, when asked what he should have done differently, his response was that he should have landed the plane he was one in a nearby city instead of doing his fly-over photo-op.  Then, I guess, he immediately absolves himself from that by saying that, if he had done so, it would have pulled police away from helping in New Orleans.  Next, he offers the following gem:

You know people say the federal response was slow—don’t tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed. I remember going to see those helicopter drivers, Coast Guard drivers, to thank them for their courageous efforts to rescue people off roofs—30,000 people were pulled off roofs right after the storm moved through. It’s a pretty quick response. Could things have been done better? Absolutely. Absolutely. But when I hear people say, ‘The federal response was slow’—what are they going to say to those chopper drivers, or the 30,000 that got pulled off the roofs?

Never mind that Bush stayed on vacation while people died in the streets of a major American city.  Never mind that some 25,000 had to stay in the deplorable conditions of the Superdome (Of course, after hearing what George Bush’s mother, Barbara, had to say about it, I can see where he inherited his depraved indifference).  Let’s not forget that, over 3 years later, New Orleans is still a mess.

Needless to say, listening to this man is a jaw-dropping experience.  I’m not a country music fan but, I think, on Tuesday, I’ll have to crank up some Roy Clark and sing “Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone!”

Rachel Maddow offered some brilliant insight on this very topic.  The video of this is below (thanks to RawStory.com).  Click on the video to play:

 

 Maddow - Bush's Response to Katrina Questions: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Okay, I am looking up today and see that Bush is going to ask for Congress to authorize the release of the remaining half of the $700 billion bailout package.  Apparently, this is in response to a request made to him by incoming president Barack Obama, who says he wants to be able to use this money on day one to start addressing the nation’s economic issues.

Okay, call me distrustful and cynical but, do you think that, if given access to the rest of the money, Bush and cronies would just let the Obama team decide on what to do with it?

We already saw the games they played with the first half of it.  We have no real oversight of what’s been disbursed so far.  Also, they Bush Administration quietly slipped in some language at the last minute that lets most of the financial institution off the hook for having to put a limit on executive compensation.

So, knowing this (and many other things about the last 8 years), why would I trust them to do the right thing, now?  Maybe I’m just paranoid but, with it being just a little over a week to go, if I were Obama, I would have held off on this request.

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Honestly, I was fed up with President Bush long before that fateful week in Late August/Early September 2005 but, this was the week that I knew that he went too far with the American people.

It was on this week that we watched our televisions in horror as we saw people dying in the streets of an American city as the President sat idly by, not even willing to cut his vacation short to address it.

This was the moment that the rest of America saw just how incompetent a leader he was and how he, himself, valued loyalty over competency based on the people he put in charge of the agencies who managed the response to this disaster.

Bush showed up 4 days and many deaths later with a promise to rebuild the Gulf Coast.  Over 3 years later, that promise remains unfulfilled.

However, this moment was not just pivotal in my eyes, it also made the same impression on former Bush aides.  In a piece in Vanity Fair regarding the Bush legacy, two of them offer comment:

“Katrina to me was the tipping point,” said Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. “The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter.”

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: “Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.”

No matter what spin came out, America had already seen the truth.  As Dowd stated, “(t)he president broke his bond with the public.”

So, as his presidency winds down, the Bush years will leave a legacy of disasters in their wake and their crescendo was a Hurricane named Katrina.

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As I have said before, Bush’s bad  economic policies is going to haunt us for years to come.  Now, we can get a better idea of just how bad the damage really is.

The White House released the projected U.S. deficit for fiscal year 2009 and congratulations are in order:  Bush and company have set a new record — when the next president takes office, he will inherit a deficit of nearly $490 billion dollars.

The Bush crew blame it on a slowing economy and the cost of the economic stimulus package.  What they should be blaming is themselves.  Had they actually done the oversight that responsible government leadership does, we could have avoided the housing bubble bursting, soaring energy cost, failed banks, etc.  Had they actually had their eye on the ball instead of thinking that the way to stimulate an economy is to give more tax cuts to the wealthiest top 5%, we might have not seen him and his cronies squander  the $236 billion surplus he inherited after Bill Clinton left office and pile another nearly half-trillion in debt on top of that, to boot.

Oh, but wait, there’s good news: according to this same White House report, we would magically get a surplus three years after Bush leaves office.  Oh, never mind, they forgot to include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this estimate.

So, in January 2009, Bush will be gone but, just like that hooker you shouldn’t have slept with, he’ll leave you an unpleasant reminder of your time with him.

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Thanks to George Bush, I now have a better idea of how people with an STD feel.  Like an STD, Bush is irritating, embarrassing and his effects are going to last for years to come.

Case in point: the Bush economic policy.

When Bush attended his first G8 Summit as president, he was able to do so with the pride of knowing he was sitting on top the strongest economy in the world.

Now, seven years later, Bush will attend the conference with the knowledge (or, hopefully, someone will tell him by then) that the dollar has slumped some 41% against the euro.  With a miserable economic growth of only .5 percent this year, the U.S. is almost at the bottom of the list for growth among the G8 members.  Only Italy ranks lower.  This puts us even behind Canada in terms of economic growth.

However, the growth of Russia’s economy eclipsed ours drastically.  Theirs grew at a rate nearly 14 times our own, putting them at 6.8% for the year.  This is the same Russia that we use to remark about its economic collapse.

So, in his last G8 summit, this is Bush’s economic legacy.  It is a gift for which we will thank him for years to come.

Anybody got any penicillin?

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Tonight, I just want to thank Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich for introducing articles of impeachment against President Bush and congressman Robert Wexler of Florida for have the backbone to sign on to it.

Kucinich laid out 35 charges against Bush, including those related to lying us into a war and the outing of a covert CIA agent.

Most Democrats lack the backbone to perform their Constitutionally-sworn duty but, Kucinich can go forward knowing that he lived up to his oath of office to try to make sure that check and balances, a pillar of our government, would not simply fade away.

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Last week, George Bush caused quite a stir when he compared those that advocate including diplomacy as part of our strategy with dealing with Iran to “appeasers” of Hitler in the run up to World War II. Bush did so in Israel during that country’s 60th anniversary and, it appears that he may have been targeting certain key Democrats with his comments.

This is not the first time that Bush has played the “Nazi” card when trying to silence political opponents. But, what always amazes me is that no one has made him uncomfortable in doing so, particularly considering his family’s Nazi ties.

I have shared this with you before (see here and here, for example). George Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, knowingly worked for and did business with companies that backed the Nazi war machine. Furthermore, it appears that he was somewhat sympathetic to the Nazi cause because Prescott Bush, along with other corporatists of his day, plotted a coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency to implement the policies of Hitler and Mussolini as a means of beating the Great Depression.

I say all that to say that little, if any, is ever mentioned about the Bush family in this regard. So, it was somewhat shocking to find out that one of the hosts of The View raised this issue on their show yesterday. I find it interesting that with all of the journalists we have out there, a daytime talk show host on a show usually know for its lighter fare is one of the few with the guts to actually bring it up.

Here’s a clip of the show below (click on the video to play):

 

 Bush Family History on The View: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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When you have a fire do you:

a) try to extinguish it?

b) watch it burn from a safe distance?

c) pour gasoline on it?

If you’re Condoleezza Rice, you’d probably choose “c”.

On a recent trip to Baghdad’s “Green Zone”, Rice decided to ramp up the rhetoric against radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and, by extension, his militia by, more or less, calling him a coward.

Really, how does this help?

“I know he’s sitting in Iran,” Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr’s latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. “I guess it’s all-out war for anybody but him,” Rice said. “I guess that’s the message; his followers can go too their deaths and he’s in Iran.”

So, you have the American Secretary of State calling out a militia leader in Iraq, basically challenging his manhood.  Also, and I apologize if this sounds sexist but, the fact that she is a woman challenging Muslim men is also not to be overlooked (this is just my observation).

Regardless of the gender aspect, it is clear that she and the Bush administration have called out al-Sadr and this can’t be good news for those who could be caught in the crossfire (both figuratively and literally).

In fact, VoteVets has expressed such a concern:

Again, we have yet another member of the Bush administration who–in a ham-handed effort to help our “allies”–is actually placing our own troops in more danger.  I don’t think there’s any question that this echoes George W. Bush’s provocative invitation for terrorists around the world to descend on Iraq when he declared, “Bring’em on” in July 2003.  And we all know how that worked out.

But it’s not just about Rice’s dismissive, provocative tone, either.  It’s also this continuing, obnoxious Bush-brand of hypocrisy that the whole world sees: If Sadr had said the same thing of Rice–that she’s a Washington, D.C. bureaucrat who sends others to fight her own battles–the Bush administration would freak out.  And that fact isn’t lost on Iraqis.

As Rice is one who will not have to stay and fight the Mahdi Army side-by-side with our troops, I suggest that she keep her mouth shut if she’s not going to say anything helpful.  Because statements like these are certainly not.

This is a group representing Iraq and Afghanistan vets expressing these concerns, not just me.  At the end of the day, people’s lives are at stake.  You would think that the country’s leading diplomat would be…well…more “diplomatic” in her use of words.

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Okay, if this wasn’t such a big deal, I would laugh. It’s amazing to me how some people’s egos force them to deny reality. We have oil topping $100 per barrel, with no sign of going down, at least significantly (the price of oil has more than tripled in the past 5 years). You have two wars that continue to drain resources from the economy (by some estimates, it’s costing us about $275 million per day). On top of that, you have a housing market where the bottom has fallen out, causing major devastation to many American families.

But, according to George Bush, the economy’s only experiencing a “slowdown”.

So, Bush is out there pushing the whole “economic stimulus package”. You know, the Congress-approved band-aid-on-a-bullet-wound measure to help get the economy on track. We are expected to believe that if some single Americans are given $600 and some married couples are given $1200 (plus, a little extra if you have kids), the economy will be jump-started. This goes to show you just how naive some people are.

The belief that people will go out, spend this money and boost the economy makes a lot of assumptions. First of all, you assume that everyone will be able to treat this as disposable income. You have a lot of people who are behind on their bills and will use this money to catch up on mortgages, utility bills, car payments, etc. I’m sure that it would be welcomed for these families but, this will not help kick start the economy again. Secondly, you have people who have dipped into savings just to keep things afloat so, I suspect that, for a lot of folks, this money will be put into savings. Again, it’s needed but, not going to boost the economy. Finally, you have to realize that, for a economy to flourish, that money needs to circulate among various individuals or businesses in a population. Think about it this way — say you go out an buy a TV with your rebate. Who gets paid? Maybe the corporation that runs the store and a few employees. But, with so little manufacturing going on in the U.S., the money goes offshore to pay suppliers in foreign countries, leaving American workers out of the picture. This means that you end up with fewer middle-class folks who buy the houses, cars, etc. that keep the economy afloat.

I am saying two things:

1) We are dealing with more than a slowdown and
2) We need better ideas than this to get us out of this mess.

Right now, George Bush is much like the kid who cleans up a mess by stuffing everything into a closet, hoping that no one opens it, at least until he’s in the clear. Therefore, I think it’s time to be serious and say that, as a country, we should chalk up the last seven years and the year to come as a loss and gird ourselves to be ready to see just how big this mess is, once the truth is allowed to come out. I have a feeling that, once the next administration starts turning over the rocks, we’ll see just how much truth was hidden from us.

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Question: What do these two statements have in common?

On Iraq:
“Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” (George W. Bush, Oct 7, 2002)

On Iran:
“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” (George W. Bush, Oct 17, 2007)

Answer: After yesterday, we know that these are, at best, trumped-up charges and, at worst, flat-out lies meant to get us into military conflict with countries that pose(d) no immediate threat to us.

As you are likely aware, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) came out yesterday and had some very telling things to say that stand in stark contrast to Bush Administration’s allegations on Iran.

The NIE is the compilation of the combined views of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies regarding the security issues affecting the U.S. and, like I stated, its findings on Iran were very telling.

According to the NIE, Iran actually halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and, furthermore, states that due to significant technical issues, Iran probably is another 3-8 years away from having enough enriched uranium for a bomb.

However, the most interesting part of the report coming out is its back story. It is believed that the administration, particularly the office of Vice-president Dick Cheney, held up the release of this report for over a year, try to twist arms of intelligence analysts to get them to change the report to match the administration’s rhetoric.

So, in other words, as in Iraq, they went around the world citing Iran as an immediate threat when they clearly knew otherwise.

Of course, the chickenhawk spin-doctors are at work and trying to wipe egg off their faces on this and Republican candidates, no doubt, are going to have to get new material for their stump speeches, as this country has no desire to repeat the Iraq debacle.

We’ll have to see how this all shakes out but, one this is clear. We are certainly being lied to by this administration on Iran.

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