THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER!!!!

Bush's Official Portrait-- from Sears

2010-11-17T08:16:00.000-08:00

A "Blind" Bush Misled by Cheney; Bush Book Shows Lameness and Lies

2010-11-14T08:04:00.000-08:00

As several observers have previously noted, Bush in his memoir repeatedly complains of being "blindsided." He was "blindsided" by the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, an utterly predictable outcome of his administration's decision to disregard previously inviolable rules respecting the basic human rights of detainees. He was "blindsided" by the controversy within his own Justice Department about warrantless surveillance techniques that were blatantly illegal. He was "blindsided" by the financial crisis, a side effect of an administration ethos that big business could do no wrong and that regulators were the problem.

The common theme is that these three areas were among the many that Bush essentially arrogated to Cheney.

Bush: I was worried Cheney wouldn’t be my friend if I didn’t pardon Scooter Libby

Ouch-- Matthew Norman: How did this wastrel ever find his way to the White House? It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied George Bush. He has the self-awareness of a bison. "There seems even less to him than met the eye, and there was precious little of that. Astounding as it appears, we misoverestimated him."

Former British intelligence chairman all but calls Bush liar, says waterboarding didn’t stop terror plots.

Bush's Book a Montage of Cut-and-Pasted Anecdotes

2010-11-14T06:32:00.000-08:00

what a joke-- bordering on plagierism

Bush Crimes and 7 Ways Bush Benefited from 9/11

2010-11-12T05:32:00.000-08:00

America's increased practice of torture was sold to the citizenry by intertwining it with a notion that post-911, everyone in the world not with Big Oil Bush, family and friends deserved torture, despite it being illegal and amoral plus it is proven to cause terrorist acts against the US.

Standard criminal investigation protocol includes seeking who benefited. (What kind of American would not want to know who benefited from 911?) A succinct summary of who has and is benefiting from the 911 New York City mass murder is provided in Upswing's October 18 Newsvine article, Did the Bush Crime Family Benefit Most From the Failed 9/11 Attacks?

As have countless others who maintain critical thinking ability, Upswing says the most rediculous of all 911 theories "is the ridiculous official Boxcutter Conspiracy Theory offered to explain the events of 9/11 -- you know, 15, 19 or whatever number of Arabs in a cave outsmarting and debilitating the entire US military and intelligence structure."

At least one-third of American adults no longer believe Bush's fabricated 911 boxcutter theory, again thanks to those dangerous sorts (to criminals) who tell the truth and rallied behind the 911 Truth Movement. Bush's official investigative commission have even rejected their own report as "almost entirely untrue." But this has not been enough for Americans to hold accountable the man in charge at the time, the man that ordered the commission to lie to get the ball rolling for a bonanza at the expense of Americans and indeed, humanity.

7 ways the Bush crime family and friends benefited directly from 9/11 events as per Upswing

1. Saddam Hussein was removed as an obstacle to the oil industry, which the Bush crime family is heavily invested in, getting control of Iraq's "suddenly uprated" oil supplies.

2. The demolition of WTC7, which was executed under cover of the attacks, meant that records supporting the SEC's case against Enron, which Bush's longstanding friendship with Enron CEO Ken Lay left him susceptible to was, in an instant, vaporized.

3. CIA records, which could easily have included the G.H. W. Bush's longstanding covert CIA activities were, similarly, vaporized in an instant.

4. Bush was able to begin what is now known to be an illegal war against Iraq, in which he not only got access to Iraq's oilfields, but that Cheney's KBR and Halliburton scammed billions of dollars by allegedly "rebuilding" it.

5. The illegal invasion of Iraq also allowed Cheney's companies to make billions of dollars by "supporting" the US and allied militaries. (Some of that "support," of course, included poisoning and electrocuting US warriors.)

6. Bush got to implement the PATRIOT Act, which gave him an extraordinary amount of personal control by fiat over the country's society, commerce and economy.

7. Bush's War on Terror scared people into re-electing him for a second term.

Dave Lindorff and constitutional rights specialist Barbara Olshansky, in their book, The Case for Impeachment, explain why G.W. Bush and his inner circle must be held accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors (instead of falling for more of his evil by supporting his book tour). Among most grievous harms they list are:

• Misleading the nation into war
• Authorizing and encouraging the use of torture
• Failing in almost every way to defend the homeland and our borders
• Undermining habeas corpus and other traditional rights
• Illegal NSA wiretapping, mail opening, and other assaults on the Bill of Rights
• The catastrophic federal failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina

Of course, Bush and Co. now extends to Obama and his criminal cronies. Lindorff states in his Counterpunch article the Case for the Impeachment of Barack Obama:

Bush's New Book a Timely Reminder of What a Disgrace and a War Criminal He Was

2010-11-05T04:35:00.000-07:00

Bush claims he was a ‘dissenting voice’ on Iraq, and still maintains he tried to avoid war.

‘Damn right’ I personally ordered waterboarding-- Bush admits (again) to war crimes.

Bush claims his most disgusting moment during his presidency was when Kanye West said he didn’t “care about black people.” Yeah, Mr. "I can't wait to hang it" isn't a racist. Not to mention he shows what a twisted sense of priorities he has.

George W. Bush Reveals His Biggest Failure Was Not Privatizing Social Security

2010-10-25T04:56:00.000-07:00

God, he's still terrible!

238 Presidential Scholars Agree-- "Bush worst president of modern era, fifth worst in US history"

2010-07-04T05:57:00.000-07:00

It's one thing for a coterie of liberals at a late-night Washington soirée to say that George W. Bush was the worst president in their lifetimes.

It's another thing when the same is said by the nation's 238 leading presidential scholars, who have been polled annually for the last 28 years.

President Bush ranked worst among modern presidents -- and the fifth worth in history, according to the poll by the Siena Research Institute. Ranking first? President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led the country from 1933 until his death in 1945.

Bush Admits to Committing a Warcrime

2010-06-05T06:12:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush's casual acknowledgment Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded -- and would do it again -- has horrified some former military and intelligence officials who argue that the former president doesn't seem to understand the gravity of what he is admitting.

Waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, is "unequivocably torture", said retired Brigadier General David R. Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years.

"As a nation, we have historically prosecuted it as such, going back to the time of the Spanish-American War," Irvine said. "Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that any use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life."

Irvine told the Huffington Post that Bush doesn't appreciate how much harm his countenancing of torture has done to his country.

"Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," Bush told a Grand Rapids audience Wednesday, of the self-professed 9/11 mastermind. "I'd do it again to save lives."

But, Irvine said: "When he decided to do it the first time, he launched the nation down a disastrous road, and we will continue to pay dearly for the damage his decision has caused.

"We are seen by the rest of the world as having abandoned our commitment to international law. We have forfeited enormous amounts of moral leadership as the world's sole remaining superpower. And it puts American troops in greater danger -- and unnecessary danger."

Bush’s latest ‘post-presidency cringe-inducing activity’

2010-01-16T19:33:00.000-08:00

Amazingly sick:

Later this month, former President George W. Bush will join up with Liz Cheney, the daughter of his former vice president, to speak to a group of hunters in Reno, Nevada. Attendees of the Safari Club International Annual Hunters' Convention will also be treated to the musical stylings of Three Dog Night and Papa Doo Run Run, a Beach Boys cover band.

On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow laid into Bush's latest "post-presidency cringe-inducing activity." Maddow featured a parody advertising the former president's gig in the style of a monster truck rally commercial.

"On Saturday! Saturday! Saturday!" the ad screamed. "It's the Safari Club International Convention starring live in person the 43rd president of the United States of America George W. Bush!"

The Safari Club bills itself as "the leader in protecting the freedom to hunt and in promoting wildlife conservation worldwide" but Michael Satchell, a senior consultant for The Humane Society of the United States, says their membership is about "doing nothing more than killing animals-an entire alphabet."

Writing a few years back, Satchell described SCI. "With its photographs of grinning hunters posing with lifeless animals and its meticulous rankings for the biggest tusks, horns, antlers, skulls and bodies, the SCI record book perfectly encapsulates what trophy hunting is all about: killing for killing's sake."

But SCI's endeavors do not end with their "macabre scorecard." They also lobby to relax restrictions on killing animals worldwide. And they have enlisted some famous names in their effort.

SCI's membership includes former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who has lobbied the government of Botswana on the group's behalf to lift the ban on killing the nation's dwindling lion population. What's more, President George W. Bush appointed Matthew J. Hogan, SCI's former Government Affairs Manager, as one of the two current deputy directors of USFWS-a classic example of the fox guarding the hen house. Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, in turn, has worked to weaken the ESA, from abandoning federal efforts to restore grizzlies in Idaho to undermining a key provision that allows citizens to sue the government to speed up protection of imperiled species.

Bush Can't Help But Smirk When Asking for Help for Haitians

2010-01-16T19:32:00.000-08:00

Bush Years-- A True Test of Conservatism

2010-01-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion [sic] of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. Think we should privatize war by handing unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Kiddo, we passed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.

They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.

What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.

And they will. Given half a chance -- less than half -- they'll do it again, only worse. Because that's the way conservatism works. Remember when the only answer to every economic problem was "cut taxes?" We have a surplus. Good, let's cut taxes. We have a deficit. Hey, cut taxes even more! That little motto was unchanging even when was clear that the tax cuts were increasing the burden on everyone but a wealthy few. That's just a subset of the great conservative battle whine which is now and forever "we didn't go far enough." If deregulation led to a crash, it's because we didn't deregulate enough. If the wars aren't won, it's because we haven't started enough wars. If there are people still clinging to their rights, it's because we haven't done enough to make them afraid.

Forget the naughts, and you'll forget that conservatives had another chance to prove all their ideas, and that their ideas utterly and completely failed. Again.

Latest poll: 58% say Bush years ‘awful, not so good’

2009-12-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON -- The jury is in on the Bush decade, and it's not looking good. At least according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
A decisive 58 percent of respondents described the 2000-2009 years as "awful" or "not so good." Twenty-nine percent called it "fair," and a mere 12 percent said it was "good" or "great."
Time Magazine described it as "the decade from hell."
While the Bush administration can't be blamed for all of it, its influence in driving the national pessimism is difficult to deny. Thirty-eight percent said the 9/11 attacks had the "greatest negative impact on America this past decade." Twenty percent said it was the Iraq war.

Whose Fault Is the Massive US Deficit?

2009-12-19T08:20:00.001-08:00

Easily Bush 43--- just to keep the record straight.

Bush Calls "Mission Accomplished" Sign for Iraq "Mission Impossible"

2009-10-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

While Bush's speech was mostly eloquent and free of the language gaffes he admits he is famous for, he said he regretted appearing in front of a "Mission Impossible" sign during a televised address in 2003. The controversial banner referring to the U.S. mission in Iraq, actually said "Mission Accomplished."
Various unions, activist and antiwar groups supported the protest.
Joan Hadrill of the Raging Grannies said she was on the street because Bush was "an alleged war criminal for his invasion of Iraq and torturing prisoners of war."
Immigration lawyer William Sloan blamed Bush for "cynically causing a war that is responsible for so many deaths and so much destruction."
"He set back international law into the 1700s, violating every convention possible and seeming to revel in it," he continued.
Among the main slogan chanters was Jaggi Singh, the Montreal activist who was part of the committee that organized the protest and asked that old shoes be brought, to emulate the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi who tossed one at Bush during a Baghdad news conference.
Various pieces of footwear were hurled high in the direction of the hotel and the line of riot police, who did not seek to arrest the throwers.

Bush secret surveillance program extended beyond wiretapping without warrants

2009-07-15T05:35:00.000-07:00

The Bush administration authorized secret surveillance activities that still have not been made public, according to a new government report that questions the legal basis for the unprecedented anti-terrorism program.

It's unclear how much valuable intelligence was yielded by the surveillance program started after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, according to the unclassified summary of reports by five inspectors general. The reports mandated by Congress last year were delivered to lawmakers Friday.

President George W. Bush authorized other secret intelligence activities — which have yet to become public — even as he was launching the massive warrentless [sic] wiretapping program, the summary said. It describes the entire program as the "President's Surveillance Program."

The report describes the program as unprecedented and raises questions about the legal grounding used for its creation. It also says the intelligence agencies' continued retention and use of the information collected under the program should be carefully monitored.

More on this from the NYTimes and WaPo.

WaPo:

"Extraordinary and inappropriate" secrecy about a warrantless eavesdropping program undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool, government watchdogs have concluded in the first examination of one of the most contentious episodes of the Bush administration.

A report by inspectors general from five intelligence agencies said the administration's tight control over who learned of the program also contributed to flawed legal arguments that nearly prompted mass resignations in the Justice Department five years ago.

The program "may have" contributed to successful counterterrorism efforts, some intelligence officials told the investigators. But too few CIA personnel knew of the highly classified program to use it for intelligence work, the report stated, while at the FBI, the program "played a limited role," with "most . . . leads . . . determined not to have any connection to terrorism."

Froomkin's Final Words on Watching the Bush Whitehouse

2009-06-30T15:54:00.000-07:00

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. (snip) Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know.

Bush administration leaks bolstered Rick Renzi’s reelection bid

2009-06-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

By Murray Waas
Posted: 06/24/09 05:57 PM [ET]
In the fall of 2006, one day after the Justice Department granted permission to a U.S. attorney to place a wiretap on a Republican congressman suspected of corruption, existence of the investigation was leaked to the press — not only compromising the sensitive criminal probe but tipping the lawmaker off to the wiretap.

Career federal law enforcement officials who worked directly on a probe of former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) said they believe that word of the investigation was leaked by senior Bush administration political appointees in the Justice Department in an improper and perhaps illegal effort to affect the outcome of an election.

Bush Ignored 9/11 Warnings

2009-05-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

A former member of the 9/11 Commission criticizes former President George W. Bush in a new book for not responding to pre-attack intelligence on Osama bin Laden's intentions.

In "The Emperor's New Clothes: Exposing the Truth from Watergate to 9/11," Richard Ben-Veniste writes that CIA analysts told Bush that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States, "yet the president had done absolutely nothing to follow up."

(snip)

Bush told the panel that the Aug. 6, 2001 intelligence summary — known as a presidential daily brief — was the only one he ever received on the domestic threat, Ben-Veniste writes.

(snip)

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

(snip)

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

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

In his interview with the commission, Bush said the mention of 70 pending FBI investigations was a good thing, helpful, according to Ben-Veniste's book. Rice testified publicly that the PDB contained "some frightening things." At the time the president received the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB, Rice was not with Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

In the runup to the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, Ben-Veniste wrote, the summer of 2001 marked the most elevated threat level the country had ever experienced, providing convincing evidence that a spectacular attack was about to occur.

(snip)

In the commission interview, "President Bush volunteered that if there had been 'a serious concern' in August 2001, he would have known about it," Ben-Veniste writes. "Being on my best behavior, I didn't come out and ask him what he thought a briefing from the CIA titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' was, if not a serious concern."

"Instead, I asked whether the president had discussed the Aug. 6 PDB with either the attorney general or the secretary of the treasury, the two cabinet officers who oversaw the FBI and other federal agencies charged with domestic law enforcement," Ben-Veniste wrote. "Had he discussed the PDB with Attorney General Ashcroft to ensure the FBI was doing everything necessary? The president said that he could not recall, nor could he say whether Rice had any such discussion with Ashcroft."

Bush a Believer in Biblical End-Times Mythology

2009-05-26T04:56:00.001-07:00

Not surprising but this confirms disturbing rumors about Bush's mindset before the Iraq war:

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

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

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

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

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

Torture-Gate Still Going Strong

2009-05-15T10:41:00.001-07:00

Keep up with the latest on Bushco war-crimes here.

Bush Administration rejected deal to dim Iraq war in 2004

2009-05-15T10:39:00.001-07:00

Raw Story:

According to a new report in Vanity Fair, the so-called Sunni Awakening, which has been credited with ending the Sunni insurgency and thus making possible the success of the 2007 surge in Iraq, could have taken place as early as 2004.
...

According to writer David Rose, “The Sunni insurgents had offered to come to terms with the Americans 30 months earlier, in the summer of 2004, during secret talks with senior U.S. officials and military commanders. … For a variety of reasons, some of them petty, some of them ideological, and some of them still obscure, these men were blocked by superiors in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House.”

Bush Popularity Rating Even Worse After Leaving Office

2009-04-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that former President Bush's popularity has dropped since he left office.

When he left office in January, 31 percent of American's viewed him positively. That number has now dropped to 26 percent.

Bush Administration War Criminals

2009-04-28T06:58:00.000-07:00

Keep up with the latest on Bushco war-crimes here.

Escape Valve? Bush Buys 100,000 Acres on border of Paraguay & Brazil

2009-04-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

Pimpin' Turtle:

Buenos Aires, Oct 13 (Prensa Latina) An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.

D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."

The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.

Additional Report from WMR:

October 23, 2006 -- George W. Bush's Paraguay land deal. WMR's Paraguayan sources have confirmed that George W. Bush recently bought 42,000 hectares (over 100,000 acres) of land in Paraguay's northern "Chaco" region. The land sits atop huge natural gas reserves, according to sources in Asuncion. Moreover, the land deal was consummated in a dinner meeting between Bush's daughter Jenna and Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte. Although Jenna, who was in Paraguay under the cover of a 10-day UNICEF trip to visit child welfare projects, put the Bush family seal of approval on the land deal, the actual legal papers were worked out by Bush family lawyers and business representatives. Jenna Bush is supposedly working for UNICEF in Panama City. A troubling aspect of the land deal is the role played by James Cason, the US ambassador to Paraguay, in a private Bush family business venture. Cason is a career Foreign Service officer whose previous assignment was the head of the US Interests Section in Havana, where he managed to stir up tensions between the mission and Cuban authorities with his anti-Castro advertisements placed in the windows of the U.S. offices. Cason also has a long history of cooperating with the Defense Intelligence Agency in such locations as Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Cason also served as the Guatemala Desk Officer at the Department of State.

from Wiki: [link to en.wikipedia.org]

"The Guaraní Aquifer...is one of the world's largest aquifer systems...It is said that this vast underground reservoir could suppy fresh drinking water to the world for 200 years."

"US President George W. Bush allegedly has recently purchased a 98,842 acre farm in Chaco, Paraguay atop the aquifer.

The Reverend Moon has purchased 1,482,600 acres in Chaco, Paraguay."

For additional info re: Bush/Moon/Paraguay connection ---> [link to wonkette.com] *

"Here’s a fun question for Tony Snow: Why might the president and his family need a 98,840-acre ranch in Paraguay protected by a semi-secret U.S. military base manned by American troops who have been exempted from war-crimes prosecution by the Paraguyan government?"

Good question! Why?

* hmmm... since both the original as well as google cached pages
of the Wonkette article referenced above have now been deleted
from Google, i will post 'my' saved copy from that link below:

Quoting: Wonkette:

We Hate To Bring Up the Nazis, But They Fled To South America, Too

Our paranoid friends over at Bring It On have put together a story that hasn’t exactly made Washington Whispers. It’s real short and real simple:

The Cuban news service reports that George W. Bush has purchased 98,840 acres in Paraguay, near the Bolivian/Brazilian border.

Jenna Bush paid a secret diplomatic visit to Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte and U.S. Ambassador James Cason. There were no press conferences, no public sightings and no official confirmation of her 10-day trip which apparently ended this week.

The Paraguayan Senate voted last summer to “grant U.S. troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction.” Immediately afterwards, 500 heavily armed U.S. troops arrived with various planes, choppers and land vehicles at Mariscal Estigarribia air base, which happens to be at the northern tip of Paraguay near the Bolivian/Brazilian border. More have reportedly arrived since then.

What the hell, after the jump. Plus a BREAKING UPDATE involving, of course, The Moonies!

Now, Prensa Latina is a Cuban-government operation that is not exactly friendly toward Washington, what with Washington trying to kill Castro for 50 years and all. But Prensa Latina didn’t invent the story. It’s all over the South American press — and not just Venezuela and Bolivia.

And here’s one from Paraguay itself.

As far as we can understand, all the paperwork and deeds and such are secret. But somehow the news leaked that a new “land trust” created for Bush had purchased nearly 100,000 acres near the town of Chaco. And Jenna’s down there having secret meetings with the president and America’s ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Bush posted Cason in Havana in 2002, but last year moved him to Paraguay.

Cason apparently gets around. A former “political adviser” to the U.S. Atlantic Command and ATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Cason has been stationed in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama … basically everywhere the U.S. has run secret and not-so-secret wars over the past 30 years.

Here’s a fun question for Tony Snow: Why might the president and his family need a 98,840-acre ranch in Paraguay protected by a semi-secret U.S. military base manned by American troops who have been exempted from war-crimes prosecution by the Paraguyan government?

Here’s a little background on the base itself, which Rumsfeld secretly visited in late 2005:

U.S. Special Forces began arriving this past summer at Paraguay’s Mariscal Estigarribia air base, a sprawling complex built in 1982 during the reign of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Argentinean journalists who got a peek at the place say the airfield can handle B-52 bombers and Galaxy C-5 cargo planes. It also has a huge radar system, vast hangers, and can house up to 16,000 troops. The air base is larger than the international airport at the capital city, Asuncion.

Some 500 special forces arrived July 1 for a three-month counterterrorism training exercise, code named Operation Commando Force 6.

Paraguayan denials that Mariscal Estigarribia is now a U.S. base have met with considerable skepticism by Brazil and Argentina. There is a disturbing resemblance between U.S. denials about Mariscal Estigarribia, and similar disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta , Ecuador. The United States claimed the Manta base was a “dirt strip” used for weather surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size, however, the United States admitted the base harbored thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops, and Washington had signed a 10-year basing agreement with Ecuador.

BREAKING, UPDATE

We’ve been directed to yet another parapolitical theory here at Rigorous Intuition, where it is reported that Rev. Moon bought 600,000 hectares — that’s 1,482,600 acres — in the same place: Chaco, Paraguay.

Another twist: The first story, from Paraguay, apparently refers to the senior George Bush as the owner of the 98,840 acres in Moon’s neighborhood. Bush 41 was the first bigshot politician to go prancing around with Rev. Moon in public. Especially in South America:

“In the early stages of the Reagan Revolution that embraced the Washington Times and Moon’s anti-Communist movement, it was embarrassing to be caught at a Moon event,” wrote The Gadflyer last year. “Until George H.W. Bush appeared with Moon in 1996, thanking him for a newspaper that ‘brings sanity to Washington.’” That was while on an extended trip to South America in Moon’s company. A Reuters’ story of Nov 25 of that year describes the former president as “full of praise” for Moon at a banquet in Buenos Aires, toasting him as “the man with the vision.” (And Moon helped Bush out with his own vision thing, paying him $100,000 for the pleasure of his company.) Bush and Moon then traveled together to Uruguay, “to help him inaugurate a seminary in the capital, Montevideo, to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of his Church of Unification across Latin America.”

Oh, and both the Moonie and Bush land is located at what Paraguay’s drug czar called an “enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades.” And it sits atop the one of the world’s largest fresh-water aquifers.

Operation Commando Force 6, scheduled to go on until next month.

The whole package is part of a controversial military agreement between Paraguay and the United States endorsed by the Paraguayan Congress more than a year ago. The US Special Forces are guaranteed total immunity and diplomatic status. They are free to import and export, they don't pay any taxes, and what they trade is not subjected to any inspections. Contraband kingpins at the Triple Border would kill for a deal like that.

Most Americans Want an Investigation of the Bush Administration

2009-02-18T03:39:00.000-08:00

Because of Sen. Patrick Leahy calling for investigations into possible criminal behavior by the Bush administration, Gallup ran some polls. The results?

Question Criminal Investigation Investigation by independent panel Neither

Possible Attempts to use Justice Dept. for political purposes 41% 30% 25%
Possible use of telephone wiretaps without a warrant 38% 25% 34%

Possible use of torture in terror investigations 38% 24% 34%
For the full break down see Gallup.
What this clearly shows is that a majority of Americans want to see an independent panel put together to investigate the Bush administration at the very least. President Obama has stated publicly that he is more interested in looking forward when asked about these types of investigations. And of course he should. Attacking the previous administration would polarize Washington more than ever, virtually guaranteeing that the Republican Party would dig in their heels and become the "Road Block" Party.

But make no mistake about it, if the Executive Branch is never taken to task for illegal or immoral behavior then we will have abandoned the critical balance of powers that has made our country strong. The Nixonian idea that if the President does something it is by definition legal needs to be debunked once and for all. It is too dangerous a precedent to set.

We can't wait for executive leadership on this issue, we have to use our voices as citizens to encourage our representatives on the hill to support investigations into the wrong-doings of the Bush administration. Write your Senator and Congressperson in support of Sen. Leahy's call for a special commission to investigate the illegal behavior of the Bush administration. Without active pressure your representative may not put their neck out on this issue. Make your voice heard!

Parting Shots from Newspapers Around the World

2009-01-19T11:01:00.000-08:00

Rancor for President almost universal
On the eve of his departure, newspapers across the world are letting loose in editorials on the man seen as responsible for diminishing America's standing in the world: President George W. Bush.

Papers in Canada and France say he's the worst president ever. An outlet in Scotland says Bush drove the world to the brink of economic collapse. A pan-Arabic newspaper penned a headline, "The Joke's On Us."

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

A Reuters summary of more than a dozen newspapers spanning the globe found an almost universal lugubriousness about the havoc they felt Bush had caused to the world. "The United States was once the symbol of justice in the world but that has been damaged by Bush," wrote Austria's Wiener Zeitung. "A web of manipulation has cost America $900 billion and the lives of 4,000 soldiers -- along with at least 500,000 Iraqis."

Perhaps the most original, however, was Pan-Arab al-Hayat newspaper, which "recalled his controversial election win in Florida and how he once nearly choked on a pretzel, watching television."

"Perhaps we could say that fate, which let the American people down first in Florida and then with the issue of the pretzel in the president's throat, ultimately helped them by making sure the president would spend half his time on vacation," wrote the paper's editorial writers. "Indeed, he would have caused twice the damage if he had been more active and focused."

Not everyone wrote badly of Bush. Most complementary, according to Reuters, was the Jerusalem Post, which remarked that Bush had been the best friend to Israel in 60 years.

Froomkin's Bush Verdict

2009-01-15T17:13:00.000-08:00

President Bush famously asserts that history's verdict on his presidency won't come until he's long dead. But far from waiting until his corpse is cold, the verdict is largely in before he's even left the building.

Some things just aren't gonna change, no matter how much time passes. Here is Bush's legacy, in part:

He took the nation to a war of choice under false pretenses -- and left troops in harm's way on two fields of battle. He embraced torture as an interrogation tactic and turned the world's champion of human dignity into an outlaw nation and international pariah. He watched with detachment as a major American city went under water. He was ostensibly at the helm as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression took hold. He went from being the most popular to the most disappointing president, having squandered a unique opportunity to unite the country and even the world behind a shared agenda after Sept. 11. He set a new precedent for avoiding the general public in favor of screened audiences and seemed to occupy an alternate reality. He took his own political party from seeming permanent majority status to where it is today. And he deliberately politicized the federal government, circumvented the traditional policymaking process, ignored expert advice and suppressed dissent, leaving behind a broken government.

Bush's great hope is that Iraq in the years to come will emerge as a thriving pro-Western democracy -- and offer some vindication for the misbegotten war that will always be associated with his name. (He has already done a masterful job of spinning his troop "surge" as a profound success -- instead of a maneuver that has simply postponed the nearly inevitable paroxysms to come.) But even if he does ultimately have something to show for our incredible -- and profoundly mismanaged -- investment of blood and capital, it will never be enough.

The coming years may shed some light on the great ongoing mysteries of Bush's presidency-- How did he make his most important decisions? Was it really him making the calls? -- but it's unlikely that will reflect well on him. We may never know the full extent of the extreme measures he and Vice President Cheney took in their pursuit of the war on terror. But at some point we should know enough to judge if those measures actually made us safer -- or, more likely, not.

Indeed, if history is at all kind to Bush, it may end up giving him a backhanded compliment -- for having created such a hunger for an anti-Bush and for a restoration of pre-Bush American values, that he paved the way for the election of an African-American president with the potential to heal the divisions that Bush exacerbated, and clean up the messes he made.

"Departing Bush at 34 percent in final Gallup approval poll"

2009-01-15T17:10:00.000-08:00

President George W. Bush's approval rating in the final USA Today/Gallup performance poll of his presidency is up "a shade" at 34 percent, the polling firm reports.

Bush "joins Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman as presidents since the end of World War II whose final job approval ratings in office registered in the low 30s," says Gallup. Bush's disapproval rating in the same final survey reached 61 percent.

At noon on January 20, Bush hands successor Barack Obama two unfinished wars and a worldwide economic meltdown and leaves historians the job of judging his tumultuous eight-year presidency.

The 43rd US president also bequeaths the controversial tactics of the global "war on terror" that he credits for protecting the United States after the September 11, 2001 attack -- the worst strike ever on US soil.

The vastly unpopular Bush, 62, will also leave behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a Middle East still in flames, uneasy relations with Russia, and, his supporters say, vastly improved ties with Brazil, China, and India.

Aides point to his overhaul of US aid overseas, including an unprecedented increase in assistance to help Africa battle deadly diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS, and cite efforts to spread democracy worldwide among his successes.

His high points included a defiant vow in the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center to punish Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorists at a time when he enjoyed staggeringly high popularity with the US public.

His low points included the failure of the government response to killer Hurricane Katrina, which drowned New Orleans and helped send his job approval to lows not seen in at least a generation.

On the economic front, Bush boasts of more than 50 months of uninterrupted growth and has rejected any responsibility for a US housing crisis that has contaminated the financial sector worldwide over the past year.

In 2008, the US economy shed more jobs than at any time since 1945.

Still, Bush said with one week before Obama takes over, "I'm better than fine. I am proud of the accomplishments of this administration.

Surveying the Wreckage

2009-01-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

Here’s some numbers from NBC News on the Bush Legacy:

And more:

And this doesn’t really take into account how he’s devastated the American geopolitical situation, made tackling climate change incredibly more difficult, or the fact that he’s responsible for a humanitarian tragedy in Iraq that’s created millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Unemployment up by 2.5%, Dow Jones down by 15%, consumer confidence down 67% (to a record low), 1.2 million more families in poverty (increase of 19%), 6 million more Americans without health insurance (15% increase), Federal budget went from a 236 billion surplus in 2000 to a 1.2 trillion projected deficit in 2009.

A disaster by any stretch of the imagination.

Bush Leaves 1.2 Trillion Dollar Federal Deficit

2009-01-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. budget deficit will swell to a record $1.186 trillion in fiscal 2009, congressional forecasters said on Wednesday, the result of an economic recession that has cut tax receipts and caused massive government bailouts of banks and automakers.

The out-of-control deficit picture by the Congressional Budget Office illustrates the daunting economic challenges President-elect Barack Obama faces when he takes office on January 20.

(snip)

The actual budget gaps for both years may be significantly greater as Washington prepares to pass the gigantic economic stimulus bill by mid-February.

The CBO report shattered President George W. Bush's pledge that the government would balance its budget by 2012. Instead, CBO sees significant deficits at least through 2019.

The recession, which began in December 2007, has brought major job losses and slashed consumer spending and tax revenues. Unhappy and anxious voters elected Obama to the White House and gave Democrats larger majorities in Congress.

U.S.-installed Iraqi ex-PM says Bush "utter failure"

2009-01-03T18:58:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Former U.S.-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has denounced the policies of President George W. Bush as an "utter failure" that gave rise to the sectarian venom that ravaged his country.

In an interview published on Saturday in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, Allawi found fault with American management of Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 as well as the government of present Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Allawi ruled Iraq for almost a year after U.S. occupation officials handed power to him in 2004 as prime minister of an interim government. He was selected by a council hand-picked by Washington after the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

"Yes, Bush's policies failed utterly," said Allawi, describing the U.S. administration that once backed him. "Utter failure. Failure of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, including fighting terrorism and economic policy."

"His insistence on names like 'democracy' and 'open elections', without giving attention to political stability, was a big mistake. It cast shadows on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt, and I believe this will be remembered in history as President Bush's policy," he said.

Congress Has Enough Evidence for an Impeachment Inquiry

2008-12-31T20:59:00.000-08:00

Detractors of an impeachment inquiry by the House judiciary committee into whether President George W. Bush has committed impeachable offenses contend that no questions should be asked until conclusive incriminating evidence is either volunteered up by the suspects themselves or appears before them by spontaneous combustion. In other words, they say, no inquiry should commence until proof of the president's guilt has been unearthed—proof which would, of course, make the inquiry superfluous! The Watergate investigation that dethroned President Richard M. Nixon would never have been launched under such an Alice in Wonderland standard of proof, because it began with nothing more than two obscure figures, E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, known to have both White House connections and associations with the Watergate burglars.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution stipulates: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Article I, Section 2 endows the House of Representatives with "the sole Power of impeachment." And Article I, Section 3 entrusts the trial of impeachments to the Senate and requires a two-thirds vote for conviction.

The impeachment process thus envisions the House as operating like a sort of grand jury and the Senate like a trial jury. The House investigates to determine whether evidence can be marshaled to prove impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. And if the answer to that question is affirmative, the House then decides whether to vote articles of impeachment. That judgment represents a collection of prudence, politics, and law akin to prosecutorial discretion. If articles are approved, a trial is held before the Senate with the chief justice of the United States presiding if the president is the accused.

The House does not require, nor should it await, proof beyond a reasonable doubt of misconduct. To wait for such proof subverts the whole purpose of an impeachment inquiry.

According to the Founding Fathers, impeachable offenses are crimes against the Constitution, which may or may not include violations of the federal criminal code. As Alexander Hamilton elaborated in Federalist 65, impeachment cannot be "tied down" by "strict rules, either in the delineation of the offense" by the House, or "in the construction of it" by the Senate. James Iredell sermonized to North Carolina's ratification convention that "giving false information to the Senate" was characteristic "of great injury to the community" that would warrant impeachment. False information distorts legislative judgments and makes a farce of congressional oversight to detect lawlessness or maladministration by the executive branch.

Articles of impeachment were voted against President Nixon by the House judiciary committee for flouting his constitutional obligation to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" and for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas issued in conjunction with the impeachment inquiry. The twin articles of impeachment against President William Jefferson Clinton accused the chief executive of perjury and obstruction of justice in violation of his duty to enforce, not sabotage, the law.

Impeachment precedents fortified by the original intent of the Constitution's makers provide ample justification for a House judiciary committee impeachment inquiry targeting President Bush for—among other things—multiple criminal violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and frustration of legitimate congressional oversight with preposterous claims of executive privilege.

FISA makes it a federal felony for the president or vice president to "intentionally engage … in electronic surveillance [to gather foreign intelligence or otherwise] under color of law except as authorized by statute." A companion provision provides that the FISA's procedures are the "exclusive means" for conducting electronic surveillance. After a leak to the New York Times published on Dec. 16, 2005, Bush confessed that in the aftermath of 9/11, he instructed the National Security Agency to flout FISA by targeting Americans for electronic surveillance on his say-so, a spying program styled the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." The president's apparently criminal spying continued until at least January 2007—or for more than five years—when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared that FISA warrants, whose nature remains classified, would replace the TSP. (The attorney general maintained, however, that Bush continued to be crowned with Article II powers to ignore the warrant requirement and to do so secretly whenever he wished.)

The president has labored successfully through legal technicalities such as a lack of "standing" or the "state secrets doctrine" to circumvent a definitive judicial ruling on the legality of the TSP. One could have been quickly obtained if the attorney general had submitted in an application for a FISA warrant evidence obtained under the TSP. In determining whether probable cause had been established, the FISA court would have been required to decide whether the TSP was legal and its intelligence admissible.

An impeachment inquiry should demand the president's defense of the TSP's violations of FISA's criminal prohibition for many years. Soon-to-be-former Attorney General Gonzales has asserted that crafting a legal rationale has been a dynamic, not a static, exercise. The committee should insist on access to the attorney general's legal evolution from the inception of the TSP. The inquiry should also demand to know, among other things, how many Americans were targeted by the TSP, how they were selected, what was the intelligence yield from the FISA violations, and what safeguards were erected to prevent misuse of the intelligence collected. Moreover, the committee should demand an explanation of why statutory amendments to FISA to correct perceived deficiencies were bypassed in favor of flouting the law.

This information is necessary before the committee can assess whether mitigating factors partially justified Bush's criminal violations of FISA. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, in explaining to Congress his unilateral suspension of the Great Writ of habeas corpus, rhetorically asked whether a republic must inescapably be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its existence. The committee should similarly explore whether in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush was confronting such a dilemma.

An impeachment inquiry should further examine Bush's repeated assertions of executive privilege to operate a secret government eavesdropping program. He has refused to disclose to Congress details of the TSP redacted to protect intelligence sources and methods. Other spying programs that have not yet leaked to the media remain secret. The president has additionally prohibited current and former White House aides and advisers, including Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and Joshua Bolten, from appearing before Congress. Their testimonies have been sought to probe suspected perjury or obstruction of a congressional investigation by Gonzales and the manipulation of U.S. attorneys and civil servants in the Department of Justice to advance the political fortunes of the Republican Party. If Bush's conception of executive privilege had been asserted by Nixon, the Watergate investigation starring former White House counsel John Dean would have been stillborn.

If what Bush has said and done falls short of warranting an impeachment inquiry, then impeachment of the president has become a virtual dead letter.

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer at Bruce Fein & Associates and chairman of the American Freedom Agenda. He is author of the forthcoming book Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle Over the Constitution and Democracy.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2173106/

Let's Impeach the President

2008-12-31T19:49:00.000-08:00

Neil Young sums the case up quite well:

Add Up the Damage

2008-12-30T05:43:00.000-08:00

Bob Herbert:

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Mission Accomplished

2008-12-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

Three Out of Four Americans Glad to See Bush Go

2008-12-26T11:15:00.000-08:00

Three-fourths of those polled are glad to see Bush's presidency end.

(CNN) — As President George W. Bush gets ready to leave the White House in three-and-a-half weeks, and [sic] a new national poll suggests that three out of four Americans feel his departure is coming not a moment too soon.

Seventy-five percent of those questioned in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they're glad President Bush is going, with 23 percent indicating they'll miss him.

"Earlier this year, Bush scored some of the lowest presidential approval ratings we've seen in half a century, so it's understandable that the public is eager for a new president to step in," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

The three-quarters of Americans surveyed who say they won't miss Bush is 24 points higher than the 51 percent who said they wouldn't miss Bill Clinton when he left office in January 2001. Forty-five percent of those questioned at that time said they would miss Clinton.

"As President Bush prepares to leave office, the American public has a parting thought: Good riddance. At least that's the way three-quarters feel," says CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider.

The poll indicates that Bush has been compared poorly to his predecessors, with 28 percent saying that he's the worst ever when compared to other presidents in American history.

Reversed a Pardon???

2008-12-26T04:41:00.000-08:00

A pardon should never have been given in the first place!

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush on Wednesday took the extraordinary step of reversing a pardon issued the day before to Isaac Robert Toussie, the Brooklyn developer convicted of a large-scale Suffolk real estate scam, the White House said.

Victims of the scam and Suffolk elected officials rejoiced at the revocation of the pardon, which the White House said was made Tuesday without the usual Justice Department review.

Bush reversed the pardon after learning more about the nature of Toussie's crimes and political contributions to the Republican Party this year by Toussie's father, Robert Toussie, said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

Beverly Sanchez, 42, one of hundreds of minority homebuyers who said they were fleeced by Toussie, expressed delight Wednesday.

Bush Role in the Mortgage Mess

2008-12-26T04:37:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON — The global financial system was teetering on the edge of collapse when President Bush and his economics team huddled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for a briefing that, in the words of one participant, “scared the hell out of everybody.”

It was Sept. 18. Lehman Brothers had just gone belly-up, overwhelmed by toxic mortgages. Bank of America had swallowed Merrill Lynch in a hastily arranged sale. Two days earlier, Mr. Bush had agreed to pump $85 billion into the failing insurance giant American International Group.

The president listened as Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, laid out the latest terrifying news: The credit markets, gripped by panic, had frozen overnight, and banks were refusing to lend money.

Then his Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., told him that to stave off disaster, he would have to sign off on the biggest government bailout in history.

Mr. Bush, according to several people in the room, paused for a single, stunned moment to take it all in.

“How,” he wondered aloud, “did we get here?”

Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

(snip)
As early as 2006, top advisers to Mr. Bush dismissed warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Mr. Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn; as recently as February, for example, Mr. Bush was still calling it a “rough patch.”

The result was a series of piecemeal policy prescriptions that lagged behind the escalating crisis.

“There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems,” said Al Hubbard, Mr. Bush’s former chief economics adviser, who left the White House in December 2007. “Had we, we would have attacked them.”

The Grand Iraq Failure

2008-12-14T17:02:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An unpublished federal draft report depicts the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq as a $100 billion failure doomed by bureaucratic infighting, ignorance of basic elements of Iraqi society and waves of violence there, The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions.

The Pentagon issued inflated progress reports to cover up the reconstruction's failure once the effort began to lag, according to the Times, which received copies of the document from two people who had read the draft but were not authorized to comment publicly about it.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is cited as saying, for example, that in the months after the 2003 invasion the Defense Department "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces -- the number would jump 20,000 a week! 'We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.'"

Powell's contention was supported by both the former ground troops commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator before the Iraqi government takeover in June 2004. Powell declined to comment on his quoted remarks, the Times said.

The report, "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who visits Iraq often and maintains a staff of engineers and auditors there, the newspaper said.

Iraqi Shoe Throwing Incident

2008-12-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

Modern Day Nero

2008-12-05T12:21:00.000-08:00

It looks like George W. Bush is determined to add Detroit to New Orleans, as this modern-day Nero fiddles while a second American city drowns. Bush says he is concerned that the automakers will not survive, but he is totally unwilling to take any action. It's clear that General Motors will be forced into bankruptcy by the end of the month and that Chrysler will fail no later than late January. Those collapses will then eat away at Ford's supply base and ultimately destroy whatever is left of the auto industry in the upper Midwest. Dealerships will close, tool-and-dye shops will close, subcontractors of all kinds will either slash their work force or go straight out of business. All autommakers will then be disrupted. The United Auto Workers will basically cease to exist.

That's the kind of legacy Bush is going to leave to the country and to the Republican Party.

Not Prepared for War?

2008-12-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

For fuck's sake:

Five years after he declared victory in Iraq on the US aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, President George W. Bush says he was "unprepared" for a war in Iraq that has gone on to claim thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

"I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess," Bush tells ABC's Charlie Gibson in an interview to be broadcast tonight, and said he didn't know if he'd have gone to war if he didn't think there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"That is a do-over that I can't do," Bush said.

He said incorrect intelligence about Saddam Hussein's arsenal was the "biggest regret of all the presidency."

"I think I was unprepared for war," Bush remarked. "In other words, I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack,'" he said. "In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents -- one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen."

But also he tried to spread the blame -- and his credulity -- for bad intelligence on others.

Asleep at the Switch on Mortgages

2008-12-01T15:23:00.000-08:00

Government warned of mortgage meltdown-- Regulators ignored warnings about risky mortgages, delayed regulations on the industry. WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

Anti-Bush Protests Abroad

2008-11-23T04:23:00.000-08:00

Iraq:

BAGHDAD – Chanting "no to America," supporters of a radical Shiite cleric burned an effigy of President George W. Bush Friday in a protest demanding parliament scuttle a U.S.-Iraqi security pact and American troops begin withdrawing from Iraq immediately.

The demonstration drew nearly 20,000 followers of Muqtada al-Sadr to Firdous Square, the same spot where U.S. Marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein and exultant Iraqis pummeled it with debris in what became an iconic image of the fall of Baghdad and the end of the dictator's 23-year rule.

Peru:

PROTESTERS have demanded that US President George W Bush get out of Peru where he is attending an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, blaming him for the world economic crisis.

"Bush out," about 1000 demonstrators chanted in the center of the capital Lima, watched by scores of police in riot gear who made sure they did not move towards the APEC summit venue several kilometers away.

"This crisis didn't come from the Peruvian people. We shouldn't have to pay for it," a union leader told the crowd, which demonstrated peacefully.

Mr Bush, one of 21 leaders of Asia-Pacific economies converging on Lima for the weekend summit, arrived shortly after the protest. He was escorted under tight US Secret Service and Peruvian police security from Lima airport to the army headquarters building housing the APEC meetings.

Friday's anti-Bush protest, organized by Peru's biggest labor union, charged that Mr Bush's decision to wage a costly war in Iraq contributed to the financial and economic crises.

"The International Criminal Court should try him for crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression," a big banner next to the main stage for the rally proclaimed.

"Bush - genocide. The Peruvians repudiate your crimes," said another.

"We believe that Bush is responsible for the fall of the financial system," explained Aldo Gil Cristostomo, a 54-year-old mechanic standing near other protesters carrying portraits of Che Guevara.

"The war in Iraq is partly responsible for the fall," he said.

Bush Snubbed at G20?

2008-11-22T16:43:00.001-08:00

Wow-- almost makes me feel sad:

Update: Official story is that Bush already greeted everyone initially and didn't need to again. Perhaps.

Poor Poor Pitiful W

2008-11-03T08:01:00.001-08:00

Oh boo hoo:

Even for a declared optimist, Bush has appeared remarkably sanguine in this season of discontent. The economy is melting down, his own party has shunned him, and Tuesday's election is shaping up as a searing rebuke to his eight years in office. . . .

"Everybody kind of wanted to spend the last 100-plus days doing some legacy things, and the financial crisis has thrown a wrench into that," said one prominent Republican who regularly talks with senior White House officials.

"You have a combination of no legacy stuff, a horrible economic mess and the likelihood that Obama is going to win," this person added. "There is a real sadness there."

None of this would matter, of course, if not for Bush's deep and abiding unpopularity. Bush has not commanded approval from a majority of the nation since early 2005, making him arguably the most disliked president since polling on the question began in the 1930s. A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll last week put Bush's approval rating at 24 percent and found that McCain had made little headway in separating himself from Bush or his policies.

It's not for lack of trying. For the first time in recent memory, a sitting president has effectively sat out the presidential race, avoiding public appearances on behalf of McCain and other Republicans and raising far less money than usual in private fundraisers. Bush voted for McCain by absentee ballot rather than voting in person in Texas, as he has for the past three elections, and officials say he plans to spend election night at the White House rather than at a rally or other campaign-related event. . . .

"This is unprecedented for a president to be this invisible during a campaign," said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "This is what happens when you have a 25 percent approval rating."

Something that should never be forgotten:

George Bush is the person in whom the Right placed its blind faith, the one they glorified and held up as the ultimate standard-bearer of what they believe in. And now he -- and they -- lay in shambles and disgrace. No matter what metric one uses, it's difficult to overstate what a profound failure the Bush presidency is, and everyone -- including Bush -- knows that. The most important aspect of this Tuesday's election is to finalize their humiliating repudiation and to bury them for what they've done.

If these guys won't be prosecuted for war-crimes, humiliation is the LEAST we can do.

Bush's Sanity

2008-10-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

The judgment of history may well be that the United States has been “taken into, and kept in, the Iraq War by a guy who is not quite right in his head,” a distinguished legal scholar says.

“It may take 25 or 50 years, but it is almost certain that one day this character will be exhibit number one for the danger of having a nut job in the oval office,” says Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

Writing in his “An Enemy of the People,”(Doukathsan Press) Velvel said, “In everyday life, someone who refuses to recognize the actual facts of the world around him, and who instead lives in a dream world in his head, is regarded as not being sane, as being, to use the blunt words, insane or crazy. Why is it different when it is a national leader who refuses to recognize facts in the world and instead lives in a dream world in his head?”

Velvel goes on to say, “Most interesting is the idea that Bush suffers from a condition called ‘dry drunk’. Essentially, this means that even if one eventually stops drinking, as Bush did, years of alcoholism cause irreversible damage to brain chemistry. Results of this damage include such Bushian traits as rigid judgmentalism, irritability, impatience, grandiosity, obsessive thought patterns, incoherent speech and other unlovely characteristics.”

“Bush also seems to have chacteristics,” Velvel continues, “that, whether or not they are characteristic of ‘dry drunks’ are symptomatic of people who don’t fully have a grip. These include immense anger, exploitativeness, arrogance, lack of empathy, and difficulties arising from relationships with one’s father.”

“With regard to the specific analyses of Bush, there seems to be wide agreement that Bush is a sociopath, defined, one gathers, as someone who feels no empathy with others, who cannot feel for others, who does not feel or care for their pain (to use Clintonian jargon,”) Velvel writes.

“That Bush is utterly devoid of empathy seems plainly true to me. Unlike Lincoln or even Lying Lyndon Johnson, who sent people to their deaths but agonized over it, Bush is thought by the shrinks, and appears to the lay eye, to give not one damn about how many Americans he kills, let alone Iraqis.”

Explaining why Bush can’t feel guilt, Velvel writes: “Given his defense mechanisms, one gathers, and his psychology of having to overcome obstacles, overcome his father, etc., one gathers that Bush is a sociopath (or another word for it, a psychopath). Using charm as a vehicle for aggrandizement, he can’t allow himself to feel guilt and so feels no empathy for all those he smashes up in his pursuit of is grandiosity and delusions.”

Velvel professes amazement that a man of Bush’s character could rise to the White House: “One wondered how he could have been picked as the nominee and then elected. After all, it was clearly early-on that he not only had been a long-time drunk, but had failed at every business venture, so that time and again he had to be rescued by Daddy’s friends and wanna be friends.”

He adds, “Bush’s life refutes fundamental values we grew up with: hard work, competence, intelligence, modesty. His life, with its drunkenness, serial failures, lack of competence, repeated salvation via Daddy and Daddy’s friends, all followed by the presidency no less, and by disastrous ill-considered policies, makes a joke of the values we absorbed as youths and still try to live by.

”Living in his Father’s shadow, Velvel writes, “his own lack of diligence and intelligence caused him to be mediocre or a failure everywhere for about 25 years; he was mediocre at Andover; he was mediocre at Yale; he was a drunk to the point where he could cure himself only by stopping cold turkey… conceivably he escaped a securities prosecution only because Daddy was president.”

Velvel writes, “One view is that Bush has a narcissistic personality. Due to insecurities, he has constructed a grandiose vision of himself and is thus immune to the criticisms or views of those who do not go along with his views. Because he is no intellect (to put it mildly), he dismisses intellect entirely, and utilized his strength, personal affability, to win over others. Narcissistically, he apparently will do anything to protect his psyche from the destruction of being shown wrong---including causing the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis in pursuit of a mere long shot opportunity to proceed.”

The author believes it is necessary for psychiatrists to investigate political personalities to find out what makes them different from the rest of us once in power.

“It seems to me that people in today’s America who seek and reach office are different from you and me and other decent people in this society,” Velvel writes. “They are willing to say and do things that would make a lot of the decent people gag, maybe make all of the decent people gag. Psychiatry should investigate, should analyze, what kind of people these are who will say and do these things, and why they are like they are. Why investigate and analyze this? For the obvious reasons, so that we can know what we are faced with, and can start looking for and electing a better kind of person.”

23% Approval

2008-10-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

Lowest ever for Newsweek.

Bush Won't Close Guantanamo

2008-10-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

Oh, those tricky issues of human rights---

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

The administration is proceeding on the assumption that Guantánamo will remain open not only for the rest of Mr. Bush’s presidency but also well beyond, the officials said, as the site for military tribunals of those facing terrorism-related charges and for the long prison sentences that could follow convictions.

The effect of Mr. Bush’s stance is to leave in place a prison that has become a reviled symbol of the administration’s fight against terrorism, and to leave another contentious foreign policy decision for the next president.

Bush's Legacy According to Boris Johnson

2008-10-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

The legacy of George Bush may take years, if not decades, to determine.

But at present he seems to have pulled off an astonishing double whammy.

However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy.

The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit - in some people's eyes - the idea of free-market capitalism.

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.

To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.

George W. Bush Sewage Plant?

2008-10-18T05:17:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS) ― President Bush still has three more months on the job, but there is already talk of an important building in San Francisco bearing his name.

Construction on the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, will begin next year, but if Proposition R is passed on Nov. 4, that won't be the only the landmark named in honor of our embattled president.

San Francisco's Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant may soon become the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

Discredited President

2008-10-02T04:57:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, 30 September 2008

Yesterday was not only a black Monday for markets. It was the blackest of Mondays too for the US political system, saddled with a discredited president who has completely lost control of his own party and a Congress that responds to a national emergency with little except snarling partisanship.

The stunning defeat of the financial bailout bill has exposed the weakness of the system at its moment of maximum vulnerability, in the quasi-interregnum of the weeks immediately before and after a presidential election. Even so, had a similar crisis erupted at the same stage of the second term of Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan it is hard to imagine Congress staging a similar rebellion. For George W Bush, alas, it is a different story.

His lack of clout was first exposed last Thursday when the bailout summit he convened at the White House degenerated into a blazing row. But that humiliation paled beside yesterday's. The President went on TV at 7.30am to plead for the measure that had been thrashed out over the weekend, to no avail. Then he called two dozen recalcitrant House Republicans, begging them to hold their noses and do their patriotic duty – but again to no avail.

When the vote came, his own party voted almost two to one against the bill, more than cancelling out the 140-95 majority of Democrats who did hold their noses to support the wishes of a President most of them despise.

Really Really Bad Approval Ratings; Record Disapproval Rating

2008-10-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

CBS poll:

Overall, the president’s approval rating has dropped five points from last week and is now the lowest of his presidency. Only 22 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, while 70 percent of Americans disapprove - a new high.

Bush hits 70 percent disapproval in ABC News' poll. That's never happened in the history of the poll since 1938. Worse than Nixon. And so richly deserved.

Our CEO President

2008-09-26T04:23:00.001-07:00

At another point in the meeting, President Bush chimed in, "If money isn't loosened, this sucker could go down" -- and by sucker he meant economy.

WORST

PRESIDENT

EVER

Bush Urges Democrats to Act Quickly on Bailout Plan

2008-09-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

Not surprisingly, President Asshole pushes the world's most obnoxious and unpopular plan:

WASHINGTON — As President Bush urged lawmakers to act quickly on the bailout legislation, Senate Democrats on Monday put forward their version of the rescue plan, including a bold addition aimed at helping homeowners at risk of foreclosure.

President Bush urged the legislators to resist the temptation to add provisions that, he said, “would undermine the effectiveness of the plan.” But it is becoming clear that Democrats have their own ideas about what should be in the plan, who should be helped and who should not.

Oh, of course-- it is all because failure to pass the Bush-Paulson plan "would threaten small business owners and homeowners on Main Street."

Economy Imploding-- Bush Nowhere To Be Seen

2008-09-17T19:31:00.000-07:00

Bush Was Doing Something Very Illegal from 2001 to 2004

2008-09-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald:

For the second consecutive day, The Washington Post has published an excerpt from reporter Barton Gellman's new book on the Cheney Vice Presidency, and it provides still more details on the intense confrontation in March, 2004 between the Bush Justice Department and the Cheney-led White House over the DOJ's refusal to certify the legality of the NSA's domestic spying activities. As has been known ever since Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified before the Senate in May, 2007, all of the top-level DOJ officials -- including Attorney General John Ashcroft, Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller -- told President Bush they would resign immediately because Bush ordered the NSA surveillance program to continue even after his own Justice Department told him it was patently illegal. Comey drafted his resignation letter, calling Bush's spying activities "an apocalyptic situation" because he had "been asked to be a part of something that is fundamentally wrong."

Such an en masse resignation in the middle of an election year was averted only when Bush finally agreed to change certain aspects of the surveillance program in order to persuade these DOJ officials to endorse its legality. The illegal NSA spying program revealed by The New York Times in December, 2005 that created so much political controversy -- whereby the Bush administration was spying on Americans without the warrants required by law -- was a program that was actually endorsed and authorized by these same DOJ officials. The program we learned about was the "compromise" program that Bush implemented in 2004 in order to avoid their resignation. That's how extreme -- what right-wing, executive-power-loving ideologues -- these DOJ officials are: they are the ones who authorized and endorsed the illegal NSA program that we came to learn about.
But whatever it was that the Bush administration was doing in spying on Americans for years prior to March, 2004 was so extreme, so patently illegal, so unconscionable that even these right-wing DOJ Bush appointees, who approved of the ultimate warrantless eavesdropping program, were ready to resign en masse if those spying activities continued.

Bush: Iranians Are ‘Assholes’

2008-09-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

While serving as CentCom commander between March 2007 and March 2008, Adm. William Fallon consistently pressed the Bush administration for more engagement with Iran and criticized the calls for another war. “This constant drumbeat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Fallon told al Jazeera last year.

In his new book “The War Within,” Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward details a telling White House meeting on Iran in spring 2007 (p. 334):

“I think we need to do something to get engaged with these guys,” Fallon said. Iraq shared a 900-mile border with Iran, and he needed guidance and a strategy for dealing with the Iranians.

“Well,” Bush said, “these are assholes.”

Fallon was stunned. Declaring them “assholes” was not a strategy. Lots of words and ideas were thrown around at the meeting, especially about the Iranian leaders. They were bad, evil, out of touch with their people. But no one offered a real approach.

Bush Grills Newly Elected Democratic Leadership of Pakistan

2008-09-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

Typical Bush asshole-diplomacy:

In July all that changed. Pakistan’s new democratically elected government made its first visit to Washington. Instead of the congratulations and aid packages they expected, ministers received what they described as a “grilling” and left reeling at “the trust deficit” between Pakistan and its most significant financial backer.

Bush confronted Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s prime minister, with evidence of involvement by its military intelligence (ISI) in the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

“They were very hot on the ISI,” said Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister. “Very hot. When we asked them for more information, Bush laughed and said, ‘When we share information with your guys, the bad guys always run away.’ ”

Bush: Iraqis Not Grateful Enough for the US Fucking Over Their Country

2008-09-08T17:28:00.000-07:00

Last night on 60 Minutes, host Scott Pelley interviewed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to discuss his new book “The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008.” Pelley noted that one part of the story Woodward tells is President Bush’s “frustration with the attitude of the Iraqi people”:

WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberated them.

PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?

WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.

Either Bush is in such a bubble, he has no clue what has happened in Iraq, or he is such a psychopath that he thinks over a hundred thousand Iraqis dying and the country being ravaged is a "good thing".

ABC: New Low Approval

2008-07-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

Driven down by the weak economy and the unpopular war in Iraq, President George W. Bush's job approval rating has reached a new low for the third month straight.

Just 28 percent of Americans approve of how the President is handling his job, matching Jimmy Carter's career low.

Only two presidents have gone lower: Richard Nixon, 24 percent in July and August 1974; and Harry Truman, 22 percent in February 1952.

Bush Hits New Low in Record High Disapproval

Sixty-nine percent disapprove of Bush's performance, a record high in presidential approval polls since 1938 (by ABC News to 1981, and Gallup before us). Fifty-six percent "strongly" disapprove of Bush's performance, another record.

Bush hasn't seen majority approval in 42 months, surpassing Truman's record of 39 months from 1949-52. Indeed Bush's approval rating hasn't exceeded even 40 percent since September 2006.

Bush approval peaks among Republicans, at 65 percent; it plummets to 27 percent among independents and only 6 percent among Democrats (the latter a new low).

It ranges from 51 percent among conservatives to 21 percent among moderates and just 7 percent among liberals (all new lows).

President George Bush: 'Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter'

2008-07-11T04:33:00.000-07:00

George Bush surprised world leaders with a joke about his poor record on the environment as he left the G8 summit in Japan.

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

One official who witnessed the extraordinary scene said afterwards: "Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America's record on pollution."

Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the "most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice".

The White House apologised for what it called "sloppy work" and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it.

Concluding the three-day event, leaders from the G8 and developing countries proclaimed a "shared vision" on climate change. However, they failed to bridge differences between rich and emerging nations on curbing emissions.

What Bush Hath Wrought

2008-07-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

By Andrew J. Bacevich
July 1, 2008

FEW AMERICANS, whatever their political persuasion, will mourn George W. Bush's departure from office. Democrats and Republicans alike are counting the days until the inauguration of a new president will wipe the slate clean.

Yet in crucial respects, the Bush era will not end Jan. 20, 2009. The administration's many failures, especially those related to Iraq, mask a considerable legacy. Among other things, the Bush team has accomplished the following:

# Defined the contemporary era as an "age of terror" with an open-ended "global war" as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;

# Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;

# Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;

# Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, "defense is not a budget item";

# Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;

# Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

# Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising "global leadership";

# Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.

By almost any measure, this constitutes a record of substantial, if almost entirely malignant, achievement.

Bush's harshest critics, left liberals as well as traditional conservatives, have repeatedly called attention to this record. That criticism has yet to garner mainstream political traction.

The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency

2008-07-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.alternet.org/election08/89686/?page=entire

By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted July 1, 2008.

A shorter version of our long national nightmare.

In a lot of ways, choosing the Bush administration's 10 greatest moments -- disastrous failures, all -- is about as pointless as picking out your 10 least favorite hemorrhoids: There are entirely too many of them, and taken together they all add up to a throbbing mass of pain. But unfortunately, history demands that we at least make the effort so that future generations will understand why we perform voodoo rituals cursing Bush's memory before we go to bed every night.

Narrowing down the Bush administration's various debacles to a mere 10 was no easy feat. In fact, I expect that many people will express dismay that their least favorite moment was left off the list. "How could commuting Scooter Libby's sentence not even make the top 10??!!" I can hear some of you shrieking already. Well, I'll tell you. Essentially, I tried to rate each Bush disaster by two main criteria: its body count and its damage to the country's reputation. So while Bush's awkward groping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel may be personally humiliating to everyone, it doesn't have the same heft as, say, the Iraq War.

The Ten. Note-- explanations following each item were left out here.

10: Bush Gets Re-elected
9: Alberto Gonzales' Congressional Testimony
8: North Korea Conducts a Nuclear Test
7: Colin Powell's Bogus WMD Presentation at the U.N.
6: The Terri Schiavo Affair
5: Bush and Condi's Excellent Gaza Adventure
4: "Brownie, You're Doing a Heckuva Job"
3: Abu Ghraib*
2: 9/11
1: "Mission Accomplished"

*This particular scandal was so bad that even the John Birch Society (!!!) concluded that the administration and its flunkies were war criminals.

This would not be my list-- to be sure-- but it still is a decent stab at summing up the badness.

Bush Impeachment Update

2008-06-12T11:51:00.001-07:00

House votes to move Kucinich articles to judiciary committee.

CNN reports this as a move that is designed to kill impeachment-- certainly Dem leadership (Pelosi et al) do not want impeachment. Words fail me in describing how fucked up Pelosi is in this regard. Talk about a fake opposition Democrat!

Optimistically, this could be a good move, as it will allow the judiciary committee to collect evidence, and the threat of bringing impeachment to the floor can be used for some leverage against Bush. Certainly, impeachment probably would have died if sent to the floor for a straight up vote, so this isn't so bad-- in a relative sense.

Meanwhile, 89% of people in this MSNBC poll think Bush should be impeached (almost 700,000 responses).

Kucinich Enters Articles of Impeachment Against Bush!!!

2008-06-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Mainstream media and most blogs ignore.

Here is an almost complete list of the articles-- even some stuff on 9/11:
(more complete list here)

#33: Repeatedly ignored and failed to respond to high level intelligence warnings of planned terrorist attacks in U.S. prior to 9/11.
Clark warned the president in daily briefings of the threat. Clark was unable to convene a cabinet level position. Tenet met with the president 40 times to warn of threat. Still no meetings of top officials.

#34: Obstruction into the investigation of 9/11

#35: endangering the health of 9/11 first responders

Video:

UPDATE: Raw Story documents the shameful response of the mainstream media.

Press Refuse to Admit Bush Lied About War

2008-06-08T18:35:00.000-07:00

Why is the press still reluctant to tell the truth about George W. Bush's run up to war -- that is a bald-faced liar who deliberately lied to the very Americans he's supposed to serve because he wanted to get into a war that he thought would give him a Great Legacy™ and fatten the pockets of himself and his cronies in the bargain?

Now that the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has come out, this is no longer the exclusive province of bloggers and "kooks." It is absolute truth, that this president betrayed the trust of the American people in a way no other president has done in my lifetime -- not even Nixon. And yet, as he plays out the string of his ghastly, destructive, miserable presidency, the press still won't call him a liar.

The Dancing Embarrassment

2008-06-08T18:31:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush dancing on the North Portico of the White House as he awaits the arrival of Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain. March 2008.

I Weep for Bush's Idiocy

2008-06-04T06:08:00.000-07:00

Among the excerpts of the interview captured in Engel’s new book, “War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq”:
- “‘This is the great war of our times. It is going to take forty years,’” [Bush told Engel]. “Bush said in forty years the world would know if the war on terrorism, and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, had reduced extremism, helped moderates, and promoted democracy.”
- Bush admits to Engel that going to war was a decision based on his personal instinct and not on any long-range strategy for the Mideast:
“I know people are saying we should have left things the way they were, but I changed after 9/11. I had to act. I don’t care if it created more enemies. I had to act.”

The 13-Year-Old-in-Chief

2008-06-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

Among the anecdotes in "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story" is an arresting portrait of Bush after four contractors were killed in Fallujah in 2004, triggering a fierce U.S. response that was reportedly egged on by the president.

During a videoconference with his national security team and generals, Sanchez writes, Bush launched into what he described as a "confused" pep talk:

"Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal."

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

Bush's Rolling Disaster of a Mideast Trip

2008-05-20T05:11:00.000-07:00

Piglipstick:

Since his last pathetic attempt to secure some sort of legacy by traveling to the middle east, which was a smashing failure, a lot of people questioned why Bush and his gargantuan entourage would bother doing it again for the second time in five months. As one journalist put it about the last time:

"Bush is heading back to Washington mostly empty-handed, said several analysts and politicians throughout the region. Arab critics deemed Bush's peace efforts unrealistic, his anti-Iran tirades dangerous, his praise of authoritarian governments disappointing and his defense of civil liberties ironic."

Ironic? I'd say arrogantly hypocritical.
Anything changed this time around? If anything it was a worse display of smarmy exceptionalism from the miserable punk, who gets his frat boy jollies throwing his weight around the bar only because he knows his friends will back up his sorry ass.

The most telling hypocrisy came with his love fest in front of the Israeli Knesset. That pathetic dig at Obama can be expected from a small man like Bush - it's been pointed out too often that shallow accusations about "appeasement" have been tossed around all the time by the likes of this wretch to have any meaning left. No, the biggest pretensions about his Israeli suckup was the fact that here was a man whose family got rich by consorting with the nazis during WW2, standing in front of jews and warning the world about dealing with enemies by using nazis as an analogy. All the while deliberately omitting any references to the vicious treatment the Israelis are currently dishing out to the palestinians. Can it get any more hallucinogenic than that?
Maybe, when several right wing knesset members walked out on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert because he wasn't a real zionist like Bush.

By any standard this walking failure is a pathetic joke and the vile MSM spent the entire trip in trying to cover up that fact, leaving middle east political observers stunned over why the hell the whole thing occurred in the first place. As Robert Fisk puts it, the clueless Bubble Boy is positively deranged when it comes to the reality on the ground. In Lebanon:

"The roads were open again; the hooded gunmen had disappeared; the government had abandoned its confrontation with Hizbollah – the suspension of the Shia Muslim security chief at the airport (who bought me a bottle of champagne a year ago, I seem to remember – some Hizbollah "agent" he!) and the abandonment of the government's demand to dismantle Hizbollah's secret telecommunication system was a final seal of its failure – and I opened my newspaper and what did I read?
That George Bush declared in Jerusalem that "al-Qa'ida, Hizbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause".
Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa'ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas's war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters – I need no apology to quote Churchill's description of 1948 Palestine yet again – and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again."

It's been said that a statesman never publicly asks for something without knowing in advance what the answer will be. And since our empty suit of a president is the farthest thing fom a statesman his visit to his autocratic buddies in Saudi Arabia was yet another failure. When he showed up with his begging bowl asking them to increase their oil production, King Abdullah gently told our pretend leader to fuck off and fix the american dollar, which is dropping like a brick and the real cause for soaring oil prices.

No doubt the middle east is breathing a fresh sigh of relief as this fool heads back home. As a parting shot in Egypt, where one headline exclaims "Bush Gets Cold Shoulder", he showed up at the world economic forum to lecture a gaggle of political and business leaders about business tactics and freedom. This was where he summed up the whole purpose of this asinine display of intemperate posturing. The trip wasn't anything about peace and after the abject failure of his first disastrous trip it wasn't anything about his murderous "legacy" in his final year in office. It was about warmongering though, in trying to stir up enmity between neighbors. It was also about freedom too - american and Israeli freedom to dictate to everyone else.

In Israel, Bush Calls Democrats Appeasers of Terrorists

2008-05-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

While delivering an address before the Israeli parliament commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel, President Bush said that Sen. Barack Obama and Democrats favor a policy of appeasement toward terrorists. CNN reports that Bush was comparing Obama to “other U.S. leaders back in the run-up to World War II who appeased the Nazis.”

In his speech, Bush said, “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

CNN’s Ed Henry reported that, while “President Bush never uttered the words Barack Obama,” his White House sources tell him it was clearly intended to be a partisan shot:

White House aides are acknowledging that this was a reference to the fact that Sen. Obama and other Democrats have publicly said that it would be ok for the U.S. President to meet with leaders like the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

A Stab at Bush's Legacy from "Sadly No!"

2008-05-12T15:46:00.001-07:00

A reasonable pictorial essay of various Bush tragedies.

Failure Watch-- April 2008

2008-04-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

From ABC News: "At 39 months in the doghouse, George W. Bush has surpassed Harry Truman's record as the postwar president to linger longest without majority public approval. Bush hasn't received majority approval for his work in office in ABC News/Washington Post polls since Jan. 16, 2005 — three years and three months ago. The previous record was Truman's during his last 38 months in office."

and...

President Bush often argues that history will vindicate him. So he can't be pleased with an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted by the History News Network. It found that 98 percent of them believe that Bush's presidency has been a failure, while only about 2 percent see it as a success. Not only that, more than 61 percent of the historians say the current presidency is the worst in American history. In 2004, only 11.6 percent of the historians rated Bush's presidency in last place. Among the reasons given for his low ratings: invading Iraq, "tax breaks for the rich," and alienating many nations around the world. Bush supporters counter that professional historians today tend to be liberal and that it's too early to assess how his policies will turn out.

Cheering God, Bush says war with Iraq 'will forever be' the right decision

2008-03-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

Oy.

Bush Cements His Reputation as Worst President Ever-- by a Long Shot

2008-03-12T10:20:00.001-07:00

Bush vetoes anti-torture bill.

While the man truly has reached new levels of assholery, the real shame is what he has done in the name of this country.

Bush Guts Intelligence Oversight Board

2008-03-03T19:48:00.000-08:00

On Friday afternoon the White House posted without fanfare a new Executive Order that revamps an important though little known intelligence board. There are a few minor changes, but the most radical revision appears to be that the board has now been stripped of nearly all its powers to investigate and check illegal intelligence activities. It's difficult to see what legitimate reasons there could have been for gutting the oversight activities of the board in this way, and the WH has not explained the changes.

And perhaps not coincidentally, the board has been renamed. Under the older Executive Order from 1993, it was called the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). Now it has been renamed the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB), suggesting perhaps that the Bush administration had domestic intelligence activities in mind while making these revisions.

Meeting with Tyrants

2008-03-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

More hypocrisy.

New Low Approval for Poll-- 19%

2008-02-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

At least the clown isn't fooling many people-- a 19% overall approval rating today, only 14% approval for handling the economy.

How pathetic is it that the Dems don't do anything against this guy?

Outside Forces

2008-02-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

Fox News's Special Report yesterday:

GOLER: The president says it's better that African nations deal with African problems. White soldiers in Darfur, he believes, would be targets for all sides.

BUSH: A clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces tend to divide people up inside their country and are unbelievably counterproductive.

The museum was the Rwandan genocide museum.

Oh, my head.

The Clown in Chief

2008-02-20T08:09:00.001-08:00

Every time I see Bush on TV lately, he has this giant grin plastered on his face.

Yeah, everything is so freaking funny.

How drugged out is this guy, anyway?

Jesus, what a disgrace.

Bush proposes cuts in health, domestic progams; Debt remains his legacy

2008-02-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

With less than a year until he leaves the White House, President Bush is proposing deep cuts in health programs while allowing virtually no increase for other domestic priorities in his final budget.
Kevin Freking of the Associated Press, citing a senior administration official, reports that the budget "will virtually freeze most domestic programs."

Nonetheless, economists predict the president has saddled his successor with near-crippling debt that could threaten the US credit rating for the first time in more than 90 years.

"Despite his efforts, Mr. Bush failed to work out a deal with Congress to tackle the spiraling costs of government health and retirement programs," report the Wall Street Journal's Michael M. Phillips and John D. McKinnon. "The next president, if he or she serves two terms, could find the U.S. government so deeply in hock that it would face losing its Triple-A credit rating, something that has never happened since Moody's Investors Service began grading U.S. securities in 1917."

Bush has proposed nearly $200 billion in cuts to Medicaid and Medicare as part of his $3 trillion budget to be unveiled Monday, and he will provide miniscule increases in spending on other domestic programs.

"It's a very small increase," an Office of Management and Budget official tells the Associated Press. "Very small."

The deficit is expected to reach $400 billion in the next budget, adding to what Philips and McKinnon call the "trail of deficits and debt" Bush is leaving in his wake.

Bush Scorecard-- Not Including Human Lives

2008-01-24T07:17:00.000-08:00

Via ThinkProgress.org

Great Insight into Bush

2008-01-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

(Post shamelessly stolen from Piglipstick. Similar story here.)

Excerpt from The Bush Tragedy, a new book by Slate's Jacob Weisberg.

"In an April 1995 memo, Bush invited his staff to come to his office to look at a painting. … The picture is a Western scene of a cowboy riding up a craggy hill, with two other riders following behind him. Bush told visitors—who often noted his resemblance to the rider in front—that it was called A Charge To Keep and that it was based on his favorite Methodist hymn of that title, written in the eighteenth century by Charles Wesley. As Bush noted in the memo, which he quoted in his autobiography of the same title: "I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves." Bush identified with the lead rider, whom he took to be a kind of Christian cowboy, an embodiment of indomitable vigor, courage, and moral clarity."

He took the painting to the white house and hung it in the oval office, pointing it out to visitors and added some stuff to his narrative:

"He came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination."

But the reality of his favorite painting is somewhat different:

"Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled "The Slipper Tongue," published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught."

Title of Pantload's autobiography?

The Lies About Iraq Never End

2008-01-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

Highly promising figures that the administration cited to demonstrate economic progress in Iraq last fall, when Congress was considering whether to continue financing the war, cannot be substantiated by official Iraqi budget records, the Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday.

White House Tape Recycling May Have Erased Controversial E-Mails

2008-01-17T09:43:00.000-08:00

The White House has acknowledged in a new court filing that it routinely recycled computer backup tapes containing its e-mail records until October 2003, a practice that could mean that many electronic messages from the first two years of the Bush administration are lost forever.

The disclosure raises the possibility that the White House effectively erased e-mail related to some of the biggest controversies of the Bush administration, including the leak of a CIA officer's name, the start of the Iraq war and the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.

Honey, I Shrunk the Economy! (And all I have to show for it are these crappy approval ratings)

2008-01-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

Bush's reverse Midas touch strikes again*:

Citigroup announced a steep cut in its stock dividend and another big investment by foreign investors on Tuesday after taking more write-downs related to subprime securities and posting a $9.83 billion loss for the fourth quarter.

Beginning what is expected to be a grim week for financial company earnings, Citigroup said it was writing down $22.2 billion because of soured mortgage-related investments and bad loans. The bank is also cutting its dividend by 41 percent and obtaining a $12.5 billion cash infusion to strengthen its balance sheet, including big investments by its former chairman, Sanford I. Weill, and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. Facing rising expenses and deepening losses, Citigroup is expected to embark on a major cost-cutting campaign that could result in at least 4,000 layoffs. And thousands more could be in the offing in the coming months.

Stock market continues to plunge-- over 200 down right now for the Dow. Not a pretty picture.

*Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's not ALL Bush's fault. I just couldn't resist the post title.

UPDATE: Not a good day for Bush-- new low approval rating.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy...

And the Dow ended down 277 points)

George McGovern: Why Bush Must Go

2008-01-06T09:53:00.001-08:00

WaPo.

Bush Wins Golden Duke For Best Scandal

2008-01-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

The First Annual Golden Duke Award for Best Scandal goes to President George W. Bush, for his role in leading the politicization of the federal government during his presidency.

Perhaps best exemplified by the U.S. Attorneys purge (which took place in 2006 but was not uncovered until 2007), the Bush-led effort to turn the federal government into an arm of the Republican Party had been underway for years but the true scope of his deliberate undermining of the rule of law was not fully realized or appreciated until 2007.

Golden Duke judge John Dean, who knows a thing or two about corruption, was one of the four (out of five) judges who selected Bush for the preeminent Dukey:

Bush's politics have done for good government what war does for peace, what famine does for hunger, what Alzheimer's does for memory, what Lee Harvey Oswald did for Dallas – you get the idea. This president has done more to damage our system of government, and weaken us around the world, than any of his predecessors. Bush is America's worst president ever, only equaled by the abetting of his partner, Dick Cheney.

Or as fellow judge Rick Hertzberg put it:

It would be a shame to allow his presidency to expire without presenting him with a cheesy statue of Randy “Duke” Cunningham . . . although there may be some good ones in his ex-Presidency.

Notified in advance of the President's win, the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) took time from his busy presidential campaign schedule to note the occasion. From his communications director, Hari Sevugan:

“The real travesty is that he wasn’t nominated for a lifetime achievement award. But I’m sure this will look nice in the trophy case next to the “Mission Accomplished” banner and Brownies’ Arabian horse show ribbons.”

The Dodd camp's sentiment was shared by blogger and netroots gadfly Markos "Kos" Moulitsas:

"I feel bad for all those scandal-plagued Republicans who never had a shot at winning given Bush's existence. He really had no peer, and deserves nothing less of a 'lifetime achievement award' for his efforts to enable every one of the GOP's most corrupt."

In honor of his (under)achievement, President Bush will be entitled to receive the coveted Golden Duke statuette, at such time as the actual figurine is sculpted, casted, paid for and delivered, which may or may not be accomplished before the end of his presidency.

Updated List of Official (Mainstream) Bush Scandals

2007-12-31T11:06:00.000-08:00

Via TPM.

Smirker in Chief

2007-12-29T05:41:00.001-08:00

Most inappropriate smirks of 2007.

Bush the Puppet

2007-12-29T05:39:00.000-08:00

and his evil controllers.

'How Bush became a government unto himself'

2007-12-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

Dan Abrams examined the Bush administration's unprecedented use of signing statements in the second installment of his week-long MSNBC series on "Bush League Justice."

"President Bush doesn't like to veto laws," Abrams began. "He doesn't have to. Since he took office, he's been attaching conditions to laws already passed by Congress, allowing him to essentially disobey the will of Congress and dramatically expand his own power."

Bush has issued 1100 signing statements -- almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together -- often completely reversing the intended effect of legislation. For example, when Congress voted overwhelmingly to ban torture, Bush announced that this would "make it clear to the world that this government does not torture." Two weeks later, he added a signing statement to the bill that allowed him to ignore it.

Similarly, when a bill required the Justice Department to report to Congress on the use of the Patriot Act, Bush added a proviso that he could override this requirement any time he thought necessary.

Law professor Jonathan Turley told Abrams that the practice has two very serious effects. On one hand, "by using signing statements to this extent, the president becomes a government unto himself." But it also gives lower-level officials cover for their own illegal behavior by creating a deliberate area of ambiguity about the meaning of the laws.

"How does he get away with it?" Abrams asked Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage. Savage explained that signing statements have previously been considered merely as instructions to the executive branch on how to interpret legislation, and typically no one outside the executive branch even reads them.

"It's an extraordinarily destabilizing effect upon our system," Turley emphasized. "Our system really only has one rule that can't be broken ... That one rule is, you can't go outside the rules." Once the executive ceases to respect the authority of the legislative branch, everything else is thrown into doubt.

Savage noted that Dick Cheney appears to be the motivating force in this expansion of presidential power. Cheney was chief of staff to President Gerald Ford in the 1970's, when Congress was taking steps to prevent any future Watergate-style excesses, and he has never ceased trying to bring things back to the way they were under Nixon.

According to Savage, Cheney's aide David Addington, who has been with him since the 1980's "is said to be the chief architect of these signing statements" and is the leader of the legal team pushing the most radical theories of presidential power.

"It's astounding to me how they continue to get away with this," Abrams concluded.

Bush Threatens to Veto Anti-Torture Bill

2007-12-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

Simply despicable.

Isn't it wonderful having a war-criminal as president?

Evoluton of Bush's Language on Iran and Nuclear Weapons

2007-12-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

From Dan Froomkin.

Related: "Bush under fire over Iran claims"

The Staggering, Unfathomable Cost of the Iraq War

2007-12-04T07:58:00.000-08:00

Bush's Real Legacy

Major Dollar Worries

2007-12-04T07:56:00.000-08:00

Dollar hanging by unravelling thread-- Dollar faces new sell-off if Gulf states end greenback pegs.

Iran Hawk Smackdown

2007-12-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald

US says it has right to kidnap British citizens

2007-12-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

Insanity:

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

(snip)

There was concern this weekend from Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP, who said: “The very idea of kidnapping is repugnant to us and we must handle these cases with extreme caution and a thorough understanding of the implications in American law.”
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: “This law may date back to bounty hunting days, but they should sort it out if they claim to be a civilised nation.”
The US Justice Department declined to comment.

Bushco Secrecy

2007-11-25T06:14:00.000-08:00

2007 edition.

Question	Criminal Investigation	Investigation by independent panel	Neither
Possible Attempts to use Justice Dept. for political purposes	41%	30%	25%
Possible use of telephone wiretaps without a warrant	38%	25%	34%
Possible use of torture in terror investigations	38%	24%	34%