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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney pulled a muscle in his back while moving boxes and will be in a wheelchair for Tuesday's inauguration ceremony.Me I'm not buying the story. My guess is that he can't walk after being they've heavily sedated by the Secret Service when he refused to leave office.
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Over at FDL, Thers also took a swipe at this bizarre little love letter.To that end, the AP's 1,400 paean to Bush's persona constitutes an odd puff piece, basically taking many of the presidential personality traits that have come to annoy millions, and characterizing them as admirable qualities.
Bush demands punctuality and disdains inefficiency. Every meeting better have a clear purpose. And it better not repeat what he already knows.
He is up early and in the Oval Office by 6:45 a.m. By 9:30 to 10 at night, it's lights out. He likes to be fresh and won't get cheated on his sleep.
In sessions with policy experts, Bush tends to ask questions that get right to the nub of a sticky issue. His top aides speak regretfully about how the country never got to see that side of him, even after all this time.
The AP presents this as a good quality. I read this and think Bush gets "right to the nub" of an issue because he doesn't care much for details, context, nuance, or history.
Bush is insistently -- some say unforgivably -- optimistic, no matter how low his poll numbers get.
"Every day has been pretty joyous," he said recently, summing up one of the hardest presidencies ever known.
The AP piece suggests this is evidence of a sunny disposition. I read this and think Bush is vaguely delusional.
The evidence is in. George W. Bush is, it has emerged, a cretin. You may find this news surprising, even shocking, but despite recent claims to the contrary, the facts are clear: the man is an absolute doorknob.Jed L at DKos also took notice and Digby weighed in as only she can,Anyone wishing to argue that Bush is not a cretin faces rather an uphill struggle, in that whenever the man goes out in public, he acts like a cretin....
[...]
But that doesn't mean nobody will try to make believe that George W. Bush is "cool" and to be admired. Mere objective reality has never been much of a consideration for many of the people tempted to advance such a thesis before, after all. Here for instance is Ben Feller of the AP, pretending that Bush is Cool on the grounds that he gives people idiotic nicknames and once "even gave the German chancellor an impromptu, perhaps unwelcome [!] neck rub." And there's more! He's also petulant, bullying, and authoritarian! Now don't you love him just a tiny bit more?
Despite the writer's obvious fondness for the Bushian personality, it actually confirms everything I ever assumed about him. He's a self-centered, authoritarian jerk who requires everyone to bow and scrape before him, even though he's an idiot. I've known plenty of people like him. He's America's mean ex-husband and the country can't wait to sign the final divorce decree.So why am I bringing this up now? Well, yesterday I found out the Ben Feller, the author of this homage to the Fratboy-in-Chief, is a Penn State Alumnus. And Penn State couldn't be prouder.
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Through it all Mr. Bush kept his head up and soldiered on. He took the criticism in stride. I remember riding with him in his presidential limousine to the Washington Hilton for a speech. A woman standing at an intersection directed an obscene gesture at him that I had hoped he missed. The president waved to her and with a bemused look said to me, "Did you see what she did?"I wonder what obscene gesture the two witnessed? Could it have been this gesture?
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WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
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Robert Draper, however, a former writer for Texas Monthly, spent hours with the president at the White House, getting Bush to open up on these subjects for an upcoming book, which Draper agreed to share with the New York Times. It led to an NYT piece today that is almost impossible to read without feeling incredibly frustrated."A fantastic Freedom Institute". That's funny, given his administration's penchant for extraordinary rendition, torture,
On the subject of his life after the White House:First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75″ thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.” Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute” promoting democracy around the world. But he added, “I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”Bush sure is an impressive one, isn’t he?
1 a : based on fantasy : not real b : conceived or seemingly conceived by unrestrained fancyHere are some synonyms.
FANTASTIC, BIZARRE, GROTESQUE: mean conceived, made, or carried out without adherence to truth or reality.>Perhaps Bush is finally admitting, albeit subconsciously, that his commitment to freedom has all been a big fantasy.
Let me see if I can get Secretary X to do Y, and Secretary Y to do X, and let’s see if we can get both to do it.This helps to explain the dominatrix outfit in these pictures.
“I told Steve Hadley once, I frankly prefer being coordinated than coordinating,” she said, referring to the current national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley.
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Today outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Peter Pace dismissed as inappropriate a transparent and easily measured metric of success of the Bush Iraq surge in favor of a metric which is difficult to gauge and can easily be manipulated by BushCo.
"If you try to define this in terms of level of violence, you've really put yourself on the wrong metric. It isn't about X number today, Y number tomorrow, because the enemy gets a chance to vote in that," Pace said. "The metric really should be for Iraqi citizens. Do they feel better about their lives today than they did yesterday? And do they think they're going to feel better about their lives tomorrow than they do today?"Thank goodness we have McClatchy to report on the state of Iraq. They give us a bit of essential background on this new metric.
The Pentagon's most recent assessment contained two gauges of Iraqi sentiment toward their government. In one, 58 percent of Iraqis said they had confidence in the Iraqi government to improve the situation. That number has held relatively stable for the past year, the report said.
The other asked Iraqis if they have confidence in the Iraqi government's ability to protect them from "threat." The report said 50 percent answered affirmatively in April, vs. 48 percent in December.
The number, however, showed wide variation by sect. In areas dominated by Shiites, whose political parties also dominate the government, 80 percent of respondents or more said yes. In Sunni areas, almost no respondents said yes.
Pace didn't say whether he thought those specific measures were the ones that should be used to measure the surge's success.
The truth of the matter is that BushCo has no intention of exiting Iraq and discussions of metrics of success are only so much window dressing. I also doubt that W or Deadeye give a damn whether we think that they are lying to us about measuring the success of the surge. However, Gen. Patraeus had careful cultivated good press during his career, just as Colin Powell had during his, and he is likely very concerned about the destruction of his reputation at the hands of BushCo. So then,it may be Patraeus to whom Pace is giving this fig leaf.
Technorati Tags: Iraq, BushCo, Gen. Pace, Gen.Patraeus
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Mahablog has two excellent posts up on the illusion of moral clarity. The following passage comes from the second of these posts. I recommend, especially to my conservative readers, to read them both. They are here and here.
As I’ve written elsewhere, achieving moral clarity is remarkably easy.
The standard way to achieve moral clarity on the abortion issue, for example, is to completely disregard women. Examples of such “clear” moralizing include this op ed by Dean Barnett and this one by Michael Gerson.First, take a firm and inflexible position on a moral question. Then, studiously ignore any factors that might call that opinion into question. If the factors refuse to go away, make up lies to neutralize them.
See? Nothin’ to it.
If you are foolish enough to take all facets of an issue into account, you risk not being clear. In fact, the more gut-level honest you are about a messy, unpleasant issue, the less clear you are likely to be. And this is a problem for conservatives, who by nature cannot stand ambiguity. One of the most basic traits of conservatives, in fact, is a compulsion to sort the world into rigid binary categories — right and wrong, good and evil, white and black. Any muddling of categories sends them into nervous fits. But once all things and all issues are properly sorted, they can relax and bask in their moral clarity.
Technorati Tags: Morality, Religion, BushCo.
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David is a great blogger but I think that third paragraph has a typo in it. I believe it was supposed to read,To follow up on the post below about the Attorney General Awards, DOJ's highest honor, I couldn't help but notice that one of the recipients of last year's Attorney General Award for Fraud Prevention was Robert E. Coughlin, II.
Coughlin was the chief of staff to the head of DOJ's criminal division until his quiet resignation earlier this month, first reported yesterday, allegedly because he is facing scrutiny in the Jack Abramoff investigation.
The award "recognizes exceptional dedication and effort to prevent, investigate, and prosecute fraud and white collar crimes." Coughlin was part of a team honored for its work on post-Hurricane Katrina fraud.
In September, Coughlin was honored for his work on fraud and white collar crime. By the following April, he was out because of his alleged connections to the one of the largest white collar crime investigations in DOJ's history. Only in the Gonzales Justice Department.
The award "recognizes exceptional dedication and effort to prevent the investigation and prosecution of fraud and white collar crimes."Let's hope David corrects this tout de suite.
...It never seemed likely to me that the big money boys of the GOP would trust their fortunes to the blithering fool they set forth as president. Let's just say that I wouldn't be surprised if some conversations before the fact took place.-Digby 02/04/07
The first step in Rove's plan to ride Junior to the White House was getting him to run for and win the Texas governership.The first time I really saw [Junior] was in 1991, 1992, the Republican National Convention, where I would see him on the floor and with the Bush family and so forth. There'd been widespread discussions before 1990 that George Bush was a guy to watch [in] the political landscape. ...
The key instrument of those discussions was a political consultant who was working at the time in Texas, a guy named Karl Rove. Rove was largely unknown outside a small circle of friends in the Republican Party in the mid- and late 1980s. He was involved in various political campaigns. He had worked for the father when the father was with the Republican National Committee.
Rove, in 1990 -- I believe it was February or March or April of 1990 -- was sitting in Austin, Texas, with another political consultant. They were talking about some political campaigns that were on tap that year. And he said, "You know, this guy George Bush, very impressive guy. I think I could make him governor, and here's how you would do it." He explained how it would be done.
"George Bush, very impressive guy, you could make him president. Here's how you'd do it." He already had, in 1990, in effect a sort of early blueprint to make George W. Bush the president of the United States.
I don't think at this point Rove gave any thought to how Junior would govern once he was in office It was unlikely that he even cared; for Rove it was all about the process. He only considered what he needed to do to get his boy to Washington.Karl Rove increasingly became the political figure in Texas behind the scenes. He represented every Republican. At one point, every Republican who would run for office and win the nomination in Texas had Karl Rove as his client. The one guy he didn't have was George W. Bush, a guy he had known for years, a guy whose father he had worked for and a guy he had to convince, "You can run for governor. And I can make you governor."
George Bush was skeptical. He didn't think he was going to win. He didn't think he could win. George Bush believed the press. The press was that Ann Richards, the incumbent governor, this extraordinarily attractive figure, a national titan, this Democrat who became a star in Texas, was unbeatable. In fact, George Bush's mother even said to him, Barbara Bush said, "You can't beat Ann Richards."
But Karl Rove knew he could, and he basically worked him. He explained to him with the numbers, with the commitment, with the conviction how he would do it. Effectively, what Karl Rove said was, "The numbers are working in your direction. There are people who will vote for you. The Republican Party is emerging as a constituency that can elect you."
"Two, you will run against her in a way that you will never attack her." Whatever we think about liberation and equality and so forth-- The idea, especially in 1994, of a man publicly attacking a woman on a political stage was something that would be political suicide.
Rove went out of his way to make sure that Bush would never appear to attack Ann Richards, at least in public --that everything he talked about would be above board and about policy. And the policy they talked about more than any other policy was her failure as a governor.
The one area where she had failed, in Bush's eyes, was in the area of criminal justice -- people who should be in prison who weren't in prison. The rise of juvenile crime was something that concerned a lot of Texans, although the statistics under the Richards administration basically showed that, actually, by the time she was running for reelection against George Bush, crime was actually falling.
It didn't make any difference, because the campaign, run by George Bush and Karl Rove, convinced people that crime was at its worst. They believed it. It was a weakness. They exploited it brilliantly.
The power brokers step in.There was something else that was happening politically at the time; not only was George Bush learning the policy that he needed to know if he was going to be a candidate. Karl Rove, his political operative, was putting together the politics, the infrastructure that he needed, which would pay off ultimately in support and money down the road.
He began a front-porch campaign of people from around the country. These are political leaders, mayors, governors -- influential types who would shuttle in and out from different places. They would have little lunches with George Bush. A group from a California and Arizona and Florida would fly in and talk to George Bush as he ostensibly was trying to figure out, "Do I want to run for president? What would happen? Can we talk about this?"
Inevitably, we -- the press -- would be called over to the mansion afterwards. A group would come out, absolutely dazzled by this George Bush person, and would talk about, "He ought to run for president."
Bush himself would say, "Well, I'm still thinking about it."... When he was a reluctant candidate, or seemed to be, at a time when in fact he had decided he was going to run for president. This was all show.
It is highly unlikely that those heavy hitters thought that Junior was suited to be president, but it is not unlikely that they determined Junior would be a suitable front man for an experienced, but unelectable, person who would be the de facto president. By summer of 1998, it looks like they settled on Dead-eye for the job.According to author James Mann, who wrote the Rise of the Vulcans book about Bush's inner Cabinet, Shultz initiated a discussion with George W. in the Spring of 1998, whereby the future President sat down in Shultz's living room on the Stanford University campus, in order to be vetted (in effect) to run for President.
At that meeting were Martin Anderson, the former advisor to both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; Abraham Sofaer, a former Shultz aide; John Cogan and John Taylor, two economics professors; and Stanford's provost, and Shultz protege, Condoleezza Rice. After the "scholars" associated with the Hoover Institution indicated that they thought Bush would make a good Presidential choice, Bush invited Shultz, Rice, and Anderson down to Austin, Texas for a follow-up meeting in the Summer. Out of that meeting, which was joined by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, came the public decision for Bush to run for President.
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