Political messages from McCain funeral

Since this past week has been a non-stop celebration of John McCain ideology in the American press, I'll add my own bit of praise for McCain's posthumous accomplishment: he made his funeral a slap in the face of the current President, who McCain had good reason to despise. And he managed to have the last Democratic President be the main deliverer of the message of McCain's greatness. And to do so in a way that reflected his famous no-red-America-no-blue-America speech of 2004 at a time when McCain's own party is practicing willing partisanship in support of a criminal President while the Democratic Party is afraid to take a partisan stance against that President and in favor of the Constitutional order.

Of course, George W. Bush gave a eulogy, too, at McCain's request. Bush, Liberator of Peoples and Scourge of the Heathen, managed to read his text without notably stumbling. And there was also the signature smirk, when he seemed to take special pride in getting out a complete sentence.

George W. Bush: John McCain 'Made Me Better' NBC News 09/01/2018:

According to Shrub Bush, McCain spoke for "the little guy" and for "forgotten people and forgetten places."

I suppose some of the beneficiaries of the plutocratic tax cuts which he supported were short, so I guess that could be standing up for "the little guy."

What was consistent with McCain's record was the neoconservative refrain that Bush and McCain used to justify the Iraq War that it was all about liberating "death camps" and the like, the mission to bring freedom to countries like Iraq by invading their country, killing hundreds of thousands of their people, and plunging them into protracted conflict and instability. Or, in Shrub's words in the eulogy, "the true peace that comes only with freedom." The peace of the grave is more like it.

Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney created the torture program and the parallel system of "justice" thjat still stumbles along at Guantanamo. McCain criticized the torture policy. But he certainly wasn't willing to take any drastic political action to stop it. And the Torture President is one of the people he specified he wanted to give a speech at his funeral.

Barack Obama's presentation was more than twice as long as Bush's. Barack Obama On John McCain: 'We Never Doubted We Were On The Same Team' NBC News

As I predicted last week, one of the two Presidents giving eulogies was a Republican praising a Republican. And that Obama's speech would inevitably be the more eloquent or memorable of the two. That was true. Not that it took any great predictive powers to guess that.

I'll give Obama credit for noting, in his mild way, that "John was a pretty conservative guy." But it was in the context of praising his Maverick greatness. And, of course, as I also predicted, he praised the virtues of moderation and bipartisanship. McCain "did understand that some principles transcend politics," Obama said. That some values that transcend party." Those principles he listed as self-government, the Constitution, etc., etc. "even the arcane rules and procedures of the Senate." And, of course, the bold Maverick would "occasionally work across the aisle," that dreadful phrase that has come to basically mean that Democrats like to surrender to Republicans.

Democrats will mostly gush about how Obama's mom-and-apple-pie invocation of American virtues to be a mighty putdown of Trump's Administration. Obviously, he didn't go so far as to explicitly condemn the kidnapping of immigrant children.

And then the talking heads even on the "liberal" MSNBC will advise the Democrats to follow his advice by surrendering to Republicans. Which way too many of them are inclined to do anyway!

The recollections Ben Norton shares in this report for The Real News wouldn't have been appropriate for a funeral service. But they are very relevant to what McCain's actual historical legacy is, John McCain: Hawkish Voice of Military-Industrial Complex, Paved Way for Trump 08/31/2018:

The Saturday night Republican horror show: "it was a mess"

Last night, the Republicans had another debate, this one in Greenville, South Carolina. The Young Turks summarize in CBS Republican Debate: The Young Turks Summary 02/13/2016

Cynthia Roldan reports in GOP debate in Greenville gets heated Charleston Post and Courier 02/14/2016:

While discussing America’s war policies, Trump lashed out at former President George W. Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq War, accusing the former administration of lying by claiming that there were weapons of mass destruction when there were none.

Trump even jabbed at claims the earlier Bush White House kept America secure.

“The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe?” Trump said, going on to say “I lost hundreds of friends” in the 9/11 terror attack.

Trump even doubled down on his attack on Jeb Bush, the current GOP candidate, criticizing him for initially struggling to disagree publicly with his brother’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

“It took him five days before his people told him what to say, and he ultimately said it was a mistake,” Trump said of Bush.

Bush, who was openly frustrated with Trump’s attacks, said he didn’t mind being singled out but that he was “sick and tired of him going after my family.”

“While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe,” Jeb Bush said. “And I’m proud of what he did.”

A President Trump's foreign policy would be at least as misguided as Shrub Bush's and Dick Cheney's. It would be quite a feat to have one more disastrous.

But I am glad Trump tossed that point out there. The Democrats should have been doing it from September of 2001. The Young Turks refer to that moment in Trump's performance, CBS News Republican Debate: The Biggest Winner Was... 02/13/2016:

D.D. Guttenplan reviews the debate in Trump Says This Was His Best Debate Yet. He Might Be Right. The Nation 02/14/2016:

The Republican Party’s continuing failure to come up with a consensus alternative to the Greatest Shill on Earth hasn’t just made Trump the prohibitive favorite in the South Carolina primary on February 20. It has also given a television audience who wouldn’t believe Bernie Sanders if he told them the earth rotates around the sun repeated exposure to the notion that the Republican party is the tool of “lobbyists and special interests,” Jeb Bush is their creature, George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq,” Ted Cruz is an even bigger liar, while corporate America has stashed “$2.5 trillion offshore.” And by the way, Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things having to do with women’s health.”

Meanwhile, Rubio also announced that “Ted Cruz has been telling lies,” Cruz called Rubio a lackey of “the donor class,” John Kasich pointed out Jeb Bush’s ruinous economic legacy in Florida, while Bush denied he ever threatened to “moon” anyone.

Trump is a rightwing demagogue. The occasional shot he takes that are things progressives might agree with on their face are not things he takes particularly serious. His fans are turned on by his White Power appeals: cheering cops who murder unarmed black people for no good reason, demanding the deportation of 12 million Latinos, promising to bully Mexico and bomb the crap out of this or that Arab country.

Bush family values

With Jeb Bush running for the Presidency, this is worth remembering: "Bush-style conservatism isn’t only about upholding the plutocracy. It’s about money as a lubricator of “free enterprise” in the varied forms Bushes themselves have pursued through the generations: banking, oil, real estate, baseball team owning." (Sam Tanenhaus, The Bush Restoration 02/23/2015 The National Interest Mar-Apr 2015 issue)

Cenk Uygur looks at Jeb's current campaign in Jeb Bush Rejects His Brother By Doing More Of The Same The Young Turks 02/22/2015:

And if you have trouble remembering what government under the last Bush Presidency, aka, the Cheney-Bush Administration, was like, Tanenhaus has this reminder: "George W. Bush slipped through to a second term, but he needed help from Supreme Court conservatives to get there in 2000; Gore received roughly 540,000 votes more than he did. And he returned to private life trailing more bad feeling than any departing president since Richard Nixon." (my italics)

Shrub Bush's famous moderation and "compassionate conservatism" were on prominent display in the invasion of Iraq:

The trouble was “a series of faulty assumptions” that Bush’s war cabinet aggressively promulgated. One was that regime change in Iraq would bring stability to the region; another, that Iraq had a direct connection to the 9/11 attacks. Bush administration hawks ignored all warnings that the Iraq invasion would inflame an already-volatile region, summoning forth fresh waves of jihadists. The martial dogma they embraced struck many as new. In fact, it was an offshoot of the rollback or “liberationist” doctrine espoused by militant anti-Communists in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, this approach was rejected as irresponsible by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. But it flourished on the right. Its first major political spokesman was Barry Goldwater. “In addition to keeping the free world free, we must try to make the Communist world free,” he declared in The Conscience of a Conservative. “To these ends, we must always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing.” This crusading foreign policy was later taken up by neoconservatives in Bush 43’s administration and at outposts like the Defense Policy Board and the Weekly Standard. Together, they created the Bush Doctrine, which was Goldwaterism revived. [my emphasis in bold]

Tannenhaus quote from Shrub's biography of his father: "When I was considering options for my vice presidential nominee, I called to ask [Bush Sr.’s] advice about his former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Without hesitating, he said, 'Dick would be a great choice. He would give you candid and solid advice. And you’d never have to worry about him going behind your back.'”

Old Man Bush is supposed to be moderate, too. Like Shrub. And Jeb.

Old Man Bush's moderation was on view early on: "In his first campaign, for the Senate in 1964, Bush denounced the Civil Rights Act, just as Barry Goldwater did. Bush lost—to the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Yarborough, who had supported the legislation—but he was now an early favorite of National Review." Or, as Charlie Pierce likes to call it, the long-time white supremacist journal National Review.

But he gets Bipartisan admiration: "Today the elder Bush’s presidency has profited from revisionism. (Barack Obama is an admirer.)"

Tannenhaus does point out that Old Man Bush did handle the collapse of the Soviet empire with less cinematic cowboy belligerence than St. Reagan's fans like to imagine Ronnie did: "Bush’s confident stewardship contrasts strikingly with the crusading of his son and discredits the claim that the two presidencies [Bush 41 and Shrub's] were ideologically of a piece."

And if Jeb manages to get the nomination, he is likely to try the same compassionate-conservative trick that both Old Man Bush and Shrub used: "if the economy continues to improve, Obama could leave office as a relatively popular president, as Clinton did in 2000, despite having been impeached. George W. Bush, grasping this, 'cunningly presented himself as Bill Clinton’s heir,' as David Frum wrote in 2008. Jeb is better positioned than most other Republicans to do the same in 2016."

And we need to remember the Bush family's elevated concept of public service: "for the Bushes, loyalty comes first. And like all dynastic families, they equate what is best for themselves with what is best for the country. This is the meaning of 'public service.'"

If you want a major dose of Jeb's foreign policy rhetoric, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs presents a video of his recent major foreign policy address, Jeb Bush addresses The Chicago Council on Global Affairs YouTube date 02/18/2015:

Obama and Bush

The one thing Dick Cheney couldn't do in the Bush Administration with his "dark side" policies of torture and violations of the laws of war was to have a subsequent Administration that validated those policies by either continuing them directly or by failing to prosecute known crimes. Obama did some of both for him. But the failure to prosecute the torture crimes is the most consequential.

Kevin Gosztola has useful things to say about Obama's laudatory comments for Shrub Bush today at the didication of the Bush Library in 'The World's Most Exclusive Club': Obama's Speech at the Bush Library Dedication FDL Dissenter 04/25/2013. Including this:

... today President Obama has more in common with former President George W. Bush than with Senator Barack Obama, who decided to run for president in the 2008 Election.

That is partly because Senator Barack Obama did not know what it would be like to be the most powerful man in the world. It is also because Obama has bought into many of Bush's counterterrorism policies and that has helped Bush’s legacy in ways that many of his supporters probably never imagined.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden, who served under Bush, has said, "Obama came to embrace Bush's positions. Both Bush and Obama said the country was at war. The enemy was al-Qaida. The war was global in nature. And the United States would have to take the fight to the enemy, wherever it may be." Former vice president Dick Cheney said in an NBC interview in January 2011, "In terms of a lot of the terrorism policies — the early talk, for example, about prosecuting people in the CIA who've been carrying out our policies — all of that's fallen by the wayside. I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate." Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who authorized torture at Abu Ghraib, said in September 2011 Obama had accepted much of the Bush doctrine out of necessity.

Jack Goldsmith, who served as an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer under Bush, wrote in 2009, "The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit." He argued, "Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies."

Thus, Obama has done what Bush could not do: he has taken policies that were unpopular or reviled and transformed them into something legitimate and acceptable. He also has made the "war on terrorism" more permanent by abandoning the phrase "war on terrorism" and relying on covert operations that involve targeted assassinations by drones or the outsourcing of detentions and interrogations to unsavory characters that national security agencies have allied themselves with (like, for example, in Somalia). [my emphasis]

Not a pretty picture.

Neither his foreign nor domestic policies on the whole have been as destructive as those of the Cheney-Bush Administration.

But he has also largely accepted the framing of both. The foreign policy strategy of world hegemony and not allowing any "peer competitor" country or alliances to arise remains, virtually insuring future wars like that in Afghanistan and more limited military interventions like those in Libya and Syria.

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, george w bush, global war on terror, torture

September 11 retrospective: George W. Bush and enduring lies

Shrub Bush: Still lying after all these years

Via Eric Bohlert, this New York Times report reminds us that Cheney and Bush promoted a lie about their decisive decisiveness on 9/11, Newly Published Audio Provides Real-Time View of 9/11 Attacks by Jim Dwyer 09/07/2011:

In its 2004 report, the commission praised front-line aviation officials. But it then thoroughly dismantled the accounts of senior government officials, who in the weeks after Sept. 11, and for more than a year afterward, assured the public that fighter pilots had been in hot pursuit of the suicidal hijackers. During these chases, according to accounts from Vice President Dick Cheney, the F.A.A. and the Defense Department, the pilots were described as ready to carry out a wrenching order from President George W. Bush to shoot down airliners.

The commission discovered that little of that was true: of the four flights, military commanders had nine minutes’ notice on one before it flew into the World Trade Center, and did not learn the other three had been hijacked until after they had crashed. Military commanders, given an order outside the chain of command to shoot down hijacked airliners, did not pass it along to the fighter pilots, but instructed them instead to identify the tail numbers of any suspected rogue planes. That turned out to be a prudent call because by then, there were no longer hijackers in the air for them to shoot.

The newly published multimedia document spells out precisely how the recordings contradicted the accounts of the senior officials.

Bush repeated this whopper in his 9/11 interview on the National Geographic Channel. I blogged about that interview after it first aired. But I didn't notice a single article or blog commentary about it; I'm sure there were some. I not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved by that.

Tags: 9/11, george w bush

September 11 retrospective: George W. Bush recalls his own towering greatness

The National Geographic Channel on Sunday the 28th premiered a long interview with Shrub Bush on the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush: The 9/11 Interview. It was a puff piece, effectively journalism-free. It even included melodramatic background music to go with the former President's words as he related his heroic deeds of 9/11 and the immediate aftermath. The website's blurb gives a flavor:

President Bush recalls what he was thinking and feeling and what drove the real-time, life-or-death decisions he faced in the first minutes, hours and days after the most lethal terrorist attacks ever on U.S. soil. Hear in unprecedented, intimate detail what he grappled with as both commander in chief, and as a man concerned for his family and fellow citizens. George W. Bush: The 9/11 Interview also takes viewers behind the scenes with extensive archival footage and exclusive materials directly from his library that open a new window into his personal experiences during that historic day that changed the face of America, and the world, forever.

Watching it, I was reminded of Tom Tomorrow's comment on an earlier puff piece on Bush and 9/11: "It's funny, Lois--I've never seen the President and Superman in the same room."

The credits at the end say that the footage was from a two-hour interview with Bush. The program probably doesn't use more than 35-40 minutes of it. We don't hear the interviewers questions, only Bush speaking as in a monologue. It was be interesting (if tedious) to see the full interview with the questions. In the portions that aired, Bush is as well-spoken as I've ever seen him. I didn't catch a single instance of his characteristic broken syntax. I was wondering while watching it if it wasn't a scripted performance with Bush reading off a teleprompter.

A couple of things did stand out as having some actual significance. One is that it was clear to me that Bush is defensive about his actions on the actual day of the attack: his stunned look while listening to grade-school children read The Pet Goat, his return to Washington only late in the day. He depicts himself as a fearless warlord, eager to return to the capital to direct the troops, while nevertheless directing the action from Air Force One and a secure bunker, boldly making the tough decisions that fell on his shoulders In A Time Of War.

The other thing I particularly noticed is that he said that one of his options on 9/11/2001 would have been to declare war. Since he explains that they didn't really know that entire day that the perpetrators were Al Qa'ida, it not clear on whom war would have been declared. (Iraq?) But his comment seemed completely oblivious to the very clear language of Article 1 of the Constitution giving the power to declare war exclusively to Congress. Is he really that unknowledgible about what school children learn about the Constitution? Has he so absorbed Dick Cheney's interpretation of the lawless Unitary Executive that he thinks there's no need to even pretend to respect the Constitutional provision?

As I thought about it, though, I wondered if what we hear there may be a conceptually garbled (though syntactically understandable) version of something that has been part of discussions with his lawyers about his liability for war crimes charges. If he sets foot in any foreign country other than Saudi Arabia and Israel, he's subject to arrest and indictment and being sent to the Hague to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Though the torture crimes would probably be the easiest for a prosecutor to prove, he could also be charged with planning a war of aggression based on the invasion of Iraq, the most serious charge brought against the German leaders at Nuremburg.

And one of his vulnerabilities on that charge would be that he violated the Congressional Iraq War resolution passed in October 2002. It would be understandable that his attorneys might try to argue that in invading Iraq, he was acting on his own Presidential powers under the US Constitution. Bush's thought that declaring war on his own was one of his options on 9/11 could be a product of such a discussion with his attorneys.

Tags: 9/11, george w bush

Shrub Bush on Bin Laden's death: total absence of self-reflection

It's not that George W. Bush ever presented himself to the public as particularly self-reflective or even especially serious.

But his reaction to the news of Osama bin Laden's demise (from Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich, US forces kill Osama bin Laden The Independent 05/02/2011) still surprised me by its cluelessness:

The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done. [my emphasis]

For a man who will have potential arrest and indictment hanging over him for the rest of his life for torture and even potentially murder in connection with the torture program, it takes some combination of incredible arrogance and lack of appreciation of one's own vulnerabilities to say something like, "No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."

There is a sense, of course, in which that is true. The torture issue isn't going away. There will be a formal reckoning with it someday. For the good of the United States, I hope it's sooner rather than later.

The Obama Administration should take a hint from Bush's statement and do its duty to prosecute the torture crimes of the previous Administration. And of this one, if the evidence warrants it.

Tags: accountability for torture, george w bush, osama bin laden, torture

The legendary May 1, 2003 Mission Accomplished speech

Out of curiosity, I went back to check the PBS Newshour commentary from Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks on May 2, 2003, where they gave their considered evaluation of Bush's Mission Accomplished speech the day before. I expected to hear Bobo praising the speech and Shields, who seemed to be more often fully conscious in those days than now, to be more critical. After listening to their commentary, I'm struck by what a measure of the depth of both their judgments it represented.

Today, of course, the Mission Accomplished speech is a subject of ridicule, generally regarded as one of the silliest and most ill-advised Presidential stunts ever. Fortunately, viewers of the Quality TV offered by the PBS Newshour were treated to the sober judgments of Bobo and Sleepy Mark, who could obviously see beyond the superficial judgments of the moment:

The president's victory speech

JIM LEHRER: All right. What did you think of the president's victory speech last night?

DAVID BROOKS: It was actually an interesting aesthetic debate over whether him flying into the boat was gimmicky and demeaning, which is what mature people thought or gimmicky and cool, which is what I thought. And so there is sort of an aesthetic judgment there. To me, the important things were the fact that he recognized these sailors who have been away from their families for ten months, some of them missing ... 150 missing the birth of their children. To me when this whole war proceeds into history, this cultural moment will be defined by those sailors and soldiers and the young people who are looking at this war will have their world view shaped by what they see of those people. And it will be totally different the way the Vietnam era saw the world. That will be an interesting thing.

The other substantive thing Bush said, he called this action in Iraq a battle. He said it was part of a longer war and you really got a sense of his mentality. Afghanistan was part of it. The al-Qaida fight was part of it. But we now got a lot more parts to go. And he said significantly the tide is turning. The tide... but you get the sense that he doesn't feel that something is over. He is in the middle of something Iran, Iraq, Syria. It is all not militarily but it's part of a life-long process for him.

JIM LEHRER: How do you feel about it?

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, I thought it was just in view of presidential presentation, it was spectacular. I mean, it was visually arresting. The president did the right thing. He struck the right note by not taking a victory lap himself, but offering a victory salute to the sailors, who, as David pointed, to the point of exhaustion. I mean these are people that have been out there ten months; 150 children have been born while they were at sea off this crew alone.

JIM LEHRER: No carrier has been out as long as this one.

MARK SHIELDS: No carrier has been out this long. And it was a symbolism that was heavy. The Abraham Lincoln; that did not go unnoticed. The fact that it was the only carrier that had been in both Afghanistan and Iraq -- but, you know, will it be a success? I thought of other great presidential moments. I thought of Jack Kennedy at Berlin in 1963. Ronald Reagan at Berlin in 1987 and Normandy....

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Gorbachev, bring down this wall.

MARK SHIELDS: One thing missing. I talked to professor Robert Schmuhl today, who's the author of "Stagecraft" and "Statecraft," and sort of an expert on this, and he pointed out two things to me. One, 9:00 Thursday night is the most viewed television hour of the entire week, so it was very shrewd scheduling on the part of the White House; they had their maximum audience then. But the other thing was there was not a memorable line that came from the speech. There wasn't "Ich bin ein Berliner". There was not a "tear down that wall." And I think we'll see this footage over and over again, probably with a voiceover of this is the president who is comfortable with his troops.

JIM LEHRER: Rather than hearing his words --

Assessing the criticisms of the speech

DAVID BROOKS: One of the nice things he did was talk about the action as the activation of America's true nation, not a Republican thing, not a Democratic thing. He talked about FDR's four freedoms, he talked about the Truman Doctrine; the Reagan Cold War policies. This -- he cast this as part of a long-term American project advancing the tide of democracy and on the Lincoln made researches to the Gettysburg Address as part of the founding of that.

JIM LEHRER: Some of the punditry suggested that the president and his handlers used these sailors and that aircraft carrier and all of the circumstances, props for his presidential reelection campaign -- cheap shot?

DAVID BROOKS: Not entirely. I went home last night in a terrible mood because I thought a lot of the pundits had ignored the sailors, had treated them as they were bunting in a big campaign event. Whereas the president paid tribute to the sailors. I wrote this up on a spasm of anger on the magazine's Web site and I got a lot of thoughtful commentaries -- well a minority of thoughtful commentaries -- some of which said the president started the politicization of this with the gimmick of flying in and treating it as a campaign prop. That's not an illegitimate shot.

It was -- some people who support the war believe he cheapened it in by flying in, by not delivering it from the Oval Office, by landing in military uniform, but I do think he at least paid tribute to those people unlike the pundits.

MARK SHIELDS: The most recurring criticism I heard of the president was the uniform, that you recall during the 2000 campaign, questions he was missing from the meetings in Alabama when he went to work on a political campaign there, didn't show up for reserve meetings. There was a question just exactly what his commitment was to the Texas Air National Guard, especially in the very important Battle of Amarillo. And so that was raised by some critic. I have flown in on to the Abraham Lincoln, I've spent a night on the Abraham Lincoln.

JIM LEHRER: I didn't remember watching you doing it live.

MARK SHIELDS: I didn't have the cameras. One shrewd thing the president did do when he got off in his flight suit was he had the helmet off, you know, the helmet. Because when you leave the helmet on, Condi Rice left the helmet on for the picture and nobody.... I don't care who it is --

JIM LEHRER: Looks good in a helmet?

MARK SHIELDS: Chuck Yeager doesn't look good. John Glenn didn't look good. I mean, it just dwarfs the person, so he was smart enough to do that. But sure, it is a legitimate question, but I don't think there is any question overall that last night was a smashing success politically for the president.

Looking ahead to the 2004 election

JIM LEHRER: And the polls, there is a new poll today, Washington Post/ABC Poll that shows the president enormously popular with the public, enormous confidence the public has in his ability to handle foreign affairs but not so much with domestic affairs. Why don't the two carry over?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, there are a number of things. The president said he wanted to be uniter not a divider when he ran. That hasn't worked out. It's his fault whether he has been a divisive figure as Democrats were charged or whether in fact the Democrats have been polarized. The president never got the boost out of this war that his father got for his leadership, in large part because his father did not have that same level of antipathy and opposition from the Democrats. And the reality is, Jim, if you're Karl Rove going into 2004, you want it to be about George W. Bush commander in chief on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. You don't want to be about 6 percent unemployment today.

JIM LEHRER: Sure. But the Democrats, who are now the nine who want to take President Bush's job, are going to have a debate this weekend in South Carolina, are going to be talking about domestic things, are they not?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And they'll have an advantage. They start way behind; 69 percent of the registered Democrats can't name one of the people running for the nomination. So they're just beginning.

JIM LEHRER: Now that is really being behind --

DAVID BROOKS: 9 percent is the John Kerry, they can name John Kerry tied with Al Gore, the number of people who still think Al Gore is running. So they're just starting. The advantage they have is that there have been two George Bushs. There has been the foreign policy Bush who has been a progressive, bold, very moralistic person -- somewhat taking Democratic rhetoric of human rights and liberation of peoples, using it for his own purposes and to me, reducing the Democrats to seeming somewhat churlish and conservative; but on the domestic side, the moral progressive, bold vision just hasn't carried over. The Republican domestic policy, the White House domestic policy is the same basic Republican orthodox policy that you had five years ago or ten years ago. There hasn't been sort of a new post-9/11 George Bush on domestic policy. To me, that's why he is still vulnerable [my emphasis]

Tags: david brooks, iraq war, george w bush, mark shields

It was eight years ago today...

When Dear Leader Bush informed us that we had triumphed in the Iraq War.

Greg Mitchell recalls how our star reporters and pundits fawned over him in At 8th Anniversary: How Media Heavies Hailed Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' Stunt Huffington Post 04/29/2011. And that didn't include just FOX News. He cites babbling adoration from Chris Matthews, Gwen Ifill and Maureen Dowd, who wrote:

Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics. Compared to Karl Rove's "revvin' up your engine" myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer's movies look like Lizzie McGuire.

This time Maverick didn't just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MiG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

We might have hoped our media stars would have learned something. We could hope for a pony, too. As Mitchell reminds us:

Even today, nearly eight years later, the often "overconfident" reporting from Baghdad and Kabul sometimes takes your breath away. At least two U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq this week so far, and over 45,000 of our troops remain there today.

Tags: george w bush, greg mitchell, iraq war

For President's Day: James Buchanan

James Buchanan: a worse President than Shrub Bush?

Civil War historian Glenn LaFantasie makes the case against James Buchanan, President of the United States 1857-1861, in Who's the worst president of them all? Salon 02/21/2011. But he still has a close competitor for that spot:

Buchanan's sins were many. Their consequences were felt by Northerners and Southerners through four years of a bloody Civil War. And so we still feel the effects of his ineptness 150 years after the fact. But we are still too close to Bush 43's despicable actions in office -- the ripple effect of all the mayhem he sought purposely to create -- for us to understand just how much lasting damage he actually accomplished. Even so, Bush's eight years in office were an unmitigated disaster. In fact, the more we learn as time goes by, the worse Bush's presidency continues to get; there will undoubtedly be more damning revelations in the years and decades ahead.

Hence my verdict: As of today, Presidents' Day 2011, James Buchanan wins the dubious distinction of having been our worst president. Nevertheless, it is well within the realm of possibility -- once historians have a chance to reckon more completely with all of Bush 43's extraordinary transgressions as president -- that W might someday unseat Buchanan as the very worst president this nation has ever had. [my emphasis]

Tags: george w bush, james buchanan

The Bush Administration and the Imperial Presidency

FDL had a book salon event this past weekend to discuss The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (2010), edited by Julian Zelizer. Zelizer participated and wrote the introductory post. Speaking of himself in the third person, he summarizes his broad view of the Cheney-Bush Administration:

In the area of national security, the administration systematically expanded the power of the executive branch to deploy military forces abroad and implement related programs such as domestic surveillance, part of a deliberate drive to recreate the pre-Watergate “imperial presidency” of the Nixon era. And in electoral politics, Bush and his adviser Karl Rove adopted the goal of assembling a permanent Republican majority that would equal the strength of the New Deal coalition energized by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s—based on an unstable approach that sometimes operated through “big-tent” tactics but more often reflected ideologically divisive appeals to the conservative base.

In the book’s second chapter, Zelizer demonstrates that, despite the antigovernment rhetoric of the conservative movement, the expansion and centralization of power in the executive branch is a major legacy of conservative governance from Nixon and Reagan through Bush. Key policymakers in the Bush administration, including Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, worked to restore presidential prerogatives that the Democratic Congress had weakened in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. During the 1970s, Congress sought to restrict the autonomy of the White House through reforms such as the War Powers Act, the Church Committee’s exposure of the CIA’s extralegal activities, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (requiring warrants for domestic wiretaps), and the independent counsel statute. [my emphasis]

And he notes the authoritarian trend in Republican Party conservatism: "'The war on terrorism,' Zelizer concludes, 'has highlighted the reality that presidential power is integral, rather than aberrational, to modern conservatism.'" (my emphasis)

Tags: bush administration, dick cheney, george w bush

Harsh words from Dan Froomkin on the Bush-Cheney record - and true

Dan Froomkin lays out the grim legacy of the Bush torture policy and the foreign policy of which it was a part (The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir Huffington Post 11/22/20-10):

These days, when we think of George W. Bush, we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy is the loss of our moral authority, and the transformation of the United States of America from global champion of human rights into an outlaw nation.

History is likely to judge Bush most harshly for two things in particular: Launching a war against a country that had not attacked us, and approving the use of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.

And that's why the two most essential lies -- among the many -- in his new memoir are that he had a legitimate reason to invade Iraq, and that he had a legitimate reason to torture detainees.

The Cheney-Bush Administration represents a very ugly inflection point for American governance. And the Obama Administration's unwillingness to deal with the very serious legal issues that the Cheney-Bush torture program in particular present has already seriously prolonged a more hopeful resolution to them.

Tags: accountability for torture, george w bush, torture

Would you give money to this guy?

I watched former Presidents Carter and Shrub Bush on Sunday's Meet the Press talking to lipless David Gregory (who looked to have multiple stiches on the side of his head close to his left eye) about their joint efforts to raise funds for emergency assistance to Haiti.

George W. Bush is one of the most hated men on the planet and one of the most unpopular in the United States. Is this really the best person to put at the head of a fundraising effort?

I mean that seriously. There was Shrub on the TV with his tradmark preppie smirk, saying:

I need to put a pitch in for the clintonbushhaitifund.org. One of my concerns around any crisis is that shysters show up and take advantage of people's good will and generosity. And so, therefore, if people want to help, one, one avenue besides the established NGOs would be to, would be to tap onto that Web site, and, and we'll, we'll help make sure your money is spent in a transparent, accountable way. [my emphasis]

My respons when I heard that was to think, good grief, this is the guy who ran the most corrupt Presidential administration in history. Billions of dollars given to contracts in Iraq under his administration just disappeared without being accounted for.

I know the Bush dynasty is extremely well connected. So they should be able to pull in some big bucks from some Saudi princes, for instance. If it goes to a good purpose, I guess that's good. If you trust an organization whose co-figurehead is George W. Bush to account for money properly.

And will Shrub be able to appear in public meetings to raise money without anyone throwing a shoe at him?

Tags: george w bush

Got to have one of these (NOT!)

I just got an e-mail from the Moonie Times:

Dear friend of The Washington Times,

Here's your chance to be one of the very first to own "W, The Legacy of George W. Bush" the compelling coffee table styled book about an extraordinary president in turbulent times. "W" is packed with gripping pictures and stories all beautifully presented in this historical keepsake presentation of all eight years of the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Save $10.00, just $24.99 plus shipping and handling, by pre-ordering this memorable book today -- be proud to share it with your friends and family!

Sure to be a treasured classic!

Tags: george w bush

Worst.President.Ever. (but the Maverick wants to be in competition)

Bob McElvaine reports on an admittedly "unscientific" poll of historians on Dear Leader's ranking among historians in HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst History News Network 04/01/08. He talks about how his own view of Our Glorious Leader's Presidency has evolved:

Four years ago I rated George W. Bush’s presidency as the second worst, a bit above that of James Buchanan. Now, however, like so many other professional historians, I see the administration of the second Bush as clearly the worst in our history. My reasons are similar to those cited by other historians: In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States enjoyed enormous support around the world. President Bush squandered that goodwill by taking the country into an unnecessary war of choice and misleading the American people to gain support for that war. And he failed utterly to have a plan to deal with Iraq after the invasion. He further undermined the international reputation of the United States by justifying torture.

Mr. Bush inherited a sizable budget surplus and a thriving economy. By pushing through huge tax cuts for the rich while increasing federal spending at a rapid rate, Bush transformed the surplus into a massive deficit. The tax cuts and other policies accelerated the concentration of wealth and income among the very richest Americans. These policies combined with unwavering opposition to necessary government regulations have produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Then there is the incredible shrinking dollar, the appointment of incompetent cronies, the totally inexcusable failure to react properly to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, the blatant disregard for the Constitution—and on and on.

He features some choice quotes from other respondents as well. Check it out.

Tags: bush administration, george w bush, robert mcelvaine