It is a tradition of the president to leave a letter in the Oval office for his successor. Here is Bush's farewell.
To Mr Obamer;
I wunt ta cugrdulate yu and hop yah have a good tym lyke I did. Yah gitall kynds ov stuff wen yu are Prezidant. Yah get to play wit toyz andyah git to eet burgers wen evr yah want. Yah alsa git to tell themilitery to drop bums on any cuntry yah want. Dat is wy it is good to beprezidant.
"Bush's Final Approval Rating: 22 Percent Jan. 16, 2009
(CBS) President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush's final approval rating at 22 percent.
Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.
Mr. Bush's final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.
The rating is far below the final ratings of recent two-term presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who both ended their terms with a 68 percent approval rating, according to CBS News polling.
Recent one term presidents also had higher ratings than Mr. Bush. His father George H.W. Bush had an end-of-term rating of 54 percent, while Jimmy Carter's rating was 44 percent.
Harry Truman had previously had the lowest end-of-term approval at 32 percent, as measured by Gallup."
"This is by way of a friendly response to the estimable Jay Nordlinger, Senior Editor at the likewise estimable National Review. Jay wrote a strong column yesterday openly saying what I’ve been hearing many conservatives express tacitly ever since the election. Reflecting on the media’s disgraceful distortion of the characters of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, he wrote: “It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person’s image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.”
I’ve been hearing and reading prominent conservatives and Republicans say nearly as much on television, in print and in private conversation ever since the election. They say Sarah Palin can never make a comeback. They say the fight for small government has been lost. They say we can’t have immigration reform that protects our borders. They say we have to distance ourselves from “embarrassing” commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.
No, no, no, no. What the right is experiencing at the moment is a phenomenon called “cultural para-stimuli.” You can read all about it in Tom Wolfe’s wonderful novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. It’s sort of like peer pressure on steroids. It was discovered by Nobel Laureate Victor Ransome Starling, who found that when he surrounded normal cats with cats whose behavior had been bizarrely altered by brain surgery, the normal cats began acting like the crazy cats all around them.
That’s us–surrounded by the mainstream media. So steeped are we now in their lies about our representatives, their ridicule of our commentators, their demonizing dismissal of the causes we know are just, that we’ve begun to adopt their attitudes toward ourselves! And perhaps chief among the lies they’ve sold us is the lie that they’ve won, that the media are theirs for good and all, and that Americans are going to be hoodwinked and brainwashed by their constant barrage of misinformation forever.
Andrew Laven's analysis is nonsense.
He has been been bushwacked by his support for a president who talked conservative values but walked liberal values, even while sheep-like conservatives continued to support the president. So, by supporting the president, they ended supporting nation building, unfunded mandates, preemptive wars, torture, executive overreach, and massive budget deficits-- all of which has established a precedent of policy for Obama.
Don't blame the media. If you are looking for blame, look in the mirror, if you supported in any way this hapless simian of a president. Politico's Joel Kotkin said it well. "Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country's college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together... Conservatism's core values rested on notions of a strong national defense and free market economics. Bush has punctured these ideas in a way that transcends the effects of historically anomalous scandals such as Watergate or Clinton's extramarital affairs. Bush has not only dinged the conservative car, he has totaled it."
Thanks to Bush and folks like Andrew, Rush, and Anne, the time of the conservative has come and gone. And so, for the next generation, Democrats have only to point to the Bush (along with Anne and Rush) as the very flower of conservatism and the Bush record on the economy and foreign relations as to what conservatives will do should they ever again get control of the levers of executive power.
Coulter is smarter than all you left wing retards combined. And that's why you hate her so much.
She is indeed smart. But you are so wrong that I hate Anne. She has smitten me for I attribute the Democratic victory in no small part to Anne, perhaps good for 50 electoral votes. I consider her the face of Republicanism. The first president I ever voted for was Ronald Reagan. I would vote for another Ronald Reagan. But so long as voters have the image of Bush, Hannity, Dobson, Palin, O'Reilly, Rove, and Coulter on their brainpain as an accurate representation of the world view of conservatism, the Democratic Part will prevail. Americans as a whole are moderate and pragmatic, and the extremism and ideology of the past eight years will suffice to keep the Democrats in power, no matter how incompetent or scandel-ridden the Democrats are or may be.
The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship.
Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.
Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”
This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).
With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer what he has learned from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”
Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.
Here is a press release from the White House press secretary on a New York Times piece that linked the present economic crisis to President Bush's policy of loose lending to promote the "ownership society".
Most people can accept that a news story recounting recent events will be reliant on '20-20 hindsight'. Today's front-page New York Times story relies on hindsight with blinders on and one eye closed.
The Times' 'reporting' in this story amounted to finding selected quotes to support a story the reporters fully intended to write from the onset, while disregarding anything that didn't fit their point of view. To prove the point, when they filed their story, NYT reporters were completely unfamiliar with the President's prime time address to the nation where he laid out in detail all of the causes of the housing and financial crises. For example, the President highlighted a factor that economists agree on: that the most significant factor leading to the housing crisis was cheap money flowing into the U.S. from the rest of the world, so that there was no natural restraint on flush lenders to push loans on Americans in risky ways. This flow of funds into the U.S. was unprecedented. And because it was unprecedented, the conditions it created presented unprecedented questions for policymakers.
In his address the President also explained in detail the failure of financial institutions to perform normal and necessary due diligence in creating, buying and selling new financial products -- a problem that almost no one saw as it was happening.
That the NYT ignored such an important economic speech to the American people and the complex causes of the crises is gross negligence.
The Times story frequently repeats a charge by the Administration's critics: a 'laissez faire' attitude toward regulation. We make no apology for understanding the concept of regulatory balance. That is, regulation should be stringent enough to protect the greater public good and safety but not overly strong so that it unnecessarily inhibits innovation, creativity and productivity gains that are the sole source of increasing Americans' standards of living. But while repeating this charge, the reporters gave glancing attention to the fact that it was this Administration that pushed for strengthened regulation and oversight, greater transparency, and housing reform.
The story also gives kid glove treatment to Congress. While the Administration was pushing for more transparent lending rules and strengthening oversight and supervision of Fannie and Freddie, Congress for years blocked attempts at stronger regulation and blocked reform of the Federal Housing Administration. Democratic leaders brazenly encouraged Fannie and Freddie to loosen lending standards and instead encouraged the housing GSEs to play a larger and larger role in the housing market -- even while explicitly acknowledging the rising risks. And while the story notes the political contributions of some banks to Republicans, it neglects that political contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac overwhelmingly supported Democratic officials -- in particular the chairmen of the banking committees. In fact, even in the midst of what by then was a housing crisis, it took Congress nearly a full year to pass specific legislation called for by the President in the summer of 2007, especially legislation to reform oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
There are many more reporting failures in this story -- failure to consider the impact of monetary policy; ignoring the regional nature of housing markets; and ignoring the Bush Administration's historic proposal to overhaul the nation's regulatory system, for example. But then a review of these issues would wave complicated the reporters' myopic point of view that only Bush Administration policies could possibly be responsible for the housing and finance crises.
Last night, I watched C-SPAN interview Bush. Both the interview and the response to the New York Times have the same thing in common-- a refusal to accept any kind of responsibility for anything that went wrong during his stewardship as president for anything. Bush allowed that perhaps the tone of his remarks on occasion was more partisan than it should have been-- but that is it. Bush portrarys his administration and himself as buffeted and sometimes overwhelmed by events that no one could have forseen. Bush, in this incarnation, is no longer "the decider" of anything. Whatever decisions were made were the logical consequence of forces that pressed down on him. And if it appears that he is leaving a nation in disarray, Bush believes that ultimately "history"-- whatever that is-- will vindicate him. It is this combination of arrogance, stubbornness, dishonesty, and fatalism that has always marked Bush's character. And I think historians will justly place him among one of the worst presidents in this history of this country. At least Hoover kept the peace and at least Nixon opened the door to China. But this president presided over the liquidation of a trillion dollars of equity and two intelligence failures-- 9/11 and Iraq-- with the resulting blood of thousands of Americans on his hands.
It won't just be at airports when we will have to remove our shoes. At every presidential press conference, the secret service will have everyone take off their shoes and, if that doesn't work, go sun-kissed naked. Ugly journalists need not apply.
This episode is a fitting coda to Bush's foreign adventurism, and it's possible that the shoes that were hurled with such disgust for an instant popped his bubble of denial.
"George, why the long face?" "I can't stop thinkin' 'bout Iraq, baby." "You mean the death and destruction and botched reconstruction and faulty intelligence?" "No, no. I mean that sumbitch that whipped his shoes at me. Why'd he do it, darlin'? Why?" "Oh, who knows why those people do half the things they do? It's over now. You're back home and you never have to set foot out of the country again." "Thank God for that. It's scary out there. Those people are savages. They don't appreciate what I done for 'em." "I know, dear. Very ungracious of them." "Why do they hate me? What'd I do?" "Oh, they're just jealous dear. They probably have Air Force One envy." "Well, I'll tell ya what. I appreciate coming back home, because I know you're always there for me, Condi... Er...uh..." "What??!!" "No, no...I meant, uh, Laura! That's you! Laura..." [Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap!] "Damn, baby, how many shoes you got?" "I got a lot of 'em, pal. I got a LOT of 'em!!! Now hold still and quit movin your head!"
But, in all seriousness, it's clear that security dropped the ball. And one or two one or two well-paid people who should have known better need to be fired.
The president was in a land where terrorists with long memories have no compunction in taking their own life to make a political point. What if that wasn't a shoe but a grenade? There also is a failure of imagination. I'm reminded of Clint Eastwood in his 1993 move In the Line of Fire, in which he played a guilt-ridden secret service agent resolved not to make the same mistakes he made when Kennedy was assassinated early in his career. The assailant put together a plastic gun that passed through the metal detectors. The mundane can become sinister, where a soda straw can morph into a blowgun and party balloons can hold poison gas. Books, pens, cameras, and cell phones can either turn into weapons or mask weapons. Weapons of opportunity include flag poles, furniture, jewelry stick pins, and weapons on other security personnel. Planted weapons are also a threat, such as was used by Michael Corleone in the move The Godfather to kill the corrupt Captain McCluskey. And, given the complacency that we saw by the secret service, perhaps they should memorize this snippet of dialogue from that movie.
Michael: I have to go to the bathroom. Is that all right? Capt. McCluskey : You gotta go, you gotta go. Capt. McCluskey : [Michael stands and Sollozzo starts to frisk him] I frisked him, he's clean. Virgil 'The Turk' Sollozzo : Don't take too long. [Michael goes to the bathroom] Capt. McCluskey : I frisked a thousand young punks.
Even in countries with little freedom, assassinations occur. Both Lenin and Hitler narrowly missed such attempts. While complete security is not realistic, especially in a democracy, the secret service can do a better job about thinking about and preventing the unthinkable. Political leaders also have a responsibility in removing to the extent possible the pre-conditions that foster emotions that can boil into such hatred.
Bush has a great passion for a 1916 cowboy scene by WHD Koerner that hangs in his office. He told staff that the painting was called A Charge To Keep, a quote from his favourite Methodist hymn by Charles Wesley. He urged them to absorb the moral lesson of this "beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us," he said. But the picture originally portrayed a bad man, not a good man. It was first used in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916 to illustrate a story about a horse thief, and was captioned as a picture of his flight from the law.
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues. Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.
And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.
There are three posters that are meant to capture "the lunacy of the Bush years". I recall a similar poster created for the 1968 Nixon campagn that did much of the same thing, but using illustrations from the LBJ era. Like all propaganda, it is unfair but compelling.
Events
Slogans
People
However, these posters beg the question. Surely, there should be change. But what kind of change? If the change is a Clintonian restoration, then we could create similar posters for those years as well. Here are some reminders of those good old years.
THE CLINTON YEARS
Events
NAFTA BIMBO ERUPTIONS TASK FORCE ON NATIONAL HEALTH CARE REFORM TRAVELGATE NO-FLY ZONE GOOD FRIDAY PEACE ACCORDS STARR REPORT OPERATION DESERT FOX DAYTON ACCORDS IMPEACHMENT
Slogans
REINVENTING GOVERNMENT TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE I DIDN'T INHALE IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID BOXERS OR BRIEFS HILLARYCARE TRIANGULATION IT TAKES A VILLAGE I DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH THAT WOMAN, MISS LEWINSKY FIRST BLACK PRSIDENT
People
SISTER SOULJAH GENNIFER FLOWERS ARSENIO HALL JAMES CARVILLE JANET RENO DICK MORRIS VERNON JORDAN LINDA TRIPP DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL SLICK WILLIE
"The twentieth century was marred by wars of unimaginable brutality, mass murder and genocide. History records that the Armenians were the first people of the last century to have endured these cruelties. The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people." http://www.anca.org/press_releases/press_releases.php?prid=3
Bush Flip Flops:
"We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915. But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror."
"The Armenian Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918. The Armenian people was subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation. The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Large numbers of Armenians were methodically massacred throughout the Ottoman Empire. Women and children were abducted and horribly abused. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was expropriated. After only a little more than a year of calm at the end of W.W.I, the atrocities were renewed between 1920 and 1923, and the remaining Armenians were subjected to further massacres and expulsions. "
"The decision to carry out a genocide against the Armenian people was made by the political party in power in the Ottoman Empire. This was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (or Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti), popularly known as the Young Turks. "
"It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923. There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of W.W.I. Well over a million were deported in 1915. Hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps."
Funny how the dims will waste time on another NON-BINDING resolution about something that HAPPENED IN THE PAST, but refuses to deal with IRAN in the present. The Turkish President warned us a few days ago that if this Resolution does go forward then the chances are high that Turkey might stop one of the main lines of supply to our troops in Iraq through Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.Pelosi knows this but allowed the Resolution to go forward anyway. This Resolution has been floating around for many years and I think that the bitch did this just to cause problems for Bush and the troops in Iraq. You cannot have it both ways-- call it a waste of time and then wring your hands at the prospect that this action is effective. It is but one of many tactics to derail Bush's war. Clearly, there are presently not enough votes in Congress to off funding to the war, but that could change after the 2008 elections. After all, 40,000 Americans had to die in the Viet Nam war while there was a draft before it dawned on Congress that stomping through rice paddies in the name of democracy perhaps wasn't the best idea.
So what to do? Until the votes materialize, the only hope is to attack on the periphery and indirectly. Thus, there will be investigations into recruiting, VA hospitals, military contracts, private defense firms, and the draft dodging our the Republican candidates (except for McCain). The weakening of our so-called allies in this so-called war on terror is just one fight in the broader war against the Republicans. This would have never happened in WWII, because there was a national consensus that it was the right war. The outing of a CIA operative and the disclosure of the al Qaeda video provided to the White House by SITE along with Petreaus' testimony are just a few examples of how politicized the war has become. The goal of the Democrats is to make the war the issue of the 2008 election make Bush and Cheney the Republican's phantom candidates.
The loss of the support of Turkey is a small price to pay if it will bring to and end one day earlier the Iraqi war.
GW denied a holocaust? He says it didn't happen? Where did you come up with that?
While I am a Zionist, I will also assert that the word holocaust is not a trade mark of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or any one else. It can refer to any genocide or mass murder aimed at the liquidation of any entire people. Besides the Shoah, other holocausts include the Africans, the Native Americans, the Asians under the Japanese Empire, the Ukranians, and others. What George Bush has done is exactly what many Nazi revisionists do. They allow that there was suffering and even mass killings of Jewish people and others but they disassociate those killings from any governmental authority or intentionality. Thus, a Nazi revisionists would say that the people died because of bombings or disease, not as part of a systematic planned program of extermination. Bush is effectively asserting the same dishonest lie-- that, yes, Armenians died, but only as a consequence of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and not because of a policy of eradication by the Turks.
Certainly it would piss off the Turks and if the Turks were pissed off enough to withdraw basing rights would shut down the war pretty decisively. But it would be a lousy tactic to that end because it would be unbelievably messy.
You make a good point. I think however the Democrat think this will apply pressure to the White House without causing the Turks to close down the bases and lines of communciation. The military scenerio that to me is more alarming is what happens if the center doesn't hold and it appears that collapse of Ameriraq is eminent? The first to withdraw will be the private militias, such as Blackwater. We are pinning much of Iraq's security on a civilian agency with no accountability to our military. My guess however is that our involvement will end with a whimper due to the Democrat's death by a thousand cuts-- a restriction here, and investigation there. But I also think the war will not end until after Bush leaves office.
The wild card of course is Iran. I see an involving alliance between Russia, China, and Iran against the US and its Iraq war allies primarily with the goal of maintaining a buffer between their countries and the war and also in defense of its own resource-related interests. China and Russia are both starting to flex their economic muscles and it will only be a matter of time before they extend that push for influence geo-politically.
With the perspective of six years of the Bush administration, is it possible to ethically support the Bush administration, or is such support inherently unethical?
Why or why not?
I support Bush as the lesser of the two evils that were available to choose from. Without that restriction I would pick someone with significantly better qualifications. It would be someone who is not religious, who is more rational, who is more principled, who is less pragmatic, who is more decisive, and who is more articulate.
On paper, the credentials of Bush and Cheney are beyond reproach with formal education at the best schools, experience in the legislature and the business world, and access to world leaders. But none of that seemed to matter in the end.
By your statement-- someone who is not religious-- I assume you mean someone who is not dogmatic. It appears that Bush's relgion in particular is Methodist through his wife's affiliation by convenience and for politicals ends. It's hard for me to accept that a serial liar-- and one who lies with such regularity, ease, and deadly consequences to so many people-- in any wise a moral person and a follower of Christ.
More principled? Are you sure? At his last press conference, the president said: “I can look in the mirror and I know that I made a decision based on principle not on public opinion”. I think what Bush means is that he is committed to upholding universal norms that transcend the clamor of the mob. What it really means is that he is infected with a virus that blinds him to such irrelevancies as facts, logic, the rule of law, and the will of the people.
More decisive? Bush's great virtue to his base is that he doesn't flip flop, that he doesn't do nuance, that he stays the course, that he doesn't ask for permission slips before acting with cowboy like dispatch. The flip side of this of course is that he doesn't consider the expereince and judgement of generals and former secretaries of state and that the mistakes he makes in consequence are of biblical proportions.
Do you need to have good communication skills to be effective? Lincoln had good communications skills, but Washington did not. I think it's a important skill but not a critical skill.
I support Bush as the lesser of the two evils that were available to choose from.
You seem to present the proposition as if it is a forced choice and if it is a single choice. Politics being the art of the possible is rarely a forced choice, say, between communism or fascism. A more reasonable approach is to figure out what is important to you in terms of your values and interests and then see which candidate, platform, or party best correlates to them. My beef with most partisans is that they correlate falsehoods and half-truths with the party they support.
Also, merely because you once supported a person or party, it doesn't mean that you are wedded to that. For most people, that isn't the case, and as circumstances warrent, they will switch their vote.
Whose ethics are we to use in making that judgment?
Your own. It is however a philosophical mistake that any two person's ethics (or principles) are equivalent. A klansman and a hit man have ethics, and it is more than a mere matter of opinion that yours are superior to theirs. What makes one person's ethics superior to another's? The answer are yet other principles that are not merely subjective, such rules of logic, emperical adequacy, rational coherence, categorical values, the reasonable person rule, community standards, and so on. There are of course flaws in any one of those standards, but taken together they suffice to render an ethical judgment.
I'm pondering what the president said at his press conference on Thursday: “I can look in the mirror and I know that I made a decision based on principle not on public opinion”.
I think what Bush means is that he is committed to upholding universal norms that transcend the clamor of the mob. What it really means is that he is infected with a virus that blinds him to such irrelevancies as facts, logic, the rule of law, and the will of the people. My principle is to beware of principles.
"Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny." "
My fingers went to my teeth as I watched the president arrive with the queen down the red carpet on C-Span. For a moment, it looked like Bush was going to give the royal buttocks a pat, something that we could only expect from a man who last year groped the German chancellor. When you dress a monkey in a monkey suit, you still see the monkey. And Bush on cue found a way to embarrass himself with his broken English causing the queen to mutter either "Some year", "Oh, dear", or "Bring me beer."
I just hope that in the next election cycle, we elect a president that we can take pride in. It would be a change from the Clinton-Bush legacy.
(Harken Allen Ginsbergh and Jack Kerouac to the president's free verse as delivered in a single speech on April 19th in Ohio. Groovy. )
Everbody wants to be loved . . .not everybody. If you've got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I'm talking about. Death is terrible. Polls just go poof. Remember the rug?
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
This quotation from George Santayana seems apt given the travails of another George. The president's prep-school insouciant contempt for the lessons of history must surely be taking it toil. For those who read history, today's headlines is a story twice-told, an exercise in déjà vu, tragedy, and farce. A quagmire abroad with no end in sight, an administration with eroding credability, and a president hurtling towards a constitutional crisis is merely a replay of the the stupidity and dishonesty from the LBJ-Nixon era and other eras before that as well.
At present, the only hope that I see for the Republicans-- and this is a long shot-- is to collude with the Democrats to immediately impeach Bush and Cheney, hoping that the continuing downward spiral in Democratic hands will be sufficient to throw the election back into the hands of the Republicans. But the polls show that the current administration continues to hold a strong albeit weakening base, so I don't view impeachment as likely. The more likely scenerio will be a Democratic sweep of the executive branch and Congress in 2008, cynically facilitated by the Democrats allowing the president to continue to dig his way to disaster while Americans continue to die in Iraq for nothing. And this may prepare the way for possibly eight years of Democratic governance and the ascendency of as many as five liberal Supreme Court justices.
