President George Bush @ MindSay

            I’ll probably vote Republican for president next year.  No big deal.  I’ve done it for the past three, and the so-called “top tier” Democratic candidates haven’t done a thing to convince me to do otherwise.

            We’ve got Hillary Clinton, the former first lady who rode her husband’s coattails to a Senate seat.  If eight years on the sidelines in the White House qualifies you for the U.S. Senate, that elevator operator who was there for 40 years should be King of the World.

            Then there’s Barack Obama.  Many of the very people who claimed George W. Bush wasn’t qualified to be president after only six years as governor of the second largest state in the nation think this guy is the second coming of George Washington after only three years as one of 100 senators.

            And don’t forget John Edwards.  He did so much for North Carolina, after all, he surely deserves a shot to screw up the whole country.  He gets $400 haircuts and claims to relate to the poor.  I had to roll up some pennies to pay for my last $12 haircut.  That’s relating to the poor.

            There is, however, one Democrat who has been shut out by the national media’s fascination with the aforementioned three stooges.  The more I learn about him, the more I like him.  New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is the one Democrat I could support, and I’m beginning to think he, more than any other candidate of either party, has the right stuff to go all the way.

            Richardson has 15 years of experience in Congress, something the Big Three, particularly Obama, cannot boast.  Prior to his election to the House in 1980, he worked at the State Department, and then was a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

            As a congressman, he met one-on-one with Saddam Hussein in 1995 to secure the release of two American civilian aerospace workers held prisoner in Iraq after accidentally crossing the border from Kuwait.

            In addition to Iraq, Richardson has also negotiated the release of hostages, American servicemen, and political prisoners from North Korea and Cuba.  Earlier this year, he traveled to Sudan and brokered a cease-fire between President Omar al-Bashir and various rebel factions in Darfur.  While that effort was to prove unsuccessful—through no fault of Gov. Richardson’s—I can’t help but think that a man who has earned the respect of even rogue dictators can surely restore the world’s faith in America as an international leader.

            In 1997, Richardson was able to capitalize on his foreign policy experience when President Clinton appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, where he served for a year before becoming Secretary of Energy.

            As secretary, he implemented tough efficiency standards that saved consumers billions of dollars in energy costs.  As governor, he has required energy companies to produce 10% of all energy from renewable resources, while reducing carbon emissions; and the state is moving toward 20% by providing incentives for solar, wind, and biofuels.  He has promised to do the same as president.

            Since being elected governor of one of the poorest states in the nation in 2002, Richardson has cut taxes, balanced the budget, and created 84,000 new jobs...all without the benefit of a $400 hairdo.  His efforts have led right-of-center and libertarian groups to praise him for reforming New Mexico’s economy.  The libertarian Cato Institute calls Richardson “one of the most fiscally responsible Democratic governors in the nation.”

            Gov. Richardson has worked to provide affordable healthcare to all people in his state, and has cracked down on illegal immigration across the New Mexico border.

            It is noteworthy that while Democratic frontrunner Hillary is as polarizing a figure as the current President Bush, Gov. Richardson commands respect on both sides of the aisle.  He was reelected in 2006, with 40% of the Republican vote.  He had a good track record of getting things done in a bipartisan fashion while in Congress, and he’s worked with both parties in the New Mexico legislature to improve their state.  His is the kind of leadership we desperately need in Washington.

            It’s been said that Hillary and Obama are riding high because people want to say they made history by electing the first woman or the first black president.  Okay…if you’re so shallow that that’s the only reason you’ll vote for somebody, issues be damned, vote to elect the first president of Hispanic descent.

            You not only will have made history, you’ll have voted for someone who knows what he’s doing, isn’t on an ego trip, and has the experience and leadership to restore pride at home and respect around the world.

 

© 2007 by J.D. Lewis

I just recently recieved this:

 

President George W. Bush was scheduled to visit the Episcopal Church
outside Washington as part of his campaign to restore his pathetic poll
standings.

His image handler made a visit to the Bishop and said, "We've been getting a lot of bad publicity because of the president's position on stem cell research, the Iraq war, hurricane Katrina, and the Veterans Administration. We'll make a $100,000 contribution to your church if during your sermon you will say that the President is a saint.

The Bishop thought it over for a few moments and finally said, "The Church is
desperate for funding - I'll do it."

Bush showed up for the sermon and the Bishop began "I'd like to speak to you all this morning about our President, who is a liar, a cheat, and a low-intelligence weasel.

He took the tragedy of September 11 and used it to frighten and
manipulate the American people.

"He lied about weapons of mass destruction and invaded Iraq for oil
and money, causing the deaths of tens of thousands and making the United States the most hated country on earth.

"He appointed cronies to positions of power and influence, leading to widespread death and destruction during Hurricane Katrina. He awarded contracts and tax cuts to his rich friends so that we now have more poverty in this country and a greater gap between rich and poor than we've had since the Depression.

"He has headed the most corrupt, bribe-inducing political party since Teapot Dome.

"The national surplus has turned into a staggering national debt of 7.6 trillion Dollars, gas prices are up 85%, which the people of America cannot afford, and vital research into global warming and stem cells is stopped cold because he's afraid to lose votes from religious kooks.

"He is the worst example of a true Christian I've ever known.

"But compared to Dick Cheney, George W. Bush is a saint."

From Frank Rich on NYTimes:

The only people clamoring for Mr. Libby's freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

I don't think Rich goes far enough. Nearly all of the "Beltway MSM" (mainstream media) were indeed "clamoring" for Libby's "freedom."

It is the MSM's consensus that Bush and Cheney, et al., never be held accountable for all of their disasters.

Why? Because Bush and his boys (and girls) have played and will play the media game as well as any administration in history.

Compare Italitian Fascist Benito Mussolini, famous for his pomposity, to our "decider" and "war president" George W. Bush:











Let's face it. The "architect" Karl Rove is more theatrical maestro than political genius. This era of American cultural history is remarkably shallow, sapped, and insipid, and impudent -- a lot is shitty things. People lose their cell phones, strangers pick them up, then demand $450 (I read it in the paper today).

Into this vacuum comes the great posturer, Bush, who, let's be honest, is no more "authentic" than Mitt Romney, and never really believed in anything more than himself, his ego, and the only promise he has kept is to serve his "base" of white Christian American powerful, wealthy men.

Indeed, in a fundraiser speech, Bush joked,

Some call you the elite. I call you my base.

And his Administration has given little bits of "insider" news -- to Time magazine (Matt Cooper), to the New York Times (Judy Miller), to Faux News, and fed the rest of the MSM enough tripe that they're still publishing Administration talking points/propaganda, like how anyone killed in Iraq is now "al-Qaida."

And you can bet this is what Hell looked like, with Lucifer's triumphalism in Paradise Lost, and this is how the newspaperman in 1930s Germany and Italy loved-upped the photogenic, theatrical Hitler and Mussolini.

In the above pictures, the hero-worship camera angles are there. It's clearly the pathetic, kitschy, simplistic theatrics of the Cult of Masculinity.

Oh, Bush's codpiece is so damn resolved, isn't it?

Oh, Mussolini's jaw is so resolved, isn't it?

And the poses both take on above are equally pathetic -- first with the Napoleonic self-congratulation of Mussolini on his white horse, and Bush's equally fake update in our benighted cultural era. Flight-suit Bush is the Napoleon pose... (below)



...updated in the contemptible era of Top Gun and Jerry Bruckheimer -- theatrics for those stupid enough to fall for it.

And here's the thing -- our press has fallen hook, line, and sinker with all of this inane shit. And they're still falling for it. Unencumbered by Bush's approval ratings cemented -- as surely as Jimmy Hoffa -- in the 20s.

For, we know, Bush fills a psychological-cultural need with all of his posturing. Why can Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Libby break the law? Because they're the "good guys" -- we ought to be kept in the dark. Jack Bauer is torturing terrorists for our own good, and dammit, can't we just trust him and be patriotic?


^{(Compare camera angle to above pictures)}

And there's no Jack Bauer, there's no heroic "Bush" or "Cheney" -- they're all fiction. And sadly, Bush and Cheney are real people, contrived, conceited, fallible men.

Tin Men. Governing a castle of cards. Lacking their emperor clothes.

There's a lot to say about the relationship between the Bush Administration and the US military.

We now know that all the 2004 election bluster about George Bush being "decisive" was an admission of insecurity:

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.

Time and again, Bush has either not had the know-how to make the right decision (like breaking up the Iraqi military and foisting elections on a populace focused on religious-ethnic difference) or out-and-out denied the truth (lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida, lack of "weapons of mass destruction"). I'm also reminded of his self-description as a "gut player," which, like so many of his self-referential statements, which I would term supremely unpresidential, are peurile, infantile formulations.

George W. Bush is a small man, in the terms of Joseph Conrad. But he's acted like he thinks himself a "great man," with enough integrity to not only bend the rules, but fully disregard them. His "dead or alive" utterance in 2001 applies here.

Bush has posed as if he's some kind of warrior outside the law, which is for "normal" people and the "bad guys." The examples here are his authorization of illegal wire-tapping, his politicization of well-nigh every department with political hacks ("heckuva job" Michael Brown).

But most negative might be how the Karl Rove "character assassination" has played out in the military. Has there been a civilian leadership ever to so weaken the national forces? Don Rumsfeld (Rumsfled?) loved to talk about his "military transformation," but I think the legacy of the Iraq War will be a combination of a loss of US diplomatic leadership with a military that will take decades to recover, just like after Vietnam. And the PTSD-sufferers and the limbless will be around for all of my lifetime.

In all seriousness, can we really doubt that we are in Iraq for any other reason than because of George W. Bush's vision for himself as a conquering "war president"?

Sorry folks, only a fool or a desperate person would volunteer to be in the US Army right now. This is George Bush's war.



I remember with some wistfulness how, in 2004, I overheard a recruit say, "Well, the way they're talking, we won't even be over in a few months" (emphasis added). How's that 18-month deployment working for you?

The term "Friedman unit" aptly describes the notion of "progress" in Iraq; it comes from how every six months, Tom Friedman of the NYTimes would write, "the next six months in Iraq are critical." The US General in Iraq, David Petraeus, has beautifully picked up on the "F.U." -- I just heard him on the radio say, "By September we'll know whether the surge is working."

Okay, the "surge" is no longer as surge if it's this old. And Petraeus is proving himself to be a Republican political hack lite by saying he'll speak the truth in his "assessment."

The issue is difficult. Of course, the first casualty of war is the truth. And you don't want your compatriots to have died in vain. But they did, and they still are, dying in vain. And so are the Iraqi civilians.

Let me hazard a basic assessment of our military operation in Iraq. With ~200,000 troops, we are in a country of 22 million, although the Iraqi exodus is in full swing. So, let's say there's 19 million left. 19m/200,000 = 95, or one soldier for every 95 Iraqis. In New York City, there is 8.2 million people, and 37,000 cops. So, a cop for every 221 people. So in the war zone, we've only got a ratio two and a third times bigger than your average peacetime American city.

Given this, there has to be motivation and political consensus on the part of the local population. No check on that. Add to that that our US Army is not trained as a "peacekeeping" force. And that the US has no "nation-building" or "colonial" tradition, where technocrats are sorely needed. The civilian leadership has made bungling decision after bungling decision in Washington, and their representatives are ensconced in the Green Zone. The military brass are not in the front lines, but instead in Central Command or the Green Zone.

After over four years of "hot" fighting, the troops are depleted, their replacements are young people that may have criminal records or who have not bothered to get a GED or graduate high school. I can only imagine how much animus and anger there is toward the local Iraqi population from a near-illiterate 18-year-old kid who just had his friend killed by an IED.

Sy Hersh's article shows how Bush is willing to sell both high-level and low-level people down the river. There's "slam dunk" George Tenet, formerly ethos-heavy Colin Powell, three US Generals (Shinseki, Batiste, Kashilisvili (sp.?) and Lt. Gen. Sanchez), and Lynndie England and Charles Graner, the Abu Ghraib "nobodies." Who else? Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. Too many to remember.

Oh, what about Valerie Plame? Her outing as an undercover CIA agent to get back at Joe Wilson was an act of treason by Karl Rove and those above him in stature who approved the outing.

Anyway, we're FUBAR in Iraq. I can't imagine much morale being left. Heck, there's National Guardsmen there without the right equipment. Our military establishment doesn't know how to deal with both an occupation where we are the ones keeping order and a hot insurgency and a hot civil war.

Here's what Hersh says about Bush's reaction to Abu Ghraib:

The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.

When I think of Bush, and America, I think of the word "drift." Where are we going? I don't know, but it's the wrong direction.

As for getting out of Iraq, look at Sen. Joe Biden's five point plan for Iraq, the only serious thinking on this elephant-in-the-room issue I've seen.

Do you still have faith in the Bush administration? That is the question debated across Vermont.