The American Crisis Deepens

The Supreme Court decision that essentially gives corporations unlimited power through campaign spending is a danger to American democracy and a danger to every citizen. It is no joke.

I was tempted to title this post: The GOP Sells the United States to the Chinese Communist Party. The consequences of unlimited campaign spending by corporations means the person with the most money wins. Since anyone outside the United States can invest in our corporations, it will now be legal for the Chinese, Saudis and Russians to influence American elections. Even Osama bin Laden, if he uses enough corporate shells, can now influence American politics directly.

George W. Bush appointed two corporatist judges to the Supreme Court. If we're not careful, the legacy of the worst president in our nation's history will now be intact.

I expect many posts around the country to focus on today's judicial fiasco. Here's a post from Firedoglake:

If you had any doubt about the corruption that has infected the very bloodstream of American politics, look at today’s ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court said corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence the outcome of elections.

(snip)

Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness. Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.

I’m compelled to repeat something else: I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.

Here's a post from Kevin Drum who almost always has some of the most thoughtful posts:

I confess that I've become more sensitive to First Amendment concerns about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law over the years. But treating corporations as mere "associations of citizens"? Color me skeptical. That's just not what they are, and this is a decision that we're probably going to live to regret. After all, it's not as if lack of ability for corporations to influence the political process has historically been a major problem in the United States.

I've been saying it for some time now and I'll say it again: something has to change.

Deepening Crisis During Legacy Spinning

With less than thirty days left, it is likely that the shoe throwing incident in Baghdad will be the bookend to Bush's dismal presidency. It is what people will remember. The outpouring of editorial cartoons from around the world has been staggering. A tiny percentage of the cartoons defend Bush but none are flattering. Even Bush's quick reflexes raise a curious question: has he had practice? Is this a clue to the strange injuries he's received from time to time over the last eight years? Have their been lapses in Bush's ability to duck? Of course Bush lacks the Teflon that protected Ronald Reagan so well. Here's more of the cartoons: here, here and here.

What can one say after eight lawless years? Bush and Cheney are on their legacy tour and the gibberish just gets more ridiculous. Part of the legacy is the illusion that Bush kept America safe. But 9/11 happened on Bush's watch, and he and many top members of his administration ignored the warning signs. Mahablog quotes this CNN report from April 30, 2001:

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and “personalizing terrorism.” …

(sigh) This was weeks after briefings by Clinton staffers about Osama bin Laden. George Tenet and Richard Clarke gave more warnings before 9/11. We're not talking policy differences. We're talking criminal negligience and willful behavior. Chalk it up to the blindness of ideology but Bush did not keep the nation safe. In fact, his actions have repeatedly undermined the security of our nation and damaged our future.

That's enough for now. The holidays are here. Let there be peace on earth. And let's hope next year we return to the community of lawful nations.

Some Thoughts on the American Crisis

First, let me say that the American Crisis has two parts. The first part is a leadership crisis that can be traced largely to the Republican Party and its habit of talking tough while obstructing any reasonable proposal to deal with a long list of problems; no one excels at this form of failed leadership more than George W. Bush. But the Republicans are not the only part of the leadership crisis. Democrats have not led as well as they might have over the last eight years though many Democrats can deal very effectively with various problems if given the chance; part of the problem with Democrats is that the party is slowed down by elements who pay more attention to polls than to leading. Many Democrats have also been somewhat paralyzed by the Republican Noise Machine that is heavily financed by right-wing elements. The other leadership problem in the United States is a media that lives for the next quarterly report and no longer acts as a balance against the political nonsense that will always come out of Washington or any other national capital.

Leadership is one side of the American crisis and it overwhelmingly affects the other part of the crisis we are facing. First of all, the American Crisis (yes, it's time for caps) is also, in many respects, the World Crisis. We are facing a rather daunting list of growing problems that are largely going unaddressed. And that itself is a major component of the crisis. Global warming, pollution, overpopulation, food resource issues, water shortages and a very serious and growing energy problem are just a few of the issues that are far from getting the attention necessary in Washington. And these problems are certainly not getting the attention from American businesses that they should despite the somewhat irrational belief that free enterprise can, all by itself, deal with these issues. If the media is more concerned with its quarterly reports, most American corporations are no better. I see signs of some business people beginning to think more seriously about a range of issues but we have to judge these things by action and not by words. Words have been used too often by politicians and business people to put off actually doing something.

The dog and pony show put on by President Bush to postpone once again any serious decisions regarding Iraq was embarrassing. It was words designed to change the subject, avoid realistic decision making and wave the flag as a way of avoiding responsible action. Americans are becoming less susceptible to this kind of nonsense and yet Bush's numbers went up a notch or two. Of course, a week after the nonsense, we see a headline like this that completely gives the lie to Bush's phony optimism:

US officials were barred on Wednesday from travelling by land outside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone amid fears of attacks after the alleged killing of civilians by private security firm Blackwater.

The suspension came as Washington grappled with ways to curb the damage from Sunday's clash in which Blackwater guards escorting US embassy officials opened fire in a Baghdad neighbourhood, killing 10 people and wounding 13.

Blackwater denies any wrongdoing but a top Iraqi judge has said the US firm, one of the largest private security operators in Iraq, could face trial.

The president and his Republican friends in Congress are still unable to answer two straightforward questions: what are we doing in Iraq and what realistic, doable goal are we trying to accomplish? A majority of the country still awaits an answer.

In spirit, at least much of the time, I favor some of the things that Moveon.org has been doing over the last seven years. But playing the Republican game of overly cute snark doesn't get our country focused on any particular element of the many problems we are facing, the fiasco in Iraq simply being just one of those problems. The ad on Petraeus ignored the fundamental problem of Iraq: the problem is Bush. This is Bush's war. If Moveon.org wanted to expand on that, the problem then is Bush and Cheney and their mutually reinforcing political philosophy that is at odds with what this nation stands for. Bush and Cheney have not only given us a war our nation did not need, but they have ignored a host of other problems largely by insisting the problems don't exist. A little further expansion on relevant criticism would include the obstructionist Republicans in the House and Senate who have chosen to ignore a majority of Americans demanding a change in course and some serious reform in Washington. General Petraeus is far down the list of issues that might be raised; he wasn't even a major figure until the last year. President Bush has the option of ignoring experienced generals and finding new generals who suit his purposes. Read that last sentence again because it's all one needs to know that the problem is Bush. Bush, of course, would like nothing more than to pin his problems on a general. I understand quite clearly the frustration felt by many progressives as the leadership of our nation continues to drift but it is important to stay focused.

The American Crisis is very much about an inability to come to grips with the issues of our times. If Moveon.org got carried away with its rhetoric, the Republican far right offers ten times the nonsense every day of the week. The actress, Sally Fields, is now the latest to suffer the slings and arrows of the Republican Smear Machine. Think Progress has the story:

Since actress Sally Field won an Emmy and spoke out against the Iraq war in her acceptance speech, the right wing has been on the attack. In addition to Fox censoring her speech, conservatives continue to criticize Field for speaking out.

Taking the slander to a very personal level, right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin attacked Field’s parenting skills with a column in the National Review entitled “Sally Field Does Not Speak For Me.”

Here's a case where right wingers are becoming caricatures of themselves. I started reading the post and burst out laughing. Republican right wingers are attacking "The Flying Nun!" They're smearing Gidget! They're trying to body tackle a slim five-foot woman! Suffice to say, much of our nation has gone stark raving mad.

Meanwhile the price of oil is $83 a barrel. Healthcare is a mess. Real wages are falling as fictitious numbers are posted on inflation. The president is deliberately kicking the can down the road on Iraq. Global warming is real and much of our nation refuses to acknowledge the reality of the problem. American innovation, while still leading the world, is actually slipping (see this month's Discover). Wheat prices are sky high. Corn prices too are going up as we gear up for an ethanol industry that is far from solving a host of problems. Mortgages, despite a significant rate drop, are going to continue to be a problem. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Various nations are increasingly making noise that suggests we're on the verge of a new arms race. And throughout the world, including inside our own country, American leadership is AWOL.

Until Republicans repair their party, I expect nothing from them. In the meantime, it's vital that the rest of the nation recognize that we have a crisis and a host of problems. We are in need of major changes and reform just like the changes and reforms that have moved our nation forward every twenty to fifty years since our founding. What I'm writing here are just quick notes and I hope to elaborate more on these thoughts over the next few months. My time is limited but there are two themes I offer to those with more time, particularly those who are bloggers. First, protect your credibility. Don't let Republicans drag you into exasperation and hyperbole. Second, focus on the essential problems that are mounting. There is profound pathology in our country right now and much of that pathology can be found in people avoiding the real problems facing us so that they can enjoy their illusions or make a few extra bucks. The Republican Party talks tough and then hides its head in the sand. One advantage to Republicans of the war in Iraq is that it's a convenient issue to talk about appeasement while appeasement on a host of much more serious problems defines much of the Republican Party's behavior these days. So stay focused on the bigger problems. They are coming. And they will bite. But there is much we can do, if we are willing.

President I'm the Decider Becomes President Kick the Can

President Bush is determined to finish his presidency without doing anything for the American people or for our future. He is a failed president too blinded by ideology and pride to admit how deeply flawed his political philosophy has become and how much damage his decisions and sometimes lack of action have done to our nation. Like other authoritarian failures, Bush will spend much of the next ten years blaming others for failures even he cannot avoid.

The White House dog and pony show starring a compliant General Petraeus is designed to kick the can all the way to the next president. It is embarrassing. It is a travesty of a once reasonably functional (though at times flawed) bipartisan foreign policy.

Visualize this cartoon I wish someone would pen: there are two panels of a White House ceremony featuring President Bush. In the first panel, near the end of his presidency, Bush hangs another Medal of Freedom around yet another official who has given in to his White House public relations machine: in this case, it's General Petraeus and Bush says, "Thanks for your service." In the second panel, Bush hangs something quite different around a displeased Uncle Sam: this time it's the proverbial albatross with the word 'Iraq' in bold letters on the dead bird and Bush says, "Sorry, but I gotta go. It's all yours."

On one level, I'm not too interested in what General Petraeus has to say. A general does not set policy: he implements it. And there is no course at West Point that explains how to handle a dysfunction presidency whose only skill is a bizarre public relations machine that has helped an inept president far more than it should have. Petraeus seems to have a better idea of how to fight an insurgency that those who have preceded him but then, knowing an insurgency was like to result after the fall of Baghdad, where were the two dozen or so colonels and generals like Petraeus that we needed from day one when they might have been useful?

But then I forget. This is a war that never had much of a purpose. After five years of public relations to sell the war, no one is certain why we're there at this late date. What is wrong with Washington? We can put a considerable amount of blame on President Bush but he has had a host of enablers. Even today, most Republicans in Washington, being the odd right-wingers that they are, still support an Iraq policy that was never justified and that makes no sense. I don't blame the Democrats, an overwhelming majority of whom seem to get it for the most part. But the Democrats barely control the Senate and there's just enough confused Democrats in the House to make a slim majority more fragile than it ought to be. The only solution is to retire what has become a dysfunctional Republican leadership and give Democrats the numbers they need to prevail and to steer this country away from an authoritarian abyss from which this country may never recover if Republicans continue to dominate our national politics in the next five years.

Our nation, indeed the world, is facing major problems that requires capable people in Washington. We need more than the public relations illlusions provided by the usual right wing political machine that has become the Republican Party. Both parties, however, suffer from an affection for power that does not serve our country well. You cannot solve what are considerable problems facing our nation unless everyone has the facts. Real facts. If Democrats sometimes get caught up in the politics of the moment, they can respond if given the chance. Today's Republican leaders, however, now specialize in power, corruption and digging deep holes in the sand to put their heads in. Damage is being done and will continue if the behavior continues. We need reform. It doesn't get any more basic than that.

President Bush: The Blamer-in-Chief

There are exceptions, but one of the classic marks of a right-wing conservative is their tendency to blame everyone but themselves. Since the members of the Bush Administration keep trying to wear his mantle, it's worth noting that one of those exceptions was Winston Churchill who, though not quick to blame himself, still managed to accept responsibility for some of his blunders. Actually people with a record of successful decisions and actions can afford to accept responsibility and that may speak volumes about today's Republican Party: they have a well-financed and well-oiled noise machine but their record of accomplishments is not good. And none have accomplished so little as our president.

Dan Froomkin of White House Watch notes Bush's latest attempt to blame someone else for his particular fiasco in Iraq:

President Bush says that he should be trusted on military issues because he listens to his commanders. But he has a tendency to celebrate his generals when they're providing him political cover -- then stick a knife in their backs when they're no longer of any use to him.

Last week, Bush rejected any blame for the chaos that ensued in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion. So whose fault was it? Bush pointed the finger at Gen. Tommy Franks, the Central Command chief at the time. "My primary question to General Franks was, do you have what it takes to succeed? And do you have what it takes to succeed after you succeed in removing Saddam Hussein? And his answer was, yes," Bush said.

As we know, Bush does not listen. It is amazing how many untruths Bush can squeeze into his statements. So far, Bush has blamed any number of people for his fiasco in Iraq. He has blamed the Iraqis themselves, the Iranians, the Syrians, al Qaida and any number of others, including his fellow Americans. It's curious to note that President Bush has not blamed his partner in war, Dick Cheney. The vice president is, in some ways, more responsible for the fiasco than the president, but he gets a free pass from Bush. Others have noted Bush's reluctance to hold his vice president accountable, presumably, as the all too biting humor goes, because Cheney knows where all the bodies are buried.

We know the president is incompetent. We know he adheres to an ideology that blinds him to advice from experts who know what they're talking about. We know Bush cannot blame the generals for his fiasco in Katrina. We know Bush cannot blame the generals for the lack of an energy policy or the high gasoline prices. We know Bush cannot blame the generals for the reams of right-wing nonsense coming out of the various departments of the government as the president ignores science, the law and history. We know Bush cannot blame the generals for the outing of a CIA operative. The list of blunders and nonsense for which the president is responsible is long. Even in Iraq, Bush seems to have a conveniently compartmentalized memory of events. The generals did not insist on no-bid contracts. The generals did not send twenty-year-olds to set up stock markets. The generals didn't waste time on lucrative privatization schemes for Bush cronies. The generals did not come up with the preemptive strike princile. And it was not the generals who set up Paul Bremer as a viceroy. Blunder after blunder can be traced directly to decisions made by the Bush inner circle and there were no generals in that inner circle.

In my opinion, Bush is an authoritarian corporatist. He believes that business knows best—and deserves the most (certainly far more than was prevalent from the 1930s to the 1990s)—and I suspect he and his closest associates believe stockholders, business ethics and democracy are 'quaint.' But even Bush's business friends, cronies, campaign contributors and associates must all be astonished at just how grossly imcompetent the president has proven to be. It's a shame that Bush's real supporters, the same business class, fail to realize how much they themselves have lost their way and how much of Bush's failures stem from their own flawed ideological view of the world. I have no problem with competent people earning more than the rest of us but today's business world needs to explain how mediocrities like Bush keep acquiring so much wealth, power and authority to do the harm they do to our country.

Republican Fiasco Only Deepens

It's been stated before but let's state it again: today's Republican Party is controlled by right wing conservatives who are bereft of ideas; the radical agenda of Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush is a disaster for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Unless you're an oil executive or someone in the defense industry or sitting on a huge family fortune, Bush and his friends have done nothing for most Americans in the last six years.

In the spring of 2004, when our finances were in better shape, my wife and I donated $50 to the Kerry campaign. Since then, we've been flooded with mailers from various Democratic groups. I have friends who get uptight when they get such mailers but I consider the mailers a minor price of democracy and don't mind all that much, except on one point. We've gotten so many mailers that the cost of sending those mailers probably now exceeds what we sent in the first place. Still, I read about half the mailers to see how well people are making their sales pitch. I got a mailer yesterday from the Bill Richardson campaign and I admit I very much like the ad on the outside of the envelope:

The war in Iraq is not the disease.
Iraq is a symptom.

The disease is arrogance.

That puts it about as accurately as anything I've seen.

These are bad times and it's worth taking care of ourselves now and then. I'm grateful that most of the time about all I need to do on some days is go out and look at the moon hanging over the hills or over the valley depending on the time of night and the phase of the moon. After a few minutes, it clears my head. Sometimes, needing more, I just need to listen to some music for a half hour or read a book about as far away from these times as possible. All of us need to renew ourselves from time to time. This is going to be a long fight and there will be harder days ahead as we attempt to repair our democracy.

I've noticed a problem on progressive blogs over the last few weeks but I'm not sure what to do about it since my own feelings aren't much different. The disgust with both Washington politicians and the inability of the media to understand what a disaster we're in on a wide range of issues is taking a toll on all of us. Here's Juan Cole of Informed Comment; I simply can't fault what he says though it's harsher than what he would have said two years ago:

The Karl Rove doctrine that when you dig yourself into a ditch, the best strategy is to dig deeper, has finally met the test of reality-based politics. It isn't going to be pretty.

These guys got away with these hawkish fantasies because they bamboozled the poor evangelicals into believing they would support public morality, and bamboozled poor conservatives into thinking they would uphold small government. Instead, they are hitching their wagons to a multi-trillion dollar quagmire abroad and don't give a rat's ass about evangelical values.

I've been reading about the Republican presidential candidates and it's hard not to cringe. They're not any better than Bush and they can't make up their minds whether to defend Bush or distance themselves from him. McCain, of course, is impossible to take seriously anymore and his poll numbers make that clear. But the other frontrunners, Romney and Giuliani, aren't any better.

Romney, of course, has been all over the map and doesn't seem to be trying at all to be reasonably honest. Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly takes issues with Romney fictional version of the months leading up to Bush's war in Iraq where Romney seems to say that the UN inspectors did not go to Iraq when in fact they did just that and didn't find anything:

WTF? Does this kind of stuff run in the family? (Yes, I know I've already made that joke once before.)

Question: does Romney genuinely not know that both the IAEA and Hans Blix's team had hundreds of inspectors in Iraq prior to the war? And that those inspectors found nothing?

Or does he know it perfectly well and has simply calculated that no one in the media cares enough about this stuff to make a big deal out of a howler like this? In any sane world, this kind of thing would be enough to disqualify a candidate from running for dogcatcher, let alone president of the United States.

And on and on it goes.

One of the first victims of a failing democracy is the truth. Juan Cole and Kevin Drum speak the truth but, like the rest of us, their disgust is growing over what they see. If we are to preserve our democracy, progressive bloggers and others are going to have to continue holding their noses and keep pushing for that truth. The reality of those who control the Republican Party is that they care far more about power than they do about their fellow Americans. They know they can't win on the issues that concern most Americans and everything we see follows from that simply observation. A political operative like Karl Rove knows this and it explains his many methods and his complete lack of conscience.

We have no choice but to push on.

The Delusional and Contrary Mr. Bush

It's hard to escape the notion that if liberals say the night is dark, a right-wing contrarian like President Bush will get it in his head to say the opposite just to spite liberals. Right wing conservative pundits have made a living out of being contrarians but the effect of such nonsense on the affairs of our country can only be described as a fiasco when put into action and made part of official American policy. In the end, we are witnessing a national tragedy of historic dimensions.

The month of May was not a good one for Bush's war in Iraq. The death toll of our soldiers in May comes to 124 and the total coalition deaths, which for some reason does not include Iraqis fighting on our side, is 129 deaths. Not since the bizarre punitive battles that took on the entire city of Fallujah have so many Americans died. The attack on Fallujah remains a symbol of Bush's bizarre war; destroying an entire Iraqi city because of the crimes of a few against a handful of contractors who ignored travel warnings against going into Fallujah not only doesn't make sense, the destruction of a city of 300,000 was an operation that can hardly be considered American. The military opposed the initial plan from the White House to attack Fallujah back in April 2004; it was considered counterproductive. But Bush and his inner circle pushed on.

And now three years later, there is no sign that Bush has learned a thing. But he still considers himself the Decider-in-Chief. Think Progress draws our attention to an article by Georgie Anne Geyer in the Dallas News:

..by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

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."

Destiny. Methinks the president has a touch of what some call the Napoleonic complex. Years before being handed the keys to the White House by his father, Bush once asked Queen Elizabeth who the back sheep was in her family, obviously making it clear that he was the black sheep in his own family. There is no sign that frat boy ever grew up. The bunker mentality of the president is not healthy and Congress need to come to grips with President Bush's increasingly delusional view of the world. A president with that kind of bunker mentality cannot properly do his job and cannot properly serve the American people.

We have a problem of course in the vice president. There is no other way to describe Cheney except to say that he takes pleasure in being sneaky and dishonest. I say that because 'last throes' Cheney has repeatedly lied to the American people, and among his friends he tells stories that are supposed to be about how clever he is but that, to my mind, show a very different person than Cheney would like us to see. Cheney has no understanding that there is no United States as we know it unless there is law and that law is the US Constitution and the laws that follow thereby from Congress. So we have a dysfunctional right wing president and a dysfunctional right wing vice president and a sluggish Congress that is finally becoming aroused but that is still doing too little to hold Bush and Cheney to account.

I Support the Troops and Oppose Bush's Fiasco

I support our troops and oppose Bush's reckless and arrogant war in Iraq. I'm tired of the way Bush's many and various reasons for war fall apart. And I'm tired of the latest mindless drivel from right wing Republicans that if we don't fight them there, they'll come here. That's an old line from emotional and baseless arguments that were used by the John Birchers of the Cold War era. During the Cold War, the John Birchers were considered the lunatic fringe by both Republicans and Democrats. Today's Republicans ought to know better.

Despite the hysterical shrillness of the American right, it is no contradiction to say I support the troops and oppose Bush's war in Iraq, and I'm tired of the deliberate distortion of such a simple and straightforward view. The right wingers even fail to note that an overwhelming majority of Americans, myself included, agreed with the necessity of dealing militarily with Afghanistan. But when did we begin accepting the nonsense of starting a second war, a war we obviously did not need, before finishing a war that needed to be finished in the first place? The bottom line is that George W. Bush must be held accountable by the legal means provided by the US Constitution. It is time.

Let me offer an analogy. Keeping in mind that no analogy is perfect, that their purpose is to illustrate a point rather than playing broad word games (Ah! You're really talking about 9/11! (actually no)), consider a crooked mayor of a major city. The mayor has financial reasons for wanting to replace the current city hall but he can't say that to the voters. He tries this and he tries that and the voters don't buy it and he has to be careful that he doesn't get in trouble with the voters, so he backs off. But he still wants a new city hall—with a his name on it—and plenty of contracts for his cronies.

Like I said, this mayor is not particularly honest and he comes up with the bright idea of moving his office to the Hilton because 'city hall is no longer safe: it is old and decrepit and a fire hazard.' Or so the mayor says. The critics take issue with the mayor; it's a perfectly fine building and maybe the critics concede an improvement or two may be necessary (aha! say the mayor friends, see, see!) but certainly not the complete replacement of city hall. The critics, despite the noise of the mayor's supporters, start making headway and the mayor gets nervous and comes up with another bright idea: he calls in his inner circle and he tells his henchmen to burn down the city hall during a parade when no one's looking too closely: the city will have no choice but to replace the city hall!

Now for all practical purposes, the mayor doesn't actually light the fire but he's the one who owns the box of matches. Anyway, the city hall's on fire and he's satisfied that his plan is moving along. He'll have the voters in his hands in no time. But his henchmen didn't know what they were doing. They made such a mess of burning down city hall, that nearby blocks are now on fire. It's a lot bigger fire than the mayor intended. The firemen, who have nothing to do with the mayor's crooked decision to burn down city hall, are doing their job. But it's such a huge fire that firemen are getting injured. Some are getting killed. And people are finding out that the mayor has been diverting funds for fire equipment and training. But the mayor's behind the firemen and when people start suspecting what a crook the mayor is, he tries to say that his critics don't support the firemen.... Bull.

It's a no brainer that people would support the firemen in such a situation. They're just doing their job and they're putting their lives on the line. But somebody started that fire and if you have your eyes open, it's not that hard to notice that the civilian guy in charge is responsible for the fire, and is a crook.

Bush is a crook. He started a fire in Iraq. The fire is a lot bigger than he ever thought it was going to be. He screwed up royally. Our troops are trying to put out the fire that Bush started and the incompetence and ideological rigidity and the budget cuts of the Bush Administration aren't helping our troops. A crook needs to be held accountable. Some argue that Bush is merely incompetent, and not a crook. But these days, not many Americans buy the argument that we can trust Bush, and they're just now beginning to realize that Bush is a lawbreaker and dishonest—I call him a crook, for short. That assessment has nothing to do with our troops. They're doing their job and putting their lives on the line. For all practical purposes, they've done their job and yet they're still on the line. Prolonging the war doesn't make sense. It's time for the Iraqis to put out their own fire. Yeah, we made a mess and we'll have to help them somewhat and no doubt we'll have no choice but to leave some troops nearby and even our air force and navy will have to keep flying overhead, but the Iraqis themselves have been adding fuel to the fire and now have some responsibility for the fire in Iraq. Keep in mind there are no good solutions to Iraq. That is an indication of how badly Bush and his neocons advisers have mucked things.

Congress doesn't have a lot of tools for making a president accountable for his mistakes, his lies, and his dishonesty once a war we did not need is launched. One of those tools happens to be funding. If you want to stop the killing of our soldiers, you have to stop doing the same thing over and over without purpose. And about the only way to do that is to get the president's attention by cutting off funding. There are plenty of ways to protect our troops as we draw down but funding a war whose purpose has been reduced to putting our troops on patrol so they can get shot at is not exactly good for our troops. Sending our troops on tour after tour is not good for our troops. Failing to train our troops is not good for our troops. It doesn't make sense.

Right wingers who say Democrats don't support the troops don't know what they're talking about. And Bush's continuing refusal to listen to the Iraq Study Group in a timely manner, say six months ago instead of six months from now, is inexcusable. Kicking the can down the road is not an acceptable policy. It would make more sense for Cheney and Bush to resign than allow Bush's war to drift for another 20 months in the hands of these two incompetent crooks who have botched things so badly we're now in the middle of a civil war.

And then there's the issue of that box of matches that Bush and Cheney are still holding. They've still got them. They're still capable of starting another war we don't need. Does any conservative at this late date believe another war will be 'supporting our troops'? Or are they just playing politics? Or both? I'm tired of the charade that Republicans know what they're talking about. We've had six years of Republican domination to find out that their philosophy, for what it is, isn't worth a pile a beans.

I repeat: I support the troops and I oppose Bush's fiasco in Iraq. We don't need more excuses and photo ops from Bush, we need accountability. If we are still a democracy, legal procedures must prevail. It's time for responsible Republicans to join Democrats instead of defending Bush. Congress can cut funding for Bush's war. Congress can continue investigations. Congress can appoint special prosecutors. And if these fail to hold Bush and Cheney accountable, there is always impeachment. But it's time to take care of business so our nation can move forward.

More on Jimmy Carter and Former Presidents

Dan Froomkin of White House Watch has been following the weird tantrum coming out of the White House in response to Carter's comments. Obviously, Carter hit a nerve. Here's more from Froomkin, including relevant comments by Mark Leibovich of The New York Times:

And for the record, Mark Leibovich writes in the New York Times that "there have been several instances of 'when ex-presidents attack' over the years. As recently as a few months ago, former President Gerald R. Ford criticized Mr. Bush's Iraq policy, albeit from the grave. In an article in The Washington Post, Bob Woodward quoted from an interview he conducted with Mr. Ford with the understanding that he could only publish Mr. Ford's remarks after he died.

"Eisenhower was critical of John F. Kennedy's domestic policies, the first President Bush pounded on Bill Clinton, now his pal, for his Haiti policy, and Nixon chided the first President Bush (for comparing himself to Harry Truman in his 1992 re-election campaign)."

The only real problem Bush and his friends had with Carter's comments is that his words had the ring of truth and the truth can sometimes hurt. Carter is an elder statesman and a gentleman and that explains why he somewhat backed off. However, after listening to Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Duncan Hunter and Tancredo, to mention just five of the candidates, it looks to me that the Republicans are pushing to send yet another failure to the White House. That is no way to rebuild a party.

White House Accuses Jimmy Carter of Breaking Tradition

Those of us who have been watching George W. Bush closely for some time are quite aware of how thin-skinned the current president is and how less than honest the White House is when it comes to defending the president. Although Jimmy Carter is now somewhat backing away from his statements, here's the original story on what the former president said on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette religious blog:

In a stinging rebuke to President Bush, former President Carter on Friday called the current administration “the worst in history” when it comes to international relations.

During a telephone interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from the Carter Center in Atlanta, the ex-president also accused the current White House occupant of eliminating the line between church and state and of abandoning “America’s basic values.”

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including [those of] George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me,” Carter said.

The White House was so concerned by Jimmy Carter's comments that they apparently had a session on how to respond to him and ended up calling him 'irrelevant':

In a biting rebuke, the White House on Sunday dismissed former President Jimmy Carter as "increasingly irrelevant" after his harsh criticism of President Bush.

Well, that sort of begs the question, doesn't it? If Nobel Peace prize winner and former President Jimmy Carter is irrelevant, then why was it necessary to respond?

As I said, Carter has somewhat backed off from his comments and I wish he hadn't. The media has stuck it's usual clumsy foot in the tiff by irrelevantly pointing out that former presidents do not criticize the sitting president. Yes, that has been a tradition but I would point out that the senior Bush has criticized his son in public by noting that his son is thin-skinned. The junior Bush did not object at the time, possibly because an objection would have drawn unwanted attention to what his father said. So the 'tradition' has already been broken, by George W. Bush's own father.

But let's go back to the cozy word, 'tradition.' There are good traditions and bad traditions. Slavery was a tradition at one time and a bad one; it was at one time acknowledged in the US Constitution and our constitution had to be changed. I'm inclined to think that for the most part it is a good 'tradition' for a former president not to criticize a sitting president. But what if the sitting president is breaking traditions himself, breaking them so recklessly and arrogantly that it becomes a bit of self-serving hypocrisy to invoke 'tradition' when it's convenient?

Let's look at some of the traditions Bush has broken:

It has been a 'tradition' for the president to work together with Congress when thinking about going to war. In 2002, Bush and his proxies repeatedly lied to Congress and claimed the president didn't need Congressional authority to go to war.

It has been a 'tradition' to separate Church and State. Our forefathers had many bad experiences with people who tried to conflate the two; the Baptists, in particular, were persecuted in our early history by those who insisted on a government-back denomination and even insisted on taxes being paid to that church which the Baptists were not members of. There are good reasons for that 'tradition' but Bush has found it politically advantageous to break down the wall that separates Church and State.

It has been a 'tradition' that Americans do not torture people. Bush has violated that tradition and pretended not to violate that tradition while seeking legal 'authority' to break the tradition with ridiculous signing statements that themselves ignore the tradition of leaving large legal issues to Congress and the courts. Congress writes the laws, not the president. The courts interpret the law, not the president. And torture is inconsistent with our values as a democratic nation and Bush's attitude on the matter has severely damaged our reputation around the world. When Bush talks about democracy, the world is no longer listening as closely to the United States as it once did.

It would not be difficult to continue listing 'traditions' Bush has broken. Many of those 'traditions' are in fact the law of the land (and there is no such law about former presidents). The fact of the matter is that George W. Bush is a national and international crisis all by himself. As the evidence mounts of the Bush Administration's blunders and even criminal behavior, I would urge Jimmy Carter and other former president to continue making statements on the most reckless and failed president in our nation's history. None of us are saying these things lightly. They have been imposed on us by a president who is unwilling to admit his mistakes and unwilling to change. Change can only come when our nation acknowledges we have a crisis in the White House.

Paul Wolfowitz Explained

Before he was hired by the Bush Administration, Paul Wolfowitz was not known as a particularly competent individual. He's still not known as a particularly competent individual. He wasn't competent in the few real responsibilities he had in the running of the war in Iraq. He also hasn't been competent as the president of the World Bank. In the case of Iraq, it was only necessary for Wolfowitz to be the theorist for the rationale behind Bush's war. His theory, it turns out, was not competent either. But he was effective on those 'news' shows with all the talking heads. He had a gift for sounding sincere while not having the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

What Wolfowitz was not known for, before he came to work for Bush, was a little streak of corruption and excessive self-importance. That became evident in the case he made for war in Iraq, a war that makes no sense, a fiasco, a consequence of broad incompetence and recklessness rarely seen in modern industrialized countries. The incompetence of Wolfowitz was little noticed at the time: there was too much incompetence to go around. And the media was overwhelmed by a noise machine coming from the White House and was oblivious to its own incompetence as fairy tale after fairy tale was being spun by the president and his advisers. Wolfowitz, another spectacular example of the Peter Principle in the Bush Administration, moved on to bigger things and became president of the World Bank.

Wolfowitz's self-importance and little streak of corruption grated on people as he waved his finger at them while talking about the need to control corruption. It tends to grate on people when they have to listen to a hypocrite. As Brad DeLong notes, Wolfowitz simply whines that he's being treated unfairly. After all, special people, particularly precious intellectuals for right wing movements, are not quite subject to the same rules as everyone else. One ought to be able to take care of one's girlfriend with a little financial help; or a lot, if one has power which everyone else doesn't. It's jealousy to demand that special people be held to the same rules as everyone else.

Paul Wolfowitz is not expected to last much longer as president of the World Bank.

After Four Years of Reckless Incompetence, Cheney Says It's 'Game Time'

It does not take four years to win a war unless something goes very wrong. Some of the possible things that can go wrong include:

a) The two sides are evenly matched.

b) A guerilla war, insurgency, rebellion, whatever you want to call it, is fueled by the growing unpopularity of an occupying army and the leaders who sent that army to war.

c) The dominant military power in a conflict is led by incompetents.

Suffice to say, the two sides in Iraq are not evenly matched. We are a superpower but we have a poor idea what it is we are trying to accomplish and our civilian leaders have little concept of the place where we have gone to war and little understanding of the post-colonial world we live in. Bush and Cheney's war has gone wrong largely because of b and c.

Dan Froomkin of White House Watch writes:

When it comes to today's visit by the beleaguered, credibility-challenged vice president to leaders of the fractured, mostly powerless government of war-torn Iraq, the White House is setting expectations appropriately low.

(snip)

The other message Cheney brings: "It's game time" -- raising the question what has it been up until now exactly?

Todd J. Gillman of the Dallas Morning News is liveblogging the vice president's trip -- complete with photos -- as well as filing pool reports to his print colleagues.

Gillman writes in a pool report that "according to a senior administration official who gaggled en route and on background, the message Cheney is bringing boils down to this:

"'We've all got challenges together. We've got to pull together. We've got to get this work done. It's game time.'

"The urgency of the situation also came through as this same senior official said: 'Everybody's got to sit down, raise their game, redouble their efforts.'"

Since the spring and summer of 2003, when has the situation not been urgent? Wasn't it 'game time' when Bush decided on war? Wasn't it 'game time' when Bush heard warnings of a possible terrorist attack just before 9/11? Wasn't it 'game time' when Bush repeatedly went on vacation, becoming the most vacation bound president of the modern era? Wasn't it 'game time' as Bush and the White House wasted hours and days and weeks stuffing the federal government with cronies, ideologues and political hacks instead of professionals (believe it or not they can still be found among Democrats, Republicans and independents) who know what they're doing?

Perhaps the reporters misread the meaning of 'game time' and it is a reference to the 2008 election? I know the American people have their own lives to live and are slow to come around on these things sometimes and I happen to be one who respects that because I respect our democracy. Democracy, by nature, is flawed, but it is by far still the best thing we've got.

But if the nonsense by Bush and Cheney continues for much longer, the American people are going to have to start pushing Congress to impeach the president and vice president. In my view, Bush and Cheney made themselves impeachable when they launched their war in Iraq with a long string of outright lies and then led us into a war we did not need and that has no purpose. No WMDs. No al Qaida connection. No democracy. No regional stability. But lots of very high-priced oil that a growing number of Americans cannot afford.

Let us say out loud the obvious: the motivations, words and actions of Bush and Cheney have not been honorable from day one of their fiasco in Iraq. And it's long past time for the media to stop pretending, despite the evidence to the contrary, that somehow Bush and Cheney mean well. They have broken too many laws and broken faith with the American people far too often for that charade to continue. I know, impeachment is not likely, it's messy and unpopular, but given the unwillingness of Bush and Cheney to mend their ways, it is now becoming the responsible course of action for our nation to take.

Majority of Americans Want Out of Iraq

On Iraq, most Americans do not agree with Commander Guy. Here's the latest poll from CNN:

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of President Bush's decision to veto a war spending bill that called for U.S. troops to leave Iraq in 2008, according to a CNN poll released Tuesday.

The poll found that 54 percent of Americans opposed Bush's May 1 veto, while 44 percent backed the president's decision to kill the $124 billion bill.

Now that the veto has been cast, 57 percent of Americans said they want Congress to send another spending bill with a timetable for withdrawal back to the White House, the poll found -- but 61 percent would support a new bill that dropped the timetables in favor of benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet to maintain American support.

What I want to know is why 44% still support a president whose Iraq policy is simply to kick the can down the road for the next president to deal with? Other than that, President Bush has no Iraq policy worthy of the name. We have turned ourselves into an unpopular occupation army in the middle of a civil war without an identifiable goal beyond not being shot at when we patrol a very unhappy and dysfunctional country that we never much thought about before Bush launched an invasion we did not need.

A war should have a realistic and meaningful goal. Bush never explained why (at least not accurately or honestly) we're there beyond his fiction created long after the start of the war that we're there so that the magical they do not come here. Bush can't even define who this magical they happens to be. Leaving war to an incompetent like Bush is also not acceptable. The 44% who think Bush was right to veto the Iraq bill need to get more realistic about what's happening. With the world's most powerful military, wars should not take four or five years to fight. And we should not be in the business of acquiring colonies or behave like we own Iraq which is how much of the world sees our presence in Iraq.

We need to wind the war down and think long and hard about what our military is for and why it should ever be used when there is no imminent threat. I believe in a strong defense but it makes no sense to go to war without an understandable policy or an acceptable and worthwhile goal. Relying on Bush's 'gut instinct' was a poor way to go. Congress needs to get Bush to wind down the war and wind down his strange and very costly ambitions.

Commander Guy at 28% Approval

Sometimes Bush says he's the Commander Guy and sometimes he says he's The Decider. A majority of Americans have their own opinion and are increasingly saying that Bush is The Failure Guy. Petulant and arrogant, unwilling to consider the wisdom of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, stubbornly refusing to engage in diplomacy, pursuing political games with no real value to most Americans, Bush continues to stumble along unwilling to change and unwilling to compromise.

Here's the story from Marcus Mabry of Newsweek:

It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ’08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir. The last president to be this unpopular was Jimmy Carter who also scored a 28 percent approval in 1979. This remarkably low rating seems to be casting a dark shadow over the GOP’s chances for victory in ’08. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds each of the leading Democratic contenders beating the Republican frontrunners in head-to-head matchups.

Three months ago, David Broder of The Washington Post thought Bush was due for a comeback. The dean of what passes for 'conventional wisdom' in Washington, as has been the case so often in the last six years, has considerable explaining to do. We have a failed and floundering president and vice president and it's time for more members of the media to make themselves useful to the American people and hold these two right wing conservatives accountable instead of running cover for their ideologial delusions and serial incompetence. We have problems and we need a functioning government or, barring that, we need a government that will not do us any further harm.

A Critique of King George By Mark Twain

Along with S.W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion, I've talked about how we seem to have returned to another Gilded Age of corruption and robber barons. Mark Twain lived in the Gilded Age and was a keen observer of the nonsense that took place in that era. Sometimes the best observations of other people's follies are rendered most clearly at a distance, say thirteen hundred years or so. Although set in a long ago imaginary time, Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is very much about the late 19th century and the convenient rules for the wealthy and the inconvenient rules for everyone else.

I could have picked from any number of great passages in the book but I offer here a section on 'freemen,' and in Twain's rendering, since the life and times of the sixth century were and are still not that well understood, he imposes something of the French social model of the 17th century to help us understand a flawed society. By this point in the book, the Connecticut Yankee has done well for himself. On the second day of a 'noble' quest he would prefer not to be on, our Connecticut Yankee is traveling the English countryside with a lady named Sandy when they encounter locals working on the road:

We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind. In half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor creatures who had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded as a road. They were as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them, they were so flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine that at first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest. My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said in their hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the other cattle—a remark which embarrassed these poor devils merely because it referred to them, and not because it insulted or offended them, for it didn't. And yet they were not slaves, not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy; and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world. And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as it should be. The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and become respectfully quiet.

The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear. They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else's without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be reading to come at a moment's notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit gatherers trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king's commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yet other taxes—upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day's work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's daughter—but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.

And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the bishop's road three days each—gratis; every head of a family and every son of a family; three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants. Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever-memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood—one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. ...

These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families—including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed-on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families—including his own.

They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. I said I had seen one—and that it would last until it had an Established Church. Again they were all unhit—at first. But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could soak into his understanding. I did it; and after a little he had the idea, and he brought his fist down and said he didn't believe a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal form a nation its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes.

I said to myself: "This one's a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its system of government."

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the peoople, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient."

Under that gospel, the citzen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate any way, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.

And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

New Deal! I grinned when I saw that. That's a good place to stop. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, the height of the Gilded Age and a few years before a series of reforms began, largely under Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Mark Twain died in 1910, long before many of the reforms our country needed at the time were completed. Republicans these days are, of course, trying to undo many of those reforms.

At this late date, does anyone doubt that we need major reforms in Washington that move us forward again? Change is possible. That's a lesson Americans need to remember from the last 250 years. At least our Connecticut Yankee almost got King Arthur to come around. President George W. Bush, however, will leave office not comprehending how profoundly he has failed the American people. After all, in Bush's mind, his corporate friends and sponsors ought to pat him on his back when he returns to his sprawling ranch in Crawford, Texas. Obviously, we need another round of reforms to spare us from the wreckage of any more MBA presidents.

Four Years Later, Bush's Fiasco Continues

It's been four years since George W. Bush strutted on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. It's been five years since Bush started making noise about Iraq.

Let's review:

1. No WMDs. But plenty of bogus charges and plenty of evidence that Bush and Cheney lied.

2. No significant connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein. But repeated charges by the White House and plenty of evidence that Bush and Cheney were trying to deceive the American people.

3. If what exists in Iraq is democracy, that might explain why democracy is under attack at home. Maybe the imperious Wolfowitz believed in the democracy project but no one believes that Cheney and Rumsfeld ever gave much thought to democracy as a rationale for war. It should be noted the Paul Bremer was appointed virtual viceroy of Iraq and early efforts of democracy were tabled. That is not democracy; it is colonialism.

4. No significant progress in the war on terror. But more terrorists are being created and Osama bin Laden is chuckling and still free in Pakistan.

What then, at this late date, is Bush's rationale for the war in Iraq? There doesn't appear to be a legitimate reason.

What might be some other reasons for Bush's war?

1. Second largest oil reserve in the world. Of course, Bush still is refusing to come to grips with our serious energy problem and the issue of Global Warming. The cost of the war would have made huge strides in making the United States energy independent.

2. Asserting America's superpower status. The incompetence of the Bush Administration has damaged our credibility and even the credibility of our military because of decisions by political types like Karl Rove. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and George W. Bush never served in the military (the champagne unit of the 1970s national guard in Texas will never qualify as military service by Bush).

3. Making profits for defense industries and close allies of the Bush Administration. This is the only area where the Bush Administration has been 'successful.' Keep in mind that the troops have often not received adequate equipment and supplies and some of the reconstruction projects are now languishing in disrepair. But many right wing Bush Republicans are pleased by the profits they have made.

The record, actions and behavior of the Bush Administration supports the above three as possible reasons for the war. Oil, colonialist pretensions and greed are not honorable reasons for a war. If a crooked mayor burns down the city hall so he can build a bigger one and his friends can make money, the fire fighters are still just doing their job by trying to put out the fire. Our military has been doing its job; soldiers do not get the choose the wars they fight. The overwhelming majority of our troops have been acting honorably in a difficult situation. The same cannot be said of the president and his top advisers. The fact that Bush has deliberately and arrogantly ignored the bipartisan Iraq Study Group speaks volumes. It's time to bring Bush's fiasco to a close.

Bush Never Much Thought About His War

The most powerful man in the world never much thought about why he was going to war in Iraq. That's pretty much one of the key points that George Tenet has made about George W. Bush. It's not news though. We already knew that President Bush doesn't think much about anything. He's the kind of guy who shoots from the lips and shrugs when things don't go his way.

Here's an AP article from over the weekend about the chaos in Iraq and the death of 9 Americans:

A car bomb exploded Saturday in the Shiite holy city of Karbala as the streets were packed with people heading for evening prayers, killing at least 58 and wounding scores near some of the country's most sacred shrines. Separately, the U.S. military announced the deaths of nine American troops, including three killed Saturday in a single roadside bombing outside Baghdad.

With smoke clogging the skies above Karbala, angry crowds hurled stones at police and later stormed the provincial governor's house, accusing authorities of failing to protect them from the bombings usually blamed on Sunni insurgents. It was the second car bomb to strike the city's central area in two weeks.

Several more Americans have died since then raising the total of Americans dead in April to 104; the combined coalition casualties for April are the highest since the Iraqi elections of January of 2005. It should be noted that the British are having increasing problems in what was once the relatively peaceful areas of southern Iraq which is predominately Shiite. As Bush stubbornly continues to ignore the advice of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, right wing Republicans in Congress and around the country should think long and hard about supporting an incompetent president who thinks he has all the answers.

Dan Froomkin of White House Watch has some thoughts on Tenet's somewhat tardy revelations:

As President Bush drove the country to what has turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq, did he ever have any doubts about whether it was the right call? Did he ever even consider there might be another way?

The new book by former CIA director George Tenet adds more evidence to the conclusion that once the president's mind was made up, there was no looking back. Inside the White House, the only debate about the war would appear to have been about how to sell it.

The administration's response to this latest charge has been angry -- yet vague. Bush's defenders are still unable to offer up one concrete piece of evidence suggesting that the costs that could (and would) be suffered by American troops and the Iraqi people weighed heavily enough upon the president that he ever seriously questioned his initial decision.

There's plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush was interested in invading Iraq long before 9/11; certainly Rumsfeld and Cheney were interested in the project before Bush became president. But we have an incompetent in the White House surrounded by ideologues who have a poor understanding of the world. Bush is the kind of man who does not harbor doubts, who has all the answers and who doesn't believe he makes mistakes; combine that recipe for disaster with sheer incompetence and there's going to be trouble no matter where such a man is put. Putting Bush in charge of the most powerful government in the world will go down as America's greatest strategic blunder.

Technically, you can only impeach a president for treason and high crimes and misdemeanors but not for gross incompetence; perhaps the words 'gross incompetence' should be inserted in the US Constitution. But it's increasingly clear Bush has actually committed any number of crimes that are impeachable; he is protected, however, by a stubborn right wing base, a compliant media (though less so than three years ago) and an increasingly deluded group of politicians who are unable as yet to acknowledge his crimes and failures. But dissastisfaction with Bush is growing even among Republicans. And there is still the matter of ignoring the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that included Republicans and was led by a Republican. Bush has no explanation for his inadequate performance.

Saudi Arabia and George W. Bush

Although Bush has had a close relationship with a number of powerful individuals from Saudi Arabia, his strange 'can't do' presidency has done damage to our relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Arab world. Because the Iraq fiasco is in their backyard, the Saudis have particular reason to be disturbed. We continue to be allies with Saudi Arabia and several other Arab countries though of course it is a difficult relationship at times.

Several bits of news in recent days have come to my attention and they highlight the complexity of our relationships and the dangerous damage Bush has done to our foreign policy (without the president having any clue where to go next). For all of Bush's posturing, the question hangs dismally in the air: how is Bush's war on terruh going? Here's Mary of The Left Coaster reminding us that Bush's war on terror has unfortunately done an effective job of creating more terrorists:

Based on the State Department report that the number of terrorist incidents in the world were up 29% in 2006, it would appear the answer is not so good.

Then there is that report from McClatchy today that the Saudis are unhappy to find that the detainees emerging from Gitmo are more extreme than when they went in. Enough so that the Saudis are providing them extensive help including counseling, financial aid and even match-making in order to woo them away from their attachment to terrorism.

Give the article and links a read. Bush's pretentious and ultraconservative ideas about how to do things are obviously not working. But Bush is not the only president who has ever made blunders. Among various presidents who have made blunders, we have to include Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest president of the 20th century. The difference between Bush and Roosevelt is that Roosevelt was a pragmatist; if he made a mistake, he talked to some experts and tried something else until he got it right. When Bush makes a mistake, he simply repackages his policies, tries a new public relations campaign and gives us more of the same.

Saudi Arabia is not pleased with Bush and one can hardly blame them. Among other things, we have made Iran stronger in the region and that does not make the Saudis happy. Saudi Arabia's former ambassador to the US and close friend to the Bushes, Prince Bandar, appears to be in eclipse thanks to Bush's mangling of our foreign policy. Here's that part of the story from Helene Cooper and Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar’s uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington.

For instance, in February, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed plans by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a high-profile peace summit meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, by brokering a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel or forswear violence. The Americans had believed, after discussions with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis were on board with the strategy of isolating Hamas.

(snip)

Since the Iraq war and the attendant plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world, King Abdullah has been striving to set a more independent and less pro-American course, American and Arab officials said. And that has steered America’s relationship with its staunchest Arab ally into uncharted waters. Prince Bandar, they say, may no longer be able to serve as an unerring beacon of Saudi intent.

(snip)

Robert Jordan, a former Bush administration ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said the Saudis’ mixed signals have come at a time when King Abdullah — who has ruled the country since 1995 but became king only in 2005 after the death of his brother, Fahd — has said he does not want to go down in history as Mr. Bush’s Arab Tony Blair. “I think he feels the need as a kind of emerging leader of the Arab world right now to maintain a distance,” he said.

Arab Tony Blair? Ouch. It's appear the British Prime Minister will be appearing as a metaphor for political poodles for some years to come. That never described the Saudis, even in the best of times. One cannot ignore that our relationship with them has always been complex just as our relationships with other Arab countries on the Saudi peninsula have also been complex.

Today we read in the paper that after the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration ignored, mishandled or botched almost a billion dollars of aid from various countries around the world. The aid from those countries included generous offers from Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Kuwait eventually acted on its own and donated large sums to the Red Cross and to the Katrina fund headed by Bill Clinton and Bush's father. Call it aid from friends, call it good public relations, it's worthy of note and should be remembered.

Even our oil relationship is becoming curiously more complex. The Saudis were not happy when Bush talked about ending our dependence on foreign oil a couple of years ago but the Saudis understand the oil situation better than anyone given that they're still sitting on the world's largest reserves and they know the numbers better than anyone. But note that a curious thing has happened in Kuwait. Years ago, the Kuwaitis raised the total of their oil reserve by a significant amount; the economists were happy with the numbers but various geologists and oil experts always considered the numbers suspect. Kuwait's recent trend towards democracy, as slow as it is, has apparently led to something of an accounting because the Kuwaitis themselves want a say in their own energy policy and they need facts to develop that policy. The result is that, practically speaking, the Kuwaitis now assume a smaller total reserve of oil left and they're pragmatically thinking, from their own point of view, of how they can stretch the time that they can make their reserves last for the benefit of their country. There are hints that the Saudi may be quietly doing the same thing: moving towards the long view instead of simply pumping as much wealth as they can as they move closer to a time when their oil production begins to significantly decline as all oil producers eventually do in a given region. The long view for the Saudis means not producing as much as they can, but holding back reserves for their own future. That may or may not be happening but it is in the interest of Saudi Arabia. Not suprisingly, if one is paying attention, that is also in the interest of the United States: it will force us make transitions in our energy policies while there is still oil to pump and a reasonably healthy economy (flawed though it is in some ways) to facilitate such a transition.

Iraq is a fiasco, and a foreign policy blunder of historic proportions, but both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to continue to pay attention to what is going on in the Middle East and particularly along the Persian Gulf. It is in our interest to keep paying attention, but it is important to be realistic and recognize we may not always get our way, particularly until the United States restores its credibility, preferably without resorting to reckless military adventurism. In fact, the time is rapidly approaching where war is far more expensive than simply working on partnerships with various countries throughout the world, whether they are friends, competitors or foes.

What Bush Will Be Doing This Summer

Before I explain what Bush will be doing on his long annual vacation in Crawford, Texas, this summer, let me note a post by James Fallows (hat tip to Kevin Drum) about former CIA Director, George Tenet and the run up to the war in Iraq:

Tenet, as mentioned earlier, would have better served his country (and his reputation) by speaking up more promptly about the Bush Administration’s failure ever to have a “serious debate” about whether it was worth invading Iraq.

But his failing was telling the truth too late — not sticking to, well, a lie like the one Bartlett uttered yesterday (according to the AP) as part of the White House’s attempt to rebut Tenet:

“This president weighed all the various proposals, weighed all the various consequences before he did make a decision.”

I say plainly: that is a lie. To be precise about it, no account of the Administration’s deliberations, by anyone other than Bartlett just now, offers even the slightest evidence that this claim is true. Innumberable accounts offer ample evidence that it is false. I have asked this direct question to many interviewees who were in a position to know: was there ever such a meeting or discussion?

The answer is: there was no discussion. Tenet, who allowed himself to fall under the spell of Bush and did too little to stop the machinations and pressure coming from Cheney and his crowd, is trying to set the record straight very late in the day. I'm not sure we're ever going to get the full story but it's become obvious that every time we get more details, the failure of Bush's presidency just becomes all that much more obvious. Think of it. We went to war without a discussion. We went to war without a realistic strategic assessment of what we were trying to accomplish (sorry, right wing or neocon fantasies about the world don't count). We went to war without a plan. We went to war with an incompetent president and vice president and a secretary of defense who should have been left retired after serving in government for too many years.

When President I'm-the-Decider Bush goes to Crawford, Texas, this summer, he'll be kicking a big can down the road. The name on the can will be 'Iraq' and he'll be kicking it all the way to the next presidency. But it won't be the only can he'll be kicking on those dirt roads of his, just the biggest one. He'll be kicking a can with Nancy Pelosi's name on it, and Harry Reid's name on it, and Henry Waxman's name on it and he'll be kicking a can with Alberto Gonzales's name on it and George Tenet's name on it and Paul Wolfowitz's name on it and he'll even be kicking a can with Carol Lam's name on it and David Iglesias' name on it. Then he'll go have dinner but he'll send out Karl Rove to kick a few more cans and then late at night, when the lights are out, he'll sneak out and he'll kick two more cans in the moonlight when no one's looking: a can with Dick Cheney's name on it and Karl Rove's name on it and he'll be kicking those two particularly hard.

No one should feel sorry for George W. Bush. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group provided Bush with the perfect opportunity to partially redeem himself, but he spurned the opportunity. He has chosen to kick the can. In the end, no one is more to blame for Bush's failed presidency than the shrub himself. George W. Bush will be blaming a lot of people in the years to come—and that too will be a measure of his failure.

White House Correspondents Wimp Out at Dinner

Rich Little was a flop but that wasn't the problem. The association for the White House correspondents picked about as safe a comedian as they could while they concentrate on those seven and eight figure salaries so many of them are shooting for. Here's something to think about. Does anyone think Jonathan Swift would have been easy on our boy king? Does anyone think Mark Twain would give George W. Bush a free pass for trying to resurrect the Gilded Age? Will Rogers would have twirled his lariat and had you thinking the Decider-in-Chief was dizzy with all that rope tightening around him.

These kind of dinners are not supposed to be safe. Not with an incompetent president. Not with a president who thought it was funny to look behind his chair for WMDs. Not with a president who increasingly rambles even when he's speaking to a carefully selected audience. The White House correspondents should be a little restless six years into Bush's presidency with so little for the Mayberry gang to show for it. The president's behavior is a disgrace. The correspondents know it and they continue to act as if it's a kind of parlour game. How's his style? How his haircut? Is he aging? Did he do a good job of putting on a photo op? Was his strutting effective? Does he look like Mister Rogers in that flight suit or like John Wayne? Ah, being a White House correspondent is apparently a difficult life.

Here's a story from Editor & Publisher, people who still care about journalism and the functioning of our democracy:

Rich Little, with shockingly dyed hair, said at the outset that he is “not political” but rather a “nightclub performer who does a lot of dumb, stupid jokes,” then proved that.

He started with a couple of Canada (his native country) jokes and a weak Sen. John McCain, which bombed...

(snip)

Little followed by doing six presidents, including a man he “loved,” Ronald Reagan. He put in false teeth to play Jimmy Carter saying that when he was a peanut farmer “I had the biggest nuts in the county.”

As the presidents got more recent, the impressions got weaker: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and then possibly the worst impression of all, the current president. But he closed with the one he is most famous for, Richard Nixon, saying, “Let’s bring him out of the mothballs one more time.”

(snip)

Speaking to E&P afterward, probably aware that his routine went over rather poorly, he said, "this is not the easiest audience in the world." But he said Bush told him when it was over, "absolutely perfect."

Some in the crowd walked out in the middle of the routine-- far more than left during Colbert's performance last year.

Embarrassing. Harry Reid says something to the effect that we're losing in Iraq and the media types, particularly on the right, go nuts. I've said for over three years we're gaining nothing out of this war. We'll end up spending $2 trillion for what? A strut on an aircraft carrier? What are we gaining from Bush's incompetence, lies, cronyism, ideological rigidity, and repeated blunders, all quite visible in his fiasco in Iraq? What are we gaining? Does anybody buy the garbage that if we don't kill Iraqis, they'll come here? Sorry, but the 9-11 attackers came by way of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and most of them were from Saudi Arabia. The logic of attacking Iraq does not hold.

Should it take five years to finish the first war? Should it take ten years to finish the second? Should these idiots be allowed to start a third? It's not about losing. It's about a president and vice president who don't know what they're doing. Other than engaging in fantasies about bringing democracy to the Middle East at the point of our guns and fighting terrorism in about as half-assed a way as one could possibly ask for, Cheney and Bush have no policy in Iraq worthy of the name. It's stall, it's dodge, it's tantrums and overblown rhetoric, it's pompous statements about running out of patience or insurgents in their last throes, it's bluster that only the Republican base deludes itself into buying.

Are Bush and Cheney impeachable? Of course they are. Should it happen? Yes. Will it happen? No, not in the current political environment with a media that still does a poor job of revealing the damage the current administration is doing to our country. But enough Americans are aware of what's happening that Bush and Cheney can be held accountable. It's time for a special prosecutor. Forget the incompetence. There's plenty of dishonesty and deception in the current White House for a special prosecutor to deal with. There are plenty of laws being broken. A special prosecutor needs to be appointed by Congress.

If we are to keep our country strong, it's time to bring most of our troops home while keeping troops in strategic position to keep the neighbors out of Iraq. It's time for Bush and Cheney to negotiate a settlement in Iraq and Iran; and if they won't, it may be time for Congress to appoint people who will. There's nothing in the US Constitution that says the American people have to put up with arrogance, gross negligience and obstinate incompetence. Bush, not the Democrats, not Congress, not the American people, is the one who chose to ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. The people of the Iraq Study Group, both Republicans and Democrats, have a record of competence. Our president does not. The surge is a profoundly flawed political stunt that puts our troops at risk. It is not a change of strategy: it's just more of the same.

Let me ask it again. Are we losing? Sorry, but that's the wrong question. The question is this: do we have an administration that knows what it's doing? The answer is no. Bush has no trouble talking like a tough guy but he didn't know what he was talking about when he launched the invasion and never had an honest strategic purpose for invading Iraq in the first place, and even if he had managed to come up with an honest strategic purpose, it's highly unlikely he could have executed it with cronies, ideologues and party hacks. We're still a strong and powerful nation. But the current president is a failure. The rest is just hot air and a lot of self-justifications by the right and a lot of nonsense by a media that still can't fully acknowledge the crisis in Washington and particularly the White House.