Ari Fleischer on Hardball (How Many Lies Can You Spot?)

(In your best Rod Serling voice): Picture if you will, a man. Small. Bitter. Demented. A man so blinded by ideology he can no longer tell the difference between truth and fiction. Black is white. Up is down. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The US hasn't been attacked since 9/11, and we have George W. Bush to thank for it. Barack Obama should say thank you every day that he inherited a world without Saddam Hussein in it. Don't bother with your remote, you won't be able to change the channel or the message. You have now entered the Twilight Zone.

Why did I do it? I was tired. I had gone out to dinner with my wife and a couple of friends last night and stayed out longer than I intended. After a restless sleep and having an early call, all I wanted to do was take a little nap after my first show. I crashed in the office but unfortunately had MSNBC's Hardball on in the background.

And then it happened. Matthews, for reasons I'll never understand even if it was explained to me, had former Bush White House Press Secretary and current Bush apologist and legacy builder Ari Fleischer on to speak about Barack Obama. Really, Chris? What the fuck? And Matthews had his hands full trying to dodge a barrage of bullshit like a shoe ducking Dubya.

How many egregious lies can you spot coming from this scumbag's cakehole in this interminably long clip?

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Poor, little Chris. He really tried, but Ari is a seasoned prick, one who can spew the crap better than anyone. He can tell little Billy that Lassie ran away while wiping the blood and guts and fur off his car fender, and do it with a smile on his weasely face.

What an A-1 Douchebag.

The Bush 9/11 Hero Myth

Bob Cesca mentions Mark Halperin's continual ass kissing of George W. Bush and the success that his administration has been, specifically in regards to the 9/11 response. How Bush responded is better than others would have done in Halperin's warped imagination. Because that's all it is: imagination. There's absolutely no way you can claim that one person would be better or worse in a certain situation than another unless you can repeat it. Although judging by Bush's record, I don't doubt many of us would have preferred someone else in his position... almost anyone else. Halperin is just spewing more Bush Legacy bullshit. If you can stomach it, here's a short clip of Halperin's rectum spelunking.

This "9/11 Hero" myth is the same myth of which Rudy Giuliani was the lucky recipient. I watched those towers fall as we were all trying to evacuate lower Manhattan. And believe me, had "America's Mayor" not been stupid enough to place the Emergency Control Center in the same location that was bombed in 1993, he would have been nowhere near the site.

It seems that hero status is automatically assigned to the leaders in charge (or rather elected officials who happen to be in office) in situations like this when it is those same leaders' negligence or indifference that helped to create the disastrous situation in the first place. I've been saying the same thing for years in regards to Giuliani. George W. Bush did absolutely nothing differently than what any other elected official would have done faced with the same scenario. Except maybe freeze in terror in the first 10 minutes after hearing the news. And starting an illegal war.

And the amazing thing is that nine months into his presidency, Bush mistakenly thought that a photo-op was the way to show his leadership. He learned nothing as time went on and continued that method for the rest of his time as "leader" of the free world.

Bush's Legacy - Iraq Reconstruction

This is un. Be. Lieveable. A new 513 page report on the history of the reconstruction of Iraq , or lack of, is about to be released with the New York Times obtaining an advance unpublished copy. The report basically states that the Pentagon's reconstruction efforts have been a complete failure. A complete $100 BILLION failure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

[...]

...In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan.

[...]

...The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.

“What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.

“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.

“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”

In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.

Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment on the history, but a spokesman, Keith Urbahn, said that quotes attributed to Mr. Rumsfeld in the document “appear to be accurate.” Mr. Powell also declined to comment.

I really, really wish I could say this is a surprise, but when the Bush government loses $8 billion in cash that was flown to Iraq on pallets, nothing is surprising anymore.

The Bush Legacy Project

For an administration so adept at the Reverse Midas Touch, where everything they touch turns to shit, the one thing I give the Bushites credit for is their ability to spin. They are Rembrandts in the art of Flim-Flam. They were able to, for eight long years, fool enough of the people enough of the time to remain in power just long enough to fill their coffers and almost destroy the country in the process. And the P.T. Barnum of the political three-ring circus that is the White House? Karl Rove.

Ron Suskind, 2004: In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

We all now know that "the senior adviser" in Suskind's piece was Karl Rove. And Rove was right. Study we did. While everyone was flipping out over the latest Bush Administration outrage, the Bushites were creating another and another. And another. Until this endless avalanche of bullshit was so overwhelming, the focus of the "judicious students of history" Rove was talking about splintered apart. There was no consolidated front. There was no one particular story that would stick.

Hurricane Katrina was really the first time they took a big hit, but how many people still talk about Bush and Cheney testifying together, not transcripted and not under oath during the 9/11 Commission investigations? How many of us are still thinking about Alberto Gonzales and the mockery he made of the Justice Department? And when one jamoke resigns, another is ready to take his place and condone torture while avoiding answering what torture is. Who talks about the devastation that still haunts New Orleans over three years later? Or even the slow recovery efforts of Hurricane Gustav's wake just a couple of months ago?

We all know the long, long list that George W. Bush leaves as his legacy: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, The Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act, illegal wiretapping, cherrypicking intelligence reports, the Iraq War, rendition, torture, waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, economic meltdown, record foreclosure rates, and on and on. That's just scratching the surface. Amazing isn't it?

And here we sit, eight years after the first national Bush atrocity that no one could have anticipated would become the norm from the crooks residing in the White House. Yet we are now hearing that Karl "Bush's Brain" Rove, former Bush communications director Karen Hughes and other senior Bush advisers are brainstorming ways to salvage Bush's legacy. A Bush legacy project. And they're meeting in the White House with current officials. They're doing it on our dime! How does one wrap their mind around the dilemma of attempting to create a positive spin on Bush's "legacy"? And since when is a president's legacy part of a White House agenda? Legacies are made, not manufactured.

This think tank's plan is to rewrite history. Already we're seeing Bush's farewell tour, kicked off with a Charles Gibson/ABC interview in which the Chimp in Chief tries to pass the buck in a sad, Bart Simpson-like "it was like that when I got here" attempt.

GIBSON: Do you feel in any way responsible for what's happening?

BUSH: You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President.

"... before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President." What the fuck?! How does one turn that into anything positive? And isn't it ironic that Karl Rove, the man who only a short time ago was plotting a permanent Republican majority (possibly the last Republican majority for at least a generation), the man Bush nicknamed "Turdblossom," now has the dubious task of polishing a turd?

leg⋅a⋅cy  [leg-uh-see]noun, plural -cies.

1. Law. a gift of property, esp. personal property, as money, by will; a bequest.
2. anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor: the legacy of ancient Rome.
3. an applicant to or student at a school that was attended by his or her parent.
4. Obsolete. the office, function, or commission of a legate.

Hmmm.... Oh, here's one!

leg⋅a⋅cy - A gift of property by will, esp. of money or personal property; a bequest. Also Fig.; as, a legacy of dishonor or disease.

That last line nails it. Bush will be remembered for his indifference; for his lack of curiosity; for his ineptness; for his butchering of the English language; for his disregard of that "goddamned piece of paper," the United States Constitution; for his preference to be at his photo-op Crawford, Texas ranch; for the hubris of his crony appointments.

But most of all, the George W. Bush legacy will be one of dishonor to the office of the Presidency. His legacy is one of a parasitic disease that sucked our treasury dry, bled us of our moral standing in the world and crippled the last remaining superpower (if such a thing still existed). And no amount of revisionist history will scrub The Shrub's "legacy" clean.

Pathetic Legacy

Bush Wants To Capture Bin Laden

President George W Bush has enlisted British special forces in a final attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.

...Intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden is sketchy, but some analysts believe he is in the Bajaur tribal zone in northwest Pakistan. He has evaded capture for nearly seven years. “Bush is swinging for the fences in the hope of scoring a home run,” said an intelligence source, using a baseball metaphor.

No matter what happens, whether Bin Laden is captured or not, nothing can be done to change Bush's "legacy" as a dimwit who listened to no one, lied a country into a war on two fronts under false pretenses and doctored intelligence, destroyed the credibility of the U.S throughout the world and sentenced thousands to their deaths due to his stubbornness.

Stunts like this are only tossed around when it was politically convenient. And if he should capture Bin Laden now, in his last months in office, shouldn't the first question out of the mouths of every news pundit and journalist in the country, if not the world, be, "Why did Bush wait so long to finally put forth the resources necessary to capture Osama Bin Laden?"

The answer of course, is if we had captured him, there would be no "boogeyman" to put out there to scare the public whenever the administration chose. Eight years of fearmongering could not have been so easy without a villain's face to flash on the TV screen and in newspapers at a specific time (usually during elections and low approval ratings).

Capture Bin Laden? The "Wanted: Dead or Alive" guy that Bush then admitted just a few months later to not "spending much time on" ? That Bin Laden?

Go ahead, Georgie. I dare you.