Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was interviewed by Lawrence O'Donnell and it got a little heated at points. The weirdest thing about the whole interview was Rice arguing the points of the first Gulf War as justification for the second Gulf War. It's amazing.
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For the last few weeks, the talking heads have been wondering where the viable Republican presidential nominees were and why they were waiting so long to announce their decision to run. At this same point 4 years ago, I believe there were somewhere in the neighborhood of ten GOP candidates. But let's face facts: despite the constant fear mongering, the constant barrage of insults, misinformation and accusations of being "the other"; despite a slow economic recovery and public sector jobs putting a drag on the unemployment rate, President Obama's approval rating has been hovering around the 50% mark. At this point in the timeline of his presidency, even St. Ronnie's approval numbers weren't any better and in fact had dipped below 40% within his first two years, a number to which Obama hasn't even come close.
GASP! She was using a teleprompter?! Isn't that the tool of the devil? Why can't she scribble on her hand like the others? So MENSA member Michele Bachmann tries to cover up one of her daily mistakes by taking a swipe at arguably one of the smartest men in whatever room he happens to enter. But hasn't that become the default position for the GOP? Sit on Fox News and laugh at the President and belittle his intelligence, and soon enough the yahoos will believe it.So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!And by the way... That will be the last time I borrow President Obama's tele-promoter!
Exactly. But of course if ever a contest or debate were to take place, the expectations bar would be set so low, it would be spun as a win for the idiot just because she didn't manage to vomit on herself....I'd love to see Bachmann or Palin or any of these hooples challenge the president to a head-to-head round of common knowledge questions. Hell, the president could be the smartest man on Earth -- he could have solved the mysteries of the universe and defeated that computer on Jeopardy, while simultaneously defeating that other chess-playing computer -- blindfolded -- and these idiots would still be accusing him of somehow being a marble-mouthed ignoramus. Remarkable.
guest-posted by Armadillo Joe
From one Texan in honor of another. Funny that I was just talking about her with the proprietor of this website about three hours ago. I had forgotten the date until surfing the interwebs.Call Me a Bush-HaterI wish she had lived to see Barack Hussein Obama become our president.
By Molly Ivins, The Progressive. Posted November 14, 2003.
Sneering, jeering, bad manners, hideous diplomacy, threats, demands, lies, arrogance, bluster, tax cuts for the rich. And you wonder why we think he's a lousy president?
Among the more amusing cluckings from the right lately is their appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W. Bush is a terrible president.
Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his 44 years of covering politics, he has never seen anything like the detestation of Bush. Charles Krauthammer managed to write an entire essay on the topic of "Bush-haters" in Time magazine as though he had never before come across a similar phenomenon.
Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to--our last president. Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice they haven't let up yet. Clinton-haters accused the man of murder, rape, drug running, sexual harassment, financial chicanery, and official misconduct. And they accuse his wife of even worse.
For eight long years, this country was a zoo of Clinton-haters. Any idiot with a big mouth and a conspiracy theory could get a hearing on radio talk shows and "Christian" broadcasts and nutty Internet sites. People with transparent motives, people paid by tabloid magazines, people with known mental problems, ancient Clinton enemies with notoriously racist pasts--all were given hearings, credence, and air time. Sliming Clinton was a sure road to fame and fortune on the right, and many an ambitious young rightwing hit man like David Brock, who has since made full confession, took that golden opportunity.
And these folks didn't stop with verbal and printed attacks. From the day Clinton was elected to office, he was the subject of the politics of personal destruction. They went after him with a multimillion-dollar smear campaign funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the rightwing billionaire. They went after him with lawsuits funded by rightwing legal foundations (Paula Jones), they got special counsels appointed to investigate every nitpicking nothing that ever happened (Filegate, Travelgate), and they never let go of that hardy perennial Whitewater.
After all this time and all those millions of dollars wasted, no one has ever proved that the Clintons did a single thing wrong. Bill Clinton lied about a pathetic, squalid affair that was none of anyone else's business anyway, and for that they impeached the man and dragged this country through more than a year of the most tawdry, ridiculous, unnecessary pain. The day President Clinton tried to take out Osama bin Laden with a missile strike, every right-winger in America said it was a case of "wag the dog." He was supposedly trying to divert our attention from the much more breathtakingly important and serious matter of Monica Lewinsky. And who did he think he was to make us focus on some piffle like bin Laden?
"The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from," mused the ineffable Mr. Krauthammer. Gosh, what a puzzle that is. How could anyone not be just crazy about George W. Bush? "Whence the anger?" asks Krauthammer. "It begins of course with the 'stolen' election of 2000 and the perception of Bush's illegitimacy."
I'd say so myself, yes, I would. I was in Florida during that chilling post-election fight, and am fully persuaded to this good day that Al Gore actually won Florida, not to mention getting 550,000 more votes than Bush overall. But I also remember thinking, as the scene became eerier and eerier, "Jeez, maybe we should just let them have this one, because Republican wing-nuts are so crazy, their bitterness would poison Gore's whole presidency." The night Gore conceded the race in one of the most graceful and honorable speeches I have ever heard, I was in a ballroom full of Republican Party flacks who booed and jeered through every word of it.
One thing I acknowledge about the right is that they're much better haters than liberals are. Your basic liberal--milk of human kindness flowing through every vein, and heart bleeding over everyone from the milk-shy Hottentot to the glandular obese--is pretty much a strikeout on the hatred front. Maybe further out on the left you can hit some good righteous anger, but liberals, and I am one, are generally real wusses. Guys like Rush Limbaugh figured that out a long time ago--attack a liberal and the first thing he says is, "You may have a point there."
To tell the truth, I'm kind of proud of us for holding the grudge this long. Normally, we'd remind ourselves that we have to be good sports, it's for the good of the country, we must unite behind the only president we've got, as Lyndon used to remind us. If there are still some of us out here sulking, "Yeah, but they stole that election," well, good. I don't think we should forget that.
But, onward. So George Dubya becomes president, having run as a "compassionate conservative," and what do we get? Hell's own conservative and dick for compassion.
His entire first eight months was tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, and he lied and said the tax cuts would help average Americans. Again and again, the "average" tax cut would be $1,000. That means you get $100, and the millionaire gets $92,000, and that's how they "averaged" it out. Then came 9/11, and we all rallied. Ready to give blood, get out of our cars and ride bicycles, whatever. Shop, said the President. And more tax cuts for the rich.
By now, we're starting to notice Bush's bait-and-switch. Make a deal with Ted Kennedy to improve education and then fail to put money into it. Promise $15 billion in new money to combat AIDS in Africa (wow!) but it turns out to be a cheap con, almost no new money. Bush comes to praise a job training effort, and then cuts the money. Bush says AmeriCorps is great, then cuts the money. Gee, what could we possibly have against this guy? We go along with the war in Afghanistan, and we still don't have bin Laden.
Then suddenly, in the greatest bait-and-switch of all time, Osama bin doesn't matter at all, and we have to go after Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11. But he does have horrible weapons of mass destruction, and our president "without doubt," without question, knows all about them, even unto the amounts--tons of sarin, pounds of anthrax. So we take out Saddam Hussein, and there are no weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the Iraqis are not overjoyed to see us.
By now, quite a few people who aren't even liberal are starting to say, "Wha the hey?" We got no Osama, we got no Saddam, we got no weapons of mass destruction, the road map to peace in the Middle East is blown to hell, we're stuck in this country for $87 billion just for one year and no one knows how long we'll be there. And still poor Mr. Krauthammer is hard-put to conceive how anyone could conclude that George W. Bush is a poor excuse for a President.
Chuck, honey, it ain't just the 2.6 million jobs we've lost: People are losing their pensions, their health insurance, the cost of health insurance is doubling, tripling in price, the Administration wants to cut off their overtime, and Bush was so too little, too late with extending unemployment compensation that one million Americans were left high and dry. And you wonder why we think he's a lousy president?
Sure, all that is just what's happening in people's lives, but what we need is the Big Picture. Well, the Big Picture is that after September 11, we had the sympathy of every nation on Earth. They all signed up, all our old allies volunteered, everybody was with us, and Bush just booted all of that away. Sneering, jeering, bad manners, hideous diplomacy, threats, demands, arrogance, bluster.
"In Afghanistan, Bush rode a popular tide; Iraq, however, was a singular act of presidential will," says Krauthammer.
You bet your ass it was. We attacked a country that had done nothing to us, had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and turns out not to have weapons of mass destruction.
It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad president. Grownups can do that, you know. You can decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred.
Poor Bush is in way over his head, and the country is in bad shape because of his stupid economic policies.
If that makes me a Bush-hater, then sign me up.
Well, not too much blogging for me today. Spent the day with the little Mrs. , running errands, trimming the tree (that's sounds nasty) and attending a friend's Christmas party. Got home and caught up on some TV. Needless to say, I was cable news free for the day - good thing too, I needed to clear my head.
But the one thing I did hear is that the King of the Douchebags, DICK Cheney said something to the effect of "even if we knew there were no WMD, we would have gone into Iraq anyways, because that's how I roll, motherfuckers!"
I haven't even looked up the direct quote, so I'll search for it now. Be right back... in the meantime, you can hum The Girl From Ipanema to yourself while waiting.
...
Okay, I'm back. So basically, it looks like Cheney was disagreeing with a Karl Rove quote while he was playing Salvage the Bush Legacy.Former White House Adviser Karl Rove said last week that if pre-war intelligence on the Iraqi WMD programs had been accurate, the United States likely would not have entered the war. But asked about Rove’s comment during an interview with ABC News Monday, Cheney said “I disagree with that.”
Then he goes on with the same old story; some such shit about Saddam Hussein still having "the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stocks."
Uh, why is this news? We all know that it was bullshit then, it's bullshit now, but somehow it's being fed to us as if this is some revelation. There is no new news about Cheney saying we still would have invaded Iraq even if we knew they didn't have WMD, because... well, we did know that there were no WMD. And we went in anyway. And it's because Cheney is an evil, evil demon. I'm starting to believe that he's not really human. He's evil incarnate.
It was all a money grab. That's all it ever was - privatize the military and get your corporate friends the overinflated government contracts, have them do a shitty job, leave the place worse off than when you went in, say it wasn't your fault, rinse and repeat. And don't forget to bleed the Treasury dry in the process. The $700 billion TARP bailout was the final slice across the throat to bleed out the country before riding off into the sunset with boatloads of cash.
UPDATE (12/17/08 12:35am): Anyone in public office who says "So what?" in a conversation as a rebuttal ought to be tarred and feathered. I thought he was just an imbecile, but I've come to realize that even Bush was smart enough to know the Devil when he saw it, and went along for the ride anyway.
I couldn't bear the thought of sitting through another Charles Gibson interview with a Republican shit for brains sitting with his deer in the headlights wife nodding her head in agreement like a couple of old farmer folk chewin' on a piece of straw and staring out at the ranch from their front porch, so I missed the very exciting Bush "I didn't do it - it was like that when I got here" interview.
I did however catch Keith Olbermann and the lowlights.
"The Wall Street decision making was done before I got there. Blame Daddy and Bubba."
"The intelligence was bad on WMD, not my fault. So what if we chose to cherrypick only what fit into our agenda."
I can't wait until I never have to listen to this nimrod again. Just hearing his voice makes me dumber. I start running into walls and tripping over the dog. Suddenly, I become entranced with shiny things and tend to play Ball in a Cup for hours. Please President Bush, stop hurting my brain.
We all knew this to be true, but it's amazing that this report took five years to be completed and wasted untold millions of dollars.Bush Overstated Evidence on Iraq, Senators Report
WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.
The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.
Of course, Bush loyalists claim that the report is a "waste of committee time and rescourses" and the White House is calling it a "selective view." I'm just wondering how "selective" the view is of Iran's nuclar ambitions and their military and weapons support against US troops and the government in Iraq. Actually, I'm not wondering. I know it's bullshit.
"Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."
-At the Radio & Television Correspondents' dinner, showing a photo of himself looking under his desk, March 24, 2004
...Iraq—no weapons of mass destruction. Iran—no nuclear weapons program. Throw in the fact that since our Mideast misadventure began, we’ve misplaced 190,000 of our own rifles and weapons somewhere, who knows where, in Iraq, and I’m thinking maybe we should outsource our weapons location intelligence gathering because it doesn’t seem to be what you’d call our specialty.
Article here.
Des Moines Register: Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson said today he was certain former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a point of contention in the 4.5 years since the war began.
"We can't forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, he clearly had had WMD. He clearly had had the beginnings of a nuclear program."
It's incredible that this is still an issue. Although when pressed further, Thompson did say he also still believed that Anna Nicole married for love. His wife Jeri had no comment.
"The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels."
"We do not claim to know where they all are," said William Brankowitz, a deputy project manager in the Army Chemical Materials Agency and a leading authority on the Army's chemical weapons dumping."We don't want to be cavalier at all and say this stuff was exposed to water and is OK. It can last for a very, very long time."
Hundreds of dolphins washed ashore in Virginia and New Jersey shorelines in 1987 with burns similar to mustard gas exposure. One marine-mammal specialist suspects Army-dumped chemical weapons killed them.
This is a facsinating story that should be read in full.
Click on portrait for a complete list of President Obama's Executive Orders, Presidential Memoranda and Proclamations
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