Bush's Final Fiasco

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, December 3, 2008; A17

As he prepares to move back to Texas, our 43rd president is the beneficiary of Bush fatigue. The nation has long since repudiated him. Americans are looking ahead to the promise of Barack Obama.

And it's lucky for George W. Bush that they are, because his handling of our plunging economy is Hooverian in both its substance and inadequacy.

Herbert Hoover, we should recall, had a program for dealing with the Depression. It consisted of lending to banks but opposing fiscal stimulus or direct aid to individuals. Which is why Hank Paulson's frenzied endeavors to prop up the banking sector and Bush's dogged resistance to assisting anybody else amount to pure neo-Hooverism.

As the 1930s began, Hoover believed that the coordinated actions of the private sector could save the beleaguered economy. It soon became apparent that the only action that private-sector businesses could agree upon was closing down factories and offices and throwing people out of work. Under immense pressure to do something, in late 1931 Hoover asked Congress to establish the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to provide funds to banks it deemed creditworthy.

By 1932, the RFC was making loans. Yet with the economy in free fall, the rate of bank failures increased until Hoover's successor, Franklin Roosevelt, created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Having done his bit to bail out the banks, however, Hoover rested. He opposed provisions that would have enabled homeowners to hang on to their homes.

As breadlines lengthened, he vetoed a bill appropriating funds for public works on the grounds that it was inflationary and contained pork-barrel spending. Bankers would be saved; everyone else was effectively damned.

Sound familiar? The Bush administration's approach to today's meltdown is to direct all its energies and largess to lending institutions. There is, as yet, no program to help floundering homeowners renegotiate the terms of their mortgages. The president is opposed to further stimulus programs, even though private-sector investment in the United States has all but ceased.

Bush: ‘I Was Unprepared for War’

By Kate Phillips

In what might be considered one of the first exit interviews, President Bush told ABC News’s Charles Gibson that during the eight years of his administration, the thing he was most “unprepared” for was the war in Iraq after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But he also said that he felt he would have been compromising his principles if he later on had ordered a pull-out of troops from the country.

From the transcript:

Mr. Gibson: What were you most unprepared for?

Mr. Bush: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

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Gus: What a lot of crock! Nearly all if not all presidents of the United States of America has had to deal with war of some kind or another. The little Bush himself was itching to go to war against Saddam but Bin Laden gave him a slap in the face so he decided to go after Bin laden half-heatedly — still is after nearly 8 years of war in Afghanistan — and also decided to blame Saddam for it all, to go and grab the oil. The little liar...

Bush has gone beyond delusional, he is certifiable!

When sane people scan over the rotting carcass that is today's Middle East, they see a breeding ground for terrorism and a powder-keg lacking only a source of ignition.

When the Nutter-n-Chief looks at the Middle East, he sees Utopia. That's not a joke!

Bush gave a speech recently (apparently, some people haven't had enough of him yet) and he said, "The Middle East in 2008 is a freer, more hopeful and more promising place than it was in 2001."

Sorry, but the dude's nuts!

US must keep fighting enemies: Bush

By Washington correspondent Kim Landers

Outgoing US president George W Bush has defended his doctrine of pre-emptive war.

In his waning days in office Mr Bush has used a speech to declare that the US must remain willing to take the fight to its enemies across the world.

Even though Al Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden, and his deputy have not been caught, President Bush says they are under enormous pressure.

"The only way they can stay alive is to stay underground," he said.

"The day will come, the day will come, when they receive the justice they deserve."

The President has also declared that the US military is stronger, more agile and better prepared than when he took office.

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Gus: stronger, more agile and still being kept close to defeat any second day by a dad's mafia of Muslim extremists... 

Under the Bush doctrine, enemies are not those who attack you but those who you choose to attack, no matter what... There are better ways to deal with problems in the world... Impeach the Bushit...

From unleashed

David Barnett

John Howard was, of course, right back in February, when he said that Al Qaeda would be praying for an Obama victory in the US presidential elections last month. He would have been even more right had he said that Al Qaeda was also likely to be praying for a Rudd victory in the Australian elections.

Assuming that whoever runs Al Qaeda nowadays was or were praying, then their prayers were answered.

All five governments that formed the alliance against international terrorism after the destruction of the World Trade Centre seven years ago have now fallen. John Howard's opinion that Al Qaeda wanted Barack Obama to become the next president of the United States is untestable, but it is hard to see how it wouldn't be true.

Al Qaeda bombed the Madrid railway station and got rid of the Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar who went four years ago. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the president of Pakistan Pervez Musharaff, who declared flatly that support for the war against terrorism was a matter of the survival of Pakistan, were the next to go.

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Hey! It's not as if Bush (or John Howard) was very successful at doing the job, is it? And after nearly eight years, still fighting without knowing where to shoot...

And Guess what? Where did most of the terrorists who did the deed on 9/11 came from?

Saudi Arabia.  Including Bin Laden...

Are we dealing with that? No... We need the oil. So while the Saudi King shakes hands with Bush, promising a crackdown on fundamentalist terrorists, the kingdom encourages — (what am I saying, ENFORCES!) — a fundamentalist form of religion that creates more fanatics than ever...
And not only that, the kingdom (more despotic than Saddam) implements private fundamentalist religious schools in Europe, such as England and other countries....

And as far as Musharaff was concerned, he was doing the minimum to please the Americans while destroying the fragile democratic construct of Pakistan. Remember the judges? If we want to go down on that route, the only one who savagely was doing his bit to fight terrorism was Saddam, but we" (Bush, Howard and Blair) took him out under false pretences.

So you're right, all the fibbing governments have bitten the dust as they should have, since their antics have not worked one bit, except create more grief without advancing the cause of understanding democracy. Even if appears as implemented in Iraq, for example, it's mostly a veneer that will vanish as soon as the US troops and their arsenals retreat...

Not a good outcome, while the real culprits are still at large and populations suffer.

Praying for the demise of Bush, Blair and Howard...???? Sure...

December 14, 2008

Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders

By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER

BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

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.’ ”

Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

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Can we accept that this was sheer incompetence from the most advanced country on earth, or was it designed to make Iraq bend at the knees to force it to sell its oil to the Yankees — while the rest of the world populace was being sold furphies to believe in reconstruction marvel?... Or a bit of both?... Why not say a lot of both plus a strong dab of corruption to benefit crooked creative entrepreneurs — read more at the NYT and see toon at top.

A treasured ratbag

The obituary of John Webster ("Anarchistic demagogue has the last word", December 17) took me back to the 1960s, before shops, theatres and pubs were allowed to open on Sundays.

Dozens of speakers were in The Domain spruiking on every imaginable topic to an audience of thousands. Other speakers stood on the ground, on soap boxes or milk crates; Webster stood on his own five-foot ladder. Others took themselves seriously; Webster didn't. Others were put off by hecklers; Webster thrived on them. Every question from the crowd, whether serious or derisive, gave him a chance to criticise organised religion - particularly the Catholic Church.

It was marvellous entertainment - irreverent Australian humour at its best. Where have all the ratbags gone?

Peter Wall Ascot (Qld) [SMH letter]

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Well, we, the sons and daughters of Webster — the encyclopedic ecumenical anti-christ ratbag, are treading the quieter planks of the Internet, while others, traitors to the spirit of the ladder, have gone to greater pastures — like having become fully fledged journos for right-wing rags full of dangerous ratbagerry.

Humans are basically lazy and are liars. That empirical discovery may not be news to many but I feel strongly about it. When the president Bonsai saw problems, he pointed the finger and said: "you go and beat the shit out of that guy over-there!.." Yes war IS the LAZY option. Yes, he had to lie big time to go to war. Sure he had to "work" hard at making up excuses... That's the problem. The more we lie the more excuses we need to justify our lies and our laziness. Vicious circle of being humanoid.

Negotiating proper outcomes is hard bloody work. Easier, on paper at least, to beat the shit out of someone and steal their hard earned cash... See the latest scam exposed in the US — I would be prepared to believe it's only the tip of an iceberg... But beliefs are the lazy options...

Webster would have been ten feet above ground.

note: There was also another good orator, in the Domain, called Gary if my memory is correct... Dunno (lazy way of saying I don't know) what happened to him though... see toon at top.

show throwing at Bush... More than 27 millioms shoes have hit him in the muzzle... Fantastic...

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: They lied about Iraq in 2003, and they're still lying now

...

Even the choral backers of Bush and Blair, once oh-so-influential, sound tinny now, out of tune. In a new book, The Liberal Defence Of Murder, Richard Seymour names many usually enlightened individuals who cheered on the disgraceful crusade and have now gone silent. Others who supported the adventure have escaped through passages of ingenious exculpation. Most Tories, for example, now say they were hypnotised by the Government's false dossiers.

Really? Even hard-of-hearing Mrs Kirkpatrick down the road – she's 79 – understood that we were being deceived. The UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Scott Ritter both told us there were no WMDs. Ken Clarke said this weekend: "I opposed the Iraq war. I'm not sure whether anybody believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to anybody. Most American spies didn't believe that, most British spies didn't believe that and most of the Foreign Office didn't believe that".

Nor did the Opposition but it still backed Blair because Conservatives love wars and one against a swarthy potentate was irresistible.

So to Iraqis, the beneficiaries of our noble "sacrifices". This week Nahla Hussein, a left-wing, feminist Kurdish Iraqi, was shot and beheaded for her campaigning zeal. Fifty-seven Iraqis were blown up in Kirkuk. Christians in Mosul are being savagely persecuted and sharia law has replaced the 1959 codified entitlements given to women in family disputes. Women in Iraq have fewer rights today than under Saddam.

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see the slop bucket at top... the content of which soon to be evicted from office into the cesspool of history...

from the Washington Post

Bush Enjoys a Simpler Life

Back in Texas, former president adheres to basic philosophy: his legacy is yet to be determined.

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Really, how can this simple fellow enjoy a simpler life... ? And how can a former president adhere to basic philosophy is beyond me, unless this one uses some very very strong superglue. see toon at top...

And his legacy is clear: crap all around.