George Bush

The sudden disappearance of GPP Pirhabbits under Obama is as mysterious as their first appearance on the scene, as this report from 2006 illustrates:

Giant Panamanian Polar Pihrabbits Strip Flesh From Helpless Carrots

Mai Hoo reporting from Garbonzo, Panama

Feb 12, 2006

As dawn broke in this usually peaceful jungle village, sobs were heard coming from the humble garden plots of the local residents.

Once again, giant pihrabbits had mercilessly devoured many of the carrots which had been lovingly planted by the gentle jungle-dwelling natives of this highland territory.

"We don't understand why these monsters are coming into our village", said one distrought gardener, as she gazed at several green remainders of devoured carrots. "Look, it is just like those rabbits ate the body, but left the green hair behind. How can we tolerate this? Will our cabbages be next?"

Brazillian investigators have fielded the theory that global warming drove Amazonian bunnies into the Amazon river, where they found relief from sweltering heat. But how those bunnies were impregnated by the vicious, flesh-eating river pihrannas, remains a mystery.

Bush administration officials scoffed at this theory, stating that global warming is as big a myth as giant jungle bunnies who raid carrot gardens in the dark of night.

"Bunnies remain the penultimate archetype of fuzzy cuteness", said a White House spokesman. "The natives of Panama must be mistaking chupacabras for rabbits. Global warming is not a proven theory, unlike Intelligent Design."

Local genetic scientists, working under the handicaps of lack of electric power, clean water, and modern instrumentation, have analyzed samples of the bunny-saliva and have determined that the genes of polar bears has been found, as well as rabbit and pihranna fish. "Hey, we may live in a jungle, but we watch CSI too, you know", they said. "Modern genetics is now our primary tool, in our quest to abolish superstition and bring Panama into the 21st century".

Peruvian scientists have theorized that due to global warming and the breakup of arctic polar ice, polar bears stranded on icebergs have drifted south, and have been sighted swimming in the Amazon river. But US Government officials, on condition of anonymity, revealed that recent satellite photos do not show any polar bears south of northern California. "Polar bears do not mate with pirhannas, they eat them."

Argentinian psychiatrists have expressed alarm at the mood of polar bears sampled thus far, and fear that global warming has changed the chemistry of the bears brains, causing bipolar disorder. "We have noticed that these polar bears are either very depressed, or inexplicably happy, even ecstatic", said one scientist. "We theorize that these bears, in their understandable desperation for relief from this painful disorder, have resorted to having sex with cute little bunnies, but only when the bears are in their ecstatic mood. Otherwise, they just eat them".

Is it possible that this accounts for the origin of the gigantic, carrot-hungry pihrabbits of the Panamanian jungle highlands? And is this yet more evidence of global warning, or is it yet more hysteria generated by hordes of disenfranchized expatriot liberals, who have chosen to live in foreign jungles, rather than to cruelly carve out a conservative lifestyle from the heart of America?

It is understandable that people were shaken up by the events of 9/11. It must have been startling for Dick Cheney to have been carried off by the secret service to an underground bunker. Meanwhile George Bush seemed to be in such a panic that he could not function for a couple of days. We  need level headed leaders who can overcome their initial shock and act responsibly. Richard Clarke, who was also there on 9/11, doesn’t accept shock over the events as justification for the disastrous policy mistakes which followed. He writes in an op-ed:

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

“Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans,” Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a “defining” experience that “caused everyone to take a serious second look” at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. “Part of our responsibility, as we saw it,” Cheney said, “was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America.”

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president’s national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president’s office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. “If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people,” Rice said in her recent comments, “then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.”

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years — on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping — were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney’s admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Clarke discussed specific ideas discussed, including invading Iraq, use of the U.S. courts and prisons to handle suspected terrorists, extreme interrogation methods, and wiretapping. While not discussed in detail in his op-ed, the Bush administration had also received warnings prior to the attack which they had ignored. He concluded:

Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques — but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

“I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities,” Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration’s response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.

The purpose of a terrorist attack is to inflict terror upon the victims. They were far more successful than they might have anticipated considering the degree to which they inflicted terror upon top leaders in the Bush administration, leading them to take actions which were counterproductive to our national security and contrary to our principles.

The New York Times reports that the wiretaps performed by the Bush administration exceeded what was allowed under the law:

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional…

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said.

After a contentious three-year debate that was set off by the disclosure in 2005 of the program of wiretapping without warrants that President George W. Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress gave the N.S.A. broad new authority to collect, without court-approved warrants, vast streams of international phone and e-mail traffic as it passed through American telecommunications gateways. The targets of the eavesdropping had to be “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. Under the new legislation, however, the N.S.A. still needed court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion.

In recent weeks, the eavesdropping agency notified members of the Congressional intelligence committees that it had encountered operational and legal problems in complying with the new wiretapping law, Congressional officials said.

Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages.

One official said that led the agency to inadvertently “target” groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred.

Glenn Greenwald further discusses these revelations. Andrew Sullivan notes the hypocrisy of many right wing bloggers. While they ignore real civil liberties violations under Bush, they have been distorting a report on right wing extremism to raise bogus civil liberties concerns regarding the Obama administration. It is also notable that nobody made a fuss over a Department of Homeland Security report on left wing extremism which was declassified in January (pdf of report here). Both the reports on left wing and right wing extremism were prepared by a Bush appointee.

Well the TV stations have been engaging in an orgy of celebration of the inauguaration.   I read a short article describing the departure of George W. Bush from the White House but most everything else has been Barack, Barack, Barack.

It is Barack's Obama's day and more power to him but I felt more like wearing a black armband of mourning.  People will eventually learn the President Obama is just as human as the next guy and I feel sorry for them for the inevitable disappointment they will feel when they find out their Messiah has feet of clay.

I have never regarded President Bush as more than human but I have always had the greatest respect for him.  He was too slow to use his veto and fiscally could have done better to rein in the budgets that the REPUBLICAN congress sent to him.  But on the big issues he was in the right.   He is a decent and honorable man.  History should treat him far kinder he is being treated today.  I wish him God's blessings and comfort in knowing that he did the right thing.

(Slightly edited to mention the fiscal shortcomings of the Bush presidency.)

In the 1980's a murderer killed seven people by tampering with bottles of Tylenol.

The response by Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, has become a textbook example of crisis management.

It was quickly demonstrated that Johnson & Johnson were not at fault - there was no doubt that the capsules had been tampered with after they were on store shelves. And the problem was local - confined to Chicago.

Nevertheless, Johnson & Johnson pulled the product off the shelves throughout the entire country - destroying product worth $100 million.  It also took out adds advising people to not take any Tylenol capsules they already had in their medicine cabinets. They offered a free exchange of capsules for solid tablets.

Several months after the crisis was past, Johnson & Johnson reintroduced the product in tamper-proof packaging.

Before the crisis, Tylenol was the number one brand in its category. A few years after the crisis, Tylenol was once again the number on brand in its category.

Peak, abyss, and peak again, all in the space of a few years.

Let me analogize: the Republican Party is Johnson & Johnson, the presidency is Tylenol.  Neo-cons and hubris are the tamperers.

The tainted product - George W. Bush - has now been pulled from the shelves (albeit by the Constitution, not the Republican Party - but then again, few analogies are perfect).

The campaign to reintroduce the product runs from now until 2012. There is only one thing that will serve as the equivalent to "tamper-proof" packaging - the party has to repudiate George W. Bush. It is the only way to convince the American people that "we get it", and the next nominee can be trusted to run an administration that is competent and productive.

Failure to repudiate Bush will result in lingering questions hanging over the heads of all Republican candidates for office at all levels. Voters will remain skeptical regarding whether any lessons have been learned, and whether the new product might also be susceptible to tampering by the same malevolent forces that wrecked the Bush Administration.

Some of you may think "the Bush years weren't that bad". But recall: this is man who wanted Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court, that he blew up the budget to no productive purpose, and his response to 9/11 was to start the second-most costly war in our nation's history - with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Repudiate George W. Bush - it is the only way to repair the damage to the Republican brand.

Two important points of view from the Left jumped off the page at RealClearPolitics.com this morning:

What Did Obama Learn in Iraq? 

The senator hasn't shown us much yet, By John Dickerson

Wrote Dickerson: 

Barack Obama's trip to Iraq was so presidential that at moments, he sounded like our current White House resident. When Karen Tumulty of Time asked Obama what he'd learned on his trip, he said, "It confirmed a lot of my beliefs." Lara Logan of CBS asked him if he was ever in doubt that he could lead the country in war as commander in chief, and he answered, "Never."

After seven and a half years of George Bush, we should pause when a man auditioning for president says that the facts confirmed his beliefs and that he's never in doubt. As Obama himself has warned us at other moments, these are signs that a fearless leader may be letting ideology or rigidity steer him in the wrong direction.

Perhaps most alarming:  Obama still holds the same policy views he did more than a year and a half ago, even though a lot has changed since then in Iraq, and a lot of those events appear to contradict his earlier views. We know that Obama hasn't moved, but we don't know, really, why that's so.

Dickerson even goes so far as to make the one comparison I never expected to read from the Left: 

Admitting you're wrong, or even that your thinking has evolved, is risky for a politician. Maybe too risky. That's certainly what George Bush believes.

Arrogance Won't Win the Election

By Susan Estrich

Wrote Estrich: 

In the prayer he left at the Western Wall, Senator Obama asked the Lord to protect him from pride and despair. Maybe he should have added something about protecting his campaign from the related danger of arrogance. It might be the biggest threat to Obama's success.

"They think they can't lose," one of the smartest people I know said to me this week, describing the attitude he sees on display in the Obama campaign. He isn't the first one to say it.

There was a crop of stories, as the trip was ending, suggesting that the Obama campaign, which used to pride itself on its openess and transparency as compared to the Clinton machine, has now abandoned openess and transparency in favor of tight controls, attacks on reporters who write less-than flattering pieces, and a particularly unattractive form of hardball that people who think they are on the way to the White House, or already there, often adopt. It will not serve him well.

Estrich makes the astute observation that "even with the press cooing, the Republican stumbling, his message muddled and his base shaky, the polls are showing the race neck-and-neck, Obama within the margin of error, behind in the key state of Ohio. And this without even factoring in, or trying to, just how many people are giving the politically correct answer to pollsters, saying they're for Obama when they aren't."

Obama could win, but he also could lose. If his campaign doesn't understand that now, they will pay for it in November.

From Ben Smith's blog at Politico - better check it out (and please educate me as to how to embed video here, thx!):

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0608/Cusack_attacks.html