BOO! Bush As the Boogeyman

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There is a monster in our mist that hails from Texas. He has a menacing
laugh:



HE IS PURE EVIL! At least that is one Democratic strategists want you to
believe. From the AP:

To minimize expected losses in next fall's election, President Barack
Obama's party is testing a line of attack that resurrects George
W. Bush as a boogeyman and castigates Republicans as cozy
with Wall Street.

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Be scared America!!! Republicans want to cut your taxes and cut
spending!

Cheney: Leahy Merited It

The mainstream media is always wanting politicians to apologize.
Cheney isn't the type to play along. Enough said:

Disappointed

I'm disappointed also, Mr. President. Just imagine how productive these past
eight years would have been if both sides weren't yelling at each other like raging
maniacs? I think these past years have set a new low in political discourse in modern
history. I fear, however, once the bar has been set so low- it will stay there. Our
wars, economy, social issues, weather (See: Global Warming) etc. have all been
politicized. I blame both sides of the aisle really.

Shoe Thrown at Bush

President Who's Often Called Religious Nut Does An Interview Sounding Not So Nutty

I never bought the "religious nut" label they gave him. Just goes
to show how the media drives memes that aren't true. But then
again to many cultural liberals, you can't be against abortion and
gay marriage and not be a religious nut.


Part 1



Part 2

Legacy

Quote from a Statesman article:

Rove sees a presidency clouded by the way it began.

"There were people who never accepted the legitimacy
of George W. Bush and acted accordingly," he said.

For now, that's the Bushies' story, and they're sticking to it.

"The political atmosphere was toxic from the beginning,"
McKinnon said. "And then 9/11 intervened, and that changed
the presidency forever."

"It was different because of the recount. It was different even
before he was sworn in than we thought it would be," McKinnon
said.

Respected and Veteran Reporter Can't Get Her Facts Straight

Veteran reporter Barbara Walters, who has interviewed several heads
of state over the decades apparently has trouble with getting her facts
straight. In an attempt to make it seem like President George W. Bush
admitted that he has regrets about sending troops to Iraq said this:

George Bush is sounding a little more like Barack Obama where
he just did an interview and said he's not sure, his biggest regret,
if he had known there were not weapons of mass destruction, I
don't want to quote. I can never quote exactly but the jest of it
was that he was still not sure he would have invaded. That was
a big decision. George Bush just said this.

First of all, President George Bush didn't invade a darn anything. Our U.S.
military liberated Iraqis from the Saddam Hussein regime and should be
commended for that. However, this is what President Bush actually said.

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you
had one?

BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to
have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their
reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a
reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my
administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in
Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations
around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you
know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different,
I guess.

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there
have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors
go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.
In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there
have been a war? Absolutely.

GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.

President Bush said, "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."
The term is "I guess" gives me the feeling of ambivalence and I think he's
not sentence explains his ambivalence:

BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting
question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to
speculate.

Somehow respected journalist Barbara Walters interpreted President Bush
not wanting to speculate about if history had been different would his decision
to go to war would have been different as "not being sure" and sounding like
Barack Obama, a war critic. Great job, Barbara Walters.

What's Missing?

Sometimes bias presents itself from what's missing in a news article.
Read this article and tell me if there is a small bit of information missing?
An excerpt:

The national proclamation issued this year asked God's
blessings on our country and called for Americans to observe
the day with appropriate programs, ceremonies and activities.

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle is named in the suit because he is
one of 50 governors who issued proclamations calling for the
prayer day. The foundation is based in Madison.

Shirley Dobson, chairwoman of the National Day of Prayer
Task Force, and White House press secretary Dana Perino
also are named.

The foundation has filed numerous lawsuits in recent years,
including one rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court last year
that attacked President Bush's faith-based initiative.

The question I had immediately after reading this article was: Since when
has this National Day of Prayer been around? The article didn't state
this information so I went to the National Day of Prayer official Web site
and behold I found the answer:

It was created in 1952 by a joint resolution of the United States
Congress, and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman

I'm curious why they would leave out that information since it provides
historical context. For a moment I thought President Bush signed into law this
legislation and that's why they were suing him. They took the time to mention
the foundation is based in Madison, why not mention that it's been around for
more than 50 years? I did a word count and the article is a measly 224 words,
I doubt it was length the problem.

Did George W. Bush Divide Us?

Here's an interesting column written by Michael Tomasky. Tomasky is asking
where's Obama's post-partisanship rhetoric. This part really stood out to me:

The grand 2004 theme of post-partisanship seems to have all
but disappeared from the candidate's rhetoric. In a major foreign
policy address he delivered just before his overseas trip last
month, he enumerated some of the steps the United States
should have taken after Sept. 11, 2001. Getting Osama bin Laden
led the list, but when it came to domestic priorities, the man who
burst onto the national scene talking about one America
conspicuously failed to mention his regret that, instead of being
united after the attacks, Americans were divided along partisan
lines by an administration that wielded patriotism as an ideological
cudgel.

I think the idea that the Bush administration 'divided us' is a big myth. Was America
united during the 2000 election when Bush won by a thread? (And I'm sure
I can't say Bush "won" because we'll have some Dems saying he didn't win
the election, it was "stolen.") Yep, we were really united back in 2000. Was
America united during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial? I'm sure that was a
kumbaya moment.

I would like to ask exactly how Bush divided us? Was it the war in Iraq? You mean
the war that a majority of Americans approved of when we went in? America didn't
seem all that divided at that time. Liberals like to say that he divides us on 'wedge
issues' like gay marriage. One only has to look at the polls to see Americans aren't
divided on gay marriage, a majority oppose it. So again how did Bush divide us?

I, too, would like to see less partisan bickering. I'm just not holding my breathe.
I think it's naive to believe that we can get people living in a rural town in South
Carolina to agree politically with people living in Berkeley, California. I believe we
are living through times where we are politically and culturally divided. I think it
might take a generation to overcome. Perhaps, if we want to start uniting maybe
we should stop blaming one side of the aisle. That might help.

Let's look at the past four presidential elections to see how close they were:

1992 wasn't a landslide



1996 wasn't a landslide


2000 was a nail-biter



2004 was also very close:



So again tell me how George Bush divided us?

Hate

President Bush is totally hated around the world.

Stay Classy, Jack Cafferty

Jack Cafferty reads a viewer email that says "If true, then Bush, Cheney
etc. deserve to be clapped in irons, held for trial and executed for treason."
Hint to Cafferty: You don't have to read all your nutty mail.
Video here.

Lame Duck

President Bush is so out of the media spotlight Yahoo! News doesn't
even want to write a full headline for an AP story about him:

Reporter Asks Bush, "Why Haven't You Called on Americans to Drive Less and Turn Down theThermostat?'

President Bush responds that Americans are smart enough to do it
on their own:



Good answer, I think. The president's job isn't to tell people how much
to drive and to turn down their air conditioners.

Bush to Lift Executive Ban on Offshore Drilling

About time!

Bush: The Most Under-rated President Ever?

That's what this guy thinks. A quote from his article:

Whatever happened to leadership and honesty as presidential traits?
I happen to believe that the only leader in the West to have these two
admirable qualities in droves is the leader of the free world: George W
Bush.

Yes, we’ve all heard the Bushisms and laughed at them but do you
really think somebody supposedly that thick can make it to the top
of the most sophisticated political system the world has ever seen?

No, and that is because Mr Bush is far cleverer than most of his
predecessors. He may not have been a Rhodes Scholar, but he has the
ability to reach out to his people and read them.

I think if Iraq and Afghanistan become stable and free countries for generations
to come I think President George W. Bush could easily be the best president we've
had in the past 30 years.

No, President Bush doesn't have the rhetorical skills of a Ronald Reagan or JFK. Yes,
he's made plenty of mistakes. He's not very inspirational. However, he had crucial
characteristics that are were needed for the past eight years: patience, persistence,
and calm. That's just what we needed.

The War on Terrorism has been long and required a leader with patience and
resilience. Let's face it we live in a fast paced society. We like our food, information,
and news quickly. Terrorism, however, required a longer attention span.

Too Much Like Bush: The Barack Obama Edition

I have a continuing series called "Too Much Like Bush." Today's edition
will make any Bush-hating liberal shutter. Guess who's like President
Bush today? It's the Democratic presidential candidate: Barack Obama.
Gasp!

Today Sen. Obama promised to expand Bush's faith based programs. This
is obviously a continuation of moving to the center that he started last week.

Boumediene v. Bush

You know what is the perfect way to spend your Friday? Reading yesterday's
Supreme Court ruling on the Guantanamo Bay detainees. It's a lengthy piece. I
spent a few hours yesterday day skimming through it. I thought I would highlight
the parts that stood out to me. I'm definitely no constitutional expert so this is just
what popped out to me, a layperson.

From the Opinion delivered by Justice Kennedy:

It is true that before today the Court has never held that noncitizens
detained by our Government in territory over which another country
maintains de jure sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution.
But the cases before us lack any precise historical parallel. They involve
individuals detained by executive order for the duration of a conflict that,
if measured from September 11, 2001, to the present, is already among
the longest wars in American history. See Oxford Companion to American
Military History 849 (1999). The detainees, moreover, are held in a
territory that, while technically not part of the United States, is under the
complete and total control of our Government. Under these circumstances
the lack of a precedent on point is no barrier to our holding. We hold that
Art. I, §9, cl. 2, of the Constitution has full effect at Guantanamo Bay. If
the privilege of habeas corpus is to be denied to the detainees now before
us, Congress must act in accordance with the requirements of the Suspension
Clause. Cf. Hamdi, 542 U. S., at 564 (SCALIA, J., dissenting) (“[I]ndefinite
imprisonment on reasonable suspicion is not an available option of treatment
for those accused of aiding the enemy, absent a suspension of the writ”). This
Court may not impose a de facto suspension by abstaining from these
controversies.

Because our Nation’s past military conflicts have been of limited duration,
it has been possible to leave the outer boundaries of war powers undefined.
If, as some fear, terrorism continues to pose dangerous threats to us for
years to come, the Court might not have this luxury. This result is not
inevitable, however. The political branches, consistent with their independent
obligations to interpret and uphold the Constitution, can engage in a
genuine debate about how best to preserve constitutional values while
protecting the Nation from terrorism.

Justice Kennedy really delved into the history of habeas corpus. He argued that the
right exists to protect separation-of-powers:

Surviving accounts of the ratification debates provide additional evidence
that the Framers deemed the writ to be an essential mechanism in the
separation-of-powers scheme. In a critical exchange with Patrick Henry
at the Virginia ratifying convention Edmund Randolph referred to the
Suspension Clause as an “exception” to the “power given to Congress to
regulate courts.

The Supreme Court's opinion is being presented as a "rebuke" and a "huge blow"
to President Bush, even though he worked with Congress to create the Military
Commissions Act. Also, it was a 5-4 ruling, so the ruling could have gone the other
way.

The dissenting opinions were also strong. Here's a quote from Justice Roberts'
dissent :

The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say
what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining
how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single
petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law’s operation.
And to what effect? The majority merely replaces a review system
designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless
procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date. One
cannot help but think, after surveying the modest practical results of
the majority’s ambitious opinion, that this decision is not really about
the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy
combatants.

Justice Roberts asks why the DTA system isn't sufficient:

The majority’s overreaching is particularly egregious given the
weakness of its objections to the DTA. Simply put, the Court’s
opinion fails on its own terms. The majority strikes down the
statute because it is not an “adequate substitute” for habeas
review, ante, at 42, but fails to show what rights the detainees
have that cannot be vindicated by the DTA system.

When people argue for habeas corpus rights for the detainees they almost
make it sound as if they have no legal recourse. The detainees are just put
in a cell and the keys are thrown away. That can't true. If it's true then how
does one explain a story like this?

Justice Scalia dissent had a sarcastic tone:

And today it is not just the military that the Court elbows aside. A mere
two Terms ago in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U. S. 557 (2006), when the
Court held (quite amazingly) that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005
had not stripped habeas jurisdiction over Guantanamo petitioners’ claims,
four Members of today’s five-Justice majority joined an opinion saying the
following:

“Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress
to seek the authority [for trial by military commission] he believes
necessary. “Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation
with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not
weaken our Nation’s ability to deal with danger. To the contrary,
that insistence strengthens the Nation’s ability to determine—
through democratic means—how best to do so. The Constitution
places its faith in those democratic means.” Id., at 636 (BREYER, J.,
concurring).

Turns out they were just kidding. For in response, Congress, at the
President’s request, quickly enacted the Military Commissions Act,
emphatically reasserting that it did not want these prisoners filing habeas
petitions.

He also puts into context the importance of the opinion in no uncertain terms:

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing
Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in
Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in
Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11
Commission Report, pp. 60–61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001,
the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the
Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C.,
and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9. It has threatened further
attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and
barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to
know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the
field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our
countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s
Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly
cause more Americans to be killed.

He's unequivocal where he stands on the issue.

Tell me what you think?

Americans Want To Believe Scott McClellan

I've come to conclusion after witnessing the media firestorm surrounding Scott
McClellan's new book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and
Washington’s Culture of Deception, ” the American people mostly likely want to
believe the former Press Secretary. In his book McClellan accuses the Bush
administration of "shading the truth" and confusing "the propaganda campaign
with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and
then sustain public support during a time of war..." Basically, he's saying the
American people were lied to without using those exact harsh terms. I think this
a claim a bulk of the American people want to believe.

Believing that we were feed propaganda and lies helps certain facts go down
much smoother. What are the facts? One fact is that in the beginning of the war
in Iraq a majority of the American people supported it and now say they were
wrong. Another fact is that President Bush was re-elected and now has low
approval rating. Saying we were lied to or duped explains why so many have
changed their mind about the war in Iraq and President Bush so drastically.
In a way McClellan represents that change our country has undergone through
these past few years. He was a supporter of President Bush and his policies who
no longer is a believer.

I, for one, have no such regrets. I don't regret supporting the war in Iraq. Simply
put: I think Saddam Hussein was a tyrannical leader and we did a good thing getting
rid of him. I don't believe Bush and his administration lied. However, as we all know
by now the intelligence was wrong.

Another Mr. McClellan claim makes is the news media didn't do its job. Here's what
he wrote:

The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which
became apparent months after our invasion, should never have
come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t
live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been
better served.

This is another explanation that liberals like to make that the news media helped
sell this war. They should have been more skeptical. Again, this allegation makes the
medicine go down smoother. The news media sold us on something we shouldn't
have bought into. However, this notion negates the fact that our news media
hasn't served the public for decades. It's about profits. One only has too look at
the previous decade to see the type of stories they enjoy covering. Endless coverage
of the O.J. Simpson trial and the Monica Lewinsky trial permeated the air waves
in the '90s . So this is the news media that should have asked "tough" question on
Iraq? They were suppose to all of sudden awake from their long stupor and become
heroic and fervently fight against American foreign policy. The news media still can't
get the story right on Iraq. How many stories have been written about what's going
on Iraq lately? Sadly, it's much less than I would like.

So believing that we bought into lies and propaganda helps. Blaming a lack luster
media helps. We want to believe what Scott McClellan is telling us now and not what
he continually told us back then. It helps us makes feel better about ourselves but
it's also leaving a whole lot.

More on appeasement

Heh. President Bush has been the Democrats punching bag for past
few years. Why are they so surprised that sometimes when you hit
something hard enough sometimes it comes swinging back? I just
can't understand their outrage. Do they just want him to spend the
last year in his presidency not saying anything and not defend his
policies. Another thing is that President Bush didn't mention the
Democratic Party or anyone in particular. Why all the defensiveness?

Bush Speaks to the Israeli Knesset

From the CNN article:

JERUSALEM (CNN) – In a particularly sharp blast from halfway
around the world, President Bush suggested Thursday that Sen.
Barack Obama and other Democrats are in favor of "appeasement"
of terrorists in the same way U.S. leaders appeased Nazis in the
run-up to World War II.

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and
radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they
have been wrong all along," said Bush, in what White House aides
privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama and
other Democrats for the U.S. president to sit down for talks with
leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks
to the Israeli Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an
American Senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler,
all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this
what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been
repeatedly discredited by history."

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