"Bush Era" Over

[scumonkey]

Here is how I will remember Bush....
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[TREPYE]

Joe Klein from Time Magazine had the best quotes to describe him....

Link: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1862307,00.html

Brief description:

In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush
never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He
never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle
class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never
understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and
that is appropriate. He was never very much of one.

The gist of the 43rd's presidency:
This is a presidency that has wobbled between those two poles — overweening arrogance and paralytic incompetence.



Touche Mr Klein!

[Ninjahedge]

Thinking back over the Eight Years of Bush ...

DID BUSH DO ANYTHING GOOD for which he'll be remembered?

Nothing comes to mind.

Please don't include "We weren't attacked again" -- protecting the US is the number one job requirement of the POTUS and no extra credit should be given for that.

Oddly enough, the only thing that comes to mind is something OBAMA mentioned.

I remember a soundbite that had Obama praising (rather briefly) his efforts in Africa in regards to AIDS....

Since I am not too aware of what he has done, I have to willingly admit that what he did MIGHT have indeed been noteworthy.



But that is about it. Everything else has been comfy Christian conservative and xenephobic paranoia.

Just what the Sheeple of America LOVE to graze on. Too bad Kerry wasn't more attractive, maybe he would have won!

Sad part is, I don't know if he would have done anything to halt the mortgage situation though...... Too much money being made by too many influential individuals to call a halt....

[Zephyr]

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I'm Really Gonna Miss Systematically Destroying This Place

By George W. Bush
December 1, 2008
Issue 44•49

Oh, America. Eight years went by so fast, didn't they? I feel like I hardly got to know you and methodically undermine everything you once stood for. But I guess all good things must come to an end, and even though you know I would love to stick around for another year or four—maybe privatize Social Security or get us into Iran—I'm afraid it's time to go. But before I leave, let me say, from the bottom of my heart: I can't think of another country I would've rather led to the brink of collapse.

Boy, oh boy, if these Oval Office walls could talk. Seems like it was only yesterday that I started my first term despite having actually lost to Al Gore by more than a half million votes. Hmm. We were all so young and peaceful then. Gosh, gas was still under $2 a gallon! On my watch it peaked at more than twice that. Never getting it up to $6 or ideally $7.50 will be one of my few regrets when I leave office.

It's just gonna be so hard packing up my things and heading off into the sunset come January. I wish I could go on forever giving massive and disastrous tax cuts to the wealthy, taking the country from a surplus to a deficit—nearly $500 billion this year, likely to pass $1 trillion next year, fingers crossed—and just generally doing irreparable damage to the very underpinnings of our economy, but, well, I'm afraid the Constitution says I can't. And not even I can overrule the Constitution. Though Lord knows I tried! Initiating blanket wiretaps without warrants, suspending habeas corpus for prisoners in Guantanamo, infiltrating an unknown number of nonviolent civilian antiwar groups without permission… such wonderful memories. I'm going to cherish them forever.

My fellow Americans, I only hope that every time you have your civil liberties encroached upon by the Patriot Act, you'll think of me.

Everywhere I look brings back memories. The Blue Room is where Laura and I put up our first White House Christmas tree. Down the hall, in the East Room, is where I concocted my favorite signing statement to circumvent the anti-torture guidelines of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and—ooh!—right across the way is where Cheney and I decided to use the death of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and the nation's subsequent fear of another attack as an excuse to carry out our long-standing plan to invade Iraq. I should really get a picture before I leave.

Speaking of pictures, whenever I look at the dusty old newspaper photos of those tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib or the crumpled ruins of that bridge in Minnesota, I can hold my head up high knowing that I truly f***ed this nation—physically and symbolically—beyond repair. I only wish I had the time to destroy a couple more major American cities.

And Cheney, I almost forgot about Cheney. What a guy, huh? I can't believe that in a few short weeks he's never going to talk to me again. The stories I could tell you about what went on in some of those back rooms—well, you wouldn't believe me if I declassified the memos. I don't know, maybe in 20 years, when the economy has rebounded and the people displaced by Katrina have rebuilt their lives from scratch with almost no federal assistance, Cheney and I can meet up again in the Rose Garden and reminisce over the good old days, when it seemed like there was no part of this great country we couldn't ruin forever.

What am I going to do once I'm no longer president? I've gotten so used to waking up every day, playing fetch with the dogs on the White House lawn, and then spending a lazy afternoon shredding every last bit of our good will abroad in a mind-boggling display of diplomatic incompetence.

The worst part about leaving is knowing I can never screw up anything this big again. Don't get me wrong, I'm only 62. I could still bankrupt an oil company, or become the next MLB commissioner and ruin baseball. But I'll never get the opportunity to f*** up on this massive of a scale again. Even if you put me back in charge for another term, I could only take the U.S. from a rapidly declining world power to not a world power at all. I don't mean to gloat, but I think it's safe to say that no one can ever unseat the American empire like I unseated the American empire.

Still, I have to admit, sometimes I think I could've dismantled so much more. The very fact that the environment still exists, that a mere 4,000 troops have died in Iraq, that there is still the slightest glimmer of hope for the future left in this nation—it's easy to feel like maybe I didn't do my job. But no, no, there's no use having any regret. I f***ed everything up the best I could and that's good enough for me.

You know, I've got a few weeks left. I could still illegally fire some U.S. attorneys for political reasons, or finally get rid of that pesky separation between church and state. Or maybe I could just bomb a place. Like Russia. But this time, I would really savor it.

As long as I live, America, I'll never forget irreparably ruining you. Unless we all die in a nuclear war or calamitous environmental disaster brought on by my neglect. Either way, I'll see you all in heaven!


© Copyright 2008 Onion Inc. All rights reserved (http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/im_really_gonna_miss)

[Zephyr]

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December 12, 2008, 1:11 pm
Sorry, We’re Booked, White House Tells Obamas


By Helene Cooper


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/12/us/blair.480.jpg
(Photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)

A view of Blair House, which is situated across the street from
the White House. The yellow facade marks the main entrance.


Updated | 3:12 p.m. CHICAGO — The White House has turned down a request from the family of President-elect Barack Obama to move into Blair House in early January so that his daughters can start school on Jan. 5.

The Obamas were told that Blair House, where incoming presidents usually stay in the five days before Inauguration Day, is booked in early January, a spokesperson to the Obama transition said. “We explored the idea so that the girls could start school on schedule,’ the spokesperson said. “But, there were previously scheduled events and guests that couldn’t be displaced.”

It remained unclear who on Bushes guest list outranked the incoming President.

“It’s not a public schedule,” said Sally McDonough, spokeswoman for First Lady Laura Bush, in refusing to disclose who was staying at Blair House. “It’s not a question of outranking the Obamas. Blair House will be available to them on January 15.”

Ms. McDonough said “there’s nothing more to say other than that it’s not available and won’t be available until January 15.” She added that “you’re trying to make a story out of something that’s not a story.”

A State Department official said he didn’t know of any foreign dignitaries staying at Blair House in early January.

A White House official said that Mr. Bush does not have family or friends from Texas staying at Blair House during the period which the Obamas requested. But Blair House, the official said, has been booked for “receptions and gatherings” by members of the outgoing Bush administration. Those receptions, the official said, “don’t make it suitable for full-time occupancy by the Obamas yet.”


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(Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)

Michelle, Malia and Sasha Obama met Barack Obama’s
campaign plane in Colorado on Nov. 1.


Mr. Obama has been staying in Chicago with his family since the election; the Obamas have decided to send their two daughters, Malia and Sasha, to Sidwell Friends School in Washington.

Obama transition officials said that the family is considering other housing options and are hopeful the girls will not miss the start of school. “The White House has been extremely accommodating to the Obama family needs — and the entire process has been smooth and friendly,” the transition official said.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/sorry-were-booked-white-house-tells-obamas/)

[lofter1]

And this ^ from the man who brought us "No Child Left Behind" :cool:

I guess that only applies once the party ("Party" ? Grand Old Party ???) is over.

[Zephyr]

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Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Final Days Fire Sale


By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: December 13, 2008

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Sophie Egan

Timothy Egan


Imagine if President Bush, on his last day in office, invited his friends to lift the Lincoln portrait from the White House Dining Room, take the 18th- century furniture from the Map Room and — for good measure — poison the Rose Garden on the way out.

In essence, he is doing the same thing this month with land that belongs to every American — the magical redrock country of the Southwest.

Well before it was a bumper sticker and a chant at Sarah Palin rallies, “drill, baby, drill” became the overriding mission of the political hacks who oversee more than 200 million acres of public land for Bush. At a frantic pace, they have opened up to oil and gas leasing canyons of golden slickrock, mesas once known only to hunters and pronghorn antelope, and little hideaways near the open-aired art galleries of the Anasazi.

Take what you want, they said — and get while the getting is good. It was a plunderfest that produced a gangster culture, with dozens of high-level Interior Department employees exchanging sex, cocaine and gifts with the industry they were supposed to be doing arms-length business with, according to a scathing and quickly forgotten report this year by the agency’s inspector general.

At the time of the report, with gas reaching $4 a gallon, many people shrugged and said we need the oil — drill, baby, drill. Now gas is selling for a pittance, but that hasn’t stopped the fire sale. Everything must go!

On Election Day, the Bush administration announced it would open 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas leasing, including about 100,000 acres near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and Dinosaur National Monument.

As with the $700 billion bailout that Bush insisted had to be given to the very bankers, insurance companies and other tassel-loafed failures who got us into the economic meltdown, the president now wants every dead-ender in the energy business to have one last treat.

Solitude and ageless stone may not be commodities as easily quantified as a couple of thousand barrels of oil. But to the American inheritance, they are the equivalent of those first-edition Audubon books and presidential portraits in the White House.

The administration never even consulted with the parks before announcing they would have oil and gas rigs on their borders.

The giveaways went far beyond public land. For the coal industry, the parting gift was a federal rule that makes it easier to dump mining waste into streams. Anyone who has spent time in Appalachia of late has seen the handiwork — entire mountaintops lopped off in an end-of-days rush for a dirty fossil fuel.

On Thursday, Bush handed out another goodie: a rule that largely frees federal agencies from having to consult independent biologists before constructing something that could lead to the extinction of birds, fish or other endangered species.

Following a storm of outrage by park officials and the incoming Obama team, the government has now backed off from some of the more egregious sales in the Southwest. But on the upcoming Friday before Christmas, it will still auction off more than 150,000 acres near some of the most stunning scenery in the world.

In a concession, officials promised that oil and gas operations would be camouflaged — the rigs and drills painted a desert red so that visitors to the wildlands of Utah would not have industrial clutter marring their sunset picture.

It would be one thing if we needed the fuel. Of nearly 9,000 oil and gas permits approved on public land in Utah, barely a third of them have been drilled. The way this game works is that oil companies buy the leasing rights — in some case for as little as $2.50 an acre — then wait for Saudi Arabia to force another oil price spike. Then they drill.

And the impact on price or domestic supply? Nothing. Even if all the accessible oil and gas were taken from federal land in Utah, it would have zero impact on prices, according to several studies.

But the loss is incalculable — “geologic architecture that has inspired our American character,” and places where “the curvature of the earth is not only seen but felt,” as the ever-lyrical Terry Tempest Williams wrote in a recent essay in The Los Angeles Times.

So why do it? Because they still can. The only urgency is Jan. 20.

Eight years ago, in an act of frat-boy vandalism during their departure from the White House, members of Bill Clinton’s staff ripped W’s off computer keyboards and glued shut some shelves. If only Bush could revert to his college character type, and leave us with such a benign exit mark. …


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/opinion/14egan.html?ref=opinion)

[lofter1]

The guy who threw his shoes at Bush (http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/14/bush.iraq/index.html) today in Iraq said it all.

No thanks. Go. No longer welcome.

[scumonkey]

Damn...it missed-I guess bush watched that "Duck and Cover" video also?!

[OmegaNYC]

A part of me is saying: No the hell this guy didn't disrespect my President by throwing shoes at him. While the other is saying: Damn, he missed! Operation: Flying Nike, is a failure! :mad:

[Zephyr]

Throwing a shoe at someone is considered the worst possible insult in Iraq and is meant to show extreme disrespect and contempt. When U.S. forces helped topple a statue of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein after rolling into Baghdad in April 2003, jubilant Iraqis beat the statue's face with their shoes.

"This is a farewell kiss!" the man, identified as Muntadar al-Zaidi, a reporter with the Cairo-based al-Baghdadia television network, yelled in Arabic as he threw the shoes.

Sudarsan Raghavan and Dan Eggen
“Shoe-Throwing Mars Bush’s Baghdad Trip,”
Washington Post Foreign Service (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/14/AR2008121401170.html)




“This is a farewell kiss!”


CLICK ANY IMAGE BELOW
to Access YouTube Video


http://graneyandthepig.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/bushshoe3.jpg?w=450&h=327 http://graneyandthepig.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/bushshoe4.jpg?w=450&h=327 http://graneyandthepig.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/bushshoe5.jpg?w=450&h=327 http://graneyandthepig.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/bushshoe6.jpg?w=450&h=327 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duLds-TZMGw)
Video – Courtesy YouTube /tpmtv;
Images – Courtesy Wordpress.com / Graney and The Pig’s Blog.

Runtime - 03:39

[Jasonik]

^Maliki is one cool customer. He barely flinches.

[Daquan13]

I just couldn't help but to laugh when I saw that video this morning on the news!!

I laughed so hard that my sides began to ache! The more I thought about it, the more I laughed!!

[ZippyTheChimp]

^Maliki is one cool customer. He barely flinches.Maybe he's just become accustomed to flying footwear.

Anyway, I see an artifact for the Bush Library.

[Jasonik]

The heroic reporter's face.

'This is a farewell kiss, you dog, this is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.'
http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20081214/capt.93e3871fdc8a4a9eb199fd89d38ebc57.aptopix_bush _irqv111.jpg?x=400&y=266&q=85&sig=eSFe2x2ijvwEhNLiQwDvDA--
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

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(Atef Hassan/Reuters)
The brother of Muntazer al-Zaidi, a TV reporter from al-Baghdadiya who threw his shoes at President Bush, displays his picture during an interview with Reuters in his apartment in Baghdad, December 15, 2008.

[Jasonik]

Throw shoes at Bush and avoid torture (http://www.roadstoiraq.com/2008/12/16/urgent-just-reported-al-zaidi-in-us-run-camp-cropper-prison/).

Shoe Throwing Flash Game Courtesy of a Norway Newspaper (http://flash.vg.no/grafikk/2008/bush/kast_sko.html)

[lofter1]

The Biggest Joke on the Planet.

Yet Bush is clueless. He now goes on and on about how the Shoe Toss didn't "bother" him.

The man can only see the incident iin regards to his personal involvement with the shoes. He DOES NOT get it that this is NOT about GWB the person. It is about how he as POTUS has Mis-Used the Power of the USA and Abused the Trust of the American People.

The man's Narcissism is endless. Classic Addict Behavior.

Too bad for the history of the human race that he decided he could exorcise his demons without the help of therapy.

[Jasonik]

Letterman last night commended Bush for being so agile saying, "he hasn't dodged anything like that since Vietnam."

[scumonkey]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B4y5sZKdI4

[Zephyr]

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December 16, 2008

White House press secretary sports black eye
Posted: 03:43 PM ET


From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney


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Perino joked reporters are no longer able
to wear shoes to press conferences.


(CNN) – Who knew being White House press secretary was such a dangerous job?

While President Bush emerged from the weekend's now-infamous shoe attack in Iraq without a scratch, press secretary Dana Perino appears to be a little worse for wear.

Perino was sitting to the side of the president when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at him Sunday. She was inadvertently hit by a microphone as the president's Secret Service agents responded and officials scrambled to wrestle the journalist to the ground.

The full effects of the accident were clear at Tuesday's White House daily briefing, where Perino sported a bruise below her right eye and scratch just above the eyebrow.


© 2008 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/)

[lofter1]

Good cover story ^ for an eye lift ...

[Zephyr]

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17 Dec 2008 12:14 pm

Quote For The Day

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

"I have two brothers who served in the Air Force and a number of friends who are either in the military or vets. I honor their service and their sacrifice with all my heart. It is precisely because I do so that I am outraged and must speak when men like George Bush and Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney organize systematic war crimes, command men and women low in the chain of command to carry them out, and then betray them and call them criminals for doing what the Administration wanted.

It is no small part of the bizarreness of the Rubber Hose Right that it is critics of this Machiavellian dealing and not the Administration who are told they "hate the troops." Of all the people involved in this sorry spectacle, the least culpable are probably people like Lynddie England. And of all the unsung heroes of this war, not the least are the guys in the Pentagon who resisted Bush/Cheney's attempt to rewrite the Army Field Manual so that they could make it easier to do what they ordered done at places like Abu Ghraib," - Mark Shea, Catholic blogger.



17 Dec 2008 01:38 pm

Quote For The Day II

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," George W. Bush. Just as he used torture to defend freedom. And occupied a country in order to liberate it.


Copyright © 2008 Andrew Sullivan. All rights reserved. (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/)

[Zephyr]

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© Copyright David Horsey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Zephyr]

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Bush shoe protester has been beaten,
Iraqi judge says


Matthew Weaver, Mark Tran and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 December 2008 10.14 GMT


The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush was beaten afterwards and had bruises on his face, the investigating judge in the case said today, as a senior cleric in Iran urged others to wage a "shoe intifada" against the US.

The reporter, Muntazer al-Zaidi, had bruises on his face and around his eyes, said the judge, Dhia al-Kinani said. Zaidi was wrestled to the ground after throwing the shoes during a Sunday press conference by Bush and the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

He remains in custody and is expected to face charges of insulting a foreign leader. Kinani said a complaint about Zaidi's treatment had been filed on his behalf and court officials "will watch the footage to identify those who have beaten him ... He was beaten and we filed a case for that. Zaidi did not raise a complaint and he can drop this case if he wants to."

In the Iranian capital, Tehran, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati praised what he called the "shoe intifada" at Friday prayers. Jannati proposed people in Iraq and Iran carry shoes in further anti-American demonstrations. "This should be a role model," he said.

Yesterday, it emerged that Zaidi had asked Maliki to forgive him. In a letter, he said his "big ugly act cannot be excused", according to Maliki's media adviser. In a plea for clemency, Zaidi added: "I remember in the summer of 2005, I interviewed your excellency and you told me: 'Come in, this is your house.' And so I appeal to your fatherly feelings to forgive me."

The journalist called Bush a "dog" at the press conference in Baghdad and hurled both his shoes at him, forcing him to duck.

Yesterday, an Egyptian man offered his 20-year-old daughter to Zaidi as a bride. Cobblers from Turkey to Lebanon have claimed the shoes were made in their factories.

Hundreds of protesters in Iraq have rallied to the journalist's cause and demanded his release.

Parliamentary reaction has been divided, with MPs clashing this week over whether he should be forgiven.

Zaidi's family have said he suffered a broken arm and other injuries after he was dragged away by Iraqi security officers and US secret service agents. They said he was in hospital in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

Zaidi was brought before a judge on Tuesday and admitted "aggression against a president" – an offence that could carry a 15-year sentence, officials said. The journalist's lawyer said more than 1,000 lawyers had offered to defend him.

University students gathered in Falluja on Wednesday to show their support for him, raising their shoes and throwing rocks at US soldiers, who reportedly opened fire above the crowd. Protesters said one student was injured.

"We demonstrated to express our support for Muntazar al-Zaidi but we were surprised with the entrance of the US military," said a protester, Ahmed Ismail. "Unconsciously, we raised our shoes expressing our support for Zaidi, but they attacked us."

The US State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, suggested that the attention to the incident was overblown. "We would hope that the fact of a US president standing next to a freely elected prime minister of Iraq who just happens to be Shia, who is governing in a multi-confessional, multiethnic democracy in the heart of the Middle East, is not overshadowed by one incident like this," McCormack told reporters in Washington.

McCormack said he believed that in the coming years "the fact of the president making that visit under those circumstances will probably overshadow any memory of this particular gentleman and what he did."



guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/19/iraq-georgebush)

[Jasonik]

Assessing the Bush Legacy: The Measure of the Man and His Administration

December, 18 2008
By Stephen Lendman
Stephen Lendman's ZSpace Page (http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/stephenlendman)


George W. Bush. US president: January 20, 2001 - January 19, 2009. Born of privilege. Unimpressive by every measure. A history of underachievement. Chosen by big money. Arranged through electoral fraud. Installed by the Supreme Court. Empowered by a dubious "terrorist" act, and ending with a record unmatched by the worst of his predecessors. Assessing the Bush legacy - from its illegitimate birth; through its lawless, belligerent years; to the world potentially on the brink at its end. Exploring it fully as a change of command approaches, and an unenviable task awaits the new incumbent.

As Texas Governor

Looking to Election 2000, big monied interests knew what they wanted and got it in George W. Bush. In his 2000 book, "The Dirty Truth," Rick Abraham (a former Texas environmental law enforcement officer) documented his record as Texas governor from 1995 - 2000 when "he championed the agenda of the state's biggest and worst corporate polluters," according to commentator, author, and former Texas Department of Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. In return for huge political contributions and jump-starting his presidential bid, he:

-- lobbied for a national radioactive waste dump in Texas;

-- told the public it was mostly for x-rays and other hospital waste;

-- solicited nuclear power waste from other states;

-- corrupted the state's environmental standards to accommodate polluters;

-- failed to provide protection from industrial pollution, air toxins, and hazardous wastes;

-- did it all secretly;

-- stripped municipalities of local control over land use and environmental protections;

-- let state parks languish in decay and disrepair, and this was only his environmental record.

He was staunchly pro-business, anti-civil liberties, unresponsive to public needs, and presided over more state executions than any other governor in the nation since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. His own aides at the time called him a man who enjoys killing, and not one to trust with the presidency as it turned out.

Elections 2000 and 2004 - Tainted by Fraud

On December 12, 2000 the Supreme Court hijacked an electoral process that was deeply flawed and rigged to elect George Bush. It coronated him president after three days earlier halting the Florida vote recount on the spurious grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. It was the first time ever in US history that the High Court reversed a popular vote (5 - 4) to install its own preferred candidate.

For its part, the media cheerled the process and wholeheartedly approved. They, too, got their man in Washington. The rallied around him ever since, ignored his high crimes and misdemeanors, the economy in disarray, and continue to support him in spite of his lowest-ever approval rating for any president. He surpassed Harry Truman at the depth of the Korean War and Richard Nixon during Watergate, and will be judged by history as our worst and most disgraceful president ever.

Election 2000 made it possible. Investigative journalists like Greg Palast documented how mostly poor African- Americans and Latinos were removed from voter roles for having falsely been "identified" as ex-felons and thus unable to vote in states like Florida. Various other obstructions were also used. Ballot boxes in African-American districts were missing and uncounted. State troopers were positioned near polling sites in black precincts to intimidate and delay voters by searching their cars and setting up roadblocks. Some precincts demanded two photo IDs. Florida law requires only one.

African-American students at schools like Florida A&M signed up in force as first-time voters but were obstructed at polling stations. They were turned away because they couldn't show a registration card or drivers license. However, Florida lets eligible residents sign an affidavit (not provided) and swear they hadn't voted.

In African-American and other Democrat districts, voters were turned away and directed to vote elsewhere. They were never mailed registration cards, and they were told they showed up too late and polls were closed. Many requesting absentee ballots never got them, and evidence emerged of forged ones for George Bush. Similar practices showed up in other states like Ohio, New Hampshire, Missouri and Tennessee that narrowly went for Bush over Gore. And all the above was besides the hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads or otherwise disqualified Florida votes that never were counted but should have been.

Election 2004 was even worse than 2000 because technology smoothed the way with electronic ease. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed as a way to facilitate fraud. It ushered in the age of privatized voting on touchtone electronic voting machines - owned, programmed, operated and controlled by giant corporations with close Republican ties. Today, over 80% of all votes are cast and counted this way. Most states require no verifiable paper receipts, so it's easy to manipulate outcomes, and not just for president.

They helped reelect Bush at a time his approval rating hovered around 40%. Most voters believed the country was headed in the wrong direction, and most polls had Kerry a heavy favorite. In addition, a record 16.8 million new voters registered, mostly Democrats. Nonetheless, Bush got 11.6 million more votes than in 2000, won with a comfortable three million vote margin, and Florida and Ohio made the difference. Either one going for Kerry would have changed the outcome, and again electoral fraud was rife and well-documented. Some of it included:

-- millions of absentee ballots never mailed to Democrats or arrived too late;

-- malfunctioning voting machines in Democrat districts wiped out huge numbers of crucial votes;

-- according to Greg Palast, over three million votes cast but never counted because of rejected "provisional ballots" (for registered voters unlisted on rolls); "spoiled ballots" (ones malfunctioning machines didn't count); uncounted absentee ballots for minor reasons; and black and Latino voters stripped from the roles for the same reasons as in 2000;

-- major deviations in 30 states between exit polls and final results; way beyond margins of error and indicative of fraud; in all but four states, discrepancies favored Bush;

-- Ohio was ground zero, much like Florida in 2000 that also went for Bush in 2004; 357,000 Ohio voters, overwhelmingly Democrat, were prevented from voting or their votes weren't counted; Bush carried the state by 118,599; clear proof he lost; Kerry won, and was elected president;

-- Democrat precincts got too few voting machines; voters were obstructed by long lines, malfunctioning machines, numerous instances of being told they were at the wrong precinct, and most disturbing:

-- one in every four Ohio registrants showing up to vote discovered they weren't listed on the rolls because Republican Secretary of State and co-chair of Bush's reelection committee, Kenneth Blackwell, ordered them purged.

These and other fraudulent practices greased the way for George Bush's illegitimate reelection and the continued fallout from it.

Transformed by September 11, 2001

The widely followed Cook report assessed Bush's first five months in office as follows: After "start(ing) off strong....his future seems far less certain. Not only are (his) overall job approval ratings slumping, but his disapproval ratings are climbing....the last three months (especially) have been less than auspicious for this new President....they have a lot of repair work to do and had better get started."

Bush entered office with an approval rating around 50%. It first rose slightly, then dipped below 50% in late August. It all changed on September 11. Bush's rating skyrocketed to a temporary high above 90% and stayed above 80% through year end. That event transformed a mediocre president overnight to a combination of Lincoln, FDR and Churchill, according to some observers and hyperactive media pundits. It was beyond laughable then, and hugely more so now.

After he peaked, it was downhill to 60% at yearend 2002, around 50% in late 2003, then around 40% or lower to more recent months when he's ranged from the low to higher 20s. Until American Research Group's September lowest ever for a US president at 19%, Research 2000 scored him lowest at 22% in late July. CBS in early August had him at 25%, and even Fox/Opinion Dynamics gave him a 27% rating at month end July. Others had him slightly higher with every incentive to keep him from submerging and failing thereafter to surface.

The Cook Report's Charlie Cook may have thought that on June 21 when he wrote in the National Journal: Ronald "Reagan drew a whole generation into the Republican Party....some observers wonder whether George W. Bush may have driven another (one) away," and McCain won't likely bring them back. But it wasn't that way in late 2001 through the March 2003 Iraq war start with the public still traumatized by 9/11 and the hype about Saddam's WMDs.

Deconstructing the Bush Legacy - The Bush Doctrine

Below is a review of the Bush administration's record, including related events before he took office.

On September 11, 1990, GHW Bush addressed a joint session of Congress following Saddam's August 2 Kuwait invasion. It became known as his "Toward a New World Order" speech. He said: "This invasion shall not stand, because it threatens the New World Order." Then in his January 29, 1991 State of the Union address, he spoke of "a defining hour....Halfway around the world (where) we are engaged in a great struggle in the skies and on the seas and sands....facing down a threat to decency and humanity (and for) a victory over tyranny and savage aggression." He called for a "new initiative in government....to prepare for the next American century (and) seize this opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise for a 'new world order....' "

After the Cold War ended in 1991, GHW Bush's Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz designed what they called the Defense Planning Guidance or Wolfowitz doctrine. It was an early plan for what later emerged in the late 1990s and in the Bush Doctrine. The New York Times "leaked" it in March 1992 and caused an uproar. It was an imperial design for unchallengeable dominance using preemptive military action to suppress potential threats - no holds barred anywhere.

In 1997, the plan was revived by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in a (2000) document called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century." It reasserted an imperial design for global dominance and stated: "America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of US military forces." It further called for "American hegemony" and "full-sprectrum dominance," and said achieving it would be long-term "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.

A host of PNC members joined the Bush administration, key among them Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz - fully committed to what emerged as a "Global War on Terrorism" starting off in Afghanistan, Iraq, and against any perceived homeland threats. Their vision:

-- unchallengeable dominance;

-- ignoring the rule of law;

-- waging wars of aggression called liberating ones;

-- making torture official state policy;

-- suppressing civil liberties for our own good;

-- targeting Muslims, Latino immigrants and others of choice for political advantage; rounding them up; denying them due process; incarcerating and/or deporting them, and much worse as discussed below;

-- building Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mass detention camps for "enemies of the state" or threats to "national security;"

-- deploying paramilitary enforcers (like Blackwater Worldwide, formerly Blackwater USA) on US streets;

-- silencing dissent;

-- turning elections into farces; pre-determining outcomes for favored candidates; letting kabuki theater, horse race journalism, and trivia substitute for real news and information; turning democracy into fantasy;

-- fostering social decay at home; and

-- institutionalizing spying and police state repression for enforcement.

Key Administration and Earlier Policy Documents

The US Space Command produced a 1998 document called Vision for 2020. In May 2000 ahead of Bush taking office, it was released as a (neo-con influenced) imperial grand strategy called the Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Vision 2020 with a sweeping aim - to achieve "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any potential challengers with all weapons in our arsenal, including nuclear and others of mass destruction.

The December 2001 Nuclear Policy Review reasserted the same prerogative to unilaterally declare and wage future wars preemptively with first strike nuclear weapons, and by inference, all others as well.

Plans were well in place long before September 11, but that event provided the pretext. It gave the Bush administration "reason" to attack Afghanistan on October 7 (long planned in advance), invade with ground troops on October 19, and look ahead to the grand scheme against Iraq.

On September 11, 2001, Bush addressed the nation and declared a "war on terrorism," asked for world support to win it, and began what became "our government's emergency (preventive war strategy) response plans." He planned to ignore the law and wage a global war throughout an "arc of instability" from the South American Andean region (mainly Colombia) to North Africa through the Middle East to the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere in Eurasia.

On January 29, 2002 in his first State of the Union address, he declared war on a "terrorist underworld (in) at least a dozen countries....in remote jungles and deserts (and) in centers of large cities." He asked "all nations (to) heed our call and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own (and) If they do not act, America will." He singled out North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an "axis of evil....seeking out weapons of mass destruction (and) posing a grave and growing danger." Things headed downhill from there.

On September 20, 2002, Bush issued what became known as the Bush Doctrine or self-declared right to wage global (imperial) wars against "terrorist" states or ones that harbor or aid them. The 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) made it policy and in stronger terms in 2006 - the unilateral right to wage preventive, preemptive and later "proactive" wars against perceived threats or potential challengers and to control the world's energy and other resources in key regions like the Middle East, Eurasia, Latin America, Africa and now the Arctic. The 2006 version mentions Iran 16 times and states: "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than Iran." Current developments suggest that position is unchanged, at least in belligerent rhetoric.

The Air Force's "Strategic Master Plan FY 06 and Beyond calls space "the ultimate high ground of US military operations." It aims to link the Pentagon with NASA, militarize its operations, "own outer space," and weaponize it with the most advanced, destructive current and future technology, including unmanned space vehicles for planetary surveillance.

The October 2006 National Space Policy embraced this agenda without so stating it. It called on NASA to "execute a sustained and affordable human and robotic program of space exploration and develop, acquire, and use civil space systems to advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system, and universe." The nuclear input is from language "to ensure space capabilities....to further US national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives (with) a robust foreign space intelligence collection and analysis capability" to assure it and have the heavens militarized for enforcement.

Seizing full advantage from the 9/11 event and follow-up anthrax attacks, the Bush administration subverted the rule of law, abandoned restrictive treaties, militarized more than the rest of the world combined, and rescinded the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) so as to illegally develop new biowarfare weapons. It further renounced the 1989 (GHW Bush-signed) Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that prohibits "the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons...."

According to international (and biowarfare) law expert Francis Boyle, it's to fight and win a future biowar. It also makes "a catastrophic biowarfare or bioterrorist incident a statistical certainty" and makes everyone unwitting subjects of a recklessly endangering experiment. To go along with a potential nuclear holocaust and turning democracy into fantasy.

Homeland Police State Enforcement

Implementation follows planning. At home, it's been high-octane repression in the forms reviewed below and covered earlier in this writer's December 2007 Police State America article. Here it's reviewed more briefly. The topic is hugely important and explains the current state under George Bush with little or no likely change coming under Barack Obama.

Post-9/11, "national security" and the "war on terrorism" became buzzwords to rally the public for what lay ahead. On the evening of September 11, Bush asked for public and world support and began the "government's emergency (preventive war strategy) response plans," but not as people envisioned. Policies were explained above. Ignore the law. Wage aggressive wars. Destroy homeland civil liberties, and more in defense of privilege over beneficial social change.

In so doing, he turned momentary world support and sympathy into mass public condemnation and rather quickly. He also risked the unimaginable. Replacing democracy with tyranny and ending planetary life with first-strike nuclear weapons - far more destructive than used against Japan in 1945.

Throughout history, going back to George Washington, presidents issued Executive Orders (EOs) even though nowhere does the Constitution let them make new law through one-man decrees. Compared to Bush, however, past presidents were almost discrete. He, in contrast, signed a blizzard of them as well as the equally unconstitutional practice of changing legislation with "signing statements."

Until 2001, all presidents combined challenged new laws with less than 600 of them. Through almost mid-2008, Bush issued at least 157 in changing over 1150 provisions of law and about which the Congressional Research Service said 78% of them raised constitutional objections. He abused his authority to rewrite laws as he wished, continues doing so to the present, and Congress and the courts let him get away with it.

Bush also usurped unconstitutional "Unitary Executive" authority or what Chalmers Johnson calls "a ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy....dressed up in legalistic mumbo jumbo" to act as he wishes on all matters, foreign or domestic, law or no law - a practice that "flies in the face of the Constitution itself."

Justice Louis Brandeis' dissent in Myers v. United States (1926) cited the separation of powers and said it exists "to preclude (this type) exercise of arbitrary power, (divide) government powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy." A clear and present danger under George Bush with no Brandeis on the High Court to object. Nor in Congress with enough power to matter. Not the House Speaker, party leaders in both Houses, or key committee chairpersons.

Post-9/11 on September 17, Bush signed a secret presidential finding (similar to EOs) empowering the CIA to "Capture, Kill or Interrogate Al-Queda Leaders." It authorized establishing a secret global network of facilities to detain, interrogate and otherwise mistreat whomever is called a "terrorist threat" and began his administration's official sanctioning of torture. More on that below.

On November 13, he issued Military Order Number 1. It disturbed one analyst enough to call it a "coup d'etat" and "watershed moment in (the) country" and hinted at what would follow: violating the rule of law, suspending civil liberties, and usurping absolute authority to act against anyone - later called "unlawful enemy combatants" or "terrorist" threats, including US citizens stripped of their constitutional protections. At the president's discretion, they're gone. And it was only the beginning. From then followed:

-- the use of National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs and HSPDs); they're much like EOs and presidential findings with the "full force and effect of law;" they relate to national security and remain classified unless made public; Bush issued dozens of NSPDs and over 20 HSPDs;

-- the October 25, 2001 NSPD-9 signed into law official administration policies adopted on September 4, 2001 - seven days before 9/11 with every expectation they'd be implemented; it's titled "Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States" and referred to Al Queda and so-called terrorist networks of Muslim fundamentalist extremists;

-- later NSPDs related to combatting WMDs, the Iraq war, biodefense (aka biowarfare), using space for "full spectrum dominance," and much more;

-- the combined NSPD-51/HSPD-20 deserves special mention; it was similar to Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12656 that empowered the executive in cases of "any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States;"

-- it established "Continuity of Government (COG)" procedures under a "Catastrophic Emergency" that may be anything from a real or contrived "terrorist" act to whatever the president calls a justifiable "emergency;" it established unprecendented powers free from constitutional constraints - to claim a "national emergency," declare martial law, and govern as a virtual dictator with limitless police state powers; some COG powers were invoked on September 11, 2001; they've remained in force since, and on August 28, 2008, George Bush continued "the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency;"

-- the USA Patriot Act (over 300 pages long) - written well in advance of 9/11; passed and signed into law 45 days later on October 26; it capitalized on a window of hysteria; granted unchecked powers to the executive; and subverted sacred constitutional liberties of free expression, religion, right to peacefully assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances; due process; and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures - in all the ways now allowed through a process of institutionalized spying and monitoring of all our behavior and practices at the government's discretion; the Act also (for the first time) created the crime of "domestic terrorism" to apply the definition to US citizens as well as aliens;

-- the November 25, 2002 Homeland Security Act (HSA); also written well in advance of 9/11 as a companion anti-terrorism bill and included the repressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) - to terrorize legal and undocumented immigrants, mainly Latinos and Muslims; DHS centralizes unprecedented military and law enforcements powers in the executive branch for greater global dominance; like the Patriot Act, it sweeps away constitutional protections and justifies it in the name of "national security;" it coordinates it with the October 2002-created US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) in violation of the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus protections against US military forces deployed inside the country except as expressly authorized by the Constitution or in cases of internal insurrection;

-- the late September 2006 Pentagon Global Strike Command called the Joint Functional Component Command for Global Strike and Integration; it followed from the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that planned policy five to ten years ahead and remains classified except for excerpted parts; they relate to offensive strike systems and a revitalized defense infrastructure to meet emerging threats; the tone is belligerent and declares preventive wars on any nation, groups or force anywhere (including internal ones) and allows NORTHCOM, DHS, and other domestic security agencies unrestricted countermeasure powers - indicative of a police state;

-- within days of 9/11, torture became official US policy and was authorized by a blizzard of presidential directives, memoranda, and other official documents from the highest levels of government; domestic and international laws and norms were rendered invalid, and a new repressive order replaced them; the rule of law no longer applies, and constitutional protections no longer exist at the president's discretion;

-- Congress was fully obliging; in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, it officially sanctioned torture after intervening against the Supreme Court's Rasul v. Bush (June 2004) ruling granting Guantanamo detainees habeas rights; it also ruled they had none.

--in the Military Commissions Act (MCA - aka the torture authorization and habeas revocation act), it subverted the High Court a second time in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld when it held as follows: Guantanamo Bay military commissions lack "the power to proceed because (their) structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions (of) 1949;" Congress responded with sweeping MCA powers, reaffirmed torture as official US policy, and let the president designate anyone anywhere in the world (including US citizens) "unlawful enemy combatants" and empowered him to arrest, detain, and torture them indefinitely in military prisons as well as deny them due process in civil courts;

-- Sections 1076 and 333 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2007; they ended the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus protections against US military forces used for law enforcement inside the country, except as explained above;

-- Congress passed the Real ID Act of 2005 that, if implemented, threatens personal privacy; originally, it was to become effective in May 2008 to require states to meet federal ID standards; so far, however, it's in question as at least two dozen states passed laws prohibiting it use; it requires every US citizen and legal resident to have a national identity card that in most cases is a driver's license; it's to contain personal information required to open a bank account, board an airplane, be able to vote, or conduct virtually any essential business; in the future it may also contain a radio frequency identification (RFID) computer chip to track all our movements, activities and transactions at all times - a police state dream; the legislation so far remains stalled;

-- institutionalized spying now policy under George Bush with Congress complicit in its implementation; since late 2001, the National Security Agency (NSA) did it illegally; the 2007 Protect America Act amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow virtually unrestricted mass data-mining and intercept of all types of domestic and foreign communications of anyone - foreign nationals and US citizens; it authorizes unrestricted warrantless spying for any claimed "national security" reason;

-- Congress further violated Fourth Amendment protections against illegal searches and seizures by passing the 2008 FISA Amendments Act; it gutted FISA by weakening standards of proof and warrants required for surveillance and granted telecom companies retroactive immunity for warrantless spying post-9/11 - now institutionalized unchecked, unrestrained and easily abused;

-- through late November 2008, Bush issued around 280 Executive Orders in additional to his signing statements, presidential findings, and official executive memoranda; the July 17, 2007 EO was particularly egregious: "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq;" under it, Bush usurped authority to criminalize the anti-war movement, make First Amendment protests illegal, and assert power to seize the assets of persons violating this decree; he effectively criminalized dissent and moved the nation closer to tyranny;

-- the Bush administration may be the most secretive one ever in a democracy; he placed limits on presidential records, the Freedom of Information Act, and a free and open society by usurping power to classify information for "national security" and create a new array of categories called "sensitive;"

-- in November 2006, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) amended the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act; it criminalized First Amendment activities advocating for animal rights - like peaceful protests, leafleting, undercover investigations, whistleblowing and boycotts; it makes these forms of animal protection advocacy a crime;

-- the House overwhelmingly passed the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007; it's now in the Senate where if passed and signed into law will effectively criminalize "thought" and further erode constitutional protections;

-- Sections 1615 and 1622 of the 2008 Defense Authorization Act; they authorize DOD to militarize state and local law enforcement authorities during a national emergency described as "an accident of national significance or a catastrophic incident;" they effectively established a martial law apparatus at state and local levels to work alongside federal agencies - without congressional approval.

For the past eight years, these and other administration policies explain the current state in America - a swift descent from a deeply flawed democracy to the tipping edge of tyranny. This is what awaits Barack Obama and the challenge he faces. Given his past record and disturbing campaign rhetoric, he's unlikely to deliver meaningful change in spite of the public pleading for and expecting it.

Permanent Wars for Global Dominance

Afghanistan, Iraq, Occupied Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, North Korea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti, Cuba as well as China, Russia and the Caucasus; a likely 1000 + US bases worldwide in around 150 countries; current defense spending exceeding $1 trillion annually with all domestic and foreign related items included - plus unknown multi-billions kept secret off-the-books; and a state of permanent war abroad for global dominance and at home for total control as discussed above. Parts of the Bush legacy today in America.

Afghanistan came first - a nation John Pilger calls more abused, long-suffering, and less helped than any other in living memory. Today, its agony continues. The country is occupied. Some estimates cite over three million deaths since 2001. War continues to rage. Little of it makes headlines, but Afghans are victimized by America's "war on terrorism."

So are Iraqis from nearly three decades of war. First against Iran in the 1980s. Then against America from August 2, 1990 to the present - the savage Gulf War causing about 200,000 deaths; 12.5 years of genocidal sanctions; an unimaginable toll of at least 1.5 million deaths; two-thirds of them children; and unmeasurable amounts of illnesses and human misery through March 2003. Then George Bush's Iraq War. At least another million deaths. Some estimates as high as two million. Around four million internally and externally displaced. Mass unemployment and poverty. A near-total absence of essential services - fresh drinking water, sanitation, electricity, medical care, education, security and for many enough food.

Emergency needs are unmet. It's an overall humanitarian disaster of epic proportions unreported in the mainstream. The "cradle of civilization" was erased for plunder. A nation was transformed into a "free trade" paradise. The message for others is it's coming - "shock and awe," invasion, occupation, lost sovereignty, mass deaths, illness and disease, incarcerations, torture, and utter deprivation. A testimony to "democracy," liberation, and "free market" majesty. A ghoulish dystopia; a living hell heading everywhere unless stopped.

It afflicted Haiti for over 500 years. Most recently beginning on February 29, 2004, in the middle of the night, from a Bush-ordered coup d'etat, when US Marines abducted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and forcibly flew him to the Central African Republic. Today he's exiled in South Africa. He vows to return, and Haitians want him back in any capacity.

Haiti is now occupied. UN Blue Helmet paramilitaries control it. So do other repressive internal security forces. The people are deeply impoverished. They're the poorest in the Hemisphere. Unemployment is rampant. A tiny 5% of elites control everything - the economy, media, universities, professions, and what passes for Haiti's polity. Washington holds an iron grip. Six powerful families and US corporate interests profit. Another "free market" paradise. Human deprivation is unimaginable and now much worse with Haitians unable to afford high food prices. Most are undernourished. Many are starving and forced to eat "mud cookies" from edible clay. They lack nutrition, contain dangerous bacteria, and are just stomach-filler.

They protest for relief. Washington-directed UN "Peacekeepers" respond violently. They patrol streets and neighborhoods, crush dissent, shoot to kill, arrest the innocent, incarcerate them under horrific conditions, and hold them indefinitely with little hope for judicial relief. Today's Haiti. More of Bush's legacy.

Venezuela might have been the same if Washington's April 2002 coup succeeded. Since taking office in February 1999, President Hugo Chavez was targeted for removal, and maybe assassination, especially after George Bush's election. Luckily he survived; continues to lead his nation; was elected and reelected impressively; prevailed in every presidential, parliamentary, municipal and referendum election since December 1998 until hitting a momentary speed bump last December.

He nonetheless remains strongly popular. Venezuela is a democracy. Chavez delivers vital social services. He redistributes national wealth to his people. He's rewarded with their support, and that makes him target one in the Hemisphere for removal - so far without success but not because Bush didn't try. To be continued under the new incumbent.

Iran is also targeted and has been since the Islamic Revolution. After George Bush's election, pressure built and today remains intense. The Israeli Lobby wants regime change. So do Bush neocons and the Democrat leadership, at least most of them. A large US naval presence is in the region. Reinforcements may be sent. A potential blockade is threatened. It's unclear if it's planned or just bluff. Pending H. Con. Res. 362 with around 250 co-sponsors calls for it. It remains undebated and referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. A companion S. Res. 580 was also introduced. It's also undebated and referred to the Foreign Relations Committee for consideration.

Things will likely remain on hold until Barak Obama assumes office in January. Nonetheless, the situation is tense and worrisome as both parties are hostile to the Iranian government and very responsive to Israeli Lobby pressure. In or out of office, Bush neocons have power and exert considerable influence. Another testimony to his legacy that gives reason for Iranians to worry. All humanity as well.

Then there's the Caucasus crisis over Georgia's willful aggression against its breakaway South Ossetian province. It erupted on August 7, subsided a few days later, but ignited a new Cold War with Georgia a US proxy and Russia falsely accused of aggression.

Another key headline-making act of America v. Russia, more Bush legacy fallout, and what the new president will face in 2009. As well as Russia's justifiable anger at being surrounded by US bases. Most in place since George Bush's election. And now "advanced tracking missile defense radar" for the Czech Republic by 2012 and offensive "interceptor (and Patriot) missiles" for Poland - neither of which Russia will tolerate nor should it. It suggests a potential 1962 Cuba scenario when the world came within an eyelash of nuclear war. It also echos Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" on how WW I began and its early weeks. Either possibility shows the perils of Bush's legacy on which the fate of the world may now hinge.

The Special Relationship between America and Israel

It began in March 1948 when Harry Truman met secretly with Chaim Weizmann (Zionist leader and first Israeli president) and pledged support for a new Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, the British Mandate ended at midnight. At the same time, National Council members in Tel Aviv signed the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Minutes later, Washington followed through on a 1922 congressional resolution in support of a Jewish homeland and became the first country to extend recognition. Harry Truman signed the following statement:

"This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof.

The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel."

It established an enduring alliance under successive administrations that became more special than ever under George Bush. At its core, realgeopolitik in a strategic part of the world. The mutual advantage for both sides, and how the influential Israeli Lobby cemented it. James Petras explained it in his important 2006 book: "The Power of Israel in the United States."

At its heart is the high proportion of wealthy and influential Jewish families in the country - despite the small percentage of Jews in the population overall. Allied with others, they created a "tyranny of Israel over the US" that threatens world peace and security and the future of democracies in both countries and elsewhere.

At least since 1967, the Lobby secured Washington's unconditional support for Israel's wars of aggression. Also the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq War, and a scheme to isolate and possibly blockade and/or attack Iran to solidify regional dominance for both countries and a lock on that nation's vast oil and gas resources.

Most important is what Washington provides in aid. Shirl McArthur explained the direct part in his July 2006 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs article titled "A Conservative Estimate of Total Direct US Aid to Israel: $108 billion. He used data from a January 5, 2006 Congressional Research Service Report to Congress from 1949 through a 2006 FY estimate. It totaled $98.72 billion. McArthur then added further DOD "special projects" amounts of $9.24 billion for a grand $108 billion total. Far and away, Israel is the largest recipient of US aid in all forms.

It includes:

-- around $3 billion annually in direct aid;

-- billions more in low or no interest loans;

-- millions annually for immigrant resettlement on expropriated Palestinian lands;

-- multi-billions in waved loan obligations; at least $45 billion since 1974;

-- special multi-billion loan guarantees for aggressive wars and to militarize and occupy Palestine;

-- billions more in military aid; financial help to develop Israel's defense industry; state-of-the-art technology; and the latest US weapons;

-- US guarantees for Israel's access to oil; and

-- open-checkbook amounts for joint initiatives in or outside the region - all with imperial aims plus special requests honored, including secret ones.

The US-Israeli relationship has always been special. More than ever under George Bush the way Ariel Sharon once boasted. With good reason he said: "We have the US president under our control." It advantages both sides but gravely harms most others. Another chilling side of the Bush legacy to be continued under Barack Obama, who'll be even more committed according to James Petras. He calls him "America's First Jewish President" in a compelling new article easily accessible online.

The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) North American Union (NAU)

It's another Bush administration grand scheme to merge three nations into one - controlled by Washington and the corporate interests behind it. It's a coup d'etat against the sovereignty of three nations enforced by militarizing the continent for exploitation. If implemented, it will create a borderless North America without barriers to trade and capital - mostly for US corporate giants. It will ensure America gets free and unlimited access to Canadian and Mexican resources, mainly oil and gas, and in the case of Canada fresh water as well.

It will also militarize North America under US dominance in the name of national and continental security, control it with police state powers, and empower corporate interests to pillage it. It's a secretly crafted scheme to:

-- make the region "safe" for business;

-- ruthlessly exploit workers; and

-- steal their future.

Its worst features are withheld from legislators. It's public language is deceptively benign. Its real design is well hidden. Growing opposition is significant but way short of stopping it. If in place, it will take Police State America to a new level. More potential fallout from George Bush's legacy.

Bush's War on Working Americans

Taking from the poor and middle class. Giving to the rich. That explains a lot about Bush's plutocratic scheme, his "ownership society." To transfer trillions of public and private dollars from millions of working Americans to giant corporations and the wealthiest segment of society.

Corporations alone are hugely concentrated and virtual monopolies. Of the world's largest economies, at least 51 are corporations. Most are US-based or controlled and function as what Noam Chomsky calls "private tyrannies." More than ever under George Bush. They're run by well-connected, powerful figures comprising the top 1% of the nation's affluent.

According to economist Michael Hudson, they (and others in the top 1%) own around 70% of the country's wealth in the form of stocks, bonds, land, business assets, natural resources, and other investments. They're interlocked for even more dominance and well served by an administration delivering most everything they want.

In contrast, 90% of American families have little or no net worth with all their debt burdens taken into account. And millions now face the potential loss of their homes because of unaffordable mortgages and the nation's grave economic conditions afflicting them. More as well. Since the mid-1970s, wages haven't kept up with inflation, and benefits have declined and are disappearing.

Jobs are offshored for greater profits. High-paying manufacturing and other good ones are lost, replaced by lower-paying, less skilled, many part-time ones, and a huge reserve army of unemployed and underemployed to contain wage pressures. Union membership has plummeted from a post-war 1950s 34.7% high to around 12% now and only 7.4% in the private sector.

Credit recent developments to George Bush. Post-9/11, he declared war on working Americans. He took on public sector unions straightaway; denied 170,000 DHS employees civil service protection and the right to bargain collectively; and targeted all federal workers for lower pay, fewer benefits, loss of unionized rights, and in many cases their jobs.

He one-sidedly supports business. Stripped workers of their bargaining rights. Denied pay raises for 1.8 million federal workers on the pretext of a "national emergency" and millions more overtime pay. He appointed anti-union officials. Tried to weaken and end Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social services; and exploited undocumented immigrants as a wedge against organized labor but failed to secure "immigration reform" to fully implement it.

Since 1999, and especially under George Bush, consumer debt grew twice as fast as income. Millions live in poverty, many millions more just above it. At least 47 million Americans have no health insurance. Millions more have too little of it, and in some portions of every year at least 80 million Americans are uninsured - and it's getting worse at a time of economic crisis and skyrocketing unemployment.

The nation's 140 million working population has been gravely harmed. Opportunity in America is disappearing. Today's wealth gap is unprecendented. According to the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), one in three jobs (around 47 million) pay low wages (defined as two-thirds the median wage or $11.11 per hour or less) with few or no benefits, including pensions or retirement accounts. One in four workers (around 35 million) earn poverty wages. Millions of others as well because official statistics mask the problem of big city workers earning too little to support their families. They comprise a permanent underclass that's growing - and a dying middle class that's eroding.

These conditions have accelerated under George Bush. He shamed the nation by:

-- targeting the poor, middle America and people most vulnerable;

-- stripping away opportunity;

-- shifting wealth to the rich;

-- making speculation even more of a growth industry;

-- designating everything for privatization;

-- aiming to end public education and hand it to profiteers for plunder; and

-- creating the grimmest and most unparalled economic conditions since New Deal reforms improved things in the 1930s.

More of his shameless legacy to be handed to the incoming administration with faint hope it'll improve things.

Additional Bush Administration "Distinctions" - Early Corruption Scandals to Today's Economy in Disarray

Besides the above, the Bush legacy has two other "distinctions." Its first two years were tainted by huge corruption scandals, and its final two by far greater criminal fraud and the greatest ever financial/economic calamity - a truly unprecedented event. First the scandals with many familiar names.

Most prominent was Houston-based Enron. It began in 1985 shipping natural gas through pipelines; then transformed itself over the next 16 years into one of the country's most dominant energy traders - aided and abetted by its close relationship with Texas Governor George Bush. In return for privileged favors, he got huge financial contributions and a jump-start for his presidential ambitions.

Enron prospered and had $111 billion in 2000 revenues. Fortune magazine named it "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years. But by the end of 2001, a corruption scandal sunk it and forced it into bankruptcy protection from its creditors.

It turned out that the company engaged in illegal, off-the-books transactions and partnerships to maximize sales and profits and conceal growing debt problems. By the time evidence emerged, it was too late for investors and employees. Top company officials were charged and convicted of securities, wire and mail fraud. Money laundering and conspiracy as well.

Its accounting firm Arthur Anderson was convicted of obstructing justice for destroying evidentiary files and preventing the court from seeing financial records, transactions, emails, memos and other fraud-related documents. On May 31, 2005, the pro-business Supreme Court reversed the conviction on the spurious grounds that jury instructions were inappropriate. Merrill Lynch was just as fortunate. On January 22, 2007, the High Court dismissed a huge lawsuit for restitution from colluding with Enron to defraud investors. It immunized other bankers as well from any liability in the company's malfeasance. Enron wasn't as lucky and no longer exists.

For every uncovered corporate scandal, countless others exist and remain hidden. Here are a few Forbes.com lists during 2001, 2002 and an earlier 2000 one:

-- Adelphia Communications (2002) involving billions of illegal off-the-books loans to top executives; also overstating financial results by inflating capital expenses and concealing debt;

-- AOL Time Warner (2002) for inflating sales by booking barter deals on advertising; AOL may have overstated revenue by $49 million, and the company took a dubious $54 billion writedown for "good will" to end 2002 with the largest loss ever in corporate history - $98.7 billion;

-- Bristol-Myers Squibb (2002) for inflating its 2001 revenue by $1.5 billion by so-called "channel-stuffing" - the practice of forcing wholesalers to accept more products than they can sell to clean out company inventory and claim added sales;

-- CMS Energy (2002) for illegally executing "round-trip" trades to artificially boost energy trading volume;

-- Duke Energy (2002) for the same offense;

-- Dynergy (2002) for the same one;

-- El Paso (2002) - the same one also;

-- Global Crossing (2002) for engaging in network capacity "swaps" with other carriers - to inflate revenue and for destroying evidentiary documents to hide them;

-- Halliburton (2002) for inflating sales by booking barter transactions as revenue;

-- Kmart (2002) - regarding anonymous letters from company employees alleging the company's accounting practices intended to deceive investors about its financial health;

-- Merck (2002) - for recording $12.4 billion in consumer-to-pharmacy co-payments the company never collected;

-- Mirant (2002) - for fraudulent accounting practices that boosted revenues and understated expenses;

-- Peregrine Systems (2002) - for overstating $100 million in sales by improperly recognizing revenues from third-party resellers;

-- Quest Communications International (2002) - for illegally engaging in "round-trip" trades to boost trading volumes and revenues;

-- Tyco (2002) - for its CEO's indictment for tax evasion, improper use of company funds, and illegal merger accounting practices;

-- Xerox (2000) - for falsifying financial results for five years to boost income by $1.5 billion, and last but not all

Worldcom (2002) - the second most notable scandal after Enron for overstating cash flow by $3.8 billion; booking operating expenses as capital ones; for SEC charges of $9 billion in fraudulent accounting practices; and for founder and CEO Bernard Ebbers illegally taking $400 million in off-the-books loans.

By late 2002, the Afghan and Iraq wars created an illusion of prosperity. Alan Greenspan engineered it with 1% interest rates and huge liquidity infusions. Ben Bernanke continued it. The administration supported it. The result was predictable. A bubble economy and credit/debt crisis was allowed to build and mushroom. It was structured on a foundation of speculative greed and fraud and is imploding because of excess. It's spreading contagion globally; creating unparalled risks; and threatening millions around the world with financial ruin. It reveals predatory capitalism's dark side and shows nothing this pernicious is sustainable.

Here's a brief look at George Bush's eight year (economic) balance sheet:

-- an unprecedented $8 trillion housing bubble now imploding;

-- millions of foreclosed homeowners and millions more at risk;

-- the likely deepest economic calamity since the 1930s and potentially one even worse;

-- skyrocketing job losses;

-- rising bankruptcies;

-- failing banks;

-- consumers maxed out on credit and strapped by debt;

-- the American dream an illusion; from eroded household wealth, declining wages and benefits, and soaring expenses;

-- trillions of dollar losses; likely many trillions more ahead;

-- a potential devastating deflation and eventual potential serious inflation from excess money creation;

-- multi-trillions in toxic debt; from asset backed securities (ABS); not by mistake; by design; as F. William Engdahl explains in his new book: "Power of Money;" to profit hugely and create a banking panic; for greater concentrated "financial and economic power in a few private hands;" globally under JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup (if it survives), Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America; masters of the universe;

-- an unrepayable national debt; in the tens of trillions;

-- speculative finance turned more than ever into a growth industry;

-- toxic waste derivative schemes in place of legitimate investments;

-- massive unchecked fraud;

-- "banksters" rewarded instead of punished;

-- the economy reeling from mountains of debt, frozen credit, mortgage delinquencies, growing defaults, rising unemployment, and the possibility of something much more serious ahead.

It's spreading everywhere, touching businesses and households. The result of speculative finance, corruption, and irresponsible governance, now threatening the nation with economic decline or possible ruin.

Today's problems are multi-fold and causing at least three simultaneously imploding bubbles; ones responsible governance and corporate oversight could have avoided:

-- a property, mainly housing one;

-- a mortgage finance one; and

-- an alphabet soup of toxic CDOs, SIVs, SPVs, CMOs, CMBSs, and a whole menu of levered-up, high-risk securitized assets amounting to financial alchemy; defrauding millions, including sophisticated investors and sovereign ones.

No one's sure how this can be resolved or how long it may take. It's a deplorable administration's final chapter. An odious one as its end approaches. From stolen elections to corporate scandals. Ruinous militarization, permanent wars, and imperial madness. Reckless spending and unrepayable debt. An environment of reckless finance, massive fraud, and unprecedented wealth transfers to the rich. A war on working Americans. Repressive police state laws. An absence of checks and balances. Democracy reduced to fantasy. The nation in decline, and a lawless state with no regard for the greater good.

Congress is largely supportive. So are federal courts, now stacked with repressive right wing justices. Nearly two-thirds are from or affiliated with the extremist Federalist Society. Its advocacy is chilling:

-- rolling back civil liberties;

-- ending New Deal social policies;

-- opposing reproductive choice, government regulations, labor rights, and environmental protections;

-- allowing the nation's prison population explode to the world's largest; mostly affecting nonviolent offenders; largely poor blacks and Latinos, and overall subverting justice to defend privilege.

A full Bush legacy accounting requires volumes. The above is just a sampling. For good measure, however, more examples are below from the many during his tenure. They range from neglect to outrage to scandal to high crimes and misdemeanors:

-- sending young men and women to fight illegal wars; then provided the sick and wounded with third world health care on return; some even charged for it; others get little or nothing;

-- irradiating vast areas of Iraq and Afghanistan with depleted uranium contamination and other deadly toxins; they cause every imaginable health problem to those exposed and their families;

-- issuing an executive order (EO) revoking Gerald Ford's ban on assassinations and thus making the practice (along with torture) official state policy;

-- willfully leaving New Orleans vulnerable to what FEMA in early 2001 called the most likely potential US disaster - a major hurricane and flood in the city; ethnically cleansing poor blacks post-Katrina to let corporate predators seize their land and property for profitable development;

-- rejecting the Kyoto Protocol ratified by 182 countries as of May 2008;

-- showing contempt for environmental issues and giving corporate allies license to pollute;

-- increasing defense spending to over $1 trillion dollars annually with all budgeted categories included plus multi-billions more in secret off-the-books allocations;

-- at the least, having full knowledge and allowing the 9/11 attack to happen; then rigging the 9/11 Commission to whitewash the investigation and leave the most important questions unanswered;

-- promoting the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act; now hurting homeowners in trouble and facing foreclosure; others as well from lost jobs and illness;

-- trying to privatize Social Security for Wall Street; to end the most important federal program keeping millions of seniors out of poverty;

-- ending Medicare through huge annual premium increases; gradually eliminating Medicaid as well for the indigent;

-- hiring journalists to be paid propagandists;

-- supporting ending Net Neutrality and allowing service providers to censor content;

-- vetoing stem cell research legislation twice;

-- supporting the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 to give loggers license to clear cut;

-- spening billions on "missile defense" that, in fact, is for offense; provocatively installing it close to Russian and Chinese borders;

-- wanting a constitutional amendment declaring marriage to be only between a man and a woman;

-- adding a signing statement to the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act asserting executive authority to open US mail;

-- supporting the 2005 Energy Policy Act and 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act that mandate biofuel production and use; a scam to create food shortages; let prices rise and enrich agribusiness; they're also a genetic Trojan horse for Ag biotech giants like Monsanto to colonize our fuel and food system, raise prices, control output, and make it all GMO - known to harm human health;

-- favoring the abolition of the separation of church and state;

-- supporting nuclear proliferation for commercial and military purposes;

-- signing the 2006 Secure Fence Act to build a multi-billion dollar barrier on our southern border with Mexico to deter unwanted Latino immigrants;

-- in 2003, exempting 20 million acres of wetlands and streams from Clean Water Act (CWA) protections;

-- letting the dollar depreciate 40% from 2002 - 2008 and now manipulating it higher to facilitate reckless money creation and borrowing; and

-- allowing market manipulation to let oil and gasoline prices skyrocket to benefit Big Oil allies.

There's more as in the administration's final days George Bush is rushing through new "midnight regulations" that will be very hard to change. They include:

-- allowing uranium mining near the Grand Canyon;

-- permitting loaded firearms in national parks;

-- prohibiting injured consumers from suing negligent manufacturers in state courts; requiring pro-business federal ones to handle them;

-- further gutting the Endangered Species Act by no longer requiring government scientists to assess how imperiled species will be impacted by mining, logging, drilling, highway building, and other development; climate change and other environmental considerations will also no longer apply;

-- opening two million new acres of mountain state lands to shale oil development;

-- opening additional acres of undeveloped lands to mining;

-- letting Big Coal dump waste from mountaintop mining into neighboring streams and valleys; letting the industry build plants next to some sites formerly restricted for environmental safety;

-- trashing the Clean Water Act by letting Agribusiness dump, or let seep, animal waste into US waterways; another new regulation will exempt factory farms from reporting air pollution from animal waste;

-- exempting big chemical companies from monitoring their lead emissions; also classifying three billion pounds of hazardous waste as "recycling" and letting another 200 million pounds be reclassified as "fuel;"

-- restricting the government's ability to protect workers from exposure to toxic chemicals and other substances; also weakening the Family and Medical Leave Act to make it harder for workers to have time off for serious illness; another favor to truckers to permit longer driver hours on the road - up to 11 hours a day with only 34 downtime hours between hauls;

-- a vaguely written rule to make it harder for pharmacies and health care providers to participate in abortions; also to provide information on contraception, family planning and artificial insemination;

-- limiting vision and dental care for over 50 million low income Medicaid recipients to make hard-pressed states and poor people cover more of the cost;

-- relaxing air pollution standards near national parks;

-- enlisting state and local police to illegally spy for the federal government; and perhaps more still in the administration's final days - to add an exclamation point to an ugly legacy.

Once these rules are published in the Federal Register, the new administration will be hard-pressed to expunge or change them. Doing so takes time, in some cases years, at a time the economic crisis, foreign wars, and other priorities take precedence.

The Center for Public Integrity published its "Broken Government By the Numbers" under George Bush. Some include:

-- 45 million (more likely 50) with no health care and tens of millions more with too little;

-- 60% of EPA scientists report political interference with their work;

-- of 1273 whistleblower complaints from 2002 - 2008, all but 17 were dismissed - a mere 1.3%;

-- 190,000 missing US-supplied weapons in Iraq;

-- $212.3 million in Halliburton overcharges for oil construction work in Iraq plus countless millions more for its other services and products; much the same is true for other companies with close administration ties;

-- record fiscal deficits, expected to reach or exceed $1 trillion for FY 2009 and successive years thereafter;

-- a record $9.91 billion for government secrecy in 2007;

-- 800 government laptops with sensitive information lost by FBI, DEA, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives;

-- 30 million pounds of tainted beef recalled in 2007 and concern for how much more is never found or reported;

-- DOD weapons acquisition budget exceeded by over $300 billion plus trillions of unaccounted for defense allocations;

-- less than 3% of US electricity needs provided by alternative energy;

-- the horrific toll in Iraq and Afghanistan - to US forces and local populations;

-- $100 billion or more in annual federal tax revenues lost by letting corporations and the rich use off-shore tax havens;

-- $60 billion in annual Medicare fraud;

-- lax FDA, FAA, OSHA and other government agency enforcement endangering public health and safety;

-- 20,000 annual US deaths from power plant and diesel vehicle pollution;

-- 60,000 newborns a year at risk for neurological problems because of mercury emissions from coal-fired plants;

-- 935 "demonstrably false statements" in the run-up to the Iraq war;

-- 760,800 disability claims backlogged and awaiting hearings by the Social Security Administration as of October 2008, and

-- 806,000 veterans' disability claims in 2006 (mostly from the Iraq and Afghan wars); the backlog reached 400,000 in February 2007.

These and other policies, measures, rules (or lack of them), actions, and shoddy under-performance favor the rich and harm most others. In addition, militarizing the nation is heading it for insolvency, tyranny and ruin - from overreach to lawlessness to massive corruption and fraud.

The Bush legacy. Tainted from start to finish. Herbert Hoover, Augustus Caesar and Caligula combined, and now on Barack Obama's plate to handle. It's doubtful he can or will try. Beware of promised change. It usually guarantees little, and none on what matters most. A lot rides on that being wrong at the most perilous time in our history when the task awaiting the new president may be more than any new head of state can handle.

Given Obama's rogue team, what James Petras calls "ambitious power-driven operatives (who represent) the biggest threat to world peace and to US democratic values in recent history," expect his policy initiatives to advance the worst of them under George Bush, and soon enough we'll know we were "Fooled Again."

A Final Comment and Tribute to Iraqi Journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi's Heroism

We heard the story and saw the clip. It's all over the world about a man who's now a hero to millions. Al Jazeera explained that: "In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt and (al-Zaidi's action) is likely to serve as a lasting reminder of the widespread opposition to the US-led invasion (and occupation) of Iraq - the conflict which has come to define Bush's presidency."

At the same time he shouted: "This is the farewell kiss you dog....this is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq." According to Musa Barhoumeh, editor of Jordan's independent Al-Gahd newspaper: "Throwing the shoes at Bush was the best goodbye kiss ever....it expresses how Iraqis and other Arabs hate" this man.

Al-Zaidi is now imprisoned. He faces prosecution by the Iraqi "government" under three articles of the country's criminal code and may be sentenced to up to 15 years - for insulting a foreign head of state, the Iraqi prime minister, and possibly the more serious charge of assault.

He's been badly beaten, struck on the head with a rifle butt, has a broken arm and ribs, facial and other cuts, and reportedly has been tortured. A signature campaign is circulating to free him. It's easily accessed online. Sign it in solidarity with him, for the many others he represents, ending the Iraq occupation, liberation and human rights for its people, and as a powerful parting gesture against George Bush, his ugly administration, and its tainted and criminal legacy.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com (http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/).

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19981

[Alonzo-ny]

The heroic reporter's face.



Far from heroic, stooping to those levels is very undignified no matter what Bush has done. Makes Iraqis look bad.

And damn Bush has got some good reaction time.

[ablarc]

Bush: a national disgrace, an indictment of the electorate's judgment, and evidence of a system that can't be trusted.

[Jasonik]

Bush Years Pave Way For Marxist Revolution (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=180923&highlight=marxist+revolution#post180923)
'Social solidarity' created while inflationary central bank policy starves the nation

[TREPYE]

Bush: a national disgrace, an indictment of the electorate's judgment, and evidence of a system that can't be trusted.

A system orchestrated by this pig:

http://www.politicsonline.com/blog/images/2005/rove2.jpg

[ablarc]

A system orchestrated by this pig ...
... who in turn learned everything he knows from this one:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/Goebbels.jpg
Wikipedia.

[BrooklynRider]

Source: Akron Beacon Journal

Pilot killed as plane crashes in Lake Twp.

By Jewell Cardwell, John Higgins and David Knox
Beacon Journal staff writers

POSTED: 11:30 p.m. EST, Dec 19, 2008

LAKE TWP.: A single-prop, private airplane crashed next to a vacant house on Charolais Street Northwest Friday evening, exploding into flames and killing the pilot.

Michael Connell, 45, of Bath Township, was alone in the plane, according to State Highway Patrol Lt. Eric Sheppard.

Connell was a prominent Republican political consultant. He founded New Media Communications in Richfield, which developed campaign Web sites for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and President George W. Bush.

The plane was attempting to land around 6 p.m. Friday at Akron-Canton Airport when it crashed about three miles short of the runway...

Read more: http://www.ohio.com/news/break_news/36482529.html

---------------------------------------------------------

From Bradblog.com 10/31/2008

Federal Judge Compels GOP IT Guru Mike Connell To Give Deposition in Ohio '04 Election Case (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6600)

Contentious Hearing Today Results in Order For Republican 'High-Tech Forrest Gump' to Testify Under Oath on Monday

Appearance to Answer Questions on 2004 Election Scheduled Just 24 Hours Prior to Election 2008...

Guest Blogged by Steve Heller of VelvetRevolution.us (http://velvetrevolution.us/ElectionStrikeForce)
http://www.bradblog.com/Images/siren.gifhttp://www.bradblog.com/Images/MikeConnell_JohnMcCainWeb_title.jpg

The Republican IT guru, recently described (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6206) as a "high tech Forrest Gump" for his proclivity to be "at the scene" of so many troubling elections since 2000, and even at the heart of the "lost" White House email scandal, has been ordered by a federal judge to appear for an under-oath deposition next Monday in Ohio.

(http://www.bradblog.com/)
The BRAD BLOG (http://www.bradblog.com/) has learned that Mike Connell, the Republican IT guru whose company, GovTech Solutions, created Ohio's 2004 election results computer network, appeared in federal court today, as compelled, and has been ordered to appear for his deposition on Monday, November 3, just 24 hours before Election Day 2008.


Today's court order came after a contentious hearing, at which Connell was present. The hearing was part of a long-standing voting rights violations lawsuit, King Lincoln v. Blackwell (http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/klbna.php), as previously covered by The BRAD BLOG (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6445) and by Velvet Revolution's Election Protection Strike Force here (http://www.velvetrevolution.us/electionstrikeforce/2008/07/ohio_attorney_files_motion_to.html) and here (http://www.velvetrevolution.us/electionstrikeforce/2008/09/motion_for_relief_of_stay_file.html).


Though Connell's attorneys have fought to quash the subpoena, recently issued after the judge lifted a stay on the case several weeks ago, it looks like his options to avoid testimony, or at least jail for avoiding it, may have come to an end. The attorneys in the case have said that Connell's testimony may well lead to the subpoenaing and under-oath questioning of Karl Rove, who, they say, would be unable to use Executive Privilege as an excuse to avoid such a subpoena in a civil RICO case...


http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6600

---------------------------------------------------------


I guess it was one of those pesky planes, like the one that took Paul Wellstone down in a firey crash.


Mainstream media is not reporting on this at all.

[Zephyr]

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/images/chicagotribune.gif

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/images/swamp.gif


Obama 'Gores' Bush on science



Posted December 20, 2008
12:48 PM
by Frank James


If politics were a beach, President-elect Barack Obama would be kicking a little Al Gore sand onto President Bush today.

In his Saturday web address to the nation, the next president, in announcing the completion of his White House science team, says his administration will be marked by a respect for scientific inquiry even when the truths it reveals are "inconvenient."

Obama said in part:


Because the truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources - it's about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient -especially when it's inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States - and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.



Former Vice President Gore has spent recent years castigating Bush and his administration for ignoring scientific results that didn't fit with their conservative worldview, a critique that culminated in Gore's Oscar-winning movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and in his winning a Nobel Prize.

It was a criticism made by many others that appeared to be borne out by reporting by journalists.

Those days are over, Obama was essentially saying.

Obama's science team includes Harvard University professor John Holdren who will be assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel-Prize winning cancer researcher and onetime Director of the National Institutes of Health, and Eric Lander of MIT and Harvard, a leader of the Human Genome Project, were named Council of Advisors on Science and Technology co-chairs.

Also, Jane Lubchenco, an Oregon State University marine scientist respected for her environmental research, was named administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which is part of the Commerce Department.



© 2008 Tribune Interactive (http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/12/obama_gores_bush_on_science.html#more)

[Zephyr]

" ... This is a well-worn flim clip, that foreshadows an actual event.
The formerly unknown Stooge of lore,
has been re-inserted into this sequence for comparison purposes. ..."


http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/images/gif5.gif
© 2007 yoursite.com / Courtesy “a little more to the right”

[Zephyr]

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/2.0/global/nav/header/cnn_politics.gif

Updated 11:07 a.m. EST
Sat December 20, 2008


'Drill, baby, drill' process has begun


WASHINGTON (CNN) – Remember "drill, baby drill"? In its last weeks in office, the Bush administration is starting to make it happen by quietly starting the process of exploration and drilling off the coast of Virginia.


http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/POLITICS/12/20/oil.drilling/art.gas.prices.gi.jpg

As the price of gas surged past $4 a gallon
this summer, U.S. drilling became a hot political issue.


The move means that President-elect Barack Obama and brand new interior secretary nominee Ken Salazar – a Democratic senator from Colorado – will have to jump feet-first into the decades-old debate over offshore oil drilling. It's an issue where the two disagreed at one point.

Wait. Virginia?

The state is ground zero for the drilling debate because of possible reserves off the coast and what energy experts see as a friendlier government than elsewhere.

The U.S. Interior Department has completed the first step, closing a public comment period on the proposal to lease 2.9 million acres of ocean to natural gas and oil companies. The pie-shaped area begins 50 miles off Virginia's coast, straight out from Virginia Beach on the south and across from Virginia's boundary on the Delmarva peninsula to the north.

"The East Coast really has not been looked at for 30 years," said Randall Luthi, who heads up the drilling plan as director of Interior's Minerals Management Service. Luthi spoke from his Washington office to CNN Radio.

"Our best guess is that area could contain about 130 million barrels of oil and 1.14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," he said.

Such an oil find would be small compared with the estimated 40 billion barrels in the Gulf Coast. The natural gas is more substantial. But both are symbolic of a rare window of opportunity for the energy industry.

A two-fold ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling ended in just the past two months.

As the price of gas surged past $4 a gallon this summer, U.S. drilling became a hot political issue. President Bush responded by repealing a presidential offshore drilling ban put in place by his father. Then in October, a gridlocked Congress let a separate drilling moratorium expire after 26 years on the books.

Back in Virginia, environmentalists echo their Southwestern counterparts, calling the offshore push a last-ditch energy grab.

"We've got an administration on its way out, trying to make its last deal for the oil and gas industry," said Glenn Besa, director of Virginia's Sierra Club chapter.

Besa pointed to what he sees as a platoon of red flags.

"The Navy has a lot of operations out there, in the area where this drilling takes place," he said, "And the North Atlantic right whale, there's only 300 or 400 of those individual whales left, and they migrate through that area as well."

The Navy has expressed concern about the prospect of drilling rigs in the area where much of its Norfolk fleet trains. NASA has objected as well because it launches satellites and low-altitude rockets from its facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.

The state's Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, asked the Interior Department to let Virginia research possible natural gas reserves. But the agency went further, opening the process for oil and gas leasing.

Luthi defends the move without hesitation. "Oil and gas are going to continue to be a major part of our energy needs in this country," he said, "for at least the next generation."

The Minerals and Management chief calls this the start of a long research and regulation period. He said that under ideal conditions, actual leasing of the ocean area could not begin until 2011.

But, the next administration could either promote or stop the process cold.

Obama could simply direct the Department of the Interior to freeze the offshore process. He could also issue another presidential ban on offshore drilling.

Or he could let the idea go forward, something his new nominee to head the Interior Department has favored.

Earlier this year, Salazar was part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers that wanted to open up Outer Continental Shelf drilling in exchange for more investment in low-carbon technology.

At the time, then-Sen. Obama was in the other camp, sharply opposed to offshore drilling. But that changed during the campaign, when gas prices were high and politically explosive. Candidate Obama said that he rethought his position and that "responsible" offshore exploration is part of the total energy picture.

The bold-faced question mark is, where will Obama stand on January 20 when he takes office?

Besa is counting on the incoming president to lean left and stop Virginia drilling.

"I do think that the environmental community's voice will be heard," he said.
But in the Bush camp, Luthi is trying to turn the change in power to his advantage, "That's one reason we started [this process], was to give the new administration an option." he said.



© 2008 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/20/oil.drilling/index.html)

[scumonkey]

What an environmental nightmare this will be...
Why Virginia?
They are already having soooo many problems
with the Chesapeake bay water system-the largest estuary in the United States!
Home to thousands of species of plants and animals-
already under heavy pressure from pollution-
One accident and it will be Katie bar the door :mad:
Will the idiots in charge please WAKE UP ?!

[BrooklynRider]

OH Election Fraud Attorney Reacts to the Death of Mike Connell
Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the growing federal election conspiracy case tells The BRAD BLOG that the loss of a key witness will not deter his pursuit of justice

U.S. Dept. of Justice ignored months-long effort to protect GOP 'IT guru' following reported threats from Karl Rove...

The lead attorney in the widening 2004 federal election fraud conspiracy case which began in Ohio --- but is rapidly growing to other states and other elections --- says that the stunning death of a key witness last Friday is a blow to the case, but not the end of it by a long shot.

"Michael Connell was a critically important witness. His loss hurts our case," Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the King-Lincoln Bronzville v. OH Sec. of State lawsuit told The BRAD BLOG in an email responding to questions about Connell's death. The Republican 'IT guru', a top IT consultant to Karl Rove, George W. Bush, John McCain and a bevvy of Congressional Republicans, had been in the nation's capital on still-unknown business before his single engine plane crashed Friday night on the way home, just three miles short of the runway in Akron, Ohio. The cause of the crash remains similarly unknown as of today.

"We will have to adjust," Arnebeck told us in response to queries about where the case may necessarily need to go from here. "The kind of organized criminal enterprise we are addressing requires the resources of the very best that the investigative press corps and law enforcement, at all levels, can muster."...

FULL STORY: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6768 (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6768)

[Jasonik]

I've been posting on Connell's death in How to Hack an Election (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=266559#post266559).

[Jasonik]

Bush 'shoe maker' hit by demand

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45320000/jpg/_45320718_006639887-1.jpg
Ramazan Baydan insists his firm made
the shoe thrown at President Bush

A Turkish shoe firm says it has had to take on 100 extra staff to cope with a surge in orders after an Iraqi threw shoes at US President Bush.

Istanbul-based Baydan Shoes (http://www.baydanshoes.com/en/) claims it made the shoes and says it now has tens of thousands of orders from around the world - including from the US and Iraq.

The shoe was called Model 271 but has been renamed Bush shoe, the firm said.

However, the brother of shoe-throwing journalist Muntader al-Zaidi says he believes the shoes were Iraqi-made.

Durgham al-Zaidi criticised people he said were trying to exploit his brother's actions for commercial gain.

"The Syrians claim the shoes were made in Syria and the Turks say they made them. Some say he bought them in Egypt. But as far as I know, he bought them in Baghdad and they were made in Iraq," he told the AFP news agency.

It is difficult to verify exactly where the shoe is from as Mr Zaidi has not been seen in public since the incident eight days ago, and the judge in the case says the shoes were destroyed during security checks.

Trial date

But Oner Bogatekin, Baydan Shoes' export representative, said the staff recognised their handiwork from the news reports.

"We saw it on videos and also in newspapers. We have been producing this shoe for 10 years, so know it very well and we can recognise them anywhere," he told the BBC.

He said there had been a four-fold interest in the shoe - now dubbed Bush shoes or Bye Bye Bush shoes - and had to take on 100 extra workers to cope with the demand.

According to the shop's owner, Ramazan Baydan, a US firm has ordered 18,000 pairs, a further 15,000 pairs are destined for Iraq and a British distributor has asked to be the firm's European sales representative.

Mr Bogatekin said the firm was pleased with the publicity it was getting, but insisted the shoes would not have done President Bush any serious harm.

"Actually, they are not heavy shoes so they wouldn't hurt him," he said.

Muntadar al-Zaidi has been hailed a hero by some for throwing his shoes at President Bush during the Baghdad news conference on 14 December. The action is seen as a grave insult in the Arab world.

He called Mr Bush a "dog", and said he was acting for "widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq".

He is due to face trial on 31 December accused of "aggression against a foreign head of state", which carries a jail sentence of up to 15 years.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7796047.stm
Published: 2008/12/22 16:26:59 GMT
© BBC MMVIII

*****

Davidson, a Maryland company has ordered 4,000 shoes (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=auI050ptHyPg&refer=europe) for US distribution.

*****

Canadians hurled shoes at a President George Bush poster outside the US Consulate in Montreal. (http://flickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/3124050372/)

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3228/3124050372_3cbafcd158.jpg

[Jasonik]

A better shot of Mr. Baydan and the Shoe Hurled Round the World.

http://www.antiwar.com/photos/baydan.jpg

[Ninjahedge]

The man has got sole.

To be surrounded by so many heels, but to remain on his own two feet!







I'll stop now. :D

[Zephyr]

Canadians hurled shoes at a President George Bush poster outside the US Consulate in Montreal.

Qu'un nom astucieux par Montrealers « Bloquez l'empire » :cool:

[TREPYE]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs_v3/cityroom/cityroom_post.png (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/)


December 24, 2008, 4:56 pm Bush Reverses Brooklyn Developer’s Pardon

By Sewell Chan (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/sewell-chan/)In an unusual move, President Bush on Wednesday reversed his decision (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081224-5.html), announced a day earlier, to pardon Isaac R. Toussie (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/bush-pardons-include-brooklyn-developer/), a Brooklyn developer who pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining federally insured mortgages and to defrauding Suffolk County by selling it overpriced land.
Mr. Toussie, now 36, pleaded guilty in May 2001 to using false documents to get mortgages insured by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In December 2002, he pleaded guilty to mail fraud, admitting that he persuaded county officials to overpay for land known as the Chandler Estate.
In the mortgage scheme, Mr. Toussie admitted that he agreed to help home buyers qualify for HUD loans by lying about their income.
Separately, Mr. Toussie admitted defrauding Suffolk County. In 2000, the county paid $5 million for the land to Toussie Family Enterprises Ltd., a company owned by Robert I. Toussie, Mr. Toussie’s father. Appraisers had valued it at about half that. Prosecutors said that Mr. Toussie gave Suffolk County’s real estate division fraudulent letters indicating that other prospective buyers had bid even more than $5 million.
Mr. Toussie was sentenced in Brooklyn in September 2003 to five months in prison and three years of supervised release conditioned on five months of home detention, and was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.
Despite his convictions, Mr. Toussie and his father had become one of the largest landowners on Long Island by 2007, by buying surplus land at auction.
The White House said in a statement on Wednesday that the pardon had been the result of a recommendation from Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel.
“With respect to the case of Mr. Isaac R. Toussie, the counsel to the president reviewed the application and believed, based on the information known to him at the time, that it was a meritorious application,” the statement said. “He so advised the President, who accepted the recommendation.”
In the statement, the White House said that the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, Ronald L. Rodgers (http://www.usdoj.gov/pardon/), had not made a recommendation in Mr. Toussie’s case. The statement said:
Based on information that has subsequently come to light, the president has directed the pardon attorney not to execute and deliver a grant of clemency to Mr. Toussie. The pardon attorney has not provided a recommendation on Mr. Toussie’s case because it was filed less than five years from completion of his sentence. The president believes that the pardon Attorney should have an opportunity to review this case before a decision on clemency is made.
The statement did not provide any details on the “information that has subsequently come to light.”
Public records show that Robert I. Toussie, Mr. Toussie’s father and a principal in their real estate company, donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee, and $2,300 to Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee, in April.
In 2001, in a civil rights class-action lawsuit brought in United States District Court in Central Islip, home buyers, most of them black and Hispanic, accused a long list of builders, bankers, appraisers and mortgage brokers — including Mr. Toussie and his father, Robert I. Toussie — of selling poorly constructed new homes at inflated prices and deceiving buyers into believing that property taxes would be deferred or reduced.
“The pardon was a bitter pill for the Toussie home purchasers to swallow, given the way they believed they had been treated by the Toussies,” Peter E. Seidman, a partner at the law firm of Milberg L.L.P. who is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in that lawsuit, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “They were angry. It was hurtful to see that the president of the United States had pardoned somebody who had sold them substandard housing, deceived them about the terms of their mortgage and steered them to certain neighborhoods based on their race.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif (http://www.nytimes.com/)

[Zephyr]

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/2.0/global/nav/header/cnn_politics.gif


Bush orders pardon re-examined


Story Highlights


NEW: Lawyer for homeowners suing Toussie said pardon was "bitter pill"
Toussie was involved in mortgage scheme in New York
Bush re-examining pardon in light of new information
Bush learned Toussie's father made contributions to Republicans



(CNN) -- President Bush on Wednesday ordered one of 19 presidential pardons granted earlier in the week to be re-examined. President Bush ordered the pardon of Isaac R. Toussie to be re-examined.

The pardon was for Isaac R. Toussie, a 36-year-old New York developer who pleaded guilty in 2001 to making false statements in a Long Island mortgage fraud scheme. Toussie and his father, also a developer, had previously been accused of conspiring with lenders and others to build and sell substandard homes -- a charge they denied.

The Toussies are also defendants in a lawsuit filed in New York federal court on behalf of more than 400 minority home buyers who allege a conspiracy involving racial steering, racketeering and fraud, said attorney Peter Seidman.

Seidman, a partner in a law firm representing the plaintiffs, said he was "very pleased" with Bush's order for a review.

"[The pardon] was a bitter pill for the home purchasers to swallow," he said.

According to a senior Bush administration official, the White House learned more about Toussie's case Tuesday night -- only hours after announcing his pardon. Specifically, the White House learned, according to the official, "additional information about the nature of fraud [Toussie] carried out."

The White House also learned Toussie's father made numerous contributions to leading Republican politicians. In 2008, Toussie's father donated almost $40,000 to Arizona Sen. John McCain, Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith, and Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor.

"Based on information that has subsequently come to light, the president has directed the [Justice Department's] pardon attorney not to execute and deliver a grant of clemency to Mr. Toussie," White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a written statement. "The pardon attorney has not provided a recommendation on Mr. Toussie's case because it was filed less than five years from completion of his sentence. The president believes that the pardon attorney should have an opportunity to review this case before a decision on clemency is made."

Bradford Berenson, Toussie's lawyer, issued a statement saying, "Isaac Toussie is deeply grateful that both the counsel to the president and the president himself found Mr. Toussie's pardon application to have sufficient merit to be granted. "Mr. Toussie looks forward to the pardon attorney's expeditious review of the application and remains confident that the pardon attorney will agree with the president and the White House counsel."

Under Justice Department guidelines, an application for a presidential pardon will not be considered by the department's pardon attorney until a convict has been out of prison for five years. Toussie was sentenced in September 2003 to a five-month prison sentence, as well as three years of supervised release.

Seidman said the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Toussies allege that the quality of construction in homes they bought on Staten Island was inferior to that in the model homes they had been shown to secure their purchase. They also allege that their applications were coded by race, a violation of civil rights laws, and that they were steered away from racially integrated neighborhoods to segregated neighborhoods, he said.

"I'm baffled that Toussie was selected as a candidate for a pardon in the first place," Seidman said. "So I don't know what I would say about the re-examination, other than why in the first place they thought he was worthy."

The Toussies deny the allegations in the lawsuit.

CNN's attempts to reach Toussie's lawyers on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

A Bush administration official noted it is rare for a pardon to be reversed.

Bush's 191 pardons and nine commutations are far fewer than those granted by Presidents Clinton and Reagan in either of their two-term administrations.

The Presidential pardon lists are being closely monitored in the final weeks of the Bush administration, particularly to see whether former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby will be granted the presidential favor.

Other notables who asked for pardons include former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham, a Republican from California, who was convicted of receiving bribes; publishing executive Conrad Black, convicted of fraud; former junk bold salesman Michael Milken; former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, convicted of accounting fraud; and Taliban American John Walker Lindh.

Charles Winters, who died almost 25 years ago, was one of the 19 people given a pardon earlier in the week. His son worked towards a presidential pardon for his dad, who had helped smuggle weapons to Jews fighting in what was then Palestine in the late 1940s.

A Protestant from Boston, Massachusetts, Winters spent 18 months behind bars. He was the only U.S. citizen to serve time for helping fly weapons to Jews struggling to create Israel.

A 20th person received a commutation of a life sentence for possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute. That individual, Reed Raymond Prior, was ordered released from prison in February 2009. He will have served more than 12 years.


© 2008 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/24/bush.pardon.reexamined/?iref=mpstoryview)

[Zephyr]

As sometimes happens, I find an article that interests me (the one above), proceed to check if it has already been posted, then post if it has not. But then you experience the dreaded misfortune of reading a better article, a short time later, on the very same topic.

Ahead was a "1 minute ago" phenomenon, discovered online, with headline from "The Grey Lady" that made me think: "here we go again." I was pleasantly surprised, however, this article actually complements the prior story - even as it overlaps.



http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif


A Father, a Son, and a Short-Lived Presidential Pardon


By KEN BELSON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 25, 2008


The ties that bind fathers and sons come in all shapes and sizes, including 10-foot-high chain-link fences.

That is one of the many connections between Robert Toussie and his son Isaac, who was pardoned and unpardoned by President Bush this week, decisions that set abuzz the normally sedate Brooklyn community of Manhattan Beach.

Neighbors say the elder Mr. Toussie built the fence a decade ago to keep rabble-rousers away from the shoreline promenade on the Rockaway Inlet that abuts his family’s waterfront homes, including one where Isaac lives.

While Mr. Toussie’s fence, which has No Trespassing signs in English and Russian, has largely kept the derelicts at bay, it has also alienated neighbors who might otherwise have little bad to say about him.

It also shines light on the complex relationship between Mr. Toussie and his son, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to using false documents to have mortgages insured by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in 2002 to mail fraud, admitting that he had persuaded officials in Suffolk County to overpay for land.

The White House said Thursday that when Mr. Bush granted Isaac Toussie, 37, a pardon earlier this week, the president and his advisers were unaware that the elder Mr. Toussie had recently donated $30,800 to Republicans. Mr. Bush took the extraordinary step of rescinding the pardon on Wednesday after reports about the political contributions.

The White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, said in an e-mail message Thursday that the administration never sought information on political donations in considering pardon applications.

“This would be inappropriate on many levels,” Ms. Perino said. “Given that no one advising the president knew of the donation by Toussie’s father, and because of the possibility of an appearance of impropriety, the counsel to the president withdrew his recommendation.”

While the younger Mr. Toussie has said nothing publicly since the revelation of the donations on Tuesday, his supporters say he deserved a pardon because he was contrite about his misdeeds and had made significant charitable contributions before and after his convictions. Both of these factors are believed to have been factors in Mr. Bush’s original decision to grant the pardon.

“There was a long list of charitable donations and work he had done since his sentence,” Ms. Perino said.

Officials said Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, was unaware in reviewing the petition that Mr. Toussie’s father had recently donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee and $2,300 to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona.

People involved in the pardon process say it has become more common in recent months for those seeking clemency to go directly to the White House, as Mr. Toussie’s lawyer, Bradford Berenson, did, rather than go through the Justice Department.

Mr. Bush’s revoking of the pardon was so unusual that some legal experts questioned whether he had the authority to reverse the pardon, one of 19 the White House announced Tuesday. But the Justice Department said it believed that the original pardon announcement was not binding and could be revoked because Mr. Toussie had not received formal notification of the president’s action. Mr. Toussie’s lawyers hope he might still be granted a pardon once the Justice Department completes a formal review.

The father and son have worked in real estate for years, but in 2001 the elder Mr. Toussie sued Suffolk County, saying, in effect, that they had been tied too closely together. The suit, still pending, said the county had refused to sell Robert Toussie 31 parcels of land he won at a county auction because of his son’s legal troubles.

Both Toussies are among the defendants in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2001 by about 400 home buyers, most of them black or Hispanic, who say they were sold poorly constructed new homes at inflated prices and were fooled into believing that property taxes would be deferred or reduced. The case is continuing.

Some of his Brooklyn neighbors say Mr. Toussie has been protective of his son. He helped him buy a home on Dover Street several years ago, according to a resident who did not want to be named for fear of antagonizing neighbors. He extended the chain-link fence from his homes on Exeter, one street to the east, to his son’s home.

But the fence cut through a 104-by-20-foot grass strip abutting the home of Igor Zolotov, who lives between the houses of Mr. Toussie and his son. Mr. Zolotov and Mr. Toussie both claimed that the land was theirs, but in 2003 a state appellate court sided with Mr. Zolotov, who removed the fence and replaced it with a smaller one.

The decision did not erase the bad will Mr. Toussie had created. Neighbors, some of whom had moved to Manhattan Beach to be by the sea, still do not have easy access to the shore because of another section of Mr. Toussie’s fence that still stands. And they see Isaac Toussie’s legal troubles through the prism of what they call his father’s heavy-handedness.

“It’s not surprising that the son is following in the footsteps of the father,” said Irena Zolotova, 31, Mr. Zolotov’s daughter. “It caused my father a lot of indignation. It’s chutzpah. How do you try to take away somebody’s property?”

Some neighbors, including Sabina Gurshumova, 29, a homemaker who lives across the street from the elder Mr. Toussie, say the Toussies are “good people.”

“Sometimes they have us over for dinner for the holidays,” Ms. Gurshumova said.

Neither Mr. Toussie nor his son answered the doors of their homes on Thursday. But one Toussie family member said the picture of the father and the son was unfair.

“They are philanthropists; they build hospitals and save people,” said a woman reached by telephone who identified herself as a cousin, Marie Torgueman. She cited in particular Robert Toussie’s donations to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital but said both father and son were involved in charitable activities.

While a president has unfettered authority to grant a pardon for any reason he wishes, the suggestion of a linkage to political donations has proved controversial in the past. The most notorious case in recent years was President Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife had donated $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.

Experts on pardons said the White House faced a difficult decision on whether to find out if someone seeking a pardon had made political contributions.

On the one hand, the president’s advisers would probably want to have that information to avoid the type of appearance problem that arose in the Toussie case. But if the White House did seek information on donations, it could be accused of tilting pardons toward those who had given money.

“I would want to make sure that anything that’s potentially embarrassing to the president, he ought to know about it in making the decision,” said Margaret Love, a pardon lawyer at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration.


Alain Delaquérière, Mick Meenan and Liz Robbins contributed reporting.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/us/26pardon.html?ref=us)

[Zephyr]

http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/.element/img/2.0/global/nav/header/cnn_politics.gif

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/2.0/sect/blogs/logo.political.ticker.sm.gif


December 28, 2008
Laura Bush ‘wasn’t amused’ by shoe incident

From CNN Political Producer Kristi Keck


http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/images/12/28/art.bush.fox.jpg

Laura Bush spoke out about the shoe incident
in an interview with 'Fox News Sunday.'


(CNN) — First Lady Laura Bush said that although she “wasn’t amused” when an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at her husband, she sees the incident as a sign that “Iraqis feel a lot freer to express themselves.”

Earlier this month, an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at President Bush during a news conference in Baghdad. Bush ducked, and the shoes, flung one at a time, sailed past his head.

“It was an assault. And that's what it is,” the first lady said in an interview that aired Sunday on “Fox News.”

“And the president laughed it off. He wasn't hurt. He's very quick. As you know, he's a natural athlete. And that's it. But on the other hand, it is an assault, and I think it should be treated that way,” she said.

During the incident, the shoe-thrower — identified as Muntadhar al-Zaidi – could be heard yelling in Arabic: "This is a farewell … you dog!" Al-Zaidi is an Iraqi journalist with Egypt-based al-Baghdadia television network.

Hurling shoes at someone, or sitting so that the bottom of a shoe faces another person, is considered an insult among Muslims.

Asked if she thinks someone who attacks another person should be released, Bush said, “that’s going to be up to the Iraqis.”

“And they'll do whatever. But I know that if Saddam Hussein had been there, the man wouldn't have been released. And he probably wouldn't — you know, would have been executed.

“So it is — as bad as the incident is, in my view, it is a sign that Iraqis feel a lot freer to express themselves,” she said.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi goes on trial Wednesday (Dec. 31) on charges of assaulting a foreign leader. Conviction could mean a prison sentence of up to two years.


© 2008 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/)

[lofter1]

When did Laura find time to have her eyes done?

[Zephyr]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/art2/photogalleries/logo.gif

David Horsey's Bush
a collection of
"one-framers"


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20041008/cartoon20041008.gif http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20050113/Cartoon20050113.gif

left - October 08, 2004; right - January 13, 2005
Copyright David Horsey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer.


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20050123/cartoon20050123.gif http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20050304/cartoon20050304.gif

left - January 23, 2005; right - March 04, 2005
Copyright David Horsey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20050719/cartoon20050719.gif http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20060216/cartoon20060216.gif

left - July 19, 2005; right - February 16, 2006
Copyright David Horsey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer.


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20060612/cartoon20060612.gif http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20060720/cartoon20060720.gif

left - June 12, 2006; right - July 20, 2006
Copyright David Horsey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20060723/cartoon20060723.gif http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20061027/cartoon20061027.gif

left - July 23, 2006; right - October 27, 2006
Copyright David Horsey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer.


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20070903/Cartoon20070903.gif

September 03, 2007
Copyright David Horsey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Zephyr]

http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/.element/img/2.0/global/nav/header/cnn_politics.gif

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/2.0/sect/blogs/logo.political.ticker.sm.gif


December 28, 2008
Rice: People will thank Bush for what he's done
Posted: 03:41 PM ET

From CNN Political Producer Kristi Keck

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/images/12/28/art.rice.gi.jpg
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says
'there is no greater honor than to
serve this country.'

(CNN) – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that despite President Bush's low approval ratings, people will soon "start to thank this president for what he's done."

So we can sit here and talk about the long record, but what I would say to you is that this president has faced tougher circumstances than perhaps at any time since the end of World War II, and he has delivered policies that are going to stand the test of time," Rice said in an interview that aired on CBS' "Sunday Morning."

The secretary of state brushed off reports that suggest the United States' image is suffering abroad. She praised the administration's ability to change the conversation in the Middle East.

"This isn't a popularity contest. I'm sorry, it isn't. What the administration is responsible to do is to make good choices about Americans' interests and values in the long run — not for today's headlines, but for history's judgment," she said.

"And I am quite certain that when the final chapters are written and it's clear that Saddam Hussein's Iraq is gone in favor of an Iraq that is favorable to the future of the Middle East; when the history is written of a U.S.-China relationship that is better than it's ever been; an India relationship that is deeper and better than it's ever been; a relationship with Brazil and other countries of the left of Latin America, better than it's ever been …

"When one looks at what we've been able to do in terms of changing the conversation in the Middle East about democracy and values, this administration will be judged well, and I'll wait for history's judgment and not today's headlines."

Asked by CBS' Rita Braver why some former diplomats say Americans are disliked around the world, Rice said that's "just not true."


© 2008 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/12/28/rice-people-will-thank-bush-for-what-hes-done/)

[Zephyr]

You had better get your "'Bush Bash' or Bust" items in now before his Reign is officially O-V-E-R.

[TREPYE]

Clueless W was just like Palin, railin' ex-aide sez

BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Monday, December 29th 2008, 11:18 PM
http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2008/12/30/amd_bush.jpg Watson/Getty/AFP/Getty Images A former aide to Colin Powell called President George W. Bush, a 'Sarah Palin-like' light-weight as a political leader.

Related News

WASHINGTON (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Washington%2c+DC) - Former administration underlings depict President Bush (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/George+W.+Bush) as a "Sarah Palin (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Sarah+Palin)-like" leader with a short attention span who deferred on big decisions.



Larry Wilkerson (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Larry+Wilkerson), a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Colin+Powell), said Vice President Cheney (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Dick+Cheney) and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Donald+H.+Rumsfeld) promoted the notion they were a national security "dream team" to guide the foreign-policy amateur Bush.
"It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like President - because, let's face it, that's what he was - was going to be protected by this national security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," said Wilkerson.
Wilkerson, who is still furious Powell was given faulty intelligence to back the Iraq (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Iraq) invasion, was among a group of former Bush aides and foreign officials cited in an "oral history" of the administration in Vanity Fair magazine (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Vanity+Fair+Magazine).
Richard Clarke (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Richard+Clarke), former counterterrorism adviser, said then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Condoleezza+Rice) and her deputy, Steve Hadley (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Steve+Hadley), told him, "Don't give the President a lot of long memos. He's not a big reader."
Said an astounded Clarke: "Well, s---, I mean, the President of the United States is not a big reader?"
Former Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Mark+McKinnon) said the administration was in trouble even before taking office in the aftermath of the 2000 recount in which the Supreme Court effectively ruled that Bush had won Florida (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Florida).
"The recount poisoned the well from the beginning," McKinnon said.
"A good number of people in this country didn't believe Bush was a legitimate President. And you can't change the tone under those circumstances."
rsisk@nydailynews.com (rsisk@nydailynews.com)

[TREPYE]

Clueless W was just like Palin, railin' ex-aide sez

Richard Clarke (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Richard+Clarke), former counterterrorism adviser, said then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Condoleezza+Rice) and her deputy, Steve Hadley (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Steve+Hadley), told him, "Don't give the President a lot of long memos. He's not a big reader."

Is there a top 10 list for the most unshocking news of 2008??

[lofter1]

Seemingly Condi has / had a crush on 43 which skewed her ability to discern. What else can explain -- especially given her understanding of his lack of brain power -- her continuing loyalty?

[lofter1]

Per stache's insane suggestion (his description, not mine) I tried -- but failed -- to change the title of this thread by doodling about with my cursor. I felt it was the least I could do during the waning days of George. But, like everything associated with that despicable man, my attempt was an utter failure. He ruins all he comes near.

Won't be missed.

[Zephyr]

http://english.pravda.ru/img/pravda-logo.gif
http://english.pravda.ru/img/slogo.gif


Condoleezza Rice leads solitary life, but surprises the world with her slim figure and determination

No one has ever heard anything about Ms. Rice's friendship with women although everyone knows the names of her male friends


Stories about modern Cinderellas may have different beginnings, but they all end similarly, as a rule. She wins the heart of a handsome man, who is ready to sacrifice his life and give the whole world to his woman. The US Secretary of State, the world's most powerful woman, according to Forbes magazine, Condoleezza Rice, is not an exception from this rule. Ms. Rice has everything that a woman needs in her life. However, she does not have a man.

This is a typical dreams-come-true story, which could happen only in the USA. A common girl from Alabama used her talents, stubbornness and discipline to the utmost and made a sweeping political career. Condoleezza could play the piano at the age of three. It is worth mentioning that Ms. Rice's unusual name originates from the Italian musical term 'dolcezza' which translates as 'with tenderness.' She joined a church choir at the age of four and became a fluent reader when she was a five-year-old girl. The girl would wake up at 4:30 a.m., do her morning exercises and then start practicing music. Ms. Rice was leading a rather regulated life during her childhood. She always knew what she would be doing the next day, the next month and even the next year.

Condoleezza Rice was staying away from politics during her early years. Condi's parents were tuning a blind eye on the issue of racial discrimination in the USA and simply preferred not to pay any attention to it. African Americans did not have any voting rights back then, but Mr. Rice would persistently tell his daughter that she would be able to become the president of the United States if only she had a wish to work hard for it. Little Condi was doing her best.

Condoleezza Rice's contemporary biographers say that the Rices were an unusual family not only in terms of Alabama alone, but in terms of the whole nation. Ms. Rice's grandfather saved a certain amount of money in 1918 and decided to spend his work savings on education. Condoleezza Rice was sure from her early childhood that knowledge was the most important thing that a human being could obtain in life.

She finished college at the age of 15 and became a Denver University graduate at 19. Condoleezza Rice originally became a student of the department of music, but her plans drastically changed a year later. She moved to the department of politics and decided to dedicate her studies to the most exotic state that was mentioned on the list of options – the Soviet Union.

Ms. Rice's rivals say that she used her knowledge of Sovietology as a springboard for her future political career. They say that she supposedly realized at the age of 16 that relations with the USSR were highly important for the USA. Condi believed that if a person becomes an expert in the field of US-Soviet relations, he or she would be able to approach the doors, to which others will never be able to make even a step forward. Her dreams came true.

When 26, Rice upheld her dissertation on relations between the USSR and Czechoslovakia and even wrote a book on the base of those materials. The book did not pass White House officials unnoticed. US officials paid attention to another book by Condoleezza Rice, which was devoted to the era of the first and the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. There were two things, which startled the US officials: Condoleezza Rice, a black woman, became a member of the white Republican Party. Secondly, Ms. Rice could speak Russian very well. Other American Sovietologists knew only two most common words in Russian – spasibo and pozhalusta (thank you and please). Condoleezza Rice, however, would start her working day reading a fresh issue of the Pravda newspaper.

When the father of the incumbent US president introduced Ms. Rice to Mr. Gorbachev during his official visit in Washington in 1989, George Bush honestly confessed that everything that he knew about the USSR he learned from Condoleezza Rice.

Like the majority of US citizens and people of other nations, Condoleezza Rice treated Mikhail Gorbachev with great respect. However, she made the US administration pay attention to the destroyer of communism, Boris Yeltsin. Mr. Yeltsin was not her type of a national hero, but he became one of the world leaders, whom Ms. Rice met in the very beginning of her political career. Since that time Condoleezza Rice became a figure of constant presence among most influential men on Earth.

When American journalists asked Condoleezza Rice to list all presidents, prime ministers, kings, sheikhs and princes that she has ever met, she fenced with a question and said that she would not like to be known for her friendship with the powers-that-be. It is noteworthy that no one has ever heard anything about Ms. Rice's friendship with women. However, everyone knows the names of her male friends with George W. Bush on top of the list, of course.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said once that he was unable to conduct negotiations about the regulation of the Middle East conflict in Ms. Rice's presence. The elderly Israeli premier gets confused when his eyes stop on Ms. Rice's slim legs!

Condoleezza Rice's influence on George W. Bush is still a mystery for many Americans. It may seem at first sight that a black woman from a family with limited means and a rich white man have nothing in common. When Ms. Rice was spending her days at school, George Bush was boozing in bars. Condoleezza Rice speaks five languages, whereas Mr. Bush's public statements won him the reputation of USA's political comic No.1.

Needless to say that the incumbent US president met Condoleezza Rice under the guidance of his father. George Bush believed that his son would become the world's most influential man and then convinced Ms. Rice of the same. Condoleezza Rice's goal was to make George Bush Jr. an expert in foreign politics. It was a hard task to do in spite of the fact that George W. Bush holds Yale and Harvard diplomas. They say that Rice made a list of world leaders for Bush to read every night before going to bed. When George W. Bush finally took office of the US President, he proudly told the nation that Condoleezza Rice was the only person, who could clearly explain issues of foreign politics to him.

She spends almost all her weekends with the Bush's family in Camp David. They watch football matches, play golf, do jogging and cook chicken. Bush never calls Ms. Rice by her full name. She in her turn never thinks twice when she needs to call the US president in the middle of the night to discuss issues of state importance.

Ms. Rice's status of a single woman is her biggest problem for the time being. She has never been married, which is nonsense for the majority of American citizens, who firmly believe that a family is one of the basic signs of social well-being. Condoleezza Rice is 51 years old now, but it seems that she has absolutely no private life at all. Even meticulous reporters managed to trace only one boyfriend in Ms. Rice's biography: a very brief affair took place in 1970. Reportedly, Condoleezza Rice fell in love with a football player during her school years in Denver. Condi's choice totally complied with her own dogmas: the eight-year-old girl told her parents once that she would agree to marry only a football player.

Condoleezza Rice was a perfect candidate to enter the closed world of men. She successfully used her chance and became a full-fledged member of the club. No one makes any facetious remarks in her presence, but men fall silent when she expresses her opinion on this or that issue. Condoleezza Rice is reputed to have become one of the ideologists of the US-led war in Iraq, tense relations with Iran, North Korea and Libya. A US cartoonist once said that Condoleezza Rice needed to fall in love with somebody to learn how to treat the world nicely. All US media outlets refused to publish the cartoonist's work afterwards.

Condoleezza Rice is a very feminine woman in spite of the fact that many people call her “a man in a skirt.” Her assistants say that she always wants to look immaculate. She likes expensive designer clothes by Armani and Oscar de la Renta; there are legends going about her impressive collection of shoes. Everyone in the USA knows that Condoleezza Rice uses Yves Saint Laurent lipstick, likes high heels shoes and Led Zeppelin's music.

Ms. Rice posed for Vogue magazine during George W. Bush's latest election campaign and answered readers' questions for Glamour magazine. White House spokespeople explained that the sessions were meant to attract the votes of glamorous ladies, but Ms. Rice obviously had her own reasons to pose for Vogue. Being in her fifties, Condoleezza Rice can boast of her slim figure and almost the absolute absence of wrinkles.

A lot of observers say that Ms. Rice has a very good chance to amaze the whole world in 2008 and become the USA's first female president.


© 1999-2006. «PRAVDA.Ru» (http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/16211_Condoleezza.html).

[Zephyr]

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Op-Ed Columnist
Bigger Than Bush


By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 1, 2009


As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.

Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.

So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.

That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.

The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.

But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02krugman.html?ref=opinion)

[TREPYE]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nyt_interbanner.gif (http://www.nytimes.com/)
January 4, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
A President Forgotten but Not Gone

By FRANK RICH (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/frankrich/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.
The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll (http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/wsjpoll20081211.pdf) on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.
The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiraling, his secret trip to the war zone (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/27CND-BUSH.html) was a P.R. slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander in chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2001806972_bushturkey04.html) for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in the country, and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html).
He tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s program of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free society,” he said. He had made the same claim (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012601009.html) three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his “freedom agenda” (and almost $500 million of American aid), led to a landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system that does that,” Bush observed at the time (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060126.html), as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard.”
The ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world/middleeast/22iraq.html) and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html) of rival-party government officials (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/world/middleeast/20iraq.html) in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.
Condi Rice blamed the press (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28337897/) for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003 (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2367). “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.
The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081218-4.html) from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/26/bush.poll/index.html)finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.
Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like a salesman who hasn’t been told by the home office that his product has been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/us/politics/25memo.html) than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,” as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN (http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/stephen-hayes-bush-administration-working).
To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060820/28presidency.htm): he is once again claiming (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123025595706634689.html) that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/bush-oral-history200902) saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”
Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/legacybooklet.pdf): a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”
This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/world/asia/02kabul.html)). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).
If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.
But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081218-4.html) many (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081218-2.html) print (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122973196721822961.html) and (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/interview_with_president_georg.html) television (http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Politics/Story?id=6356046) exit (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081207.html) interviews (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121003790.html).
The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-20.html) in 2004 still can’t.
He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson (http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Politics/Story?id=6356046)) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans.”
“The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081218-4.html), as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of a Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure,” not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds,” that sped us into Iraq. Did he take too long to change course in Iraq? “What seems like an eternity today,” he says (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122973196721822961.html), “may seem like a moment tomorrow.” Try telling that to the families of the thousands killed and maimed during that multiyear “moment” as Bush stubbornly stayed his disastrous course.
The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081218-4.html). “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson (http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Politics/Story?id=6356046). And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told The Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122973196721822961.html). But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretenses. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he explained, by “the character of the American people.” The American people are surely relieved to hear it.
With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122973196721822961.html) what he has learned from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”
Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/04/opinion/04rich_large1.jpg

[lofter1]

15 DAYS

And Counting ...

Then we can all SMILE :D

[Zephyr]

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George W Bush moves to protect ocean reefs, fish and volanoes
George W. Bush is planning to create the world's largest oceanic protected area in the Pacific
as part of a bid to improve his record on the environment before leaving office.

Last Updated: 9:25AM GMT 06 Jan 2009

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(Inserted by Z)


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01216/bush-coral-460_1216526c.jpg
Photo: AP

Coral is seen off Jarvis Island in the central Pacific Ocean,
parts of the island chains are being set aside by George W Bush
as national monuments


In an attempt to protect pristine coral reefs, rare fish and underwater volcanoes, Mr Bush will mark out an area spanning 195,000 square miles in the Pacific Ocean as a trio of "marine national monuments," a spokesman said.

The areas include the Mariana Trench and northern Mariana Islands, the Rose Atoll in American Samoa and a chain of remote islands in the Central Pacific.

Fishing will be barred or limited in many island areas while the 21 volcanoes and hydrothermal vents along the ocean floor beneath the Mariana Islands will also be protected.

"This is very, very big," James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality Issues, said.

"In the last several years, it's on par with what we've been able to accomplish on land over the course of the last 100 years," he said, noting that the total area would "comprise the largest areas of ocean or ocean seabed set aside as marine protected areas in the world."

Collectively, the three areas will nudge out the Phoenix Island Protected Area, established in 2008 by the South Pacific nation of Kiribati as the world's largest protected area.

They also top Mr Bush's last such announcement of a marine protection area in 2006 - the 140,000 square miles (363,000 square kilometers) of Pacific Ocean near the northwestern Hawaiian islands.

"Because these areas are pristine it gives us the best opportunity to understand effects in the ocean system," said Mr Connaughton.
In some island areas, commercial fishing will be prohibited within 50 nautical miles while indigenous, recreational or research fishing will be permitted on a case-by-case basis, he said.

The move was praised by environmentalists, though details remained unclear on the degree of protection the areas will be afforded.

For scientists, the designations are "wonderful opportunities," said Roger McManus, vice president for global marine programs at the environmental group Conservation International.

"You don't get a better natural laboratory than we have in these places," he said.


© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2009 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/conservation/4128073/George-W-Bush-moves-to-protect-ocean-reefs-fish-and-volanoes.html)

[Ninjahedge]

Question is, were these areas in any danger to begin with?

Was there large scale commercial fishing here?

I can bet you money there was no real oil interest! ;)

[Jasonik]

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Establishment of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2009/01/print/20090106-6.html)

*****

Establishment of the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2009/01/print/20090106-2.html)

***

Detailed maps of designated areas. [pdf (http://www.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2009-01/44374653.pdf)]

[Zephyr]

http://www.ap.org/media/images/logo.gif


Bushisms: U.S. leader sets standard for mangled phrases
during presidency


Sat Jan 3, 4:03 PM
By The Associated Press


President George W. Bush will leave behind a legacy of Bushisms, the label stamped on the U.S. leaders original speaking style. Some of the president's more notable malapropisms and mangled statements:

"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." - September 2000, explaining his energy policies at an event in Michigan.

"Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?" - January 2000, during a campaign event in South Carolina.

"They misunderestimated the compassion of our country. I think they misunderestimated the will and determination of the commander-in-chief, too." - Sept. 26, 2001, in Langley, Va. Bush was referring to the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

"There's no doubt in my mind, not one doubt in my mind, that we will fail."


Oct. 4, 2001, in Washington. Bush was remarking on a back-to-work plan after the terrorist attacks.

"It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber." - April 10, 2002, at the White House, as Bush urged Senate passage of a broad ban on cloning.

"I want to thank the dozens of welfare-to-work stories, the actual examples of people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves." - April 18, 2002, at the White House.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." - Sept. 17, 2002, in Nashville, Tenn.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." - Aug. 5, 2004, at the signing ceremony for a defence spending bill.

"Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." - Sept. 6, 2004, at a rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo.

"Our most abundant energy source is coal. We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge." - April 20, 2005, in Washington.

"We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job." - Sept. 20, 2005, in Gulfport, Miss.

"I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbours back into neighbourhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs." - Sept. 5, 2005, when Bush met with residents of Poplarville, Miss., in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

"It was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship. After all, 60 years we were at war 60 years ago we were at war." - June 29, 2006, at the White House, where Bush met with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

"Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." - Dec. 7, 2006, in a joint appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved." - June 11, 2007, in Sofia, Bulgaria.

"Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for your introduction. Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit." - September 2007, in Sydney, Australia, where Bush was attending an APEC summit.

"Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome speech." April 16, 2008, at a ceremony welcoming Pope Benedict to the White House.

"The fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place." - May 27, 2008, in Mesa, Ariz.

"And they have no disregard for human life." - July 15, 2008, at the White House. Bush was referring to enemy fighters in Afghanistan.

"I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office." - June 26, 2008, during a Rose Garden news briefing.

"Throughout our history, the words of the Declaration have inspired immigrants from around the world to set sail to our shores. These immigrants have helped transform 13 small colonies into a great and growing nation of more than 300 people." - July 4, 2008 in Virginia.

"This thaw - took a while to thaw, it's going to take a while to unthaw." Oct. 20, 2008, in Alexandria, La., as he discussed the economy and frozen credit markets.


Copyright © 2009 Associated Press (http://www.ap.org/)

[Zephyr]

With Bush trying to talk up his "legacy," trying to alter the view of his environmental record, enlisting Condoleezza Rice to talk him up to reporters who questioned his foreign policy and so forth, is anybody not shaking their head or laughing to avoid crying?

Here is an article from 2005!

Was this man prescient or just "wised up?" (I suspect many of us here had the same thoughts much earlier.)


http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/article/pieces/postcom_logo.gif

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2005/03/26/PH2005032604398.gif


End of the Bush Era

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005; Page A27

The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them -- and the country.

Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush's government doesn't work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.

The Bush Era did not begin when he took office, or even with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It began on Sept. 14, 2001, when Bush declared at the World Trade Center site: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Bush was, indeed, skilled in identifying enemies and rallying a nation already disposed to action. He failed to realize after Sept. 11 that it was not we who were lucky to have him as a leader, but he who was lucky to be president of a great country that understood the importance of standing together in the face of a grave foreign threat. Very nearly all of us rallied behind him.

If Bush had understood that his central task was to forge national unity, as he seemed to shortly after Sept. 11, the country would never have become so polarized. Instead, Bush put patriotism to the service of narrowly ideological policies and an extreme partisanship. He pushed for more tax cuts for his wealthiest supporters and shamelessly used relatively modest details in the bill creating a Department of Homeland Security as partisan cudgels in the 2002 elections.

He invoked our national anger over terrorism to win support for a war in Iraq. But he failed to pay heed to those who warned that the United States would need many more troops and careful planning to see the job through. The president assumed things would turn out fine, on the basis of wildly optimistic assumptions. Careful policymaking and thinking through potential flaws in your approach are not his administration's strong suits.

And so the Bush Era ended definitively on Sept. 2, the day Bush first toured the Gulf Coast States after Hurricane Katrina. There was no magic moment with a bullhorn. The utter failure of federal relief efforts had by then penetrated the country's consciousness. Yesterday's resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown put an exclamation point on the failure.

The source of Bush's political success was his claim that he could protect Americans. Leadership, strength and security were Bush's calling cards. Over the past two weeks, they were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans.

But the first intimations of the end of the Bush Era came months ago. The president's post-election fixation on privatizing part of Social Security showed how out of touch he was. The more Bush discussed this boutique idea cooked up in conservative think tanks and Wall Street imaginations, the less the public liked it. The situation in Iraq deteriorated. The glorious economy Bush kept touting turned out not to be glorious for many Americans. The Census Bureau's annual economic report, released in the midst of the Gulf disaster, found that an additional 4.1 million Americans had slipped into poverty between 2001 and 2004.

The breaking of the Bush spell opens the way for leaders of both parties to declare their independence from the recent past. It gives forces outside the White House the opportunity to shape a more appropriate national agenda -- for competence and innovation in rebuilding the Katrina region and for new approaches to the problems created over the past 4 1/2 years.

The federal budget, already a mess before Katrina, is now a laughable document. Those who call for yet more tax cuts risk sounding like robots droning automated talking points programmed inside them long ago. Katrina has forced the issue of deep poverty back onto the national agenda after a long absence. Finding a way forward in -- and eventually out of -- Iraq will require creativity from those not implicated in the administration's mistakes. And if ever the phrase "reinventing government" had relevance, it is now that we have observed the performance of a government that allows political hacks to push aside the professionals.

And what of Bush, who has more than three years left in his term? Paradoxically, his best hope lies in recognizing that the Bush Era, as he and we have known it, really is gone. He can decide to help us in the transition to what comes next. Or he can cling stubbornly to his past and thereby doom himself to frustrating irrelevance.


© Copyright 1996-2009 The Washington Post Company (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/12/AR2005091201433.html)

[Kris]

January 12, 2009
Obama Signals His Reluctance to Look Into Bush Policies
By DAVID JOHNSTON and CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.

But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.

In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”

Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

“And part of my job,” he continued, “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.”

The Bush administration has authorized interrogation tactics like waterboarding that critics say skirted federal laws and international treaties, and domestic wiretapping without warrants. But the details of those programs have never been made public, and administration officials have said their actions were legal under a president’s wartime powers.

There was no immediate reaction from Capitol Hill, where there has been a growing sense that Mr. Obama was not inclined to pursue these matters. In resisting pressure for a wider inquiry, he risks the ire of influential Democratic lawmakers on Congressional judiciary and intelligence committees and core constituencies who hoped his election would cast a spotlight on President Bush’s antiterror efforts.

The issue will also be an important early test of his relationship with conservatives in Congress and the country’s intelligence agencies; both groups oppose any further review.

On other terrorism issues, Mr. Obama suggested in the interview that his approach might be more measured. He said the closing of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which once seemed to be an early top objective, was not likely to happen during the first 100 days of his administration.

“It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize,” Mr. Obama said, “and we are going to get it done. But part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom who may be very dangerous, who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication.”

Mr. Obama has in the past condemned waterboarding, and he was explicit in the interview that he regarded the use of the technique, in which a subject is made to believe that he is drowning, as torture, prohibited by statute. And the president-elect said he disagreed with Vice President Dick Cheney, who has defended the practice.

“Vice President Cheney, I think, continues to defend what he calls extraordinary measures or procedures when it comes to interrogations,” Mr. Obama said, “and from my view, waterboarding is torture.”

Mr. Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., is widely expected to be asked about his views on these issues at his confirmation hearing this week. Associates say Mr. Holder is open to prosecutions based on specific accusations but is less eager to use the criminal law to commence wide-ranging inquiries. Before being chosen for the Obama cabinet, he said there should be “a reckoning” over Bush administration policies.

Lawyers who represented Bush administration officials over the years expressed little surprise that Mr. Obama’s legal and national security team had lost whatever appetite it might have had for delving into alleged misdeeds of the Bush years.

“A new president doesn’t want to look vengeful,” said a former Bush White House lawyer, Bradford A. Berenson, who was a Harvard law classmate of Mr. Obama and has represented administration figures as a private lawyer, “and the last thing a new administration wants to do is spend its time and energy rehashing the perceived sins of the old one.

“No matter how much the Obama administration’s most extreme supporters may be screaming for blood, the president himself doesn’t seem to share that bloodlust.”

Moreover, any effort to conduct a wider re-examination would almost certainly provoke a backlash at the country’s intelligence agencies.

Mark Lowenthal, who was the assistant director for analysis and production at the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2005, said if agents were criminally investigated for doing something that top Bush administration officials asked them to do and that they were assured was legal, intelligence officers would be less willing to take risks to protect the country.

“There are just huge costs to the day-to-day operation of intelligence,” Mr. Lowenthal, now the president of the Intelligence and Security Academy, said of a potential investigation. He added that he saw no benefit to such an effort because, he said, the public was not clamoring for it.

But it may be difficult for Mr. Obama to resist the pressure for a fuller public accounting, and lawmakers appear ready to proceed even without his support.

The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has already introduced a measure to create a commission to investigate Mr. Bush’s detention, interrogation and rendition policies. Mr. Conyers’s bill would establish a bipartisan nine-member commission with subpoena power and a mandate “to investigate the broad range of policies” undertaken with claims that Mr. Bush’s wartime powers as commander in chief trumped laws and treaties.

The measure by Mr. Conyers is not the only sign that Congress may force the issue. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the second-ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, said such a commission might not be necessary because the panel itself would press the administration to declassify as much information about C.I.A. prisons as possible.

“With regard to the C.I.A. interrogation program,” Mr. Wyden said in an interview, “if you want to make a break with the flawed policies of the past, as the president-elect has said he wishes to do, you have got to come clean about what happened over the past eight years, and that is why I’m going to push very hard to declassify these documents.”

Mr. Obama’s legal team could also be forced to react to litigation pending before federal courts. For example, the Bush administration has invoked the state-secrets privilege to avoid disclosing information about its surveillance program being sought in a civil lawsuit. The Obama legal team will have to decide how to handle that case.

In a related area, Mr. Conyers has indicated that he intends to keep pressing a House Judiciary Committee investigation into the Bush administration’s firings of nine United States attorneys and other accusations of political favoritism in hiring at the Justice Department.

The Bush administration has blocked subpoenas from Congress for documents and testimony by White House officials in that case, citing executive privilege. Last week, Mr. Conyers reissued the subpoenas to Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, and his former White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, in the name of the new Congress, ensuring that a lawsuit over the dispute will stay alive into the Obama presidency.

Mr. Obama is facing even more intense pressure from liberal, human-rights and civil-liberties groups to allow some kind of investigation into the Bush administration’s terrorism policies.

Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be a simple matter to start such an inquiry because the Justice Department’s special prosecutor, John H. Durham, is already investigating whether the C.I.A. acted illegally when it destroyed videotapes of its harsh interrogations. Mr. Anders said Mr. Durham’s mandate could be expanded to look into whether the interrogations depicted on the tapes were illegal.

Some groups are focused on prosecution. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecution efforts were justified, even if they did not lead to convictions, as a way to deter future officials from undertaking a similar “assault on the law itself.”

Other groups want fuller public disclosure. They favor a commission that would answer lingering questions about exactly what happened — like disclosing how many Americans were wiretapped without warrants and making a detailed accounting of what interrogators did to each detainee and the real value of the information they obtained through the enhanced tactics.

“One of the things that is going to have to happen is an examination and, to the extent possible, a public airing of the validity of the claims that these policies enhanced our security,” said Elisa Massimino, the executive director of Human Rights First. “Because there is a lot of reason to think that calculus hasn’t been accurate.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/us/politics/12inquire.html

[ZippyTheChimp]

The lamest duck

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2009/0901/gw_bush_disappoint_0112.jpg



Monday, Jan. 12, 2009

Bush's Last Press Conference: Full of Disappointment

By Massimo Calabresi / Washington

In the current Administration's waning days, Americans have struggled to find a single word that would encapsulate history's judgment on the two-term presidency of George W. Bush. The left has offered disastrous, citing the damage they see inflicted on the country by Bush's foreign policy and economic stewardship. The right has countered with secure, arguing that another 9/11 was prevented by Bush's taking the fight to terrorists at home and abroad. But in what the White House says will be his final press conference on Monday, President Bush himself provided the word everyone has been looking for: disappointment.

The President used the word in one sense or another more than a dozen times in the course of his parting exchange with the White House media corps. But it was the quality, rather than the quantity, of its use that was most telling. The more he uttered disappointment, the more fraught it sounded, until it was delivered not just with his signature shoulder-hunching emphasis but with a kind of protestation that seemed to carry the full weight of his historic fall from nearly 90% approval ratings after 9/11 to his current tally of less than 30%, a record low. (Read "The Bush Presidency, Eight Years Later.")

Bush was asked yet again if he thought he had made any mistakes. As he has done since John Dickerson first asked him that question four years ago, the President ran for the safety of history. "There is no such thing as short-term history," he said, and he laid out his familiar assertion that his presidency will look different to historians than it does in its current historically unpopular state.

Bush then broke with his own tradition and weighed in on some mistakes. The "Mission Accomplished" banner brandished during his aircraft-carrier appearance two months after the invasion of Iraq gave the wrong impression about his and his Administration's assessment of progress in the war, he said. He then referred obliquely to mistakes in some of his own "rhetoric"; Bush has said that his vow to catch Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and his challenge to America's adversaries to "bring 'em on," among other cavalier comments, were unhelpful, and that is presumably what he was hinting at here.

But Bush quickly moved on to things he wasn't sure he would count as mistakes; instead, he labeled them "disappointments." Among things Bush found disappointing: the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina and the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all. As the press conference continued, Bush kept coming back to the word. On the political environment in the capital, he said, "I am disappointed by the tone in Washington, D.C." He even predicted that Barack Obama will on occasion feel the same way. "There'll be disappointments, I promise you," he said. "He'll be disappointed. Sometimes the biggest disappointments will come from your so-called friends."

Even during the press conference, Bush appeared to recognize that he was overusing the word. While looking back at parts of his presidency that had fallen short, the President asserted that he wasn't feeling sorry for himself, and that to do so would be unseemly. He raised the most recent crisis to hit the country — the economic crisis — and said he scorned the idea of the "burden of office." "Why'd the financial collapse have to happen on my watch?" he mocked. "It's just pathetic, isn't it, self-pity?" (Read "Bush's Last Days: The Lamest Duck.")

In the end, though, there's a difference between self-pity and self-reflection, and it's not clear that Bush has made the distinction. True, he deserves credit for speaking so bluntly about so many of the things that went wrong during his presidency. And he is clearly working hard to understand what he might have done differently: he laid out in detail how he had reflected on whether or not he should have landed Air Force One in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, and argued passionately that in retrospect, he made the right decision in not burdening local officials with his presence.

But there is no shortage of observers, some of them historians, who are willing to point out where Bush's presidency went wrong. His over-reliance on a cadre of ideological advisers who steered him in the wrong direction is often the first error cited by critics. Vice President Dick Cheney's dominance led Bush to many of the decisions he now qualifies as disappointments, as did Donald Rumsfeld's bullying leadership at the Pentagon. Bush's own ideological inclinations against regulation certainly contributed to the financial crisis. And his inexperience in foreign affairs made him unrealistic about what freedom and democracy actually mean in much of the rest of the world.

But Bush, by his own admission, is still struggling to get a handle on where he went wrong. Asked a follow-up question about why Washington had remained so partisan despite his promise eight years ago to be a "uniter, not a divider," Bush said, "I don't know," and suggested asking others. Even his reaching for the safety of history reflects a kind of myopia. In that sense, Bush's final press conference was most revealing for what it showed about his inability to accept responsibility for his presidency. The difference between Bush's mistakes and his disappointments may just be that he hasn't yet taken ownership of the latter. But the American people have no difficulty connecting the failures on Bush's watch with the President's mistakes, which is why disappointment is the word they were looking for.


* Find this article at:
* http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1871113,00.html

Copyright © 2009 Time Inc.

[lofter1]

Perfection:


The lamest duck

He is such a spoiled and clueless sour-pussed frat boy ...

GTFO

[Ninjahedge]

Perfection:


He is such a spoiled and clueless sour-pussed frat boy ...

GTFO

Guantanamo's The First Option?
Girls Take Fun Obstensively?
Grapes Tread For Oxidase?
Grappa Tasting For Oldies?

[Kris]

January 16, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Forgive and Forget?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.

Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/opinion/16krugman.html

[Jasonik]

Editorials worldwide pillory Bush one final time

Erik Kirschbaum
Reuters North American News Service
Jan 19, 2009 07:57 ES (http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE50I2OV20090119?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&sp=true)T

BERLIN, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Editorial writers around the world have been taking their final printed whacks at George W. Bush, accusing the president of tarnishing America's standing with what many saw as arrogant and incompetent leadership.

Some newspaper editorials, for all their criticism, suggested historians might just be kinder later on than those now writing first drafts of history. A success often cited by those seeking a silver lining was the United States' freedom from further homeland attacks following September 11.

Bush's successor, Barack Obama, will be sworn in as the 44th U.S. president on Tuesday.

"A weak leader, Bush was just overwhelmed in the job," said Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung under a headline: "The Failure". "He confused stubbornness with principles. America has become intolerant and it will take a long time to repair that damage."

Editorials hit out at Bush for two unfinished wars, for plunging the economy into recession, turning a budget surplus into a pile of debt, for his environment policies and tarnishing America's reputation with the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

Bush was given credit in some editorials for defending the United States against terror attacks after Sept. 11, 2001.

Israel was most complimentary, of his intentions if not necessarily of his achievements.

"Of all the U.S. presidents over the past 60 years, it is hard to think of a better friend to Israel than George W. Bush," the Jerusalem Post daily wrote during Bush's final visit.

Last week columnist Caroline Glick wrote Bush "recognises Israel and the U.S. share the same enemies and they seek to destroy us because we represent the same thing: freedom. But Bush never learned how to translate personal views into policy."

Canada's Tornonto Globe was categorical in its condemnation.

"Goodbye to the worst president ever," it declared. "Bush was an unmitigated disaster, failing on the big issues from the invasion of Iraq to global warming, Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."

"Bush leaves a country and an economy in tatters," wrote the Sunday Times in London. It said America's national debt and unemployment nearly doubled on his watch.

Britain's Daily Mail said he entered office with a budget surplus of $128 billion but exits with a $482 billion deficit.

"He leaves the world facing its biggest crisis since the Depression, the Middle East in flames and U.S. standing at an all-time low.

"How will history judge George W.? Have we, perhaps, to quote his own mangled malapropisms, 'misunderestimated' him? On the plus side, after 9/11 he achieved what became his number one priority: to prevent his country suffering further attack on its own soil. Al Qaeda has been hugely weakened."

LEGACY OF WARS

The Scottish Daily Record observed: "America is now hated in many parts of the world. Bush leaves a legacy of wars and the world economy in meltdown. He has been dismissed as a buffoon and a war-monger, a man who made the world a more dangerous place while sending it to the brink of economic collapse."

The Economist found room to praise Bush on free trade, immigration reform and China. But its overall view was negative:

"He leaves as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America's reputation since World War Two."

The Sydney Morning Herald complained about Bush's "singular lack of curiosity in international matters" in an editorial titled "Farewell to a flawed and unpopular commander-in-chief."

But it also praised Bush for improving U.S. relations with China and India, his efforts to fight AIDS in Africa. It predicted historians might one day rank Bush in the mid range.

Le Monde disagreed.

"It's hard to find a historian who won't say that Bush was the most catastrophic leader the U.S. has ever known," the French daily wrote. "One success: since Sept. 11, 2001, there was no attack on U.S. soil. But this sits alongside an interminable list of failures, starting with the war in Iraq."

Germany, ridiculed as "old Europe" by Bush's former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for opposing the Iraq invasion, took aim at Bush.

"Bush brought great misery to the world with his 'friend-or-foe' mentality," wrote Die Zeit.

Stern magazine said: "Bush led the world's most powerful nation to ruin. He lied to the world, tortured in the name of freedom and caused lasting damage to America's standing."

The Pan-Arab al-Hayat newspaper resorted to bitter black humour under the headline: "We cried a lot and the joke was on us". It recalled his controversial election win in Florida and how he once nearly choked on a pretzel, watching television.

"Perhaps we could say that fate, which let the American people down first in Florida and then with the issue of the pretzel in the president's throat, ultimately helped them by making sure the president would spend half his time on vacation.

"Indeed, he would have caused twice the damage if he had been more active and focused."

Austria's Wiener Zeitung wrote Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even ranked higher in one international opinion poll than Bush:

"The United States was once the symbol of justice in the world but that has been damaged by Bush. A web of manipulation has cost America $900 billion and the lives of 4,000 soldiers -- along with at least 500,000 Iraqis."

In Poland, the Warsaw daily Dziennik lamented the worst part about Bush's presidency: "It was empty rhetoric."

(Additional reporting by Jakub Jaworoski in Warsaw, Peter Griffiths in London, Alastair Macdonald in Jerusalem, and Francois Murphy in Paris; editing by Ralph Boulton).

[Ninjahedge]

It is one thing to say that you have defended your country, but if you were once attacked in your bedroom and your response was to moon people from the neighbors lawn, you can't really claim victory because no-one has gone back to the bedroom.

[Jasonik]

http://internetservices.readingeagle.com/editor/archives/bush_door_gallery__470x391.jpg

Won’t Anyone Give Bush a Job?
Book publishers and speaking agents express little interest in what Bush has to say—and not just for political reasons.

Daniel Gross
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 26, 2009 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/180029)

For many of President Bush's critics, the fact that he is now seeking work in the worst job market in a generation is poetic justice. As 43 noted in his farewell press conference, he is too much of a Type A for "sitting with a big straw hat and a Hawaiian shirt, sitting on some beach." (He might want to reconsider. Thanks to the economic malaise, tropical resorts are running great promotions.) Given recent history, Bush has reason to think he might be able to monetize his presidency. Bill Clinton reported income of more than $90 million between 2000 and 2007.

But Bush probably shouldn't expect to post Clintonian numbers. Ex-presidents peddle image, presence and experience; in Bush's case, each is tarnished. To aggravate matters, many of the industries in which ex-presidents make easy money are (a) doing poorly, and (b) based in the Axis of Acela, the Washington-Boston corridor in which Bush hostility runs deep.

An ex-president's first move is usually a book deal—Bill Clinton got an estimated $10 million to $12 million for his memoirs. But with sales down, and Borders and Barnes & Noble contracting, "there's likely to be a buyer's strike in the book business for up to six months," says one former head of a well-known imprint. Moreover, the industry just isn't that interested in what the Bush inner circle is peddling. Agents are dining out—mostly at Subway—on tales of turning down meetings with Condi Rice. Laura Bush is believed to have received an advance of about $2 million for her memoirs, about one quarter Hillary Clinton's haul.

Several publishers I spoke to believe a Bush memoir wouldn't command much in the way of foreign-rights payments. And given Bush's professed lack of interest in reflection, what could he offer to American audiences? "Right now, his presidency is seen as such a cascade of mistakes that it's hard to know what he could say that would be compelling," says Geoff Shandler, executive editor at Little, Brown. Bush's best option may be to cut a deal with a Christian publisher like Thomas Nelson, which pays smaller advances than the New York houses. "Somebody out there will be willing to make a bet that he can reach his political constituency," says Peter Osnos, founder of the politico-friendly publisher PublicAffairs. The consensus for a Bush advance: $1.5–$2.5 million.

Bush has been mum about book plans, but he's been more forthright about his desire to joint the lucrative yakkers' circuit. "I'll give some speeches, to replenish the ol' coffers," he said in September 2007. Ronald Reagan flew off to Japan to make $2 million for a few speeches soon after leaving office. Clinton, to no one's surprise, has been a prolific speaker. But speaking agents I talked with expressed little interest in Bush—and not, they say, just for political reasons. "I'm in business to make money, and I don't think I'd make money doing it," says Bill Leigh, chairman of the Leigh Bureau speaking agency.

The biggest spenders for the high-profile speakers have traditionally been investment banks and asset-management companies, like Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. But many firms have disappeared, and those that remain are wards of the state. Bush could, however, count on a few trade associations and friendly defense and energy companies to generate a handful of gigs at $125,000 a pop (plus private plane travel).

While corporate boards used to be a reliable, well-paying sinecure for former politicians, "I'd be surprised to see him on one," says Wendy Pangburn, a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles. Besides, board slots have really morphed from a few meetings per year at resorts to several meetings and lots of conference calls. "You have to work at it," she says. In the age of Sarbanes-Oxley, board seats entail a heightened amount of fiduciary responsibility—which, even the dwindling core of Bush partisans will concede, hasn't been one of the president's strong suits.

That leaves the time-honored and highly lucrative field of crony capitalism, or, as it's known more genteelly today: private equity. Out of public view, magnates routinely provide nice incomes to pols who can open doors and help raise funds. Former vice president Dan Quayle and former Bush Treasury secretary John Snow hang their hats at Cerberus Capital Management. Bill Clinton was dealt into a fund run by ally Ron Burkle. The Carlyle Group has been a bipartisan haven for Washington A-listers, including former president George H.W. Bush. Bush the Younger has friends in this world, including Tom Hicks, the private-equity baron who helped W make his fortune with the Texas Rangers.

We may be too quick to write off Bush's prospects. Twenty-eight years ago, another onetime Southern governor, possessed of a deep Christian faith, left office unpopular, thanks to a shambolic economy and a foreign-policy disaster in a Muslim country whose first three letters are I, R and A. He, too, was largely written off by the Axis of Acela. It was a great embarrassment when Jimmy Carter's memoir failed to garner a seven-figure advance. But Carter has since become the Stephen King of politicians—a prolific, highly paid bestselling author of volumes on any number of topics, including fly-fishing. He probably has a lot to teach Bush about how to rebuild a reputation and build a fortune. At the recent gathering of ex-presidents in the Oval Office, 43 couldn't stand far away enough from 39. That may have been his final strategic mistake.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/08/bush_at_ranch.jpg

[Ninjahedge]

Carter = Smart.
Bush = Dumb.

No matter what they did in office, or what was handed to them, you leave with a bad rep, you can't rely on it alone to carry you afterwards.

Bush has always been carried. Lets see who hauls his sad arse around after he and wheelchair bound Cheney hit the road today.

[195Broadway]

You and I will.

[BrooklynRider]

As my last post in this thread, I'd like to offer George W. Bush and Dick Cheney a hearty "F*** You" and slow, painful death.

[Ninjahedge]

As my last post in this thread, I'd like to offer George W. Bush and Dick Cheney a hearty "F*** You" and slow, painful life.

Better? ;)

[lofter1]

Stick a fork in him.

[Bob]

OK, so he's gone and now you have a new President of your choosing. I hope you will not be disappointed. I voted for George Bush, not once but twice, and probably nobody is angrier than I am how this turned out for his Presidency, much less the country. His main failing, as I see it, is that he failed the country by failing to accept his role as leader of the Republican Party. He repeatedly failed to set standards for his own party, failed to engage the Democrats with reasonable arguments, tried to be a better Democrat than the Democrats (always a fatal flaw) and assumed an Imperial Presidency, much as Richard Nixon did. He suffered (and rightly deserved) a similar fate. He squandered a valuable opportunity to lead a Republican Congress and Senate to tackle tough issues, and he blindly accepted a lot of baloney from the Democrats rather than take 'em on using the bully pulpit. He imitated Lyndon Johnson by trying to tackle Iraq on the cheap, costing plenty of wasted lives. He learned NOTHING from our years of pain in Vietnam...NOTHING!!

In fairness, you or I weren't there, in the Oval Office, making the tough decisions. And although I don't assume to be in a position as powerful as the President, I know what it's like to be the one making decisions. You can never try to be popular; you have to make tough decisions knowing not everybody will like them. For that, I will give President Bush a partial pass, as I will our new President.

In the end, though, I think George Bush has single-handedly destroyed the Republican Party, and for that you have to know that the fish rots from the head. The same wing of the GOP that fought against Reagan in 1976 and 1980, and the same wing that delivered us the HORRIBLE John McCain in 2008, is responsible for handing over our country, and perhaps our republic, to the left wing zanies now running the show who tell us to feel guilty about flushing a toilet. Not the democrat's fault! They can't help themselves! It's the fault of George W. Bush and his wing of the GOP. Let's tell it like it is.

Good luck to Comrade Obama. He truly scares the hell out of me, but if he is at least partially competent he'll be a far sight better than George Bush I or II, and that's not a bad thing for the Office of the President.

[Fabrizio]

^ "I think George Bush has single-handedly destroyed the Republican Party"

Oh no, it's much bigger than that. Example: folks like you who must refer to Obama as "Comrade Obama". Everyone is tired of that kind of mentality... and it was a huge factor in Republicans losing. It's what you do when you have no argument.

"He truly scares the hell out of me"

That pretty much sums up the mentality of modern Republicans. When you've got no argument, all you can resort to is fear.

"His main failing, as I see it, is that he failed the country "

Uh... when did you figure that out?

--

[scumonkey]

Americas true farewell to bush!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0wMuHRbgss

[ZippyTheChimp]

Oh no, it's much bigger than that.
And much further back.

We can thank Bush for one thing - lifting the haze and allowing enough of us to see the way we've been conducting politics for decades. Bush didn't destroy the Republican Party; it began a slow demise with the poison of Lee Atwater.

[Fabrizio]

Yes, from the Willie Horton thing.... to "Obama palls around with terrorists".

He's a Communist.... he's "Comrade Obama". And etc.

Honestly, I really thought it would work again this time. Boy am I happy I was wrong.

[Fabrizio]

to the left wing zanies now running the show who tell us to feel guilty about flushing a toilet.

Ben Franklin (remember him?) wrote a list of 8 personal virtures. One of them is the virtue of "frugality"... waste nothing.

[eddhead]

@Bob

Odd as this may sound (considering I am a life long lefty) I agree with almost all that you wrote, about how Bush misrepresented traditional conservative ideology and in so doing may have single handedly destroyed the GOP. The rest of your diatribe is just a bunch of sour grape ramblings .

Still, to your point, the GOP is in a state of chaos right now., The party identity is torn asunder as extreme christian righties , neocons, classical Goldwater conservatives, and centrists such as Pawlenty battle to redefine the party's underlying principles.

As a member of the GOP, you would be very hard pressed to articulate a mission statement consisting of one coherent paragraph with no contradictions, and harder yet to find a leader who all the factions are comfortable getting behind.

[lofter1]

As the "author" of this thread I'm tempted to have it locked-up now that the End of the Era is upon us (thank God!). Even though I believe that the ramifications of Bush's Era will haunt us for generations. But we all can rest assured that Bush Bashing will never go out of style (look at Millard Fillmore 150 years later).

So, I'll leave it up to the forum ...

Tell us what to do:

1) LOCK It

2) Leave It OPEN

[Bronxbombers]

I don't like George H.W. Bush Sr. and I also don't like George W. Bush Jr. I am glad the the Bush Era is over with.

[TREPYE]

Adios Bush!!

Its is hard to conjure up anger at you sometimes because I truly believed that you were too incompentent to realize that you were too incompetent to be a president. Thus blame should be layed a this machine of yours that made your misplacement possible: The GOP. To all you Republican idealouges: Thanks for nothing you treasonous bastards.:mad:

But in a way Bush's incompentence did turn out to have some silver lining. He visually defined cause and effect in his acts of ineptitude and the state he left this country in. This may have allowed some of the more narrow-minded people in this country to have a broaded prespective and paved the way for them to open their minds enough to vote for an african american candidate for president, but most importatly a competent President......

[Jasonik]

"Throw-A-Shoe at Bush!" Inauguration Day photos San Francisco (http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/20/18564901.php)

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/1-009.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/2-043.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/3-078.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/4-083.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/5-011.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/6-035.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/7-068.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/8-108b.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/9-108.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/10-075.jpg

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/01/20/throw-a-shoe3-550.jpg

[Jasonik]

Washington notebook: One final round of shoe-throwing

by Bob Braun/Star-Ledger columnist
Monday January 19, 2009, 9:30 PM (http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/01/newark_teacher_gets_washington.html)

http://blog.nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2009/01/large_ARISTIDE.JPG
Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-Ledger
Members of the National Park Service and the Secret Service clean up shoes
thrown at the White House gate today, in protest against President Bush.
A similar shoe-throwing event took place at DuPont Circle.

Inaugural celebrations come in all forms -- including the chance to throw a shoe at an effigy of outgoing President Bush.

At the park on DuPont circle today, an organization called "Arrest Bush" erected a 25-foot balloon figure purporting to be Bush and attached a sign urging passers-by to throw shoes at it. The organization supplied the old shoes.Shoe-throwing became a fad after an Iraqi journalist caught worldwide attention by tossing his two shoes at Bush during a press conference in Baghdad.

Throwing shoes at an inflatable Bush [video] (http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2009/01/throwing_shoes_at_an_inflatabl.html)

``We've had the balloon for years and used it in demonstrations,'' said Jay Rodriguez, a member of the Washington-based group seeking to have the soon-to-be former president prosecuted for war crimes.

By mid-day, the effigy had attracted a crowd of several hundred participants.

``It just makes me feel good to do it,'' said Carla Adele, 58, who said she was from Gary, Ind. She tossed an old pair of tethered sneakers at the balloon, trying to catch them on its large nose.

[STT757]

An irrelevant Republican party is not good for our Nation, we cannot let one party have too much power otherwise they will become corrupt. Also conservatives need to be part of the process, not isolated. Otherwise the seeds of discontent will just keep growing.

[londonlawyer]

Bush was an utter disaster.

The one thing that I will miss about his administration, however, is Dana Perino.

http://www.colostate-pueblo.edu/news/releases08/imgs/wdana_1029.jpg

[Jasonik]

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/nm/20090121/2009_01_21t075200_379x450_us_usa_bush.jpg?x=290&y=345&q=85&sig=eF3_o8fWfMuLvSh6a7ZXpA--
President Barack Obama waves alongside his wife Michelle,
and Vice President Joe Biden and his wife Jill, as the presidential
helicopter carrying former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura,
leave the Capitol after Obama was sworn in as the 44th U.S. President in Washington, January 20, 2009. (Saul Loeb/Pool/Reuters)

[Ninjahedge]

Buh-buy!

[Jasonik]

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20090120/i/r1394426085.jpg?x=400&y=280&q=85&sig=Cbpsv5gLSLBst5ppZ3gnNg--
A visitor to Madame Tussauds poses next to the wax figure of US President George Bush,
in London January 20, 2009. The waxworks allowed free entry to US citizens on Tuesday,
the day of the inauguration of US President Barack Obama.
REUTERS/Stephen Hird (BRITAIN)


Why they might miss Dubya when he’s gone
Many of those still bashing Bush as an idiot indulged in some political idiocy of their own over the past eight years.

PLUS: Who’s the poodle?

Mick Hume | Tuesday 20 January 2009 (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/printable/6122/)

President George W Bush might officially leave office today, but he effectively lost power a long time ago. Even his own party have disowned and tried to forget their president for at least the past year, with Republican candidate John McCain standing on an I’m-Not-Bush ticket – a remarkable testament to the exhaustion of the Bush administration as it sank into oblivion.

But while President Bush himself has been quietly fading away as Barack Obama prepares to take office on a wave of euphoria, one thing above all has kept the man known as Dubya in the news – the determination of his opponents to drag him out and give him one last kicking in the media (a painful spot) for supposedly being the worst/most unpopular/stupidest president in American history.

In recent times it has often seemed as if many of the big questions in US and international affairs have been simplified to the point where any child can grasp them. A primer in politics, economics and science could perhaps be boiled down thus. Name the main cause of man-made global warming: President George W Bush. Outline the central causes of the war in Iraq: President George W Bush. Analyse the factors giving rise to the terrorist threat today: President George W Bush. Explain the origins of the financial crisis: President George W Bush. Give reasons for the ‘dumbing down of America’: see above. Etc, etc.

To judge by many of the farewell send-ups of Bush, we might conclude that the outgoing president was an incompetent and incoherent fool. Yet it seems these same people would have us believe that the useless idiot has been the most powerful and dominant force for evil on Earth since President GW Beelzebub. One columnist waved farewell to Bush this week with the assurance that ‘outside of the obvious mass murderers, you were one of the worst leaders in the history of the modern world’. Whether or not Bush is the most unpopular president ever, he certainly leaves office as the one to attract the most vitriol from all sides.

Now like most people, I barely have a good word to say about the Bush presidency. But what are all these millions of bad words re: Bush really about? Does the accusation that his was an outstandingly wicked presidency stand up to the test of history?

Yes, Bush misled America (with assistance from the UK) into pointless, disastrous, politically-motivated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to be confused, of course, with President John F Kennedy’s escalation of the Vietnam intervention, which he justified via the strictly non-political statement that ‘we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place’. Or with President Lyndon B Johnson misleading the world over the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify launching the full-scale war in Vietnam that still makes Iraq and Afghanistan look small by comparison.

There are other areas where attacks on the easy target of the Bush presidency owe much to myth and historical amnesia. So those who condemn the alleged ‘unilateralism’ of his foreign policy, and refusal to bow to international institutions over issue such as Iraq, often forget how President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair launched an equally ‘illegal’ war against Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN support. And those who slam the supposed free market ‘neo-liberalism’ of Bush’s economic policy ignore the way that his administration ran up the largest federal debts in US history even before the huge bailouts of the past year. It made no more sense to call Bush a neo-liberal when the US state was spending billions supporting capitalism before the financial crisis than it would be to suggest he has since become a socialist for boosting state intervention.

Many of Bush’s most vitriolic critics have often confused the self-publicising rhetoric of his neocon supporters with realities in the world of politics and power. That confusion, wilful or otherwise, has served a political purpose of its own.

How much easier it has been to blame Bush for ‘stealing’ the 2000 election or ‘duping’ American voters than to ask the hard questions about why the Democrats twice failed to win enough support to defeat such a joke character. (Indeed many of the liberal media insults hurled at Bush have really been aimed at the ‘lizard-brained’ American voters who were stoo-pid enough to prefer him over his enlightened opponents.) How much simpler is it to blame Bush for lying over Iraq than to ask why so many on all sides supported the invasion, or seriously to examine the wider problem of US intervention, a policy pursued by the likes of Clinton before him and supported by Obama today. Why bother examining the deeper causes of terrorism or economic crisis in the heart of American society, when you can simply pin the blame for it all on the personality flaws of a discredited president?

One thing that Bush could rightly be accused of in his heyday was exploiting the emotive politics of fear over issues such as terrorism. Yet his critics have used their own version to distort political debate, stirring and exploiting fears not only over, say, global warming, but a visceral fear of George W Bush himself.

Perhaps President Bush really has been the idiot he is depicted as in all those collections of film clips now adorning YouTube. But this hardly makes it profound or radical for serious commentators to echo that philosophical genius Russell Brand, who hilariously called Bush a retard. This is political idiocy with a liberal face.

Like it or not, I fear it will not only be the cartoonists and impressionists who will miss the easy target in the White House when he has gone. Without such an obvious boil to blame for all of their ills, the liberal intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic might even be forced to confront some deeper questions about themselves and the sort of societies in which we live. Or perhaps they can just keep on blaming Bush for the next 20 years - after all, there are many over here in the UK who would still like to hold old Margaret Thatcher responsible for the current crisis.

The writer mentioned above (a US liberal writing on a British website), who accused Bush of being just behind the ‘obvious mass murderers’ in history’s league table of bad leaders, concludes that we have one thing to thank Dubya for: making things so bad that Obama got elected. Now, he says, ‘things can only get better’. Some in Britain might think that an unfortunate choice of words. It was, of course, the slogan of the first Tony Blair government, elected in 1997, when many were so bitter about the outgoing Tory government that they invested all of their hopes in New Labour. Even those with short memories might recall how well that turned out.

Mick Hume is spiked‘s editor-at-large.

BUSH WAS BLAIR’S POODLE

by Brendan O’Neill

Perhaps the greatest myth of the past eight years, the one that most deserves to be squished beneath the hobnail boot of historical fact, is that British prime minister Tony Blair was President Bush’s poodle.

From bad pop (both the Pet Shop Boys and George Michael recorded ‘protest songs’ depicting Blair as a lapdog to Bush’s Rottweiler) to serious journalism (‘What is Blair doing hanging around with this guy?’ asked bemused hacks) to godawful cinema (Richard Curtis’ edgy piece of anti-Bush propaganda, Love, Actually, featured a floppy-haired British PM standing up to a Texan American president), it became commonplace to accuse evil Bush of leading generally decent Blair astray. Not only did Bush launch terrible wars, he had the temerity to drag us Brits along with him!

This self-serving fantasy allowed British officials and observers to pose as the dupes, even the victims, of Bush’s all-powerful drive to war. ‘Unhitch us from the Bush chariot!’ demanded one British journalist, as if plucky-but-unwilling Britain was being dragged along by the force of the Bush war machine, and let us ‘set the bearings of our own moral compass’. Get a grip. In reality, Blair and his backers in the British liberal media were the founders of the very same world-saving, good-and-evil, end-of-days foreign policy that was later adopted by Bush. It might be more accurate to describe Bush as Blair’s poodle.

Of course it’s true, and has been since Suez (if not earlier), that Britain is subservient to the US. Ricky Gervais summed that up when he collected his Golden Globe award in 2004 and said: ‘I’m from Britain. We used to rule the world before you lot.’ Yet Blair’s ‘ethical foreign policy’, launched in 1997 when Bush was still doing his best to stay away from the drinks cabinet down Texas way, massively influenced the Bushites who were waiting to take power.

Indeed, the two things that Bush is most commonly criticised for - his naive and pseudo-religious belief that the world can be divided into Good and Evil, and his cavalier attitude towards state sovereignty and the authority of the UN - were founding principles of Blairite humanitarian imperialism. Bush is attacked for his super-reductionist, black-and-white worldview, where you’re either ‘with us or against us’. ‘No other president in living memory has spoken so often about good and evil, right and wrong’, says Peter Singer. Yet it was Blair who first injected international affairs with such a simplistic, lethal new moralism. Blair said his ethical foreign policy would be something entirely new - militarism executed not for land or political power, but for ‘what is right’. In Kosovo in 1999 he said: ‘We are fighting not for territory but for values.’

Blair described the Kosovo campaign as ‘a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship’. Bush completely ripped him off in a 2002 speech about the ‘war on terrorism’, when he said: ‘Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree… There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.’

Bush is most loudly attacked for overriding the UN and ignoring state sovereignty. He’s labelled a cowboy, a criminal, an international lawyer’s worst nightmare. He even invaded Iraq without UN authority! Again, it was mild-mannered Blair from Islington, not foul-mouthed Bush from Texas, who elevated Ignoring State Sovereignty into a new principle of international affairs.

In April 1999, Blair gave a speech at the Chicago Economic Club, in which he called for moving away from the old UN emphasis on respecting nations’ sovereign independence and towards taking more pro-active forms of military action to topple ‘regimes that are undemocratic and engaged in barbarous acts’. It became known as the ‘Chicago doctrine’ and is known to have had a big impact on both Clinton (then in power) and Bush. Blair declared that when a state is failing, ‘the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect’. He put this theory into practice when he bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 without the unanimous backing of the UN. Four years before Bush did the same over Iraq.

Many of those who today wring their hands over Bush’s wicked warping of decent British politics were only too willing to support Blair’s post-UN, good-and-evil invasion of other countries back in the 1990s. On Kosovo, the Guardian said the UN constitution was a ‘recipe for inaction’ and ‘its imprimatur cannot be the sole trigger for international action to right an obvious wrong’. Bush couldn’t have put it better himself. Maybe he had recently re-read that Guardian editorial when in 2003 he criticised the UN’s slowness on Iraq and decided to forge ahead with his shock’n’awe.

Bushite foreign policy is not some weird, alien, oh-so-Texan force that sprung from nowhere – it is the successor to, and the brutal realisation of, the ethical foreign policy that was first articulated in London in the 1990s and which sought to transform the globe into camps of good and bad that should be open to the attentions and interventions of armed ethicists in the West. It seems that what some people really find offensive about Bush is that he added an explicitly religious gloss – eeurgh! – to Blairite ideas of, er, good and evil, right and wrong, ethical and unethical. All the various phrases invented to describe Bushite foreign policy – ‘neoconservatism’, ‘neo-imperialism’, ‘Empire-building’ – are simply cynical and see-through attempts to disguise the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both launched in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘humanitarianism’, were the logical follow-on from Blair and Clinton’s ethical imperialism.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.

[BrooklynRider]

Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court

03/07/2009 @ 3:52 pm

Filed by Stephen C. Webster


http://rawstory.com/images/new/bushfrown20081205.jpg

An ex-UN prosecutor has said that following the issuance of an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan (http://rawstory.com//%3Cbr%20/%3Ehttp://rawstory.com/news/2008/After_government_retaliation_a_million_face_0305.h tml), former US President George W. Bush could -- and should -- be next on the International Criminal Court's list.

The former prosecutor's assessment was echoed in some respect by United Nations General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, who said America's military occupation of Iraq has caused over a million deaths and should be probed by the United Nations.

"David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects," reported the New Zealand Herald (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10560243).

The indictment of Bashir was a landmark, said Crane, because it paved a route for the court at The Hague to pursue heads of states engaged in criminality.

"Crane also said that the [Bashir] indictment may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture," said Turkish Weekly (http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/66115/the-icc-issues-an-arrest-warrant-for-sudan-leader.html).

"All pretended justifications notwithstanding, the aggressions against Iraq and Afghanistan and their occupations constitute atrocities that must be condemned and repudiated by all who believe in the rule of law in international relations," Brockmann told the Human Rights Council (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12581). "The illegality of the use of force against Iraq cannot be doubted as it runs contrary to the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. It sets a number of precedents that we cannot allow to stand."

The Bush administration boycotted the Human Rights Council. The day Brockmann made his accusations happened to be the first in which the United States had observers at the council, on orders from President Obama.

According to Iranian news network PressTV (http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=87818&sectionid=351020101), the Iranian government called the Bashir indictment "a blow to International justice" and an "insult directed at Muslims."

Iran's plainly stated sentiment toward the court's legitimacy is similar in spirit to that of the United States. Because the US Government has refused to recognize the court by becoming a signatory in its statute, "the only other way Bush could be investigated is if the [UN] Security Council were to order it, something unlikely to happen with Washington a veto-wielding permanent member," said the Herald.

Due to the International Criminal Court's lack of any real police force, it has traditionally relied upon signatory states for enforcement of its rulings. But when the leader of one such state is indicted, the court's authority and enforcement capability is called into question. Even the arrest of Bashir is a far cry, for now (http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN05338605). And without a UN Security Council order, former US President Bush would not go on "trial" before the court any time soon.

However, on January 26, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak insisted that the pursuit of Bush and members of his administration for the torture of terror war prisoners is crucial if justice is to be served.

Nowak added that he believes enough evidence exists currently to proceed with the prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2008/UN_official_Enough_evidence_to_prosecute_0126.html ), the former Secretary of Defense who was credited as being highly influential in the crafting and push for America's invasion of Iraq and the prior administration's abusive interrogation tactics.