Bush Sure Likes The Taste of His Own Foot

Today, President Bush held a press conference in Vienna, Austria as part of a diplomatic visit to Europe. He was asked by a member of the press why approval for his policies, particularly on national security issues, was so low in Europe. Bush explained that Europeans didn’t take the 9/11 attacks seriously. “For Europe, September 11th was a moment. For us, it was a change of thinking.”

85 Europeans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Bush added that “some people,” presumably Europeans who disagree with his policies, believe it’s “OK to condemn people to tyranny.”

Video and transcript

Right-Wing Radio Talk Host Turns On Bush

California's McIntyre in the Morning host, Doug McIntyre explains his turnaround. God, he sounds like a liberal!

"...So, accept my apology for allowing partisanship to blind me to an obvious truth; our President is incapable of the tasks he is charged with. I almost feel sorry for him. He is clearly in over his head. Yet, he doesn’t generate the sympathy Warren Harding earned. Harding, a spectacular mediocrity, had the self-knowledge to tell any and all he shouldn’t be President. George W. Bush continues to act the part, but at this point whose buying the act?

Does this make me a waffler? A flip-flopper? Maybe, although I prefer to call it realism. And, for those of you who never supported Bush, its also fair to accuse me of kicking Bush while he’s down. After all, you were kicking him while he was up.

You were right, I was wrong."

Listen here.

Crooks and Liars

The colossal lies, the intelligence ignored, the ongoing slaughter, the criminally irresponsible waste of taxpayer dollars, the countless opportunities lost, the crony profiteers. [snip]...a headline juxtaposition that perfectly reflects the dangerously delusional world of the President of the United States.

A link-rich post on Crooks and Liars.

Beginning To See The Light

It has taken more than three years, the loss of tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, and the expenditure of $200 billion -- all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war. But finally the neoconservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words.

We were wrong.

Interesting article.

The president who claimed he had no idea Katrina would be so bad, despite repeated urgent warnings, must now explain why he also didn't heed the warnings of Middle East experts who warned him about exactly what is unfolding in Iraq.

As ABB says,

It’s like taking a rabid dawg to your neighbor's birthday party, watching it go crazy for two hours and then abruptly leaving while shouting ‘sorry!’ as you rush out the door. The regret is legitimate, but you might want to take that rabid dawg with you. Oh, and help clean up the mess, pay for the medical bills and counseling and so forth. But maybe your neighbor doesn't want to look at your face for...well, ever again?

Y’all feel me?

Where Is Gandhi When You Need Him?

(AP Photo/A. Mahesh Kumar)

Bush is headed to India on Wednesday for a 3 day visit. Guess he's looking for allies wherever he can find them now that virtually the whole world is against him. Well, they're ready for his ass. Dozens of protests have been planned by Islamic leaders and communist politicians.

"Bush is terrorist No. 1, and it is an insult to Indian Muslims that he is coming to India as a guest of the government," said Mohammed Saeed Noori of the Bombay-based Muslim organization Raza Academy. "Bush first destroyed Afghanistan, then Iraq. He should be stopped from entering India."

Would you like some catsup with your Baigan Ka Bharta, Mr. Bush?

Another Lie Exposed

...with deadly consequences. Three days after Hurricane Katrina hit, Bush claimed that the government had no way to foresee the damage it would cause. "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Oh yeah? We were told months ago about "Hurricane Pam," a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. "Pam" predicted almost everything that happened in New Orleans and Mississippi at least a year before it happened.

Now the Washington Post reports that

In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property...

The Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) document predicted losses in the tens of billions of dollars.

In addition to the NISAC document, WaPo obtained a FEMA slide presentation that was prepared for a meeting two days before Katrina hit. They compared the potential damage to the simulated disaster of "Hurricane Pam", but said it could be even worse.

It's horrible that so many government employees, who were doing the job they were hired to do, tried in vain to warn those in charge about the impending disaster, and all their warnings were totally ignored. Then we had to endure the lies, the spin, the finger-pointing and shifting of blame to someone else. As the facts which contradicted the government's position began to emerge, and the horrors of the Superdome played out on television for the world to see, the truth became obvious, and Bush was forced to accept the blame. I don't even recall an apology. I really don't think there was one.

How much more incompetence do we have to endure? The only glimmer of hope I see is that the Bush administration will go down as the worst in the history of this country and will become a model of what to avoid in the future. If we don't go over the brink before that can happen.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Shoooot. It worked for Mary Poppins.

"Hey, Laaaaaaaaa-dy!"

I don't know what I'd do without Watertiger's humor on Dependable Renegade! Her hilariously captioned photos crack me up every day.

The Worst President In History

James Buchanan, the 15th president, is generally considered to be the worst president in American history. A recent informal poll of historians indicates that 338 believe Bush is failing, while 77 say he's succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.I just had to highlight that. It gives me hope.

This is what those historians said -- and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came fromself-identified conservatives -- about the Bush record:

• He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process.
• He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich.
• He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state.
• He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign.
• He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign ( Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida).
• He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity.
• He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress.
• He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Another Argument Down The Tubes

As Bush supporters desperately defend his disastrous presidency, they scramble to find scraps from his crumbling regime. Lately they've been charging that Congress was privy to the same intelligence as Bush, and yet the Democrats voted for war. They deny that Bush skewed intelligence to serve his nefarious purposes. Oh yeah?

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

There's so much more detailed in this National Journal article, Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel.

Operation Restore Mojo

James Wolcott dissects the last throes of neocon support for the worst presidency in this country's history in an article entitled "Windbags of War Give It One Last Wheeze". Clever with words, that Wolcott. After citing the same old tired rhetoric of Bush apologists, he comments,

No one better embodies the creamy elitism of the neocons than does [Bill] Kristol, who believes that the American people are a lumpy mass easily manipulated and are incapable of arriving at judgements of their own. But they can, they do, and they have. They have turned against this war and slowly come to the conclusion that they were deliberately misled. Questioning the patriotism of the war's critics isn't going to work because a majority of Americans now share that criticism and don't think of themselves as unpatriotic. Bush's counteroffensives are no longer effective because he's lost the confidence of the American people: they've had it with this guy.

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, sums it up.

"What a sorry, sorry, unfortunate president -- caught in his lies, his half-truths, his reckless disregard ... caught with, well ... caught with time. Time has finally caught up to him. And now he doesn't have the popularity to beat back all the people trying to call him to account. He could; but now he can't. So he's caught. And his best play is to accuse his critics of rewriting history, of playing fast and loose with the truth -- a sad, pathetic man.

[snip]

"In the president's new angle that his critics are trying to 'rewrite history', those critics might want to point out that his charge would be more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he's blowing into a fierce wind. The judgement of history hangs over this guy like a sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too."

It's his blogger allies who don't.

I Ain't Superstitious, But A Black Cat Has Crossed My Trail

(jjoats)

Why does it seem like every time the Bush administration gets some bad PR, a terror alert goes up within days? I think we all know the answer to that question. Keith Olbermann suggests that in the last three years there have been about 13 similar coincidences - a political downturn for the administration, followed by a “terror event” - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning. He describes each of them in the article. Here's Number Two:

June 6th, 2002. Colleen Rowley, the FBI agent who tried to alert her superiors to the specialized flight training taken by Zacarias Moussaoui, whose information suggests the government missed a chance to break up the 9/11 plot, testifies before Congress. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Graham says Rowley’s testimony has inspired similar pre-9/11 whistle-blowers.

June 10th, 2002. Four days later, speaking from Russia, Attorney General John Ashcroft reveals that an American named Jose Padilla is under arrest, accused of plotting a radiation bomb attack in this country. Padilla had, by this time, already been detained for more than a month.

As the approval rating continues to fall, Bush's handlers scramble to repair the damage. First the "terra" alert in New York. Then the photo op at a Habitat For Humanity site.


(jjoats)

Then trumping the race card by pulling a couple of really nervous black kids from a mostly white classroom. They should have made him pay them a fee for using them as props. The Lauratron doesn't look too happy in that picture either.

On The Sauce?

Rumors are flying that Dubya is drinking again. I have the proof.

Is Bush Drinking Again?

Reports of Bush's profanity-laced tirades against anyone who opposes him, including White House aides, and his increasing bitterness over mounting opposition to the war in Iraq have prompted a prominent Washington psychiatrist to say that the President's behavior "is all too typical of an alcohol-abusing bully who is ruled by fear".

Dr. Justin Frank explains Bush’s behavior as typical of an alcoholic who is still in denial.

Radical Russ, On Bush Apologists

If George W. Bush sped through California on a meth binge in a white Ford Bronco loaded with the severed heads of sixteen girl scouts, waving a flaming torch in one hand and a bloody machete in the other as the live news helicopters filmed him burning down the Redwood forests and running over disabled Iraq war veterans in a Wal-Mart parking lot, ...probably at least 25% of the country would say the New York Times planted the meth, the girl scouts were terrorists, Northern California's environment will be healthier now that all those big useless trees are gone, the war vets should've made better decisions not to recklessly wheel around in parking lots, and it's all Bill Clinton's fault because Clinton once owned a Ford Bronco. Besides, li'l George couldn't have done all that -- he's a good Born-Again Christian!

Radical Russ, love ya! :D

Worst Disaster

The media finally gets it right.

Endless Love

Bush and Blair. So moving. And so funny! Somebody put a lot of work into this.

More Bushisms

George Bush attempts to explain his new proposals for social security reform in Mrs. Finkle's kindergarten class last February.

"Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."—Explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

The definitive collection can be found in The Complete Bushisms. Read 'em and weep.

Bush Smiles

Well look at that. George Bush is smiling! He really does have teeth. I wonder what made him so hap...

Oh.

London

I didn't post anything here yesterday about the tragedy in London, because I just didn't know what to say. Of course I feel terrible for the victims and their families and the agony they are suffering. I hate it that there are people in the world who could do such a thing. It should never have happened, and it should never happen again. But it will, and George W. Bush is, in large part, to blame.

I think about the fact that the innocent people in Iraq suffer terrorist acts on a daily basis. When dozens of people are killed at the funeral of another victim of a terrorist attack or assassination does the world "recoil in horror" in the same way? Why not? What's the difference?

Instead of spending an hour showing us grisly videos of the scene and intruding upon the suffering of the survivors, all the while playing sappy violin music in the background, the networks should devote their time to covering the heart of the problem and asking tough questions of the administration.