BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 02 May 06 - 09:51 PM

The high point of the last few months on the political front has been watching Steven Colbert hand Bush his arse on a plate, while W sat still and tried to smile about it.

If Colbert dies a mysterious death in the next few months, the reason why is in this tape.

I would be ROFLMAO if it weren't so close to the truth.

A

(Part 1 goes almost all the way through. Part 2 starts with the introduction of "Joe Wilson, the most famous husband since Desi Arnez."

Enjoy!

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 02 May 06 - 11:08 PM

Bob Herbert: War as It Really Is is a description of a movie that sounds very compelling. Even if you don't see the movie, reads the description.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: number 6
Date: 02 May 06 - 11:14 PM

Thanks for posting that link Amos .... that war has to end (period).

sIx

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Bobert
Date: 03 May 06 - 07:30 AM

And will...

...but not in the next 1000 days according to the Liar in Chief...

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 11 May 06 - 07:35 PM

I really am POd at the New York Times for putting Maureen Dowd behind the Subscription Curtain, especially when she comes up with sharp analyses like this comparison among the Bushialites:

"Father and Son Reunion
Maureen Dowd


One Bush did it by staying out of Baghdad, raising taxes and driving down the deficit.

The other Bush did it by going into Baghdad, cutting taxes and driving up the deficit.

But, perhaps inevitably, the father and son ended up in an Oedipal tango at the same spot: 31 percent.

After trying not to emulate his father's presidency in any way, W. emulated it in the worst possible way. He came out of a conflict with Saddam as a towering figure with soaring approval ratings and ended up as a shrunken figure with scalding approval ratings.

In the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, W.'s stunning implosion landed him in a tie with his dad's low point in July 1992, four months before the public traded in Poppy for Bill Clinton. As Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee noted in their Times article today, that is the lowest approval rating for any president in the last half-century, other than Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.

Even Hillary Clinton has a more favorable rating than W. -- 34 percent. But the president can draw some solace: John Kerry's at 26 and Al Gore's at 28 percent. And Dick Cheney is in the bunker at 20.

But in the new poll, even many of the party faithful are glum. Only 45 percent of evangelical Christians, 69 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of conservatives like the way W. is taking care of bidness. A whopping 70 percent deem the country pretty seriously on the wrong track, and two-thirds consider the nation in worse shape now than when W. took over.

On the issues that earned Karl Rove his nickname, Boy Genius -- values and national security -- the shift was notable. Fifty percent of respondents said Democrats came closer to sharing their moral values, compared with 37 percent said Republicans did. And the G.O.P. retains a tenuous advantage on being seen as stronger on terrorism. The numbers for those who think we did the right thing invading Iraq are steadily dropping, and rising for those who believe we should have stayed out.

Many Americans have simply lost faith in the administration's ingenuity. Only a quarter of those polled had much confidence in W.'s ability to handle a crisis; a mere 9 percent are sure that he can successfully end the war in Iraq, and a paltry 4 percent think the administration has a clear plan for keeping gas prices down.

The Bush presidency has devolved to an assertion of empty will.

The White House blew off warnings from Republicans in Congress about appointing Gen. Michael Hayden as C.I.A. chief. You know you're in trouble when conservatives fret that the military is getting too much power.

If W. really cared about getting good intelligence for his war on terror, he would never have appointed Porter Goss. That wasted more than 18 months that could have been used fixing the dysfunctional agency, and drove out some good officials.

Mr. Goss, the Cheney toadie, was appointed because W. and Vice wanted him to go to Langley and do a hostile takeover to clear out suspected leakers (especially Kerry contributors), malcontents, critics of the war or anyone else who wasn't with the program.

Before the Iraq invasion, it was about fixing the intelligence around the policy. Now it's about appointing yes men and enforcing loyalty. The Bush warriors didn't want good intelligence in the first place because it would have told them they were wrong about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda and W.M.D. And now they're still more concerned with turf battles than with truth-tellers, and finding someone -- anyone -- who can tell us where Osama is. (Osama who?)

Even Denny Hastert, the Republican speaker, scoffed at the Hayden move as a Negroponte "power grab."

The general is a Cheney pal who stood up for the White House's right to be unconstitutional, going along with the heinous warrantless snooping. That makes him one of the team and ready for a promotion, or a Medal of Freedom. He will no doubt be accommodating when Darth Cheney comes over to Langley to lurk around the analysts and oversee the evidence building a case on sending bombs rather than diplomats, to Iran.

Now that we're dealing with a crazed Iranian president, dreaming of nukes and writing an 18-page letter that sounds like an Israel-hating Islamic version of the Rapture, wouldn't it be great if our spooks could stop fighting and go spy on somebody?
..."

---

If I were only her age and single.... ;>)


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 15 May 06 - 06:41 PM

Fran Rich of the New York Times observes the beginning of a witch-hunt:

"
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
Frank Rich
NYT Op-Ed

When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin...."

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 16 May 06 - 12:53 AM

Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_source_.html

May 15, 2006 10:33 AM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

"A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government
is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out
confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told
us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling,
or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of
the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters
for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are
being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a
confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known
to have upset CIA officials.

People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say
the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of
CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for
the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones
were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.

A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide
valuable clues for leak investigators."

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 17 May 06 - 08:02 PM

The passion of the liberal press is rising:

"In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.

Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear -- so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.

If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.

Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak of yet another presidential power grab: the administration's collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.

The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country. It supposedly wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.

Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.

The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its fearmongering and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of government checks and balances.

Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.

The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war." But George W. Bush, employing an outrageous propaganda campaign ("Shock and awe," "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"), started an utterly pointless war in Iraq that he still doesn't know how to win or how to end.

If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.

So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.

The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.

Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.

There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw. "

America The Fearful
Bob Herbert
NYT Op-Ed

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 18 May 06 - 11:30 PM

Saying No to Bush's Yes Men
Thomas Friedman
NYT Op-Ed (excerpt)

President Bush has slipped in one recent poll to a 29 percent approval rating. Frankly, I can't believe that. Those polls can't possibly be accurate. I mean, really, ask yourself: How could there still be 29 percent of the people who approve of this presidency?

Personally, I think the president can reshuffle his cabinet all he wants, but his poll ratings are not going to substantially recover -- ever. Americans are slow to judgment about a president, very slow. And in times of war, in particular, they are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I think a lot of Americans in recent months have simply lost confidence in this administration's competence and honesty.

What has eaten away most at the support for this administration, I believe, has been the fact that time and time again, it has put politics and ideology ahead of the interests of the United States, and I think a lot of people are just sick of it. I know I sure am.

To me, the most baffling thing about the Bush presidency is this: If you had worked for so long to be president, wouldn't you want to staff your administration with the very best people you could find, especially in national security and especially in the area of intelligence, which has been the source of so much controversy -- from 9/11 to Iraq?

Wouldn't that be your instinct? Well, not only did the president put the C.I.A. in the hands of a complete partisan hack named Porter Goss, but he then allowed Mr. Goss to appoint as the No. 3 man at the agency -- the C.I.A.'s chief operating officer -- Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose previous position was chief of the C.I.A.'s logistics office in Germany, which provides its Middle East stations with supplies.

Mr. Foggo has spent almost his entire undistinguished C.I.A. career in midlevel administrative jobs. He ingratiated himself with Mr. Goss during his days as a congressman by funneling inside dope about the C.I.A. under George Tenet to Mr. Goss, Newsweek reported. When Mr. Goss was tapped by the president to head the C.I.A., he plucked Mr. Foggo from obscurity to handle day-to-day operations at the agency, where he immediately made his mark by purging the C.I.A. of veteran spies and managers deemed unfriendly to the White House. I feel safer already.

Mr. Foggo resigned, along with Mr. Goss, after the C.I.A.'s chief internal watchdog opened an investigation to determine whether Mr. Foggo had helped steer a contract, apparently involving bottled water, to a company run by his old friend Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case involving the corrupt San Diego congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who is now in prison. Mr. Foggo is not an expert on Iran or Iraq or Russia, but rather on Perrier, Poland Spring and Fiji water. That is the guy the Bush team chose as its chief operating officer at the C.I.A.

Is there no job in this administration that is too important to be handed over to a political hack? No. (...)

---

Discuss...

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 24 May 06 - 08:05 PM

Molly Ivins, a little white-haired lady from Texas, offers these thoughts on the immigration question:

Yes, I Am Actually Calling Them Racist.

I highly recommend it for a refreshing view of another way to look at things.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
From: Wavery
Date: 31 May 06 - 08:45 PM

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

- Inscription on Billy Pilgrim's tombstone; and my current philosophy to avoid going insane trying to be a US citizen under the Bush Administration.

Buck Fush.