The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency

Brad Reed, of Sadly, No! has produced a short version of the last 7+ years focusing on the 10 most awesomely bad moments which floated to the surface of the Bush presidency.

Essentially, I tried to rate each Bush disaster by two main criteria: its body count and its damage to the country's reputation. So while Bush's awkward groping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel may be personally humiliating to everyone, it doesn't have the same heft as, say, the Iraq War.

But for those of you who insist on seeing your least favorite moment get its due, here is list of every honorable mention I could come up with: warrantless wiretapping; Valerie Plame; Scooter Libby's sentence commuted; Bush believes Rafael Palmeiro is innocent; soldiers face neglect at Walter Reed; signing statements; the Kyoto treaty ripped up; loyalty oaths; the fake turkey; a staged teleconference with troops, staged FEMA press conference, extraordinary rendition, support for junk science; endorsement of neo-creationist "intelligent design"; inaction against global warming; record oil prices; record budget deficits; record trade deficits; record number of Americans without health insurance; two recessions; no-bid contracts; bin Laden still at large; the Federal Marriage Amendment; stem cell research vetoed; waterboarding ban vetoed; "Last throes"; "Old Europe"; "It's hard work"; "Bring it on"; "Yo, Blair!"; "I'm the decider"; "I'm the commander guy"; "I'm a war president"; "This is the guy who tried to kill my dad"; "So?"; "Let the Eagle Soar"; John Bolton; Kenny Boy; Harriet Miers; John Roberts; Sam Alito; Blair talks Bush out of bombing al-Jazeera; Cheney shoots some guy in the face; the Military Commissions Act; Jose Padilla arrested and held without charge or access to counsel; endless tax cuts for the rich; let's waste a shitload of money by sending people to Mars and let's hire some Heritage Foundation staffers to rebuild Iraq.

Those are the ones that didn't make the list.

Go read. It's well worth it.

The verdict is in

I try generally not to ascribe to conspiratorial evil-doing what can reasonably chalked up to stupidity, incompetence, arrogance and inertia. When New Orleans - a coastal city built largely below sea level - was hit by Hurricane Katrina, I was as horrified as the next person by the complete and utter failure of the U.S. federal government to respond in any meaningful way. But I just figured it was mostly a matter of a chain of dumb decisions - like putting a lawyer whose only other organizational experiece was running a club for horse breeders in charge of emergency management. Sure, there was evil involved - like the white deputies who opened fire on blacks fleeing the city to keep them from entering their parish, or even the pearl-clutching by shit-for-brains conservative bloggers and pundits who decried the "looting by savages" or the "lawlessness" by those trapped at the Superdome, though the two are hardly comparable in seriousness.
I tended to pooh-pooh or at least take with a grain of salt claims by some that the entire episode was some sort of monstrous pogrom against blacks or a cold-blooded, cynical attempt to wipe out a Democratic center in the South. No one could be that monstrous or cynical and cold-blooded, right? Not even as big a shit as Karl Rove could look at all those poor people drowning and think "How do I use this to partisan advantage?" right? I'll admit that, even after the invasion of Iraq, even given the torture scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, I didn't think the Bush crowd were actually evil. I thought they were a bunch of violent, ignorant clowns, prone to lashing out at things they didn't understand, even occasionally vengeful agains their political enemies and driven by an ideology they didn't really even understand, but still the bottom line was that they were a bunch of red-nosed, floppy-shoed, horn-honking, Bozo-coiffed clowns.
I was right, they are clowns, but it turns out that they have patterned themselves on the clown from Stephen King's "It" that lives in the sewers and eats children. They are still hapless, clumsy, clowns prone to hitting each other with pies and seltzer bottles, but they are Evil (with a a capital E).

This is all you need to know about what plain rotten, filthy, lickers of Satan's taint these people are. The entire administration, past and present, should be locked in the darkest, dampest, most rat-and-roach-infested part of Angola Prison and left there.

"We landed at the 17th Street Canal," Landrieu says. "The story that day Karl Rove was feeding was: 'The president is on the job, the president has taken control, the president is going to rebuild, and despite the fact that the government and all these babbling fools down here can't do anything, the Corps of Engineers is on the job.' So we landed at the canal, five minutes from my house. I was so excited because they were finally doing something. The Corps of Engineers was there, and they had dump trucks and sandbags. All the cameras were there for the president, who was doing one of his famous press conferences about how he was going to do everything. So I thought, 'At least the guy is doing something, so show your manners and be good and smile.'"
...On Friday, Mary Landrieu had been with Bush and Blanco as they toured the 17th Street Canal, where, at last, major work had commenced to repair the damage that had been caused when the levee broke. "Then, on Saturday," Landrieu says, "George Stephanopoulos called and asked to do an interview with me, and I said, 'George, I'm tired of doing interviews. I have to work. And nothing you are airing is accurately showing what's going on down here.' He wanted to go to the Superdome, and I said, 'We still have people stranded on their roofs. If you want to tell the right story, I will help you tell the right story. You get a helicopter and I'll go up and I will show you what is actually happening. It's awful what's happening at the Superdome, but the reason the people can't understand the story is because the entire region is under 20 feet of water. People can't get into the Superdome to help. They can't get out. People are drowning in their homes.'
"So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, 'George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can't send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.' So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there -- people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it." There, in the cabin of the helicopter, as they flew above the breached canal below them, Landrieu sat devastated.
"I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life."

Hat tip to posse member Chet over at The Vanity Press, who has been burning up the blogosphere lately.
(crossposted from the woodshed)

Supporting the troops?

I've written in passing about the uncounted costs for the United States and its allies, including Canada, that are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much has been made of the number of soldiers killed in action and there has been some coverage of the tens of thousands of seriously wounded. Earlier this year, I linked to the stories being told at the Winter Soldier conference about the U.S. Veterans Administration hospitals failure to diagnose and treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It would seem there is a reason for this failure. Depending on the study you look at - and there are several - it is estimated at anywhere from 12% to 20% of vets returning from Iraq suffer from PTSD to some degree. Add to that the uncounted number of "military contractors" working as everything from truck drivers to mercenaries security consultants and that is a lot of potential for very bad things to happen.

But not to worry. In war, we all must make sacrifices. After all the President is working hard and has given up golf for the duration, what more can we ask?

crossposted from the Woodshed

George Bush is taking his clown act on the road.

This should strike Americans as one thing: A colossal waste of taxpayers' hard earned dollars.

President George W. Bush's diplomatic passport will acquire a slew of new country stamps during his final year in office as he tries to rebuild the U.S.'s international standing and create a foreign-policy legacy beyond Iraq.

*Choke* The same guy who destroyed the U.S.'s international standing is about to go out and try to salvage it? That just strikes me as perverted in a bishopric kind of way.

The president plans trips to the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America, which would make 2008 his busiest year abroad. While his major domestic initiatives may get stalled by a Democratic majority in Congress and the gridlock caused by election-year politics, he still has an opportunity to exert his influence overseas.

In short, he's screwed at home, so he might as well go out and see what a shit-awful mess he's made of things.

Influence? What friggin' influence? He doesn't have any. Hopefully the leaders of the countries he visits laugh him right back onto Air Force One.

While the president will strive to strengthen alliances, it won't come at the expense of continuing to prosecute the war on terror, said Jim Jeffrey, the deputy White House national security adviser. "We want to be well-perceived in the world,'' Jeffrey said in an interview.

Perhaps, (and, geez, this is only a mild observation) you should have thought of that before you fingered the UN, ignored international complaints, invaded countries which had not threatened you, invented "intelligence", tortured prisoners (including those known to be mentally ill), engaged in extraordinary rendition, derailed international attempts to combat global warming, hijacked NATO for your own purposes and bungled every opportunity to capture the one person who actually did do harm to the United States.

Do you still wish for a pony, Mr. Jeffry?

The U.S. is not well-perceived in the world and it isn't going to be until the people get rid of that gang of shallow-thinking shitheads which form the current presidential administration. Take the Bush doctrine, AKA the Project for the New American Century and destroy it.

A Pew study of public opinion in 47 nations found ``extensive'' anti-Americanism and ``increasing disapproval'' of the cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy.

A perception that Washington acts unilaterally was shared by 89 percent of the French, 83 percent of Canadians and 74 percent of Britons. America's image in most Muslim nations is ``abysmal,'' Pew said.

The exception, Pew found, is Africa, where the U.S. image remains positive, especially in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Given such results, ``going around the world won't make things necessarily worse'' because ``it's difficult to see how they could be any worse,'' said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former national security council aide in the Clinton administration.

Yes, well, remember, this is George Bush we're talking about here. Just when you don't things can get any worse, he always finds a way to screw the pooch a little harder.

US State Department. Slackers, plagiarists and... ohhh! Nice shoes Condi!

The US State Department produces the Iraq Weekly Status Report which is described, on Foggy Bottom's website in this way:

This comprehensive status report on Iraq provides weekly updates in the eight key areas identified as pillars of U.S. Government policy.

So one could visualize teams of people working diligently for hours each day, gathering in information from a variety of official sources in preparation for a complete, concise weekly briefing on all that is important in Iraq.

One could visualize that, but it would be wrong. You can read the Iraq Weekly Status Report for November 21, 2007 here, or you can go to the following sources and get the same information, virtually word for word:

- The Washington Post - Nov 15, 2007

- Associated Press - Nov 14, 2007

- United Press International - Nov 19, 2007

- Voices of Iraq - Nov 18, 2007

- United Press International - Nov 16, 2007

- The New York Times - Nov 16, 2007

- Reuters - Nov 16, 2007

- Yahoo! News - Nov 16, 2007

Interestingly, the State Department authors of this "report" didn't bother to footnote each article they plagiarized, although they do cite sources on the last page of the report.

Kind of makes moot the idea of posting any State Department personnel to Iraq. I mean, hell, the major media outlets are already doing everything the State Department can do. Why take the risk?

You must now go to AmericaBlog who is the sole origin of this story for more information and where you can see the word for word comparisons.

Condi. You go too. You'll learn something.

The PDB that Bush ignored

August 6th, 2001, saw George W. Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Having had his presidency decided by the Supreme Court, he felt secure enough in his position, 7 months in, to take a vacation.

On that day he was handed this document. A Presidential Daily Briefing containing a warning:

FBI information ... indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The report identified Osama bin Laden as the focus of that activity.

The next day, Bush, in an effusive mood, went golfing. He encountered a couple of reporters who noticed.

During the month of August, 2001, Richard Clarke and eventually George Tenet, then Director of the CIA, were going into nervous fits. Things were happening in the bin Laden world and they didn't like the smell of it.

When the PDB of 6 August, 2001 was delivered to Bush, (not by George Tenet, but by one of his lesser subordinates), it should have caused somebody to stand up and take note. Former State Department head of counter-terrorism, Larry Johnson, who has written many PDBs described the average brief as a paragraph or two long. The 6 August brief was a page and a half. That amount of detail, with that amount of warning should have, in Johnson's estimation, caused the entire Presidential ranchocade to saddle up and beat a hasty path back to Washington.

Seventeen days later George Tenet was briefed on the report by the FBI Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui had been taking flying lessons - in a 747 trainer. According to Tenet, he didn't brief Bush because the two were out of touch. Bush was in Texas.

Then National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, wasn't in Texas either.

The PDB should have been enough, but once combined with the information of Moussaoui taking lessons on a 747 trainer alarm bells should have been set ringing in the White House inner circle.

Nothing.

Thirty-six days later, the World Trade Center towers came down. And the person who orchestrated it, the person George W Bush was warned about, remains at large, no closer to capture than he was 6 August 2001.

George W. Bush, President of the United States of America and the so-called "leader of the free world" had failed to heed a critical warning and allowed one of the most heinous acts of terrorism ever to occur in North America to proceed unchecked - on his watch.