Category Archives: George W. Bush

America’s Most Centrist President.

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In history, no president has ever nominated more than two members of the opposing party to his cabinet…until President Obama.

While Republicans call Obama an extreme liberal, a socialist, a communist, and worse, the president continues to nominate Republicans to important posts. He nominated Ray LaHood as Secretary of Transportation, Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary (although Gregg later withdrew his name from consideration), John Huntsman as Ambassador to China and John McHugh as Secretary of the Army. He also nominated Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. (Although Gates is a Republican, he changed his registration to independent in order to give the appearance of impartiality.)

And that was just the first term.

So far in his second term, President Obama has nominated Republicans Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and James Comey as Director of the FBI. That’s a total of seven Republicans nominated for important positions in his administration. And there may be more to come.

If that’s not the definition of a centrist, I don’t know what is.

By comparison, Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated two members of the opposing party over three terms. Eisenhower nominated one for each of his terms. John F. Kennedy nominated two, Nixon one, Carter two, and Reagan nominated one who later switched affiliations to become a Republican. George H.W. Bush nominated no members of the opposing party. And both Clinton and Dubya nominated one apiece.

So if, according to Teapublicans and their right wing media whores, President Obama is pushing an extreme liberal agenda on Americans, he’s had a whole lot of help from conservatives.

“Private Eyes” Given A Whole New Meaning.

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Recent revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping on phone records, emails and Internet history have been used by some politicians to attack President Obama. Really? He not only inherited these programs from Dubya. By most accounts, he placed new restrictions on them.

Whatever the case, government spying on American citizens should be openly debated by all Americans and our representatives. Only the American people should decide how much privacy we’re willing to sacrifice in exchange for the prevention of terror attacks.

But while the media and Washington have been focused on each new revelation of the NSA program, several aspects have been relatively ignored.

One is that those collecting the information are not government agents or employees. They’re private companies. Edward Snowden was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, which is a publicly traded, for-profit corporation that has sucked up billions in revenue from government agencies such as the Department of Defense, all branches of the U.S. military, U.S. Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Treasury, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Security Agency.

As a result of the political right’s fascination with privatization, companies like Booz are now handling many of the tasks the government used to. The belief, although not proven, is that awarding government contracts to such companies will save money.

Apparently, it also makes information related to these tasks less secure.

Not satisfied with revealing aspects of the secret program, Edward Snowden has told the South China Morning Post that the US has been “hacking Hong Kong and China since 2009.” Great! So after turning many American citizens against their own government, Snowden is now attempting to turn other nations against it, too.

Another surprising aspect of the Snowden leak is that Booz Allen Hamilton was paying him a salary of $200,000! This is a 29-year-old who dropped out of high school, dropped out of the Army, and possesses a GED. According to his social media sites, his real expertise is playing video games.

Finally, after revealing classified information about what he considered to be US government abuses, Snowden moved to China, saying that he admired Hong Kong for its commitment to free speech! (Perhaps he should talk to a few of my Tibetan friends about China’s commitment to free speech. He can find many of them in Chinese prisons.)

Not surprisingly, all of this has made Snowden a “hero” to the tinfoil-hatted Glenn Beck. Upon reading an account of Snowden’s revelations and his flight to Hong Kong, Beck tweeted “I think I have just read about the man for which I have waited. Earmarks of a real hero.”

On the other hand, Richard “The Dick” Cheney scurried out of his hidey hole and pronounced Snowden a “traitor.”

For me, this poses a real dilemma. If Beck praises someone as a hero, I can usually count on that person being a lunatic. And if the black-hearted Cheney calls someone a traitor, I can usually count on that person to be the opposite.

So now what am I to believe?

How Quickly We Forget!

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A new poll by Gallup has found that 49 percent of Americans now view President George W. Bush favorably, while 46 percent view him unfavorably. Assuming that the poll is more accurate than Gallup polls from the 2012 election, it would seem to indicate that 49 percent of Americans are either uninformed, misinformed or blissfully ignorant. The only other possible explanation is an epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder!

What exactly did Dubya do that could be considered good?

Was it the fact that he used his brother’s position as governor of Florida to steal the 2000 election? Was it his failure to pay attention to pre-9/11 warnings of a terrorist attack? Was it his campaign of lies and misinformation leading up to the Iraq War? Was it his apparent disinterest in completing the mission in Afghanistan? Was it his administration’s failure to regulate our nation’s largest financial institutions leading to an economic collapse? Was it his policies that led to the loss of millions of jobs? His bailout of the too-big-to-fail banks?

Was it Dubya’s embrace of “extraordinary renditions,” torture, no-bid contracts to military suppliers, or warrantless wiretaps? Was it his administration’s failure in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Was it his administration’s embrace of the oily executives who control our nation’s energy policies?

Yes, by all means, let’s sit back and, through the haze of fading memories, fondly remember those halcyon days of incompetence, corruption and abject failure.

Big Oil And Its Worldwide Oiligarchy.

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If oligarchy is a power structure in which all political power effectively rests with a few people, Oiligarchy is the perfect term to describe what has become the most powerful industry on Earth. Since World War II, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others have gained increasing control over the US government, along with our foreign policy and our military.

Oiligarchy operatives and lobbyists are a virtual Who’s Who of American politics, including Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, as well as former Secretaries of State James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Condoleezza Rice, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Senator Bob Dole, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and many, many, many others.

Their connections to the oily empire are deep. Richard “The Dick” Cheney was previously CEO of oil giant Halliburton. Condoleezza Rice served on the board of Chevron and even had an oil supertanker named in her honor. And before Dubya failed as president, he experienced multiple failures in the oil business.

At times, these people have sided with Big Oil at the expense of national security, the environment and human rights. Indeed, the oil companies’ greed, along with our thirst for cheap gasoline has resulted in wars, dictatorships, genocides, toppled governments and a growing worldwide hatred of the US.

Following the Cheney-inspired Project for a New American Century, Bush, Cheney and their minions helped Big Oil elbow its way into the Caucasus and Caspian Sea regions in order to steal oil from Russia and keep it from Iran. In the process, we took the side of Chechen rebels who were led by Muslim extremists in their fight for secession from Russia.

The war in Afghanistan was preceded by US demands for an oil pipeline across that country. The war in Iraq was a cynical and clumsy attempt to control Iraqi oil. Even our unyielding support for Israel seems driven less by a desire to protect Israel from its Arab neighbors than by Big Oil’s desire to have a powerful ally near Middle East oil fields. And in an especially cynical move, US-backed Big Oil and Russia are in a race to lay claim to Arctic drilling as the polar ice cap melts. (Ironically, oil-caused global warming is creating an opportunity to capture and burn even more oil!)

Not content with its lethal impact on international politics, Big Oil has set its sights on further destroying our environment in its quest for ever larger profits. The Oiligarchy is demanding that the Obama administration approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which is intended to carry oil from the newly-fracked oil fields in North Dakota and the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to refineries in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast. The claim is that the pipeline will create “tens of thousands” of new jobs in the US, but a review by the Cornell University Global Labor Institute estimated that the pipeline would add only 506 to 1,387 new jobs.

In exchange for that meager number of jobs, Big Oil wants us to risk the inevitable spills of a substance the EPA says is virtually impossible to clean up. The US has already experienced at least two spills of the particularly dirty and gooey tar sands oil. In one of the spills, a pipeline belched 200,000 gallons of oil into a Michigan river. Nearly three years later, the oil has sunk to the bottom of the river and has not biodegraded. It likely never will.

Worse yet, the bituminous oil from tar sands is often referred to as “junk oil.” As a fuel source, it is terribly inefficient, creating an inordinate amount of pollution relative to the energy it provides. Once it flows (or more accurately, oozes) onto the market, it will dramatically increase greenhouse gases, leading environmental experts to state that it will be “game over” for our planet.

Big Oil doesn’t seem to care.

Spending billions in attempts to elect subservient politicians, to lobby Congress and to confuse voters, Big Oil owners like the Koch brothers deny the impact of fossil fuels on climate change. Ignoring the findings of almost every climate scientist in the world, they and their bought-and-paid-for politicians claim that climate change is “unsettled science,” a “sham,” the “greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.”

If they’re wrong (and it’s almost certain they are), they won’t pay the price. But our planet and most of its inhabitants will.

“RNC Needs To Be Closed For Repairs.”

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That’s what former Senator and Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole said about today’s Republican National Committee. Asked if he would fit into the GOP today, he said, “I doubt it…Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon wouldn’t have made it, because he had ideas.”

Now Former Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) has reiterated Dole’s comments. “The Republican Party is undergoing some, you know, significant and serious changes, and they are going to have to rethink their approach as a political party and how they are going to regroup and become a governing majority party that appeals to a broader group of Americans than they do today,” she said.

Dole and Snowe are the latest in a long line of moderate Republicans to decry their own party…or, more accurately, what’s left of their party.

But don’t expect Dole’s and Snowe’s comments to make much of an impact on the party. Today’s Republicans, especially their Tea Party parasites, simply don’t listen to reason. They live in an imaginary world where faith prevails over science; ideology over mathematics; anger over compromise; fantasy over history.

According to today’s Republicans, Ronald Reagan never raised taxes, Reagan and Bush never presided over deficits, and neither contributed to the national debt. They believe Watergate was merely a second-rate burglary, Reagan never sold weapons to Iran, and Bush never lied about WMD in Iraq.

In Republican World, only liberals and socialists rely on government while Republicans rely on their investments and hard work. On their own Red Planet, Republicans believe that government is unnecessary because free markets are self-correcting and self-policing; if corporations cheat or lie, they simply won’t survive…never mind the impact on consumers.

In Republican World, all scientists are wrong about climate change; all economists are wrong about the negative effects of austerity; and evolution is just a theory.

Most important, in the new Republican Party, all real Republicans toe the party line; independent thought is heresy; and former Republican officials who criticize the party are just that…former Republicans .

31 To 5.

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Teapublicans continue to demand accountability for the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi. They might begin with some simple addition and subtraction.

For example, under President George W. Bush, the US State Department suffered the following attacks:

  • 2002 Karachi, Pakistan Embassy – 10 dead
  • 2004 Tashkent, Uzbekistan Embassy – 2 dead
  • 2004 Jidda, Saudi Arabia Consulate – 8 dead
  • 2006 Damascus, Syria Embassy – 1 dead
  • 2007 Athens, Greece
  • 2008 Belgrade, Serbia Embassy
  • 2008 Sana, Yemen Embassy – 10 dead

That adds up to a total of 31 who died at embassies on Bush’s watch.

During the Obama administration, the US State Department has thus far suffered the following attacks:

  • 2012 Benghazi, Libya Embassy – 4 dead
  • 2013 Ankra, Turkey Embassy – 1 dead

That adds up to a total of 5 who have died on Obama’s watch.

Now for the subtraction. Since 2010, the Teapublican-controlled House cut the State Department’s budget for embassy security by $296 million. Okay, Rep. Issa, investigate that!

You simply can’t be “outraged” by the events in Benghazi, if you weren’t equally outraged by the many events that preceded it. And you can’t blame the State Department for failed security if you don’t fully fund its requests.

The Austerity Fraud.

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For more than 30 years, conservatives have pushed for smaller government. Their battle cry is to “Starve the Beast,” the beast being our federal government. They have demanded more and more tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, and they finally got them under President George W. Bush. Yet, when the tax cuts led to large deficits, Richard “The Dick” Cheney and other conservatives famously stated that “deficits don’t matter.”

Of course, when President Obama took office, their attitude suddenly changed.

Despite having driven our economy off a cliff, conservatives demanded that the new administration cut spending in order to bring the deficit and debt under control. To prove their point that these were the biggest challenges facing our nation (bigger than rampant unemployment, the housing crisis, losses by pension funds and the depressed stock markets), conservatives cited a Harvard University study by Reinhart and Rogoff which stated that economies suffer whenever a nation’s debt surpasses 90 percent of GDP.

This study was cited over and over by conservative politicians and conservative media.

Unfortunately for conservatives, it was recently debunked by a graduate student who found numerous statistical and computational inaccuracies which completely altered the study’s conclusions. Turns out, there were numerous exceptions to the Reinhart-Rogoff rule.

As for the effects of austerity measures, one need only look to Europe to see what happens when concern over deficits and debt trump job creation. Following strict austerity measures in both Greece and Spain, unemployment among young people now exceeds 60 and 50 percent, respectively. Both countries are facing major upheaval as the unemployed have taken to the streets to riot. In England, France and Italy, the effects of austerity have been less dramatic. Nevertheless, austerity has pushed their economies back into recession.

Had President Obama followed the advice of conservatives, we, too, could be struggling through another deep recession. Despite conservative claims to the contrary, the economic stimulus worked. For the past 3 years, we have not only recovered the jobs lost as the result of the Bush recession. We have added 1.5 additional jobs, and we would have added many more if not for layoffs in the public sector forced by Republican-controlled state houses.

We might well be back on the road to full recovery had the Teapublicans not taken  control of the House in 2011.

Virtually every economist has stated that the budget restraints imposed by our Teapublican Congress have hampered our economic recovery. Indeed, a recent article in The New York Times states that deficit reduction has already cost our economy at least 2 percent growth and 1 percent employment. And the budget cuts forced by sequestration have yet to fully take hold!

But don’t look for conservatives to give up on austerity any time soon. Despite our fragile recovery, they’re still demanding severe cuts to federal programs. They have proposed cuts to “entitlements” such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They want to eliminate or severely reduce unemployment insurance, SNAP (food stamps), Pell grants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They even want to cut or eliminate the United States Postal Service!

During the last election, Teapublican candidates said they would target entire departments for elimination, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives. Some want to get rid of the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard.

Given a limited (and false) understanding of history and our Constitution, today’s conservatives believe that the only constitutionally-allowed functions of the federal government are defense, homeland security, border security and highway construction. For everything else, you’re on your own.

It’s easy to see what these policies would do to our nation. Just look at Somalia.

A Teapublican Twofer.

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This Wednesday, Teapublicans in Congress will, once again, hold hearings on the murders of Ambassador Stevens and three other US government personnel at the consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Unwilling to accept the State Department’s account of the incident, the Secretary of State’s account, testimony in previous Congressional hearings, or even a report by a special Accountability Review Board chaired by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Michael Mullen, the Congressional witch hunters are determined to expose evidence of egregious failure by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a cover-up by the Obama administration.

For Teapublicans, that would be akin to finding the Holy Grail and El Dorado, the lost city of gold, in one search.

It would not only cripple President Obama for the remainder of his term. It would seriously damage the prospects of a presidential run by Clinton. According to polls, Hillary would easily defeat any potential Teapublican candidate in 2016. So, of course, Teapublicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are going to keep hunting for the Benghazi smoking gun. They’re going to keep claiming a conspiracy. They’re going to keep accusing the administration of a cover-up. They’re going to keep calling it “Benghazi-gate.”

Having failed to uncover any evidence of a scandal thus far, this time Teapublicans claim they have the goods. They have promoted the upcoming hearings by calling the new witnesses “whistleblowers.” They say they want to “find the truth” so that our nation “can better protect our diplomats in the future.”

If that were the real motivation, wouldn’t they also look into the attacks on US Embassies under President Bush resulting in the murders of 31 people? Where was the Teapublican outrage then?

Make no mistake. This hearing, like all the Benghazi hearings, the Fast and Furious hearings and the Solyndra hearings that came before are not motivated by a search for truth and justice. They’re motivated by politics, pure and simple.

A Message To Tea Party “Patriots.”

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There’s simply no nice way of saying it. You are a bunch of self-serving, gun-toting, conspiracy promoting, anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-evidence, anti-American nitwits.

You call yourselves Tea Party Patriots, but you’re neither patriotic nor even a party. You are the lunatic fringe. You wrap yourselves in the flag and spout quotes from a select few of our Founding Fathers all the while undermining the very principles they stood for. You say you’re strict Constitutionalists, but it’s apparent that the only part of the Constitution you’ve read is the Second Amendment (and you can only quote half of that). The other principles you attribute to the Founders are actually from the Articles of Confederation, the document our Constitution replaced.

You didn’t have the guts to stand on your own, so you decided to backdoor the Republican Party. Your angry rhetoric and Koch brothers’ millions managed to drive most moderate Republicans from office. As a result, you and your wealthy supporters have destroyed the party of Lincoln.

Now you’re trying to destroy our nation.

Your economic theories not only defy economics, they defy logic. They’re hurtful to children, the elderly, the poor, even veterans. You claim to be worried about the national debt, yet you sat idly by while the previous administration ran up enormous deficits through two ill-conceived wars and the collapse of our economy. Then you blamed President Obama for our economic ills. You watched as President Bush expanded the size of government by creating the government’s second-largest agency, the Department of Homeland Security, then screamed about the growth of government when the new administration took office.

You ignored the bailout of “too big to fail” banks, which saved the jobs of Wall Street millionaires and the assets of billionaires. But you howled in disgust when President Obama loaned money to US automakers, saving tens of thousands of jobs for middle class workers. You whined that you are “Taxed Enough Already” and blamed President Obama for raising taxes, even though tax rates were at a 60-year low.

You claim that you’re not racists, yet every single one of your rallies includes blatantly racist depictions of our democratically-elected president. You call him a Muslim, a socialist, a communist, a fascist and worse. You compare him to Hitler. You have even called him the leader of al Qaeda.

When you’ve failed to win elections, you’ve tried to change the rules. You have tried to suppress the votes of minorities and your political opponents. You have tried to deny women the right of equal pay for equal work. You have tried to deny women the right to control their own bodies. You have held our economy hostage in order to get your way. You have undermined democracy through use of the filibuster and gerrymandering. As a result, our nation now suffers from tyranny by the minority.

Thanks to your tactics, Congress has been turned into a venomous body devoid of compromise. Thanks to your representatives, the approval rating of our duly-elected Congress is lower than that of cockroaches. Thanks to your policies, the very wealthy have become wealthier while the rest of our citizens have suffered. Thanks to you, our nation is on the verge of becoming a plutocracy.

All of that is bad enough. But your real “triumph” is that you have made millions of Americans fearful of their government and of each other. Thanks to you, according to a new poll, 44 percent of Teapublicans now believe that an armed revolution against our government may be necessary…our own democratically-elected government!

Your entire movement is based on lies and meanness.

That said, it’s difficult to determine who is most at fault…you…or those who tolerate you, especially the media that give you undeserved credibility. One thing is certain…your movement would be more accurately called the Tea Not-Really-A-Party Traitors.

Caution With Syria Justified.

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Despite the right wing warmongers’ calls for war with Assad’s Syria, President Obama is correct to move cautiously. There are many questions to be answered. Who are the rebels? What are their aims? What will be the future of Syria if the rebellion is successful? What will be the cost to the US if we do intervene?

The truth about the Syrian situation is that it’s a civil war between Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. Neither of these groups will further the interests of the US. In fact, the best outcome may be for both sides to do serious damage to each other.

The bigger question is why the drumbeat for yet another war? Why do people such as Senators McCain and Graham seem so anxious to send our troops into battle? Aren’t these some of the same people who are horrified by the deficit and national debt? What effect would yet another war have on our economy? How many lives would be lost? How many lives changed?

Until the warmongers can provide answers to these questions, President Obama is right to ignore them. If McCain, Graham, McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, Bush, Cheney and all of the Tea Party members are so impatient to join the fight in Syria, maybe they should just grab one of their numerous assault weapons and book a flight to Damascus.

We should never again choose to send our military into battle without serious debate and a full understanding of the goals and consequences.