George W. Bush

Bernie Sanders Sets The Smithsonian Straight

Posted by on January 11, 2009 at 12:08 pm. NO Comments :

It’s pretty sad when a respected national institution like the Smithsonian fails to uphold the minimum scholarly standards that its reputation implies.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery recently unveiled the portrait of George W. Bush that will hang in the museum. Accompanying the portrait will be a description of Bush’s tenure that says it was…

“…marked by a series of catastrophic events” including “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Of course the catastrophic events of 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with the war in Iraq. Well, unless you consider the fact that the Bush administration conspired to exploit the tragedy in order to justify their previously determined agenda of aggression against Iraq and other Middle East oil producers. By now everyone knows that the claims about WMDs and connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda were lies. For the Smithsonian to be so careless in their exposition of these events is an irresponsible mangling of history.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has sent a letter to the portrait gallery director, Martin Sullivan, objecting to the language. The letter says in part…

“The 9/11 attacks did not lead to the war in Iraq. What President Bush was telling us (before the war) was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq was somehow in collusion with Al Qaeda. Those were misstatements of fact, as even President Bush has since acknowledged. […] You can agree or disagree with the war. I simply think it’s important that history not be rewritten. Politicians spin all the time, but a wonderful national institution like the National Portrait Gallery should stick to the facts.”

The Smithsonian has not yet responded to Sen. Sanders’ letter. In the meantime, it might be useful to weigh in on the matter by letting the gallery know that people are paying attention and that accuracy in the depiction of American history is important. Particularly as it relates to matters of war and the trustworthiness of our government representatives at the highest levels.

Email the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Exhibitions group and demand that they tell the truth: NPGExhibitions@si.edu. And please be respectful in your communications. Gallery director Sullivan has a distinguished record that includes this honorable act after the Bush administration permitted Iraq’s historical treasures to be stolen and destroyed:

“It didn’t have to happen,” Sullivan told Reuters. “In a pre-emptive war that’s the kind of thing you should have planned for.

Sullivan said that just prior to resigning in protest from his post at that time as chairman of the U.S. President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property. He had been appointed to that office by President Clinton. Also, as Gallery director Sullivan acquired the iconic “HOPE” poster of Barack Obama by Shepard Fairey. That’s the very same poster made internationally famous by my John McCain “NOPE” parody of it.

Victory Update: Gallery director Martin Sullivan has responded to Sen. Sanders’ letter conceding the inaccurate language and promising to revise it:

“Our label was not intended to imply that there was a causal connection between the attacks that occurred on 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq…I appreciate your concern, however, about the words ‘led to’. We will revise the label and delete the words ‘led to.'”

Much thanks go out to Mr. Sullivan and, of course, Sen. Sanders.

George W. Bush: Lame. Duck!

Posted by on December 14, 2008 at 2:18 pm. 7 Comments :

On what George Bush must think is his victory lap, the president surprised the country he destroyed with one last visit before he slips off into irrelevancy. However, during a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, one of the reporters slipped off his shoes and hurled them at Bush.

After the incident, Bush dismissed it saying that it was merely “one way of getting attention.” But in the Middle East, the symbolism of shoes is much deeper than that. Even crossing your legs in a manner that shows the sole of your shoe to someone is considered a supreme insult.

Take this, Bushie…


Dismembering George W. Bush

Posted by on December 8, 2008 at 12:15 pm. 1 Comments :

As the administration of George W. Bush at long last comes to a close, the historical record of his presidency will begin to take shape. And like everything else that touches this president, the outlines of his legacy will be distorted by his accomplices and apologists. They will seek to recast in the public mind an accounting that bears little resemblance to reality. It will not be a remembering of the Bush era, but a dismembering, a mutilation of facts and consequences.

In pursuit of that goal, a coven of Bush minions has already convened to forge a counterfeit version of recent events. This faction of falsifiers includes the most notorious of Bush’s inner circle. Amongst the notables who have converged to sanitize and canonize the outgoing misleader are:

  • Karl Rove – Also known as the Architect or Bush’s Brain. Rove was the source of some of the most insidious propaganda emanating from the Bush White House.
  • Margaret Spellings – A Bush crony from the Texas clan. As Secretary of Education, with no experience in teaching or administration, she presided over millions of children being left behind.
  • Mark McKinnon – The Bush media advisor who received a recess appoint to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. His role as an advocate of fake news reports makes him an obvious choice to help fictionalize the Bush years.
  • Karen Hughes – A long-time PR flack for Bush whose work with the White House Iraq Group was instrumental in developing the lies used to sell war to the American people.
  • Alberto Gonzales – The Former Attorney General. A natural choice for historical recollections when, during testimony before Congress, he couldn’t seem to recall anything about his own tenure at the Justice Department.

The determination of this group to whitewash Bush’s reign of error will no doubt be intense. But so will be the level of difficulty. Bush is skipping out of Washington with the lowest approval rating of any president for as long as such ratings have been measured. Even worse, with regard to forming a legacy, is that majorities of historians rank Bush as the “worst president ever,” an awesome achievement considering competition from the likes of James Buchanon, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon. The comments of one historian in the survey summarize the situation nicely:

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush. Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

It will be interesting to see how the defenders of the Bush legacy respond to that. Karl Rove has already provided a preview of how the history manglers are going to proceed. And he is not shy about disseminating nonsense. He asserts that no one will regard the decision to take out Saddam Hussein as a mistake or that the broader war on terrorism was a miscalculation. Rove may have a point there, except for the fact that most Americans already regard the Iraq war as a mistake, and the broader war on terrorism has been miserably miscalculated, as evidenced by the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the recent bombings in Mumbai. However, some of what Rove says is disturbingly plausible:

“No administration in the foreseeable future is going to go in and say, ‘You know what, we’re repealing the Patriot Act. You know what, we’re throwing out that terrorist surveillance program.'”

If Rove is right about this, than the American experiment was a failure. This is why it is imperative for Bush to be reprimanded by the law for his transgressions against the American people, the Constitution, and the world. If the Obama administration fails to undo these legislative and executive atrocities, then an abhorrent precedent will be set for decades to come. Americans may forever lose the freedoms for which Bush says the terrorists hate us. Maybe that’s his secret plan. If terrorists truly do hate us for our freedoms, then if you take them away the terrorists will no longer hate us – or hurt us. Safe at last. But Rove isn’t through prognasticating:

“We are better off for having woken up to the fact that we were in a war, and, mark my words, no president in the foreseeable future is going to step back from the tenets of the Bush philosophy, which are: better to fight them over there than to fight them here, and we will not wait until dangers fully materialize before we strike.”

The tenets of the Bush philosophy are nothing less than the grotesque advocacy of superiority and aggression. The phrase “fight them over there” is an overt declaration that non-American lives have less value and are expendable in the war on terror. Rove is making the argument that, while it is Americans who are fighting terrorists, it is everyone else who should suffer the consequences. And Bush’s doctrine of preventative war is not a policy of striking before “dangers fully materialize.” It is a policy of striking whether or not danger even exists. It is a policy of striking at shadows and illusions, except with real victims. Rove seems to have forgotten that no WMDs were ever found in Iraq. It’s too bad that thousands of Americans and more than a million Iraqis had to die in the interim. More likely, however, Bush’s philosophy is just a policy of manufacturing false justifications for attacking economic and ideological adversaries.

In the passage of time it is going to be important to preserve honest representations of the past. We must foil the legacy perverters in their attempts to fictionalize history. This means vigilance over the sort of odious assemblies described above, as well as over the media that has already been infiltrated by these and other revisionist historians.

If we are not vigilant, our legacy will be that we misunderestimated their strategery and we will forever dismember what actually happened in the dark days of Bush. And thus we will be condemned to repeat it.

Chris Wallace Defends His Hero George Bush

Posted by on December 3, 2008 at 12:58 pm. 4 Comments :

At a Washington screening of Ron Howard’s new movie, Frost/Nixon, Howard slipped into a bit of uncharacteristic politicking. The Washington Times reports that…

Mr. Howard was the first to comment about the film’s connection to Mr. Bush, saying that he had told friends in 1977 that an abuse of power similar to Mr. Nixon’s would “never happen again.”

“So that led to some frustrations that I’ve experienced over the last few years,” said Mr. Howard, an Oscar-winning director.

That blistering and treasonous assault on America’s reluctant hero, George Bush, could not go unchallenged. And thankfully, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace was on the scene to protect the honor of the Decider. Wallace, in the tradition of fairness and balance for which his kind is known, leaped into action from his perch in the audience to save the day:

“Richard Nixon’s crimes were committed purely in the interest of his own political gain. I think to compare what Nixon did, and the abuses of power for pure political self-preservation, to George W. Bush trying to protect this country — even if you disagree with rendition or waterboarding — it seems to me is both a gross misreading of history both then and now.”

Wallace may want to reconsider raising the question of how Bush compares to Nixon. After all, both were presidents who brazenly broke the law. Both believed in their own political supremacy. Both waged illegal wars against third world countries that never presented a threat to the U.S. Both packed government agencies with loyal but unqualified cronies. Both abused their offices for partisan purposes. Both obstructed investigations, invoked executive privilege, and ignored subpoenas. Both worked to advance the interests of corporations and the wealthy at the expense of workers and the middle class. And both oversaw a parade of underlings and associates marching from the White House to the Big House.

I could go on, but I think I should pause to illuminate an important difference. Nixon was not an imbecile who considered himself ordained by God to lead the world.

But Wallace’s key premise was also wrong. Bush’s crimes were as motivated by self-interest as anything Nixon did. The assertion that Bush was acting only to protect the country is nonsense. Invading a nation that posed no threat is not protecting the country. Neither is sanctioning torture; or revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative as political payback; or firing U.S. attorneys for partisan reasons; or allowing thousands to drown in New Orleans while praising the former horse pageant lawyer you installed to head FEMA; or presiding over an era of deregulation that sent our economy into a tailspin.

If anyone is misreading history it is Wallace. For him to go out of his way to recast Bush as a hero is above and beyond the call of even a Fox News toady. It also should obliterate any facade of impartiality Wallace hopes to maintain. Not that he hadn’t already brought that curtain down.

Rupert Murdoch: True To Form

Posted by on September 20, 2008 at 5:13 pm. NO Comments :

Last May News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch attended the All Things Digital Conference and made a few headlines with his commentary on the presidential election:

“[Murdoch] on Wednesday predicted a Democratic landslide in the U.S. presidential election against a gloomy economic backdrop over the next 18 months.”

That sort of talk had some folks wondering if the old fella was growing a soul. Could the uber-rightist media monarch be ever so slightly scooting over to the left? Asked directly whether he is supporting Barack Obama (like his daughter, Elisabeth) he said:

“I’m not backing anyone, but I want to meet Obama. I want to know if he’s going to walk the walk.”

Since then, Murdoch has met Obama. It should be noted, however, that on that occasion the purpose was primarily to persuade him to appear on Fox News. It was therefore imperative that he pour on the charm while appearing to be neutral. Subsequent to achieving his goal, Murdoch is now publicly displaying his expected preference for leader of the free world (other than himself), and it’s the Republican, John McCain:

Breaking down Murdoch’s reasons for supporting McCain, it seems to be primarily an anti-Obama decision as he never overtly praises McCain. Still it is perplexing given the facts. He says that Obama will:

  • “…give us a lot of inflation.” Never mind that inflation right now is at it’s highest level since 1991. At that time 17 years ago, Bush, Sr. was just wrapping up his term in office. Like father like son.
  • “…ruin our relationships with the rest of the world.” If that does not immediately invoke guffaws given the world’s perception of America under George W. Bush, then note this poll that shows that “Obama was favoured by a four-to-one margin across the 22,500 people polled in 22 countries.” 46% said that relations would improve with an Obama win, only 20% held that view for McCain. Those numbers parallel American’s attitudes as well (46% Obama/30% McCain).
  • “…find companies leaving this country.” As if they haven’t been leaving in droves throughout the Bush years. Forrester Research projects a loss of 1.2 million jobs to foreign soil for 2008, increasing to 3.4 million by 2015.

To an objective observer the facts support precisely the opposite conclusion to which Murdoch has arrived. Nevertheless, the septuagenarian media mogul hangs unto his opinion that it is Obama, and not the Bush/McCain cabal, that threatens the nation’s future. That’s evidence of just how confined he is by his partisan worldview. He goes even further to tar Obama with the crusty old conservative slander that…

“[Obama’s] policy is really very, very naive, old fashioned, 1960’s socialist.”

Coming from an old fashioned, 1940’s fascist, I suppose we’ll need to take that with a pound or so of salt.

Anyone who might have thought that Murdoch’s remarks last May signaled a shift in his political ideology may now return to their senses. He is as much a right-wing propagandist as he ever was, and he isn’t shy about it either. This appearance on Neil Cavuto’s “Your World” is one of many that he has booked for himself. To underscore how peculiar that is, try to recall the last time that the CEOs of GE/NBC, Viacom/CBS, Disney/ABC, or Time Warner/CNN, appeared on their own news programs. They are rarely, if ever, guests, and certainly not even close to the frequency with which Murdoch pastes his face on his air.

This most recent booking appears to have been scheduled exclusively to disparage Obama just as the electoral momentum is shifting in his direction. The looming financial crisis has focused the campaign dialog back onto issues as opposed to personalities, and Murdoch wasn’t going to sit still for that. The trivialities and tabloidism that is Murdoch’s stock in trade just happens to advantage McCain, whose campaign relies on shallow griping about celebrities and lipstick. So he goes on Cavuto’s show, calls Obama a naive socialist, enumerates reasons to vote against him that are actually reasons to vote against McCain, and concludes the interview by plugging his new and struggling Fox Business Network.

That’s Rupert Murdoch in a nutshell: An arch-conservative, self-serving, greedy, monopolistic, liar. And always true to form.

In Defense Of The Pre-9/11 Mindset: Reprise

Posted by on September 11, 2008 at 8:55 am. 2 Comments :

[On September 11, 2006, I wrote an essay about how the American perception of its place in the world supposedly shifted after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I reprint it here today because, sadly, it’s still true.]

In September of 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a sinister demonization of Democrats, warned that…

“if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and it will fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset, if you will, that in fact, these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we’re not really at war.”

The Pre-9/11 Mindset is much maligned as mindsets go. Disdain is heaped upon it as if it were a discarded hypothesis. There is now a stigma associated with a worldview that was perfectly acceptable 24 hours prior. And a cadre of power hungry fear merchants is restlessly hawking the notion that everything we thought we knew has withered into irrelevance. The Post-9/11ers propose that an imaginary line has been drawn that illuminates the moral and intellectual differences between those who stand on one side or the other. So what exactly does it mean to be 9/10ish?

I remember clearly what was on my mind. I was still upset that a pretend cowboy, whose intellectual marbles rattled around vacantly in his 2 gallon hat, had gotten away with stealing an election. I was recalling, with renewed appreciation, an era of domestic surplus and international cooperation. Or as The Onion headline put it when Bush was first elected, “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over.”

9/11 was undoubtedly an unwelcome milestone in American history. But the idea that everything changed on that day is shallow and puerile. The history of human civilization reveals that we simply do not change that much from one century to the next. And the events that actually do precipitate change are rarely the ones we presume them to be. There was terrorism before 9/11. There were birthdays and funerals and parking tickets and snow cones and life’s everyday extraordinary spectrum of pleasure no matter how painful.

What changed was that a nation that was once perceived to be inviolable and courageous was now seen as vulnerable and afraid. Like a child lost in a crowd, America was searching for a guardian, but what we got was no angel. As President Bush took to the mound of rubble for his megaphone moment, he was not alone. He was accompanied by a media that sought to construct a hero where none stood. I must admit that it was an ambitious undertaking considering the weakness of the raw material. They took an inarticulate, persistently mediocre, dynastic runt, who on September tenth was considered by many to be Crawford’s lost idiot, and transformed him into a statesman overnight. The enormity of this achievement underscores the power of the media.

My Pre-9/11 Mindset was thrust into fear on that transitory day because I knew that the imbecile we were stuck with in the White House was incapable of reacting appropriately to the threat. I remember vainly trying to persuade previously reasonable people that if they thought Bush was a moron the day before, there was nothing in his breakfast that infused him with wisdom on that sad morning.

What transpired since has, regrettably, proven me right. We toppled the Taliban but let the 9/11 commander escape. Now the remnants of the Taliban are rising again and creating havoc in an unprepared and unstable Afghanistan. We were misled into an unrelated conflagration in Iraq via fear and deception. Now tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been liberated – liberated from the confines of their physical bodies. It’s too bad that these liberated corpses will be unable to march in the parades celebrating their liberation. A world that had nothing but sympathy for us after 9/11, is now repulsed by our arrogance. At home we are paying for our adventures by burdening the next few generations with a record debt. And we pay a much greater price in the cost of lost liberties, courtesy of a despotic cabal in Washington that has more trust in fear than it does in our Constitution.

The historical revisionists that cast the Pre-9/11 Mindset as a pejorative are blind to its inherent virtue. The Pre-9/11 Mindset honors civil liberties and human rights. It recognizes real threats and inspires the courage to face them. It demands responsibility and accountability from those who manage our public affairs. It condemns preemptive warfare and torture. The Pre-9/11 Mindset is not consumed with fear, division, and domination. It is rooted in reality with its branches facing the sunrise.

The Pre-9/11 Mindset is superior in every aspect to the Post-9/11 apocalyptic nightmare that has been thrust upon us. Its adoption is, in fact, our best hope for crawling out from under the shroud that drapes our national psyche. Vice President Cheney also said that…

“Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness.”

If that’s true, then the terrorists must have perceived the weakness of the Bush administration and considered it an invitation to launch their attack. How do you suppose they perceive us now? They’ve seen the passage of the Patriot Act that limits long-held freedoms. They’ve seen our government listening in on our phone calls and monitoring our financial transactions. They see us lining up at airport terminals shoeless and forced to surrender our shampoo and Evian water. They see us mourning the loss of our sons and daughters who are not even engaged in battle with the 9/11 perpetrators. They see us as fearful and submissive. Is this not emboldening the terrorists for whom this perception of weakness will be seen as yet another invitation to attack?

Yes, I have a Pre-9/11 Mindset and it is not a yearning for a simpler bygone era of harmony. You could hardly call the maiden year of this century simple or harmonious. I have a Pre-9/11 Mindset because I’ve had it all along; all through the Post-9/11 defeatism and scare-mongering; through the war posturing and false bravado; through the sordid attempts to divide Americans and vilify dissenters; through the bigotry and arrogance of those who believe that their way is the right way and the world will concur as soon as we’re done beating it into them. I have a Pre-9/11 Mindset because I have not let the Post-9/11 Mindset infect my spirit with its yearning for a bygone era that more closely resembles the Dark Ages than the Renaissance.

Pre-9/11 Mindset Post-9/11 Mindset
Enduring Peace Perpetual War
Prosperity Poverty and Debt
Civil Rights The Patriot Act
Human rights Torture
Accountability Corruption
Reality Fear

I have a Pre-9/11 Mindset because I have a mind, and I use it.

Bush: Back On The Bottle?

Posted by on August 12, 2008 at 3:32 am. 45 Comments :

Bush DrunkThe national embarrassment that is our president once again raises its reddened face. In photographs from the Olympics in China, it appears that recovering souse, George W. Bush, is relapsing.

In one picture his face is flushed, his eyes droop, and his expression is dopey. In all fairness, that may be his normal expression. However, the bloody scrape on his arm suggests that he has recently taken a less than normal fall.

In the other picture, Bush appears to be having trouble remaining upright without considerable help. It takes three men to prop up the wobbly boozer-in-chief.

Don’t it make ya feel proud?

This is the man that John McCain’s 3rd term would seek to emulate if, Heaven forbid, he gets the chance. However, this is not the first evidence of Bush’s backsliding. First and foremost, that high bar of American journalism, the National Enquirer, wrote about it three years ago.

EOnline reported last year that Bush’s return to drinking drove Laura to move out of the White House and to a possible split-up. Other rumors had her house hunting in Dallas for a post-presidency home away from George.

Both the Globe and Examiner covered Laura’s “eruption” at her hubby’s imbibing.

Just last month Bush accused Wall Street of getting drunk and having a hangover. Perhaps they were binging together. We know how close they are.

This is a president who can’t stay upright on a bicycle and who nearly chokes to death on pretzels. Maybe we’ll get a better picture of the man when Oliver Stone’s movie “W” is released in a couple of months. Stone’s script reportedly has Bush Sr. telling his no-good progeny that…

“You never kept your word once…you’re only good for partying, chasing tail, driving drunk…You deeply disappoint me.”

He deeply disappoints us all. This is what America gets when they vote for the guy they’d most like to have a beer with.

On The Passing Of Tony Snow

Posted by on July 12, 2008 at 11:16 am. 13 Comments :

Tony Snow, former Fox News anchor, radio talk show host, and press secretary to George W. Bush, has succumbed to the cancer that he has been battling for many years. He was 53 years old.

I have written about Snow extensively over the years, with little positive to say. But this is not the time to dwell on that. Snow leaves behind a wife and three small children, and this is surely a tremendous loss for them, as it is for his many friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers on the Right.

But it is also a loss for our nation and for the pursuit of truth. Snow was the consummate insider. He was there as a speech writer for George Bush Sr. He was there at the birth of Fox News. He has had unique exposure to the twin powers of government and media – an interdisciplinary complex that I believe is far more dangerous than the military-industrial one that Eisenhower warned us about.

When it comes time to wax autobiographical, press secretaries and journalists are often the source of astonishing revelations about the inner workings of their fields. If Scott McClellan’s recent book purports to tell us “What Happened,” just imagine what Snow might have revealed if he had the opportunity to express himself without the constraints of his professional service. Whether he ever would have done so completely and candidly, we will never know. But he has been rather blunt on occasion in the past. ThinkProgress had compiled some commentary by Snow prior to his appointment at the White House that refers to the president as “an embarrassment,” “impotent,” and more.

In his career, Snow has exhibited a reliably rightist tone to his pronouncements in both the public and private sectors. As press secretary, he stubbornly affirmed the lies and misrepresentations of the White House. But he has also ventured off the plantation to deliver unexpected truths about the people and places he’s observed. We need much more of the latter. That’s the sort of forthright expression that can be truly beneficial politically, historically, and culturally.

With Snow’s untimely passing we can only wonder what might have happened; what might have been.

Bush Nominates Clifford May To Propaganda Board

Posted by on July 12, 2008 at 4:50 am. 1 Comments :

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is the federal agency responsible for all U.S. government and government sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting. Its affiliates include the Voice of America, Alhurra, Radio Free Europe, and Radio and TV Martí. If its mission was not originally intended to be a purveyor of propaganda, the Bush administration has seen to it that that is what it has become.

Now President Bush has made his latest attempt to further mire the agency in disgrace by nominating Clifford May to the Board. May is a former Republican National Committee communications director and the President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, whose list of directors and advisors reads like a who’s who of neocon warmongers. He is an advocate of torture abroad, the suspension of civil liberties at home, and always the supremacy of America by virtue of its military might. As a writer for the National Review and a frequent guest on television news programs, he has a record of deliberately inflammatory and partisan rhetoric. Here are a few examples:

On coddling terrorists: “[Democrats] demand that foreign terrorists abroad be given the same privacy protections enjoyed by American citizens here at home.”

Actually, Democrats were demanding that Americans be given the privacy protections they are promised by the Constitution.


On the success of the surge: “…the threat of an Iraqi civil war has diminished and there is no ‘resistance’ movement to speak of.”

Since May made this claim, 236 more American troops died in Iraq, along with 4,591 Iraqis.

On the Left as traitors: “…some of those on the left who would like to see America defeated in Iraq as a demonstration exercise that U.S. power never, never can be used for good.”

Setting aside the repulsive assertion that the Left is rooting for defeat, May erroneously implies that there is some good in BushCo’s occupation of Iraq.

This isn’t the first time Bush has used the BBG for blatantly political purposes. He had previously installed the utterly corrupt Kenneth Tomlinson as chairman. Tomlinson, thankfully, didn’t last long.

The circumstances proximate to May’s nomination further illustrate Bush’s purposeful mission to staff the BBG with faithful cronies. To make way for May, Bush had to withdraw his previous nominee, Mark McKinnon. McKinnon himself is a loyal Republican who worked on both Bush presidential campaigns. He was also a sitting member of the Board, having received a recess appointment from Bush in December of 2006. McKinnon’s fate was sealed, however, when earlier this year he resigned his post as the lead media consultant for John McCain saying…

“I just don’t want to work against an Obama candidacy. [Electing Obama] would send a great message to the country and the world.”

Despite insisting that he remains a “friend and fan” of the McCain campaign, whatever loyalty and qualifications he had that justified his prior service and nomination were null and void as he no longer displayed sufficient unquestioning partisanship. The Bushies require greater obsequiousness than that.

May still needs to be confirmed by the Senate to take a seat on the Board. With less than six months remaining in Bush’s term it would be idiocy for the Senate to do so. That obviously doesn’t rule out the possibility that they will. The FISA bill that the Senate passed last week was fully in line with May’s position on the issue. And it passed with Barack Obama’s vote. That should be an indication of how much we can rely on the Senate to do the right thing.

The Suppresion Of The Prosecution Of George W. Bush for Murder

Posted by on July 7, 2008 at 12:39 am. 1 Comments :

Former Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, has published several best-selling books and received many awards for his writing. But he is still having trouble getting the media to cover the release of his current book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.”

The book’s provocative title foretells a serious exploration of the legal case to be made for trying Bush for the murder of American soldiers killed in Iraq. The publisher describes the book as…

“…a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses-a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world.”

But this successful, highly regarded author is being given a cold shoulder by the media who are instrumental in the marketing of such products. Bugliosi even reports that Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and MSNBC are declining to book him for interviews. He says that…

“They are not responding at all. I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they’d fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left.”

Even worse, Jon Meacham of Newsweek admitted that the reason Bugliosi is being shut out is that, “…there’s a kind of Bush-bashing fatigue out there.” The notion that editors are blocking the promotion of controversial works on that basis is rather chilling. Firstly, because there is no foundation for drawing such conclusions. While there is plenty of disdain for Bush, who many historians have crowned the worst president ever, I have seen no evidence of the public tiring of documentary proof of that designation. Secondly, because the merit of the content ought to be the determinative factor as to whether to engage the author. If the work is meaningful, well-constructed, and has value to our society and its institutions, the media ought not to bury it for reasons that are arbitrary or biased.

If someone of Bugliosi’s stature is inhibited in this manner, what does that portend for lesser known authors? What does that portend for free speech? Why can’t they just let the people decide?