There are so many examples of how this party has completely lost its way, but this news item takes the cake.
A group of 31 House Republicans have introduced a resolution “declaring victory in Iraq,” which is bound to evoke images of “Mission Accomplished” and George W. Bush in a flight suit.
The intention of the resolution isn’t actually celebratory. It’s intended to set a political trap by declaring, six weeks into Obama’s presidency, that all responsibility for the six-year conflict, which was initiated by President Bush on flawed evidence and incompetently pursued for much of his presidency, is now Obama’s to lose.
These guys are complete morons. It’s amazing that they would try to declare victory when we still have 150,000 troops in Iraq and the Iraqi government needs to hide from its own people behind our army in the Green Zone!
This is pure politics, but it’s also dumb politics. The GOP is turning into a sideshow.
George W. Bush’s farewell tour has been just as pathetic as his actual presidency. In several days, we’ll finally be able to turn the page on one of the worst presidencies in American history.
As I’ve said repeatedly for the past 6 years, Bush’s failures have little to do with ideology and instead can be traced to his utter lack of competence. He screwed up practically everything he touched.
The Republican Party helped him along. Most Republicans are so consumed with partisan bitterness that George W. Bush still gets an approval rating in the 70 percent range with Republicans. Republicans also went along with massive spending and deficits and an ill-conceived war that has crippled our nation.
I’m very optimistic about Barack Obama’s ability to chart a new path for our country that will return us to peace and prosperity. Many Americans share this optimism according to the polls. Obama’s leadership skills have been on display throughout the transition, and thus far he’s been impressive.
I expect Obama and his team to hit the ground running on Wednesday. They face huge challenges, and yet they will not shrink from doing big things like health care reform and transitioning to a green economy.
Leave it to Joe Klein to sum up the sad spectacle of George W. Bush limping to the finish line of his failed presidency.
That we have slightly more than one President for the moment is mostly a consequence of the extraordinary economic times. Even if George Washington were the incumbent, the markets would want to know what John Adams was planning to do after his Inauguration. And yet this final humiliation seems particularly appropriate for George W. Bush. At the end of a presidency of stupefying ineptitude, he has become the lamest of all possible ducks.
Watching Obama name a cabinet of all-stars is reassuring, though Bush also appointed heavyweights with impressive resumes. You can have the best team in the world, but that team will fail without strong leadership. I’m optimistic that Obama will fare much better than W.
Klein ends his column with a final indictment of Bush’s presidency.
In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one.
The movie is just as bad as the Bush presidency. Josh Brolin gives an inspired performance, but most of the film falls flat.
The film works best when focusing on Bush’s life story and his rise to the presidency. His relationship with his father was central to his life, and his interactions with his parents and Laura inspired the more interesting parts of the film.
Regarding his presidency, however, all we see are caricatures of the people around him. Scenes are invented based upon public statements we saw in other contexts, but they seem forced and inauthentic. Historians can rightfully criticize the roles of administrations officials like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, but the portrayals of these men in the film are ridiculous.
Someday, we’ll see a serious movie that delves into the disasterous Bush presidency and the march to war, but “W” is not that movie. Oliver Stone goes for a lighter touch, but he doesn’t deliver enough laughs to make this a successfult comedy. In the end, it’s mostly a waste of time.
The speeches are getting much tougher tonight at the Democratic convention, though so far the cable networks haven’t been showing all of them.
Bob Casey actually introduced a pretty good line. After pointing out that John McCain voted with George W. Bush over 90% of the time, he said that McCain shouldn’t be referred to a “maverick,” but instead should be referred to as the “sidekick.” Frankly, if this was written by the Obama campaign, they probably should have had a better speaker deliver it, but at least Casey did a decent job with it.
I’m not a fan of George W. Bush or Michael Gerson (one of his former aides who’s now a columnist), but Gerson rightly points out that Bush deserves credit for devoting resources for fighting AIDS, Malaria and other diseases in Africa. Bush has fought hard and worked with Democrats to dramatically increase spending in this area and the efforts are saving lives.
With President George W. Bush, we had a president who made sweeping promises about the importance of fostering democracy around the world, to the point that many of his speeches reminded listeners to the utopian goals of Woodrow Wilson. Unfortunately, Bush and his advisors had no clue about the challenges facing those trying to bring democracy to places like the Middle East. Just as in Iraq, lofty goals were not backed up with preparation or hard work. Instead we had utter incompetence.
Joe Klein reports the following from the U.S,-Islamic World Forum in Doha:
The distress was deeper than exhaustion. Many of the Muslim delegates seemed stunned, finally, by the rush of history unleashed by the Bush Administration. “Everything the United States has favored is now radioactive, especially democracy,” said Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist. The Administration had pushed for elections in places like the Palestinian territories where the essential components of democracy—a free press, a free economy, the rule of law—did not exist. Religious parties had won, or gained momentum, in most of these elections, and the U.S. had backtracked, refusing to accept the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories, re-embracing autocrats like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. “Our indigenous democratic reformers,” Khouri said, “are in retreat across the region.”
This isn’t about conservative or liberal foreign policy. It’s about common sense. Conservatives like George Will and Pat Buchanan saw the folly of Bush’s policies, as did liberals like Ted Kennedy. The greatest tragedy is that real efforts to bring democracy to the world have been set back by this administrations incompetence.
Between 2000 and 2006, earmarks exloded in the federal budget, as the Republican Congress and President Bush made a mockery of their small-government claims. Now that the Democrats are running Congress, Bush has suddenly found religion on earmarks.
Over the past several years, numerous statement made by President Bush and his administration have proven to be false, including statements about WMD, the Iraq war, the events preceding 9/11 and issues like torture and domestic spying. We can now add another one to the list – the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001.
During last year’s presidential campaign, President Bush and John Kerry argued over whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Kerry charged that Bush let bin Laden get away by not choosing to “use American forces to hunt down and kill” him. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.
Now we have the CIA commander on the ground telling his side of the story in a new book to be released. Newsweek breaks the story:
But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”
I just saw Bernsten interviewed on MSNBC. The man is very credible. Again, we have incompetence from the Bush administration, and then they try to cover it up by denying the truth. Pathetic.
Everyone had the same intelligence. This bogus claim has been repeated over and over again by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the entire GOP spin machine in their defense of pre-war WMD claims by the administration. This is not true. It’s a ridiculous claim, and the fact that they are repeating it cast even more doubt on the administrations credibility about pre-war claims.
Senator Bob Graham had a front-row seat during the runup to the Iraq war given his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Calling Bush’s claims “outrageous,” on Sunday he made it clear that most Democrats did NOT have access to the same intelligence as the administration. This should be obvious to everyone. Legislators NEVER have the same access to information, and the Bush administration is notorious for being one of the most secretive administrations since the Nixon years.
If the administration’s main defense is so patently false, how can we trust them? Do they have any credibility left? Graham says no:
The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.
