This was no ordinary president. This was a president who was, by any measure, absolutely remarkable. Just not in a good way. This is a president who is now neglecting the worst economic crisis in generations so he can instead concentrate on using the presidential office to “secure his legacy”; while America plunges into crisis, this president is so busy trying to make people believe he did a good job that he’s not even doing his job any more.

But campaigning cannot a legacy make; this president’s actions have already defined that legacy.

This was a president who came to office by stealing an election. Who lost not only the popular vote, by a substantial margin, but who in truth lost the electoral vote: had it not been for an illicit purge of legitimate Democratic voters by an assistant of his brother, the 2000 election would have gone the other way.

This was a president who initially distinguished himself by violating significant international treaties, treaties meant to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. All so he could justify a trillion-dollar boondoggle to benefit corporate interests, a missile defense “shield” which could be easily, naturally, more anonymously, and even more cheaply circumvented by not using missiles to deliver nuclear weapons.

This was a president who, perhaps because of the terrorist angle to the missile defense argument, systematically ignored terrorist threats and allowed the most horrific and damaging terror attack in history to hit the United States. Despite repeated specific warnings about who, when, and how, this president ignored all warnings; despite the arrests of two terror suspects learning how to fly but not land commercial jets, no follow-up action was taken. And then, after the attack, this president shamelessly used the fear it generated to his own political advantage.

This was a president who drove the nation into a three-trillion-dollar war which killed more than four thousand of our troops and hundreds of thousands of civilians, a war which was not only unnecessary, but which even caused things to become worse. A war which was so badly mismanaged that it still boggles the mind. A war for control over the flow of oil. A war which claimed to fight terror but instead benefitted terrorists immensely.

This was a president who reversed our long-standing commitment to a policy of never being the first to begin a military strike.

This was a president who reversed our long-standing commitment to never torture.

This was a president who took a budget surplus, the strongest trend to fiscal solvency in generations, and turned it into the deepest deficit and debt in history, not just through massive spending on a destructive, unnecessary war, but through unchecked partisan pork-barrel spending unlike anything seen before.

This was a president who oversaw the deconstruction of countless jobs, the descent of the American wage-earner, the slow but persistent war against unions and worker’s rights, and the relentless expansion of the divide between rich and poor.

This was a president who consistently, even doggedly, acted against the American people at every turn, in favor of wealthy institutions. He gave tax breaks to the rich and tokens to the middle class and poor, tokens cancelled out by reductions in public services. He gave license to corporations to poison, pollute, pillage, and plunder so as to deprive the people of health, environment, and security. Whenever there was a conflict between citizen and corporation, this president always, without fail, sided against the citizen.

This was a president who effectively repealed the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, denying Americans the right to privacy.

This was a president who effectively violated, weakened, or obviated eight of the ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

This was a president who politicized the entire government, appointing people to lifetime positions based solely on their political affiliations and partisan loyalty.

This was a president who used the American soldier to legitimize his actions, but never missed an opportunity to short-change and abuse the soldiery.

This was a president who either ignored the intelligence machinery of the nation or else directed it to whitewash intelligence for political purposes, and then blamed his own failures on them.

This was a president who used fear against the American people, from false frightening threats of nuclear attacks so as to start a war to false frightening terror alerts to win an election.

This was a president who incessantly lied to the American people.

This was a president who let New Orleans drown while he ate cake and strummed a guitar, then halted life-saving emergency rescue operations so he could pose for some photo ops.

This was a president who took more time off on vacation than any president in history.

This was a president who took international goodwill and respect and turned it into contempt, anger, and suspicion.

This was a president who tried to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and the educational system.

This was a president who left the nation in a state of utter disrepair: a crumbling infrastructure, bleeding manufacturing jobs, an economy devastated by deregulation and neglect, with a debt of literally unimaginable depth.

And this is not even a comprehensive list.

This president need not bother to waste time in his attempt to polish his legacy; his legacy is truly secure and undeniable. Since he seems uninterested in working hard to help fix the economic mess he has helped to create, he should simply be true to his legacy, and spend the remaining twenty-seven days on vacation. Goodness knows that having no president is a far better alternative than having this one.

Stumble it!

It’ll be nice to have a president who values the people of the nation at least as much as he values its institutions. Over the past eight years, Bush has given far higher priority to energy companies, financial institutions, drug companies, media corporations, so forth and so on. Whenever there was a conflict of interest between the American people and these organizations, Bush always acted against the interests of the people.

In the last days of his administration, Bush is spending most of his time enacting all manner of new edicts which essentially do all the things he couldn’t even bring himself to do before, a massive free-for-all, a giveaway to the fat cats and a serious reaming for the American people. Among the slew of new scandalous decisions: allowing more farm manure runoff, more mining waste runoff, more pollution near national parks, uranium mining in the Grand Canyon, allowing concealed weapons in national parks, allowing religion to be used to deny women abortions, transporting toxic materials through populated areas, allowing truckers to drive longer hours without sleep, giving more freedom to fisheries to damage the environment, and more corporate activity that could kill off endangered species.

Fortunately, there is talk of Congress employing a loophole which could–hopefully–easily repeal all of Bush’s changes in the last two months of his presidency. If not, then this last-minute fire sale to corporate interests, this lame-duck assault on the safety and rights of the American people could prove to be a major distraction for the Obama administration.

At the very least, we won’t have a president who is actively out to harm the American people. As Keith Olbermann noted, it’s almost as if Bush decided, upon his election, to do the most damage to the country possible. Or as Aaron Sorkin put it about a fictional Republican, he’s someone who says he loves America but clearly can’t stand Americans.

Stumble it!

Bush just isn’t getting any breaks on Iraq. Pretty surprising footage, which you’ve probably seen a thousand times already:

From Bloomberg:

In Arab culture, throwing shoes is a grave show of disrespect. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” the man shouted in Arabic. …

The shoe-thrower, who was in a group of journalists, was wrestled to the ground and taken away. “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq,” shouted the man, later identified by the Associated Press as Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi- owned station based in Cairo, Egypt.

The guy actually had pretty good aim. Though it’s hard to judge, it seems that he might have hit Bush if Bush hadn’t ducked both times. The shoes might have been a little high, though–like I said, hard to judge.

And yes, it’s just one guy, the other journalists apologized, with all the deaths in Iraq it’s inevitable that at least someone would feel this way, etc. But it’s pretty iconic, don’t you think? If this is the footage that gets remembered when we think back about Iraq, it would be pretty damned appropriate.

It’s also a small peek at authenticity in an arena where little is authentic. Everything about Bush and Iraq that the U.S. can control, especially at high-level events like these, is scripted; for real life to intrude like it did here is worth noting because it’s the only thing you can be sure is true to life instead of being some kind of manufactured political play.

The thing to look for is how the Iraqis in general respond. Will they see this guy as a jerk, or will he become an underground hero? My bet is on the latter, which doesn’t bode well for him–who knows what the people in charge will do with him if they consider him a threat to the manufactured imagery.

If you think that all this not really something that’s important or relevant, remember that pageantry is very important with Bush and Iraq. Remember that other iconic moment, from the beginning of the war, where a crowd of “Iraqis” toppled the statue of Iraq? The scene you see again and again whenever a TV program shows a quick succession of images recalling the Iraq War? That even was a pure fabrication from start to finish, one that the media willingly went along with (and still goes along with today).

I see it as wholly relevant, perhaps definitively so: Bush going out not under the carefully staged guise of a patron statesman seeing off a country he liberated, but as a dirt-low huckster with an angry audience throwing shoes at him.

This is the pageantry Bush deserves, and I’m glad he’s getting it.

Stumble it!

You know those political statements you hear sometimes in which the sheer number of lies and inaccuracies embedded in such short utterance just overwhelm you?

GIBSON: You’ve always said there’s no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

The “intelligence failure.” You have to sometimes wonder if Bush, at this point in time, truly believes the line of BS that he has been spinning all these years about Iraq. Maybe, like Reagan, he actually does; it’s hard to tell. But if you recall what actually happened, the intelligence failure was not at the CIA end, it was at the executive end. Or has everyone forgotten that the Bush administration, fully intent on steamrolling forward into a new Gulf War, (a) completely and intentionally ignored evidence given to them by the intelligence community that said Iraq was not a threat (just as they ignored terror threats before 9/11), (b) spun intelligence reports like political talking points so as to emphasize the propaganda they felt best helped their established political goals, and (c) completely made up crap as the metaphorical whipped cream with a cherry on top–you know, like Cheney’s assertion that our intelligence not only told us that Hussein was 6 months away from completing a nuclear weapon, but that we knew exactly where the Iraqi nuclear facilities were.

There was no “intelligence failure” in the traditional sense, or if there was, it was far less significant than the fact that the Bush administration, as with everything else they were involved in, politicized the intelligence information that came their way, just as they politicized scientific data, the Constitution and our laws, the bureaucracy and the entire legal system, so on and so forth.

The problem with politicized intelligence data: it fails.

“A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein”? Yeah, because you told them so. You were the head cheerleader in that propaganda assault, remember? You were the one releasing only information that led people to that conclusion, remember? You were the one sanitizing even data being given to Congress, and then claiming they made an independent decision on the matter because they saw the same data you did. And, it “wasn’t just people in my administration”?? Listen to this guy cast the blame on others, as if it was everyone but himself–world leaders, the Congress, people in his administration–everyone and anyone but himself. All Bush has to do is utter the phrase “the buck stops here,” and he’ll break irony but good.

As for everyone else having the “same intelligence”? That part is pure fiction.

But Bush didn’t stop there:

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

I can’t find an emphatic enough synonym for “unbelievable.” Either Bush really is buying into his own line of crap, or he believes that everyone else has. Bush said this years ago and keeps saying it, even though the facts are so blindingly clear they hurt: Hussein did let the inspectors in, Hussein’s claims that he did not have WMD were true, and it was Bush who yanked the inspectors out.

But note Bush’s re-writing of the question: the question clearly intended to ask, “if the intelligence had been right and shown that Hussein was not a threat”–a question that makes sense. But Bush did not answer that question. Instead, he assumed that the question was, “If the intelligence had been right in that the WMD were actually there, would there have been an Iraq war?” And that question makes no sense–after all, the war was completely predicated upon the fiction that the WMDs were present; if the “intelligence” had been correct, it would have been no different than what happened. Here, Bush must be (a) an idiot, (b) so entrenched in his lies that he literally cannot imagine anything else, or (c) both. My vote is for “c.”

But Bush gets the Academy Award for irony when he answers this question:

GIBSON: Greatest accomplishment? The one thing you’re proudest of?

BUSH: I keep recognizing we’re in a war against ideological thugs and keeping America safe.

Do I even have to explain that one?

Stumble it!

Few people have been paying attention to George W. Bush, and I for one stopped paying attention to his poll numbers after he stalled at 28~30% for several months. Just took a look, and saw that despite a few polls putting him in the 26-to-29% range, Bush has been festering between 20 to 23%. That is the lowest rating for any president in the last 70 years–lower than Nixon when he resigned, lower than Truman’s lowest.

Bush, meet dust bin of History.

Stumble it!

Reagan got a big airport in Washington D.C. Dubya gets a small sewage plant in San Francisco.

The appropriateness of this designation is so blindingly obvious that it needs no further comment.

Stumble it!

Man.

I’m going to blog more on this later, but Bush & McCain really outdid themselves today with sheer idiocy and hypocrisy.

Really. Imagine Bill Clinton, in mid-2000, going to Israel and comparing then-Governor Bush with Hitler appeasers. Republicans would have gone nuclear with rage, not the least of which would have been at the idea of an American president going overseas and using a foreign podium to slam another American politician.

And then there’s McCain, whose big day was trounced on by Bush’s speech. Personally, I think Bush did McCain a favor by eclipsing his “Magic Pony” speech, in which he’s finishing his first term in office and he presides over a world of winsome faeries and prancing unicorns. All McCain could do in Bush’s shadow was to agree that that nasty Obama man was indeed an appeaser.

And then the wingnuts, apparently attracted to stupidity light moths to flame, chimed in. Reserving further comment for later, I will simply let you watch Chris Matthews utterly annihilate the right-wing talking head as an unimaginably blustering moron. It is literally breathtaking.

Some days you can be so thoroughly stupid that even your pals in the media come out and call you a laughable moron.

Stumble it!

Wow, the right-wingers are really showing their true colors as bigots. They just filibustered (what, the 5,349,816th time this session?) a bill that would make it possible for workers to sue for pay discrimination, essentially killing it. Obama and Clinton returned to D.C. to vote for it, and McCain stayed away, signaling that he would have voted to kill it anyway.

Let’s rehash: this is based upon a scummy re-interpretation of law by the Bush administration. The original law was intended to make it so that if you found out your employer was paying you less than another worker for the same job because you were the wrong gender or race, you could sue them, so long as you filed suit 180 days after the last occurrence of the discriminatory pay. That was obviously meant to be structured so that the 180 day deadline happened after the last disparate paycheck was issued.

In a suit based upon this law, an employer tried to claim that the 180-day deadline started when the initial decision was made to issue unequal pay, taking advantage of wording that was just nebulous enough to allow for that interpretation (if you’re a complete idiot). Co-workers don’t immediately disseminate how much money they make to all coworkers, and employers often strongly discourage (or even try to prohibit) such sharing in any case. Finding such disparity within 6 months of the initial pay difference is so rare to discover that the law would essentially be meaningless under the new interpretation. It’s about as obvious as it can get that this was not the way the law was supposed to work.

The plaintiff, Ms. Lilly Ledbetter, won her case, and all the appeals until it reached the conservative-stacked 11th circuit (a spin-off of the 5th circuit, the most conservative in the country)–whereupon the law suddenly changed to support discrimination. Then the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, and naturally, the Bush administration jumped on the company’s side, filing a brief in support of the bigotry, in opposition to the EEOC’s rational application of the law in accordance with decades of precedence. And the 5-member Republican majority on the Supreme Court voted along straight party lines to uphold the ludicrous reinterpretation that essentially gutted the law. (Message: if you’re a corrupt, lawbreaking corporation, now is the time to get your suits before the high court! Get the payoffs while they last!)

Some right-wingers used the “it’s the law’s fault” defense, saying that they’d like to fight against discrimination, but darn it, the law is just so clearly written to be stupid, we have no choice but to follow it and be stupid ourselves. The Bush administration made no such dodges; they simply claimed [PDF] that once a decision was made to discriminate, a corporation could not be expected to remember that it had initiated such discrimination beyond 6 months, and it would be a travesty if people were allowed to sue after discrimination had continued for years and years. (They even made the deranged argument that the Ledbetter law would discourage allegations of discrimination from being “expeditiously resolved.”)

So if a corporation got away with discrimination for 180 days, then they were home free–untouchable from that point on. As I pointed out before, this asinine view of the law just begs for abuse, and is even institutionalized in posterity if pay increases are decided as a percentage of initial pay levels.

Well, no problem–just re-word the law so that it clearly states the obvious intent. But there’s a big problem–no, two big problems: one, the president–who vowed to veto the reworded bill, and now the Senate Republicans, who just filibustered it to death before it could even get to the president’s desk.

So the conservative wingnuts in all three branches of government have not voiced their intent to let bigotry reign.

Ready to vote yet?

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the insidious Liberal Media™ continues to call Republican obstruction “blocking” or “denying” in their headlines, even eschewing the correct term “filibuster” in the full text of most of the articles covering this story (the few that there are, that is). They showed no such reluctance to use the word “filibuster” almost endlessly in the far more rare cases when Democrats blocked a handful of the most extremist right-wing judicial nominees.

Oh, and here’s a bonus bit of Republican hypocrisy:

Republicans said Democrats were playing politics, by timing the vote to give the Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, time to return to the Capitol from the campaign trail. Both senators spoke in support of the bill before the vote.

Yes, how terrible that they allowed senators time to vote on legislation. As opposed to four years ago, when Kerry returned to D.C. to vote for a veteran’s health care vote… and the Republican leadership delayed the vote so Kerry couldn’t vote on it. Those Republicans are just pips, aren’t they?

Stumble it!

You know how Bush (along with his supporters) likes to say that history will judge him? (No doubt in an attempt to delay judgment till well after he’s dead.) Well, the early verdict is in, and it doesn’t look too good for him. 109 noted historians, among them Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winners, were asked to judge Bush, and fully 61% call him the “worst in the nation’s history.”

However, 35% of the respondents had a more favorable impression, saying that he ranked only somewhere among the worst ten presidents (though a few of those said that only James Buchanan saved Bush from coming in dead last). Others in that 35% credited their generosity to a hesitancy to decide too soon: “It is a bit too early to judge whether Bush’s presidency is the worst ever,” said one historian; “though it certainly has a shot to take the title. Without a doubt, it is among the worst.”

In fact, only 4% of the respondents ranked Bush among the 2nd-to-30th group, and half of them–two historians–dared call Bush’s tenure a success.“

It’s not as if these people did not explain their reasoning, either:

”No individual president can compare to the second Bush,“ wrote one. ”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.“

”With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,“ said another historian. ”When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.“

One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: ”the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.“ Another classified Bush as ”an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .“ Still another remarked that Bush’s ”denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.“

”It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,“ concluded one respondent. ”His domestic policies,“ another noted, ”have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.“

”George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,“ wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. ”Bush does only two things well,“ said one of the most distinguished historians. ”He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.“

And there’s more. But I think that covers the high points.

Stumble it!

Remember those millions of White House emails that happened to get lost? And the backups were lost too? And then the hard disk drives these were all stored on accidentally destroyed? And the emails from the alternate email system many used were also lost, along with their backups if there ever were any? And that the lost emails just happened to cover periods of time that happened to coincide with likely periods of White House lawbreaking?

I suspect that even anyone unfamiliar with technology would find this all unlikely, unless you were so biased in favor of the Bush administration that you would believe excuses involving the Easter Bunny. But to those who have even a rudimentary understanding of how computers work, this all comes across as such a stupid, blatant load of BS that it is rather unbelievable that criminal prosecutions are not already in progress.

If you would like a more detailed explanation of much of that story with the perspective of experts in such things, then read this post from Daily Kos. If you want the story from a less biased source, I was only able to find this article from the AP; for some strange, unexplained reason, the MSM doesn’t seem to be covering this story much at all. Go figure. A few tech blogs have covered some aspects of it, however.

Stumble it!

It’s official!

“If the House had nothing better to do, this futile partisan act would be a waste of time,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. “The ‘people’s House’ should reflect the priorities of the American people, not the fantasies of left-wing bloggers.”

Well, maybe not me, probably they’re referring to Josh Marshall. This is about the House vote to hold presidential chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt for not responding to subpoenas issued by the House compelling them to testify under oath.

The background is familiar over the past few years: the Bush White house fired nine US Attorneys and apparently pressured a great many more for reasons that are completely improper. The attorneys were pressured to pursue election fraud charges against Democrats even if the attorneys felt the charges had no merit, and they were similarly pressured not to pursue legitimate cases against Republicans. In the investigations that followed, the Attorney General and other White House officials made misleading and false statements under oath to Congress, and the White House has refused to surrender documents and has “accidentally” destroyed mountains of evidence, much pertaining to this case.

The White House refused to allow Miers and Bolton to testify on the grounds of “executive principle,” which is a code word for “we want to deny the checks and balances guaranteed under the Constitution.” Bush offered to allow them to testify, but only if their testimony were not under oath–of course, the only reason to make this demand is if there is an intent to lie to Congress. When House Democrats voted for the contempt charges, the Crybaby Republicans stomped their feet and held their breath, staging a walkout–as if it were the height of impropriety to investigate massive corruption, if the focus of the investigation were Republican.

If anything, the Democratic Congress has been far too soft in its investigation, letting the White House drag its heels and show utter contempt for Congress’ authority for the past year. The move to hold the White House officials in contempt is, quite frankly, very late in coming. The intensity and depth of political corruption in this White House far exceeds that in any presidency in U.S. history, and deserves far more scrutiny and investigation.

Worse, since the Bush White House controls the enforcement of laws, it simply refuses to honor any charges held against it. It is exactly as if a prosecutor were a serial criminal offender, but was put in charge of the prosecution of the cases against himself–and simply declined to do anything. In any other such case, there would be a higher authority that would step in and clobber the scofflaw–but here, we are dealing with an executive branch that has no higher authority than the Constitution, which they hold in contempt and refuse to follow. There being no higher corporeal authority, there is not much else that can be done.

The Bush White House’s legacy will have been to establish that the president is above the law, that he can violate any statute, make any ethical breach, and get away with it.

Theoretically, the next president could reverse these decisions and release any documents not shredded or deleted by this administration (which will probably be very few by that time), and allow justice to be realized. But if a Democratic president tried to do so, he or she would instantly be attacked in fury by conservatives, accusing the new president of “wallowing in the past,” not allowing “bygones to be bygones,” and of “abusing the power of the presidency to exact partisan political retributions.” In short, the claim will be that a president can break any law, refuse to prosecute himself, and then enjoy immunity the day after he leaves office.

After all, this is the presidency that promised to “restore honor and dignity” to the White House.

We’re still waiting.

Stumble it!

Yes, this has already been bouncing around the net quite a bit since Slate published the story (based on a book by their writer Jacob Weisberg) and Harper’s picked it up as well, but the punch line is so funny that it bears yet another re-telling on a blog, just in case somebody here hasn’t seen it yet.

Apparently, when Dubya was governor in Texas, he had a painting mounted on the wall of his office. The painting depicted a horseman riding up a hillside, with others not so far behind him. Here’s the image:

Bush was awed, moved, and inspired by the portrait, so much so, that he sent a memo to his “hard-working staff” to come to his office and view the painting. Here’s the memo text:

STATE OF TEXAS
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR

GEORGE W. BUSH
GOVERNOR

MEMORANDUM

TO: Hard Working Staff Members
FROM: Governor
DATE: April 3, 1995

I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission.

My very close personal friend from Midland, Joe. J. O’Neill, III, recently loaned me a portrait entitled “A Charge to Keep” by W.H.D. Koerner. This beautiful painting will hang on my wall for the next four years.

The reason I bring this up is that the painting is based upon the Charles Wesley hymn “A Charge to Keep I Have”. I am particularly impressed by the second verse of this hymn. The second verse goes like this:

“To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill;
O may it all my powers engage to do my Master’s will”

This is our mission. This verse captures our spirit.

Joe was inspired to make this generous loan during the church service preceding the inaugural ceremonies. It was in this church service when we sang the hymn “A Charge to Keep I Have”.

When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

Thank you for your hard work. Thank you for your service to our State. God Bless Texas!

Weisberg notes, “Bush identified with the lead rider, whom he took to be a kind of Christian cowboy, an embodiment of indomitable vigor, courage, and moral clarity.”

When elected president, Bush took the painting with him to the White House, and hung it in the Oval Office, adding to and expanding the tale of the painting; in 2004, Bush said:

There’s a painting on the wall in the Oval Office that shows a horseman charging up a steep cliff, and there are at least two other horsemen following. It’s a Western scene by a guy named W.H.S. Koerner called “A Charge to Keep.” It’s on loan, by the way, from a guy named Joe O’Neill in Midland, Texas. He was the person, he and his wife Jan, introduced — reintroduced me and Laura in his backyard in July of 1977. Four months later, we were married. So he’s got a — I’m a decision-maker and I can make good decisions. (Applause.)

And so we sang this hymn — this is a long story trying to get to your answer. (Laughter.) This is not a filibuster. (Laughter.) That’s a Senate term — particularly on good judges. (Applause.) The hymn was sung at my first inaugural church service as governor. Laura and I are Methodists. One of the Wesley boys wrote the hymn. The painting is based upon the hymn called, “A Charge to Keep.” I have. The hymn talks about serving something greater than yourself in life. I — which I try to do, as best as I possibly can.

Bush continued to keep the painting in the Oval Office, admiring it and drawing inspiration. In 2007, Sidney Blumenthal noted:

Bush takes special pride in pointing out two paintings he has hung that highlight his motives and legacy. He consciously placed these pictures in the Oval Office at the beginning of his tenure to serve as prescient cultural markers. “The Texas paintings are on the wall because that’s where I’m from and where I’m going,” he says.

One of them, by little-known painter and illustrator William Henry Dethlef Koerner, titled “A Charge to Keep,” depicts a hatless cowboy followed by two other riders galloping up a hill. Their faces are intent as they pursue some quarry in the distance that cannot be seen by others. Or are they being chased? “I love it,” Bush said, further explaining his intimate feeling for the painting to reporters and editors of the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper. He offered his interpretation: “He’s a determined horseman, a very difficult trail. And you know at least two people are following him, and maybe a thousand.” Bush added that the painting is “based” on an old hymn. “And the hymn talks about serving the Almighty. So it speaks to me personally.” When he was governor of Texas and the painting hung in his office, Bush wrote a note of explanation to his staff: “This is us.”

So, there’s the set-up. Almost thirteen years ago, Bush receives a painting and is taken in by it, seeing in the brushstrokes a reflection of himself. This, he decides, is what I am. This is my mission. This striking horseman epitomizes my own Texas spirit, my commitment to God and country. I will be that horseman, I will take his mission on to be my own, to become my calling to fulfill.

The punch line: Koerner did not paint a rugged horseman riding to spread the word of god. Koerner painted the man as a horse thief fleeing a lynch mob.

The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

That explains a lot.

Stumble it!

This from the New York Times:

President Bush said Friday that the court had tacitly approved his use of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“It didn’t say we couldn’t have done — couldn’t have made that decision, see?” Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Chicago. “They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo — whether or not we should have used Guantánamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made.”

Mr. Bush’s remarks put a favorable spin on a ruling that has been widely interpreted as a rebuke of the administration’s policies in the war on terror. The court, ruled broadly last week in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military commissions were unauthorized by statute and violated international law.

The question of whether Mr. Bush had properly used Guantánamo Bay to house detainees was not at issue in the case. At issue was whether the president could unilaterally establish military commissions with rights different from those allowed at a court-martial to try detainees for war crimes.

In other words, Bush is interpreting the meaning of a Supreme Court decision based on what was not specified, reading meaning into it that was not explicitly stated.

So much for strict constructionism.

If the White House press corps had any balls, the next chance they got, they’d ask him if he believed in the principle of strict constructionism, of not reading anything into legal matters that was not explicitly stated; when he replies in the positive, hit him with this.

It’s always fun to see the president of the United States stammer and stutter.

Stumble it!

Remember Bush’s pledge to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” after eight years of the Republican Party machine in high gear trying to smear Clinton with everything they could think of? Well, Clinton may have been nabbed for having sex with an intern, but what Bush has brought to the White House is anything but “honor” or “dignity.” A president who lies to get us into a war and then loses the war? A president who has used false terror warnings as a political weapon, who betrays the American people in favor of wealthy corporations at every turn, who has dirtied the name and reputation of the United States of America all around the world. The first president to enter the White House with a criminal record, who lied about it repeatedly to the American people before he even took office. This is the man who said he’d “restore” such institutions as “honor,” “honesty,” “integrity,” and “dignity” to the White House.

But then, he never promised that he was a genius, that he would be the one with his hands on the wheel. He said that he would “surround himself with good people and build a strong team.” That was the promise to balance his oafishness, his clear lack of intellect: I may not be smart, but I’m a good judge of character, and the people I choose will do the job right.” Of course, he then surrounded himself with manipulative neocons, witless yes-men, and corrupt cronies. His own vice president, whom Bush allowed to choose himself for the job, swears like a sailor, sells the country out piecemeal to corporations, and betrays one of our own intelligence agents so he can dish out political payback. Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, a destructive, conniving political hack halfway on his way to prison. These are the “honorable” men he chooses? And does Bush act with honor in regards to them? When it was revealed that Rove had a part in revealing Valerie Plame’s CIA identity, Bush promised that anyone involved would get the boot–then reneged and backtracked, so that apparently Rove will have to be frog-marched in handcuffs out of the White House before Bush will ask him to resign. The one honorable man Bush did hire–Colin Powell–was disregarded and dismissed while he lasted, his integrity abused to spread lies to the international community.

And it goes on. Every once in a while, we get a peek at others Bush allows into his inner circle. Take, for example, Claude Allen (pictured at far left), a “top domestic policy adviser.” Allen resigned a month ago, ostensibly to “spend more time with his family.” What he did not say, and neither did Bush (it could not be more obvious that Bush knew at the time), was that he had been arrested for felony theft. Allen, whom Bush had appointed to handle the Katrina response team at the White House, and who advised Bush closely on domestic issues, was reportedly going to Target and Hecht’s stores in his spare time and stealing thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.

As explained by the police, Allen would go into the store and buy merchandise, then take it out to his car. He would then return to the store with the empty bag, and place new merchandise identical to that he just bought into the bag while placing additional items into his cart. He would then use his prior receipt to “return” the duplicate goods, and then leave the store with the money as well as the other items in his cart, items he did not pay for. If true, this would indicate a serious character flaw in the man, stealing a few thousand dollars from retail stores when the man makes a $161,000 salary in a West Wing office. Bush even tried to make him an Appeals Court judge, possibly on track for a Supreme Court nomination. (Democrats blocked him from taking the seat, however.)

These are the “good” people Bush surrounds himself with. Now, you might say that Bush can’t be held responsible for these people. However, that is exactly what Bush promised he would do. He promised that he would be responsible for the people he chose–and with that promise, he can’t be excused on the grounds that the people around him are incompetent cronies or corrupt thieves.

Stumble it!

As Bush tries to divert attention by using fear in a new offensive against Congressional Democrats, the media seems to be buying into it, giving Bush good press and riffing on his themes. CNN ran a recent TV-headline titled “Bush’s Staunch Defense,” and failed completely to point out a number of facts completely contradicting Bush’s claims.

But one item I think is worth noting is how this all got started in the first place. By now, most Americans have probably bought into Bush’s recasting this as the Democrats trying to kill the Patriot Act–which is far from the truth. The politically-named act is complex and has many provisions. Many are needed, but some are controversial, and Democrats hold that those controversial provisions threaten Americans’ civil liberties. One example of this is Section 215, which allows the government to look at the personal records of Americans, such as financial, medical, phone, internet, student or library records, without probable cause, in conflict with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Already, some sections of the act have been ruled as too vague or outright unconstitutional by courts.

The current mess came up when Democrats and some Republicans refused to agree to make many of these controversial provisions permanent, instead insisting on sunset clauses that would allow renewal of the provisions upon future review.

Let’s make sure we understand that. The Democrats (plus some Republicans) were not trying to shut down the act. They were not even trying to shut down those provisions. They were only trying to make it so that the most controversial provisions would have to be renewed every few years. That’s all. That’s it.

So, why did the act almost expire? Because Republicans decided they would rather see the act expire than to agree to the sunset clauses on those few provisions. Because they saw they could make a political play–act like the Democrats were trying to kill the law, frighten people into thinking it would expire, and then blame the Democrats for everything.

Even as the Democrats were offering a temporary extension so debate could continue, Bush and the Republicans were screaming at everyone who would listen that the Democrats were trying to kill the act. When, in fact, the Democrats were ready to approve the full act for a number of years, and the Republicans were the ones refusing to accept these extensions.

Essentially, Bush and the GOP want everything or nothing: give us 100% of what we want, or we let the act die and blame the Democrats.

While I am sure they really want the provisions which threaten our civil liberties to become permanent, I am convinced that this is more about simple opportunism: the GOP is in bad shape for the 2006 elections, and Bush is in huge trouble with his domestic spying program, so they are fabricating a non-existent issue in hopes of eliciting fear among the American people. That’s their way of gaining popularity, after all: frightening people. As Aaron Sorkin once wrote for the title role in The American President,

He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

Sorkin got the Republican playbook down to a tee, didn’t he? Because that’s exactly what Bush and the GOP are trying to do here: make you afraid, and tell you who’s to blame.

Stumble it!

Probably you’ve heard Republicans for Bush telling about what a kind, decent, generous, caring, loving person he is. Yes, he had a few “youthful indiscretions,” but that was the alcohol acting, not sweet, gentle George. And since he’s gone clean and sober, he’s a good Christian and a kindhearted soul.

Well, usually.

QuickTime movie, 1 MB; Click photo to play

And let’s not mention that time Bush cruelly mocked the woman on death row in Texas who had become a born-again Christian and was doing good works, with religious leaders begging Bush to reduce her sentence to life imprisonment. How he joked about her dying with reporter Tucker Carlson while using the word “f***” repeatedly.

This instance was well after Bush “recovered,” when he was Governor of Texas. Just like he was in the video clip above.

You see, when someone takes on the appearance of a saint but every so often you see a sinner’s face, it is the saintly face that is almost certainly the facade. There not really much getting around that.

Stumble it!

If you would like to see what Bush and Kerry were both doing throughout their lives and compare them side by side, visit this site. They’ve done a pretty good job, and it is not hard to see where Kerry is the far more competent, honorable, and accomplished man.

I have my own Bush Record page, visited 559 times in October despite the fact that I don’t advertise it–at least, not until now. People just found it. It takes you through a lot of Bush’s history up to his being elected president.

While Kerry, in the Naval Reserves, is regarded a “top-notch officer in every measurable trait,” Bush gets a 25% on his pilot aptitude test and yet is accepted into a champaign unit of the National Guard; while Kerry earns his rank of Lieutenant and goes off to the Mekong Delta where he earns a Silver Star, Bush is promoted without merit and stays at home. While Bush goes AWOL and then is given an easy early out from the guard, Kerry, back at home, is district attorney putting organized crime figures behind bars. Meanwhile, Bush gets arrested for drunk driving. As Bush drives his first family-money-backed business into the ground and begins his second failed business with Saudis funding him, Kerry gets elected to the Senate without even using PAC money.

While Kerry gets appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supports deficit reduction and stops a Dick-Cheney sponsored oil tax, Bush gets involved in a variety of insider trading and other questionable activities; this is also about when he drunkenly explodes in a hail of obscenities and threats against newspaper editor Al Hunt, his wife and their four-year-old child. Kerry, meanwhile, is on the job rooting out corruption as he chairs the Senate subcommittee on the Iran-Contra hearings. The same year Kerry saved the life of Republican Senator Jacob “Chic” Hecht by using the Heimlich maneuver, Bush buys the Texas Rangers in a sweetheart deal and trades away Sammy Sosa. Bush violates the law at least three times in insider trading, tax law violations, and other financial scandals, but as the son of the President is not investigated by the SEC. Soon afterward, Kerry works closely with John McCain to investigate US soldiers still missing in Vietnam, eventually working to normalize relations with Vietnam.

Bush gets elected Governor of Texas and immediately gets a new driver license number to wipe the public records of his criminal past. He accepts a call to jury duty and leaves the legal forms referring to his criminal record blank; he soon has his staff finagle him out of jury duty when he gets assigned to a drunk driving case and will be asked under oath if he was ever arrested on that charge. Kerry, meanwhile, co-sponsors the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Bill, and fights for better pay and benefits for soldiers, veterans, police, and teachers. Bush, on the other hand, gets involved in a corporate scandal and lies under oath to get out of having to testify.

This is just a partial list. Read the two pages and get a better idea of how the two men spent their lives. An alcoholic, draft-dodging three-time-loser in business with an abusive character and a criminal record, versus a decorated Vietnam War vet with a conscience, spending his life putting bad guys behind bars and rooting out corruption.

Not really much of a challenge to pick the better man.

Stumble it!

…what will happen?

Remember how the Bush administration claimed that when the came to occupy the White House, they discovered all kinds of vandalism, from the alleged missing “W” keys on the computer keyboards to much more serious damaging and pilfering? Remember how the GSA, which maintains the White house, debunked the story, saying that most of the damage claims were false, and the “vandalism” was “consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy”? In other words, it was a Bush administration dirty trick after all–they just made it up as a way to attack the Democrats.

To be honest, I’m not worried about the Bush people pilfering all the “J,” “F” and “K” keys from the keyboards when Kerry moves in. I’m much more worried about what damage his administration will do to the country and to the world in the three months they will occupy power whilst knowing they are leaving, and are going to be bitterly, angrily vindictive about it.

I do not consider Bush’s father, H.W. Bush, to have been even nearly as bitter or vindictive, and yet look at what he did: after spending his entire presidency refusing to engage in any messy third-world quagmires, he chose one month after he lost the 1992 election to order 25,000 U.S. troops into Somalia–without an exit plan. Knowing that the start of the operation would appear victorious, strong, forceful and decisive, just as he knew that it would soon turn bloody, violent, and remorseful–on his opponent’s new watch. Bush Sr. knew without a doubt that “winning” in Somalia was impossible; that if Clinton stayed in for too long that he would get caught in a quagmire, and that if Clinton pulled out, the Republicans could thoroughly attack him for weakness and being a “cut and run” president.

No president, unless under dire necessity, should ever begin such a military action, unilaterally, so close to exiting the White House. It was a low, mean and dishonorable thing to do–and violated the trust a president must keep with the military not to use them for political means.

We know that Bush Jr. has even less a problem with abusing the military to achieve his means. What will this Bush administration do when they know they can hand off any number of messy, bloody situations to an incoming John Kerry administration? Will they refuse to fund Iraq, leaving the troops in the cold, so Kerry’s first move will have to be massive emergency funding for the Iraq conflict? Will they make a plethora of last-minute edicts on controversial issues so that Kerry’s first move will have to be deconstructing presidential orders on flag burning, abortion counseling, the pledge of allegiance and other hot-button issues? Or will Dubya go whole hog like his father did and start a military action in a country where there is no chance of winning–say, the Sudan–leaving Kerry the option of watching our soldiers die in a quagmire, or looking weak by cutting and running?

Personally, I will not put thing one past this Bush administration.

Stumble it!

From the Des Moines Register, October 21:

President Bush touted himself as a man of his word Wednesday, reminding a crowd of 4,000 supporters about promises he made four years ago when campaigning in Iowa, and maintaining he’s fulfilled them.

“I kept my word,” Bush said repeatedly at a morning rally held at the North Iowa Fairgrounds in Mason City.

From Knight-Ridder, October 20:

President Bush will end his four-year term having fulfilled about 46 percent of the [178] promises he made during the 2000 presidential campaign, according to an analysis by Knight Ridder. … A similar Knight Ridder analysis found that, during his first term, President Clinton had fulfilled about 66 percent of the 160 commitments that he made during his first presidential campaign.

This Reality Distortion Field Bush puts up is not a mistake; he very much wants people to believe things that are patently untrue–and it’s working. According to PIPA, most Bush supporters have a completely mistaken idea of what Bush stands for. A slight majority are correct on his standing on defense spending (increase), and 70% know that he wants the U.S. to do nation-building in Iraq. But fewer than half know his standing on missile defense, the international court and even (unbelievably) the Kyoto accords–and fewer than 25% know that he opposes nuclear weapons testing bans or the land mine treaty. Only 13% know that he opposes labor and environmental conditions in trade agreements.

Kerry supporters, on the other hand, know their man much better. On only one topic–defense spending–do a minority understand his position, and that’s 43%. On all the other above-mentioned topics, a majority of his supporters know where he stands: International court, 65%; Missile defense, 68%; Kyoto accords, 74%; Nuclear test bans, 77%; Land mine treaty, 79%; Role in rebuilding Iraq, 80%; and Labor/environment in trade agreements, 81%.

In short, people who support Kerry do so because they know that Kerry stands with them on the issues, while Bush has hoodwinked his own supporters into voting for him by making them think that he stands with them on the issues when he really doesn’t.

Stumble it!

Critics point out that Bush failed to take a physical exam required of him by the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, and this got his flight status revoked.

The White House counters that Bush didn’t take the physical because he “was not going to be flying.” Okay, even if we ignore earlier conflicting White House claims about that issue, let’s say that what they now say is true. Bush was not going to be flying.

So here’s the question: why was Bush not going to be flying?

Bush had entered the Guard claiming that he wanted to make flying a part of his life. He has commented on how important flying was to him. Was being a flunky on the campaign staff for a House seat in Alabama more important than that? And why go permanently off of flight status? He would have returned after a few months, why would he not fly again after that?

When you think about it, it doesn’t make too much sense. A physical exam only takes, what, an hour? I don’t think I have ever heard the president say why he made that decision. I’d like to hear it asked, because the only explanation that comes close to making sense is this one.

Stumble it!