Like Kryptonite To Stupid
What. An. Idiotic. Tool.
I’ll tell my kids someday, “There was a period of about eight years when everyone at the most important jobs in our government were crazy, stupid, evil or a combination of the three. No, really. This recent bout of competence we’re going through was a rarity at the turn of the century. Bong! Oh, viagra spam is so unseemly when they beam it right into your brain.”
This is the kind of thing Bush always does. Dismiss the experts, put down people with intelligence and expertise, deride them and ignore them in favor of short term policies with slightly populist overtones that turn out to be a mess. This is the same sort of thing she pulled when she voted for the Iraq War.
“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” the New York senator said when asked to name a credible economist who supported her proposal.
“We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans,” said Clinton, a former first lady who would be the first woman president.
Ron Suskind detailed this sort of world view back in 2004.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
With this move - and many others - Clinton continues to move away from a reality-based view of the world.
Every day the dumb flows like water.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation “embarrassing,” and some members of Congress vow to fix it.
The requirement applies to former South African leader Mandela and other members of South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC), the once-banned anti-Apartheid organization. In the 1970s and ’80s, the ANC was officially designated a terrorist group by the country’s ruling white minority. Other countries, including the United States, followed suit.
Because of this, Rice told a Senate committee recently, her department has to issue waivers for ANC members to travel to the USA.
Remember we won the war (we even got a strategy for VICTORY two years later). No wonder John McCain wants 100 years more of it.
Over 3,500 servicemembers have died since Bush declared “Mission Accomplished”.
Good night, and good luck.
Clearly this is good for out of touch John McCain.
Americans’ confidence in the economy continued to plunge this month as their homes lost value at the fastest rate in two decades, according to reports released on Tuesday.
The data suggested that the housing slump was far from a recovery and the job market might continue to weaken, ratcheting up pressure on the Federal Reserve, which began a two-day meeting on Tuesday, to take steps to stave off a prolonged slowdown.
The reports were consistent with a recession, economists said, though some optimists have insisted the economy is growing, albeit at a snail’s pace. President Bush remained in the latter camp at a news conference on Tuesday, where he said the economy was facing “a tough time.”
In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.
I’m not saying that we would sit on our hands if Iran attacked Israel, but its amazing how easily Sen. Clinton accepts the premise that Iran is going to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. A few months ago she wouldn’t answer hypotheticals, now she’s launched nuclear war on Iran over a hypothetical.
Clinton further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on Good Morning America Tuesday, ABC News’ Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
Of course, when Sen. Clinton was faced with the most important foreign policy decision of her life she chose incorrectly.
So why would the Bushies know the difference between Nepal and Tibet?
Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.
The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.
Who’s in charge here?
Our worst president ever continues his string of horrific approval ratings by hitting 28% in the AP-Ipsos poll, the lowest they’ve ever measured for him. Why does this show how out of touch Republicans are? 7% of Democrats approve. 17% of independents approve. And 60% of the Republicans approve of him.
I think its funny the media and the right keep pushing the Obama cult meme when its clear that the messianic leader with a group of sheep-like followers who are resistant to facts and information clear as day to the outside world is the Republican party.
And they’ve annointed as their next cult leader candidate, a Bush clone in John McCain.
German PM Angela Merkel will not be attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics due to China’s ongoing brutality in Tibet.
British PM Gordon Brown will not be attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics due to China’s ongoing brutality in Tibet.
There was a time in my lifetime where this sort of thing started at the White House and emanated out to the rest of the world’s leaders.
I hope it’s just that that sort of leadership is in hibernation due to the current unqualified occupant, and not any sort of long term thing.
The same old garbage wrapped up in a shinier package.
The likely Republican presidential nominee was asked Wednesday at a town-hall style meeting if he would reject “the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war,” a reference to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq without it having attacked the United States.
“I don’t think you could make a blanket statement about pre-emptive war, because obviously, it depends on the threat that the United States of America faces,” McCain told his audience at Bridgewater Associates Inc., a global investment firm.
Using this analogy, Obama is not the Mac (an elegant well functioning OS I happen to be a switcher to, but with limited appeal), but he is in fact the iPod. A tiny little device that was underestimated at its debut but soon, in aggregate, grew to dominate the market and upend an entire industry.
John Yoo’s memo giving the administration an escape clause for illegal acts in the war in terror has been released. If you look at it, his other work, and the interviews he has given its stunningly clear that he has no idea what the hell he’s doing (nor does Cheney’s legal guy, David Addington). It’s not that I disagree with the conservatism of it, it’s that his basic argument boils down to “if the president does it, it must be legal”. As Richard Nixon can testify, that assertion is without any grounding - legal, moral, or otherwise.
Yet, at least when the president is conservative (they would give no such latitude to Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton), the right will always err on the side of executive discretion.
Bush, like Cheney, was booed throwing out the opening pitch for the Nationals. Disliking the president is the new national pastime.
Add another to the list.
An aide to President Bush has resigned because of his alleged misuse of grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development when he worked for a Cuban democracy organization.
Felipe Sixto was promoted on March 1 as a special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and stepped forward on March 20 to reveal his alleged wrongdoing and to resign, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Friday. He said Sixto took that step after learning that his former employer, the Center for a Free Cuba, was prepared to bring legal action against him.
Stanzel said the alleged wrongdoing involved the misuse of money when Sixto was an official at the center.
Could they be that stupid? That craven? That evil? You bet. But it won’t matter. The people who take the time to watch are not the people you need to be concerned about. The evil, the stupid, and the ignorant are what has pushed us into the ditch and keep us there.
President Bush’s policies made it harder for us to be stewards of our environment by protecting endangered species.
In January of ‘09 we’re just going to have to hit CTRL-Z for a month or two.
The true legacy of George W. Bush is less people dumb enough to call themselves Republicans.
Remember, John McCain just doesn’t understand economics… and he won’t learn any more in the next 8 months that he hasn’t in his many decades in the senate. Now, about that economy of ours.
A rise in jobless claims and a drop in a key forecasting gauge provided the latest evidence that the U.S. economy is faltering and may be slipping into recession.The Conference Board, a business-backed research group, said Thursday that its index of leading economic indicators fell in February for the fifth consecutive month. The index, which is designed to forecast where the nation’s economy is headed in the next three to six months, dipped 0.3 percent to 135.0 in February after slumping 0.4 percent the month before.
Surely it must have been a slip for Maureen Dowd to align the artistry of my late husband, Gene Kelly, with the president’s clumsy performances. To suggest that “George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly” represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight. If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.
When Gene was compared to the grace and agility of Jack Dempsey, Wayne Gretzky and Willie Mays, he was delighted. But to be linked with a clunker — particularly one he would consider inept and demoralizing — would have sent him reeling.
George W. Bush will hold on to the Iraq war forever. He doesn’t possess the ability to look introspectively, to care for one measly second about the lives his mad decisions have ended. He doesn’t care. He’s incapable of caring.
And John McCain and the rest of the Republicans are no different.
The income growth of the super rich far outpaces the rate of taxation.
A new report by the IRS on America’s top 400 income-tax payers shows that the super-wealthy are gaining a larger share of the income pie, but are paying a lower share of taxes.
The report, obtained by my Journal colleague Tom Herman, profiles the so-called Fortunate 400 (as measured by adjusted gross income or AGI). The last time the IRS released such a report, it sparked a heated war of words between the right and left over inequality.
This time, the data are even more provocative.
In 2005, you needed at least $100.3 million in AGI to make the list — more than triple the amount needed in 1995. This is roughly in keeping with the increases in the Forbes 400 list, where the wealth needed to make the 400 has more than tripled since 1992 to $1.3 billion. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the same rich people are getting richer, since the income list tends to be fluid. It just means that the fortunes being made today are much greater than those of the past.
What’s most striking however is the income and tax shares. The IRS report shows that the Fortunate 400 now control 1.15% of the nation’s income — twice the share they controlled in 1995. Over the same period, however, the average income tax paid by this same group has fallen from 30% to 18%. That’s due mainly to the Bush tax cuts.
Ah, to be mega-wealthy during the years of Bush. You just end up mega-wealthier.
A Bush administration plagiarist comes to light.
