George W. Bush News

Yet Another Way George W. Bush Helped To Cause The 2008 Financial Crisis

4:57 pm EST July 12th, 2011 | Conservative, Economy, Republicans | 72 Comments

One of the things progressives and conservatives often don’t appreciate is the power a presidential administration has over policy simply by the people they choose to hold vitally important jobs within the government.

Bush, PaulsonAmerica is a massive country, and besides the legislative process, it takes a lot to keep it working. As such, its always best if you appoint competent, capable people to help you run the government.

In the case of George W. Bush, there were three kinds of people he installed in the government. The smallest group was actual, competent people. Very few of these were in place during the Bush years.

The second group of people were the totally incompetent. That includes people like Michael Brown, who had no business running FEMA or Donald Rumsfeld, who got more American servicemen killed as a result of bungled war planning than probably any Secretary Of Defense in U.S. History.

The third, and often most damaging group, were ideologically conservative zealots — people who drink the right-wing kool-aid so much that they would rather bend reality than face it. This group, of course, included the President and Vice-President themselves.

It is this group of people who perverted the Justice Department, made a mockery of diplomacy at the State Department, botched military operations at the Pentagon, and made a general mess of things while running the country. Granted, some people in the Bush administration were incompetent ideological zealots. Alberto Gonzales comes to mind.

(I would also argue there aren’t nearly enough ideological people in the Obama administration.)

In this third group were the people executing the administration’s policy of supporting deregulated commerce, admittedly a holdover from the Clinton era – showing us that badly conceived conservative economic policy knows no party.

In this NY Times profile of outgoing FDIC chair Sheila Bair, we get a taste of what Bush’s policies had done to actual regulation of the work being done in the mortgage industry:

Arriving at the F.D.I.C. that summer, Bair found an agency that was floundering. “There hadn’t been any bank failures in a long time,” she said. “We were in this so-called golden age of banking, regulation had fallen out of favor and the F.D.I.C., which had a reputation as a tough regulator, had fallen on hard times.” Its budget had been slashed, employees had been let go and morale was terrible. Except for a 10-second handshake, she never even spoke to Henry Paulson her first year or so in office.

Alone among the regulators, though, the F.D.I.C. began to home in on subprime lending. By 2006, the subprime industry was running amok, making loans — many of them fraudulent, with hidden fees and abusive terms — to just about anyone with a pulse. Most subprime loans had adjustable interest rates, which started low but then jumped significantly after a few years, making the monthly payments unaffordable for many homeowners. The lenders didn’t care because they sold the loans to Wall Street, which bundled them into mortgage-backed bonds and resold them to investors.

Curbing subprime-lending abuses should have been the job of the Federal Reserve, which has a consumer division. But the Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, with his profound distaste for regulation, could not have been less interested. The other bank regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees national banks, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, which regulates the savings-and-loan industry, should have cared, too. But their responses to the growing problem were at best tepid and at worst hostile. (The O.C.C. actually used its federal powers to block efforts by states to curb subprime abuses.) By the time Bair got to Washington, the O.C.C. had spent a year devising “voluntary subprime guidance” for the banks it regulated, but it had not yet gotten around to issuing that guidance.

Ah, “voluntary” regulation, the regulatory version of Bush’s famous “you covered your ass” statement about the threat of terrorism before 9/11. Even Bush’s SEC chairman, Chris Cox (I would place him in the incompetent appointment category) admitted that expecting our modern robber barons to police themselves was the height of folly.

But that’s what they did here, instead of providing oversight of an industry, they left the industry to its own devices – ignoring the warning signs, then using our money to bail out their pals.

If we had in our government people who truly believed their jobs were about helping America, instead of the zealotry of the Bush era, we’d be much better off today.

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Former Spy: Bush White House Tried To Use CIA To Smear Blogger

10:21 am EST June 16th, 2011 | National Security, Republicans | 30 Comments

If you ever why conservatives try so hard to disappear the Bush presidency, it is because they were a bunch of unethical, dangerous, crooks.
Bush

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

Its things like this that make you roll your eyes when the Obama administration said we shouldn’t look back at what these jackals did to America.

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Mitch Daniels: Architect Of The Bush-Era Debt Crisis?

1:26 pm EST May 16th, 2011 | Politics | 3 Comments

Consortium News on the newest Republican savior-in-waiting:

In other words, the “fiscal conservative” Daniels oversaw the federal budget as it was making its precipitous dive from a $236 billion surplus – then on a trajectory to eliminate the entire federal debt in a decade – to a $400 billion deficit by the time he left in June 2003.

Plus, because of proposals developed on Daniels’s watch – such as tax cuts favoring the rich and unpaid-for projects, including the invasion of Iraq and a new prescription drug plan – the fiscal situation of the federal government continued to sink over the ensuing years, plunging to a trillion-dollar-plus annual deficit by the time Bush left office in 2009.

Though Daniels was surely not at fault for all the elements in this budgetary catastrophe, he was a central player in the early stages of the process. A former political operative for Ronald Reagan and an Eli Lilly pharmaceutical executive, Daniels was the salesman who pitched and defended Bush’s plans.

Certainly, Mitch Daniels was no David Stockman, President Reagan’s first budget director who sounded the alarm two decades earlier when he saw an ocean of red ink looming in the nation’s future.

And it wasn’t as if Daniels and other figures in the Bush administration weren’t warned about the need for continued fiscal discipline.

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Failed President Bush Still Lives Down To Expectations

11:02 am EST May 13th, 2011 | News | 67 Comments

BushA simple man who once, sadly, had a complex job.

Former President George W. Bush made his first candid public comments on the killing of Osama bin Laden during an appearance Wednesday at a conference of hedge fund managers in Las Vegas.

“I was eating souffle at Rise Restaurant with Laura and two buddies,” Bush said when asked what he was doing when he received the call from President Obama, according to an ABC News contributor who attended the event.

“I excused myself and went home to take the call,” Bush said. “Obama simply said ‘Osama Bin Laden is dead.’”

Bush said Obama described in detail the secret mission to raid bin Laden’s Pakistani compound and the decision he made to put the plan into motion. He told Obama, “Good call.”

That’s right Bush, the Bad Man Gone Away Now. The Bad Man Gone Away. Now back to your French food and hobnobbing with hedge fund managers.

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Bush & Obama On Town Hall Meetings

9:32 am EST April 21st, 2011 | Politics | 20 Comments

President Obama is holding a series of town halls this week. It’s worth noting that President Obama’s meetings are actual town halls, open to Joe & Jane America.

It is also worth remembering that it wasn’t always like this. 2005:

“I think it’s so typical of the Republican Party to close out everybody they don’t agree with,” says Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Dean says the Bush administration’s policy of shutting out opposition in his appearances is emblematic of what he says is an administration that has little respect for people who disagree with the president.

“There’s nothing wrong with a town meeting. I think they’re terrific,” says Dean. “I think the problem is that these meetings that the president’s having really aren’t town meetings. They’re really rallies with the faithful, and I don’t think that gets you much in the way of policy.”

The White House declined a Minnesota Public Radio request to discuss its town hall forums and criticism that the president’s gatherings, billed as official White House business, seem to be open only to Bush supporters.

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Of COURSE Donald Rumsfeld Is A Liar

11:42 am EST March 1st, 2011 | History | 2 Comments

He is Donald Rumsfeld after all. I’m no fan of Bob Woodward, but his data here is pretty solid on Donald Rumsfeld being a pretty big liar. Woodward doesn’t say it, but Rumsfeld – by the way – is the man whose decisions led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. It’s always worth pointing that out.

On January 9, 2002, four months after 9/11, Dan Balz of The Washington Post and I interviewed Rumsfeld for a newspaper series on the Bush administration’s response to 9/11. According to notes of the NSC, on September 12, the day after 9/11, Rumsfeld again raised Iraq saying, is there a need to address Iraq as well as bin Laden?

When Balz read this to Rumsfeld, he blew up. “I didn’t say that,” he said, maintaining that it was his aide Larry DiRita talking over his shoulder. His reaction was comic and we agreed to treat it as off the record. But Balz persisted and asked Rumsfeld what he was thinking.

“Yeah,” Rumsfeld finally told us. “I wanted to make sure that — I always ask myself, what’s missing. It’s easy for people to edit and make something slightly better. But the question is, what haven’t we asked ourselves? So I do it all the time. I do it here, I do it in cabinet meetings or NSC meetings. It was a fair question.”

“I don’t have notes,” Rumsfeld insisted. “I don’t have any notes.” His memoir cites his personal handwritten notes dozens of time.

…

One of the important questions about the Iraq War has always been about when and who started the Iraq clock after 9/11. On page 425, Rumsfeld alleges that Bush on Sept 26, 2001 — just 15 days after 9/11 — called him to the Oval Office. “He asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq…” Rumsfeld provides no footnote for this scene.

When I interviewed Rumsfeld at his Pentagon office on Oct. 23, 2003, Rumsfeld had a different story. “I do not remember much about Iraq being discussed at all with the president or me or the NSC prior to when the president asked me to — asked me what I thought of the Iraq contingency plan — that I believe was November 21st of ’01.” He was confident of the date because six days later he went to talk with the combatant commander for the region, Gen. Tommy Franks. “And I would not have waited long from the president asking me.”

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VIDEO: Donald Rumsfeld Daily Show Interview

7:06 am EST February 24th, 2011 | National Security | 2 Comments

Jon Stewart interviews Donald Rumsfeld on The Daily Show


Donald Rumsfeld Extended Interview Pt. 1

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Bush Administration’s “Curveball” Source Admits Lying About WMD

1:51 pm EST February 15th, 2011 | Foreign Policy, Republicans | 69 Comments

Powell WMD UN

In case you forgot for a minute about all the people who died thanks to the policies of worst President ever, George W. Bush:

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by German and American intelligence officials, now admits he made up tales of mobile biological weapons trucks and clandestine weapons factories in Iraq, information that was used by the Bush White House to press the case for war. He also says he’d do it again.

How did the Bush machine use Curveball?

“We have teams of people that are out looking. They’ve investigated a number of sites. And within the last week or two, they have in fact captured and have in custody two of the mobile trailers that Secretary Powell talked about at the United Nations as being biological weapons laboratories.”

Donald Rumsfeld
Infinity Radio Interview
May 31, 2003

“Is it an embarrassment to people on the other side that we’ve discovered these biological production vans, which the defector told us about?”

Paul Wolfowitz
CNN Interview
May 31, 2003

Disgusting.

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Government Report: Bush, Rove Broke The Law

1:02 am EST January 25th, 2011 | Crime, Republicans | 35 Comments

BushShocking.

The Bush White House, particularly before the 2006 midterm elections, routinely violated a federal law that prohibits use of federal tax dollars to pay for political activities by creating a “political boiler room” that coordinated Republican campaign activities nationwide, a report issued Monday by an independent federal agency concludes.

The report by the Office of Special Counsel finds that the Bush administration’s Office of Political Affairs — overseen by Karl Rove —served almost as an extension of the Republican National Committee, developing a “target list” of Congressional races, organizing dozens of briefings for political appointees to press them to work for party candidates, and sending cabinet officials out to help these campaigns.

ALSO:

The investigators also found evidence that the Bush White House improperly classified travel by senior officials as official government business, “when it was, in fact, political,” and the costs associated with this travel were never reimbursed.

Worst President Ever strikes again.

(You can see the report for yourself here)

This chapter addresses how OPA employees violated the Hatch Act by giving political briefings to agency political appointees during the Bush II administration. The briefings typically were given by the OPA Director or Deputy Director, who testified that the briefings were intended to boost morale among political appointees and provide an overview of the “political landscape.” However, witness testimony, e-mail messages, and PowerPoint slides used at some of the briefings indicate that the electoral success of the Republican Party, and
possible strategies for achieving it, were often on the agenda. As such, these briefings constituted political activity. Because most of the briefings took place during normal business hours and in government buildings, many of the briefings implicated the Hatch Act’s prohibition against engaging in political activity while on duty or in a federal workplace.

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VIDEO: How Republicans Screw The Religious Right

11:43 am EST January 3rd, 2011 | Conservative, History, Republicans | 24 Comments

I recommend the entire series of God In America for a great look at how religion has affected American history. But I particularly recommend the final hour of the series as the religious right themselves explain the way in which Republican presidents like Reagan and George W. Bush totally used them without actually enacting the core of their agenda.

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