Georgie shows what he's made of

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - An increasingly combative President Bush vetoed a bipartisan water projects bill Friday, making it the fourth bill that he has nullified with his veto pen in the past year alone.

The $23 billion The Water Resources Development Act water bill would authorize hundreds U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects across the country intended to improve access to water supplies, improve flood control and restore threatened ecological zones. They include: building barriers to the invasive Asian Carp assailing the Great Lakes; developing flood control, restoration and hurricane mitigation projects in Louisiana and Mississippi; initiating protective projects along the upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers; and restoring the Florida Everglades. While the bill would authorize the projects themselves, the actual funding would be approved separately.

Support for the bill surpassed the 2/3 majority needed for an override in both chambers of Congress, making it highly likely that lawmakers will challenge the president's veto.

"When we override this irresponsible veto, perhaps the president will finally recognize that Congress is an equal branch of government and reconsider his many other reckless veto threats," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, (D-NV).

Preserving his legacy

As the most incompetent president ever:

Yesterday, the House passed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, despite President Bush’s veto threat. The White House objects to a provision that would require DHS contractors to “pay their employees at least the local prevailing wage.” It also “funds the hiring of 3,000 new border patrol agents, rejects the cuts President Bush sought in the training and equipping of first responders, and improves aviation and port security.”

Trillions wasted in Iraq, wheelbarrels full of money unaccounted for ..... but make contractors pay the local prevailing wage? More guards for border patrol? No cuts for first responders? Improvements for aviation and port security?

Georgie is going to veto this???

He may try to smirk his way through the last two years draped in American flags, but he will still be a miserable failure.

Listening to the generals, Georgie?

Two generals (ret.) speak out:

Washington, DC

Today, two retired Generals who led troops in Iraq expressed outrage at the President's veto of the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act.


The President vetoed our troops and the American people. His stubborn commitment to a failed strategy in Iraq is incomprehensible. He committed our great military to a failed strategy in violation of basic principles of war. His failure to mobilize the nation to defeat world wide Islamic extremism is tragic. We deserve more from our commander-in-chief and his administration.
--Maj. Gen. John Batiste, USA, Ret.

This administration and the previously Republican controlled legislature have been the most caustic agents against America's Armed Forces in memory. Less than a year ago, the Republicans imposed great hardship on the Army and Marine Corps by their failure to pass a necessary funding language. This time, the President of the United States is holding our Soldiers hostage to his ego. More than ever apparent, only the Army and the Marine Corps are at war - alone, without their President's support.
--Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, USA, Ret.

Ignoring options in Iraq

Because blaming Democrats is more politically advantageous than trying to end the fighting. (My bold).

WASHINGTON - The language on a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq voted out of the House and Senate conference committee this week contains large loopholes that would apparently allow US troops to continue carrying out military operations in Iraq's Sunni heartland indefinitely.

The plan, coming from the Democratic majority in Congress, makes an exemption from a 180-day timetable for completion of "redeployment" of US troops from Iraq to allow "targeted special actions limited in duration and scope to killing or capturing members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations of global reach".

The al-Qaeda exemption, along with a second exemption allowing US forces to re-enter Iraq to protect those remaining behind to train and equip Iraqi security forces and to protect other US military forces, appears to approve the presence in Iraq of tens of thousands of US occupation troops for many years to come.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed, by 218 to 208 votes, the US$124 billion House and Senate supplemental appropriations bill that requires US troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq by October 1. President George W Bush has said he will veto it. The Senate is expected to approve identical legislation, setting the stage for the first veto fight between Bush and the majority Democrats.

The large loopholes in the Democratic withdrawal plan come against the background of the failure of the US war against the insurgency - including al-Qaeda - in al-Anbar and other Sunni provinces and the emergence of a major war within the Sunni insurgency between non-jihadist resistance groups and al-Qaeda.

The Sunni resistance organizations represent a clear alternative to an endless US occupation of hostile Sunni provinces that has driven many activists into the arms of al-Qaeda.

[snip]

A five-page US Marine Corps intelligence report on Anbar last September reflected that view. It said Anbar province was a "vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq". Media reporting on the province largely conformed to that interpretation. The notion of a two-sided war in the Sunni heartland bolsters the Bush administration's political position that any talk of a timetable for withdrawal is defeatist.

In fact, however, it is far removed from reality. The majority of the important Sunni insurgent organizations represent a second anti-al-Qaeda force that has far greater potential for defeating al-Qaeda than the US military does.

[snip]

Nevertheless, the Sunni resistance option was clearly seen last year by the US military, Khalilzad and even Bush himself as preferable to an unending US counterinsurgency war in a hostile Sunni heartland. But the administration has quietly shelved that policy option as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have confronted Democratic demands for a withdrawal timetable.

The White House would rather be in the position of blaming the Democrats for its "defeatism" than pursuing that option more vigorously.

Democratic leaders in Congress, meanwhile, appear to believe they must support a continued US war against al-Qaeda to avoid being tagged with defeat. But the initial Democratic plan voted out of the conference committee on Monday is only the first of several congressional battles on Iraq policy to come in the next few weeks.

The massive loophole for continued US war in Iraq will be one of the issues fought over in these coming rounds.

'Confronting Mr. Bush on Iraq has become a patriotic duty'. Paul Krugman

Via NTodd:

So how should Congress respond to Mr. Bush’s threats?

Everyone talks about the political risks of confrontation, recalling the backlash when Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in 1995. But there’s a big difference between trying to force a fairly popular president to accept deep cuts in Medicare — which is what the 1995 confrontation was about — and trying to get a deeply unpopular, distrusted president to set some limits on an immensely unpopular war.

Meanwhile, there are big political risks on the other side. If Congress responds to a presidential veto by offering an even weaker bill, voters may well react with disgust, concluding that the whole debate over the war was nothing but political theater.

Anyway, never mind the political calculations. Confronting Mr. Bush on Iraq has become a patriotic duty.

The fact is that Mr. Bush’s refusal to face up to the failure of his Iraq adventure, his apparent determination to spend the rest of his term in denial, has become a clear and present danger to national security. Thanks to the demands of the Iraq war, we’re already a superpower without a strategic reserve, unable to respond to crises that might erupt elsewhere in the world. And more and more military experts warn that repeated deployments in Iraq — now extended to 15 months — are breaking the back of our volunteer military.

If nothing is done to wind down this war during the 21 months — 21 months! — Mr. Bush has left, the damage may be irreparable.

Update: Jurassicpork of Welcome to Pottersville has the funniest juxtaposed pictures for this article!

Update: Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat notes the baldly worded blackmail:

"Drop your legislative guns, or the soldier gets it..." yes, that's the perfect line for Bush.

Bush threatens Congress:

Dont make me veto your bill that forces me to support the troops by training and equipping them properly because that will show I support the troops more than you because I'm sending them into the meat grinder with bad equipment and little training as it should be!


Make me veto your bill and the old vet gets it!