Do NOT let the Republicans whitewash the Bush presidency.

The eight years we had to live through while Georgie was at the helm should never be forgotten.  And the Republicans are trying to do just that.  Talking Points Memo's Aurin Squire:

Memories...

Can we finally get a War Crimes Tribunal?

CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation.  We knew this then, we know this now.  What is so awful is the inability to admit we went full-Dr. Mengele on the people in Gitmo.  We tortured.  Admit it.

And then send the people responsible for this horrible moral and ethical failure to jail.

And .... they're off!

Louisiana Parents Fear Elementary School Cafeteria Scanner Will Implant the Antichrist’s ‘Mark of the Beast’ on Kids’ Hands

Congress: They don't work for you.

Bedbugs in hospitals.

We can blame Chile for deforming the earth.

This PROVES we should let the oil companies build pipelines all over the place and drill and ... oops...

Roundup ... is really really toxic.

Have telemarketing people been calling you more on the phone?

What single gif or picture would you show someone?

Georgie Bush's Great Mulligan.

Teaching Game Theory.

Paul Krugman on George Bush's presidency

Copying his entire article because this needs to be repeated loudly. They are trying to rewrite history. Why should we let them get away with it?

Paul Krugman: 

APRIL 27, 2013, 2:00 PM The Great Degrader 

I’ve been focused on economic policy lately, so I sort of missed the big push to rehabilitate Bush’s image; also, as a premature anti-Bushist who pointed out how terrible a president he was back when everyone else was praising him as a Great Leader, I’m kind of worn out on the subject. 

But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out. 

From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair. 

But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover. 

Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies. 

I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where. 

And no, this wasn’t standard practice before. Politics ain’t beanbag and all that, but the president as con man was a new character in American life. 

Even more important, Bush lied us into war. Let’s repeat that: he lied us into war. I know, the apologists will say that “everyone” believed Saddam had WMD, but the truth is that even the category “WMD” was a con game, lumping together chemical weapons with nukes in an illegitimate way. And any appearance of an intelligence consensus before the invasion was manufactured: dissenting voices were suppressed, as anyone who was reading Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) knew at the time. 

Why did the Bush administration want war? There probably wasn’t a single reason, but can we really doubt at this point that it was in part about wagging the dog? And right there you have something that should block Bush from redemption of any kind, ever: he misled us into a war that probably killed hundreds of thousands of people, and he did it in part for political reasons. 

There was a time when Americans expected their leaders to be more or less truthful. Nobody expected them to be saints, but we thought we could trust them not to lie about fundamental matters. That time is now behind us — and it was Bush who did it.

Memories...

An old post:

Res ipsa loquitur at Rising Hegemon lays it out for us: 

September 11th. Iraq. Katrina. FEMA. The DOJ. The deficit. Walter Reed. Surging rates of teenage pregnancy, soldier suicides, and income disparity. Lurita Ding Dong Doan and the GSA. Bernie Bada Bing Kerik and the DHS. Heckuva Job Brownie and FEMA. Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld. Condi Ferragamo. Megan O'Sullivan. We scream, "Incompetence!" Still think incompetence across virtually every spectrum of government is an accident? 

You're missing the overall. This is incompetence by design. Disdain as a philosophy. Contempt as a core value. You want the bridge to fail? Let me design it. You want the government to fail? Send a twenty-one-year old whose most meaningful job experience has been driving an ice cream truck to Iraq to rebuild Iraq's interior ministry. Let "The Fucking Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth" formulate defense policy. Put a schmuck with no disaster management experience in charge of FEMA. 

I've said before that we're going to have to fire virtually every person hired into federal government after January 20, 2001. But we need to go farther. Every time a Republican runs, voters need to be reminded that Republicans should never be permitted to run government again. Ever. They don't believe in it.

And today looking back.

Well, we're certainly NOT.

George W. Bush: 'I'm Comfortable With What I Did'

Posted this three years ago....

And we're still paying for his eight year reign of incompetence

We knew this from the very beginning.

From the moment Bush was selected to be president, some of us bet we'd be at war with Iraq in two years. The neocons had been begging Clinton for years to take out Saddam, and now they had the power and ability to do so themselves.

The Bush administration was obviously prepping for war while theatrically pretending to be weighing the decision until the last minute. It was so very clear to us what they intended to do but the media just bizarrely ate up each declaration from Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush as the truth and asked no questions. It's what made me give up on the mainstream media in disgust and go hunting for those who actually reported the truth.

I really think the neocons felt they had all bases covered. The churches had been bought off with the 'faith-based initiatives', the allies were ready to get the oil, the military brass got a new shiny war with really big bombs, the media had been seduced with quail eggs and special interviews.... The Bush administration just didn't plan on those pesky bloggers with their damned facts and discomforting questions.

The truth refuses to die even though you thought you put out a hit, Mr. Cheney. And now the facts are slowly working back to the surface. Even though we knew what the truth was, it's nice to prove it.

Newly Declassified Documents Show Bush Administration Looked For Excuse To Start War In Iraq In Nov. 2001

Bush's Legacy

We will never forget.

Good grief.

The stupidity is flying so fast around the blogosphere, I feel like hunkering down in my bunker.

Did the Era of Bush start this celebration of the Era of Stupid? Does high fructose corn syrup clog our arteries AND slow our brain activity? Did the melamine in our genetically altered food make Americans cease to think?

If the Teabaggery Party is the newest 'revolution', being stupid must be the first tenet on its party platform: Keep your hands off my Medicare but no government health care! Soldiers are dying for our freedoms so we can hunt illegals and prevent mosques from being built! Take us back to the happy age somewhere in our past (but actually only found on tv) where white males were in power and everybody else knew their place!

Stupid is as stupid does.... and that's why I'm stocking up on canned food and catapults.

Update 8/18: Speaking of which...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Dick Armey Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Update: And even more to the point:

In a new segment called "Jon Stewart And Anderson Cooper Look At Gaping Holes,' Stewart analyzed the plot holes in Rep. Gohmert's story. First of all, wouldn't it be easier to recruit adult Americans than to raise them from scratch? Secondly, Stewart pointed out that raising a terror baby would be difficult because, "you know, when they become terror teens they tune you out."

As always, Stewart introduced a logical solution: hero babies! We can raise our own babies to fight the terror babies to be prepared for the wait-listed attack. "These babies don't run... Yet," Stewart said.

Stewart then took a look at some of Rep. Gohmert's other causes by showing clips of him speaking in Congress. Let's just say the topics ranged from animal protection to sleeping with corpses to Hitler. In that order.

Good.

Have at it.

In a move that will put Britain's relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies under intense and possibly damaging scrutiny, British Prime Minister David Cameron has launched an unprecedented inquiry into whether security services were involved in the torture of terrorism suspects.

Americans don't 'torture', remember? (Nudge nudge wink wink) We just do necessary enhanced interrogations!



Renaming a war crime doesn't change the fact it's a crime, Georgie. Semantics won't save your prezidenting legacy.

You must remember this

A kiss is just a kiss

A lie is just a lie ... except from Karl Rove it's a great staggeringly big baldfaced fucking ultimate lie.

David Axlerod for the Washington Post: (my bold)

Of all the claims Rove made, one in particular caught my eye for its sheer audacity and shamelessness -- that congressional Democrats "will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years."

So, let's review a little history:

The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus -- with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit -- and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it.

To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration's swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit.

Don't let them rewrite history. Remember this.

h/t to Echidne of the Snakes for the link.

Bush apparently SAVED our economy

Rather than gutting the Treasury for the benefit of his buddies. The rewriting of Bush's legacy is in full swing.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly:

But what was especially interesting was the knee-jerk partisanship of former Bush aide Karen Hughes, who responded to Halperin by saying, twice, that Obama "misread the country" by trying to enact the agenda he ran on, thereby "exacerbating" the public's "anxiety." She added:

"I have to disagree with you, Mark, about rescuing the economy, I think that happened before President Bush left office when they took the action that they did on TARP, and the banks have now repaid much of that money, but that's what stabilized the economy and prevented the collapse of the financial system."

Be on the lookout for this one -- as the economy improves and the Bush Recession ends, Republicans will try to convince people that Bush, not Obama, deserves credit for rescuing the economy. While the evidence is overwhelming that it was the stimulus that created economic growth and pulled the economy bank from the brink, Karen Hughes -- and soon, her cohorts -- would us believe that the economy had already been rescued before Obama took office.

They're truly shameless, but I can only assume this will be a major talking point fairly soon.

This feels like when the local bully and his cohorts push you down and steal your wallet... then pick you back up, dust you off, and demand to know why you can't take a joke and nothing happened, did it?

They are trying to sell the fact Bush's terms were not an unmitigated disaster, but somehow thoughtfully run. All the horrible things that happened were because of Clinton or because of Obama.

Remember Bush's legacy for what it actually was. A miserable failure.

Meanwhile....

Back at the ranch:

Azzaman , January 4, 2010

Iraqi security forces have launched a wide campaign in Sunni Muslim-dominated neighborhoods of Baghdad and towns and cities to the north and west of the capital.

The campaign is said to be the widest by the government in years and has led to an exodus of people to the Kurdish north.

The campaign comes as the country gears for national elections in March.

The summary arrests have fuelled anger in these areas and raised fears of popular unrest at a time the government finds it extremely hard to reinstate law and order.

In Baghdad most of the arrests have taken place in the restive township of Abu Ghraib, home to the notorious Iraqi prison bearing the same name.

Parents and relatives said they have no idea where the security forces are keeping their beloved ones. They said officials told them all those arrested will remain behind bars until after the elections.

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity said hundreds of young people have been taken away from Tikrit, Anbar and Mosul.

They said popular discontent was apparent in the restive city of Mosul where rebels fighting U.S. and government troops are quite active.

Meanwhile, there has been a separate sweep against members of the so-called Awakening Council, Sunni militiamen who had joined U.S. troops in fighting al-Qaeda.

The war Bush and Cheney started still has people becoming displaced, being jailed, being killed.

No amount of effort will buff this out, Georgie.

Now outside of government, members of the George W. Bush administration are desperate to polish their turbulent legacy. However, a history of "Operation Enduring Freedom" being prepared by the Army would seem to contradict their version of the war on Afghanistan.

Contrary to repeated claims that the Iraq war did not deprive Afghan forces of necessary resources, the Army's history shows that the Bush administration "hamstrung" forces in the country, according to The New York Times.

"A Different Kind of War," to be published later this year, was written by seven historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute. It is the first report of its kind, giving an official stamp on events which transpired between October 2001 and September 2005. The Times obtained the 400-page manuscript and posted it online.

Blog sprinkles

The pope attack! I'm not laughing. Honest. Really...



Bryan of Why Now? explains how to deal with terrorism.

Think Progress: Mary Matalin claims President Bush ‘inherited’ the September 11th terror attacks. Just wondering....Mary, are you really buffing Georgie's legacy all by yourself or did someone encourage you to do so?

Just wondering... but if the Catholics bishops can demand that no federal money is ever used for abortions because they are evil, why can't we demand that no federal money is ever used for war because it is evil?

Via JJ of the Unrepentant Old Hippie, a final solution to the Muslim 'problem'. And another cracked pot is heard from.

Why are we letting Israel block aid to Gaza?

Republicans want to repeal the just voted for Health Care bill! Or something!

AmericaBlog: ABC: Two al Qaeda Leaders Behind Northwest Flight 253 Terror Plot Were Released by Bush in 2007.

The Jokerization of media figures.

Mustang Bobby wants to know whether you will say Twenty ten or Two thousand ten...

Bush and his AIDS project in Africa

That everyone touts as a wonderful thing, just remember this:

Under President George W. Bush , the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.

However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa's epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world's poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.

AIDS went up with Bush's abstinence program.

And he cut programs:

BUSH LIED ABOUT THE AIDS FUNDING HIS ADMINISTRATION IS PROVIDING, AS WELL AS ITS TIMING "Mr. Bush's other foreign aid initiative, announced in his State of the Union address, is $10 billion in new money to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean over five years. But his budget falls short of that promise. He is proposing only a $550 million increase over the global AIDS money in this year's spending bill now in Congress. Since the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria would be an effective channel for the aid, there is no excuse for the initiative's leisurely start. Mr. Bush's 2004 budget for the Global Fund, $200 million, actually cuts in half what Congress is likely to do in 2003. Mr. Bush has also found part of the money for his AIDS programs by cutting nearly $500 million from child health, including vaccine programs. Child survival is the biggest loser in the foreign aid budget — a scandalous way to finance AIDS initiatives. With the budget dominated by defense spending and huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the White House should not be forcing the babies of Africa to pay for their parents' AIDS drugs." 2.17.03

So while the Bush Legacy buffers search for something ... ANYTHING... that Georgie did while president that was good, this was not as gloriously wonderful as they would have you believe.

The man has no soul

And no conscience:

Cheney: 'I Basically Don't' Think Bush Administration Responsible For Afghanistan Problems

A reminder of who we had in the White House

During the Bush administration:



Glenn Greenwald:

Jonathan Schwarz notes that in 2005, Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Lithuania and visited a museum in Vilnius which once housed a KGB prison, where the Soviets tortured prisoners. That museum exhibits "solitary confinement rooms which were used to break down the prisoners and make them confess." Shockingly, "the walls are padded and soundproofed, made to absorb the cries and shouts for help," as it was the site of barbaric acts like this:

Prisoners either had to stand in ice-cold water or to balance on a small platform. Every time they got tired they fell down into the water.

After his visit, Rumsfeld released an "Open Letter to the People of Vilnius," in which he solemnly observed that "the museum was a stark reminder of the importance of preserving our liberty at all costs." Schwarz asks: "Did Rumsfeld Tour KGB Torture Museum to Pick Up Useful Tips?"

I wouldn't doubt it. Remember, they went down to Guantanamo to watch. And Rumsfeld complained that standing wasn't torture:

Forced Standing: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a 2002 interrogation memo. "Why is standing limited to four hours?" Rumsfeld would probably feel a little differently about this if he had to stand in place for 8-10 hours, which can cause ankle swelling, bruising, and excruciating pain.

Past nightmares to haunt your Halloween

Eight years of this guy:



And this undead torture-loving guy:



And don't forget this moron:



And I wish we could forget this creep:



But then Halloween dress-up time passes:



And we all wake up to a big mess the day after:



And get back to work: