Tag: Worst President Ever

Bush, Cheney Dig Deep for Friendly Graduates to Address

Trish

Both the president and his impeachment insurance — er, I mean, his vice president — will speak to graduating young people this month. Cheney will go to Mormon-run Brigham Young University while the holder of the nation’s highest office will go to…wait for it…a satellite campus of a community college.

Meanwhile Condoleezza Rice will address the graduates of Little Tots Preschool in St. Joseph, Missouri. Rice is preparing for tough questions afterward, like “Can I go pee-pee now?” Oh wait, Bush won’t be there to ask that last question.

President Bush will deliver a rare commencement address at a community college: the Miami Dade College Kendall Campus, on April 28.

The White House said Monday that it’s only the second time in history that a sitting president has spoken at a community college commencement. The first time came last year, when Bush traveled to Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College following Hurricane Katrina.

O.K., it’s billed as the country’s largest community college but still. This is just embarrassing. Why MDC?

“Though his popularity is at a historic low, [Bush] remains more popular among Cuban Americans, said Fernand Amandi, executive vice president at public opinion research firm Bendixen and Associates…

”I think the student body at Kendall Campus are an educated body and will understand that he’s the commander-in-chief and will show him the respect he deserves,” [17-year-old Student Government President Christopher] Miles said.

Well, Chris, I are educated enough to know that you’re probably right. There’s no chance Bush would go anyplace that isn’t a slam dunk to love him. And obviously, those places are getting harder and harder to find. No offense.

Cheney, meanwhile, is venturing into hostile waters. I know, he’s supposedly from the West and Mormons are very Republican but BYU students are protesting his visit. A writer for the University of Utah’s independent student paper really let it go, saying Cheney came looking for the work.

BYU has invited the devil to Happy Valley.

OK. That last sentence isn’t entirely true. Vice President Dick Cheney will be giving the commencement address at BYU-and yes, he is the devil. What isn’t true is that BYU sought out his services. It was the Bush administration that laid the groundwork for this controversial decision. It asked politely if BYU leaders could see it in their hearts to listen for an hour or two to the half-smiling codger. It seems Cheney won’t be busy this month giving no-bid contracts to Halliburton, outing CIA agents over a grudge or shooting his friends in the face.

Whew. Want to come to work for Pensito Review when you graduate? The pay’s not so good but…well, anyway.

The first of the actual protests got off to a very Mormonesque start.

The College Democrats passed out fliers listing their grievances with having the VP speak at the ceremony. Among them are complaints that: “Cheney’s controversial actions do not represent a model our students should follow,” various issues with the war in Iraq from, the war being “preemptive” to “misleading use of weak intelligence to elicit fear” to ties with Halliburton…

The protest was a peaceful sit-in style with discussions between students but very little shouting and no chanting.

At the BYU College Republicans’ counterprotest, students handed out blue armbands, circulated a letter thanking Cheney for agreeing to speak and offered cookies, brownies and lemonade.

The speeches are still a couple of weeks away, so maybe the action will pick up. Meanwhile Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will address graduates of Little Tots Preschool in St. Joseph, Missouri.* Rice is said to be preparing for tough questions afterward, like “What’s your favorite color?” and “Can I go pee-pee now?” Oh wait, Bush won’t be there to ask that last question.

* Not.

When Man-Crushes Go Bad – Former Bushie Has a Change of Heart

Jon Ponder

Matthew Dowd switched parties in 1999 to work on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. He says he believed candidate Bush’s pledge that he would bring a new spirit of cooperation to politics in Washington.

It is hard to feel sympathetic toward Matthew Dowd now that his eyes have been opened to his colossal self-delusion about George W. Bush.

I remember hearing then-Gov. Bush making those claims back then, and I didn’t buy it for a minute. Bush learned slasher style politics at the knee of his father’s dirty trickster, Lee Atwater. I expected the political divide to be as bad as it was in the Clinton era, although I could have never predicted that Bush would divide the country before sending it off to to war. (Who could have ever expected a president to do something so dastardly.)

Now Dowd has a come to Jesus on the true character of George W. Bush:

[…]

How It All Started

Jon Ponder

From Yellowcake to Abu Grahib to Katrina and Scooter, Gonzales and the rest, the markers were there at the genesis of the Bush administration:

[The] biggest clue about what they were up to came in 2000 with the Florida recount. I know it seems like ancient history to go back to that but it is extremely important to remember just how outrageous their tactics were: the Gore campaign used legal tactics and the Bush campaign didn’t. There was the “bourgeois riot” and dirty trickster Roger Stone directing the street theatre from a van. (Here’s a list of what the Village Voice termed the five worst Bush recount outrages.) They used every lever of power they could to count illegally cast overseas ballots. They operated a hypocritical and situational media campaign that the press completely failed to properly analyze until it was too late. And after they did they helpfully told those who objected to “get over it.”

And I guess we did.

Bush Embroiled in Belgium Envoy Crisis, Blames ‘Politics’

Buck Banks

Although our country is at war in Iraq, the United States will have to continue to carry on without diplomatic leadership in Belgium after President Bush announced today he was withdrawing his nomination of Sam Fox to the post of ambassador to the Benelux nation. The reason?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush believes Fox is qualified to serve as ambassador but withdrew the nomination “because of politics.”

Oooh, politics — that old bugaboo that sometimes gets in the way of George Bush getting what he wants, except when it helps him get what he wants. In this case, however, it wasn’t politics so much as Missouri moneybags Fox’ decision to financially back a political loser — those nasty Swift Boat Veterans who fought so long and dirty against Sen. John Kerry’s bid for president in 2004.

‘Sam Fox had every opportunity to disavow the politics of personal destruction and to embrace the truth.’
— Sen. John Kerry

Fox, a Bush supporter from Missouri, had come under fire for contributing $50,000 in 2004 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which spent $26 million disparaging Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s service during the Vietnam War.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said the White House had made a “wise decision” in withdrawing Fox from consideration.

“His unwillingness to denounce the reprehensible activities of the Swift Boat organization and express regret for providing $50,000 to bankroll the organization convinced me that he would not be an acceptable candidate to represent the United States abroad,” he said.

Dodd is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was preparing to vote on Fox’s nomination today until Bush announced the withdrawal. Dodd said Tuesday that he would oppose Fox. Kerry also is on the committee, and we can guess which way he would have voted, though all he said was that the White House made “the right decision.”

Of course that didn’t stop the White House from trotting out its favorite whiny accusation:

“Some members of the Senate would have voted against his nomination, which would have prevented him from serving in this important position,” Perino said. “So we are disappointed that they made their decision based on partisan politics instead of his leadership abilities.”

Seems Fox’ “leadership abilities” are concentrated in his wallet and his ability to extract contributions on behalf of the Republican Party. We’re certain he would have achieved a lot as ambassador to Belgium.

Fox, 77, of St. Louis, is national chairman of the Jewish Republican Coalition and has helped raise millions for the Republican Party over the last three decades. He hosted a record-setting Washington fund-raiser in 2000 that took in $21 million. Fox and his two sons, Gregory and Jeffrey, were named “Rangers” in Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign by each raising at least $200,000 for the effort.

In a side note to the Fox story, everybody’s favorite turncoat-for-sale, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, testified in favor of Fox at his February confirmation hearing and stood by him as late as yesterday, probably because the Fox family contributed $23,500 to Lieberman’s re-election campaign in October when he successfully ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary.

Way to be independent, Joe!

Start of Iraq War Year Five — Where are the Bushes?

Buck Banks

Decline and fall: When I was in gradual school I took an advanced literature seminar titled, “the Southern Family Saga.” The professor teaching the course had sussed out a recurring theme in Southern literature that he actually traced back to the Bible and the book of Genesis.

The typical Southern family saga began with a pioneering patriarch who worked hard, cheated some and accumulated wealth and prominence at the cost of some soul substance. Subsequent generations were born with progressively less intelligence, gumption and drive, and existed merely to squander the family’s good name and fortune.

Faulkner made a career out of the saga, and it has been a useful literary conceit for many Southern authors. Kitty Kelley, unauthorized biographer of the Bush clan, has detected a similar pattern in George W. Bush’s progeny. In her op-ed piece, “Why Aren’t the Bush Daughters in Iraq?” she notes that the entire Bush family, from daughters to sibs to cousins and uncles, are absent from Iraq — when they’re not making a profit on it, that is.

WHEN I WAS a little girl in a convent school, the nuns impressed on me the power of setting a good example. These beloved teachers are no longer around to instruct the president and his family, so I recommend that the Bushes learn from Mark Twain, who said: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

The only member of the Bush family to show the strains of our ‘troubled world’ is former President George H.W. Bush.

My suggestion comes after the White House announcement earlier this month that Jenna Bush, one of the president’s twin daughters, is writing a book on her all-expenses-paid trip to Panama, where she worked for a few weeks as an intern for UNICEF. Jenna Bush is quoted as saying she will donate her earnings from her book to UNICEF, a commendable gesture, considering her father’s net worth of $20 million. But while the 25-year-old makes the rounds of TV talk shows this fall in a White House limousine, dozens of her contemporaries will be arriving home from Iraq in wooden boxes. In Britain, Prince Harry is insisting on going off to Iraq — even as his country is reducing its troop commitment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed how the power of good example could also be powerfully good politics. When he led the country to sacrifice in World War II, his children enlisted and his wife traveled to military bases to counsel and comfort the families of soldiers. Newsreels showed the president’s four sons fighting with the Marines in the Pacific, flying with the Army Air Forces in North Africa and landing with the Navy at Normandy. Soon other public figures followed suit — movie stars (James Stewart and Clark Gable) enlisted and sports heroes (Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg) went off to war.

The contrast between FDR’s good example during wartime and that of George W. Bush is stark and sad. The Bush family rallies to the political campaigns of its scions and spends months on the road raising money and shaking hands to put their men into public office. In fact, the public image of their cohesive family — the pearl-choked matriarch surrounded by progeny and springer spaniels — helped cinch more than one presidency for the Bushes. Yet now, when its legacy is most in peril, the family seems to be squandering its good will on a mess of celebridreck.
[…]

That’s So 2005: Bush Requests “No Strings” Budget

Trish

As George W. Bush celebrated the opening of the fifth year of accomplishing the various missions in Iraq, he showed he can still gall people without breaking a sweat.

Bush at the opening of Year Five: “Just shut up and give me the money”

Bush asked Congress to hand him a blank check with no strings attached. You know, like the good ol’ Republican-controlled legislature always did. Those were the days.

As Bush delivered a speech to inaugurate Year Five, he reached new heights of saying nothing but in a really threatening way.

“There will be good days and bad days ahead as the security plan unfolds.”

…“It can be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude our best option is to pack up and go home,” he said. “That may be satisfying in the short run. But I believe the consequences for America’s security would be devastating.”

…[Democrats] have a responsibility to get this bill to my desk without strings and without delay.”

Unfortunately, we have all come to find out that Bush’s beliefs and assessments are usually 180 degrees off from reality, and that his motivations have more to do with greed and religious zealotry than the welfare of people about whom he understands almost nothing. Meaning both the Iraqis and us.

Congress is being entirely reasonable.

The House’s war spending bill includes a troop withdrawal deadline of Sept. 1, 2008. The timeline would speed up if the Iraqi government cannot meet its own benchmarks for providing security, allocating oil revenues and other essential steps.

Trump: Bush Administration ‘All a Big Lie’

Jon Ponder

It’s so rare that I ever agree with the Donald:

TRUMP: Look, everything in Washington has been a lie: weapons of mass destruction — was a total lie. It was a way of attacking Iraq, which [Pres. George Bush] thought was going to be easy and it turned out to be the exact opposite of easy.

He reads 60 books a year, he reads a book a week — that’s — do you think that’s — do you think the president reads a book a week? I don’t think so.

He doesn’t watch television. Now, one thing I know is that, when I’m on television, I watch, or I try. Because you do — your own ego says, you know, Let’s watch, let’s see, whether it’s good or bad, you want to watch, right? He doesn’t watch television. So he’s on television, being interviewed by you or somebody else, he doesn’t watch. Does anybody really believe that?

Now they’re doing this whole scandal with the U.S. attorneys. Now they’re finding e-mails, and it’s proven to be a lie. Everything’s a lie. It’s all a big lie.

Quote du Jour

Jon Ponder

“He’s not bright enough to be President. For a long time, anyone who questioned Bush’s ability to think was pointed to the opinion polls and told that discussing whether or not the President is borderline stupid was bad manners and counterproductive. Actually, that is the main problem with Bush. He neither reads, nor writes, nor speaks well. It turns out that a C average is not good enough for the Presidency.”

— Molly Ivins, March 2004

Bush Approval in GOP Drops 13 Percentage Points

Jon Ponder

Republicans have a remarkable ability to live in denial:

In the months since the Congressional elections, President Bush has lost substantial support among members of his own party, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Mr. Bush’s approval rating dropped 13 percentage points since last fall among Republicans, 65 percent of whom now say they approve of the way he is handling his job as president, compared with 78 percent last October.

Over all, Mr. Bush’s job approval remains at one of its lowest points, with 29 percent of all Americans saying they approve of the way he is doing his job, compared with 34 percent at the end of October. Sixty-one percent disapproved, compared with 58 percent in October, within the margin of sampling error.