Tag: Worst President Ever

Phyllis Schafly Hates George Bush — and America

Jon Ponder

Not so very long ago, the right wing told us that anyone who criticized Pres. George Bush was “Bush hater” — and that criticizing our president during a time of war was tantamount to hating America.

“We’ve got to stop this nonsense of teaching our schoolchildren in foreign languages.”
— Phyllis Schafly

Well, look who is hatin’ on America now:

[The] annual Conservative Political Action Conference that began this morning is a three-day extravaganza of activism in which purists, not pragmatists, are on parade — and they are busy bashing the president.
“We cannot afford to be ‘Bush Republicans,'” Phyllis Schlafly said, to great applause, in the vast Omni Hotel’s largest ballroom. “This has got to be a grassroots party,” and works best as such, as when “the whole conservative movement rose up to tell George Bush that we could not have Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court.”

Why, oh, why do conservatives hate America?

But wait, there’s more:

“We’ve got to stop this nonsense of teaching our schoolchildren in foreign languages,” she told the crowd. “We cannot afford to let Mexico turn us into a two-language nation.”

She was incensed, she said, that that George Bush had made such a big deal of signing the bill into law that would provide for a fence along part of the border between the countries: “Was that dishonest? I’ve been looking at TV every night and haven’t seen that fence being built yet. We want that fence!”

The less educated Americans are, the easier they are too fool. Right, Phyllis?

Report: Iran War Is Set to Start Now, But Resistance Has Given Bush ‘Weak Knees’

Jon Ponder

Apocalypse now: New reporting by Robert Parry on the behind-the-scenes battle between Pres. Bush and the U.S. military’s top generals picks up where the Seymour Hersh’s story in the New Yorker leaves off — painting a picture of a what amounts to a quiet military coup at the very top ranks of the Pentagon against the neocon cabal at the White House.

Resistance from the Pentagon, Blair and even Democrats in Congress appears to be having an effect on Bush’s decision-making. He had planned to launch an attack on Iran, possibly as early as this week, but was getting “weak knees.”

The nation’s top brass are convinced that attacking Iran would yield calamitous results, and yet the White House — under the sway of the neocons and Vice Pres. Cheney — is determined at any cost to escalate the sectarian war it has started in Iraq into a full-scale regional war between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Iran.

In an elaborate contest of wills, the generals, apparently including Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have leaked the broad strokes of Cheney’s secret war planning to the media. They have also let it be known that many of them would resign if Cheney and Bush take the country to war.

To counter this threat, Cheney has instructed the Pentagon to be ready to start bombing Iran within 24 hours after a signal from the White House — relying on the military’s “do or die” ethos to force the generals to stay at their posts until after the damage is done:

By creating such a tight time frame for action, Bush would negate the possibility for the Pentagon brass and Congress to mount any serious opposition to a presidential order on Iran, even if they are convinced Bush’s actions will be catastrophic.

The tradition of the U.S. military is to implement presidential orders regardless of doubts. Perhaps months later, a dissenting commander might quietly resign.

That practice and the 24-hour window may help explain why several U.S. generals are pondering now how to stop Bush from blindsiding them with a new war. One of their tactics appears to be leaking indications of their strong opposition to the press.

It was the order to set up the 24 hour trigger that prompted several top generals to signal to the Sunday Times of London this week that they would resign if the order to start the war is given. And, as unlikely as it may seem, it appears that the generals’ resistance may have been worked, at least in the short term:

[One] source told me that the resistance — from the Pentagon, Blair and even Democrats in Congress — appears to be having an effect on Bush’s decision-making. This source said he believed Bush had planned to launch an attack on Iran, possibly as early as this week, but was getting “weak knees.”

Nonetheless, based on the way Cheney and Bush drove the country to war against Iraq in 2002, the best assumption is that the new war against Iran could begin at any moment. It will come, according to Parry’s sources, with an attack by Israel on Iran, probably on its nuclear facilities. When Iran retaliates, the U.S. will come in full force to defend Israel, launching a bombardment of Iran’s infrastructure similar to the “shock and awe” bombing at the start of the war in Iraq.

What the generals want the American people to know is that this nightmare scenario is real, the planning is complete and ready to go — and that an attack could begin at any moment that would likely trigger a full-scale war in the Middle East.

Poll: Conservatives Play Blame Game on Viguerie’s Site and You Can Play Too

Buck Banks

Texas pick ’em: Our favorite strident-voiced REAL conservative Richard Viguerie has a poll running on his site that is kind of fun in a perverse way. He lists 31 people or reasons why the Republican Party got beaten worse than Keith Moon’s snare drum in last fall’s elections and invites us to choose 10 of them.

Of course, you have to provide a name and party affiliation “to prevent fraud,” and you can’t vote for more than 10 (I tried), but it’s still interesting to be forced to make some hard choices when all you really feel like doing is pushing every button. Viguerie gives the results of how those identifying themselves as Republicans voted and how the total vote count came out with Dems, independents and others included.

According to Viguerie, the number-one reason for blame chosen by 76 percent of the Repugs was “Conservative leaders who kept silent when the GOP became the party of Big Government,” which coincidentally is one of Richard’s obsessions. Second was “Illegal corruption, such as Mark Foley, Robert Ney, and Jack Abramoff” at 64 percent, followed by George W. Bush at 57 percent.

Those percentages and rankings were about the same when all results were lumped together, but that makes sense, since Republicans constituted 75 percent of the poll pool, which is a testament to all the liberals who don’t go to Viguerie’s site: 76 percent for silent conservative leaders, 64 percent for illegal corruption and 63 percent for Bush.

Viguerie plans to release his “findings” to the MSM on Monday, provided he can get anybody’s attention besides the guy who writes the column on crackpots. So there is still time to get your votes in and skew the findings. If we all vote as Dems or independents, we can perhaps help George Bush win again by being named the number-one reason why Repugs lost the House and Senate.

Go here to vote.

Karen Hughes Turned Bush into a Caricature, Now Is ‘Tired’ Of Seeing Him Treated Like One

Jon Ponder

This is rich:

[Bush loyalists] are increasingly angry at criticism leveled at him. Karen Hughes, the communications adviser who famously went back to Texas when her teenage son grew homesick but has since returned as an under secretary of state, says she is tired of seeing Mr. Bush treated as a “caricature.”

We’ll stop treating him like one when he stops being one.

Fratboy-in-Chief Threatened to Sodomize Bin Laden

Jon Ponder

This is sourced to Ariel Sharon, a Bush ally:

“I will screw him in the ass!”
— Pres. Bush

Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon’s delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: “I will screw him in the ass!”

Sounds like our guy — likes towel snaps and fart jokes, and was caught on tape speaking with his mouth full in an expletive-laden conversation with Tony Blair.

But is it a Freudian slip?

Snow: Bush Knew About Horror at Walter Reed – But Did He Care?

Jon Ponder

Tony Snow was awfully casual about the fact that Pres. Bush knew about the horrid conditions at Walter Reed hospital’s Building 18:

In today’s press briefing, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow about the Washington Post’s two-part series over the weekend, highlighting the Walter Reed hospital’s dilapidated conditions. Snow stated that “the president certainly has been aware of the conditions in the wards where he has visited, and visited regularly.” Snow also affirmed that the administration was aware of Walter Reed’s conditions “before the articles appeared in the paper.”

So Bush knew wounded soldiers were living in rat- and cockroach-infested squalor at the military’s flagship hospital and yet he did nothing about it. In fact, no one did anything about it until the Washington Post ran an expose.

Scaife Funded ‘Arkansas Project’ to Destroy Clinton, Now Says He Was a ‘Pretty Good’ President

Jon Ponder

In the 1990s, Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife provided at least $1.8 million to fund the “Arkansas Project,” a conspiracy to dig up dirt on Bill and Hillary Clinton in their home state. The project was successful in that it eventually led to the snaring of Pres. Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in a perjury trap, and their sex lie under oath led to his impeachment.

Rightwingers like to blame the September 11 attacks on Pres. Clinton, saying he was distracted by his personal problems. This is bull, of course. But if it were true, the real culprits would include Scaife, Olson and Tyrrell.

Another result of the Arkansa Project was that it softened support for Clinton’s would-be successor, Vice Pres. Al Gore, thus paving the way for the Bush administration and six diasastrous years of conservatives’ corrupt control of the government, as well as the war in Iraq, which has been called the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

Now, however, an aide to Scaife says the reclusive billionaire has changed his mind about Bill Clinton:

Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, “Both of us have had a rethinking.”

“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Mr. Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.”

The purpose of the Arkansas campaign was to hobble the Clinton presidency by spreading lies, half-truths and rumors about the Clintons. According to sources that include the invaluable, “Hunting of the Presidency,” by Joe Conanson and Gene Lyons, the Arkansas Project operated out of the offices of the American Spectator magazine, a mouthpiece for rightwing ideology. Another good source for this story is David Brock, whose book, “Blinded by the Right,” describes how he worked as a “hit man,” writing deliberately false news stories about the Clintons’ personal lives at the behest of American Spectator and its editor-in-chief, Emmett Tyrell Jr.

(Brock has repented and now runs the liberal watchdog organization, Media Matters for America.)

The administrator of Scaife’s funding for the Arkansas Project, according to these and other sources, was Ted Olson, a longtime pal of Whitewater inquisitor Ken Starr. There is much speculation, along with some evidence, that Olson or his minions fed Starr’s Whitewater investigation information collected by the Arkansas Project. This connection was a key element of the “vast rightwing conspiracy” Hillary Clinton referred to during her appearance on the Today Show on January 27, 1998.

Olson’s late wife Barbara was one of the rightwing blondes in the 1990s that included Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, who used their virulent hatred of the Clintons to became media stars. Barbara Olson wrote an anti-Hillary screed titled, “Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton.” (She died onboard the plane that hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.)

In 2000, Ted Olson argued for the Bush-Cheney campaign in Bush v. Gore at the Supreme Court, thus delivering the presidency to the man who will forever be known as the Worst President Ever. Olson was rewarded by being named Bush’s first solicitor general, a post once held by his friend, Ken Starr.

Rightwingers like to blame the September 11 attacks on Pres. Clinton, saying he was distracted by his personal problems. This is bull, of course. But if it were true, the real culprits would include Scaife, Olson and Tyrrell, who drummed up moral outrage about the president’s peccadillos. Other presidents, including the current president’s father, have reportedly had affairs while in office without the intrusion of public scrutiny.

Now that Scaife has seen the light, it seems that the least he could do is offer a full accounting of what was done in his name, and with his money, in connection with the “get Clinton” project.

Poll: D.C. Insiders Don’t Believe Bush on Iran

Buck Banks

More lies: For this week’s Insider Poll, National Journal asked inside-the-Beltway types their views on whether George Bush is gearing up to lead from behind in an invasion of Iran:

‘For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran.’
— Defense Secretary Robert Gates

The new insiders poll asked 40 congressional Democrats and 35 congressional Republicans to grade the administration’s handling of Iran. Bush received an average C-plus grade from his fellow party members and a D-minus from the opposition. The perception that Bush has already decided to act against Iran was commonly cited.

“I would have given him an F, but he has not invaded yet,” a Democratic insider who gave Bush a D grumbled. A colleague echoed that reasoning, adding that a military strike “would be an utter disaster with enormously negative consequences.”

Indeed, Democrats’ skepticism of the administration’s stated intentions for dealing with Iran led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to tell reporters this week, “For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Thursday suggested she would try to nip Bush’s alleged Iran ambitions in the bud with a binding resolution requiring congressional approval for military invasion.

Predictably, Democrats were all but evenly split on whether Bush should receive a D or an F (not one gave him an A). Republicans were more forgiving: Forty-six percent gave him a B, 29 percent gave him a C and just 3 percent gave him an F. One of the 9 percent who gave him an A laid blame for the diplomatic crisis with Iran squarely on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “It is difficult to work with a person who seeks world destruction.”

There are two popular lines of thought when it comes to the Bush administration and Iran. One is that a military strike would more likely be considered justified because of Tehran’s nuclear program, and a fresh war would entice the American public to rally behind the troops. The other is that the Bush administration is chastened by the Iraq war and is sincere in seeking a diplomatic solution with Iran.

But even if the latter is the case, insiders have more criticism to add to the pile. Groused a GOP insider who gave Bush a D: Bush “should not rely on the weak-kneed lefties at the State Department to manage our interests in Iran.”