Bush is at Camp David (with Condi). AmericaBlog suggests he’s at the presidential country retreat hoping to recharge what little presidential mojo he has left.
My first thought was Kitty Kelly’s description in her book about the Bushes, “The Family,” of George W. Bush doing cocaine at Camp David when his father was in office. (The source of this story appears to have been Sharon, Neil’s ex-wife.)
Pres. George W. Bush might never be impeached, but he could be forced to resign as a result of the coming investigations by the Democrats. If he and his co-conspirator, Vice Pres. Cheney, were to resign together, Speaker Pelosi would become president. Any risk of this is intolerable, so Cheney has to go first.
Unhappy with Bush, the GOP establishment will want Sen. John McCain to replace Cheney. If Bush resigns, Pres. McCain would serve out the rest of his term and then enjoy the sublime benefit of barnstorming the country in 2008 on Air Force One. (The fact that McCain and Bush hate each other would be icing on the cake.)
I expected to hear rumors about Cheney after the holidays: his health problems are flaring up, he is bored in his diminished role and wants to return to business — or that he and Bush are having a major spat — but why wait:
The latest Evans-Novak Political Report suggests the way President Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld caused considerable friction in the White House. “Even Vice President Dick Cheney is said to be profoundly disturbed by Rumsfeld’s treatment.”
…[Robert] Novak also suggests Bush’s “shrouded decision” came after he declared Rumsfeld would serve out the second term. “It fits a pattern of a President who is secretive and impersonal.”
Wait. I thought Bush was “loyal to a fault?” Did Novak unilaterally change the president’s meme? If so, did it come from Karl?
History repeats itself. Vice President Dick Cheney is trying to bury a classified draft assessment by the CIA that shows Iran, like Iraq before it, might be telling the truth about it nuclear weapons program. Be sure to pick up the Nov. 27 issue of the New Yorker, with the full article by Seymour Hersh.
The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency….
But Cheney and the Bush administration aren’t going to let little details like the truth stop them from pursuing their goals, whatever the hell they are.
Cheney and his aides discounted the assessment, the former senior intelligence official said. “They’re not looking for a smoking gun,” the official added, referring to specific intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. “They’re looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission.” […]
When I hear a Republican refer to my party as the “Democrat Party,” rather than “Democratic Party,” it’s a signal to me that the speaker is an asshole. It sounds insulting because it is supposed to. When the President of the United States repeatedly refers to the “Democrat Party” it sends the message that he is only the President of the Republican Party — and that he is an asshole. Ruth Marcus expresses the same idea more nicely in today’s Washington Post:
If he wanted to, President Bush could change the tone in Washington with a single syllable: He could just say “ic.” That is, he could stop referring to the opposition as the “Democrat Party” and call the other side, as it prefers, the Democratic Party.
The derisive use of “Democrat” in this way was a Bush staple during the recent campaign. “There are people in the Democrat Party who think they can spend your money far better than you can,” he would say in his stump speech, or, “Raising taxes is a Democrat idea of growing the economy,” or, “However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.”
But even as he promised to work to change the tone in Washington after the elections, the president couldn’t manage to change his language. In his day-after-the-elections news conference, Bush employed this needling locution five times. “This morning, I spoke with Republican and Democrat leadership in the House and Senate,” he began, adding, “it is clear the Democrat Party had a good night last night.” That was followed by references to “Democrat leaders,” “Democrat leadership” and “Democrat votes,” as in, “We got some tax cuts passed with Democrat votes.” Geez, you’d think he’d at least give them the -ic when they vote for his tax cuts.
President Bush 41 got a dose of reality about his son at an an event in Abu Dhabi earlier this week, and the harsh words appear to have genuinely shocked him:
Former President George H.W. Bush took on Arab critics of his son Tuesday during a testy exchange at a leadership conference in the capital of this U.S. ally.
“My son is an honest man,” Bush told members of the audience harshly criticized the current U.S. leader’s foreign policy…
“We do not respect your son. We do not respect what he’s doing all over the world,” a woman in the audience bluntly told Bush after his speech.
Bush, 82, appeared stunned as others in the audience whooped and whistled in approval.
A college student told Bush his belief that U.S. wars were aimed at opening markets for American companies and said globalization was contrived for America’s benefit at the expense of the rest of the world. Bush was having none of it.
“I think that’s weird and it’s nuts,” Bush said. “To suggest that everything we do is because we’re hungry for money, I think that’s crazy. I think you need to go back to school.”
The hostile comments came during a quesion-and-answer session after Bush finished a folksy address on leadership by telling the audience how deeply hurt he feels when his presidential son is criticized.
“This son is not going to back away,” Bush said, his voice quivering. “He’s not going to change his view because some poll says this or some poll says that, or some heartfelt comments from the lady who feels deeply in her heart about something. You can’t be president of the United States and conduct yourself if you’re going to cut and run. This is going to work out in Iraq. I understand the anxiety. It’s not easy.”
…He told the audience — including dozens of women in black robes and head scarves — he was extremely proud of his sons, President George W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
He said the happiest day of his life was election day in 1998 when George and Jeb were elected to the governorships of Texas and Florida, but he also described the pain he feels when his sons are attacked.
“I can’t begin to tell you the pride I feel in my two sons,” Bush said. “When your son’s under attack, it hurts. You’re determined to be at his side and help him any way you possibly can.”
…Bush said he was surprised by the audience’s criticism of his son.
“He is working hard for peace. It takes a lot of guts to get up and tell a father about his son in those terms when I just told you the thing that matters in my heart is my family,” he said. “How come everybody wants to come to the United States if the United States is so bad?”
The Bush administration has eliminated hunger in America, and it was much easier than anyone suspected. They have simply quit using the word.
Yes, the folks who brought you “faith-based initiatives” instead of “lack of separation of church and state,” and “healthy forests” instead of “clear-cutting” are proud to present, “very low food security” instead of “hunger.”
…in Chicago, at the Holy Family Food Pantry, the people lining up for assistance know exactly what hunger means.
“I’m running out of food, so I got to find somewhere to get some food,” Terry Sutton said.
But according to the new government report, that doesn’t necessarily make him hungry.
Sutton and others like him have “very low food security.”
“When they hear ‘very low food security’ it sounds like bureaucratic jargon. It doesn’t sound like people who can’t get enough to eat,” said Deborah Leff of the Public Welfare Foundation.
Some say that may be just the point.
We can expect Rush Limbaugh to chime in any time with a screed about fat poor people and how they’re all just faking it.
Meanwhile, groups like USA Harvest pick up the Bush administration’s slack by fighting hunger all over this country and Canada, including Houston, where, over one year later, many of the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina still live. A study conducted in September showed them not doing very well.
While about 60 percent of the evacuees surveyed had been employed in New Orleans before Katrina, a little more than 60 percent are now unemployed. Almost 74 percent have an annual income of less than $15,000, and almost 17 percent have an income of between $15,000 and $25,000.
Guess we ought to do something about that. Maybe we should call them “geographically shifted people of newfound leisure” instead.
As a coda to Republicans’ losing Congress this year, the firing of Donald Rumsfeld may serve as the tipping-point moment when the GOP could no longer ignore the fact that their former Dear Leader, George Bush, is indeed the Worst President Ever in the history of the United States.
History may well show that the forced resignation of the secretary of defense on the day after the election is the equivalent in the political realm of Pres. Bush’s mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested that if Bush replaced Rumsfeld two weeks before the election, voters would not have been as angry about the unpopular Iraq war. Republicans would have gained the boost they needed, according to Gingrich, to retain their majority in the Senate and hold onto 10 to 15 more House seats.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed with that assessment.
Bush should have removed Rumsfeld “as soon as he had made up his mind. And that’s a hard thing to calculate. But it’s highly doubtful that he made up his mind between the time the election returns came in on Tuesday and Wednesday when Rumsfeld was out.”
“And if Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference,” Specter said. “I’d still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”
The same thought occurred to veteran Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., who was on the verge of becoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. After the election, Shaw said that if Rumsfeld had stepped down before last Tuesday, Shaw and other Republicans might have won.
“It could have made a difference in who is running the Congress,” said Shaw.
Let’s stipulate that lying — often gussied up as “misleading” or “shading the truth” — is part and parcel of politics. But George W. Bush came into politics with a record and a reputation as someone who lies compulsively.
In this instance, whether he lied to the press before the election when he said that Rummy and Cheney were doing “fantastic” jobs and would stay on through the end of his term, or whether, as my colleague Trish has suggested, he lied after the election in order to cover his tracks, the fact is, he lied one time too many — and he may have contributed to the undoing of his presidency, and his party, in the process.
In his news conference today, Pres. Bush inadvertently admitted that he lied to reporters last week when he said that he planned to retain Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney through the end of his term:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Last week you told us that Secretary Rumsfeld will be staying on. Why is the timing right now for this, and how much does it have to do with the election results?
THE PRESIDENT: Right. No, you and [two other reporters] came in the Oval Office, and [one of you] asked me the question one week before the [election], and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they’re going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.
In other words, yes, I lied to you and so what? So what if lying to reporters is the same as lying to the American people.
The president continued:
The truth of the matter is, as well — I mean, that’s one reason I gave the answer, but the other reason why is I hadn’t had a chance to visit with Bob Gates yet, and I hadn’t had my final conversation with Don Rumsfeld yet at that point.
Many of us remember a time when the idea of a president admitting during a news conference that he’d lied to the media would have produced excitement and anger among the gaggle on the scene.
Today, however the session continued as if nothing had happened. Three or four reporters lobbed unrelated softballs, apparently oblivous — or apathetic — to the fact that he had just admitted to lying to their colleagues. Finally, someone asked for clarification — and the president, a certified pathological liar who is accustomed to murdering the truth and getting away with it, simply lied about lying:
Q Mr. President, thank you. Can I just start by asking you to clarify, sir, if, in your meeting with Steve and Terry and Dick, did you know at that point —
THE PRESIDENT: I did not.
Q — you would be making a change on Secretary Rumsfeld?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I did not. And the reason I didn’t know is because I hadn’t visited with his replacement — potential replacement.
Q But you knew he would be leaving, just not who would replace him?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I didn’t know that at the time.
And that was it. No follow up. No outrage. Not only did Chris Matthews not spew spittle in outrage, he did not even mention it, probably didn’t even notice.
There are consequences much harsher than the expectoration of pundits. This time — unlike any of the dozens, maybe hundreds of times this president has lied to the American people since 1999 — there was an immediate and unexpected consequence. Bush’s unqualified endorsement of Rumsfeld became a big news story in the run-up to the election that was not received well by the country’s uniformed personnel. Their displeasure was expressed in editorials published in the military newspapers on Monday, the day before the election, that called for Rumsfeld’s ouster.
But just like all the other uncountable lies told by this man since he’s been president, he’s has gotten away with this one, too. The media has moved on. It’s like they simply expect him to lie.
And what about Cheney? The results of the elections yesterday make it even more likely that the lameduck V.P. will be replaced with a GOP heir apparent — the party elders would no doubt like it to be John McCain — sometime before the commencement of election season early next year.
It is notable that Bush included Cheney with Rumsfeld in his “heckuva job.” Perhaps we should expect to hear stories about Cheney’s failing health or his sudden ennui with government soon after the holidays.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
