Tag: Worst President Ever

“There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time.” — American Conservative

According to the rightwing, criticizing President Bush equals hating America. If so, then American Conservative Magazine now despises this country.

Owned by Christian Nationalist talking head Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, the superannuated rightwing European playboy, the magazine has published an editorial today, on the eve of the midterm elections, that excoriates President Bush and the Republican Party. The headline says, “GOP Must Go.”

While the content of the editorial sounds perfectly reasonable — almost like it was written by smart liberals — it may well signal a schism on the right that could cripple the coalition between christianists and libertarians that has held the Republican Party together since the Reagan era:

It should surprise few readers that we think a vote [in Tuesday’s midterm elections] that is seen — in America and the world at large — as a decisive “No” vote on the Bush presidency is the best outcome. We need not dwell on George W. Bush’s failed effort to jam a poorly disguised amnesty for illegal aliens through Congress or the assaults on the Constitution carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism or his administration’s endorsement of torture. Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why — thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer.

As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush’s decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation…as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides…the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel’s northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony.

The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can’t face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, America’s image in the world, its capacity to persuade others that its interests are common interests, is lower than it has been in memory. All over the world people look at Bush and yearn for this country…which once symbolized hope and justice…to be humbled. The professionals in the Bush administration (and there are some) realize the damage his presidency has done to American prestige and diplomacy. But there is not much they can do.

There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen…in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur…as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.

On his CNN show this morning, media analyst Howard Kurtz did two segments on John Kerry’s verbal gaffe. This is such an nonstory by now — Kerry made the misstatement six days ago — that there could only be one reason Kurtz, who is married to a Republican operative, would continue to flog at it: He was obviously and blatantly doing his best to keep the story alive two days before voting starts.

Some are suggesting that Kerry’s slip of the tongue will knock him out of contention for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Even though I’m convinced he does not believe the military is only for stupid and uneducated people — after all, he was a Yalie who volunteered to go to Vietnam — I would prefer that he shelve his presidential ambitions for good.

But the fact that Kurtz brought in two different sets of talking heads to discuss Kerry’s gaffe underscores the fundamental unfairness of the media’s coverage of Republicans and Democrats. After all, President Bush screws up public statements all the time — so frequently, in fact, that his screw-ups are routinely ignored by folks like Howie Kurtz and the Gang of 500 in the D.C. punditocracy.

I found this nice archive of Bushisms and have pulled a few of his less often repeated mangling of the language just for fun. Enjoy:

[…]

Guardian UK:

America is now seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbours and allies, according to an international survey of public opinion published today that reveals just how far the country’s reputation has fallen among former supporters since the invasion of Iraq.

Carried out as US voters prepare to go to the polls next week in an election dominated by the war, the research also shows that British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both countries were once cited by the US president as part of an “axis of evil”, but it is Mr Bush who now alarms voters in countries with traditionally strong links to the US.

The survey has been carried out by the Guardian in Britain and leading newspapers in Israel (Haaretz), Canada (La Presse and Toronto Star) and Mexico (Reforma), using professional local opinion polling in each country.

It exposes high levels of distrust. In Britain, 69 percent of those questioned say they believe US policy has made the world less safe since 2001, with only 7 percent thinking action in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased global security.

The finding is mirrored in America’s immediate northern and southern neighbours, Canada and Mexico, with 62 percent of Canadians and 57 percent of Mexicans saying the world has become more dangerous because of US policy…

Mr Bush is ranked with some of his bitterest enemies as a cause of global anxiety. He is outranked by Osama bin Laden in all four countries, but runs the al-Qaida leader close in the eyes of UK voters: 87 percent think the al-Qaida leader is a great or moderate danger to peace, compared with 75 percent who think this of Mr Bush.

The US leader and close ally of Tony Blair is seen in Britain as a more dangerous man than the president of Iran (62 percent think he is a danger), the North Korean leader (69 percent) and the leader of Hizbullah, Hassan Nasrallah (65 percent).

Lies to truth: In today’s Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts takes Bushco to task for lying about its lying lies. He draws an eery parallel to George Orwell’s 1949 novel, “1984,” with this quote:

‘The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. `Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ” — from 1984 by George Orwell

Pitts then lists five different occasions when George W. Bush used the term, “stay the course,” and then Bush’s latest lie from Oct. 22: “Listen, we’ve never been stay the course . . .”

In the world Orwell invented, words had no objective meaning beyond that assigned to them by the Party, whose slogans, not incidentally, were, ”War is Peace,” ”Freedom is Slavery” and ”Ignorance is Strength.” In that world, there was no past — or rather, the past was what the leaders said it was, and it was a waste of time to check for yourself, because all books, newspapers and other records were constantly being updated to reflect whatever the new reality was.

Thus, ‘Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.’ Much as we now learn that the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq has ‘never been stay the course.’

Thus, ”Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.” Much as we now learn that the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq has ”never been stay the course.” And never mind that the president and his henchmen have spent three years pounding that phrase like nails into the public consciousness.

”Stay the course” doesn’t work anymore, not with most of the nation united against the war, so the White House announced last week that the phrase would no longer be used. That’s their prerogative. But it’s quite a leap from won’t be used to never has been used.

So did we dream these last three years? Is ”stay the course” just something we mumbled in our collective sleep as we twisted in our collective sheets? Or do we learn something here about the administration’s level of respect for our collective intelligence?

It is not, by now, surprising that the president and his surrogates rewrite the past. We’ve seen that before, after all. Seen it with John Kerry the war hero ”traitor,” with John Murtha the Marine ”coward.” Saw it with WMD, which, it turned out, were not the reason we invaded Iraq. (Where’d we ever get that idea?) What’s painful, though, is that we see it so quietly, see it, as the citizens of 1984 did, with apparent acceptance.

If lying about sex is an impeachable offense, then what is lying about torturing prisoners?

In light of today’s revelations of the particulars of torture techniques used by American interrogators on terror suspects, I conducted a quick search to see how many times President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and their spokesmen have looked at a camera and said, “We do not torture.”

In a half hour, I found 18 instances over the past 18 months or so of senior Bush officials denying what we now know is true: The United States under George Bush does torture people:

[…]

Bush’s Amerika:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Suskind, the Red Cross recently visited all of the prisoners at Guantanamo who had been transferred from secret CIA prisons, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. Do we know more about these CIA prisons, or “Black Sites” as a result of this visit?

[Ron] Suskind: We know that almost everything from the tool kit was tried: extraordinary techniques that included hot and cold water-boarding and threats of various kinds…

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And what happened to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed?

Suskind: He was really the prize. He is the 9/11 operational planner, a kind of general in the al-Qaida firmament. He was water-boarded, hot and cold, all matter of deprivations, beatings, threats. He told us some things, but frankly things that professional interrogators say could have been gotten otherwise.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: With waterboarding, the prisoner is made to feel as though he is drowing, even if he isn’t really at risk of dying. There are reports that Mohammed was a kind of unoffical record-holder when it came to waterboarding.

Suskind: With extraordinary minutes passing he earned a sort of grudging respect from interrogators. The thing they did with Mohammed is that we had captured his children, a boy and a girl, age 7 and 9. And at the darkest moment we threatened grievous injury to his children if he did not cooperate. His response was quite clear: “That’s fine. You can do what you want to my children, and they will find a better place with Allah.”

One thing you gotta give President Bush — he’s not the least bit shy about putting his ignorance on display:

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

This just says it all, doesn’t it? The Google puts an entire universe of knowledge at the president’s fingertips, and yet all he can think of to use it for is gazing at his own navel.

The president’s wistfulness about his ranch is touching — sad, really. As ever, we want to remind Mr. Bush that all he has to do is resign. He can be back in Crawford in 24 hours, with nothing on his agenda for the rest of life but working on his abs.

It hasn’t been a week since President Bush signed a law passed by the GOP Congress legalizing torture of suspects. Now Jordan is claiming the right to torture its people because the United States is doing it:

Some countries try to rebut criticism of how they treat prisoners by saying they are only following the U.S. example on handling terrorism suspects, a U.N. human rights expert said Monday.

Manfred Nowak, the United Nations investigator on torture, told a news conference that “all too frequently” governments responded to criticism about their jails by saying they handled detainees the same way the United States did.

“The United States has been the pioneer of human rights and is a country that has a high reputation in the world,” Nowak said. “Today, other governments are kind of saying, ‘But why are you criticizing us; we are not doing something different than what the United States is doing.’ ”

He said nations such as Jordan tell him, “We are collaborating with the United States, so it can’t be wrong if it is also done by the United States.”

Other similarities: Jordan has a dictator, lacks free elections and is a de facto theocracy.