Month: July 2006

MoDo on Bush’s Foreign Policy Evolution: ‘Like Watching Dry Paint’

Jon Ponder

Maureen Dowd:

The more things get complicated, the more W. feels vindicated in his own simplified vision. The more people try to tell him that it’s not easy, that this is a region of shifting alliances and interests, the less he seems inclined to develop an adroit policy to win people over to our side instead of trying to annihilate them.

Bill Clinton, the Mutable Man par excellence, evolved four times a day; he had a tactical and even recreational attitude toward personal change. But W. prides himself on his changelessness and regards his immutability as the surest sign of his virtue. Facing a map on fire, he sees any inkling of change as the slippery slope to failure.

That’s what is so frustrating about watching him deal – or not deal – with Iraq and Lebanon. There’s almost nothing to watch.

It’s not even like watching paint dry, since that, too, is a passage from one state to another. It’s like watching dry paint.

Military-Industrial Complex Healthy — Boeing Blackmailing Army

Buck Banks

Washington bullets: “Congress Daily” reports that Boeing Co. and two subcontractors are threatening to stop development work and lay off as many as 1,300 employees working on the manned vehicle portion of the Army’s $164 billion Future Combat Systems program because it has run out of money, according to the Army said.

Of course, work can continue and employees stay employed if two congressional committees that oversee the defense budget approve a transfer of $295 million, the Army said Monday, as reported by Bloomberg News.

Boeing Co. reported a $1.1 billion second-quarter loss today.

“That money has now been exhausted and must be restored,” Army Lt. Col. William Wiggins said in an e-mail. Wiggins said he did not know when a stop-work order or layoffs might begin.

London-based BAE System’s North American unit and Falls Church-based General Dynamics are the primary companies developing eight models of manned tactical and support vehicles for the Army’s Future Combat Systems program.

A General Dynamics spokesman referred all comment to the Army, and a BAE Systems spokesman had no immediate comment.

But a Boeing spokeswoman said that “reports of imminent layoffs on the FCS program due to funding issues are incorrect.

“It is our understanding that a funding reprogramming request was submitted to the congressional defense committees and is proceeding through approvals,” she wrote. “The reprogramming approval needs to occur in a timely fashion, however, to allow the FCS program to continue to execute on plan.”

So the request is wending its way through the approval process, just not as fast as the Army — and probably Boeing — wants it to.

The Future Combat Systems program is described as “a new family of faster manned and unmanned battle vehicles linked by high-speed, digital communications, unmanned drones and new combat radios organized into brigade-combat teams taht are lighter than today’s Army.”

Interesting, but TradingMarkets.com reports today that Boeing is losing money wing over rudder:

Boeing Co. announced financial results for its second quarter, reporting a loss as the company took $1.1 billion of previously announced charges to settle government investigations into its defence unit and to cover the costs of delayed surveillance aircraft.

Ouch! I don’t suppose $294 million will go far to offset that kind of loss, but hey, it’s a start, right?

Midterm Alternatives Shaping Up to be ‘Pretty Pathetic’

Buck Banks

Hobson’s choice: “National Journal’s” Charlie Cook sums up the rather cynical state of our two-party system as we approach November:

For all the talk about Democrats needing to “be for something,” a stronger case can be made that the Democrats should just stay out of the way and let events take their course. If Democrats prevail on November 7, their success won’t be due to any great idea they have or great message they are selling.

It will be because they are not Republicans and because people voted against Republicans. The Republicans’ only hope of retaining control on both sides of Capitol Hill is to get across the message that “no matter how angry or disappointed you are in us, Democrats are far worse and would screw things up even more.”

Pretty pathetic, isn’t it: Either one side wins because of what it isn’t, or the other side wins because it convinces voters that it is the lesser of two evils.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

GEORGE W. BUSH: I’m looking forward to the feast you’re going to have tonight. I understand I may have the honor of slicing the pig …. I’m optimistic we can still get something done on the Doha Round. It’s going to take work, but G8 is a good place for us to continue the dialogue, and we will. And I guess that’s about all — we discussed a lot of things, in other words. And thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to that pig tonight ….

REPORTER: On both of these. Does it concern you that the Beirut airport has been bombed? And do you see a risk of triggering a wider war? And on Iran, they’ve, so far, refused to respond. Is it now past the deadline, or do they still have more time to respond?

GWB: I thought you were going to ask me about the pig.

REPORTER: I’m curious about that, too.

GWB: The pig? I’ll tell you tomorrow after I eat it.

— During a press availability event with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was going to be serving roast wild boar to President Bush that evening during the G8 Summit, Stralsund, Germany, July 13, 2006

Favorite Bush Moments

Jon Ponder

A compilation by David Letterman of President Bush’s top 10 video moments prompted this call by the Last Chance Democracy Cafe for readers’ favorite Bush moments. Here are a few from commenters that are particularly memorable:

  • “My favorite moment is in the future. As he is found guilty of treason and crimes against humanity and tries to pardon himself in court after the verdict.”
  • “How about when he masturbated in a coffin surrounded by a couple-dozen fellow Skull-and-Bonesmen at Yale? That’s gotta be a keeper.”
  • “being arrested for drunk driving, being arrested for being drunk in public, getting a score of 25 on his air force exam, going AWOL instead of getting tested for drugs,getting his girlfriend an abortion, sitting on his ass like a scared child on sep 11th, invading a country for WMDS that don’t exist (even though he said he would do it even if they didn’t) saying he doen’t care about finding BIN LADEN, or that he doesn’t give him much thought, appointing miers, appointing BROWN to FEMA, giving the PEOPLE most responsible for 911, medals of honor, bankrupting AMERICA, not being able to name 1 thing he has done wrong thats just a few of MY FAVORITE BUSH MOMENTS.”

My favorite George W. Bush moment constituted my first impression of him. At the 1988 Republican Convention, where his father, the vice president, was seeking a presidential nomination, a reporter asked Bush the younger, who was 42 years old at the time, what he and his father talked about when they were in private. The future forty-second president of the United States responded with one word: “Pussy.”

So what is your favorite Bush moment?

When Is a War Not a ‘Civil War?’

Jon Ponder

“I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war.”

A scholar in the “New York Times” recently went through about 10 recent wars that were categorized as civil wars, and none of them was as bad as this.

Semantic conspiracy: History will record that our invasion of Iraq in 2003 to depose Saddam Hussein had the unintended consequence of triggering a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. That much is clear. What is less clear is when our politicians and the media will be forced to come to terms with the reality on the ground in the new Iraq.

For the rest of us, it is past time to call the mess in Mesopotamia what it is — the Iraqi Civil War:

[BRIAN UNGER, substituting for Keith Olbermann on Countdown last night]: Jonathan, before anything else, I‘d like to get your take on whether this is or isn‘t a civil war in Iraq.

[JONATHAN ALTER, writer for Newsweek]: You know, I think it clearly is, by any historical standard. I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war. A scholar in the “New York Times” recently went through about 10 recent wars that were categorized as civil wars, and none of them was as bad as this.

You know, so I think what‘s going on here is a semantic game where the media doesn‘t want to start calling it a civil war before the politicians do, because then they will be accused of liberal bias and the Democrats don‘t want to call it a civil war, because they‘ll be accused of lack of, you know, patriotism by the Republicans. And, of course, the administration doesn‘t want to call it that because it will confirm it‘s a fiasco.

So, everybody has this kind of semantic conspiracy to not call the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room.

The same cabal of conniving Republicans, million-dollar Kool Kids in the DC media and spineless Democrats who pretended to be blind to the false rationale for invading Iraq in 2002 is obfuscating the fact that our mission there has changed in 2006. We were conquerers then but now the billion-dollar robocop of the U.S. military is deployed as a beat cop, trying to keep the peace in the midst of a civil war.

ABA Bipartisan Task Force Finds Bush’s ‘Signing Statements’ To Be Unconstitutional

Jon Ponder

With both Congress and the media unwilling or unable to challenge President Bush’s unprecendented accumulation of power, we should be grateful that the American Bar Association has had the courage to step into the breach.

A bipartisan task force appointed by ABA President David Greco took on the issue of the so-called signing statements Pres. Bush issues after he signs bills into law. In many of the over 800 statements issued by the president — a number that dwarfs the 600 or so such statements issued by all of his predecessors in the past 217 years, combined — the president has indicated that he intended to break the very the laws he just signed.

The ABA task force ruled that this countermanding of laws passed by Congress is unconstitutional.

With the media focused on the Israeli-Hezbollah war and the Iraqi Civil War, the ABA findings have gotten very little attention.

Imagine, if you will, that a Democratic president had been found to have deliberately and repeatedly engaged in unconstitutional activities. What a hew and cry there would be.

Now Sen. Arlen Specter says he just might sue the president over these activities. What we know for sure about Sen. Specter is that he is all bark and no bite. I, for one, am not expecting much.

Here’s a link to the ABA Task Force Report

And here’s a list of the task force members:
[…]

Media Guy Sums Up the Oprah-Gayle Gay Thing

Buck Banks

The horror, the horror: AdAge’s Simon Dumenco, aka Media Guy, plumbs the depths of his psyche to create images we never wanted to entertain. WARNING: If you read this, it will happen to you, too.

Oprah and Gayle are happy-gay, not gay-gay
Look, when I worked with Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King (on the launch of O magazine), I didn’t think they were gay. I still don’t think they’re gay. I don’t care that they think that the American public might think they’re gay, or that their in-print denials of their gayness (in the current O) are making many people who’d never a-thunk about their possible gayness now think they actually are gay. What I am concerned about is how to strike from my mind the images of Oprah and Gayle sharing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Neapolitan Dynamite (with one spoon), loofahing each other in the shower (in slo-mo) and then shopping at Home Depot together (taking turns pushing the cart).

Ew!