Day: March 19, 2007

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.

Miami to Romney: ‘!El Mitt es realmente estúpido!’

Buck Banks

Ethnomoronic Mormon: For all his touted smarts and political savvy, Mitt Romney really laid a boner here in Miami during a recent speech where he was trying — some say way too hard — to court the notoriously conservative Cuban-American vote. Besides sprinkling his speech with “Libertad, libertad, libertad” like a drunk priest slinging holy water, and mangling several Cuban-American politicians’ names like JKimmy Durante on crack, Romney casually used one of Fidel Castro’s favorite closers like a drunk who swaps one joke’s punchline for another’s — with similar effect.

According to the Miami Herald:

People chuckled when presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Mormon raised in Michigan and elected in Massachusetts, bungled the names of Cuban-American politicians during a recent speech in Miami.

But when he mistakenly associated Fidel Castro’s trademark speech-ending slogan — Patria o muerte, venceremos! — with a free Cuba, listeners didn’t laugh. They winced.

Castro has closed his speeches with the phrase — in English, ”Fatherland or death, we shall overcome” — for decades.

Despite the fact that Romney has Al Cárdenas, a Cuban immigrant who is a well-known Miami lawyer and former Florida GOP campaign chair, he still screwed up, like so many before him. The Republicans think they need the Cuban voter base of South Florida to win the state, and they are embarrassingly unembarrassed about sucking up to people for whom “politics” and “corruption” are virtual synonyms, and for whom the only reason to enter politics is for the power and the perks. “Service” never really enters into it.

So, though it’s too late to save Mitt from making an ass of himself, and since the pilgrimage to the Versaille Restaurant in Little Havana has become as ubiquitous a part of Repug campaigns as baby-kissing, here are a few suggestions to other pols seeking to get an “in” with the South Florida Cuban-American faction:

1. Don’t hyphenate “Cuban American”; they don’t.
2. Don’t call them Latinos, they prefer Hispanic or Cuban American (no hyphen).
3. If you decide to step onto the slippery slope of incorporating Spanish quotations or expressions in your speech, remember not to use expressions from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, the barrios of California or Spanish Harlem.
4. Don’t make wisecracks about Desi Arnaz, José Martí or the movie “Scarface.”
5. Do praise Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Gloria Estefan and Andy Garcia.
6. Don’t try to dance the salsa or the rhumba. You’ll look silly and someone could get hurt.
7. Do try to eat whatever Cuban food they put in front of you, no matter how disgusting it may look or smell.
8. When they serve you cafe con leche, remember to pour the black stuff (coffee) into the white stuff (steamed milk). If you do it the other way, it will explode.
9. Do try to play dominoes for a photo op, but don’t try to win.
10. Never, ever show up for an official function dressed in a guayabera shirt.

‘Loyalty’ the Litmus Test of Bush Whitehouse

Buck Banks

Just drink your Koolaid: George Bush currently is facing a loyalty test. His “long-favored courtier” (as Jon called him) Alberto Gonzalez has a bipartisan lynch mob ready to leave him twisting in the March zephyrs. The eight U.S. attorneys who were unceremoniously fired failed their loyalty test, according to Karl “Hell’s Cherub” Rove, et. al., and so were summarily sacked.

But as Leonard Pitts notes in his column today, The kind of “loyalty” the Bush administration expects is of the blind, deaf and dumb variety, the kind that enables true believers to dutifully drink their Koolaid and croak at the feet of their monarch/messiah/military leader — and to take a few dozen non-believers with them.

People who applied to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority — the agency governing Iraq — were asked in job interviews about their political party, their opinion of Roe vs. Wade, their religious affiliation and whether or not they voted for Bush in 2000.

First, let me tell you what I’m not here to talk about.

I’m not here to talk about the role politics played in the sacking of eight U.S. attorneys. Or the fact that newly released e-mail exchanges and other documents indicate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputies misled Congress when they said the White House had nothing to do with the decision to fire those attorneys. Or the fact that Gonzales is facing bipartisan calls for his head from angry lawmakers.

All this I will leave to others. I want to talk about a word that jumped out at me in news reports about this latest Washington scandal.

The word: loyalty.

We learn that, in deciding which attorneys to retain and which to release, one factor that weighed prominently in Justice Department deliberations was whether they ”exhibited loyalty” to President Bush. The quote is from an e-mail sent by D. Kyle Sampson, then one of Gonzales’ top aides. Sampson was also author of another note in which he suggested that the “vast majority of U.S. Attorneys, 80-85 percent, I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc., etc.”

It is this notion — that being a ”loyal Bushie” is a qualification for getting or keeping a job — that rankles. And if any of this sounds like déjà vu all over again, that’s only because you’ve been paying attention. Indeed, the revelations spilling out of Gonzales’ office are distressingly familiar.

Take Brownie — please. You remember Michael Brown. Guy had zero experience in disaster management. So naturally, he wound up as head of FEMA, the federal disaster management agency. He was, after all, a ”loyal Bushie” — a friend of a Bush friend. Not that that helped him when a hurricane named Katrina came knocking.
[…]

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends on the methods employed, not on the doctrine taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious — it makes little or no difference. Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything.

— Aldous Huxley

Bush’s Obvious Choice for His Next Attorney General: Jeb

Jon Ponder

Beltway types think they smell blood at DOJ. Granted, a normal president would have fired an attorney general as bad as Abu Gonzalez — especially in light of his role in the prosecutor purge last December. But whether Pres. Bush will fire his long-favored courtier has become a matter requiring intense speculation by bewigged millionaire pundits in the Capitol, when they are not speculating about the 2008 presidential campaign.

The main qualification George Bush demands from his attorney general, as both John Ashcroft and Gonzalez have proved, is a keen ability to keep his lips in near proximity to the president’s buttocks.

Six years into the Bush era, and despite daily evidence of the president’s rank incompetence at management and governance, the Old Media types still can’t believe he is as bad as his critics say he is. The Old Guard still clings hopefully to the notion that George W. Bush is “resolute” and that “he values loyalty,” while the record shows very clearly that he is simply a self-absorbed, dim-witted and stubborn aristocrat.

Why wouldn’t this president fire Gonzalez? He gave in to criticism on the two most controversial appointments of his presidency: Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the failed nomination of his secretary, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. He screwed up in both cases — waiting to fire Rumsfeld until after the 2006 elections, when it was too late to help his party; and letting Miers, his “Miss Jane Hathaway,” twist in the wind agonizingly for days while his troglodyte base became increasingly lathered over her lack of ideologoical purity.

So, assuming Bush will fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who would he nominate as a replacement? (If you just thought, “his dog, Barney” — get out of my head!) One obvious candidate is his brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida, who has been out of office for over two months, and is undoubtedly tanned and well-rested.

There is a famous precedent, of course. Pres. John F. Kennedy appointed his younger brother, Robert Kennedy, as AG. Yes, Bobby earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1951, whereas Jeb’s 1973 Bachelor degree from the University of Texas was in Latin American Studies. But really the main qualification George Bush demands from his attorney general, as both John Ashcroft and, especially, Gonzalez have proved, is a keen ability to keep his lips in near proximity to the president’s buttocks.

Could Jeb’s nomination muster the 60 votes it would require to pass in the Senate? It seems unlikely but if you look at every other important issue that the Senate has voted on since the Dems took their one-vote majority, the approval of Jeb’s nomination is as likely as not.