Day: March 4, 2011

Worst Ex-President Ever Still Clueless

Trish

bushtapsbrainSpeaking in Republican-dominated Jacksonville, Florida had to be better than former Pres. George W. Bush’s last attempt to address crowds. That appearance, planned recently in Switzerland, was canceled after human rights advocates threatened to arrest Bush when his plane touched down.

By contrast, Jacksonvillians gave standing ovations to the former chief executive, whose rein included two invasions, economic collapse, the worst handling of the worst natural disaster in our country’s history, and other low points too numerous and painful to recall. But Bush showed in the speech, in which reporter Karen Brune Mathis noted he “referred frequently to his recently published autobiography, ‘Decision Points,'” that he still doesn’t get it.

Bush, who was known as the most incurious person to ever hold the office now says, “I’m a content guy”

Bush said that his core principles include the belief that freedom should be universal and is the “gift of almighty God.”

“Freedom will lead to the peace that we want,” he said. “Freedom was the cornerstone of my policy agenda.”

Reality check: Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, presided over passage of the Patriot Act, an omnibus piece of legislation that allowed formerly illegal searches and seizures, secret wiretapping of American citizens, and – showing no intrusion was too minor – called for libraries to turn over records of people reading about Islam.

Bush showed his puffed up ego has grown since leaving office.

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

Huntsman’s too liberal, comes with the tarnish of having accepted the appointment from Obama. He’s never said anything really conservative in his life. How’s he going to win in a conservative primary? He can’t. Huntsman is, in my opinion, a non-player.He’s still an Obamaite. We’re not going to nominate an Obamaite. And I will make sure the Republican Party does not nominate an Obamaite.

— Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R), quoted by RealClearPolitics, on U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman running for president.

Huckabee and the Boy Scouts

Jon Ponder
David Huckabee in mug shot from weapons arrest
David Huckabee in mug shot from an April 2007 arrest on weapons charges

On Day Three of Mike Huckabee’s Lie-apalooza Tour this week, in an interview with hate-group radio host Bryan Fischer, Huckabee said this:

At age 18, Huckabee’s son David was fired by the Scouts as a camp counselor after he and another counselor captured a stray dog, hanged him by the neck, slit his throat and stoned him to death.

HUCKABEE: “…I do think [Pres. Obama] has a different worldview and I think it’s, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher, former governor of Arkansas and Fox News host, first got himself into rhetorical trouble on Monday when, on another right-wing radio show, he opined that Obama’s worldview had been warped by having grown up in Kenya under the influence of his paternal grandfather, who, according to Huckabee, had been involved in the Mau Mau Revolt against the British in the 1950s.

As evidence of how Obama’s worldview had been distorted by his Mau Mau revolutionary grandfather, Huckabee cited the president’s decision early in his term to return to the British Embassy a bust of Winston Churchillthat had been on loan in the Oval Office. Churchill was Britain’s prime minister during the revolt.

Except for the fact that Obama returned the Churchill piece — which he replaced with a bust of Abraham Lincoln — all of that was a lie. Obama was in his late twenties when he first stepped foot in Kenya. He met his paternal grandfather for the first time and only time then. There is no evidence his grandfather was involved in the uprising, other than a less-than-reliable recollection of it decades later by his then-87-year-old widowed third wife.

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