Start of Iraq War Year Five — Where are the Bushes?

Decline and fall: When I was in gradual school I took an advanced literature seminar titled, “the Southern Family Saga.” The professor teaching the course had sussed out a recurring theme in Southern literature that he actually traced back to the Bible and the book of Genesis.

The typical Southern family saga began with a pioneering patriarch who worked hard, cheated some and accumulated wealth and prominence at the cost of some soul substance. Subsequent generations were born with progressively less intelligence, gumption and drive, and existed merely to squander the family’s good name and fortune.

Faulkner made a career out of the saga, and it has been a useful literary conceit for many Southern authors. Kitty Kelley, unauthorized biographer of the Bush clan, has detected a similar pattern in George W. Bush’s progeny. In her op-ed piece, “Why Aren’t the Bush Daughters in Iraq?” she notes that the entire Bush family, from daughters to sibs to cousins and uncles, are absent from Iraq — when they’re not making a profit on it, that is.

WHEN I WAS a little girl in a convent school, the nuns impressed on me the power of setting a good example. These beloved teachers are no longer around to instruct the president and his family, so I recommend that the Bushes learn from Mark Twain, who said: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

The only member of the Bush family to show the strains of our ‘troubled world’ is former President George H.W. Bush.

My suggestion comes after the White House announcement earlier this month that Jenna Bush, one of the president’s twin daughters, is writing a book on her all-expenses-paid trip to Panama, where she worked for a few weeks as an intern for UNICEF. Jenna Bush is quoted as saying she will donate her earnings from her book to UNICEF, a commendable gesture, considering her father’s net worth of $20 million. But while the 25-year-old makes the rounds of TV talk shows this fall in a White House limousine, dozens of her contemporaries will be arriving home from Iraq in wooden boxes. In Britain, Prince Harry is insisting on going off to Iraq — even as his country is reducing its troop commitment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed how the power of good example could also be powerfully good politics. When he led the country to sacrifice in World War II, his children enlisted and his wife traveled to military bases to counsel and comfort the families of soldiers. Newsreels showed the president’s four sons fighting with the Marines in the Pacific, flying with the Army Air Forces in North Africa and landing with the Navy at Normandy. Soon other public figures followed suit — movie stars (James Stewart and Clark Gable) enlisted and sports heroes (Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg) went off to war.

The contrast between FDR’s good example during wartime and that of George W. Bush is stark and sad. The Bush family rallies to the political campaigns of its scions and spends months on the road raising money and shaking hands to put their men into public office. In fact, the public image of their cohesive family — the pearl-choked matriarch surrounded by progeny and springer spaniels — helped cinch more than one presidency for the Bushes. Yet now, when its legacy is most in peril, the family seems to be squandering its good will on a mess of celebridreck.
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Where the Candidates Stand on the Fate of AG Gonzalez

Predictably mixed bag: According to Congressional Quarterly, the 2008 presidential candidates’ positions on what should be done with Attorney General Alberto ‘The Judge” Gonzalez range from “hang him high” to “no comment.”

‘[Gonzalez has] clearly forgotten the difference between his current job as America’s top law enforcement officer and his old job as President Bush’s personal attorney.’
— Hillary Clinton

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called for Gonzales’ resignation in a March 13 statement in which he accused Gonzales of having “betrayed his public trust by playing politics when his job is to enforce and uphold the law.”

“Attorney General Gonzales should certainly resign now,” Edwards said.

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York called for Gonzales’ resignation during an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and sent an e-mail to supporters March 14 urging them to sign an online petition calling for Gonzales’ resignation.

Clinton wrote that “it is time for the attorney general — who repeatedly and falsely claimed the firings were based on performance — to step down.” She accused Gonzales, a former White House counsel, of having “clearly forgotten the difference between his current job as America’s top law enforcement officer and his old job as President Bush’s personal attorney.”

Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd called for Gonzales’ dismissal if the allegations were found to be true — according to a statement his campaign released Friday to CQPolitics.com.

“Anyone found responsible for these egregious lapses in judgment — up to and including Alberto Gonzales — should be immediately dismissed,” Dodd said.

Republican candidates, on the other hand, have taken a more cautious approach — either by saying calls for Gonzales’ resignation are overhasty, or by declining comment on the matter altogether.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, in a March 15 interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, said it was too soon to make a pronouncement about Gonzales’ future.

“We collect facts and interview witnesses before we convict. And we don’t have that information yet,” Romney said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, during a campaign trip in Iowa last week, did not call for Gonzales’ resignation — but said, according to the Des Moines Register, that “congressional hearings are warranted and will take place. And there’s a lot of explaining to do.”

Several other Republican candidates or their campaigns — including that of former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani — have declined to say whether or not Gonzales should resign.

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

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

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.
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Quote du Jour

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

Poll: Insiders Piling On Gonzalez

If only they could wipe off that perpetual smirk: In National Journal’s poll of Washington insiders, the consensus is that the attorney general is generally a screw-up who probably should lose his job:

Things aren’t looking good for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. After finding himself mired in controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, two GOP senators seeking re-election next year in their blue-tinted states called for his dismissal.

‘One more example of poor management by the current administration. They couldn’t manage themselves out of a wet paper bag.’

Republican lawmakers continue to pile on the criticism. National Journal’s congressional insiders poll this week reveals that just 48 percent of the 33 surveyed said they are confident in Gonzales’ performance as attorney general.

But at least two of those respondents weren’t enthusiastic in their affirmations. One who answered yes added, “But [my confidence] is rapidly waning.” After offering a lukewarm avowal, another retorted, “Do I have confidence in his ability to avoid jumping up and down with both feet on another political land mine? Nope.”

One-third of the GOP respondents said they didn’t have confidence in the attorney general’s abilities, and 18 percent couldn’t make a call. One of the naysayers claimed to never have had confidence in Gonzales, explaining, “He is a weak administrator and was without ability from the start.” Another blamed the White House: “One more example of poor management by the current administration. They couldn’t manage themselves out of a wet paper bag.”

Democratic insiders were nearly unanimous in their misgivings — 93 percent said they lacked confidence in Gonzales. “The attorney general should move to a Republican campaign committee. It would be more in keeping with what he does,” one offered. And another Democrat who gave a thumbs down quipped, “But I’m sure he already knew that. After all, Gonzales and John Ashcroft listen in on all my calls!”

Of course, Gonzales is not the only administration official feeling the heat these days. A new Gallup poll conducted following the verdict in the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial — which resulted in further media scrutiny of Libby’s former boss, the vice president — shows that just 34 percent of respondents approve of the job Dick Cheney is doing, the lowest Gallup rating to date.

Richard Viguerie’s Self-Fulfilling Poll Fulfilled Its Conservative Mandate

Last Friday, I posted an article about a poll being conducted by Richard Viguerie, poster boy for the Goldwater school of conservatism, and ever so wisely predicted that he would rig the poll to support his far-right platform. See, Viguerie and his cronies feel betrayed and marginalized by the Bush neocons, so what better way to highlight that fact than to mount a rigged poll? Viguerie got what he was looking for, despite the noble efforts of me and Trish to skew the results toward sanity.

The poll was hosted on Viguerie’s Web site ConservativesBetrayed.com. It asked only one question: “Who was responsible for the Republicans’ disastrous defeats, including loss of control of the House and Senate, in the 2006 elections?” Readers were encouraged to select no more than 10 reasons from the 31 choices provided. Viguerie’s agenda is clear from his presentation of the results:

How could you look at what happened in the 2006 elections and not blame the Republican loss on George Bush?

Their number one culprit: “Conservative leaders who kept silent when the GOP became the party of Big Government.” Coming in sixth was “Conservative media that kept silent while the GOP became the party of Big Government.” More than 77.1 % of Republicans selected conservative leaders, with 47.8% selecting conservative media, as one of the reasons for the negative outcome of the election.

“While many conservative leaders and conservative media outlets kept quiet, or were even cheerleaders for the White House and Congress, the grassroots noticed very little of a conservative agenda but huge increases in federal spending,” Viguerie explained. “And because the Big Government Republican politicians were not receiving criticism from conservative leaders and conservative media, they felt free to indulge their tendencies to spend and spent in order to buy votes.”

“It is interesting to note that the #3 reason cited by Republicans was ‘legal corruption’ to ‘buy’ votes through the use of taxpayers money for special interest purposes. That strategy backfired with the voters,” Viguerie said.

What’s interesting to note, Richard, is that George W. Bush was listed in fifth place when most people would agree that the election was a referendum on his incompetence and failed policies. How could you look at what happened in the 2006 elections and not blame the Republican loss on George Bush? Should have been number-one, if you ask me, but Viguerie’s cohorts loaded the results with a focus on the media’s influence and dumb stuff like Ted Stevens of Alaska:

The Top 10 selections made by 850 self-identified Republicans were:

1. Conservative leaders who kept silent when the GOP became the party of Big Government
2. Illegal corruption, such as Mark Foley, Robert Ney, and Jack Abramoff
3. Legal corruption, such as spending on special interest groups to “buy” their votes, including earmarks
4. Mainstream media that may have influenced the voters to throw out the Republicans
5. President George W. Bush
6. Conservative media that kept silent while the GOP became the party of Big Government
7. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), former President Pro Tempore of the Senate and promoter of the $223 million Bridge to Nowhere
8. Blunders and misstatements by Republican candidates
9. Former Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN)
10. Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-IL), former Speaker of the House

Viguerie delightedly noted that “There were only minor variations in the order of the list among self-identified Democrats, members of other political parties, and independents.” Well, duh, Dickie, there were like 20 times as many self-identified Republicans voting on your site, compared to a handful of those of us with the intestinal fortitude to stomach your site’s content long enough to vote.