GOP’s Blankley: Bush Deserves Credit for bin Laden Kill under Obama, Just As JFK Got Credit for Moon Landing on Nixon’s Watch

Blankley
Blankley
When asked on KCRW’s “Left, Right and Center” last week whether Pres. Obama should get credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, the show’s resident conservative, Tony Blankley, said this:

My view — I wrote this actually in the Washington Times in a clever, I thought, article — that we give Jack Kennedy credit for going to the moon even though Nixon was president at the moment that it happened, because he was continuing Kennedy’s policies. And we should give George W. [Bush] a lot of credit for instituting a lot of the structures on the war against terror that includes the interrogation processes and all the rest — the black sites. And give Obama the credit that Nixon got on going to the moon — which is, he continued wise policies effectively.

Poor Richard Nixon. He just doesn’t get enough credit. And poor right wingers, they are the biggest victims on the planet, or so they say.

Of course, Blankley’s comparison falls apart when exposed to air. After declaring that the United States would go to the moon “in this generation,” JFK did not then lose the moon — as Bush lost bin Laden at Tora Bora — nor did JFK, after losing the moon, close NASA, as Bush did, analogously, when he closed the CIA’s bin Laden unit in 2005, around the time bin Laden was building the compound in Pakistan where he lived in undisturbed comfort for the rest of Bush’s term in office.

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We Apologize for This Offensive Version of Marilyn Davenport’s Racist Chimp Photo

art-davenport-w-chimps
Now you know why Marilyn Davenport (center) is a half-wit

Okay, right off the bat, we want to apologize for this lame attempt at humor, not to mention the half-assed Photoshopping. However, unlike Marilyn Davenport, the Orange County, Calif., GOP birther and GOP tea party official,
who caused a controversy after she sent out an email based on this same montage but with Pres. Obama’s face superimposed on the adorable baby chimp shown here, we’re not going to issue a non-apology apology.

You will recall that Davenport’s first response went went like this: “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people — mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”

As we noted at the time, one way to tell you’re a racist is if you find yourself saying crap like “Everybody who knows me knows I’m not a racist,” and especially, “I have friends who are black.”

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Obama Has Created 863K Jobs in 2010, More Than Double Average Annual Creation under Bush

graph-863k-jobs-created-09-10

One of the most galling examples of Republican double-speak this year is their assertion on one hand that the government cannot create jobs — which is demonstrably false; states and cities hire private contractors to build and repair roads all the time, just as one example — and then on the other hand their habit of blaming Pres. Obama for the high unemployment and excoriating the government for not creating more jobs. Which is it?

“Bush … shows the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records.”
-Wall St. Journal

The GOP will keep making these mutually exclusive arguments until a) the corporate media catches on (so don’t hold your breath) or b) they take control of Congress in three weeks, at which point their corporate masters had better start hiring or Speaker Wanna-Be Boehner will find himself with an approval rating even lower than his current rating of 22 percent — a full 11 points lower than Speaker Pelosi’s.

Despite the high unemployment rate caused by the Bush Recession — and Republicans’ refusal to invest in state and local budgets to prevent teachers, police officers and other public sector employees from being laid off — Pres. Obama is doing a better job at job creation than Republicans and the corporate media will acknowledge, especially when compared with his predecessor, George Bush.

As of the end of September, Obama had created 863,000 private sector jobs this year:

Private-sector payroll employment increased in September for the ninth straight month (every month this year). The increase of 64,000 jobs last month brings the total number of private-sector jobs added this year to 863,000, which is the largest 9-month gain in private payroll employment since the summer of 2007 (see top chart above).

Obama’s record so far is more than double the 375,000 jobs created by Bush on average each year during his eight years in office. Here’s how the ultra-right wing Wall St. Journal described Bush’s record in job-creation:

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Pelosi: We’ll Stop Blaming Bush When the Crises We Face Stop Being His Fault

Speaker Pelosi
Speaker Pelosi
In an interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked the speaker if Democrats’ efforts to remind the public that it was the policies of George W. Bush that led to the various crises facing the country is a smart political strategy:

Asked how much longer Democrats should continue to blame Bush, Pelosi replied: “Well, it burns out when the problems go away. And here’s what the president inherited. He inherited a deficit, when this president [Bush] inherited from the Clinton administration four budgets that were either in surplus or in balance. And he turned it into a massive deficit. He … brought us to the brink of a financial crisis. He brought us to the brink of deep recession, ignoring issues that relate to climate change.”

It’s not surprising that Washington Republicans and Beltway media types like Chuck Todd don’t want Democrats to remind Americans what happened during the Bush years — they were complicit in his downfall, to one degree or another.

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Will Republicans Take Impeaching Obama off the Table If They Win Control of Congress in November?

From left: Prospective House Speaker Boehner, House Oversight Chairman Issa, House Judiciary Chairman Smith, Senate Judiciary Chairman Sessions. Would they impeach Obama? You betcha.
From left: Prospective House Speaker Boehner, House Oversight Chairman Issa, House Judiciary Chairman Smith, Senate Judiciary Chairman Sessions. Would they impeach Obama? You betcha.
In May 2006, with the midterm elections just six months away, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi went out of her way to assure conservatives that if Democrats won control of Congress that November, any efforts to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be “off the table.”

Now, four years later, with Republicans within range of winning control of the House and possibly the Senate, their tea bagger and neo-con base is sending an equally clear signal: They want Obama impeached, and they don’t much care how or why.

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