On March 19, 2003, George W. Bush announced that he had ordered the invasion of Iraq, an action later revealed to be based on either the biggest deception or the most egregious incompetence (take your pick) in the history of U.S. military engagement — a disgrace to the nation or a war crime (again, choose for yourself) for which Bush and his vice president were never held accountable.
Transcript:
A lot of hypotheticals made the rounds after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. “What would you do if” questions were a way to process all the horror, as were scenarios of how to go forward.
My boss back then was a young Jewish woman, raised by her Orthodox rabbi grandfather. She had spent time in Israel, where she said the kind of invasive security procedures that eventually became codified as the Patriot Act were necessary to protect the country. “But if it isn’t America after you’re done protecting it,” I asked, “what’s the point?”
Ten years later, I still wonder about the answer to that question. When Bush suggested that average Americans could best defeat terrorism by going shopping, we responded. We flooded sport utility vehicle show rooms, and gawked as Hummers and Lincoln Navigators attempted to squeeze into parking spots like paunchy football coaches trying to wear their high school uniforms. We distracted ourselves with the antics of second-rate celebrities as they bounced from sex tapes to drug binges to rehab and back. We went along with invasions, with shock and awe, with rigged videos of statues falling and blond female service members being rescued. We were at war but we were never quite sure with whom: Insurgents? Dead-enders? Enemy combatants?
On “Countdown” last night, Keith Olbermann and Markos Moulistsas rightly savaged the National Geographic Channel for producing a Fox News style interview with George Bush on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Olbermann noted that while Bush refers to 9/11 as a “monumental” and “significant” event but he never uses word like “tragic” or “sad.” Moulitsas suggested that the reason Bush did not describe the attacks as “tragic” is because he and his party did not view the attack as a tragedy but rather as an opportunity to install a more authoritarian regime inside the government.
The Bush interview and the release of Dick Cheney’s memoir were strategically timed to come out around the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks next month.
James Moore, co-author of Bush’s Brain, a profile of Karl Rove, has an explanation for why America has a very good chance of electing Perry-Palin in 2012. And why doing so will be the end of democracy as we know it.
He starts by revealing what “The Response,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent prayer meeting, was actually about.
The big brains gathered east of the Hudson and Potomac Rivers believe that Mitt Romney is the candidate to beat. But they are unable to hear what Rick Perry is saying. The Christian prayer rally in Houston was a very loud proclamation to fundamentalists and Teavangelicals, which said, “I am not a Mormon…”
Moore on Perry: ‘A C- and D-student who hates to govern, loves to campaign, and barely has a sixth grader’s understanding of economics, will lead our nation into oblivion.’Perry, of course, can’t come right out and print bumper stickers that say, “Rick Perry — 2012 — Not a Mormon.” But he doesn’t have to…Perry is about to remind the tea partiers and fundamentalists that Romney created a state health care plan…, believes global warming is real, and has a troubling history for conservatives on the matters of abortion and gay marriage.
So good-bye Mitt. Moore dispatches the rest of the Republican field in quicker order, and returns to the subject of Perry winning — and the depressing consequences.
In addition to being the day that the word “weiner” stopped being naughty and started being tiresome, June 7 was another milestone. According to self-proclaimed “Corporate Person American” William Rice, it deserves commemoration as the 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts.
It was on June 7, 2001, that President Bush signed into law the high-end tax cuts that added $2.6 trillion to the national debt. It was these tax cuts, along with two wars and a recession, that created the deficit now being cited as a reason to pretty much scrap Medicare and once again make a college education a pleasant, impossible dream among the lower classes.
Rice’s modest proposal says that government is for pansies, unless you’re a corporation and in that case, government is here for you.
We expect the government to continue providing certain vital services, of course, such as huge, no-bid defense contracts; and 24-hour, drive-through patent courts for us to fight over the profits of questionably-useful and semi-dangerous but very well-promoted new drugs. But all the peripheral activities of government — such as ensuring adequate childhood nutrition and repairing drawbridges — merely create a strain on the natural ecosystem of corporations and Corporate-Person Americans.
If Republicans continue to run the economy into the ground by refusing to look at the revenue side of the budget equation, Obama will have to borrow Pres. Reagan’s line when he ran for re-election in 1984, but with a slight adjustment: Are you better off now than you were ten years ago?
Bush made it perfectly clear he wasn’t even looking for Osama bin Laden and didn’t care if we ever found him. No wonder he didn’t attend the memorial at Ground Zero.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
