Tag: Worst President Ever
Memo to FOX News: You’re Running a Photo of the Wrong President with Bin Laden Story
When the mission is actually accomplished, which president does FOX News post on its home page to discuss the death of Osama bin Laden? None other than the guy who “took our eyes off the ball,” (to quote the president of the non-teabag portions of the country) but George “Let’s Invade Iraq Because Al Qaeda Attacked Us” Bush.
Look for FOX to start finding reasons to simultaneously condemn Pres. Obama’s decisions and/or the carrying out thereof while ginning up conspiracy and cover-up theories about the dispatching of bin Laden’s body.
Worst Ex-President Ever Still Clueless
Speaking 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.
Bush Cancels Switzerland Trip After Threat of Arrest for Torture Crimes
Former Pres. George W. Bush is denying that the sudden cancellation of his scheduled speech at a Jewish charity event in Switzerland has anything to do with the fact that human rights groups promised he would be arrested on arrival.
Human rights lawyer: ‘I think George Bush’s world is a very small place at the moment’
Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod’s annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.
Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say.
Breaking: Sotomayor Vote Delayed by Republicans
Ken Rudin is reporting that Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee canceled today’s vote on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Today’s scheduled vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court has been postponed until next Tuesday.
Republican senators on the committee, as is their prerogative, asked for a one-week delay. Ranking Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama officially requested the delay, and chairman Pat Leahy accepted it.
The committee will reconvene next Tuesday, July 28.
Sessions and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have taken heat for their relentless beating on the dead horse of Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment. Is this their petulant revenge?
Update: C-Span confirms
If Torture Worked, How Are We Getting By Without It?
Jeff Stein at CQ Politics asks a very good question of former Vice Pres. Dick Cheney.
Stein: What stopped terrorists from attacking for the past five years?
The CIA is said to have relinquished water boarding, roughing up, sleep deprivation and other tough interrogation techniques in 2004, according to most reports.
But between Sept. 11, 2001 and the end of 2004, Cheney claims, terrorist attacks were thwarted by physically abusing detainees in the CIA’s secret prisons.
“Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place,” Cheney insisted.
But what stopped terrorists from attacking after the harsh interrogation techniques were aborted five years ago?
Hmmm. We scared the terrorists (many of whom are suicide bombers) so badly that they decided to quit? Not likely.
Besides, others say, we know the effort the Bush administration put into bolstering its positions and spinning its views with photo ops, selective leaks, coordinated backdrops of key slogans, and backdoor paid P.R. and “news.” So why on earth would they have kept secret that they were not only effectively protecting us but that they could prove it?
…another former CIA official has come forward to dismiss the former vice president’s claims, saying that if the Bush administration had evidence of “torture” stopping attacks, it would have surfaced long ago.
“I cannot imagine that the system would not have leaked such a story. It would have been leaked in a New York minute,” says Milton Bearden, who was a CIA station chief in Pakistan among other assignments during his three decades in the spy agency.
Bush Invaded Iraq Over Biblical Prophesy of Gog and Magog
Bush’s combat map?
If you thought Bush was only using the born-again shtick to rally his base, you might be wrong. It’s possible that George W. Bush not only truly believed the most horseshit aspects of fundamental Christianism, but according to Clive Hamilton on Counterpunch, he used them as the basis for the invasion of Iraq.
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped.
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac: “This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.
Hamilton: “Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog.”The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.
The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.
In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.
Bush Legacy: Presidents Can Be Impeached After They Leave Office
If Alberto Gonzalez gets punk’d at speaking engagements, and Donald Rumsfeld has to be whisked out of France to avoid a war crimes indictment. what does the future hold for George W. Bush after he leaves office one year and six days from now?
Just as hindsight shows that Americans 30 years ago could have prevented the abuses of Bush and Cheney by prosecuting and imprisoning Nixon in 1974, we owe it to future generations of Americans to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for their crimes and incompetence today.
Chris Hedges probably has it right:
Bush will soon be reduced to the cipher he once was, left to spend the rest of his life trying to salvage a legacy of shame and deceit. In a just world he would be put on trial, if not by the International Criminal Court of Justice then by the U.S. Congress. He would be forced to face up to his lies and wars of aggression. But the moral rot that infects the nation has seeped into the bowels of the legislative as well as the executive branch.
There are many organizations and efforts dedicated to the impeachment of George Bush. And Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) is leading a drive to impeach Dick Cheney — if you haven’t signed his online petition, do it now. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced articles of impeachment against the vice president last spring.
But there is one insurmountable obstacle to impeachment this year, and it is not Speaker Pelosi — it’s the continued support for Bush by Republicans in Congress. Unless and until it is expedient for them to get rid of Bush and Cheney, the congressional Republicans have shown that they will block any move to hold them accountable.
So while it looks likely that the millions of Americans who believe the Bush-Cheney regime has committed impeachable acts — taking the country to war based on lies, betraying a secret operation that tracked the WMD black market, spying on Americans without warrants, torturing prisoners and firing U.S. attorneys without cause, to name a few — will have to settle for the cold comfort of watching Bush and Cheney grow old in disgrace, there is another option for bringing them to justice:
Bush: Mukasey Needs to Know If We Do It Before He Can Say If It’s Torture
He did it again. Bush tried to scare the Senate into confirming the open-minded (when it comes to torture, anyway) Michael Mukasey to replace former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Follow me closely here — Mukasey needs to know whether we waterboard because if we do it, it’s automatically not torture.
Bush later linked the debate to national security and suggested that senators were hampering his administration’s ability to pursue suspected terrorists by failing to swiftly approve Mukasey, a retired judge and former prosecutor.
“This is no time for Congress to weaken the Department of Justice by denying it a strong and effective leader,” Bush told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank…
“There’s an enemy out there. I don’t want them to understand, to be able to adjust one way or the other,” Bush told reporters. “The American people have got to understand the program is important and the techniques used are within the law.”
Got that? If you don’t confirm Bush’s pick, you are aiding and abetting the enemy. Pretty soon, the terrorists have won. Because of you, you, you!
And see, the terrorists don’t know what might happen to them if we catch them. Waterboarding, hooking them up electrodes and having them stand in water with a hood over their head, siccing dogs on them…all these things are a complete surprise to terrorists when we do them, and we want to keep it that way.
And here’s the important part, folks, if we’re doing it, it’s not torture. Because, you know, we don’t torture. Bush said this about asking Mukasey about waterboarding.
“I believe the questions he’s been asked are unfair,” Bush said in an Oval Office session with reporters. “He’s been asked to give opinions of a program — or techniques of a program — on which he has not been briefed.”
…Bush said of Mukasey, “He doesn’t know whether we use that technique or not.”
And — follow me closely here — he needs to know whether we do it because if we do it, it’s automatically not torture. Because, as Bush has said many times, we don’t torture. So before Mukasey can say if it’s torture, he needs to know if America does it.
Read it a few more times, preferably like Bush, with your lips moving, and you’ll get it.
