The CEO we deserve

I've really got to hand it to George Bush. He promised to run this country like a corporate CEO, and bygod, it's the one statement that's crossed his lips that has actually been true. Like with this - faced with a lemon of a product (his foreign policy) that the world hates, rather than try to work out the kinks, he goes out and hires him a new PR flack to come up with a better ad campaign.

The only question I have: how does one fail upwards after being preznit?

No.

If you can't come right out and say "waterboarding is torture," as it has been for centuries, you have no business being the chief law enforcement official in this country. Period.

Jonah's holding

Mama's little Goldberg has gotten hold of some powerful pills if this statement is any indication:

Me: I think history will be kinder to Bush than all of the smug prophecies and assurances that he's the "worst president ever" suggest. But, I'd be surprised if he's ranked alongside Reagan.

I'll leave alone the assertion that Reagan was a "great" president, and I'll probably just have to suck it up and admit that the dominant historical narrative for the foreseeable will be that Reagan "won" the Cold War (again, a dubious proposition). Given all that, Bush won't even come close to being alongside Reagan. Sorry, Jonah. Bush isn't the worst president ever (that spot will be retained by current basement dweller James Buchanan - Bush only precipitated a civil war in somebody else's country). I mean, can we name a success for the Bush presidency, besides winning an election (yes, just one election)? He managed to turn universal goodwill into international disdain over the course of a dozen months after 9/11. His War on Terror has actually caused terrorism to increase in the intervening six years. NCLB? Failure. Social Security reform? Failure. Civil liberties? Thoroughly trashed. Government corruption? Endemic. His poll numbers are downright Nixonian. He's leaving the GOP in disarray. His fiscal policies have turned surpluses into deficits.

Seriously, I can't think of one thing that the Bush Administration can legitimately claim as a success, other than orchestrating a string of electoral and political wins. Not one thing.

Now, to be fair to Jonah, who is, after all, high as a kite, I don't think history will be much crueler to Bush than his contemporary critics. We all know he is the dauphin king, a dolt who failed upwards to greatness. No, history will be much crueler to the rest of us for letting him get away with the damage he's caused.

Petulant president pisses on poor children

What a load of horseshit:

President Bush yesterday rejected entreaties by his Republican allies that he compromise with Democrats on legislation to renew a popular program that provides health coverage to poor children, saying that expanding the program would enlarge the role of the federal government at the expense of private insurance.

The president said he objects on philosophical grounds to a bipartisan Senate proposal to boost the State Children's Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over five years. Bush has proposed $5 billion in increased funding and has threatened to veto the Senate compromise and a more costly expansion being contemplated in the House.

"Objects on philosophical grounds," my ass. Bush will expand public spending when it serves to enrich his cronies or allows him to play toy soldier in the Situation Room, but expend some scratch to provide poor kids with some health care? He's got to pretend to have principles.

The sociologist in me always wants to warn that there are structural tendencies which compel political leaders to act in certain ways, but the folks in the Bush administration are downright evil.

The decider

I suppose I should be heartened that Bushco is doing something to try to avert the disaster in Darfur, despite being somewhat cynical about the whole sanctions business, with reason. But something towards the end of Bush's prepared comments really rubbed me the wrong way:

The people of Darfur are crying out for help, and they deserve it.

I've long ago accepted that most popular media sources will present news as a narrative where there are good people and bad people, people who deserve our sympathies and those who've earned our enmity. The decision about what color hat a person wears is made by a small number of people, usually in their own interest, unless a determined collective effort by the general public forces the elites to pay attention, as may be the case with Darfur.

It's a fucking travesty that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cabal are the people making the decisions of who is worthy of the Imperial Benevolence of the United States. And it's even worse to know that they probably really believe that they're imposing a pax Americana.

But he's the Decider.

For fuck's sake

By the look of it, the crack where I'll be moving is dy-no-mite:

Years ago, someone coined the term "neoliberal." I was never sure what it meant, and it has since fallen into disuse, but whatever the case, I'd like to revive (and mangle) the term and apply it -- brace yourself -- to George W. Bush. He's more liberal than you might think.

No, he's not. Having a "diverse" cabinet merely masks an administration that has persistently pursued goals and utilized methods that are racist and misogynistic. The Iraq war was never about freeing the Iraqi people. The Bush years were emphatically not a period of misunderstood and mismanaged idealism. In one way or another, it has been about feeding a private elite from the public trough, like Reaganism on steroids.

Sorry, but Bush is all conservative. And I don't really want any of what you're smoking.

This isn't happening, is it?

Sy Hersh has been on top of Bushco's barbaric single-mindedness with regards to Iran for some time now. The Guardian pulls out this little tidbit in their summary:

Elements of the tough new approach towards Tehran outlined by Hersh include:

· Clandestine operations against Iran and Syria, as well as the Hizbullah movement in Lebanon - even to the extent of bolstering Sunni extremist groups that are sympathetic to al-Qaida...

In case you didn't follow that: the new Bush strategy involves us forming alliances with supporters of the people who attacked us on 9/11 so that we can destabilize not just one, but three other countries (in addition to Iraq) who had nothing to do with 9/11!

These sorts of contingencies demonstrate how dangerously unhinged Dick Cheney and his bloody-minded colleauges really are. Is he allowed to get away with growling out one side of his mouth about giving comfort to al Qaeda while handing cash out underneath the table to Bin Laden's allies in Iraq? Why do I have this weird sense of déjà vu?

Hersh claims that the former director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, resigned his post to take a parallel job as the deputy director of the state department because of his discomfort with an approach that so closely echoed the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s.

Oh... that would explain Elliott Abrams hanging around the White House again.

I'm not sure I follow

I was struck by this AP report (it's Salon, so wait for the ad):

Iran has brought its war games maneuvers over the past year into busy shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which two-fifths of the world's oil supplies pass, the top U.S. Navy commander in the Mideast said.

The moves have alarmed U.S. officials about possible accidental confrontations that could boil over into war, and led to a recent build-up of Navy forces in the Gulf, Vice Adm. Patrick Walsh said in an interview with The Associated Press and other reporters.

So let me see if I can follow this logic:

1. The Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz are crowded
2. Iran is holding naval war games in these crowded waters
3. These war games pose the threat of starting an "accidental confrontation that could boil over into war"
4. Presumably to counter the threat of an accidental confrontation, the U.S. Navy has sent more warships into the already crowded Persian Gulf

The Bushies aren't even pretending to hide their bloodlust these days.

Pave the planet!

I'm sure we all expected the Bush administration's analysis of and proposals on traffic congestion to be something less than clear-eyed, forward-thinking, and bold:

Carpooling won't do much to reduce U.S. highway congestion in urban areas, and a better solution would be to build new highways and charge drivers fees to use them, the White House said on Monday.

That's the ticket! More roads! More spendy roads!

Based on the latest data supplied by the White House, only about 13 percent of motorists carpooled to work in 2000. That compared with 20 percent of daily American commuters in 1980.

"This trend makes it unlikely that initiatives focused on carpooling will make large strides in reducing vehicle use," the White House said.

What initiatives focused on carpooling? Other than High Occupancy Vehicle lanes, what government programs exist that encourage carpooling?

That said, I think that there's some good structural explanations to explain the decline in carpooling. My money is on two driving factors: 1) the spatial dispersion of the workforce (both in terms of the locations of their homes and their places of employment) over a wider geographical area and 2) the temporal dispersion of the workday (as we became a 24-hour society). In other words, back in 1980, it was easier to find someone living near you who worked close to you as well, and worked similar hours taboot. Neither of these are, of course, benign "natural" changes, but rather the results of policies and economic conditions which promoted urban sprawl and the introduction of more "flexible" employment policies.

Anyhoo...

Building more highways won't reduce congestion either, unless drivers are charged a fee, according to the administration.

"If a roadway is priced -- that is, if drivers have to pay a fee to access a particular road -- then congestion can be avoided by adjusting the price up or down at different times of day to reflect changes in demand for its use," the White House said. "Road space is allocated to drivers who most highly value a reliable and unimpaired commute."

In other words, SUV drivin' jerks living in their cookie-cutter, ex-urban McMansions.

The administration argued that congestion pricing is already used by many providers of goods and services: movie theaters charge more for tickets in the evening than they do at midday, just as ski resorts raise lift prices on weekends. Similarly, airlines boost prices on tickets during peak travel seasons and taxi cabs raise fares during the rush hour.

Congestion pricing... is that what they're calling price gouging these days?

And in an article on the Bush administration's response to traffic congestion, anyone want to guess how many times affordable and efficient public transportation is mentioned?

Giving it a chance to succeed

Noted without comment:

The success of the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy depends on a series of rapid and dramatic political and economic reforms that even the plan's authors have little confidence will work.

Is this what they teach in international relations courses?

And to what rationale do we owe the seemingly rash decision to go after Iranian operatives in Iraq?

Senior administration officials said the policy is based on the theory that Tehran will back down from its nuclear ambitions if the United States hits it hard in Iraq and elsewhere, creating a sense of vulnerability among Iranian leaders.

Brought to you by the "greet us with flowers" gang. At least the Bush White House is consistent in its misuse of the word "theory." Much like intelligent design, Bush's plan in Iraq has no basis in reality. What could possibly go wrong?

But if Iran responds with escalation, it has the means to put U.S. citizens and national interests at greater risk in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Crap. That's bad. But that's a worst-case scenario, right?

"This has little to do with Iraq. It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It is purely political," the official said. The official expressed similar views about other new efforts aimed at Iran, suggesting that the United States is escalating toward an unnecessary conflict to shift attention away from Iraq and to blame Iran for the United States' increasing inability to stanch the violence there.

Oh boy.

Toy soldiers

I don't like these rumblings coming from the White House:

"The president is pleased with the progress being made" in the [Iraq] strategy review, White House spokesman Blain K. Rethmeier said. Rethmeier declined to discuss details of the briefing at Camp David or which options appear to be more likely to be adopted. "The president is leaving all options on the table on the way forward. [emphasis mine]"

Oh my. When all options are on the table, George W. Bush has a horrifying tendency to choose - and stick with - the worst option of the bunch. And all indicators point to another disastrous decision.

It's a wonder we're not more cynical

I'm ashamed to admit that I clicked on this article on the eventual disappearance of Arctic sea ice in the summer half-expecting to find some "global warming can be good!" sentiments to provide some "balance." My cynicism was not to go unrewarded:

Polar bears will struggle, these scientists said, and so will Arctic people who still go out on sea ice to hunt seals. By contrast, countries and businesses pursuing new shipping lanes, energy supplies and fishing grounds could profit.

Whole species and cultures will be threatened with extinction, but opportunities for a few fat rich fucks to get fatter and richer abound!

This would greatly ease the task of maintaining shipping lanes with icebreaking vessels, said Lawson W. Brigham, deputy director of the Arctic Research Commission, which advises the White House on Arctic matters. Mr. Brigham and other experts said the new research raised the urgency of establishing common standards for protecting the Arctic environment and patrolling shipping lanes. The commission plans to deliver letters to the Bush administration and Congress this week urging them to commit at least $1 million to start work on replacing the country’s two aging, ailing polar-class icebreakers.

Here's a nice little Catch-22 for the Bushies. What with all this calamity, displacement, and human suffering, someone - someone who is well positioned at the time - is going to get filthy rich. Being positioned apparently means having the means to maintain year-round Arctic shipping lanes. But the justification for investing in icebreakers is a phenomenon that the Bushies say isn't happening. What sort of contortions will Tony Snow have to go through to wiggle out of that one?

Probably ones that won't be half so impressive as the gyrations he'll have to perform in explaining why the Bush administration would rather profit from than prevent catastrophic global warming.

Summoned

Any remaining doubts that the credibility of the Bush Administration is hovering around zero should be put to rest with an observation buried in this article:

Saudi Arabia is so concerned about the damage that the conflict in Iraq is doing across the region that it basically summoned Vice President Cheney for talks over the weekend, according to U.S. officials and foreign diplomats. The visit was originally portrayed as U.S. outreach to its oil-rich Arab ally.

When the leaders of "the most powerful nation in the world"™ are being summoned to the courts of other world leaders and being lectured about the mess they've made, it might be time to re-visit our attitude vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

Not looking so hot

If the goal was to completely destabilize the Middle East, the Bush administration has hit it out of the park, judging from these headlines:

• Going... - U.S. and European policies may be damaging to Turkey's secular traditions.
• Going... - militias local to Muqtada al Sadr have received training from Hezbollah militants in Lebanon (yet another deteriorating situation). I don't think this really surprises anyone too much: al Sadr has consciously modeled the Mahdi Army on Hezbollah. Early on in the Iraqi conflict we saw militias loyal to al Sadr filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam's regime with the provision of security and social services in Sadr City.
• Gone. - The U.S. has lost the fight in western Iraq, according to a Marine Corps report.

A modest (but improbable) proposal

Dave and the gang at The Bellman got me thinking about the nature of our moral obligation to Iraq. I'm pretty firmly in the "withdrawal sooner rather than later" camp, but do have a certain amount of sympathy to the argument that because we've fucked that country up, we should have to fix it. And it seems that in order to fix Iraq, we'd have to dramatically escalate the number of troops there (ours or someone else's) in order to provide a secure environment in which a political settlement could be reached.

Fine, problem is no one trusts the people who are prosecuting the war - not the men and women in the military, not the American public, not the international community, not the Iraqi people. No one. The people of the United States, and of any foreign nation who might be asked to help, have every right to say no to throwing more lives into the Iraq meatgrinder based on the performance of the Bush Administration. We simply have no confidence in them. They've repeatedly lied, they were incompetent in their prosecution of the war, and they've dragged the world into a very, very dark place. Why should they be allowed to keep fighting this war?

Again, however, an unstable Iraq is a potential disaster for the entire Middle East, with effects that would ripple far beyond the region. And while I've argued that the U.S. presence isn't helping the situation, I can certainly see how a rapid withdrawal leaves a vacuum in which millions of lives could be lost. Preventing that, to me, is a compelling reason to stay.

So here it is - if Bush is really sincere about wanting to stabilize Iraq and facilitate a political settlement, here are the conditions that must be met:

• The mission is framed explicitly in these goals, and any foreign troops leave as soon as they are asked to by the (hopefully solvent) Iraqi government. No permanent bases. No military advisors. We get out, and that's that.
• A full accounting of the run-up to and prosecution of the war must be had in order to re-establish any sort of public and international trust in the mission, and the Bush administration must be willing to abide by the findings of this investigation. That means rooting out the war criminals amongst the civilian leadership and military brass who pushed an illegal war, approved of torture, etc. etc. That means discussing the real reasons why the Iraq invasion was pushed - geopolitics, oil, world domination, whatever. A full and complete accounting, with the people responsible removed from power and held accountable. Nothing less.
• An international coalition (preferably mostly non-Western) is brought in to help provide security and mediate.

So there's my scenario for a plan - the only plan - I'd support for maintaining or increasing our involvement in Iraq. Pie in the sky, I know. Bushco will never agree to that. Rumsfeld will go quietly into the night. The generals who toed the line in order suck up to their civilian masters will quietly collect their pensions. But I will go on record as saying that with the current bunch in power, there is no way that the mess in Iraq will be resolved.

Election day predictions

Let's see: reports of voter suppression; reports of e-voting machings not registering votes properly; shameless fear-mongering; and razor-thin margins thrown into court. I keep having to remind myself that while completely and utterly incompetent at governing, BushCo and its pit crew, Team GOP, are going to be ruthless when it comes to trying to maintain their vanishing permanent Republican Majority.

Oh, and when it's all said and done, we'll be looking at Speaker Pelosi and Trent Lott making an outsider's run for majority leader.

Rolling in the mud

Even Laura Bush can't resist kicking a person with a chronic, debilitating disease:

Q: One of the issues that’s come up. Michael J. Fox. The whole issue of stem cell research. Your reaction to the events of the past week.

LAURA BUSH: Well, I don’t have any idea about any of those. I mean, I’ve watch on television just like you have. But the fact is President Bush is the only president that authorized funding for stem cell research. And, um, you know, it’s an issue that it’s easy to try to manipulate people’s feelings about and I understand that. My dad died of Alzheimer’s. You know, there’ s nothing I’d like more than to think there was a cure for Alzheimer’s. Especially before I get to be the age he is, but knowing also how he suffered. It’s always easy to manipulate people’s feelings, especially when you are talking about diseases that are so difficult.

She should know. She's had a front-row seat to Bushco's manipulations for almost six years.

And for the record, she wasn't on my list.

About that whole "strong on security" meme

It appears increasingly likely that the reason we haven't seen a 9/11-style attack on the United States in the last five years has more to do with blind luck than any sort of coherent plan on the part BushCo and the GOP.

Well, there's your problem right there

Of the many nuggets found in Bob Woodward's documentation of BushCo's incompetence, I doubt many of us were surprised to see that the neo-con dream team was being advised by none other than the world's favorite American war criminal, Henry Kissinger:

The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.

In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.

In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."

He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.

Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.

Ah, still fighting Vietnam, 30 years after the fact.

It's the last paragraph there that gets my attention, specifically the "American culture of avoiding hardship." Now, as far as my recollection goes, I seem to remember the GOP always extolling the virtues of heroic American individualism and Yankee can-do attitude as pillars of the nation. Are we to believe that our leaders actually believe the American public to be a bunch of knee-knocking weaklings who will run at the first sign of hard work?

Or maybe there's a more plausible reason for the public's squeamishness for continuing to fight a war that is draining our treasury and costing us thousands of lives. The American public didn't "go soft" on the Vietnam War because of the cost of victory. The American public turned against Vietnam because it was unwinnable, despite what the sage Kissinger might say. The U.S. carpet-bombed North Vietnam to no effect. Showing "resolve" would have only extended the conflict and cost thousands more lives.

Similarly, "not giving an inch" on Iraq isn't going to all of the sudden make things better. In fact, as Ben Franklin said, it's the very definition of insanity.