CapitalistImperialistPig

Mathew L. Wald and Micheline Maynard, writing in The NYT this morning , lay out how the current air chaos followed from Bush's lack of governance. Like the crisis in the financial markets, Katrina, and so much else, the airline troubles resulted not so just from his personal incompetence but also from his attempt to implement conservative ideology. Randites like Alan Greenspan and their many fellow travelers in Bushworld believe in market magic - they think that government regulation isn't needed. In the case of the airlines, things reached a critical point when whistleblowers pointed out that deregulation had reached the point where the law was being flouted. What happened? One answer is that some whistle-blower inspectors for the Federal Aviation Administration disclosed that they had been discouraged from cracking down on Southwest Airlines for maintenance problems, and they found a sympathetic audience with some Washington lawmakers. That prodded the F.A.A. to order a na...

We now know that the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were orchestrated from the very top. Lawyers for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all went to Guantanamo to brief the commander on the torture authorization memos they had ordered from Justice Department (irony!) lawyer John Yoo. The commander of Guantanamo took the message to Iraq and Abu Ghraib. When the Abu Ghraib pictures came out, Rumsfeld covered up high level involvement and let low ranking GIs take the fall. Cheney and Bush and their lawyers (Addison, Gonzalez, Yoo) of course knew what they were doing. They all deserve jail for this despicable betrayal of our soldiers alone. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that any will. The profound cowardice of our Congress makes impeachment impossible, and Bush's magic pardon pen will probably spare the rest in any case.

As the wheels come off the economy, Dan Froomkin wonders if Bush is again asleep at the wheel . As the storm clouds gathered, was President Bush once again asleep at the wheel? A consistent theme in today's political and economic coverage is that Bush's failure to recognize the severity of the ongoing financial crisis and act accordingly is reminiscent of his disastrously slow and inept response to Hurricane Katrina. I think that metaphor needs to be retired Dan. Asleep at the wheel implies that he was formerly in control. Bush is stoned and passed out in the back seat. Always has been.

The counsel of despair and surrender to Mordor is everywhere, but I'm feeling optimistic. I think there is definitely a tide turning, a tide that will likely sweep away many of the evils of Bushworld. More and more attention is focussed on Bush crimes: the Haynes resignation and the 60 minutes expose of the Siegelman lynching for two. Corporate media is still largely in the Bush-Cheney time warp, but they may not even be that relevant anymore.

The Bushies stated rationale for their plan to disrupt that falling surveilance satellite seems to be provoking a bit of mirth among the pros. David Kurtz at Josh Marshall's TPM links to this detailed discussion . A few lowlights: The Pentagon says it has to shoot down a malfunctioning spy satellite because of the threat of a toxic gas cloud. Space security experts are calling the rationale highly unlikely. "Having the US government spend millions of dollars to destroy a billion-dollar failure to save zero lives is comedic gold," one tells DANGER ROOM. Lots of hydrazine tanks have fallen to Earth already, without doing any harm. Even in the worst case scenario, the hazard area is small - a couple of football fields. "The cynic in me says that the idea that this is being done to protect the lives of humans is simply a feel-good cover story tossed to the media," another veteran space security specialist adds. "It is true that hydrazine is very toxic and...

With Bush and the Neocons, Paranoia may be the only rational response. UPDATE: Critique and response. From the comments, WB says: This story names only one name in an official position: "assistant secretary of state for European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of state for political affairs". So why do you have Bush and NeoCons in your one-line post? The post I linked to mentions no names, but it does have four secondary links, which I will call A, B, C, and D in order of their appearance. Secondary link B links to a tertiary link, and quotes from it. No names appear in the tertiary link quote either, but it did reference an unnamed high official. Following that, secondary link B claims that the official in question is Marc Grossman, a Clinton appointee. It goes on to mention a number of other officials allegedly involved or on the fringes: Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle, and Eric Edelman, all of whom are former very high Bush admi...

Paul Steinberg, writing in today's New York Times, has an interesting parable on the subject of George Bush's intellect. Even after longstanding sobriety this inflammatory response translates into a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making. I thought the part about inflexibility of learning was particularly apropos - it explains a lot. Apparently the efficacy of exercise is less in humans, however.

The House of Representatives is playing a high-stakes game of chicken with the President. He has asked for 200 billion to fund next year's war, but the House is offering him a short term fix of 40 with conditions that he start withdrawal. He has indicated that he is likely to veto it. So what happens then? The Secretary of Defense has indicated that 100,000 DOD civilians might be laid off to pay for the war. Could that work? It could work as an intimidation tactic, maybe, but it wouldn't save nearly enough - maybe a billion a month of the 18 billion a month he needs. Many of those civilians could be spared for a few months - researchers, budget analysts, secretaries, etc., but others would be less easily dispensed with, like the people who staff the offices of the SecDef and major commands. How about those who keep military posts functioning? Troop trainers, gate guards, police, firemen, plumbers, food service workers, and many others. How about the people who buy and s...

From Huffpost : A recently-unearthed video from 1992 shows Vice President Dick Cheney predicting the mess that occupying Iraq would create: If you get into the business of committing U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq, to occupy the place, my guess is I'd probably still have people there today instead of having been able to bring them home...The bottom line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: not very damn many. So how did he get so stupid in the meantime? -- Crazy Frank

Dan Froomkin rounds up some commentary and adds his own in It Came From Planet Bush : In the alternate universe that President Bush occupies, he gave a smashing speech last night. Over there, the people of Iraq need our help to save them from the al Qaeda terrorists who intend to overthrow their brave and united government on the way to attacking America. It's a battle of good versus evil. We have 36 countries fighting alongside us. And the fight is going very well indeed. Ordinary life is returning to Baghdad. There is much, much more, but a common theme is alternate reality. Bush and his Republican allies are now trapped in the web of lies they have woven. They can't face reality without enraging the deluded 30% who still support them.

Andrew Sullivan watched Bush and felt some pity: He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading. And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our nose . . . One million dead - no tears from me for this crocodile. The president's stunning detachment from this reality tragically endures - whether out of cynicism or delusion or, more worryingly, a simple intellectual inability to understand the country he is determined that the United States occupy for the rest of our lives. The low-point was his almost desperate recitation of a poignant email that posited that this war is one between "good" and "evil". There is enough evil to go aroun...

Bush's war has now killed about one million Iraqis plus another four million driven from their homes. This puts him and his fellow thugs in a class with Idi Amin, Attaturk, and other major genocidal murderers, if still trailing a bit behind Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

Josh Marshall was less than impressed: Let's start by stipulating that the arguments for our Iraq policy have been a pretty big crock for a really long time . . . But as we saw in President Bush's speech last night things have gotten to a point where the White House spinmeisters hardly seem even to have their heart in it anymore. And the president just seems to be living in some sort of alternative universe populated by the failed gods of his narcissism and vainglory . . . Anyone watching what's happening can see that what the president is talking about bears no relation to what's actually happening in Iraq -- a fact well confirmed by the fact that polls show no change in the public's take on what's happening in response to the president's speech. Primitive animals will sometimes keep chattering or twitching their muscles even after their heads have been cut off . . . But best read the whole thing.

Slate has a three part excerpt from Robert Draper's Dead Certain. Draper had unprecedented access to Bush and most of the excerpts consist of interview. I felt that there was a certain pathos to the Bush that emerged. The famously upbeat Bush who seems to be so out of touch with reality seems to be partly a pose put on to keep up others spirits and his own: "And part of being a leader is: people watch you. I walk in that hall, I say to those commanders—well, guess what would happen if I walk in and say, 'Well, maybe it's not worth it.' When I'm out in the public"—and now he was fully animated, yanked out of his slouch and his eyes clenched like little blue fists—"I fully understand that the enemy watches me, the Iraqis are watching me, the troops watch me, and the people watch me. "The other thing is that you can't fake it. You have to believe it. And I believe it. I believe we'll succeed." More upsetting, and more pathetic, is the ...

Michele Malkin is a right-wing crazy lady - hot but crazy. But she did sound positively shrill going through a list of the incompetent and unqualified cronies Bush has appointed to Homeland security positions. You know you are rotten if you're a Republican President and even Fox News is being driven shrill.

NPR went all out to hand Bush a double early Valentine today. First a story claiming that a growing consensus in Washington has concluded that "the surge is working." They hauled out Michael O'Hanlon of the "center-left" Brookings Institution for his usual line of crap (though they did concede that his billing as an anti-war Democrat might be "slightly misleading"). Next was US Representative Bryan Baird (D - Wash) who had voted against the war before he was for it. He thinks we need another Friedman Unit or two before we can start to pull back a little. It's like being the prosecuting attorney at one of those old Mafia trials. All your witnesses suddenly seem to have developed terrible memories. Hillary seems to be ramping up her pro-war rhetoric as well - is the fix really already in? Somebody at least seems to be working at giving the impression.

The preposterous new meme being pushed by the President and the clown show at the Washington Post is that Bush had a "vision of ending global tyranny" that stalled "in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass." Give me a f****** break. This from a guy who has done his best to install and practice tyranny in the US and who never met a dictator he didn't like. Peter Baker's article begins with: By the time he arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, President Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of "ending tyranny in our world," yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that his own government was not committed to his vision. As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. "You're not the only dissident," Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian Presi...

Peggy Noonan is about as hard-core as a Republican can be, but she seems to have left the church W. She puts her finger on one point that grits my teeth: I found myself Thursday watching President Bush's news conference and thinking about what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth. I mean what it is apart from the huge and obvious issues on which they might disagree with him . . . As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president's seemingly effortless high spirits . . . . . . his good humor seems to me disorienting, and strange . . . Like strange in the sense that you get with crazy people, I think. That and his bizarre detachment and disinterest, the unwillingness to read even a single page memo on Iraq. Americans can't fire the president right now, so they're waiting it out. They can tell a...

Who is IOZ looks at how we manage to be on all sides and against all in West Asia: Can it be true that the United States is engaged in a clandestine effort, using its own special operations troops, to support Turkish incursions into Iraqi territory to combat the PKK and other "Kurdish guerillas"? Sure! Consider. The United States invaded Iraq and deposed its Sunni Arab Ba'athist government. After months of inept proconsular hijinks that guaranteed Insurgency Now! instead of Insurgency One-ah-dese-days!, hasty elections were mounted under a bloc-lists system of proportional representation, which guarnateed that Iraqis would not actually know whom they were voting for, and which also guaranteed a substantial Shia majority in the parliament. At about this point, the Americans discovered--holy shit!--that Iran is, in fact, a Shia nation, and that these Shia politicians had the backing of Iran. And not only that, but they were, like, trying to consolidate their power with pri...

Arun has some of the bizarre details of the killing of Pat Tillman and the subsequent cover up. Most suspicious are: The doctors ... said that the bullet holes [three bullet holes in Tillman's forehead] were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away. And: White House, Pentagon cite executive privilege to hold up documents on friendly fire victim Tillman UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan adds another sinister piece to the puzzle: I keep thinking this incident is out of a movie. The heroism, the sacrifice, the tragedy, the lies, the cover-up, and the unthinkable. I should repeat I think it's almost certainly a friendly fire accident. But too much still doesn't add up. And then there's this: his diary was destroyed? Holy coverup, Batman!