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New York, 5:09 PM
Sat Dec 5
24 posts in the last 24 hours
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Additionally, as he continues to do more retrospective interviews on his way out, it comes more and more into light how little he actually takes responsibilities for his Administration's shortcomings and in fact does not regard any of his failings as failures.
This is only the beginning. And come January 21, he will be more and more publically shamed though I feel he will never be indicted for what is widely perceived as his crimes.
So no, I will not lay off on him. Not as I and my other fellow countrymen continue to be negatively affected by his actions or non actions as one would see befitting one who holds that office.
12/02/08
Historical perspective is gained over time, and most of the issues that seem big now will be trivial in a decade or two, nobody complains much about Iran-Contra anymore, all the scandals of the Clinton Administration didn't really do any lasting damage.
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And to use your examples: The Clinton Admin scandals were more to do about their personal business and political ethics which involves sexual indiscretions but no one died from them nor did the economy tank from them. And yes no one talks about Iran Contra, but don't think that those actions did not plant seeds in regards to our current relationship to them now.
The criticisms of Bush 44 are indeed relevant and rational, especially in regards to our National Security and Foreign Policy. So are you implying that his disastrous foreign policy, which also includes Iraq, is in no way relevant ten, twenty, fifty years from now? Are the lessons of the first World Wars and their catalysts to be ignored?
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I mean, the idea that that was not a serious failing of Reagan's presidency that had lasting historical implications just because the average person doesn't talk about it anymore is really stupid.
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I believe you're totally making this up as it goes along. And it did have lasting historical implications. And one can argue that it opened the door for certain levels of terrorism towards America afterwards. But I'm not going to make the research easy for you.
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@BadUncle: So Reagan is responsible for nuns being raped? You're really grabbing at straws.
12/02/08
[en.wikipedia.org]
Also, good faith efforts have been made to accommodate inmates' religious, dietary requirements at Gitmo.
Well...
[www.commonwealmagazine.org]
I mean, I think it's great that the Bush administration is making sure that the prisoners being held unconstitutionally at Gitmo are getting the food they need, but that's kind of missing the point. How is doing something that by all rights the Bush administration should be expected to do a defense of torture and extraordinary rendition?
Now, as to your glib dismissal of "sleep deprivation, loud music, waterboarding, homo-pyramids etc." let me just quote Andrew Sullivan. I apologize for it being a very long quote.
Even the word "torture" can be too vague and abstract a term. So let us state in plain English how Bush, Cheney, Tenet, et al. actually got information. They did it by subjecting prisoners to repeated drowning, or freezing, or heating, or sadistically long sleeplessness, or shackling or crucifying them until the pain could be borne no longer, or beating them until they pleaded for mercy, or threatening to kill or torture their children or wife or parents. Or all of the above in combination, in isolation, and with no surety of ever seeing the light of day again, with no right to meaningful due process of any kind, sometimes sealed off from light and sound for months at a time, or bombarded with indescribable noise day and night in cells from which there was no escape ever. This is what "under coercive conditions" actually means. It drove many of the victims into become mumbling, shaking, insane shells of human beings; it killed dozens; it drove others still to hunger strikes to try to kill themselves; and it terrified and scarred and "broke" the souls of many, many others. For what? Intelligence that cannot be trusted, and the loss of the sacred integrity of two centuries of American history. Did it save lives? We do not know. We do know that the people who are claiming it did have been unable to bring any serious case to justice based on their original claims, and are the people who are criminally responsible for the torture they have committed. Why would they not say it saved lives? And yet we have no other way to know. And we have the terrifying possibility that false information procured by torture provided a pretext to torture others in a self-perpetuating loop in which any ability to find out the actual truth is lost for ever. That, after all, is how some of the flawed intelligence that took us into Iraq was procured.
We are not cutting off fingers or burning people with hot pokers, if this is what you mean by Bush's supposed efforts to ensure his interrogation techniques were legal (though they aren't). Despite this, what we are doing is definitely, absolutely torture. I'm not prepared to give us a pat on the back because we haven't been as brutal as third world dictatorships.
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@BadUncle: It's a good thing none of the leftist insurgency movements in Latin America ever committed any atrocities, the Sandinistas, FARC, and Shining Path were all choirboys, but the US and its allies, we're always the bad guys in the eyes of the true believers.
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The comparison to Nixon is just lazy Hollywood leftism. Bush isn't the paranoid shark Nixon was. To be fair, both presidents sure loved to spend money.
This whole business of violating the Constitution is nauseating hyperbole. Bush based his decisions on legal counsel from John Yoo et al, who believe in strong executive powers in a time of war. Obama is already beginning to retreat from previous positions on the Patriot Act and wire tapping. He may yet shut down Gitmo and facilitate trials for its inmates, but don't expect a full rollback of Bush's initiatives. I'm not saying civil libertarians shouldn't be outraged, but that doesn't change the fact that Bush's (Yoo's) view of the executive office holds some water.
As for the "he lied us into a war" delusion, simply repeating it over an over doesn't make it true. The French, Brits, and Russians all had the same intelligence. Add that to the 20+ reasons for war approved by congress and you have a compelling case for removing Saddam after 9-11.
"Poorly-planned" war? Compared to which war? Saddam's regime and elite Republican Guard were toppled in weeks, in spite of predictions to the contrary. The insurgency has been defeated (for now), a constitution is in place, a democratically-elected government is still in power, and the majority of the provinces are now under Iraqi control. This could all turn to mush but if the trend holds, we may yet be praising the running of the war.
Does anyone other than David Corn understand the Plame non-scandal?
Anyway, we obviously disagree on all this, so I'll stop spazzing.
In the meantime, Ron, now that you have Obama to worship, why not ease up on the Bush hatred? It's so 2008.
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1) The French and Russinans indeed had the same intel, and opposed the invasion of Iraq, urging more time for Hans Blix' inspections. Your bolstering Pareene's point.
2) Poorly planned vs., oh, say, WWII (which clearly the chickenhawks sought to relive). Two years prior to the VJ Day, Truman knew we would need to occupy a country with which we had little cultural understanding, noting that he had no idea if our troops would have to fight house-to-house for years. He commissioned a study which is still used in college sociology courses (printed under the title "The Chrysamthemum and the Sword"). By contrast, we entered with no occupation plan.
3) Plame's identity as an agent was disclosed for political expedience. In some circles, this might be seen as treason. Clearly, you don't get this.
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Don't you find your willingness to gloss over the legalization of torture and the practice of extraordinary rendition unsettling? At all? There's a huge difference between those things, which are in clear defiance of the Geneva Convention and are considered actual, you know, war crimes (and please explain to me how that is "nauseating hyperbole"), and allowing the PATRIOT Act to continue, which is unsettling and wrong and in defiance of the fourth amendment, but at least has precedent and arguably has kept us safer (an argument that cannot be plausibly made for torture).
12/02/08
For instance, satellite photos showed what could either be "mobile chemical warfare labs" Saddam could have theoretically, possibly built, or they could have more likely been the weather balloon inflation trucks the Brits sold Iraq in the 80s. When Colin Powell went before the UN and sold out all his credibility, he completely tossed out Occam's Razor and decided they were chemical warfare labs.
Are there really people who believe that this was all an innocent mistake?
12/02/08
(2) With respect, you're way off on WWII. There are countless examples of silly, horrifying mistakes that resulted in needless loss of American lives. For instance, Sherman tanks were death traps next to elite Panzers. Normandy, in spite of its success, was a comedy of errors complete with bad intelligence, accidents, and needless slaughter. The Battle of the Bulge (another tactical blunder) resulted in massive American losses b/w 44 and 45. Soldiers routinely were ill- and under-equipped. That's simply the history of the war.
(3) Sorry, there's no treason in the Plame non-scandal. She wasn't even covert anymore. No link b/w Armitage's leak and Bush. Maybe some nepotism in having Wilson go to Niger. The real head-scratcher is why uranium was an issue in light of this: [www.cbc.ca]
Thanks for posting.
12/02/08
Regarding Plame, whether or not an agent is covert has no bearing on determining whom she had contact with. Any counterintelligence service would start immediately trying to reverse engineer her work. So wrapping up treason in the gift wrap of legalese is kind of shifty.
12/02/08
[www.msnbc.msn.com]
Headline: "Plame was 'covert' agent at time of name leak"
"Covert" is in scare quotes because it's the word Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald used to describe her status at the time.
12/02/08
I say "hyperbole" b/c I honestly don't include sleep deprivation, loud music, waterboarding, homo-pyramids etc. to be in the same league as the torture we could expect from Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel etc. I really do think Bush made a good faith effort to ensure that these actions were legal.
Also, good faith efforts have been made to accommodate inmates' religious, dietary requirements at Gitmo. You can't hold people indefinitely without trial -- Bush will lose (has lost) this argument -- but I think the positives of our actions there outweigh the negatives, especially considering the consequences of letting high-level terror suspects go free.
Lastly, I really do think it's a significant accomplishment to have prevented a terrorist attack. Most everyone expected us to get hit again (and evidence shows they've been trying). My hope is that Obama can match that record.
12/02/08
You can't hold people indefinitely without trial -- Bush will lose (has lost) this argument -- but I think the positives of our actions there outweigh the negatives, especially considering the consequences of letting high-level terror suspects go free.
Even our current Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense disagree with you:
[www.iht.com]
Lastly, I really do think it's a significant accomplishment to have prevented a terrorist attack. Most everyone expected us to get hit again (and evidence shows they've been trying). My hope is that Obama can match that record.
We can never know if anything Bush did is the reason we haven't had a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the past 7 years, and saying otherwise doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If we do have another terrorist attack, in fact, part of the reason we may be vulnerable is probably due to Bush's failure to more directly combat terrorist organizations by getting bogged down in Iraq (as well, of course, as the rise in anti-Americanism his presidency unfortunately provoked).
(My apologies for two long comments in a row.)
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But weasel legalities aside, common sense dictates that this is the sort of behavior to which our nation was founded in opposition.
12/02/08
Also, blaming Bush for a hurricane that destroyed New Orleans, maybe they shouldn't have built a city on a below sea level swamp near the Gulf of Mexico. Get your facts straight and lay off the moronic rants of trying to blame Bush for the weather.
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Have at him, lovelies.
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The difference is basic: Clinton "fired" 92 (or was it 93?) in the same sense that EVERY president "fires" them -- he accepted their resignations upon assuming office. That is the longstanding tradition for political appointees of one president; they tender their resignations when a new president steps in, who appoints his own people.
Bush's firings came in the middle of his term and involved singling out specific U.S. Attorneys for specific political reasons -- i.e., they wouldn't pursue the administration's pet "political corruption" cases against Democratic politicians they wanted to take out.
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I can't begin to describe the stupidity of that statement.
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I'm sick to death of the "we've not had another attack since 9/11" argument. It doesn't hold water. We hadn't been attacked for years before 9/11 with the exeption of the World Trade Center garage bombing carried out by the same group, and the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by an American. If memory serves, before those two attacks, it was Pearl Harbor! So we went the better part of 50 years without being attacked on our soil. Asshole gets into office and within a year we're attacked. But, because the last 7 years of his administration resulted in no other attacks, it's an accomplishment? That's some faulty logic!
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