Kristallnot

Here's an idea that is only part polemic:  the next whiny, thieving billionaire asshole to complain about Obama being Hitler, should get the literal result of his assertion -- that is, stripped of all valuable possessions, herded on to a boxcar, trundled out to an isolated work camp, starved, beaten, tortured and forced to fight to survive, until being loaded into a fucking oven. Hokay? Enough of this shit already.

It's just beyond disgusting, this incessant whinging from these slimeballs who have everything they could want, and it's still not enough. Apparently they need the admiration of the peons as well. Well, fuck you, Tom Perkins, Steve Schwartzman, et al. Do the world a huge favor and kindly fuck off and die already. We don't need you and the nothing you produce, but expect everything in return for.

I sincerely look forward to the day when enough people realize how badly these assholes have ripped them off, and have added insult to injury, and we finally get the guts and brains to bring the tumbrels and guillotines on to Wall Street, and we put an end to this self-serving bullshit once and for all. Better yet, an economic collapse that evaporates their paper profits, catapults them and their useless skill sets into a Mad Max hellscape, and forces them to do something worthwhile to survive, would just about be worth it. Many of the rest of us are already on our way there, thanks to their shenanigans, so might as well lean into it.

Alternate Reality

While the usual snark flies over whether or not the George W. Bush Liberry 'n' Tackle Shop contains My Pet Goat and a couple of unfinished coloring books [spoiler:  it does!], we can compare the coverage -- the attempt to be "even-handed" versus the cold, hard truth. (Extra points to the Atlantic for its freakshow commenters, especially "Summer," who seems determined to respond to each and every post with precisely the same invective and straw-gathering.)

The things that really stand out about Bush's ultimate legacy are not the tremendously bad decisions (as always, depending on whether you're one of the have-mores or not), nor his inability to pronounce incredibly complicated words such as "nuclear". It's the pains he and his various dogsbodies always took to show how disinterested Himself was in politics to begin with -- which begs the obvious question why didn't he just go into baseball and spare the world from his bumbling indifference?

I doubt we'll ever know the answer to that question; he probably doesn't know the answer himself. This is, after all, a guy who held the most important job on the planet, and could not be bothered to know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. More seriously, much like Sarah Palin, I can't recall a single instance where Bush exhibited anything but disdain for anything beyond the most superficial, facile analysis of any issue, foreign, domestic, financial, whatever. He took pride in going with his gut, and if it went wrong, well, fuck it -- someone else would pay the price, as always.

Forget the argument over whether Bush is intelligent or not. His intellectual acumen is less important than his intellectual perspective -- here is a guy who apparently had no interest in politics, yet became governor and then president; then did a terrible job by any objective measurement, and now claims not to care about history's assessment of his track record, yet is proud of his botchery all the same. Hokay then.

Scarier still is to look at the current model of the GOP, and consider that Shrub was a comparative moderate.

And as Faulkner said, the past isn't over, nor even past, not as long as there are at least two more Bushes jockeying to get back into office, so they can again parcel it out to their donors, rack up more debt for future generations to pay, then toddle off and act like they never wanted the job in the first place. This is precisely why this whitewashing matters, because American politics are dynastic, and have proven over and over again that from either party, there is no incompetence so wretched that it can't be elected if people know the name.

Now He Tells Us

I so enjoyed the latest nugget of EmBeeAyyy profundity to bounce from Himself's nether regions, I had to make it the new tagline (header line, whatever it's called):

It turns out that there's a lot of interlinks throughout the financial system.

Duuuude. Fuuuuck. I mean, dude, really? Are ya fuckin' sure about that one, the heretofore undetected interdependence among the diseased strata of corporate bookies and the paper-swapping monetary system? Yeah. "It turns out." Awesome. There has to be some point in his misbegotten life when Fredo went to a county fair and lost to a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken. But to be fair, the chicken's coke habit probably wasn't as bad.

More brilliance:

At first I thought we could deal with this -- deal with the problem one issue at a time. We made the decision on Fannie and Freddie because there was systemic risk to our mortgage markets. And then obviously AIG came along -- and Lehman came along and it was -- it declared bankruptcy; then AIG came along and it -- the house of cards was much bigger, beyond -- started to stretch beyond just Wall Street, in the sense of the effects of failure. And so when one card started to go, we were worried about the whole deck going down, and so therefore moved, and moved hard.

Seriously, it's like he's stoned, except not quite as coherent. He's basically tripping out on his fingers, man, have you ever thought about how no two fingerprints are alike, dude? He's lost like a wayward toddler at an Orange County galleria. I suppose golden parachutes require golden showers, but damn, he clearly didn't even bother to skim the bullet points of the executive summary.

This guy shouldn't be trusted with a child's piggy bank, and he wanted to put Social Security in the hands of these goons. The Democrats will really have to put in the extra effort to fuck this one up.

Shedding Skin

Just a friendly reminder of what we are blessedly getting rid of.

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said, with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''

This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)

I love the penultimate point in that excerpt, the room going silent until the subject was changed. Was it that disagreement with Le Dauphin is punishable by death (or worse yet, downward career mobility)? Or is it that they understood instinctively what sort of person they had to deal with, and that it's always a waste of time to try to argue with a bratty, insolent child?

Think about it -- Lantos was originally from Europe, and had dealt with world issues in Congress for many years at that point, where by that juncture in Bush's abysmal tenure, he hadn't been to much besides Mexico and China, and was only a few years removed from not knowing who ran that quaint little overcrowded nucular backwater known as Pakistan.

And instead of dialoguing with and listening to Lantos' suggestion, he tried to punk him in front of everyone else, 'cause everyone knows that Sweden don't have no army, dumbass. Just a big wall of meatballs and Volvos surrounding Göteborg. Fuck, this guy would lose on one of those "how long do you cook a three-minute egg?" questions they give you in the warm-up round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Every person in government who has failed to correct or engage this mendacious, clueless slob has done a disservice to the country and the world, whether they realize it or not. By humoring and ignoring his profound ignorance of even simple trivial points, they enabled an attitude of petulance and entitlement which engendered far worse things, which will take a generation to undo. Thanks for that, guys. At least Biden had the balls to share that one with the rest of us. I'm sure it's not even the 100th-worst example of enabled boobery in the past eight years.

Termites

This stupid cow and every one of her retard cohorts needs to spend the rest of their lives asking people if they want fries with that at the local Sonic. I mean, it's not terribly farfetched to wonder if she has a fucking shrine to this clown in her home, maybe a W-shaped dildo.

It's going to take at least two presidential terms to undo what all these assholes have done to the country, in so many different areas. And that's just what we know about.

Goring the Ox

The more I've heard this "at least Saint Algore would've kept us out of Iraq" stuff over the years, the less convincing I find it. Let's at least accept as a given that Gore and his security team would have been astute enough to not blithely ignore a memo telegraphing the culprit and mode of 9/11; i.e., it would have either been prevented or (if you're a LIHOP) not allowed to happen.

(Forget the MIHOP theories; these people couldn't put their fingers together in the dark, much less steer remote-controlled jets into skyscrapers. Still, there are at least as many CYA actions as one might find around the JFK assassination, thus lending empathy if not actual credibility to the more lurid speculations out there. People may be speculating a bit too wildly, but they are probably correct in assuming that they have not been told much of the truth at all.)

Anyway, so no 9/11 perhaps, but that does not automatically translate to no war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. The Taliban, aided by Pakistan's ISI, were in the process of committing a great many serious human rights violations in any case, well before 9/11. The country was being seriously destabilized, per Pakistan's express desires, as it regards Afghanistan as a convenient buffer state against India. It was a humanitarian crisis waiting to happen, and Gore is exactly the type who would have looked for his own private Kosovo with which to bolster his own humanitarian cred.

As for Iraq, the Clinton administration had ramped up its bombing and strafing runs there in its waning months, and had been studiously indifferent to the damage wrought by sanctions throughout the '90s. Whatever poll ratings Fatboy had managed to retain, it was more from popular revulsion at his hypocritical accusers, rather than any naturally accruing goodwill. He had little or no political capital left with which to operate outside the constraints of the Delay/Gingrich douchebags in Congress.

And that's what a hobbled-from-the-gate Gore would have been dealt anyway, had he chosen to fight a little harder for what was his. Look what insufferable winners the Baker junta turned out to be; what kind of sore losers are they? It would have been a contested victory by a candidate who lost his home state by 4%, paired up with a hostile Congress that would have scapegoated him at every opportunity because that's what they do. And Gore is exactly the type of bien pensant doofus to let himself get rolled into a bad idea for putatively humanitarian reasons.

Of course, a Gore administration would not have gone to war the way the Cheney administration did, especially without having 9/11 as a pretext. It wouldn't have been poaching laundered documents from Italian intelligence to frame Saddam Hussein, or trotting Colin Powell in front of the UN to conjure specters of havoc wrought by remote control airplanes launching out of Basra. It would have been more artfully done, to be sure. With a Chimpco production, the assumption was that the Iraqis would shower us with flowers 'n' candy; with the Gorons, we would have been the ones with treats.

But even the "success" of Kosovo is heavily qualified, with a young, underemployed, seething populace still torn by ethnic strife, no economy to speak of, and an enormous US base plopped in the center of things. It seems to be a great transition point for the trafficking of heroin and girls, but other than that, not so much.

The great thing about speculative history is that anyone can pull pretty much anything out of their ass. I don't know that Gore would have invaded Afghanistan and/or Iraq anymore than they know that he wouldn't have. But conditions in each situation were such that he could have found cause or pretext to do so, and Lieberman has proven to be a complete fucking weasel. There's no point in trying to make one side or the other attempt to prove a negative, but their unconditional presumption of impossibility is really something to behold, given Gore's own track record, and that of the administration he served.

Been close to eight interminable years of this N8r-b8ting schtick, and not once have I ever seen a tacit admission or even acknowledgement of some inescapable facts: that with Gore as president, you would also have had a dickhead like Lieberman as VP; that Gore was a bad candidate with a worse campaign, and would have entered office with absolutely zero juice and a motivated, hostile, radical congress to contend with; and most importantly, that many more registered Democrats voted for George Fucking Walker Bush than their anointed saint.

Birthday Boy

Fredo spends his final birfday in office gladhanding at the G8 Summit, surely not what he had in mind for a holiday/birthday weekend. (As someone whose birthday is also on a holiday weekend -- Memorial Day -- I can relate. I like to make a full weekend of R&R out of it, not just the one day.)

So, because I'm refreshed and full of good food and beer and just sunburned enough to give my pale Scots-Irish-Slav ass some blessed color, I'm feeling a wee bit magnanimous, just enough to acknowledge that he's right about something:

"I also am realistic enough to tell you that if China and India don't share the same aspiration that we're not going to solve the problem," Bush said.

It's true. One in two people -- every second person on the planet -- is in Asia, mostly in either China or India. And everyone's moved operations to those places. Nothing significant can be done without them.

Of course, even when he's right, he's wrong. China and India are still in the mid-to-late stages of ramping up their economies and infrastructures in the process of globalization. They're not going to monkey-wrench their economic development just to make him happy. They may not have immediately followed suit if we had joined in the Kyoto Protocol, but there was never any question about what they would do if we didn't.

That's the thing that should dog him to the bitter end. He didn't even try. Whether the issue has been foreign policy, the environment, or economics, these guys seemed to think that they had swinging dicks they could wave at the problem and scare it away. The fact that problems only worsened in all those areas should be a clue to them that their dicks were never nearly as big as their courtesans told them they were.

Caddyschmuck

The sacrifices he makes:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - [Junior] said in an interview out Tuesday that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year.

"I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said in an interview for Yahoo! News and Politico magazine.

You know what else sends the wrong signal, Chief? Grossly exaggerating your rationales; canning experienced military advisors who disagree with your brilliant strategery, while promoting inept yes-men; taunting the enemy with "bring 'em on"; dumping $2 bn per week into this endless snipe hunt; gentrifying the Green Zone with luxury condos and an amusement park while the rest of the country has intermittent power and water at best. And on and on.

Christ, the usual turd-burglars are scrambling to cobble together some sort of observation on what sort of "legacy" Bush will leave. I honestly cannot think of a single thing that didn't either directly benefit his donor class, or adversely impact the nation's fortunes. Usually both. (Small exceptions: increasing AIDS relief for Africa and debt forgiveness. I mean, whoopdee-fuckin'-doo, in the overall scheme of things.)

You made your bed, hoss, you may as well go ahead and play golf in it for all it's worth. The sad thing is that he probably sincerely believes that this matters, not that it's ever stopped him from mountain biking and clearing brush. It doesn't even seem to occur to him that he is deeply resented despite quitting golf, that whether he played or not wouldn't matter in the least if he had ever displayed even a trace of sentience or competence.

Go. Go shoot a round. Really, it doesn't matter anymore, except to the extent that every minute on the back nine is a minute away from lawndarting the country. I just do not understand why this is newsworthy now, four years after we watched that drive on Fahrenheit 9/11. Whatever and ever, amen.

Back Door Man

The bozos are up to their usual tricks:

As if to offer denial in the face of disaster -- and commit the U.S. to losing many more soldiers and Marines -- the Bush administration has begun negotiations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for years, even decades, after President George W. Bush leaves office.

The negotiation, set to conclude this summer, will establish the basis for a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to the Bush administration, the Iraqi government requested a bilateral agreement to replace the expiring U.N. mandate for the occupation, which offended Iraqi sovereignty. Asked if there was any irony in preparing a plan to keep thousands of foreign soldiers in Iraq in the name of Iraqi sovereignty, a National Security Council official, who requested anonymity, replied, "Sure, but we plan to negotiate that aspect" of the agreement.

....

The Bush administration has less than a year in office, yet it is now negotiating a deal that will commit the U.S. to an open-ended continuation of its most momentous, and controversial, foreign-policy decision. At the very least, the accord will prove a thorny issue for any successor Democratic administration that wins election on a promise to end the war.

Which was probably the point -- if McCain wins, the country has lost its mind anyway, and endorsed Cheneyism after supposedly repudiating it for several years; if Clinton or Obama wins, they will be hemmed in from day one by an eleventh-hour agreement. Of course, that can be augmented or even circumvented with more mercenary units, and rotating regular troops home.

But the most glaring aspect of all this is that after five years, they're still making this up as they go along. There's scarcely a semblance of a plan, certainly not a proactive one, and not even a reactive or much of an adaptive one. It's just stick people in as needed, take credit and deflect or ignore blame. When Clausewitz declared that war was politics by other means, I guess the Bushies took him as literally as they possibly could.

Life's a Pitch and Then You Cry

Life outside the bubble.

Conspiracy Guy Notes and Errata

Regardless of topic, Rigorous Intuition is never dull, and the same is true of its chat fora, this one discussing an interesting, appropriately ominous article in the Financial Times:

John Lipsky, the IMF's first deputy managing director, said: "We must keep all options on the table, including the potential use of public funds to safeguard the financial system."

The statement by the senior IMF official marks the second radical policy intervention from the IMF this year. It had previously called on governments to consider using fiscal policy to offset the impact of the credit crisis on growth.

Mr Lipsky said: "I fully recognise an appropriate role for public sector intervention after market solutions have been exhausted."

He urged policymakers to "think the unthinkable" and prepare now for what they would do if the worst case scenarios materialised and "low probability but high impact events" threatened to jeopardise global financial stability.

He warned of the risk that a "global financial decelerator" could take hold, in which rising defaults and margin calls from lenders triggered forced asset sales, driving down the value of collateral and forcing further forced sales.

The speculation as to what such a catalyzing event could be is reasonable enough, I suppose. It would not take much to kick over a war with Iran; an Iranian-backed Sadrist strapped with a dirty bomb penetrating the Green Zone would be pretext enough. And Poor Ol' Straight Talk has already begun establishing rhetorical turf in the brief border incursions between Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia recently. Venezuela being the third-largest oil exporter to the U.S., if Chàvez suddenly gets any bright ideas about turning off the tap, or even just screwing up production with his nationalization programs, his Bolivarian dream may be brought unceremoniously to heel.

But whatever. We can all nurse our pet theories till the cows come home. What I find interesting is the notion that, in the face of such a catalyzing event, Le Dauphin and his éminence grise would have an excuse to suspend elections and retain power, which presumes that they are looking for such an excuse. Folks, I think this is making rhetorical toothpicks out of logs, as it were; you can be quite certain that, should a Democrat happen to accede to the figurehead position come November, he or she will assiduously continue most of the operational prerogatives currently in play. Obama (and perhaps Clinton) is surely less predisposed to mindlessly attack another country, but with the required pretext, he would have little choice.

There is no need whatsoever to suspend or postpone elections. Indeed, maintaining their due course is critical to continuing the notion that they matter in any substantial way, other than elites sending signals amongst themselves. Plus, without the election industry, consultants would have to return to their former occupations, and there's only so many hobos to blow.

Why on earth would Bush want a third term anyway? He's done his bit; he'll spend a couple years scooping up money on the rubber-chicken circuit with Benito Giuliani and then amble off to Crawford -- or perhaps Paraguay.

Romancing the Stoned

Just when you think Bush can't get any more sociopathically indifferent to the realities of war -- his war -- he goes and ups (or is it lowers?) the ante:

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Funny how when he was "slightly younger", and had that very opportunity to bring Freedom's Gift™ to Charlie, Bush scrambled for a bullshit gig defending the Tortilla Curtain politely declined and went to Yale. Apparently branding Deke pledges and running his mouth to his professors was where his "front line" concerns were.

I honestly wonder sometimes just what is wrong with this person. All snark aside, there's just something very fundamental missing. The utter lack of genuine empathy, the complete incompetence -- no, dereliction -- at interpreting plain empirical data, the inability to avoid stock sales pitches instead of saying something meaningful (e.g., his habit of saying "in other words" in roughly the same manner as a teenage girl prefaces every phrase with "like" or "you know").

Coming from a family where people actually served in combat, I have heard a few (very few, since most veterans actually don't like regaling civilians with them) war stories over the years -- WW2, Vietnam, Korea. Not one was ever told as if it were "romantic". That Sands of Iwo Jima shit never comes from actual combat veterans, only the chickenhawks who live vicariously through them. It's truly pathological. He walks past mirrors buck naked, and sees only full regalia.

GeeDub Quote of the Day

Look, I recognize some people don't like accountability. In other words, accountability says if you're failing, we're going to expose that and expect you to change.

Simply priceless. Just when you thought he couldn't possibly be any more un-selfaware. In other words, if there is such a thing as accountability, as Bush's own faith insists there is, eternity in hell (which, for Bush, is probably a never-ending word-a-day calendar) is a guarantee.

Bonus oratory lesson from ol' Bust -- I mean Bu, uh Buster, see, um, er Busta R-r-rhymes:

In other words, in return -- and I -- you know, I was -- I was an old governor of a state.

Jesus Christ, it's like watching Helen Keller play darts, or that dingbat beauty-pageant chick try to find "the Iraq" on a map.

Don't Know Much About History

History is odd. I will be long gone before the true history of the Bush administration is written. I'm still reading analyses of Abraham Lincoln's presidency. -- GeeDub Bush

Sigh. This tired-ass riff is as stale as the one about the yellow rug in the Oval Office, or how peachy-cool it is that Daddy shot Japanese and now Junior can be friends with them, maybe pitch a tent on the South Lawn and cook fucking s'mores. Jesus H. Christ.

Look, Cletus, there is nothing "odd" whatsoever about history. History is just people doing things, and other people writing about those things, the people who did them, and the people who had to deal with the consequences. As such, it is a quintessentially human endeavor, one that is generally not helped much by this or that writer's need to justify themselves, either to their academic peers, popular demand, or ideological brethren. Realism should at least trump hagiography, insofar as the craft itself generally consists of its practitioners reading their stuff to each other, not unlike the network news.

Thus I would venture that it is infinitely more likely that ten, twenty, fifty years from now, more people will find valuable perspective in, say, The One-Percent Doctrine than Rebel in Chief. Why? Because odds are that events will continue to unfold in accordance with one far more than the other. Nobody's going to give a damn about a Freedom Institute appended to a coloring-book library of redacted lies, and nobody's going to give a shit about what a court jester like Bob Woodward had to say about anything.

Bush is right in that time and perspective are the ultimate arbiters of whether you're remembered as a Lincoln or a Fillmore. But in his case, time is only going to strengthen the perception that he initiated what was essentially a war on gravity, to the immense profit of a select few who just happened to be part of or associated with his term in office. Gravity eventually wins, and Cheney and Halliburton and Blackwater and the Carlyle Group and the rest of them got their filthy pelf.

What gets remembered most is whether we continued to allow these people to metastasize, and bring us the rest of the way down, or if we start to recognize our own collective roles and disengage from the system, so as to delegitimize its more energetic misdeeds.

Season's Bleatings

I don't think the word "mixed" means what CNN thinks it means.

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times -- a tale of two legacies as President Bush prepares to ring in the final year of his presidency.

Sitting in the front row for Bush's final press conference of 2007 on Thursday, I was struck by how it's a mixed bag for the president on three key issues -- his relationship with the Democratic Congress, the state of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the health of the U.S. economy.

Jay-zus. You know, it's great to get a hummer for Christmas, but it should be from your wife (or whatever), not some reporter assigned to Christmas kneepad duty. I mean seriously, how the hell are the three issues Henry puts forth in his own article perceived even charitably as a "mixed bag"? There's no way, pal -- there is no relationship between Bush and congressional Democrats; the economy is foundering; the war in Afghanistan is stalling, and the one in Iraq has temporarily normalized because Iran has told the Shiite militias to stand down for a while.

I honestly cannot figure out why this article needed to be written.

Translating Nospeak

Let's, I say let's mosey on down to the Tumbleweed Farm, there in the middle o' Petticoat Junction, and examine closely just one (1) paragraph of Mister Man's important pronuncimatin' on matters of some seriousness, to wit, Pakistan.

First, the question, just to put things in context.

Are you at all concerned that General Musharraf may not live up to the promises that you said he's made to you? And are you concerned, as Secretary Gates suggested yesterday, that the distraction, the internal turmoil in Pakistan is actually -- or could have an effect on the effort in Afghanistan? Thank you.

Not too complicated, right? Right? Well, let's see if we can parse the non-answer:

I take a person for his word until otherwise. I think that's what you have to do. When somebody says this is what they're going to do, then you give them a chance to do it.

This is the usual aphasic boilerplate he probably mumbles in his sleep; you can tell because it's practically in iambic pentameter. He genuinely seems to think that, for example, his good buddy Pooty-Poot hasn't worked him over like Rosie O'Donnell on a box of Devil Dogs. Nor is this dispositive factoid applicable to much else in the way of volatile areas of foreign policy. You don't take anyone's word for it.

But even in this case, with Musharraf, it is becoming apparent, even to someone of Bush's intellect, that Musharraf cannot be trusted anymore. He's played both sides for too long, and this is not a situation where hydrostatic tension can be held indefinitely. And Musharraf himself has propelled the crisis forward with a series of autocratic maneuvers which may cement his position with the military which really runs that country, but also secures his popular perception as Our Man in Islamabad. This "give them a chance" bit, hilarious. Musharraf has had six years and $11 bn to do something. There are extenutaing circumstances, there always are, but the results are not there, bottom line, and Pakistan is now on the verge of a political meltdown.

I can tell you this, that President Musharraf, right after the attacks on September the 11th, made a decision, and the decision was to stand with the United States against the extremists inside Pakistan.

And this year has been the deadliest for troops in Afghanistan. How do those two things square and again, how many years are these decisions and policies supposed to be exempt from review just because you invoke 9/11 over and over again?

In other words,....

I get that he has to regurgitate this shit in the same way it was explained to him, but this is the most shopworn rhetorical crutch he employs, by far. It's too bad they can't fit him with a shock collar that goes off every time he spins his wheels with this utterly stupid time-waster of a phrase.

It's the absolute worst sort of intellectual abuse, to constantly recycle this simplistic crap, under the pretense of elaborating on obvious points, while actually obfuscating them further. Everyone talks a good game about Orwell, but this was exactly the thorn in Orwell's side, language being used to conceal rather than reveal. This is Bush's stock in trade.

....he was given an option: Are you with us, or are you not with us? And he made a clear decision to be with us, and he's acted on that advice.

But he hasn't done those things, certainly not to the degree one might expect from the blank checks we've written him the past half-decade. He's helped track and kill several #3's, good. But he's also consolidated his power, signed treaties with Taliban leaders, used our money to buy weapons that appear to be more well-suited for a conventional war with India than for flushing out terrorists, and trampled the institutions of his country, which redounds to us as far as the seething populace is concerned. Meanwhile, no viable successor or opposition has been cultivated, which means the next best plan is to bring back a populist kleptocrat, whose father was deposed and hung. And you thought American politics was a sideshow.

Bush keeps talking about the "goals" he shares with the Pakistani people, but that can't possibly be true. They want Musharraf out -- now. They may decide they want to keep using Afghanistan as a proxy buffer in their ongoing bullshit with India. That too is at cross purposes. Once Musharraf eventually leaves, it is entirely possible that the jihadis and madrassa thugs gain political potency.

Thus that entire paragraph, much like most things Bush has said over the years, literally has almost no meaning.

Potemkin Government

Love it. It was only a matter of time.

Tuesday the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it was holding a news conference to answer reporters' questions about the federal agency's emergency response to the Southern California wildfires.

The agency gave reporters just 15 minutes notice to attend, and those members of the media who called in via phone lines could listen to the event but were not able to ask questions.

....

The event went smoothly. That is, until the news media discovered that the press conference wasn't exactly a press conference at all.

....

No reporters? No problem for FEMA. The agency filled the press room with its own public affairs personnel who asked questions.

It looked real enough for cable networks to briefly air the live event.

"I'll be glad to take some of your questions," Johnson said.

"Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?" one staffer asked.

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response so far," Johnson replied.

And so it went for more than 10 minutes, without any journalists.

Even as the White House feigns indignation, you know they're trying to find a way to do this with everything. Saves a lot of trouble giving the same non-answer to pesky questions. Heckuva job, Harvey.

Boogers Is Tasty

Important decision about to be made -- eat or flick?

I remember my first beer:

LANCASTER, Pa. - Give the man a microphone and he'll talk about anything. For 76 minutes, [Junior] prowled the stage Wednesday in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, giving a speech and answering questions about everything from his opposition to tax increases to his veto of a bill to expand children's health insurance.

Yeah well, you can field just about any question on any subject when your only answer is to surf incoherently on a nose-picking symphony of boilerplate, homilies, and (hopefully) invented anecdotes.

He offered a pointed description of his job.

"My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions," the president said.

He elaborated on that point later.

"I delegate to good people. I always tell Condi Rice, `I want to remind you, Madam Secretary, who has the Ph.D. and who was the C student. And I want to remind you who the adviser is and who the president is.'

"I got a lot of Ph.D.-types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, `[Dude who clears tumbleweeds], here's what's on my mind.' And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device (sic), I decide, you know, I say, `This is what we're going to do.' And it's `Yes, sir, [Mister Man].' And then we get after it, implement policy."

With this kind of rigorous decision-making process, it's no wonder we are where we are. But shit, is he retarded, or does he assume that we are? As usual, probably both.

Still, the same tired-ass stories every freakin' time, man, like he's proud of that shit. "Heh-heh, see, ya studied hard 'n' played by the rules 'n' lurned lots 'n' lots of heavy stuff -- an' yer still workin' for a guy like me! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!"

It's all about him and his wittle ego, isn't it? It's about smarter, more qualified people having to be deferential to him and his gut, never mind that there is no university management program on the planet -- especially Harvard's -- that tells you to just go with your gut at the expense of all countervailing empirical evidence and analysis. He'll show 'em all; nobody can tell him nothin'.

Well, he's your preznit, Lancaster, that's why he's there, so choke on it.


The PhD and the C student consult on a weally big decision.

Preznit Miss Teen South Carolina

Jesus. Now I'm starting to be embarrassed for him:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as U.S. President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue?

When Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how -- with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

The White House was left scrambling to explain after a marked-up draft of Bush's speech popped up briefly on the U.N. Web site as he delivered his remarks, giving a rare glimpse of the special guidance he gets for major addresses.

It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), a friend, and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of U.S. human rights criticism.

Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the draft, labeled the 20th version and complete with typos and speechwriters' cellphone numbers, had been turned over in advance to help U.N. interpreters who must simultaneously translate leaders' speeches into several languages.

The easy road would be to put (puh-REE-no) after Dana's name, but I prefer to pronounce it "milftastic", and my teevee screen has the dents where I've been grinding my loins to prove it.

Seriously, though -- Mauritania? Mugabe? I know I joke about it, but for Christ's sake, did he really just play pinball, snort coke and brand plebes all through college or what? Wasn't there a Will Ferrell skit back in 2000 about Bush showing up to the second debate with Gore, all proud of himself for saying "Obasanjo" correckly and all?

This is sad. If we're just going to have dopey airheads running things, let's at least make them hot dopey airheads. Americans are much less irritable when they have a good reason to spank their hapless monkeys.

Pants Afire

You want your smoking gun, here ya go (transcript and analysis here):

Today, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a transcript of a discussion between President Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in February 2003 in which the Bush told Aznar that the U.S. would go to war with Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein with or without a UN resolution:

“We must take him right now. We have shown an incredible degree of patience until now. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we will be militarily ready.”

Though Aznar asked Bush to “have a little patience” and urged, “It is very important to have a [UN] resolution,” Bush pushed for war throughout the meeting, telling the Spanish Prime Minister, “We will be in Baghdad by the end of March.”

Just a few days later, Bush insisted to the American public that war with Iraq was not a certainty:

BUSH: “I’ve not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully.” [3/6/03]

BUSH: “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force.” [3/8/03]

Here's Bush plotting teh warporn with noted foreign policy enthusiast Harry Reems Aznar:

Yeah, baby, why doncha put on yer French maid outfit, and invest heavily in oil futures and PMCs? You know how I like it.

[Super Happy Fun Bonus: About 20-25% of the way down the translation page, there's a rather unfortunate remark by the Li'l Genius, comparing the protracted UN resolution process to "Chinese water torture". All those other dummies, getting in the way of his Great Idea. He should have them freedom-boarded for their impertinence. Definitely read through the conversations there. Fascinating stuff.]