Campaigning
for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the
president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland
Security Department against Democrats.
He told at least two
audiences that some senators opposing him were "not interested
in the security of the American people." In reality, Democrats
balked not at creating the department, which Mr. Bush himself first
opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil
service protections.
And
it's almost amusing to run across this statement about trying to
decide whether to go to war against Iraq:
During this period, Bush relates, "I sought opinions on Iraq from a variety of sources." By coincidence, every one of them urged him to do it.
Yeah,
funny how that happens when you've absolutely made up your mind to do
something and when you have a limited circle of advisers, everyone
you speak with just happens
to have reached the same conclusion! One of the Bush vacations that
really stuck me as wildly irresponsible was in August 2003. It was
becoming clear that the Iraq War was transitioning from a
straightforward military-to-military battle followed by a
more-or-less peaceful occupation regime and turning into a situation
more like what Mao Zedong described as "protracted
war" where the objective is to outlast a
technologically-superior foe. Had Bush drawn around him a more
heterogeneous set of advisers, had he been listening to something
other than a bunch of "yes-men" or "loyal Bushies,"
he would have spent that August hunkered down in the map rooms and
consulting with people who knew something about guerrilla wars.
Instead, he just treated that month as simply another vacation and
twiddled his thumbs on his Texas ranch for a month while the Iraq
situation deteriorated.
More on Bush's dodgy language:
Bush writes in the memoir: "No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find weapons of mass destruction. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do."
[...]
And Bush of course never actually tells us who he's angry at, or what exactly sickened him. He's certainly not willing to say that he was angry at himself, or that going to war was a sickening mistake.
It's most curious that the Republican Party constantly speaks of personal responsibility and how important it is and how Democrats don't observe it, but for Bush, just about everything that went wrong appears to have been somebody else's fault. He says "My bad" for purely rhetorical mistakes, things like the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) or for saying "bring 'em on" in response to a question about the emerging Iraqi insurgency. But when it came to really serious misconduct on his part:
In fact, Dubya and his ghostwriters' version of the Plame-CIA outing is even more curiously incurious than Packer suggests. Condensing the lengthy investigation and Libby's trial to roughly a paragraph, Bush faithfully cites the GOP talking point that Richard Armitage was Robert Novak's source in exposing Plame, so special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald shouldn't have bothered investigating anything or anyone else" and then blithely notes that he refused to pardon the convicted Libby because his lawyers unanimously agreed the verdicts were justified . [emphasis in original]
Bush's book just came out a little while ago, but as Froomkin points out, the traditional press corps, "The Village" as the blogger Digby calls them (The Village and how they're responding to Sarah Palin), is doing its collective best to ignore, downplay and paper over Bush's crimes and the immense damage that he did to this country and to the rest of the world. They shouldn't be allowedto get away with that. If the US doesn't place Bush on trial and then imprison him, we risk a reprise of the temporary imprisonment and national embarrassment of Augusto Pinochet in 1998. From a piece on Bush and torture:
Tom Porteous, the UK Director of Human Rights Watch said, "There is no point having international justice for petty African dictators if you can't apply it to the leaders of powerful countries like the US."
Porteous
is right. For justice to not simply be "victor's justice,"
something that the winners get to apply to the losers, it has to
apply to the "Leader of the Free World" as well.
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