From The Daily Show:
George W. Bush breaks his silence to speak at the live equivalent of a creepy low budget infomercial for exercise equipment you'll never use.
Well, I guess when Dick Cheney referred to Obama "dithering", he actually meant spending any time thinking about the situation at all, given how little time they spent preparing a report for the incoming administration. CAP's John Podesta points out the problem on This Week:
(Former Bush officials and Republicans) have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward (to criticize Obama's decision process). From Cheney’s recent remarks to the Center for Security Policy:
In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.
Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:
PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.
Oh...I see...we're operating on the "shoot first, ask questions later" methodology of foreign policy. Yeah, that's worked so well for us so far.
Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:
KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.
If nothing else demonstrates why the world community was happy enough with the new direction in foreign policy brought by the Obama administration that they would award him the Nobel Peace Prize, this certainly does. Imagine--taking a measured, educated and thoughtful approach as to how to deal with the mess that is Afghanistan. What a radical notion after the last eight years.
Steve Hynd at Newshoggers has a piece up on Afghanistan that focuses on why the Bush's gut reaction, no brains technique in Afghanistan has made it impossible to ever "win":
Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg talks to Real News Network about Afghanistan. He says that he wrote McChrystal's assessment thirty years ago, only with the names changed; that counter-insurgency cannot succeed for a foreign occupier and that there can be no success that will survive after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.
Ellsberg should be followed by reading Paul McGeogh's blistering critique of McChrystal and Obama's Afghan plan, which I noted yesterday and Andrew Sullivan picked up on today.
Via Raw Story, this very enlightening news that the Bush administration blocked efforts to enforce laws against predatory lending. We are so shocked:
Federal regulators in the Bush administration blocked attempts by state governments to prevent predatory lending practices that resulted in the financial crisis now stalking the American economy, a new study from the University of North Carolina says.
In 2004, the Office of the Currency Comptroller, an obscure regulatory agency tasked with ensuring the fiscal soundness of America's banks, invoked an 1863 law to give itself the power to override state laws against predatory lending. The OCC told states they could not enforce predatory-lending laws, and all banks would be subject only to less-strict federal laws.
Now, a research paper (PDF) from UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for Community Capital shows that those anti-predatory lending laws had actually worked. States that had stricter regulations on issuing mortgages were found to have fewer foreclosures.
"We believe that these findings are remarkable, since they suggest an important and yet unexplored link between [anti-predatory lending laws] and foreclosures," the study's authors state.
The study may be the first scientific evidence to back up claims made by many critics that the Bush administration and earlier administrations allowed last year's financial crisis to happen by not enforcing common-sense regulations on lenders.
Last year, seven months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing government banking bailout, then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wrote a Washington Post column in which he described how the Bush administration blocked states' efforts to prevent a crisis in the mortgage industry.
Spitzer wrote:
Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.
What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.
Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.
Spitzer's Post column ran a month before the New York Times reported that federal authorities were investigating Spitzer as a patron of high-end hookers, ending his political career and long-running crusade against corporate malfeasance. Some observers, including investigative reporter Greg Palast, say this was not a coincidence.
The Bush Administration sure had a knack for letting criminals get away with it, didn't they? They failed to stop 9/11, never caught bin Laden, and now we're learning about the total incompetence of the SEC in responding to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly missed chances to catch Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion fraud over 16 years by assigning inexperienced investigators and accepting “implausible” explanations after catching him in lies, the agency’s internal watchdog said.
At least six warnings from sources including a money manager, a “respected hedge-fund manager” and a firm that studied Madoff’s business failed to spur a “thorough and competent” probe, Inspector General H. David Kotz wrote in a summary of a report released today. Madoff, in an interview with Kotz, said even he “was astonished” when investigators failed to check trading records that would have exposed his scam.
“Despite numerous credible and detailed complaints, the SEC never properly examined or investigated Madoff’s trading and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme,” Kotz wrote.
This is not only an incredible report, it plays into a larger truth about the conservative conception of regulation as a needless bother rather than a diligent effort to protect the consumer. One incredible moment, referenced above but covered in detail by Zachary Roth, shows that Madoff basically thought he was caught and the scheme had been discovered by federal regulators, only to find himself safe once again.
The agency's biggest screw up, says the summary, was the fact that examiners never verified Madoff's trading through an independent third party.
The details of that failure are more astonishing still. Madoff at one point told examiners that all his trades were cleared through his account at the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a clearing agency -- and he gave the examiners his DTC account number. At that point, Madoff told Kotz in an interview, "I thought it was the end game, over. Monday morning they'll call DTC and this will be over." Amazingly, the SEC never followed up with DTC. Madoff said he was "astonished."
The summary almost makes clear that the SEC's right hand didn't know what the left was doing. It notes with astonishment that at one point, two Madoff examinations were going on at the same time within the agency, without either being aware of the other. It was Madoff himself who informed one team of the other's existence [...]
The final, failed Madoff investigation of 2006 -- triggered by a detailed Markopolos complaint -- was perhaps the most egregious. According to the summary, most of the investigative work was done by a staff attorney "who recently graduated from law school and only joined the SEC nineteen months before she was given the Madoff investigation. She had never previously been the lead staff attorney on any investigation, and had been involved in very few investigations overall. The Madoff assignment was also her first real exposure to broker-dealer issues."
According to the summary, that inexperience helps explain why, when Madoff told the examiners that he got such unprecedentedly good return simply because he had a good "feel" for the market, they took that nonsensical explanation at face value.
Bush's SEC didn't bother to check up on Madoff's dealings, and they took his explanations as good enough for them, because their attitude toward regulation was "don't mess with a good thing." Indeed, the entire stock market during the Bush years was kind of operating under a false reality in its own right. Madoff was a crook, but at least an honest crook. And even he couldn't get caught.
This is not just the story of one agency's embarrassing failure. The failure lied in the theory of government, existing to make profits for cronies and lay off the connected and the powerful. The failure to catch Madoff and the failure of conservatism are essentially the same stories.
Obviously, Jeffrey Immelt feels more than a little pressure to prove that NBC is not the liberal bastion (and messenger of Obama's secret army) that the unapologetic righties like to whinge about, otherwise there's really no excuse for this latest hire:
Journalism continues staggering pushes forward on an otherwise ordinary Sunday! In the great "tradition" of mixing up people like Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera with public drunks like Hoda and Kathy Lee, The Today Show's newest hire? Jenna Bush. Whee!
Absolutely, completely, 100% true. Here's looking at you, NBC, via the AP report:
...a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, [Bush] will contribute stories about once a month on issues like education to television's top-rated morning news show, said Jim Bell, its executive producer.
"It wasn't something I'd always dreamed to do," she said. "But I think one of the most important things in life is to be open-minded and to be open-minded for change."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the spawn of the guy who mangled the English language so often that it was painful to listen to him speak and who is personally responsible for the grammatically-odd statement above is going to cover educational issues?
That's like asking the spawn of Darth Cheney, Liz Cheney, on her opinion about Obama's foreign policy, or lifelong government-paid health insurance recipient John McCain about his opinion on the public option...oh wait.
As Atrios tweeted yesterday:
I look forward to seeing Jenna Bush interview Liz Cheney on The Today Show, being introduced by Luke Russert
Unqualified nepotism: Conservative values at their very best.
Bernard Goldberg was on The O'Reilly Factor last night touting his hot new scoop in the long-running controversy over George W. Bush's military service in the Texas Air National Guard:
Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue: the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed. But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed. This is it: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.
Who says? The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called “Rathergate” mess says. I recently re-examined the panel’s report after a source, Deep Throat style, told me to “Go to page 130.” When I did, here’s the startling piece of information I found:
Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.
This information, despite the fact that it has been available since the CBS report came out four years ago, has remained a secret to almost everybody both in and out of the media — one lonely fact in a 234- page report loaded with thousands of facts, and overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the documents.
There's only one problem with this: These claims were nothing new. In fact, it had been reported by the Washington Post back in 1999 -- in a story that Goldberg in fact cites in his piece. Here are the relevant grafs:
Four months before enlisting, Bush reported at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts to take the Air Force Officers Qualification Test. While scoring 25 percent for pilot aptitude – "about as low as you could get and be accepted," according to Martin – and 50 percent for navigator aptitude in his initial testing, he scored 95 percent on questions designed to reflect "officer quality," compared with a current-day average of 88 percent.
Among the questions Bush had to answer on his application forms was whether he wanted to go overseas. Bush checked the box that said: "do not volunteer."
Bush said in an interview that he did not recall checking the box. Two weeks later, his office provided a statement from a former, state-level Air Guard personnel officer, asserting that since Bush "was applying for a specific position with the 147th Fighter Group, it would have been inappropriate for him to have volunteered for an overseas assignment and he probably was so advised by the military personnel clerk assisting him in completing the form."
During a second interview, Bush himself raised the issue.
"Had my unit been called up, I'd have gone . . . to Vietnam," Bush said. "I was prepared to go."
But there was no chance Bush's unit would be ordered overseas. Bush says that toward the end of his training in 1970, he tried to volunteer for overseas duty, asking a commander to put his name on the list for a "Palace Alert" program, which dispatched qualified F-102 pilots in the Guard to the Europe and the Far East, occasionally to Vietnam, on three- to six-month assignments.
He was turned down on the spot. "I did [ask] – and I was told, 'You're not going,' " Bush said.
Only pilots with extensive flying time – at the outset, 1,000 hours were required – were sent overseas under the voluntary program. The Air Force, moreover, was retiring the aging F-102s and had ordered all overseas F-102 units closed down as of June 30, 1970.
In other words, if Bush actually did volunteer for Vietnam duty, he did so secure in the knowledge there was no chance he'd actually be called upon. That is, he was talking big talk, once again, knowing full well he'd never have to back it up.
I didn't run this here when I mashed it up last January, due to its graphic content. Also, as liberal patriots, we don't endorse burning US flags here at Crooks and Liars. We certainly understand why the rest of the world hated Bush though.
This week, YouTube made this a 'featured video,' and we found out we were all too right about the politicization of the terror threat thing by Bushco, so I thought it was time to share. Major h/t to Annapaprika for the 'Lady Liberty in bed' animation.
Open thread below...
WaPo:
In his first few months after leaving office, former vice president Richard B. Cheney threw himself into public combat against the "far left" agenda of the new commander in chief. More private reflections, as his memoir takes shape in slashing longhand on legal pads, have opened a second front against Cheney's White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush.
Cheney's disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.
"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."
The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney's critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.
Cheney's memoir will be published in Spring of 2011. Given Cheney's sneering of recent memoirs by former Bushies, such as Paul O'Neill and Scott McClellan, I don't anticipate a whole lot of self-awareness or openness to his book, just a lot of finger-pointing and blame placing of others.
Why exactly does George W. Bush think he has even a smidgen of credibility when discussing economic issues? Here's what he said yesterday:
"I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in," the former president said to applause from members of a local business group. "You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money."
Repeatedly in his hourlong speech and question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush said he would not directly criticize the new president, who has moved to take over financial institutions and several large corporations. Several times, however, he took direct aim at Obama policies as he defended his own during eight years in office.
"Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States," he said to huge cheers.
Brian Williams briefly mentioned it in his newscast yesterday, pointing out that it was actually Bush who signed the first bailout packages for the banks and auto and insurance industries. But that was really only the half of it.
Ed Shultz, on his MSNBC show yesterday, did an admirable job of tackling the rest of the matter:
What did he do? Attack the president of the United States and basically did what he does pretty well, which is rewrite history. Now Bush is babbling, trying to make sense out of the worst eight years this country has ever had since the Great Depression.
And if he‘s going to go out and do this, and I think we need to remind the American people, and I think we have an obligation to say this—Bush gave us what? Record deficits, record foreign debt, record trade deficits, butchering the middle class, letting the financial sector run wild with absolutely no oversight. Those are a just a few things—I don‘t have a whole hour to do this, but the American people are not stupid. Our new NBC News poll proves this. The American people do not blame Barack Obama for the fiscal condition of this country.
Here are the numbers. Fifty-three percent say that Bush and the congressional Republicans are to blame. Only six percent blame President Obama. Now, weeks ago, the president said he didn‘t want to second-guess the current president. That‘s exactly what he‘s doing. Bush is lying and he is setting the framework for the Republicans to make the case against President Obama at a very tough time. Gosh, how one speech can change people. It‘s almost like the state of the union address, the 16 words.
This is the last person that anybody in the Obama administration should pay attention to. Bush has no credibility. He has no authority. He has no clue what‘s going on. You see, he didn‘t stop with the economy. Brainless Bush went out and goes after, with a generic statement about health care reform. He really cared about that. He goes on to say, “There are a lot of way to remedy the situation without nationalizing health care.” He also said - “You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money.” I tell you what, just a couple of dandies out there on the rubber-chicken circuit.
This is a man who sat there for eight years—eight years—and did absolutely nothing when it comes to the number one issue in this country for families, which is health care. He told you to go out and get a private savings account. This is vintage Bush, appealing to the lowest common denominator when it comes to the problems we face as a country. I guess you could say that things haven‘t changed. They think we‘re stupid. But in the words of the former president, “Fool me once, you can‘t get fooled again, or whatever that was.”
Thanks, Ed. Somebody needed to say it. Too bad you seem to have been one of the few doing so.
Oy. Only on FoxNews.
EASTON: Well, I thought this whole -- the two speeches this week were just a high-pitched -- unfortunate high-pitched partisan duel between the two of them.
I know the press focused a lot on -- and has focused a lot on Dick Cheney and his provocative comments that the administration is keeping us less safe. And frankly, I think Cheney should give this president some credit on things like his very difficult decision to not to release the photos of alleged detainee abuse, for example, his flip on military tribunals.
But if you look at the Obama speech, that was equally partisan, and there wasn’t a lot of focus on that. I mean, he talked about this mess that he had inherited. He talked about the administration sort of fitting facts for an ideological agenda.
Why can’t this president give the previous president credit for keeping us safe for seven years? And by the way, we know from the C- SPAN interview that he’s in touch with President Bush. They’ve actually talked since he’s been in office.
But I think it would carry this White House a long way past the problems that Ceci talks about and get the support of somebody like McCain, Senator McCain, or Senator Lindsey Graham , who also supported closing Gitmo and also had concerns about enhanced interrogation techniques.
I think it would buy him a lot of credit or a lot of good will on the other side of the aisle and with centrist Democrats if he gave this -- he gave the Bush administration some credit.
Actually, I think considering the mess that Obama was left (something that is indisputable) and the grief he's been getting, not only from Cheney but the rest of the Party of No, he's been remarkably reticent on blaming the Bush administration for anything.
But I tell you what, Nina, we'll give the Bush administration credit for keeping us safe in the last seven years (although residents in the Gulf Coast might quibble) IF you and your entire FoxNews bobblehead crew admit that they quite stubbornly and fatally did NOT keep us safe for that first year despite warnings that Bin Laden was determined to strike and that we lost 3,100 Americans because of that blindness.
Deal?
Via Frank Rich today:
This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.) What’s up with that?
As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
And speaking of Rumsfeld, Rich also mentions this:
In a highly unusual reversal, the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office has withdrawn a report it issued in January exonerating a Pentagon public relations program that made extensive use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.
Donald M. Horstman, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for policy and oversight, said in a memorandum released on Tuesday that the report was so riddled with flaws and inaccuracies that none of its conclusions could be relied upon. In addition to repudiating its own report, the inspector general’s office took the additional step of removing the report from its Web site.
The truth may set you free, but not if you're a Republican and the subject is taxes. After all, 95% of American families as promised received a tax cut from the Obama stimulus package. And while three-quarters of Americans support President Obama's proposal to roll back the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to their Clinton-era levels, it turns out that affluent voters, too, chose Barack Obama over John McCain. Making matters worse, a Gallup poll Monday revealed that Americans' "views of income taxes among most positive since 1956."
So as their furious followers head off to their April 15th orgy of tea-bagging, the leadership of the GOP and its amen corner in the right-wing media have instead turned to tall tales on taxes.
Here, then, are 10 Republican Tax Day lies:
For the details behind each of the GOP's Tax Day deceits, continue reading.
March 30, 2009 News Corp
"'I said he was important,' Bush said to Tenet at one of their daily meetings. 'You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?'
Dan Froomkin has written a comprehensive piece making the case there was simply no logical reason for the Bush administration to torture suspects. He thinks it was about retribution for the World Trade Center attacks.
I figured out a few decades ago that when there's no logical reason for an action, there's usually a subconscious, compulsive one. Froomkin reminds us there were simply no intelligence gains to be had, yet the Bush administration was very, very focused on torturing prisoners, anyway. It seems obvious to me that the question is the answer: George W. Bush.
What do you know about his character that makes you think he would be something other than vindictive and vicious? I mean, the only job at which he was ever really successful was running the dirty tricks operation for his father's campaign. Why wouldn't he authorize torture? It made him feel presidential.
And if we've learned anything in the past eight years, it's that it's all about George:
Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.
That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.
Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."
March 16, 2009 MSNBC
