Archive for the 'Bush Administration' Category

What Bush was doing instead of dealing with the economic crisis

Former Vice President Cheney recently accused former President Bush of failing to deal with the imminent collapse of General Motors during the last months of his presidency, preferring instead to give GM just enough money to survive until Bush left office:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says that former President George W. Bush did not want to be the one who “pulled the plug” on General Motors and instead decided to pass on the issue to President Barack Obama.

“I thought that, eventually, the right outcome was going to be bankruptcy,” Cheney said, “[GM] had to go through such a dramatic restructuring to have any chance of survival that they had to be able to renegotiate labor contracts and so forth,” he said. “And the president decided that he did not want to be the one who pulled the plug just before he left office.”

Cheney said that rather than acting on GM, the Bush administration “put together a package that tided GM over until the new administration had a chance to look at it.”

Actually, that sounds perfectly reasonable. In fact, it sounds very much like Clinton’s response to the bombing of the USS Cole. Remembering the way George the Smart had gotten entangled in the Somali conflict during the final days of his administration, Clinton decided not respond directly to the bombing of the Cole so that his successor would be able to formulate his own policy and his own response.

The only difference between Clinton’s response to the Cole bombing and Bush’s response to GM’s unraveling is that Obama actually grappled with the problem he had been handed, while Bush ignored the Cole bombing and al Qaeda, the organization behind the attack.

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Just because I’m feeling generous, here’s a bonus video of Bush working hard:

Bush’s undead administration continues to suck the blood from America’s most cherished institutions

Remember when Bush and his henchmen politicized the Justice Department by turning it over to a bunch of young ideologues from Pat Robertson’s “university”? To no intelligent person’s surprise, many of the Bush-era prosecutors have been screwing up a lot of prosecutions with their incompetence and disregard for the law:

• Federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly recently removed a Justice Department lawyer from a Guantanamo detainee case for flouting several deadlines, then lambasted his supervisor for submitting a “shockingly revisionist” sequence of events to the court.

• In Miami last month, federal Judge Alan Gold complained of “flagrant violations” by prosecutors who did not disclose the existence of secret recordings of a defense lawyer for a doctor charged with prescription fraud.

• Another federal judge in Washington, John Bates, last year cited a failure to turn over evidence as he ordered a new trial for a man convicted of illegal business dealings with Iran. Bates said he had “grave concerns” about the government’s actions, which “severely prejudiced” the defendant’s fair trial rights.

• And in a separate Gitmo case, Sullivan also lashed out at the government, vowing that “someone’s going to pay a price” for withholding evidence.

So the policy of passing over the most qualified applicants from the most prestigious law schools in favor of mediocre ideologues from the recently accredited Regent University had the unexpected effect of seriously damaging the professionalism and effectiveness of the Justice Department. Who could have foreseen that?

It’s hard to imagine an ethical line that Karl Rove wouldn’t cross. Now we find that he even kept loyalty files on Republican congressmen, which helps explain why Bush had so little trouble convincing them to go along with his gigantic deficits and his disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Would YOU want this guy showing up at your party?

From the New York Times:

Condoleezza Rice will be there. So will Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett and Michael Gerson. And George W. Bush himself.

The old gang is getting back together next week in Dallas for a reunion of sorts, the Bush team’s first since leaving the White House. On tap is a dinner with the former president and a daylong discussion of the future George W. Bush Policy Institute.

Not coming to next week’s session is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who in the final days of the administration argued with Mr. Bush about his refusal to pardon Mr. Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was convicted of perjury for his role in the leak of Valerie Wilson’s employment with the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Cheney later went on television to air his grievances with Mr. Bush, while also accusing Mr. Obama of endangering the country.

It’s hard for me to believe that a disagreement with the former president is keeping Cheney from the party. Every other former administration official had disagreements with Bush, and they’re putting them aside in order to come together as friends and enjoy each others’ company.

More likely, Cheney wasn’t looking forward to an evening of standing around with a drink in his hand, looking for someone to talk to.

From ABC News:

For the last four decades, the laws of the land were all about dropping the hammer on crime by locking away criminals for a very long time. Some carried scary names like “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” as in cast out of society. The harshest penalties for drug offenders, the Rockefeller laws, were named after a New York governor battling a 1970s heroin epidemic. Nearly half the country and the federal government have adopted some kind of hardcore laws, while “get tough on crime” became the mantra of politicians running for everything from the local city council to the president of the United States.

But after cracking down and incarcerating hundreds of thousands, cash-strapped states including New York, Kentucky and Kansas are pulling back. They face an uncommon confluence of dire economics and prisons bursting at the seams and several have changed, in whole or in part, their stances on hard punishment.

Their reasons: the get-tough laws didn’t always work, especially when it came to slowing recidivism, the revolving door of prisoners who get out, mess up again, and come back. There were legal challenges, and questions about whether the punishment always fit the crime.

And of course, there’s the money. In tough economic times, the expensive laws are increasingly being deemed expendable.

So the failed get-tough approach to illegal drugs is falling out of favor, partly because it didn’t work, and partly because Bush metaphorically flew Air Force One into World Trade. And partly, I think, because people are starting to reassess all of the policies that they associate with Bush and his failed presidency.

So now it appears that we may be seeing an end to the War on Drugs, which means that we might be able to start a new era: the Rational Approach to Drugs. Now if we could just get started on the Rational Approach to Terrorism…

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Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of residual insanity left over from the drug war. The dire rhetoric of the drug warriors and their insistence that one drug is as bad as another has led many institutions and organizations to adopt “zero tolerance policies” for drugs. Including prescription drugs:

When a Fairfax County mother got an urgent call from school last month reporting that her teenage daughter was caught popping a pill at lunchtime, she did not panic. “It was probably her birth-control pill,” she thought. She was right.

Her heart dropped that afternoon in the assistant principal’s office at Oakton High School when she and her daughter heard the mandatory punishment: A two-week suspension and recommendation for expulsion.

This cartoon neatly captures the legacy of the Worst President Ever

Here’s a couple of stories that illustrate just how stupid and just how brutal the Bush Administration was:

Buy High, Sell Low

The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to shift its holdings from bonds to equities, just about the time the bottom fell out of the stock market.

A finance professor who had previously advised the agency not to make the switch away from bonds compared the move to an insurance company writing policies to cover hurricane damage and then investing the premiums in beachfront property.

Bush was able to do for the PBGC what he tried and failed to do for Social Security.

Bush’s Torture Rationale Debunked

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.”

Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush’s Exhibit A in defense of the “enhanced interrogation” procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders.

But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago — and as The Post now confirms — almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong.

Zubaida wasn’t a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn’t holding back critical information. His torture didn’t produce valuable intelligence — and it certainly didn’t save lives.

Betray every ideal that America was supposed to stand for, and stupidly flush billions of dollars down the toilet. All in pursuit of long-debunked theories of economics and interrogation techniques that were based on the sort of simplistic reasoning that appeals to children. Greater risk brings greater reward. Inflict enough pain, and you’ll get to the truth.

It’s as if we were governed for eight years by teenagers who were raised on a steady diet of “24” and “Wall Street“. Except that I think the teenagers might have gotten better results for their efforts.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

Bush tell the soldiers what he really thinks of them

First there was the missing body armor, then the inadequately armored Humvees, then the Walter Reed Scandal, and now the news that conditions at the Ft. Bragg medical facility are so poor that many soldiers would rather go back into combat than be left to recuperate there:

Soldiers in a recovery unit for wounded troops at Fort Bragg told the Secretary of the Army that they feel forgotten by the military and that combat duty would be better than the treatment they get now, according to a memo obtained by the Associated Press.

The memo summarized the comments of soldiers who attended a closed-door meeting last week with Army Secretary Pete Geren. It was held after the service said it would look into complaints of overzealous discipline reported by The Associated Press.

Some of the soldiers told Geren they have “feelings of worthlessness and abandonment,” the memo states. They told Geren that low morale and suicides in the base’s Warrior Transition battalion are “pushed by (a) negative command climate” that is enforced by the unit’s squad leaders.

“If I had been in the (unit) after I was wounded the first time, I would not have fought so hard to stay in,” one soldier told Geren, according to the memo. “It is very demoralizing and a very different experience from my previous recuperation.”

The Army set up its 35 Warrior Transition units two years ago to help soldiers navigate the medical system and monitor their progress and treatment following the scandal over shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

But a recent Associated Press investigation found that discipline rates vary widely across the system. The comments to Geren mirror those of a dozen current and former soldiers interviewed by the AP about their time in Fort Bragg’s unit. They accused the unit’s officers of being indifferent to their medical needs and punishing them for actions that stem from their injuries.

This just confirms what we’ve known for a long time: Bush loves to dress up and play Army, and he loves to get his photo taken with soldiers. But for Bush and the people in his administration, the troops are “the help”. As long as they do their jobs and keep their mouths shut, they can occasionally be singled out for praise. But they are to be ignored at all other times, and their pay and benefits are to be kept at an absolute minimum.

Detainee abuse at Guantanamo continues to shame America

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, has finally admitted the obvious. Many of the detainees at Guantanamo are innocent:

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.

“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”

In his posting for The Washington Note blog, Wilkerson wrote that “U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because “to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership.”

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Former president George W. Bush directed Karl Rove and Harriet Miers not to answer subpoenas issued by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is investigating the prosecution of former Governor Don Siegelman of Alabama.

Apparently, Bush is under the impression that his executive privilege extends to the period after he leaves office:

Just four days before he left office, President Bush instructed former White House aide Karl Rove to refuse to cooperate with future congressional inquiries into alleged misconduct during his administration.

On Jan. 16, 2009, then White House Counsel Fred Fielding sent a letter to Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin. The message: should his client receive any future subpoenas, Rove “should not appear before Congress” or turn over any documents relating to his time in the White House. The letter told Rove that President Bush was continuing to assert executive privilege over any testimony by Rove—even after he leaves office.

A nearly identical letter (.pdf) was also sent by Fielding the day before to a lawyer for former White House counsel Harriet Miers, instructing her not to appear for a scheduled deposition with the House Judiciary Committee. That letter reasserted the White House position that Miers has “absolute immunity” from testifying before Congress about anything she did while she worked at the White House—a far-reaching claim that is being vigorously disputed by lawyers for the House of Representatives in court.

The letters set the stage for what is likely to be a highly contentious legal and political battle over an unresolved issue: whether a former president can assert “executive privilege”—and therefore prevent his aides from testifying before Congress—even after his term has expired.

If Bush’s assertion of privilege is upheld, it would make it virtually impossible for anyone to investigate possible lawbreaking by the former president or by members of his administration. I guess that’s why Bush decided not to issue blanket pardons to his closest advisers before he left office.

But it’s not at all clear that Bush can continue to immunize his staff:

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