The USA in the Time of - George W Bush
2001- 2009
by Mike Donovan
PREFACE/DISCLAIMER
Most of the second half of this book is about the 2008 Presidential campaign. I plan on moving most of that to the Obama chapter at some future date, but the Obama chapter isn’t a product until he’s been out of office a few months and is part of history. That’s the only reason the Obama chapter requires a password to read. Not that I am worried that anyone might find out what I think of Obama.
I didn’t vote for Obama but I like him. I might vote for him in 2012, but I probably won’t. I don’t think he’s ruining the country, and I think he is a good person.
As for the subject of this chapter, I voted for him twice. But I certainly didn’t hate Dem-noms Gore or Kerry.
W
2,752 - ‘Dubelya’ - VP Dick Cheney – Male Cheerleader – The War in Iraq – Yale – Texas Rangers – Fighter Pilot – The Smirk - Oil Man - “Mission Accomplished” – Seventeenth Governor to Make President – Altar boy – Midland – Rathergate – Varsity Baseball at Yale
The forty second president was Al Gore. He was president for about 40 seconds.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Opening Take
Bio
Election of 2000
Chinese April Fools
Attack on September 11
Falling Man
Arab Extremist Scorecard
Reaction Summation
Al Kaida and The Taliban - Enemy Mine
Operation Miller Lite
The Northern Alliance
Uz-Buck-Istan
Escape From Tora Bora - 11-01
Powell Throws the UN a Curveball
Liberation is Near
To Be Invaders or Not to Be
“Down Down Sadaam” - 4-9-03
Operation Iraqi Free Stuff
“We Don’t Need Your Help in This - We Have Enough American Power to Deal With It.”
Mission Accomplished - 5-1-03
WMD - W Mad Delusion
Armistice Day at Safwan - Remember When
Vulcans - Hawks Who Inspired the War of 2003
Rummy
Wolfie
007 Armitage
Condi
Rove
JCS - Shelton Myers and Pace
Bremer
NION
Bush is a War Criminal
You’ve Been Bagged, Dad - 12.13.03
A Story That Sends Tingle Up My Spine - FCF - 4.2004
Election Year 2004
Lieutenant Kerry
McCain for Democrat VP - Yeah, Rite
Four More Dumb Years
“Stole It”
Moore is Less
Katrina
Bushwomen
Supreme Sam Alito - October 2005 - January 2006
Lay Down and Die - You’re Out of Energy
Mark Foley Scandal - 2006
These Are the Times That Try Conservative’s Souls
Dem Dems Take Back the Congress - November 2006
I Swear on the Koran to Protect the U.S. Constitution
Move On - To a Relevant Name
Cruise to Nowhere
Classical Gas Greenhouse Kyoto Effect
Clinton Wants Back in the White House
11-07 The CNN You-Tube Republican Debate
NH Primary - 2008
Michigan
South Carolina Debate
January 31 2008 - And Then There Were Four
Super-Tuesday
Prime Time - TX OH VT RI
The Emperor’s Club - March 2008
Penn Prime
NC - 5-7
Biden - His Time
Russian Relations 08 - The Ossetia Crisis
Rise and Fall of Gas 2008
DNC 8-08 - Day One
Don’t Mess With Billary - Day Two
Presency
The Nominee is ... Sarah Palin
RNC- St Paul MN - September 1-4 2008
Palin and the Power of Political Comedy
Two ‘Bama Bios
Harvard Moron is an Oxymoron
First Presidential Debate - September 26 2008
Top Ten Reasons There is an Obvious Lefty Bias in the Media
Second Debate, My Friends
That One
Bill Ayers - Hippie Leftovers Reheated
Too Big to Fail - September 08
Arab Clerics- Just Say No to Noor
OJ Convicted - 2008
Joe the Plumber Debate
McCain and Able
Election of 2008 Results
The Iraqi Mess at Administration Transition
Bottom Line
Like Father Like Son
Shoe Business - December 14 2008
America Unfriends W Bush
Leggo My Blaggo
Richardson Picked off Third Base
Obama Silence on Gaza
Impeachment Fails
POTUS Plus Four
Last Word
Sources
OPENING TAKE
Islamic terrorists destroyed the two World Trade Towers and WTC #5 on Bush’s watch on “911” 2001. Radical Islam murdered 2,752 Americans, and more than half of their remains have never been recovered. They disintegrated.
Bush responded by occupying Afghanistan and then invading Iraq.
The public supported the invasion of Afghanistan (even President Obama has no problem with this one today,) but the invasion and occupation of Iraq divided the nation and continued its divisive influence for the rest of his forsaken term.
Throughout the 2004 election I said repeatedly, “If not for 911 I would agree with Kerry on this - if not for 911 I would agree with their criticism of W Bush on that.” The Democrats tried to campaign in 2004 as if 911 had not happened. Yes, it was three years in the background but it still affected everything in the political life of the USA for better or worse.
Only one man only was going to have to bear the full responsibility if another similar attack or worse took place. It wasn't Vice President Dick Cheney. It wasn't a Democratic Congressperson. It wasn't a journalist or laborer or college student. It was one man's burden alone. It's unfair to judge Bush from any other prism besides 911 for the rest of his presidency. You cannot know the weight of that responsibility.
So many of the Bush-bash-books focus on bashing his family history, overanalyzing him with fourth rate amateur psycho-babble, and distort everything that ever happened to him in his life in order to fit their preconceived hateful feelings towards him.
I don't understand why these Bush-bash-books seem to think that if they can prove that he got to where he is unfairly, and that his family is self-delusional, corrupt, spoiled, stern and despicable, that somehow means you got him on how he ran his presidency.
What kind of a president was Georgie, that's what really counts. If you hate him for his performance as president, fine. If you are obsessed with his privileged background and how much you hate the whole Bush clan, then you’re just visceral and immature about the whole thing.
They bash his mother and his father first and then everything W ever said and did. These small time journalists only get away with it because he is too big to come down to their level and fight back on lowered ground. “Punch me, I can use the money” is really what is going on here. If they wrote these things about the mother and father of their co-worker they would have a shiner shortly. By attacking their betters with cheap shots from way down below them, they are safe.
History evaluates Kings and Queens for their job performance, not for why it was wrong that they became kings and queens.
Now that Obama is in office we can start to look at W. Bush in historical perspective. A few million people really hated GWB especially at the end there. In stand-up comedy dressing rooms, he was hated by a 35-1 margin. That's one political report I can offer. I know he was elected twice, but I seem to have never met anyone who said a kind word about him. His supporters were clearly intimidated.
After four years out of power at this writing, the hate has started to die down a little, especially as Obama's favorable ratings have dropped a lot since his Inaugural in 09.
The last five years of the W Presidency were a long drawn out argument about the War in Iraq. Then at the end, an economic collapse turned his shaky name to mud. But W didn't resign like a Nixon and certainly had a shot at re-election if there wasn't a two-term limit (a lot of people won't agree with that one.) He wasn't involved in any personal scandal like Clinton, or an Iran Contra situation in 1988. All he did wrong was invade a country that had flagrantly violated the terms of a standing armistice agreed to by both parties in 1991, and mess up his syntax. At the end he overspent the economy into a disaster to pay for his war.
I know it's a bad record at face value, but what would you rather have, a good economy and major terrorist attacks on American soil every three months, or a bad economy and a secure America. It may well be true that Iraq did not directly participate in the attack on the World Trade Center, and if that is true the invasion of Iraq may have been unjust. But look at the message that Bush sent to the world. - Bush said in essence, Even though I will catch hell from just about everyone, even conservatives, I am going to invade two countries just to make a statement about how we all feel about 911. If my people do not re-elect me, fine, but I'm going to do something big. I'm gonna do something that will make people stop and say, 'let's not mess with these people anymore. They're nuts!'
His message, like it or not, was that the United States is a warrior country when aroused to anger, and you really don't want to kick that sleeping eagle by killing 2,700 civilians on a sunny Tuesday morning in New York. If the USA would invade a country that couldn't even be proven to have done it, what would happen to any country that actually gets caught doing it or trying to do it? That warning was made clear to the whole world. Bush may well have overreacted, but if he had done anything less than warlike in response, the left, center and right all would have called him a wimp, like they unjustly called his brave and courageous father. GHWB in 1991 and W in 2003 opened up the playing field for even any Democratic successor. Bush and then Bush made the road map that Democrats have to now follow in foreign policy, even if they hate the war, and want to pull back.
The fact of the matter is, W Bush got away with it. All he got for punishment was a lot of best-selling books hating his guts, and I'm sure he never read them, as I, unfortunately have. Even if he did wrong, and should never have invaded and occupied Iraq, the fact is that he did it and got away with it. This was the Orisak attack times 1,000. The United Nations did not expel the United States for violations of international law. If Bush's war were as illegal and immoral and clear cut wrong as the critics said it was, the United Nations would have to have done just that, or it least would have been in turmoil over it, which it was not. If it were as clearly as wrong and immoral and unjust as the Bush haters said it was, then how did he get re-elected after the invasion? You can have your opinion but they aren’t facts. Your declarations that he is evil and the war is an atrocity against humanity are not facts. More than half the country voted that they weren't facts. You are saying that all those millions of Americans voted to continue an evil policy.
Today, a Democrat can do something in foreign policy that would have been considered too aggressive before OIF, but compared to what Bush did to Baghdad, would now seem within acceptable bounds.
Call it luck if you want. But there was no follow-up terrorist attack under the W. Bush Administration in the 7 years after 911. History may or not end up giving him considerable credit for this. I will.
“What a difference these few months of extremism have made.”
Jimmy Carter at the 2004 DNC
“We need an administration in Washington that genuinely cares about the American People.”
Jimmy Carter at the 2008 DNC
“Terrorism is a theatrical, well choreographed drama exploiting the mass media in order to disrupt government and generate fear.” Robert H. Kupperman
BIO
George W Bush was born in 1946.
He grew up in Midland Texas while his father was in the oil business.
One day at Sam Houston grammar school when George W was 7 his family came to school in mid-day in the family car. George experienced a mirage that day. He though he saw his little four year old sister peeking over in the back seat. Boy W knew that his parents had taken her to New York for medical treatment, but he was not prepared for the news that his little sister was never coming home. Robin Bush died of leukemia at the age of four. People talk about how spoiled W. Bush grew up, but a lot of people without silver spoons never have to face a tragedy like that at such an early age.
Bush had a serious love of baseball all his life, and the ex-President still follows the game closely in the post-steroids era. Georgie played Little League baseball and was a catcher. I like that. It's a noble position for born leaders who aren't out for glory but want to do most of the hard work. This isn't to say that I think that is exactly the way it turned out in the man, but in pure baseball terms, there is no one you want to have as a friend more than a catcher. And the child is the father of the man. That's not a partisan writer reaching for praise. I would insert that point as a positive if I were writing about a Jimmy Carter. As a matter of fact I did when I wrote about Jimmy Carter – he was a fine little schoolboy basketball player based on his tenacity on the court and I gave him full credit.)
In his early teens his down-to-earth aristocrat parents sent W. to super-preppy Andover Academy in Massachusetts, the same school where his father went. I drive by it now and then on the way to a hell gig at some bar. So near, yet so far away.
One of the most famous stories about W's teen years, one that was depicted accurately in the Stone movie W involved classic teen-aged drinking and finally confronting the old man. W came home drunk with his younger brother Marvin in tow. He crashed through the family garden knocking over the ash cans with the bumper at 3 a.m. He left the car on the lawn and staggered into the living room where, unsurprisingly, GHW Dad was waiting for him in a bathrobe sporting an angry face. Barbara Bush watched the whole thing from the top of the stairs. Here is how she describes it in her memoir,
“There was my son confronting his dad asking him if he wanted to duke it out 'mano y mano.' My husband tried to talk him out of it, figuring he would punish him later by reducing his allowance by $1,000 a week. I was frankly surprised at how well my husband kept his cool while teenage George kept putting up a boxing stance and saying, 'c'mon dad, bring it on.' Young George finally took a roundhouse right swing at his father. My husband ducked it easily, then delivered three quick punches to the stomach, jaw, and chest in that order. I had never seen my husband actually fight before, and I was filled with a mixture of pride and horror at what I had just seen. Little George was doubled over on the ground and big George leaned over to him about an inch from his face and said, 'any time you want a rematch, little man, you know where I live.' ”
Many males have experienced that moment of truth when they finally confront their dad and ask them if they want to have it out. I had mine last year when I visited him in Florida. I was 55 and he was 79.
W graduated from Yale in 1968. “On the strength of his family connections, he got in,” writes one Bush-basher. I've read and heard this a hundred times. Yet no one has ever offered any proof. I am going to write the Presidents of Yale and harvard about this. They also tell me all the time that his family got him into Harvard Business School. They tell me that “his father fixed his grades” too. I've heard that one another hundred times. These are serious charges against the Bush family and against these famous schools. It seems like you should present some evidence before saying this so often that it becomes a solid fact in the Bush-haters mind.
W. Bush was in the infamous Skull and Bones Fraternity at Yale. Also in the same frat was Lanny Davis, a future spokesperson for Bill Clinton, and author of a fine political book called Gotchya.
George W. once dated Richard Nixon's daughter while he was President. The young brats went to the movies, a future son of a President holding hands with a President's daughter in the dark (they went to see Putney Swope, and neither of them liked it.)
GWB served in the Air National Guard from 1968-1973, during the latter stages of the Vietnam conflict. He flew F-102 jets. There is much controversy over his attendance record as a Guardsman. He is accused of shirking his duties by going AWOL during the last months of his service time.
Let's assume that his critics are right, and he was AWOL inexcusably for the last months of his service in the Air National Guard. In any case Mr. Bush did complete his training and was a certified fighter pilot at the time he was allegedly sneaking out out to go to political soirees.
Even if the charges of local desertion are valid regarding his state unit, the fact also remains that flying fighter jets in training missions is a dangerous business and he risked his life patriotically for his country when he undertook this training. Pilots die in training. And he was in the Air National Guard which meant that he would be still called into combat if (but only if) the Vietnam War began increasing in intensity and commitment.
However, by 1971 that war was winding down big time. W. wasn't shirking duty in Vietnam because the Vietnamization of the war precluding the calling to overseas duty of the Alabama Air National Guard Units. The air war in Vietnam was being very well handled by the full time professionals of the Air Force and Navy already deployed there. He deserted Alabama, but he didn't desert his brothers on the front line. Alabama was pretty safe and no one 's life was threatened because he was sneaking out of the barracks.
GHWB never shirked his duty to go to Vietnam. If he had been called, he would have served. in 1972, when Bush is accused of deserting his country in time of war there were only 25,000 US servicemen and women left in Vietnam, down from a high of 590,000 in 1968. No one was being sent over there anymore. It was a one way flow back to the States from Nam.
In smugly condemning W's service in the National Guard as cowardly (just as they did with Quayle) the R-haters are demeaning everyone who has served or is serving in the National Guard. Biographer Molly Hatchet Ivins, the Wicked Witch of the Left notes that,
“Regular Air Force pilots used to refer to people like Bush as “FANGers,” for F—-ing Air National Guard.”
So if they have an playful insider nickname for those taking less risk, they have no respect for them at all, is that right Molly?
I've read a lot of left-wing (they call themselves “progressives” while slamming the other side as “right-wing”) writers accusing Geroge W. Bush of being a coward. The charge is more demeaning to those making it, than to the man taking it. Just running for President alone takes guts. The winner knows he will always be a target for assassination. Out of 43 US presidents, six have been shot, four fatally. That's a dangerous job. It takes more courage to do that than it does to hang out in coffee shops and write hate pieces against Republicans.
Bush was once arrested for drunk-driving. He admitted when running for President that he had been something of a “wild youth.” He admitted that he had experimented with grass and coke “a few dozen times.” And with whiskey “a few times more than a few dozen times, heh heh.”
In 1977 he met and married Laura Welch, a librarian from El Paso who lived in Midland. She made W settle down, or else. At one point Laura gave George an ultimatum. She said, “you have to choose between me and Jim Beam.” He responded by saying, “Laura, you have better legs.” And that was that. No one has ever seen him touch a drop of alcohol since 1978. I'm not saying he wasn't drunk when he invaded Iraq, I'm just saying that no one actually saw him drinking alcohol.
In 1978 George ran for Congress in Texas and lost to Democrat Ken Hance who taunted Bush as being a carpetbagger and a wealthy daddy’s boy. Hance scored big when he accused Bush of supplying Texas college students with free booze in order to win votes. Kenny produced during a debate a flyer for a 'Bush-Bash' fundraiser with free booze. The fact that some of these students might have been below the legal age was used to hurt Bush. It's ironic that at one time “Bush-Bash” was a pro-Bush event. Now its the national pastime negative sport for all those who want to feel superior to the president and by default elevate their own status.
Ken Hance later left the Democrats and became a GOP Congressman who made major contributions to the W Bush campaign for Texas governor. He also enhanced the coffers of the W run for the presidency in 2000.
At the end of the 70's Bush moved to Midland and helped form an energy company called Arbusto Oil. It almost went busto but the fact that W's dad became VP of the USA in 1981 made the company more valuable in juice than it was in money. Outside investors in 1982 bought Arbusto for about five times what it was worth. They bought a losing company at the price of a profitable company. When you buy Arbusto you get executive George W. Bush with it and he becomes political and social influence. The new company was now less owned by Bush but now it changed its name to the Bush Exploration Company. That tells plenty.
The Bush-bash-books always tell of these lowlife insider business moves as if its some big expose, like it will shock America into hating Bush and declaring him a scoundrel. Sorry Molly, we take it for granted that the big business corporate world is selfish, cutthroat, slick, and dishonest to the point where it doesn't even throw anybody off. If a business person gets ripped off they are not angry on moral grounds. They're like someone getting cut off in traffic and thinking 'damn! he's a better driver than I am.' Americans are ho hum about a certain amount of corruption in the proceedings of big business. If you prove that a billionaire paid four times the fair price for Arbusto to get Bush and his political connections on the executive board, it's not headline 'gotchya'.
The other big thing the Bush bashers think they have on him regarding the Midland oil days is a connection with Osama bib Laden, of Cole – 911 fame. It turns out that one of the early investors in Bush energy company was none of other than Claude bin Laden, the half brother of Osama bin Laden. Several books dedicate an entire chapter to proving that Claude bin Laden helped Bush get started in business.
They are saying that Bush is a corrupt hypocrite and a bad person. They are saying that we cannot trust him since he was in bed with the very people he is asking America to declare war on terror on.
So what if its true? This was 1979, not 2003. The United States was not enemies with al Kaida at this time. Saudi Arabians doing business with Americans was a completely normal part of life. This was at the height of the Cold War when the United States was supporting radical Islamic forces in Afghanistan in resisting Soviet aggression there. America was almost in a state of war with Iran and Saudi Arabia was conservative Islam compared to the Iranian revolutionary export brand, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Politically, it was not bad form to do business with Saudi millionaires at the time of Arbusto. Was Bush supposed to be a player in the oil business in 1979 and somehow refuse to have anything to do with Middle East Arab businessmen? That's like asking me to be a stand up comedian for 40 years and never do one single gig at a club owned by someone with mob connections. It's not fair and not realistic. But all the Bush bashers think they have him tried and convicted of treason when they take 40 boring pages to prove that W. Bush once took money from Osama bin Laden's half brother.
In 2010 President Obama was dealing with a controversy because his Aunt is living in South Boston as an illegal immigrant and saying to news reporters that it is the duty of the USA to provide for her. He isn't her, and he doesn't have to answer for her. Claude bin laden is not Osama, and Bush doesn't have to answer for making a business deal with his half brother 30 years ago. It doesn't make him a bad person, and it doesn't make him a hypocrite when he fights terrorism with fire.
Besides, they hadn't done anything yet!
Bush campaigned hard for his father in 1992 and was upset when Clinton won. W Bush blames Ross Perot and a few other factors and learned a few lessons about fighting back hard when your opponent attacks. GHW Bush waited too long to fight back and then didn't hit back hard enough and didn't exploit his Gulf War victory like a bare-knuckles political brawler should have. I remember it well and could not agree more. Bush Senior could have beat Clinton with a fine campaign. He ran a poor one.
A few people suggested that W. run for Texas governor in 1992, but he did not want to take that step at that time.
On May 1, 1993 a special election was held in Texas to replace Senator Lloyd “you're no Jack Kennedy” Bentsen. President Clinton had named Bentsen Treasury Secretary and he resigned his Senatorial seat.
When W. got up to introduce Republican Senatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchinson as a fundraising rally, some in the crowd began to friendly heckle him (a luxury I've rarely known);
“Run for governor!”
“Hail to Governor Bush!”
From that point on Bush decided it was time. This heckling was spontaneous so the support was now coming from outside his own greedy heart and greedy friends.
The opponent, the sitting Texas Governor, was none other than revered recovered alcoholic woman of the people with the harsh voice and even harsher demeanor, beloved by the Democrats for that fact, Ann Richards. The nasty Dems had found their Texas voice in Miss Richards, a woman who was always a little rough around the edges. If she married Keith Richards, she could keep her last name and they would look the same in a white veil.
At the Democratic National Convention in 1988, Richards famously delivered a long speech attacking President GHW Bush with ridicule. The entire speech was nothing but undignified insults straight out of high school. The crowd went wild as her vicious speech attacked and mocked the sitting president below the belt over and over. I will never forget it and it was one of those moments in life when you choose what political party you want to belong to. She smiled smugly and sneered with each cheap shot. “Poor George,” she paused and grinned in sarcastic condescension, “he can't help it.” Then she paused and delivered the memorable zinger, “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!” The crowd went bananas.
Up till then I was lukewarm about GHW Bush at best, and I liked Dukakis, a man who lived 8 blocks from my house. But that wicked-witch speech not only pushed me to the right, it shoved me. And it made Anne Richards a national name overnight. The Democrats cited the speech as a wonderful thing for months and months, but it didn't help the Democrats beat Bush. It back-fired on the fence-sitters who decide all the elections.
So the contest for Texas Governor in 1994 was not only a straight battle between a Democrat and a Republican, it was a battle for revenge against the pitiless pit bull bitch who had bashed his father at he DNC.
During the campaign a rumor swept Texas that Richards had rudely referred to Mr. Bush as “some jerk.” The white haired Richards showed her yellow rose of Texas streak as usual when that story broke. She denied it vehemently. “I never said that, and I defy you to come up with any proof.” A reporter for KDFW-TV in Dallas took her up on that offer. In dramatic fashion they rolled the tape to lead off the 11 o:clock news. There stood the dry drunk who couldn't control her alcoholic ego at the microphone,
“You just work like a dog, do well, the test scores are up,
the kids are looking better, the dropout rate is down, and
all of a sudden, you've got some jerk running for public
office telling everybody it's all a sham and he doesn't give
you credit for doing your job.”
Richards tried to back out of it by saying the reference was generic and not directed at W. Bush. Hey lady, the primaries were over and Bush was your only standing opponent. Nice try. The voters of Texas didn't buy it and she slipped in the polls like she was walking home on a 1a.m. icy sidewalk in her drinking days. Anne lost a close election and the “some jerk” comment was decisive. Isn't that beautiful? She who lives by the big shrill mouth will die by the big shrill mouth.
Bush didn't personally respond to the remark except to laugh it off and say that he hadn't been called names like that since he was in Sam Houston Grammar School.
In holding back his response, Bush was either being classy or shrewd, or both. Richards could play victim if he struck back, using her femininity as a shield. Ann could dish it out liberally, so to speak, but if a male opponent responded in kind he would look like a bully.
Bush won the Texas governor election by three points.
'Govena Dubelya' became famous for ruthlessly enforcing the death penalty. Many states have the death penalty, but getting governors to make it count is another story. Bush was something of wild west judge, the Roy Bean of the 1990's. So many people were executed in the electric chair on Bush's watch, that a rumor went around that he was thinking of saving the taxpayers some expense by constructing “electric bleachers.”
Bush invested in the Texas Rangers baseball team and made a 14 million dollar profit when he sold out. For that he has also been richly condemned ad nauseam. The nerve of using family help to exploit free enterprise for profit. The Kennedy family was particularly outraged over the Texas Rangers business. In the Oliver Stone film W, Bush tells his father the mistake he made “Trading Sammy Sosa.” Bush owned less than 12% of the team and was never the General Manager of the Texas Rangers, and so he certainly did not “Trade Sammy Sosa.” (Besides, even if he had, how was Bush to know that Sosa was about to go on steroids, and jump from 16 to 60 home runs a year?)
In 1999 the Republican Party approached W and asked him to be their candidate for President in 2,000. He didn't approach anyone. He hadn't said a word. The Party people admitted that at first his name hadn't come up much, but all of the other candidates seem to have some major drawback and he didn't, so the more they thought about it the more it was W in 2000.
Oliver Stone claims on celluloid that W called a famous religious leader to his Texas Office and told him, “I've seen the light. God has told me to run for President,” and the preacher hung his head with a thought bubble face that said, 'Oh no, you can't be serious, now I'm going to have to pretend I like the idea and I have to say go for it, but inside I'm thinking 'heaven help us all.'
More people saw that movie than read a single biography of W Bush, we can be sure of that. On the second day the movie came out in 2007 it surpassed the bookmark.
If we were to believe that movie, then Barbara Bush is a nasty horrible witch and Laura is a shallow decadent gold-digger. And than any time you ever ran into W. Bush from 1965 to 1995 he was stumblebum obnoxious out of control drunk. Red Skelton drunk. You would never ever meet him in any other condition. The man would show up drunk at his own court hearing for a traffic ticket, and do so many gross and rude things in court that he would be fined for contempt and dragged out while he screamed “Yi-haaaaaaaaa!” That's the message in that movie.
ELECTION OF 2000
The 2000 presidential election was the most controversial national contest since 1876. Not only did the winner get less popular votes than the loser, the votes for the decisive state of Florida was disputed for weeks before the outcome was officially proclaimed. An army of “sore-losermans” spent the next 4 to 8 years saying that Bush “stole the election.”
In the end George Bush won the election of 2000 by officially carrying the state of Florida by a breathtakingly slim margin of 535 votes. I played for 600 people last Saturday night at a club on Cape Cod last weekend.
535 people. The exact same number as there are Members of Congress.
That's how important it is to vote.
Aside from disputing the vote count itself (1,200 pages can be set aside for that controversy) there was the issue of accidentally deceptive ballots that led old stupid Floridians to vote incorrectly. One of the most liberal counties in Florida gave a disproportionately large number of votes to rightie Pat Buchanan on a third party ticket. Clearly there was a legitimate complaint that the Florida ballots were confusing and many old people clearly accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan when they intended to vote for Al Gore.
But the fault was not with the Republican Party or it's candidate. It was not deliberate subterfuge. The Democrats demanded that the entire vote for the state be taken all over again. It was an unfair demand because the Democrats, (prior to Obama,) were always more guilty of laziness in registering and showing up to vote. It was always axiomatic that the higher the voter turnout, the worse for the Republicans because Democrats, especially the young ones, speak loud and point fingers, but they are higher on the no-shows on Election Day. Republicans voters keep relatively quiet and speak loudly at the polls.
Voter turnout is a legitimate factor in all elections and it would be unnatural to hold a second election with every person knowing that their vote was so very important. A second Florida election would give an unfair and unnatural advantage to the Democrats. The Republicans show up the first time. Now they would be punished for their traditional high turnout by giving the lazier crowd a mulligan. If every eligible U.S. voter registered and voted in every election the Republicans would not have elected a president in my lifetime.
The final tally for Florida was finally ruled upon by the US Supreme Court. The pro-myside pro-gressives repeatedly referred to “the stolen election” and “the Court-appointed Bush administration,” as if the judicial branch of our three cornered system is invalid. The Supreme Court is a legitimate and important branch of the United States, and if it's ruling in the end settled the election then this means the ruling is legitimate. That applies to the Florida Supreme Court as well as the national.
Millions of people voted for Mr. Bush and the Supreme Court settled a disputed vote tally in one state.
Some American calls Bush a Nazi every day in public somewhere. The needlessly personal and reactionary hatred the left heaps upon this man every day is an avalanche.
The “stolen election” was only the beginning.
The night of the Election all three networks (in a shining example of wishful thinking) officially called the state of Florida for Al Gore. The election was over!
By four a.m. the networks corrected themselves and called the state of Florida for George Bush. Al Gore called George Bush and congratulated him as a gentlemen politician ought to.
By 9 am the next day the networks all again changed their mind. Al Gore called Bush and said he had withdrawn the concession. Now it was too close to call and we would have to wait until every last ballot was meticulously counted before we knew who won.
Days went by with accusations of fraud and dishonor being tossed about on both sides. Crowds of idiot prejudiced demonstrators yelled at each other in front of the buildings where the votes were being tallied, as if that does a damn bit of good for anyone's cause.
Controversy followed controversy. Were the people counting the ballots honestly? What about the overseas absent-T ballots. Had they all been counted? How long would we have to wait for the overseas votes from servicemen? Knowing that military men don't vote left very often, the Gore team wanted the closer absent-T ballots counted right away and then stop admitting any more new ballots, thus stopping the importation of Republican votes from military bases far away.
It was an angry and difficult time as the Election of 2000 hung in the balance for weeks without a clear decision. Famous politicians and lawyers for both sides went at in battles of press conferences, and press releases. It wasn't fun.
The Florida Supreme Court finally declared Bush the winner. Democrats pleaded with Gore to keep fighting on in the legal system. Don't let George Bush steal the election!
Then one night Gore came out on national television and conceded the election in a noble and beautifully-written speech pleading and preaching reconciliation. It was his finest hour.
Since then several independent studies have concluded that Bush won Florida, period. All the different formulas the Democrats offered for the fraud charge were studied. If these votes had been counted this way, or that way; if that recount had not been allowed, if these 'hanging chads' had been disallowed; Bush still would have won. No matter what the formula, these independent study groups concluded that Bush won Florida. Some said by 900 votes, some said by one 200, some said by 535. But they all said that Bush won Florida, period.
Did that put an end to the charge that the Republicans stole the Election of 2000? Of course not. What was really sad is that the refusal to accept the facts was more pronounced the higher up the ladder the lefty went. The famous left pundits defied the clearly defined study groups conclusions even more than the man in the street.
Of course they did scour the earth for a year and found one partisan study group that concluded that the Florida vote count was not legitimate, and they clung to that one in the face of several more legitimate studies that concluded otherwise.
One clever bumper sticker in 2004 urged Democratic voters to,
“Defeat George Bush Again.”
CHINESE APRIL FOOLS 4.1.01
The first crisis in the W era cam on April Fool’s Day 2001 when a Chinese Fighter jet collided with a US recon aircraft near Hainan Island over the South China Sea. The US plane was damaged and had to make an emergency landing on Hainan. The Chinese fighter plane went down in the water and the pilot, a dude named Wang Wei was never found. The US crew was held hostage pending a US apology. That is serious business.
The Chinese said that the US plane was violating Chinese airspace, but the United States said the old prop plane was in international airspace. How can I know who to believe? The Chinese fighter jets had been shadowing these US electronic surveillance craft regularly for years, trying to intimidate them, or drive them out of Chinese airspace if you believe the Chinese.
The spycraft was a U.S. Navy Aires (EP-3E). The Aires was just a modified four-prop Electra from the mid 1960’s. This plane was slower than a comedy paycheck, but Aires was reliable and had long range. The Chinese jet (a Choy-22) was tailing the Aires when it rammed into one of the Navy Plane’s propellers.
The Choy went down out of control into the sea. The US plane began spiraling out of control too.
But pilot Tom Collins regained control of the old Lockheed. The Americans asked to land on Hainan. They got no reply. They landed on Hainan, and said, “Ni Hao!”
If not for the death of Wang Wei, perhaps the incident might have passed with little international attention. But China had lost face with the death of the pilot and the loss of the modern plane to an old prop plane that landed safely with no injuries to report.
The American aircrew were not technically hostages. They stayed in nice rooms at a hotel near Linglang Airport. Just try getting out the front door of the lobby. Go back to the room and eat a Snickers. You’re not going anywhere for a while.
China demanded an apology and an indemnity. When Rumsfeld heard this he said, “the Chinese can...”.... well I’d better not tell you what he said. Let’s just say that cooler heads prevailed.
China didn’t want any trouble any more than Uncle Samuel did. China was trying to get into the World Trade Organization, and a big problem with America wouldn’t help that.
9/11
MASS MURDER AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, THE
PENTAGON, AND SHANKSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA;
The Presidency of George Bush and the era he ruled over will forever be defined by the horrible terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001. It was an event that truly changed the world, and not for the better. It changed everything for the worse.
THE ATTACK ON SEPTEMBER 11
The two masterminds behind the first hijacking were Mohammed Atta and his schveinhund partner, Abdul Aziz al Omari. The pair for some reason still unknown, had first driven to Portland Maine from Boston on the night of September 10th only to fly back to Boston early in the morning on the 11th.
When he boarded the plane in Portland, Atta was selected by the computer screening system as a suspicious character but no actions were taken other than to delay putting his checked bags on board until he was definitely on board the aircraft. The entire airport screening process was based around bombs, not box cutters, which was, amazingly, the weapon of choice of the 911 terrorists. The 2 Arabs left Boston at 6:00 a.m. and landed in Boston at quarter till seven.
At Boston’s Logan International Airport Atta and Omari were joined by three other Arab terrorists. The five of them boarded American Airlines Flight #11 at terminal B. Flight 11 was destined for Los Angeles with a departure time of 7:45. The three other criminals on AA flight 11 were named Satam al Suquami (the name bears a strong resemblance to Satan, but then again so does Santa), Wail al Shehri, and Waleed al Shehri.
Before boarding the plane Atta got a phone call from an accomplice at another terminal (probably terminal C) a man by the name of Marwan al Shehhi, presumably to make sure that all was going smoothly for both teams. Al Shehhi was part of the second gang that was planning to hijack United Airlines Flight 175, also bound for Los Angeles, with a scheduled departure time of 8:00 a.m.
Also conspiring to kill innocent women and children in God's name on Flight 175 were Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al Shehri, Ahmed al Ghamdi, and Hazma al Ghamdi.
So we have so far two teams of five boarding two flights out of Logan International. Both of these flights were chosen because both jets were loaded with fuel for the long trip non-stop to LA. This was brilliant strategy that worked. Their only oversight was hitting the World Trade Center towers just before 9 a.m. A mass of WTC workers and visitors were still buying coffee in the neighborhood and had not entered the building. If the hi-jackers has scheduled the demolition derby for an hour later they would have doubled their tally of shame.
Atta led one team. Al Shehhi the other. The security at Logan failed that day. The computers did not recognize the threat. The metal detector and physical screeners who use the wand to double check for metal objects all failed like the radar operator eating a sandwich while 363 Japanese planes flew overhead on December 7 1941. It's hard to blame them considering the rules they were instructed to follow. The process was designed to locate on one's person anything larger than a 22 caliber handgun. Because of 911, people now have to take three pennies out of their pocket before they can make it through the metal detectors. But on the morning of 911, the box cutters made it past the magic wands without a problem. They were in bounds.
There was some delay for two of the United terror team because their English was so poor that they had trouble with the routine security questions. But they finally lied to the satisfaction of the authorities of the moment and boarded the aircraft.
No less than three members of the American Airlines terror team were at some point identified and stopped as suspicious characters by the computer program in operation (called CAPPS, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System). But the system fear was of someone planting a bomb on board in someone else's luggage. not getting on with the item, so the three terrorists were cleared to go once it was confirmed that they were actually on the plane. Airline security was still hung up on the worst recent terror disasters in the industry and these had involved an on board explosion. There was the Lockerbee crash over Scotland, another bomb that exploded in a plane over Greece sending a baby and its two parents falling to their death, and the mysterious explosion of TWA flight 800 over Long Island (see the book by Jack Cashill on this one). So four out of the five of the Flight 11 attackers had been stopped as suspicious and then cleared, Atta in Portland, three others in Boston.
Why did they do it? Why was the United States unprepared?
Before the narrative continues, a pause for these key questions. I do not condemn the USA for being unprepared for 9/11. The religious bigot Arabs exploited the conditions of the moment and caught us off guard because we were a nation at peace. I do not expect every aspect of my society to revolve around an anticipated act of war when we are at peace. There has been a lot of finger pointing since 911 aimed at US security failures. The only real finger pointing should be directed against the sick religion of Iran styled Islam which is based on anti-Semitism, sexism against women and intolerant violence as punishment against anyone who dares to not worship the teachings of Allah.
I will not add the disclaimer that in no way do I condemn all Arabs as bad people. I think that should go without saying as common sense if you trust that I have any decency at all. But anyone who does not believe that Islam is based on anti-Semitism should read the Koran before expressing opinion about it. If every American would simply read the Koran it will open our eyes to what we are up against, or more accurately, what is against us. It is a sick document and I am tired of American’s kissing up to the racist Koran in order to prove that we aren't hateful.
They think their way is the only way and if the rest of the world doesn’t go along with them, then look out rest of the world. Their message is ‘We are going to try and kill everyone who doesn’t adhere to the teachings of Allah.’ Well if that is the equation then this Allah fellow must be one bad person. To the Koranicists, the only war is “holy war.” They have the word ‘jihad’ meaning holy war and we on the other hand just prefer to call war what it is, ‘war’. Islam considers itself in a non-ending state of war with anyone and any nation that does not adhere to it’s teaching. That is sick.
The literal meaning of the word jihad is ‘to exert oneself in the way of God.’ So they way they have co-opted this word in the service of killing innocent people and that is also sick.
What does Allah want from his followers, anyway? What about all those people on those planes and in those buildings? Does Allah really want them to die? Does Allah want their children to grow up without fathers and mothers? The victims of 911 never said a word against Allah or against Islam. All they did was go about their lives peacefully and they get murdered for no sane reasons by these sick conceited fanatics?
The only reason the World Trade Center Towers were attacked on September 11, 2001 was racism. Its that simple. It’s all about the sick and evil anti-Semitism in the Arab world.
These people don’t hate America because they hate America. They hate America because America supports Israel. That’s what Americans by and large don’t understand. It’s not about America, it’s about Israel. That’s their hang-up with America. Its not our decadent lifestyle, our music or drugs or movies or women in bikinis. It's not our money. Arabs seem to like wealth as much as the next person. It’s our undaunted support for Israel that fills our Koranicist enemies with terrorist rage.
It angers me that liberals are always urging us to praise Islam as a great religion just like Christianity or Hinduism. Aren’t liberals supposed to hate racism, religious bigotry, and sexism in any form? It seems their anger at racism is always selective according to their checklist. The liberals think that it’s wrong for Americans to be racist or religious bigots towards foreigners, but it’s okay for foreigners to be racist (or placist – to hate someone based on where they’re from) against Americans. It is a working part of the intrinsic self-flagellation of America by the left that only got warmed up in the Blame America First era of Jeanne Kirkpatrick (who coined the phrase) and Ronald Reagan (who popularized it.)
The Muslims have directed nothing but hostility my way since I was old enough to read. The radical Muslims have hated me for existing from the time black Americans began to embrace it in the 1960’s as a shield for their racist hostility towards white people. Since Islamic hate already had a support system in place, it was a small matter for bitter blacks to change their name to Muhammad or Shabazz and don a cloak of propriety for their violent desires. If you want to say you are furious with racist white people, go for it! But don’t change your name to al Salami so you can pretend you’re doing God’s work.
Black people do have good reason to be bitter. They have suffered under white racism here since 1619. But just own up to your honest justified feelings and don’t use God as a beard. If Allah is God then God is love by another name and Allah could not possibly have smiled with approval at the deeds of these hi-jackers.
But again, it is all about Israel, not America. A Jewish-American comedian by the stage name of Uncle Dirty, (who was on the Tonight Show with the late Johnny Carson 17 times in the 60’s) summed it up this way to me backstage one night, “The Arabs,” he said shaking his head, “ they couldn’t beat Israel, now they want to take on the whole world.”
Dirty has a way with words. Terrorism is a last resort for groups that have lost all political, economic, and military power. Strong nations do not resort to terrorism, whether those nations are good or evil. So terrorism is in reality a loud confession of weakness.
When the Arab nations honestly felt they had a chance to wipe Israel off the map in a conventional war, that is, up until the end of 1973, they only occasionally resorted to terrorism. But as Israel became stronger and more secure, as it survived the Arab full scale attack wars, developed nuclear weapons and maintained the alliance of the superpower United States of America, the Arabs began to throw in the towel. Knowing the fight to destroy Israel was becoming a lost cause and, worse, seeing in 1991 Arabs embracing the United States against Arabs in the Kuwaiti Conflict, they upped the ante. Seeing infidel Americans on more friendly terms with Saudi Arabia than ever before, the bitter enders had only one answer; The same answer as the petulant baby who doesn’t get his way so he destroys things to satisfy the wounded ego. The World Trade Center was destroyed because the baby Arab Islamists have finally realized they may never destroy Israel and they want to make some noise about their unhappiness with that. The death of 2,700 innocent stockbrokers and children was Islamic babies smashing their bottles and saying, “Waaaaaa!.”
7:55 A.M.
So it is 7:55 a.m. on Tuesday morning September 11, 2001. Flight 11 is taxiing out of the gate, four minutes away from firing up its engines and barreling down the runway at Logan for liftoff. There are two pilots, nine flight attendants, 76 passengers and five pigs on board, a total of 92 doomed people.
At terminal B, Flight 175 is being boarded and preparing to leave the gate as passengers are stuffing small bags in overhead compartments, nervously reading boring magazines and nodding tense hellos to the new faces seating themselves beside them. The #175 Boeing 767 will be carrying a human cargo of 65 people, two pilots, seven flight attendants, fifty-one lovable passengers and five pigs.
At the same time at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C. five terrorists of Middle Eastern origin have boarded a third plane.. These motherless rats were named Khalid al Mindhar, Majed Moqed, Hani Hanjour, Nawaf al Hazmi and his brother Salem al Hamzi.
The Dulles plane is a Boeing 757. The jet would take off at 8:20 a.m. All of the terrorists were on board by 7:55. All five were selected as suspicious during the check-in process, three by computer, one because he did not have a photo ID and the other because the agent thought he was acting suspiciously. Again, the only response to the fingering of these men as sp’s was to hold their checked bags from the plane until it was confirmed they were on board. Hanjour would be the man who piloted the airliner after the hijacking. The target of this humanity-filled guided missile would be the Pentagon.
There was a fourth jetliner involved, this one at Liberty International Airport in Newark, NJ, a Boeing 757 (Boeing lost four aircraft in one day). At 7:55 a.m. Flight 93 from LIA was loaded with four Arab terrorists. Flight 93 was supposed to leave the gate at 8:00 a.m. for it’s journey to San Francisco, but the Newark airport was busy that morning and this United Airliner would not be air bound until 8:42. This delay may have helped save the White House or the Capitol building, for by the time this plane was hijacked over Ohio, the #93 passengers on cell phones were able to learn the details of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Unlike the other three planes, the passengers here understood that they were on a suicide run with intent to mass murder far more innocent people on the ground than they constituted in the air. They understood that they were human gunpowder in a flying cannonball the Hindenburg doing 550 MPH. Hence their decision to go down fighting. If the other three groups of innocent passengers had understood the mission of the terrorists they too would no doubt have shown the same heroism that was displayed on flight 93.
There was supposed to be a fifth terrorist on flight 93 to round out the standard figure of five holy warriors per aircraft. But Mohammed al Kahtani had been stopped at a Florida airport and detained by immigration near the end of August as a suspicious person, so al Kahtani missed his rendezvous with destiny. The four cockroaches who did make it onto Flight 93 were Ziad Jarrah (the “pilot”), Saeed al Ghamdi, Ahmad al Haznawi. (and to any tiny real cockroaches who can read, I'm sorry for the insult.)
So at 7:55 a.m. all 19 terrorists are seated on board four jets preparing for takeoffs on scheduled departures within twenty minutes of each other. We have mentioned the Jihadists by name. Let us honor the good guys in the story by giving the names of their pilots as we recap the situation at 7:55.
John Ognowski, the captain of Flight 11 is pulling a Boeing 767 out of the gate of American Airlines in Boston with 81 passengers.
Victor Saracini the captain of Flight 175 is three minutes away from leaving the gate at United Airlines in Boston at the controls of his Boeing 767 with 56 passengers.
Charles F. Burlingame the captain of Flight 77 is waiting for clearance to leave the gate at Washington’s Dulles Airport with his American Airlines Boeing 757 with 58 passengers.
Jason Dahl the captain of Flight 93 is waiting for permission to leave the gate with his Boeing 757 at Liberty Airport in Newark with his 37 passengers.
TO IMPACT
At 7:59 a.m. Ognowski's American Airlines #11 out of Boston lifted off the ground. Saracini's United 175 out of Boston lifted off at 8:14. It was a fatal moment. Just at Saracini’s plane was lifting off, the hijacking of Ognowski 11 was taking place, both events coming at 8:14.
The last routine transmission from Ognowski 11 came when the plane acknowledged some instructions from the FAA control center in Boston. At the time the jet was at 26,000 feet on its way to it’s predetermined cruising altitude of 29,000 feet. This was at 8:14. From this point on the airliner did not respond to anything. The hijacking had begun.
About five minutes after it all began, a flight attendant on AA #11 called the Southwest reservation office for American Airlines in Gary, North Carolina. She used one of the AT&T telephones that are fastened to back of each seat. Betty Ong would stay on the phone for 25 minutes, describing first what had happened so far, and other events as they developed.
“The cockpit is not answering,” said Betty at 8:19, “somebody’s stabbed in business class—and I think there’s mace—that we can’t breathe—I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.”
The hijacking began when the Sheheri brothers in first class got out of their seats and stabbed two flight attendants. They apparently announced that they had a bomb and sprayed the front passenger area with mace or pepper spray and ordered everyone to the back on the plane. How they got into the cockpit remains a mystery. They may have taken a key from the stabbed flight attendants or somehow forced their way in. Another guess is that they waited until the moment when the door was open for some communication or errand between the flight crew and the pilots before they struck. They may have attacked the flight attendants and burst into the cockpit in one action.
Daniel Lewin, a former Israeli army officer, tried to interfere and was stabbed in the back by one of the terrorists. Dano was likely trying to manhandle the two men in front of him in coach who were making a move and did not realize that another one of the hijackers was seated behind him.
It is now 8:20. The takeover of Ognowski 11 is effected. The call from Betty Ong has relayed the situation to the ground and wheels are turning there. Burlingame's 77 is lifting off the runway in Washington. Dahl's 93 in Newark is still in a taxi line waiting for a chance to take off. 93 Newark was supposed to depart before 77 Dulles but airline schedules are unpredictable as everyone knows. September 11 was no different for the four designated victim airliners.
Now in a best case scenario with full 20-20 hindsight, the 8:20 a.m. news of the Ognowski 11 hijacking sweeps the country; brilliant analytical deductions are made that it is not an isolated hijacking, and all intelligence, defense and air traffic control agencies panic within a New York minute; Every flight in the country in the air is alerted to be vigilant for a possible hijacking; Every plane on the ground is ordered to stay there, and all planes airborne are advised to land until the crisis is resolved.
But based on the past history of hijackings, this is an unrealistic fantasy. Hijackings have always been isolated to single jetliners so there would be no reason to presume immediately that this was part of a multiple hijacking operation.
Also, there was never a major instance of a hijacked jetliner being used as a missile to destroy skyscrapers, so it is much to ask in hindsight that anyone should be anticipating this. More importantly, many hijackings were in the past resolved by calm negotiations. Panic and overreaction was the last thing on the ‘to-do’ list for people handling a crisis like this, based on past incidents. The idea was to handle it as a hostage crisis, hoping to land the plane safely somewhere and negotiate from there. No one was operating on the premise that the hijacked plane was part of a mass op, or that the jets were suicide rockets.
At 8:25 a.m. the new “pilot” of Flight 11 from Logan, Mohammed Atta decided to inform the passengers of what’s what and he switched on what he thought was the airplane’s public address system. Instead he was speaking directly to the FAA on the ground and none of the passengers heard the following announcement, “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”
At the same time, 8:25, a second flight attendant on Ognoski's #11, Amy Sweeney contacted the ground by phone and reported the situation. She told the Boston American Flight Service office that a passenger in first class had his throat slashed and the plane was flying “erratically.”
The plane now turned off it’s intended course towards Los Angeles and began heading south for New York City. The attendants noted the seat plan for the hijackers and relayed the message on the phone through Betty Ong. On the ground the villains were being identified.
At 8:28 a.m. the Boston Center of the FAA notified the Northeast sector of NORAD, the North American Air Defense system of the crisis. From this moment on the military have information about the incident but co-ordination and response between NORAD, the Air Force, the FAA, the airlines involved, the civilian command structure, the President and Vice-President, and the Secret Service would be spotty and faulty.
There has been a lot of speculation that the last of the four hijacked jets may have been shot down by our own fighter aircraft. The National Enquirer printed an article to that effect but they are not the only ones who engaged in serious inquiries about this possibility. There is no real evidence to support this. As will be seen, there were no military aircraft in place with orders to shoot down the hijacked jets by the time the fourth plane went down. It's not an outrageous speculation for journalists and it took a few years before that rumor finally went away.
At 8:42 a.m. Dahl's Flight #93 finally lifts off of the runway at Newark after a long delay.
At 8:46 a.m. Flight 11 smashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Two other key events take place at 8:46. Two jet fighters are scrambled at Otis Air Force base on Cape Cod and ordered to look for hijacked flight 11. Saracini's Flight #175 from Boston is hijacked over the skies of southern New York State.
At 8:52 a.m. a flight attendant on Saracini United 175 is calling the ground and passing on the information about the hijacking in progress. 11,000 gallons of airplane fuel are now burning out of control in the area of the 86th floor of the North Tower of the WTC. Also at approximately 8:52 Burlingame's 77 out of Dulles is being hijacked over the skies of southern Ohio near the West Virginia border. Captain Dahl out of Newark is reaching cruising altitude with no idea of any of the other hijackings and no idea that his 93 is in danger.
In Sarasota Florida Karl Rove informs the President that a small twin-engine plane has hit the World Trade Center.
President Bush was reading to a group of grammar school children at the time, an indication of just how much the nation was a peace at the time. When Bush learned of the second plane hitting the building he blinked, caught his breath and then continued to finish the lesson to the schoolchildren as planned before he got up and went to work on the crisis.
The critics have bashed Bush for this for years. They can't believe he was so stupid as to finish the lesson and not jump up and show some leadership. The left mocked him for this blunder for the rest of his Presidency.
W later explained that he didn't want to create a sense of panic in the country by panicking the children and setting off a chain reaction from there. That seems logical to me, and an instance of calm leadership. The Air America broadcasts for years laughed and mocked at how incompetent he was and how important an example this was.
I'm sure if an aide has whispered to him that Chicago has just been destroyed in a nuclear explosion he would have panicked and shut the book. But this wasn't the same as that and he knew that some response was probably under way without special executive orders. In Hitler's Germany, officials were afraid to take any independent action without the Fuhrer's personal permission, thus paralyzing government and military response at times. But in the United States the civil, police, state, municipal, federal and military authorities can respond to any situation short of the deployment of nuclear missiles without an executive decision from the White House. I'm confident that an awareness of this obvious fact factored into Bush's thinking when he decided to finish the lesson. I cannot tell you how many people ranted to me personally about what a moron and a dummy Bush was for finishing that reading lesson for the little kids that day. They of course had no idea that I didn't hate the guy, but in the crowd I run with, everyone presumes that everyone hates all Republicans and especially all Republican Presidents.
Speaking of Hitler, Bush was compared to Hitler by the American left countless thousands of times in an ultimate act of disgraceful exaggeration. The same people who called Bush stupid were forever equating him with Adolph Hitler. Excuse me, did you say Adolph Hitler?
A geography teacher in Colorado compared Bush to Hitler so often that a student secretly taped him and the recording made to a conservative radio station and was played on the air nationally, and this was anything but an exception that proves the rule – it was typical left cruel self-righteous moronity. Anyone with a diseased birdbrain knows that a comparison of Bush to Hitler shouldn't even be worthy of the dignity of a response, yet that was done over and over. And they call Bush a dummy. Only a moron and a dummy would make that kind of comparison.
Ognoski and his Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.
Flight 175 out of Logan smashed into the South Tower at 9:03.
The tower that got hit second imploded first. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., 110 stories collapsing in on everyone and everything, mass murder in a sea of metal, glass concrete and dust.
The North Tower came down at 10:28 a.m.
It's almost impossible to imagine the hell within that giant 220 stories of death. People in the neighborhood were stricken with terror from the cloud of smoke and debris spreading out from the site like the black plague. Young athletic men had a chance to outrace the smoke if they ran like mad. Others were beaten by the cloud and their lungs wee damaged.
The media was all over the first crash as huge news on a slow day. Then the second jet hit the other tower while the nation watched with their morning coffee. Glib talk show hosts are making concerned faces as the monitor shows the burning North tower and in the background the viewer sees another plane crash into the other tower, sometimes the anchor being the last to realize what just happened. My friend Tony V was watching the first jet fuel fire from an upper Manhattan Street corner with a crowd of about 90 people. The second plane hit the other tower and it dawned on the crowd that this was no accident. The crowd broke up and went home.
FALLING MAN
The New York Times published a chilling photograph on September 12 which became known as the “Falling Man.” It was a businessman upside down falling to his death from 1,300 feet with the silver WTC as backdrop. He looked calm. He was never identified. He had a nice shirt and tie. The tie was pointing straight up.
More than 60 people chose to jump to their deaths rather than face the smoke and the flames and die that way. It took nine seconds of breathless hell for them to die. That's the math at the fall rate of 125 feet a second. One firefighter described bodies hitting the pavement and exploding. Now you see it, now you don't. Severed heads and limbs were part of the landscape for the rescue workers.
The Times came under heavy criticism for publishing the picture. The networks were willing to run footage of people jumping falling to their death up until about 7 p.m. and then it stopped forever. I VCR's the whole day from noon 911 to noon 912. Once it stopped it stopped forever, and it wasn't even on the six WTC documentaries I've seen over the years. But all afternoon on day one it was fine. The whole idea behind not showing the footage is to try to settle things down and not incite. The video is considered too emotional.
The media should show it because most of these victims would want their lives avenged. They would want Americans to get upset and riled up when they saw that those bastards did.
Too bad we couldn't taken a poll of the departed 2,989 New Yorkers. There would be a few Christ-like angels who would ask us to forgive, and would say, “We need to reach out and try to understand out Arab brothers and sisters so they will not be compelled to do something like this again. And don't show that dreadful video of people falling.”
Then there would be the other 95% who would say, “If you love me, pay them back. If you want to honor my memory, pay them back! And don't sugar coat what they did in the name of taste. Show the video.”
It is perfectly all right to show the buildings collapsing and nearly 3,000 people dying at that moment. Just don't get in too close where we can see individuals dying, then all of a sudden it's bad taste.
Count me a sinner. Count me in that 95%. If it was video of me falling 110 stories to my death in a terrorist attack I would want my last 9 seconds to be the on the opening credits of a new right-wing TV series called Kill the Bastards! that runs twice a day every day on the big 3 networks, and is syndicated in reruns all over the world. And put the clip on the closing credits too, plus in slo-mo as a bumper going to and from commercials. For music you can have the sound of Arab music, then a machine gun, and the music goes into sour notes and then stops.
ARAB EXTREMIST SCORECARD
After the Twin Towers fell the toll of missing started out at almost five thousand. Over the next few weeks the death toll went down steadily until it settled in at a fraction below two thousand killed. Then it rose again streadily to the currently accepted 2,989. It was the worst civilian loss of life in an act of terrorism in American history. This was much bigger than Oklahoma City and the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor combined.
Among the passengers killed in the four suicide jets was Barbara Olsen, a journalist and author who had written two bitter bash books about Hillary Clinton. Her husband was Ted Olsen, a lawyer for the George H. W. Bush campaign team that won the struggle for the Florida election count.
Also killed in the plane crashes was Ace Bailey a former member of the Boston Bruins hockey team that I knew and admired as a boy. My good friend Brian Kiley's wife was a passenger in the plane behind Flight 11, at Boston. Her jet taxied off a couple of minutes after Attah's plane. Jim McCue is the man behind the Boston Comedy Festival. His fiancee was a regular flight attendant on the same Boston to LA run of Flight 175, but she had the day off. I have flown Boston to LA out of Logan about 20 times in my life. I grew up one mile from Logan Airport.
As a kid I always felt sorry for people from Dallas. Imagine being from the city that killed JFK. I just thought that made it an evil city. After 911 I felt like I knew what it felt like to be from Dallas in 1964. Two planes out of Boston had taken out the World Trade Center Towers.
I felt shame for my city, even though it wasn't Boston's fault any more than it was Buffalo's fault that McKinley was assassinated there.
REACTION SUMMATION
The left blames the United States for what happened on 9/11. Sam got what he deserved because of U.S. 'terrorist foreign policy.' Americans need to rethink themselves and listen to the terrorist explain what had made them act so angrily so that they would not act this way in the future. ‘Love the terrorist, hate the conservative.’
The United States responded first by invading Afghanistan, then Iraq. One nation for each tower.
TALIBAN AND AL QAIDA - EMEMY MINE
First of all both al Qaida and Usama bin Laden have about 70 different Anglicized spellings so roll with it (many top US officials, including President Clinton, always pronounced it ‘yoo-sama.’
In any case it wasn’t difficult to know immediately who and what was behind the attacks. It was Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida terrorist organization. These were the same human spit-stains that masterminded the first attack on the WTC back in 93, and the USS Cole slaughter in Yemen later on.
The second enemy of the USA was the Taliban. In the heat of crisis, a lot of us got confused as to which group was which and which one did it.
Al Qaida was an Islamist Fundamentally Regressive organization without a home. It was a world wide terrorist gang hoping for a new world order in which sadistic, monotheistic, intolerant, violent, racist, xenophobic, sexist, and chauvinistic Islam ruled the planet. AQ had leadership, money and drive. But it had no home. Saudi Arabia booted ‘Tally” out, then the Sudan kicked Usama out of there too. Usama held up a sign on the Global street-corner that said “Help the Terrorist Homeless.”
The Taliban was the legitimate internationally recognized group that controlled the nation of Afghanistan. The Taliban was not in the same crusader-terrorist class as Al Qaida. It shared the same rotten to the core beliefs as Al Qaida, but the Taliban didn’t lose sleep at night because it didn’t murder at least 100 innocent Westerners today, as the Al Kaidas did.
But the Taliban shared the goals of Osama if not the methods. The Taliban government of Afghanistan provided a homeless shelter for Al Qaida. The Taliban didn’t mastermind the attack of 911 but it liked it and it clapped when it happened, and was delighted to keep providing a home for Al Kaida and Osama bomb-laden.
So the Taliban became the umber one enemy to go after for W. Bush and his team. Sam couldn’t get at the Al Kaida because it was elusive and wandering by nature. But the Taliban was an entrenched government. The good guys could go after “those who harbor terrorists” for starters. The Taliban was a sitting target and Al Kaida was not. The way Bush saw it, and the way most of us saw it, the Taliban was an accessory to mass murder and was guilty of harboring international fugitives.
President Bush went on TV and warned the Taliban that it was going to have to hand over the Al Kaida terrorists or face the consequences. Bush appeared on TV with a huge hour-glass on the desk right out of the Wizard of Oz. He said that,
“The Taliban has 48 hours to hand over Osama a bin Laden or face decisive US military intervention. We are not bluffing.”
Bush then turned the hour glass over, stared at the camera, and the TV shot faded out.
Afghanistan was going to be the second domino to fall in the FIF (‘Freedom Isn’t Free’) roll-back of Middle Eastern states hostile to the USA. Iraqi-occupied Kuwait was the first. Afghanistan was on track for number two, and Iraq in 2003 became number three.
The US had no power or influence in the Central Asian Middle East in 1989. In 2004 it owned three countries. And the Middle East had only itself to blame. If Sadaam had minded his beans, and if Usama hadn’t attacked the WTC, the USA would still be a ME outsider, and would still have to land at British owned Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean if it wanted to set up even a tiny military rescue mission. Now it had Kuwait as the 51st state, plus the Cold War was over and W didn’t have to fear Communist Bloc intervention, the way LBJ and Jimmy Carter did (Carter, for all his famous pacifism, would probably have mounted a straight ahead military operation against Iran in 1979, but he understandably feared Soviet intervention on their long border with Iran).
The Taliban didn’t heed the warning, and lost control of Afghanistan to an American invasion and occupation.
OPERATION MILLER LITE
I can’t stand all these pompous military names for every operation. Why not call it “Operation Invade Afghanistan?” No, that’s never good enough anymore. The brass had to come up with a cool quasi-moralist name for invading Afghanistan. The name game dominated much of an important NSC meeting that should have been dedicated solely to military plans. Frankie Pace suggested “Operation Freedom Light.” For a moment everyone liked it, but then Condi Rice (of all people) said it would soon get misspelled on purpose by the lefty comedians and become negative mockery as “Freedom Lite.”
That was sharp. The culture had indeed adapted the Lite Beer from Miller TV ads to fit sarcastic needs. For example, I know a comedian who moved to LA and was so much the same style as Lenny Clarke, star of the CBS sit-com “Lenny,” that he got the derogatory tag of “Lenny Lite.”
So it was lites’s out on that idea. Wolfowitz came up with “Operation Enduring Freedom.” No one thought it was great, but it was getting late, everyone was hungry and no one really disliked it. So that’s how the invasion, occupation and regime change for Afghanistan became entitled “Operation Enduring Freedom.”
I said on stage one night that,
“I think a better name for it would be ‘Operation Smash the Towel-heads.’ ”
That of course is a no-no expression in the PC era, and may not get past an editor to a final version of this book, but I will not conceal my feelings at the time, even if they may or may not all hold true today, nine years later in 2012. And I was joking, knowing full well that invoking that volatile phrase was some edgy tweaking, appropriate for a smokey night club. Deliberately saying something everyone knows you’re not supposed to say is part of the job. Sometimes I’m on stage at 1:08 a.m. and I’m the only one sober in the entire room, so extrapolate everything from there.
The fact of the matter is that I said it and it got a huge laugh from my audience of about 140 people at the Comedy Connection at Fanuel Hall in Boston. If I was out of line for saying that, then my audience was too for laughing at it, and the fact that they approved that statement is noteworthy in my book. The nation was so inflamed with rage that I could think that as a joke, dare to say it on stage, and get approval from the crowd. If you made a “towel-head” joke ten years before October 2001 or ten years after it, the crowd would probably recoil except for a few roughneck drunks. And just so you know, that crack was mild compared to what a lot of stand-up comedians were saying on stage in the weeks after 911. Even lefty comedians were turning in their backward baseball caps for “US ARMY” caps. Comedians were launching into tirades about blowing the Arabs to bits and nuking them and, sadly, most of the time they didn’t even bother to include jokes! They were just taking time in their acts to vent and the crowd cheered and approved every time, instead of saying what they should have said, “hey, I paid money to see a comedy show - where’s the joke?” At least mine was an attempt to vent, tweak, and be funny at the same time.
One night, at the peak of the jingo hysteria, I felt it had gone too far and wanted to pull back a little. It was a huge weekend show of 400 people. Two of the other four comics were milking the “God Bless America” thing and closing their sets with it. I was on fifth and last and I closed my set with “God Bless All Peace-loving Nations.”
A couple of people took me aside after the show and thanked me for that.
USE-BUCK-ISTAN
The independent state of Uzbekistan helped America in its Afghan war with Al Qaeda. The former Soviet Republic gave the Coalition the full use of K-2 airbase near the Uzbek border with Afghanistan.
I read about this while it was going on and it always seemed odd to me. First of all it ruined a lot of my belief that old Soviet republics are still tied much more closely to Moscow than people think. If Russia were still a monolith wolf in newly independent states clothing, it probably would never tolerate Uzbekistan giving the Americans full use of a military airbase on old USSR soil.
It just seemed like something didn’t add up with US helicopters and fighter jets taking off for combat on old Russian land.
When I recently read General Meyers account of the post-911 crisis I found the missing ingredients. It seems that Uncle Sam paid the Uzbeki government a lot of money to use the base. It was dollar diplomacy. Now it all makes sense. Moscow might well have got a chunk of that change, too. I’ll bet that whole deal had to be cleared in Moscow on both ends.
The other factor is that Uzbekistan was also having deadly problems with some of the same Islamic extremists the USA was planning to fight, so there was some sincere sense of alliance too, but really, I’ll bet it was mostly about the money. I want to know how much Sammy paid Uzbekistan.
POWDER RIVER
Like things weren’t disheartening enough all round, now some clown starts mailing people poison powder all over the country. The Anthrax Scare of 2001 was on.
A photo editor at the Florida Sun opened up a letter on October 4. The envelope said,
“Free Gift Inside! From Your Friends at Credit One Bank.”
Bob LaMotte opened it up and got very sick. Two days later he was dead. Anthrax is a weapons grade poison that can be delivered in many forms, but powder is the method that nine out of ten terrorists prefer best.
Tom Brokaw at NBC headquarters at Rockefeller Plaza also got a letter from Credit One Bank. But TB had once had an account with that horrible institution, and so he set it aside as junk mail. An intern opened it and got sick, but recovered. There were no fatalities at NBC.
But the Anthrax killer also sent bad material to Tom Daschle, the highest ranking member of the HOR. That’s when the story really became an international blockbuster headliner. Someone was trying to assassinate members of the United States Congress. Other politicians got the same powder letter, but by now, everyone was in high alert.
Unfortunately some of the mailmen delivering these packages inhaled the deadly material through their bags. Three mailmen died. Rain or sleet can’t stop them, but Anthrax can.
It was nine years before the culprit was finally identified. He worked at a US weapons lab in Maryland and he killed himself just as the FBI was about to arrest him. The suicide guy’s name was Eric Ivins.
Now if only Molly Ivins would kill herself too, we’ll be all set. They aren’t related, but they both deal with uncalled for poison attacks, hers in print, his in powder. I realize that is an outrageously unfair comparison, but I hope Eric’s family will forgive the insult.
Five people died from the Anthrax attacks. It made the whole country a little bit scared. These terrorists were apparently just getting warmed up, or so it seemed to many of us. The Anthrax scare helped the Bush Administration get away with pretty much anything it wanted to do to fight back. It sent a warning message to every person in the USA that you could be next. You don’t have to trapped on the 90th floor to fall victim to this insanity.
THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE
The United States did not want to go into Afghanistan like a cop arriving at a domestic marital dispute and finding that each gay man wanted to punch the cop for getting involved in what was their private dispute (I’m being progressive, not gay-bashing.) American solo invasion might even unite the factions temporarily, like when the Chinese Nationalists and Communists set aside their civil war for a few years to fight the Japanese invaders (1937-45.)
The Taliban was a mean group of Akhmeds. They made Saudi intolerance of women in bikinis look like nothing. The Taliban would give you thirty lashes for even saying you’d like to see a picture of a beautiful young woman in a bikini, even if you said it politely like that. A married woman who made out with another guy might be publicly executed, and I’m not joking. A teen-ager listening to rock and roll on the radio might get tied up and whipped in public, and I’m not joking. Now these fanatic fascists were allied with al Kaida. The Taliban was even more religiously intolerant than al Kaida, but al Kaida was the group hell bent to wage a global war of international terrorism on non believers, the egoist pigs.
Al and Tali were a deadly combo, but they had made plenty of enemies in Afghanistan along the way. Some of the enmity was simple power rivalry, racial, geographical and political, and had little to do with ideology. But there were also plenty of Afghanistan people who did not want to live in the stone age of intolerance and sadistic self-righteousness.
The United States united these disparate desperate groups and said, we will work with you, and restore your power and expel your enemies. Come join the United States in this fight. The groups who hated the Taliban about as much as I do was called the Northern Alliance. The NP would play a major role in Operation Invade Afghanistan.
Some of these Afghan people believed in a strict form of Islam, just like the Taliban, but did not believe that those who did not agree with them should be whipped with a cat o’ nine tails three times a day for it. In their case, Operation Enduring Freedom is a phrase on the mark.
But they weren’t a majority either. Religious intolerance is a global disease and there is plenty of hypocrisy in the states - like the Catholic who threw a drink in a comedian’s face after the show because he’d joked on stage about Christ.
The US goal was to create scenes where American and Afghanistan troops fought mule-shoulder to mule-shoulder while ‘embedded’ photographers took snapshots for the Chicago Tribune. The alliance with the Northern Alliance was militarily sound and great PR. The National Alliance was one area where the Coalition actually addressed the issue of ‘hearts and minds’ effectively. ‘Actually’ is the sneaky-jab word in the previous sentence.
OIA BEGINS - OCTOBER 7 2001
Operation Invade Afghanistan began with air strikes on Sunday October 7.
By the end of December, the Taliban no longer ruled in Afghanistan, and Coalition forces were in control of Kabul. An interim government was set up under National Alliance leader Ahmad Lashua Shibazz.
ESCAPE FROM TORA BORA
In November of 2001 US troops had Bin Laden and most of the top low-class brass of Al Kaida (that’s the spelling I’m mostly going with) cornered in Afghanistan. I remember it well when CNN and all the hyper and hyperbolic news organizations for days kept flashing bulletins that the capture of Osama Bin laden was imminent.
I was happy.
Every hour was a new report that it was all but over and statements were being made that this is the moment of victory. I broke out the blank VCR tapes and recorded it all, hoping to be there watching when the flash came in that the wicked old witch at last is dead.
Then a few too many hours passed and the bulletins were slowing down and being more cautious. Then it was still near certain that the US forces would get him but there were admittedly some problems. Then a few too many days passed and the bulletins slowed to a halt.
He got away.
The left was all over the Bush team for letting Laden escape from the trap on November 15, 2001 at Tora Bora.
I can forgive the failure part. What bothered me was not that they let him get away, but how they gloated and sang to the world that it was all over when it wasn't over. Osama was a coward but don't count your chicken before he's snatched. Why did they have to put the huge media spin on a victory they hadn't achieved? Letting a rich well organized terrorist get away is nothing to be ashamed of, unless you bragged for a week that you had him in the bag.
FRANCE IS MAD
France made some real military contributions to Operation Invade Afghanistan (I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to call it Operation Enduring Freedom.) But the French were mad because the brains trust in DC and in Bonn (NATO Meetings) had not included the French on the decision making process.
France is always mad. It’s like the diplomatic position of France is to ask, ‘What would de Gaulle have done?” De Gaulle was always offended at someone or something.
(And the proper original term was ‘brains trust,’ not ‘brain trust.’)
ANACONDA 2002
A Coalition spring offensive against Taliban/al Kaida positions in the mountains of Afghanistan succeeded. But it took longer than expected and was not flawlessly conducted.
It was called Operation Anaconda, a rip-off of Abraham Lincoln and Eddie Stanton’s nickname for the 1861 strategic plan to win the Civil War.
Less than 40 Americans died in the 2002 snake pit, but clearly some of these casualties were the result of poor planning and especially of poor coordination between land and air forces. This was the very sort of thing was supposed to have been cured by the Goldwater-Nichols act of the 1980’s.
AUMFAIR IN LOVE AND WAR
During and after the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the critics of the Bush Administration conveniently forgot that the United States Congress had authorized this war in 2002 with both House eyes open. The Senate passed it unanimously, which may have cos John Kerry the Election of 2004. The House had passed it with about 40 dissenting votes, but after that, no one in the Senate wanted to get caught doing an imitation of Jeanette Rankin.
Aumfair stands for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution.
Congress since 1950 has surrendered its right to declare or not declare war by being intimidated by patriot-blackmail in times of crisis to give the President a blank check to do whatever he or she wants. Once they do the Gulf of Tonkin Watusi the Congressperson have lost all control of military decision making. They sign off that the leader can do whatever they think best and over quite a long time span too. I wish more Congresspersons, especially hawks (because they are the only people that can get away with it) would stand up and say “I am voting no because it violates the principles of US national government, not because I do not support the specific Administration plans for the situation. I would rather vote on specific war measures, not on passing on the responsibility for death and destruction to individuals while abjectly surrendering the Congressional perogative.
POWELL THROWS THE UNITED NATIONS A CURVE BALL - 2-5-2003
This February 5 was a big day in our story. The United States Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council and made the case for invading Iraq (the case for “going to war with Iraq” in euphemism-speak.) By 2006 Powell was appearing on Meet the Press saying he had been deceived by bad information and he regrets the entire speech.
“It’s a stain on my record that even Wisk can’t get out,” he told Tim Russert.
Before Powell gave this famous 2.5.03 speech, top UN weapons inspector Hans Blix gave a talk advocating the invasion of Iraq. These were two powerful voices. Powell was habitually against military action, the brake against rash military action in several Administrations. For him to come out in favor of the same wild cowboy plan of Bush and Wolfie, that was something. Powell later resigned, and much of his reason for stepping down was feeling he had been deceived into selling those ‘military but liberal’ credentials out.
Hans Blix was a powerful voice because he was not from the United States, he was from the United Nations.
So Blix rocked the UNSC house and Powell was on next. Colin complained to someone off-stage that “I’m tired of always having to follow that Blix. He’s got the music and the gravy spot. I’m low key. I hate going on last.”
The most dramatic part of his famous speech, but one which included a humorous moment, was when he discussed the power of weapons-grade anthrax. Powell took out a tiny glass vial of white powder and began to talk about the power of this bioweapon,
“If I dropped this on the ground and it broke, everyone in this room would be dead within 90 seconds.”
Some people in the gallery panicked and began to rush the exits. Powell had to calm everyone down,
“I didn’t say this was real anthrax! Calm down! This is Wisk powder. Come on now.”
Powell and just about everyone else had a good laugh as the big room settled back in.
It’s moments like this that make my job easy. Folks, I can’t make this stuff up!
The rest of the speech was very serious. Iraq had 24 warehouses each one filled with 90,000 50-gallon drums of chemical poison, “each drum capable of killing everyone in Chicago eight times.” Powell, the lefty in the Bush One cabinet on the eve of Gulf War One, was now saying ‘got for it’ to the B-2 bomber, Bush II, and saying it to the United Nations.
It turns out that the bad info about the WMD’s that had been fed to Powell had come from a corrupt Iraqi source that operated under the CIA code-name of “Curve Ball.” I’d make a joke about that, but I don’t know anything about baseball.
2003 WAR LOOMS WITH IRAQ - LIBERATION IS NEAR
On the evening of March 18, President Bush gave a cross speech on national TV explaining why he is pretty much going to liberate (invade) Iraq at any given moment. He gave the “war speech” as it became known, from the Cross Room of the White House. Who knew there even was a Cross Room in the White House?
Bush explained that Iraq most certainly possessed large caches of weapons of mass destruction. His message to the Iraqi people was,
“The day of your liberation is near.”
Bush explained that this war, if it did indeed becomes necessary (as though it wasn't already a done deal) “will not be waged against the Iraqi people, only against their leaders.” He really must have thought smart bombs were more like genius bombs, capable of singling out leaders before exploding. I didn't like the speech, especially the part about the war not being waged against the Iraq people. Yeah, and the Nagasaki bomb was only directed against Japanese leaders, who led the people so wrongly into war.
On the eve of war I spent the night with two very left wing friends and told them this,
“I'm torn. You both know I'm a Republican, but I think this is wrong. Iraq is sitting still while the 1,000 times more powerful United States claims it is threatened. It's just too creepy. It doesn't feel right.
But on the other hand I think I do understand the motives and they aren't bad. In my brain are 100 senators and the vote is 53-47 against this war. If I had the deciding vote, the US won't do this. However, if America does go in, the vote will change overnight. I will be 53-47 in favor of it the moment it is done. To forcibly change the Middle East for progress, to install democracy at gunpoint, I am not entirely opposed to that idea at all.”
That's the way it was, and once America did move in, I became a supporter of the effort. Once the ugly stain of pre-emptive aggression in the defiant face of all diplomatic precedent for 4,000 years was put in the rear view mirror, once the critics got their chance to call Bush a Nazi for a few years at the top of their lungs, then the picture looked a little better. That stigma of aggressor was a lot to have to go through, and it made me feel some shame for my country. But after that ugliness began to fade with time, the whole thing begins to look pretty good. The further I step back and look at the Iraq invasion from the larger perspective of international relations of the past and future 50 years, as opposed to the past and future 50 weeks, the more I feel that W did the right thing. A very looney and bizarre thing, but the right thing nevertheless. The Baathist regime of Sadaam Hussein was simply the most evil nation on the planet earth, a place where innocent people were arrested, tortured and murdered by the thousands all the time, and it's a bit shallow to think that everything that came out of eliminating that regime was bad. Sometimes only violence can put a stop to violence.
The issue of freedom isn't as intense as the issue of torture and murder, There are places in this world where there is very little freedom of speech, but families aren't kidnapped and tortured on a regular basis. Lack of freedom was just the opening act for the people of Iraq.
Bush closed that entire show.
Thank you, crazy sir.
TO BE INVADERS OR NOT TO BE
There were already no-fly zones enforced for years in the northern and southern tiers of Iraq. Weapons inspectors had been roaming the country for years from the UN making sure that Iraq’s military capability was limited.
Bush and the USA kept threatening Iraq with invasion if it did not give the UN weapons inspectors full access to all facilities in that country. As the threats continued it was a strange feeling as far as casus beli was concerned. A large country continued to claim it was threatened by a smaller country and threatened to attack if its demands were not met. It was similar to Austria in 1914 threatening to invade Serbia.
Iraq was not a threat to its neighbors and the region, as was claimed, because Iraq was emasculated. Even if it did possess a weapon of mass destruction, it was not logical that Iraq would want to deploy it. After what happened in 1991 they surely knew that any act of aggression on their part would meet swift and terrible retaliation. Having a WMD and having the political will to use it are two different matters and Hussein was not insane. He was a brutal tyrant who worshipped Stalin, but he wasn’t insane enough to see his country invaded, and that surely would have been the result if he had used a weapon of mass destruction against Israel or some other one of his neighbors.
There was a heated debate between left, right and center over the impending invasion of Iraq. But one thing is certain, and one would have a tough time convincing a 17 year old lefty of this; the protest and outcry against the second Iraq War was considerable smaller in tone and substance than the protests against the First Iraq War of 1991.
The reason for this is simple and is fading from our consciousness in the hindsight of presentism. In 1991 the very concept of war was shocking and unthinkable to many if not most Americans. We hadn’t been at war since 1973 and that one was defensive and limited to the preservation of an ally. I saw people crying on TV in 1990 because they were scared that we were going to war. And they did not even have a loved one in the military! I saw this with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears many times on the news.
All of the major television talk shows in January 1991 had two hour specials on the eve of war filled with people on both sides red in the face and fighting back tears. Venerable news anchors lamented sadly from the left (pretending to be centrist) that it is almost unthinkable, but indeed it looks like this country might actually be going to war. Dan Rather reported that bombs were falling on Baghdad and then stopped for dramatic pause and said, “Now I want to pause for a moment and repeat it again so that it can sink in. This country has actually gone to war.”
In 1993 there was a lot of screaming from the left against this new war, but there was not in 93 a lot of crying nor shock at the concept of war. The 1991 war made the 2003 war much more palatable, even to its opponents. Gone was the idea that war was an unthinkable concept. After all, most Democrats had supported Clinton when he bombed Kosovo, and also when he bombed Baghdad, the Sudan, and Afghanistan. These same liberals would never have advocated such actions in the era of Dukakis and Mondale. They had been changed by the events of the First Gulf War whether they would ever care to admit it or not. The first Gulf War produced a new dynamic in our national mentality. Even the left had been desensitized to war as a concept. Pacifism per se, was dead. George Bush Senior, had untied the wings of the American eagle. Now the issue between the left and the right was a bitter argument over when it was proper to use or not use American military might. No longer was it a fight between the two sides over the moral wrong of the use of American military might for any reason.
The criticism against Bush Senior was always that “he didn’t finish the job” in the first war when he left Sadaam in power. It supposedly took his son to clean up the mess he left in 1991. Doesn’t anyone realize that without the first Gulf War there could never have been the second one? There never could have been the air campaign in the Balkans either. Bush senior hit the beach. Clinton and Bush 2 expanded the beachhead to the enemy capitols, while critics condemned the man who made the first crucial bold moves and decisions that created the very playing field that later presidents worked with. Without our new ally, (‘the 51st state’ as the Kuwaitis call it) Kuwait, as a starting point for military operations, both the second Gulf war and the war in Afghanistan would have been highly untenable in logistics. Without the psychological change in the mass American mind created by the victory in the first Gulf War, there could never have been enough Congressional or rank and file support to launch Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq 2. Bush senior’s Gulf War performance is never given the credit it deserves. Historical revisionism continues to blame him for his great deed rather than praise him.
INVASION OF IRAQ – MARCH 2003
United States and United Kingdom military forces invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003. It took less than one month to completely conquer Iraq.
There were a few days when the operation seemed stalled, and the media was beginning to run with the story that the invasion was not a success so far. Then the military machine got back out of the mud and finished up in Baghdad.
The British met tough resistance in Basra and the US forces were slowed to a near stop around Nasiriya, my favorite town. But these setbacks were surmountable. Two major sandstorms slowed the “Coalition forces” almost as much as the Iraqi Army did.
In Nasiriya, Saddaam's loyal militia fought like the rest of his army did not. The rest of his army in the end did not surrender, and were not defeated. They just disintegrated by the hundreds of thousands into the civilian population. Some would fight back as terrorists for at least the next ten years.
The Bush-Rove brains trust didn't really foresee this development. They thought they would defeat the Iraqi Army and then turn half of them as turncoats glad to help the new world order.
“DOWN DOWN SADDAAM” APRIL 9 2003
Coalition (US-UK) forces entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Joyous Iraqi mobs celebrated in the streets almost as uncontrolled as the way Americans do when their sports team wins it all. They tore down all the statues and posters of Saddaam, and chanted with pumping fists and wild-eyed grins, “Down Down Saddaam! - Down Down Saddaam!”
Critics often charge that the United States never properly got help from the Middle East natives in formulating their policies towards the Middle East. That charge has merit, and we'll get to that. But doesn't it work the other way too? The Iraqis apparently couldn't find one person with enough command of the English language to instruct everyone that the proper wording is “Down With Saddaam,” not the stupid sounding, “Down Down Saddaam.”
The same thing happened in the first Gulf War as critics all over the Middle East hit the streets with posters matching their mantra chant, “Down Down Bush! - Down Down Bush!” You people are making fools of yourself saying that. You look laughable while you think you look triumphant and righteous. I always smiled when I saw that. It picked me up whenever I was feeling down down. Reminds me of the Chinese Restaurant in Nevada with the huge sign out front that reads
ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET
NOT MEAN ALL DAY BUFFET
YOU NO COME STAY FOUR HOUR
YOU EAT - YOU GO HOME
That’s a real sign. Get someone who knows the damn language to get it right.
OPERATION IRAQI FREE STUFF
The USA called the invasion of Iraq, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But, as before, with the Down Down Saddaam business, there was evidently something of a language barrier problem. The Iraqi people looted everything in sight all over the cities of Iraq, making the Rodney King Riots look like chump change. Apparently they thought they thought it was called “Operation Iraqi Free Stuff.”
When US forces (do I really always have to say “coalition”? - it's a little embarrassing) conquered Iraqi cities, that is, expelled the Baathists of Saddaam's regime, they created an instant vacuum of control and power the ‘Allies’ were not remotely ready to fill. Grunts are not governors, they are hired to fight. So if, as the Bush-Condi forces told us, the Iraqi people have been living under a brutal dictator for more than 30 years, they might consider the entry of US troops to be their “Day of Jubilee.” They might be ready to break out and 'party hardy' at their first chance. The Iraq people looted as a nation. It was awful to watch. Any store with anything in it was smash and grabbed into oblivion in a flash. Government buildings were smashed and burned just for the statement, even if they had nothing worth stealing. Thousands looted the Iraq National Museum, burning ancient manuscripts and taking away priceless Mesopotamian vase and then breaking them just for laughs. All right, I made up that last detail, but it was close enough that.
US troops stood by and did nothing, like white cops in old Mobile whistling past a lynching, as the people of Iraq looted off the scales. CNN cameras were taping the whole thing, and the grab baggers didn't care. They flashed the stolen bling to the lens and ran off laughing. It was awful to watch at home, because these were the people supporting America, and the people America was supporting, the good people Bush had liberated. The U.S. soldiers maybe couldn't blame the Iraqi mobs for feeling this way. The Iraqis burned the government buildings the U.S. had partially bombed, almost like they were both on the same side of the fight, one with cannon, the other with torches.
US troops were in a no-win spot, as political considerations pinned them from doing the moral obvious thing and try to stop the mass looting. BushRumCondiRoveWolf couldn't risk losing the friendship of the Iraqi people they had just set free. If American soldiers shot down even one or two looters, the media could set that aflame and turned the only power base left in Iraq against the United States in a heartbeat. If they shot 40, the US forces might as well all fly back to Edwards Air Force Base and call OIF a day. This equation blackmailed American occupation efforts for years. If the US gets tough, it makes things worse for Iraqi support. If a nervous US does nothing when Iraqi's do wrong, that makes things worse also.
“WE DON'T NEED YOUR HELP IN THIS, WE HAVE ENOUGH AMERICAN POWER TO DEAL WITH IT.”
Like Polish brigades in London in 1942, Iraqi exile groups had brigades of fighting forces ready to serve in combat against the Baathist forces. But the W team declined their offer with a stern warning that if the Iraqis entered the fray on their own they would be treated as hostile military forces by the coalition! Ali Allawi tells this story in the form of an angry complaint against the injustice of W., but he fails to see or state the surely obvious factor that the last thing the United States needed at the moment was to create scenes of Arab brother fighting Arab brother. Nothing good could have come out of of turning this, on top of everything else, into an Iraq Civil War. That could lead to a Vietnam situation where friend and foe both looked exactly alike, with insurmountable consequences. Like a stubborn TV detective told he was off the case because he was too close to it, the Iraqi exile brigades ignored American orders and went after the bad guys anyway. They took up some hard fighting in the central east provinces of Diyala and Wasit on the Iranian border. Iraqi exile brigades secured two medium sized cities for the coalition. Fortunately, Bush exiled them to a distant front, far from the embedded CNN cameras with the Third Infantry Division. Few Americans ever heard a word about this Iraqi intra-mural theatre.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED - 5.1.2003
George Bush made one of the biggest political mistakes of his presidency on May 1 2003 when he landed on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln in a Viking jet, and gave a speech declaring that major combat operations were completed. Bush was the passive co-pilot and had flown the bird for a few minutes over the sea, but the Navy guy made the carrier landing. It was the first carrier landing any sitting US President had ever made. Behind him was a giant banner over the Abe Lincoln's bridge that said,
“Mission Accomplished”
Yeah, if your mission was to paint your Administration into a corner.
When the Iraqi people began a war of rebellion against the American occupation, and US casualties mounted higher and higher over the months and years, the Mission Accomplished speech became a major embarrassment for the Administration. The critics hit W. on this incident a million times. It's one of the first things the Bush-haters always bring up.
Far more US troops have been killed since the speech on the Lincoln than had died before that day. It was as if Abraham Lincoln had declared “Mission Accomplished” on the eve of Gettysburg.
A likely reason for this showboat V-message was frustration over having failed to either capture Saddam Hussein the dictator or find weapons of mass destruction. The critics were starting to suggest that the United States had won nothing, and Bush and his team may have decided that it was time to plant the flag of victory via show and ceremony.
The Bush haters really ridicule the whole idea of him landing on a carrier and addressing the men and women of the Navy in a flight jacket. I have no problem with that. I think it's pretty cool. But the giant banner was a huge mistake. Maybe the stupid sign was an overzealous decision by the carrier commanders, and the W team had to pick up the tab.
WMD – W MAD DELUSION
US forces never found the WMD they had assured the world that the Iraqi's possessed. Millions of people have condemned the United States and Mr. Bush personally for claiming that they would find them.
Iraq, of course, had plenty of warning that the US was coming, and plenty of time to sell them all to Syria.
Iraq in any case was determined to develop WMD’s at all cost. Even if Bush-Rice-Rummy were wrong on the WMD they still might have prevented in 2003 an Iraqi nuclear attack ten years down the road on New York or Washington.
The bash-Bush-books all call him a no good liar. They title chapters, “Bush is a Liar!” First and foremost W lies like a rug because of the WMD. You told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and it turned out there weren't any. You justified the invasion of Iraq with the false claim that there were weapons of mass destruction there. There weren't. President Bush, u-r-a liiiiiii-aaaaaaarrr!!!
Maybe W. Bush didn't really think Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction. I think he was willing to be proved wrong on that one, just so long as Sadaam was out of power. Bush wanted to give the United States had a chance to re-invent the region in the name of progress, and he wanted the assassination attempt on his father avenged. He probably told himself that the best way to get Congressional and public support for going in was to hinge it all on the idea that Iraq, and this man, was a permanent threat to the region. This approach had worked for his father in late 1990, when GHWB cited the Iraqi threat to the region beyond Kuwait, more than need to liberate Kuwait.
It’s possible that Bush only thought there only sort of might be WMD’s when he told the world there were almost certainly WMD’s. If so, that was dishonest. But at the very least, if you want to say he lied, I would say that he lied in the name of good, not evil.
You know, the movie W, by Oliver Stone rips W. Bush to shreds from start to finish. A great movie, but a real slasher. Nevertheless, at no point in the movie does the Stoner suggest that W was insincere. The film showed no determination on W’s part to do anything corrupt, nor anything injurious to anyone. W beat W and his family up, but it never questioned that George W. Bush was in his heart always trying to do the right thing.
I wish you people who hate him could at least try to give him that. Even Ollie Stone gives him that.
ARMISTICE DAY AT SAFAWN - REMEMBER WHEN
What W and his team should have done was operate from the fact that a suspended state of war had already existed between the USA and Iraq for all this time. The 1991 Gulf War had ended in an armistice. There was no formal political settlement. W and his team should have explained this to the public and marched in that way. The US had every right to go to war with Iraq pursuant to Sadaam’s refusal to abide by the terms of the 1991 armistice, not because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or possible connections to Al Qaeda. When he expelled the weapons inspectors, that was grounds for the US to resume hostilities legally under international law.
I of course heard someone very important say this on TV, and read it at least once too. I don’t recall the source, but Schwartzkoff signed an armistice in the tent at Safwan that remained in place indefinitely, not a Treaty of Kuwait. The terms at the tent were still operative in early 2003.
VULCANS – THE HAWKS WHO INSPIRED THE WAR OF 2003
They were named after the God of fire and these are the top six “Vulcans” who both ran the war, and influenced the foreign policy thinking of President W.
Donald Rumsfeld
Paul Wolfowitz
Condi Rice
Dick Cheney
Richard Armitage
Colin Powell
There were other lesser vulcans, but these are “the best and the dimmest.”.
RUMMY
Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense until he resigned under a storm of criticism in 2007. Rumsfeld was nicknamed “Rummy” when he was working for Richard Nixon's White House as a security advisor as the tender age of 39. His critics at Air America referred to him on the air more than once as “Dummy Rummy” which I think was in poor taste, especially since I made it up.
Rumsfeld was a U.S Navy pilot before he ran for Congress. He was the Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford making him the only person to hold that job under 2 non-consecutive terms.
Rummy was the youngest Secretary of Defense when he served under Ford, and the oldest Defsec in US history when he served under Bush in 2006.
The left fired mortars at Rumsfeld for the entire time he served under Bush.
DR was often at the center of some controversy. Don could weather most storms, even on the Iraq War, that is until the high ranking military officers began an organized protest against his policies in Iraq.
Rumsfeld offered his resignation in the mail on Election Eve 2006, so Bush didn't get the chance to accept it until after he opened it which was after the votes were in. A few Republican candidates wished that Rumsfeld had resigned a day or two before the election. He was the lightning rod for so much criticism on the war that a more timely resignation might have helped the party in a general way.
But the war improved and was won in Iraq after he resigned, so his cloud of failure sort of cleared up over the last five or six years as of this writing in 2012.
I would love to meet him. He is very articulate.
WOLFIE
Paul Wolfowitz is on the Mt Rushmore of bad guys in the Bush war cabinet, at least in the minds of the left. Wolfowitz is one of the “neocons” who masterminded the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in 2003 and sold the idea to the Texan redneck President.
Wolfowitz graduated from Cornell University at Ithaca where he acquired the nick-name “Wolfie” for his lack of interest in girls (sort of like when a fat guy is named “tiny”)
Wolfowitz had a father that taught math at Cornell, but Paul drifted towards politics and international relations where the numbers may not always add up but they always count for a great deal.
PW became a disciple of the famous author Alan Bloom who was teaching at Ithaca when he wasn't writing poetry under the famous “suicide waterfall.” Bloom wrote the highly influential book, Closing of the American Mind” in 1987, after Wolfie graduated. Bloom was in turn a disciple of Leo Strauss, who apparently is one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. I had read Bloom's book and was feeling pretty good about myself when reading about Wolfowitz until I got to Strauss. I never heard of the guy and he is even more important apparently than Bloom. I had only heard of Bob Strauss the soft-spoken yet caustic Dem, and the guys who wrote the waltzes. Leo Strauss may have written a more powerful tune than either Johann or Bob Strauss. More homework.
Wolfowitz went on to teach at Yale and found his way up to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George Herbert Walker Bush Administration.
Wolfowitz was one of the few voices who were definitely upset when the United States ended the war in Iraq when it did in 1991. Ten years later there were 200 million Americans screaming that “we should have finished the job!” but at the time of the Iraqi defeat and the highway of death, 1% of 1% was saying it. Wolfie was one of those. Paul disagreed with Colin Powell that further military operations would serve no useful purpose except to make America look like sadistic butchers. Wolfowitz thought that a few more days of war would have destroyed the republican Guard and probably led to the removal of Sadaam Hussein from power. It is ironic to me that the left screamed just as loudly as the right that George HW Bush “should have finished the job!” yet none of them think of Wolfowitz as anything less than a slimy scum war mongerer, and he was the only one sticking up for their point of view at the time.
Wolfowitz is one complex life and trying to give him a brief treatment is equivalent to trying to write a two paragraph biography of Aaron Burr.
The left is almost always anti-Israel when it comes to US policy in the Middle East, so his Jewishness is a factor. Some right-wing lefties (how else do you describe a left wing radical who sticks up for right wing Arab states vs Democratic Israel?) believe that his Jewish heritage influences his anti-Arab thinking. Some Arab writers speak of his Jewishness rather plainly and with undisguised anti-semitic style.
007 ARMITAGE
Dick Armitage is another key member of the neocon vulcans. When I was a freshman at Umass Boston he came to give a lecture. I confronted him with several hostile questions about Vietnam and we almost had it out in the parking lot later on.
I'm kidding. Rich Armitage was a wrestler and football star in high school, then joined the Navy and went to Vietnam. But there wasn't any action off-shore there so he got himself assigned to the fighting units that went upriver in smaller boats. Armitage got into plenty of firefights and kept his cool like Bob Duval in Apocalypse Now. Armitage is a lunatic hawk and a real killer out of a Hollywood spy movie.
Armitage did several tours of duty in Vietnam and was involved either directly or indirectly in the red-hot “Phoenix” program. In other words Armitage was an assassin. He led units of super-fighters into VC held villages where they killed people and then got out before anyone knew what happened. This was one of the guys directing W Bush foreign policy in the Iraq War years!
Rich denies that he was officially a part of the notorious “Phoenix Program” but he did not deny that he assisted members of Phoenix hit squads and that his job was close enough at times.
CONDI
Condaleeza Rice has grown more and more famous for the last 20 years. She is a wizard on Russian history. She always had the Ronald Reagan seal of approval with her scholastic take on the USSR.
“Candy Condi” served as National Security Advisor to both Bush Presidents. I have never been able to say whether I like CR or not after all these years. There was talk of her running for President in 2004 and 2008.
People at the top really listen to this woman. Condaleeza might be the most powerful broad in all of American history, when you come right down to it.
I understand that she is also a fine pianist.
Now, at this writing, in April 2012 there is talk of her as Mitt Romeny’s running mate. She will certainly be strong on national security. The question is, if Romney died in office, would a Condi Presidency be too strong on national security. After all, she is one of the architects of the take-over the Middle East in order to prevent another 911 policy of George Bush. Would a Condi Rice Administration conclude that it was time to invade Iran and put and end to that threat, even if it costs 10,000 American lives?
I think she is a bit like Rumsfeld in that people can’t figure out their personality, and it bothers a lot of them too. People like Rice and Rummy just always have their mind on some problem solving work and do not bother to project much personality. That social image game just isn’t even on their minds. No time for that. They end up being called enigmatic but they could care less, they just have work to do.
ROVE
Now we’re past the top Vulcans. Here’s some other names around W.
Karl Rove was a true intimate of W Bush. KR was the go to guy on political strategy. I don’t think he had too much say on foreign policy, except to be the one considering its domestic political implications.
Here is the man who the left hates more than Satan. I see Rove on TV all the time. He seems all right to me.
The guy who plays Rove in the movie W looked like an alien. Come on. Rove isn’t great looking, but give him a break. That was low.
Rove used to lobby for the big tobacco companies. That was low.
Some political experts say that Rove is way better at the game than James Carville or Dick Morris. Rove set a new standard in the industry the way he handled things in Texas. Junior took him to DC and he ruled as near regent.
JCS - SHLTON, MYERS, SANCHEZ, AND PACE
They weren’t vulcans. They were soldiers at the top. They offered no political opinions at top NSC meetings but they were usually there to listen and offer military input when asked.
The first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under W Bush was General Hugh Shelton. When he stepped down in late 1991, General Richard B. Meyers of the US Air Force took over. The four armed services take turns providing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Shelton represented the Army’s turn.
“Baby Huey” Shelton was 6’5”, about 220 and used to parachute into hot battle zones in Vietnam. He was a Southern boy.
Myers is from Kansas. His life story is an explosive tale. When little Richard was all of two years old he came in the house crying. He had just witnessed a B-24 bomber crash close to his backyard and blow sky high in a mushroom cloud. The Myers family lived close to a US air base.
For years every time a plane flew overhead, the poor little guy would start crying. But Dick overcame that fear and learned to really love planes. Myers grew up to fly over 230 missions over Vietnam, destroying bridges, trains, trucks and people.
General Sanchez took over in Iraq just after the completion of Phase III, the conquest of Iraq. He though that Phase IV meant taking over a pacified country. He had way more on his plate than he could handle and that’s no criticism. Sanchez too the fall for Abu Ghraib.
Whenever any of these generals give a press conference in a crisis it is very boring.
In 2005 General Frankie Pace replaced Myers os the Chairman of the JCS.
BREMER
Another important name for 2003 is Paul Bremmer. He took over the provisional government of Iraq, the CPA in the spring of 2003 and the military commanders didn’t from Shelton, through, Myers, and Sanchez, didn’t like the things he did and didn’t like Paul Bremer. I will have to read his side of it before I maybe make a judgement call. The Generals thought that they were doing a half way decent job or running the occupation (Phase IV as the military called it.) The situation was chaotic, demanding, and at times impossible, but no one could have done a better job of damage control than the military, was the way the military saw it.
Bremer was a State Department guy, a pin-striper with Kissinger books in his satchel. The military resented his decisions and his cologne.
The first thing Bremer did was fire every Iraq official who was a member of the evil Arab Socialist Baath Party. This meant that every hospital, school, power plant, and police station was suddenly leaderless. Under sicko-Sadaam’s regime only Baath party people were in positions of authority. Bremer in mid-May sent the unemployment rate in Iraq from 30 to 60% in one day. These dismissed Baathists were likely to join the insurgency. The army was mostly Baathist, and 400,000 of these chipper souls were now suddenly on the fig-line.
Bremer was at one meeting with the generals and suggested that maybe it was time to start shooting some of the looters and restore order. Someone leaked Bremer’s blackheart statement to the press and it made headlines. The military nobly backed Bremer up by saying that Paul had said it off-handedly out of exasperation. It wasn’t a serious suggestion.
The late night comics had a run with Bremer. Dennis Miller said,
“Sound’s more like Arthur Bremer is in charge over there.”
Artie Bremer is the guy who shot Governor George Wallace. Dennis Miller once became a color man for Monday Night Football. Both events were unspeakable tragedies.
NION
A bunch of Bush hating people with hearts too big to be true got together and formed an organization called “Not in Our Name.” They wrote a manifesto and a lot of celebrities signed it. Don't wage war against innocent people in our name. We don't accept your patriotic leadership, Mr. President because you can't speak for us. Don't wage war on our behalf. Not in our name.
Many powerful political voices signed the NION Manifesto including, Sherman Hemsley, Rick Rockwell, Clark Rockefeller, Ben Roethlesberger, Cameron Diaz, Tom Bergeron, Rick Mears, and Tommy Hilfiger.
BUSH IS A WAR CRIMINAL
That has been the charge by the left since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It has not let up. I have heard Bush called a Nazi at least 500 times in the last year alone. A geography teacher in a Colorado high school was so consistently calling Bush a Nazi war criminal that a student taped the lecture and the recording was played on national radio, stirring a deserved controversy.
“He is just like Hitler!” exclaimed the teacher.
The comparison is so absurd as to defy a response. But this is a standard, not an extreme. This has been the angle of the left since they called Reagan a fascist a few million times in the 60’s 70’s and 80’s.. Never mind intelligent reasoned arguments why we should not have invaded Iraq, and there were many. Just resort to the standard argument of the left. Anyone I don’t like is a Nazi or at least a ‘fascist.’
The Democrats have charged that the USA is not fighting for freedom in Iraq, but rather fighting for American imperialistic hegemony as part of a neo-fascist conspiracy launched by the think-tank punks Rumsfeld, Rove and Wolfowitz.
American troops are dying over there while Democrats rail against their presence there. They demand that they come home. They say we are not fighting for freedom or democracy, but for an unjust war started by an unjust president.
But of course if a Democrat had done the same thing they would have backed him.
On the eve of the impeachment of President Clinton, air strikes were launched against Iraq. Some Republicans unfairly charged that Clinton was trying to divert attention from his trial. Democrats on the other hand supported his strike.
In the House of Representatives a parade of legislators began condemning the impeachment proceedings as unpatriotic in light of the hostilities under way. How can we carry on these impeachment proceedings while our sons and daughters are risking their lives in combat, they said repeatedly, ignoring the fact that we launched cruise missiles into Iraq from the safety of the Persian Gulf and the fact that the USA suffered no casualties in Operation Desert Fox. In October of 1998 Democrat Shirley Jackson Lee prefaced her verbal assault on the evil Republicans by stating, “First of all Mr. Speaker let me thank our troops who are fighting for our liberty.”
Oh. So when Clinton sends cruise missiles into Iraq, killing civilians and saving not a single Iraqi from the murderous wrath of Sadaam, we thank him and our “troops” for fighting for our liberty. But when Bush occupies the most fascist and inhumane nation on earth and tries to replace it with a democracy, he is called a fascist and a Nazi by these same people.
Would Bush get any support from the dead presidents if they could see what he is doing in the name of good vs evil? Woodrow Wilson sounds supportive when he speaks on the Fourth of July in 1914,
“My dream is that the world will never fear
America unless it is engaged in some
enterprise which is inconsistent with the
rights of humanity; and that America will
come into the full light of the day when
all shall know that she puts human rights
above all other rights and that her flag is
not only of America, but of humanity.”
YOU’VE BEEN BAGGED, DAD - 12.13.03
Again, I can’t go along with these military names for operations. ‘Operation Red Dawn?’ Come on, that was an awful movie.
The real name should have been OCS, Operation Capture Sadaam.
The search for Sadaam was a strong ongoing story in the news. Some in the liberal media were kind of gloating that the coalition had failed to capture the elusive leader of Iraq, who had been on the lam since April.
On December 13 2003 the US Army and Marine Corps found him hiding in a hole near Tarkit.
The soldier who looked in and pulled him out of his pitiful pit said to him,
“President Bush sends his regards.”
That was pretty good.
Sadaam said in reply,
“Just don’t take me to Abu Ghraib!”
Capturing the king might not have made much difference in the war, but it helped. Now Sadaam’s loyalist lost any personal incentive to fight on for their leader. The “insurgency” still had years to go, but this one was a nice step for progress on the slow road to victory.
It might not be going too far to say that this is the event that re-elected George Bush. Nobody wants to back a loser, and not capturing Sadaam put a losing tint on the whole US effort in Iraq. This was a big psychological boost for Bush just as election year was about to roll around. Those who wanted to make the War in Iraq the number one reason to turn Bush out of office were no longer in such a strong position. Capturing this clown was great, but the movie Red Dawn is not.
The trial of Sadaam went on a long time and he eventually died dancing. I didn’t follow any of it, and I didn’t watch him die, but most people I knew did.
When the USA captured Usama bib Laden in 2011 there was ten times more celebrating. That’s because Sadaam had already been defeated and was just as loser fugitive. Osama at the time of his capture was still waging an active war against the USA, the West and any Islamic state that was even cvil to those two groups. People tend to forget that al Qaida directs most of its violence, not against the West, but against Islamic states that cooperate with the west. The 911 attacks got the big press, but more al Qaeda violence is committed against Muslims in Muslin states than against Americans in America.
I almost felt sorry for Sadaam. I said almost. He was such a pathetic figure, unshaven, dirty, hungry, thirsty, hiding in a hole with a pile of cash and 7 cans of Bumble Bee tuna to live on, and no can-opener. He grew up in a brutal home, a brutal environment, and his brutality was the result of what he was exposed to. He rose to power in a brutal society rather than let that brutal society devour him. I’m not saying I’d like to go to a ball game with him, but, unlike Osama, he has a cover story. Osama had money and power and 70 wives and he still wanted to kill innocent civilians every day in order to get a good night sleep. Sadaam killed more out of paranoia and self-preservation, however misguided. He was very much like his idol, Stalin in that way.
A STORY THAT SENT TINGLE UP MY SPINE - APRIL 2004 - SHAME ON US(A)
CBS broke the story first in April 2004. United States troops had tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners for months at BCF, the Baghdad Correctional Facility. BCF became better known as, ‘Abu Ghraib.’
Abu has been a media sensation from the time it broke until even the present day in 2012. It represents a victory for the leftists in the U.S. and all over world who hate the military per se, and the U.S. military in particular. This validated all their angry rhetoric.
The abuses weren’t anything remotely close to what the North Vietnamese did to John McCain every day for five years, but by United States standards, it was torture. Some of the abuse was sexual and I will say no more. Humiliation was key. Sleep deprivation, and other slick physical tortures that leave no verifiable scars was the way to do it.
There was some ‘water-boarding’ at AG and I want to say something about that.
I put a mental block on water-boarding’ and to this day I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know. If I can avoid anything nasty I try to. I never saw Theisman’s leg. When I read a paragraph describing water-boarding in a book I underline nothing and a month later I forgot it. But I do know that it involves water and it’s physical torture.
The left went bananas on Abu Ghraib, blaming Bush and his insane militarist regime.
I guess George is responsible in the end. Too much cheerleading, as in ‘you soldiers are all heroes who can do no wrong.’ All this patriotic praise for the military trickles down to the American people, and so he is partly accountable. But each of us are just as accountable in reverse. The mass at the bottom of the pyramid are the foundation of the nation. The President reads the people more than he controls them. I’m the one who made a “smash the towel-heads’ joke at a comedy club. I pitched in to Abu Ghraib too.
Most Republicans I knew just couldn’t put the jingo brakes on. At least I could do that much. They defended the torture. I heard this all the time! They confided in me because they knew I was a conservative. They had various reasons why it was ok. It wasn’t really torture, how else can you stop a nuclear attack on New York City, the enemy tortures and even beheads our guys, so enough is enough. I was actually surprised how many right-wingers defended it. If the United States has to become what it hates in order to prevent terrorist attacks, then what’s the point of living here?
I think the only part of this story that has been neglected is the disproportionate number of female U.S. soldiers who were guilty of the abuses. I have been passenger flying for many years and I always notice at the security clearance, it’s the female TSA’s who usually have the macho attitude. You can interpret that your own way, as I do. I think the same syndrome was in play at the BCF.
My friend Jimmy Tingle was a star on Sixty Minutes II. He did the humor segment in 1999 and 2000, essentially being Andy Rooney II. He did a great job and we were so thrilled to see him on there after the years together in the clubs.
The Bush Administration had asked Sixty Minutes II to delay the story until the US government had time to look into it and maybe start punishing the guilty. Chairman JCS Myers spoke with the top CBS execs and more or less begged them to consider how much trouble this could stir up for everyone. American troops might die because this story is released with the Islamic backlash.
CBS actually did its patriotic duty for a couple of weeks, but when CBS found out that a magazine was going to release the story any day, Vice President at CBS Ross Bickford called General Myers and said he had to air the story. Myers said,
“I understand Mr. Bickford, but I’d like to add one thing.”
“What’s that, Mr Chairman?”
Then Myers hung up on him.
BAGRAM 2002 - DISCOVERY 2004
The photos and the story from Abu Ghraib set off a storm of protest all over the world against the United States. But there was something worse. During the Congressional investigation into Abu Ghraib, it was also discovered that in December 2002, two Afghani detainees were beaten to death by American interrogators. No one had been beaten to death at Abu Ghraib.
One of the victims was a cab driver who had strayed too close to the American airbase at Bagram. The Americans had no evidence on this guy. Yet they string him up by his wrists and beat him on the legs for about, oh, 20, maybe 22 hours. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they were chanting These macho all-American pinhead patriots cut him down for more interrogation later on and were surprised to find that he was dead. They’d seen too many moves where a guy gets beaten for hours during an interrogation, and then two scenes later he’s back in the movie with a band-aid on his cheek. In real life the guy dies, you disgraceful fascist fools. Why didn’t you suffocate him to death by shoving the Bill of Rights down his throat while you’re at it.
But here is the best part. The United States knew all about this incident, hid it from the press, and no one thought it might be a good idea to go over the rules of interrogation with the people who were setting up shop at Abu Ghraib. In other words, if the US military had simply applied common sense correction of its procedures at correctional facilities in the war zone, the Abu Ghraib thing never would have happened, and the US probably could have kept the murders at Bagram Airport quiet or who knows how long.
ELECTION YEAR 2004
Bush-bashing was at fever pitch as campaign year rolled around.
The war in Iraq was unpopular. If I had the deciding vote at the Bush cabinet meeting I would have said no. But now that it’s done the USA should stay the course and I take some satisfaction in knowing that if any Middle Eastern country tried anything now, the US is armed and dangerous and in a position to do something about it immediately. This time unlike the Carter rescue mission, if three US our copters crash, there are plenty more where that came from.
George Bush can’t say ‘nuclear.’ He pronounces it ‘nuke u lar.’ The guy in charge of the nuclear weapons can’t pronounce them, He was a male cheerleader in college. He makes embarrassing mistakes in his speeches. W has his negatives, but so what? 2004 was a choice between two men, not 700. I chose Bush.
LIEUTENANT KERRY
I didn’t like the way John Kerry ran as a Vietnam War hero instead as the Vietnam War protester, which is what made him famous. He offered up his performance as a soldier as a substitute for being frank on the issues. Kerry flip-flopped on Iraq repeatedly. I never knew what his plans were to get the US out of there. He had a lot of vague suggestions about gradual troop withdrawal that sounded like the Nixon campaign of 1968. Is Kerry going to Iraqi-ize the war? Be clear! I had no choice but to vote for Bush if only because he’s still the antidote to Jimmy Carter.
The campaign was dominated by the issue of Kerry’s truthful or not truthful story of his service in Vietnam. A book came out called Unfit for Command in which a bitter gang of former Vietnam vets, led by John O’Neil claimed that Kerry was a fraud who was not liked or respected by most of his fellow boatmen. Unfit claims that Kerry fabricated his first purple heart in order to get home earlier than his one year tour requirement, and that he lied about spending Christmas Eve in Cambodia in 1968.
Critics said the book should have been titled Unfit for Publication.
Senator McCain of Arizona called the swiftboat campaign against Kerry dishonorable, but JM was a pilot and a POW. His military loyalty supersedes his Party loyalty any day. Mac was not a swiftboat veteran so how does he know?
All of the commentators on the political shows (all presumed liberal unless showcased as conservative) fumed over this vile and inaccurate book by these no good bums. They knew that Kerry’s own book about his war service is complete truth and that the Swiftboat gang were liars in the pay of the big money Republicans. As if they were there.
The Dems stressed that Kerry volunteered to fight for his country while Bush ran from serving his country because in December of 1972 he seems so have been goofing off somewhere and was nowhere to be found as a National Guard pilot.
When we were approaching draft age on East 5th St in South Boston in 1967-68, there was a lot of time to talk about the Draft while hanging around on doorsteps (we never preferred the corners). The conversation was always “what will you do if you get drafted?”. I couldn’t even fathom the thought and personally I considered fleeing to Canada. I did not want to go and die in Vietnam. But one thing we all agreed on was that if it looks like you were going to get drafted, the wise thing to save your hide was to enlist in the Navy. You were very unlikely to get killed in Vietnam if you were in the Navy. Very very unlikely. It was common knowledge that this was the right call for anyone about to get drafted. One or two of the guys said Air Force but no one ever talked of enlisting in the Army or the Marines. We weren’t political. We liked baseball and girls and did not want to die in Vietnam.
CNN did a 50 minute biography on John Kerry during convention week and it was unequivocally stated and not denied by Kerry that he enlisted in Vietnam because he was almost certainly going to be eligible for the draft. Is that the spirit of volunteerism that we are supposed to so look up to? Film director Oliver Stone volunteered to serve in Vietnam, and in the infantry because he believed in the cause at the time. Kerry volunteered to avoid the draft.
Initially the Navy assigned Kerry to a destroyer the Gridley, where he was serving safely until one day on shore leave he spotted some ‘swift boats.’ This was too JFK to be true. Kennedy and Kerry were from the same state, same party and he had met Kennedy as a teen-ager. When he saw the swift boats it set off the fireworks. These things looked almost identical to John Kennedy’s PT boats. This was kismet. Kerry wanted so much to be like Kennedy that this was the reason he volunteered for swift boat duty. To be like Kennedy and to help run for President. When he was in high school he used to walk by his classmates and they would mockingly sing the notes to Hail to the Chief on kazoos, because he so obviously was planning his life around running for President, and this was before the Navy.
There is another version to the story, besides the one I just told you, which was based on a CNN biography video. The other is from the biography of Kerry by three Boston Globe reporters. Their version is that Kerry volunteered for swiftboat duty because they only patrolled in safe areas near the coastline. Then just as he got approved to command swiftboat #44, an admiral named Grumwalt changed the US Navy policy. From now on, swiftboats would go upriver into the most dangerous enemy waters. Their mission would be to draw enemy fire so they could rake the shore with casualties.
Kerry showed poor character when he tried to get a Purple Heart for a little scratch mark on his arm, no worse than the burn I got tonight trying to use a cigarette lighter to burn a loose thread off a dark red dress shirt. He was wrong to say that he wrote an anguished letter home wondering why Nixon was sending him into Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968, since Nixon didn’t take the oath of office until January 1969.
However, both of these charges have redeemers. Kerry clearly showed almost amazing courage under fire on many occasions after the first skirmish where he wanted that bogus purple heart. His men admired him and he led them well. And he got legitimately wounded twice and got two bona fide Purple Hearts.
The Swifties also said that Kerry was not in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968. But the upriver missions to the Mekong border were very secret, and he probably was in Cambodia, and it could just be an honest mistake to mix up the dates and the Presidents.
In the famous book and movie, The Red Badge of Courage, the hero runs away the first time he sees battle. He is ashamed. 287 pages later he is a highly decorated Civil War hero for the Union Army. I no more hold the first Purple Heart story against Kerry than I hold the first battle against the hero of the Red Badge of Courage. JFK won a Silver Star. The Silver Star is serious business.
This chapter has been revised in 2011 and 2012 - During the 2004 campaign I bought into the Swiftie charges more than I do now. As for George Bush, even if we assume the worst about his missing months, it must be repeated that by 1972 no one was being sent to Vietnam anymore, no one was needed, no one was being asked. If Bush was AWOL in some jerky way, it was not at the expense of others who were fighting and dying. In fact the complete end of the war and the draft was one month away! This was the backdrop and time-frame of Bush’s infamous military cowardice.
MCCAIN FOR DEMOCRATIC VP - YEAH, RITE
When John Kerry was looking around at vice presidential possibilities the idea of John McCain came up. There was a Boston Herald banner headline on it. What a joke that was to me. I can be plenty naïve at times, but on this one the world was, not me. McCain is a Republican's Republican. The whole idea was idiotic. People were just tossing it around to spice up the campaign and politicians would smile and say, “Hey that's not such a bad idea!” and the reporters ran with it as though those politicians who said that took it a zillionth of an ounce seriously. McCain would poison Kerry’s filet mignon and then roll back every Democratic piece of legislation ever passed. Come on. What was supposed to happen if Kerry won and died in office? Was a Republican supposed to take over?
When the were impeaching Clinton, the Democrats kept shouting about how the Republicans were simply trying to overturn the results of a legitimate election. But if Clinton were removed from office, Al Gore, a Democrat would be the re-fill.
Now here were the Democrats leaking stories about how Kerry was considering John McCain as the veep. McCain is an extremely conservative Republican and this story was demented. There was no way in hell. I got very annoyed every time I heard it. Kerry was cleverly evasive about the McCain VP rumors. Kerry was simply sucking up to conservative voters down the road who would remember that he was once considering McCain. Now experts on TV casually mention that McCain “had been Kerry’s first choice.” Ridiculous. And McCain was so flattered that he formally announced he was not interested. He should have said that it was an untenable idea to return to the nightmare of 1796 when the USA had a President and a VP (President Adams, Federalist and Jefferson VP Republican) from different parties with some poor results. The thought of another 1796 being planned voluntarily is especially idiotic.
During the campaign it was discovered that Kerry was not an Irish name, at least not in Kerry’s case. His Jewish grandfather had changed his name in order to avoid discrimination. The original Jewish name was O’Sullvan.
Kerry had never lied and said he was Irish. But for decades he let everyone presume he was.
FOUR MORE DUMB YEARS
Kerry put up a fight but Bush won re-election, and this time won the popular vote too. The occupation of Iraq has cost over 2,000 killed and it looks like Hillary is going to be the next president. In 2006 the gambling odds were 11-4 for Hillary Clinton as the next President of the USA. The next best bet was John McCain at 7-1. VP Cheney is not in the hunt, but he does like to go hunting.
Bush’s second cabinet
Secretary of State--------------------Colin Powell
'Condi'
Secretary of Defense --------------Donald Rumsfeld
Robbie Gates
Director of Homeland Security----Tom Ridge
Att. General--------------------------John Ashcroft
Secretary of Treasury -------------Donald Trump Jr.
“STOLE IT”
This time the voices were not quite as shrill and not as ubiquitous as in 2000, but the Democrats in the aftermath of the 2004 Election accused the Republicans of stealing another one, just like they did in 2000. One reporter confronted Bush by asking the question that was not a question, “Many in the press think that you stole the Election of 2004. How do you respond?” Bush stared at him in disgust and just repeated the phrase back to him, “Stole it.” Then he shook his head and said nothing more. It was one of my favorite Bush moments.
The main accusation is that there was voter fraud on a large scale in three swing states, especially Ohio. The Democratic members of the Judiciary committee got together and produced a 101 page report summarizing the charge. It was called Preserving Democracy, What Went Wrong in Ohio. It is a powerful document but the fact that it's writers were bitter partisan Democrats means that it isn't the Holy Bible either.
Author Marc Crispin Miller is all over this one in his book, Fooled Again. Miller says the Election of 2004 was stolen in a criminal way in several states. And those who respect objectivity should listen when Marc Crispin Miller speaks. The man wrote for Al Franken on Air America, so you know you are getting the truth. the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Che.
MOORE IS LESS
And now a sidebar on one of the most undeservingly famous Americans of my time. He is the most famous spokesperson from the left today, and has been for almost a decade. More than Howard Zinn, more than Hilary Clinton, more than Noam Chomsky, Ted Kennedy or Dennis Kucinich, Michael Moore was the voice of the left in the W era. He has written several books and made several movies. His work has little depth, and he is never impressively literate. It's all superficial obvious tirades against the right in order to make a big name and big bank account for his inarticulate self. He has talent as a movie-maker and everything emanates from that legitimate core.
All 317 pounds of him sat with Jimmy Carter at the DNC. Two weeks later John McCain condemned him in a speech to the RNC. Moore was in attendance as a hostile observer. He stood and doffed his Seattle Mariners cap with a smug smile while the crowd cheered against him. I have read chapters of several of his books in bookstores at airports. He is rarely insightful but always incite-ful. Moore is the ultimate divider. Conservatives hate his guts but he thrives on that energy and makes millions off it.
Its bad enough that he writes with a freshman style (“some people say our teacher’s suck but maybe it's our country that sucks”) but Michael Moore has also written a recent book that is packaged dishonestly.
I heard that he had a new book out that consisted of a collection of letters home from Iraq by US soldier’s who were against the war.
Heavy premise. A collection of letters home from soldiers in Iraq who are against the war in Iraq. Hmmm.
I made a deal before I went to the bookstore. If the book is fat and packed with legitimate letters without fake blank space to fatten up the page number total I will be impressed. It might not make me take his side overall. but it would be an impressive statement for his side. I’ve had plenty of misgivings about this invasion/occupation they call a war, and I was willing to factor in this book, if it was legitimate.
I went to the bookstore and checked out the book for a half an hour.
It was tiny! Not only was the book shockingly small, it was filled with a ridiculous amount of blank space. Each letter was couched north and south with huge amounts of blank space. There were blank pages between sections, pages consisting of only one-line quotes. Every official business page at the beginning was counted as a numbered text page.
What was far worse, there weren’t even enough of these lefty-in-the-military letters to fill the book within these weak parameters. He had to fill up almost one third of the work with letters from relatives. Good grief, are you kidding me? Is there a single soldier that has ever served in any war in all of human history that did not have at least one relative who was either against the cause for which that person was fighting, or set against that person going to fight for it? This book actually thinks it’s making a hot political point when the author cites an anti-war letter he got from a left-wing relative of a soldier in Iraq! Did Moore get around to asking these moms and step-dads whom they voted for in say, 1984 or 1992? Most were surely Reagan-Bush haters from way back when. A huge part of the picture is simple heated partisan politics. Many of these same scribes would be proud if their son served in a conflict promoted by a Clinton or a Kennedy. They are furious that their son’s and daughters are serving in a Republican war, not a war, per se. So so-what if a conservative young man who volunteered to back his country has a mother who knows who Michael Moore is and when she heard he was writing a high-profile book about letters against the war had the smarts to write Mike a letter condemning their son’s participation? So what? I mean, big deal, really. It's her big chance to get published through the fat man’s powerful liberal publishing connection. Each soldier has a dozen close friends and relatives that are ripe for exploitation.
The publishers included letters from the first Gulf War in 1991. False advertising. The alleged premise of the book was to say that this war in Iraq is so wrong that we have enough letters from soldiers condemning it to create an actual book. Impressive except that it is an actual lie. There are not enough anti-Administration letters from Iraq to make a real book (if there are enough then Mike Moore is lazy and forgot to run down enough of them in). So he cheats by adding letters over and above the premise on the jacket. He really should have written a book called “Letters Hating Bush by College Students, Partially Employed Bohemians, and College Drop-outs in Show Business” He could have printed a twelve volume work every other month.
The point of the bonus letters from non-soldiers in Iraq is not to add to the political leverage of the argument, its just to build a brick house with straw. He had no choice but to flesh it out with letters from relatives, letters from past wars and a lotta blank space.
Now what about a book filled with letters from men and women who are proud to serve their country, proud to support the mission, people who may also feel that if one or two family members are against the mission so be it. This is not their decision. This is between me and my conscience. What about those letters? Could they actually fill a book? They could fill several, and without hamburger-helper blank spaces, or letters from second cousins at home who support the mission.
The first duty of every soldier is not to engage in the trafficking of political ideas while on the job. The soldier is the apolitical instrument of the civilian leadership, a leadership which makes all strategic political decision including and especially in the military arena. By publishing this book in the first place and in encouraging and seeking out these letters, Moore is inciting members of our military service to dereliction of duty. Of course, retired generals and admirals are routinely on the TV criticizing administration policy. But they key word is retired. They are not doing so while they are still wearing the uniform. They know better. The same rules apply for the soldier. MacArthur got fired by Truman for political insubordination. A soldier lives with a smaller version of the same rules and the Moore “book” is trying to turn the grunt into an unwitting MacArthur. He takes their private correspondence and turns it into public military disloyalty.
Michael Moore is a heavy hitter. His real name is Smith but he got the nickname “Moore” because of what he shouts at the end of every meal.
KATRINA
At the end of August 2005 one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States took place along the Gulf coast as Hurricane Katrina devastated the City of New Orleans. Other areas such as Biloxi and Mobile were hit hard but the hurricane hit New Orleans dead center. More than 2,000 people died in Katrina. National magazines showed dead Americans laying on top of the roofs of their homes. One nursing home was sunk and all the occupants died. The New Orleans Superdome where NFL games are regularly played became an emergency shelter for thousands of stranded people, most of them black.
At first it had seemed that the city had survived the storm just barley with a lot of damage and a few deaths. But then the levees broke and all hell broke loose. Half the city was submerged in a great horror. The scenes of the business district on the waterfront looked like something out of World War II documentary. People were crying on the news begging for help and looking for lost loved ones. No decent American was not overcome with sorrow at these scenes. It made people think twice about the security of life itself when a vibrant city like New Orleans could suddenly become a scene of such carnage.
The left relentlessly blamed Bush for the large death toll. It was charged that he was slow to respond because most of the victims were black and he was a racist. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was criticized brutally for not doing enough to prepare for the emergency and not doing enough to help out after it struck. It was like the cop who shows up and faces gunfire to stop a crime and then gets hollered at by the street corner crowd for arriving so late. It was wrong to blame those who came to help for not arriving in time and not doing it well enough. Mayor Ray Nagan of New Orleans used profanity on a regular basis when talking to the media as he condemned Bush, FEMA and everyone else who came to help. It was all so unfair. No hurricane had ever killed 2,000 people in the US before and yes, better preparations would have helped, but after the fact we all know what should have been done in all things. If Clinton had responded in the exact same way the criticism would have been one fourth what it was for Bush. It was really a matter of people who already had a passionate hatred for all Republicans and the President in particular, and they just used the deaths at New Orleans as a pretext to broadcast the hate that was in their hearts long before the first raindrop fell.
Later when people began to return to the evacuated city Nagan told the media that “New Orleans has always been a chocolate city and I expect it will remain a chocolate city.” Some white people thought this represented a racial double standard and that no white mayor could have made such a statement in reverse without being called a racist. In the first mayoral election after the hurricane, Nagan was re-elected by a comfortable margin.
I want to make a bold and daring assertion about the real cause of the tragedy at New Orleans. My own theory is that it was the weather that caused the deaths.
Poverty was the second cause. Everyone in New Orleans was given ample warning to evacuate the city but there were thousands of people who did not have cars and lived in poor areas. How were they supposed evacuate without cars? A few died because they were stubborn fools, but most died because they were old or poor or both and did not have cars. Poverty killed more people at New Orleans than FEMA did.
BUSHWOMEN
According to Air America airhead Laura Flanders, all of the women in the Bush Administration were no good witches. Her book Bushwomen is a delight to read. That's because I enjoy being mad.
Her bitch-list,
Laura Bush – The first lady campaigns for her husband and sticks up for him and Laura sees this as proof of her perfidy.
Karen Hughes – If they could manage it, Bush spokeswoman Karen would be burned at the stake as the Air America crew cheered and laughed.
Condaleeza Rice – Bush gets no credit at all for naming an African-American woman to the post of Secretary of State. Instead Laura Flanders “proves” that Condi is “complicit in human rights crimes.”
Elaine Chao – The Secretary of Labor is a person who hates labor and desperately want to do everything in her power to hurt and demean the working men and women of this country. Rite on, Laura! Rite on!
Gale Norton – Secretary of the Interior – All Gale wants to do according to Flanders is destroy all the national parks and give them to oil companies to exploit for the sake of profits. Norton can only pull it off in a couple of cases, but if she had her way and Bush had his way, there would be no national parks at all, just condos for Condi and all her rich Republican dirty dog friends.
Katherine Harris – Secretary of State for Florida – The wicked witch of the South, Kathi stole the election of 2000 for W. Bush. The Air America gift shop sold Katherine Harris dart boards for $29.95. Katherine Harris is evil. Eeeeeviiil!
SUPREME SAM ALITO OCT 2005- JAN 2006
President Bush named his second Supreme Court nominee on Halloween, 2005. It was Samuel Alito. Apparently he scared the daylights out of the American Civil Liberties Union. They officially opposed the Alito nomination, only the second time they had done so (Judge Bork was the first.)
Alito's name went to the Senate in November. Hearings reached a climax the last week in January 2006. Many Democratic Senators considered him a right-wing bum in the mold of Clarence Uncle Thomas. Senator Kerry reported for duty and tried to block Alito's nomination through filibuster. But it didn't work, buster.
The Senate confirmed Alito by a score of 58-42, one of the lower percentage approvals in the history of the confirmation process.
Alito is a Jersey Catholic boy who knew what he wanted in life and went out and got it. Good for him. In his high school yearbook he wrote that he wanted to someday warm a seat on the United States Supreme Court. He's only the second Italian-American to make the top of the justice system. The first was Luigi Santorelli, appointed in 1876 by Ulysses Grant.
LAY DOWN AND DIE - YOU’RE OUT OF ENERGY
On July 6 2006 Kenny Lay died of a heart attack in Colorado while vacationing with his family.
Kenneth Lay was the former President of the Houston based Enron Corporation and was awaiting sentencing for conviction on securities fraud charges. Lay was looking at 30 years in jail.
The Enron scandal involved insider trading that robbed people of millions of dollars. Lay sold off stock in Enron for three years and then Enron went under, as he knew it would. Working class investors couldn't sell their stock. The rich were allowed to get even more rich before the company went down.
Enron was one of the top corporations in America from 1995 to 2001. Fortune magazine named it one of the top five corporations in America four years in a row. But an intrepid reporter exposed the truth. It was overstuffed with false assets and artificially inflated stock, and anyone with a brain should sell while they can. Lay and his VP Ratso Skilling sold off their stock while forbidding their 20,000 employees to sell theirs. In fact they encouraged their little investors to buy more stock and started a propaganda campaign within the company showing that Enron still had a bright future. When Enron collapsed Lay and Skilling had made about 300 million and the rest of the investors, large and small had lost three billion.
The trial put Skilling on the fire with Lay and lasted for most of the spring of 2006. Both scums were convicted. Lay was lambasted on 60 Minutes and a host of another angry news shows. Kenny had an outstanding reputation as a likable, personable socially active big shot. A lot of the top media people had met him personally and liked him. This of course increased their bitterness. A month after being convicted, and two months before sentencing, he died, and there is an incorrect date on his autopsy.
W. Bush attended Lay's funeral. The left cites the Enron scandal as proof that W. Bush is corrupt too. If you are friends with someone who is convicted of something and you attend the funeral, you are corrupt too.
After Ken lay down in the box, the charges against him were declared “vacant.” This meant that legally he was never tried and convicted. This made it tougher for the victims of his fraud to go after the 44 million he left to his family.
There is a popular conspiracy theory that Lay is alive and faked his own death with the help of wealth and political connections. He is perhaps in Tahiti selling stock to Jim Morrison and Andy Kaufman.
MARK FOLEY SCANDAL 06
In late 2006 Republican Congressman Mark Foley of Florida kept the headline writers busy by falling from office at the bad end of a sex scandal. CMF had sent sexually explicit e-mails to a young male page. When Markie Mark got bagged he tried to get out of it by pleading that he was an alcoholic and that he had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest as a child. That seems to be the main excuse for people in trouble nowadays.
The Democrats had a field day. Foley’s boyfriend was just that, a boy. Unlike Clinton who sexually assaulted an adult named Juanita Brodrerick leaving no evidence to prove it, Foley was dumb enough to commit a sexual crime with an underage page, and leave an e-mail footprint to prove it. Foley had to resign.
This was big news at the time, but as the years went by, this, and about 100 other political sex scandals, have been largely forgotten. In the early 70’s it was Wilbur Mills controlling headlines for weeks and weeks and now, hardly anyone even remembers it, and they young have zero awareness that Wilbur Mills ever existed, let alone that the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee once got naked with a bimbo in the Washington Mall reflecting pool while they were both drunk. Mills had his ways and his means.
THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY CONSERVATIVE SOULS
The New York Times in the George Bush era too often slanted its news coverage to try and bring this man down and put the Dems back in.
For openers, the Times push-polled and used weighted polls.
There are all types of push polling, but my favorite is the slick question giving misleading results and an opportunity for even more misleading interpretations.
Lets say it's November of 2002 and you want to ask the American people how they feel about the war in Afghanistan.
You could ask in a poll, “Do you think that America made the right decision in invading Afghanistan?”
You know you'd get 64% yes, 31% no and 6% undecided.
But instead you ask in the poll, “Do you think Bush can expect an easy and quick victory in Afghanistan?”
Now you'll get 78% no 18% yes and 4% don't no.
Now you can report that 78% of the American people do not support the Bush war in Afghanistan.
Today you can ask, “Do you think the Obama Administration has done all it can to solve the crime problem in our inner cities?” You might get 55% yes.
But you can cleverly ask, “Do you think the Obama Administration has solved the crime problem in our inner cities.”
Now you get 87% no, and you run with that. “87% of the American people do not think Obama has done a very good job with the crime problem.
I can do a show in Vegas and the survey card on the way out could ask, “Was the that the best stand-up show you ever saw in your life?”
The next day I'm fired because apparently, “98% of the customers weren't happy with the quality of your show.”
The Times had a long history of being admirably objective, but in these Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama years it no longer is. It is now a marching and chowder society for the Democratic Party. (I'm not completely sure what that is, but Vin Scully uses it all the time, so I thought I'd throw that in.)
I have always known that the Boston Globe is partisan Dem, but the world news agencies do not follow the leads of the Globe. But when the New York Times asserts itself in a slanted story, the story and its bias spreads all around the world. And you know that a lie can travel the Globe before the truth can get out of bed.
Weighted polls are when there are more Dems in the interview than Republicans, but its close enough that you balance them out and say its a true cross sampling from all parties. As long as the margin of error is small, then its in-bounds. But when the pattern never evens out, that is, when the Democrats are always weighted up and the Republicans weighted down, the bias is proven.
Everything else aside, the writing quality of the NYT is the best.
DEM DEMS TAKE BACK THE CONGRESS - NOVEMBER 2006
The mid-term elections of 2006 were a major victory for the Democratic Party. By the thinnest of margins the Democratic candidates gained control of both Houses of the Congress. The Senate would be 51-49 in favor of the Democrats beginning in January of 2007. The Democratic Party needed 15 victories in the House of Representatives to win control there also, and after a two day count of votes in a couple of close races they did exactly that.
The morning after the election Donald Rumsfeld finally resigned as Secretary of Defense. An impressive array of critics had been calling for Rummy to resign for some time. To some extent he had made too many needlessly controversial statements for too many years and months, and had become a liability in a general sort of way. But more than that it was a sop to critics of the War in Iraq.
I SWEAR ON THE KORAN TO PROTECT THE US CONSTITUTION
The new crop of Congressman were sworn in on January 3 2007. Keith Ellison won his battle for the 5th Minnesota district, in spite of the fact that he was a Muslim in a paranoid of Muslims land called America.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi swore him in. But Ellison used the Koran instead of the Bible. The righteous right were outraged at this, but I could have cared less. In fact, I wish all religious referents were removed from all official Congressional business. It's offensive that a chaplain still begins the major Congressional sessions with a formal prayer. You can't pray in school, but you have to pray to start a Congressional session. That is quite the double-standard.
In any case, the individual swearing in ceremonies are just decorative. The only swearing in ceremony that counts is the one they all take together on the House floor. The individual ceremonies are for photographs and local district consumption, or to please and thrill the individual. Many Congressmen do not even do the individual swearing in thing. It's strictly an optional extra. So Ellison had to swear on the Bible with everyone else in the grand ceremony, and asked for a Koran individual event to express his personal faith.
Why don't they just make them pledge their word of honor and maybe swear on the flag and the souls of their families? That might do just as well. (When comedy actor Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate seat he actually asked if he could take the oath on his own book, Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and he said something unprintable when they told him, no.)
MOVE ON - TO A RELEVANT NAME
Moveon.org may be largely responsible for the Dem comeback of 2006. This org anization is a totally left wing outfit whose purpose is to demonize all Republicans and defend all Democrats. It is always accusing the Republicans demonize all Democrats. Moveon.org is a divider not a uniter. In 2009 it boasted 3 million members.
In October 2007 Moveon.org took out a full page ad in the New York Times in which it claimed that US Army General Petreus, the commander in Iraq, was “cooking the books for the White House.” In other words he was not a man of integrity and was assisting in validating known lies about the situation in Mesopotamia.
The headline in the ad read,
“General Patreus, or General Betrayus.”
There was a lot of reaction to the ad, most of it condemnation of course. Liberals are always blackmailed by military men than cannot be seen to offend, because it might lead to accusations of a lack of patriotism, a political poison-dart. Here was moveon in your face calling a General a lying scoundrel.
The United States Senate proposed a resolution condemning the moveon attacks, no less than 25 senators voted against the resolution, all of them Democrat, but it passed by 75-25.
Moveon started as a Clinton-defender web based organization during those scandals.
CRUISE TO NOWHERE
Many individuals connected to the Bush Administration were charged with criminal indictments. But the left makes it seem like deputy secretaries of secondary offices who get caught in a corrupt private enterprise are the same thing as the Teapot Dome or Credit Mobilier. No one really close to W got caught doing anything so heinous that it tainted his reputation for personal integrity.
One of the scandals involved Jack Abramoff. He was a lobbyist who was briefly a member of the Bush transition team in late 2000. Abramaoff was convicted in 2006 of corporate crime and sentenced to six years. He got out in December of 2010.
Jack ripped off the Suncruz Casino line to earn his prison stripes. These were 11 big yachts that sailed off the US coast to a distance of exactly 3 miles and then everyone started gambling. It was high-roller stuff, too. That's how these excursions got the name 'Cruise to Nowhere.' My wife is a travel agent and she used to book it. A Chinese woman, who could barely speak English, came in one day and asked repeatedly, “Where is nowhere?” not understanding that it was not a place. With her poor English, no one could explain it to her and she still she asked, “Ok, but where is it? Where is Nowhere?”
The Suncruz line lasted for about 10 years, closing in 2009 after a pretty good run. The owner, the guy that came up with idea, was murdered by the mob. I don't know why and I don't want to know.
CLASSICAL GAS GREENHOUSE KYOTO EFFECT
They call it Global Warming. Comedians like to make jokes about how great it would be if global warming is real because its so cold all the time and we hate it when its cold. But it's obviously serious if man-and-woman-made pollution is really destroying the protective layers of the atmosphere, and it's going to get real hot all over the world, and the farmlands will dry up, and starvation and chaos will rule the earth.
Al Gore has made a new career out of the global warming issue. He made a hit movie about it and I had an opportunity to see it recently on TV but I watched some spy thriller instead and they took it off the cable and now I feel guilty. I should have watched it. I think it won the Oscar for best documentary by a losing presidential candidate.
There are a small percentage of scientists who say that the global warming business is a false alarm. They say that these hot and cold cycles are going to happen anyway, and that the apparent heating up of the earth over the last few decades is just a part of the natural cycle and it will probably cool off later. They say that the earth has survived volcanic eruptions equivalent to ten years of today's pollution and nothing really happened to the planet. They say that the planet is a lot more durable than these left-wing alarmists like Al Gore are telling you.
Conservatives, at least the talk-show variety, generally like to take sides against whatever someone like Al Gore is in favor of. I think the percentage of scientists who believe that global warming is real is more than 90%, so that's good enough for me. I'm with crusader Al Gore on this one.
Now to the Kyoto syndrome. First of all Kyoto is one of the most important cities in Japan, I vacationed there in 1991, and we bombed it pretty bad in World War II.
The Bush-bash-book by Eric Alterman and Marc Green, The Book on Bush, is rough on W for “pulling us out” of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to voluntarily control, limit, and reduce the world-wide emission of air pollution.
In 1992 the United States signed it but Congress wouldn't ratify it. Most of the world ratified it. Through four terms of Clinton and Bush, the Kyoto Protocol was never ratified by the United States. Yet Altrman and Green say that W pulled out,
“President Bush further deflated efforts to reduce carbon dioxide
by removing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol. ... It was
his complete disengagement from the international environmental
process – first refusing to cap greenhouse gasses domestically,
then pulling the United States out of Kyoto – that generated such
worldwide anger.”
Then they quote some European newspapers that were mad at the Republican President. Well, if they said it in Bonn or Paris, in a selected biased sampling, then you must be right and your opponents wrong. I get a head shaking kick out of the left wing books (I try to read them as top priority) that constantly quote European anti-American editorials as proof that we are wrong. First of all, most of these European anti American action editorials are really more a case of anti-Americanism. They just use events as an excuse to vent opposition to both the United States, and it's conservative wing in particular. As if these liberal and anti-American writers in Europe normally try to see the best in American actions and intentions. These American writers flatter and celebrate their comrades in arms across the sea in their brotherly hatred for our President and his evil administration.
The Bush-bashers in America love to quote foreign writers attacking America, as if that proves it. Watch these quotations; they're from Europeans and even they hate Bush! That's the tone. The only way they could really use that tone would be if they were defending him on something and quoted a European writer with a “Even some European writers defended Bush on this one!”
The more they hit him unfairly, the more reason to think Bush might be a good guy.
CLINTON WANTS BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE
In January of 2007, to the surprise of no one, Hillary Clinton threw her pink hat into the ring. The former First Lady would seek the presidency in 2008. How much influence would her husband have if she won? He would have to be the most powerful first lady of all time. He would also be the most unfaithful. None of the other First Ladies had a bad reputation for sleeping around.
NOVEMBER 2007 THE CNN-YOU-TUBE REPUBLICAN DEBATE
Late in November of 20007 came the so-called ‘You-Tube’ debate, complete with commercials, CNN promos, amateur comedy videos, and a tiny TV screen within a giant TV screen (you explain the benefits of that one, I can’t.) You-Tube pumped somebody with big bucks and CNN let a bunch of You-Tube chumps in T-shirts ask questions of the candidates. An atrocious folk singer in a baseball cap sang a four minute comedy song that would get booed off the stage at a real comedy club, but for an uptight presidential debate it was given the big spotlight as merriment. The candidates had to stand there and pretend to smile and laugh as they were lampooned by a rank amateur who can’t sing or write a halfway decent piece of music, that is, even if you somehow thought his lyrics were funny.
CNN presenter Anderson Cooper hosted the debate but all he had his mind on were the ‘You-Tube questioners.’ What an erudite man he proved himself to be. When Fred Thompson’s attack commercial was played on the big screen Coop looked at him and said with a grin, “Senator Thompson .. What’s up with that?” Can you see this guy in 1939, “Mister Hitler, you’ve invaded Poland . now… what’s up with that?” - 1960? “Mr. Nixon, they spat on you in Caracas, what was up with that?”
“What’s up with that?” What’s up with that?
On two occasions when the audience became demonstrative over a candidate's remarks, Cooper admonished them that “Please .. people … these people out there took a long time to formulate and submit these questions on You-Tube. They deserve to be heard.” He wasn’t even thinking about how the candidates needed to be respected!
The technical quality of the You-Tube video was extremely poor. The audio started up with a half a word missing or ended with half a word left hanging. Faces were framed in dark shadows. And just to create a total You-Tube effect, the video of the questioners was reduced to a tiny size. 80% of the screen was filled with useless self-serving infantile dancing graphics.
And why the windbag questions? Anderson Cooper says, “our next You-Tube question comes from Elk’s Tail, Montana,” when the real intro should read, “Our next You-Tube speech with a token question at the end comes from.” The trend in debates nowadays is always give a long speech first, then follow up with a medium length question. They might give a long speech followed by an equally long question, but the one thing they almost never do is give a short question without a soliloquy to set the stage for their question. They do it usually in smug self-satisfied condescending tone, like they are the conscience of the world finally getting a chance to let these bums have it. Then they ask a question after having done right.
My wife and I were both disappointed with the performance of our Governor, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. We just were.
Mayor Giuliani came off ok.
Fred Thompson from the TV show Law and Order came off ok too.
McCain had very good moments and then ruined it with his usual me-monster emotionalisms. John was my main man on Iraq. But I think McCain cannot control his temper and I wouldn’t trust him to be brave enough to accept some small national humiliation if that’s what it took to avoid a silly war. To me, a McCain presidency could lead to a Nuclear War of Jenkin’s Ear.
Congressman Ron Paul was a little too old but the most sincere and the one least made of ego. Paul was the only anti-war R candidate. He wants the troops home from Iraq.
Congressman Duncan Hines of California was so-so. Dunkan had a great moment when all of candidates had pledged to not raise taxes. Duncan took a different stand and said that if there were a national emergency he might of course have to raise taxes, so it would not be honest for him to make that pledge.
What I didn’t like about Romney was that when he attacked his opponents (meaning Giuliani pretty much) he didn’t settle for looking at the audience and the camera and explaining his argument against the other guy. He had to always turn and face the guy he was berating, which I think is rude. Romney showed his shoulder to the audience and camera all night. None of the other’s showed that propensity. The others might do it once or twice but with Romney it was a constant. Verbal aggressions will cover the whole field for your team, Mitt. Don’t add the violence of aggressive body language to what is already a harsh speech in a harsh tone.
I was undecided for the entire campaign. I never hated Hilary even though I’m a partisan conservative. And its not because its my wife’s name too. It’s hubby I disliked. I could liked have Bill if he had only been a better person – most of his decisions as President didn’t get me mad at him like they did a lot of conservatives.
There was one candidate I felt medium about but they never showed his name and my wife and I agreed that it was poor work for CNN to never run the graphics of who was talking. They never missed a chance to not only show the graphic for the You-Tube questioners, they also let them say out loud who they are, where they’re from, and what they do before they even start their opening speech! But actual candidates who speak 15 times never get a graphic below. Below the candidates as they spoke was the text of their question.
So third rate video is not third rate video as long as it comes in under the great You-Tube name. Then the scratchy audio and jumpy video with no coordination in the lips and the bad soundtrack; that’s all a plus now for some reason. A Bell and Howell movie camera from 1970 provides better technical video quality than these You-Tube videos.
What a scam. I was thinking of putting a whole bunch of home made comedy stuff on You Tube. After tonight I’ve changed my mind. I don’t like the tacky selling out to You Tube of a great national institution, the Presidential Debates.
I thought the “Fed-Ex Orange Bowl” was bad enough. Now we have the You-Tube Presidential Debate.” Soon tourists will visit the “Lukoil Liberty Bell” in Philly.
NH PRIMARY JANUARY 2008
Obama had the lead in all the polls leading up to the New Hampshire primary. But the night before the voting, Hillary cried on television in a phony moment for the cameras. It was in response to this question, “As a woman, how do you do it? How do you stay so fantastic?” – She faked tears saying “I just don’t want to see this country slipping backwards.” The rest of her answer was ultra vague about nothing at all but it had an impact. Her weeping moment was the lead story all over the news everywhere. It was as if Bill had coached her. She even added that “its not about who is up and who is down” which is verbatim from Bill’s Inaugural speech of 1993. Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire Primary in a stunning upset by 39 to 37% for Obama
McCain won over plastic Romney for the Republicans. At least Romney had fake cried over something important.
MICHIGAN
Mitt Romney won the Michigan primary for the Republicans. So now three different Republicans had won the first three primaries.
SC DEBATE
On January 24 the Dems were down to three debaters. Obama, Hillary, and Edwards slugged it out on CNN. Obama criticized something Bill Clinton had done as president and Hil snapped that I’m here and he isn’t.
“Sometimes I’m not sure who I’m running against,” said Obama unfairly.
Smiling handsome John Edwards was mr. perfect moral nice guy and helped the ticket. Edzo was cheating on his wife the whole time. After Obama became President, a lot of bad things happened for John Edwards.
JANUARY 31 2008 –AND THEN THERE WERE FOUR
Ex-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani was counting on a Florida Primary win to stay in the race. He finished a distant third at 15% to 38% for McCain and 31% for Mitt Mass Romney. On that night of the 31st of January Giuliani announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing John McCain for President. With McCain already looking good for “Super Tuesday” when half the nation voted in Primaries, it looked like Romney was now drifting out of it.
On the Democratic side, “Weeping Hillary” Clinton won the Democratic Florida primary but it was not binding. The delegates of Florida are not obliged to go the Democratic Convention in the summer with pledged votes. In true Clintonian spirit, Hillary declared after she finished first that the rules should be changed and that Florida’s delegates should be obliged to support her at the DNC.
On the morning of February 1st John Edwards announced that he was withdrawing from the race. At the debates he had complained that “I thought this was a three person debate.” He was never really in it. Now it was the star black senator from Illinois versus the woman many Republicans believe was complicit in the killing of Vince Foster.
I have never believed the Foster charge, but a lot of people I talk to around the country still believe this, and that's some heavy baggage to run for president with. The Clintons are so despised that even my left wing friend dreaded the thought of another Clinton in the White House. He dreaded the renewal of the stand off between those who blindly worship the Clintons and those who blindly hate them.
By the first of February Hillary was the front-runner. It was beginning to look like McCain versus Clinton with Barak Obama of Illinois still hanging in but losing hope, in spite of his audacity.
McCain is a divider, not a uniter. However, he is the only candidate in the field who gave clear statements on his positions. Many Republicans are opposed to him because he has never towed the Party line. He is not a right winger on immigration and other issues.
He is clear on the war in Iraq. He supports the mission over there and has stated controversially, that “We may have to be over there for a hundred years.” The critics of the war cite this as though the man is ‘Insane McCain' – But he is the only one with the guts to say it when a lot of people know that is the real truth about the mission.
For the United States, the war in Iraq is probably not a winner if seen from a purely selfish standpoint. US troops are dying over there, the country is bitterly divided over it, the money to pay for it is being raised on a pay later dangerous plan, and the image of America in the eyes of world wide liberals is falling to new lows. America is being compared with Nazi Germany at worst, or at least as a new colonialist dragon like the Great Britain of 1900.
But from a larger moral perspective I believe in the mission and believe that America is truly trying to do the right thing, period, not the right thing for America.
SUPERTUESDAY
February 5 was super Tuesday and for the Dems. Hillary did well, winning California. McCain won California for the Republicans.
Mitt Romney dropped out a few days later. But on the Dem side Obama made a big comeback over the next week, winning primaries and Caucasus in nine consecutive small states and picking up all kinds of momentum. Hillary fired her female campaign manager, stating publicly that the woman had resigned for personal reasons.
Is it possible that Hillary in firing this person was demonstrating why she was slipping in the race? Was she simply too tough and intolerant for her own good? Was it not well known that in the Bill Clinton White House, the subordinates were fond of Bill but terrified of Hillary?
The big story with the Republicans is that the far right hates McCain and he can’t seem to make peace with them. The right-wing radio talk show hosts put him down as not a real conservative. This might serve to help him in the general election. Nothing like courting the moderate vote in November.
The right wing superstar talk show hosts get all the credit for representing the Republican Party. These celebrities don't represent conservatives, or Republicans or anyone else but themselves, and I'll listen to most of them. But if McCain is a moderate Republican, then good for him.
John's past should help him while his age is a big problem. The North Vietnamese tortured him a lot in Vietnam when he was a POW. Little did they know that they might have been building up a backlash against their world goals in creating this monster, if he'd won.
Late in February Obama began pulling ahead and the Hillary train was rolling off the tracks. A controversial photo of Obama swept the land showing him dressed in traditional African garb. It was supposed to scandalously show how deeply Muslim he really is. The Clinton camp took the blame for the picture but I doubt if it was responsible. What was more important is that the Clinton was perceived as being responsible. The public thought she was getting desperate. The picture was taken when he was vacationing in Africa and put on the costume as a courtesy to his visitors. No way he was out of line in dressing like that, but the fact of the controversy said much.
PRIME TIME – TX OH VT RI
With a victory in the March 5 Texas primary, John McCain locked up the nomination for the Republican party.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton made a big comeback with wins in Ohio and Texas. These states plus little Rhode Island put her back in the hunt with a small but difficult margin between her and Obama.
Hillary was beaming and smiling in her speech to an adoring crowd that evening. She was certainly glowing with happiness. It was completely different person from the harsh bitter and angry unsmiling Hillary we'd seen in past weeks as she lost 12 states in a row to the man from Illinois. It was disturbing to see that her persona was so completely dependent on the latest swing in her personal quest for power.
She is at least gracious in victory.
Obama won only Rhode Island. He gave a speech that clearly showed some unhappiness. Both candidates had their hearts on their sleeves.
On Wednesday afternoon, President Bush and nominee McCain appeared before the Washington press corps on the White House lawn. The two had been scrappy opponents in 2000 and McCain has been famously rough on Bush during many a presidential crisis. But McCain has been rough on everybody, and the tension that liberals were hoping to see at this press conference was not there. Bush heartily endorsed the party's nominee and did not do it in that perfunctory way when people say “well he's the choice of my party so the only thing to do now is support him.”
In the second week in March the former Vice Presidential nominee of the Democratic party got Hillary Clinton into trouble at a time she didn't especially didn't need any trouble. Gerry Ferrarro was frustrated that her pal Hil was still trailing and she said in public that Obama would not be winning if he were a white man or a woman of color. The Obama campaign branded Ferraro a racist and she had to resign from her position on the Hillary Clinton Election Committee.
MARCH 2008 THE EMPEROR'S CLUB
The biggest scandal of the spring 2008 involved the Governor of New York, a Democrat named Eliot Spitzer. It seemed that 'Spitzy' was a regular client of a high priced prostitution ring called “The Emperor's Club” (not to be confused with a recent lame 'the boys love their teacher' movie with actor Kevin Kline.)
If Spitzer wasn't married he could have survived the scandal. But as it were, he embarrassed his wife and himself when exposed as a John. Spitzy was paying $500 a night for top shelf. And Spitzer had campaigned often as a defender of high morals and family values.
On March 12 Spitzer announced his resignation as Governor of New York with his wife at his side trying not to show the pain. His press conference took two minutes. The late night comedians had a field day.
The Lieutenant Governor, a man who was legally blind, took over in Eliot's place at Albany. Then there were headlines that even this guy was involved in some sort of little sex scandal.
“Gotchya” politics was back in the saddle. Ever since Gary Hart, the sex scandal card had become crucial in the game of competitive politics.
PENN PRIME
Amidst calls that she should drop out for the good of the party Mrs. Clinton won 55% of the Pennsylvania popular primary vote of April 18.
Obama was just coming out of the “guns and religion” trouble. Barak made some off the cuff remark about how poor people “hide behind guns and religion” and that remark, needless to say, turned into a controversy. Mr. Obama apologized and said he had been misunderstood,
NC 5-7
Obama won the North Carolina primary on May 7 2008 and with that almost everyone agreed that Hillary could not win the nomination. But she did not withdraw from the race.
In mid-June Hillary finally conceded and soon was making campaign appearances with BO.
Little controversies appeared here and there for Obama. On one occasion a woman a muslim headdress was sitting behind him as he was getting ready to make a speech. His handlers decided that this would be bad for his image and made her switch seats so she was off camera. The woman's feelings were hurt and she made a big deal out of it. Obama had to call her to apologize and the headdress redress was all over the news.
BIDEN HIS TIME
On Saturday August 20, Obama finally ended the suspense. He named his VP. The big news was not who it was but who it was not. It was not former First Lady Hilary Rodham Clinton. It was Delaware Senator Joe Biden.
“Oh yeah, the plagiarism guy.” That was the first thought I had. That's the first though most Americans had. But the media conspired to not mention it!
The famously biased against the left FOX News, spent five hours discussing the Biden choice on Saturday night. Not once did the plagiarism issue ever even come up. There were scrolls and submenus up and down all night giving the bio of Joe Biden. Not one mention of plagiarism. Did they really forget that this plagiarism incident was headline news for a week back in 1988? It was the lead story on the ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings for two consecutive nights, back when I VCR taped it every night. Two in this case is one big number.
Maybe the liberal wings of the media are protecting their candidate, and the conservative media are afraid of being accused of Biden-bashing.
An internet search came up with pages on the plagiarism incident in an instant, yet it never comes up when he's being supposedly vetted by the national news media? For some reason the mainstream media is unwilling to even mention that Joe Biden was running for President in 1988 when he got knocked out in shame because he lifted lines from the speeches of a British Labor Party leader named Neil Kinnock.
This is not to say that the crime was unforgivable and the ultimate dirt on this guy that would indicate he is a bad man and the nerve of the Dems to name this swine to the ticket.
I could forgive this in any candidate after 20 years. It's not the kind of story that should disqualify him from being president. But in this tell-all age of news reporting, it seems bizarre that the media has failed to mention it.
My wife thought it was bizarre too and she is not a knee-jerk supporter of my take on anything. She does her duty as a wife on that point. She was wondering aloud often why they wouldn't even mention “the plagiarism thing.” I hadn't even mentioned it. It was her first thought about the guy.
We live in an age when if a rock star threatens to leave his label, it comes over the TV as “Breaking News”; an age where if a football coach cheats on his wife, we get names, addresses and photographs of all parties, plus unsubstantiated here-say accounts by “friends” of each of them. But when Senator Joe Biden is named VP they can't mention that this guy was involved in a famous plagiarism scandal back when he was running for president in 1988.
Biden was running hot for president at the time and the plagiarism incident knocked him out of the race. He called it a day and, after the incident, became a harsh and pitiless man. There was no ruder interlocutor on the United States Senate for the next 20 years. Sean Hannity said on FOX the night before he was picked that “I hope it's not Joe Biden. He's the angriest man in Washington. He's too nasty.” I was so happy to hear Hannity say that because it was a judgement I had formed based on 20 years of watching the news and C-Span, but had never seen validated elsewhere. I think the plagiarism incident turned Biden sour.
But JB knew how to put on the funny charming side when he ran for president in 1988 and he's put the charm back on again in 2008 when he got the nod.
Sean Hannity said that Obama made a mistake picking Biden if all he cared about was winning. The obvious choice on the eve of the Convention was Hillary Clinton. The choice would have electrified the convention, the Party and their campaign. It would have lent a breathtaking new momentum to the campaign. Instead Obama let the air out of the balloon with the safe choice of Joe Biden. If Obama was behind in the polls he might have forgiven the Billaries and pick the Hillary. But he didn't need them to win, and he knew it.
Obama was playing the game like the true politician that he is. The critics are charging that Obama is to weak and inexperienced on foreign policy issues. So he picks Biden, who is the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has been a prominent member of that party since 23 B.C..
Biden's first speech as a member of Obama's team had a couple of imperfections. He yelled it up for “The next President of the United States, Barak Amera!” Not Barak Obama or Barak America, but Barak Amera, three syllables.
The media gave the Obama team every break on the little mistake. On reporter announced it as though it was something cool and intentional. “And Biden gave Obama a new name.” Then they played the clip.
A right-wing talk show mentioned Biden's gaffe in calling him “Barak America.” But Biden didn't call him that. The nit-wit talk show host blundered even worse when describing the blunder.
No, fool. Biden called him Barak Amera.” Obviously Biden was distracted, he was probably thinking about the next line and trying to remember it ahead of time, to make sure he got it right and was mailing in the present line and botched it in the process.
The other mistake, and no one really called him on this was when Biden said to the crowd. “You people are just like me. You sit around the kitchen table and worry about how you're going to pay the bills.”
Biden is a rich man. What on earth is he saying and why doesn't anyone call him on this? At least Johnny Carson used to make jokes about how rich he was. It's a new world think. Today, Leno makes jokes about the outrageous price of Starbucks coffee almost every night.
If President Bush ever said “Barak Amera” or “I'm poor just like you people,” you can imagine the backlash.
RUSSIAN RELATIONS IN 2008 – OSSETIA CRISIS
If you told an American in 2006 that you just returned from Ossetia, the response would be, “Where in the Sam Hill is Ossetia? Is it in the Poconos or something?”
By the end of 2008 most Americans knew where Ossetia was. It was a province in the Georgia that was once a Soviet Republic and is now independent.
Ossetia decided it wanted to break away from Georgia and go back to being part of Russia like it was before. Georgia did not want to let Ossetia secede, so it launched a military suppression of the Ossetian independence movement.
RISE AND FALL OF GAS 2008
The price of gasoline was on everyone's mind in the summer of 2008. Two years ago gas was 2.50 a gallon give or take a few pennies.
In June 2008 a gallon of regular gas went up to about 4.10 a gallon. The nation was angry. You know it's bad when a rich TV talk show host comes out and jokes angrily about the price of gas and it seems he isn't kidding.
The price of gas fell in the fall as precipitously as it had risen. By Christmas it was below 2 dollars a gallon. There were Christmas cards that were obsolete by the time they hit the shelves, joking about the high price of gas, with Santa filling up his car with a frown and things like that. The nation only casually took notice of the sharp downward turns in gas prices later in the year. That's because there are more negative ego problems in this world than positive ego problems. For every “I am the greatest” egoist who annoy you, there are 50 “woe is me” egoists to annoy you worse, and that mentality is a national malaise we see in how Americans react to gas prices. You can just as easily read up and know that even at $4.00 a gallon in 2008, gas was on a par with inflation or below it, based on gas prices at any other time over the least 40 years. It's health care costs that are doubling every eight years, but those prices are too complex for people to get riled up about in an organized fashion, they way they can jump around mad when gas goes up 20 cents in one week.
DNC AUGUST 2008 – DAY ONE
Evening one for the Democrats was fairly uneventful. Afterwards, James Carville on CNN bluntly asked where the party platform was,
“If they have one they are certainly doing a good job of hiding it.”
DON'T MESS WITH BILLARY – DAY TWO
Evening two was Hillary's big night. She gave a self centered speech in which she urged everyone in the Party to support Obama, but never said a kind world about him. Hillary said more kind words about Michelle than about Barak. Reagan in 1976 made a TV spot for Gerald Ford but would not endorse him by name, only begrudgingly urging the viewers to “Vote Republican!” Ford had beaten off a major Reagan challenge for the Republican nomination in 1976. It was the same thing, and it was more conspicuous than the Reagan spot, which I have seen. You wouldn't catch the snub at casual glance the way Reagan delivered the ad, but with Hillary, it was right there.
Just one or two very simple short sentences of praise would have meant a great deal to the Obama supporters. “He's a worthy able man who is ready to lead America.” “We had our differences but I know he will make a fine leader and a great president.” There wasn't a sniff of anything like that in the air. It was a very ungracious speech giving an absolute minimal endorsement for the candidate on the sole grounds that she feels it only right to support the party. The post game analysts at FOX were 5-1 in agreement that the speech was startlingly absent of any kind worlds of praise for the candidate. It was damning with absent praise, never mind faint.
Former President Bill Clinton on that same Tuesday created a stir with a roundabout long answer to a question at a speaking engagement in which he seemed to infer that it might seem logical for a Democrat to vote for McCain!
“Obama might have ideas that you all agree with - Candidate X - but he can't get anything done. The other one only has only half the ideas that you agree with - That would be candidate Y -but he's the one that can deliver. So which one do you vote for.”
No missing the point here, is there? This was a broken paper clip slingshotted with a rubber band right into the back of Obama's head. Bill stuck out his leg as Obama walked by and watched him fall on the very afternoon of his wife's evening dis speech to the convention. All of the analysts on the TV shows interpreted it that way. It was the Clintons at their scratch-fighting worst.
Bill Clinton's loose lips may have sank Hillary's ship. He opened his mouth a few times defending his wife during the campaign and only created hostility between her camp and Obama's.
Bill Clinton's power isn't so much deteriorating as his game is. The mask is falling. The one thing that I always disliked about Clinton was how he had that fake frozen smile on his face whenever he was on the attack. He'd be ripping some Republican apart with the most violent words, but his face had this warm fuzzy perma-smile as he ripped. Don't call me names and smile at me, you knave. At least Al Gore made an angry face when he delivered hard-hitting words. Gore and Clinton were both great politicians and great debaters, but one was slick and the other was just good. Deep down inside Clinton, like Wilson, Carter, RFK, and Mahatma Ghandi, for all their liberalism, was a rough tough fighter and loved the political battlefield like Patton smelling death and gunpowder. He's not really a smiler, is what I'm saying, he's a fighter. One of his weapons was that fake smile. You had to know what lay beneath.
Well now he is aging prematurely. He has put on 20 years in ten. So now he just doesn't have the strength to maintain the mask. Now, for the first time in his career he's attacking without the fake smile. The real Bill Clinton, the guy who verbally can stab you 30 times fast before you know what hit you, violent Bill Clinton, is now slowed down. The act doesn't work without the glitz and the energy. And not being movie star good-looking anymore reduces his power too. That was always a big gun in his bag of tricks.
The Democratic Party kept Bill Clinton as low-key as possible during the campaign of 2008. They could not, or at least dared not risk, spotlighting Bill Clinton's legacy of 8 years in the 1990's. He put the economy back in the black and won a war in the old Yugoslavia region. Yet he was more trouble than he worth for his endorsements. The sex scandals were part of it, his clear jealousy that a black guy was taking away all of his black fan base, and his need to back off and let Hillary run as her own person, were all factors. Hillary only mentioned him once, and quite briefly, in her DNC speech. He stood up and took a bow.
Hillary talked a lot about energy and how the Republicans are to blame for the high gas prices. If only the Democrats could get in, then America would cure its dependency of foreign oil.
Oh, really. You “two-fers” were in office 8 years and did nothing to mitigate US foreign oil dependence.
There are two things that the party out of power since 1972 always pledges, and never delivers on when they get in. - One: If elected, we will reduce American dependence on foreign oil. Two: If elected, we will punish China with trade sanctions for its violations of human rights
PRESENCY
Obama made the big speech in front of about 120,000 people at an outdoor Chicago stadium. It was live a rock concert and it was supposed to be. The young vote always leads in the no-show Jones votes, so if you lead the young out of the wilderness of apathy, you win, and he did.
Barak said, and I quote,
“I accept your nomination for Presency of the United States.”
I've got the tape. He said it. Presency. The media made nothing of it. If Bush had made half as bad a verbal blunder it would be in 30 bash-books and on 80 smug TV shows in short order.
THE NOMINEE IS .......SARAH PALIN
On August 29, three days before the RNC, John McCain ended the suspense. He named his VP. The odds-on favorite was Mitt Romney the former governor of Massachusetts. McCain instead chose Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, and, even more unimpressive, the former mayor of Wasilla Alaska.
There were mixed reactions to the pick from both camps. John Kerry went on Meet the Press and said that Sarah Palin does not have the experience and foreign policy credentials to lead this country in a crisis.
The idea was to tap into the Hillary supporters angry with Obama, and a woman on the ticket might make the difference in making that crossover.
So now no matter which party wins, history is made. It's either the first black president or the first female Vice President.
Mitt Romney was ready to serve, but he'd attacked McCain too much during the primaries. If McCain had picked him the Democrats would break out the footage and used it on a hundred commercials.
Here was a Republican party that was attacking Obama because he wasn't experienced or qualified enough to lead the nation, and they nominate someone less qualified by experience than Obama. Any US Senator had a foreign policy experience edge over any governor, let alone a remarkably obscure governor from one of the least populated states. Palin has never been in the arena long enough to have a track record to go on for any foreign policy issue.
Carville screamed on CNN that Palin was an absurd choice. “This is the best you can come up with? If you're going to pick a woman, why not Olympia Snowe? She's got more experience, she's respected by everybody and she's reformist minded.”
So Carville respects Republican Olympia Snowe from Maine. McCain probably didn't want an Olympia Snowe because a Carville respected her. McCain wanted someone to his right, and Snowe might not be.
Conservative Republicans have long accused McCain of being too liberal for the party, a RINO. The little right-wing gun-toting soccer-mom from Alaska balances the ticket for rednecks. I hope the choice wasn't made solely in order to help win the election. Carville says that Sarah Palin wants to teach creationism in Alaska public schools.
RNC ST. PAUL MN SEPTEMBER 1-4 2008
The RNC was scheduled to open on Monday September 1, but the game was rained out.
Down in the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Gustav was headed towards the Louisiana coast.
The Republicans cancelled the first night because they were afraid the cane would rip New Orleans apart while they were making happy speeches. They were afraid of a repeat of Hurricane Katrina when much of the country blamed the Republican Administration for failure to do enough fast enough in emergency relief. So the donkeys (small d) cancelled night one. The GOP jack-asses made a major mistake in caving in to fear and criticism here. President Bush was supposed to be they keynote speaker on opening night. That could have been a great speech that partially repaired his image as a verbal stumbler, an image that was so being played by the comedians of TV every night, that an antidote speech was almost essential to his creating any trace of helpful coattails. A merely good speech would have helped plenty, and, all W aside, would have given the whole convention a push that, like that slight push at the top of the luge, earns compounding interest all the way down the slope. Instead they played like a team that was trying not to lose, which is not how you win soccer games. Take your chances and play to win, and keep the competitive juices flowing by playing in your true rhythms.
The Republicans also played scared to begin with by pushing the Convention all the way ahead to September 1, the latest a major party convention has ever taken place in the USA. Why? Because they didn't want to compete with the Summer Olympics in the TV ratings! Talk about playing scared. To hell with the Olympics! Get on your horses and get in the game. Good grief. It obviously didn't work.
I have to wonder if the political geniuses behind the scenes aren't getting drunk with their own power and are starting to actually buy their own publicity kits. Surely these bad decisions originated with some overpaid political genius strategist who lacks common sense and has written 9 books. These kinds of decisions can only come from over-thinking. Thinking wouldn't get you there. This is the hi-tech generation that can record the Olympics and watch it later. Comedy shows used to get killed by World Series games. But now, everyone records it and watches it when they get home. The numbers at the club aren't much down anymore unless its your home city in game 7. And these clowns thought the Olympics were too much competition? They got their campaign for political control of the United States of America off the ground a month too late because there were track meets on one other channel?
And as for Gustav - The the media weather departments panicked for ratings, Gustav was estimated to be a category four maybe a five and it was heading straight for New Orleans! Oh no! Not again!
The Republicans not only did not dare open their convention, they even officially titled the limited schedule of events on Monday Sept 1 as the Republican Fundraiser for the Victims of Gustav.
They gambled on Gustav out of fear and they lost. That's no way to play. Gustav was no Katrina. Gustav turned out to be a category 2, A mean heavy rainstorm with high winds.
If the Elephants had rolled out W on opening night, and he gave the speech of his life, who knows how that might have made things different. Gustav wouldn't have hurt one bit. And if they hadn't wimped out before the boring Olympics, Gustva wouldn't have been a factor anyway. Cowering before Gustav gave them lower ratings that the stupid Olympics ever could have.
How in the hell was not having an important National Convention in St. Paul supposed to help anyone survive a storm better in New Orleans? Katrina rode the Republicans on their backs, and as MLK once said, “a man can't ride your back unless it's bent.”
I wonder what happened to all that money they raised to help the victims of a minor rainstorm.
PALIN AND THE POWER OF POLITICAL COMEDY
The Republicans rolled out Sarah Palin on night three. She gave a tremendous speech. It was one of the most electric convention speeches of all time. The next morning she was the hottest political figure in the world.
But within a week Tina Fay of Saturday Night Live was doing a vicious and effective mocking impression of her all over the TV, and people at the local diner were talking about Tina Fay's impression of Sarah Palin instead of about Sarah Palin. That pulled the rug out from under her, and Palin hit the mat like Jerry Ford. Fay did Sarah's stumbling for her.
To make things better for the Dems, Palin had to run the gauntlet of hostile celebrity news interviewers. The same Katy Kourics and Whoopie Goldbergs who would supportively smile when a Democrat commented on something with an outreached smile would return a frown of rejection when Palin smiled. If Obama said something they didn't even agree with in an interview and offered an outreach smile they would smile back sincerely, even if they were preparing a follow up question that was gently challenging to what he just said. For Palin, it was the reverse, brutal cold looks back even if she said something with a smile that no sane person could disagree with. That overtone did plenty of damage as Sarah smiled unrequited smiles as she toured the mainstream. Style is substance and the people were catching the tone of it all more than the exact things being said. It was highly effective polemic work. The media soldiers beat her up pretty good and it worked. Two weeks after SP walked out on that RNC stage and had the killer set of the century, she was a straight out liability to John McCain. Big Mac's campaign had to focus on defending her from ridicule and abuse, instead of showcasing her positives.
As usual, the left called her stupid. Every Republican who is a threat to win an election is stupid, and if they win one then they're really stupid. One comedian said in a poker analogy,
“The Republicans saw that a black man, Obama, was the nominee, so they didn't put it down at all. Instead they said,
'OK, no problem, we'll see you your black man, and we'll raise you a retarded white woman.' ”
The 90% Dem audiences laughed all week. If the thing had been done in reverse they would have booed and sued the comedy club. Imagine if a conservative comedian had called a Democrat candidate “retarded'?
The national TV shows had the exact same running theme about how stupid she was, they just toned down the language a bit. They ran with a comment she made that she could see Russia from her house, as though that was all that counts right now. The found every piece of dirt they could on her, and when they didn't come up with much, they just mocked and laughed at her tomboy frontier lifestyle, that she could skin a bear and shoot a shotgun accurately. Were they suggesting that this still slim and pretty ex-beauty queen was mannish? It was something of a contradiction of hatchets colliding in mid-air on their way to the R-target.
Another comedian talked on stage about how the Republicans were “claiming” that she was a “former beauty queen.”
“The Republicans keep telling us that she's a beauty queen. Hey! Sarah Palin was only a runner up in a Miss Alaska contest. Big deal! I'm pretty sure that a moose can finish third runner up in a Miss Alaska contest.”
Yeah, you're right. Sarah Palin isn't the least bit attractive, and Alaska has no beautiful women. Her looks aren't an issue to me until someone tells me she doesn't have any.
The same TV shows that rip her and never give her looks a tip of the cap would be all over her looks if she were a liberal Democrat. Leno and Letterman would be joking about what they could do to get a date with her. You know it, too. John Stewart and Bill Maher would be doing comedy bits about love letters they need to mail to her but don't have the courage.
Nevertheless, all things considered, and with the help of some hindsight at this writing, John McCain made a catastrophic blunder in choosing an unknown Alaska governor as Vice President. It would have been less of a blunder if McCain was 48 years old and fit as a fiddle. Consider the high possibility of him dying in office if he won. McCain was almost forcing every voter to picture her as the next President of the United States, and even I, a registered Republican (at the time!) wasn't comfortable with it. She just didn't have any experience in foreign policy, and I didn't want her in charge of the nukes, any more than I wanted McCain to be in charge of the nukes.
Naming a complete unknown governor with no strength on foreign policy issues would have been a blunder if he was a fat white man with thick glasses from Ohio or Louisiana.
W. Bush was merely a governor, but he chose wise old foreign policy veteran Dick Cheney as his VP. Clinton was a rookie governor, but he chose venerable Senator Al Gore for his VP. Reagan was a rookie governor, but he had spoken out on foreign policy issues for nearly 20 years before 1980, and for VP he named GHW Bush, a man who was a former Ambassador to China, and head of the CIA. Jimmy Carter was a governor, but he named respected senator Mondale to be his VP. John Kennedy was an inexperienced Senator, but he named a sage, the most powerful politician in Congress, LBJ, to be his VP, and he had foreign policy expertise. Compared to these choices, McCain was reversing the formula. It was as if he was going out of his way to make the number two a far less experienced and well-known talent than the number one. What was he thinking?
He (his name is Joe) was right. That's what the choice of Sarah Palin was really all about. I'll see your black guy, and I'll raise you a woman. McCain thought he would go down in history as having made one of the most brilliant campaign choices of all time. Instead he is going down as a dunderhead political strategist. Dick Morris and Ed Rollins were supposed to sit back and wish they were that smart. JC was going to offset the black guy emotional factor, and put the liberals in a conundrum. 'What do we want to see more, the first black president, or the first female president,' he foolishly thought they'd wonder.' They didn't care. Palin didn't connect with woman as a mass gender group, certainly not enough to make 150 million of them teary-eyed at the though of her getting in. Her candidacy didn't match the emotional progressivism of Obama's, partly because it just didn't, and partly because she wasn't the right person to represent that. Racing dogsled teams and beating guys at bows and arrows while wearing a hot red skirt didn't exactly make her the 'I'm just like her' American woman of 2008.
By the middle of September 2008 Obama regained the lead in the polls by about two points. The swing was caused by two things in my opinion. One was one we could all agree on. The nation was undergoing a massive financial crisis in the mortgage lending industry and a giant government bailout was ongoing. The incumbent party took the blame for the economic panic situation and the polls changed accordingly.
The second factor was Saturday Night Live. Once these lefties get their mitts on a Republican, they inflict serious damage. They and Chevy Chase hurt Gerald Ford big time during the Election of 1976. They and Dana Carvey inflicted serious damage to George Bush Sr. in the Election of 1992, and they tried their best to elect Al Gore and John Kerry on 00 and 04.
Now leading female cast member Tina Fay has come up with an effective and funny spoof of Sarah Palin. The whole country was talking about Tina Fay's ridiculing impersonation of Sarah Palin. Millions that missed the show were going on their computers and watching it on You Tube. My wife was telling me how funny it was and how I had to watch it. I couldn't make her understand that I couldn't watch it. I did not question that it was well done. The political damage superseded any laughs I might give up for Saturday Night Left's latest one-sided vicious send-up.
The serious Democrats had tried for a month to make Sarah Palin a laughing stock with serious diatribes against her inexperience, right-wing views, and Alaskan background. They had failed. But the SNL cavalry came riding to the rescue. They couldn't take her down fair and square in straight political talk, so they hire the below-the-belt comedians to make the hit. Since its a comedy skit they can get away with any unfair charge or exaggeration they want. They hide behind the laughter and the art form while they throw spears through the chest of decent people because they happen to belong to the political side they dislike.
In these W years many famous stand-up comedians make a living bashing the Republicans in loaded Dem audiences of the inner cities. They thrive when a hated Republican is in power, almost to the point where I wonder who they'd vote for if they had the absolute deciding vote, their opponents who keep them fueled, or their candidate who puts them back to the drawing board.
The left-wing screamers could never survive a real mixed audience without their famous name. They'd get booed off the stage for the same things their loaded audiences cheer them for. A true comedian can build his own support system out of any given group who doesn't know him or her at all. A fake needs a pre-loaded support system for protection against lame bits.
Do these stand-ups think they are breaking new ground? They all have the exact same rap! Republicans are all Nazis. Scream it, add some swearing and the big city crowd will hail you as hero with a long cheer. They won't be actually laughing, since condemning people isn't funny, but they will cheer long and loud.
If you're going to go out on a limb, at least shake me up with some viewpoint I had never considered before. Be a Lenny Bruce, be a Will Rogers, be even-handed and clever and make me think. Don't just push buttons and add histrionics and call that a political act, and especially not a stand-up one.
Update 2012 - Obama has been the president for four years and the comedians have left him alone. It’s so relaxing to not be agitated by all the political comedy R-bashing for a spell. When a Republican is president, the sound of the shrill left comedians permeates the atmosphere. Now it’s chirping birds and gentles waves.
TWO ‘BAMA BIOS
There's never been a person with a more mysterious background as the nominee for President than Barak Hussein Obama.
Barak has two completely different campaign biographies.
There is the official campaign biography, and there is the biography that is floating around on anti-O websites. These negative bios obviously contain some inaccurate information, but what about allowing that some of it might be accurate also? I never apply all or nothing credence to any book or website, so if even a fraction is true it's worth a cautious look.
This is the “Swiftboat Standard,” a famous political term I just made up. “Swiftboat implies negative but I’m making it positive political slang. If 95% of the charges are false and unfair, but 5% are accurate, then the charges are serious. Dismissing the other 95% doesn't take the other 5% down with the ship. They still float. The left uses “swiftboat” now as a verb to indicate an unfair low blow attack from the right, but I say these people missed the point about the Swiftboat people of 2004. They threw a hundred arrows at Kerry and about five of them stuck, and they stuck because they were true. The Swiftboat people weren't influential in 2004 because of the 95% they hurled at Kerry that was a lie. They were influential because of the 5% that was true. And if some of these anti-Obama nuts come through with one or two along the way that stick amidst their awful lies, it should be noted and taken seriously, even if it did originate from an unlikable source.
That’s what I mean by “Swiftboat Standard.” Or, the “Swiftboat 5% rule.”
We can be sure of five things.
Barak Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.
He has lived in Indonesia.
He has been a “Community Organizer.”
He has been an Illinois State Senator and a US Senator from Illinois.
He seems like a nice guy.
Here is the Obama official biography from campaign headquarters. It's short,
“Barack Obama was raised by a single mother and his grandparents. They didn't have much money, but they taught him values from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. He took out loans to put himself through school. After college, he worked for Christian churches in Chicago, helping communities devastated when steel plants closed.
Obama turned down lucrative job offers after law school to return to Chicago, leading a successful voter registration drive. He joined a small law firm, taught constitutional law and, guided by his Christian faith, stayed active in his community.
In the Illinois State Senate, he worked with both Democrats and Republicans to help working families. In the U.S. Senate, he has focused on tackling the challenges of a globalized, 21st century world with fresh thinking and a politics that no longer settles for the lowest common denominator.
Obama and his wife Michelle are proud parents of two daughters, Sasha and Malika.”
That's the official version.
The unofficial versions claim that he was born in Indonesia, is a devout Muslim, and wants to commit the USA to a one-world socialist government.
Exactly what lucrative jobs did he “turn down?” That can be one very flexible phrase. Where are the CEO's who are telling the story about how they offered young Barry Obama $39,000 plus benefits to start with their company in 1980 but he nobly held up his hand and said, “Nope! I must go back to my community and make things right. Even if I make very little money.”
If the official campaign bio story is absolutely true, then BHO is one noble man. If the story is deliberately exaggerated to the point where it is in essence not true, then he’s a politician.
HARVARD MORON IS AN OXYMORON
Obama graduated from Harvard University. Now whenever anyone questions Obama's intelligence, his friend's rightfully scream that the man went to Harvard! But these same people called President Bush “a moron” for 8 years and thought nothing of it. Yet Bush graduated from Harvard too. The difference is that in Bush's case it doesn't count. In Barak's case it does.
I played a comedy club in Portland Maine in 2008. The guy on in front of me, a young man I've never met, closed with this joke.
“I've been working with mentally challenged children lately. One of them told me that he wants to grow up to become the first retarded president.”
I saw the punch line coming a mile away and I knew it would kill and it did,
“I told him, 'you're too late! We already have one! - Good-night ladies and gentlemen!”
It's not a bad joke and the guy had a good original set. But if he spoke like that in 33 countries he'd disappear and his body would never be found.
Many comedians call Republicans Nazis and think nothing of it. If they were right they'd be dead by now, so they're wrong.
There is a total double-standard in show business about politics. The politically correct crowd doesn't even care what is politically correct as long as you are throwing grenades at the right targets.
If I tried to make a similarly vicious and unforgiving joke about a liberal politician, any liberal politician, the reaction would be a big “you're playing with matches' groan of whoooooooooaaaaaaaaa from the collective crowd. Also the use of the word 'retarted' would put me that much more in hot water. But no one would question the license of a liberal entertainer to refer to a Republican as a “retard.” One left wing talk show host in San Francisco, in fact, always calls them “Retardicans.”
Yeah, I get it.
I’m laffin’.
FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE – SEPTEMBER 26 2008
The first presidential debate was scheduled for Friday night September 26, in Mississippi. On Monday McCain announced that he was going to cancel because as a US Senator he needed to work on the economy. The mortgage and banking investment crisis was too dire for him to go to Mississippi and debate Obama.
The reaction to John's canceling out was mostly negative. Jay Leno quipped on The Tonight Show that “McCain said he plans to postpone the debate until ... he is ahead in the polls.” I laughed out loud. It was pretty obvious. McCain changed his mind and the debate went ahead a scheduled.
So who won the first debate? That's an easy one. All the analysts who were Obama supporters said that Obama won it hands down. All the conservative analysts McCain said that McCain won the debate hands down. The news media went to every diner and bowling alley for the next three days asking the man and woman in the street who won. Again, all the Obama supporters said Obama won, all the McCain supporters said he won.
This pattern is so certain that I wrote this an hour before the debate began. I'm not worried that I will have to go back and correct it.
TOP TEN REASONS THERE IS AN OBVIOUS LEFTY BIAS IN THE MEDIA
The Late Show with David Letterman Show's after the debate had its famous “top ten list” as “top ten surprises in the debate tonight.” Five jokes were anti-McCain, none were anti Obama. Five were neutral. Dave’s show is a propaganda machine for the Democratic Party. They mocked President Bush every night during the election campaign, and never mocked Obama.
In earlier days they rarely mocked Clinton either except for sex jokes that weren't all that vicious. The Clinton jokes were, wink-wink that guy got a lot of action, jokes. Ripping Bill but ah, heh heh, sort of praising him too.
After Obama was elected the Late Show continued to pound away at W Bush instead of the sitting president for a year.
Letterman is a great talent who deserves to be where he is and he’s made me laugh so many times. I just want to make sure I get that disclaimer in too. The show is an American institution. I fire my howitzer with respect. Pardon me while I reload....
SECOND DEBATE, MY FRIENDS
The second debate on Thursday October 8 did not go well for McCain. My wife and I were in disbelief at how many times he used the folksy phrase, “my friends.”
My friends, he really overdid it, my friends. My friend, it really made him sound insane, my friends. My friends, no normal human being says “my friend” ever other sentence. It's a phrase you use once in a great while for extra emphasis on something, but you don't say it as much as McCain did. It really made him look foolish - not quite insane, but certainly foolish, my friends.
The next day it was the big topic of conversation everywhere. On the Tonight Show the next evening, Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live and the absolute master of mediocre impressions, did a spoof on McCain. It was a better than average voice for Carvey, although it would have been professionally unacceptable for Rich Little. But Carvey is a funnier comedian than Little and he rode a fair impression to big laughs because as he imitated McCain he said “my friends” four times a sentence. It was hilarious. McCain scuttled the debate by saying “my friends” to the point where people all over the country were roaring with laughter. Another TV show simply spliced together all the McCain “my friends” and played it while the studio audience, the host, the sidekick, and the country laughed out loud.
Obama finally has made himself clear on at least one thing. He wants to cut and run in Iraq. I didn't like hearing that. But McCain is a hothead who picked fights as a young man and admits it with pride. Who wants him in charge of our armed forces?
I was an unhappy prospective voter. One guy is too “all we are saying is give peace a chance” and the other guy is a super-hawk who once responded to a question about relations with Teheran by saying, “that reminds me of the old Beach Boys song, 'Bomb, Bomb Iran.' ” (the real song line is Ba-ba-bara Ann)
A video 'went viral' of a moment in the debate where McCain said a curse word under his breath. It's not clear that he did, but it is hard to say that he didn't. It means to declare something useless nonsense.
I compare these guys to cops. As a neighborhood policeman, Obama lets the teen-agers get away with everything and even hangs out with the guys that pulled the b&e last night and doesn't even realize it. But if he arrives at the scene of a domestic dispute, he'd be perfect for calming things down. Someone pushes him in the heat of an argument and he lets it go because he wants to resolve the situation first and foremost.
McCain as a cop would keep the streets safer and there would be little or no social interaction between him and the teens. But if you sent McCain into a domestic dispute you would make a major mistake. He would take an incendiary situation and inflame it further because someone dared to call him a name or hit him with a spitball. If someone pushed McCain in the middle of the same dispute that Obama solved, there would be a riot and more squad cars would have to be called in.
“THAT ONE”
The biggest supposed incident of the debate was when McCain referred to Obama as “that one.” Senator McCain was making a point about how he had supported a bill in Congress, but “do you know who was one of the only senators who supported it? Then he smiled and nodded a little in Obama's direction and said “that one.”
It was a big controversy. Obama's army of change accused McCain of being a racist. It spun around the country picking up momentum. Rap stars put videos up in the internet calling McCain a racist.
It doesn't make a lot of sense. If McCain had ever been a racist you'd think the country would have known about it by now. This is one of the most constantly public men that ever lived, in an era that gets all the dirt of private men. Why would he wait until 7 years as a POW and 25 years in the Senate had gone by before getting around to revealing his racism? How could he keep it so well hidden for so long? He couldn't. It's making something out of nothing. McCain is inveterately impolite to people of all races.
BILL AYERS - HIPPIE LEFTOVERS REHEATED
Then there's Obama's relations with Bill Ayers. I have a right to consider that an issue. That doesn't make me a reactionary or a fool. But some leftists think that. They're saying that they are being “swiftboated” on Bill Ayers. The implication being that the charges are all lies, as the swiftboat charges allegedly all were.
Obama had ties with some lefties left over from the wild sixties, but he survived the baggage.
Fox news commentator Sean Hannity as of 2012 is still ripping Obama for having been close with Jerry Rubinesque lefty rad Bill Ayers. I like Hannity and I agree with him on it, but it’s time to move on.org. Sean has been hammering away at Obama on Bill Ayers for four full years.
TOO BIG TO FAIL - SEPTEMBER
In September 2008 the entire banking system of the United States almost collapsed completely. There could have been a chain reaction that set off a panic and a run on the banks that could have then led to another Great Depression, or something almost as dangerous.
First the investment firm of Sherson Lehman failed and the feds decided at the 11th hour not to bail them out.
Then the lending firm of AIG and its 54 billion in toxic mortgage loans was about to fail too. But the Federal Reserve under Henry Paulson intervened and saved it with a $125 billion bail out loan. The banks were supposed to lend that money out but they never really did. They were supposed to help jump start the economy back to stability and restore confidence with these loans but they didn't make the loans. They did all manage to eventually pay back the bail out loans, but they never did make the loans.
That is what I know based on the very good movie produced by HBO, Too Big to Fail. In spite of Paul Giamatti's acting, (no one talks that softly, you ham - and if anyone did, no one in the room could hear them - Giamatti is determined to ruin the legacy of at least a dozen historic personages before he hangs up the leotards) it was a very informative film. I lived through this historical event having little idea what was happening, and no one was talking about it at the local diner. But I did hear dramatic rumblings on political TV shows, and the statement that the entire financial system was close to collapsing did get my attention, even if I didn't understand it all.
I get this big Federal bailout mixed up with Obama's 2009 stimulus package of 800 billion which also rescued many big corporations with Federal money while smaller business were allowed to go under by the thousands. They were too small to bail.
ARAB CLERICS - JUST SAY NO TO NOOR
In the fall of 2008 the most popular television show in the Arab world was a Turk produced series called 'Noor.' The lead characters are soft-line Muslims who believe in tolerance, a little wine at dinner and even a little sex.
Arab clerics issued a statement that it was not a sin to kill the producers of this show, since they produced immoral work.
They also said that Mickey Mouse was immoral too. I'm not making this up. They said that Mickey was a 'soldier of Satan' and should be killed, along with the producers of Noor.
Hilarious.
First of all, it's a cartoon, you clowns.
Second of all, how on earth could anyone find Mickey Mouse immoral?
Third of all, who do they think they are telling the world what they can watch and what they can't watch, what they can produce and what they can't produce?
And in the middle of all this heat, who do the liberals in America call “fascists?”
Why the Republican Party of course. The Arabs? They are misunderstood and there must be some good reasons why they hate America and we have to reach out and try to understand them.
Every time I feel down, I just think of the Arabs declaring Mickey Mouse to be a “Soldier of Satan” and it brings a smile to my face.
OJ CONVICTED 2008
Football and Movie star OJ Simpson dominated about a year of the Bill Clinton era when his trial as an accused double-murderer gripped the nation. The jury acquitted him and the nation was all upset about that. He got away with murder. Oh, well, what can you do?
Imagine getting away with bloody murder and then committing a needless, reckless, foolish crime and going away for a long time. He was the luckiest man alive, and he threw it all away because he wanted his trophies back.
OJ and two men broke into the Vegas hotel room of a sports memorabilia dealer and brandished pistols. They held the man at gunpoint and demanded that he give OJ back all his trophies and rings and rookie cards, as if the guy had stolen them, when he had bought them from someone else. Even if the guy had stolen OJ's rings, it wouldn't have made their kidnap-armed robbery deed any more tolerable in the eyes of the law. Police arrested OJ two days after the robbery. The other two guys flipped and took lesser sentences in exchange for testimony about the presence of guns and the premeditation. They sold OJ out for 30 pieces of calender. This time OJ didn't have Johnny Cochoran to play the race card from the bottom of the deck. Johnny was about three years dead. But this time the black community was indifferent. A man named Obama was on the verge of winning the Presidency, and by 2008 OJ was yesterday's news, and almost off the black political radar. Besides, it was slowly but surely becoming commonly accepted, even amongst black people that “OJ did it” in the first place.
There wasn't even a lot of media coverage this time. It was a page three here and there event for those outside Las Vegas. You had to seek out the story if you wanted details. The story didn't seek you out.
On October 4, the jury convicted OJ and his accomplice of kidnapping and armed robbery. When I heard about it, I turned on CNN to see the “breaking news” stop-the-presses coverage, but it wasn't there. The OJ bulletins were on a scroll of miscellaneous news at the bottom of the screen, while Sarah Palin bringing up the Bill Ayers thing was on the main screen.
Sentencing came on December 5, 2008. The judge tackled OJ behind the line of scrimmage for a 33 year loss!
A new book came out in 2011 that claims that OJ was innocent of the murders that the country thinks he was unjustly acquitted of. It’s called OJ is Innocent and I Can Prove it and the real killer is supposedly OJ’s son Jason.
JOE THE PLUMBER DEBATE
The third Presidential debate took place in late September, with the classy Bob Sheiffer hosting. The three candidates sat close at a small table. There was no walking around making wild gestures as sometimes happens in these things.
The star of the debate was a guy named Joe the Plumber. Both candidates found themselves looking at the camera and explaining how his tax plan was not going to hurt Joe the Plumber. “And Joe, I know you're out there and I just want to say to you. ...” The three of them directly addressed Joe the Plumber about 30 times.
So who the hell is Joe the Plumber?
A few days earlier Obama was campaigning in a suburban Toledo Ohio neighborhood when he encountered a husky 34 year old man named Sam Wurzbacher, who asked Obama a question in the form of a statement (which is what 88% of all political questions are.) Sammy said that he was a plumber and was hoping to buy a company that earned $250,000 a year. Wurzbacher told Obama, “Your tax plan is going to hurt me.”
Obama responded with a virtual admission of a socialist agenda. At least the way a lot of people heard it. It seemed that this working man from Toledo had tricked Obama into actually stating his position, something the adoring media had failed to do in the last year and a half. I made my own transcript from the audio,
“Its not that I want to punish your success. I just wanna make sure that everybody who is behind ya, that they've got the chance for success too.
... My attitude is that if the economy is good for folks from the bottom up, its gonna be good for everybody. ... I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.”
So Obama believes in trickle up economics, the opposite of Ronald Reagan-Andrew Carnegie trickle down. If all the homeless and unemployed people have some federal spending money, its bound to increase sales for small businesses, and the chain reaction upwards will begin. The foundation of Obama's healthy economy is millions of very poor people with a little dole money kick-starting the recovery.
Joe Plumber kicked a nest of bees with one question. You can see by the text that the Obama handlers couldn't have been too happy with that one. It was the antithesis of the usual Obamaspeak. Their man has a big lead and he's making statements that would make Franklin Roosevelt gulp with fear itself.
The Obama forces responded by attacking the credibility of Joe the Plumber. On October 17 the big story was the vetting, bashing and discrediting of Samuel Wurzbacher. Journalists working for Obama (while taking a newspaper paycheck) wrote scandalous revelations about Joe. Never mind what Obama said or what the question was in theory. What mattered now is that Joe the Plumber is a fake.
Wurzbacher doesn't have a valid Ohio plumbers license. Not only that his name isn't even Joe! And get this, Joe the Plumber owes Ohio $1,200 in back taxes and has an outstanding medical debt. Sam the unlicensed plumber owes The Sisters of Mercy Hospital more than a thousand dollars and they're leaving messages on his machine.
Obama told a crowd in New Hampshire a few days later that he doesn't know of many plumbers making $250,000.
Samuel Wurzbacher personally isn't the issue. I don't care if he's wanted for armed robbery in 14 states. The issue is that he just happened to force Obama to state categorically his faith in the FDR is God Democratic ideal of the federal redistribution of wealth. Obama will “treat the people in the wagon better than the people who are pulling the wagon.”
More than one columnist stated plainly that Sam Wurzbacher has a lot of nerve complaining about higher taxes when he owes some himself. I don't see the A=B. Joe isn't running for President. His policies don't matter. His person doesn't matter. He was simply a tool to open Obama's voice on an important matter.
So the media vettes Joe Plumber as if he was a Supreme Court nominee in front of the Senate. At the same time they look the other way on every serious charge about Obama's past. Vett the plumber, don't vett the candidate for President. The media has given Obama a free pass more so than any candidate I have ever seen run for high office.
McCAIN AND ABLE
Republican John McCain is just to crusty to be a great President in this era. Maybe in the time of John Quincy Adams an old curmudgeon fit the bill, but not for me, not now. Johnny Mac behaved himself a little better in the third debate, and most analysts thought he did pretty well. But he still had a mocking and disrespectful tone towards Obama. That was enough for me. Style is substance. McCain negotiating with a Russian leader in a verge-of-war type of crisis would be a nightmare from hell. It wouldn't so much be what he said, but how he said it. Even if the translator fell silent, the Russian could look at his mannerisms and hear his voice tones and pick up his papers and walk out of the meeting, justifiably offended.
“He didn't even hear what I said,” McCain would plead.
The translator could look back as they walk out and say, “He heard it all.”
Style is substance. Like rubbing a dog's neck, and kissing him on the head and saying in loving tone, “You're a horrible dog. I'm going to kill you,” it's not what you say, it's how you say it. The seven years of beatings took a toll on this poor man, so I give him a pass for being the way he is, but he is that way, and I don't want him negotiating with Arabs or Russians, or allies.
I know that polls have indicated that McCain is turning people off (read .. the center and undecided voters) by the way in which he is always attacking Obama. Some people are finding it mean and sad. I feel that way. You can disagree with the man without always shaking your head and pounding the point that the other guy is unqualified and naïve on everything. McCain is always breaking out the schoolteacher “you don'ts.” My opponent thinks he can do this or that. You don't negotiate with foreign leaders that way. That's foolish. In tone it was sort of like 'You don't chew with your mouth open at the dinner table. Way too many 'you don'ts.' The American people deserve a little more credit than that. I'm an anti-lefty since about 1982, but I don't think that side would choose a complete naïve incompetent man as their standard bearer. They would choose a lefty of some ability. But McCain is as predictable as a sunrise with his attack posture in every response. He never says a kind word or concedes a single point for his opponent, while Obama graciously does. A smooth rubber tree survives a hurricane where an rough egoist oak tumbles over at the roots. McCain tries so hard to always play tough guy that it has become unbearable for this voter.
I will tell you exactly when McCain lost my vote, and he had it begrudgingly up to this point. He discussed during the third debate how he was going to handle relations with Russia.
“I met with Vladimir Putin. I looked him in the eye and I saw three thing, a K, a G and a B.”
Now I am a cynic and a conservative when it comes to the former Soviet Union, and when it comes to Vlad Putin who stole a New England Patriots Championship ring from owner Bob Kraft. But how is a President McCain going to establish a solid personal relationship with the Russian leader after insulting him in public like this before the election? McCain is the one who is always admonishing Obama that you just don't do. “You don't do this” and “You don't do that.”
Well John, you don't condemn the Russian leader before you even take office and make a macho boast about how you looked him in the eye and saw a KGB agent. That's not leadership. That's antagonistic and hardly a heartening hint of the type of diplomacy we could expect out of you for he next four years. That's anti-diplomatic. Ronald Reagan stood up tho the Soviet Union and even he never made an irresponsible statement like that. Even when Reagan spoke of the “Evil Empire” it wasn't an ad hominem attack on the Russian leader he was going to have to treat with after becoming president. “K-G-B?” Grow a brain McCain!
ELECTION OF 2008 RESULTS
The oddsmakers had Obama as 2-5 favorite on Election Eve.
My wife and I liked Obama but we both voted for McCain. Obama got 69 million votes and McCain got 59 million. Ralph Nadar got 750,000 votes as an Independent. A Commie got 199,000 votes. The Green Party candidate got 161,000 votes. Bob Barr ran as a Libertarian, he a former Republican.
I know I said McCain lost my vote. If Massachusetts pre-election polls had the race between McCain and Obama dead even I would have voted for Obama. I would never trust McCain during a war scare. But since I knew that Obama was going to get my Electoral College vote anyway, I maintained party loyalty and voted for McCain. So he’d lost my vote, but he got it anyway (I resigned from the Republican Party in 2009 and am now a registered Independent.)
THE IRAQI MESS AT ADMINISTRATION TRANSITION
On Thanksgiving Day 2008, the Iraqi Parliament, by a close vote, decided to approve an agreement with the United States that called for the complete withdrawal of all American troops by the end of 2011. More than 4,200 Americans had died in the conflict up to this point, or about twice as many civilian deaths in the WTC attack of September 11, 2001.
If Obama wants to keep them there beyond that, he can do it when the time comes. Bush has established a new legal precedent in international relations; that the United States can move in wherever it wants if it feels that some group is seriously trying to destroy New York City or Washington D.C. Obama spoke during the campaign and during the transition period about concentrating American military efforts against Afghanistan and Pakistan. That was where the real threat was, not Iraq. He was going to hunt Bin Laden down, unlike Bush who had not done it right. But the very fact that he talked at all about moving against Pakistan was a foreign policy stance no Democrat would have advocated in 2000, and not even on September 12, 2002. The decision to take the offense in the Middle East was George W. Bush's Republican decision. Like his father did to Clinton, W Bush dragged his successor into a Republican induced and framed foreign policy agenda. In only partly rejecting Reagan-Bush extremism, Obama and the Democrats are taking RFK-Carter-Kucinich liberalism and hurling it out the window for the foreseeable future. In rejecting Republican very aggressive foreign policy, the Democrats are accepting by default, a moderately aggressive Republican foreign policy. The liberal Democrats still have their feet on the ground when it comes to domestic policy, but in foreign policy, the Democrats are carrying the Republicans luggage for them while the R's get to sit back and criticize Obama for not carrying the bags properly.
When Obama first began to run for President he talked about the great mistake of the Iraq War and how he was going to end that war as soon as he got in. He needed to win the left in the early weeding process, so he started out with a Dennis Kucinich-Father Drinan “Out now!” policy.
But over the next 20 months Obama's stand on the war drifted gradually towards moderation and accepting the idea that the mission should be concluded honorably. It was a far cry from his rhetoric early on. By election eve Obama was sounding downright hawkish at times, advocating more intervention in Afghanistan, a spectacular reversal of his opening imitation of Eugene McCarthy
Bush's alleged failed presidency (that's what most people are calling it now) leaves Obama the option of military offense in areas where whenever America feels threatened. The failed Bush Administration left Obama a friendly quasi-independent and quasi-democratic nation in the center of the Middle East. What Kennedy, Carter or Nixon could have done with such a playing board is anyone's guess, but from FDR to Bush 1, the United States had no assets or Allies in the Middle east to work with, and consequently the Arabs bullied the United States a hundred times on a hundred issues. No nation in the Middle East will dare to try and intimidate the United States in the immediate future, and Obama gets to work with that strong dynamic.
The Bush-bash-books all stress that the good name of the United States has been damaged if not ruined all over the world as a result of the Iraq Invasion of 2003. The United States will need to display decades of good behavior before the rest of the world begins to respect it ever again. I could dig up 2,000 quotes saying this bluntly. It was on the radio and in the newspapers every day for years. It's in 300 books. And it is not true. For every American and every Arab and every other foreign citizen who lost respect for the United States as a result of the Iraq Invasion, there are four who respect the United States more. In arriving at this 4-1 figure I'm including those who respect the United States more because they agree with the invasion morally, and those who respect the United States more because they appreciate and fear American military strength, and appreciate that Sammy isn’t a Carter Paper Tiger variety any longer.
Bush was a wild man who recklessly started a war. Like a pitcher who can't control his fastball, Bush makes America seem dangerous even if not willfully so. Bush thought he was in the right, and Arab states in the Middle East have to know that they will face certain retaliation if they cross the line with the USA. No, check that. They will face certain invasion and occupation if they cross the line with the United States. This is a whole new set of rules in international relations, and the critics have not missed their cue.
If a liberal Democrat is in power, can Arab states relax and start the old slap America around business like it was the 1970's? No. Because for one, they have to know that the next President will be an extreme reactionary just rubbing his hands with joy waiting to get in and start fighting back. They also know that the Democrats know this and cannot afford politically to be very outflanked on the right in foreign policy, even if some of their vocal leaders still speak like Gene McCarthy in their public utterances. The radical Arabs are therefore almost as afraid of a Democratic President as a Republican.
The Democrats are pinned down by what already is, and can't get up off the matt to try to create its own reality, based on its own principles. Ever since Reagan attacked Libya in 1986, the Democrats have been caught in a foreign policy straightjacket built by Republicans. Clinton's greatest foreign policy success was when he acted like Reagan in Bosnia, not when he acted like Carter in Somalia.
Is all this a good thing or a bad thing? Officially I am undecided and go back and forth depending on what I study in a given week. I'm very gullible towards whatever excellent book I most recently finished. If I have to vote right now, I'm pulling the lever that says this is a good thing. The Middle East is too dangerous to let the pattern of intimidating the United States continue. Terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, in the wake of WTC, is too serious a threat to accept within the framework of the foreign policy of FDR-IKE-JFK-NIX-JC. The new foreign policy of aggressive deterrence, which started with Libya, advanced with Gulf War One, progressed with Clinton's Desert Fox attacks, and went over the top with the Iraq Invasion of 2003, is a better alternative than sitting back and letting the Arab States do their worst against the USA whenever they feel like it, and worse, plan some big holy war down the road. Enough is enough. The WTC was the last straw. It's as simple as that. Even if I concede the personal foibles of the hated W. Bush, it still doesn't mean that the fate of the United States might not have been helped by that guy being in the right place at the right time. And it may be just as true that Obama is the right guy at the right time to send a signal to the rest of the world that the United States is willing to pull back somewhat and start to deal with the Middle East more reasonably, albeit with W. power weaponry in the trunk just in case there's any trouble. The new President can pop the trunk latch in three seconds anytime there's trouble on his watch, and that threat is real to any hostile state. But it was W. and his dynastic dad who gave 'The Big O' his license to kill. Obama may be saddles with a bad economy he inherited from Bush, but Obama also inherited more foreign policy power than any Democrat would have handed him.
BOTTOM LINE
The people who write the bash-Bush-books never mention the fact that no other major terrorist attacks took place on US soil after 911. He did his job. He did what Americans wanted him to do, and later on the pretended they hadn’t really wanted it. He may have hurt the economy badly in order to do it, but he did it.
If on 9/12 some genie in a bottle had offered an American the deal that at the end of 2008 the economy would turn bad, but there would have been no terrorist attacks on the US in all that time, would they take it? I know how I felt on September 12. I was afraid for my career, my life, my entire future in this world. I was thinking I might have to move out of Boston because it was too much of a prime target for terrorists. I pictured a small nuke destroying Boston or New York and a mass flight out of the cities that sends the economy off a cliff. Just give me back my feeling of normal life. All has changed. Yes, I would have taken that offer and got on my knees and thanked God for sending me the genie.
Of course, by 2008, millions of Americans forgot how they had felt on September 12. In this, Bush was hamstrung by his own victory. By deterring terror on American soil, he had restored some normalcy to American life, but the return of normalcy enabled people to start to look at him as just some guy who made verbal blunders and ruined the economy. Normalcy returned and, in the lens of normalcy Junior became a buffoon. Never mind that his anti-terrorism leadership had paved the way for the return of the very normal lens that suddenly didn't shine on him very well. No good deed goes unpunished.
LIKE FATHER LIKE SON
George Bush Senior had to listen to the same false assessments of his work in his last months in office too. People commonly spoke of GHWB's 'failed presidency.'
Poppy had lost the Gulf War by not capturing Sadaam and the economy was bad. He was a bum. Virtually no one was speaking well of George H. W. Bush in public during his last months in the White House at the end of 1992. But I think Senior’s legacy has improved with each passing year. In 1990-1991 the left called GHW Bush a Nazi and mass murderer for invading Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. That has faded. History has not judged him badly overall on the first Gulf War.
My wife and I watched an extensive 60 Minutes interview with President W Bush in early 2008. President Bush came off inspired, poised, gracious, articulate and very very mature. My wife felt the same way and she voted for Gore in 2000 (I'm pretty sure.)
I feel very sad about all the abuse that has been heaped upon this President. It's a real orgy of hate, some of it from conservatives who pretend they are deserting him over issues, but are really running off the ship because he became unpopular, so liking him might make them unpopular.
SHOE BUSINESS 12 14 2008
President Bush visited Baghdad in an unannounced visit in mid-December 2008. An Arab reporter violently threw his shoe at the President while Mr. Bush was at a podium. Bush ducked as the spinning shoe buzzed by. In an instant the reporter took off his other shoe and threw that one at Bush also. Bush ducked that one too. The reporter, Abba Thaam Maakhan, was about 20 feet from the President.
The reporter was shouting out how this first shoe was a gift from the Iraqi people and the next shoe was for the orphans.
Bravely spoken. He never would have thrown a shoe at Sadaam. The relatives of the victims of Sadaam's Iraq would have never have had the courage to throw their shoes at Sadaam. He would have made them eat those shoes. Literally.
It really is an ugly video. The people who hate W. Bush in the United States rejoiced and laughed. They laughed all over the mainstream media. The flying shoes incident was treated, for the most part, as a funny story. That wasn’t funny at all to me. I never felt more strongly for the man George Bush that I did when I saw that.
I hate to see our president like that, ducking from an angry flying shoe. He looked like a tired man, a lot older than he was just a year ago. The last year of his presidency has been the toughest.
I would like to box that guy for throwing his shoes at my President. I would feel that way if someone threw a shoe at Jimmy Carter, and he is my least favorite president, so its not about politics, it’s about he is my president, even if I didn't vote for him. The Prez and the VP are the the only elected officials who represent all Americans.
AMERICA UNFRIENDS W BUSH
They always talk about how horrible W’s approval rating was near the end. They say its only 38%. Quite low. Fine. But where were the 38%? You never heard from them. People who liked President Bush were afraid to speak up. I often was. Who wants trouble?
Everywhere we went we got Bush-bashing on the presumption that we agreed with it. It's not like they were trying to pick a fight, its just that they presumed that you hate the guy too so they start bashing him. You don't want to turn a friendly conversation into a hostile one, so you say nothing. My friend in LA tells me it was worse out there. TV studios sent out memos to every one bashing Bush presuming that no one could possibly like him. The 38% were intimidated. In these lame-duck months, W didn't have many public friends.
I did sent a letter to Mr. Bush of support a couple of weeks ago. Actually I wrote it and mailed it on Election Day Eve 2008 (but I didn’t try to defend him on stage in my stand-up. Maybe I could have found the guts, but it would have been unprofessional because the crowds would never go with me on that and all comedians must pander. That’s the job. And that’s why I like writing and politics - making people occasionally angry is part of the perfect tapestry, not a disastrous monkey-wrench.)
LEGGO MY BLAGO
On December 9 2008 the Democratic Governor of Illinois, Mr. Rod Blagojevich was arrested at his home for attempting to sell the vacated Senate seat of President Elect Barak Obama to the highest bidder.
On January 9 2009 the Illinois State Legislature voted to impeach and remove “Blago” from office. He did have his defenders. It certainly wasn't unanimous. The vote was 144-1 for impeachment.
“Blago,” as the headline writers took to calling him, insisted all along that he 'didn't do anything wrong,” Rod was always careful not to say that he “didn't do anything illegal.”
Federal agents had a widely-publicized private interview with President-elect Obama, and he came out clean on the Blago scandal.
Blago was charged with 14 counts, including conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. Solicitation of bribery was the big one. Blago beat all but one of the indictments and also won a reprieve on a mistrial.
At the height of the scandal in January of 2009, Blago went on a media blitz to defend himself. His publicity agency got him on all the big TV shows, just when you would think he would want to go into hiding. It probably helped.
[update 2012 - Blago is in the can]
RICHARDSON PICKED OFF THIRD BASE
Obama's nominee as Secretary of Commerce was the Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson. But an investigation was underway in early January 2009 into some of his financial dealings. The usual stuff - bribes for jobs, illegal campaign contributions. Billy Rich withdrew his name from consideration in deference to the interest of a smooth transition for his friend Obama.
Richardson was once a star baseball player, and his autobiography is so focused on this, that I put it down for good at page 73.
OBAMA SILENCE ON GAZA
Israel launched a punitive attack on the Gaza strip as the New Year 2009 rang in. Headline news for a week or two, just another typical Middle East moment.
Obama went on along vacation in Hawaii (no one criticized him for it) and he got back to the mainland on or about January 2. Arab and many European newspapers criticized him for his silence on the Israeli attack on Gaza, some analyst suggesting that he has lost a lot of ground already by saying nothing.
In reality, Obama is simply trying do the right thing by not undermining the presidency of George W. Bush. One foreign policy at a time and whatever Obama wants to do he will do when he is sworn in on January 20. I resent the criticism of him for his “silence” and the critics overseas can jump in the Mololoa Volcano. It's obviously a can't win situation for Barak. If he made statements about US foreign policy towards the Middle East, he would catch a storm of criticism for arrogance and a disrespect for the acting administration.
The Arab world seems to be presuming that because he has an Arab name. Barry Hussein is going to support the Arabs against Israel. These Arab journalists are in for a rude awakening.
IMPEACHMENT FAILS
But there were always bumper stickers, left-wing talk show hosts, and former government officials who called for the impeachment of George W. Bush.. They said that W had violated the Constitution with his illegal wiretaps and by waging an illegal war. The Bush-haters called for his impeachment from the time he invaded Afghanistan in response to 911.
But impeaching Bush was never a remotely serious proposition. There was never any genuine momentum to start impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush.
POTUS PLUS FOUR
On January 7 2009 the three living ex-Presidents, and the president-elect were invited to the White House for coffee, cake, and a picture party with POTUS, the President of the United States. I love the shots of Bush Senior, Obama POTUS, Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Such power in one little room, it’s really impressive. For me they're all pretty impressive except for Carter. I'm kidding. I would be shaking with reverence to be standing in a corner of that room.
Some reporters on the right-wing were a little offended because when the photo session was over and the bright lights were shut off and the five men began to file out, Obama said he'd like to say one more thing. The lights came back on and the Bushes looked a little annoyed as Obama said with 40 'umms' and 'aahs' sprinkled in how grateful he was that the four of them were all so graciously invited here. One low crass reporter asked Barry how he was going to learn from the mistakes made by the others. Obama said he was going to learn by their successes. Bravo.
It was the first time in 27 years that all the former living presidents had met at the White House.
On January 8 Obama gave a nationally televised press conference on his proposed economic stimulus package. There was a feeling in the country in January 2009 that Barak was about to inherit the helm of the Titanic.
LAST WORD
Not one stand-up comedian ever said a kind word about The President of the United States, George Walker Bush in a public place in 8 years. More than a thousand bashed him. What a country.
SOURCES
50 Ways You can Show George the Door in 2004, by Ben Cohen and Jason Salzman c) 2004 - Westview
Guess it didn't work. Another we all hate Bush book, this one an election year plea to do constructive and destructive things to help the Dems win in 2004.
It's a great looking little cloth paperback until you start really reading it. Then its ugly enough to host The View. Ben Cohen is the co-founder of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Empire, so you know this book is academically advanced.
One of the 50 ways suggested to show Bush the door in 2004 is to write a political poem and start circulating it on the internet.
Here's mine for Ben Cohen and his ice cream partner Jerry Greenfield.
Roses are red,
violets are blue
Die in your sleep
The both of you
Books like this did help to show Bush the door ... to the Oval Office.
It Ain’t Easy Being Liberal, 40 years at CBS, by Ross Bickford - c) 2008 - Viking
This is the source for the General Myers hanging up story.
American Dynasty, by Kevin Phillips – c) 2004 Viking NY
This is truly one of the worst books I have ever read. Unbelievably convoluted garbage. More of a vendetta than a book. His guy lost to a Bush in a bitter Republican contest so he switched parties and bashes Bush now for a living. And much of it is confusing and boring too!
This book is a theory in search of facts to prove it, and it never does. The Bushes are a dynasty, all dynasties are evil, therefore the Bushes are evil. That is the 349 pages in a nutshell and Phillips is a nutshell. Revenge at the typewriter.
Kev goes out of his way to try to make the writing intellectually advanced, like some pipe-smoking Princeton professor torturing the students assigned to read it,
“To begin with the putative imperium of the early twenty-first century bears more relation to Professor Walter McDougal's American 'Crusader State,' with its proselytizing ideology and its biblical analogies, than to any European pomp-and-liturgy type of empire.”
But at least the Princeton professor is the real deal no matter how difficult to read. Kevin is the fake professor, throwing sand in the readers face with snobby 50-cent-word-riddled writing when in fact the point being made after all the jive smoke has cleared, is laughably stupid.
For example; The ABC TV series Dynasty began airing just after Reagan was inaugurated. It became wildly popular. Phillips actually thinks Dynasty was paet of a trend begun and inspired by the Reagans toward ostentatious opulent spending and an acceptance of dynasties.
Kevin quotes a 'cultural historian' from California to back him up – Here is a composite of their exact words,
“A greater sense of the popular mood can be gleaned from the ties between the Reagans, the Republican Party, and the most-watched television series in the United States (and for a while, the world): Dynasty. There is a mutually reinforcing connection between popular opulent fashion and the dual roles of White House Nancy Reagan on one hand and the television fantasy of “Dynasty's” Krystle Carrington on the other. Krystle is the devoted wife of a rich and loving “entrepreneur” and her sartorial splendor, like Mrs. Reagan's, is presumed to be the natural physical expression of her husband's competitive success in the marketplace. “Dynasty” began programming during the week of the first Reagan inaugural in 1981, and exploited the confusion between fantasy and reality.”
Burp.
What an insult to the American people watching TV. Like they are that stupid to be subliminally or overtly influenced by an entertainment program into accepting an entire new set of national mores. Phillips uses his bitter screwdriver to twist up a fantastic thesis from some egghead, adopts it as his own, present it as his own, then quotes the professor to back him up. See? His thought line; My thesis is valid because I have another thinker to back me up - But really it was stolen from the other person in the first place, and then 'proven' by quoting the person he stole it from in the first place.
Dallas was wildly popular during the Jimmy Carter era and that was the same type of show, the rich dynastic powerful family. No one ever concocted an absurd over-analysis of the political import of Dynasty while it was on. Only when a Republican wins the White House do the partisan university fellows cook up theories to relieve their emotional distress over a Reagan in power, and then offer academic spin as proof. That is why Nixon was overanalyzed beyond belief and Carter almost never.
Now here is another dopey theory reaching for even more preposterous proof. The idea here is that the restoration of the old dynasties of Europe indicates a deadly world trend that comes now full circle to a newfound acceptance of the Bush dynasty in America,
More from the New York Times bestseller.
The restoration of George W. Bush in the United States had company. In Bulgaria, Simeon II, deposed as a boy in 1946, returned in 2001 as prime minister. King Michael, the Romanian claimant, allowed to return to a local chateau, had actually ruled Romania as a boy before being expelled by the Russians in 1947.
It is more than eerie.
Kev, Brother. Come on. You're joking right?
He continues with one of the most foolish unfair extrapolations in all of writing history.
A disturbing sidebar to the political culture of these restorations was how many of these royal houses had been on the fascist side in World War II. They suggest the dark side of a political force that has buoyed dynasty and restoration.
Dynasties are being reinstated in Europe. Dynasties are also being reinstated in the United States. The dynasties of Europe were on Hitler's side in World War II. Therefore...... 'It is more than eerie.'
Yeah, it's more than eerie all right; it’s contrived nothing, a tiny twig floating by in the wind from the tree of an angry fool.
The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Costs of the War in Iraq, by George Soros – c) 2004 –
You gotta love this guy. Even though he's a Bush-basher, no one has ever questioned his sincerity. He makes his opposition to Bush bluntly clear but his language is invariably classy. George hits Bush with every 16 inch gun in the battleship but there are few Soros torpedoes below the water line. And there's no smug. It's just so refreshing to read a Bush-bash book without all the discourtesy and astonishing immaturity.
Soros is a millionaire businessman and progressive philanthropist who hated W. Bush, especially for the U.S. aggression against Iraq.
This guy is everything Michael Moore wishes he was. Soros is a good sophisticated writer, wise and mature man, and a trenchant provocative political pundit with originality. George is a political leader, even if to some extent he bought his fame. He made himself a great man and then became a big mouth on politics and against Bush. Moore became a great man by being a big mouth on politics. Without the big mouth on politics, Moore would be washing dishes at Fratellos Ristorante. Soros would still be a one of a kind success story.
Soros put up 24 million of his own money to try and stop W. Bush from winning the 2004 United States Presidential Election.
The right wing talk show hosts hate this guy and rant about some new thing he is doing to promote his liberal causes. I have no problem with George Soros. He argues his left respectfully. The left needs more of his tone and less fighting stridence. The message can be the same, but style is substance and when you open every thought with an insult and attack on your opponent you make it impossible for them to accept your persuasions, so why argue at all if you have no desire to persuade?
Bush in Babylon, The Recolonization of Iraq, by Taraq Ali – c) 2003
The cover photo is a US soldier crouched low with a rifle pointed in anger somewhere inside an Iraq city behind some concrete steps. An American flag is painted on his helmet. Above the soldier, unbeknownst to him, is a boy about three years old, who is hitting the soldier on the helmet with a perfect stream of remarkably accurate urine. I don't know if the photo is doctored or not, but this Ali guy better not step in front of my car with a bag of groceries while I'm changing the radio station (hey, I’m only serious.)
If your goal (and it should be) is to persuade the reader that you are right and they should reconsider their own views, you lose. You are finished from the start by adding unenlightening hatred like this on the cover. There is no call for this cheap low work, even if you were somehow right on every point in the book, which I am sure you are not.
Ali is the editor of the New Left Review. I can't believe my latest issue isn't here yet.
Bush Country, by Poderhotz
The Bush Dyslexicon, The Sayings of President Dubya, by Mark Crispin Miller - c) 2001- Bantam
Whenever an author feels criticism in advance, they write a preface explaining that this isn’t what this is. They cut off criticism at the pass, or at least they think they do. Miller pleads up front that this book isn’t just base visceral partisan ridicule to satisfy a lust to bash this man personally and obtain consolation for the lost election. But, of course, that is exactly what this is.
When Obama mis-speaks it is ignored. When W misspeaks it becomes a title page quotation.
Here’s the real point. Bush is stupid. Therefore, the author is smart.
The Bush Tragedy, by Jacob Weisburg c) 2008 Random House
Hey Jake, are you a professional psychiatrist? Do you have a degree in psychotherapy from Johns Hopkins? No? Then why the hell are you writing an in depth amateur psychoanalysis of President Bush?
Jacob states in no uncertain terms, as the main thesis of the book, that Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 because he had a deep insecure need to compete with his father.
Psychobabble is bad enough when pros do it, but when amateurs do it, it's that much worse.
Oliver Stone ran with the same theme in his movie W.
Bush at War, by Bob Woodward
Woodward is mediocre always. That means he can be read and enjoyed with some effort, but if you never read anything he ever wrote, you’re not missing as much as you think.
Woodward played a role in bringing down Nixon as he was writing about it in a book. His book never revealed his key part in the story he describes (the source for that is Silent Coup.)
Bushwomen, How They Won the White House for Their Man, by Laura Flanders
Laura had her own show on Air America so she has no credibility with me. That station was nothing but unreasoned unfair left-wing hatred towards the Republican Party.
It used to be that right-wing talk shows had a monopoly on emotionally immature undignified hate attacks on the other side. Air America proved that two can play at that game. The number one rule at Air America was, “don't stick to the facts.” If they had a fact to argue, it was couched in four minutes of cheap-shot smug extras. It was almost impossible to find the pearl of a fact in the oyster of non-stop insults.
Bushwomen argues that every female in the Bush Administration as an evil person trying to do evil for the evil king. That is an intellectually untenable position to take.
Laura was also on a public radio station in San Francisco. So you know she will be as fair and balanced as can be, and I am the King of Togo.
I like the impressive endorsement on the back cover,
“It's a terrific read and just what we need – an accessible account of the far Right's drive to power and the women who front it.”
- Susan Sarandon
Well! If no less a political personage than washed-up old actress Susan Sarandon endorses Laura Flanders's Bush-bash book, then I'd just better pack up all my books, index cards and pens and call it a day.
A Charge to Keep, by George W. Bush, c) 1999
CK is a campaign biography for gullible fools who like boring campaign rhetoric in print form. The left claims that George W. didn't write it. Let's hope they're right.
Cobra II, The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor - c) 2006 Pantheon
These two guys became famous as talking heads during Gulf War I. Now they exploit their big names with a book on Gulf War II. I never cared for either one of them. But I am reading their book anyway because I found the $28 hardcover it in mint condition for three dollars. It has great maps, it’s thorough, they are military professionals, and there aren’t many books looking at that war from a military standpoint.
Trainor’s predictions about Gulf War I came out wrong and he never owned up and admitted. He predicted a bloodbath because the Iraq army was no Grenada.
The Commanders, by Bob Woodward –
The standard ‘I never come out and make a call’ Woodward treatment on the decision making in the Iraq invasion of 2003.
The Devil We Know, Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower, by Robert Baer - c) 2008 - Crown Publishers
Yeah, Bob we get it. America is a nation of blind ignoramuses because its people do not to try to appreciate the great Iranian people and culture. Also, Iran isn’t that oppressive compared to other Middle Eastern states.
Dial someone else’s number, will ya, Bub? 60 pages is enough for me on this one.
Eyes on the Horizon, Serving on the Front Lines of National Security, by General Richard B. Myers USAF (ret.) - c) 2009 - Threshold
Once I got past the dreadful 90 page childhood biography (I don’t care that much about the childhood of a president, let alone the Chairman of the JCS who is not a household name in any of the 50 states) this became a valuable read. It’s nice to get the basics on many important events that involved the US military from someone who was literally in command of the information. For a general, Myers seems like a pretty nice guy. He only brags once in while. Most of them are insufferable with that.
Fire Breathing Liberal, by Robert Wexler, with David Fisher – c) 2008
Florida Congressman Wexler hates George W. Bush a lot. I mean a real lot. Bush is a real evil guy surrounded by other really evil men. Bush is too partisan and one-way. Bush is a liar, a cheat, and a scum. Wexler won't even meet with W in the Oval Office, not even when requested by formal invitation on official business. That is his protest over the stolen election of 2000. Like a seven year old, Congressman Wexler vowed that would refused to talk to the President in the Oval Office because he is permanently angry.
Wexler hates Republicans. Oh my God, he hates them all so much.
That is my summation of this book.
Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) – by Mark Crispin Miller – c) 2005 Perasus NY
I like this book because this Air America lefty actually does his homework. This is not light fluff hate from some Strident Streisand, or Bombastic Baldwin. This is a well-documented well-written book by a real political scholar. The ultimate compliment is due too. This book is persuasive. It’s too bad MCM had to balance this book out with his cheap hate book quoting Bush verbal blunders, The Bush Dyslexicon.
Florida was the key state in the 2000 controversy, Ohio in 2004. The trouble for Miller is, the USA did not see Ohio in 2004 as a controversy, even though this book does. Even if Miller is right, he just isn’t going get anyone to care. I care, and I'm open minded and am reading this book, but 98% of the other 299.9 million people are watching American Idol and really caring a great deal who finishes third. The media machine doesn’t like to go over old ground with expose. There’s a spark and little smoke, but no fire. A good book is about as far as “Crispy” is going to get. This book should have been a national sensation, but that needs a perfect storm of many factors.
Fortunate Son, by Bill Minutaglio – 1999 campaign bio by a Dallas Morning News reporter.
Wikipedia claims that this is a pro-Bush book, but since Wikipedia is usually anti-Republican, it isn't true unless you think all Bush books must bash as the default position. Any book that tries to be fair is therefore considered “Pro-Bush.”
Fortunate Son is an awesome 1970 (71?) hit song by Credence Clearwater Revival rock band. It was an anti-war song. A recent Chevy truck commercial really did the song-writers an injustice. The song starts with great drumming - then,
“Some folks are born,
made to wave the flag,
ooh they red white and blue.
And when the band plays
Hail to the Chief
Ooh the point the cannon at you.”
With the cannon line, an anti-war message is clearly developing here. But the TV ad only used the beginning, up to “red white and blue.” They show happy people waving the American flag in slow motion in front of the shiny new truck.
Foul!
Now a lot of people don’t realize that ASCAP owns the rights to almost every song for secondary media distribution. So you people who are furious because some 70’s artist “sold out” are mistaken. You heard that great hit song on a deodorant commercial, and you misjudge them. The artists do not have control the secondary distribution out of ASCAP. They get a check, but they can’t prevent the sale.
That’s rotten enough, but to have a TV-commercial completely flip the political import of a political song, that crosses the line. If I was John Fogerty (and I did model my haircut after him for about 10 years) I would make that song and that ad a test case for the legal rights of ACAP to sell out the artist without their consent. CCR should’ve sued. A lawsuit like that might have stew cooked
The G.O.P. Haters Handbook, by Jack Huberman – c) 2007 –
Huberman compares “The Bushies” to Mussolini several times and referred to the G.O.P. as “The Repugs” as though this brilliant phrase is going to catch on. He lists George W. Bush as “Republican Asshole Number 8” on his “List of Republican Assholes.” I apologize for the profanity but I am citing it as evidence of lefty verbal abuse, not exploiting it for shock value. I have pledged to keep my books clean, but this should be cited bluntly to make the reader understand the needlessly disrespectful atmosphere that prevailed in this time. This is not right. This sort of thing was hurled at W. Bush for eight years and has never been hurled at Obama, a man who is criticized harshly, but respectfully.
If ex-President W. Bush ever starts drinking again, and rereads this, Huberman might be seen sporting two black eyes. Worst of all, the cheap-sot low blows are badly written. I respect writers I hate if they can write If you're a really bad person and a lousy writer to boot, it's unbearable. This guy needs counseling for his sociopathic hatred of the Republican party. Huberman seriously believes that The Republican party is out to do harm to poor people. Hubie condemns the Republican party for being insensitive and hateful. Look in the mirror, baby.
The I Hate George Bush Reader, Why Dubya is Wrong About Absolutely Everything – c) 2004 – By Clint Willis and a large cast of contributors – Thunder's Mouth Press NYC
What else is there to say about a book by such a title? This is the kind of hatred that the left specializes in while thinking they stand for love. Chapter Two is titled, “He's Mean.”
Well look who's talking!
I'd guess that this was published without a profit motive as the absolute bottom line. The main idea was to help bring W down in the Election year. If the book made money that would be a bonus, but the cause is what counts.
The Impeachment of George W. Bush, A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens. - by Former Congresswoman from New York Elizabeth Holtzman, with Cynthia L. Cooper. - c) 2006 Bushbash Books NY-London.
Liz Holtzman defends Clinton as a victim of an impeachment witch-hunt, but asserts with angry tears in her fingers that W. Bush should be tried and expelled immediately. CEH helped to fry President Nixon when she was on the Judiciary Committee in 1973-4.
The Iraq War, by John Keegan
The venerable military historian tackles the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which I do not consider a war, so I don’t agree with the title. It takes two to tango and call it a war. Pakistan and India in 1971, now that was a war. Norway did not have a ‘war’ with Germany in 1940.
John F. Kerry, The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best, Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton - c) 1984
I never knew his grandfather committed suicide at the Copley Plaza Hotel in 1921.
Kerry was upset with this book because he though it was kind of a hatchet job. I’ve read 120 pages and I can tell you I like Kerry a lot more that I did before.
One thing that really comes through is that JFK was a sincere, serious and dedicated person all his life.
Known and Unknown, A Memoir, by Donald Rumsfeld - c) 2011 - Sentinel
I had to wait a few years for the W years to become history, but now all these awesome books are coming out, and I couldn’t be any more excited about it. The title refers of course to his famous enigmatic personality.
I don’t know if I like him, but I know I don’t hate him and ... woa ... a lot of people sure do.
I am just getting started so I can;t comment on the content, but the book feel and design is superb. A pleasure to have, hold and handle by the Sentinel.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken –
The all-time puppettbagger, the lefty sketch-comic Franken is now a United States Senator, and he never could have done it without his best-selling political books, if you could call them “books.”
Reading this book serves as a breather from real work. After the heavy scholastic works I’m usually locked up in, these Franken/Moore puppettbagger polemics are like The Cat in the Hat. This is not a liberal vs. conservative issue. It is a hard-working scholar vs. not a hard working scholar issue. Sydney Blumenthal, Howard Zinn, Dick Gregory, and Bill Clinton are hard working scholars. Al Franken and Michael Moore are not hard working scholars. (and I am not judging Senator Franken - Surely they all are hard-working, and I’m in awe of the office - I’m strictly talking about his books before he became Senator.)
Because he was already famous in the TV comedy world Franken was given access to a team of Harvard students who scoured the earth for all the bad and stupid things said by ultra conservatives. Then they let him lead the writing team as they wrote a book rebutting these dumb things.
Well sure, there are always extremists that one can set up like a straw man to knock down as though that makes one side right and the other wrong. Anyone can find a thousand idiotic things said by the worst lefties and do the same thing. Why rebut word for word, what Sean Penn screamed about last night? Why bother? That’s a barking dog in the neighborhood to close the window on to muffle out so you can go back to reading a real lefty who knows what they’re talking about. The trick is to test and challenge one’s own beliefs by addressing the opposition when its best speakers are giving their best arguments.
Franken searches out the extremists on the right, people I would never profess to stand by anyway, quotes them at their worst, then bases an entire book around rebutting them. You know Al, Ann Coulter does not speak for all of us. She is entitled to her version of conservatism within the diverse Republican party, but she doesn’t represent all of us, only her. I have a scroll of conservatives I don’t agree with. Anyone could have written your stupid book with a Harvard staff doing most of the real work. The problem with this book is that it’s too easy to read.
One of the right-wing lies he cites is the crazy claim that
“Liberals hate all religions except Islam.”
I had never really heard it put exactly that way but it is an interesting point, very pithy. I like that. Thanks for spotlighting that one and promulgating the very myth you’re trying to debunk.
Losing Iraq, Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, by David L. Phillips – c ) 2005 –
Of course a lot changed between the time this was published and the end of the W. Bush second term. The war in the last year of Bush (2008) took a turn for the better and some of the main points in the book are somewhat suspect with the help of unfair advantage hindsight.
Philips was a “senior advisor” at the State Department, an elastic title that usually implies more clout than it really has. Dave P. worked on something called the “Future of Iraq Program” in the Clinton Administration. Phillips carried over into the Bush term and as soon as Bush didn't behave properly, Phillips resigned from the State Department on the showboat date of September 11, 2003.
Just because he worked in the government during the Bush term, Phillips tries to play it up as if he is a disgruntled apostate (always more credible than a basic opposition person) who only quit when his own side had gone too far.
I would just like to know who this guy voted for in 2000. He writes for the New York Times and the Washington Post and is an analyst for NBC News, but the most important credential the publishers stress is his insider post in the Bush Administration as a senior State Department Advisor. If DLP hadn't been already so deeply involved in Iraqi affairs under Clinton he never would have made it past the on-deck circle trying to get into the W. Bush Administration. The State Department is always rich with crossover holdovers from the previous opposition administration, this for expedience, courtesy, and good bi-partisanship publicity.
I don't appreciate the false premise of this book that Davey is a Bush man that couldn't countenance any further abandonment of the Bush principles. I would imagine that from day one of the W Bush term, if you fed this guy a few drinks he would walk around the room calling Bush all the bad names that college lefties shout at him on placards and in comedy skits.
The book is useful, but a outsiders polemic disguised as an insider's anguished explanation for why he had to quit. In his conscience, Phillips resigned on the day W. Bush was sworn in. The Iraqi invasion was a nice excuse to get out of the crook's hideout, and make a few bucks on a book too.
The Occupation of Iraq, Winning the War, Losing the Peace, by Ali A. Allawi – c) 2007 Yale Press
This important work by an important player was written just before the Surge Savard turned things around. It is a most pessimistic work. Ali was minister of finance in the occupation government.
I like the writing very much.
Off With Their Heads, Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media, and Business, by Dick Morris, Fox News Political Analyst – c) 2003 Harper-Collins
This books rips Clinton and praises W. And Morris knew Clinton up close. DM used to be on the Clinton team. He doesn’t seem like the most loyal guy.
Morris is good at explaining complex political things without going over the ignorant reader’s head. He keeps it ‘pop’ without dummying it down either.
Patriots Act, Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out, An Oral History, by Bill Katovsky – c) 2006 - This was in the reading library where the comics stay at the Ritz Carlton in Atlantic City (Warren G. Harding and Al Capone used to stay there a lot....back when it represented success.)
I borrowed this hardcover Patriots Act and read two chapters. The first was the ‘White House Defector’ – It was the work of Rand Beers, a special assistant to President W Bush on combating terrorism. Beers resigned from the Bush Administration five days before the invasion of Iraq in an act of protest and went on to become a national security advisor to John Kerry when he ran for President.
The other chapter was 'The Flaming Liberal,” the story of Air America talk show host Randy Rhodes.
The Rand Beers chapter was useful, articulate, persuasive and disturbing. The Randi Rhodes chapter was just a useless exercise by an ego who knows nothing impressive about anything.
I was driving down Boston's Storrow Drive one night channel surfing the radio and I heard this shrill harsh woman calling all Republicans childish insulting names, displaying a spirit of meanness I had seldom heard in any medium.
I began thinking to myself, “Oh my God, I hope this isn't Randi Rhodes.” The reason being that a good close left wing friend of mine was a full time writer for her at the time. On and on she went, making up fake nicknames for Republicans, taking low blow uninformative cheap shots, laughing smugly at all her venom, cheering on callers who did the same and generally making me feel sorry for her for how miserable she has to be to that consumed with hate for all conservatives. All the while I'm thinking, 'please let this not be Randi Rhodes.
“We'll be back after these commercials, I'm Randi Rhodes.”
All I could think was “oh no.”
Who is Randi Rhodes? First of all she claims to be the all time great disc jockey. Her chapter is filled with awful brags that I just can't get over. She says that she was applying for a job on the radio and the guy said that you can't use the name Randi Rhodes. “There's a great girl deejay in New York and she's unbelievable and you can't take the name.” She had to tell him that it was indeed the same great and unbelievable girl he was talking to
Did you really say “unbelievable?” Do you honestly expect us to believe any DJ that ever lived has ever been referred to as “unbelievable?” It’s scientifically impossible for a DJ to be “Unbelievable.”Edwin R. Murrow wasn't “unbelievable.” The Beatles weren't “unbelievable.” The 1927 Yankees weren't “unbelievable.” Her ego is unbelievable. He didn't say that.
She's Dice Clay from the left, an intolerant thug.
Rhodes (a high school dropout) thinks she owns the supreme truth on everything. Anyone on the right who doesn't get that needs to be straightened out by her personally. If only Republicans would speak to her personally, they would have no choice but to admit the error of their inferior views. Here’s one of the most obnoxious and stupid paragraphs ever typed up and put in a book,
We do get a lot of Republican haters calling. They hate me
because I am telling the truth. It goes against everything
they've heard. At first they are sure I am making this stuff
up. But I read the facts to them. I give them Websites to
look up so that they can personally see that they've been
lied to. A lot of callers will start out combative with me
because its nothing they've ever heard before. They've read
all the lies for so long they think I'm lying. If they give me
a chance and look at something, they will call me back and
go, “You know what? I changed my voter registration card.
I'm voting Democrat.” I get a lot of converts. A lot. I always
tell them, “You're a real man.” Or, “You're a real woman.”
Because it takes a lot to admit you're wrong. And then to do
it in public. So I'm really proud of those people.
First of all, where's the bucket?
Second of all, “Nothing they've ever heard before?” Not in my car. There's 200 leftie talk show hosts out there screaming the same thing every day, so why does she think conservatives are going to turn in to her show and gasp, “wow! that's nothing I've ever heard before!”
And websites? You want a collection of half truths and lies? Start with websites. Start with mine. But I don;t claim to the be the final word-source on one single thing. But some websites act like that. Left wing and right wing websites have a virtual monopoly on specious material.
Maybe a couple of weak-minded callers changed their votes because of a website RR railroaded them to. That only makes those callers more pathetic than she could ever dream of being. In the meantime there are multi-millions of conservatives who would never be influenced to the point of a political sea change by a music disc jockey turned political talk show host later in life.
She has a problem with hateful Republicans and even calls them, “Republican haters.” There's two ways to read that phrase. You are the Republican hater.
The first sentence in her chapter is, “I can't identify with one single Republican.” Wow. Of all the closed minded ignorant rude statements ever said. I don't feel that way about Democrats. I can relate to millions of them. I want to be everyone's friend if I can. I want to listen to their point of view, read their books, and challenge my own beliefs, all the while not hating them personally because we differ. She is the Republican hater. It’s not easy to pull it of when you get insulted, but that’s at least the way I try to be, the way I want to be, if not the way I am. These types don’t even try to be or want to be. They revel in they hateful state, partly because it’s good for ratings. “Don’t touch that dial - Republicans are morons who should be burned at the stake! I’ll tell you why after these commercials.”
Randi compliments fellow left-extremist talk show host Jeanine Garofalo (move star cross-over to politics) who is such a nice person, provided you aren't a Republican, and then takes a cheap shot at her fellow talk show host Al Franken, now a Minnesota Senator (and a Harvard Graduate with a degree in political science, by the way),
Janeane is just the nicest person. Al Franken gets all the great guests on Air America because he's Al. That's hard to deal with. Everybody will do Al's show. Everybody. But nobody will do mine. Al's a moderate. I'm a flaming liberal.
You're a flaming something, all right. You've got a lot of nerve saying Al Franken is a moderate. Have you read his books? Let me direct you to his website. Don't take away Al's left-wing extremist sincerity because you're jealous. Let him decide if he's a moderate.
The publishers seem proud for some odd reason to include this description of Rhodes from the New Republic. Randi hates Rush Limbaugh and his type to the point of sleepless nights with cupie dolls, yet she does the same hateful things he does, and then some. The New Republic citation backs me up,
“Rhodes demonstrates every afternoon drive, a liberal talk show host can be just as bombastic, hyperbolic, and plain old nasty as a conservative one.”
‘Plain old nasty’ is not a compliment, you blubbering fools.
Meanwhile, the stimulating and mature Rand Beers chapter makes me think twice about W. Bush and the War in Iraq.
Decent, fair, and educated players can be persuasive in the direction they mean to be. I’m always willing and eager to listen to the opposite point of view, but not when its plain old nasty.
The Nasties on both left and right are persuasive in exactly the opposite direction they mean to be. Every time I start to drift from right to center I run into a lefty garbage-storm and retreat back to the right. How bout an open door instead of an iron maiden.
Plan of Attack, by Bob Woodward – c) 2004 Simon and Garfunkle Shuster –
Big Bob's first big hardcover on the 2003 Iraq war. I've read too many of his books. They're never completely boring but rarely lively. He is guilty of the Confucian sin of 'concealment.' He never makes a real call. His books are like Keifer Sutherland's TV show 24. Something big is always about to happen. When it finally dawns on you that nothing ever will really happen, you stop watching. I have a pile of half finished Woodward books around the house I can kindle the fireplace with over a three day blizzard. And don't get me started on his John Belushi book.
Rise of the Vulcans, A History of Bush's War Cabinet, by James Mann Jr., - c) 2004
Mann tells us that the nickname came from the God of fire named Vulcan. Then he mentions that Condi Rice, a main vulcan, happens to be from Birmingham Alabama where there happens a giant statue of Vulcan. Then, to give you some idea of the extent he will reach for a biased jab, Mann tells of how in 1999 this statue was taken down for repairs. Then in some seriously convoluted logic, cracks that the Bush team “understandably did not emphasize that fact when it began employing the metaphor.”
Why - were they supposed to? The name Vulcan wasn't based on one statue in Birmingham, it was based on “Vulcan, the God of fire, the forge and metalwork.” Jimmy Mann Jr. is quite a vulcan himself, at the keyboard.
Overall, RV is a readable and important book. It is not a waste of time. In other words, Rise of the Vulcans not like reading one of those disagreeable lefties who are also boring and confusing (hello Kevin Phillips!)
The author’s father Jimmy Mann was an unbelievably good hockey-fighter in the NHL.
Rogue State
This book is so anti-American that it was publicly recommended personally by Osama bin Laden! That's no kidding.
Showdown, by Larry Elders, c)2002 –
You must respect your elders and I do him. A conservative black radio talk show host who has a lot of conservative economic theories of interest. Elders blames FDR for the entire federal mess.
Shrub, The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose – c) 2002 – Vintage
Every paragraph on every page is an unfair vicious attack on the sitting President of the United States. This book should be called,
Club! - Immature Bush-Bashing, by Poison Ivins, and You Debase.
In the W Bush years I used to get e-mails from people I had just met last week bashing Bush as part of the introductory conversation. As usual they just presumed I hated him too, and there was no risk of offending me. I was accustomed to that ignoramus behavior. But I used to wonder why they always called him “Shrub” in the e-mails. I didn't get it. I understood that it was a fourth rate insult pun not worthy of a laugh on the easiest night in front of the friendliest crowd in stand up, but I didn’t know where it came from. At first I thought it was just that individual trying and failing to be clever. Then I noted it in other people's e-mail and didn’t get it.
Now I have found the source of this pitiful pun. Molly Irvins wrote this “biography” of W. Bush in 2000 in order to try to get Al Gore elected. It is a campaign biography just as if it was funded by the DNC. The whole idea is to just bash W Bush unfairly from cover to cover and call it a biography which it is not. It’s a hatchet-job. She’s always trying to be viciously funny in every paragraph. The operative word in the previous sentence is ‘trying.’
Every time I read a political or history book I expect at the end of a two hour read to find some new information which I can can then plug into my own history book in my own words after some studied cross referencing to spice it up. I honestly can't get my hands on anything concrete to work with here. It's just all hack name-calling based on the idea that we all know this guy is a corrupt silver-spooned dummy who deserves complete condemnation for everything he has ever done or said in his life. How can you expect the undecided in the middle, the open minded reader who enjoys a challenge to maybe be persuaded towards your point of view, to move your way when the entire book is based around insults, with the subject's name as a put-down pun on the cover title?
Yeah, I get it. His father was a bush, and he is a shrub. Hold on while I double over laughing. Even if it was one tenth of funny, which it is not, how are you going to win anyone over but the choir?
That's the starting point for the reader who is undecided about Bush and likes somethings about him and dislikes other things. Hell, you're not even preaching to the choir. You're partying with the choir. You’re not saying much at all. You will not win one undecided voter with this approach. This type of attitude is the reason this bum got re-elected, if, as you say, he is one. There's really no excuse for what goes on in this book, except that Molly is a famous columnist and enjoys making money on books that are only bought and read by people who already share her hatreds. Those type of books became an industry in the W years.
President Bush is always 'Dublya' – His father President Bush is 'Big Daddy.' Too bad Maureen Reagan died young. It would have been nice to get Maureen drunk at some national gala event and watch her put Molly in a headlock and rearrange her make-up. Maureen Reagan was a tough gal.
As usual the father GHWB gets opportunism praise in order to show the bad contrast with his son, when these same lefty writers called his father every name in the book when he was President from 1989-1993.
I can do puns too. This book should be called,
The Random House People repackaged it with a contrived introductory chapter to make it seem, to anyone who picked it up at random, like it was a 2002 contemporary book, but the entire bio is about the man before he became President.
State of Denial - Bush at War Part III, by Bob Woodward - c) 2006 Simon & Schuster
I never love reading Woodward’ works.
Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore – Why is he writing a book about himself, Molly Ivins, and Al Franken?
Truth and Duty, The Press, The President, and The Privilege of Power, by Mary Mapes – c) 2005 St Marty's Press
CBS fired her. Her partisan hard-luck story is our job to read about now. 60 Minutes threw Mary under the bus when she produced a down in the dirt story about W. Bush that turned out to be false. In 2005 she wrote this self-indulgent excuse towel saying that she was right, but by a thin margin of the definition of proof she was only very technically wrong. Therefore CBS should have shown more liberal courage and stood by her instead of firing her.
The 60 Minutes story was an attempt by the Democrat left (and by the way, half of the left claim to be independents – ok, so they are independent leftists) to hit Bush hard during the Election Campaign of 2000. The CBS piece spectacularly revealed a letter from a public official from 1971 proving that W. Bush only got into the Texas Air National Guard by way of nepotism.
But the letter was a forgery. 60 Minutes was deeply embarrassed, and had to make a contrite on-air apology. The network fired MM, the producer of the piece. Mapes became famous as a result of the firing, and now could write a book. As a successful producer at 60 Minutes, she could not convince a major publisher to advance her a royalty. But as a failed producer she became book-worthy.
W Must Die!, by Keith Olberman - c) 2007 - Smugleft Press NY
He’s pretending to be joking, but he really means it.
Wiser in Battle, by General Ricky Ricardo Sanchez, c) 2008 - Harper/Collins
He kills for the Lord. It’s bad enough coming from Tim Tebow.
Sanchez commanded US military operation in Iraq during much of “Phase IV,” the duties after mission accomplished. He didn’t always get along with the CPA civilian leadership under Mr. Bremer. CPS is code for Coalition Provisional Authority. There were two layers of occupational government, one military and one civilian, and integration was poor.
VIDEO
W – A movie starring Josh Brolin as George W Bush – c) 2008
If Joseph Goebbels had produced The Life of Chaim Weizmann, it would have been more fair, decent honest and even handed than this very good movie by the always political Oliver Stone.
I can live with the hatchet job on W. What is offensive is the way he makes Bush senior seem like a pathetic wimp, and the relationship between father and son bordering on outright hatred. They actually show Bush Sr. break down and cry in front of the entire family when he watches the election returns in 1992 and he realizes for the first time that Clinton is the winner. Stone needs a slap for that. As if Bush Sr. didn't know that the polls had him clearly in an impossible position long before election night. They guy had flown fighter planes in WWII. He’s going to pick right now to cry? You clowns!
This was just the Bush-haters version of George W. Bush. He visits wounded US troops in the hospital and the parents of the young men give him dirty looks. They of course don't show the thousands of political prisoners in Iraq freed from Sadaam's torture doctors and the grateful looks on their parents faces. Nor do they show the troops that were honored to meet the President of the United States. Nor the family members who understood the price of being a soldier was to give up the political right to judge missions. There are plenty of family members who love their flag and their wounded or deceased son, and can still feel proud of their service even if they had mixed feelings about the mission. They never get a part in a movie or a Michael Moore documentary.
To give you some idea of the bias here, they show George Bush doing a number 2 with the door wide open right in front of Laura and him wiping himself while talking to her and not missing a beat of the conversation. Give me a break.
Having said all that, this is a great movie, as far as movie-making goes. Parts of it were very informative, and Brolin is amazing as W. As long as the students were instructed that this is a completely biased take, I would recommend that every high school student in America watch this film. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time!
Brolin as W, and Frank Langella as Nixon in the movie Frost-Nixon are the two ends of the spectrum. You can’t nail it any better than Brolin, not any worse than Langella.
POSTSCRIPT
My letter to the Wash Post after Palin interview
Great article, Mr. K.
Gibson was condescending to the max. Did you see when he asked her slowly and almost incredulously about how when she got the call to be VP, "You didn't first stop and ask yourself, 'Am I ready?' - It wasn't asked in a straightforward manner, but rather with the implication that she should have.
He never would ask Obama that question in that tone, nor would he have asked it of Gerry Ferraro in 1984, a two-term Congresswoman from New York running for VP in 1984.
Even the Truman doctrine was very malleable. Only the Monroe Doctrine has ever been treated politically as an official government policy.
By the way, a lot of people suggesting that Palin said we would have to go to war with Russia should look up the word "perhaps" in the dictionary.
AUDIO
I borrowed a line from a fine comedian named Jimmy JJ Walker in this chapter. I'm not going to tell you the line either. It spoils the fun. Jimmy is 'Dy-no-myte!.” We're friends and I already got his permission the last time we worked together in Atlantic City. He also gives the into on my comedy CD, “Throwing Rocks.”
Coming Attractions.
CAPTURE OF SADAAM HUSSEIN
IRAQI POW ABUSE SCANDAL
TSUNAMI OF 2004
RATHERGATE
DISCLAIMER
The anthrax letters did not come with a return address of
Credit One Bank - I’m just ribbing them for the way
they never allow you to get a live person on the phone
and all the other credit cards do. Plus a couple of other
thing they do that I do not like, untoward things none of the
other credit card companies do.
The real return address of the Anthrax letters was a
fictional grammar school in New Jersey.
I heard the joke about ‘the forty second president.’ My
mailman Hymie Kelly told me that joke.
DISCLAIMER ON THE DISCLAIMER
Hymie Kelly is not my mailman’s real name. Hymie Kelly
was the name of the racially mixed character in the
1966 movie The Oscar, starring Steven Boyd. Tony
Bennett was in it as Hymie Kelly, the only movie TB
was ever in, and he hated it, and was awful - which was
probably why he hated it. Hymie Kelly’s
mother was Jewish and his father was Irish.
It’s considered a bad movie, but I love it.
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