Posts Tagged Under ‘George Bush’

Pointing Out David Addington

John Yoo got the bulk of the negative publicity for his torture memo, but I’ve read many times that David Addington has been the real advocate for scrapping the rule of law in the Bush Administration. This Bob Herbert column on Addington makes that point better than I can.

Gay Marriage and the 2008 Campaign

I didn’t think this one would be back again as a campaign issue, but it seems that it will be.

There are a few differences this time around. First, if campaigning were a video game, the G.O.P. already used the one-time, battleground-state-gay-marriage-ballot supermove to defeat the 2004 Democrats, leaving them without the ability to use it again. You can’t write the same amendment to a state constitution twice, so that’s out of the question in important electoral states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri and Kentucky It thus can’t be used to quite the same right-wing-voter motivation effect.

Second, Barack Obama doesn’t even support gay marriage. I had no idea that this was the case until I read it tonight. Liberal groups are apparently so excited that a liberal has a decent shot at the presidency that they have swept this normally liberal-upsetting factoid under the rug. (How mature of my fellow bleeding hearts to accept political nuance for a change.) Though Obama has an otherwise pro-gay-rights voting record, he is on the record against gay marriage. So it’s not really something that can be used against him the same way it could against John Kerry, who was more vague on everything.

I do, however, say that even as people continue to buy the Muslim rumor even after weeks of high-decibel tongue-clucking over Obama’s Christian pastor, so figuring out which smears will stick isn’t much of a logical pursuit.

Third, McCain is the candidate who is potentially the most impacted by this. Does McCain come out strongly against the California court in a bid for more religious-conservative support? Or does he stick to his relatively libertarian past talk on gay issues, in which he said he didn’t support a federal amendment banning gay marriage? (That’s libertarian by moralistic-Republican standards; he still opposes gay marriage on moral grounds and supports “don’t ask, don’t tell”.) I don’t think he’ll do anything beyond reiterating the “Marriage is between a man and a woman” boilerplate b.s.

Meanwhile, Godwin’s law has already come into play in this campaign—by the President himself!—and we’re still five months out from the election. While Bush technically compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain, I’m going to say that it still counts because Nazis were explicitly mentioned.

“Moral Vacuum”

This column was deeply unsettling and thought-provoking:

The Age of Irresponsibility

For a President who believes so deeply in good, evil and the need for justice, why does he think a situation with no consequences isn’t going to bring out the worst in people? And for those who argue that counterinsurgencies—from the American West to Ireland to Malaysia to Kenya—have always involved (or even “require”) violent excesses by the occupiers, I think it’s obvious who deserves the blame for failing to learn that and promising the opposite in Iraq.

Iraq

Understanding the logistical impossibility of maintaining the troop surge, and disregarding whether or not you really believe that the past few months’ effort has worked, I can’t quite wrap my head around this one.

When you say spend months arguing that a certain strategy will work, then you believe that the strategy does indeed work, why then do you abandon the strategy for the very reason that, well, it worked? Apparently the President is assuming the troops’ presence allowed some other societal facet to bloom that will provide ongoing stability. But it seems to me that other than the troop level, there aren’t other variables that have changed from spring 2007 to now: even if violence is down, we haven’t seen a big Iraqi government breakthrough (ask the White House), nor is there any kind of factional reconciliation to speak of.

This is like when a patient takes medication for a chronic condition, then after realizing he feels better, says, “Man, I feel great–looks like I no longer need to take my medication.”

They Seem Made Up, And Yet They Aren’t

As my friend Steve put it, “these sound a lot like people doing imitations of him”:

The 50 Dumbest Things …

I’m particularly fond of Nos. 50, 44, 39, 35, 26 and 14-13.

Why Do Special Olympic Athletes Hate America?

Today’s testimony from the outgoing Surgeon General is probably the best one yet in the never-ending parade of scientists who don’t like the current government. Not only did your man Dr. Carmona (dude has one hell of a c.v., btw) testify that administration officials suppressed his reports on stem cells, contraception, global health and secondhand smoke and asked him to mention the President three times on each page of his speeches, but he also said that senior officials actually asked him why he would support the Special Olympics when the Kennedy family is involved in that charity.

I think that all future “The Administration is politicizing [x]” testimony has jumped the shark, because after the idea that it’s a worthwhile thing to diss mentally disabled people just so you can stop your ideological opponents from scoring points, where do you go from that?

This is an example of how far one’s leadership culture should extend. The President, spiteful and unsympathizing as he is, would not have given anyone specific orders to go and hate on Special Olympic athletes and families so the Kennedys would miss out on added support. The problem is that he seems to have let the suck-up culture run wild underneath him to the point that staffers would think, “Hey, dissing Special Olympics is a great idea,” and carry it out. I think we’ve all encountered the in-your-face, unprincipled one-upping type of staffers we’re talking about here—they’re a chance to use the awesome word “sniveling”—but it’s the leader’s job to set the tone and smack those people down so the honest people can be heard.

Meanwhile, only 19 more months!

Libby: G. Gordon or Scooter, They’re All Criminal To Me

I guess I’m supposed to be mad at the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence, but normally you have to be taken aback by something to be angry, and this is probably the most predictable presidential action since the last bad decision Bush made. (Choose your own; there’s no shortage.) But the point is, it was predictable.

The time to be mad about this was probably when he was convicted. If on the day of the conviction, you somehow thought Libby wasn’t going to be pardoned, you should probably also see a doctor about the inordinate amount of time you spend submerging your grill-piece in grains of silica. I will give Bush credit: he surprised us with the speed that he arrived at the incredibly bald-faced decision we knew all he’d eventually make. I was thinking fall 2008 or so, but it’s not even mid-summer 2007 and we’re already witnessing the bending of justice. (Note to Tony Snow: keeping Libby away from justice is clearly worse than Clinton’s pardons, because it’s pretty obvious that Al Gore didn’t go to Marc Rich and order him to break the law. We can’t be quite so sure about Dick Cheney going to Libby.)

Keith Olbermann is certainly right here, but we’ve come to the point where we have two options: impeachment / resignation (as if!), or battening down until January 2009. (The latter being contingent on us not going to war with Iran. Should he opt for that, all Bush has to lose are many thousands of human lives, and that hasn’t proven to bother him so far.)

Though I think the president’s actions more than warrant impeachment, the Republicans unwittingly did themselves a favor by impeaching Bill Clinton: that was such a partisan joke that the pooch of impeachment has been good and screwed for at least a generation or so going forward, and it just doesn’t seem like something the country is willing to go through again, even though the case for Bush’s impeachment just gets stronger and stronger all the time.

I still can’t believe all these G.O.P. jokers I see interning on the Hill, like the events of today aren’t even happening. Is impeachment justified? I think so. Will it happen? F no, it won’t.

2009, where you at!

Hung, Then Tried, Then Shot?

I agree wholeheartedly with this guy: