The Case for Impeachment

Oops, below I cited Cheney's polling figure as 29%. Correction, it's 18%.

Oh, and this news story is just too much. It regards the bin Laden tape that happened to surface just before the 2004 election. To think that GW and the gang sat around conducting "enormous amounts of discussion" over whether or not this tape would help Junior's chances. Are you kidding me? He really does assume the public are fools. Given how Rove et al meticulously played (plays) the fear card, this tape must've been greeted with immediate approval. A gift from God, no doubt.

Conservative columnist George Will recently reviewed Bruce Bartlett's book "Impostor" and was quick to remind all of the many Reagan worshippers who still believe that The Great Communicator was all about cutting taxes, "[Reagan] signed tax increases in 1982 (twice), 1983 (twice), 1984, 1985 (twice), 1986, 1987 (twice) and 1988." I've cited this track record many times before here. Facts, they're a bitch to those who wish to dream.

And here's some shocking news just out: "Postwar Iraq Chaos Blamed on Poor Planning." Based on a study from an entity beyond the influence of this strong-arming administration, it offers up quite a different reason for the mess of things over there other than the BushCo trotted out excuses (insurgent attacks and lack of security). Instead, not surprisingly the blame falls on a lack of proper preparation by our government and therefore the many billions in U.S. taxpayer money has been frittered away with nothing to show for it. The report states, "The U.S. government workforce planning for Iraq's reconstruction suffered from a poorly structured, ad-hoc personnel management processes." Just more half-assed due diligence work by these bunch of incompetents.

Still believe Bush cares about military vets? This item is just the latest in vet cuts: "After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter." Notice the increase to provide cover for this year's elections -- but then the ax post-haste.

A good summary of Bush's many problems and screw-ups, from a journalist who has covered five presidencies.

A terrific column by Jonathan Chait in the LA Times. He writes, "Bush's interest in renewable energy seems to have come about as a result of his need to have a dramatic theme for his State of the Union address. Before that, he was not just uninterested but outright contemptuous of the idea." Policy and getting things right from the get-go is an extremely low priority for BushCo. As Chait concludes, "Clinton was meticulous about the policies themselves, which emerged only after long deliberation and study. Bush does things the other way around. Speeches are crafted with painstaking care; policies are an afterthought."

Some items to chew on when considering the Dubai Ports uproar:

George W. Bush nominated Dubai Ports senior executive David Sanborn to be the U.S. Maritime Administrator -- "a key transportation appointment reporting directly to Norman Mineta the Secretary of Transportation" -- just three weeks before the UAE takeover of U.S. seaports was made public.

Treasury Secretary John Snow, who approved the deal and now denies it, was chief executive of CTX Corp. until George W. Bush appointed him in 2003. CTX sold its port operations to Dubai Ports for $1.15 billion a year later.

The United Arab Emirates is a major stakeholder in the Carlyle Group -- the same gargantuan private equity firm that employed the elder George Bush as senior adviser. The UAE government-run fim Dubai International Capital backs an $8 billion Carlyle fund. And the Carlyle Group bought CSX Corp. in 2002, while Snow was still CEO.

The UAE even gave more than a million dollars to the elder Bush's presidential library in Texas.

34%: President Bush’s approval rating, according to a new CBS poll, an all-time low. The question is: will GW's abysmal polling number drop below Cheney's (29%)? Stay tuned.

Apparently the good folks in California did not read Mark Crispin Miller's excellent book, "Fooled Again."

Kevin Drum writes about the recent TNR article by Lawrence Kaplan, who attempts to make the case for why American troops must stay in Iraq. Drum opines:

Kaplan demonstrates pretty convincingly that Iraq is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly sectarian, and takes this as evidence that the United States needs to stay....It's not what I got out of Kaplan's description. Rather, his article persuaded me that the American presence is hopelessly ineffectual and increasingly pointless. Sure, it's possible that our presence can prevent Iraq from descending into an immediate, full-scale civil war, but Kaplan's own evidence seems to indicate that while we might be preventing immediate mayhem, we're not changing any of the underlying dynamics of Iraqi society, even at the margins. If we stuck around for a decade and finally left in 2016, Iraq would be a bloodbath in 2017.

Not to mention the many U.S. soldiers that will continue to die -- and for what? If civil war is seemingly inevitable -- whether it be tomorrow, next month, or next year -- than why have our men and women die in the process? With Iran (and other interested parties) working behind the scenes to insure mayhem continues and escalates, and with the three Iraqi groups bitterly divided based on many years of history, where's the hopeful signs that democracy will take root anytime soon?

This administration continues to play up fears when politically convenient, but when it comes to Iraq it's all lip service as even they can't deny that the current situation there is dire, devolving from bad to worse, and the likely preoccupation as we speak is how to best frame and spin the ugliness once it unfolds. First priority: as always, don't accept blame for anything. Second priority: do place blame on anyone/anything else. Third priority: state sh*t happens when democracies are in their infancy.

Drum also discusses the recent Newsweek article which lays out how badly BushCo has botched the "war on terror." He concludes his blog entry with exceedingly true words, "The damage that George Bush has done to the United States is going to be with us for a very long time."

Karl Rove has hatched a new culture-war wedge issue to excite the zombie contingent of the GOP base. Better to leave these kids in foster homes, right Karl? Or do you care about them at all (beyond just getting those votes)?

As per usual, "love" the fetus, hate the child.

Why the wingnuts despise Clinton:

Percentage approval rating of Bill Clinton the day after impeachment and George W. Bush in November, respectively: 73, 37

Iraq moving closer to civil war.

The uptight, dim-bulb George Will writes today about how conservatives are happier than liberals. Has he ever heard the saying "ignorance is bliss"? But more so, Will doesn't even question the likelihood that the poll is flawed due to a skewing in the population sample. I would venture to guess that conservatives are more affluent than liberals and it stands to reason that wealth and therefore quality of life may factor into this poll.

And more of this bullsh*t: "The Bureau of Land Management, caretaker of more land and wildlife than any federal agency, routinely restricts the ability of its own biologists to monitor wildlife damage caused by surging energy drilling on federal land, according to BLM officials and bureau documents."

Bush recently declared this country's excessive reliance on foreign oil as "a national security problem." If so, then where's the many billions of dollars thrown at this problem? Oh, that's right, alternative energy sources lack a significant K Street presence and are not big campaign donors.

Bush is touring the country, attempting to convince people that he truly supports non-oil solutions to our energy problems. However:

"It's great that the president is talking about our addiction to oil, but his policies are feeding the habit," said Jeremy Symons, director of the National Wildlife Federation's global warming campaign and a former staffer on Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. "The budget that came out funds less than half of what the recent energy bill promised for renewable energy and energy efficiency - the two most readily available opportunities to break our addiction to oil," Symons said in an interview. Most benefits from the alternative energy sources that Bush favors are years away from practical use, and some of the technology is unproven or financially impractical now.

Many a right-winger will exclaim, "he finally backs some leftist solutions and this is what you do? Criticize him??" Uh, yes, because it's mainly lip-service bunk.

This recent charade helps to illustrate two classic Bush administration traits:

1) Publicly propose "bold" initiatives -- but then quietly underfund them. Reap the pomp and fanfare but ultimately do very little. Garner the favorable public opinion via splashy headlines and glossy rhetoric, but in the trenches where it counts, come up very short.

2) Stress years into the future -- when you don't have to. There already exists many technical breakthroughs that could be implemented fairly quickly if Bush would just offer the leadership to make it happen. Example: raise the MPG on the US fleet of autos/trucks, forcing the use of existing technical know-how to make vehicles more fuel efficient.

Instead, as with global warming, GW chooses to emphasize the more-science-is-needed approach, thus stalling any impetus to do something, anything, now. He pushes out the urgency. The end result: very little will get done, later rather than sooner.

Notice how his SOTU speech had near zero bragging points on his achievements over the last five years.... My point.

Kristof in yesterday's NY Times:

President Bush now has a public approval rating that is 33 percentage points lower than President Clinton's was at the time he was impeached.

[In 1987] Mr. Reagan systematically overhauled his presidency....his approval rating rose from 40 percent in 1987 to 64 percent when he left office.

....But Mr. Bush today is not retooling; he's hunkering down in the bunker. Instead of the Reagan approach of 1987, it's the Nixon approach of 1973. It just increases the national polarization and doesn't help Mr. Bush.

That symbol of tolerance and reason, Sen. Orrin Hatch, recently stated, "Nobody denies that he [Saddam Hussein] was supporting al-Qaida. Well, I shouldn't say nobody. Nobody with brains." According to the WSJ, 59% of Americans do not believe this Cheney-manufactured lie anymore -- so I guess they're brain-dead. As are the folks on the 9/11 Commission.

Bush's "Portgate" is quite odd. He doesn't use his veto in 5+ years in office but for some reason this matter is when he throws down the gauntlet and declares he'll finally use it....? There's more to this story than meets the eye.

That said, the most interesting aspect is the extent to which it shows how much "political capital" GW has lost. Heck, even Bill Frist (!) has come out against Bush -- what next?

Kevin Drum writes:

What it shows is that Bush still doesn't understand how much influence he's recently lost with his conservative base. In the brave new post-Harriet, post-Katrina world, outrage over the port deal has been driven equally by both liberal critics and conservatives like Michelle Malkin and administration uber-stalwart Hugh Hewitt, who are no longer willing to simply take Bush's word for it that they should trust him on this issue. For today's chastened conservatives, it's "trust but verify" when it comes to the Bush administration....Bush is a dead man walking these days, and the UAE port deal shows that he still doesn't quite get this.

A very close right-wing friend of mine helps to keep me clued in as to how the mind operates on the other side. I am frequently perplexed by how he and I can laugh and agree on so many things in life, and yet look at a given political issue in such starkly different ways.

The following are some questions I've asked him over time which he seemingly refuses to answer; you may understand my frustration when you read them:

1) Regarding the fairly recent Supreme Court ruling in the Oregon case, to the surprise of many conservative backers, Scalia ruled against states rights and a smaller, more limited federal government role. My friend's knee-jerk response was to halt any premature judgment towards Scalia until one actually read his dissent. When I emailed him the entire text of the dissent, expecting to hear from him soon once he digested it, I was instead met with many days of silence.

It's been weeks and I have yet to hear a thing regarding this dissent. Trust me, I won't hear a thing. It was a classic dodge, one I've been treated to many times before. The right wing stalls and then never delivers, hoping everyone has just moved on, banking on the poor memories of most Americans. The problem is many liberals have excellent memories and do a very good job of connecting the dots.

2) I will cite a news item (a recent example being Ken Starr's forged documents) and yet it never fails, my friend denounces the news source as liberal and untrustworthy. Thus, he dismisses any and all of the story, period. Pulling my hair out, I've asked him what info or news source(s) he in fact endorses. FOX News? Limbaugh? O'Reilly?? I get no answer. I suppose the strategy is to just dismiss and badmouth every news source out there without providing favorable alternatives. It makes you wonder if they read any news at all, choosing instead to be uninformed, living in their own carefully manufactured reality.

3) Like many right wingers, my friend is a big-time global warming skeptic. Let me say that he's by no means an uneducated yokel; he's a very intelligent working professional. Yet, any climate change that he does admit to gets relegated to the "it's a big mystery" category, or that it's the earth going through some kind of natural mega-cycle. More to the point, by no means does he believe man necessarily has anything to do with it.

In response I've asked him a very simple question: where do man-made air pollutants go? Do they just rise and escape into outer space? Assuming "no" to this question, and assuming they don't just magically disappear, then where do they end up? As with the above points, he has yet to answer this question. Another dodge.

If the right-wing professes to know so much about what's good for this country, then why don't they have answers to so many questions?

And now for some disturbing environmental items:

I'm sure you've already read that Greenland's glaciers are melting at a faster rate than originally thought.

Those faster-moving glaciers now dump in a year twice as much ice into the Atlantic as they did in 1996, researchers said Thursday. The resulting icebergs, along with increased melting of Greenland's ice sheet, could account for nearly 17 percent of the estimated one-tenth of an inch annual rise in global sea levels, or twice what was previously believed, said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA...."It's likely that Greenland is going to contribute more and faster to rising sea levels than previously estimated."

And as for the arctic:

An extensive international study on the effects of climate change in the Arctic has reached some startling conclusions on issues ranging from how fast polar ice is melting to the impact on Inuit communities. About 120 scientists from 11 countries involved in the Canadian-led research project, which started in 2002, are meeting in Winnipeg this week to present and discuss their findings.

One of the most surprising for David Barber, a sea ice specialist at the University of Manitoba, was the fact polar ice is melting at a rate of about 74,000 square kilometres each year - an area about the size of Lake Superior - and has been for the last 30 years....Barber added there is increasing concern in the scientific community that there are factors actually speeding up the melt, but he cautions it's too late to reverse the trend. "The time to act actually was a few decades ago," he said. "We're not going to be able to shift the economies of the planet to get off this fossil fuel addiction in a week, a year or a decade. But we have to start the process now to have some stability for future generations."

Once again, a state feels the need to sue the EPA, this time it's New York for simply desiring data on pollutants released into the air by paint companies. BushCo's EPA has been - surprise -- siding with paint companies.

Here's some classic Bushian logic: they've been slashing the US Forest Service's budget for years. Now they claim that this smaller Forest Service is too thin to effectively manage its lands, so the solution is to shrink the national forests by selling off the land to private interests. Incredible. Rather than up the budget of the Service to better handle its workload, nope, better to simply shrink our national forests (by 300,000 acres).

Another in what's becoming all-too-frequent 1984-ish news item:

Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.

The disclosure comes nearly two weeks after the NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, called for "scientific openness" at the agency. In response to that, researchers and public affairs workers at the agency have described in fresh detail how political appointees altered or limited news releases on scientific findings that could have conflicted with administration policies.

Oh, this is priceless:

US commanders in Iraq are expressing grave concerns that the overcrowded Abu Ghraib prison has become a breeding ground for extremist leaders and a school for terrorist foot soldiers...."Abu Ghraib is a graduate-level training ground for the insurgency," said an US commander in Iraq.

They now refer to Abu Ghraib as "Jihad University" -- another instance where before there were no terrorists in Iraq, now we're breeding them.

Out of the blue, Alan Dershowitz has resurfaced, speaking out about Cheney's shooting incident. I asked the question about a year ago: what ever happened to this guy? He used to be on every TV news shoutfest, representing the liberal side, and then he suddenly disappeared. Very odd.

Did you know there are 33,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, vs. "just" 15,000 about the time Clinton left office? I thought BushCo was going to clean things up in Washington -- funny, you'd think lobbyists wouldn't be part of the solution. Also in that time, 250 former members of Congress have joined the ranks of lobbyists (including former AG Ashcroft!), as well as 275 former White House aides.

And yet for incumbents, elections are more of a sure-thing than ever. Example: 400 of 435 House members run in safe districts, often unopposed. One would think this means less spending and campaigning is required -- so then why the massive donations by lobbyists? It appears it's all about greed and influence when writing laws for special interests.

Do the math, 92% of House members are shoe-ins for reelection, so don't "buy" their oft-used excuse that they need to raise massive $$$ to effectively campaign. There's much more going on here than that lame justification. (Source of data: The Leuthold Group)

An insightful letter to editor in Boston Globe:

AS SCARY as an accidental shooting is, the scarier part of Vice President Cheney's interview with Fox News concerned his interpretation of his declassification authority, which would have allowed his former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, to divulge information to reporters.

The disturbing part of Cheney's perspective and the part that, along with the quail, he missed is that if information is to be declassified, it should be made publicly available to the press, to Congress, to scholars, and to the American people through an orderly and transparent process. Declassifying information for the purpose of sharing it with trusted journalists who then attribute it to anonymous sources taints the process and provides yet more proof that the disclosure was politically motivated.

This Cheney-shooting sideshow, which is wrought with troublesome questions and poses larger problematic examples of what's wrong with this administration, has served to distract the nation from a recent bombshell news release that merits close scrutiny. According to Scooter Libby, Cheney authorized a treasonous act to be committed.

Where's the so-called leftist media to go ape-sh*t over this eye-opening revelation? (crickets)

This story is absolutely stunning and a perfect example of what this Congress represents and stands for.

At one point, there was bipartisan support for an investigation into Bush's secretive -- and illegal, according to most expert opinions -- warrantless eavesdropping. That unsurprisingly has been watered down to a laughable charade.

However, rather than the GOP putting together some highly partisan group of clowns to seemingly review the program only to later (much later) offer some lukewarm, meaningless and toothless opinion that amounts to nothing, instead they've decided to investigate the FISA law itself. In other words, they're going to spend time reviewing not the controversy that sparked the need for an investigation in the first place, but rather to instead take a good, hard look at the law Bush broke. By doing so, they'll no doubt conclude they need to change the FISA law and presto magico, Bush no longer is in trouble.

Yup, when the King circumvents the law of the land, what do you do? Why of course, you ultimately just change the law.

If originally there was something wrong with FISA, that suggestion should've come up prior to the King simply running roughshod right over it. But that's the rub and why it was wrong to begin with: these guys just do as they please and don't take the time to consider that they, like us, must follow the laws of this country. Such trivial things apparently only apply to the peasants.

Green Knight, I feel your pain.

Fellow blogger, The Green Knight, and I share the same reasons for starting a blog -- and subsequent frustrations:

When I started this blog, I hoped to do a tiny amount to change the shape of American political discourse. I was amazed and disgusted by the media's slavish toadying to BushCo, but I figured that if enough dissenting and reasonable voices got out there in this new medium, things would have to change at some point. My aim was to contribute to the tide of change.

Apparently, I was wrong.

BushCo has gotten the USA into a pointless war, allowed the worst terrorist attack in history to happen on its watch, is gleefully shredding the Constitution, allowed a major American city to be destroyed, ruined the USA's image abroad, spies on its citizens, tortures people, loots the public purse, and wrecked its own intel operation against Iran for petty political purposes. None of that has resulted in vigorous and sustained criticism on the part of the press or even of the opposition party.

....So, I give up trying to change things. It's just not going to happen. All this blog and others like it can accomplish is to provide some kind of record, so that when historians of the future (assuming there is one) look back at the decline and fall of the United States, they will at least see that some of us saw it coming.

More on the Cheney shooting incident, namely why what's most troublesome about the accident is nearly everything other than the accident itself:

....It took multiple phone calls and several hours for Bush to find out that his vice president almost killed a man. Bush's obliviousness is more interesting than Cheney's bad aim.

Being out of the loop is nothing new for this president. Whenever the public gets a random glimpse into Bush's private schedule, he seems to be strangely detached from events around him. When a crazy person sprayed the White House grounds with bullets in the middle of the day in 2001, we learned Bush was not working, but working out. When a plane flew into restricted Washington air space in 2005, Bush was biking in the suburbs, clueless about the emergency.

....Fear of detail is what has led to Bush's greatest failures. He didn't aggressively follow up on the pre-9/11 Presidential Daily Brief that warned "bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." He was so determined not to second guess his generals that he watched from the sidelines as their military strategy allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal spread out of control without presidential intervention. And as the damning report to be released today on Hurricane Katrina shows, Bush dithered while New Orleans sank. According to The Washington Post, the report notes that "'earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response' because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance." But that would have required micro-management instead of delegation.

The Bushies are supposedly fans of the so-called unitary executive theory, an idea with roots in Alexander Hamilton's Federalist No. 70. Their reading of Hamilton is that the executive branch has to be powerful. But they have it wrong. Hamilton didn't call for a powerful executive, he called for an "energetic" one, the kind who cuts through bureaucracy during an emergency or commands his generals instead of deferring to them. But Bush's detached MBAism is the opposite of energetic. It's passive and lethargic. No wonder he's always the last to know.

Well, King George is "passive and lethargic" when it comes to governance, public policy, and serving as the competent president we deserve. However, he apparently only has the energy to do things like workout incessantly, ride bikes, clear brush, and pack bags for vacations.

A must-read by Peter Daou, entitled "A Challenge to Rightwing Bloggers Who Blame the Media for the Cheney Mess." He discusses the hackneyed right-wing gripe that the media is liberal and challenges the wingnuts to prove it -- something they rarely if ever do. All too often we hear sweeping generalizations supported by zilch, notta. It's good to see someone call them on it.

Regarding the shooting, if these same events occurred with Cheney as Halliburton's CEO, make no mistake we would've seen a quicker response in getting the word out. As it is, Cheney is a public servant (I realize a reminder is in order), we pay his salary -- he works for us! And yet we've grown accustomed to secrecy and deception when it comes to this VP. He doesn't respect his office or we the people, and he must resign. This recent shameful episode is simply the last straw. He's a pathetic, woeful disgrace.

Grant him this much: he didn't mention 9/11 or spread fear when talking with Brit Hume.... Shocking.

I thought Bush recently stressed that we need more scientists -- how does this help?

....Anyone wanting proof that Boehner is no reformer need only look at the changes to federal student-loan programs that he just helped push through Congress as part of this year’s budget reconciliation bill. The alterations reduce government subsidies for student loans by $13 billion over the next five years.

....The Republican leadership, with Boehner serving as point man for the issue, studiously avoided alternative proposals for student-loan reforms that nonpartisan experts, such as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the CBO, as well as many Republican House members, reported could have achieved similar tax savings without costing students and their families. Doing so, however, would have required a larger government role in administering student loans — something that is anathema to pro-business ideologues like Boehner. The alternatives also would have cut into the profits of the private lenders who make student loans and who have been very generous donors to Republicans, especially Boehner, in the last several years. Boehner says he cares about his constituents’ dreams, but the Republican changes to the student-loan program clearly make it tougher for students to realize theirs. And Boehner talks about respecting constituents’ values, but the groups whose values he served best in this case were those of his political donors, the companies that make money offering student loans.

....The end result, says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, is that lower- and middle-class families will pay more to give their kids the education now needed to have a chance at a decent job, “while the playing field is tilted in the favor of lenders,” who happen to be big contributors to Boehner and his party. Concludes Nassirian, a longtime observer of educational politics in Washington, “Boehner will be a worthy successor to Mr. DeLay.”

"Conservative Kabuki"

Terrific editorial in The New Republic:

One of the most familiar rituals in George W. Bush's Washington is the fantasizing that accompanies the president's annual budget. The ritual goes something like this: Bush announces plans to cut a variety of domestic spending programs. Conservatives cheer the spirit of the cuts -- even as they worry that they could be tough to implement or that they aren't ambitious enough. Then, during the budget process, most of these cuts are restored -- except those that affect the poor. And those cuts are too small to have any practical effect on the deficit. Which raises the question: At what point do conservatives acknowledge that their constant calls for spending restraint have real-world repercussions that are, to say the least, morally suspect?

....But, wouldn’t you know it, of the $40 billion in savings over five years finally approved last Wednesday, the vast majority of cuts affect the poor, who will face higher premiums, among other things. The effect of these cuts on the deficit will, in turn, be offset by the $70 billion in tax cuts.

....Only the poor have neither the votes nor the money to secure their goodies. The problem from the perspective of the budget-cutter is that, precisely because the poor aren’t a very powerful constituency, there isn’t much to take away in the first place.

....The point isn’t simply that cuts for the poor aren’t sufficient to rein in spending. It’s that the cuts do serious damage to the people who depend on the axed programs even as they do nothing to advance the goal of fiscal restraint. If conservatives really want to single out the poor for punishment, they should say so explicitly. Until then, they should stop pretending their rhetoric on spending accomplishes anything else.

But that would take guts and forthrightness -- two things completely lacking in this hoodwinking, GOP-controlled Congress.