From Reuters:

Some of President George Bush’s advisers, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, contended that a sitting president had the power to use the military on U.S. soil to sweep up the men, known as the Lackawanna Six, and brand them as enemy combatants, the newspaper said.

Bush eventually decided against the proposal, which was floated in 2002 without consulting senior military officials, the Times said.

And regarding the CIA and Al Qaeda (New York Times):

Mr. Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

And, of course, his approach to due process in court:

After 9/11, the Bush regime scrapped due process rights for captured suspects. Cheney said his new legal approach “guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve”—an incredible prejudgment as only a tiny handful of suspects ever saw the inside of a courtroom.

I have one question for you, Mr. Cheney. Why do you HATE America so much? Are our laws not good enough for you to follow? Do you really feel our government is weak and too compliant with the rest of the world and every issue facing us needs to be dealt with in concrete terms?

Explain to me why you would put a CIA operative at risk - a woman who has worked for the government for years who’s identity was a well-kept secret - just to exact revenge on a bad article? Is your contempt for freedom of speech in this country that huge that the potential murder of a very vulnerable group of black ops are worth the threat from you?

How about this new revelation about the Buffalo sleeper cell (which has since proven to be false)? Do you really feel that some Americans have less right to privacy than others? How do you define this? Do you feel you’re BETTER than most people and can therefore decide who deserves the rights they are born under and who doesn’t? Hey, If someone wants to hurt this country I have no issue with strong-arming them. But how do you decide this fate? Aren’t there gray areas to consider, or do you just don’t care?

And this constant harping on the pardon for Scooter Libby. Let me remind you, this man LIED while under oath and obstructed an investigation based on a treasonous act. You feel he’s a good soldier for the country and deserves the benefit of the doubt? Well, Benedict Arnold served his country well in the Continental Army. In fact, he was promoted many times and fought in many honored battles along the way. Still, he defected to the British and betrayed his country. Isn’t that what Libby did in no uncertain terms when he lied about committing treason? I guess that’s of no consequence to you because our country’s legal system is simply a tool for you to manipulate.

Really, Mr. Cheney, most of these questions are simple ones, but I don’t expect you to give simple answers to them. Your rhetoric over the last 15 years has been so muddied with lies, large and small, that you wouldn’t know the truth if it shoved it’s fist up your ass, opened its hand and did spirit fingers inside your rectum.

As far as the country is concerned, you owe it an apology. As for me, I don’t want your apology. I don’t even want you to try to answer the questions I asked you because, sir, your actions against this country deserve nothing short of a prison sentence. You probably won’t get that but you will get a few choice words from me right here in this post that sum up my attitude about your attitude:

You’re a piece of shit. You’re a disgrace to your office. You deserve to live the rest of your life as an outcast and an example of the worst kind of scum this country has ever elected into office. And, by the way, your daughter doesn’t seem any better than you. Nice child-rearing, asshole.

Verbal Paintball Dick Cheney, George Bush, panetta

A few words from George W. Bush during his speech in Michigan (CNN):

“The first thing you do is ask, what’s legal?” he said. “What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I can say to myself, ‘I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.’ I can tell you that the information we got saved lives.”

And a little bit about how to handle foreign policy and rogue regimes:

“A lot of times people want to give out the carrots,” he said. “My attitude is, you give out the carrots when the behavior changes.”

He was courteous to Obama, but that’s not the news here. My question is this: If you are so vigorously defending the interrogation techniques and the necessity for them, why mislead the public about them? If they are NOT against the law, why use your lawyers to find a work-around? Here’s this prick in 2007 answering questions for the press:

The President’s words: “We stick to U. S. Law and our international obligations.” Well, that’s just a large, steaming pile of bullshit. The Geneva Convention - part of our obligation in international law, states in Part III, Section I, the following:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

Maybe it’s me, but there’s no lawyer-speak in this statement. It’s so straight-forward a gorilla could understand it. The simple truth is: EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS THIS. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous.

So, once again Mr. Ex-President, if you were so confident that your program fell within the law and was necessary to our safety, why mislead, why lie, why keep it in it’s entirety from Congress? And even if you want to tinker with the meaning of “torture”, wouldn’t waterboarding fall within the description of a prisoner not being “threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind?” Surely, the prisoners of Abu Graib were a tad uncomfortable when they were “threatened” by dogs - and maybe a little bit “insulted” when guards, oh, what’s the word….INSULTED THEM.

Look. I’m no fan of these people. Anyone who attacks this country really doesn’t deserve a whole lot of mercy if I were the one dishing out the punishment. But that is why we have law, so angry whackos like me can’t make my actions against these type of people personal. And our government is supposed to be held to a higher standard.

Bush knew what he was doing. That’s why he mislead. No amount of defense for these actions will soften the fact that our President broke the law and lied to the country.

Verbal Paintball Geneva Convention, George Bush, torture

The most consistent problem we face from the outgoing republican administration is their long-held belief that repeating a lie and attacking the messenger is acceptable as the truth. It’s not becoming of people who are supposed to represent us, unless we like being represented by vengeful high school girls who enjoy cruel whispering campaigns. From CNN:

…Liz Cheney, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that “Nobody who is talking about this in the press has any knowledge of specific detainee treatment.”

“The people that claimed to have been waterboarded in these articles are not any of those people,” she said.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, was former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff during the Bush administration’s first term. Since leaving office, he has become an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq.

In an online essay Thursday, he wrote that al Qaeda captive Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was “waterboarded” by Egyptian intelligence until he told interrogators that Baghdad trained terrorists to use chemical and biological weapons — a key element in the Bush administration’s case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But Liz Cheney told ABC that Wilkerson “has made a cottage industry of out of fantasies about the vice president,” and pointed out that al-Libi was not among the three al Qaeda figures the United States has admitted to subjecting to waterboarding.

And she said the former vice president — who has been publicly defending the interrogation program in recent weeks — “would not substitute his own judgment for the professionals at the CIA.”

What Liz Cheney has done in a few sentences is call everyone who isn’t following the Cheney line a calculated liar, from those tortured to the public servants who’ve been intimately involved in the details of these events.

Now, anyone will concur that there might be liars in the midst, but this pattern is particularly Bush-like. Manipulate intelligence, lie about the path to it while covering up the “ugly” then, when a REAL American decides to step forward and tell the truth about what really happened - or was happening - skewer him (her), call them names, infer that it’s ALL about them making money on this information, or suggest they have mental issues.

Some of the people who suffered through this name calling are people like Scott Ritter, Coleen Crowley, Richard Clarke, Lawrence Wilkerson, Hans Blix, Teresa Chambers, Paul O’Neill, Scott McClellan and others of whom time and truth has been kind to. In the real world, the liars are usually the one’s who are trying to cover up information, not expose it. While there are always exceptions to the rule, take a look at this group and ask yourself: why risk a potential backlash as a traitor or liar on a national level - where your business is Washington and your connections will inevitably suffer or you will be outcast completely if you’re exposed as a fraud - for a few dollars? Here’s another question: Why not go on record with a book saying the opposite - and then be embraced by those who can help you most and get even more money as a shill on Fox News (i.e. Ari Fletcher)?

The other argument from the asshole right is that you have a bone to pick and want revenge against those who did you wrong in the Bush government. Okay. HOW would you get satisfaction if your information is completely fabricated - and, once again, you could be found out and exposed as the bigger fraud? Wouldn’t that justify everything bad they had to say about you? Why take that risk unless you’re telling the truth?

There’s no logic to any of this - and what defies logic further is the extravagant list of “liars” that have exited the Bush inner circle. Can ALL these people be liars? Lets say ONE is telling the truth. What then? The fact of the matter is they are ALL telling the truth and Dick, Liz and George are filthy, miserable liars - some with blood on their hands.

This way of dealing with people has been a Bush trait for quite some time. We remember reading this about his college years (Salon):

Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi (one of his college professors) said. “In class, he couldn’t challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that’s how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy.

And the event doesn’t have to be as big as a yellowcake reference to set them off. If it was internal and could effect Bush “business”, these brave people were uniformly silenced in other ways (Huffington Post - July 7, 2008):

Ever wonder why more patriotic whistleblowers weren’t blowing the roof off the Bush White House with truths that needed to be told? Now we know that the DOJ rejected or bottled up thousands of whistleblower complaints and reports, and even the ones they accepted, they kept unprocessed for years.

Former Attorney General Gonzales, already proven to be corrupted by partisan operators, inverted the purpose of the DOJ. Instead of rooting out corruption, the Gonzales DOJ intentionally intercepted and silenced thousands more whistleblowers. Unfortunately, this policy apparently continues even today.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that federal officials refuse to investigate corporate corruption cases. More than 900 cases regarding billions of dollars of government contractors and drugmakers have defrauded taxpayers out of billions of dollars have been shelved. It appears that the Bush administration has put a kind of moratorium on fraud investigations.

The simple truth is that people like Bush, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are the dregs of society - vengeful, angry, cruel pricks who have never had a moral backbone and look at others as cattle to devour. While the rest of us help our kids and act as good friends and neighbors in this life they see everything, including a soldier’s life, as expendible fodder to make a buck and speak poorly about us all.

What I hope for but never expect to see is a response like the one Joseph McCarthy received from lawyer Joseph Welch, defending his client Fred Fisher, who told him in no uncertain terms what everyone was thinking by that time:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you …You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

The problem with this hope is that none of these three people have an ounce of decency in them, so all we can truly hope is that when they need help, we can tell them to go fuck themselves.

Verbal Paintball Dick Cheney, Fred Fisher, George Bush, Joseph Welch, Liz Cheney, republican liars, whistleblowers

Once again, these filthy cowards in the Bush administration (this time, in the form of Condi Rice) are still trying to justify torture because of September 11th. I find this so disingenuous it defies logic. By their admission, the September 11th attack opened up the window to the “anything goes” form of retribution.

Their logic goes something like this:

<i>We were attacked on September 11th, so we will take any means necessary to pull information out of potential informants, no matter the consequences or pain induced.

We were attacked on September 11th, so the laws of privacy for ALL Americans no longer apply. Why? Well, because we were attacked.

We were attacked on September 11th, so it’s necessary to attack Iraq. Why? Don’t you remember? Terrorists attacked our citizens! Why are you pressing me on this? Don’t bother me with your cowardly “but the terrorists were Saudi’s” bullshit.</i>

America has been a beacon for other countries because of the extent of our freedoms and the depth of our example as good citizens of the world. We’re not perfect and we have erred (many times in many ways); Propping up puppets in third world and middle east countries, such as the Shah in Iran, for example. But the majority of our efforts have been for the betterment of people here and elsewhere. Why? Because we ARE (or have been) our government in one way or another.

The Bush administration took us backwards - and very simply because they were so shit-in-their-pants scared of everything around them after 9-11 that they figured anything was acceptable. Want to know what a coward looks like? That’s it. A courageous person would take stock in the situation and soberly decide the best course. Bush and his people acted like chickens with their heads cut off and knives flailing in both hands.

And I still suspect our government knew some of the limits of our enemy - and even if they didn’t, there are things this country should never be and never do because the response to our fall from grace damages our security more than anything else in this world will.

We win with our enemy by destroying their reason to exist. It’s more nuanced, more complicated and less concrete, but it’s the only way to actually come out on the better side of this thing.

That is what this country did with the KKK. If we had taken KKK members, tortured them, put them into rendition, killed family and friends accidentally and lied about our reasons, we would have had MORE of them and a civil war in the U.S. again.

Anyway, here is our previous incompetent Secretary of State tripping over herself trying to justify the lies and criminal behavior of herself and her asshole administration:

I particularly like the line “Unless you were there…”

Nice excuse for committing crimes, bitch.

Current News, Politics abu ghraib, Condoleezza Rice, George Bush, republican liars, torture

Bush at Elliot's Hardware store, Dallas

From Fox News:

In one of his first outings in Dallas since leaving the White House, former President Bush made a surprise appearance at a hardware store Saturday and joked, “I’m looking for a job.”

Really? Well, so is half the country, fuckhead - thanks to you. This smug, arrogant little man apparently has no perspective of the world beyond his own navel. Sure, he may have been joking with the Hardware store owner. The owner very likely took it that way. But when you leave a country in tatters like this asshole has, the very least you can do is be mindful of your words. Similar to his mother, who never felt the need to burden her ears with the misfortunes of others or the reality she could afford to ignore:

“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths,” Barbara Bush said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on March 18, 2003. “Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

Her shithead of a son proves once again how indifferent he is to the suffering of others. Not that any of this is a surprise. He and his father both ran their administrations like country clubs, open to the high earners with perks to follow. The rest of us might be good enough to caddy for them but would never be invited to the dinner table afterwards.

Once we pull ourselves out of this economic nadir, this falsely executed war, and this poisonous political climate, lets vow never to hire, elect - or for that matter - talk to George W. Bush ever again. If you need to find some way to communication should you bump into him on the golf course, spitting would suffice.

Current News Barbara Bush, George Bush, George HW Bush, George W. Bush

My wife lost her job. During the last three years there have been 8 rounds of layoffs in her firm. This new round came just the other day. While the loss in business was steady through the last few declining years, I think it’s only fair to blame Barack Obama for this. He has been in office for almost a month.

Furthermore, my property and school taxes have risen over the past five years. My state has been receiving less money from the federal government due to the tax cuts. My taxes have risen from $4,800 in 2003 to $7,400 this last year. When I pay my next bill this week, I will blame Barack Obama. He was in office when I received that new statement. It must be his doing.

My stock portfolio had gone from something substantial in 2002 to petty change. I know Barack Obama has only been in office less than a month, but he IS responsible for the plunge of the stock market. The day he took office was the same day I received my Merrill Lynch statement. While it may have gone out into the mail before he took oath, it still must be his fault. Everything is, isn’t it?

My house is worth considerably less than it was in 2005. I know, I know. There’s been no regulation in this market and people with the same amount of petty change to their name that I currently have in my stock portfolio were being approved for loans. It’s true that those loans were sold in group packages to my broker, Merrill Lynch, and were then multiplied many more times as derivatives. It’s also true that George Bush was a great friend of business and felt oversight was unseemly. Still, even though my house went up in value in the last week, I blame Barack Obama. He should have known he was going to be President and everything was going to tank. Shame on him.

That guy who beheaded his wife last week? Well, that’s Barack Obama’s fault. He should have intervened. How dare he hold his head up high after not making some effort to thwart that tragedy.

The hundreds of thousands who’ve died in Iraq. You guessed it. His fault. It’s his responsibility now, so he should bear the responsibility for the entire war, even though he was against it. President Bush couldn’t be responsible. He’s too good a man. As we all know, everything bad that happened to him in the first five years of his Presidency was really Bill Clinton’s fault. The Republican congress and senate with their majorities? Nah. They couldn’t stop it. It was the Democrats who bullied them into this war. At the very least they were complicit since all the evidence showed Saddam has WMD’s.

Got a parking ticket the other day. It’s not my fault I parked facing out in the parking slot instead of in. Damn that Barack Obama.

Politics Barack Obama, blame game, George Bush, Katrina, Obama, political cowards, republican blame, stimulus, washington politics