The American Jihad

The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Thanks to Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ), of all things, we are learning that our progress reports on our battle against Islamic extremists were peppered with our own brand of “let’s go on a crusade” rhetoric.

The reports prepared for Donald Rumsfeld, then Defense Secretary, to share with the President included a cover page with an inspirational war-time picture and an accompanying biblical quote. Ah, but not just any biblical quote. Here are a few samples:

“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand” — Ephesians 6:13

“Commit to the LORD whatever you do and your plans will succeed” — Proverbs 16:3

“It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” 1 Peter 2:15 (this one appeared above a photo of Saddam Hussein)

And perhaps the most egregious, this one accompanied by a photo of a US tank rolling into Iraq:
“Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, The nation that keeps faith” — Isaiah 26:2

If “God” and the “lord” were replaced in the above quotes by “Allah” you could not tell the difference between us and our enemy. One aspect of liberal spin on this is that Rumsfeld or his minions were trying to manipulate Bush’s attitude toward the war by playing on his piousness. Even though I do feel that Bush was not up to the job and was mislead by bad counsel repeatedly during his administration I don’t buy this “Manchurian Candidate” (“Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”) theory of religious messages playing some subliminal role to keep the President in a war he would otherwise have abandoned. Too far fetched for me.

I don’t really care why the messages appeared on the security briefings. It’s just really scary that they were there. You would think that an administration that needed to distance itself from the appearance of fighting a religious war would keep all defense documents concerning Iraq completely void of any religious implications. Instead, these documents make it look like we were sending our Christian soldiers to conquer the Muslims.  One commentator said today that this is worse then the Abu Ghraib photos and I tend to agree. These memos betrayed one of our most enduring traditions, a strict separation between church and state. They make us look like supreme hypocrites.

Every time I think we can’t hear anything more bizarre from the Bush years, something new arises. With the debate over torture and now these new revelations, every day we look more and more like the enemy we were fighting.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Obama Video Address: April 25, 2009

This week President Obama discusses his plans for government reform. In the background of course is the quagmire his administration finds itself in as it wrestles with what to do about new revelations of our torture program under the Bush administration. Maybe I’m influenced by comments I saw posted on YouTube but I can see the stress on Obama’s face. He wants to focus on the economy and our two wars and he doesn’t need the distraction of prior administration shenanigans. Unfortunately, this is a genie that even Obama with all his persuasive talents will not be able to put back in the bottle.

And now the President of the United States of America:

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Diplomacy and Torture

It’s understandably difficult to calibrate proper diplomatic behavior when your best idea of how to treat your enemies is to waterboard them.

Just in case you don’t know what waterboarding is, here is a refresher. You force your enemy to lie on his back. Then you place a sponge or some other type of porous cloth over his nose and mouth. Then you pour water onto the sponge or cloth so that your enemy cannot breathe. It’s called simulated drowning. Journalist Christopher Hitchens has undergone the procedure so that he could write about it authoritatively. He says there is nothing simulated about it. You are being drowned for 20 seconds at a time.

With that as our cozy backdrop, let’s discuss the latest offense Obama has given the far right, for whom he can do no right. He actually shook hands with Cesar Chavez! Oh my! He didn’t read Daniel Ortega the riot act after Ortega ranted about America for 50 minutes. Treason!

The problem conservative are having is that Obama takes quaint phrases like “disagree without being disagreeable” and puts them into action. He really means it. As a result, he behaves like a gentleman with leaders of other countries, even leaders with whom we strongly disagree. Anyone watching the body language of Obama when Chavez handed him an anti-American book as a “gift” could see that the President was basically saying “thanks for the book, now go back and sit the hell back down in your seat and stop wasting my time.” Did he need to actually say that? No.

As for Ortega, why should Obama stoop so low as to go tit for tat with a thug leader? I hate to break it to you folks but this is not the playground behind the elementary school where you have to prove you can’t be bullied around. By not dignifying Ortega’s attack with a similar  response, he left the Nicaraguan President looking like a silly extremist. The only folks upset about this are your macho swagger guys, Scarborough, Buchanan and Cheney.  Obama’s only response to Ortega showed how foolish the 50 minute tirade was:

To move forward, we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements. I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old. Too often, an opportunity to build a fresh partnership of the Americas has been undermined by stale debates. We’ve all heard these arguments before.

via Obama Endures Ortega Diatribe – First 100 Days of Presidency – Politics FOXNews.com.

Putting aside some historical inaccuracy (Ortega referenced the Bay of Pigs which occurred before Obama was born, not when he was three months old), Obama said all that needed to be said.

So, admittedly after eight years of acting like cowboys, the Obama approach to diplomacy may be a bit hard to swallow. Now the question is how do we deal with one of the consequences of our former shoot-first-ask-questions-later style of international relations? If you think the economy and two wars was a major turd left on our door step by Bush, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We are now getting details on how the former administration framed a legal defense of torture so that the savage practices could go on unchallenged.

Let’s first deal with the criticism that Obama’s decision to release the legal briefs “allowing” for torture has made us vulnerable. What baloney! The fact that the primary cheerleader in this meme is Dick Cheney tells you what hogwash it is. For starters, the legal memos don’t tell us anything all that new. They just tell us how premeditated all of these shenanigans were. Secondly, are we really so naive to think that Al Quada did not know our interrogation techniques? You don’t think there were communication networks that allowed for leaks out of Gitmo to the terrorist community? Do you really think Osama and his henchmen were telling their followers, “we have no idea what will happen to you if you fall into the hands of the infidels. Don’t worry, it won’t be too extreme.” Come on! Get real folks. I have to laugh when I see the likes of Cheney and Joe Scarborough acting like we’ve given away major secrets to the enemy. And in this case, does knowing that you’re going to be waterboarded make the experience any less terrible? It still sucks to be drowned for 20 seconds at a time whether it’s a surprise or not.

Then of course there is the whole debate on the effectiveness of torture. Many experts on the subject say that we don’t get reliable information from the practice. If we compare the practice to what was done to US airmen during the Korean War, we see one of the fundamental problems with our approach. In the Korean War, a form of water torture was used to force airmen to lie. It was NOT used to get the truth out of them. Hence there is a strong likelihood that waterboarding will get the prisoner to say anything that will bring him relief, not necessarily the truth.

President Obama has himself in a bit of a pickle right now, not because he released the torture memos (which would probably have been requested by an international inquiry anyway) but because he has been inconsistent on how we should move forward. His initial stance was that he wanted to end the practice of torture and then move on. He wanted to look to the future and not punish people for the past mistakes. Of course this had the far left apoplectic. This stance reached its most unequivocal point this past Sunday when Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told George Stephanopoulos that neither the practitioners of torture nor the architects of the program would be prosecuted. But within the past forty eight hours, Obama has backpedaled on this, now saying that those who were “just following orders” should not be prosecuted but the folks giving the orders might be subject to scrutiny by the Justice Department (i.e. Eric Holder). Of course the list of  folks giving the orders could extend all the way up to the former occupant of the Oval Office.

This leaves us on the precipice of a situation far more divisive than our current economic or foreign relations policies. I am not sure this country can handle the prosecution of our former Vice President and potentially our former President for war crimes. In 1947 we prosecuted and convicted a Japanese officer for the very acts that the recent legal memo disclosure details. We have committed acts that we once felt were criminal when committed by our enemy. With that said, I have to say that I liked Obama’s original stance on this. We stop doing the wrong thing and we move on. The far left says that if these crimes go unpunished, we will have learned nothing and history will eventually repeat itself. That may be true but my greater fear is that our country currently in so much distress, cannot afford to immerse itself in years of  self recrimination. And while I would lose no sleep over Dick Cheney going to jail, my heart would go out to George W. Bush. As I’ve stated in other posts, Bush will receive his reward or his punishment from the judgment of history and that judgment is profound and long-lasting.

If the international community chooses to prosecute us, so be it. But we, as a nation have a lot of healing to do.  I don’t see how we can heal if we open the wounds of our former criminal activity and potentially make George W. Bush the first former President to be tried, convicted and sentenced for crimes against humanity.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Silence is Golden

I’ve stated in the past that George W. Bush’s best post presidential strategy is to lay low and hope that sometime down the line events prove him to be a better President than the current polls suggest. Unfortunately, some of Bush’s former minions are not taking the same advice.

Tonight on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleisher got into a heated debate with host Chris Matthews. The second half of the debate appears below:

Primarily because of Matthews’ abrasive style, one could go back and forth on who was scoring more points in the debate. Fleisher held his own for the most part and Chris unnecessarily hit a very raw nerve by reminding Ari that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch. It’s only at the very end of the interview that Fleisher proves why he and every other save-the-Bush-legacy talking head need to shut the hell up. At the 7 minute mark in the video, in defending the invasion of Iraq, Fleisher says:

After September 11, having been hit once, how could we take a chance that Sadam might not strike again?

To my astonishment both Chris Matthews and later Keith Olberman let this comment go by unchallenged! Perhaps Chris was just too tired by that point in the interview to actually hear what Ari said. “How could we take a chance that Sadam might not strike again?”

Sadam did not strike us the first time! What does Fleisher mean by “again”?

With this one sentence, Ari blew his entire argument out of the window, perpetuating the myth, even after Bush is gone from the public scene, that somehow Sadam was responsible for 9/11.  It gives further evidence of the constant state of delusion in which the Bush administration was mired. Fleisher says this foolishness with such conviction that I find it hard to believe it is a put on. The Bush White House really believes that Sadam was behind 9/11 and no evidence to the contrary will ever convince them otherwise.

My heart went out to George W. Bush when he left office. I was mortified when he received boos at Barack Obama’s inauguration. More recently, I’ve almost admired Bush’s restraint now that we know that Bush’s legal advisers essentially gave him carte blanche to run a dictatorship. So now I tell all those well meaning associates of the former President who want to ensure his positive place in history to do so by just shutting up. The only thing that will redeem the Bush presidency will be the eventual establishment of a stable democracy in Iraq, which can then be traced back to Bush’s efforts.

For now, to use a now infamous phrase, all the talk in the world will do nothing more than put lipstick on a pig.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Is the Economy Obama’s Iraq?

Eight years of George W. Bush taught us one thing very clearly. When the President says act NOW, we ought to take a breath and think about it a bit. Bush told us a mushroom cloud would rise from one of our cities if we did not invade Iraq. It was baloney, whether Bush actually believed it or not.

In the past few days, President Barack Obama has told us that our economic crisis will become a catastrophe if we do not act NOW. I’m sorry but when a liberal strikes fear into the masses, it carries no more weight than when a conservative does so. There are good reasons why we should be in no rush to spend 800 billion dollars.

Liberals want to spend money but there seems to be no clear consensus on when this infusion of money will result in economic improvement. To make matters worse, there is this sense that the recovery plan is a grand cathartic experience for liberal congressmen who have suffered under the suffocating watch of the Bush administration. Normally I tow a liberal line but I heard something earlier this week that really disturbed me. Arianna Huffington was on “Morning Joe” saying that the economic stimulus package was not going far enough. Do you know what she wanted in it? She wanted educational reforms to properly certify teachers. Excuse me? In what universe does that create more jobs or provide economic relief to anyone? The Huffington’s of this country want the stimulus package to solve all the nation’s problems. The result will be a big fat unmanageable bill that will be impossible to track and will get nothing done. It is this kind of over the top approach that caused the House Republican shut out earlier this week. You don’t reach across the aisle to Republicans by throwing every social program you’ve ever wanted into the recovery package.

Sadly, conservative are no better. After eight years of wrecking our economy by betraying their conservative ideals, they are suddenly talking religion again. “No spending! We can’t buy ourselves out of this mess.” Their answer? Tax cuts. Will tax cuts get anyone employed? No. Will tax cuts stimulate buying? No. Will tax cuts allow the rich to keep more of their money? Absolutely. Yet again, the Republican party can’t see beyond corporate America and get into the heads of the common American citizen who is struggling right now.

Several pundits have said, and I agree, that Obama should have been on top of this bill before it ever left the House. Obama and Rahm Emanuel should have been all over Speaker Nancy Pelosi to ensure that this bill was not a social program wet dream. They should have had a laser focus on putting in this bill primarily those elements that would create immediate relief and then secondarily those items that position us strategically. Instead, Obama appeared to have said, “I’ll let the Dem’s run with it and I’ll make nice on the Republicans in the hope they come on board.” He got a rude awakening when the GOP said, “thanks for lunch Mr. President. We’re still not voting for the bill.”

The fate of our nation is now in the hands of the moderates. People like Democrat Claire McCaskill who admits the original bill in the House was weighted down with easy targets for the Conservatives, and Republican Olympia Snow who seems ready to say that tax cuts don’t solve everything.

President Obama needs to work with moderates like this if our problems are going to be solved. Only moderates can be truly bi-partisan. Everyone else is an ideologue. The last thing the President wants is a year or two down the line for people to look back and say that Obama’s mushroom cloud was no more real than Bush’s and he rushed us into a bad deal that just made things worse.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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News Flash: Cheney Makes Bush Look Like Genius

Twice this week, former members of the Bush administration have said something stupid and twice this week Time magazine’s Joe Klein, bless his heart, has eloquently revealed the fools for who they are.

Let’s take the second and more silly offense first, that of former Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card. First let’s place Card in context. He is the man who watched the former President sit paralyzed in front of a group of  elementary school children after he whispered to Bush that our country was under attack on 9/11. So Card knows a thing or two about effective Presidents. This week, Andy said that Obama is not showing sufficient respect for the office of the President because he does not wear his jacket in the Oval Office.

OK, Joe, please let ‘em have it:

In today’s edition of Please Go Away, we have Andrew Card suggesting that Barack Obama should wear a suit and tie when he’s in the Oval Office. After all, George W. Bush did–and all that respect for the office helped him to be a really great President.

The point is, when people are actually working–as opposed to working out their Oedipal crises in the Oval Office–they tend to want to roll up their sleeves and get comfortable. George W. Bush could have come to work in a tuxedo and still been a lousy President; Barack Obama will do just fine in shirtsleeves, I predict.

In the meantime, Andy Card, you join Dick Cheney on the expired list: Please. Go. Away.

via Please Go Away–II :: Swampland – TIME.com.

Bravo Joe Klein! It is true that George W never received fellatio in the Oval Office and no doubt he thought he had a lot of respect for the place but it hardly amounted to anything in the final analysis. So, as Joe Klein so elegantly puts it, Andy Card is irrelevant and needs to disappear.

The more egregious example of speaking out of turn came from our former Vice President, Dick Cheney, in an interview with Politico. In the interview, Cheney warns of the dire consequences that await us if the Obama administration dismantles the less savory parts of the Bush anti-terror program. Again, Joe Klein responds brilliantly:

… it is sleazy in the extreme for Cheney to predict another terrorist attack. For several reasons:

1. Some sort of terrorist attack is likely, eventually, no matter who is President.

2. Cheney has done here what the Bush Administration did throughout: he has politicized terror. If another attack happens, it’s Obama’s fault. Disgraceful… and ungrateful, since it’s only Obama’s mercy that stands between Cheney and a really serious war crimes investigation. Which leads to…

3. The means that Cheney has supported to combat terror in the past, especially “enhanced” interogation techniques, are quite probably illegal. He is criticizing the Obama administration for not being willing to defy international law.

4. Cheney’s track record of mismanagement in Iraq and Afghanistan–his sponsorship of Donald Rumsfeld, the worst Secretary of Defense in US history– disqualifies him from having any credible say on the security policies of his successor.

This is a man who should either be (a) scorned or (b) ignored.

via Please Go Away :: Swampland – TIME.com.

Joe’s second point really resonates with me. In the days leading up to the inauguration, Cheney strutted from interview to interview saying essentially, “yeah, I authorized torture and what are YOU gonna do about it?” I have written before that I think George W. Bush should be left to a quiet retirement and I might have been willing to extend the same generosity to Cheney were he not so arrogant. With this latest outburst, I’m more tempted to tell Cheney, “open your big fat mouth one more time and we’ll haul your ass to the nearest federal prison faster than you can say Osama Bin Laden.”

George W. Bush has the good common sense to know that in the wake of his disastrous presidency, the best thing he can do is lay low. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Dick Cheney. By comparison, Dick has made W look like a genius.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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George W. Bush: A Final Assessment

Since I only became politically aware within the last two or so years, I’m always hesitant to use the phrase, “I’ve never seen …” but I’ve never seen an administration leave Washington with as much retroactive public relations as that of the Bush administration. It’s even been named by the media as the Bush Legacy Project Tour. We’ve seen the President, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice and even the elusive Vice President, Dick Cheney on multiple talk shows proudly proclaiming the victories of the Bush administration. The latest example of this was the President’s final televised address to the nation.

As I watched him, I could see how he could be the target of both sympathy and utter disdain simultaneously. When George Bush says that he always had our country’s best interests at heart, I believe him. I have no reason to doubt that. He comes from a family that has given decades of service to this country. With the exception of relatively minor acts of terrorism (World Trade Center of 2/23/93, and Oklahoma City) our country had not sustained a direct attack from an enemy since Pearl Harbor and then September 11 came. Bush was faced with an unprecedented loss of life on our shores, lives taken not from a warring country but from a nebulous network of international thugs. Conservatives are right when they say that most Americans in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 would have given Bush carte blanche to make sure this never happened again.

Was the appropriate way to end WWII and avenge Pearl Harbor to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and bring an horrific end to the lives of many innocent civilians? President Harry Truman did what he thought best for his country. He stands much higher in history then he did immediately upon leaving office. Bush made terrible choices in response to 9/11 but he did so to protect his country. This is where I do feel a sympathy for him. I find his exit from the world stage a sad one. I’m annoyed by folks who say they want to prosecute him for war crimes. I feel he should just be left alone.

But then I listen to some of what Bush says in his farewell address and the disdain starts to creep in. Not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “disappointment” to Bush. On MSNBC’s “Hardball”, Chris Matthews gave a brilliant analogy. When a cop sees a man reaching for his wallet and shoots and kills him because he thought the man was reaching for a gun, he doesn’t say “I’m disappointed that the man didn’t have a gun.” He says that he’s sorry he made a terrible mistake in judgement. Instead of regretting his decision based on faulty intelligence, Bush only regrets that the intelligence didn’t justify his decision. He’s happy with the decision and unhappy that he can’t justify it. When you hear this kind of logic you just want to slap the guy.

Bush angrily told a reporter at his last press conference that the government response to Katrina was not slow. He pointed to thousands of people being rescued from rooftops by “chopper drivers” (apparently George forgot the word “pilot”) as evidence of the government’s effective response, as support of his original assessment of “Good job Brownie”. His regrets about Katrina seem limited to whether or not he availed himself of a photo-op during the crisis. He seems oblivious to the fact that thousands were stranded without clean water and care in the immediate aftermath of the flood and that to this day many are still displaced. You watch Bush talk about this stuff and you say “the man just doesn’t get it.” You want to shake him and wake him up.

It is hard to look at the Bush presidency and come away with any sort of success story. To some extent, his administration was a victim of circumstance but sometimes it is not what happens to you but how you react to it that shapes public and historical opinion. I don’t blame Bush for 9/11 even though it happened on his watch. I do blame him for attacking the wrong country. I don’t blame him for Katrina. I do blame him for not taking the role of an empathetic leader at the time and not mobilizing his government to take proper action.

I believe the final assessment of George W. Bush is that he was a man not ready to be President, faced with challenges even the greatest of Presidents would have found daunting. He did his best but within his limitations, his best was no where good enough. Just as he wishes Barack Obama well, I wish him well. I hope he has a peaceful retirement and finds a way to use the role of ex-President to help the world in much the same way that Jimmy Carter, George-41, and Bill Clinton have.

I think given the choice between sympathy and disdain, I fall on the side of sympathy. I think we should let George W. Bush return quietly to citizen Bush and allow history to judge him in good time. That will be more than enough punishment for his sins.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Reverend Rick and the Day “Everything Changed”

Tonight, I’d like to comment briefly on a relatively new item and a relatively old one.

The Rick Warren Controversy

Frankly, I don’t get it. While I personally support gay marriage, I am confused by the outrage shown by the GLBT community concerning Rick Warren’s planned inclusion in the 2009 Obama Inauguration festivities. First one has to accept the premise that an “invocation” has any place in an inauguration at all. Seems to me we play with separation of church and state when we have official prayers at a governmental ceremony. I won’t pursue that argument any further as I believe congressional sessions are sometimes started with a prayer and like it or not, we regularly accept a tacit Christian oriented skew to our government. So let’s get past that initial objection.

This brings the argument to how we reconcile being gay with organized religion. Unless this is a perverse interpretation, as I understand it, the Bible considers homosexuality an abomination. As I’ve said in several previous blog entries, I don’t subscribe to the salad bar approach to religion. Either you believe the precepts or your don’t. As far as I’m concerned, gays wanting into organized religion makes no more sense than Blacks wanting into the KKK. OK, perhaps that’s a bit extreme. But it seems reasonably clear to me that gay folks are not going to get “validated” by standard organized religion. This is a futile battle for them.

Now let’s get specific about the two central players in this drama, Warren and Obama. I’m not overly familiar with Rick Warren but as far as I can tell he is no Jerry Falwell. I think it’s fair to say he represents the intellectual arm of the Christian church. I think he demonstrated his intellectual curiosity when he hosted Obama and McCain at Saddleback Church earlier in the campaign season. This is what I believe attracts Barack Obama to him. My guess is that Obama finds Warren a reasonable man with whom to debate and with whom to form an alliance. I also think Warren’s practicality was demonstrated when he had his church remove some anti-gay rhetoric from his web site in the immediate aftermath of the brouhaha.

As for Obama, did the GLBT community bother to listen to Obama before they voted for him? I know that to some extent Obama represented an empty vessel into which many Americans poured their hopes and aspirations but Obama’s position on gay marriage could not have been clearer. He was and is against it. (He favors civil unions.) While I don’t think Obama would actively support an initiative like Proposition 8 in California, I also don’t think he would hold such support against the likes of Rick Warren. The simple fact is that when it comes to gay marriage, Warren and Obama agree.

Why the gay community needed a reality check in this area escapes me. The Christian stance on homosexuality is unambiguous and the Obama stance on gay marriage is equally unambiguous. So in what way did Obama let down his gay supporters?

September 11, 2001, “The Day Everything Changed”

Baloney! Over the weekend, First Lady Laura Bush was interviewed by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”. Mrs. Bush said that she and the President never expected to be party to a “wartime presidency”. Then on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, the host quoted Mrs. Bush and nodded in agreement saying “that day [9/11] everything changed”. I’m sorry folks but the idea that Bush should not have expected to be a wartime President and that everything changed on 9/11 is simply the myopic view of a very selfish nation.

Let’s talk about this war we’ve been fighting. It’s the war on terror, right? Did that war begin on September 11, 2001? Certainly not. International terrorism was a well established problem before that. The war on terrorism that needed to happen well before 9/11 didn’t much interest us until WE got hit. (It’s actually quite similar to WWII where we stood by and watched the world go to hell in a hand-basket until we got hit in Pearl Harbor.) Absolutely nothing changed on September 11, 2001 except that the hell that people all over the world were suffering finally came to our shores.

While I have not been a fan of the Iraq war (because it’s not the enemy we should have been fighting), it does seem reasonable to me that if we’d sent troops to Afghanistan and other terrorist harboring nations before 9/11, then 9/11 would never have happened. The war was already being waged. We simply chose to not actively pursue it.

The time has come for us to realize that isolationism no longer works for us socially, politically or economically. When we see some other country getting their ass kicked by a terrorist attack, we should jump into action to send a clear message that it’s unacceptable. The message should be that any faction that terrorizes our neighbor (and not just a Western hemisphere neighbor) could potentially terrorize us so we will proactively stamp them out before they do more harm. That essential piece of the Bush Doctrine got invoked one day too late in my view. We didn’t really care until we lost 3000 of our citizens.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Bush Narrowly Escapes AssasSHOEnation While Secret Service Sleeps

On his “farewell tour” of Iraq and Afghanistan, President George W. Bush encountered an outraged shoe wielding journalist. Considering that Gerald R. Ford had two women shoot two real guns at him in as many weeks, this attack was relatively benign. Culturally, while we find the episode humorously bizarre, it is considered a supreme insult in Iraq, probably the equivalent of spitting at someone here.

But what I noticed and what really troubled me despite the levity of this entry’s title, was the action, or apparent inaction of the Secret Service. Let me see, in Secret Service school are you taught how to quickly discern a shoe flying through the air from some other more dangerous object? One would think that after the President adroitly ducked the first shoe, that Secret Service would have sprung into action to step in front of Bush until his safety had been assured. On the contrary, Bush was defended by no one but Iraqi  Prime Minister Maliki as he reached up to try and catch the second incoming projectile.

If I were Barack Obama, I’d be damn nervous after watching this incident. In fact, I’d fire the whole crew and start with a fresh one in January.

Rule number 1:  You see anything flying through the air in my direction, tackle my ass to the ground until you know what is going on.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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The Election of Flawed Men

Anyone who has ever looked at old film clips of Hitler rallies sees an enthusiastic audience listening to his every word. Adolf Hitler is extreme proof that deeply flawed men can be the chosen leaders of their country. (Even though Hitler was not actually elected, he still had the support of many of his countrymen.)

This week, we got a chance to look inside the mind of two flawed leaders of the United States. This week, nearly 200 hours of recorded conversations with Richard Nixon were released to the public. Some of the excerpts paint a picture of a deeply insecure, paranoid man. This is not exactly new news but the recently released tapes reinforce what we already knew about the 37th President. In this audio, some of which is transcribed by MSNBC below we hear Nixon’s order to destroy documents at the Brookings Institution:

Nixon tells Haldeman to “clean out” Brookings Institution

– On July 1, 1971, Nixon instructs Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.:

“I can’t have a high-minded lawyer … I want a son-of-a-b—-. I want someone just as tough as I am. … We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy that will use any means. We are going to use any means… . Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame.”

via Nixon tapes: Ruthless, cynical, profane – First Read – msnbc.com

That excerpt had actually been released prior to this week but the latest tapes echo that same paranoia.

Fast forward 37 years and we see the following exchange between George W. Bush and Charles Gibson of ABC News:

GIBSON: You’ve always said there’s no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn’t.

BUSH: Oh, I see what you’re saying. You know, that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do. It’s hard for me to speculate.

via ABC News: Transcript: Charlie Gibson Interviews President Bush

Notice how when Gibson asks Bush what he would have done had the intelligence been correct, Bush interprets the question to mean had reality matched the faulty intelligence, not that the intelligence itself reflected reality. To this day, Bush cannot accept that there were no WMD’s and his preferred outcome would be that there had been WMD’s, not that he would have gotten proper intelligence that there were none. When Gibson revisits the question more directly, Bush says he can’t speculate on what he would have done.

I’ve written before about the cognitive limitations of our President. Many liberal pundits are making great sport of Bush’s rewrite of history. I’m not sure I’m with that gang. I think Bush is a truly limited man for whom the presidency was much too tough a job.

As the press renews its attack on the long dead Nixon and the soon-to-be ex-president Bush, I can only feel sadness. When we elect a President, we get only one guarantee, namely that they will be flawed human beings, sometimes with devastating results. I don’t think Nixon or Bush wanted to do their country harm. I think they were trapped by the limitations of their own personalities.

While it is important that history make an example of them so that their successors might avoid similar mistakes, it is also important that history be a bit forgiving.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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