Category Archives: Bush Administration

Say Good Night, Dick

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Dick

So, what are your reflections on these last eight horrible years, as our wreck of a country struggles to emerge from the dark machinations of these malicious sociopaths? My view is along the lines of Jim Kunstler‘s:

To me, GWB will remain the perfect representative of his time, place, and culture. During his years in Washington, America became a nation of clowns posturing in cowboy hats, bethinking ourselves righteous agents of Jesus in a Las Vegas of the spirit, where wishing was enough to get something for nothing, where “mistakes were made,” but everybody was excused from the consequences of bad choices. The break from that mentality will be very severe, and we may look back in twelve months and wonder how we ever fell for the whole package. The answering of that question will occupy historians for ages to come.

Kunstler’s take doesn’t begin to capture the horror I felt, of living through these last eight years, of watching much of the country go mad. Like waking up one day in a coast-to-coast version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I remember the shock of seeing nearly everyone around me lose their minds, believing in ever more stupid things announced from on high. What was truly frightening was envisioning the trajectory of where this national insanity could take us. Didn’t we have a Constitution or something to protect us from this, or a media that would finally come forward and tell us what was really going on? The whole experience taught me how fragile the achievements of American civilization really are, and how easily and silently they can be lost (and in some cases are still lost). Fortunately the force of this madness eventually peaked, but not without huge, debilitating costs, that have yet to be fully reckoned.

But enough of my own dark memories, what are yours? What are your plans for January 20th?

My brother and I are getting together to commemorate a number of things: the New Year (belatedly), the new administration of course, and our departed mother’s birthday (Jan 20). She was a life-long New Deal Democrat and would’ve been pleased with Obama.

Bush and China

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The Peking Duck:

In my entire stint in Asia, starting in 2001, I have never once heard a positive mention of Bush by any Chinese person, either in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan or the PRC. Not among teachers, mid-level government officials, co-workers, friends, business people or taxi drivers. Despite the bombing of the Belgrade embassy, I still hear Chinese people praise Clinton. I’m not sure why, but most seem to adore him. The mention of Bush’s name tends to prompt a reflexive reaction of scorn and disappointment. If people were glad he went to the Olympics, they didn’t make a big deal out if it, the way they did over Spielberg’s backing out. And I’m not sure how the reporter measured Obama’s “unpopularity” in China during the primaries. I’m not going to say Chinese people I knew were raving about Obama, and he probably was less popular than Clinton, but I never heard anything indicating he was unpopular. (The only memorable remark I heard about Obama that wasn’t gushing with praise came from a Chinese teacher who, the day after the election, asked me, “How is it possible that white people voted for a black man?”)

Poor Dubya. China doesn’t love him after all.

We’ve Still Got China

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One of several pathetic points in Bush’s press conference today:

[Bush] hotly challenged the premise of one question that his policies had made America less prestigious and respected around the world, saying that was just the view of some “elites” and other pantywaists in part of Europe. Go to China! he said. They still respect us there.

Yes, but China is one of the biggest supporters and perpetrators of nasty oppression on the planet. That’s the best we can do?

Stuff to Talk About, Seriously

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Finally, let’s talk about the word “serious.” There’s a thoughtful post by Peterr at firedoglake about Munib Younan, now the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL). Peterr met Bishop Younan 20 years ago, when the bishop was a parish priest in Ramallah, on the West Bank. So the bishop is a man who has been living in the center of the Palestinian-Israeli controversy for many years.

Peterr quotes from a talk given by Bishop Younan in 2007, in which the bishop begins by referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[W]ho would have imagined that less than two decades later we would be back to building walls? I have no doubt that the Separation Wall in the Holy Land will one day fall for the same reasons. The only question is how many lives, how many shattered and demolished villages, how much dehumanization and stigmatization will we tolerate?

This Wall is not a sign of justice or peace, it is a material sign of the walls of hatred that are growing stronger everyday. This wall does not provide security, it breeds despair and a culture of separation. And it cannot contain the hatred and resentment that are building every day.

Yes, sadly, of course that is right. But I want to get back to the word “serious.” McQ of Q and O blog dismisses the Bishop’s comments — “Anyone who can liken a wall erected to keep oppressed citizens in with a wall erected to keep suicidal enemies out simply can’t be taken seriously.”

No, Bishop Younan is only a Christian bishop who has lived his life pastoring and serving the people who live with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict every day. What could he know? We can’t take him seriously. Only people sitting in their living rooms on the other side of the world can possibly be serious about the Middle East.

(Do some people ever stop to think that, maybe, other people may understand the world better than they do?)

But this is a common tactic of the left – attempt to draw parallels between any totalitarian regime and Israel so its attempts at self-defense can then be compared to those oppressive regimes.

I can understand someone taking offense at comparing Israel to the Soviet Union, because it is not a valid comparison. However, the Bishop’s larger point is valid, especially in the second paragraph — the walls of hatred that are growing stronger everyday. This wall does not provide security, it breeds despair and a culture of separation. And it cannot contain the hatred and resentment that are building every day.

I don’t often write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because there are other people writing about it who follow it more closely than I do — I do not, in fact, claim to know everything about everything — and I defer to their knowledge. However, I do follow it closely enough to know that ain’t nobody innocent. There has been enough wrongdoing and stupidity on both sides to fill oceans. This conflict is not going to stop with military victory. It’s going to stop when enough people are damn sick of it and want it to just stop.

Yes, the Israelis have reason to hate the Palestinians. And the Palestinians have reason to hate the Israelis. Somebody show me the practical application of hate. This is just going to keep escalating unless enough people are able to rise above their own emotions and self-indulgent need for revenge and just stop it.

As for oppressed people versus suicidal enemies — the two do seem to arise together, don’t they? People who identify themselves as oppressed give themselves permission to use violence to fight back. People who see other people are dangerous enemies give themselves permission to oppress. They not only can be “likened” to each other; they create each other. They co-exist in a sick symbiosis. Seriously.

Um, Yes?

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You’ll never guess who wrote this:

Perhaps the most irksome characteristic of the Bush administration has been the Rio Grande-wide gap between rhetoric and action.

The president has consistently talked a good game when it comes to democracy promotion, stopping weapons proliferation and other important goals, but his actions have just as consistently fallen short. Inaction is defensible — because there is always a good case to be made for caution in international affairs. But why then has his rhetoric been so incautious? The combination leads to the suspicion that there is no underlying strategy, merely a disconnect between what the White House speechwriters churn out and what the rest of the government actually does.

The combination leads to the suspicion that there is no underlying strategy, merely a disconnect between what the White House speechwriters churn out and what the rest of the government actually does. This has been the Bush Administration from the get-go. I dimly remember writing a blog post in the Mahablog’s early days in which I said the Bush Administration is not so much a presidency as it is a pageant. It’s all staging and props. Nobody actually does anything, or at least, anything legal or normal.

Put another way, the Bush Administration all along has been a political machine dressed up to look like an administration. But I wonder if some of the major players, particularly Bush and Karl Rove, actually know the difference.

I sincerely believe the biggest reason Bush resorts to underhanded methods like signing statements to get what he wants from Congress is that he lacks either the ability, or the inclination, or both, to actually do the job of president and play the role presidents normally play in relation to Congress. It’s not so much that he wants to destroy the separation of powers and the Constitution; it’s just that he doesn’t know any other way to function in the job.

But also, one of my biggest early frustrations as a blogger was that righties were always taking Bush at his word, whereas I was judging him by what he actually did. These two factors were never in the same continent, much less the same ball park.

Here’s a post I wrote on this subject back in October 2005. It holds up, I think. Bush sometimes (not always, of course) makes speeches that are perfectly reasonable speeches, and in his speeches he promotes values and ideals that are also my values and ideals. However, his actions in office undermine those same values and ideals he promotes in his speeches. And righties, on the whole, have been too thick to see it. They embraced his rhetoric as if his words represented what he was actually doing in office.

Among other things in the October 2005 post, for example:

You can still find righties who get all misty-eyed about the “bullhorn moment” but are not at all bothered by the fact that Osama bin Laden was never brought to justice. It’s as if the rhetoric itself is all that matters, and reality is just an inconvenient minor detail.

In the final days of his Administration, the propaganda machine is churning out the notion that “victory” has been won in Iraq, and all that’s left is the mopping up. But they could have held the same pageant a year ago, or two years ago, or five years ago. Again, war supporters are too thick to see how they are being played. But I think all they ever really wanted was the pageant, the victory parade. What actually happens to Iraq is just an inconvenient minor detail. As soon as they can declare we “won,” they will utterly lose interest in what we actually did in Iraq.

Here’s another little glimmer of reality from the writer quoted above:

The “freedom agenda” has suffered as much as Bush’s anti-proliferation efforts. His claims to be “pressing nations around the world” on reform will come as news to dissidents like Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to run against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s 2005 presidential election and has been rotting in jail ever since, even as the U.S. continues to give Mubarak $2 billion a year in aid.

Bush’s entire administration has been one long mockery of the word “freedom.” The writer I’m quoting hasn’t come to grips with the full range of Bush’s mockery, but at least this one little piece of light broke through the fog. But here the writer demonstrates that he is still pretty foggy:

Bush has not felt the need to ratchet down his promises to bring them into closer alignment with what his own administration has been able to achieve.

Why would we expect him to? He’s done nothing from the beginning but say one thing and do something else. The only policy he has been rock-hard consistent about is tax cutting, and even then he has been nothing but duplicitous in his rhetoric about which taxes actually were being cut.

The writer is Max Boot, by the way. I’m not holding my breath waiting for Boot to measure the gap between his own rhetoric and reality.

Waste and Fraud

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It’s not really news that the Iraq “reconstruction” effort was and is the Mother of All Boondoggles, and that billions of taxpayer dollars have been pissed away in waste and fraud. But the New York Times has a new story about it, so I’ll comment anyway.

The Times got hold of a 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq being circulated in Washington. This report was not supposed to be released until February, after Dear Leader had left office.

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The article doesn’t name the “Pentagon planners.” Want to bet it was the civilians who reported to Rummy — Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, etc.?

No takers, huh?

It’s been obvious all along that BushCo. was utterly incompetent to handle anything as complicated as a kids’ birthday party, never mind reconstructing Iraq. Other stuff we already knew:

  • The Pentagon has been lying its ass off all along about the “progress” being made in Iraq.
  • Much of the money allocated for various projects was diverted into a “spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs.”
  • To this day, “the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.”
  • Rummy didn’t think the U.S. would need to spend $1 billion to reconstruct Iraq. He was right; so far, we’ve spent $117 billion.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

We’ve become a can’t-do nation.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

You’ll like this part:

¶When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.

That was only $20 billion for a “show of progress” so Bush could get re-elected. Congressional GOP saw to it BushCo got every dime it asked for since. But Detroit auto workers? They can drop dead.

Ideology, Pragmatism, Conceptual Frameworks, Ideals, Prejudices, and Yogachara

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Chris Hayes has written an essay on pragmatism versus ideology that is inspiring much thoughtful commentary. It’s worth reading all the way through, but to simplify, Hayes looks at the reigning conventional wisdom that the Bush Administration failed because it is too ideological, whereas the Obama Administration promises to be pragmatic.

However, Chris argues, ideology and pragmatism do not neatly sort themselves into cleanly separated dichotomies.

For one thing, as Glenn Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead decision-makers to ignore facts, it is also what sets the limiting conditions for any pragmatic calculation of interests. “Presumably, there are instances where a proposed war might be very pragmatically beneficial in promoting our national self-interest,” Greenwald wrote, “but is still something that we ought not to do. Why? Because as a matter of principle–of ideology–we believe that it is not just to do it, no matter how many benefits we might reap, no matter how much it might advance our ‘national self-interest.'”

One frustration I had with Chris’s essay, and most of the essays written in response to it, is that definitions of “ideology” and “pragmatism” remain a bit fuzzy.

For example, Hayes quotes Alan Greenspan: “Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to–to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.”

Here’s where I come in. I think Greenspan is right when he says that people deal with reality through conceptual frameworks. Buddhist teaching is that our self-identity is merely a kind of conceptual framework. The way we perceive reality is a conceptual framework. The Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy, for example, says that everything that exists, exists only as a process of knowing. That is, everything is just space and matter until our brains organize it into this or that, and this process of organization is in large part conceptual.

However, from this perspective, everything short of Anuttara-Samyak-Sambodhi (and good luck with that) is ideology, which renders the word ideology into mush.

The American Heritage dictionary defines ideology as

1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture. 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

So an ideology would be a set of values, perhaps, or a belief system. Let’s work with that. Now, what is “pragmatism”? Back to the dictionary —

1. Philosophy A movement consisting of varying but associated theories, originally developed by Charles S. Peirce and William James and distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences. 2. A practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems.

“The meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences.” I like that. One of my problems with current conservative ideology is that its observable practical consequences are light-years apart from its stated goals or ideals. For example, one gets the impression that conservatives think “freedom” is acquired by cutting taxes, deregulating business, and waging wars against hostile heads of state on the theory that, given the means and opportunity, those heads of state might attack us first.

However, the observable practical consequences of the Bush Administration’s tax-and-war policies are that our economy is wrecked, our military is weakened, our credibility is shot, and we’re in debt up to our eyeballs to China, which has one of the most heinously nasty governments on the planet. I contend that this is less freedom, not more freedom. Therefore, we can define “movement conservative” ideology as a plan for making America poorer, weaker, more vulnerable, and less free, since it results in limited options and puts us in the position of having to kiss China’s ass.

After several years of holding up Bush as the Conservative’s Conservative, now conservatives complain that Bush is not a “real” conservative, because he “grew” government, as in raising expenditures. However, one can argue that growing government is an observable practical consequence of movement conservatism. The truth is that Bush has been a purer Reaganite than Reagan himself. Bush has been more aggressive about cutting taxes, more favorable to business — to the point that regulatory agencies have been handed over to the industries they regulate — more opposed to regulation and oversight, more determined not to back down from fights even if they are stupid fights. Yes, federal coffers have hemorrhaged money under Bush, but that’s mostly because of war, incompetence and corruption. And the war and corruption parts, at least, go hand-in-hand with conservative “ideology.”

From this perspective, pragmatism is pursuing a course that will give you the result you want, and not-pragmatism is pursing a course that will not give you the result you want.

For example, in a response to Chris Hayes, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that “People forget that there is pragmatic, if ultimately flawed, case for torture.” However, people who have studied torture say that it gives you bad intelligence, and further, it complicates trying to get convictions for whatever the tortured people allegedly did. Thus, torture is not pragmatic at all.

And why do people do things that are not pragmatic? Because they want to.

Torture is its own end. People who want to do it, want to do it for the sheer emotional gratification of it. They won’t admit that, but it’s the truth. Torture has no pragmatic application; therefore, no honest pragmatic argument can be made for it. Genuine pragmatism is, IMO, centered in self-honesty, whereas un-pragmatic ideology is centered in self-deception.

Pragmatism is, IMO, pursuing a course of action in order to obtain an achievable result, rather than pursuing a course of action because it is emotionally gratifying. The flaw in my definition is that people are dishonest with themselves about why they do things. People who are motivated by resentment, bias or greed will nearly always throw a cloak of ideals over what’s really driving them.

For example, conservatives want to do away with regulation on the grounds that regulation is unnecessary and gets in the way of business. Regulation is unnecessary, they argue, because corporate executives would not do something, such as cheating customers or stockholders, that is detrimental to the long-term interests of the company. But the fact is that corporate executives do stupid and underhanded things all the time. Why? Because they want to. Greed trumps good business practice every bleeping day.

And many of the leaders of the Right who push deregulation and small-government ideology do so not because of “freedom,” but because they want to cash in. Whether they are able to admit that to themselves I do not know.

Let’s get back to the original contention, the conventional wisdom that the Bush Administration failed because it is too ideological, whereas the Obama Administration promises to be pragmatic. Yes, the Obama Administration, so far, promises to be relentlessly pragmatic. We see this in the way Joe Lieberman was “forgiven.” Yes, it would have been emotionally gratifying to kick Lieberman’s ass off of the Senate Homeland Security Committee chair, but to what end? Democrats are better off with Lieberman caucusing with them rather than with the Republicans, like it or not.

However, the Obama Administration also promises to be ideological, in the sense that it promises to operate within the parameters of values and ideas. We can debate what those values and ideas might be, but we can’t say there aren’t any.

The Bush Administration, on the other hand, most certainly was not pragmatic. Just look at the results.

I have argued in the past that all ideologies are wrong, because none of them are the whole truth.

I define ideology as a kind of cognitive filing system. The cosmos is an infinitely complex place, and we have very finite brains, so as we grow and learn we tend to organize input in certain ways to make sense of it. The way we learn to file depends a lot on our upbringing, the social and cultural values we absorb, our experiences, the limitations of our intelligence, etc. etc. We use cognition to interface with absolute reality, breaking the awesome absolute down into little digestible relative bits that we can comprehend, label, and file. And we all do this, unless maybe you are a superduper Einstein-level genius, and then I suspect you still do it most of the time.

I still think that’s true. However, a wise person is able to learn, adjust, and adapt his ideology to fit changing reality (or, his changing understanding of reality). A fool cannot do that; fools will continue along an obviously unwise course because their ideologies have become a cosmic security blanket, something they cling to for safety and comfort rather than consult for answers. And there’s your distinction between ideology and pragmatism.

Rules and Republicans

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OK, here’s the deal with U.S. Attorneys. Usually they are appointed to four-year terms by a new president. When their terms are up, and if they are not re-appointed, they are to remain in their positions only until a new U.S. Attorney is confirmed to replace them. Those are the rules.

Once again, we see that Republicans don’t think the rules apply to them. Loyal Bushie Mary Beth Buchanan, a U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh, says she will not leave her position.

Despite a new administration coming into power, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said she plans to stick around.

“It doesn’t serve justice for all the U.S. attorneys to submit their resignations all at one time,” she said yesterday. […]

Asking for the old attorneys to submit resignations is a courtesy, as far as I can tell. If she doesn’t resign that doesn’t mean she can keep her job. If a new Attorney is appointed and confirmed by the Senate for her position, she’s out, whether she resigns or not.

Usually if a president is re-elected to serve a second term, he doesn’t bother about replacing his own appointees, although he could if he wanted to. When a new president is elected, he can choose to replace most or all of the attorneys by appointing new ones. The GOP ginned up a phony scandal when Bill Clinton replaced the old U.S. Attorneys in 1993, even though Reagan had done the same thing with Jimmy Carter’s appointees, and Bush II would do the same thing to Clinton’s appointees when he took office.

Rightie blogger Stephen Brainbridge claims to be a law professor at UCLA:

A lot of people got very worked up when George Bush fired some US Attorneys for political reasons. Now some of those same people are exercised over the refusal of a Bush-appointed US Attorney to resign so that Obama can replace her.

I don’t think you can have it both ways. Either the US Attorney job is a political one or not.

Some people are born stupid, and some people choose to be stupid. If Bainbridge got through law school I will be charitable and assume the latter. He refuses to acknowledge the reasons Bush’s firing of U.S. Attorneys was scandalous.

The tradition of having US Attorneys resign when a new president takes office emerged so that the new president could make political appointments of the key personnel that would be enforcing the new administration’s legal priorities. Firing US Attorneys for failing to advance those priorities differs neither in degree nor kind.

The “priority,” of course, was that the fired attorneys refused to “help” Republicans get elected by bringing bogus charges against Democratic candidates right before an election. Like I said, some people choose to be stupid.

Iraq: Another Corner Turned

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It’s been a while since we’ve turned a corner in Iraq. You might remember that we used to turn corners with some frequency. Iraqis held various elections resulting in a dysfunctional government; adopted a half-assed constitution that needed massive revision; and my favorite — giving Iraq back its sovereignty — are just a few examples. Now Charles Krauthammer says we’ve turned another another corner.

The barbarism in Mumbai and the economic crisis at home have largely overshadowed an otherwise singular event: the ratification of military and strategic cooperation agreements between Iraq and the United States.

Wow, and we only had to spend about $700 billion so far and occupy Iraq for 5-1/2 years to achieve that.

Tina Susman writes for the Los Angeles Times,

Reporting from Baghdad — Explosions tore through two police stations Thursday in the western Iraqi city of Fallouja, leaving at least 16 people dead, and a blast in a northern city killed two U.S. soldiers in the latest reminders of this country’s fragile security situation.

The attacks came on the heels of other large blasts this week that targeted Iraqi and U.S. security forces and left dozens of people dead.

With U.S. combat troops scheduled to begin pulling out of Iraqi cities and towns early next year, the bombings were an ominous sign of what Iraqi security forces may face on their own after the drawdown.

Iraq’s three-member Presidency Council on Thursday formally ratified a Status of Forces Agreement that mandates the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from population centers by June 30 and from the country by the end of 2011. Iraq’s parliament approved the pact Nov. 27. Ratification by Iraq’s president and two vice presidents was necessary for it to take effect Jan. 1, after the United Nations mandate governing the U.S. troop presence expires.

In other words, Krauthammer looks at a pile of shit and sees a pony.

Tom Hayden writes,

The agreement forces the Bush Administration and Pentagon to back down from long-held positions, especially over deadlines. The barracking of American troops in remote areas by June 2009 will be a retreat from offensive operations. More important, the language of the agreement in Arabic stipulates that all American forces, not merely combat units, will be withdrawn by 2011. …

…This is not “out now”, but that was never possible politically or militarily. It’s not literally “ending the war in 2009” as Obama promised. But this pact is officially known as “the withdrawal agreement” to all proud Iraqis. Read carefully, it is an agreed 2009 timetable for ending the war, the occupation, the troop presence and closing the military bases in three years.

However,

Only a few weeks ago Prime Minister al-Maliki was praising Obama’s 16-month timetable. Obviously something or someone got to him. American embassy officials, according to press accounts, were button-holing Iraqi parliamentarians in the hallways in the days before the final voter. There are no registered lobbyists or even lobbying laws in Baghdad.

The Iraqis, finally, were fixin’ to just kick us out, and somehow the Bushies threatened or bribed enough people to make “the withdrawal agreement” look like a mutual agreement between Washington and Baghdad, just to let George W. Bush save face.

Oh, and we’re supposed to thank Bush for that.