Category Archives: Bush Administration

Reacting Versus Responding

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A wise person pointed out to me once that there’s a difference between reacting and responding. As it says here, reacting is a reflex, like a knee-jerk. Reacting is nearly always triggered by emotions — attraction or aversion — and is about making oneself feel better. Responding, on the other hand, is a thought-out and dispassionate action that is primarily about solving a problem.

By now it’s clear that the Bushies are a tribe of reactors, not responders. Their well-established pattern is not to acknowledge a problem until it bites their own ass somehow, and then they react, sometimes over-react, with “solutions” that (pick as many as apply) miss the mark, make the problem worse, and waste tons of money without really helping anybody but which somehow ends up in the pockets of corporations that happen to be big GOP donors.

We saw this happen with 9/11. Before 9/11, intelligence experts did everything but bash Condi Rice in the head with a 2 x 4 trying to get the Bush Administration to pay attention to a screaming terrorist threat. After, the Bushies reacted. The whole nation wanted to bash the President in the head with a 2 x 4 during Katrina week; the belated reactions to that disaster were wasteful and ineffectual, not to mention political.

I’m thinking also of the Christmas tsunami that devastated parts of Asia. Bush very nearly ignored it until Bill Clinton made headlines by talking about it. Then, pissed, Bush crawled out of Crawford and made a respectable pledge of money. But, apparently to snub the United Nations, the Bushies bypassed the established relief agencies that already were helping the survivors and instead created a temporary, on-the-fly coalition to receive U.S. taxpayer dollars appropriated for tsunami response. I’ve never seen any follow-up on that, and I’m willing to bet only a small part of those dollars made it to Asia.

The pattern continues. The Bush Administration insisted the financial markets’ problems were under control, until it was obvious even to them that problems were not under control. And then their hair caught on fire. This is from an editorial in today’s New York Times:

This page has consistently held that the government must intervene in markets when failure to do so would cause even greater economic harm. The impending collapse of Citi or an unrelenting credit freeze demand intervention. But good crisis management also requires that the calamity of the moment not be allowed to overwhelm good governing. Unfortunately, that is not the case now.

Even, as the rescue tab rises, taxpayers are not being adequately informed or protected. There is as yet no effort to deal effectively with the underlying causes of the problem, especially mass mortgage defaults that feed bank losses. And officials seem to think urgency to act absolves them from considering the longer-term implications of the actions they take.

It was obvious during the campaign that John McCain is pure reaction; the sort of guy who rushes about putting out fires without ever stopping to consider how the fires are getting started. My hope is that the cool and intellectual Barack Obama is more of a responder than a reactor.

However, my understanding is that the real solutions to the crisis will require a big outlay of money also. My fear is that once we’ve gone through a cycle of reaction, there will be no support for response.

Take George Will. Please. He made an ass of himself on ABC’s “This Week” awhile back,

Having learned nothing, Will is still spreading revisionist history, as are other righties. Paul Krugman continues to respond with actual facts —

The main line of empirical argument seems to be that FDR didn’t succeed in ending the Great Depression. Since that’s also what my side of the debate says — fiscal expansion was too cautious, and disastrously abandoned in 1937 — I don’t see what this is supposed to prove.

In other words, Krugman says, yes, the New Deal didn’t revive the economy effectively, but that was because FDR was too conservative and cautious in his approach. But when the real government spending program of World War II got underway, the economy bounced back just fine.

See also The Keynesian Moment.





Gobble, Gobble

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While the world slides into a financial sinkhole, George W. Bush wants us to know he’s a good president.

“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process,” Bush said in the interview. “I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn’t going to sacrifice those values.”

“I’d like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace; that focused on individuals rather than process; that rallied people to serve their neighbor,” the president added.

He also called No Child Left Behind (Because We’re Setting Them All Back) one of the “significant achievements of my administration.”

Some things snark themselves. I think the line about “the political process” is particularly interesting, however. The “political process” is important. As in “due process of law.” As in “our form of government.” Governing is a process. Preserving the process is important. Chucking the process of government out the window in order to get the result you want is dangerous and foolish.

Matt Yglesias writes,

Part of the effort to pull the wagon of conservatism out of the ditch into which Bush piloted the country is going to be an effort to deny that George W. Bush was a real conservative.

Going to be? They’ve been reciting that line for at least a year.

In reality, Bushism should be understood as the highest form of conservatism. In particular, the High Bushist years of 2001-2006 represent the only time that the post-war conservative movement has had total control over the federal government. If the practical consequences of pre-Bush conservatism were less disastrous, that’s largely because conservative political power was more constrained in those earlier eras.

Meanwhile, it’s worth recalling that at the peak of his political power, when Bush was making his most disastrous decisions, conservatives not only thought he was a good president, but a great one.

Matt is pulling conservative testimonials to the greatness of Bush out of the memory hole. If you have any tidbits to nominate, let Matt know.

Fantasy and Lies

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Reuters is reporting a possible al Qaeda threat to the New York City transit system. DHS seems a bit ho-hum about it, but I can’t think of any political reason the Bush Administration would have for hyping imaginary threats now, unless they just wanted to do it one more time.

Dan Froomkin wrote last week,

When and if the curtain is fully pulled back on President Bush’s “war on terror,” how much of what he said will turn out to be true, and how much of it will turn out to be fantasy and lies?

The more we learn, the more it seems the appeals to fear that Bush used to rally the nation behind him were unfounded.

The latest example came yesterday in a federal courtroom in Washington, where a Bush-appointed judge ordered the release of five Algerian men who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for almost seven years.

As we now know — well, as we’ve pretty much known for some time — the Bushies were not terribly discriminating about the men they scooped up and held at Guantanamo as “enemy combatants.” Our country has been holding innocent men in prison as showcase prisoners, so that the Bushies could point to something resembling progress in the war on terror.

Last night on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, Jonathan Turley said that Bush was refusing to pardon officials involved in torture because he figures the Dems are too spineless to indict anyone. Probably, yes. I hope I’m wrong.

Get This

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James Rosen and Steven Thomma write for McClatchy Newspapers:

Whether by design or necessity, Obama appeared to be using the deepening economic crisis to step to the forefront and seize the stage in order to reassure a nervous nation two months before he takes office.

One prominent Republican, former Secretary of Treasury James Baker, suggested that Obama and President George W. Bush take the almost unprecedented step of sitting down and trying to work together to address the crisis.

Let me guess — Baker lost a ton of money on the stock market. Well, you’re the one who got him into the White House, Jimbo.

58 Days

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Our economic house of cards continues to fall. Citigroup is next, they say.

Daniel Gross argues that we’re not reliving the Great Depression all over again:

Ironically, the differences between the two eras can be summed up in a few sound bites. The world of 1929-33 was one that lacked shock absorbers such as Social Security and deposit insurance to insulate people from economic disaster. In the 1930s, some of the world’s largest economies—Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Italy—were run by leaders hostile to the very notion of market capitalism. Today, U.S.-style market capitalism is under assault from self-inflicted wounds, and Germany, Italy, and Japan (Russia, not so much) are working with the United States to cope with a common problem. Back then, we were cursed with a feckless Federal Reserve, and a wealthy Treasury secretary, Paul Mellon, saw the downturn as a force for good. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he said. “People will work harder, live more moral lives.” By contrast, today’s Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, is a student of the Great Depression, and the wealthy Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, wants to provide liquidity to stocks, farmers, and real estate. A final difference: After the 1929 crash, the nation had to wait more than three years for a president who simply wasn’t up to the job to leave the scene. This time, we’ve got to wait only two more months.

Paul Krugman says Gross is missing the point.

The reason we’re making analogies with the Great Depression — and the reason I’ve come out with a new edition of The Return of Depression Economics — is the collapse of policy certainties. In particular, the Fed’s sudden impotence — its inability to cut rates any more, because they’re essentially zero — is a very real parallel with the Depression, and necessitates drastic responses.

Now, if all goes well the Obama stimulus plan will head off the worst. But that will be precisely because we understood that the current crisis is, indeed, like the Great Depression in important ways. Only those who learn from history can hope to avoid repeating it.

Barack Obama is doing what he can from the sidelines to keep the crisis from getting worse. Bubble Boy, on the other hand …

Bush, meeting with international leaders in Peru, warned against government intervention in free markets after weeks of overseeing one of the largest government financial interventions in U.S. history.

Many pundits argue that the nation can’t afford to keep Bush in office for three more months, because we need effective leadership now. Good luck with that. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t chain himself to the Resolute desk on Inauguration Day, forcing the Secret Service to saw the priceless antique apart and carry him out of the White House.

So the ship of state will continue to float along aimlessly for the next, what, 58 days? Tom Friedman writes,

Right now there is something deeply dysfunctional, bordering on scandalously irresponsible, in the fractious way our political elite are behaving — with business as usual in the most unusual economic moment of our lifetimes. They don’t seem to understand: Our financial system is imperiled.

The Bushies haven’t shown any inclincation to govern responsibly lo these past seven years and ten months. And now Friedman is upset? I guess the loss of billions of dollars of his wife’s wealth got his attention.

Today, bloggers on the Right are hysterical about the impending Obama Administration, which will combine the worst elements of Franklin Roosevelt and George McGovern. Some bloggers on the Left are already certain that the Obama Administration will be the same old entrenched Washingtonian politics-as-usual Big Fat Zero, and maybe it will. I’m making no specific predictions about what he will or won’t do. Maybe he’ll surprise us. Maybe he won’t. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I see little else to do but keep breathing.

Jokes Writing Themselves

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It’s dark humor, but it’s still humor — first, the headlines:

Now, here’s the punch line:

Like, something bad might happen if we do?

Update: Here’s another punch line:

You don’t even need the set-up for that one.

Pardons and Prosecutions

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Mark Benjamin writes in Salon that Dubya might issue a blanket pardon for anyone in his administration involved in torture. Meanwhile, advisors to Barack Obama are pushing for a nonpartisan commission to investigate torture in the Bush Administration.

It is said (nothing is official) that the plan is to do painstaking investigation of torture before coming to any conclusions about prosecution. As much as we’d all like to see Dick and Dubya in stocks asap, that’s probably sensible.

But then there’s the blanket pardon thing. Benjamin writes,

Constitutional scholars say a pardon of this kind would be an unprecedented move — the prospective pardon of not just individuals but entire categories of people, perhaps numbering in the thousands, for carrying out the president’s orders , which the White House has argued all along were legal.

Those scholars agree, however, that Article II of the Constitution gives Bush much latitude: There is no authority that can stop the president from doing so if he wishes, and there is no outside check or balance to revisit such a decision, however controversial it may be. “The president can do with pardoning power whatever he wants,” explained University of Wisconsin Law School professor Stanley Kutler. “It is complete and plenary unto itself.”

To complicate matters further, Charlie Savage writes for the New York Times that there is precedent for former presidents to continue to keep matters in their administrations secret. The precedent was set by Harry Truman —

When a Congressional committee subpoenaed Harry S. Truman in 1953, nearly a year after he left office, he made a startling claim: Even though he was no longer president, the Constitution still empowered him to block subpoenas.

“If the doctrine of separation of powers and the independence of the presidency is to have any validity at all, it must be equally applicable to a president after his term of office has expired,” Truman wrote to the committee.

Congress backed down, establishing a precedent suggesting that former presidents wield lingering powers to keep matters from their administration secret. Now, as Congressional Democrats prepare to move forward with investigations of the Bush administration, they wonder whether that claim may be invoked again.

In the years that followed, the precedent has been cited twice — by presidents Nixon and Reagan.

Savage again:

Topics of open investigations include the harsh interrogation of detainees, the prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, secret legal memorandums from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the role of the former White House aides Karl Rove and Harriet E. Miers in the firing of federal prosecutors.

This could take some time.

Speaking of pardons — the Dems seem to be moving toward pardoning Joe Lieberman for his reprehensible behavior during the recent election. I suspect the primary reason for this is mathematics — without a 60-vote majority, the Dems need every possible warm body in Congress on their side. I understand this, even though I don’t especially like it.

I just wish Tweety and the other bobbleheads would stop saying that Lieberman campaigned for McCain on “principle.” There was nothing “principled” about helping the Right spread poison. I don’t know what Lieberman’s problem is, beyond harboring the Godzilla of egos, but an excess of principle doesn’t seem to be holding him back much.

That said, I pretty much agree with Glenn Greenwald when he says —

It is worth remembering that the Democrats who are going to exert dominant political control are the same ones who have provoked so much scorn — rightfully so — over the last several years, and particularly since 2006. This is the same Democratic Party leadership which funded the Iraq War without conditions (and voted to authorize it in the first place); massively expanded the President’s warrantless eavesdropping powers; immunized lawbreaking telecoms; enacted the Patriot Act and then renewed it with virtually no changes; didn’t even bother to mount a filibuster to stop the Military Commissions Act; refrained from pursuing any meaningful investigations of Bush lawbreaking; confirmed every last extremist Bush nominee, from Michael McConnell to Michael Mukasey; acquiesced to even the worst and most lawless Bush policies when they were briefed on them; and on and on and on. None of that has changed. That is still who they are.

It is who they are, which is why we have to stay active and keep pushing for change, or there will be no change.

At the same time, keep in mind that anyone who claims to know what President Obama will or won’t do once he is in office is an idiot. We’ve had one such person in the comments already, and of course Obama haters who pose as liberals — you know who they are — are already writing off his administration.

It’s fair to say that anything one hears in the news now about what the Obama Administration will or will not do on any issue is speculation, including the investigations mentioned at the top of this post. People who are in a position to actually know anything aren’t talking — well, except maybe for Rahm Emanuel. This is standard behavior for a presidential transition. The President-elect should not be running a shadow government while someone else still is president, whether we like him or not.

Reporters are picking up hints and clues and speculation and writing about them as if they were official pronouncements from the President-Elect’s office, and the usual jerks are using these speculations to bash Obama before he’s even taken office. Oh, and if you tell them to get a grip on reality, you must be part of a cult.

I’m all in favor of criticizing Obama or any other politician when criticism is due. However, relentless bashing of anyone for something he hasn’t done and may not even be thinking of doing says more about the basher than the bashee.

Update: While I’m at it, Dear Lambert —

Obama’s fans labored so hard to elect somebody when they didn’t know what he was going to do. The real reason they have to wait, I hazard, is that since they established no policy standards for him in their own minds, they have nothing to hold him accountable for.

Lambert, dear, electing “somebody when they didn’t know what he was going to do” is what Americans have done for every single presidential campaign since Washington. One never really knows what they will do until they do it. This would have been equally true if Hillary Clinton were the president-elect and not Obama. One of the reasons some of us were skeptical of Hillary Clinton during the primaries is that her actual record of accomplishment doesn’t exactly match her claims and promises.

The Obama campaign had exhaustive policy proposals on the campaign web site, so it’s not as if we didn’t know what he proposed. And if he betrays our trust, especially on matters like health care and Iraq, many of us will be bitterly disappointed and will criticize him copiously. However, bashing Obama for things he hasn’t yet done, hasn’t had a chance to do, and has not expressed any intention of doing (see above about what’s appearing in the news), is what we call “pathological.” Get help.

Like, It Could Get Worse?

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I always cringe when I hear someone say, “It can’t get any worse.” That’s absurd; it can always get worse. I don’t think “worse” has a floor, unless you count the End of the Universe. And maybe there’s a “worse” beyond that that’s unreachable by human understanding. But let’s leave that for another post.

It is beginning to sink into the rightie hive mind that they could lose the White House as well as more seats in Congress. And they are flapping about frantically trying to warn us of how dangerous it would be to elect Barack Obama.

Like, it could get worse?

For example, Jonah “the Doughboy” Goldberg warns us that electing Obama would be returning to the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

For some reason, I’m not quaking in my boots.

Goldberg also displays his firm grasp on American history by calling Woodrow Wilson our “first progressive president.” Please. Wilson was a damn sight less progressive than one of his predecessors, whose birthday happened to be yesterday, btw. The Wilson administration and World War I marked the end of the Progressive Era and ushered in the Republican Era of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, which took us to the Great Depression Era. But I’ve ranted about that before.

Today the righties are screaming that Obama would undermine the Constitution, never mind that the current GOP administration did more to undermine the Constitution than the previous 43 administrations put together.

And for all their hysteria about “redistribution” of wealth, I second biggerbox — “Pallet loads of cash to Iraq? No-bid contracts for Haliburton, and so many others? Jack Abramoff? Dick Cheney? Ted Stevens? Seven-house McCain?” While the GOP controlled the federal government the Republicans redistributed wealth wholesale — to their supporters and themselves.

We liberals have a crazy notion that people who create the wealth through their labor — i.e., workers — ought have something to say about what happens to the wealth. And that maybe a part of the wealth could be used to benefit the nation and its citizens, and not just the wealthy and powerful at the top of the pyramid. We think that’s democracy. The Right claims it is “socialism,” but it is not socialism by any objective definition of socialism.

Gary Kamiya writes (in an article well worth reading all the way through),

William Kristol warned that an “Obama-Biden administration — working with a Democratic Congress — would mean a more debilitating nanny state at home and a weaker nation facing our enemies abroad.” It takes a deep obliviousness to reality for an ardent Bush supporter to be sounding the alarm about the “nanny state” at the same time that his beloved president and party are solicitously spoon-feeding their wailing Wall Street brat out of a $700 billion jar of Gerber’s.

And then there’s the Religious Right. Sarah Posner tells us,

Religious-right honchos are girding the troops for political apocalypse. Townhall magazine, owned by Salem Communications, one of the largest Christian broadcasters in the country, ran a September feature, “Obamageddon: Could We Survive a Barack Presidency?” This month evangelical publishing giant Stephen Strang, whose magazine Charisma endorsed McCain, predicted that “life as we know it will end if Obama is elected.” Last week, the political arm of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family sent out a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America”, a 16-page (pdf) parade of horribles, and talk radio show host Janet Porter imagined that Christians will be imprisoned with Obama in the Oval Office.

I say they are already imprisoned in their own lunacy. If it gets worse for them, it will be entirely their own doing.

As I said in the first paragraph, it can always get worse. A great many things are outside the control of an American government and could get worse no matter who is elected. The global financial crisis might worsen, for example. The Middle East could become more unstable. Giant sea creatures could swallow Indonesia. The next big, frightening thing might be something no one is anticipating now.

But the issues the Right is trying to use to frighten us just aren’t that frightening — except to them. To everyone else, “worse” has already arrived.

Update: Via Balkinization — Steven Calabresi, Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School and Co-Founder of The Federalist Society, warns us what will happen if Obama is elected —

“[A]ny or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants…”

These people are bleeping insane.

Update: Here’s more. In her trademark lyrical prose, Sarah Palin said,

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record… Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you.”

“And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us”? This from a woman who wants the government to make our reproductive choices for us?

Never Mind

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Ashley Todd, the McCain volunteer who falsely claimed she’d been attacked because of her McCain bumper sticker, probably is a troubled young woman trying to get attention. What’s more pathetic is the way so many on the Right seized her story either as proof of the depravity of Obama supporters or vindication of their hatred of the Left.

To their credit, some rightie bloggers suspected the hoax from the beginning, and today the ones who were fooled are printing retractions. But what’s most pathetic is that the McCain campaign itself seemed poised to make Ashley Todd into a campaign icon, à la Joe the Plumber. Ashley the Victim?

McCain’s Pennsylvania communications director dressed Ashley’s story up even more to feed to the press. The same communications director said that Sarah Palin called Ashley. The national campaign took interest. Then it all went poof.

We’re going through the same poor-little-victimized-Right nonsense we went through in 2004. There are overheated jerks on both sides who have gone out of bounds. In Rightieworld, however, only righties are victims. When McCain supporters cross a line, by definition it’s “just a prank.”