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Bush’s Final Press Conference: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish
Image by elycefeliz
"I did not sell my soul for the sake of popularity. "
~ George W. Bush
Not that anyone made you an offer . . . .
It isn’t necessary to sell one’s soul for popularity – or respect. Bush’s deep denial prevents him from realizing how he could have achieved respect. It’s probably too late, now – he’ll just go on trying to justify his disasters.
He seems to think it’s only "foreigners" or "the elite" or "opiners" who don’t respect his record, methods and character . He’s wrong once again – it’s the majority of American citizens. And he has no right to disregard the people of the nation as he has, and is still doing.
www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm
pewresearch.org/pubs/1063/bush-and-public-opinion
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/arti…
President Bush today passionately defended his turbulent eight years in office and lashed out at the "elites" and "opiners" who claim he has damaged America’s moral standing in the world.
At a final and often gripping White House press conference, in which he veered from nostalgia to outright aggression, Mr Bush was largely unrepentant. He defended his economic and foreign policy record, including Iraq, the current financial crisis and Guantanamo Bay.
"I think it is a good, strong record," Mr Bush declared, nine days before he leaves office.
He departs with an approval rating of 27 per cent, the lowest since Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974.
. . . Mr Bush became most heated when confronting those who claim he has damaged America’s reputation in the world. "I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged."
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28617979/
www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/12/raw-data-transcript-b…
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-bush1…
In a nostalgic final news conference, President George W. Bush defended his record vigorously and at times sentimentally today.
. . . Bush showed anger at times when presented with some of the main criticisms of his time in office. He particularly became indignant when asked about America’s bruised image overseas.
"I disagree with this assessment that, you know, that people view America in a dim light," he said.
Bush said he realizes that some issues such as the prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have created controversy at home and around the world. But he defended his actions after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including approving tough interrogation methods for suspected terrorists and information-gathering efforts at home in the name of protecting the country. With the Iraq war in its sixth year, he most aggressively defended his decisions on that issue, which will define his presidency like no other.
He said that "not finding weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment." The accusation that Saddam had and was pursuing weapons of mass destruction was Bush’s main initial justification for going to war. Bush admitted another miscalculation: Eager to report quick progress after U.S. troops ousted Saddam’s government, he claimed less than two months after the war started that "in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed," a claim made under a "Mission Accomplished" banner that turned out to be wildly optimistic. "Clearly, putting ‘Mission Accomplished’ on an aircraft carrier was a mistake," he said today.
. . . He has been granting a flurry of legacy-focused interviews as he seeks to shape the view of his presidency on his way out the door.
voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/2009/01/the_politic…
The Bush Administration’s Most Despicable Act
www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870319,00.html
By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009
This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004.
The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act.
It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.
The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling out over the years in books like Jane Mayer’s excellent The Dark Side. But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the committee’s report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary was published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they’re taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners.
It should be noted that there was, and is, no evidence that these techniques actually work. Experienced military and FBI interrogators believe that torture leads, more often than not, to fabricated confessions. Patient, persistent questioning using subtle psychological carrots and sticks is the surest way to get actionable information.
But prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured — first at Guantánamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services Committee report details the techniques used on one prisoner: "Military working dogs had been used against [Mohammed al-] Khatani. He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks."
Since we live in an advanced Western civilization, there needs to be legal justification when we torture people, and the Bush Administration proudly produced it.
Memos authorizing the use of "enhanced" techniques were written in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council. Vice President Dick Cheney and his nefarious aide, David Addington, had a hand in the process. The memos were approved by Bush’s legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales. A memo listing specific interrogation techniques that could be used to torture prisoners like Mohammed al-Khatani was passed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He signed it on Dec. 2, 2002, although he seemed a bit disappointed by the lack of rigor when it came to stress positions: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," he noted. "Why is standing limited to four hours?"
It would be interesting, just for the fun and justice of it, to subject Rumsfeld to four hours in a stress position — standing stock still with his arms extended, naked, in a cold room after maybe two hours’ sleep.
But that’s not going to happen. Indeed, it seems probable that nothing much is going to happen to the Bush Administration officials who perpetrated what many legal scholars consider to be war crimes. "I would say that there’s some theoretical exposure here" to a war-crimes indictment in U.S. federal court, says Gene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. "But I don’t think there’s much public appetite for that sort of action." There is, I’m told, absolutely no interest on the part of the incoming Obama Administration to pursue indictments against its predecessors.
"We’re focused on the future," said one of the President-elect’s legal advisers. Fidell and others say it is possible, though highly unlikely, that Bush et al. could be arrested overseas — one imagines the Vice President pinched midstream on a fly-fishing trip to Norway — just as Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, was indicted in Spain and arrested in London for his crimes.
If Barack Obama really wanted to be cagey, he could pardon Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for the possible commission of war crimes. Then they’d have to live with official acknowledgment of their ignominy in perpetuity. More likely, Obama will simply make sure — through his excellent team of legal appointees — that no such behavior happens again. Still, there should be some official acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the Bush Administration’s policies were reprehensible, and quite possibly illegal, and that the U.S. is no longer in the torture business.
If Obama doesn’t want to make that statement, perhaps we could do it in the form of a Bush Memorial in Washington: a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position — the real Bush legacy.
www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/fallows_victory/5
Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.
Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing America’s ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East.
. . . Higher-priced oil has hurt America, but what has hurt more is the economic reaction bin Laden didn’t fully foresee. This is the systematic drag on public and private resources created by the undifferentiated need to be “secure.”
The effect is most obvious on the public level. “The economy as a whole took six months or so to recover from the effects of 9/11,” Richard Clarke told me. “The federal budget never recovered. The federal budget is in a permanent mess, to a large degree because of 9/11.” At the start of 2001, the federal budget was 5 billion in surplus. Now it is 0 billion in deficit.
. . . The final destructive response helping al-Qaeda has been America’s estrangement from its allies and diminution of its traditionally vast “soft power.” “America’s cause is doomed unless it regains the moral high ground,” Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of Britain’s secret intelligence agency, MI-6, told me. He pointed out that by the end of the Cold War there was no dispute worldwide about which side held the moral high ground—and that this made his work as a spymaster far easier. “Potential recruits would come to us because they believed in the cause,” he said. A senior army officer from a country whose forces are fighting alongside America’s in Iraq similarly told me that America “simply has to recapture its moral authority.”
. . . America’s glory has been its openness and idealism, internally and externally. Each has been constrained from time to time, but not for as long or in as open-ended a way as now. . . .
Succeeding in Business
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E5DD1E31F934A…
As Joshua Green says in The Washington Monthly, in a must-read article written just before the administration suddenly became such an exponent of corporate ethics: ”The ‘new tone’ that George W. Bush brought to Washington isn’t one of integrity, but of permissiveness. . . . In this administration, enriching oneself while one’s business goes bust isn’t necessarily frowned upon.”
Camper Is a Bad Dog!
Image by Dyanna Hyde
This video was taken by my brother. He and his wife spent a day out and left their dogs, Rusty (Doberman) and Camper (Beagle-Lab mix), outside in the backyard. While they were gone, it stormed, and the wind was so strong is blew the back door open. Camper decided it would be a Good Idea to go through the house and destroy just about anything she could get her mouth on.
Camper is notorious for her destructive behavior. She recently dug up the sprinkler system in the backyard and also chewed through the metal enclosure to the air conditioner controls and chewed through all the cables causing the AC to short out.
It’s a good thing she’s so cute!
Bush's Final Press Conference: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish
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