bush - Robert Maguire on Diigo

10 Dec 09

According to the latest Pew poll on US attitudes on international affairs, 44% of Americans think that the world's leading economic power is... China. Only 27% think it's the United States. Here's the somewhat blurry chart from the report.
3 more annotations...
- As Barack Obama would say: Let me be clear. People who think this are crazy. Or, to be more gentle, they are really woefully misinformed about what the world is like.
- You could address this point with, you know, "facts." Almost no one in the United States is a peasant farmer. Most people in China are. Nearly everyone in America has indoor plumbing. Most people in China don't. Japan has one-tenth as many people as China, yet its economy is larger -- the second largest in the world. America's is of course largest of all, three times larger than Japan's and about four times larger than China's. Name 20 large American corporations that do business worldwide. Without trying, you can probably name 50. Try to name even 10 from China. Name the most recent winner of a Nobel prize in science from a Chinese university or research institution. (Hint: this is a trick question.)
- In unrelated news, I see that 44% of the public wishes that the 43rd president were still in office. I'm not sure which is the less heartening thought: that these are the same 44% who think that China is already #1, or that a total of 88% of the public holds one of the other of these views.

Fact-Checking Gonzales - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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All the internal investigations are over with, no finding of
wrongdoing, no finding that I misled Congress.*
*Editor's note: A 2008 Department of Justice investigation was referred to a federal prosecutor and remains ongoing.

09 Dec 09

Gonzo Being Gonzo | Talking Points Memo

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You know it's bad when the second thing Alberto Gonzales says in an interview with Esquire is given an asterisk that directs you to more complete rendering of the facts the former attorney general is asserting.
We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.

08 Dec 09

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

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obama US politics reference statistics torture bush cheney law doj waronterror guantanamo suicides detainees

military officials proclaimed "suicide by hanging"
military officials proclaimed "suicide by hanging"
20 more annotations...
- On the night of June 10, 2006, three Guantanamo detainees were found dead in their individual cells.
- Without any autopsy
- Admiral Harry Harris, the camp's commander, said it showed "they have no regard for life" and that the suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare aimed at us here at Guantanamo"; another official anonymously said that the suicides showed the victims were "committed jihadists [who] will do anything they can to advance their cause," while another sneered that "it was a good PR move to draw attention."
- Questions immediately arose
- constant and intense monitoring
- their bodies were not found for over two hours after their deaths.
- To allay the questions that quickly emerged, the military announced it would conduct a sweeping investigation
- did not do so until more than two years later
- heavily redacted reported
- Two of the three dead detainees were Saudis and one was Yemeni; they had been detained for years without charges; one of them was 17 years old at the time he was detained and 22 when he died; and they had participated in several of the hunger strikes at the camp to protest the brutality, torture and abuse to which they were routinely subjected. Perversely, one of the three victims had been cleared for release earlier that month.
- A major new report from Seton Hall University School of Law released this morning raises serious doubts about both the military's version of events and the reliability of its investigation.
- The Report details that the three men "died under questionable circumstances"; that "the investigation into their deaths resulted in more questions than answers"; and that "without a proper investigation, it is impossible to determine the circumstances of the three detainees' deaths." The 54-page, heavily-documented Report raises numerous troubling questions, as illustrated by these
- a lawsuit filed in federal court by the parents of two of the detainees against various Bush officials for the torture and deaths of their sons -- who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any wrongdoing (indeed, one had been cleared for release).
- As The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar detailed in October, "the Obama administration has surprisingly endorsed the same legal positions as its predecessor, insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."
- In fact, the Brief filed by the Obama DOJ demanding dismissal of the case explicitly argues -- in classic Bush/Cheney fashion -- that merely allowing discovery in this case to determine what was done to these detainees would help the Terrorists kill us all:
- As Harper's Scott Horton documented over the weekend, a new filing by the Obama DOJ in defense of John Yoo is "seeking to make absolute the immunity granted Justice Department lawyers who counsel torture, disappearings, and other crimes against humanity." In other words, as we lecture the world about the need for them to apply the rule of law and hold war criminals accountable, we simultaneously proclaim about ourselves:
- We can kidnap your sons from anywhere in the world, far away from any "battlefield," ship them thousands of miles away to an island-prison, abuse and torture them mercilessly, and when we either drive them to suicide or kill them, you have no right to any legal remedy or even any recourse to find out what happened.

06 Dec 09

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder - Trailer • videosift.com

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05 Dec 09

Iran Is No Existential Threat | Foreign Policy

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iran US politics israel nuclear weapons sanctions bush obama UN

But the sanctions did not prove
"crippling," as Bush had hoped: Iran
continued to expand its nuclear infrastructure, and the risks of a military
confrontation between the United States
and Iran
climbed.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama's administration has decided
to repeat this sorry history.
8 more annotations...
- More
  broadly, U.S., British, and
  French insistence on "zero enrichment" in Iran
  makes successful nuclear diplomacy with Tehran
  impossible.
- At this point, there is no chance that Tehran
  will accept "zero enrichment" as a negotiated outcome, for at least two
  reasons: It is a country-specific formulation applied to Iran but not to anybody else, and it requires Iran
  to forswear its sovereign right to the full range of civil nuclear technology.
- A more constructive approach would seek to maximize
  international monitoring of Iran's nuclear activities by emphasizing
  country-neutral formulations for curbing nuclear proliferation in the Middle
  East. This would require international acceptance of enrichment on Iranian
  soil. Getting Iran to ratify and implement the Additional Protocol to the
  Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would be an important step in this direction, but
  the most effective country-neutral initiative would be the establishment of a
  nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the region.
- serious
  consideration of these ideas in U.S. foreign policy circles always stops as
  soon as Israel's nuclear status comes up.
- It is simply not analytically credible to describe
  the unresolved Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese tracks of the Middle East
  peace process as "existential threats" to Israel.
- More recently, the dominant Israeli discourse about Iran has routinely characterized an Islamic
  Republic with a nuclear "breakout" capability -- not to mention actual nuclear
  weapons -- as an "existential threat" to Israel. (Both Prime Minister
  Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have reiterated Israel's
  position that Iran's full suspension of uranium enrichment is the only
  acceptable outcome from nuclear talks with Tehran.)
- Even if Iran were to fabricate a nuclear weapon, it is not
  credible to describe that as an existential threat to Israel -- unless one has
  such a distorted view of Shiite Islam that one believes the Islamic Republic is
  so focused on damaging "the Zionist entity" that it is collectively willing to
  become history's first "suicide nation."
- But that commitment should not be confused with
  maintaining Israel's military
  hegemony over the region in perpetuity, by continuing to allow U.S. assurances of an Israeli "qualitative edge"
  for defensive purposes to be twisted into assurances of maximum freedom for Israel
  to conduct offensive military operations at will against any regional target.

03 Dec 09

Neo-Hoover Revisionism | Talking Points Memo

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lies US politics conservatives bush obama unemployment financialcrisis economy republicans

Former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (who happens to be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's wife) tells Fox News that the current high unemployment is all Obama's fault, especially if you skip over the last year of the Bush Presidency and compare it to the jobless numbers in 2007.

For The Record - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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doublestandards bush palin afghanistan waronterror bill kristol conservatives republicans politics US

I want to know that we have an exit plan in place
not to set a timetable for withdrawal that
signals a lack of resolve to our friends, and lets our enemies believe
they can wait us out

Matthew Yglesias » McCain Calls for Additional Resolve to Win a War He Thought We Won Years Ago

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mccain conservatives republicans politics obama doublestandards waronterror afghanistan success bush

“I don’t agree with an arbitrary date for withdrawal. Success is what dictates dates for withdrawal. If we don’t have that success and we only set an arbitrary date it emboldens our enemies and dispirits our friends.”
“Could I add, it was in Afghanistan, as well, there were many people who predicted that Afghanistan would not be a success. So far, it’s a remarkable success.” [CNN, 3/2/05]
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- “Afghanistan, we don’t read about anymore, because it’s succeeded.”
- “Nobody in Afghanistan threatens the United States of America.”
- “The facts on the ground are we went to Afghanistan and we prevailed there.”

the highlights of Richard Armitage's interview with Prism - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

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armitage torture law democracy bush waronterror nsc statedept diplomacy isi pakistan afghanistan intelligence iraq cooperation conservatives republicans

an
interesting interview
to Prism
"The second surprise was frankly how successful we were for
the first 4 years-almost 5 years-at keeping the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Service
Intelligence] relatively out of it. They were so shocked with the speed at
which we invaded Afghanistan that I think the ISI felt it was only a matter of
time until we prevailed."
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- Armitage's timeline here suggests to me that
  Afghanistan started really falling apart when the ISI went back in. That's an
  interesting conclusion
- He says Bush and his war cabinet never formally
  considered whether to invade Iraq. "Never to my knowledge, and I'm pretty sure I'm right on
  this, did the President ever sit around with his advisors and say, 'Should we
  do this or not?' He never did it."
- The Bush administration didn't
  understand democracy and how to encourage it.
- "The Bush administration's push
  for votes as though voting equals democracy was wrong-headed because a vote is
  something that happens inside a democracy, but is not necessary for a democracy.
  You can have a democratic system without having people raise their hands and
  have a secret ballot. Loya jirgas to some extent are these."
- He believes Bush administration actions undercut the
  American position abroad. "It's harder and made more complex when we abuse the
  writ of habeas corpus here or when we torture people."

01 Dec 09

As Obama Sends More Troops, Giant Shadow Army Of Contractors Set To Grow In Afghanistan | TPMMuckraker

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US politics reference statistics private contractors waronterror military afghanistan iraq bush obama xe blackwater

The Administration seemingly hasn't addressed the issue, and the word "contractor" doesn't appear much in media coverage -- for example, in the Times and Post stories on the escalation today.
But David Berteau, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells TPM that as Obama increases troop levels to at least 100,000, "there will definitely be an increase in the number of contractors."
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- the majority of whom are Afghan nationals, according to a Congressional study --
- Between 7% and 16% of the total are Blackwater-style private security contractors, according to various estimates.
- That includes goodwill-draining episodes like the May shooting of two Afghan civilians in Kabul by contractors working for Xe, formerly Blackwater.
- The best count we and the experts we spoke with could find is a September study by the Congressional Research Service, with numbers through June provided by the military. It notes that last December, contractors made up 69% of the DOD workforce, "the highest recorded percentage ... in any conflict in the history of the United States."
- The number of contractors in Afghanistan as of June was 73,968, compared with 55,107 troops. Of the total contractors, about 10,000 are Americans, 51,000 are locals, and roughly 12,000 are third-country nationals. Take a look at this graph from the study:
- It's not just discussions of troop levels -- which typically ignore contractors -- that obfuscate the size of the American commitment in Afghanistan. According to a powerful piece in the Los Angeles Times, almost 1,600 civilian workers have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
- "They're off the books and don't really count, even though you have to pay for them."
- The White House said today that each additional 10,000 troops will cost roughly $10 billion. But does that number include any increase in the contractor force? It's not clear.
- A comprehensive study of the issue by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, created by Congress in 2008, is due in the summer of 2011.

In praise of George W. Bush - James Fallows

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cheney style bush US politics decorum conservatives republicans obama attacks lies

Since the results of the 2008 election became clear, the 43rd President of the United States has behaved in a way that brings honor to him, his family, his office, and his country. By all reports he did what he could to smooth the transition to his successor, including dealing with the house-is-burning-down world financial crisis. Since leaving office he has -- like most of his predecessors in their first years out of power -- maintained a dignified distance from public controversies and let the new team have its chance. He has acted as if aware that there are national interests larger than his own possible interests in score-settling or reputational-repair.
The former vice president, Dick Cheney, has brought dishonor to himself, his office, and his country. I am not aware of a case of a former president or vice president behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power, most recently but not exclusively with his comments to Politico about Obama's decisions on Afghanistan. (Aaron Burr might win the title, for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but Burr was a sitting vice president at the time.) Cheney has acted as if utterly unconcerned with the welfare of his country, its armed forces, or the people now trying to make difficult decisions. He has put narrow score-settling interest far, far above national interest.
1 more annotations...
- The mystery is that Cheney has been through this process before. As chief of staff in Gerald Ford's White House, he was in charge of the transition to the Jimmy Carter team after Ford narrowly lost in 1976.

Cheney: 'I Basically Don't' Think Bush Administration Responsible For Afghanistan Problems | TPMDC

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US politics cheney conservatives republicans waronterror binladen bush afghanistan

Afghanistan -- and also insisted that the Bush administration is not responsible for the situation in that country
As Spencer Ackerman points out, Cheney's statement comes right on the heels of a Senate report saying that the United States missed an opportunity to capture Osama bin Laden in December 2001, in Tora Bora.

The Revival Of Fiscal Conservatism - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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us politics conservatives republicans bush cheney approvalrating obama economy stimulus spending

The GOP is a party that has become increasingly conservative,
particularly on fiscal issues. Obama's stimulus package of nearly $800
billion, bailouts for banks and the auto industry, and a health-care
bill with a price tag of nearly $900 billion over 10 years have aroused
strong opposition on the right.

Almost three-quarters of Republicans and GOP-leaners identify
themselves as "conservative" on most issues, up sharply from a couple
of years ago... On fiscal issues, the percentage calling themselves conservative has
soared to more than eight in 10. More striking is that a majority
considers themselves to be "very conservative" on fiscal issues, up
about 20 points in two years.
The better news is that Republican voters understand that the GOP is also responsible for the fiscal mess:

Just 1 percent pick George W. Bush as the best reflection of the
party's principles, and only a single person in the poll cites former
vice president Richard B. Cheney. About seven in 10 say Bush bears at
least "some" of the blame for the party's problems.
2 more annotations...
- The problem, it seems to me, is that most sane people understand that offering no stimulus this year and no bank bailout and no auto industry bailout would have led to an unemployment rate far higher than we have now, and a much, much steeper recession which would have compounded the debt, not helped it. McCain could have opposed TARP in the campaign but didn't. Maybe a president could have just said: let it all collapse, it will revive soon enough. I just doubt that any actual president could ever have actually done that.
- And the base is far less interested in obstructing climate change legislation than expanding private health insurance through public subsidy. So polarization may actually decline next year if health reform passes.

PolitiFact | Krugman says Bush was first president to lead country into war and cut taxes

"This is a lot of money," liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Nov. 30, 2009. "And the point is, we should have been paying for these wars to begin with, right from the beginning. I mean, this was, if you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into a war and cut taxes."
Generally, we found, taxes and wars have followed a fairly predictable pattern: taxes rise during wartime and then come back down in the years afterward.
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- We'll start with the Civil War. Congress enacted various income and excise taxes to meet the rising cost of the war, most of which were repealed in the years after the war.
  
  During World War I, the 1916 Revenue Act and the War Revenue Act of 1917 increased tax revenue from $761 million in 1916 to $3.6 billion in 1918. After the war, in the 1920s, Congress cut taxes five times.
  
  The same was true during World War II. Tax increases over several years raised revenues from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945. Again, tax cuts followed the war.
- It's worth noting, however, that during all of those wars, the war expenses were much larger than today, relative to the size of the economy.
- The one notable exception is the Kennedy tax cuts, which took effect in 1964. The conflict in Vietnam stretched from 1959 to 1975, but when the Kennedy tax cuts were implemented, the Vietnam War did not have much of an impact on the U.S. budget. Within 18 months, when the tax cuts were in full bloom, the United States was spending plenty in Vietnam.
- But many argue the Kennedy tax cuts shouldn't count in Krugman's example because they came at a time when the United States did not anticipate the escalation of the war that followed.
- "The Kennedy tax cuts were proposed, and then adopted by Congress, before the Vietnam war was a big expenditure item,"
- It was not until 1968 that the Johnson administration proposed the surtax to help pay for the Vietnam War. ... Still, the Vietnam era surtax went into effect within five years of major spending on that war. We are now more than eight years into the 'war on terrorism,' and we’ve had only tax reductions; no tax hikes."
- "Traditionally countries raise taxes to pay for wars, then cut taxes by a portion of the amount raised once peace descends," agreed J.D. Foster, senior fellow in the economics of fiscal policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
  
  But Foster noted two caveats. One, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 came during a jobless recovery period after a recession. And the economic stimulus package championed by Obama includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years -- also in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

27 Nov 09

YouTube - China in U.S. Campaign Politics: Part 6 of Election 08 and the Challenge of China

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25 Nov 09

Fox News - No Terrorist Attack During Bush's Presidency • videosift.com

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SPIN METER: 'War and Peace' in 209 pages? - Yahoo! News

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24 Nov 09

Palin: Then And Now - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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bush obama doublestandards palin conservatives republicans waronterror afghanistan

Just a reminder. December 2006:
I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really
focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new
deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances
that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe.
My italics. Today:

“I want our president and this administration to listen to the advisers
who they hired. McChrystal, for one, back in March, telling
the president, 'Here's what we're going to need there' and then ramping
up that advice lately, saying, 'Mr. President, here's what we need in
Afghanistan to win, to make sure that those terror cells don't grow, so
that those terrorists don't come back over to the homeland in America,
on our soil, and kill innocent Americans.'”

21 Nov 09

An Intelligence Bonanza Of Another Sort - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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US politics obama ksm yoo law justice torture bush cheney

What the trial will likely show, instead, is that there was a great deal of information already available
before they started torturing KSM.
That’s the real risk for Yoo: not the illegal actions that the trial
will expose. But how much evidence there was independent of Yoo’s
little torture shop.
1 more annotations...
- One begins to wonder if this trial will not in the end be a smoking gun in proving the war crimes of Bush and Cheney in a court of law. It would be classic Obama to play the game this long and this well.

Robert Maguire's Library tagged bush → View Popular

44% of Americans Think that China is the World's Leading Economic Power | The Progressive Realist

Fact-Checking Gonzales - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Gonzo Being Gonzo | Talking Points Memo

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder - Trailer • videosift.com

Iran Is No Existential Threat | Foreign Policy

Neo-Hoover Revisionism | Talking Points Memo

For The Record - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Matthew Yglesias » McCain Calls for Additional Resolve to Win a War He Thought We Won Years Ago

the highlights of Richard Armitage's interview with Prism - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

As Obama Sends More Troops, Giant Shadow Army Of Contractors Set To Grow In Afghanistan | TPMMuckraker

In praise of George W. Bush - James Fallows

Cheney: 'I Basically Don't' Think Bush Administration Responsible For Afghanistan Problems | TPMDC

The Revival Of Fiscal Conservatism - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

PolitiFact | Krugman says Bush was first president to lead country into war and cut taxes

YouTube - China in U.S. Campaign Politics: Part 6 of Election 08 and the Challenge of China

Fox News - No Terrorist Attack During Bush's Presidency • videosift.com

SPIN METER: 'War and Peace' in 209 pages? - Yahoo! News

Palin: Then And Now - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

An Intelligence Bonanza Of Another Sort - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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