The GOP Playbook

---

Republicans: The Party of Stupid

Know-Nothing Politics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 7, 2008

From the article: ...the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid. (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of Know-Nothing Politics

---

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

---

Energy: Carter was right

Carter Tried To Stop Bush's Energy Disasters - 28 Years Ago
by Thom Hartmann
Tuesday, May 3, 2005

In his recent news conference, George Bush Jr. suggested that our nation's "problem" with high gasoline prices was caused by the lack of a national energy policy, and tried to blame it all on Bill Clinton. First, Junior said, "This is a problem that's been a long time in coming. We haven't had an energy policy in this country." This was followed by, "That's exactly what I've been saying to the American people -- 10 years ago if we'd had an energy strategy, we would be able to diversify away from foreign dependence. And -- but we haven't done that. And now we find ourselves in the fix we're in." As is so often the case, Bush was lying. (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of Carter Tried To Stop Bush's Energy Disasters - 28 Years Ago

---

GWB: Worst. President. Ever. Part II

Sorry, Mr. President, But Your Legacy Is More Awful Than You Think
by: Bob Cesca

Posted June 11, 2008 04:57 PM (EST)

From the article: War mongering is a significant aspect of your legacy, but I think we can conclude, and without much debate, that your legacy will also be one of criminality, failure and a degree of incompetence rarely achieved by any American president, much less one whose deficit of character is rivaled only by his nearly unprecedented lack of humility in the face of his unprecedented roster of inadequacies. Sorry. As it turns out, you won't have much control over your legacy and the history of your administration anyway. You might have some cursory input, but no-one really takes you seriously anymore and anything you put forth will be taken as just another work of fiction; another bit of propaganda. Your legacy will ultimately be written by those of us who have been actively documenting your presidency in real time -- millions of voices authoring the narrative of your awful regime and preserving it with digital clarity one trespass at a time. And everywhere we look, we can plainly observe your smirking, affectless footprint. Death, poverty, war, pain, ignorance, blind patriotism, joblessness, and abandoned homes. And guess what? We're writing it down on the Internets. Your history, Mr. President, is being written at this very moment by those of us who are watching our homes collapse in value and our friends and relatives sent to places like Ramadi and Fallujah and, in some cases, Walter Reed or worse. Your history, Mr. President, isn't going to be settled and published decades from now. It's being published immediately and without the fog of memory to obscure the ugly details. (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of Sorry, Mr. President, But Your Legacy Is More Awful Than You Think

---

Yes...An Amazing Accomplishment!

May 7, 2008 Jonathan Schwarz: What an Amazing Accomplishment It’s September 12, 2001. You’re sitting in front of a TV, watching footage of the World Trade Center collapse over and over and over again. All of a sudden, someone from seven years in the future walks out of a tiny temporal vortex, and tells you: George W. Bush is going to fuck this up so badly that in 2008, the United States of America will likely elect as president a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim. Oh, and he also admits he’s used cocaine. I think it would have been easier to convince me of the reality of time travel. “No, no, I believe you really are from the future. But the other stuff, that’s CRAZY.” posted by Jonathan Schwarz at 3:33 PM

---

The Fool on the Hill

---

GWB: Worst. President. Ever.

There are those who erroneously claim that Jimmy Carter was the worst president ever. They cite the economic situation during his administration and the Iranian hostage crisis as proof of their assertion.

I would argue that, without a doubt, we are witnessing and living through this country's worst president ever: George W. Bush. It isn't a matter of the so-called "irrational hatred of President Bush." Nope. I believe that future historians will reflect what this Michael Hirsh article from Newsweek has to say, and it isn't pretty:

An Unnatural Disaster by Michael Hirsh In a month of horrific natural disasters—the China quake, the Burma cyclone—it's instructive to consider what one of the biggest unnatural disasters in memory looks like. That is the decline in America's position in the world from where we were when George W. Bush inherited power on Jan. 20, 2001, to what he will bequeath to the next president eight months from now. (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of An Unnatural Disaster

---

The Reason for $4.00 a gallon gasoline

From our friends at Democratic Underground, and the 336th edition of The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (in this case, #7, George W. Bush):

---

Viewing the Bush Administration with a mixture of anguish and contempt

Bush strategist looks back in sadness

By Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 14, 2007

Matthew Dowd knows sorrow and loss. He has been divorced twice. A daughter died two months after she was born. And then there is the added heartbreak -- a word he uses -- of his split with President Bush. Dowd, 46, is one of the nation's leading political strategists, a onetime Democrat who switched sides to help put Bush in the White House, then win a second term. He spent years shaping and promoting Bush's policies -- policies that Dowd now views with a mixture of anguish and contempt. (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of Bush strategist looks back in sadness

---

The GOP Greenspan Problem

Republicans and their big Greenspan gap
By ROBYN BLUMNER
Published September 30, 2007

Talk about a kick in the teeth. It's one thing to have former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill or even former CIA chief George Tenet turn on you once they are out of office; it's quite another to have the Delphic oracle on all things economic, Alan Greenspan, do so. Our president likes to point to the American economy as one of his successes. Despite turning a $5.6-trillion 10-year projected surplus into a $2.4-trillion 10-year projected loss, President Bush boasts that his aggressive tax cutting has led to economic growth and a lower deficit than anticipated. In other words, he's putting less on America's credit card than expected. Goodie. (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of Republicans and their big Greenspan gap

---

“The phony soldiers,” says Rush Limbaugh

---

Priorities on Jesus' General

---

Tomgram: Empire of Stupidity

Seven Years in Hell On Body Counts, Dead Zones, and an Empire of Stupidity By Tom Engelhardt On August 22nd, breaking into his Crawford vacation, the President addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, giving what is already known as his "Vietnam speech." That day, George W. Bush, who, as early as 2003, had sworn that his war on Iraq would "decidedly not be Vietnam," took the full-frontal plunge into the still-flowing current of the Big Muddy, fervently embracing Vietnam analogy-land. You could almost feel his relief (and that of his neocon speechwriters). In that mud-wrestle of a speech, he invoked "one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam.... that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,' ‘re-education camps,' and ‘killing fields.'" The man who had so carefully sat out the Vietnam War now proclaimed that Americans never should have left that land. As he's done with so much else, he also linked the Vietnam War by an act of verbal ju-jitsu to al-Qaeda and the attacks of September 11th. 9/11, too, turned out to be part of the "price" we'd paid for succumbing to "the allure of retreat" and withdrawing way back when. ("In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks," intoned the President, "Osama bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.'") (read the entire article)

Adobe Acrobat copy of Tomgram: Empire of Stupidity

---

Bush the Delusional

Bush on Iraq: "We're kicking ass" A day after the Government Accountability Office reported that the Iraqis have met just three of 18 benchmarks they had agreed to meet, George W. Bush offered a slightly rosier assessment of the war during his visit to Australia today. Asked by Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile to say how things are going in Iraq, the president of the United States declared: "We're kicking ass." -- Tim Grieve

---

2001 to now: What America Has Lost

Click image for larger view
Click here for original post

---

Review: No End in Sight

No End in Sight
August 10, 2007
by Roger Ebert

Remember the scene in "A Clockwork Orange" where Alex has his eyes clamped open and is forced to watch a movie? I imagine a similar experience for the architects of our catastrophe in Iraq. I would like them to see "No End in Sight," the story of how we were led into that war, and more than 3,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of other lives were destroyed. They might find the film of particular interest because they would know so many of the people appearing in it. This is not a documentary filled with anti-war activists or sitting ducks for Michael Moore. Most of the people in the film were important to the Bush administration. They had top government or military jobs, they had responsibility in Iraq or Washington, they implemented policy, they filed reports, they labored faithfully in service of U.S. foreign policy and then they left the government. Some jumped, some were pushed. They all feel disillusioned about the war and the way the White House refused to listen to them about it. The subjects in this film now feel that American policy in Iraq was flawed from the start, that obvious measures were not taken, that sane advice was disregarded, that lies were told and believed, and that advice from people on the ground was overruled by a cabal of neo-con goofballs who seemed to form a wall around the president. The president and his inner circle knew, just knew, for example, that Saddam had or would have weapons of mass destruction, that he was in league with al-Qaida and bin Laden, and that in some way, it was all hooked up with Sept. 11. Not all of the advice in the world could penetrate their obsession, and they fired the bearers of bad news. It is significant, for example, that a Defense Intelligence Agency team received orders to find links between al-Qaida and Hussein. That there were none was ignored. Key adviser Paul Wolfowitz's immediate reaction to Sept. 11 was "war on Iraq." Anarchy in that land was all but assured when the Iraqi army was disbanded against urgent advice from our people in the field. That meant that a huge number of competent military men, most of them no lovers of Saddam, were rendered unemployed -- and still armed. How was this disastrous decision arrived at? People directly involved said it came as an order from administration officials who had never been to Iraq. Did Bush know and agree? They had no indication. Perhaps not. A National Intelligence report commissioned in 2004 advised against the war. Bush, who apparently did not read it, dismissed it as guesswork -- a word that seems like an ideal description of his own policies. Who is Charles Ferguson, director of this film? A one-time senior fellow of the Brookings Institute, software millionaire, originally a supporter of the war, visiting professor at MIT and Berkeley, he was trustworthy enough to inspire confidences from former top officials. They mostly felt that orders came from the precincts of Vice President Cheney, that Cheney's group disregarded advice from veteran American officials, and in at least one case, channeled a decision to avoid Bush's scrutiny. The president signed, but didn't read, and you can see the quizzical, betrayed looks in the eyes of the men and women in the film, who found that the more they knew about Iraq, the less they were heeded. Although Bush and the war continue to sink in the polls, I know from some readers that they still support both. That is their right. And if they are so sure they are right, let more young men and women die or be maimed. I doubt if they will be willing to see this film, which further documents an administration playing its private war games. No, I am distinctly not comparing anyone to Hitler, but I cannot help being reminded of the stories of him in his Berlin bunker, moving nonexistent troops on a map, and issuing orders to dead generals. Cast & Credits With Campbell Scott (narrator), Barbara Bodine, Chris Allbritton, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Col. Paul Hughes, Walter Slocombe, Seth Moulton, David Yancey, Gen. Jay Garner, George Packer, Gerald Burke, Hugo Gonzalez, Samantha Power, James Fallows, Linda Bilmes, Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, Marc Garlasco, Matt Sherman, Nir Rosen, Paul Pillar, Ray Jennings, Richard Armitage, Robert Hutchings and Yaroslav Trofimov. Magnolia Pictures presents a documentary written and directed by Charles Ferguson. Running time: 122 minutes. (read the original post)

Adobe Acrobat copy of No End in Sight

---

Iraq is Just Like Vietnam

© dhonig 2007
Click image for larger view
Click here for original post on Hypnocrites.

---

Something worse than a crime: It was a blunder

Bush's Vietnam Blunder

By Jim Hoagland
Friday, August 24, 2007; Page A15

Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq.

Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president. (read the entire article)

---

The Problem with Bush

Just ahead of my Saturday's broadcast of Situation Awareness ("Poison the Well, Salt the Earth") comes this excellent article from Oliver Willis ("2008: George Bush The Pariah").

In 2008, there will be a sitting Republican president with an approval rating ranging between probably 25-32% percent. In many ways the election will be the fork in the road 2004 should have been: stay the course or change direction. In order to garner their party's nomination, Republicans have pandered to the base by essentially endorsing a continuation of Bush's strategy in Iraq. It is a course of events violently opposed by Democrats and now Independents. The Republican party is going to have a George Bush problem, I think. (read the entire article)

Be sure to tune in to Situation Awareness this Saturday at 10:00am Eastern Time (-05:00 GMT) .

---

Bush is a Jerk

Rove Reading:
The Plank - The New Republic
by Jonathan Chait

From the article: "Dick Armey, the House Republican majority leader when Bush took office (and no more a shrinking violet than DeLay), told me a story that captures the exquisite pettiness of most members of Congress and the arrogance that made Bush and Rove so inept at handling them." (read the entire article)

---

Dick Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire

In this interview from April 15th, 1994, Dick Cheney reveals the reasons why invading Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein wouldn't be a great idea. He also stipulates that "not very many" American soldiers' lives were worth losing to take out Saddam during the Gulf War.

---