Tag: Bush

Blue Sky

unsolicitedanalysis:

Did Reagan give the incompetent, corrupt motherfuckers in the Interior the gifts, lunches, or sport tickets?  His ghost must have turned their computers to porn.  And he personally instructed them to allow the drilling companies to fill out their inspection reports themselves.

[…]

What you’re doing instead is trying to pin the blame on a minority party for dubiously-documented “systematic weakening” based on a nebulous “anti-government right” with no cited paper trail of cause-inducing failure.

What color is the sky in your world? Two seconds worth of cursory googling:

And, in this instance, Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches for blowout preventers would be an undue burden on the industry:

In secret meetings with the oil company officials in 2001, incoming Vice President Cheney set the foundation for a permissive, welcome mat with the oil industry.

After stocking the Federal government’s Material Management Service with his cronies, this agency reversed an earlier 2000 decision requiring a mandatory accusatorial regulator, allowing BP and others not to install a $500,000 acoustic switch to automatically shut down oil gushers.

Reversed the decision that would have prevented this accident. But, yeah, the take-home lesson here is that sensible regulatory agencies just won’t work. Ever. Nothing whatsoever can be done about it. The market will do all the regulating anyone could ever want. Best thing to do is pretend that no empirical data on the capability of regulation to sensibly manage industry exists and that nothing useful could be drawn from such information anyway. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.

Precious Blame

unsolicitedanalysis:

Where was this clarity during the Bush administration? The failure of federal, state, and local regulators/agencies never absolved our previous President.

It was certainly absent if you’re looking for the MSM to provide it. But you’re missing the fact that Bush specifically was in favor of the failure of our federal, state, and local government and regulatory agencies. Need I quote Lord Reagan? I guess I do:

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem

You can’t deny the government a legitimate role in any issue, no matter how large or small, and then expect government to be secretly housing a massive underwater engineering specialty, or to have regulated the offshore drilling industry into essential safety. This is the fundamental disconnect of the current argument, not that that stops the spread of utter nonsense.
Every prior GOP administration has systematically weakened regulations on offshore drilling. These chickens come home to roost and it’s suddenly all Obama’s fault? How? Why? In what universe does that make any rational sense?

And, of course, the anti-government right’s reaction to the crisis? Blame the government. Obama should (apparently) be down there, personally, running the mud shot or at the very least torturing somebody aboard the mud shot injection machine.

Now, of course, were he down there, you get to play the “government meddling is ruining BP’s brilliant plan” card. That’s what I call good policy.

I’m not trying to say that the spill is George Bush’s fault, just like the hurricane itself was not George Bush’s fault. But the mentality that government not only can’t successfully regulate business but has no place attempting to do so, that corporate insiders know better than experts, and that people can deal with disasters on their own is a conservative one.

The problem is that conservative failures spawn more conservatives: When conservatives cripple government, and then government fails, people believe government is incapable.

Ali Frick (who is subbing for Matt Yglesias). I’d add: Which is exactly what the conservatives actively wrecking the government want to happen.

That was surreal. Guys, what I just saw in there made me realize, we have got to win. It was crazy in there.

Maybe I shouldn’t be president, but [McCain] definitely shouldn’t be.

Barack Obama, as reported by Jonathan Alter, reacting to the pre-election meeting with Hank Paulson, McCain, various members of Congress, and then-president Bush

Not a Mistake

southpol:

“Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama’s “Katrina.” But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster..”

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Will Wreck Your Pathetic Ideology

(via ryking)

Also worth noting that the debacle of a Katrina “response” detailed in this quote was not a mistake. It was the logical extension of “Go Die in the Streets,” the mantra by which all GOP decisions were (and are) currently made.
It was only the palpable and forceful public revulsion at this reasoned choice that both mandated and resulted in the spasmodic, utterly demeaning to US self-image non-response that came after (heckuva job, Brownie). And it was only the torrent of fury to that response that finally, finally elicited something approaching competence and problem-solving from the administration.

How quickly we forget

ryking points out weakness in the Democrat by noting that:

— The GOP had at most 55 Senators during Bush’s presidency

Yeah, but where are the accomplishments? What was W’s healthcare? What historic game-changer did the man manage to pass? Certainly not what he tried hardest to do with his “political capital”: Social Security Privatization. The link notes these “accomplishments”:

– John Ashcroft nomination
– Iraq war resolution
– Repeated Iraq funding resolutions
– 2001 & 2003 tax cuts
– Patriot Act
– Alito
– John Roberts
– Medicare Part D

Pretty weak tea there. Let’s knock off the low hanging fruit first: Americablog and ryking seem to be forgetting that, back in them days, a President was deemed capable of choosing who would serve in his cabinet; anyone not utterly and plainly incapable or actively serving time in prison was generally passed along through without much of a fight. Thus Ashcroft (Brownie, Gonzales, Bolton, and a host of others. Seriously, it’s not hard to understand: GOP Presidents are given wide latitude in their appointments by Democratic Senators. Democratic Presidents are not afforded this luxury by the GOP Senate). Obama, specifically, is not allowed even the most controversy free, obviously overqualified appointments; all of them have been subject to secret holds and as many time-wasters and cloture votes as are possible to throw up. And that’s leaving aside the furor over (previously and entirely) non-controversial advisory roles (aka the Czars).Do the Democrats or our Liberal Media hold the GOP to any of this? Why, of course not. Any time there is a microphone around, a Democrat should be screaming into it that the GOP is killing babies because it won’t approve [insert name]. All the time, every time. Only then will things begin to change. But we hold ourselves above all that, apparently.

The tax cuts broadly fit under the same aegis: give the “winner” what he wants. Elections have consequences: The GOP was in charge of all three branches, it is they who should set policy (speaking here in the extremely broad strokes of Our Media Elite; you know, like Cokie Roberts). Democrats, mind you, are never afforded such a luxury, and furthermore forget said poor treatment “the next time around,” immediately sucking up to the furthest right-wing opponents they can find in the hopes of “rekindling bipartisanship.” Idiocy, but undeniable.

9/11/01 and the spectre of mushroom clouds being our wakeup call led to Iraq and the Iraq votes. Honestly, given the volume and velocity of the lies in and around that debate, it’s amazing any kind of push-back was managed, much less a successful one. Not that we’re going to investigate any of that, of course. Gotta keep ourselves focused on the future! That way it’s easier to repeat the past in four years. But, once we’re in Iraq, you’re not going to vote against the troops, are you? Why do you want to kill our troops? The votes follow. And continue to this day. However, the GOP is now merrily allowed to vote to kill our troops. The media: zzzzzzzzzzzz. Boooooooooring. Old news.

Roberts played his role perfectly. Exactly what in his confirmation hearings seemed so far right as to warrant a filibuster? Again, anyone from the right-wing of American politics is allowed wide latitude on appointments. Plus, by the time you got to Alito you had the Gang of 14, whose ranks included many of the right-wing Democrats now giving insurance reform fits. So a filibuster there, though widely discussed (and, IIRC, attempted), was functionally never possible. You couldn’t hold 41 votes against a cloture with those 14 avowed non-participators. That was the point. All of whom, by the way, completely lost interest in judicial filibusters right after Obama won the election. Amazing. The media has certainly put this whole thing into the memory-hole and so have ryking and Americablog, apparently.

Which leaves us with Medicare Part D. Broadly framed, Medicare Part D gets at a core Democratic issue: making health services affordable to as many as possible. Is it so hard to imagine why Bush peeled off lots of Democrats with such a move? This is the fundamental Achilles heel for the Democrat, something we touched on earlier today. Namely:

if a given piece of policy is flawed but ultimately in service to the greater good, then the Democrat will vote for it over their several reservations.

Republicans, however, show no such compunction. Obama and the Democratic Congress could offer them the complete elimination of the IRS and all non-tariff tax revenues and the GOP would lock-step against it. Period. Not invented here, so fuck off. This is ultimately and not coincidentally what Lieberman and his ilk are counting on:

I won’t be killing the bill, because these left-wing do-gooders will be too focused on getting something passed, no matter how fractional and/or dysfunctional the final product might be because of my actions

There is no point in the process where a Rockefeller or Brown will simply say “fuck it, I’m going to Wisconsin” and walk away. Thus, without a credible, bill-killing threat to sit on, it is the left that constantly is forced to give away while the right is constantly operating on the expectation of taking away that which the left most prizes. To the Liebermans of the world, it boils down thusly:

The more Kos and MoveOn squeal, the more likely it is we’re onto something that needs to be excised.

He said as much. What is needed, as Matthew Yglesias notes, is legislation that swings for the progressive fences but can be allowed to fail. Then you can bludgeon Senators X, Y, and Z over their murder of said (popular) bill; use that energy to launch a primary challenge from the left or unseat a Republican. Bank reform (which is what Yglesias suggests) might be a good one. But again, you need something that the left can walk away from. So, basically, it can’t be good policy but has to play in the media as though it is the best possible policy.

Good luck with that.

Obama and his Telepromter

squashed:

jgh writes,

Since when do politicians not read from Teleprompters? Obama has written many of his own speeches. I’m unsure of what this talking point is supposed to be about.

Can somebody help?

I think it’s mostly the logical paradox of a man who these folks a priori distrust and despise (for an assortment of reasons that are left as an exercise for the reader) being quite capable of delivering a speech, more or less on demand, that’s as good as anyone’s heard out of an American politician in quite some time. So he’s merely a speech reader, likely a secret illegal immigrant from Kenya, and etc… That he (on several occasions) largely wrote the speech, or when that devil the teleprompter is on occasion non-functional and said speech was delivered entirely from memory never seems to enter into these calculations. After all, these are the same people that think Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s books based on the joint use of “crazy” words like “ontological” or some-such.

What bothers me most, though, is that these same folks are the ones systematically referring to W. Bush as a tragically misunderstood genius…who, on teleprompter, mind you, gave us such quotes as:

put food on your family

vulcanize society

make the pie higher! make the pie higher!

just to name a few. So, if Bush presumably couldn’t reliably read a speech properly, and definitely couldn’t give a canned one “off the cuff” either, then exactly where on the intellect scale does he rank relative to Obama, the putative “reader”?

And, going beyond that, how do you square the “he’s only reading” canard with Obama’s own, oft-criticized press conferences (which the press finds soooooo boring, natch), in which he departs on a 30 minute disputation about policy concerns relevant to some sub-issue of the question? No teleprompting there. Secret earpiece, no doubt.That or an ancient form of Kenyan mind-control that makes us think he’s answering at length. Again, square this with Bush’s press conference performance which generally involved a chuckle, a reference to the nickname of the questioner, and the odd personal attack on a blind man for wearing sunglasses.

All this before you even begin to consider that running for President requires, absolutely requires the candidate to give innumerable speeches off-prompter, every day, with YouTube lurking in the wings 100% of the time. But we won’t consider that either, apparently.

Nixonian: A Love Story

Let’s review a few items of interests re: the W. Bush Administration:

  1. Paying Armstrong Williams, Michael McManus, and Maggie Gallagher and others for favorable opinions about WH policies or to attack opponents of the WH.
  2. Planting Jeff Gannon to lob softball questions.
  3. Used reporters to out a CIA agent, then sat by and watched reporters go to jail to protect their sources.
  4. Fed reporters misinformation about WMD (with malice aforethought, mind you) on Iraq, then used those reporters stories as corroborating evidence of the existence of WMD in Iraq.
  5. Waged a coordinated campaign against NBC.
  6. The Pentagon Pundit program, which sold the war by planting former military officers on networks.
  7. Staged mock press conferences with FEMA employees pretending to be reporters.
  8. Told America and, specifically, journalists to “watch what they say and what they do.”

But, indeed, Obama’s administration calling out FoxNEWS as a glorified communications wing for the GOP is a yet another example of the President’s outlandish, Nixonian lawlessness. Truly unprecedented.

Call me when FoxNEWS turns over three hours of their vaunted “news time” in the mornings to a former Democratic representative. Likewise when msnbc hires anyone who is remotely like Glenn Beck for their “editorial” hours (which are loosely 7-10pm EST for both FoxNEWS and msnbc).

(Top 8 topics largely via Balloon Juice; links a free value-add for you, the Lemkin reader)

Tops Fore Bush

  1. I think we all agree, the past is over.
  2. Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
  3. I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
  4. Put food on your family! Knock down the tollbooth! Vulcanize society! Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!