Welcome To The George W. Bush Presidential Library; Please Switch Off Your Brains

They opened up the George W. Bush Presidential Library the other day.

Is this a great country, or what?

Here's a guy who was without question a total disaster as President. And believe me, having lived through Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Elder, I have a fairly high threshold for disasters.

But Simple W. set the bar at a level that one hopes will never be approached again. Let us count the ways:

Asleep at the switch for 9-11 whilst cuddling up with his Saudi soul mates; dropped the ball on Bin Laden's pursuit at Tora Bora at the same time his administration was legitimizing torture; bait and switch war in Iraq that cost us more than a trillion dollars, not to mention all the death, dismemberment, and PTSD; turned a budget surplus into a huge deficit with his tax cuts; watched Wall Street run wild because he believed in the beauty of the unregulated "free market"; half-assed response to Katrina; wanted to privatize Social Security; shit all over the Constitution every chance he got..Jesus, the list goes on and on, but I'm starting to have flashbacks...

So anyway, because it's de rigueur for former Presidents, Incurious George gets himself a library. Keep in mind, this is a fella who probably hasn't read anything since My Pet Goat and very little before.

Now, there's a very good reason for this: Books are sometimes filled with facts, and facts can get messy. And since Bush's administration decided early on that they would create their own reality, it is only natural that the George W. Bush Presidential Library would be dedicated to the completely counter factual narrative that Bush was a great leader, a great President, and a great American.

Shortly after Obama was elected the first time, a billboard appeared by the highway in the desert near Yuma, Arizona. It featured  the beaming face of George W. Bush and the words "Do You Miss Me Yet?"

Of course the only sane answer to that would be "No, no we don't. Not now, not ever."

Fortunately for W. (and the Bush family in general), the American people have a tremendous capacity to forgive, but an even greater capacity to forget.

What's in A Name?

Last week, they unveiled portraits of George W. Bush and his fawning wife, what's-her-name, at the White House. Simple W. cracked a few jokes, smirked his frat boy smirk, and it was just like old times...

Brought back a lot of memories: Florida 2000, fat Jeb, the Supreme Court shitting all over the Constitution, 9-11, turning a surplus into a deficit, Iraq, Osama Bin Laden alive and kicking, tax cuts for the richest, W. looking like a chimp in a flight suit, "mission accomplished", Katrina, rendition, Rummy, Condi, Wall Street's meltdown, Halliburton, Blackwater, the Dark Lord Cheney's fetching sneer--ah Jesus, the list is endless...

Which reminds me, Bush's nickname for Karl Rove is "turd blossom".

Rove is also widely known as "Bush's brain".

Ergo, George W. Bush has shit for brains.

A Balanced, Well Reasoned Analysis

Because these things have a way of sneaking up on us, it's never too early to start analyzing the upcoming Presidential election from the perspective of a typical Republican leaning independent voter:

Former President George W. Bush, Simple W. to friend and foe alike, and as Republican as you can get, came into office with a budget surplus which he quickly turned into the largest deficit in history. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, would go even further than Bush in cutting taxes--the root of the deficit. The Democratic incumbent, Barack Obama, would return taxes to the level of the Clinton years. However, Obama is black.

Goaded on by his Vice President, Dick Cheney, or if your prefer, the Dark Lord Cheney, Bush then started two "unfunded" wars. The one in Iraq was completely uncalled for and will cost us as a nation well over a trillion dollars. Romney's foreign affairs advisers are all Bush retreads. Barack Obama ended US combat involvement in Iraq, oversaw the elimination of Osama Bin Laden, and is winding down the US presence in Afghanistan. But Obama is still black.

The world wide economic meltdown was caused for the most part by an unregulated gang of Wall Street bandits who fancy themselves "Masters of the Universe." They wreaked havoc on the industrialized countries with a series of financial instruments so complexly structured that few understood them. Mitt Romney who was himself one of these "Masters of the Universe" would prefer that Wall Street be totally unregulated and we let the "free market" decide everything. Obama has called for more--not less--regulation of Wall Street.  However Obama remains black.

Health care in the US is much more expensive than in any other nation. Yet our life expectancy lags and we have millions of uninsured citizens. Mitt Romney is fine with this. Being a multi-millionaire, he has no worries about the cost of health care. "Whatever the market will bear" seems to be his motto. Despite the determined efforts of the Republican party, Obama was able to pass the first major overhaul of the US healthcare system in 40 years. It's major flaw is that it doesn't go far enough. Romney has promised to repeal every aspect of the President's program, once again depriving millions of people of healthcare.

As you can see, it will be a very tough decision for the undecided. Romney? Wrong about everything. Obama? Black.

Terrifying

As we approach the tenth anniversary of September 11th, the avoidable tragedy that will be forever known, like Pearl Harbor, by its date, we find ourselves in an increasingly terrifying world.

Even though Bin Laden is finally dead--and killed not by order of that smirking, flight suit wearing, dry drunk, AWOL prone National Guardsman, Simple W, or his puppet master, the gun safety poster boy, multi student deferment wielding, Dark Lord Cheney, but instead by Barack Obama, our Kenyan Socialist semi-Democrat President--the world just gets scarier and scarier.

It turns out the enemy, to paraphrase Pogo, is "us".

"We" get fooled over and over by the same divide and conquer tactics that Nixon proudly called his Southern Strategy. Emphasize fear more than anything else. Play the whites off against the blacks. As an added twist play both off against the browns.

"We" accept stupid, simplistic explanations from bought and paid for corporate mouthpieces masquerading as statesmen or "mavericks".

"We" forget the lessons and struggles of the past at the drop of a hat. As a nation we have ADHD. We believe in a fictional history, fairy tales about a nation that never existed. And whoever tells them the best, Ronald Reagan being the prime example of this, gets our vote.

"We" make millionaires out of Murdoch, Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly and all of the other purveyors of hate, fear and divisiveness.

"We" don't want to pay taxes--but we still want services. But just for "us" and not for "them". Because "they" don't deserve them and "we" do.

"We" want to blame someone else. Usually the wrong someone else.

This nation will never fall to a foreign enemy. But the enemies within? I'm not so sure.

Forgetting the Past

This post is about Afghanistan. I was going to call it The Graveyard of Empires, but then I read an article in some foreign policy mag that claimed at great and learned length that that was an incorrect description of Afghanistan and I got really confused.

Which is only fitting, because confusion seems to be at the core of what we are dealing with.

What we have here is a primitive, incredibly poor, collection of tribes and loosely affiliated factions, masquerading as a country. A country that just happens to be strategically located and sitting on a fortune of minerals. A fortune that they do not have the wherewithal to exploit. And as the history of the world shows, if you cannot exploit, then you will be exploited. For the most part the Afghan people are illiterate or uneducated and shackled by religion and age old customs. How you change that in a couple of years is beyond me.

President Obama is a highly intelligent man, but one lesson American Presidents never seem to learn and retain, no matter how smart they are, is that it is much easier to get into a war than it is to get out of a war. Especially when there is no clearly defined goal. Osama Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda has metastasized. So what do we want now? A stable, let alone democratic Afghanistan? I'm not sure any of us will live to see that. Certainly not as long as the Pashtun region remains untamed. And pacifying the Pashtun without the complete cooperation of Pakistan is impossible. As we have seen, "Pakistani cooperation" is a sometimes thing, indeed almost an oxymoron.

The fact is that Afghanistan will only enter the 21st Century when the majority of its people want to enter the 21st Century. Until then, you can keep as many troops there as you like, spend a king's ransom, and all you'll end up with is a handful of sand. And a bigger graveyard.

Other Things George W. Bush Should Get Credit For

There's been an uproar on the Right ever since Obama whacked Osama. Seems like they think W. should get the lion's share of the credit--not Barack. My favorite argument is the "don't you see, by ignoring him, W. tricked Bin Laden into a false sense of security." Wow, the master strategerist strikes again!

Seriously, why quibble over the death of Osama Bin Laden when there are so many other things Simple W. should get credit for:

Taking a huge budgetary surplus and turning it into an even huger deficit. Because Republicans are so much more fiscally responsible than Democrats.

September 11, 2001. Because he was busy doing other, more important things, and because he thought his people were so much smarter than the Clinton people, he felt free to ignore all of the warning signs. Oops. Then after the horrors of that day, he let a bunch of Bin Laden's relatives fly home from the US because, well, they couldn't possibly know anything about what Osama was up to, right? Besides, they're Saudi's and the Bush family has very close business ties to the Saudi's.

The debacle in Iraq. He ignored the fact that Bin Laden was trapped in Afghanistan and began planning the invasion of Iraq. He repeatedly lied about the justifications for this. And then he wore that bitchin' flight suit and strutted around under that big Mission Accomplished banner. Sweet.

Pissing trillions of dollars away on a war we did not need to fight, while refusing to raise taxes to pay for it.

Legalizing torture.

Allowing John Kerry, a decorated veteran, to be smeared by his supporters, while he, who apparently spent a great deal of time AWOL from a cushy National Guard posting, sat by silently smirking that frat boy smirk of his.

His half-assed response to Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans. Because that's what compassionate conservatism is all about: the appearance of caring, not actually caring.

And last but not least, the financial meltdown of the whole world. The Decider understood that those pesky safeguards and regulations only hobbled the entrepreneurial spirit. He knew in his heart that you just have to have a little faith in Wall Street and the free market and everything will be okay. Besides, big numbers is confusing!

All in all it was a very busy 8 years for Simple W., and we must never forget who should get the credit for everything he wrought.

Better off dead?

For a few days now I've been trying to process how I feel about the death of Osama bin Laden. On the one hand, I feel some satisfaction over the death of the terrorist responsible for changing our country on 9/11. On the other hand, I've been thinking that I would have preferred to see him captured and tried for crimes against humanity, combined with the fact that I refuse to celebrate the death of any human, no matter how vile. Add into that the apparent fact that he was unarmed, thus possibly summarily executed, and it makes me wonder if OBL did not succeed in making us lose an irreplaceable bit of our humanity.

With that said, I want to direct your attention to a blog that sums up what I'm feeling in a rather brilliant manner. It's called The Corner Tavern, written by a Chicago blogger named Dave von Ebers and it saves me about 1500 words. I also want to bring you a video from Bruce off the Live in Barcelona DVD that I find appropriate. Usually I ask you to enjoy the videos, but right now that seems like the wrong thing to say. Instead, I'd like to ask you to just watch and think about it.

The Chicago Way

Over the wall in the middle of the night, one shot to the head, and dump the body in deep water...RIP

Now, that's the Chicago Way.