How we got into Iraq will not be a campaign issue in 2016

By Richard Barry

In an Op-Ed appearing in the Wall Street Journal in February, Laurence Silberman, the federal judge who co-chaired the 2004 Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, stated succinctly the conservative position on the charge that George W. Bush lied to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Our WMD commission ultimately determined that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” about Saddam’s weapons. But as I recall, no one in Washington political circles offered significant disagreement with the intelligence community before the invasion. The National Intelligence Estimate was persuasive—to the president, to Congress and to the media.

The clear argument is that Bush didn't lie, he was simply misled by faulty intelligence like everyone else. And that is what every conservative will say to this day. And every liberal (give or take a few) will say something like Simon Maloy wrote at Salon in response to the Silberman Op-Ed.

But the Bush administration absolutely did engage in willful deception. Quite a bit of it, in fact. It’s one thing to simply repeat an intelligence assessment that is wrong, and quite another to take a disputed, credibly challenged intelligence assessment and state it as uncontested fact. That’s a lie, and senior Bush officials did it often. There’s no better example of this than the aluminum tubes.

Yes, the aluminum tubes, and more, if you really want to be reminded. But I don't want to relitigate the episode, nor is there any reason to because it won't change anyone's mind.

I only raise it because it came up in a recent Fox News interview with Jeb Bush in which he said, “I would have [authorized the invasion], and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got."

The positions of each side are entrenched, and it no longer matters, certainly not for the 2016 election. No doubt the instability in the Middle East will provide fodder for Republicans to sabre-rattle and charge Mrs. Clinton with having done a poor job as Secretary of State. And she may push back in some way that generally invokes Republican foreign policy failures, but how and why we got into Iraq in the first place will not figure prominently.

Americans prefer to forget things if they can find a way to do it. I can't imagine this issue will take up any oxygen in 2016, even if a Bush is the Republican nominee. Strange, but true.

Dana Perino, self-righteous fool

By Richard Barry

Dana Perino, White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, doesn't like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In fact, she has called him  “poisonous.”

“He’s an absolutely poisonous figure in Washington, D.C., he’s been a disaster for the country,” she said on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

“I think a lot of the dysfunction in Washington can be traced directly to his doorstep."

And what moved her to such passionate criticism? It was a comment Reid made about W.

Reid quoted a New York Daily News column by Mike Lupica that noted that Republican White House hopeful and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush backed the nomination of Loretta Lynch as attorney general. Reid then quoted from a section of Lupica's column that attacked George W Bush.

“Bush didn’t just show grace in doing that, he also showed more common sense than his brother showed in eight years as president of the United States,” Reid said, quoting from Lupica's column, on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

And that was enough to send Perino over the edge as she said that Reid’s impending retirement is “very good for this country, for the world, and especially for the Democrats," adding, “I've never seen anything so abhorrent in my entire life as Harry Reid."

So, Dana, I'd like to help. You want to see something more abhorrent? What about Dick Cheney, or Liz Cheney or any number of Tea Party extremists who hide their racism, homophobia or misogyny behind a stated interest in "taking their country back."

If you want poison, look no further than your own party, which uses the stuff as fuel to motivate its base.

Hillaryous

By Carl 

So Karl Rove got caught with his tongue firmly up his ass cheek by one of his own media outlets and now he's been forced to jog back some comments:

Last week, Karl Rove questioned her capacity for the White House and reportedly said she had brain damage.

The New York Post reported on Tuesday that Mr Rove, the strategist behind George W Bush's election to the White House, had told an audience in Los Angeles last week, "Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that."

In fact, Mrs Clinton was in hospital for three days after falling ill with a stomach bug in December 2012. After becoming severely dehydrated, Mrs Clinton fell at home and struck her head, suffering a concussion. While she was in hospital doctors diagnosed a blood clot.

Needless to say, when this became public, Rove was forced to eat his words:

"I didn't say she had brain damage. I said she had a serious health episode," he said on Fox News.

It's incumbent of me to point out that Fox News and the New York Post are both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., so essentially Rove is denying that Murdoch's people can tell the truth.

And the delicious irony is that he used Murdoch's outlets as his own personal PR machine for decades. The cherry on top? He worked for a man in George W. Bush with enough emotional and mental instabilities to likely choke a horse. An unrecovering alcoholic, possible cocaine addict with delusions of godhood and perfection, yet Rove couldn't quite bring his armchair medical insight to a real problem of a real person with the very real ability to screw us all up, but good. Which Bush managed to do.

Somehow, Rove missed all that.

He seems nice.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

The view from 90

Guest post by Robert Stein

Ed. note: A couple of months ago, my friend and fellow blogger Bob Stein turned 90. I meant to publish this wonderful post at the time, but, well, time got away from me and it's been a sporadic couple of months of blogging for me anyway.

It is, in any event, a timeless post, and I'm very happy to publish it today, belatedly. Bob has led an incredibly interesting life and he's seen some incredibly interesting things. What is truly encouraging (and amazing) is that as he looks not just back at America's and the world's messy history but out at the crazy world around him now, he retains a sense of hope and optimism that overrides doubt and despair. He sees the good, that is, even when it is hard to find.

I wish him all the best, and a (belated) happy birthday, from all of us here.

This is Bob's third guest post here at The Reaction, and the first since his reflections on the anniversary of JFK's assassination last November. (His first post for us was "A life in black and white: Personal reflections on race in America.") -- MJWS

Robert Stein has had a long career as an editor, publisher, media critic, and journalism teacher. A former chair of the American Society of Magazine Editors, he currently blogs at Connecting the Dots. 

**********

On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated. It was my ninth birthday.

In April 1945, I was a 21-year-old foot soldier on the floor of a German farmhouse when someone shook me awake to whisper that FDR had died. 

Now, at 90, I am inevitably shaped by those years after a working lifetime as writer, editor and publisher trying to explain the world to others -- and myself.

The scenes around me today are filled with human folly, selfishness and shameless behavior, but that’s far from the whole story. My so-called Greatest Generation, which survived a Depression and World War, does not in retrospect seem so morally superior to those that succeeded it but only more limited in education, experience of the world and outlook.

Many of our virtues were rooted in ignorance: no TV, cable, computers, Internet, no electronics of any kind, only radios with music, soap operas and swatches of evening news lifted from newspapers (as a teenage copy boy, I wrote some of them.)

As a nation we were united, but in an innocence that also had its dark side -- racial ghettos, religious prejudice, rural isolation -- where only unseen white men, all Protestant, held power over our lives in government and business.

Women then lived no fuller a life than those in Nazi Germany: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Our mothers patrolled homes in house dresses, with only one exception.

Although we knew her as Mrs. Goldstein, nothing went with that matronly name, not the shimmer of clothes clinging to her trim body, or the beauty-parlor hair, the high-heeled shoes and face painted with makeup even in daytime, or the sweet perfume cloud that came into the living room in late afternoons when she kissed her son goodnight and dazzled the rest of us playing there with a cupid's bow smile on her way out.

She always seemed on the move to someplace exciting or, if my mother's mutterings could be believed, sinful. I had no idea what nafka meant, but Mrs. Goldstein gave our pre-teen senses a whiff of hope that the night life on movie screens existed somewhere in the real world.

Jump cut through decades: a World War; prosperous but Man-in-the-Grey-Flannel-Suit Fifties; JFK, the Youthquake, Civil Rights awakening and Women's Lib of the televised Sixties; a backlash of the Silent Majority and Watergate in the Nixon years; Reagan's "Morning in America" to paper over growing economic and political gulfs followed by Clinton's centrism and self-centeredness barely surviving Gingrich's loopy Contract with America; and then almost a decade of W's preemptive war and mindless tax cuts to bring us into the Obama years of almost total Tea Party collapse of the civility that held us together all that time, with racism showing its naked face.

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Bill O'Reilly understands neither Lincoln nor the presidency nor comedy

By Carl 

It's odd that a man who claims among his favorite guests both Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart would have a problem with President Obama's appearance in a comic interview on the website Funny or Die. But he does:

All I can tell is you Abe Lincoln would not have done it. There comes a point when serious times call for serious action. We're a divided nation which Talking Points believes is in decline. Mr. Obama is quick, has a good sense of humor. Those are assets.

Oh, um, Bill? About Lincoln? Yeah. He likely would have.

In response to a discussion about the pressure from abolitionists for the president to take action against slavery, Lincoln said:

Wa-al that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was travelling in Illinois when I was a boy, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad — ugly to cross, ye know, because the waters was up. And they got considerin' and discussin' how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on 'em thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another another way, and they got quarrellin' about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, 'Brethren, this here talk ain't no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.'

It was a characteristic Lincoln moment. He deflected the question of what he would do about slavery; he used the story as a device to explain his policy; in a display of folksy wisdom, he got his listeners to laugh.

Lincoln understood what Obama understands and what even idiots like Frank Luntz get: if you want to get your point across, you have to hit your audience in their gut with something.

It can be humor. Often, it can be tragedy, or anger. Bush utilized our anger to talk us into two massively destructive wars that made little sense in toto. Yet to this day – and it even echoes in your network's offensive, treasonous coverage of our president – people talk about how "strong" Bush was, and how "weak" Obama looks.

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Progressive Music Classics: "Something Bad" by The Fatima Mansions

By Marc McDonald

(Ed. note: Here's another installment of Marc's ongoing series. For the full series, check out his site. -- MJWS)


These days, I think pretty much everyone outside of the Rush/Drudge/Fox crowd now accepts that George W. Bush's eight years in the White House were a true disaster for the American nation, as well as for the world.

Bush's two terms were so awful that it's easy to forget just how bad his father's term in office was, as well. So while the memories are still fresh of how GWB was an arrogant, incompetent little prick and a warmonger, it's important to remember that Bush senior wasn't a whole lot better. Clearly, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.

Bush senior's time in office back in the early 1990s was truly a miserable period. After eight agonizing years of Reagan, it was almost too much to bear.

It was a dark and sinister era in many ways. It was a time well summed up by the 1992 song, "Something Bad" by the Irish band, The Fatima Mansions.

Led by Cathal Coughlan, The Fatima Mansions were (ironically) named after a crumbling housing estate in Dublin. Coughlan was gifted with a wonderful voice. He had a knack for lyrics that could lure you in with their beauty -- and then, when you least suspected it, come at you like a sudden switchblade with deeply disturbing imagery.

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What would President Gore have done after 9/11?

By Marc McDonald 

I've often wondered: if Al Gore had been allowed to assume the presidency that he won in the 2000 election, how would he have responded after the 9/11 attacks? Actually, I think it's pretty likely 9/11 would never have happened in the first place under President Gore.

Gore was (and is) a reader and a scholar, you see. One of those dreaded "liberal book learners." Unlike Bush, Gore didn't make decisions "based on his gut." Gore read about and studied the issues. He listened to experts. Oh, the horror!

And on Aug. 6, 2001, when the CIA hand-delivered a Presidential Daily Brief to President Gore, he would have actually read the goddamn thing (particularly after glancing at the alarming headline, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in U.S.")

Unlike Bush, Gore wasn't fond of endless five-week vacations on the taxpayer's dime. So it is entirely possible that Gore wouldn't have been on vacation at the time. I'm think it's also highly likely that if Gore had been on vacation, he'd have cut it short to deal with the PDB.

What's important, though, is that President Gore would have taken action. For example, it's a virtual certainty that he would have called a meeting of his top security people. (Maybe such a high-level security meeting would have brought attention to issues like the FBI's July 2001 reporting about suspicious Middle Eastern men who were learning to fly passenger airliners at U.S. aviation schools.)

I also suspect that President Gore would have ordered possible terror targets like airports to step up security a notch.

Sadly, none of this actually happened. Of course, that's because in the previous year, a blatantly pro-GOP Supreme Court in 2000 awarded Bush a presidency in an election that Gore won by over half a million votes.

And so when Aug. 6, 2001 rolled around, Bush was handed the fateful Bin Laden PDB and took no action, as he continued to enjoy his 5 week vacation.

And so 3,000 Americans died on 9/11. And later, hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in the trillion-dollar fiasco called the Iraq War.

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Remembering when Ronald Reagan embraced Apartheid South Africa

By Marc McDonald 

After many years of struggle, the evil system of apartheid in South Africa came to an end in the early 1990s, thanks to the brave efforts of Nelson Mandela.

But apartheid's end arrived with absolutely no thanks to Ronald Reagan, a man who embraced the racist apartheid regime.

In 1986, during the growing struggle against apartheid, Reagan used the words "immoral" and "utterly repugnant." 

Unfortunately, Reagan wasn't talking about apartheid. Instead, he was using those words to describe his views on the Anti-Apartheid Act, a proposed law that called for imposing sanctions against South Africa.

Reagan's position was too extreme, even for his fellow Republicans. Reagan's veto of the Anti-Apartheid Act was overridden by the GOP-controlled Senate in October 1986.

The Gipper's position really shouldn't have been surprising. After all, throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration maintained close ties to the South African government. Reagan even demonized foes of apartheid, such as the African National Congress, as "dangerous and pro-communist."

It's no wonder that 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu called Reagan's policy "immoral, evil and totally un-Christian" during a visit to the United States.

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No, Ron Fournier, you punditocratic hack, Obama is not like Bush

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Today's primary example of punditocratic hackery comes from National Journal's odious Ron Fournier, who tries to make the case that Obama in his second term is basically Bush 2.0:

Claiming a mandate he never had, the newly reelected president foisted a bold agenda upon Congress and the public, then watched it collapse within months—a victim of scandal, cynical opponents, and his own hubris. One despairing adviser declared, "This is the end of the presidency."

That was George W. Bush in 2005. Or was it Barack Obama this past year? Reading Peter Baker's extraordinary account of the Bush-Cheney era, Days of Fire, I found a striking number of parallels between Bush's fifth year in office and the atrocious first 12 months of President Obama's second term.

My takeaway: Obama needs to shatter the cycle of dysfunction (his and history's) or risk leaving office like Bush, unpopular and relatively unaccomplished.

Fournier then proceeds to go through "nine analogues between Bush's 2005 and Obama's 2013. I'll leave you to read them on your own, if you haven't already. But be forewarned: You'll be wading into a stink-pool of bullshit.

Consider, for example, this gem:

First-term success haunted the second term. The increasingly unpopular Iraq war Was an issue in 2004, even after Saddam Hussein's capture, but Bush had managed to finesse it for reelection. Obama's white whale was the Affordable Care Act. In both cases, luck ran out after Election Day. The death toll rose in Iraq during Bush's fifth year. For Obama, the federal health insurance website didn't work, and millions of Americans lost their insurance policies despite his promises to the contrary.

Both presidents deceived the public about their signature policies, and their credibility crumbled. Insularity hurt both teams. Vice President Dick Cheney famously said the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes." Obama and his advisers characterized catastrophic flaws with the ACA website as "glitches."

Nonsense. First, Obamacare is not, you know, the fucking Iraq War, which by Bush's second term was a full-on quagmire of bloodshed and devastation with no end in sight. The only problem with Obama's health-care reform has been the online rollout, which was indeed slowed down by glitches, which can be fixed (and have been or are being fixed), unlike, say a catastrophic and unwinnable war. Sure, some people have experienced some difficulties signing up, and some people are losing their (terrible) pre-ACA coverage. But how is that like the nightmare of chaos and death in Iraq?

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NSA smacked down over massive data collection of Americans' phone records

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What Orwell feared.

The fight for Americans' privacy rights and civil liberties against an increasingly totalitarian surveillance state just got a major boost:

A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program that is systematically keeping records of all Americans' phone calls most likely violates the Constitution, describing its technology as "almost Orwellian" and suggesting that James Madison would be "aghast" to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way. 

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the government to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs in the case and to destroy the records of their calling history. But Judge Leon, appointed to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush, stayed his injunction "in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues," allowing the government time to appeal it, which he said could take at least six months.

"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page ruling. "Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment," which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. 

Let's keep this in perspective. This is just one judge. The government will appeal. It is likely that an appeal will be successful, more or less, and that the NSA will be authorized to continue doing most, if not all, of what it is doing now. And, regardless, given the available technology, the surveillance state is here to stay. (The question is just how vast and unregulated that surveillance state will be, and in the end whether Americans' retain anything of their essential American-ness.)

But this is nonetheless a victory -- hopefully not just a temporary one -- for the forces of liberty and privacy, and it's pretty much entirely thanks to Edward Snowden and those, like Glenn Greenwald, who have worked so hard, against the shrieking cries of the establishment and its supporters across the spectrum, to reveal the truth, as Charles Pierce explains (via Libby):

Let us be clear. No matter what you think of Snowden, or Glenn Greenwald, and no matter what you think of what they did, this ruling does not happen if the NSA doesn't let a contractor walk out of the joint with the family jewels on a flash drive. This ruling does not happen if we do not know what we now know, and we don't know any of that unless Snowden gathers the data and leaks it to the Guardian. This entire country was founded after a revolution that was touched off to a great extent by the concept of individual privacy.

Personally, I think very highly of what they did. And for this fight to have any chance at all, we need much more of it.

John McCain, hypocrite extraordinaire, freaks out over largely meaningless Obama-Castro handshake

By Michael J.W. Stickings

TPM:

President Obama's handshake with Cuban President Raul Castro on Tuesday was met with a mostly muted reaction from conservatives and Republicans. Invoking memories of the Munich Agreement, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) broke the right's silence with a harsh assessment of the gesture.

"It gives Raul some propaganda to continue to prop up his dictatorial, brutal regime, that's all," McCain said of the handshake between the two world leaders that took place at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela.

When asked if Obama should have extended his hand, McCain was quick to respond.

"Of course not," the senator said. "Why should you shake hands with somebody who's keeping Americans in prison? I mean, what's the point?"

Then, after a slight pause, McCain went there.

"Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler," he added.

Seriously. A fucking handshake. At a memorial service. For Nelson Mandela. It was the mature thing to do, nothing like the childish impetuousness that characterizes Republicans' interactions with pretty much everyone and everything. Maybe it signified a willingness to engage Cuba as a way of opening that country to liberty and democracy (as opposed to isolating it and enabling its totalitarian regime, as Republicans prefer), but maybe it signified nothing. So there.

But while we're here, remind me again who sold arms to Iran, who cozied up to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, who propped up dictators like Pinochet, Noriega, and the Shah of Iran, who kissed and held hands with Saudi royals, and, oh, who tried to make nice with Gaddafi?

Fucking hypocrite.

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) August 15, 2009

The new and improved Kirsten Gillibrand

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What a difference a few years can make.

Back in 2009, when then-New York Gov. David Paterson named then-Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary's vacated spot in the Senate, I said it was "a horrible, horrible pick": 

Earlier, I suggested that Gillibrand, who represents a pro-Bush district, is "almost a Republican." Almost? I'd say she pretty much is, what with a 100% approval rating from the NRA, support for the Iraq War, and, as she herself put it, "one of the most conservative" voting records in the state, including voting for the FISA bill that included telecom immunity and to lift the ban on the possession of semi-automatic weapons in D.C. Her father was close to former Republican Governor George Pataki. She even once interned for former Senator Al D'Amato, a conservative and hyper-partisan Republican.

Was that wrong? No. But has Senator Gillibrand emerged as something altogether different? Yes.

The fact is, Gillibrand represented a fairly conservative district in upstate New York. (Obama won it decisively in 2008 and 2012, but Bush won it by fairly large margins in 2000 and 2004.) And so her views very much lined up with what she had to do to succeed there. That's not to say she was lying about herself. While she was strong on civil liberties and a proponent of same-sex marriage (and gays in the military), there is no doubt that she was genuinely a conservative Democrat, and that's why many of us were concerned when she was appointed to the Senate.

But give her credit. She's adapted to her role as New York's junior senator and broadened her views, or at least her positions, to reflect a significantly more progressive outlook.

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Bushie minion pens willfully dishonest WaPo op-ed about President Obama and the Affordable Care Act, hilarity ensues

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Former Bush II speechwriter Marc Thiessen attacks President Obama in today's Washington Post for supposedly lying to Americans when he said they could keep their existing health plans:

This whole episode is a window into a fundamentally dishonest presidency.

*****

Every president faces the challenge of explaining complex policies in simple terms. But the quest for simplicity is no excuse for dishonesty.

I'm prepared to admit that the president shouldn't have said what he said and that he oversimplified for the sake of making a point, for trying to minimize concerns about the new Affordable Care Act system. Hell, Thiessen even quotes the venerable Times as supporting his point: "Mr. Obama clearly misspoke."

But wait. Is that the end of it?

No. Read the Times editorial in full. (Maybe Thiessen did, but he quotes selectively and intentionally misrepresents its point.) Most people can keep their plans. The ones who can't are the ones with bad plans:

Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that. By law, insurers cannot continue to sell policies that don't provide the minimum benefits and consumer protections required as of next year. So they've sent cancellation notices to hundreds of thousands of people who hold these substandard policies. (At issue here are not the 149 million people covered by employer plans, but the 10 million to 12 million people who buy policies directly on the individual market.)

But insurers are not allowed to abandon enrollees. They must offer consumers options that do comply with the law, and they are scrambling to retain as many of their customers as possible with new policies that are almost certain to be more comprehensive than their old ones.

Indeed, in all the furor, people forget how terrible many of the soon-to-be-abandoned policies were. Some had deductibles as high as $10,000 or $25,000 and required large co-pays after that, and some didn't cover hospital care.

This overblown controversy has also obscured the crux of what health care reform is trying to do, which is to guarantee that everyone can buy insurance without being turned away or charged exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions and that everyone can receive benefits that really protect them against financial or medical disaster, not illusory benefits that prove inadequate when a crisis strikes. 

There will always be a small fraction of exceptions, examples of people who for whatever reason aren't getting what they want, whose plans have changed in ways they don't like, and conservatives like Thiessen will continue to highlight those exceptions as the rule even as they're anything but, so intent are they to destroy the Affordable Care Act and the effort to extend health insurance to tens of millions of Americans.

But the Times is right. The president simply "misspoke," while the facts about the Affordable Care Act remain the same. Almost all of those who can't keep their plans can't keep them because they're horrible plans and because they'll get better plans in the new system.

It's interesting, isn't it, that Thiessen accuses the president of lying while only quoting four words of an editorial that otherwise destroys his case?

Who's really being dishonest? Who's really the liar?

If you need time to answer that, I'd remind you again that Thiessen worked for George W. Bush. And if you recall, the truth wasn't exactly high on the list of priorities during that abominable presidency. Remember those Iraqi WMDs?

Saying something nice about W.

By Richard K. Barry

As one who probably never said anything nice about George W. Bush during his disastrous tenure as president, I don't mind throwing the man a bone now that he is far from the levers of power. In this case, W. was asked by Fox News to comment on whether or not Obama should intervene militarily in Syria, to which he responded, "the president has to make a tough call," adding that he "was not a fan of Mr. Assad." He also said some things about President Obama having the best armed forces in the world at his disposal should he choose to act, and other such platitudes. 

The point is that in an overheated partisan environment, the former president has kept his head down while others in his administration, notably Dick Cheney, have been obnoxious in the extreme. I am not suggesting that former presidents can't or shouldn't be partisan. They continue to be members of a political party once they leave office, and have every right to support whatever and whomever they like. But, and I'll be a bit of a traditionalist here, once having held the highest office, I think they have an obligation to dignify the experience by keeping their partisan comments respectful of the efforts of those who currently lead. You know, the old "disagreeing without being disagreeable" thing. 

For my money, George W. Bush has done well on that score since going back to Texas. Yes, if we occasionally praise respectful dialogue, we might actually see more of it. And now you can tell me that Bush is the last person to deserve our respect given the fact that he lied so easily to justify invading Iraq where so many have died as a result, which would be another way of saying that there never will be a good time to be respectful in politics. Too bad. 

Bush 2.0

By Frank Moraes 

(Ed. note: For my take on Obama's "end of the war on terror" speech, see here. I thought it was, in general, a thoughtful, intelligent speech that addressed, without entirely disregarding, my progressive concerns, and I applaud him for presenting a serious understanding of the complexities of the world and America's place in it, as well as for encouraging a broad discussion of national security, but he's got an awful lot to prove after more than four years of continuing, and in some cases worsening, the Bush-Cheney national security state. The rhetoric was there, but, then, the rhetoric's often there with him. The question is where he actually goes from here and whether there will actually be meaningful change, and of course whether that change actually puts an end to endless war and largely unlimited executive power. -- MJWS)

In general, I like caveats. The world is not a simple place. But that can be taken to extremes, especially by supposedly liberal politicians. The best description I've ever heard of Obama is by Roger Hodge in The Mendacity of Hope, "Obama presents a dizzying series of hands -- on the one and then the other, repeatedly, like some hyper-discursive blue-skinned Hindu deity -- in which he discusses the Bill Clinton wing of the Democratic Party (the wing to which he belongs, but he doesn't really come out and tell us that), which embraces the new economy of advancing pools, even though 'a sizable chuck' of the Democratic base resists the agenda." In other words, Obama is a conservative Democrat but he respects the rest of us who aren't.

After President Obama's speech last week, I didn't know what to make of it. As usual, it sounded very nice. He got all the stuff that I didn't like out of the way at first so he could provide me with a soft landing. But I've been hearing pretty words from Obama for five years and I've been disappointed in his actions for four. On economics, I feel more qualified to cut through his bullshit, but I'm none too clear on the War on Terror, regardless of what the current administration wants to call it. So I have to depend upon more knowledgeable people like Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald to clarify what the truth actually is. So I was very eager to hear what Greenwald had to say, especially given his tardiness in weighing in. Finally, yesterday morning he published "Obama's Terrorism Speech: Seeing What You Want to See."

He started out saying what I've long known, although in this case specific to Obama's speech on Thursday:

If one longed to hear that the end of the "war on terror" is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have found that. And if one wanted to know that the president who has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world feels personal "anguish" and moral conflict as he does it, because these issues are so very complicated, this speech will be like a gourmet meal.

He then went on to point out the fundamental purpose of the speech was to calm progressives.

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Ted Cruz goes squish

By Mustang Bobby

Jennifer Rubin, the right-wing columnist for The Washington Post, is peeved at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for not playing nice with other Republicans and calling those who supported background checks for guns "squishes."

For starters, it's just not smart to annoy colleagues whose cooperation and support you'll need in the future. Second, as a conservative he should understand humility and grace are not incompatible with "standing on principle"; the absence of these qualities doesn't make him more principled or more effective. Third, for a guy who lacks manners (see his condescending questioning of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) he comes across as whiny. They yelled at me! Boo hoo, senator.

When liberals go after each other, it's like watching Quakers argue: "Friend, I have a concern," and you can practically hear the sorrowful sighs. Not so with conservatives. They can really get into it.

In Ms. Rubin's case, it's not surprising that she'd be put out. She just got herself pilloried by just about everyone for the puff piece she wrote last week about how wonderful George W. Bush was and how history will treat the gentle fool with kindness. Then in comes this new senator from Texas like he was Godzilla and Washington was a Japanese fishing village. Squish. There goes the compassionate-conservative rehab.

What's interesting is that it's not like they didn't know what they were getting when he ran. He campaigned as a whack-job, he won the primary against the hand-picked Republican establishment candidate, and he won as a whack-job. Unlike Democrats -- or anyone with prefrontal development beyond the age of 14 -- he never learned that once you get into office you pretty much have to learn that to do much more than get your 15 minutes on C-SPAN, you have to work together. Your constituency is slightly larger than the Tea Party rally in the parking lot of Family Dollar in Buzzard Gulch.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Misty water-color memories

By Mustang Bobby

If you thought it was nice that all five living former and the current president got together yesterday to dedicate the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and you thought it was magnanimous of men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to say nice things about him, well, I’m not going to pee on your campfire. Let him have his moment in the sun and all that; he’s out of office and can’t do us anymore harm except to continue to assault the English language.

Conservatives accused Democrats and liberals of hating him blindly, of never giving him the chance to prove that he’s not evil incarnate. (Ironically, a lot of conservatives have done the exact same thing to Barack Obama, so I guess they know what they’re talking about.)

Personally I never hated George W. Bush. That would mean I actually cared about him. But I could never muster the energy to actually give a shit about him as a person. His policies and his methods of governing and the things done in his name are another matter. And so while I never made it personal, and I don’t really care about his museum or the attempt by his minions to polish up the turd that was his administration, I do remember the reasons that I counted down the days until he was out of office and back in Texas where the worst thing he could do to the sensibilities of the world was to launch an attack on the art world with his new-found toy: a paint brush.

If you need a reminder of what it was like, Steven Rosenfeld at Jezebel has compiled a concise list of the 50 reasons a lot of people despised the presidency of George W. Bush. Some are little, but most of them are harsh reminders that while it’s fine to let him have his little museum, it is a monument to abject failure.

Actually, the real monument to his legacy are the rows of white marble stones in Arlington National Cemetery and the other graveyards around the country where young men and women now lie because of his lies. Paint that, Mr. Bush.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Forgiving torture

By Frank Moraes 

I am often reminded that I'm not a very nice person. Most recently, this came to mind because Jonathan Bernstein wrote at PostPartisan, "How Do We Keep from Torturing Again?" This is coming off the Constitution Project report stating unequivocally that after 9/11, the United States, as a matter of government policy, tortured people in our custody. As I reported in an update to that story, Andrew Sullivan has called for a truth commission or something similar to address this unacceptable behavior.

Bernstein said much the same thing, but with a political scientist's eye: the only way we can prevent future episodes of government torture is to admit what we did. We can't be a nation where one party is against torture and the other is for it. In fact, that is exactly what we now have for reasons that should be clear to readers of this site. But this gets to the point about my not being a nice person. Bernstein wrote:

I've argued -- against many torture opponents -- that a Truth Commission, combined with blanket pardons and generous expressions of understanding for those who were responsible, as odious as what they did was, is actually the best way to proceed.

I think he is right, and yet I have trouble offering those generous expressions of understanding. But it isn't because I'm not forgiving -- I am very forgiving. It is just that I remain resentful as long as the wrongdoer does not admit his error. I think most people are like this.

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Bob Perry (1932-2013)

By Richard K. Barry 

Bob Perry was the money behind the insidious "Swift Boat" ad campaign attacking John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, in 2004. Perry, a homebuilder, started as one of the largest campaign donors in Texas before branching out nationally. 

He died at the age of 80 at his home in Nassau Bay, Texas, near Houston. 

In 2004, he gave $4.4 million to a group called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." They used the money to launch a baseless ad campaign accusing John Kerry of embellishing his military accomplishments and discrediting others who served with him. 

The New York Times gently suggests that the ads were "widely criticized as misleading." In truth they were simply a pack of lies, but they did their job. They made some voters doubt the facts behind Kerry's war record, a record for which he was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. 

Though one cannot say for sure that he would have won a close race against George W. Bush in 2004 had Perry kept his checkbook in his pocket, there is a decent chance he would have. 

Whatever good Mr. Perry may have done in his life, he will be best remembered as the man who bankrolled one of the biggest lies in American electoral history. Quite a legacy. 

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

America tortured after 9/11

By Michael J.W. Stickings and Frank Moraes 

MJWS:

I highly recommend reading the report, or at least as much of it as you can, particularly the "Statement of the Task Force" and "Findings and Recommendations" -- that will take you just to page 25. Much of the rest is an extraordinarily detailed account of detainee treatment. The statement includes this:

The events examined in this report are unprecedented in U.S. history. In the course of the nation's many previous conflicts, there is little doubt that some U.S. personnel committed brutal acts against captives, as have armies and governments throughout history.

But there is no evidence there had ever before been the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after September 11, directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.

In other words, what happened was historically awful. Which makes it even more unacceptable, and unjust, that the enablers, architects, and practitioners of America's massive post-9/11 torture regime have yet to be held to account for their crimes.

**********

FM:

It is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture. That's not what I say; that's according to the nonpartisan, independent review conducted by The Constitution Project and released, as a 577-page report, yesterday.

I understand that a group with a name like "The Constitution Project" sounds like it's filled with a bunch of libertarian and pacifists who are outside the political mainstream. But that isn't really the case. It is a think tank that tries to bring the left and right of the political spectrum together to agree on constitutional matters. And the eleven members of panel were well represented by the two major parties. What's more, as Scott Shane of The New York Times explained, "[i]t is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs."

What is most significant about the report is that it is so unequivocal. When Dianne Feinstein et al, wrote their letter criticizing the film Zero Dark Thirty, they were careful never to use the word "torture." This is because, according the United States government, we never tortured anyone. Of course, this is just a semantic game: you say "torture," I say "enhanced interrogation techniques"; let's call the whole thing off?

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