“Defending gold medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh gave (President Bush) some (volleyball) pointers. Then after a good play, in the tradition of female volleyballers, Misty May-Treanor turned, bent over slightly and offered her bikinied rear-end for the 43rd president to slap. “Mr. President,” she said, “want to?” — From LA Times Top of the Ticket blog
I might be the last person to figure this out but, based on this trailer, Stone appears to tackle two questions: “How in the hell did George W. Bush ever become president of the United States?” And, “What happened to him before he got to the Oval Office that made him so inept once there?” Or maybe that’s one question.
An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.
“The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren’t “the worst of the worst.” From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.”
Stories like this one — and the way those accused respond to them — raise a troubling (to me) question about American journalism. Why can’t we have one news organization that everyone can agree is factual and fair. Just one. “Truthiness” is no longer a joke.
Somewhere in the White House and the Pentagon, men and women are figuring out ways to discredit this story and the people who reported it. I won’t try to list the tactics they employee because we are all too familiar with them.
And those who chose not to believe stories like this one need only the flimsiest excuse (“There goes the Liberal Media again.” or “Fox News says it’s not true.”).
Remember how skeptical the world was of the claims by German citizens that they didn’t know what was going on in the concentration camps?
“Whoa! Hold on there smays.com! You aren’t comparing Guantanamo to Auschwitz are you?”
No. I’m talking about what we, the American people, allow our government to do on our behalf. If we’ve been holding hundreds of innocent men for five or six years and –in some cases– torturing (I know, I know… water boarding is not torture) them, will our best explanation be, “We were at war.”
Ich bin beschämt
"Never discuss religion or politics." It was one of the few rules I set for myself that I actually followed.
I’m not a fan of organized religion so it hasn’t been difficult to avoid talking about it. The same was true for politics until Obama began running for president. Sure, I’d been bashing Bush for years but it was only when I came out for Obama that friends started trying to pull me into mini-debates.
In my enthusiasm for Obama and the better future I hope he represents, I broke my rule and engaged in these discussions. Big mistake.
Looking back, I now see the point –the only point– of these encounters was to convince the other guy he was wrong. Even with friends, there was a negative undertone to these discussions. I’d go in feeling up and positive… and come out down and negative.
So I’ve decided to avoid discussing politics. We can talk about anything else you want… my sex life, books and films, The Office, whatever. But no politics.
I’ll post on political topics here, but that’s strictly therapeutic. I don’t expect anyone to read these posts and, frankly, discourage it. smays.com has always been, first and foremost, a personal journal. A place to write some things down.
There. I feel better already. You should, too.
A little gem from “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story,” the new autobiography of retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the onetime commander of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Following the the killing of the four contractors in Fallujah in 2004, W tried to go all George C. Patton in a video conference with his national security team and generals:
“Kick ass!” he quotes the president as saying. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.”
“There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”
Can you imagine being in combat with dick-wad like Bush commanding your unit?
I started blogging on February 2, 2002 (I had been ranting a bit for a couple of years before that) and will soon reach 3,500 posts. George W. Bush took office on January 20, 2001, so I missed the opportunity to comment on the first year of his administration.
Between now and when he leaves office (assuming he DOES leave office), I’m going to go back and tag every post dealing with W and/or his henchmen with “Bush Years.” Mine will be just one of thousands of records of his time in office.
From George Mason University’s History News Network:
“In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.
“Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history.”
“The reason for the hesitancy some historians had in categorizing the Bush presidency as the worst ever, which led them to place it instead in the “nearly the worst” group, was well expressed by another historian who said, “It is a bit too early to judge whether Bush’s presidency is the worst ever, though it certainly has a shot to take the title. Without a doubt, it is among the worst.”
I bet they’re all Democrats. I think W will get his wish. He’ll be remembered for a long, long time.
“It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.
This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.” — New York Times editorial
Dave Winer passes along an idea for persuading George Bush to leave office early.
“We all contribute to a fund, that hopefully would contain a lot of money, say $150 million. If Bush resigns on the first day, he gets the whole $150 million. Every day he waits, the fund goes down by 10 percent, so there’s a real incentive for him to act quickly. On Day 2 it’s worth only $135 million. On Day 3, $121.5 million. And so on. It’s kind of a simplified version of Deal or No Deal.”
That’s jack Abramoff on the left and you know the gentelman on the right. The picture was taken at a campaign fundraiser in December 2003. Kim Eisler, Washingtonian magazine writer and a friend of Abramoff’s, confirmed the photo’s authenticity for The Associated Press. He said he had seen the picture at Abramoff’s house.
Abramoff helped raise more than $100,000 for Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. He is serving nearly six years in prison for a fraudulent Florida casino deal and is cooperating with the FBI in a bribery investigation involving members of Congress and the Bush administration. [Associated Press]