Greetings, earthlings
Hi.
I'm julia, and I'll be blogging for the magical dinner hour, from six thirty 'til seven thirty.
So unwind your minds and rethread your heads and I'll play you some of the greatest hits of anti-Bush thought from the past few weeks.
You may recognize the tunes, but you may be surprised so see which artists have covered them.
This is the summer of conservatives' discontent. Conservatism has been disoriented by events in the past several weeks. Cumulatively, foreign and domestic developments constitute an identity crisis of conservatism, which is being recast -- and perhaps rendered incoherent...
Yes, that was George "your morality is my business, but mine has nothing to do with my wife and kids" Will singing "Your Daddy was a Lapdog and you're a son of a bitch"
See if you recognize this familiar theme:
David Brooks, Senior Editor
One of the things we've learned is that Democrats are better at controlling spending than Republicans. Bill Clinton's growth domestic spending was a lot lower than George W. Bush's or George H. W. Bush's were. And so I have a feeling the Republicans are going to spend.
Yes, it's the Senior Editor of the Weekly Standard, with "When you asked me if I wanted you to go down, I didn't think you meant the ship"
Now, let's go back to a golden oldie. From the OpEd page of Rupert Murdoch's own New York Post, it's "Where have all the flowers gone - I forgot my wife's birthday"
- it was a classic example of how to mismanage personnel, hurt morale and break the hearts of thousands of military families.
- [service members are] disappointed, and angry, and resentful at being treated like nothing more than numbers and statistics.
- lack of support from Pentagon civilians who never paid any dues except to their country clubs. The Rummycrats who insisted we could occupy Iraq with two Boy Scout troops and a repainted pickup truck...
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's button-down hit men, each a champion of arrogance...
- Underpaid, overworked soldiers are picking up the slack for Bechtel, Halliburton and the rest of the corporate vultures.
-Want to know how far off the rails things have slid at the Pentagon? Recently, the Army wanted to tally up how much money it had been forced to divert to private contractors as part of Rumsfeld's rush to privatize military tasks. The Rummycrats forbid it...
- [a contract employee] will cost the Pentagon $100,000 a year. A sergeant barely makes a quarter of that, and a private hardly a fifth - including benefits.
-This is corporate welfare that has nothing to do with the welfare of our troops.
A fresh spin on an old, old tune.
This is a new one from the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
You may remember a few days ago when Pat Roberts, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (clearly a seniority post), fed Tenet's lifeless and eerily translucent body into a woodchipper over the bad information in the SOTU.
Apparently he's sorta kinda become willing to entertain a certain amount of flexibility of perspective.
This is a man who almost certainly has access to polling data, is all I'm saying.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee suggested Wednesday that the White House might bear some responsibility for President Bush's faulty charge that Iraq tried to buy nuclear weapons fuel from Africa.
It was the first time a senior Republican has hinted that blame for the matter might extend beyond Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet.
The Washington Post chimes in with "Did you get that stenographer thing in writing, guys?"
In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.
By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa -- although now almost entirely disproved -- was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier.
The volume of bilge seems to be constant, but the hold of the USS Bush is emptying out fast.
Cornhusker Sen. Hagel adds this:
Quoth Senator Chuck Hagel (R-RedState), whose committee assignments include
-AForeign Relations - Chairman, Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export, and Trade Promotion
-Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs - Chairman of Subcommittee on International Trade and Finance, Subcommittee on Securities
-Select Committee on Intelligence
"It wasn't just the CIA involved here," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska. "We had the vice president and his office involved, - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell's people. This wasn't just a one-man show."
Hagel voted to give Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq, but he told reporters last week the administration's case for war was looking "weaker and weaker." He told CNN: "There's a cloud hanging over this administration."
the AP chimes in:
CIA didn't get disputed documents until February 2003 after Bush claim
By John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press, 7/16/2003 18:04
WASHINGTON (AP) When the Bush administration issued its pre-war claims that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, the CIA had not yet obtained the documents that served as a key foundation for the allegation and later turned out to be forged, U.S. officials say.
The CIA didn't receive the documents until February 2003, nearly a year after the agency first began investigating the alleged Iraq-Africa connection and a short time after it assented to language in President Bush's State of the Union address that alleged such a connection, the officials said.
Without the source documents, the CIA could investigate only their substance, which it had learned from a foreign government around the beginning of 2002. One of the key allegations was that Iraq was soliciting uranium from the African country of Niger.
Even as the CIA found little to verify the reports, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to put them into public statements.
from overseas, it's Andrew "morality is just another word for nothing I would have done anyway" Sullivan, with this hit climbing the charts:
No one can now doubt that, in matters of free trade, the Clinton administration was far better ...than Bush.... We now have two huge disappointments: a protectionist tilt on trade and a profligate slide on fiscal responsibility. At least some conservatives are begining to realize the damage Bush is doing...
Sadly, Dylan pulled the rights so the Byrds got their version out first.
Pat Robertson is a popular figure in some circles of Washington, but not right now:
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has accused President George W. Bush of "undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels" by asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, recently indicted for war crimes, to step down.
"How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down'?" Robertson said Monday on "The 700 Club," broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.
Robertson, a Bush supporter who has financial interests in Liberia, said he believes the State Department has "mismanaged the situation in nation after nation after nation" in Africa...
From MSNBC, until recently home of Michael Savage:
The familiar drip, drip, drip of a brewing political scandal echoes through the power centers of Washington and London these days as the Bush administration and the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair are pelted daily with increasingly pointed questions about the case they made for going to war against Iraq. The admission that the president made an apparently false allegation against Iraq in his State of the Union address was supposed to help put the issue to rest. Instead, it reopened fissures inside the administration and in Blair's government over the validity of their case for war.
THE FAILURE to turn up chemical or biological weapons in Iraq - initially dismissed as a sour grapes issue by Bush insiders - is growing into a genuine political problem, dogging the British and U.S. leaders at every public appearance and sparking various agencies that had a hand in Iraq policy to begin plotting a course through the gathering storm.
Throughout the president's Africa trip this week, for instance, Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell were peppered with questions on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and particularly on the president's Jan. 28 claim that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from African countries that mine it.
The image of African leaders standing mutely by as their news conferences were transformed into debates on Iraq could not fail to recall similarly uncomfortable moments during Bill Clinton's scandal-plagued administration.
But the comparisons end there. Clinton's troubles were domestic, in the strictest sense, and largely dismissed as unimportant in the rest of the world. Today, with U.S. troops dying in Iraq at a rate even the White House sees as politically unsustainable, there is a palpable desire to lay to rest any questions about the war's real motives and stem any further damage to U.S. and British credibility.
"They have to get by this, and they have to do that very soon," says a source close to the Bush family, who requested anonymity. "The GOP can bottle up inquiries in Congress, but they can't bottle up public opinion."
Well, there you go, cats and kittens. A few favorites of mine and I hope you love them too.
More later.
For now, we return you to MB, already in progress.
Comments
Will it make groovin' behoovin'? Nice to see another Doonesbury fan with a long memory....
Posted by: emily | July 26, 2003 07:30 PM
I was wondering if anyone would recognize that.
Posted by: julia | July 26, 2003 08:08 PM