Ten Years Ago . . .

[The following is a re-posting of what I wrote a decade ago on this blog in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the botched Federal response to that catastrophe.  I think it is important to occasionally look back on stuff like this, not only to remind ourselves of what happened, but to see how far we've come since . . .]

We Needed a Great President Last Week, But We Didn't Get One

What's that old Rumsfeld line again? I think he said, "You go to War with the Army you have." Last week, America experienced one of its greatest catastrophes, and we had to go into that disaster with the president we have. Unfortunately, we had George Bush in the White House.

Actually, he was nowhere near the White House. He was on vacation. It's a shame that Terri Schiavo's body wasn't still kept alive and maintained in New Orleans when Katrina hit. Bush did, after all, interrupt one of his vacations last March to fly -- in the middle of the night -- all the way back to Washington D.C. to sign legislation to keep Schiavo's body on life support. Had Schiavo been in New Orleans during the Katrina aftermath, Bush would have sent an entire division in on Monday evening to rescue her body, and perhaps some of those troops could have remained and helped the people who were actually still alive.

Oh, I'm sorry -- did I write that Bush was on vacation? I guess that on the day Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, our president cut his vacation short so he could -- well, deliver a speech in California regarding how great a job he was doing in Iraq. Or was he still technically on vacation when he delivered that speech? Unfortunately, we may not know the answer to that and other questions until Bush enters retirement and writes his much anticipated book on travel and leisure.

Dick Cheney, the one who actually runs the show, was nowhere to be found during the Katrina aftermath. Cheney's excuse for avoiding Vietnam was that he had "other priorities." I'm looking forward to hearing what his other priorities were this last week. I'm sure they had something to do with GOP fund-raising -- if he wasn't on vacation, that is. We do, however, know where Condi Rice was. She was buying a shit-load of expensive shoes in NYC. She also attended a Broadway musical on Wednesday night. Good for her.

Perhaps Condi stayed away from D.C. because of all the in-fighting that was going on there. Administration officials who weren't on vacation were debating for days about who was actually in charge of the Katrina response. Meanwhile, people were dying needlessly in New Orleans. Where's Alexander "I'm In Charge Here" Haig when you need him?

The thing I find the most remarkable -- from a purely political standpoint -- is the opportunity the Bush Administration pissed away. The Katrina aftermath gave Bush the perfect chance to revive his faltering presidency. Sure, he still would have had to contend with the fact that his tax cuts for the rich and his misadventure in Iraq pulled important funding away from the flood control programs in Louisiana, but how many Americans really pay attention to minutiae like that? Hell, over 40% of the U.S. still believes that Iraqis were flying the hijacked planes on 9-11.

Bush, with the help of his Congressional friends, could have easily weathered any political shit-storm that emerged from the funding-cut issue. And all he needed to do to get that help in Congress was appear on the ball and in charge before, during, and after Katrina hit.

Instead, Bush fumbled the ball, and his Congressional allies are now going to have a much more difficult time covering up for him. Indeed, political expediency may force some of Bush's supporters in Congress to discontinue their efforts to prop up an Administration that is now widely seen as incompetent and out of touch. The 2006 mid-term elections are, after all, just around the corner, and there are a lot of angry voters out there.

Bush's big problem, of course, was that he couldn't control the images coming out of New Orleans like he could with the Iraq Debacle. It is, for example, pretty easy for the commander-in-chief to enforce an order that no pictures be taken of caskets returning from a war zone. Bush's failure, however, to move quickly in response to the Gulf Coast disaster allowed the media to go in there and give the world an unobstructed view of the horrors left in Katrina's wake. As a result, many attempts by BushCo and its apologists to "focus on the positive" were met with angry responses from on-the-scene television personalities who just weren't buying it.

This country has often had the good fortune of strong leadership during times of crisis. We had Lincoln during the Civil War, FDR during the Great Depression and World War II, and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. No such luck this time. I've often referred to Bush as arguably the worst American president of all time. There doesn't seem to be a need for argument on that point anymore.

"Conciliatory Rhetoric As A Ruthless Strategy"

Last year, I wrote this about Obama:

By adopting conservative positions, the President has backed the Republican Party into a corner and forced it to become increasingly radicalized in its quest to opposed All Things Barack. In other words, he took the GOP's Achilles Heel, namely, the intense hatred within its ranks for America's first Black president, and fully exploited it to the long-term detriment of the Republican Party.

Although I stand by that statement, I was also among the group of people who thought Obama gradually adopted this strategy only when it became apparent that the GOP was going to obstruct him on everything.  But this excellent post by Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly makes it clear that this was Obama's strategy from day one:

[T]he historical record shows that he wasn’t unaware of Republican plans from the outset. In his book The New New Deal, Michael Grunwald points out that, during the negotiations over the initial stimulus package (which was signed by President Obama 28 days after he was inaugurated), a couple of Republican Senators informed Vice President Biden that the plan was to obstruct anything the President tried to do. So, at minimum, we know that Obama was not uninformed.

Obama then took this awareness of the Republicans' plan and used it against them, knowing -- of course -- that the GOP will oppose everything he proposes, including ideas that Republicans once supported. LeTourneau writes:

The scenario that played out over and over again on everything from health care reform to budgets was that President Obama would put his ideas on the table and then ask Republicans to do the same. Most of the time, they simply refused. As the President demonstrated that he was willing to meet them more than halfway, the demands they did articulate became more and more extreme - leading to things like a possible default over raising the debt limit.

Knowing that the Republican position was simply to obstruct, President Obama offered pragmatic conciliations, recognizing that the closer he moved to what had traditionally been “sensible” Republican policies, the more difficult that would become. Their options were to either work with him on solutions (his preference) or continue to obstruct - painting themselves into an ever-more extremist corner.

LeTourneau closes her article by stating that it might be too soon to say whether or not “conciliatory rhetoric as ruthless strategy” is a success. But I think the strategy has been enormously successful.  Just listen to what the Republican candidates for president are saying right now: some support banning abortion for 10-year-old girls who conceive because they were raped, many support mandatory deportation for all illegal aliens as well as their children who were born in the U.S., most support mandatory perpetual warfare in the Middle East and mandatory rejection of climate science, and on and on and on.

Well played, Mr. President.

Christ, What's Next -- Death Camps?

After Mitt Romney was crushed in the 2012 General Election, the Republican Party issued an autopsy report which proposed certain fixes for the GOP.  Here is an excerpt from that report, released in 2013:

"If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence. It doesn’t matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In essence, Hispanic voters tell us our Party’s position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door."

Wow, what a difference a couple years makes. Here is what Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner [!!!], is saying now about illegal immigration:

Trump’s plan, which is detailed on his website, calls for construction of a wall along the Mexican border, vowing to “make Mexico pay” for it; an end to birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants; the defunding of sanctuary cities; the strengthening of immigration enforcement; and more. In an interview on NBC News, Trump added that he would rescind President Obama’s executive actions shielding millions from deportation, and deport all illegal immigrants: “They have to go.”

If you think Trump is the only one in the GOP race saying shit like this, then you'd be wrong. Scott Walker now supports mass deportation as well, as do other Republican presidential candidates.

Look, I know I'm on the record saying that the GOP's days as a national party are numbered, but even I find these latest developments astounding. The Republican Party's relationship with Hispanic voters was bad enough prior to Trump's ascendancy -- radicalized elements within the GOP basically prevented the passage of the bipartisan immigration reform bill, and the GOP is now actively trying to thwart President Obama's attempt to fix the system on his own.

But Donald Trump has taken Republican hatred for Hispanics to a whole new level, and there is no way this can end well for the GOP.  I guess now I know why the 2013 report on the Republican Party's health was called an "autopsy" -- the folks who wrote the report could read the writing on the wall.

Re-Writing History is Hard -- Part 2

U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno won't let Jeb Bush blame Obama for the current instability in Iraq:

Ahead of his official retirement on Friday, Odierno, the former highest-ranking officer in Iraq and one of the architects of the 2007 troop surge there, sought to set the record straight.

“I remind everybody that us leaving at the end of 2011 was negotiated in 2008 by the Bush administration. That was always the plan, we had promised them that we would respect their sovereignty,” Odierno said during his final press conference at the Pentagon.

Gen. Odierno brings up a good point, one that the Republican Party wants everyone to forget: The U.S. launched the invasion to bring freedom to the Iraqi people -- at least that is one of the reasons BushCo gave for the invasion.

The invasion itself was actually dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and even the idiots in the Bush Administration knew that if you give an invasion a title like that one, then you sure the fuck better follow through on the whole "freedom" part.  That is why the words "freedom" and "democracy" dominated BushCo's post-invasion rhetoric.  Here is an example of that from 2005:

"It took a four-year civil war and a century of struggle after that before the promise of our Declaration (of Independence) was extended to all Americans," Bush said. "It is important to keep this history in mind as we look at the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq." * * *

The president said Iraq's path to democracy would not be a smooth one and highlighted what he called three milestones the nation has achieved. Those were: handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi leaders on June 28, 2004, two days ahead of schedule; holding elections in January 2005 and adopting a democratic constitution.

And that whole "freedom and democracy" thing is what George Bush tried to do in December 2008 when he signed the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq.  These are Bush's own words at the signing ceremony:

"The agreement provides American troops and Defense Department officials with authorizations and protections to continue supporting Iraq's democracy once the U.N. mandate expires at the end of this year. This agreement respects the sovereignty and the authority of Iraq's democracy. The agreement lays out a framework for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq -- a withdrawal that is possible because of the success of the surge."

Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi democracy -- that's what Bush's efforts near the end of his presidency were all about.  The Surge -- and the subsequent Status of Forces Agreement -- constituted BushCo's last shot at getting a flower to grow out of the steaming pile of excrement it deposited in the Middle East, and needless to say, it failed miserably.

What I find most humorous about the Republican Party's attempt to re-write history on Iraq is that Jeb and the rest of the GOP apparently wanted the United States to subsequently reject the Status of Forces Agreement signed by George W. Bush in 2008 and thus act more like a conquering invader than a liberator. If that's the case, then they should have called the invasion something other than "Operation Iraqi Freedom."  I think "Operation Free Iraqi Oil" and "Operation Crush The Brown People" were available.

Re-Writing History Is Hard . . .

. . . especially recent history. Just ask Jeb Bush:

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush was heckled during an Iowa speech over his brother George W. Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq. Bush criticized the haste of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq under the Obama administration. “The Iraqis want our help,” he said. “They want to know that we have skin in the game, that we’re committed to this.”

“We had to get out in 2011!” the heckler yelled. Despite the interruption, Bush kept his composure. “We didn’t have to get out in 2011,” he retorted.

“Your brother signed the deal!” the heckler continued.

“It could have been modified, and that was the expectation,” Bush said. “Everybody in Iraq and everybody in Washington knew that this deal could have been expanded. And now what we need to do–”

“Your brother signed a bad deal!”

“–now we have to do something else,” he finished.

This isn't going to end well for Jeb, because folks not only remember the clusterfuck his brother created in Iraq -- they are still really pissed off about it.

Quote Of The Week

"In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party's right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump."

- Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone.

Taibbi is definitely on to something here.  Indeed, I've long thought that the GOP's weird obsession with Benghazi!! had more to do with frustration over the Bush Administration's failures than anything else.

Remember: Bush/Cheney was a dream come true for right wingers -- not one but two tax cuts for the rich, not one but two wars against brown people, sweeping deregulation, etc. -- and the whole thing ended in disaster.

Can you imagine how Republican extremists (i.e., the entire GOP) then felt when an uppity . . . gentleman named Barack Hussein Obama won the White House in 2008 and then had the temerity to not only prevent another Great Depression but to also kill Osama bin Laden a mere two years into his presidency? The Bush Regime wasn't able to do that, and it had eight years.

The GOP psyche just couldn't handle it. The passage of the Affordable Care Act and a second Obama term probably didn't help much either.  The result, of course, is that the Republican Party has gone completely insane.  And I can't get enough of it.

The Most Hilarious Article I've Read On The Campaign So Far . . .

It reminds me of Dr. Frankenstein trying to talk down his monster. I don't know if that even happened in the book or the movie, but it still reminds me of it.  Yes, it's that hilariously fucked up.

And by the way:  I don't like it that Megyn Kelly is getting death threats from Trump supporters over her debate questioning.  She seems like a decent person who was just trying to . . .

Oh, fuck it . . . it's all hilarious.

UPDATE:  As usual, The Rude Pundit nails it:

You know who was right down in the trenches of the war on Sandra Fluke? Fuckin' Megyn Kelly, that's who. The conservative "feminist" we're supposed to defend now because Donald Trump said some bitchy things about her couldn't get enough of attacking Fluke. Indeed, you could make a case that it was Kelly's targeting of Fluke that pleasured Roger Ailes and got her the primetime slot she's in now.

Fox News created Trump -- it is really that simple.

Donald Trump Is "The Great Evil" from The Fifth Element

The more I watch Donald Trump's candidacy unfold, the more I realize that he is The Great Evil that everyone was trying to stop in the movie The Fifth Element (the relevant scene starts at 10:10 and ends at 14:00):



In the movie, a powerful warship (Fox News) is sent out to destroy a gigantic evil space blob (Donald Trump) that is attacking the universe (the Republican Party). The warship repeatedly fires its most lethal projectiles into the evil blob, only to find that the more it attacks the blob, the more powerful the blob becomes.

That's Donald Trump's relationship to the GOP in a nutshell.  I stated in a previous post that Fox News tried to torpedo Trump in the recent debate, no doubt thinking that it could put an end to his Evil Presence once and for all.

No such luck.  As noted today by Josh Marshall:

Numerous commentators speculated over the weekend that Trump's public spat with Fox News host Megyn Kelly might finally spell the end of his surge in the polls. Top Republicans openly cheered his apparent downfall. But NBC's weekend poll suggests that assumption was misplaced.

The poll in question shows that Trump has the post-debate support of 23% of Republican voters, with Ted Cruz at 13%, Ben Carson at 11%, Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina tied at 8% and Jeb Bush and Scott Walker at 7%.  Yes, you read that right -- Trump enjoys a double-digit lead despite all of Fox's efforts to knock him out of the sky.  Nothing seems to be able to stop Trump, not even Megyn Kelly.

In The Fifth Element, the activation of certain "element stones" finally brings down The Great Evil.  I think there is one weapon that will ultimately bring down Trump's run for the GOP nomination, and that is the passage of time.  I agree with the pundits who say that Trump is probably locked into around 25% support in the GOP -- he won't go much below that no matter what he says, but he also won't be able to go much above it.

Once folks start dropping out of the GOP field, support for the other candidates still in the race will go up and Trump's position in the polls will eventually drop.  But until that happens, just sit back and enjoy the rest of the film.  It should be a good one.  I'm also looking forward to the inevitable sequel, which will be titled: Trump Launches Independent Bid For The Presidency.

I Think John Kasich Would Make A Good President

The Republican Debate was fairly entertaining, Trump was more or less what I expected (the Fox News people really hated him, though -- I think it's because they want to get rid of him). Bush was surprisingly flat, as was Walker. Rubio, Christie, and Cruz did okay, Huckabee and Carson had some funny moments. Rand Paul, whom I like on a lot of issues, seemed out of his element at times.

But as far as substance was concerned, most of the candidates were completely full of shit on most every issue. I hope that some of the answers they gave tonight are not the answers they'd give in a debate if they won the nomination -- a Democratic opponent would tear them to shreds.

But there was one answer I found very interesting.  Megyn Kelly asked Ohio Gov. John Kasich about his decision to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, and he responded:

"First of all Megyn, you should know that President Reagan expanded Medicaid three or four times. Secondly, I had an opportunity to bring resources back to Ohio. To do what? To treat the mentally ill. Ten thousand of them sit in our prisons. It costs $22,500 a year to keep them in prison. I would rather get them their medication so they can lead a decent life. Secondly, we are rehabbing the drug-addicted. Eighty percent of the people in our prisons have addiction problems. We now treat them in prisons, release them in the community, and the recidivism rate is 10 percent. And everybody across this country knows the tsunami of drugs is threatening their very families. So we are treating them and getting them on their feet. And finally, the working poor, instead of having them come into the emergency rooms where it costs more where they’re sicker and we end up paying, we brought a program in here to make sure that people could get on their feet. And you know what, everybody has a right to their God-given purpose."

That was the most presidential thing I heard all night. He also had a thoughtful answer with regard to his opposition to same-sex marriage.  I may not agree with him on a lot of issues, but Kasich came off as a serious-minded person, which (of course) made him stand out from the rest of them.

I know it's early and it's hard to tell anything about a candidate after a single debate -- especially given that he shared the stage with nine other people -- but I think Kasich has a real shot at the nomination if Bush continues to under-perform.

Could This Spell The End To Donald Trump's Candidacy? (Updated)

This is hilarious, but also has the potential to be incredibly sad:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.

Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

This news is hilarious because it means that Bill Clinton might have had a hand in causing the GOP's Trump Catastrophe. But it also could end up being incredibly sad because Bill Clinton is hated by the GOP almost as much as Obama.

Republicans -- especially the ones who like what Trump has been saying -- might not take too kindly to The Donald cozying up to the The Big Dog.  Indeed, the "Trump Is A Clinton Plant!" Conspiracy could end up eclipsing Jade Helm 15.

And speaking of Trump, there is one question I'd like to hear him answer in tonight's debate, and it is:

Mr. Trump: You contend that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president because you believe he was not born in this country.  One of the men on stage with you tonight -- Ted Cruz -- admits he was not born in the U.S. Why aren't you insisting that Senator Cruz drop out of the race?"

I know -- the question will not be asked. But I'd love to hear Trump try to answer it.

UPDATE:  Kevin Drum has more on the "Trump Is A Clinton Plant!" Conspiracy.

If Obama Is Neville Chamberlain, Does That Mean Iranian Hardliners and U.S. Republicans Are The Nazis?

President Obama, in defending the Iran nuclear deal today, launched a brutal attack on those Republican motherfuckers who lied this country into Iraq twelve years ago. It was fun to watch.

After stating that the decision facing Congress next month on the nuclear deal will be the most significant since the vote to invade Iraq, Obama then made repeated reference to that disastrous decision during the rest of his speech. This approach, of course, allowed the President to continually push the GOP's nose into the pile of excrement now known as the Iraq Debacle, the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history. Here's a good example of that:

"I know it's easy to play on people's fears. To magnify threats. To compare any attempt at diplomacy to Munich. But none of these arguments hold up. They didn't back in 2002 or 2003. They shouldn't now. [Applause]  The same mind-set, in many cases offered by the same people who seem to have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have done in the decades before or since. It's a mindset out of step with the traditions of American foreign-policy, where we exhaust diplomacy before war, and based matters of war and peace in the cold light of truth."

I took issue recently with the Republican attempt to re-write the history of the Iraq War. So it was good to hear the President go after those GOP bastards by not only saying the invasion was a huge mistake, but by also pointing out that it actually strengthened Iran's position in the region (i.e., "you assholes caused this mess -- I'm just trying to clean it up.").

One thing that has bothered me about Obama of late was that he really didn't hit back very hard when 47 GOP senators -- in an act of treason -- sent an open letter to Iran's leaders, warning that any agreement reached with Obama without legislative approval could be reversed by the next president. He fixed that problem today when he said:

"Just because Iranian hard-liners chant 'Death to America' does not mean that’s what all Iranians believe. Indeed, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status quo, and who have been most opposed to this deal. They're making common cause with the Republican caucus."  

Obama has jokingly used that "common cause" line before, but this one had a bit more bite to it, especially given how many Republicans have recently compared the President to Neville Chamberlain, which was weird because they usually compare Obama to Hitler.