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George W. Bush

Bush Revisionist Changes Reasons for War. Again.

Mar 17th, 2010
by Tom.
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Re: Spinning for Bush, Then Spinning the Spin | Mother Jones, By David Corn, Mon Mar. 15, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Spinners gotta spin. And Brad Blakeman, a Republican strategist and commentator, is an expert at keeping his own gyrations turning.

On Tuesday, he and I appeared on MSNBC to discuss Karl Rove’s new book. The main issue at hand was Rove’s assertion that George W. Bush did not “lie us” into the Iraq war. I went first and explained how the Bush administration had overstated iffy intelligence regarding Iraq’s WMD capabilities to grease the way to the invasion. Defending Bush’s war, Blakeman, who had worked in the Bush White House’s scheduling office, noted that Saddam Hussein had used WMDs against the Kurds—without mentioning that this had happened 15 years before the Iraq war and that UN inspectors had subsequently reported destroying Iraq’s WMD facilities. He then asserted that another reason for the war was that Saddam “was preventing inspectors from coming in and inspecting the [suspected WMD] sites that the UN demanded be inspected.”

I interrupted, “Brad, that’s not true,” noting that UN inspectors had been inside Iraq for months prior to the war and had uncovered no evidence of existing WMD stockpiles. 

Revisionists gotta revise. And Brad Blakeman now joins the growing chorus of revisionists all singing songs of the innocuous behavior and the moral chastity and innocence of George W. Bush. Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove are all a conspiratorial clan of former Bush components who can make themselves seem cleaner by cleaning up Bush. “Bush didn’t lie!” Sadly, yet another lie.

“They were denied access,” Blakeman insisted.” And after I referred to two instances when Bush had made utterly false statements about Saddam’s relationship to al Qaeda and his nuclear weapons capabilities—statements not supported by the intelligence of the time—Blakeman argued that Bush had not lied. He repeated his claim that the reason for the war had been Saddam’s opposition to weapons inspections:

President Bush did not bring us into this war because of WMD. He brought us into the war because Saddam Hussein failed to allow inspections of the sites the UN demanded be inspected.

While Blakeman throws out lies David Corn lays out the facts. For all of us who weren’t in a coma during this time, the fall of 2002, and happened to pick up a newspaper, we recall that Saddam Hussein was really rather generous to the inspectors’ requests to inspect. I remember that the Iraqi officials went with the inspectors and opened the sites for them. One such site turned out to be a milk factory. Corn interjects some facts here from a “2003 Congressional Research Service report on the inspection process:”

* From late November 2002 to March 2003, U.N. inspectors combed Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

* The U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conducted over 750 inspections at 550 sites. These inspections seemed to benefit from strengthened authorities under the new U.N. resolution, new technologies, a better relationship between UNMOVIC and the [International Atomic Energy Agency], and pressure from the threat of military strikes.

* On the eve of war, inspectors withdrew from Iraq.

* For the approximately three months of inspections, inspectors reported that the Iraq was cooperating on access, with a few minor delays. Dr. [Hans] Blix [the head of UNMOVIC] noted in his March 7 [2003] report that cooperation on process was better this time for UNMOVIC than it had been for UNSCOM [in the 1990s].

Thank you, David Corn, for getting the truth out there. These revisionists cannot be allowed to have their retelling of history to stand as the truth.

I like to read comments to these articles when they are allowed and now I want to post one comment I found that offered intelligent, if not somewhat apologetic, support for Brad Blakeman’s version of history. This comment by Jason Ray:

The issue of WMD and the inspectors was not as clear-cut as you make it seem. Hans Blix himself clearly stated that the Iraqis had been unhelpful in many areas. Indeed, Mr. El Baradei stated that, “What’s required is a dramatic change in spirit and sincerity,” on the subject of coorporation (sic). I think it’s safe to say that Blix and El Baradei are as non-partisan as it gets in the UN-community.

Also, wasn’t there concern that Iraq had launched SCUDs into Kuwait after the Coalition started targeting Saddam’s palaces and command centers? The main concern being that Iraq wasn’t supposed to have any of these SCUDs yet they were launching them.

I am no defender of George Bush or New Labour, but if there was no case for the invasion why did the UN pass a resolution threatening invasion unless Iraq fully cooperated? The UN backed out at the last minute when its members demanded yet another resolution and at this point the Compassionate Cowboy decided to invade Iraq.

My reply was this, which Mother Jones website wouldn’t let me post due to a technical glitch:

I said, “The UN would not have passed resolution 1441 that ‘threatened invasion’ were it not for the lies and falsification of intelligence surrounding the existence of WMDs in Iraq. In short, Bush lied the UN into war, with the help of a great presentation from Colin Powel, which was a monstrous lie. Bush was able to convince the UN that Saddam was keeping us from examining weapon sites, which he was not, that weren’t really weapon sites.

Bush also did some serious arm twisting in the Security Council. He told them to either act, or he would, by asking in 2002, “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?” But the purpose of its founding was to maintain peace, not precipitate war.

The Bush Doctrine dangerously adopted the policy of preventive war, a violation in itself of UN Charter 2(4).”

Here is an excerpt of a reply by a commentator named leafsong1:

2) A UN authorized invasion would be authorized by the UN; the US is not empowered to guess what the UNSC might be thinking and unilaterally act to enforce their will.

George W. Bush bent over backwards to rub off the blame onto the UN for his illegal invasion. The UN Security Council would not take responsibility for this, and rightly so, no matter how much Bush tried to blame them and have the UN own the invasion. Although it may be argued that Iraq violated resolutions dating back to 1991, those resolutions are owned by the UN Security Council – all 15 members – not just the United States. The United States cannot unilaterally invade another country as if it were the will of the Security Council, which it was not. The UN’s response to the arm twisting was to send the inspectors back into Iraq, and Iraq did not deny them access as Blakeman has claimed.

The UN inspectors fled Iraq on their own, not booted out as Blakeman would have you believe. They did it for their own safety during the ramp-up to war.

Brad Blakeman is the former president and chief executive officer, as well as one of several prominent conservatives funding Freedom’s Watch, a  now defunct organization that promoted the Bush Doctrine through TV ad buys, and funded/promoted the swiftboating of Senator John Kerry.

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Tea Party = Angry White People

Feb 6th, 2010
by Tom.
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Re:  White Racial Resentment Bubbles Under the Surface of the Tea Party Movement | News & Politics | AlterNet, AlterNet / By Rich Benjamin

Dale Robertson, who calls himself the “president and founder of the Tea Party,”

February 5, 2010  | Editor’s Note: Rich Benjamin’s commentary on the underlying “white grievance” currents in the Tea Party movement were buttressed Thursday by the statements of Republican Tom Tancredo, the opening speaker at the Tea Party convention. Tancredo told attendees that President Barack Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country,” an allusion to how Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters before the civil rights era.

I need to add that suffrage was forced upon southern states after the “civil rights era” because of foot dragging or outright refusal to accept the Civil Rights Act by the state of Mississippi and others. Many districts in the south fought the black vote well into the 1970’s through various means like misinformation on where and when to vote, crowding the precinct voting place with angry white men and other methods of intimidation, and even resorting to redistricting predominately black neighborhoods by splitting them in pieces to be part of larger white districts and in doing so, weakening the black vote to the point of nonexistence. The force of suffrage came from the federal authorities, such as the FBI, investigating voting irregularities.

It is very easy to see the underlying racism in the Tea Party movement. They tote signs that are “dog whistles” showing our first black president as a world-wide hated figure like Stalin or Hitler, suggesting that Obama is on the same level although he has done nothing to deserve it other than to be black.

And speaking of signs, most of the tea party crowds I’ve seen sported messages of anti-taxation, claiming that they refuse to bear the burden of Obama’s tax hikes, as untrue as that is, to pay for illegal immigrants’ food stamps, or anything else for that matter. Haven’t taxes always been a convenient target of whoever was out of favor of the American voter? Anyway, most of the southern and mid-western states, the “red” states, actually receive more money from the federal government than they pay into it. What we see at these tea party gatherings are middle class white people who have just received a tax cut from their hated Obama, protesting that Obama is unfairly raising taxes. Giving these folks some credit for having half a brain seems appropriate, so the public must infer that “taxes” as a rallying cry is false and the Tea Partiers message must convey underlying racism.

This has been going on a long time, long before the Tea Baggers came into existence last summer.

All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and ’60s.

Before the Tea Party’s debut, a whole generation of powerful southern Republicans propelled their careers through a conservative tax-cutting, privatizing, “free-enterprise” politics that remains wildly popular in America’s white outer suburbs and exurbs: Lee Atwater (GA), Newt Gingrich (GA), Dick Armey (GA), Tom DeLay (TX), Karl Rove (AL, TX), and George W. Bush. These suburban and exurban Republicans intimately understood their constituents’ disdain for court-ordered desegregation. They fueled the rising mania for “individual freedom,” “privatization,” “states’ rights” and social homogeneity that once defined their Southern home turf and now defines the Tea Party.

To me, this movement is all about white supremacy while its members taking pains not to say it out loud. When Sarah Palin speaks of “the real America” she is actually talking about rural white America.

At a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis called cap-and-trade legislation “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.” In Tea Party-speak, “heartland” often means “white” — what Palin calls “the real America” — while “coastal state” means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as “gateway states” for Latino immigrants.

What’s the verdict here? I think common sense will win out. I think that sooner or later these folks who vehemently hate immigrants, the xenophobes, and the racists, will eventually realize that the federal income tax and social security tax that they pay allows the government to do things for us as a nation that we cannot do for ourselves as a family or small community. These taxes provide health care to more poor white families than ethnic minorities, and Social Security taxes allow many elderly white folks to retire with some dignity. Medicare benefits allow the same white elderly white folks a chance to live a few years longer by providing health care that they could not get elsewhere. The tea partiers are all going to draw Social Security and Medicare when they are eligible.

If they were true to their cause then they should refuse to apply for these benefits, but they are not true and they will not refuse them. The only other conclusion is that the tax protest is just a dog whistle for segregation.

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Progressives Have Only Themselves to Blame for Disappointments

Jan 9th, 2010
by Tom.
1 comment

Re:  Obama Year One | The American Prospect, Paul Starr | December 24, 2009 

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

As Barack Obama ends his first year in office, there is much talk about disillusionment with the president among progressives. The litany of complaints is obvious: unemployment still at 10 percent, economic policies unduly favorable to Wall Street, the surge in Afghanistan, compromises on health care, the failure to close down Guantánamo, and a general inability to bring about the transformative change that Obama spoke of during his campaign. 

Policy has certainly not moved as fast or as far as many of us would like. But perhaps because I never shared the political fantasies about Obama in the first place, I don’t feel let down, and I don’t think other liberals should. No president was about to turn the country around on a dime — the structure of our government doesn’t allow it. And anyone who paid attention to what Obama said as a candidate about specific matters of policy would have realized he wasn’t the lefty some imagined and others feared. 

Every president has had to walk back some of their campaign promises. Ronald Reagan had to raise taxes – 6 times. 

No one president broke more campaign promises than George W. Bush, but you don’t hear about that because the main stream media sides with Republicans. Bush promised on the campaign trail, during the primaries of 2000, that he would fully fund the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). His FY 2003 budget slashed funding for LIHEAP by $300 million or 18% of the previous year’s allotment. 

During the campaign of 2000, Bush said, “Every year, U.S. colleges attract the best and the brightest students from all over the world. I want to make sure that higher education is affordable and accessible to every American. And therein lie our greatest weaknesses: college tuition and the burden of student indebtedness. I am committed to helping families prepare for the cost of higher education.” Then, in 2002, Bush slashed the federal student loan program by $1.3 billion. 

Bush also promised not to spend the Social Security surplus. But it was spent, anyway, on an unnecessary war. 

There is something here that I have often repeated. President Obama has never been a progressive, but progressives have painted that portrait on him by somehow mistaking their agenda as something that he has promised to do, but has failed. One promise in contention is the health insurance mandate, or the requirement that everyone have health insurance. This was not his idea, but Hillary Clinton’s. 

The news of late have shown snippets of the President at the podium in 2008 during the campaign lambasting Hillary Clinton’s insurance mandate. Now, the Senate health bill has the mandate and the President gets blamed for breaking the campaign promise of being against a mandate. 

For starters, Obama’s plan had an insurance mandate for children, but not for all, as did Clinton’s. Studies done by the Lewin Group and others at that time suggested that Clinton’s plan would be the one closest to “universal coverage” depending on the strength of the penalties for noncompliance. 

What is striking with this example is that when you compare both Obama’s and Clinton’s campaign health plans, you will quickly discover that they their focuses were on insurance reform, not health care reform. Then, compare those plans with Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s plan, you’ll see a stark difference. Kucinich promoted health care reform, not insurance reform, with his plan of Medicare For All. 

Here’s my message to progressives, of which I consider myself also. If you go back and read through some of their policy statements on the campaign trail you will find that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama were progressive, but rather left-leaning centrists. If progressives wanted a progressive candidate they should have voted for one.The progressive’s disappointment is no one’s fault but their own.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

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