Ma Nishtana

GW Bush palling around

The first line of The Four Questions song from the Passover Seder asks "Ma Nishtana?" Or, "What has changed?" The term is often used sarcastically to refer to something that someone thinks is new, but is actually not.

So, I ask, in a more contemporary English translation, "This is different how?"

“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. 

That's Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, via Digby, on the Twenty-Eight Pages the Dubya administration removed from the 9-11 Report.

Here's Josh Roggin at the Daily Beast with the answer to the question of why on earth doesn't Dick Cheney talk about who's backing the bad guys de jour:

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.

Ma Nishtana?

Meanwhile, occasionally, someone from the elite actually stands up and tells us what all this palling around with fascists has gotten us.

"I can only plead with you to examine the current political and cultural works of my country [the U.S.]. We are in the hands of a terrible counterrevolution and a great reaction, a second Civil War sponsored by the same people that lost the first Civil War," the director said.

"And it has created a good president who is a prisoner of the White House who can do little beyond the ceremonial," McTiernan continued. "It has made, despite of what you may see on screens, a prison country, and I've had the pleasure of seeing what most people in our class are never allowed to see. I've seen the engine of the beast, it has given us a country with more prisoners than North Korea per capita, more policemen per capita than Germany in 1938. They have suspended trial by jury in most of America."

Now there's a guy I hope keeps talking.

Donald Rumsfeld Said Bin Laden's Mountain Lair was Serious Business

The fictoid of Bin Laden's mountain fortress

Paul Waldman has a great piece that will defibrillate your memory of the kind of BS that was coming out of the Bush-Cheney administration after they got caught with their pants down--after W himself had told the CIA agent that gave him the PDB on August 6, 2001 entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Here's a paragraph and the footnote from Paul:

The answer, in case you've forgotten, is that [Cheney] and so many other Bush administration officials were basically enacting a fantasy in which the enemy—"the terrorists"—were not actually a bunch of semi-literate religious fanatics who got incredibly lucky one time with an extraordinarily low-tech attack, but were actually evil geniuses, had unlimited resources at their disposal, and could execute complex, highly technical schemes with multiple interlocking parts that enabled them to do things like get close enough to the Vice President to deliver him a fatal electric shock. And of course, we can't close Guantanamo and house the prisoners now there in supermax prisons in the United States, from which no inmate has ever escaped, because they're terrorists, and who knows what super-powers they might have developed in the fantastically well-equipped lab in their hollowed-out-mountain lair? 1 

1 I joke, but do you remember Bin Laden's mountain fortress? It was quite a remarkable feat of engineering—check out this conversation between Tim Russert and Donald Rumsfeld, going over all its amazing details. "A ventilation system!" marveled Russert. "The entrances large enough to drive trucks and even tanks!" Even computer systems and telephone systems. It's a very sophisticated operation!" "Oh, you bet," responded the Secretary of Defense. "This is serious business. And there's not one of those. There are many of them." You may also remember that the mountain fortress never existed. It was all made up.

It's amazing alright. Go read the story of how this particular piece of bullshit made it out of Rumsfeld's mouth,  from Edward J Epstein, and how, perhaps even more horrifying, the press ate it up.

Man Who Shot World in Face is Sad Someone Took His Gun

"I think the President came to power with a worldview that's fundamentally different than mine. The sense that he wanted to reduce U.S. influence in the world. He wanted to take us down a peg."-- Former Vice President Dick Cheney

Well, Du-Uh-uH-uh-UH...

Jesus on a pogo stick, Dicky, if you haven't figured out that that is precisely the point yet, then I wonder how you ever got as far as you did in life? Oh, wait, I almost forgot about Wingnut Welfare, which is why Dick Cheney still appears in public to actually say things, and why a man with a list of deferments longer than his heart lasted was put in charge of the Pentagon, and then in charge of GW Bush.

Just for the record, here are some of my favorite Dick Cheney quotes:

• I think Barack Obama is a one-term President. 
• I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.
• My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
• We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.
• I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.
• Go fuck yourself.

Yeah, Dick, I'll give you this: you helped convince a majority of Americans that the whole idea of increasing America's influence on the world by lying us into a multi-trillion dollar war that killed and maimed millions of innocent people is precisely the kind of thing we need to take down a peg. And I hope sucking on that at least gives you a little agita until the day you die. 

In the mean time, please, keep talking while the rest of us try to find peaceful, lasting, and moral ways to increase our influence in the world. You know, things that people will thank us for, instead of shooting back.

The White Horse Apoplexy

Via Steve Benen (because I wouldn't watch a GOP debate if you held a McDonnell brand trans-vaginal ultra-sound probe to my head), I hear that Willard had yet another software glitch last night, when he revealed that he hasn't been updated with the latest current events driver (aka, reality patch) in regards to Iran, and his speech center blurted out this gem:

This president should have put in place crippling sanctions against Iran, he did not.

Benen points to the still quite conservative Jeffery Goldberg, who says:

It is precisely because the Obama Administration has constructed a sanctions program without precedent, and because the Obama Administration has funded and supported multinational cyber-sabotage efforts against the Iranian nuclear program, that Iran is panicking and lashing-out.

It is not only Israeli leaders who have doubted Obama's commitment to stop Iran's nuclear program; Iran's leaders themselves didn't take Obama seriously. After all, George W. Bush labeled Iran's government a member of the axis of evil, but then did nothing much at all to thwart its ambitions. But Obama, while avoiding rhetorical drama, has actually done more to stop Iran than the Bush Administration ever did.

Here's the thing, Republicans. When you update your brain with the reality patch, which essentially just puts the Bush Administration back into your memory, you'll realize that we had a President who lied us into attacking Iraq, which empowered Iran, which wanted to protect itself from US imperialism and a belligerent White House that says shit like "Real men go to Tehran," so it gets going on building a bomb, and then this whole Mission-Accomplished ball of bee-hive gets handed to Obama as part of the giant clusterfuck that was the end of 8 years of GW Bush and Dick "Deficits Don't Matter" Cheney.

Obama then quietly repairs our image around the world, gets major-league sanctions going while keeping diplomatic channels open, slowly ratchets up the pressure, and even gets praise from Jeffery "WMD" Goldberg, and the best Willard (who's foreign policy team is a who's who of Dick Cheney's best friends) can do is a lie that stands out like a man standing in front of everyone with nothing on but his magic underwear, which is hanging by a thread.

Wonder Who Bush and Cheney Left Burrowed in the Food Regulation Bureaucracy

Molly Ivins used to say that if you really want to see the difference between Republicans and Democrats, look at food safety.  Republicans were in charge of the federal government for 8 years and now the Democrats for a little over two. In the game of staffing the federal bureaucracy, Obama has a long way to go to even undo the damage the Cheney administration did.

Like unemployment and food stamp use, a lot of what comes out of the government in terms of regulation is a kind of lagging indicator. So, yes, we are still seeing results of the Bush/Cheney administration.When you inherit a government that Bush/Cheney had de-fanged when it comes to regulatory prowess, what's a guy supposed to do?

With that in mind, this piece in the NY Times tells me that even a basic thing like food identification has become a difficult thing for the government to enforce. And with austerity becoming the buzzword in Washington, I don't expect Obama to be able to do much to reverse the damage any time soon. Even a lot of Democrats are suckling on the Big Ag teat, and it's hard to regulate businesses when they basically buy the politicians and write the laws.

I recently read about meat glue that they use to put pieces of lesser cuts together into a T-bone. There's all kinds of food safety horrors that evolved during lax regulatory years of Republican corporatocracy. Fits right in with the lax environmental regulation, financial regulation, and all the other things that government is supposed to do that Republicans would rather do away with.

These are things that happen because George W. Bush and Richard Cheney hated regulation and did everything they could to make sure the government either didn't do it, or did it badly. And the Bushistas had 8 years to put cronies in charge regulating their old frat buddies' businesses.

Generally speaking, Republicans are from rural areas that produce food and giant ag companies that want to slip shit past the consumer, and Democrats are from cities, where the consumers are. So, there's that.

The Bushies (i.e. Cheney) were especially adept at putting foxes in charge of hen houses, and then the industries that got helped hired the very people who helped them.

Some people even got left behind, so-called "burrowing" that Cheney was doing at the end of that nightmare.

Additionally, before leaving office, the Bush administration aggressively placed political appointees into permanent civil service positions as part of a process known as “burrowing.” Some of the burrowed former political appointees have close ties to Cheney, such as Jeffrey T. Salmon, who was a speechwriter for Cheney when he served as defense secretary. In July, he was named deputy director for resource management in the Energy Department’s Office of Science.

So, yeah, Cheney's dark forces really did a number on a lot of things like this, especially for energy companies. Remember, these are the boys that brought you everything from Enron to Iraq to most of the debt they're trying to blame on Obama.

Follow the money.

Something about that year 2007

Hmmm... This article could mention the fact that it was Bush appointees running MMS and Wildlife, that they'd been guarding the hen house since 2001, they had gutted the regulatory power of the agencies and, in the case of MMS, staffers were literally snorting coke of oil industry asses.

This is what Dick Cheney wanted.

in reference to:

"But in a letter dated Sept. 14, 2007, and obtained by The New York Times, the wildlife agency agreed with the minerals service’s characterization that the chances that deepwater drilling would result in a spill that would pollute critical habitat was “low.”"
- Agency Agreed That Spill Risk to Wildlife Was Low - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)