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Quote of the Day

Our choices in life are made according to our sense of our own worth.
 – Kaylan Pickford

Buck Fush

… the Bob Woodward interview on  60 Minutes tomorrow night (Sunday, October 1, 2006).
The New York Times

A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 30, 2006

In Bob Woodward’s highly anticipated new book, “State of Denial,” President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war. It’s a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in “Bush at War,” his 2002 book, which depicted the president — in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed — as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the “vision thing” his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.

As this new book’s title indicates, Mr. Woodward now sees Mr. Bush as a president who lives in a state of willful denial about the worsening situation in Iraq, a president who insists he won’t withdraw troops, even “if Laura and Barney are the only ones who support me.” (Barney is Mr. Bush’s Scottish terrier.)…

As depicted by Mr. Woodward, this is an administration in which virtually no one will speak truth to power, an administration in which the traditional policy-making process involving methodical analysis and debate is routinely subverted…

The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news and a good time had by all.” Were the war in Iraq not a real war that has resulted in more than 2,700 American military casualties and more than 56,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the picture of the Bush administration that emerges from this book might resemble a farce. It’s like something out of “The Daily Show” or a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, with Freudian Bush family dramas and high-school-like rivalries between cabinet members who refuse to look at one another at meetings being played out on the world stage.

There’s the president, who once said, “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy,” deciding that he’s going to remake the Middle East and alter the course of American foreign policy. There’s his father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush (who went to war against the same country a decade ago), worrying about the wisdom of another war but reluctant to offer his opinions to his son because he believes in the principle of “let him be himself.” There’s the president’s national security adviser whining to him that the defense secretary won’t return her phone calls. And there’s the president and Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, trading fart jokes…

Washington Post

STATE OF DENIAL

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page A01

In May, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: “Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat.”

Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president’s forecast.

Instead of a “long retreat,” the report predicted a more violent 2007: “Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year.”

A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been — exceeding 3,500 a month. (In July the number would be over 4,500.) The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.

On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs’ secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the “appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007.”

There was a vast difference between what the White House and the Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States’ ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.

(The release last week of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for terrorists — following a series of upbeat speeches by the president — presented a similar contrast.)…

[Click through to read more examples of Bush’s incompetence.—Caro]

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Mike Lane, Baltimore Sun

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Washington Post

New Book Fuels Election Year Debate Over Bush, Rumsfeld

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 30, 2006; Page A01

… [Woodward’s] book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.

The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration “was at least as aggressive” in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.

The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black “felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.”

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. “We didn’t know about the meeting itself,” she said. “I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it.”…

… handles disagreement.
The New York Times

Memo Fueled Deep Rift in Administration on Detainees

By TIM GOLDEN
Published: October 1, 2006

In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.

They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals…

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

“It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president,” said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. “It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy.”…

The Nation

posted September 28, 2006 (October 16, 2006 issue)

Revolt of the Generals

Richard J. Whalen

A revolt is brewing among our retired Army and Marine generals. This rebellion–quiet and nonconfrontational, but remarkable nonetheless–comes not because their beloved forces are bearing the brunt of ground combat in Iraq but because the retirees see the US adventure in Mesopotamia as another Vietnam-like, strategically failed war, and they blame the errant, arrogant civilian leadership at the Pentagon. The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops in Iraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”). These men recently sacrificed their careers by retiring and joining the public protest.

In late September Batiste, along with two other retired senior officers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democratic policy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “not a competent wartime leader” who made “dismal strategic decisions” that “resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq.” Rumsfeld, he said, “dismissed honest dissent” and “did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war.”

This kind of protest among senior military retirees during wartime is unprecedented in American history–and it is also deeply worrisome. The retired officers opposing the war and demanding Rumsfeld’s ouster represent a new political force, and therefore a potentially powerful factor in the future of our democracy. The former generals’ growing lobby could acquire a unique veto power in the future by publicly opposing reckless civilian warmaking in advance…

[Sorry, but I don’t find the idea of generals nixing going to war troublesome.  I think it’s great.—Caro]

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com
 

Calls us all dupes.
Agence France Presse

Stung by criticism, Bush calls for offensive ‘across the world’

Sat Sep 30, 2:49 PM ET

US President George W. Bush called for fighting America’s enemies “across the world” as he stepped up his counteroffensive following charges that his policies were breeding a new generation of Islamic terrorists.

The call, delivered in his weekly radio address, was aimed at countering a rash of accusations that the Bush administration had seriously mishandled the war in Iraq and created fertile ground for Islamic extremism…

But Bush insisted Saturday that claims that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq was helping foster anti-American terrorism were tantamount to buying “into the enemy’s propaganda.”…

Associated Press

Candidate-veteran attacks Bush on Iraq

By DENNIS CONRAD, Associated Press Writer
Sat Sep 30, 11:41 AM ET

An Illinois congressional candidate who lost both her legs during combat in Iraq said Saturday that President Bush has no real strategy for securing the war-ravaged nation, just political talk designed to appeal to voters.

“Instead of a plan or a strategy, we get shallow slogans like ‘mission accomplished’ and ’stay the course,’” former Army Capt. Tammy Duckworth said in the Democrats’ weekly radio address. “Those slogans are calculated to win an election. But they won’t help us accomplish our mission in Iraq.”

Duckworth’s address served as a response to the president’s weekly radio talk and gave the Democratic Party a chance to showcase one of its strongest candidates as it seeks to regain control of the House in November’s elections…

Ben Sargent, Universal Press Syndicate

… of this administration yet, simply has not been paying enough attention.
Associated Press

Gonzales cautions judges on interfering

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer
Fri Sep 29, 12:18 PM ET

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush’s anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president’s judgments in wartime.

He said the Constitution makes the president commander in chief and the Supreme Court has long recognized the president’s pre-eminent role in foreign affairs. “The Constitution, by contrast, provides the courts with relatively few tools to superintend military and foreign policy decisions, especially during wartime,” the attorney general told a conference on the judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center.

“Judges must resist the temptation to supplement those tools based on their own personal views about the wisdom of the policies under review,” Gonzales said.

And he said the independence of federal judges, who are appointed for life, “has never meant, and should never mean, that judges or their decisions should be immune” from public criticism…

[Nobody but the president gets to have an opinion.  And if you have another opinion, you’d better not express it.  If you do, we’ll sic the Brownshirts on you. So STFU, and let Bush destroy the Constitution, the middle class, and the country.  It belongs to him, and he can do what he wants with it.  UNLESS WE STOP HIM!—Caro]

… then maybe this will.
Charleston Post and Courier, SC (thanks to Crooks and Liars)

Shirley offers fix for bad parenting
Sterilize irresponsible moms, dads, he says

Saturday, September 30, 2006

BY BRIAN HICKS

Charleston City Councilman Larry Shirley says the robbery of a downtown video store – allegedly by a band of kids, including one too young to be charged – is a sure sign society has gone awry, and it’s time to start a “dialogue.”

And one of the things he says needs to be talked about is whether bad parents should be sterilized.

“What we’ve got is a failure in society, whether it’s in Mount Pleasant with yuppie parents or whether it’s on the East Side with poor crackhead parents,” Shirley said Friday. “We pick up stray animals and spay them. These mothers need to be spayed if they can’t take care of theirs. … Once they have a child and it’s running the streets, to let them continue to have children is totally unacceptable.” Deadbeat dads might ought to be sterilized as well, he said…

… as the next person, but using the IRS for the benefit of big corporations just plain rubs me the wrong way.  This is another huge invasion of our privacy.
Hartford Courant (thanks to Calculated Risk)

Lenders Will Be Spotting Income Fibs Much Faster

October 1, 2006

Starting Monday, it’s going to get much riskier to fib about your income when you apply for a home mortgage. That’s because the Internal Revenue Service is overhauling a key income verification tool used by lenders – making it faster and easier to pull up electronically the confidential income tax information of borrowers.

“It could be huge” in spotting fraud upfront – before it’s too late – said Mike Summers, vice president of Veri-tax.com, a Tustin, Calif.-based firm that services 3,000-plus large and small mortgage lenders nationwide. Fraud in mortgage applications is now a multibillion-dollar-a-year problem, according to the FBI, and falsified income tax filings are an important contributing factor…