Bush promised invading Iraq would bring ‘hope and progress into the lives of millions’

Was he right? Let’s have a look…

NBC News:

When the administration of President George W. Bush planned the invasion of Iraq, hopes ran high that the massive deployment of troops and money wouldn’t just result in the toppling of Saddam Hussein: The United States would help create a country that stood as an example to others. 

Ten years ago Tuesday, Bush announced military operations “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” He warned that the coalition campaign “could be longer and more difficult than some predict,” but vowed to give the Iraqis a “united, stable and free country.”

In a speech only weeks earlier, the president had stressed that “a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions.”

In a televised statement to the nation, President George W. Bush announces “early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq.”

An estimated $61 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds later, reality has fallen short of these expectations.

An estimated 189,000 people — including Iraqi civilians, U.S. troops and journalists — were killed in the war in Iraq since 2003. The country is considered one of the most corrupt in the world, and many of the improvements promised have not materialized. Sectarian tensions regularly explode into open violence. 

And, of course, there’s the complete lack of anything remotely resembling “stockpiles” of WMD. So, I guess no. It’s been the big, stupid boondoggle/clusterfuck all the terr’ist-sympathizin’ peaceniks predicted it would be. Turns out we’ll be right about torture and warrantless surveillance, too. Reality has a liberal bias.

[photo via Dept. of Defense]

Petraeus, Pentagon directly connected to Iraqi torture centers

The Guardian:

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq, that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele, then 58, was a retired special forces veteran nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, according to an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the membership of the Special police commandos was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups like the Badr brigades.

A second special advisor, retired Colonel James H Coffman (now 59) worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding. Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq between 2003 - 2005, and kept returning to the country through 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations made by both American and Iraqis witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, for the first time implicates US advisors in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that General David Petraeus - who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal - has been linked through an advisor to this abuse. Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”

»READ MORE»

[photo via gregwest98]

Rush to invade Iraq fueled to large degree by congressional ignorance

Raw Story:

On Monday night, Rachel Maddow presented “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” a documentary about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, one of the biggest military blunders in U.S. history. In one segment, she reported that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who were charged with determining whether or not the country should go to war, never read the pertinent briefs before giving then-President George W. Bush the go-ahead to launch the Iraq War.

The segment began in September of 2002, when Congress returned from its summer recess. Bush administration officials were lobbying heavily for an invasion of Iraq, using a flawed intelligence brief, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which wildly oversold the case for Saddam Hussein having a nuclear and biological weapons program.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, told MSNBC that the main “shop” behind a large amount of slanted, pro-invasion intelligence was the office of Doug Feith, undersecretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, who was key in positing that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that attacked the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.

The NIE on Iraq was prepared by the CIA in less than a month, a rush job that contained many thinly sourced claims, as well as outright distortions of the facts on the ground in Iraq. In intent, it was a barely disguised PR document for the Bush administration, hastily cobbled together by CIA Director George Tenet, who was then all but acting as the administration’s spokesperson.

Even within the NIE, however, there were caveats about the whether Hussein’s weapons programs were still active. Unfortunately, as Michael Isikoff, co-author of the book Hubris, noted, “As far as we can tell, only about a half a dozen Senators actually read it. If they’d done so, they would have seen that it was filled with dissents.”

Of course, for a lot of congress critters, reading it would’ve been a waste of time. They were going to go to war no matter what, facts be damned. One way to get a reputation as a “tough” politician is to cast a vote to send Americans to kill and die. John McCain, for example, has never once in his entire career voted against military action. Think of it as an extension of the “tough on crime” spin.

But those who cast their votes without studying the rationale for signing off on creating a mountain of corpses should not sleep soundly at night.

[image source]

Neocons have learned nothing

Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Dictators always take away all the guns?

source: “Iraqi Public Well-Armed and Wary,” Christian Science Monitor 2003.

Stories to Watch: 10/21/11

Not much going on here lately. Finally got that faucet working right, so that's a plus. Anyway, here's the news...


President Obama says that all US troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year. Unable to control his jerking knee, Mittens Romney seems to argue that troops should remain in Iraq indefinitely, I guess because that argument worked out so well for John McCain.


A quick reminder for Mittens, the Iraq War was really expensive -- both in money and lives -- and, since the pretense for the war was the elimination of nonexistent WMD, it was ultimately pointless. Yeah Mitt, let's keep shoveling money and blood down that stupid hole in the desert.


Much to Republicans' discomfort, dems aren't letting up on keeping the focus on jobs.


Herman Cain digs himself out of a hole he'd dug for himself on abortion. Seems reasonable and pro-choice aren't good positions for GOP candidate to take, so off into Crazytown he goes -- it should be illegal for rape victims to have abortions. It's official; you can't be sane on even one issue and be a "good Republican."


Remember Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor who had an affair with an Argentinian lady? Yeah, he works for Fox now.


Jon Stewart notices that the GOP response to Gaddafi's death is a little dickish.


Finally, more on the GOP's commitment to providing jobs and infrastructure funding for anywhere but America.

Related articles

• Will you remember where you were when you learned the Iraq war was over? (dailykos.com)
• Obama's Iraq announcement fuels debate at home (cnn.com)
• Disgraced Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford Heads to Fox News - TheWrap (news.google.com)
• Obama Orders USA Out Of Iraq, Promise Kept (oliverwillis.com)

News Roundup for 6/15/11

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, all-American boob

-Headline of the day-
"Rorhabacher: Iraqis 'Just Aren't Grateful For What We've Done.'"

Danged ingrates. We make up a story to justify blowing the living shit out of their country, kill countless people, and what thanks do we get? Zip. It's an outrage, I tells ya...

See, all Rep. Dana Rohrabacher wanted from Iraqis was a little recognition -- and a whole lot of dough. We've been blowing up the place for eight years now and Dana wanted to know when Iraqis were going to pay us back for all the ammo and rebuilding and stuff.

So he went to Iraq to ask the Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki just that; when are you guys gonna fork over for all we've done for you?

Well, you'd think that Rohrabacher had said something insane, from the way they acted. They told him and a bunch of other Republican congress critters to get the fuck out. No, really. They threw them out of the country -- which we won in a war fair and square.

"We spent a trillion dollars trying to free those people from the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and help them build a more democratic society," he said. "Yet now it seems there is no gratitude on the part of the people who now are in charge of the Iraqi government... They just aren't grateful for what we've done... American people gave their lives, their children, and we expended billions of dollars, which now we're -- is hurting our economy." Here we are throwing lives and money and bullets at this country and what do we get out of the deal? Nothin'.

It's almost as if the whole thing was a big waste of time and money and lives, just like all those hippies said it would be at the beginning.

Damned reality. (ThinkProgress, with video)


-It's just a game...-
A true-life tale of the greatest existential crisis imaginable.


We are a cruel people... (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)


-Bonus HotD-
"Al Gore praises Romney on climate."

And thus was Mittens doomed. (Politico)

News Roundup for 2/3/11

Sen. John McCain

-Headline of the day-
"McCain Calls Middle East Pro-Democracy Movement A 'Virus'."

Remember how, when we invaded Iraq, democracy was supposed to bust out all over in the middle east -- and that was a good thing?

Well guess what: democracy is busting out all over in the middle east -- and that's a bad thing!

See, it works like this; these democracy movements have jack squat to do with Iraq, so that makes them automatically bad. Because they're gonna hate Israel. See, if democracy movements were born because of Iraq, then those movements would automatically love Israel.

Why? Just because, OK? When we bomb someone into democracy, that's like a vaccine. But when it breaks out all on its lonesome, then it's a virus.

Although, now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that's how the British once felt about things -- say, two hundred and some years ago. (ThinkProgress, with video)


-Totally gratuitous graphic...-
...because I'm still wiped from dealing with ALL THAT SNOW!!



Totally worth it though, am I right? (Daily What)


-Bonus HotD-
"NATIONAL ENQUIRER SHOCKER: Enquirer Thinks Boehner Is 'Handsome'."

Also, that he's been banging a lobbyist and a "pretty congressional press secretary." (Wonkette)

The Moment Operation Iraqi Freedom Ended

A story I'm unwilling to let go overlooked by this blog.

That's it folks, Operation Iraqi Freedom has officially gone out of business. Peace out, y'all.

Robert Byrd, the Lone Voice of Reason

Sen. Robert Byrd, March 19, 2003 -- "I weep for my country":

Greg Sargent:

Putting aside the problematic aspects of Robert Byrd's legacy, many are properly focusing on the strong and compelling case he made against the Iraq War and against Bush's rough handling of the Constitution.

But what's important about this aspect of Byrd's legacy is not just what he said, but when he said it. His stance against the Iraq War came at a time when many other Democrats, cowed by Bush's swaggering popularity, were too meek and frightened to say the same thing -- even though they undoubtedly agreed with the late Senator.

Byrd's stand against the Iraq invasion is not just a testament to his own courage. It's also a testament to the cowardice of other members of his party at an absolutely critical moment -- an epic cave that may have altered the course of history and should never be forgotten.

I'd add that this is why the right hated Byrd and why you won't find an obit in the rightwing blogosphere today that doesn't mention his one-time association with the KKK. If the right gave a damn about racism, they'd attack the unrepentant racists in their own party and give the repentant a break. And Byrd was repentant -- he endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency.

No, Senator Robert Byrd stood up to Bush when no one else would and that's why the right won't forgive him. Never mind that Byrd turned out to be correct, it's a matter of grudge-holding -- the right never lets go of anything and, if you were declared evil once by rightwing talk radio, you are evil forever. Long after the propaganda value of that hate as faded, the hate itself remains. Because that's just what they do.

R.I.P., Senator Robert Byrd, whose unforgivable crime was in being one of the few people in congress with the courage to be right.

Cucolo Backs Off Court Martial Threat

After getting flack for threatening to court martial military women who get pregnant in northern Iraq (and the men who do the impregnating), Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo is backpedaling.

ABC News:

An Army general in Iraq backed away from his threat today to court martial female soldiers who get pregnant.

"I see absolutely no circumstance where I would punish a female soldier by court martial for a violation ... none," Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo III wrote to ABC News in an exclusive statement. " I fully intend to handle these cases through lesser disciplinary action."

Cucolo triggered debate, some of it angry, when his Nov. 4 policy forbidding pregnancy among his soldiers became public recently. His policy statement said violation of the rule could be punishable by court martial, and that it would also apply to the men who get female soldiers pregnant, even if the couple is married.

While legal and military experts said the order was proper, a spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women called it "ridiculous."

That the quote comes from a feminist organization says a lot. As I wrote this morning, the anti-abortion types have been silent on this, despite the fact that it so obviously encourages abortion.

If you're against abortion and this rule bothered you, consider that NOW did more to mitigate this than any "pro-life" group out there.

Griper Blade: 'The Only Solution Given is Pills'

The Army has a bit of a problem. Despite efforts to curb suicide among troops, Army suicides continue to rise. "One week after the U.S. Army announced record suicide rates among its soldiers last year, the service is worried about a spike in possible suicides in the new year," CNN reported yesterday. "The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.

"If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January."

In fact, the Army has seen a rise in suicide every year for the past four years. To combat the problem, the service has created a "battle-buddy" program, which is basically the buddy system for suicide, but this has turned out to be as ineffective as you might have thought it would be.

In 2005, in testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee, the Army’s surgeon general placed the blame squarely on the troops. "That’s still part of our culture: Real men don’t see [mental health counselors]…" said Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley. "I would like to see a culture that resets the force mentally." Macho, tough guy culture was killing troops, but it seems a pretty safe assumption that this culture had been with the Army longer than its suicide problem. I don't remember the Army having a previous reputation as being a place for sharing and emotional support. Clearly, this "real men" culture -- which, of course, includes real women -- may be aggravating the problem, but it couldn't possibly be the cause.

For their part, the Army seems at a loss to explain the real cause of the suicides. "This is terrifying," Col. Kathy Platoni, chief clinical psychologist for the Army Reserve and National Guard told CNN. "We do not know what is going on." She speculated that maybe it was winter blahs.

"There is more hopelessness and helplessness because everything is so dreary and cold," she said.

"But Platoni said she sees the multiple deployments, stigma associated with seeking treatment and the excessive use of anti-depressants as ongoing concerns for mental-health professionals who work with soldiers," CNN reported.

Now we're getting someplace... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Republicans, Iraq, and Santa Claus

A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., on the $888 billion economic stimulus package.

Wicker's statement represents the Republican view of the stimulus package. Sadly for him, he's typical of a GOP senator; how he feels about spending depends entirely on which party is doing it. Like most of the remaining Republicans in the Senate, Wicker voted with Bush every time a bill dealing with the occupation of Iraq came up.

$1,000,000,000,000 may be a terrible thing to waste, but $3,000,000,000,000 is just fine. That three trillion dollar price tag is what the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have cost us before we're done -- and that's the conservative figure. Talk about your shovel-ready projects -- we've been shoveling money down a hole in Iraq, while Republicans in Washington shoveled BS on the American people. The difference here is that all that money does nothing for the US, let alone Iraq. It's just a big money-pile we've lit on fire. If it's changed American and Iraqi lives at all, it's changed them for the worse.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Jim DeMint debated the merits of the stimulus, with DeMint arguing in favor of tax cuts. Because eight years of tax cuts have been so good for the economy. To listen to DeMint, the stimulus is spending money to spend money... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Firing Blackwater USA

A few days ago, Blackwater USA CEO Erik Prince wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. The gist of it is that the mercenary corporation is absolutely wonderful and we should just go ahead and ignore the fact that five guards were charged in an atrocity that left 17 unarmed Iraqis dead and involved a rocket-propelled grenade fired into a girls' school. These guys face a possible 47 years in prison for crimes ranging from weapons charges to voluntary manslaughter.

We're told Blackwater employees are "putting their lives at risk each day to protect U.S. Department of State officials and other civilians working in the country. Yet somehow that role and the part they play in this war have been grossly misunderstood." Unfortunately, Prince doesn't really explain why Blackwater is protecting that diplomatic corps. And no one else can either. Before the Bush administration, State Department employees were guarded by US Marines and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security -- an agency similar to the Secret Service. After Bush, Marines and federal cops were somehow not good enough anymore -- we had to hire rent-a-cops with machine guns. But it's the Bush administration, it doesn't have to make any sense. It just is. The fact that Prince and his family were significant donors to the Republican party and Bush's campaigns probably had nothing at all to do with it. Replacing US Marines with Blackwater employees was absolutely necessary because... Well, just because. Remember, if there's any possible way to privatize something, then Bushies go ahead and privatize it. The idea that government is hopelessly incompetent and wasteful extends even to the US Marine Corps. Way to support the troops, George.

But it turns out that Prince realized he had a bit of a public relations problem on his hand. Blackwater employees -- who have been regularly described as "thugs" -- didn't have the shiniest public reputation and that rep needed a little buffing. "What he says is less important that the fact that he's saying it at all," wrote Daniel Schuman for Mother Jones. Erik Prince, normally willing to shut up and let the Bush administration to all the Blackwater apologism, was forced to make his own case. Bush administration officials weren't rushing to the company's defense... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Those Ungrateful Iraqis

It may turn out to be one of the most lasting images of the Bush presidency. The leader of the free world ducks as an angry journalist throws a shoe at him. President Bush was in Iraq to sign an agreement that would require -- by Iraqi and international law -- that occupying US forces withdraw. Shoes were thrown, things went haywire, and we had the Iraq war in miniature -- a nearly perfect metaphor for the whole thing. While Bush was talking about how wonderful things are in Iraq, Iraqis hate him for how awful things are in Iraq. Telling that lie here, where we're protected from the truth by a play-along media, is one thing. Telling that lie there, where they live with the truth every day, is another thing entirely.

Middle east expert Juan Cole tells us that the shoe-thrower, Muntazir al-Zaidi, was reacting to the things he had witnessed in his country, calling out, "Killer of Iraqis, killer of children!" as the guards took him down.

[Zaidi] had covered the US bombing of Sadr City last spring, in support of PM Nuri al-Maliki's incursion into this stronghold of the Sadr Movement and its Mahdi Army, and is said to have been emotionally affected by the sight of that destruction

The frequent US bombing of civilian Iraqi cities that are already under US military occupation has been one of the most under-reported stories of the Iraq War.

Raining death from above tends to make people angry, I guess. As an American, I wouldn't know -- that's just something that happens in other places. Places we invade. It's the sort of thing that we do to other countries, so I wouldn't have any idea what it feels like, what it looks like, what it smells like, or how it the memories wake you up in a cold sweat. Never having been on the receiving end of aerial bombings, I'm not in a position to know these sort of things. Living within the empire has its privileges... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Shinseki the Realist

I would say that what's been mobilized to this point -- something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about posthostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence.
-General Eric Shinseki to Sen. Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the size of the force required to invade Iraq, 2003.

That got Shinseki fired. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long argued that the US needed to use a lighter force, with the emphasis on speed, and that anything else was fighting a 21st century war from a cold war mindset. Needless to say, Shinseki was right. Rumsfeld's strategy was shortsighted and simpleminded. When we invaded Iraq, our forces were too few to defend gains. We'd chase fighters off, declare victory, then roll of in a triumphant cloud of dust. Then the fighters would return and we'd be gone. This boneheaded "strategy" of Rumsfeld's had entirely predictable results. We'd chase off Iraqi guards from munitions stores, roll off in our big American cloud, and leave these ammo dumps completely unguarded, because we didn't have enough personnel to leave behind. Munitions captured by militias and terrorists are probably still being used as IEDs to this day. Donald Rumsfeld's brilliant plan for a light, fast fighting force was just as idiotic as it seemed to be.

But before all that happened, before Shinseki was proven right, the general was forced into retirement for not buying the neocon line. Rumsfeld said Shinseki's estimate in senate testimony "will prove to be high." Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz said his numbers were "way off the mark."

It wasn't until 2006 that anyone admitted that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had bet on the wrong horse. "General Shinseki was right," Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told that same committee three years later. Bush's "surge," while coming too late to correct the neocon vision for the military of the future, was basically an admission -- three years after the fact -- that Shinseki was right and the Rumsfeldian's side of the argument was as wrong as any ten year-old could've told them they were. As a result, Bush wound up claiming success for his surge, although the decrease in violence was due more to successful ethnic cleansing campaigns by militias and insurgents that might have been avoided. Violence had died down not because of an increased military presence, but because the killers had run out of people to kill. Rumsfeld's brilliant new strategy not only cost him his own job, but also countless lives. Entire neighborhoods went dark, the residents either dead or refugees...

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Griper Blade: KBR, a Typical Privatization Story

Today, our service men and women continue to inspire and strengthen our Nation, going above and beyond the call of duty as part of the greatest military the world has ever known. Americans are grateful to all those who have put on our Nation's uniform and to their families, and we will always remember their service and sacrifice for our freedoms.
- George W. Bush, Prayer for Peace, Memorial Day, 2008

There's "above and beyond" and then there's "above and way beyond." Bush, in his "prayer for peace," neglects to tell us just what America's fighting forces are expected to face. We know about the nuts with guns and RPG rounds. We know about the roadside bombs and sectarian violence. We even know about the heat. What we don't get a lot of coverage of is how they're expected to live. Turns out, that's a really big story. And, despite having broken yesterday, it's still not getting a lot of press.

Military Times:

A Georgia man has filed a lawsuit against contractor KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton, saying the companies exposed everyone at Joint Base Balad in Iraq to unsafe water, food and hazardous fumes from the burn pit there.

Joshua Eller, who worked as a civilian computer-aided drafting technician with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, said military personnel, contractors and third-country nationals may have been sickened by contamination at the largest U.S. installation in Iraq, home to more than 30,000 service members, Defense Department civilians and contractors.

“Defendants promised the United States government that they would supply safe water for hygienic and recreational uses, safe food supplies and properly operate base incinerators to dispose of medical waste safely,” according to the lawsuit, filed Nov. 26 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “Defendants utterly failed to perform their promised duties.”

The details are horrific.We're told about suffering from "skin lesions that subsequently spread, filled with fluid and burst," about "vomiting, cramping and diarrhea," about "severe abdominal pain." Worse, the lawsuit tells the story of "a wild dog running around base with a human arm in its mouth. The human arm had been dumped on the open air burn pit by KBR."

KBR also reused ice from mortuary trucks. Troops were served ice that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them..." That's above and beyond the call of duty. That's way beyond anything that should be expected of anyone...

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Griper Blade: The Price Tag

There's a popular myth out there that jobs and wealth are created by businesses. This isn't true. Jobs and wealth are created by demand. I could open a business selling something for which there is zero demand and all the people I hired would be out of work again as soon as I went under. Consumers create jobs and wealth, not suppliers. It always gets me when people talk about business owners and CEOs as "job creators" -- they're not.

Likewise, Wall Street doesn't create wealth. Wall Street trades on wealth. Wealth comes from the creation of objects for which there is a demand. These objects can be solid and tangible, like a boat or a hamburger, or they can be more conceptual, like a newspaper column or a novel. But it has to be a noun. Value is added to things that already exist by labor. The dead cow becomes the hamburger, the blank page becomes the novel. No one pays money for something they could easily find lying around. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

In the bailout debate, we're left arguing over whether the product of labor is worth more than the business of capital. Granted, the auto industry has pulled a lot of boneheaded maneuvers, but the fact is that the root of their problem is identical to the banking industry's problem -- a credit crunch. Car sales are just as dependent on loans as Wall Street. When it's hard to get a loan, it's hard to buy a car...

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Griper Blade: The Exit Interview

Some have called it the "exit interview." President Bush sat down with ABC News' Charles Gibson for an interview, to be broadcast during the nightly news. A few moments are getting all the coverage and they probably should. Bush continues to live in a world all his own, completely isolated from the facts and reality. Still, there are cracks in the bubble and reality seeps in in small quantities. Asked by Gibson, "Was the election in any way a repudiation of the Bush administration?" Bush answered:

I think it was a repudiation of Republicans. And I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me. I think most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy. In other words, they made a conscious choice to put him in as President.

I like that last sentence. That ought to kill all that speculation that we elected Barack Obama by accident. We made a conscious choice. Good to know. You ever notice how Bush will say something obvious, then say "in other words" and say something just as obvious? Sometimes the "other words" aren't even other words, just the same words in a different order and in a different tense. It's like he's thinking he's got to say more, so he pads his word count. In other words, he's padding his word count because he thinks he needs to use more words...

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Griper Blade: The Terrorist Candidate

During the election campaign, it definitely got out of hand. Losing and desperate, the McCain campaign tried to capitalize on Barack Obama's weak connection to '60s radical William Ayers. That people confused this attack with a separate email smear campaign saying that Obama was a Muslim and, perhaps, a terrorist himself was probably less than coincidental. Barack Obama was the "soft on terrorism" candidate, which in turn became the "terrorist candidate" in many people's minds. The far right and the racist crowd aren't known for their deep intellect. I know that most people immediately suspect claims that are too good to be true, but I'll never understand how people can fall for claims that seem too bad to be true. If a claim about a candidate is so bizarre that it seems absurd, then guess what? It probably is.

Still, as I said, there are always plenty of dopes who'll fall for anything and it's probably safe to assume that most of those people voted McCain-Palin. But the McCain campaign needed every vote they could get and they weren't extremely picky about where they came from. If someone would cast a ballot for McCain-Palin because they were terrified that Barack Obama was going to sell out America to al Qaeda, then so what? A vote's a vote.

But they were playing with fire. Stupid people can be brutal people and gullible people are about 90% stupid people. The decision to believe that Barack Obama was an actual, honest to goodness terrorist betrays a bad decision-making impulse that goes farther than just that one choice. That decision led to other decisions and those decisions were just as idiotic. Earlier this month, the Telegraph reported that, as the William Ayers talk increased on the stump, there were entirely predictable consequences.

Sarah Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president, Secret Service agents revealed during the final weeks of the campaign.

The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

It got so bad that Michelle Obama asked a campaign aide, "Why would they try to make people hate us?"...

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