Bush Whisperer

This now-famous photo is just one of the many showcased on this photographic review of the Bush presidency. Tip of the hat to Boing Boing.

Harper's Index: the Bush Years

Harper's Magazine has an index at the front of eash monthly issue with stats about the world around us -- here's Harper's Index for the Bush years, including these outstanding selections:

Number of members of the rock band Anthrax who said they hoarded Cipro so as to avoid an “ironic death”: 1

Total amount the Bush campaign paid Enron and Halliburton for use of corporate jets during the 2000 recount: $15,400

Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069

Minimum number of close-up photographs of Bush’s hands owned by his current chief of staff, Josh Bolten: 4

Minimum amount that religious groups received in congressional earmarks from 2003 to 2006: $209,000,000

Amount such groups received during the previous fourteen years: $107,000,000

Percentage of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that are violated by the USA PATRIOT Act, according to the ACLU: 50

Average percentage of Americans who approved of the job Bush was doing during his second term: 37

Percentage of Russians today who approve of the direction their country took under Stalin: 37

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Enough already.

I've had enough of guys like Bush and McCain...



But I'm not yet done enjoying this sort of thing: a faux trailer for a Disney-esque movie about Sarah Palin.

Bush Reassures No One

“He'd offer you an egg if you promised not to break the shell.”
Irish Proverb

Wall Street in Worst Loss Since 2001
Officials Try to Stem Crisis — Fed Will Meet Tuesday
By STEPHEN LABATON
Despite reassurances by the Bush administration, stocks fell 4.4 percent on Monday, dragged by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch.

The above is the headline from the online version of The New York Times this evening. What caught my eye were the first six words. Who would ever be reassured by Bush? His word and the word from anyone still employed by the administration is worth less than nothing. They have a track record from WMDs to Katrina of promising the world and delivering nothing.

The Embarrassor in Chief

The United States has got some of the dumbest people in the world. I want you to know that we know that.
Ted Turner, businessman

President Bush is once again out embarrassing the country:

According to a story from the Associated press:

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, he said: "Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit," Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Bush quickly corrected himself. "APEC summit," he said, joking that Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year (for the record, an impossibility, since neither Australia nor the U.S. are OPEC members).

The president's next goof went uncorrected — by him anyway. Talking about Howard's visit to Iraq last year to thank his country's soldiers serving there, Bush called them "Austrian troops."

That one was fixed for him. Though tapes of the speech clearly show Bush saying "Austrian," the official text released by the White House switched it to "Australian."

Then, speech done, Bush confidently headed out — the wrong way.

He strode away from the lectern on a path that would have sent him over a steep drop. Howard and others redirected the president to center stage, where there were steps leading down to the floor of the theater.

The event had inauspicious beginnings. Bush started 10 minutes late, so that APEC workers could hustle people out of the theater's balcony seating to fill the many empty portions of the main orchestra section below — which is most visible on camera.

Even resettled, the audience remained quiet throughout the president's remarks, applauding only when he was finished.

A logistical glitch added to the woes.

APEC security workers would not allow the members of the media who travel in Bush's motorcade to enter the Opera House along with him. This even though the journalists allowed into the president's entourage are extensively screened and guarded by the Secret Service, which has more stringent security standards than about any operation in the world. And even though they always accompany him into public events.


It would be so nice if the the betterment of the country he would leave early and take Dick Cheney with him.

"...So Help Me God" God Help Us

“...Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”
Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826) U.S. President

Is President Bush snorting drugs and drinking again? It sure sounds like it in his defense of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

He praised Gonzales as “a man of integrity, decency and principle” and complained of the “months of unfair treatment” that preceded the resignation.

Unfair? Here is the man almost single handedly responsible for rendering obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.

“It’s sad,” Mr. Bush said, asserting that Mr. Gonzales’s name had been “dragged through the mud for political reasons.”

Sad? It’s sad that he told an astonished Arlen Specter during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January that habeas corpus rights are not guaranteed under the Constitution.

It is more like criminal as when it was revealed that while he was White House counsel, he tried to press a hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft to approve illegal domestic spying.

From Frank Rich at the New York Times:

By my rough, conservative calculation -- feel free to add -- there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously -- an all-time record.

Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That's the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it.

Bring back sex in the Oval Office, please

Trying the Pope's Patience

There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), playwright

Right-wing nut jobs make me crazy. This is dedicated to you, who don't understand the mess this administration has created. One moron left a comment under "Presidents Say the Darnest Things," and another doesn't believe in free speech (which is why I suppose they are okay with the government spying on its citizens), so he deleted my comment.

In Other Words

Sometimes I think words are like girlfriends—can't find a good one to save your life when you're actually looking, but when you don't need any they're falling out of the goddamned trees!
Jay McInerney, author, from "Brightness Falls"




Thanks to Anything They Say (see link to your right).

White-Haired Guy Gets Mad

Read George Will's Newsweek column from this week's issue. Excerpt:

Contrary to the Constitution's mandate that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed," the current president, much more than any other, has issued "signing statements"—essentially, line-item vetoes, which are unconstitutional—to tell the executive branch that some provisions of bills he signs into law need not be enforced for constitutional or policy reasons. As [Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe] writes, "If a president has the power to instruct the government not to enforce laws that he alone has declared to be unconstitutional, then he could free himself from the need to obey laws that restrict his own actions."

Don’t do it George W. Bush, don’t do it.

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), essayist

At some point today the prince of darkness, no not knuckle head columnist Robert Novak, but the real thing, Dick Cheney is going to assume the powers of the President of the United States! President Bush will have a colonoscopy Saturday and temporarily hand presidential powers to Cheney.

The doctors are going to do to Bush with their medical instruments, what he has been doing the American people and the world with his policies.

With Cheney at the controls, I wonder if he will completely pardon Libby Lewis. If he does, I am sure we’ll be the last to know.

Mission Accomplished

Has Bush ruined the phrase "mission accomplished"? I heard it used the other day in a radio commercial -- some guy referring to his do-it-yourself carpentry project or something like that -- and my first thought was, "are they intentionally referencing Bush? Was this written by liberals? Is 'mission accomplished' now used only sarcastically?"

Your thoughts? Have we lost the ability to use this phrase now?

Only One Little Drop for Mankind

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), playwright

It was only one little bird dropping, but it was one symbolic leap for how all mankind feels.

It's too bad it wasn't an enormous condor to further bury him in his magnificent desolation.

Bush Didn't Say It,But It Sure Sounds Like Him

You can't spell "soldier" without "die."
So quit whining and get back to Iraq.

[Click here to get a peek at the back, too.]

And I hope it goes without saying that Toner Mishap proudly supports our troops, and their right to life.

Bush in Brazil

Someone has some great photos of the anti-Bush protests in Brazil from this past week. Thanks, BoingBoing for letting us know about it! (Caution: some may be NSFW.)