Not so fond memories from the Bush era

From the NY Times: George H. W. Bush fishing with George W. and Jeb,in 1998. 

  Credit George Bush Presidential Library, via Reuters.

I don't often link to a column by Maureen Dowd - her acid tongue usually attacks responsible political leaders as often as it does those like the two sons of H.W. Bush; you know who I mean: George W. and Jeb. So it is that I'm linking this  morning to Modo's entertaining NY Times piece, Poppy Bush finally gives Junior a spanking. Go ahead and read it; there are some worthy insights into the Bush era, especially the war-crazy neocon influence:

WESTEROS — I VISITED HBO’s “Game of Thrones” set in Belfast last week, and after watching Daenerys Targaryen in firelight for a couple hours, I learned how to say “I have to go to the bathroom” in Dothraki.

I’ll never be fluent in that martial language. But I am fluent in mangled Bush-speak.

So I must pull myself away from the Iron Throne and return to the Iron Ass, trading one serpentine family tangle for another. I am here, my puzzled readers, to help interpret the latest Oedipal somersaults of our royally messed up Republican royal family.

Like many uptight, upper-class families, the Bushes seem oddly unable to directly confront tensions and resentments and talk to each other candidly. With other families, the unsaid and circuitous end up rupturing relationships. In the case of the Bushes, it ended up rupturing the globe.

Like Queen Cersei, old King George knows that revenge is a dish that doesn’t lose its flavor when served cold. After more than a decade of publicly keeping his lips zipped, Poppy Bush took his full measure of payback in Jon Meacham’s new biography, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.”

While W. used to say that what he liked about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld was their brass appendages, Poppy offered a dimmer anatomical appraisal, calling each an “iron-ass.”

Read More:

Obama’s big boy pants

disquietreservations.blogspot.com.

Winner of the Nobel peace prize for his good intentions, our president is fast achieving the kind of notoriety that Dubya momentarily commanded with his “mission accomplished” swagger. 

Neocons praise Obama for putting on his big boy pants the first time he made a secret kill list and checked it twice before unleashing Predator drones programmed in the name of anti-terrorism to unleash acts of terror against other nations

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf urges Congress to wake up to Obama’s dramatic expansion of executive power, which, of course, includes the right to maintain the above secret kill lists:

Even the Obama Administration agrees that the lethal drone program it runs permits the executive branch to kill too easily. Its officials felt it urgent to codify various constraints when they thought Mitt Romney might win the election, The New York Times recently reported, quoting one official who said, "There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands."

The story went on to report that the efforts are less urgent now that President Obama has won reelection (as if he alone is trustworthy enough to extrajudicially kill all willy-nilly, or to delegate that power to unerring paragons of good judgment like retired CIA Director David Petraeus). Still, the effort goes on with as much transparency as you'd expect: "The draft rule book for drone strikes that has been passed among agencies over the last several months is so highly classified, officials said, that it is hand-carried from office to office rather than sent by e-mail."

So consider this.

The Obama Administration thinks that on the president's authority it can adopt secret rules to a secret killing program, and that the rules will bind future presidents to Obama's notions of prudence?

That isn't how it works. Some David Addington/Harold Koh type could write up a memo demolishing any prudent safeguard the next president found hobbling in no more than a week or two.

Read more:

Take your pick: a diplomatic response to the Egyptian crisis or another neocon shock and awe adventure to overthrow the regime of a sovereign nation?

A US soldier watches as a statue of Saddam Hussein falls in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

Neocons as romanticists? You’d think that was the case in reading David Brooks’ interpretation of the Obama Administration’s response to the Egyptian crisis in which the erudite, comparatively moderate Republican columnist at the NY Times takes a swipe at both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (See No Quarter’s Larry Johnson for more about the neocons’ “trying to light the fires of democracy in Egypt.”)

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic offers a more thoughtful, in-depth analysis of how Washington has responded to the unfolding revolt in Egypt. Ambinder clearly points out the difference between an Administration benefiting from the expertise of a cadre of seasoned diplomats and taking well-considered steps rather than following the advice of neocons to rush blindly into the turmoil erupting on the soil of another sovereign nation.

Ambinder writes:

After Tunisia, the intelligence community, the diplomatic community and the White House all anticipated that protests would spread. The sheer number of calls the State Department was fielding from other governments was a clue: lots of mid-level diplomats in the Mideast wanted to know what their counterparts at State were hearing and seeing.

What they were seeing was "a sort of contagious element," a senior administration official said. (Like others, the official offered a candid assessment on the condition of anonymity because events were still unfolding.) "By Thursday night we were warning journalists and our allies that we anticipated that Friday would be a tough day ... and that there would be some stark images."

Egypt was simply the most logical candidate for unrest. Protests of some sort erupted in the country fairly regularly. Anger at President Hosni Mubarak for breaking his promise to lift the country's decades-old emergency law was acute. A food shortage was in the offing. The government wasn't able to distribute coupons for bread that many smaller vendors relied upon. Mubarak had long ago lost the formal support of the Egyptian Army, who, the U.S. was fairly certain, would never take up arms against the people.

On Monday, January 24 and Tuesday January 25, the White House watched the first wave of mass protests in Cairo. Ironically, there was little about the internal political debate inside the country that the U.S. was not privy to, a consequence of its close military relationship with the Egyptian Army and Air Force, which had kept informal tabs on the government for Americans.

Most Egyptian military officials of consequence were in the U.S for an annual training exercise assessment last week, as were several of the country's intelligence officials. The early briefings were basic. Outside of the National Security staff and State Department desk officials, the knowledge about Egypt's political structure was thin. A number of White House officials were given an Encyclopedia Britannica-like briefing about the basics: how many U.S. citizens were inside the country and contingency plans to get them out; reminders that Egypt wasn't a Muslim country; Hosni Mubarak was a Coptic Christian of a certain sect; the Muslim Brotherhood was at once an opposition political party and a co-opted part of the social system. The government encouraged its charities and even accepted its recommendations for cultural censorship while treating its political platform as anathema.

Read the entire article:

Neocon Bill Kristol Thanks Obama!

P
Photo credits: Reuters

Kristol's subtext: “Americans.are.ready.for.a.likable.regular.American.guy.”

Bill Kristol, a neocon from the Weekly Standard, began his career as an op-ed columnist for the New York Times with a salute to Barrack Obama, subject of several earlier fawning columns by David Brooks (NY Times, here and here), Andrew Sullivan (Atlantic), and Karl Rove (Newsweek).

I have to admit, though, Kristol was far more upfront about his motives than the other members of Obama’s neocon fan club were in their clever treatises.

Here’s Kristol’s lead paragraph:

“Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.”

But after acknowledging that gratitude only goes so far, Kristol continues:

“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.”

Kristol meanders his way to the conclusion that “After the last two elections, featuring the well-born George Bush and Al Gore and John Kerry, Americans — even Republicans! — are ready for a likable regular guy.”

Just in case it didn’t sink in, the worthy right-wing Mr. Kristol said: “Americans.are.ready.for.a.likable.regular.guy.” That is to say, Americans are not yet ready for the most qualified candidate running, who just happens to be a woman, Sen. Hillary Clinton.

In conclusion, envisioning a general election face-off between Huckabee and Obama, Kristol offered this reminder to his Times readers: “the fact is that the Republican establishment spent 2007 underestimating Mike Huckabee. If Huckabee does win the nomination, it would be amusing if Democrats made the same mistake in 2008.”

If you wish to read Kristol’s complete inaugural column at the NY Times, go here.