Sandra Day O'Connor, 1930-1923

 

To the surprise of the conservative president who appointed her, the conservative first female Supreme Court Justice kept Roe v. Wade on the books. But on the other hand, try as I might to come up with something different regarding her being a trailblazer, I kept coming back to the Bush v. Gore decision. 

She wanted to retire and wanted a Republican to replace her. George W. Bush replaced her with Sam Alito. 

And Roe v. Wade was eventually undone. 

So?

I can't expect someone to have the foresight to realize that the dominoes lined up like that. On the other hand, it was still some kind of selfish decision on her part, and from the 2000 decision, a lot of nastiness flowed. 

So I'm still mad. And I'm not over it. 

We Felt Our Mortality

 

We are a young country, the US, in some ways, and ride on the idea of our strength and sense of purpose as a leader among nations. The first country among equals (except we're not) as one might say "primus inter pares." The memorial logos, the sigils, the swag, often just show the World Trade Towers themselves, draped in flag-wrap. The buildings were not the tragedy--the loss of lives was.  We lost great people that day. We lost parents and children, leaders and caregivers, sinners and saints. All kinds of people. Office workers, police, firefighters, medics. 

But the pictures of the victims themselves is too haunting: and yet we see them, forever in our minds. And they get reposted on social media. 

We are losing them even today--people who inhaled too much of whatever makes buildings and are dying too young of what they breathed in. We are losing them even now, people who were there or their loved one was there and now it's 22 years out, and we lose people all the time. The narrative memory of what happened will fade. Except in what has been committed to print, video, etc.--but that memory is always a little short. 

Tragedies amortize. Tragedies fade. We said "Never again" but we don't step into the same river twice, or face the same sort of history as Memorex: just an echo. 

Twenty Years Ago, the US Invaded Iraq

 

Saddam Hussein was no hero and his statue rightfully was toppled ending an anti-democratic regime so many years ago, but the invasion 20 years ago was a war of choice and the US often blows off our dumbest choices, refusing to understand the how and why of our clearest fuckups. But our basis for war then was thin.  The US made choices during that war that impacted the country very negatively, and the US failed to understand why or how until it was too late. The cost was high. 

To me, the worst thing about it was the war of choice also lead to horrible choices at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere--the dehumanization of populations, the broken faith that we were supposed to be the good guys. That even now, we have a potential US Presidential candidate who sanctioned rectal feedings at Gitmo should appall us. He rose up in the GOP bestride a very horrific steed--the willingness to not just follow a multitude to do evil, but to lead a pack. Iraq was a proving ground of what was the worst in us. Our attempts to manage the government of Iraq by crisis, to use their tragedy to make bank should be taught in every classroom. It won't be, but it should. 

I'll Allow It!

 

Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 19, 2022

Yep. He said it. It's Freudian. We know. He knows. It still isn't enough. But anyway...

(Just to add, he once looked into Putin's soul. And he didn't see then what we all can see, now.)

Gaslighting and Gas Prices

 

The above screenshot from Twitter (because I don't think his account is liable to stay up forever as this situation progresses) shows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the following statement: "The goal of Russia's special military operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukraine territory or that could start from there. "

Great shades of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The kids who don't remember the Cold War might not know that one, as well, but they will probably recognize a few bars of what else the Russian narrative is trying to lay down--the potential of a dirty bomb made in Ukraine (if I knew that was coming, I'd have baked you all a yellow cake) and biowarfare labs (but were they dangerously on wheels, I wonder?).  There's even a laptop! (Is it Hunter Biden, secret Burisma NATO undercover spy's laptop? inquiring minds might indeed venture to ask at this idiotic point in time.)

It almost feels like the laziness of the Russian disinfo spree is to throw the US's own war lies back in our face, as if to say, well, why can't we do it as well? To me, it makes no difference. I was as opposed in 2003 to stupid big countries laying waste to smaller countries who didn't deserve it, so they aren't fucking me up, any.  And actually, I kind of did want the Bush Administration to get their feet held to the fire and still do, because of torture and indiscriminate killing of civilians and use of mercs like Blackwater and all that. I still do.

I was a baby during Vietnam and I still feel some kind of way about it. My father's working class neighborhood all went and a lot them had health issues including mental health issues from that. They drank, they got cancer, they lived recklessly sometimes and my dad doesn't have a lot of friends still alive in his early 70's. One of my mom's brothers went and he was a bad alcoholic and died in his 60s and I don't think those things weren't unconnected. I don't like stupid wars. They kill human beings, sometimes for a long time after we are still counting the death toll of them. 

Anyway, it isn't about NATO and it wasn't about WMDs and it isn't about preventing a war because honey, if this isn't a war I don't know what one looks like, and it had nothing to do with denazification because these assholes sent an actual neo-Nazi group into Ukraine. Probably to kill their Jewish president. 

It might make more sense for Putin to activate his deep-rooted sense of imperialism because Ukraine's pipelines exist. I mean, he doesn't have any use for the people. But just like the Iraq/Kuwait issue, there are other equities to consider? 

So with all this disinfo and intentional bullshit in the ether, this obviously one-sided decision to wage actual war by Putin's government and all that, and what are our journalists going to talk about? The gas prices going up like 50 cents over the past week. And isn't that a Biden problem? Let me turn to my bete noir, Sara Carter, for why this is fucking stupid. 

Federal land is already open for drilling, and all the portions of Keystone that bring oil from Canada to the US have already been built (and that oil is low-grade and not even fit for use in fuel anyway.)

Also the U.S. is a net energy exporter.

Learn what you're talking about. https://t.co/YlZvMgDy6R

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) March 7, 2022

She is literally wrong on every point. US oil companies can drill here, drill now, as conservatives have been saying since the Obama Administration, but they would rather price gouge. They are managing a finite and climate-disruptive resource in its end-stage.  Keystone XL isn't the problem. Whether we sanctioned Nordstream wasn't the Russian problem. Our addiction to fossil fuels on a dying planet and our love of money over human lives is. 

I'm getting sick of the gaslighting. I'm sick of the gaslit foo dogs of war. When you talk about scarcity--talk about renewables and why it didn't have to be this way. When you talk about Putin's invasion and war against Ukraine, talk about how it probably boils down to greed and backfired because Putin and his kleptocrat state never bothered to adapt to the 21st century, but we all have to. 

Every part of this debacle is everything I hate. Lies, greed, death and massive human stupidity. 

Our Better Angels and Our Greater Devils

 Colin Powell knew that the UN speech he gave to lay out the case for war against Iraq on the sketchy basis of their weapons program would haunt him to the end. He was an intelligent man capable of great insight and scrupulous honesty. That's what makes his fault a bit worse: how does an adult, experienced leader go and peddle half truths (and unsubstantiated nonsense) to set the stage for a ground war that he knew would be brutal, that he warned the Bush Administration about (albeit in terms like "the Pottery Barn" rule, which seems awfully flip in the aftermath, doesn't it?) , as if guilelessly led by "a bad crowd"? 

It's impossible. And yet, he was not the worst of the Bush Administration lot, at all; just at the time, so exceptionally disappointing. And also, I believe in his own way he understood the extent to which his reputation was used to promote a war of choice that was not legitimately reasoned, and I note his later support of Obama and his rejection of Trump--but they were low key. 

Could he have served his country better were he more vocal? See, I don't have responsibility to not be vocal, so I say what I want. His position was as a soldier with a respect for civilian leadership who ceded his reputation to the service of his CINC. Maybe he felt that he served best by offering his opinion, but leaving it to the person selected by 5 members of the Supreme Court elected by the people. Maybe he understood, at least since the time he whitewashed the My Lai massacre, He had a vantage to to a political window of how war history got made. 

I don't believe in hero worship. We're all fragile skin sacks barely containing the drama caused by mutant brains that perceive and personify and signify a lot--a blessing and a curse. Colin Powell was better than a lot of our kind are, and not better than he could have been. He was a trailblazer and the people who know him well liked him a lot, but I have noted how one can smile and be a villain, I've noted how intelligent people can be persuaded to get it all wrong and defend getting it wrong long past when it made sense. 

Our better angels sounded in him, and our greater devils also had their way. This man died at the age of 84, with Parkinson's and multiple myeloma, a cancer that sadly, specifically has implications for the immune system, and he died of "Covid-19 complications", which is more like, "COVID-19 was fatal to Powell because of his immunocompromised state". Which, because he was also fully vaccinated, means anti-vaxxers are using his example to wage their war on science. 

This is sadly typical, and not what he or we deserve, It is only too sadly what our greater devils do with themselves, finding a figure to make their mischief with. Once again, his profile is lent to a bullshit right-wing narrative.

But my sympathies and condolences to those who loved him. One could not regret his fault so much, were there not also so much to redeem. And for those whose care for him predated his Iraq/Bush era error, perhaps redemption was never even in question. But I could not post an elegy without a reckoning--this is just my way. 

(Adding: Notwithstanding, read about something like birth defects in Iraq, and see how you feel about anything at all about the US as a country.)

9/11: Over the Horizon

 

The final act of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 people. Our latest investigation shows how a man the military saw as an "imminent threat" and "ISIS facilitator" was actually an aid worker returning to his family: https://t.co/eUX5WSImrD

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

There just isn't anything more apt to round out our 20 year misadventure in the War on Terror, than by this--a misguided drone strike that showed how far we had come, that we could be wrong from farther away instead of having to be wrong face to face and street by street. 

The memorial of 9/11 has been fraught for some time with me because of the cant and formulaic expressions of remembrance and the truisms that just strike me as false. "We came together that day." Tell it to visibly brown Muslim or Central Asian people who experienced discrimination, and find a kernel of what people came together to be. We needed to be unified to move forward, but we didn't need to do all we moved forward to do. 

The 9/11 fallen, those who died that day, and also their survivors, and the ones who have died of assorted toxins breathed in from working near or on the pile since and their survivors--they deserve every respect and support. But they were also used to sell an open-ended global war that was misguided in many ways. These ill-conceived decisions, occurring in part because short-sighted people didn't want to know any better and acted on what felt "right" politically, did more harm than good.  

Things Could Have Been Very Different

The Taliban were weak and ready to surrender in 2001 when the U.S. passed on a deal to end the war in Afghanistan. Nearly 20 years later, the U.S. did negotiate a deal — but the balance of power was very different. It favored the Taliban. https://t.co/gI1u5mzMZM

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 23, 2021

Here's part of the problem:

Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.  

But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.  

“We don’t negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead.

As incredibly stupid and awful as I think the Trump Administration had been, it really is hard to compete with the steely-eyed ignorance and thick-skulled hubris of the Bush Administration. And of course, the Iraq War was dumb as hell and went on forever as well. What the hell does "We don't negotiate surrenders" even mean--we refuse to accept a win? They could have said--Mullah Omar turns up, you turn him over. It wouldn't have been super-satisfying, but it would have not been--this.

So many pundits, military "experts" and so on, people whose credentials have been made in participating in prolonging this tragedy, get to take up cable news real estate when they shouldn't be given the ground.

I do believe I will stay mad about this for a very long time.

 

Things Related and Not

 

It happens that a man can live a long time and do any number of appalling stupid things, like help facilitate a long, brutal, murderous war of choice and authorizing torture, and if he is capable of mustering a grin and fashioning statements that in hindsight seem ghoulish or hysterical depending on how you look at things (among the greatest hits, "I don't do quagmires", "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want to have", "Freedom is messy" and the convoluted mush that is the full "unknown unknowns" quote) and he will somehow receive surprising praise even in death,

He's still dead though, and the history he leaves behind him is still brutal. Some people will say that the Iraq invasion, and the way the justification was tied to 9/11, and the excuse made for appalling judgements of error and misrepresentations of fact were judgment calls by people who felt, after the enormity of 9/11, that they were doing the right thing. Others will say those choices were deliberate and, had there been no 9/11 to tie them to, would have still been made, if more slowly.

Unknown unknowns, right? 

Even after investigations and time, accountability is hard to come by. 

That's the frustrating thing, after the lives lost and damage done and still ongoing. And there was a lot of blame to go around. 

John Dean's Trip Down Memory Lane

I was skeptical about the value of John Dean's testimony comparing President Trump's actions in office with Watergate, and still am. It's not that I think the comparison is wrong--I don't! It's just that even after Nixon resigned (and was pardoned) we still got Republican presidents even though the madness of the criminality proposed or actually engaged in by Nixon and associates is actually mind-blowing when actually contemplated.

So we got Reagan and-Iran Contra (and I never could swear the October Surprise conspiracy wasn't a real thing, either). When George H.W. Bush got into office, he pardoned the handful of Reagan officials that had been convicted, and it seems pretty unlikely that Bush was as "out of the loop" regarding that affair as he claimed.

George W. Bush's presidency should have been the final straw. The pre-9/11 intelligence. The Iraq War. Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib.

But how did Republicans treat Presidents Clinton and Obama? (Do I need to go into how Whitewater and Benghazi weren't about fact-finding but fault-finding?)

And now, you can't even get Republicans to read the damn Mueller Report (which, it was once crowed in front of tv cameras, exonerated Trump--until it didn't).

The double-standard view holds up even to this day, though. While I, or liberals in general, or even objective folks of goodwill, might Dean's comparison seriously based on the details we know of Watergate and the detail in the Mueller Report, and think, for example, a line of questioning intending to diminish his testimony based on an ad hom argument was poor, Rep. Matt Gaetz's description of Dean as having made a "cottage industry" of criticizing presidents will stick simply because he pointed out that Iran-Contra and, well, shit, half of what the Bush Administration did was worse than Watergate. There might be truth in it--but not to Republicans if they've never admitted it to themselves.

And after all, didn't Dean make money...on his books?

Look, Dean made a perfectly good swipe at Gaetz for possibly not understanding the rule of law issues involved because "Watergate was before his time". But I was still in diapers at the time, and I get it. The problem isn't when Gaetz was born, it's actually assuming you can treat Republicans like they weren't born yesterday. The environment of unaccountability they've created has served them well, and they aren't going to be shamed by something that happened 46 years ago, or 35 years ago, or thirteen years ago. Or a minute ago--unless you rub their noses in current events.

Where some might see the throughline from then until now, Trump loyalist conservatives will only see water under the bridge, because there is none so blind as those who don't want to see. Everyone is either dead and gone or alive and pardoned and reborn on cable news. It's a little harder, though, to get away from what's happening right now.  And now is what and when Democrats need to focus on.

Whether to Bury or Praise

There is something fortuitous in the historical placement of George Bush in wherever he happened to be in the course of his long life. He was fortunate in being born privileged, he was fortunate in surviving a brutal war. He was fortunate in politics, after a fashion. He married the love of his life, and one of his sons followed him in the White House. As lives go, it wasn't half bad. He was surrounded with admiration and love at the end of his life, and that's nothing to scoff at. We could all hope to do so well. 

He also benefited by being neither so wretched as Nixon or crass as Trump, and the halo of his dedication was in part burnished by the haplessness of his son's time in office, and the bar of doing politics had dropped to where service and decency, just by being part of one's make-up, were all that needed to be present to gloss over really harsh truths. But his record was mixed, and a pretty damn comprehensive blog post of the not-great bits was served by Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, so I'd say check that out for the stuff already said, and better than I would have, by him. 

As for me, I still simmer over 1988. This was the first presidential election I paid attention to, occurring after Iran-Contra, and in some way, my innocent soul thought Republicans should have been over, for at least this round. How in the world does a country accept Bush was "out of the loop" as a former head of CIA, and not think his principal job in taking office in the White House was to tidy up loose ends? I was all of sixteen and livid at the "pledge of Allegiance" nonsense and the entire crock of referring to Dukakis as an "ACLU card-carrying liberal" as if sticking up for the Bill of Rights was something to sneer at. Stupid wedge issue content (and maybe not the most competent campaign waged by Dukakis and Bentsen) dictated a win, and a pardon for several folks who participated in that debacle of literally extralegally arming a country that we considered a supporter of terrorism, to also extralegally support a faction in a war that wasn't any of our business. And cite the reason for these pardons as "patriotism". 

I still to this damn day don't know what American principles or interests were served by this thing. As with Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, it sits poorly with me as a violation of the concept that no one should be above the law. 

And the nomination of Clarence Thomas, whatever we think of his qualifications today or his sexual harassment concerns, was a slap in the face of civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall, whose seat he filled. As if this bland patrician looked on this black conservative, and gave no fucks for the vast difference in viewpoint but saw a certain blatant commonality, and rolled with it. 

I do not know the family or personally, any friends of George Bush. I knew I was slipping as a blogger when I tried to silver-lining the life of his beloved spouse. The War on Drugs,  and whatever crap example he set that made George W. Bush and Jeb Bush the politicians they were,  his poor response to the AIDS crisis, his feints to hardcore conservatism to try and obviate the claim he was a "wimp" which in some ways proved it--all stay in my memory as things that were part and parcel of his legacy, that should not be forgotten. 

And yet, in retrospect, he could have been so much worse. And he wrote lovely notes, and his family doesn't all suck, and his friendship with Clinton and Obama....? 

He was human, and we are all a mixed lot, and have redeeming features. He did his thing for charity, and I will allow I consider some of what people say about Carlyle Group and the defense industry and drawing arrows here and there from Halliburton/Dressher to the exploits in Iraq seems a bit paranoid. I can't dispute that the end of the Cold War would have been something difficult for any president to navigate. 

His family will bury him, and they can praise him as well. As well as can any of his loved ones. I am not in that circle, and I will tell the truth if I please. His civility was admirable. But we should not hurry to polish the reputations of those who have died when their legacies are still ongoing. And the stupid political postures of 1988 still resound in 2018. I can't shrug that off, or forget that Roger Ailes, who made Fox News, was one of his campaign advisors back in the day, and of course, the episode of peak Les Atwater--the Willie Horton ad. 

I am dry-eyed and unromantic about his legacy. We are here in it. And my Trump obit will definitely be even worse, come the day. I wish peace of mind to his surviving loved ones. (But not without clear memories.)

UPDATE: And just one other damn thing--he was for Brett Kavanaugh, and fuck him and his son and Brett Kavanaugh. But not the all the way, because none of them deserve the satisfaction. 

Here We Go Again

I am entirely amazed at the resourcefulness of one Hillary Rodham Clinton, who based on all the medical experts who were paying close attention back in 2016, wasn't even still supposed to be alive right now, what with all the Parkinson's and brain damage and what not, that she is still out here fiendishly stealing elections for other people in 2018 (like she, um, did not do in 2016 for herownself). Or so Rudy Giuliani, one-time presidential hopeful, and current Trump lawyer, wants us to imagine. 

The unvarnished story appears to be that Rick Scott, current governor and possible future senator of the great state of Florida, would very much like to see a manager because somebody is still counting these votes and he might not stay ahead. He has a little problem with this Florida law that triggers an automatic recount if the margin is...

Ah, fuck me, I have been here before. If we're older than 18, we all the hell have. It's the long national nightmare again, isn't it? Where, for some reason, Florida's election law says all the votes should be recounted, but there's a special, invisible ink "dibs" where GOPers think maybe this shouldn't always be true if electing a Republican is at stake, right?

Because there will be a popular revolt, where "popular" means a rent-a riot of GOP stalwarts from out of town will swoop in to stop the counting of the actual Floridians' votes. In other words, a kind of mob. (I thought those were supposed to be the worst, though, right? Ask Ann Coulter, or Derek Hunter, or some orange peel-wrapped rancid bacon sculpture like Donald Trump.)

Or maybe, just saying, instead of being the kind of guys that Scott and Giuliani are actually being, Florida could just, I don't know, follow the actual election rules as they were written and see what shakes out in the game as it is supposed to be played? Especially when it's a likely recount for US Senate, Governor, and players to be named later? Instead of being the kind of drama that goes all the way to SCOTUS, which was always kind of stupid. But now, it would be even more stupid, because Justice Bro Keggernaugh. 

This isn't even addressing the extra-special crispy fried fuckery that is whatever is going on in Georgia (Jesus be a legitimate and fair run off with all the machines present and working) and probably Arizona, where Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is now up because of the mail-in ballots, and now the GOP in AZ doesn't want to count all of those. 

Which is not to say not all Arizona Republicans get it:

@AZGOP I am one of those mail in ballots. I was under the impression my vote was always counted.

— Cindy McCain (@cindymccain) November 8, 2018

(I respect this lady.)

We have dealt with voter suppression, from purging of the voter rolls to voter ID laws that can't really address an in-person voter fraud problem that doesn't actually exist, to try and rustle up the people to just know that they have a voice. I have so much respect for the way some of these challenged but still rising stars worked their asses off to try and increase the map of who we think of as "likely voters". But. This sort of thing, right here, the actual clear message the GOP as a freaking institution, puts out that they are not interested in actual "one person, one vote" where any of those people might be demographically likely Democratic voters, is an outright admission that they don't really love small "d" democracy or perceive that what they are doing is extremely divisive because it means they want, not to debate people who differ, but to erase their vote--their ballot-voice. 

How do you negotiate with a polite grin for your existence as a political power, when the other side will aim for your teeth?

Strap in. This arc of justice is not too rusty yet to get moved. 

The Trump Problem

Joe Scarborough Says He Won't Vote for Trump Unless He Changes His Tune https://t.co/8mC2hbfTD0 pic.twitter.com/NmpV7EK2Rj

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) May 5, 2016

The Morning Joe team is so known for their velvet-glove treatment of Donald Trump that Larry Wilmore made a colorful joke about it at the White House Press Correspondents' Dinner--so it's actually kind of a howler for Joe Scarborough to say now that he just can't support Donald Trump unless he "changes his tune":

“I gotta say I was surprised and disappointed … that yesterday, he stuck by the Muslim ban. That’s a loser. It’s a loser with the majority of Americans. And you’ve got Republicans like me. I just, I’m not going to vote for a guy” like that, Scarborough said, according to Politico.

Well, sure. But wouldn't it have been better to just be a little bit surprised and disappointed the first time he said it? And the disappointment--is it that Trump really seems to mean it--or that he keeps saying it out loud where the general election audience can hear? Does he just want Trump to change what he's saying for the general election regardless of what he believes? Oh! I get it! He wants a principled Republican!

This is why I can't take Senators Susan Collins or Kelly Ayotte as having a credible, sensible, or even half-assed stand when they offer their non-endorsement-level support. That isn't a needle you can really thread, is it? When Speaker of the House Paul Ryan bats his baby-blues and juts his manly jaw to say "I am just not ready" to support Donald Trump at this time--isn't he implying he's looking for a reason to be gotten to "yes" by some silver-tongued art of the deal? When the older, grayer heads of the party simply decline to show up, are they withdrawing support--or is it more like they are backing down from fighting for their party's values in the most conspicuous place?

That last ship has probably sailed. I think Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has been admirably consistent in rejecting what Trump stands for--he'd be a Constitutional nightmare and I think there could be real agreement between left and right on that--but looking for a third-party conservative to rescue Republicans from the disgrace of considering voting for Hillary Clinton on the basis of knowing what she is actually doing and not being a conspiracy-theory-chugging whackaloon is a bit late. There was this thing called a GOP primary where there were 16 other people, all of them with resumes of varying degrees of seriousness. And nobody wanted them more than the people who wanted Trump, wanted Trump. And I noticed how no one put in their strong endorsements for any of the puppies in that slushy sled race. Folks didn't all pile on in Summer of 2015, when it might have counted. And it would have been a lie anyway, because they all applauded secretly when this jackass was calling for Obama's birth certificate and school records back in 2011. They courted his attention. They mainstreamed his ass.

Boo-hoo.

My advice to the GOP is take the knee on the presidency and focus on the down-ticket races, because those poor exposed congress-critters who can't figure out whether they want to support Trump for president or not need all the help they can get. That's my free-of-charge feelings on how to partially handle the Trump Problem, and I doubt you'd get better from experts at any price.

But as a lifelong Democrat, this problem is only my problem if this doofus gets elected, and I already know I'd do anything I can to not let that happen. I wish everyone else saw it that way--but I wouldn't be surprised if any number of Republicans get into that voting booth when it's only them and their conscience and their Maker, if they believe in one, who know a time for choosing when they see it.

The Bush Family Drama

It seems like a little bit of family business worked its way out in public as some of the senior Bush's opinions have been related by Jon Meacham in his biography of George H. W. Bush. It seems that "41" had a bit of criticism for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as a little criticism for "43".  The elder Bush described his son as having been badly served by Rumsfeld, and described Dick Cheney as becoming a more hardline and "iron ass" guy (possibly with the encouragement of his wife Lynn, and daughter, Liz). Bush "43", for his part, sticks up for those who served in his Administration. Say what you like about W.--he's loyal to a fault or a hundred.

There's nothing in that necessarily that makes me go "OMG!" about either what was said, not the source and direction of the opinion. I got a good enough sense that "43" didn't seek his father's advice when he said as much himself; when asked if he sought his father's counsel on things, he said he had a "higher father" that he relied on. This kind of statement, when it was not signifying theocratic holy war scary-times, was in line with the idea W. projected of being "the Decider". Nevertheless, in the midst of making claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, programs to build same, and relationships between Saddam Hussein and terrorists that couldn't possibly have made sense, the one thing I thought rang true was when Bush justified his invasion with "This was the guy who tried to kill my dad that one time."  This was family drama as war. Unless Bush's real reason was some crazy End-times shit--we will never really know, right?

Now, presuming that Jon Meacham is a Beltway remora and Poppy Bush still has his wits about him, that particular message slamming Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney has a couple of familial interests behind it. Knowing that Number 2 son is in need of distancing himself from the foreign policy disasters of Number 1 son, he establishes a narrative of distance by setting out that the reason for the disaster was a Team Effort, giving Number 1 son opportunity for plausible deniability and Number 2 son running room. He was trying to do a mitzvah for his boys like they understood how this worked. I guess he never told them though, or didn't think he had to.

43 hugged Dick Cheney like they were still testifying behind closed doors for like an hour that one time in front of the 9/11 commission. And Jeb, like the stunning political performer he is, also totally sided with Team Cheney. This is the guy we last saw being lashed by Donald Trump with his brother's foreign policy, and then like a mook stood in front of a mirror and straightened out the knots.

When 83-year old reptilian Donald Rumsfeld was warmed up enough by the sun, he mentioned that GHWB was "getting up in years" but that W. made his own decisions. He sure did. I'm not saying I'd make any kind of president, but after the Abu Ghraib revelations, I'd have been asking for Rumsfeld's resignation the first damn thing to show I treated this stuff as a top-down disaster.

But the insinuation that Bush "41" isn't still mentally sharp is a lie. He is. He was jumping out of planes when folks his age couldn't jump out of bed. Sharp as he ever was. The people around him, though, are only sharp as they ever were, too.

Jeb: Dead Candidate Walking?

First, we were hearing that the Jeb! campaign was making cutbacks to staff and payroll, then we heard he was meeting with donors and his family. Some could say it's a little early for the pre-post mortems, but, as I've been saying, even if he had the money to hang in there, he's kind of an awful candidate and it might be a good idea of he just didn't hang in there. The US News pre-post mortem I linked to has a beautiful line in it--"he can't ad-lib a fart". Of the cuff, Jeb! is kind of a clod. The sad thing is, with preparation, he's just not much better.

When the family gathers round him to square with the facts, I have the feeling his mom and dad might just tell him that his campaign is going off to live on a farm in the country, where it will have plenty of room to run around, and Jeb won't see it anymore--but won't the campaign be so much happier? And maybe Jeb! will understand.

Trump vs. Bush: 9/11

How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 16, 2015

Donald Trump just crossed what has been something of a political red-line in acknowledging that George W. Bush was president during 9/11 and maybe could have seen the attack coming and didn't keep us safe. (He also pointed out that a hurricane nearly wiped a major city away--again, American people weren't "kept safe"--there was a tragedy, then a slow, grinding, and not necessarily efficient response.)

Jeb Bush's response is to call this "pathetic" and insist his brother "kept us safe".

Kept who safe?

I think Trump is bombastic and have a problem accepting his seriousness. I don't know to what extent he understands the ins-and-outs of public service, and given that he would've left afflicted doctors who contracted ebola behind, well, he's not a model of overflowing selfless compassion--but do I think the Bushes, as a clan, are singularly incapable of understanding that you specifically address a problem and solve it and you do not find another thing to do and then flog it because you don't know how in the hell to fix the problem you ignored until it became tragic. Giving medals to Jerry Bremer, George Tenant, and saying "Heckuva job, Brownie" all kind of suggested someone who would nod at the fuck-ups to the extent that they protected number one--Bush himself.

Jeb Bush can't admit that George Bush's style of management is a big part of why the "War on Terror" became a campaign against an idea with a raft of tactics attached, not an approach to a problem that started with recognizing the terrorism threat in the first place and followed up with a strategy to combat terrorism based on and building on successful strategies in the past.

Donald Trump knew to go there. He crossed that line and is not in a place where criticizing GWB will hurt him. It won't. He criticized John McCain's "heroism". We know he has discovered a different way of campaigning based on giving no fucks. But the thing of it is, Jeb Bush was certain that "his brother kept us safe" would really sound right. Sure, it was said on the right for the longest time. It never was really true. But believing it would never be challenged left him with a half-hearted response. You can't say these things unless you believe them. How do you do that? It's not so.

And Jeb is still surrounded by his brother's continent of broken foreign policy advisors. An island of misfit political toys.

The house of Bush delenda est.

Jeb is Most Certainly Not the Smarter Bush

Sometimes I wonder if Jeb Bush is going to drop a political memoir, called Bush v. Gore 2000: How I Did It.  That the access to the ballot and the delegitimization of valid voters was not only soundly screwed with by Florida Governor Bush on behalf of his brother and mostly along racial lines was a well-discussed topic for years. He opposes reinstatement of the VRA as is, echoing the notion forwarded by Chief Justice John Roberts (a GWB appointee) that the racism of the deep south is a thing of the past.

The state of Alabama is on line one, Governor Bush--would you like to pick up or hide under a desk or what? Lots of things are being tried right this minute to make voter suppression happen. Basically, Jeb is claiming that his brother as president did too much to protect voting rights.

Which is nonsense, because his brother did as much as anyone could to poison the well of voting rights in this country.

But as I always say, the main proof that Jeb is not the smarter Bush is that he let Dubya go first.

Jeb!: I, Clod-I-is

I just want to direct my readers' attention right here.

Jeb Bush said out loud, where people could hear, that he was offering "hope" to African Americans, instead of "free stuff".  Having paid attention to what Bushes do to the economy, you don't mind if I think white people should also think "free stuff" would be a better deal than what these idiots think "hope" means?

That's just clod-ish. This is supposed to be the "smarter brother". And he still isn't showing any signs of it. For one thing, you can't pretend you're not divisive, but then talk about a group of people as "the other" so naturally. And then, wow, welfare queen stereotype much? That's just kicking it Reagan-era. Is this a thing he thinks is okay in the 21st century?

Yeah. Well--maybe he thinks he will survive the primary from hell if he plays it dumber? You know, like Claudius from the popular PBS series I, Claudius, based on the novels from Graves, downplays whether he understands what's going on? Is it possible that he is pretending to be an actually super-thick nonsense shake because if the straw fits-?

I am going to both posit this theory, and then completely reject it. He's not playing dumb. I think the mistake with GWB was thinking he was playing dumb. I am doing to come out and say, this dude is actually kind of dumb. When the guy with the Mexican wife says "multiculturalism is bad"--dumb. When he says he's his own man and then embraces everything his father and brother did, including relying on their aides and advisors, dumb. When he calls rejecting the XL Pipeline "environmental extremism"--he's just being a clod. What are we really getting out of it? What is our pay-off? How is this beneficial to us and not an ideological fetish?

He doesn't know. He doesn't think he's supposed to know. He's a clod.  He's really as dumb as we might suspect he is.

Dick Cheney Gets A Little Char from Chris Wallace's Grilling

I think the exchange in this FOX News Sunday piece is a good reminder that even if the rationale for the Iraq war was supposedly anti-proliferation of WMD's and WMD-capability--the Bush Administration really wasn't much good at it.

Wallace made this key point:

Wallace pointed out that Cheney had eight years to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and failed to do it.

“You and President Bush, the Bush-Cheney administration, dealt with Iran for eight years, and I think it was fair to say that there was never any real, serious military threat,” Wallace noted. “Iran went from zero known centrifuges in operation to more than 5,000.”

“So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?” the Fox News host asked.

Cheney completely did not understand that this was a failure. He pointed to the invasion of Iraq as something that was supposed to have done some good there--but the actual facts are that no, the Iran nuclear program was never arrested by the invasion, and in fact Iran had an ever-greater influence in Iraq because of that invasion and the destabilization of the previous political infrastructure.

Which gives me a notion that Cheney was in part, operating under the Kissingerian "madman" strategy, where the monstrous destruction wrought in Iraq was supposed to serve as a caution to other nations to not even try with the US.

That would be goddamn stupid. Because if you became aware that your neighborhood was unsafe--wouldn't it make sense for you to arm yourself? That nonsense didn't even work in Vietnam. If looking like a country run by crazies was supposed to result in a draw-down, what in the hell was the arms race with Russia and the escalation in Afghanistan in the '80's about? Everybody got to buying weapons. It was the opposite of anti-proliferation logic.

Well, funny old thing--in his post-congressional life in the 1990's, Dick Cheney got a job at Halliburton and they kind of went around sanctions to sell multi-use gear to Iran that might have been useful in their nuclear program. (There was all kinds of wrongdoing in the 1990's by Halliburton though. But they were in good--that is to say bad, company--see Donald Rumsfeld and North Korea.)

But let's call all those little ways in which Bush Administration so-and-so's screwed-up to make things worse world-wide in terms of WMD mere mistakes.(And how could they do better, being the heirs of Iran/Contra and the Cambodian Campaign?) Would it not make sense then, for people who were journalistically inclined, to not actually ever rely on the words of such people as experts in anything ever again? Just because they are very likely either abominably stupid or quite obviously lying?

I do not understand why failures are promoted in the media and why I should feel so happy to see one journalist even bother to address some aspects of the failure. This should be the media's regular job. Cheney should have been called out like an SOB in 2003.

Jeb Bush and the "Pretty Good Deal"

When hearing that Gov. Jeb Bush referred to getting rid of Saddam Hussein as a "pretty good deal", I immediately thought of his mother. Ten years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, she had made staggeringly insensitive comments about the victims:

"Almost everyone I've talked to says: 'We're going to move to Houston,' " Mrs Bush said late on Monday after visiting evacuees at the Astrodome with her husband, former president George Bush.

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," she said.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this - this is working very well for them."

It's the same kind of insensitivity--a family resemblance, you could say. Sure, over four thousand US service members lost their lives, tens of thousands were maimed, over three thousand military contractors were killed, and so on, the country of Iraq was completely destabilized and not only was al Qaeda brought there and ISIS born there in what many people have called the worst foreign policy decision ever, but hey, the war got rid of Saddam Hussein so, that's one thing!

Regarding the Iraq War, he's basically wrong on everything. He's wrong about what happened and he's wrong about what he's fixing to do about it. And yes, he's also leaving torture on the table as something he might be all about when he inevitably gets the US enmeshed in an open-ended boot-on-the ground military conflict.

I really don't think Jeb sounds like a "pretty good deal", himself.