‘I’d do it again’ — former President Bush told a Grand Rapids crowd about waterboarding terrorists. Bush was answering questions during his visit with the Economic Club of Grand Rapids on Wednesday.
“Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Bush said of the terrorist who master-minded the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. He said that event shaped his presidency and convinced him the nation was in a war against terror.
“I’d do it again to save lives.”
Criminal Bush defended his decision to go to war in 2003 with Iraq: “Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him,” Bush said.
“Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.”
“We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill,” said Dick Morris while scratching his butt-hole.
Yeah Dick-shit — Obama is Nixon …and he caused the gulf oil spill!
Dick Morris is part and parcel of the evil Republican push to de-legitimize Obama at ALL COSTS! Their only plan is to destroy Obama and not to solve any of the severe problems facing the nation. Obama’s handling of the oil spill is far from Bush’s criminal, corrupt and grievous mis-management of Katrina. Other opportunists like James Carville can scream all they want ….this is not Katrina!
Reference:
5 Ways the Oil Spill Isn’t Obama’s Katrina — The Root makes a side-by-side comparison of Bush’s response to the hurricane’s aftermath and Obama’s response to the BP oil leak using several criteria. [ READ MORE ]
Sean KLANnity defends Palin: Fox News’ Sean Hannity commented on Sarah Palin’s struggle with her journalist neighbor portraying the former Alaska governor as the victim.
Sean Hannity, the filthy-vicious, syphilis derangedextortionist at Fox News, again last week, falsely suggested that President Obama ignored the floods in Tennessee and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In fact, Obama responded quickly to both disasters. [ READ MORE ]
Elsewhere, Frank Rich of The New York Times Writes: Obama’s handling of oil spill is far from Bush’s corrupt, grievous mismanagement of Katrina; The Obama administration has been engaged with the oil spill from the start — however haltingly and inarticulately at times. It was way too trusting of BP but was never AWOL. For all the second-guessing, it’s still not clear what else the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to cosmetic, difference in plugging the hole: yell louder at BP, send in troops and tankers, or, as James Carville would have it, assume the role of Big Daddy? The spill is not a Tennessee Williams play, its setting notwithstanding, and it’s hard to see what more drama would add, particularly since No Drama Obama’s considerable talents do not include credible play-acting. [ READ MORE ]
In claiming that the Gulf oil spill is “Obama’s Katrina,” media figures and outlets have falsely suggested that the federal government has been unresponsive to Louisiana’s request for a permit to create sand barriers — or “berms” — around the coast. [ READ MORE ]
LIARDick Morris asks if Gulf oil spill is “Obama’s Katrina…or much worse“
Ingraham praises Bush response to Katrina, says Obama oil spill response “a lot worse“
Larry Gatlin: Obama has been “elevated far above his level of competence“
Rush Limbaugh: Obama is “outclassed by the job” and “infantile“
Limbaugh on Obama: “We got a … 45-year-old kid directing the country“
Let’s get something straight here — the gulf oil spill was caused by BP, operating in a highly de-regulated business environment — thanks to neo-con Bush’s eight years of “man eat man” dictatorship. Katrina was a natutal disaster which struck mostly poor black people, whose suffering was subsequently ignored by the Bush administration.
Ed Schultz discusses Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion that environmentalists caused the oil spill to make a point
MediaMatters: “Drill, baby, drill”: Fox News’ environmental catastrophe — In the wake of the catastrophic oil spill currently occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, Media Matters reviews Fox News’ fervent advocacy for offshore drilling. Its activism has including promoting Sarah Palin’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra and pushing myths suggesting that drilling is environmentally safe. [ READ MORE ]
It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons. The nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.
Welcome to Confederate History Month
By: Essayist – Frank Rich It’s kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season’s episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!
“It’s Not About Race” declared a headline on a typical column defending over-the-top “Obamacare” opponents from critics like me, who had the nerve to suggest a possible racial motive in the rage aimed at the likes of Lewis and Cleaver — neither of whom were major players in the Democrats’ health care campaign. It’s also mistaken, it seems, for anyone to posit that race might be animating anti-Obama hotheads like those who packed assault weapons at presidential town hall meetings on health care last summer. And surely it is outrageous for anyone to argue that conservative leaders are enabling such extremism by remaining silent or egging it on with cries of “Reload!” to pander to the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base. As Beck has said, it’s Obama who is the real racist.
I would be more than happy to stand corrected. But the story of race and the right did not, alas, end with the health care bill. Hardly had we been told that all that ugliness was a fantasy than we learned back in the material world that the new Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, had issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month.
In doing so, he was resuscitating a dormant practice that had been initiated in 1997 by George Allen, the Virginia governor whose political career would implode in 2006 when he was caught on camera calling an Indian-American constituent “macaca.” McDonnell had been widely hailed by his party as a refreshing new “big tent” conservative star when he took office in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, in January. So perhaps his Dixiecrat proclamation, if not a dream, might have been a staff-driven gaffe rather than a deliberate act of racial provocation.
That hope evaporated once McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.” After acknowledging that slavery was among “any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,” the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues “I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Only when some of his own black supportersjoined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too — a fifth of the state’s population is black — did he beat a retreat and apologize.
But his original point had been successfully volleyed, and it was not an innocent mistake. McDonnell’s words have a well-worn provenance. In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since.
But once again you’d have to look hard to find any conservative leader who criticized McDonnell for playing with racial fire. Instead, another Southern governor — who, as it happened, had issued a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation of his own — took up his defense. The whole incident didn’t “amount to diddly,” said Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, when asked about it by Candy Crowley of CNN last weekend.
Barbour, a potential presidential aspirant, was speaking from New Orleans, where the Southern Republican Leadership Conference was in full cry. Howard Fineman of Newsweek reported that he couldn’t find any African-American, Hispanic or Asian-American attendees except for the usual G.O.P. tokens trotted out as speakers — J. C. Watts, Bobby Jindal and Michael Steele, only one of them (Jindal) holding public office.
New Orleans had last attracted G.O.P. attention in 2008, when John McCain visited there as part of a “forgotten places” campaign tour to deliver the message that his party cared about black Americans and that “never again” would the city’s tragedy be ignored. “Never” proved to have a shelf life of less than two years. None of the opening-night speakers at last weekend’s conference (Newt Gingrich, Liz Cheney, Mary Matalin et al.) so much as mentioned Hurricane Katrina, according to Ben Smith of Politico. When Barbour did refer to it later on, it was to praise the Bush administration’s recovery efforts and chastise the Democrats’ “man-made disaster” in Washington.
Most Americans who don’t like Obama or the health care bill are not racists. It may be a closer call among Tea Partiers, of whom only 1 percent are black, according to last week’s much dissected Times/CBS News poll. That same survey found that 52 percent of Tea Party followers feel “too much” has been made of the problems facing black people — nearly twice the national average. And that’s just those who admit to it. Whatever their number, those who are threatened and enraged by the new Obama order are volatile. Conservative politicians are taking a walk on the wild side by coddling and encouraging them, whatever the short-term political gain.
The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.
“They tried it here in Arkansas in ’57, and it didn’t work,” said the Democratic governor of that state, Mike Beebe, likening the states’ health care suits to the failed effort of his predecessor Orval Faubus to block nine black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High School. That battle for states’ rights ended when President Eisenhower, a Republican who would be considered a traitor to his party in 2010, enforced federal law by sending in troops.
How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown. It’s unnerving that Tea Party leaders and conservatives in the Oklahoma Legislature now aim to create a new volunteer militia that, as The Associated Press described it, would use as yet mysterious means to “help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.” This is the same ideology that animated Timothy McVeigh, whose strike against the tyrannical federal government will reach its 15th anniversary on Monday in the same city where the Oklahoma Legislature meets.
What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.
At least we can take solace in the news that there’s no documentary evidence proving that Tea Party demonstrators hurled racist epithets at John Lewis. They were, it seems, only whistling “Dixie.”
About The Author: Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.
Mr. Rich started as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page in January 1994. He first began writing his longer-form essays for the Op-Ed page in 1999, and from 1999 to 2003 was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Before writing his column, Mr. Rich served as The Times’s chief drama critic beginning in 1980, the year he joined The Times.
From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Rich was the front-page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also served in an advisory role in the revamping of The Times’s daily and Sunday cultural report during that time.
Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. In addition to his work at The Times, he has written about politics and culture for many other publications. His latest book, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina,” was published by Penguin Press in 2006 and as a Penguin paperback in 2007. His childhood memoir, “Ghost Light,” was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to “Ghost Light” have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich’s drama reviews, “Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993,” was published by Random House in October 1998. His book “The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson,” co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.
In May 2008, Mr. Rich signed on as a creative consultant to help initiate and develop new programming at the pay-TV network HBO. He recused himself from writing about either HBO or its parent company, Time Warner, in his weekly Times column.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for The New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine. He was a founding editor of The Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s.
Mr. Rich earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971 and serving as Editorial Chairman of The Harvard Crimson.
Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
Ben Smith of Politico Reports: Republicans [ The TEA-KLUX KLAN ] convene in New Orleans, with no mention of Katrina — Five years after President Bush’s failed response to a natural disaster in New Orleans deeply damaged his party’s credibility and helped sweep them from power, top Republicans speaking to supporters in New Orleans tonight made no mention of Hurricane Katrina. The series of speakers to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference at a Hilton conference center on the Mississippi River paid passing tribute to New Orleans’ food, its culture, and its championship football team, but made no reference to the disaster still shadowing what Mary Matalin called a “vibrant city.” [ READ MORE ]
Feds: Texas explosives suspect was angry at gov’t:TYLER, Texas– A man accused of dropping more than 30 explosive devices into mailboxes and other locations across east Texas did so out of anger toward the government and was acting alone, federal authorities said Thursday.
Larry Eugene North was indicted Wednesday on charges of possessing an illegal firearm or destructive device. Authorities said they would evaluate whether to pursue more charges.
Authorities believe North is responsible for planting 36 devices between Feb. 5 and Wednesday, said Robert R. Champion, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Authorities previously said they had found at least 16 explosive devices, including five pipe bombs.
“These devices, over 30 in number, have caused fear in this community nothing short of domestic terrorism,” prosecutor Brit Featherston said. “Today that fear stops.”
Texas: Larry Eugene North Arrested For Political Violence
North had been under surveillance for about a week before he was arrested Wednesday while placing an explosive in a Tyler mailbox, authorities said. A pipe bomb was found in the van he was driving and bomb-making materials were discovered in his home, they said.
No injuries or explosions resulted from the devices. At least half were found in mailboxes, while others were in assorted locations such as the front yard of a business and a cemetery, officials said. The spate of discoveries kept people on edge for weeks in east Texas, a region recently hit by a series of church arsons.
North, 52, remained jailed after a brief hearing Thursday in federal court during which a judge granted court-appointed defense attorney Ken Hawk’s request for a mental competency exam. North could face 10 years in prison if convicted. [ READ MORE ]
Special Comment on The TEA-KLUX KLAN; LA Congressman Encourages Mistreatment of Patients
It’s kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season’s episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the 
