GOP Lies and Lies

Update: See Bruce Murphy's piece that argues GOP is desperate against Doyle, mocking the silly notion that Doyle is doomed.

But lying is the Republican way.

Faced with the hollowed-out economy executed by the Bush-Cheney administration, 47 states this year face ballooning budget deficits, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

State legislatures and governors from California to Maine are fighting to clean up the fiscal carnage.

So the over-heated GOP shills in Wisconsin snipe and gripe, screaming about the state budget addressing the $6 billion deficit: The worst ever, sure to draw the wrath of the people.

Yes, the state budget not yet approved is the cause of economic misery and generates outrage across the state. Right.

And Jim Doyle is sure to feel this wrath and outrage. Milwaukee talk radio and GOP shills are never wrong.

Where were these fiscal Republican geniuses the last eights years that saw the Bush administration applaud and actually brag about economic progress as 1,000,000s of jobs were outsourced? Smirking no doubt.

Where were these geniuses the last eight years that saw in 2001 the projected elimination of all public debt [and states arguing about what to do with their surpluses] morph into Bush bequeathing $10 trillion debt to the new administration and the 50 states in fiscal crises? That's easy, they were applauding King George's leadership and courage.

Remember the "deficits don't matter" assurance infamously voiced by our intrepid former vice-president.

As the GOP scolds, do yourself a favor and don't buy their snake oil.

Their public record and commitment to honest commentary ain't the best as the omission of inconvenient facts make clear.

If we could get a honest policy discussion from Republicans, our country and our fellow states would not be in this mess.

Sanity

Update: CIA WATERBOARDED KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED 183 TIMES IN ONE MONTH (via Huffington Post)

Two extraordinary pieces in the Sunday Times on rightwing depravity and rightwing stupidity:

April 19, 2009
Editorial
The Torturers’ Manifesto
To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation.

They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and,
most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions. ...

From Frank Rich:

WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic 'The Village of the Damned' with the Broadway staple 'A Chorus Line'? You don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube under the title 'Gathering Storm': a 60-second ad presenting homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism. ...

Far from terrifying anyone, 'Gathering Storm' has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from 'the homo storm' strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A 'New Jersey pastor' whose church has been 'turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch' declares that he likes gay people, 'but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.' ...

What gives the ad its symbolic significance is not just that it’s idiotic but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead. ...

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Hey Wisconsin, Remember the Fear of Zero National Debt

As Gov. Doyle grapples with the giant budget deficits, it's worth recalling a time when zero national debt was feared and states argued about how much fiscal revenue they should shave off their budgets.

In 2001 Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testified before the Senate Budget Committee on the potential dangers of having no federal debt [we're at $11 trillion now], a fiscal legacy of the Clinton administration that Bush, Cheney and his rightwing ideologues were desperate to avoid.

It was an ambiguous and wide-ranging testimony, recounted by Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil in The Price of Loyalty, that included Greenspan's "fear that large surpluses would create a drag on the economy," among other expressed cautions and concerns about the then-proposed Bush tax cuts (O'Neil p. 63).

But the damage was done and Greenspan gave political cover (then and in later statements) to the reckless Bush tax cuts for the super-rich.

Said Greenspan in his subsequent testimony before the House Committee on the Budget (March 2, 2001):

At zero debt, the continuing unified budget surpluses now projected under current law imply a major accumulation of private assets by the federal government. Such an accumulation would make the federal government a significant factor in our nation's capital markets and would risk significant distortion in the allocation of capital to its most productive uses.

A significant distortion?

The GOP commitment to make a fiscal mess of things is long-standing, notes Joe Conason in Salon today, and "and Republicans who are complaining about Barack Obama's spending are hypocrites," and avoid even addressing the arguments for stimulus spending (see Krugman, Dec. 1, 2008). Writes Conason

In our time, the Republican Party has compiled an impressive history of talking about fiscal responsibility while running up unrivaled deficits and debt. Of the roughly $11 trillion in federal debt accumulated to date, more than 90 percent can be attributed to the tenure of three presidents: Ronald Reagan, who used to complain constantly about runaway spending; George Herbert Walker Bush, reputed to be one of those old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicans; and his spendthrift son George "Dubya" Bush, whose trillion-dollar war and irresponsible tax cuts accounted for nearly half the entire burden. Only Bill Clinton temporarily reversed the trend with surpluses and started to pay down the debt (by raising rates on the wealthiest taxpayers).

As is clear among honest observers, among the pathological programs pursued by the Bush administration was its enterprise to turn the national debt from prospects that were made in 2001 of the debt being completely paid off in 10 years to upping the debt to $10 trillion when it left office.

The wish list that the rightwingers, like Grover Norquist, desired from the future administrations dealing with the massive debt: Eliminating those awful programs like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare which they hoped would become unsustainable because of the debt purposefully piled up by Bush and Cheney.

Bush bequeathed more than that: Millions of jobs shipped overseas, $trillions of unregulated financial products that may yet cost the dollar its role as reserve currency, states' deficits like Wisconsin's and on and on.

Obama has been scrupulously careful not to put the blame on the GOP; it's the wrong message for the guy sent in to clean up the mess. But Conason, Krugman and others should continue to further an understanding of the political-economic commitments of the GOP.

- See also Krugman: Large fiscal expansion needed (Dec. 1, 2008)

Sunlight

The Inauguration of Barack Obama on Jan. 20 marks the end of the single worst presidency in American history, truly our bleakest days.

Never has an administration been so duplicitous and hostile to the cause of liberty as that of George W. Bush.

Looking forward, we see Jan. 20 as a day that has some 20 minutes more daylight than December 20. The long winter is dying down.

Politically, is it possible to have a president whom we believe is dedicated to the oath he to prepared to swear? Yes.

For those who struggle with long winters and this authoritarian, reckless administration, the answer is not to hang on and endure but rather to get busy, work out and see that a lesson of the Bush administration is this: If you let a president, he can ruin a country and the Andrew Sullivans, David Broders and other such cowardly souls will be there to cheer on the carnage.

For the rest of us, we are ready to move forward like our futures depend on it.

BBC: Shoe-throwing Reporter's Brother Says He Has Been Severely Injured

We savaged a country; perhaps it's fitting that now Iraq savages a protester as we watch.

Dignity and Honor, Says Bush Staff Talking Points

From the LA Times:

For Bush's staff, upbeat talking points on his tenure. Administration officials get a memo from the White House suggesting what to say about the last eight years: President Bush upheld 'the honor and the dignity of his office,' for one.

Even a sociopath has more shame.

Juan Cole Rips Bush Apart One Last Time

Update: See also J. P. Green's Challenging the 'Bush Kept Us Safe' Meme - "It's reflection time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the inhabitants of the white house and their minions are not milking their fading authority to smash and grab as much as they can, they are busy spinning history to describe their positive accomplishments. All they have is the fact that we have not had a major terrorist incident 'on U.S. soil' since 9-11. For this, they figure, Americans should be expansively grateful to the lamest duck."

In case anyone missed it, Juan Cole tears apart Bush's-impersonation-of-a-Soviet commissar address last week on Bush's Middle East policy at the Saban Forum in Washington, D.C.

Not that anyone with the power of insight exceeding Cokie Roberts takes anything Bush says seriously these days, but Bush's "self-glorifying speech" disrespects the million human beings no longer alive because of his lying foreign policy.

Concludes Cole:

Bush was always all hat and no cattle. Bush turned the United States into an aggressor nation. He kicked off an orgy of violence in Iraq that has probably left a million dead. He destroyed entire cities. He left millions of widows and orphans, and millions more displaced. He lied, he destroyed habeas corpus at home and abroad, he tortured. It is too soon to know if American democracy will ever really recover from lawless regime.

Cole and not the Cokies of the world will show the world how quickly that we can recover by speaking truth to power.

But many would like to see not just a reversal of Bush's anti-Democratic and illegal foreign policy towards Iraq, but a presidential repudiation from Barack Obama of this huge war crime that we by virtue of our citizenship are all guilty.

Loser, Loser, Loser

Brian Adams, a mathematics and computer science professor at Franklin & Marshall College, reports that there's a 99.98% chance that Sen. Barack Obama will win the presidential election on Tuesday.
- Political Wire

See also:
- Intrade Prediction Market Electoral Map

- 538.com

- Real Clear Politics

A corrupt hack like J.B. Van Hollen cannot change anything, though he tried his worst.

As Josh Orton writes on Van Hollen and his judicial follies: "Really the best of both worlds: Barack Obama would win Wisconsin even if the suit failed - but now another careerist Republican looks foolish having failed to politicize the voting process."

Political Psychopaths

Cannot recommend too strongly THE WRECKING CREW (sub. needed) How a Gang of Right-Wing Con Men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing by Thomas Frank.

Of the Jack Abramhoff, Grover Norquist, Bush-Cheney regime, Frank Writes:

They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

The Outlaw Presidency

Dan Froomkin's The Outlaw Presidency, discussing Jane Meyer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, points to a significant fact of the American political culture.

Finally, it is now conventional wisdom that the Bush-Cheney regime is the most lawless and immoral administration in American history, though I still recommend that elitist Harper's magazine. See Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How a Gang of Right-wing Con men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing.

Human Rights

Bush does torture.

- AP: Exams prove abuse, torture in Iraq, Gitmo

- General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

- The U.S. isn't likely to try Bush administration officials for war crimes-but it's likely that a European country will.

- Torture from the Top Down

- CIA Played Larger Role in Advising Pentagon Torture

Human Rights Groups and Documents

- United States Constitution
- Fourth Geneva Convention (full text)
- Human Rights First
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Jimmy Carter: Presidents Should Not Be Liars

In a message that is a thinly veiled attack on the dishonesty of George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter offers a message on lies and the American presidency in the Washington Post late last week.

Though referencing modern history during the era of Carter's presidency, it is George W. Bush, not named by Carter, who comes to mind for his execution of the presidency and his active subversion of the Constitution that make his administration, without question, the most dishonest and anti-democratic in modern American history.

Jimmy Carter

Presidents Should Not Be Liars

I do not think the President of the United States should be a liar, and believe that the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens agree with me. For security reasons, the whole truth cannot always be revealed, but it is quite obvious that lies are seldom made to protect our nation. Almost invariably, the political fortunes of the prevaricator are at stake.

During my campaign for the White House in 1976, veracity was a very important issue, because of the known falsehoods having been told during the Vietnam War and the revelations of the Frank Church senatorial investigation that our government had, through the CIA, committed murder and other crimes. I habitually told my small groups of supporters, "If I even make a misleading statement, don't support me."

Although stigmatized as naïve and often having to suffer the consequences, I maintained this commitment to truthfulness during my term in office, and it paid off in many ways. One example was the trust aroused in me by President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachim Begin, which was instrumental in orchestrating the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. I've observed at other times that the exploding consequences of a small lie can result in political catastrophe, as was shown in President Nixon's effort to conceal the Watergate break-in.

There have been other examples since I left office.

The author was the 39th President of the United States.