NY Times declares in this Sunday's editorial "Bush is Full of Shit"

Lists 3 recent revelations as reasons for why Bush can't be trusted:


[size=l]The Trust Gap[/size]

Published: February 12, 2006
Archived Here


We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers - and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.

DOMESTIC SPYING

After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it.

According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel.

THE PRISON CAMPS

It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do.

On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world.

According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings.

And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists.

THE WAR IN IRAQ

One of Mr. Bush's biggest "trust me" moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.

But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.

When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.
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Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

i work in a photography studio, and for the next 2 weeks the boss will be out of town. which means that me and the other 2 full time employees will have to pick up the slack, and fill in the blanks, when customers call looking for their pictures and wedding albums. We've done this before, it's a little crazy but we manage.

Anyway, before he left, the boss (Mike) left us instructions on how to deal with the many loose ends regarding people's individual orders, this is what Terri's desk looked like this morning.






my desk and Angela's were just as bad or worse, but by the time I thought to take a picture we had cleared some of the debris.

I posted an article on WNY Media about a week ago called "Impeaching the President" . It was a short article that I wrote after I stumbled on a document from the House Judiciary Committee. That Document said that they are creating a panel to “investigate the misconduct of the Bush Administration with regard to the Iraq war and report on possible impeachable offenses.” I thought it was fascinating so I wrote the article to say that the wheels of impeachment are in motion, if we push for it, Bush might not finish his term.

the response to the article was astonishing. within a day it had 550 hits, many articles on WNY Media get 25-40 hits on average, my most popular articles have gotten about 140 hits total. Today the article is up to 754 hits, not quite record breaking but huge.

Also just now I looked at the article and noticed the comments, there are about 50. that is completely un-real. most I've ever seen is 7, and they weren't even talking about the article. check it out there are so many comments. That's why i wrote this, I was totally amazed as I scrolled through what is now a realy long page.

I have to let you guys know, after watching the State of the Union address I was giddy for an entire day. Bush did terribly, and the democrats finally gave a speech that people can actually get behind. it was totally friggen amazing. and it wasn't just me, nobody gave bush good marks, and anyone who saw the democratic response was totally amazed and inspired. (Text of response --- Video )

Below is part one of two, it talks about how bad bush's speech was. part two will cover the democratic response. Part one below is like a normal article, part two will be in the form of a letter to my public officials urging them to adopt the themes of Tim Kane's democratic response as their official 2006 platform.

here's part one:

[size=l]State of the Union: Bush gives his worst[/size]

Bush gave the same speech he always does, using powerful terms but not really saying much of anything. The difference was that this time, nobody believed him. Bush ignored the fact that Americans are not happy with the direction of our country. We want a leader who produces results, if the current plan isn't working we need to change it. But Bush offered no changes, he only sought to justify the current plan with flowery language.

If Bush's goal was to convince the American people to have confidence in his party and their ability to lead our nation, he failed miserably. If the State of the Union is any indication of how the 2006 midterm elections are going to go, the Republicans are in deep trouble.

Bush offered very little with regard to real plans and proposals, instead he relied on rhetoric and repetition to paint a happy face on this past year. Americans are getting restless with republican leadership, and we don't fall for the usual spin about freedom and democracy anymore. America is in trouble, and the terrorists are not the ones creating the problems this time.

We want a president admits and accepts our problems, then comes up with innovative solutions for them. Last night, the president did not meet those expectations. Nobody was fooled by Bush's usual dog and pony show. After the speech the TV news coverage did not bode well for Bush.

The dominant themes from the TV reporters after the speech were, that this speech will not help boost Bush's poll numbers, and that Bush was not at the top of his political game. They also said that Bush offered few changes or new ideas, one reporter noted that it was as if he had cut and pasted lines from his recent speeches into this one, no surprises. They weren't giving Bush any leeway or benefit of the doubt as they usually do.

The next morning I caught a little bit of radio news coverage of the speech. Our republican morning show host Tom Bauerlie was not ashamed to admit that Bush's speech was pretty terrible. Bush preformed badly, conservatives found little inspiration for their cause or their party within Bush's speech. Bush could have done much better, this was not a president in his prime.

Rush Limbaugh on the other hand followed his usual routine and simply lied, repeatedly, insisting that this was a great speech and he can't understand the criticisms of it. Limbaugh spent most of his show citing "evidence" that Bush's speech was great, and that it was making liberals scared. I had the opportunity to hear Rush read about nine paragraphs of a MoveOn.org e-mail word for word.

It really made my day to hear Rush announce the start of MoveOn's new funding drive to raise $250,000 in one day for the 2006 elections (which they have now tripled to $750,000 after getting flooded with donations, thanks for the free advertising Rush). He read the e-mail as "evidence" of liberal fear, because the beginning of the e-mail told recipients "not to be discouraged" by Bush's State of the Union Speech. Grasping wildly to keep his audience safe in their own willful ignorance Rush Limbaugh ended up advertising MoveOn.org.

I've been asking everyone if they listened to the speech, and before offering my opinion I listen to theirs. Nobody thinks that Bush did well, largely because they witness all of the problems in our world, and need a leader with a plan for change. To most, Bush sounded like a bad Charlie Brown teacher, rambling on and on without ever actually saying anything or giving a damn. People fell asleep and lost track of Bush's words because he spoke without any inspiration or emotion.

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More Bad News for Bush

State of the Union: Zzzzzz


Another Bush Deficit: Ideas


Buff News

We've gone beyond the impeachment demands from activists and progressive groups, and beyond demands from former attorney general Ramsey Clark , now mainstream journalists, and members of the house and senate using the 'I' word,

but Government documents and investigations serve as a nice reinforcement. here's the logical first step.


Congressman John Conyers is the ranking member of the house Judiciary Committee, (that's the committee in which impeachment hearings would begin). his office just completed a report entitled "The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retributions and Cover-ups in the Iraq War."



This report finds that:

"In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration. There is at least a prima facie case that these actions that federal laws have been violated � from false statements to Congress to retaliating against Administration critics."

"In response to the Report, I have already taken several initial steps. First, I have introduced a resolution (H. Res. 635) creating a Select Committee with subpoena authority to investigate the misconduct of the Bush Administration with regard to the Iraq war and report on possible impeachable offenses. In addition, I have introduced Resolutions regarding both President Bush (H. Res. 636) and Vice-President Cheney (H. Res. 637) proposing that they be censured by Congress based on indisputable evidence of unaccounted for misstatements and abuse of power in the public record. There are a number of additional recommendations in the Report that I expect to be taking up in the coming weeks and months."


Check out the intro, it's serious stuff...


If we hope to have any Allies left in this world, we had better impeach the president.