Showing posts with label worst president ever. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worst president ever. Show all posts

George Herbert Walker Bush: A Photographic Profile Review

George Herbert Walker Bush: A Photographic Profile
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George Herbert Walker Bush: A Photographic Profile ReviewI think Dave Valdez, President Bush's Official White House photographer, did an outstanding job depicting President Bush, the statesman, the family man, and the friend, beautifully in his book of pictures and very few words. Dave Valdez captures it all: from vital moments in world affairs, to lighter family times--all the while gaining an insight into George Bush, our 41st President. A wonderful coffee table book and gift book.George Herbert Walker Bush: A Photographic Profile Overview

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Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove Review

Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove
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Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove ReviewAt times journalist Paul Alexander's book MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW: THE RISE AND FALL OF KARL ROVE reminds me of psychoanalyst Justin A. Frank's BUSH ON THE COUCH, a study of the emotional troubles that make George W. Bush what he is. As MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW recounts, Rove, the infamous political adviser of Bush, learned the man he thought was his biological father was a stepfather when the stepdad, announcing he was homosexual, dumped the family. Rove's mother then committed suicide.
Karl Rove lost two fathers to rejection and a mother to suicide. The homosexual father went on to pose in body piercing magazines. MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW does not suggest what psychological effects all that had on Rove, who toiled in the direct mail business while repeatedly failing to make a name for himself as a political adviser. But with all the rejection he experienced in his family and career, it's as if Karl Rove attempted to deny reality, trying to make winners out of fellow losers such as George W. Bush, as no one with any credibility wanted him around. Rove often proved them right, falling on his face more than he would admit. According to this book:
- the late political hatchet man Lee Atwater, whom Rove claimed to be his mentor, hated him.
- Rove did not have the close relationship with George W. Bush he purports started when they met in the mid-1970s. They spent little time together until Bush hired Rove for his 1994 Texas gubernatorial campaign.
- George Iran-Contra Bush fired Rove from this 1988 presidential campaign for spreading lies about a political opponent.
- Rove was one of the gang that couldn't shoot straight at the Florida elementary school September 11, 2001, as George W. Bush, Andy Card and he froze up after learning the second plane hit the World Trade Center, confirming America was in crisis. No political adviser worth his salt allows a client - a U.S. president, no less - to look as stupid as Bush did those long six-plus minutes after Card whispered the news, yet Rove could not think on his feet.
Karl Rove, the man they deem "Bush's Brain," is in reality Bush's lame brain.
In 2000 George W. Bush seized the White House not on account of Rove's savvy but because of Ronald Reagan's and George Iran-Contra Bush's partisan Supreme Court appointments. Without the five "justices" who stopped the 2000 Florida recount that would have awarded the Sunshine State and the presidency to Al Gore, Karl Rove would have gone back to licking postage stamps for a living, one more failed campaign under his belt.
Naming every egregious Rove/Bush move would be like detailing each home run Hank Aaron hit; there were just too many to elaborate on all. Some that MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW neglects include:
- regarding Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush knew the storm was to devastate New Orleans, as a meeting videotape proves. But after the warning Bush did nothing and, as MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW reminds us, the Bush White House's inept response was too little too late as flooding killed hundreds and stranded thousands.
- Rove accidentally sent voter caging lists to the wrong e-mail address, inadvertently breaking the story for the journalist Greg Palast, whom the e-mail recipient contacted after getting Rove's unintended missive.
- While MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW says the George W. Bush administration decided to attack Iraq after 9/11, it's well-documented they actually started planning the invasion in January 2001 while the White House staff was still washing egg and tomato from Bush's inaugural limousine.
Karl Rove is not a comic book villain, one who commits crimes alone. While MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW names accomplices as it recounts the offenses Rove orchestrated, the corporate media deserve much blame for not pressing Rove and George W. Bush harder on their scandals. The best example of that does not even involve Bush. Working for a Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1986, a few days before a televised debate Rove calls a press conference to claim he found a listening device in the candidate's campaign headquarters, implying the Democratic opponent was eavesdropping. The reporters promptly laugh in Rove's face, dismissing the stunt for what it was but several nonetheless write about the accusation. The corporate media act as nothing more than "He said, she said" stenographers instead of doing their job by investigating the matter. Rove's candidate wins the election. Too often journalists, like Karl Rove, don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
It all reminds me of Michael Moore's 2003 Academy Awards speech, when he said, "We live in fictitious times." Read MACHIAVELLI'S SHADOW.Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove Overview

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The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder Review

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
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The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder ReviewI highly recommend Vincent Bugliosi's new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (Vanguard Press, 2008). Bugliosi is a highly admired prosecutor. He prosecuted the Manson family trials. He has never lost a murder conviction. He usually votes Democratic, though he supported McCain in 2000. He now offers an objective, factual, spin-free treatise on one of the greatest crimes in American history.
The reason that Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney and Rice went to war with Iraq is because George W. Bush simply wanted to go to war with Iraq. Just as Hitler was planning to go to war with Poland and France long before he became Chancellor of Germany, Bush was planning to go to war with Iraq long before he became President. Even though there was no connection between Iraq and the events of 9/11, that tragic event gave him the opportunity to sell his war dreams. Going to war had absolutely nothing to do with national security or any kind of imminent threat to the United States. It had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda. In fact, the security of the United States has been considerably reduced as a result of Bush's adventure in Iraq. Therefore, the reason that the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, siblings, best friends of thousands of Americans (and tens of thousands Iraqis) have had their intestines blown out of their bodies to be commingled with the pulverized brain tissue of the soldier sitting next to them in their unprotected, armor-free humvee is NOT because they bravely gave their lives for our country. It's because Bush lied to the country (and to the World), hid the truth and fabricated facts in order to satisfy his lust to go to war -- and have "fun" being a war-time President (at a cost that is now running over $1 Trillion in direct and indirect costs -- at time when Social Security is going bankrupt, health care coverage is not available for over 50,000,000 Americans, the economy is going south and the richest Americans are enjoying tax breaks).
Now, this is old news. You'd have to be either a fool, an ignoramus, in a coma or be a Fox News Channel viewer to be unaware of this. The facts are well documented and irrefutable. Just as volumes have been written about other recent criminal regimes (i.e., Pinochet, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- even Sadaam Hussein who, while not a threat to America was a bloody despot), there is no dearth of published information about the crimes of the Bush regime. Bugliosi's book differs in that he asks the question, "so what are we going to do about it?" He answers the question with a well thought out, logical, objective, non-partisan and legally sound solution: some time after Bush leaves office, prosecute him for murder in each of the 50 States.
On the face of it, this may sound like a preposterous proposal: prosecute a U.S. President for a capital crime (actually, over 4,000 counts of that crime)?!? But he makes a very strong and logical argument for why it should be done. He follows this up with a legally sound explanation about how it can be done.
In this election year, we can look forward to a lot of partisan books and articles from both political parties. Mr. Bugliosi offers us a refreshing (if unsettling) break from partisanship and spin with his objective, factual and well documented arguments. He even anticipates many rebuttal arguments to his thesis and responds to them. The book is neither pro-right nor pro-left. It is pro-American. Not Republicans vs. Democrats but, rather, The United States of America vs. George Bush.
Before I read this book, I believed that prosecuting and convicting a U.S. President, regardless of the extent or heinousness of his crimes, would do more harm to the United States than good. Now that I have read the book, my thinking has changed. Here we have a man who is personally responsible for putting tens of thousands of innocent people into harm's way for no other reason than his own, personal desire to wage war -- laughing and talking about how much fun he is having while all this is going on. A man, who while Governor of Texas, would publicly make fun of condemned convicts when they asked for mercy or for a stay of execution. The Governor of a state that executes more prisoners than any other state. As much as I personally oppose capital punishment, I have to admit that it would be ironic and just to see this particular criminal strapped to a gurney, himself, awaiting the needle. (At least it would be a swift, probably relatively painless, death. Not the kind of death that our nation's sons and daughters experienced as their armor-free bodies were ripped to shreds and whatever could be recovered of their remains categorized at the mortuary as "unviewable.")
I strongly encourage all patriotic Americans to read this book -- then lend it to your friends.
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Utter Incompetents: Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush Review

Utter Incompetents: Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush
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Utter Incompetents: Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush ReviewYou might suppose from the title that this is just another book bashing the Bush administration and not worth the time or money when there are so many others to choose from, but while the catastrophes in foreign policy and the war in iraq are now well documented by convincing books, Oliphant is not content to retrace now well worn trails. He brings new information and background to the entire range of Bush administration incompetence--health care, environment, education, etc.
This is important to do since voices in Congress are mostly silent on these issues and newspapers with only a few exceptions have been far too restrained in their assessments. What you end up with here is an appreciation for the abysmal failures of this administration even to achieve its own goals because it is forever substituting short term public relations gimmicks for long term solutions. The full dimension of the Bush disaster becomes much clearer is this well written and carefully argued record.Utter Incompetents: Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush Overview

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The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future Review

The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future
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The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future ReviewProbably the more appropriate photos for the dust jacket would have been those that appear facing page 215: George H.W. Bush breaking down into sobs while discussing his son. Ostensibly meaning son Jeb, although no one watching could help believe his anguish was with son Dubya.
How did George W. turn out so differently from his father? How did he go from drunken, failure-prone frat boy to a "born again" self-styled "compassionate conservative" and twice-elected President of the United States? Author Unger lays out his case, starting with a brief history of American-style evangelicism, especially the "Rapture"-based theology and fundamentalism, and follows with a chapter on the origins and philosophy of the neoconservative movement. The two seemingly disparate groups provided the ideological underpinings of the George W. Bush administration, as well as the reliance on purity of faith over rational and objective analysis.
Much of the background material has been long available, but there are some curious new revelations. In spite of what Bush (or his ghost-writer) wrote in "A Charge to Keep", Bush was "born again" not under the guidance of Billy Graham, but by a far sketchier character named Arthur Blessitt. (Blessitt once ran a "Jesus coffeehouse" on the Sunset Strip, until he was evicted in 1969.) When Bush senior came in behind Pat Robertson in the 1988 Iowa caucuses, he had Dubya act as his liason to the growing grass-roots evangelical vote. In that role, he took delight in denying "access" to his father and got his first taste of power. Although his parents had long counted on brother Jeb to be the political heir, Dubya had other plans.
This isn't a biography, and certainly isn't a military history - only 55 pages from the start of the war in Iraq to the last page. It IS very well researched, with 49 pages of footnotes and a 9-page bibliography. I can't say how much overlap there is with Draper's book "Dead Certain", the book it is most likely to be compared with. Unger does go into detail on the Bush-Cheney relationship that Draper seems to have skimmed past. (Unger includes "Dead Certain" in the footnotes and bibliography.)
With so many books out on the Bush presidency and the Iraq war, what does this contribute? Most of all, it traces the alliances of the forces behind the scenes, and provides new insight into the motivations of the key players. It really is fairly objective in its assessments, but I was surprised (and disappointed) in the petty visciousness displayed by both Bush and Cheney towards subordinates and critics in example after example. (One of the better lines comes from Bob Strauss, who said, "Bush senior finds it impossible to strut, and Bush junior finds it impossible not to.") It also makes it easier to understand how the events so well documented in "Fiasco" and "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" came about. It is very disconcerting to see that George W. was holding secret, "no press allowed" meetings with assorted Christian Zionist/ evangelical groups before and during his 2000 campaign. The catch-phrase "compassionate conservatism" takes on an entirely different meaning when it is shown to be part of the agenda to smash down the church-state barrier. There's some pretty interesting background on a particularly skeezy schlub (Michael Ledeen) whose fingerprints seem to be all over the infamous Italian "Niger yellowcake" forgery. (This character also asserts that "my mother was the model for (Disney's) Snow White".) Unger makes it abundantly clear why the current Republican "base" will never, ever allow Israel to establish anything like a Palestinian state, at least not on land on the West Bank. (That would effectively block their end-time Rapture fantasies.)
I'd recommend the book to those who haven't followed the rise of the evangelical (and most especially the Christian Zionist and "Dominionist") voting bloc, the move of the neoconservatives (or "the crazies", as Bush senior referred to them) from the margins to hands on the levers of power, or the direction they may take next. This administration has larded every conceivable federal agency with these kinds of people, and it will take many years to repair their damage.
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Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy Review

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
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Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy ReviewThere have been lots of books about the Bush-Cheney administration, and considerable coverage of efforts to increase presidential power. However, "Takeover's" well-researched, thoughtful and important material requires no outside leverage to gain a prominent spot amongst them.
Savage's summary asserts that Bush-Cheney have succeeded in seizing vast powers for the presidency by ignoring many of the restraints placed on it by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution. Warrantless waretapping, politicization of the Justice Department and the torture debate, use of "signing statements" to claim a right to defy new laws, efforts to impose greater control over military JAG lawyers, secrecy behind Cheney's energy task force (and innumerable other government actions), and holding U.S. citizens without trial as "enemy combatants" have all served this end.
Savage clearly sees Cheney as the force behind these moves, citing Cheney's earlier experiences and actions in government, beginning in the Nixon administration within the Office of Economic Opportunity with Don Rumsfeld, on to episodes of classified information disclosure (eg. illegal CIA spying on Americans, U.S. submarines eavesdropping on Soviet cables), Cheney's restricting access to President Ford by those with competing viewpoints (also reduced likelihood of leaks), and efforts within Congress to support Reagan-Bush power grabs (eg. forcing executive agencies to submit proposed rules to the White House before they could take effect).
The Bush-Cheney powergrab began immediately upon assuming the office. White House Counsel Gonzales was assigned a support role almost on the administration's opening day. September 11 clearly was a God-send to the Bush-Cheney efforts - protecting national security became the all-purpose rationale for more secrecy and more presidential power. However, it was not until January, 2002 that Cheney openly took ownership of the agenda to expand these powers.
Secrecy was extended wherever possible, even to rather mundane topics under the logic that even little pieces could be put together to provide information to terrorists. Republican congressional leadership was only too willing to assist by failing to oversee executive actions, and even restricting congressmen from mentioning the contents of intelligence authorization bills, for fear of criminal prosecution and expulsion. The administration also succeeded in shutting down embarrassing court cases (eg. claiming failure to pursue espionage) on the grounds of needed secrecy. Finally, suppressing scientific findings and rewriting reports has also been a major Bush secrecy tool.
Bush's power-grab even included abrogating signed international treaties. One of the administration's earliest actions was informing the Soviets that we would no longer be bound by the 1972 ABM treaty. The Geneva Accords followed, described as "quaint" by Gonzales, was later circumvented through a number of actions - Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib imprisonments, secret renditions, torture, plans for military tribunals at which defendants would not necessarily know what the evidence was against them, over-ruling JAG leadership, etc.
One of the best-known actions was Gonzales' effort to get A.G. Ashcroft to approve the administration's wiretapping program legality - while Ashcroft was under heavy sedation in an ICU bed. Ashcroft stood by his earlier refusal, while also reaffirming that he was no longer A.G. - he had temporarily ceded his power while in the hospital. (Bush authorized the program anyway. No wonder Ashcroft was booted at the beginning of Bush's second term!)
By the seventh year of Bush-Cheney, Bush had attached signing statements to about 150 bills and referenced 1,100 sections. (The latter figure compares to about 600 for all prior presidents. To be fair, Reagan was the primary prior promulgator.) During this same period, Bush vetoed only two bills. Those puzzled by the discrepancy soon realized that Bush's actions were equivalent to a line-item veto - banned by the Supreme Court in 1998, though supported by future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in a memo where he advocated implementation in slow motion so that opponents would be less likely to realize what was happening.
"Signing statements" have also been used by Bush as a means of controlling subordinates in the executive branch (another dimension of the Unitary Executive), and a way of combating "veto-proof" bills. All new bills are now reviewed by Cheney's staff for possible signing statements.
Why have signing statements continued? Savage contends that it is difficult to contest them in court, between all the administration's secrecy and the general inability to acquire legal standing.
So now we have a much-weakened system of government, per Savage. The question is "What will happen in the future?" These new tools lie ready to be used in any new "important cause," and may not be willingly put aside. In the meantime, our civics books are clearly out of date.Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy Overview

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