Bush administration takes six blows in a row

[ck4829]

During a 24-hour news cycle last week there were these major stories:

# Six of the eight recently fired United States Attorneys told Congressional committees that they believed they lost their jobs because they wouldn't play partisan politics in their handling of high profile political corruption cases. Some also claimed they'd been threatened by the Justice Department not to go public with their complaints.

# Nine American servicemen were killed in action Iraq.

# More than 100 Iraqi Shiites making a religious pilgrimage were killed by suicide bombers. At least 200 were injured.

# Seriously wounded soldiers told Congress about the neglect, bad housing and bureaucratic nightmares they suffered as outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington while two top army generals accepted responsibility and apologized to the soldiers and their families.

# According to a new USA Today/Gallup Poll, six in 10 Americans want Congress to set a time table to withdraw all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2008.

# And, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and a national security aide to President George W. Bush, was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in the case of the leak of the identity of a CIA operative in the summer of 2003.

Any one of these stories would have been bad news for the Bush White House. As a group they represent a devastating political "perfect storm" because they paint a vivid picture of corruption, neglect and incompetence even while things continue to go badly in a war that a significant majority of Americans no longer supports and wants to end. It was enough to make the White House spokesman want to hide from the press, which Tony Snow tried to do by taking the day off. But neither he nor his boss can hide from the reality that Bush administration policies have created at home and abroad – a reality that seems about as bad as it can be but promises to get worse.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070311/FEATURES05/703110301/1014/FEATURES05

[saltpoint]

1. ck, you're right -- this is a barrage of bad news for Bush and his

corrupt gaggle of fools, thieves, and powermongers.

The list of transgressions is long, foreign and domestic and administrative.

At least Reagan had the impulse to call in David Gergen to help tidy up -- not that David Gergen is all that great a bargain. Bush can't call anyone competent in to help because that person would immediately see the illegal crap that's going on, and blow the whistle.

The Bush administration's failure is comprehensive and probably irretrievable.

[Bobbieo]

2. So, who is stopping Bush?? No one!!!

[saltpoint]

5. Hi, bobbieo. I think Bush is stopping Bush. Here's a guy who's not

even a true Republican. Certainly he's not a Lincoln Republican. He likely has only the vaguest notion of who Lincoln is. I doubt seriously if George W. Bush has read the Gettysburg Address, or knows what it is, or why it's important. He's as detached from the definitional roots of the Republican Party as anyone can be.

His administration as Texas Governor was marginal at best. And as I'm speaking as a strong partisan Democrat I hope you won't take umbrage if I say it was godawful shitwork.

He cheated to win the presidency. Twice. He cheated Gore in Florida. He cheated Kerry in Ohio. He's a cheat, someone who's had everything given to him without breaking a sweat, including his college degrees, which for the life of me had to have been "gifts" by Yale and Harvard to Poppy's little fake cowboy. Most 6th graders are better students than what I picture Dubya being at Yale.

The Republican Party wasn't always as disgustingly repulsive as it is today. Howard Baker, though I thought he was too conservative, was a decent man and did the right thing during the Watergate hearings against Richard Nixon, his own party's president. There was also Chuck Percy and Edward Brooke -- many Republicans then who behaved differently in their roles than Republican senators do today. Ideologically too conservative, yes, but not jerks like Santorum and Cornyn et al.

Bush has destroyed his own legacy. I've posted on DU before that the historians are dipping their quills into the ink jar and the first books of his historic failures will hit the stands very soon. He will never again see a 50% approval rate, no matter what. He's cooked. His presidency is over. If anything, it's getting worse, and impeachment whispers are growing a bit louder.

He's pissed in his own bucket.

[INdemo]

6. Here's a thought .........

"Most 6th graders are better students than what I picture Dubya being at Yale."

Could you imagine GB on the new game show "Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader"

[saltpoint]

7. LOL! That's a challenge Dubya better not undertake. I think those

5th graders would whomp him good.

[INdemo]

10. Maybe we should require all Presidential Candidates to take some sort of

aptitude test ,you know something similar to the college SAT tests..
Then we could at least be assured we never have a President as dumb as this one.

But then again if we did that it would be awfully tough for the Republicans to find a candidate..

[saltpoint]

11. You're right. Let's get that enacted immediately.

The Republican Party would have to dissolve.

Hallelujah and hang the balloons!

[Rydz777]

13. Well said

And just a footnote. I read that, after the war had already begun, the first time anyone ever mentioned the words "Sunni" and "Shiite" in Bush's presence, he just looked blank. He had never heard the words before and knew nothing of the divisions in Islam and in Iraq. That's probably true of most Americans, but Bush was after all "the Decider."

[saltpoint]

16. Hello, Rydz777, and yes, I had heard the same thing about Bush's

blank look when confronted with Iraq's religious and social sectarian groups.

I doubt if Al Gore or John Kerry would have looked like that. Who was it who said it is a dangerous man who does not know what he does not know? George W. Bush could have been the man who prompted that quotation.

[pretzel4gore]

3. the gopig's pyrrhic victory a wonder to behold...

it cost every single one of us, but somehow maybe the facts that bush has ruined the very thing which supposedly justified his excesses, his lies and crimes against humanity, and poor old america, reduced to a monstrosity which cause most of its citizens anguish AND with the true bill/cost still hidden until da pipsqueak bush drags his vice off stage and a legitimate gov can reveal the scope of the disaster; MAYBE some of this will enter the reptile brains of the rightwing boors who slipped the phony prick into office in 1980....wow! AND Sinclair Lewis saw it looming, 80 years ago!
It= selfserving ignorance
--------------
"The drift of our commercial culture in the forty years since ‘Babbitt’ appeared suggests that Lewis did little to alter it, perhaps, but he was the first novelist to tell us explicitly into what stupid, and finally devastating social damnation we were drifting. Have we landed?"
Prof. Mark Schorer, University of California 1961 afterword to ‘Babbitt’

[radfringe]

4. Question

With the dark clouds and stormy skies in the forcast - will the White House raise the umbrellas at half mast?

[rasputin1952]

9. Just as soon as they can figure out the catch mechanism...

damn umbrellas, always a pain trying to get them open...:evilgrin:

[A wise Man]

8. Why do you think

he's taking these trips around the world. The US is getting to hot to handle.

[dkofos]

12. Too bad they weren't the kind that can get you impeached!!

[Supersedeas]

14. your discounting the power of the GOP/Media Establishment to divert attention elsewhere

[Javaman]

15. 6 blows???? IMPEACH IMPEACH!!!

Sad to say when it takes a blow job to get someone impeached these days.

I get so tired of living in an alternative universe.