The End of an Error

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

George W. Bush gave his Farewell Address to the nation last night. He oddly invited his unindicted co-conspirators as his guests (current and former administration officials) so that he had a friendly audience before whom to deliver his speech.

There is only one thing I wanted to hear from this supremely arrogant man: "I have made mistakes (enumerated) and I am profoundly sorry for my failure and the damage I have caused to this great nation."

But there was no admission of his mistakes forthcoming (only "misjudgments"), there was no admission of his failure and, most significantly, there was no apology to the American people. Bush remains supremely arrogant and unapologetic to the very end.

Bush instead delivered a self-congratulatory pat on his own back for a job well done: "Heckuva job Shrub!"

I suspect the audience watching at home, like me, were reaching for a shoe to throw at their television sets.

A man incapable of admitting his mistakes and demonstrating a modicum of humanity by expressing sincere remorse and an apologizing to his victims is not entitled to any leniency from the court, nor the American people.

According to Bush's retelling of his presidency, he did not become president until September 12, 2001. He is not responsible for ignoring repeated intelligence warnings that Osama bin Laden intends to attack the United States. He is not responsible for failing to protect America on that fateful day of 9/11. He should not be criticized for continuing to read "My Pet Goat" and appearing frozen with fear (no doubt crapping his pants) when told "Mr. President, the country is under attack."

Bush stood on the rubble of the Twin Towers and promised to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." After seven years, he has failed to deliver. Osama bin Laden recently released a farewell address of his own to mock Bush: "you're gone and I'm still here mother f#@ka!"

Bush perpetuated the myth that the boot-licking mainstream media never calls him out on that he has kept this nation safe from another terrorist attack since 9/11. What about the anthrax attacks which killed five Americans in the weeks following 9/11? Most experts agree that the weapon-grade anthrax came from the U.S. biodefense labs at Fort Detrick in Maryland. The only "person of interest" in the case, a scientist at the lab, conveniently died from an overdose of Tylenol and codeine in August 2008. Federal prosecutors quickly blamed the dead guy to close their file. He was never charged or tried in a court of law on the evidence. Was this a case of domestic terrorism covered up?

9/11 and the anthrax attacks led a pants-wetting cowardly Congress to pass the USA Patriot Act and other measures to greatly expand the powers of the executive branch and to abdicate the constitutional powers of Congress. Congress effectively "narrowly reinterpreted" the rights and privileges of citizenship guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, and suspended our constitutional system of checks and balances. Congress rendered itself irrelevant.

Bush's response to 9/11 was to shred the U.S. Constitution even further and to assert extra-legislative/judicial powers.

Bush suspended habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights for American citizens, not just foreign terrorist suspects. He ordered a data mining electronic surveillance program (which predates 9/11) to spy on the communications of American citizens, not just foreign terrorist suspects. He declared that the U.S. may exempt itself from the Geneva Conventions regarding warfare and the treatment of prisoners, and approved torture techniques for suspected terrorists, some of whom were American citizens. Bush declared himself "the decider" of whom is an enemy combatant, including American citizens, and ordered prisoners held indefinitely without charges, without the advice of counsel, and without trial before a judge. He devised a military tribunal system that is the modern day equivalent of the Star Chamber. He established a Soviet Gulag-style system of foreign prisons to which prisoners could be "renditioned" for torture beyond the reach of U.S. law.

Bush extensively used signing statements to exempt himself and the executive branch from the law and to eviscerate the laws of Congress. He extensively used "secret" executive orders to assert extra-legislative powers. His political advisors politicized the U.S. Justice Department and turned it into a partisan legal arm of the RNC campaign committee.

This brief indictment is not intended to be comprehensive. It would take a multi-volume set of books to fully document the many crimes and ethical violations of the Bush administration. No administration in American history has engaged in such a systematic and wide-spread disregard for and violation of U.S. law, international law and treaties, and the U.S. Constitution. No man has dishonored and failed to execute his oath of office more than George W. Bush.

Bush permitted Al Qaeda and the Taliban to escape at Tora Bora and left the war in Afghanistan unfinished while turning his attention to military adventurism in Iraq.

The Neoconservatives whom Bush brought with him into the White House saw 9/11 not as a national tragedy but as an opportunity to effectuate their bloodlust for Iraq. These Neoconservatives, both within the Bush White House and in the boot-licking mainstream media (William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and many others), fabricated phony intelligence and hyped it into a case for war with Iraq. A pants-wetting cowardly Congress abdicated its constitutional war powers to the "Decider-in-Chief" who took us to war.

Americans now know (many of us knew at the time) that Iraq was an unnecessary war of aggression, a war of choice, not justified by any threat of an imminent attack upon the U.S. The architects of the Iraq war can be charged with war crimes and that includes members of Congress and the propagandists in the media, as they are well aware, under the Nuremberg Tribunal Principles. (Hence their lie that "everybody believed the intelligence" at the time. They are all covering for each other.)

Bush was indifferent to the destruction of the ancient cultures of Iraq, allowing the country to be looted. American troops were caught in the cross-fire of cultural cleansing while ancient scores were settled between Iraq's ethnic and religious groups. More than 100,000 Iraqis are dead and a substantial number more are casualties or refugees. More than 4,000 U.S. service men and women are dead and more than 30,000 suffered casualties, many of them permanenty disabled. The reconstruction of Iraq has been an abject failure and is marked by rampant fraud and corruption committed by western companies, including Vice President Dick Cheney's former company. Some $9 billion dollars in cash disappeared at the very beginning of the occupation and remains unaccounted for. (It would appear that the Iraq Provisional Authority was the working model for the TARP bailout funds to Wall Street investment banks).

Bush was indifferent to the human suffering and the loss of human life while America's Gulf Coast and the City of New Orleans were drowned by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He seems to believe that Americans were only upset with him because he did not land Air Force One in New Orleans. Incurious George just doesn't get it.

Bush failed to acknowledge the devastation to our economy that his laissez-fair conservative economic policies have wrought. Bush Lead During Weakest Economy in Decades:

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges.

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.

"The nation's economic expansion was driven to a large degree by the interrelated booms in the housing market, consumer spending and financial markets. Those booms, which the Bush administration encouraged with the idea of an "ownership society," have proved unsustainable."

"It's sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com. "It's almost a lost economic decade."

The truth is that Bush has no positive achievements of which to be proud. He is unquestionably the worst president ever. That is his legacy. Thank God that Bush's reign of error is over. But it may take a generation or more to repair the damage that Bush and his conservative supporters have inflicted upon this nation.

Finally, Chris Matthews was one of the mainstream media villagers who engaged in idol worship of Bush after 9/11 (did his leg tingle?) and the hyping of the war in Iraq ("we're all Neocons now.") His analysis comes from an entirely different perspective than mine – someone who believed in Bush but now feels entirely betrayed – yet Matthews arrives at a very similar conclusion. I guess "we are all in agreement now" that Bush is a spectacular failure, but for the few remaining Bush sycophants and apologists out there.