Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Official Declaration of War Against Bush

host · 07-02-2007, 04:03 PM

I'm Just Warmin' Up....<a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/07/02/libby-commutation-washington-responds/#more-682">Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence</a> is for me, the straw that breaks the camel's back.... I'm "calling out" all republicans and other conservatives who support Bush, Cheney, Bush's war against "terrorism", tax cuts for the wealthy while 150 million are reduced to owning 2-1/2 percent of US wealth...and while US treasury debt was "transformed" from $18 billion annually, in the fiscal year ending 9/30/2000, to a recent six year, annual average of $412 billion.....RNC/Bush - Cheney/DOJ vote suppression conspiracy.....this is going to be a war of words.... a verbal <b>"throw down"</b>.

To start it off....what are you thinking.....what do you read....what do you "know"?????? Do we even speak the same language, anymore????

Here's the "editor at large", of one of your most prominent publications:

Quote:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19460029/
'Tucker' for June 26
Read the transcript to the Tuesday show
Updated: 10:43 a.m. CT <h2>June 27, 2007</h2>

Guests: Jonah Goldberg, A.B. Stoddard, Mort Zuckerman, Michael Chertoff

CARLSON:.....On his last full day as prime minister, it is reported that Blair will be become a special envoy to the Middle East. Will he make the difference in the world‘s most perilous region?

Plus, the most perilous region in Washington, D.C. this week is the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Today‘s “Washington Post” featured the third in a series of four articles bent on exposing Mr. Cheney‘s sinister and alleged skirting of the Constitution, and reputedly dangerous influence on the rest of the Bush administration.

In today‘s episode, the vice president dictates economic policy and tax cuts, among many other things. The “Post‘s” scathing series has spawned editorials across the country, suggesting that Dick Cheney ought to be impeached, or otherwise forced out of office for the good of the nation.

Well, joining me now, one of Dick Cheney‘s very few remaining defenders and only a part-time defender at that, is nationally-syndicated columnist and editor-at-large at “The National Review Online,” Jonah Goldberg.

Jonah, welcome.

<b>JONAH GOLDBERG, THE NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE:</b> Hey, thanks for having me, Tucker.

CARLSON: So, you are one of the very few people with the courage, the moxie to go into print, and say, you know, there is something good about Dick Cheney. Was this a parody or do you feel this way and if you do, defend it. <h2>Why are you defending Cheney?

GOLDBERG: No, I, I—well, first of all, I have—I just simply, I have always liked Dick Cheney.</h2> I think that he‘s, you know, as I put it in the piece, you know, everyone—everyone on both sides of the aisle, there‘s a lot of this you know, sort of talk about how we don‘t want politicians to go by the polls, who don‘t put their finger in the wind and go with just whatever the prevailing conventional wisdom is.

And yet, <b>Dick Cheney is really the only guy who doesn‘t bother talking the talk, he just walks the walk.</b> He does not care, and I think it‘s a sign of character and integrity on his part that he just doesn‘t care. There are a lot of people out there who worship the masses and Dick Cheney doesn‘t. He cares about history, he cares about the merits of the argument. He probably cares about power quite a bit, too.

But he‘s a serious guy, and the flip side to that is that I‘m not sure that‘s the best thing to have in a vice president. It turns out that there‘s something to be said for having the only other nationally elected candidate, other than the president themselves, be a politician, as it were. Care about winning the Oval Office for himself....

........CARLSON: That‘s right, and I agree with you completely that whenever people say, we need a politician who doesn‘t look at the polls, we need another Harry Truman, they don‘t know what they‘re talking about or they‘re lying. People want to be pandered to, they want someone to suck up to them, they want a very democratic president—small D democratic, I agree completely.

GOLDBERG: That is what Michael Bloomberg is, right?

CARLSON: I am bothered though—that‘s right, that‘s exactly right.

GOLDBERG: I mean, he‘s sucking up to the vanity (ph) of the independents.

CARLSON: But I‘m bothered by Cheney ‘s—but does—Cheney‘s secrecy, his penchant for secrecy. I mean, this is a cliche, a stereotype, but it‘s rooted, apparently, in truth. The guy really is secretive to a degree we haven‘t seen in a while. That is—I mean, we do have a right to know what our government is doing, don‘t we?

GOLDBERG: Yes, sure, although I think you would concede, even though you and I disagree about some foreign policy stuff, you and I would agree that there are some things that should be kept secret. We might disagree about what they are.

CARLSON: Right.

GOLDBERG: And you know, but I do think that what Cheney has learned after a lifetime in Washington as a power player, is that the person who holds the secrets has power. And he is using that for what I would say, or probably what he believes to be certainly good ends. A lot of people disagree on that, but he‘s trying to do best as he can and he sees holding onto power as a tool to do that.

I think it‘s got a real counter-productive side to it because it creates this kind of antibody reaction of such visceral dislike of the guy that it makes his policies that much less effective because he can‘t really get everything that he wants that way.

CARLSON: I think you‘re absolutely right.

Why is he so disliked? When you talk to—when you talk to liberals or just even garden-variety Democrats and Dick Cheney‘s name comes up, you‘re apt to see hyperventilation. People hate Cheney on this visceral level. What is so hateable about Dick Cheney?

GOLDBERG: I have no—I really, I truly have no idea. I like Dick Cheney, love to have a beer with the guy. I think he is a smart, serious man in American life. I think one of the things that bothers them is that he doesn‘t care. You know, there‘s nothing—you know, the opposite of love isn‘t hate, it‘s indifference. It drives stalkers and some hard-core lefties crazy. He just doesn‘t care what they think about him.

CARLSON: Have you ever seen Dick Cheney give a speech? I mean, the contempt for the audience is palpable. He doesn‘t, he doesn‘t—he tells a joke that‘s written into his speech, he doesn‘t wait for them to laugh, he just blows right through it.

GOLDBERG: I know, I—see, I love that. He looks like he should be eating a sandwich while he‘s doing it, you know. I mean, it‘s just this sort of like matter-of-fact, eating lunch over the sink. Oh yes, and by the way, here is my view of the world. I love that.

CARLSON: Every time he speaks, I have the same thought. I can just see him yelling, hey you kids, get off my lawn. I love it. And I‘m glad to find someone else who will stand up for Dick Cheney. You are almost—you‘re almost alone in this nation of 300 million.

Jonah, I really appreciate you coming on, thank you.

GOLDBERG: You should come to our fan club meetings. There‘s lots of empty chairs.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Jonah Goldberg, thanks a lot.

GOLDBERG: Thanks, Tucker......

.....CARLSON: This is MSNBC, the place for politics.

....and....here is your "leader"..... the "decider"..... Where does he get his confidence....where do you get yours? Together, you've fucking ruined our country !!!! <h3>WTF ????</h3>

Quote:

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003575.php
Today's Must Read
By Spencer Ackerman - July 2, 2007, 9:57 AM

At least Lyndon Johnson was introspective. That's the takeaway from Peter Baker's big Washington Post <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/01/AR2007070101356.html?hpid=topnews">exploration</a> of George W. Bush's "tranquility" in the midst of the compounding disasters of his presidency, from Iraq to Katrina to Alberto Gonzales. Enduring what Baker calls "the most drastic political collapse in a generation," Bush holes up in the White House, turning down appearances where he might face public disapproval, as when he declined to throw out the first pitch for the Washington Nationals' opening day. Even when he calls historians to the White House to discuss precedents for Iraq war strategy or the "nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world," he remains surprisingly confident:

<b>In public and in private, according to intimates, he exhibits an inexorable upbeat energy that defies the political storms. Even when he convenes philosophical discussions with scholars, he avoids second-guessing his actions. He still acts as if he were master of the universe, even if the rest of Washington no longer sees him that way.

"You don't get any feeling of somebody crouching down in the bunker," said Irwin M. Stelzer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was part of one group of scholars who met with Bush. "This is either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can't tell you which."</b>

Stelzer is very generous, perhaps due to his personal audience with the president. Consider the origins of the surge. Josh Bolten, the White House chief of staff, had to "shock" Bush into recognizing that his Iraq strategy had failed after the GOP rout in the midterms. A less serene president might have interpreted Bolten's message to mean that it was time to, at the least, seek a path to extrication. Instead, Bush's "extraordinary self-confidence," in Stelzer's words, led him to... escalate the war. Bush shows every sign of believing that the GOP midterm massacre was, in reality, a mandate for him to deepen the U.S. commitment to the war.

Even the outside scholars Bush invites to the White House seem like enablers. Consider this frightening exchange:

<b>Stelzer said Bush seemed smarter than he expected. The conversation ranged from history to religion and touched on sensitive topics for a president wrestling with his legacy. "He asked me, 'Do you think our unpopularity abroad is a result of my personality?' And he laughed," Stelzer recalled. "I said, 'In part.' And he laughed again."

Much of the discussion focused on the nature of good and evil, a perennial theme for Bush, who casts the struggle against Islamic extremists in black-and-white terms. Michael Novak, a theologian who participated, said it was clear that Bush weathers his difficulties because he sees himself as doing the Lord's work.</b>

The piece doesn't list Stelzer or Novak's reactions to the way Bush conceives of the question of the world's rejection of the U.S. under Bush. But it would be a great credit to both men if they had said that the issue isn't so much Bush's "personality" but instead the way that he's taken America on a violent, imperial course, further destabilizing the Middle East and South Asia, without any ability to mitigate or even understand the consequences.

Conservatives are starting to understand as well that Bush's solipsism turns blunders into quagmires. A case in point is the president's take on the U.S. attorneys scandal:

<b>Bush remains convinced that his old friend did nothing wrong ethically in firing U.S. attorneys, and senior adviser Karl Rove angrily rejects what he sees as a Democratic witch hunt, according to White House officials. Yet beyond the inner circle, it is hard to find a current or former administration official who thinks Gonzales should stay.

"I don't understand for the life of me why Al Gonzales is still there," said one former top aide, who, like others, would speak only on the condition of anonymity. "It's not about him. It's about the office and who's able to lead the department." The ex-aide said that every time he runs into former Cabinet secretaries, "universally the first thing out of their mouths" is bafflement that Gonzales remains. ...

Beyond Gonzales, the discontent with the Bush presidency is broader and deeper among Republican lawmakers, some of whom seethe with anger. "Our members just wish this thing would be over," said a senior House Republican who met with Bush recently. "People are tired of him." Bush's circle remains sealed tight, the lawmaker said. "There's nobody there who can stand up to him and tell him, 'Mr. President, you've got to do this. You're wrong on this.' There's no adult supervision. It's like he's oblivious. Maybe that's a defense mechanism."</b>

If a consistent thread ties these episodes together, it's that, for Bush, his poor fortunes are the faults of lesser beings. One of his last remaining allies, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), describes Bush as concerned with how "100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong." Bob Woodward first captured that aspect of Bush in Plan of Attack, when Bush parried a question about history's verdict on Iraq by remarking, "We don't know. We'll all be dead." Like all truisms, it missed the point: history looks most kindly on those who correct their mistakes, rather than entrench themselves. It will take an energetic approach to historical revisionism to explain away the George W. Bush on display in Baker's piece this morning.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...902258_pf.html

Three Cheers For Nervous Hand-Wringing

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, July 1, 2007; B04

Here's who we need in Washington: Socrates. The Greek fella. We need him not because of what he knew, but because of what he knew he didn't know, which was pretty much everything. He was one of the all-time great doubters. Listen to Loyal Rue, a professor of science and religion at Luther College, describe him:

"He would say things like, 'How do you know that? What's the evidence for that? What do you really mean when you say that? Here's the implication of that claim. Here's the danger you get into if you try to generalize that claim and apply it to everyone.' "

Give Doubt a Chance: This could be a rallying cry for our troubled times.

Doubt has been all but outlawed in contemporary Washington. Doubt is viewed as weakness. You are expected to hold onto your beliefs even in a hurricane of contradictory data. <h2>Believing in something that's not true is considered a sign of character.</h2>

The president sets the tone: He told Bob Woodward that he relies on "gut instinct" and said, "I'm not a textbook player. I'm a gut player." Blogger Glenn Greenwald's new book, "A Tragic Legacy," opens with something Bush told journalists last September: <h2>"I've never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions."</h2> The smart bet: He'll become more convinced yet. He's not the type to slap his forehead and say, " What a bonehead I am!"

Then there's Dick Cheney, a one-man branch of government who, we can safely estimate, second-guesses himself as often as he re-roofs his house.

The certainty-mongering of the Bush administration has created an opening for political opponents. Al Gore's latest book criticizes Bush for his "seeming immunity to doubt." He has found a market for books with "Truth" and "Reason" in the title. Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, declares that Democrats are an "evidence-based" party. Of course, Gore and Clinton radiate a fair amount of certainty themselves. Politics isn't for equivocators. At the elite level, there's pressure to prove oneself the surest and smartest person in the room. Think of former House speaker Newt Gingrich: In your mind, you see him emitting certainties with the air of a man who is delighted (but not surprised) to be right once again.

And now even the doubters have become overly certain. Look at all the atheism books on the bestseller lists. In "God Is Not Great," Christopher Hitchens writes, "The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species." But it's hard to think of a public intellectual more certain of himself than Hitch. (Carl Sagan was certainly no believer, but he once told me, "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know.")

But in an age of warring certainties, of dogmas gone ballistic, uncertainty is viewed as the shaky prelude to going wobbly. Confidence is what citizens look for in their leaders and, increasingly, in their pundits. The pros know that John Wayne never said, "On the other hand . . . " It's dangerous to change or modify a position. The worst thing you can say about a politician today is that "he was for it before he was against it."

Washington is full of alpha males (some of them female) who would no sooner express doubt than join a knitting circle. Their mantra is "Failure is not an option." But perhaps we might suggest (meekly) that sometimes failure needs to be an option -- which is to say, you ought to have a Plan B in case your initial indubitable judgment turns out wrong.

We need to rehabilitate doubt and uncertainty and recognize them as tools for cutting through mushy notions and wishful thinking. We need to stop elevating decisiveness over intelligence in the list of political virtues. We need leaders who think more like scientists, who know that knowledge is provisional, that today's orthodoxy might be invalidated tomorrow. We need to learn how to think again.

Jerome Kagan, professor emeritus of psychology at <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Harvard+University?tid=informline">Harvard</a>, says we've valued ultra-confident leaders since time immemorial. "The public is uncertain," he notes, "and they look to their leaders for certainty, for confidence. De Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt: In times of crisis, you want a person who appears to you to know exactly what he is doing. That's not recent or American. That's human."

But we should probably doubt our own talent for discerning competence from a distance. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Princeton?tid=informline">Princeton</a> psychology professor Alexander Todorov has shown that we will reach a decision on whether someone looks competent in just one-tenth of a second. In another study co-authored by Todorov, test subjects looked at photographs of senatorial candidates. (If the subjects recognized any of the candidates, they were bumped from the study.) They had one second to reach a conclusion about which candidate was more competent. For the 2004 senatorial races, this snap judgment correctly predicted the outcomes of 69 percent of the races.

So sometimes we pick a guy because, at first glance, we like the cut of his jib. (Even when we're not exactly sure what a jib is.)

All of us -- citizens and senators and shopkeepers and scholars -- need to review the principles of "critical thinking." In 1990, psychologists Carole Wade and Carol Tavris listed eight elements of critical thinking:

1. Ask questions; be willing to wonder.

2. Define your problem correctly.

3. Examine the evidence.

4. Analyze assumptions and biases.

5. Avoid emotional reasoning.

6. Don't oversimplify.

7. Consider other interpretations.

8. Tolerate uncertainty.

This would get you instantly fired from many jobs in Washington. Asking questions is a time-waster in a culture that demands instant answers. Defining your problem correctly, examining evidence and contemplating biases can be extremely inconvenient. The media marketplace favors absolutism and hysteria.

But doubt, when properly managed, pays rewards. It gives you more information. It helps you create coalitions, which is necessary in a society designed to be coalition-based. And doubt prepares you for those inevitable moments when what you hoped was true turns out to be false.

Have there ever been leaders who were comfortable with uncertainty and doubt? <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+Washington?tid=informline">George Washington</a>, who was always the first to cite his lack of qualifications for a job (Continental Army commander, president), said in his farewell address that he did the best he could with a "very fallible judgment." No one today would dare say such a thing.

Other leaders also come to mind, some more politically talented than others: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Dwight+D.+Eisenhower?tid=informline">Dwight D. Eisenhower</a>, who before D-Day wrote a statement taking the blame for the invasion's failure; Bob Dole, always more of a pragmatist than an ideologue; and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Bill+Clinton?tid=informline">Bill Clinton</a>, who could talk through eight sides of every issue, often until his listeners passed out from information overload.

But these are particularly polarized times, and we're in a war (or three), and no one has much patience for a lot of maybe-this, maybe-that stuff. If you want to become president, you probably should act as though you've never had a doubt in your life. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Rudolph+Giuliani?tid=informline">Rudy Giuliani</a> said the other day, "You face bullies and tyrants and terrorists with strength, not weakness." And strength means you don't sit around requesting more data.

This was driven home in the first Democratic debate, when <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Barack+Obama?tid=informline">Barack Obama</a> was asked what kind of military action he'd take if the United States were attacked again by terrorists. His answer was criticized as weak. He began by saying he'd check on the emergency response to the attack itself. Then:

"The second thing is to make sure that we've got good intelligence, (a) to find out that we don't have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and (b) to find out: Do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network? But what we can't do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast."

Way too deliberative. Correct answer: I'd start killing lots of bad guys. (Better yet: Make pocketa-pocketa sound effects while pantomiming the machine-gunning of the enemy.)

Professor Rue reports that in Renaissance England, political jesters were allowed to poke fun at the alleged wisdom of the king, injecting a little doubt into the royal court. (Think Leno and Letterman and Stewart, live from the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+White+House?tid=informline">Oval Office</a>.) In the medieval church, a devil's advocate would participate in the debate over whether a certain person deserved sainthood. And in ancient <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Rome?tid=informline">Rome</a>, the victorious general returning from battle would have a slave trotting by his side -- a reminder, Rue says, that the general was a mere mortal.

"Doubt motivates inquiry, but it is also a source of humility," Rue says.

So as a nation will we rehabilitate doubt? Will we suddenly pivot toward greater tolerance of uncertainty?

I doubt it.

<h3>This is the worst president in the history of the US, and polls indicated that 77 percent of you STILL support him....what is it.....confidence, pride, ego, principle...... what makes you do it?</h3>