September 20, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH THE PETULANT

Since George W. Bush has conducted himself as though he's a king, maybe it's appropriate we give him a moniker. Even more appropriate, since the Bush organization behaves like a Mafia family it's appropriate to give him a name like a Mafia hood. Bush the Petulant. Bush really thinks he's better than everyone else, so when he doesn't get his way he stamps his foot or uses sarcasm to demean those around him. This article by Sidney Blumenthal is at www.salon.com:

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor's mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, "Karl, hang up my jacket." In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush's attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him "Pigpen," for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family -- certainly not people like them.)

Bush's deployed his fetish for punctuality as a punitive weapon. When Colin Powell was several minutes late to a Cabinet meeting, Bush ordered that the door to the Cabinet Room be locked. Aides have been fearful of raising problems with him. In his 2004 debates with Sen. John Kerry, no one felt comfortable or confident enough to discuss with Bush the importance of his personal demeanor. Doing poorly in his first debate, he turned his anger on his communications director, Dan Bartlett, for showing him a tape afterward. When his trusted old public relations handler, Karen Hughes, tried gently to tell him, "You looked mad," he shot back, "I wasn't mad! Tell them that!"

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: "KARL!" Rove, according to Draper, was Bush's "favorite punching bag," and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, "You don't know what the hell you're talking about."

THE FOOLISH CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS

I get the feeling that people who deny the reality of global warming really believe in fairy tales. They're the same people who think the "free market" solves everything or that prayer can cure cancer. Accepting the reality of climate change is inconvenient. It means lifestyles have to change. This article by Joe Brewer is at www.truthout.org:

A typical technique used by climate contrarians is to frame projections of likely future events as predictions and call climate scientists foolish for predicting the future. Tierney goes the other way and frames future events as reflections of the past. Check out this quote:

"Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
(emphasis added)

He does more than claim numerical equivalence. That alone would merely be inaccurate (the average of all scenarios for sea level rise over the next century is closer to 1.5 feet, but could be as high as 3 feet). Instead, he goes further to imply that the rise in sea level over the last century didn't cause any harm. Therefore, another increase of the same amount will have the same consequence. Clever sleight-of-hand, isn't it? He does the same thing with temperature:

"The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete … that's estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what's expected globally in the next century."
(emphasis added)