November 30, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

MAKING GOVERNMENT BAD

Right-wingers tell us that government, particularly "big government," is bad. Big government encroaches on our freedoms, they say. But they aren't bothered in the least by things like spying on us, suspending habeas corpus, attempts to dictate our sexual behavior, monitoring what we read, and listening to our phone calls. Oh no. Government is only bad when it interferes with the ability to make money. People who say government doesn't work are only too happy to prove it when they get into power. We saw that in spades during the Reagan years and it's been worse with George W. Bush. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:

As the Bush administration sinks deeper into its multiple quagmires, the personality cult the G.O.P. once built around President Bush has given way to nostalgia for the good old days. The current cover of Time magazine shows a weeping Ronald Reagan, and declares that Republicans “need to reclaim the Reagan legacy.”

But Republicans shouldn’t cry for Ronald Reagan; the truth is, he never left them. There’s no need to reclaim the Reagan legacy: Mr. Bush is what Mr. Reagan would have been given the opportunity.

In 1993 Jonathan Cohn - the author, by the way, of a terrific new book on our dysfunctional health care system - published an article in The American Prospect describing the dire state of the federal government. Changing just a few words in that article makes it read as if it were written in 2007.

THE BUSH PERSONALITY CULT

Some of the most detestable people in history have their fans. Serial killers on Death Row usually get lots of mail from women wanting a relationship. There are devotees of Hitler. Charles Manson had his groupies. There are still people in this country who think George W. Bush is a smart and courageous leader. If Bush is intelligent, he disguises it very well. This article by Jaime O'Neill is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

People who cling to the insane notion that George W. Bush is a smart guy who's been good for the country are fond of citing the fact that the 43rd president of the United States has degrees from Harvard and Yale. Other delusional defenders of Bush intelligence point to the assertion from the White House press office that Bush read 94 books in the first nine months of this year, despite all those other time-consuming duties he had to perform.

That's the same Bush, I guess, and the same avid reader who could not be troubled to read a one-page summary of the possible negative results of an American invasion of Iraq, a summary boiled down especially for him by career military and State Department officials precisely because it had generally been known that this was a president who doesn't read much, a fact he acknowledged in an interview with Fox's Britt Hume way back in 2003when he copped to the fact that he doesn't even read newspapers. "I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what's moving," Bush said. "I rarely read the stories." So, those career foreign service people condensed lots of info into one page˜and still the man didn't read the thing, an act of nonfeasance in office that is still bearing rotten fruit.

Last year, after Bush spokespeople had spent a couple of years trying to spin Bush's lack of curiosity and reluctance to read stuff, Bush told NBC's Brian Williams: "I said I was looking for a book to read, Laura said you ought to try Camus. I also read three Shakespeares. ... I've got a eck-a-lec-tic reading list."