You remember BDS?

Well those same people also suffer from Obama Worship Disorder. It's like Jerusalem Syndrome for progressives. There's no known cure.

Via

George did it

Every family needs a scapegoat.

Via

Halliburton Stock Price

Since Bush/Cheney left office a year ago.

I guess business has still been pretty good.

Thank you, President Bush!

Here is a site collecting "Thank you" notes for former President Bush. You can just click to say "Thanks!" but you can also write a personalized note.

He couldn't speak very well in public or articulate a vision; most of his administration's defense was outsourced to bloggers and talk radio. He also let a corrupt GOP leadership run roughshod over our fiscal affairs during the economic boom years. But we were kept safe from attack for 7 years, a monumental achievement no one thought posssible at the time. We have won in Iraq thanks to his courage. And literally millions of Africans owe him their lives. He also remains a good and gracious man despite suffering the slings and arrows of the Left and the Right. It was time for him to go (and probably for the Bush family in its entirety to resign from national political life), so he won't be missed, but he can still be appreciated.

He should have done this years ago

Bush talks back to the press.

Via Ed Morrissey, who adds:

this exemplifies the vapidity of American war coverage. We saw this in the Basra coverage, where the initial pushback by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army got portrayed as a great victory and an embarrassing loss for Nouri al-Maliki — and within 48 hours, Sadr started offering terms for retreat. When Maliki’s forces liberated Basra a few days later, the media outlets responded by reminding everyone that the Mahdis fought back, and therefore the victory didn’t count as much.

The reptilian Dick Cheney

David Edelstein uses all his critical powers to explain the thing that is Dick Cheney and his seemingly innocuous sidekick, President Bush, in an interview at Bookslut.

[Q] For what it’s worth, Dick Cheney seems more outlandish than anything Oliver Stone or anyone else could have created.

[Edelstein] I would say Darth Vader, but no. Dick Cheney is so much scarier than Darth Vader. There is something subterranean about him.

...

[Q]There are precedents of George W. Bush, the idiot child-president who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s like Peter Sellers’ president in Dr. Strangelove.

[Edelstein] ]No, he’s far worse than that.

[Q] The part where he’s talking to his Russian counterpart on the telephone. “Yes, I understand Dmitri…”

[Edelstein] No, I must disagree. He’s a much more terrifying character in and of his own right. You have the combination of someone who’s been insulated and protected his whole life by Daddy and by Daddy’s power and who at the same time hates Daddy and needed to prove himself against Daddy. The fragility of his ego, not to be able to admit other opinions, other views. “I’m the decider guy.” He’s scary. I had problems with American Dreamz because it presented him as this nice buffoon. That gives him too much credit. He’s a perfect storm.

But Cheney. Remember Men in Black. They’d shoot someone’s head, the head would split open and this big black insect would crawl out. That’s what I think of when I see Cheney. There’s no way to account for him on a terrestrial level. I know it sounds like I’m being facetious, but I’m really not. I actually find it easier to imagine an insect coming out of his head than to think, “What are the human forces that shaped him?” The man is just entrenched in evil and slime.

Scooter stays home

Bush commutes Lewis Libby's sentence.

Mr. Libby was sentenced to thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine. In making the sentencing decision, the district court rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.

Bush's speech

He sounded awful, which is not unusual, though I guess the speech portion was OK. The question and answer period was awful, with Bush on defense on both Iraq and the immigration bill. Though he defended the immigration bill better than the war. It's really just a sorry dance that I guess will be replayed endlessly until Bush leaves office. Unless the surge works and September brings a better outlook to the war, but I doubt that either the press or Congress would even acknowledge a successful campaign.

January 19, 2009

The date President George W. Bush will pardon Scooter Libby. This was actually Fred Barnes' prediction on Fox last night, but I'll second it.

He's depraved on account of he's deprived

Andrew Ferguson takes on this "psychopolitical survey" of George Bush's mind.

Pretending that your political adversary is crazy -- rather than merely misguided, mistaken or misinformed -- is a relatively recent strategy of political partisans. It coincides with the rise of the pseudo-intellectual among the country's cultural elite.

There are lots of ways to identify a pseud, that over- schooled, undereducated poser who places the highest value on appearing sophisticated rather than on sophistication itself.

One mark is his belief that whoever disagrees with him must be intellectually deficient somehow -- the owner of a mind far punier than the finely tuned organ the pseud is fortunate to enjoy.

But assuming the stupidity of other people gets boring, and pseuds have short attention spans. And sometimes one's political opponent seems too crafty to be merely dumb.

That's when the pseud calls in the heavy artillery of bogus psychologizing. The fellow with whom you disagree is not merely a dope, he's a nut. And the surest evidence of his psychopathology is -- that he disagrees with you.

Of course, people who disagree with me are nuts--or stupid.

Via John Podhoretz.

Why do we need a rebuttal of the SOTU?

I mean, regardless of which party you belong to, whoever's the president is still the president of all of us. According to Wikipedia, the other side's been rebutting since 1966. I'm pretty sure most people just change the channel before the other side comes on.

Anyway, I watched Webb last night. I wasn't going to, but I was too lazy to change the channel. He seemed OK--composed, well-spoken. Nothing exactly earth shattering, though. It's really not what the Democrats say after the speech that's important, but what they do regarding the president's proposals. And Webb was pretty short on specifics.

The problem with the address in general is its laundry list approach: It's boring. That said, I thought Bush did well. His opening about Nancy Pelosi was gracious--Nancy's facelift seems to settling nicely, BTW, and she looked good--and he seemed much more relaxed than he was during the surge speech. I liked his tax credit for health insurance, though apparently the Democrats won't even give it a hearing. I thought the foreign policy part was good. Now we just have to see what the Democrats do.

I actually like the President's health care proposal

Jules Crittendon: The Speech George Bush Should Make Tuesday Night.

The disaster is that you, Congress and the American people, do not care to fight.

Faced with a fundamental challenge to our own security, to everything we believe in, to the world order to peace and security for which we and our parents fought so hard for so many years, you now want to pretend like none of these threats are real. You want to surrender to the evil I have been telling you about. An evil that, unchecked, can consume large parts of the world and threatens to usher in a dark age.

You didn’t like it when I talked about evil. Sounded too simple, too uncompromising, too moralistic. Too … biblical.

I don’t know what else you call people who fly passenger jets into office buildings; who rape women in front of their husbands and children, and execute their opponents in acid baths; who seek to spread tyrannical and archaic religious regimes that enslave women and stifle fundamental freedoms. Who want to dominate the world’s primary oil fields with nuclear weapons.

I call it evil. Works for me.

Sigh.

Anyone else feeling a sense of impending doom about Iraq?