Bush isn't as dumb or incompetent as many say he is, Bush knows exactly what he's doing, he just doesn't care about the price being paid by people outside his social class as he pushes his ideology; unbridled capitalism. An example of who Bush & co. represent was on display this past summer when they tried to make permanent the 2001 Estate Tax cuts due to expire in 2011.
Though they failed in this attempt they did not try to save the Tax Cuts to the middle class and lower middle class, which are also due to expire in 2011.

Bush, Cheney and that gang spend their lives fighting against the kind of government intervention needed in catastrophies like 9/11, Katrina, etc., why be surprised when they fail? And they fail because they haven't the knowledge, the desire or the empathy to succeed.

I never liked Reagan, but I never saw Reagan as having the hubris, the arrogance, the sense of entitlement, nor the absolute confidence that his vision and decisons were right as Bush has.
Nor did I ever fear for the health of the Republic under Reagan as I do under Bush, and this is why I see the upcoming election
as perhaps the most important in our history.

never forget that base Bush is the voice of Bush’s base

Exactly. I'm reminded of a Bush cousin, I think it was, who said he laughed whenever he heard someone talk about Bush pandering to the relgious right, because he is the religious right. These are people who are reassured when they hear him say things about God speaking through him, that scare the bejeezus out of the rest of us.

The people I really despise are Bush allies in the rational part of the Republican party and the media--Dick Lugar, Olympia Snowe, David Broder, George Will. Not that I mistake any of these people for secret liberals or even moderates in most cases, but I also don't believe they really support things ranging from Iraq to the Unitary Executive to pretending that the "jury's still out" on evolution, they just think they can clean up the mess later (except maybe for Broder, who's so far gone in Beltwaycentrist thinking that I don't think he can see the mess). These people are the monkeys who let the tiger out of its cage. And where the ones who are going to have to clean up the mess.

Bush hitched his political wagon to the extremist far right of the republican party.  In the 2000 primaries they smeared and torpedoed John McCain in S. Carolina for him.  So Bush panders to these people, which is not surprising...he looks at it as they put him in power and they will keep him in power.  But the base's rejection of Bush might not be a repudiation of Bush or his policies per se...the far right read polls and their apparent abandonement of Bush probably represents the realization that Bush is a lame duck who is dragging down their movement. In a little more then 2 years they have to get their new "candidate of God" to continue building their theocracy.  So I don't see it as the far right dumping Bush because they feel he is a loser now...it is just their attempts to position themselves for '08, early.  Just like Bush his supporters are Machiavellian opportunists and have no conscience when it comes to politics.

gold standard for democracy

Huh? Why? I'm not bashing the US or saying it's not a democracy, but why would it be the "gold standard for democracy", now or at any time since the 1950s or so? The world is full of democracies, a lot of which have been by many measures more democratic than the US for quite some time. I don't think much of the world thinks of the US as a "gold standard for democracy", and certainly not after the 2000 election. Why allow this tone of American exceptionalism to creep in?

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

I agree with those who think we've given ourselves grades which are much too high when it comes to democracy. We might want to review our commitment to egalité and fraternité one of these days! Liberté? I see by the NYTimes this afternoon that there's a serious tussle going on in the Senate -- Cheney pushing hard, Dems losing out for now -- with respect to curbs on surveillance. Aux barricades?

The Senate Judiciary Committee today endorsed a bill backed by the White House to have a secret court review the constitutionality of the Bush administration’s eavesdropping program. Today’s vote was a victory for the White House in the continuing debate over the proper balance between national security and personal liberties, but it was far from the last word. Many Democrats are sure to try to derail or amend the measure when the Senate takes it up. Indeed, the Judiciary Committee voted today to send other provisions to the Senate floor for debate, even though they are not wholly compatible with the Specter-White House agreement.

Perhaps you didn't fear for the health of our Republic under Reagan - I didn't either. But what about Nixon?

When he was under great pressure from the impeachment proceedings and there was an announcement that he was going to give a public statement that evening, I seriously expected him to announce that the 101st Airborne had surrounded the Congress and he was declaring martial law. His resignation surprised me.

I later heard from military people I knew that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had put out an order stating that the various commanders could not act on any order from Nixon that was not counter-signed by the Joint Chiefs. Nixon could not have ordered a division into Washington.

Today I am not so sure that the military would protect America from its President.

You are correct that this upcoming election is critical to the health of the American Republic. But that was what I felt going into the 2004 Presidential Election, also. We are still in the process of falling off a 50-story building, and replying to the question of "How are you doing?" as we pass the 20th story going down with "OK, so far."

I'm not sure how far it is to the ground floor, but when we get there we won't be able to say anything good about it. And it is getting closer fast.

Bill Clinton recently on Bush, and related:

"I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions," Clinton went on. "So I can't give him a bad grade on curiosity. I think both he and his father, because they have peculiar speech patterns, have been under-estimated in terms of their intellectual capacity. You know, the way they speak and all, it could be, it could just relate to the way the synapses work in their brains."

"I've never been worried about his intellect as much as his ideological bent. I think he believed--and perhaps correctly--that his father was defeated in '92 because he lost the right. And he made up his mind that he'd never lose it. Kind of like George Wallace did when he was beaten for governor."

"I also think that he was genuinely more conservative on questions like concentrations of wealth and power, weakening of environmental and health regulations--things of that kind--than any President we've had in a very, very long time. Even more conservative than Reagan, probably, and way to the right of his father and Nixon and Eisenhower. But the thing that bothers me about having an ideology as opposed to a philosophy is that, if you have an ideology, then the outcome is dictate before the facts are in, before arguments are heard. And that, I think, can cause problems."

Clinton said that Bush, despite embracing the slogan "compassionate conservatism," never hid his radical-right agenda. "He said, 'Vote for me, and I'll give you judges like Clarence Thomas and Anton Scalia,' and that's exactly what he did."

from "Profiles: The Wanderer:
The ex-presidency of Bill Clinton,"
by David Remnick,
The New Yorker issue of 2006-09-18
(not available online.)

Clinton's as bright as ever. Something has me wondering, and I realize I was the one saying this morning we should stop speculating on whether Bush is too dumb, ideological, political, or passive. Before the Bushies, I think ideology had a different meaning than blindness to reality. Whatever one says of Lenin and Hitler, they weren't in that kind of delirium. Lenin was even, I'm afraid, a good strategist capable of shifting policy quickly, which is part of how we got to a power-mad, not so clearly ideological tyrant like Stalin. He also pored over books by Marx and others and wrote some that historians of Marxism no doubt still have to read to understand what happened.

Hitler did a scarily good job of taking office and conquering others, and it's not his ideology that made him overreach in Russia. Ironically, he was sufficiently into German culture that a British critic, John Carey, has made the preposterous argument that art is bad because it drove Hitler to kill millions. Even bin Laden probably didn't think the attack on the WTC would bring the towers down, and he certainly didn't think he'd have been greeted with flowers. Indeed, he probably couldn't have known enough then about America to expect that this attack would generate the Bush policy sustaining his cause.

It reminds me of certain religious cults that have something almost beyond ideology, awaiting the apocalypse. At the very least, it's an ideology in which an uninquisitive, nonreader, ex-cheerleader would feel at home.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Hey, what are you talking about? He said he read "three Shakespeare's" this summer (on top of Camus, of course). Did anyone ever describe books that they ACTUALLY READ that way?

He can say shit like that because he KNOWS no one will actually ask him about the books he claims to have read. When he got asked what the Camus book was about, he ignored the question and brought up the "Shakespeare's." He KNOWS he can get away with it! And he does!

Jan Knaus

I sure do miss that direct and info-dense way of talking. I'm proud to have had him in charge.

While we could wait until Israel is hit with a nuclear bomb (or our troops in the area - since it appears the terrorists in Iraq don't mind killing Muslims wholesale either) it would severely hamper our ability to effectively retailiate.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Technically - sure, we could still lob a nuke into Iran at that point and probably kill a few million more civilians in response.

I guess the thought I am trying to make here is that I would rather not wait until we lose hundreds of thousands of people to justify killing a few hundred thousand more. It seems to make much more sense to pre-empt that and do "surgical" (and I am not discounting that there would be a high potential for some civilian casualties) strikes to take out military targets.

I think the beginnings of the change in this "no pre-emptive" attack doctrine started at Pearl Harbor for the US. But back then it normally took large coordinations of resources and personnel to be able to kill large numbers of people in short order. Once the nuke came out and then the Cold War, that policy shifted even more - look at Cuba and Kennedy.

IMO we need to get to the point where we put a huge emphasis on our intelligence gathering (and not using those capabilities for subversion) so that we can be sure if we have to take pre-emptive action, we do it with the utmost confidence that we are avoiding a much larger catastrophe.

While the "Cold War" is basically over, it doesn't mean we can just reduce our military so much (as Clinton tried to do) that we can't protect our interests and "free trade" for the rest of the world. It seems to me that much of the reason there was even a hint of surplusses during his presidency had a lot to do with the huge cuts made in the defense budget, and the fact that there was a boom in communications technology.

"If it doesn't make sense, why are we doing it? If it does make sense, why aren't we!?!" - A deranged computer consultant.

Bush, Cheney and that gang spend their lives fighting against the kind of government intervention needed in catastrophies like 9/11, Katrina, etc., why be surprised when they fail? And they fail because they haven't the knowledge, the desire or the empathy to succeed.

What kind of government intervention was needed for 9/11 that they could have enacted with the political environment at that time (remember, it was all about how he had been given the election by the SC)? Also the CIA and other similar institutions were gutted and hamstrung during the 70s and 80s by Congress. There are laws and other barriers in place to ensure the domestic side of the house doesn't share intelligence or resources with the foreign side - so what more would they have done prior to 9/11? Bush/Cheney that is?

Regarding Katrina, do we toss State rights out the window, and just make it so the President can order the military into any State for a national crisis? I can see that in a case where the governor of a state is taken out, or perhaps it is obvious up front that the State is not capable of managing the issue at hand. Certainly experts had warned for years that a Hurricane of lesser magnitude than Katrina could have caused serious damage to New Orleans - was it the responsibility of the Federal Government to write the disaster plan for local authorities? That would have flown like a lead balloon. Lousiana authorities knew for years that something like Katrina could happen, and yet they couldn't even follow their own plan for evacuation. I am sure there are a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which is human nature - and crying wolf. They had heard for years that every hurricane heading their way was going to be "the one", and yet they dodged the bullet every time - why should this one have been any different?

Granted, the feds could have done a better job at pre-positioning so they could get in quickly, but they were probably working under the same false assumptions that everyone else was. Added to that, you have current hostile politcal environment which surely made it harder for people to cooperate (on both sides). IMO it was a monumental failure at all levels, but truly, the State and local authorities need to look at themselves squarely in the mirror to see where the biggest failure occured in the whole chain of events. If they had acted in the way their disaster plans stipulated, a lot of what happened to the people down their could have been avoided.

Working for a police department not even close to Louisiana we were still hugely affected by Katrina. Most of the people I know don't believe the feds were the problem in that case.

Do you think the people working for the police departments around the country are not empathetic to what happened? And yet they are pretty conservative for the most part. Just a question - one of those "put yourself in their shoes" kinda things. I just find it hard to attribute values or attitudes to people I don't know personally - I may have an opinion on it, but stating it as some sort of fact:

And they fail because they haven't the knowledge, the desire or the empathy to succeed.

How do you know for a fact? Or is this just your opinion?

"If it doesn't make sense, why are we doing it? If it does make sense, why aren't we!?!" - A deranged computer consultant.

We are in agreement, I think, that it's unwise to kill large numbers of civilians over a potential, and that our intelligence has to do a good job of staying in contact with developments. There's no one form of intelligence collection that obviates the need for others. For example, communications intelligence is highly rated. If you can veryify that the other side is really talking over circuits, it's like listening in on their conversations.

While optical fiber is not impossible to tap, it is far more difficult and dangerous to do than tapping copper wires. This is not to say we don't have places where could,clandestinely tap -- we certainly did in the Cold War. In one moment of comedy, a vacant store lay over a Soviet cable in Germany. The CIA rented the store, and decided it had to do something in the store or it would look suspicious. They decided to start a cloth/sewing supply place specializing in English styles.

Unfortunately, that was a year English was In, so they had to add (and train) cover staff to run the store as a store.

With something like Iranian uranium enrichment, the basic process, even though the details may be classifed, are known to many nations. One of the key aspects is that you need not tens, not hundreds, but thousands or tens of thousands of centrifuges. It's going to be hard to conceal, from imaging satellites, the trucks of material going back and forth to a buried facility. Even empty roads that have heen heavily trafficked have heat signatures.

One of the hardest things to hide will be the electrical power plants feeding the enrichment facility. The US facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was located because there was large hydroelectric power nearby, from the Tennessee Valley Authority. If you find large power sources without apparent civilian use, nuclear production is a clue.

Most enrichment facilities will have at least two independent power supplies, through high-voltage power supplies. For example, if we reasonably think a centifuge array is buried somewhere, and we could bomb the power plants or transmission lines simultaneously, the centrifuges might shake themselves to pieces -- rather explosively.

Right now, it's generally accepted that Iran has a few hundred centrifuges. Through various forms of intelligence collection, we may be able to keep somewhat abreast of where they are. I don't begrudge any funds for that purpose.

Perhaps the reference example is South Africa, which did have a weapons program and shut it down. There's a lot of data there on concealment, and, indeed, some of their engineers probably should be working in counterproliferation.

Our free trade helps when it, perhaps deliberately, lets key components through, in ways we can track.

As far as I can tell, Iran is 5 to 10 years, even with Chinese or rogue Pakistani guidance, of getting an appreciable number of nuclear weapons on missiles. A lot of the practical problems aren't exotic nuclear ones -- we, for example, discovered after retirement that a large percentage of the early Polaris warheads would not have gone off, for as mundane a reason is a specialized glue, use to hold specialized materials in an exact set of positions, didn't hold well in storage. It's this sort of problem that is hardest to work out.

I don't rule out that preemption might, at some point, be needed. Right now isn't the time, especially when there still might be grounds for international cooperation and diplomacy. I don't see Iran as a country that can or should be embargoed indefinitely -- let us find reasons to talk and trade with them if only for intelligence value.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

As it stands this anecdote makes no sense.

I realize that you may not wish to say when your father died or how much your mother received when she sold his civil engineering business or the amount of her marital deduction, but without that information the reasonableness of your assertions -- wildly improbable as they appear -- cannot be judged. 

There is a logical fallacy in preventive war. How can you know the future?

In my thinking there is there is a logical fallacy involved, for exactly the reason...that we cannot divine the future.  Using that premise a case can be made for attacking any country based on the fact that at some point in the future, for reasons unknown, they might attack us.