Stay true to the dreams of thy youth

An admission: while I spent years watching and writing about the Bush Administration, I have not rushed out to buy a copy of George W. Bush's ghost-written autobiography. I have not watched or listened to one of his many media interviews.

All it took was Bush's take-away headline yesterday morning --- the false claim that his approval of torture via waterboarding prevented Terrorist Attacks in the United Kingdom --- to reinforce years of conclusion that the 43rd President was/is a) lying b) immoral c) blissfully ill-informed d) all of the above.

And I do not think that hundreds of pages of text can do more than this Bushian comparison, made in his television promotion on Tuesday: 1) Torture was not wrong 2) What was wrong was pouring vodka into my sister's aquarium, killing her goldfish.

Stephen Walt, however, did have the patience to go beyond the puffery to offer an incisive critique of Bush's "Delusion Points". He begins with an essential case for not giving in to historical revision/forgetting:

Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, it has become a cliché to observe that the newish president, who spent his 2008 campaign promising a U-turn from his deeply unpopular predecessor's activities abroad, has ended up with a foreign policy that looks surprising like George W. Bush's. The United States has more troops in Afghanistan than it did at the end of the Bush years, Guantánamo is still open, efforts to engage Iran have failed, and while American soldiers may have begun pulling back from Iraq, they've left plenty of Western defense contractors in their wake.

In anticipation of tomorrow's release of Bush's memoir, Decision Points, this line of thinking is reinforcing one of the Beltway press corps' favorite rituals: the "was he really that bad?" nostalgia for a president that the same reporters and analysts were happily pummeling only two years ago.

Don't believe a word of it. George W. Bush's presidency really wasthat bad -- and the fact that Obama has largely followed the same course is less a measure of Bush's wisdom than a reminder of the depth of the hole he dug his country into, as well as the institutionalized groupthink that dominates the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.

Mirroring the Bush/ghostwriter approach of 14 chapters claiming a key decision that Bush made in his adult life, Walt puts forth his own list of 14 foreign policy decisions distinguishing the Bush years as President. The Iraq War, the ignorance of Al Qa'eda before 9/11 and then the elevation of Osama bin Laden "to the status of a warrior heroically defying the world's sole superpower", the dismissal of international agreements on law, justice, and the environment, failures in the Middle East and with Iran, and Hurricane Katrina --- "observers around the world saw this debacle as both a demonstration of waning U.S. competence and a revealing indicator of continued racial inequality, if not outright injustice" --- are all here.

However, in light of Bush's decision --- with Oprah, with Fox News' Sean Hannity, with radio host Rush Limbaugh, with NBC television --- to highlight his Torture Is Right approach, here is Walt's Decision 6:

Within days of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began preparing to authorize a set of practices -- meticulously documented in Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side -- that are normally associated with brutal military dictatorships. These measures included the systematic use of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, secret renditions of suspected terrorists, targeted assassinations, and indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo and other overseas facilities. These practices were endorsed and approved by John Yoo, a mid-level official in the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and Bush admits in his memoir that he personally approved the waterboarding of captured terrorist suspects. The sordid debacle at Abu Ghraib prison was hardly an isolated incident conducted by poorly supervised subordinates; it was in fact entirely consistent with Bush's post-9/11 approach to human rights and civil liberties. And as Obama's inability to shut down Guatánamo suggests, it may take decades to dismantle these practices and restore America's tarnished international image.

• A Task for George W. Bush - The Atlantic

  **While I find most of Goldberg's articles to be abhorrent Israeli propaganda, he makes a few good points in this article** "Americans who seek the marginalization of Muslims in this country are unwittingly doing the work of Islamist extremists. I am not arguing that there are no radical Muslims in our midst -- the Ft. Hood shooter, among others, has proven that there are -- but I am arguing that the vast majority of American Muslims are law-abiding citizens uninterested in either committing terrorism against their country, or in seeking to impose shari'a, Islamic law, on it."

• East Texan Louie Gohmert lacks evidence of "terror babies" so he just yells at Anderson Cooper - Dallasnewsdallasnews.com

  **What is wrong with these people?** "The debate over the existence of terror babies continues to generate more heat than light. First, Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, went on Anderson Cooper's show on CNN and claimed illegal aliens were coming into America to have babies, take them back home for indoctrination, then send them back to the U.S. in 20-30 years as terrorists. "

• Scientists Create Invisibility Cloak Made From Silk - Huffington Post

  "Scientists at Tufts and Boston University have created a small "invisibility cloak" made of a gold-etched silk. The 1-cm square "cloak," made of a unique new metamaterial, works only on terahertz waves (T-rays) for now, but researchers hope in the near future to apply the same principles to make the material work at other wavelengths, and, with time, visible light spectrum."

• Medical Care Prices Fell for First Time in 35 Years - NYT

  "Then again, maybe the deflationary apocalypse really is upon us: For the first time in 35 years, the one sector of the economy always guaranteed to get more expensive suddenly became a bit cheaper in July. According to a report released today by the Labor Department, consumer prices over all grew 0.3 percent in July, on a seasonally adjusted basis. The medical care index, however, fell 0.1 percent in July, after three and a half decades of constant increases."

• Alvin Greene Indicted On Obscenity Charges - TPMMuckraker

  "South Carolina Senate candidate Alvin Greene (D) has been indicted by a grand jury on two charges relating to an incident last November in which he allegedly showed porn to a college student. Greene was indicted on one felony count of disseminating obscenity and one misdemeanor count of "communicating an obscene message to another person without consent." "

• US, Saudi sale, with helicopters, said to approach $60bn - Arabian Business

  "A proposed US weapons sale to Saudi Arabia of Boeing Co F-15 fighter jets also includes as many as 132 Boeing Apache attack helicopters and United Technologies UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters that bring the total value of the package to around $60 billion, according to a government official familiar with the plan."

Song of the week!

Okay, one comment. The Republicans have become the new Democrats, they never miss an opportunity to screw up and look like jackasses.

• Hell's Angels and German Puppes
  

  "A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria when he 'mooned' a group of Hell's Angels, hurled a puppy at them and then escaped on a bulldozer."

• Poll bolsters congressional Democrats - Yahoo! News

  "The reeling economy remains people's top concern, according to an Associated Press-GfK Poll conducted earlier this month, making public attitudes about it crucial for both parties' hopes in November. The good news for Democrats: By a margin of 47 percent to 42 percent, people trust them more than Republicans to guide the economy, and 64 percent — slightly more than in April — say their household budgets are in good shape."

• Dick Armey: Angle and other tea party candidates should talk to the press

  ""Rand Paul made an amateur mistake," said Armey. "A freshman mistake. A rookie mistake. He thought MSNBC was a legitimate news organization, bless his heart... You don't want to talk to anyone in the press that is unprofessional or lazy. Now, basically what he did in that case was, he walked into the buzzsaw. The people who asked that question... any legitimate news person would have been embarrassed to see that. They're not news people. They're political hacks.""

• Tom Mullins: New Mexico Congressional Candidate Wants Landmines Along U.S.-Mexico Border

  "The Republican nominee for a northern New Mexico congressional seat suggested during a radio interview that the United States could place land mines along the Mexican border to secure the international boundary.
  

• Saad Eddin Ibrahim - Obama is too friendly with tyrants

  "To be fair, Bush did back away from his support for Arab reform in his second term. But the image of his support stuck. Why has Obama distanced himself from his predecessor's support for democracy promotion? One unsurprising outcome is that the regime in Egypt has reverted to wholesale imprisonment and harassment of political dissidents. "