Category Archives: Bush

Updated: Neocon Redux

Ann Coulter, Bush, Intelligence, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Race, Reason, Republicans, Terrorism

“WE WANT TO FIGHT THEM OVER THERE, RATHER THAN HERE.” Ann Coulter repeats that embarrassing, Bush-era non sequitur, also a center piece of Bush’s foreign policy. With that line, Bush bamboozled Boobus Americanus into believing that war in Iraq and terrorism in America were mutually exclusive conditions.

Andrew Breitbart prefers to forget the many times Bush betrayed “red-state Americans.” But worse than that: AB seems to be accusing the “MoveOn.Org crowd” of maligning Bush’s efforts at preventing 9/11. Is he seriously defending the stumble-bumble Bush administration’s criminal negligence in the year before the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil?

Let us reminds Breitbart of Condoleezza Rice’s bafflegabs:

She ignored “a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets,” stating that it belonged to the realm of analysis, and wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.'”

Condy Cow then blamed her ineptness on the need to reform Washington’s atrophied alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. (Ten years on, the Obama administration is doing the same.) But the National Security Council headed by Rice was an office created to advise the president on anything relating to national security and to facilitate inter-agency cooperation. “If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she oversaw.”

On Condy’s watch America experienced perhaps the worst intelligence lapse ever: Remember the Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memorandum about the bin Ladenites who were training in U.S. flight schools? Agent Ken Williams’ report was very specific. Over and above the standard sloth the memo met in the Washington headquarters, it transpired that the FBI was as concerned about ‘racial profiling’ then as it is today.

Listening to Breitbart and Coulter, you’d think that security breech involving Mr. Hot Pants Abdulmutallab, AKA the Christmas Bomber, rivaled the one that allowed 9/11.

Watch the duo:

Update (Dec. 31): Sigh. Just as long as they spell your name right, right? From where I’m perched, I’ll settle for “them” reading what I write.

In response to the missive accusing me of, hitherto, misdiagnosing Ms. Coulter’s Craft, here’s an excerpt from my 2006 “Coughing Up Some Coulter Fur Balls”:

Mencken certainly would have had few kind words for dirigiste Dubya, the ultimate statist. Coulter, conversely, has shown Bush (who isn’t even conservative) almost unquestioning loyalty, other than to protest his Harriet Miers indiscretion and, of late, his infarct over illegal immigration. Such singular devotion would have been alien to Mencken. Nor would the very brilliant elitist have found this president’s manifest, all-round ignorance forgivable or endearing—Bush’s penchant for logical and linguistic infelicities would have repulsed Mencken.

About foreign forays, Mencken stated acerbically that “the United States should mind its own business. If it is actually commissioned by God to put down totalitarianism, let it start in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Santo Domingo and Mississippi.” Mencken believed that “waging a war for a purely moral reason [was] as absurd as ravishing a woman for a purely moral reason.” Not in a million years would he have endorsed Bush’s Iraq misadventure.
Since he was not a party animal, but a man of principle, conformity to the clan would not have seen Mencken fall into contradiction as Coulter has: she rightly condemned Madeleine Albright’s “preemptive attack” on Slobodan Milosevic, as having been “solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people.” But has adopted a different—decidedly double—standard regarding Bush’s Iraq excursion.
To repeat: Coulter is sui generis, but a Mencken she is not.

What readers find confusing is my unfem knack for fairly detailing the woman’s obvious talents, without fulminating excessively and vindictively about her failings. Coulter is a very talented Republican hack. Since I am quite comfortable in my unappreciated abilities, I see no need to denigrate hers. I know this is unusual, but it’s why rational individualists gravitate to this site.

Updated: Contemptible Chris Calls For Profiling

Bush, Crime, Homeland Security, Islam, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Terrorism

Ten years too late, Chris Matthews voices discomfort with America’s airport insanity, where “old women and old men are taken out of their wheelchairs, having to do this Lord’s Walk for about 20 yards to prove that they can walk. It’s insane.”

The Johnnie-come-lately anchor of “Hardball” asked for common sense, as deployed by the Israelis (again; ten years too late): “And then you hear about this guy who raises all the red flags and the walks right through. Why to we put up with this? Is this going to come down to profiling?”

Watch:

Could this creep be alluding to what I termed “Rational Profiling”? This from “Rational Profiling: Cabbies Do It Too: Cabbies Do It Too”:

Bush, we presume, is aware of the shared characteristics that distinguish Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, Hani Hanjour (all of the 9-11 “fame”); Mohammad Sidique Khan, Hasib Mir Hussain, and Shehzad Tanweer (of 7-7); Ayman al-Zawahiri’s and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Bin Laden’s Capo Bastones).

If not, his security detail knows “Muslims proportionately commit more airline hijackings and suicide bombings than non-Muslims.” The taxpayer-funded security squads watching over our legislators certainly do not confine their protective efforts to frisking old ladies.

Yet the Bush administration has severely punished airlines “whose pilots have refused to carry Muslim men whom they regard as a security risk.” The Department of Transportation—and resentful Muslim advocacy groups—has no qualms about continually suing airlines for attempting to put the safety of passengers first.

From “Lunatic Government Occupies Airports”:

“Compiling a composite of the criminals most likely to hijack an airline or blow up a building isn’t hard. … The menace faced is invariably from ‘young Muslim men of North African, Middle Eastern and South Asian origin.’ … officials keep telling the believing ‘Boobus Americanus’ that safety lies in pretending everyone is equally weighted in his propensity to blow up an airplane. If we were on the lookout for an abortion clinic saboteur, would we be patting down Islamists, or Southern Baptist survivalists? In every other whodunit, behavioral scientists attempt to construct a criminal profile of the suspect. In the case of Islamic terrorism, however, the state won’t even use the compelling evidence it has.”

Update (Dec. 29): SMILE; YOU’RE BEING STRIPPED. Is it to be “rational profiling” or this strip-search (courtesy of Drudge)? We know the answer, as well as we know our overlords.

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Socking It To The SEALs

Bush, Criminal Injustice, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Military, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Terrorism

Another of the many stories covered and analyzed on BAB for its significance ahead of the rest was that of Petty Officers Matthew McCabe, Jonathan Keefe and Julio Heurtas. The three Navy SEALs stand accused by Ahmed Hashim Abed—thought to be behind the premeditated murder and mutilation of four U.S. contractors in Falluja in 2004—of punching him. The real scandal is that our bloated behemoth of a military, the Navy in this instance, is acting like the state bureaucracy that it is and proceeding at full throttle against the these patriots.

Read “Make Me Thankful: Don’t Enlist!.”

The common refrain you’ll hear from your garden variety neoconservative is that Obama is to blame.

Please! Bush was every bit as hateful when it came to unleashing his bloodhound, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, on Border-Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, to give but one example of Bush’s many betrayals.

“The state’s ‘rules of engagement’ rule-out any meaningful defense of American lives and property; they are rigged against America’s defenders and favor her infiltrators.”

Don’t expect the megaphones for the Republican-cum-neocon cabal to be capable of articulating this reality. At core, they are tribalists and collectivists who cleave to their own no matter what.

Update II: Bush & Barack Sitting In A T-R-E-E …

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Neoconservatism, Regulation, War

Who Does Barack Obama Remind Me Of? BUSH. The indignant protestations from the Republicans notwithstanding, the two parties and potentates are interchangeable.

Dec 11, 2009: “… leaders say they will try to raise the ceiling to nearly $14 trillion as part of a $626 billion bill next week to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military programs in 2010.”

September 11, 2003: Bush increases the ceiling on a whopping $6.8 trillion national debt.

Pleasing neoconservatives: Bush’s preemptive war doctrine never failed to bring a smile to Bill Kristol’s face. Pursuant to last week’s Nobel War Speech address, Obama too is making Bill warm all over.

Read the “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” to see why Bill is glowing.

Update (Dec. 15): The two converge on war and on chasing “fat cats” (bar the likes of Barney Frank):

Bush: “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, courtesy of the Republican Party, cost American companies upwards of $1.2 trillion. The capital flight it initiated caused the London Stock Exchange to become the new hub for capital markets. Given America’s habit of forcing its habits on others, SOX struck fear into quite a few Liberal Democratic hearts in the House of Lords. Lord Teverson worried about the ‘increasing danger of regulatory creep from American regulators that threatens [Britain’s] own light-touch approach to financial regulation.'”

Barack: “A regulatory tsunami is on its way. ever-increasing regulation, stricter corporate-governance standards and the threat of higher taxes in response to the ballooning deficit. This week the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it considered carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, raising the spectre of clumsy administrative measures to reduce emissions—a prospect even more terrifying to business than the cap-and-trade scheme currently under consideration in Congress. Meanwhile, hopes of business-friendly reforms to America’s convoluted corporate-tax regime, among other things, have fallen by the wayside. …

‘The concern is pervasive but rather amorphous in the sense that different executives have very different worries,’ says Joe Grundfest, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who now runs a ‘boot camp’ at Stanford University for corporate directors. ‘Some fret over tax policy. Others agonise over cap-and-trade, or health-care reform. Many worry about additional corporate-governance regulations. It’s a smorgasbord of corporate neuroses out there.'”

Update II (Dec. 15): Peter Schiff, of course, is hip to the Bush/Barack overlap: “Through aggressive monetary and fiscal stimuli, we are trying to re-inflate a balloon that is full of holes. This was the Bush Administration’s exact response to the 2002 recession. It’s shocking how few observers note the repeating pattern, especially the fact that each crash is worse than the last.”