Category Archives: Bush

Updated: Quick-Fix Quacks

Bush, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Socialism

“The subprime mortgage cesspool is the latest acquisition in the government’s growing disinvestment portfolio.

If you’re working from the right set of first principles, you’ll understand that the State should not have an investment portfolio.

When one works from solid first principles, predicting what will happen upon their violation is easy. What isn’t easy is arriving at the correct principles in the first place.

Holding immutably true, principled positions is both politically unpopular and intellectually unintuitive to the mindless multitudes.

But not for one very clever economist—Bob Higgs—who, like another very clever statesman—Ron Paul—predicted the mortgage miasma into which the country has slid.”

That’s an excerpt from my new WND column, “Quick-Fix Quacks.”

Update: This apt comment from Bob Higgs, whose commentary I quote extensively in “Quick-Fix Quacks”:

“People seem to be especially receptive to this message right now, perhaps because the cannibals in Washington are consuming their substance right down to the bone. Of course, the House just passed the bailout bill–the worse-than-original one–after the appropriate items had been added to assist formerly resistant members in further plunder. Democracy in action.”

Bob

Update II: Deflating the Democrats?

Bush, Democrats, Iraq

“Washington has acceded to Baghdad’s wish and tentatively agreed to pull all of its combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011,” Time reported.

The New York Times seconded: “The United States has agreed to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by next June and from the rest of the country by the end of 2011 if conditions in Iraq remain relatively stable, according to Iraqi and American officials involved in negotiating a security accord governing American forces there.”

This is one important story that has disappeared from the headlines ever since Barack and Biden made their announcement. (Unimportant by comparison, mainstream media have also forced the John Edwards scoop to fade.)

With this agreement, the Bush administration might just have taken the wind out of the war as an issue for Barack Obama. As it is, Obama had grown weaker on that front, his position increasingly converging with McCain’s. But if Bush finalizes the withdrawal, he will have taken the issue and the decision away from Obama. Strategically, it’s a smart move.

Update (August 24): And what does an agree-upon withdrawal from Iraq, sealed by Bush and Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, say about McCain’s position on the war! This makes the GOP’s Manchurian Candidate look especially lame.

Update II (August 26): The plot thickens. Maliki vouches the US has agreed to withdraw from Iraq; the Bushies say, “Not so fast.”

McClatchy Newspapers report:

“There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil,” Maliki said.
But the White House disputed Maliki’s statement and made clear the two countries are still at odds over the terms of a U.S. withdrawal.
“Any decisions on troops will be based on conditions on the ground in Iraq,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in Crawford, Tex., where President Bush is vacationing. “That has always been our position. It continues to be our position.”

Which is it? And who’s the boss in Iraq?

Update II: POT. KETTLE. BLACK.

Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Russia

Easily one of the most mind-boggling spectacles in the Georgia/Russia conflict is that of Bush accusing Russia of “bullying and intimidation”; of Bush admonishing Russia about its unacceptable “way of conducting foreign policy in the 21st Century”; of Bush expressing “grave concern” about Russia’s “disproportionate response”; and of Bush condemning the violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation.

Bush may be describing Russia but he is also describing what he did to Iraq. Another of Bush’s Freudian projections and hypocrisies all rolled into one is to charge Russia with pursuing “a policy that promises only confrontation and isolation.”

Since the war in Georgia is one neocons and neoliberals can get behind, both factions–and most mindless media–have chosen to ignore this Bush burlesque.

Update I (August 16): More “pot-kettle-black” Bushisms, delivered to Russia:

“The days of satellite states and spheres of influence are behind us.”

What’s Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Some of the reasons given by American policy wonks for the U.S.’s lingering in these blighted spots are the fear of other players getting the upper hand in these regions.

What is that if not “sphere-of-influence” plotting and planning?

Perhaps I just don’t have the necessary partisan gene, or blind sport, required to ignore these pious, specious homilies.

Update II (August 20): Americans fall for these easy storylines politicians and pundits spin, rather than look at how we conduct ourselves in the world and the repercussions this has.
Why is it that the US can increase its spheres of influence with attendant invasions and military presence in countries across the word, yet when another super power acts comparably, our “analysts” apply different yardsticks to its conduct?

In the context of the Georgia/Russia conflict, who among big-time pundits is able to consider America’s national interests? Who is able to offer a perspective that doesn’t, atavistically, galvanize American opinion around imagined enemies, but rather, looks at the crisis from a bilateral perspective?

None other than Pat Buchanan. This from Buchanan’s latest, “Who Started Cold War II?”:

“Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship?”

Read the entire column.

***

(August 15): “Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them,” writes Pat Buchanan in a sharp analysis of the conflict in Georgia, among which are some pesky facts mass media has concealed:

“Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.

Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.”

Neocons Resurrecting The Cold War

Bush, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

My colleague Vox Day has a perspicacious post about Russia’s assistance to the South Ossetian and neighboring Abkhazian separatists:

“This battle for Georgia – not South Ossetia – is a long time in coming. Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for it by altering the rules of the game in Serbia, in which it was made clear that a major power had the right to intervene on behalf of a breakaway republic if it cried “help, help, I’m being repressed” by the sovereign territory owner. The Russians rightly feel that they’re playing by our rules and they have every reason to believe they’re going to get away with it since there is zero sympathy for the anti-Russian US position in Europe. The European position, quite reasonably, is to shrug and assume that it’s just like Kosovo, except that they also don’t want to upset their Russian fuel supplies.

At this point, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia appears to have been a terrible miscalculation by the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisors, who have been trying to solidify control over the oil pipeline in recent months.”

Myself, I warned against recognizing Kosovo some time back: Here and here.

The neocons are getting hot for war. These warmed-over Trotskyites yearn to resuscitate the Cold War. Andrew Sullivan, once a neocon, really seems to have repented—turned away from neoconery. He dishes it out:

“Krauthammer this morning goes into raptures about the possibility of reliving the 1970s and 1980s:
The most crucial and unconditional measure, however, is this: Reaffirm support for the Saakashvili government and declare that its removal by the Russians would lead to recognition of a government-in-exile. This would instantly be understood as providing us the legal basis for supplying and supporting a Georgian resistance to any Russian-installed regime.

This is a 1980s Afghanistan gambit, a de facto return to the Cold War, even though Russia is not a global expansionist power any more, and even though it is no longer communist. No thought given, apparently, to the chance that this could backfire on a power now occupying two countries rather closer to Russia than Georgia is to the US. Oh, well. They’ll figure that out later. There’s Russians to fight! One thing that baffles me: why does the US need a legal basis for anything in Krauthammer’s view?”

All that from a man who used to be a neocon of the deepest dye. Andrew may yet redeem himself.