Category Archives: Bush

An Ode To Paul Ryan By MSNBC’s Left-Liberal Lawrence O’Donnell

Bush, Constitution, Donald Trump, Government, Kids, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Natural Law, Republicans

Oh what natural bedfellows these fleas make and how they love The People. I’m talking about the Left and the left-leaning “Right” of our political and media establishment.

Last week, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell practically glorified House Speaker Paul Ryan for, as he put it, “giving little Donald Trump his first a major kindergarten lesson in government during a meeting on Capitol Hill, putting into perspective how hard it will be for Trump to pass his outrageous legislative agenda.”

Ryan was the best and smartest Republican negotiator [code for shyster] in D.C.; Trump the worst, exalted statist O’Donnell.

Note how O’Donnell frames the right thing—naturally right thing to do—as ignorant, “magic thinking. “Ryan has been dealing with children like Trump for years,” intones this pompous member of the ruling class, in reference to Tea Party fiscal impulses and Trump Nation inclinations.

Lawrence thinks the good kind of power comes from the Law and from The Constitution, rather than from The People heeding the natural law. Naturally, to O’Donnell, Ryan, a mere boy, is the adult in the room. Trump, a man of the world, who’s built stuff, is the child, sitting at the feet of legislator-cum-apostle Paul, lapping up his wisdom.

It’s simple. If Trump doesn’t fulfill his promises, just as Barack Obama did through Executive decrees (which most certainly are in the overreaching U.S. Constitution), through brute force; he’ll be a one-term president. The Constitution is a dead letter. Has been for a long time.

Besides, “The Constitution has saddled Americans with a very strong presidency, should he choose to act on the veto it grants him. Buried in the constitutional thickets, concedes historian Paul Johnson, are “huge powers.” The American president “was much stronger than most kings of the day, rivaled or exceeded only by the ‘Great Autocrat,’ the Tsar of Russia (and in practice stronger than most tsars). These powers were not explored until Andrew Jackson’s time, half a century on, when they astonished and frightened many people.”

See “The Sovereign Agrees To … A Bourbon Summit.”

Hope For Rubio’s Political Demise, Or Expect More Wars

Bush, Neoconservatism, War

Marco Rubio is the closest to George Bush in his robotic, ruthless ability to “regurgitate the militaristic talking points of the party’s neoconservative wing.” He’s even hired the war criminals that lined the Bush administration. As has Rubio curried favor with the most internationalist, interventionist among the donor-class: Little Marco is bitch to billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

Via Foreign Policy Focus:

Adelson doled out an estimated $100 million — more than anyone else in American history — during the 2012 presidential election, at first in support of Newt Gingrich and then to the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan presidential ticket.

“… another major hardline “pro-Israel” donor: hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. Rubio’s political career was in fact jump-started by powerful donors in the ideological vein of Adelson and Singer. Norman Braman, a Florida businessman with a decisively hawkish attitude on U.S. Middle East policy, has been the ‘single-largest backer of Rubio’s presidential campaign.’”

And here are the “disgraced foreign policy entrepreneurs” whom Rubio has recruited:

Rubio counts among his foreign policy advisors numerous prominent neocons, including Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, hawkish former senator Jim Talent, former Reagan official and Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams, neoconservative writer and historian Robert Kagan, and former George W. Bush national security advisor Stephen Hadley.

Rubio has also been advised by the avowedly militarist John Hay Initiative, an advocacy group founded in 2013 by former Romney advisor Brian Hook and former George W. Bush administration officials Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen. The Hay Initiative consists of more than 250 “experts,” of whom the vast majority have hawkish track records, and is “structured somewhat like a campaign foreign policy team in waiting,” according to the Daily Beast. Observers have opined that the group is a “rebirth of the Project for the New American Century.” (My hunch was right.)

Another Rubio advisor, neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot, recently garnered attention for his call for the United States to unilaterally declare a Sunni autonomous region in Iraq. Rubio promptly echoed him, stating that as president he would “demand” that Iraq’s government grant “greater autonomy” to the country’s Sunni regions.

On his official campaign team, Rubio has appointed Jamie Fly as his “counselor for foreign and national security affairs.” A former director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, another PNAC successor organization that was founded in 2009 by Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, Fly co-wrote a paper in 2012 with Gary Schmitt (of PNAC fame) that explicitly called for a military attack on Iran that would “destabilize the regime.”

Is Rubio’s full-spectrum saber-rattling just campaign rhetoric, or is it reflective of what he would actually do as president? Either way, his water-carrying for hardline donors and disgraced foreign policy entrepreneurs is bad news for global peace and stability.

READ “Marco Rubio Is Winning the Neocon Primary.”

Mitt Romney Gives Mormons (I Love The Mormons) A Bad Name

Bush, Donald Trump, Elections, Iraq, Morality, Republicans, Taxation

Mitt Romney, who inherited his privileges, says of Donald Trump, “He inherited his business, he didn’t create it.” Pot, kettle, black?

But above all, Romney is utterly morally bankrupt in his praise for war criminal George W. Bush, while condemning Trump (who has never ordered the killing of a single Iraqi kid) for destroying Dubya’s precious memory:

“Donald Trump says he admires Vladimir Putin, while has called George W. Bush a liar. That is a twisted example of evil trumping good.”

(Required reading: “Trump Called Bush A Liar & He Won South Carolina (Nevada, too)” & “Making America Great Means Exposing ‘W.’”)

“On foreign policy,” says Romney, “Donald Trump tells us that he is very, very smart. I’m afraid that when it comes to foreign policy he is very, very not smart.”

Sounds like ad hominen, not argument, Mitt.

At least Trump has not promised to bomb the world as Romney did during his failed, meek, mild and obsequious run against Barack Obama, in 2012.

On Iraq, says malevolent Mitt, Trump “spoke in favor of invading.”

Well, Trump did come out forcefully against the invasion of Iraq early in the game, when Romney was cheering the Republican blood hounds he runs with. But it is true that Trump has a horrible record of actually speaking coherently and consistently. His linguistic infelicities are unbearable. Surprising, too, given Trump was such a well-spoken, refined young man. Then again, Trump has not been a politician and should not be treated as such.

Trump has never passed a law. He’s political tabula rasa to Mitt Romney’s iffy record.

On his wealth: Romney predicts “that there are more bombshells in his tax returns. I predict that he doesn’t give much if anything to the disabled and to our veterans. … And I predict that despite his promise to do so, first made over a year ago, he will never ever release his tax returns. Never. Not the returns under audit, not even the returns that are no longer being audited. He has too much to hide.”

Let’s see. Trump’s tax returns will indeed be revealing.

MORE from the bitter and twisted Mitt, who respects the Republican base not at all.

Trump Called Bush A Liar & Won South Carolina (Nevada, Too)

Bush, Donald Trump, Iraq, Neoconservatism

“Trump Called Bush A Liar & He Won South Carolina (Nevada, too)” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Donald Trump has buried George W. Bush, for good. Or so we hope.

This might not be “Morning in America,” but it is a moral victory for values in America. Somewhere in those Judeo-Christian values touted by “values voters” is an injunction against mass murder.

Before the February 20 South Carolina primary, it looked as though G. Bush might just make a comeback.

After the South Carolina primary, where Donald Trump won with 32.2 percent of the Republican vote, it seems certain that nothing will resuscitate the legacy of “one of the nation’s worst presidents.”

Notwithstanding his war crimes and unprecedented intervention in the financial system and the private economy, “W” also happened to preside over the largest domestic spending since Lyndon Johnson. As chronicled in Ivan Eland’s “Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty,” “[Bush] advocated bad policies and demonstrated horrendous operational incompetence.”

The disastrous and expensive (in casualties and money) nation-building project in Iraq and Afghanistan were only exceeded in catastrophic results by Bush’s expansion of executive power and theft of the civil liberties that make the United States unique. Bush had almost no accomplishments to offset such foibles.

Trump addressed the war: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

The chattering class, Left and Right, was—still is—gobsmacked. A political Samson was bringing down the pillars of their world.

Desperate to restore equilibrium before the crucial SC vote was CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “You would not say again that George W. Bush lied?”

Trump obliged. He backpedaled before the primary, going with non-committal: “I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I mean, I’d have to look at documents.”

So America has some unfinished business. Because we do know. We can say for sure. And we have all the documents.

George W. Bush lied America into war.

Bush began his ballyhooed presidency by lying during his campaign. He promised America a humble foreign policy, but came into office with the express purpose of using his plenary powers to unseat Saddam Hussein. …

… “Trump Called Bush A Liar & He Won South Carolina (Nevada, too)” is the current column, now on WND.