You can stop praising Pence for doing his job January 6

[Mike] Pence said in a statement, one of only a handful since leaving the White House, that America had lost a "Giant" with [Rush] Limbaugh's passing.

  The Hill

And stop trying to rehabilitate George W Bush's reputation, too.

“Laura and I are sorry to learn that Rush Limbaugh has passed away,” the statement read. “Rush Limbaugh was an indomitable spirit with a big heart, and he will be missed.”

  The Hill

A big heart? Was it enlarged from his cancer? Because he was a nasty, hateful bigot.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

I love it

Thank YOU, sir.  That was a great moment.

I think I'll watch it again.

Elections have consequences

The Obama spying Trump doesn't care about - Part 2

Part 1

What happens when no one responsible is held accountable?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Obama spying Trump doesn't care about

The movie referred to in this interview - "The Report" - is currently (December 2019) available on Amazon Prime.

UPDATE:  Part 2

The rehabilitation of George W Bush's reputation

Just because he's not as bad as Trump doesn't make him what he wasn't and isn't.

Back in November 2018, Michelle Obama described George W. Bush as “a beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man,” shortly after images of the former first lady and the former president sharing a cough drop went viral.

On Tuesday, talk show host Ellen DeGeneres told her audience that she is “friends with George Bush,” after images of her laughing with the 43rd president at a Dallas Cowboys game also went viral. In an extended monologue, she explained that she is “friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. … Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them.

  Mehdi Hassan @ The Intercept

If that were true of anyone, no one would have any friends.

“Be kind to everyone,” she urged her cheering studio audience, before joking: “Thanks President Bush and Laura for a Sunday afternoon that was so fun. By the way, you owe me $6 for the nachos.”

The comedian’s remarks won her praise from everyone from CNN’s Chris Cillizza to the right-wing National Review to Hollywood star Reese Witherspoon to Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.

A double confession: I’m an admirer of Ellen, who has been a champion of refugees and a supporter of Muslims. I’m also guilty of having favorably compared George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump (although, to quote Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, “next to Trump, just about anyone compares favorably.”)

[...]

No one is suggesting that she shouldn’t be pals with a conservative or a Republican. Bush’s beliefs are irrelevant here; his actions are what matters. He was one of the most destructive presidents in modern American history; a man who has never been held to account for a long litany of crimes, misdeeds, and abuses of power committed during his two bloodstained terms in office. The reason “43” should be treated as a pariah is not because he is a Republican or a conservative, but because he caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and tortured hundreds of others.

[...]

Bush’s own former counterterrorism chief accused of him committing war crimes.

[...]

The then-commander-in-chief falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was working with Al Qaeda. He has never apologized for these falsehoods.

[...]

You think calling journalists “fake news” is bad? According to the U.K.’s Daily Mirror newspaper, Bush “made clear he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera in Qatar” at a meeting with then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair [who], according to the Mirror, had to persuade him not to.

[...]

[I]t was Bush who “authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to commence a secret detention program” after 9/11, under which suspected terrorists were held incommunicado in CIA black sites across the world, and it was also the then-president who granted the agency “expansive authority to engage in ‘extraordinary rendition’” — or the transfer of detainees to foreign governments for the purposes of interrogation and torture. (Asked by aides if he was OK with torturing detainees, Bush replied: “Damn right.”)

[...]

[Consider] the 780 detainees who were held at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, after it was opened by Bush in January 2002. Forty of them still remain behind bars; 15 of them were juveniles; nine of them died in custody. None of them were ever charged or convicted of a crime in a court of law. According to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson, the then-president knew many of the detainees at Guantánamo were innocent of any crimes but refused to release them for political reasons.

[...]

[During] one of this country’s worst natural disasters, [...] “day after day, George W. Bush continued a long-planned vacation at his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. … When Katrina made landfall, Bush had been on holiday at his ranch for 27 days.” More than 1,800 Americans died and a Republican-led special Senate report later concluded that the Bush administration failed “at all levels to plan, prepare for, and respond aggressively to the storm.”

[...]

[Paranoid schizophrenic Larry] Robison was one of 152 prisoners executed by Bush during his five years as governor of Texas — a higher number of executions than under any previous governor in modern American history.

[...]

A year earlier, the then-Texas governor had mimicked and mocked a clemency plea made by Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman to be executed in the Lone Star state since 1863, in a Talk magazine interview with Tucker Carlson. As Carlson wrote: “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”

[...]

George W. Bush is not a “kind, sweet man.” There is nothing “beautiful” about him. He was a monster as governor of Texas and a monster as president of the United States. Nor has he become any less monstrous since retiring from politics. In September 2018, Bush lobbied Republican senators to approve his former staff secretary, Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court — and reaffirmed his public support for Kavanaugh even after Christine Blasey Ford and others accused the judge of sexual misconduct.

Yes, the 43rd president is a better husband and father, more mentally and emotionally stable, and less of a racist or Islamophobe, than the current president. But is that really now our benchmark for making friends or being “kind”?

[...]

This slow but steady rehabilitation of the former president, and the whitewashing of his manifest crimes, cannot be left unchallenged. Bush may owe Ellen six bucks for nachos. He owes the rest of us a prison sentence at The Hague.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I pick "B"

Of course Dubya should have been impeached.  He led the attacks on countries that were not involved in the 9/11 attacks with falsified information and then authorized torture in pow camps.  He's a war criminal.  And the blowback is still happening.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

9/11

Remember Katherine Gun?

Read this.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I've often wondered about this myself

That little escrow signing by Eric cost taxpayers a cool $100,000 for his hotel room. It's odd, him in Uruguay, a country next to Bush's 100,000 acres of land in Paraguay that sits on huge gas reserves. His next door neighbor is Sun Mueng Moon's even bigger land purchase sitting on a huge aquifer. Are all these corrupt people going to flee to the interior of S.America when the stuff hits the fan? It's very reminicent of hitler fleeing to Argentina (right next door also)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Say what?

On the speaker phone?  Dubya wasn't even there in person?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Worry about him no longer

That throw was one of the highlights of my political awareness life.  It could have only been better if he had hit his target.  By the way, he didn't throw "a" shoe.  He threw both.

It's still good.

The Iraq invasion - 15 years on

I know I'm old, but it really does seem like just a few years - certainly not fifteen. But maybe that's because of the enormity of the impact on my consciousness.

Fifteen years ago this week, George W. Bush invaded Iraq. It was an awesome drama, made more thrilling by the seemingly obvious craziness of it all.

[...]

In the press, no one could really make sense of the supposed justification for the invasion. That it was compelling, no one could deny. Hell, just look at the fonts. We all used the biggest ones we had! The New York Times said it all with its dramatic banner:

"BUSH ORDERS START OF WAR ON IRAQ; MISSILES APPARENTLY MISS HUSSEIN"

GOON BOMBS CITY ON HORSESHIT PRETEXT would have been more accurate.

[...]

Shock and awe, we called it: a new plan for "achieving rapid dominance." What a great Hollywood name, and goddamn if people didn't sit glued to their TVs to watch its rollout, getting off like a bunch of kids blowing up frogs.

Wars are great TV. The prolonged political lead-up, the decision to kill, it's all rich with suspense, and when wedded to the sight and the sound of the bombs, after waiting all those months for one nightfall, at the hour of crime and sex, to launch the first sorties from a secret location at sea – it all trips the senses. It's a turn on. It makes the Super Bowl look like paint drying. The sheer drama is how they sold this thing to the public, fifteen years ago this week.

But that's not how our rulers sold the war to themselves. They weren't overcome with emotion, or some post-9/11 yearning for vengeance. They knew what they were doing.

The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America's decline, was instead a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi "enemy."

  Matt Taibbi

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Can't wait for the Double W reaction

Could we have an SAT-type test competition between Dumb and Dumber?  An IQ test would do.  I'd pay to see it.

Actually, George, no

Sorry, George.  Trump does indeed look even worse than you, but that's a low bar, and nothing can make you look good.

How sad to have to wait for someone like Trump to come along to be lifted off the bottom of the pile. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Stop trying to rehabilitate W's image

The man should be in prison for war crimes.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bragging rights for Trump

The lawyer, Brett Talley, is the fourth judicial nominee under President Trump to receive a “not qualified” rating from the bar association and the second to receive the rating unanimously.

  NYT

Of course, Trump himself is unqualified for his position, and as we've seen in so many, many cases of unqualified Trump nominees for everything - they still get confirmed - often with Democrat support.

Since 1989, the association has unanimously rated only two other judicial nominees as not qualified.

[...]

[T]he comparative rarity of “not qualified” ratings for judicial nominees under previous administrations may have been due, at least in part, to a difference in procedure. Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, with the exception of George W. Bush, screened potential nominees with the American Bar Association before publicly announcing them — a tradition the Trump administration has decided to shun.

[...]

The Senate committee on Thursday also approved four other nominees for federal judgeships, including Holly Lou Teeter, who also received a “not qualified” rating.

Of course, this begs the question: By whom were the other two nominated? And, if your mind went immediately to George W Bush, as mine did, you would be right.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Can we stop pretending Dubya is a good guy?

George W. Bush left office as one of the most reviled presidents in modern history—even by many Republicans’ estimation—but he’s found a path to rehabilitation: reminding everyone how much worse Donald Trump is.

[...]

Nostalgia is not a harmless vice. It clouds our ability to understand how the past is shaping the present. Trumpism is a powerful and pernicious force because it has deep roots in American history. To defeat Trumpism, we not only have to fight the sitting president himself, but also address the causes that made his rise possible. Every time we extoll George W. Bush, we drift further from the sober and painful reckoning we need, and further yet from solutions to prevent a Trumpian or Bushian presidency from ever wreaking such havoc again.

  New Republic

I have no doubt we'll get another one.  If we can't even remember how W brought this country to its nadir and are wishing we had him back at the helm, there's no doubt whatsoever.

Nostalgia, in this case, isn't any better than MAGA. Maybe even worse. MAGA proponents are probably honest about what they think made America great. Bush praisers are nostalgic for something they've completely fabricated.

Jeet Heer does a good job in this article of reminding us what George W Bush is/was and little space there is between W and Donald. Read it if you've been inclined to feel nostalgic for the previous SOB or have forgotten just how much damage he did.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Ditto

[F]ormer presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama reminded us last week that there is nothing normal about this moment.

[...]

As Bush put it, “We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty."

  WaPo

[I]n response to Carlson asking him for his impressions regarding Karla Faye's interview on the Larry King show, prior to her execution   [...]

"He (Larry King) asked her real difficult questions, like, `What would you say to Governor Bush?'"

"What was her answer?" I (Tucker Carlson) wonder.

"`Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, `don't kill me.'"

[...]

As it turns out, the Larry King-Karla Tucker exchange Bush recounted never took place, at least not on television. During her interview with King, however, Tucker did imply that Bush was succumbing to election-year pressure from pro-death penalty voters. Apparently Bush never forgot it. He has a long memory for slights.

(Emphasis mine.)

Interesting huh? Did Bush have a mistaken memory about the interview, sparked by his anger with Karla Faye? Or was his recollection to Tucker Carlson a complete fabrication, because he didn't want to admit to "pressure from pro-death penalty voters?"

It seems perfectly logical to me that, in George Bush's sick little narcissistic mind, he'd rather be perceived as a cruel, mocking bully than as someone too cowardly to go against the will of the voters.

  Daily Kos

Never Forgetting

Yeah, I don't understand why more people are not pissed off that the people in charge at the time used the deaths and destruction in NYC as political cover to attempt to control the world's largest oil supplies.  So many Americans drank that kool-aid.  Still drinking it.

[The ruler of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud,] who took the throne in January 2015, suffers from dementia. Generally seen wearing a puzzled look, the king has been known to wander off in the middle of conversations.

  Harpers

Trump does that, if only mentally. In fact, Trump wanders off in the middle of his OWN speech.

The Trump Administration is “desperate for Saudi money, especially infrastructure investments in the Rust Belt,” [a] former official told me. An influx of Saudi dollars could generate jobs and thus redound to Trump’s political benefit. As a cynical douceur, the Saudis, derided by Trump during his campaign as “people that kill women and treat women horribly,” joined the United Arab Emirates in pledging $100 million for a women’s-empowerment initiative spearheaded by Ivanka Trump. A joyful president took part in the traditional sword dance and then helped launch a Saudi center for “combating extremism.”

[...]

“We made and saved the U.S.A. many billions of dollars and millions of jobs,” he tweeted as he left Saudi Arabia. The White House soon trumpeted $110 billion in weapons sales and billions more in infrastructure investments, with the total purportedly rising to $350 billion.

[...]

“Mohammad bin Salman made the same pitch to the Obama people,” the former official told me. “ ‘We’re going to invest all this money here, you’re going to be our great economic partner, etc.’ Because the Trump Administration doesn’t know much about foreign affairs, they were really seduced by this.”

Yet amid the sword dances and flattery, a shadow lingered over the occasion: 9/11. After years of glacial legal progress, the momentous charge that our Saudi allies enabled and supported the most devastating act of mass murder on American soil may now be coming to a resolution.

[...]

Now, at last, we stand a chance of discovering what really happened, largely because of a court case.

In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, which grew out of a suit filed in 2002 on behalf of bereaved family members and other victims of the attacks, includes a charge of direct Saudi government involvement in 9/11.

The Saudis, though scorning the accusation, have been striving ever more desperately to prevent the case from advancing through the legal system. To that end, they have employed to date no fewer than fifteen high-powered Washington lobbying firms.

And shame on those firms.

The task is growing more urgent because the kingdom, long confident of essentially unlimited wealth, is facing money problems. Oil prices are in a slump and likely to stay there. The war in Yemen, launched in 2015 by Salman’s appointed heir, Mohammed bin Salman, drags on, costing an estimated $200 million a day, with no end in sight. To alleviate his cash-flow problems, the young prince is set on raising as much as $2 trillion by floating the state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, on international stock markets. That is part of the reason the 9/11 lawsuit poses such a threat — it raises the possibility that much-needed cash from the stock sale might never find its way to Riyadh. “They’re afraid they’re going to get a default judgment against them, and some of their domestic assets will be seized,” the former senior official explained to me.

[...]

A multibillion-dollar award “would certainly stop the Saudis from financing terrorism,” [one 9/11 survivor and plaintiff] told me. “That’s the whole point of this. It is all about money. If you can cut that off, that would make a serious impact on the dissemination of this rabid ideology around the world.”

[...]

There has always been evidence [of Saudi collusion in the 9/11 attacks and their support of terrorists] — in abundance.

[...]

After a mere ten months, in December 2002, the Joint Inquiry team presented its report to the CIA for declassification. The agency demanded numerous cuts, only a few of which, in Graham’s view, were justified. But one section had been censored in its entirety: a twenty-eight-page summary, written by Jacobson, of the evidence relating to Saudi government support for the hijackers. It was the only area on which the Bush White House absolutely refused to relent. “The president’s loyalty apparently lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety,” Graham told me bitterly.

Continue reading.

This Harper's report drops a reminder that Robert Mueller was head of the FBI at the time, and claims that he strongly objected to an agent investigating a lead in San Diego regarding a bureau informant's personal knowledge of one of the 9/11 hijackers. In fact, he had another informant moved to an undisclosed location "for his own safety" - probably under orders from the White House - thus avoiding other FBI agents interviewing him. That's not very encouraging in terms of what he might find in his investigation of Trump. In fact, I think it taints whatever he does eventually report. And it makes me wonder: why is Mueller so well regarded?

I wonder also about this lawsuit going forward. Will it publicize the Bush Administration's responsibilities for, during and immediately after 9/11? What happens if it uncovers irrefutable evidence of, not just Saudi, but also Bush administration criminal (including war crime) activity? What about the Obama administration's continued cover-up?

The Harper's article covers a lot of territory, including the obstacles and the fight for 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia. Have a go at it. It does a good job of condensing the unwieldy volumes of information and disinformation surrounding the events of 9/11 into its major points.

And all of this is to say nothing of the fact that the unwarranted invasion of Iraq to cover up Saudi involvement in 9/11 and to attempt to control foreign oil fields has created a never-ending war on an ever-changing stateless organization - "Terrorists" - while simultaneously restricting domestic freedom. The Washington Post has that article.