b, I don’t believe anything will work for Bushie. He will look even more out of touch than Reagan did in Iran-Contra and Bush 41 with the scanners.
That bullshit won’t fly. The American people are dumb SOBs many times, but saying he was out of the loop would take the cake.

Posted by: jdp | Nov 25 2005 2:18 utc | 4

Extreme Bush: The Good, Bad & Ugly, by Bernard Weiner
“Keep pouring it on, don’t give the Bushies a moment of peace to regroup their forces.”

Posted by: manonfyre | Nov 25 2005 3:19 utc | 6

WTF. You run for President, then you don’t know what went on?
BULLSHIT.
It happens in your administration, you’re responsible. If you knew, it’s your fault. If you didn’t know, it’s in your name-you should have known-you’re responsible.
If you’ve got Alzheimer’s, you shouldn’t have run/been reelected.

Posted by: doug r | Nov 25 2005 4:21 utc | 8

It would be great to think that Bush is going to jail but DiD has decided to introduce a note of reality.
Firstly how the hell do you think Amerikans are going to stop the demopublicans colluding with the mainstream media and letting him go.
They will you know. The first defence will be that CheneyCo colluded against the upstanding but weak link in the Republocrat’s first family. Dubya will be deemed to be “guilty of loyalty and trusting his team”.
Those a bit more within the demopublican tent will be told with a nudge and a wink that ‘realistically we had to be pragmatic and consider the damage to the position of President of the United States’. This creates a mixture of ‘being responsible and pragmatism’ which appeals to those on the fringes of politics.
The real reasons and rationale; discussion of which will be limited to the ‘inner circle’, is twofold. Firstly the repubcrats will offer the demopublicans everything they have ever asked Santa for plus a bit, secondly the demopublicans will be thinking ‘there but for the grace of god go I’ and decided that letting W off is a huge one in the favour bank if the demopublicans ever do fall from grace.
The republocrats will offer the world to the demopublicans quite simply because an indictment of a republocrat prez would mean many years in the wilderness and maybe never getting to come in from the cold as another party grew on the left side of the demopublicans pushing these closet ‘wingers publically closer to where they actually are on the right and away from left of centre where they pretend to be.
A scenario that gives any demopublican worth his/her salt panic attacks. That’s because once you fall off the fence onto one side or the other it’s devilishly tricky to get back astride it. That in turn puts you in the same position as brought the republocrats unstuck. Instead of following the sheeple around slavishly adopting the mainstream position on everything, a party has to try and shape public opinion to refect the demopublican stance.
Any change such as one party being subsumed by the other the better to fight a challenge from a new party would be firmly rejected by the vast majority of congresspersons/senators in both the old parties. Politicians at the zenith of their careers are unlikely to enjoy moving out of their comfort zones.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 25 2005 5:41 utc | 10

@ doug r
“It happens in your administration, you’re responsible. If you knew, it’s your fault. If you didn’t know, it’s in your name-you should have known-you’re responsible.”
And this is why I have not understood the wisdom behind this administration’s constant invocations of 9/11 to bully through unpopular and unilateral actions. If a massive security failure (charitable interpretation) had occured on my watch, I wouldn’t be falling all over myself to remind everyone about it at every opportunity.
But this is where the conventional wisdom of accountability that you have outlined falls down. Like it or not, it has worked and worked well for them to flaunt their ineptitude and impotence. Wisdom does not enter into the picture at all here. If one can believe the attack ads during the last election cycle or the talking points of Right wing blogs, the majority of the American public actually believe that the administration who could not catch Osama bin Laden or the anthrax mailer, the ones who were running the show when the greatest act of terrorism on US soil occured and later when an American city drowned, are the ones who make the American people feel safer!
Unless good old-fashioned common sense starts gaining some ground in the US of A, we will still hear (ostensibly) educated people making arguments like “cowards cut-and-run” to justify remaining in Iraq. If wisdom or accountability even began to enter the picture, the response to that would have to be: “Perhaps only cowards cut and run, but only idiots allow themselves to be bled to death in unwinnable fights”. As long as the American public would prefer to be thought of as imbeciles who can’t pick their battles rather than cowards who don’t choose to go down with a sinking ship, calls for accountability (and common sense) will have to be thought of as “quaint”.

Posted by: Monolycus | Nov 25 2005 6:43 utc | 12

Once again, Antifa, I’m mesmerized. You are right. It’s all going to come down around the tax cuts. Yes, indeed. The radio active, million megaton bomb.

Posted by: jm | Nov 25 2005 7:08 utc | 14

@Antifa and jm
You’re both correct of course, but the point must be made if this mess is left up to politicians to clean up all that will happen is the re arrangement of a few deckchairs.
During the past couple of weeks we’ve seen the dems begin to position themselves ready to benefit politically from a mess they are complicit in creating.
They will get away with it if good people do nothing.
It is vital that the momentum that will build (unfortunately really because for citizens to reach a critical mass of dissent things have to get pretty bad for them) is controlled by the people themselves rather than the self appointed ‘spokesmen’ that will appear as if by magic as people begin to express themselves.
Suddenly young/inexperienced mainchancers apparently on the fringes of the dems will appear. They will renounce their previous alliances but once they and a few of their kind get their feet under the table they will steer the movement inexorably toward the netherworld of compromise and political hackdom.
Just for once it would be good if citizens stuck together and didn’t let themselves get divided by ‘isms’. Those that favour various schools of economic/political thought will get a really good opportunity to express themselves later. First of all though US citizens need to stick together and force some basic changes in the political infrastructure that will make the nation’s governance more consultative and less combatative, more representative of ALL the citizens instead of just white middle aged middle class men, and much more responsive to changes in citizens thinking.
Yeah I know it seems impossibly idealistic, but it can be done.
It was done here in NZ in the early 90’s after people got angry when they voted for a social safety net and got economic rationalists, so the next election they tried the right even if just to let the ‘social democrats’ know what lowlifes and liars the public considered they were. Of course things got much worse because a party trying to create a niche to the right of monetarists is unbearably inhumane.
Anyway the people forced a national referendum on proportional representation. The corporatists spent millions trying to scare voters into submission. All that crap about the instability and indecisiveness of coalitions causing economic uncertainty. However there have been two periods of about a month where in a similar situation as that Germany has just been through, the election has not tossed up any clear victor so a mob of horsetrading is undertaken.
The stockmarket and the general economy usually steams along because there is no ‘expert’ pulling at the levers for a while.
Now of course getting a change in the US political system, is a much bigger ask than in a small nation like NZ. But it is eminently doable, as long as, citizens don’t let the ‘professionals’ succeed in distracting them.
That is one of the reasons DiD has been rude to demopublican spruikers and shills who have stuck their unappealing boofheads through the door at MoA.
The meme for citizens to ‘stay on message’ with is that there is a plague on both their houses and that only by fundamentally changing the way that the democracy picks it’s representatives will citizens be able to ensure there isn’t a repetition of the Iraqi invasion and massacre.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 25 2005 8:22 utc | 16

DiD agrees that using the 3rd person is bizarre but he is experimenting with removing the self from his posts in a vain attempt to be less egocentric. he thinks (lol)

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 25 2005 9:17 utc | 18

Continuing along the lines of Monolycus’s excellent assessment above,we will probably see a great deal of public outrage over vote fraud in the wake of Bush’s WMD lies, as people will want to ascribe Bush’s election wins to vote fraud rather than admit they voted for him themselves. Or not .

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 25 2005 9:51 utc | 20

Pardon me, Rearrangement

Posted by: jm | Nov 25 2005 10:05 utc | 22

Also see: Turkey Day leftovers: .

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 25 2005 10:11 utc | 24

@jm
“Isn’t that a proverbial oxymoron?”
That was the joke, yes. And it’s just as funny now as when Benjamin Franklin first made it.
“Of course, right now we really can’t experiment as we are in extremely deep shit. Literally. So we have to work pretty much with what we have with reasonable expectations as to how much things could improve.”
I’d say being in deep shit would make experimentation the more desirable. The “two parties” (Corporate and Corporate Lite) already have had their fingers in all of the pies, and that’s what has produced the aforementioned deep shit in the first place. I’d say radical times call for radical solutions… and nothing could be more radical in this day and age than an honest examination of individual’s platforms instead of party affiliations, oversight and transparency for all public officials and a levelling of the playing field.
Frankly, I’d say the very definition of a “mainchancer” would be the guy who insists you are throwing your vote away if your refuse to back one of the two parties who have historically screwed you.

Posted by: Monolycus | Nov 25 2005 10:31 utc | 26

I perhaps, could reword this, and say it better, but I’m tired, full and greatful I have a full belly tonight. But, the following dovetails nicely w/ the conversation at hand… “systems change”.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 25 2005 10:55 utc | 28

there’s a warm bunk a’waitin Gov. Bush opens largest faith-based prison
annie thinks debs is nuts!
uncle, diebold is the virus that keeps on giving

Posted by: annie | Nov 25 2005 16:27 utc | 30

the scary conclusion is he’s not out of the loop, only his image is. is it rollin bob?

Posted by: annie | Nov 25 2005 16:36 utc | 32

To see Bushie’s position I always look at this:
Link
also here, plenty facts:
Pollkatz
such as:
Bush and gas prices
(for those who want the numbers and don’t know these sites..)
Antifa’s post was very enjoyable. However, my pov. is that 9/11, the terrorism hype, the semi failure or success of Afghanistan, catching (or neutralising) Binny, stopping terrorism, links with Saudi, and so forth, have always been implicitly understood both by the elites and by the people as acceptable excuses for agression and as tangential matters that are not essential. (E.g. Links with Saudi are vital because of oil, it is not their fault if there are some nutters in that country..)
The stuff of words -rationales- and not of life.
All refer to anomalies (9/11) or mysteries (anthrax) and to events far away that can be spun how one likes. Had the ‘hearts and flowers’ scenario worked in Iraq no one would say a word about these things, and Binny would simply be presumed dead, terror stats would show terror takes place in foreign lands and is not too consequent anyway, who cares.
Bush’s slow, now plunging, fall is due to: Social Security > Katrina > the continuing American deaths in Iraq (no change, no positive news) and gas prices; more largely, the ‘economy’. Then, the abysmal failure in Iraq is layered on top of factored in: false info, poor intelligence, bad planning, torture is suddenly not respectable, etc. Waking up after a long slumber to notice that elections are rigged is another symptom.

Posted by: Noisette | Nov 25 2005 17:13 utc | 34

Isn’t it a chalabity, as tante aime puts it, that on the one hand our American Congress pushes,
“We must not stand by as leaders silence their people and dissolve opposition parties.(sic)
Only by assisting the (Central Asian) region’s development into a bastion of stable free-market democracies that respect the fundamental human rights of their citizens can we hope to address the underlying factors which help the rise of extremism and related violence.
(straight from Neo-Con’s Koran, verse by verse)
Only by ‘helping to’ (sic) create an environment where freedom and prosperity can flourish will the United States be able to guarantee (sic) the success of efforts in the war against terror and oppression.”
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, Chair of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia
Yet this same US Congress, and far worse, White House, engages in *wholesale* fundamentalist war of oppression against *our own people’s* freedoms and prosperities, both directly, with Patriot Act II and SCOTUS law, and indirectly, pyramiding deficits upon deficits which we can never repay,
within a race-towards-the-bottom in real wages and benefit cuts, and with a hands-off attitude towards run-away Net and Housing bubbles, pension and mortage fund under-investment, and Corporate hyper-consolidation of the US economy, which will inevitably destroy our freedoms, our prosperities (for all) and shortly, our social security.
To paraphrase Twain, “There is no great nation, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by religion, howsoever poor and witless.”

Posted by: UchinchiI Bob | Nov 25 2005 19:24 utc | 36

annie,
Bush is not entirely out of the loop, but his handlers certainly don’t feed him any more information than he needs to perform his appointed tasks.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 26 2005 9:36 utc | 38