Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Sorry isn't good enough

Conservative radio talk-show host Doug McIntyre's mea culpa;

I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. I believe George W. Bush is unarguably the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. A case can be made he's the worst President, period. I reached the conclusion he's either grossly incompetent, or a hand puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both.

After September 11th, I believed President Bush when he said we would go after the terrorists and the nations that harbored them. I supported the President when he sent our troops into Afghanistan. I supported the war in Iraq because I believed Colin Powell at the UN, and trusted Tony Blair. The President said Iraq was an urgent threat, and after 9-11, the risk seemed too real. But in the months and years since shock and awe I have been shocked repeatedly by a consistent litany of excuses, alibis, double-talk, inaccuracies, bogus predictions, and flat out lies. I have watched as the President and his administration changed the goals, redefined the reasons for going into Iraq, and fumbled the good will of the world and the focus necessary to catch the real killers of September 11th. The President says the commanders on the ground will make the battlefield decisions, and the war in Iraq won't be run from Washington. Yet, politics has consistently determined what the troops can and can't do and any commander who does not go along with the administration is sacked, and in some cases, maligned. I was wrong about everything associated with Iraq.

We're in the "waning days of the insurgency." We're about to slink home with our tail between our legs, leaving civil war in Iraq and a nuclear-armed Iran in our wake And Bin Laden is still making tapes. It's unspeakable. The liberal media didn't create this reality, bad policy did. James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Warren Harding were all failed Presidents but the damage this President has done is historic. His mistakes have global implications, while the other failed Presidents mostly authored domestic embarrassments.

And speaking of domestic embarrassments, let's look at President Bush's domestic record. He cut taxes and I like tax cuts. But tax cuts combined with reckless spending and borrowing is criminal mismanagement of the public's money. We're drunk at the mall with our great grandchildren's credit cards. We traded tax and spend Liberals for borrow and spend Conservatives. Bush created a giant new entitlement, the prescription drug plan. He lied to his own party to get it passed. It was written by and for the pharmaceutical industry. So much for smaller government In fact, virtually every tentacle of government has grown exponentially under Bush. Unless, of course, it was an agency to look after the public interest, the environment or worker's rights. His open border policy is a disaster for the wages of working people-- he debases the work ethic, "jobs Americans won't do!" He doesn't believe in the sovereign borders of the country he's sworn to protect. And his devotion to cheap labor for his corporate benefactors, along with his worship of multinational trade deals, makes an utter mockery of homeland security and calls into question his commitment to sovereignty itself. Katrina, Harriet Myers, The Dubai Port Deal, shrinking wages for working people, staggering debt, astronomical foreign debt, outsourcing, open borders, the war on science, media manipulation, a cavalier attitude toward fundamental freedoms -- this President has run the most arrogant and out-of-touch administration in my lifetime, perhaps, in any American's lifetime.

America needs a vibrant opposition to check the power of a run-amuck majority party. Tragically, the Democrats have allowed crackpots, leftists and demagogic cowards to snipe from the sidelines while taking no responsibility for anything. In fairness, I don't believe a Democrat president would have gone into Iraq. Unfortunately, I don't know if President Gore would have gone into Afghanistan. However, the Republicans run the show and have more to answer for. With a belated tip of the cap to Ralph Nader, the system is broken, so broken it's almost inevitable it pukes up mediocrities like Al Gore and George W. Bush. Where are the Trumans and the Eisenhowers? Why do we have to settle for recycled hacks and malleable ciphers? Greatness is always rare, but is basic competence and simple honesty too much to ask? Does this make me a waffler? A flip-flopper? I prefer to see it as realism.

For those of you who never supported Bush, it's also fair to accuse me of kicking Bush while he's down. After all, you were kicking Bush while he was up. You were right. I was wrong.
Look, it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize what was going on prior to the 2000 election. All you had to do was look at Bush's history, and listen to him speak. It was not at all difficult to realize what we had on our hands was the Worst President Ever (WPE). Even after "9/11 changed everything", some of us were not frightened into believing obvious lies. It was so completely obvious what was going on, and liberals and progressives are brave enough not to wet our pants and lose our fucking minds over a horrible act of terrorism.

It's important that people keep a rational perspective in the worst of times. That's what leadership is all about.

And now Glenn Greenwald had compiled a list of other right wingers jumping on the trash Chimpy brigade, here: This is in specific reference to the disaster that has been the latest blood bath in Lebanon. It's also important to understand that Cheney authorized the Israeli offensive earlier this summer. It had NOTHING to do with 2 kidnapped Israeli soldiers. That was simply the pre-text, and as we've seen, this bunch is really good at finding pre-texts.

The list includes;

National Review Editors
Dan Riehl
Paul Mirgenoff, Powerline Blog
Michelle Malkin
Peter Brookes, Senior Fellow, Heritage Foundation, NRO Symposium
Soshana Bryen, NRO Symposium
Anne Bayefsky, NRO Symposium
Jeff Goldstein
Pamela "Atlas" Oshry, interviewer to John Bolton
Daily Pundit
Bill Kristol
Charles Krauthammer

Andrew Sullivan has been for months now crying about how sorry he is. But what all of these mother fuckers don't get is - a lot of people are dead now. Thousands and thousands of people are dead - and these assholes are not. They simply keep pounding out words on their keyboards as they have done all along, and now they say they're sorry.

And then in the next column, they'll opine again. They'll have more opinion about the situation the world finds itself in, and make suggestions or observations about the larger world. They simply treat this as if it is a budget issue that they were wrong about. Well, it's not. You can fix budget issues. It's just money. But because of these idiots, thousands of people are dead and many more thousands injured, including the very best of America.

Fuck that. Fuck those assholes. They never get to have an opinion ever again. They should all be fired, and never again have word space in a published journal, or tv show, or write a fucking book.

Good god, fucking Andrew Sullivan has a new book coming out. Fuck you Andrew you stupid piece of shit. People are dead because you were too stupid to see what was so obvious to the rest of us.

Fuck all those assholes. It's time for the people who were right all along to run the show.

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