Do they still have weekly spelling tests in schools these days? I can remember from elementary school we were given a list of words on Monday that we had to memorize by Friday for a spelling test. Part of the assignment, of course, was to retain not only the spelling of the words but their meanings as well. Larry Beinhart over at Huffinton Post set me off on this path of distant memories this morning with his excellent piece on failure in this administration. Beinhart does an incredible job of showing how Bush endlessly uses the phrase “failure is not an option” in every policy or directive in which failure has already occurred.

Failure…it’s not an option…it’s standard equipment these days.

I honestly feel sorry for the President these days. The arrogance of the first six years of his unchecked regime is coming back to bite where it counts the most.

Let’s be perfectly honest, the first eight and a half months of the Bush administration was little to do of nothing. It was not until the attacks of 9/11 that this President began to define himself, and it has been that definition that has carried him from election to election infringing upon the rights of nearly every American citizen.

It was inevitable that there was a price to pay for his arrogance. For nearly four long years we have been engaged in a war that lacks direction and purpose. We were told that the war was necessary to protect our national interests, we were told that Iraq had the ability to endanger our very existance, we were told that the war was necessary to give freedom to a repressed people, and we were told that the war was necessary in the sense of the global war on terrorism. The truth is that we were told a complex set of lies hidden by smoke and mirrors.

Now Bush, who has never been held accountable for one thing in his entire life, is being held accountable for his actions and for his lies. What a terrible awakening it must be for a man who has shirked responsibility and intelligent thinking his entire life to suddenly find himself taking responsibility for the war and not having the support of two-thirds of the nation for the one solid decision he has ever made.

Personally, I feel like 20,000 troops is not enough to complete the job, but there is absolutely no way we can afford to do what needs to be done in order to save Iraq. Let’s be perfectly honest here, the surge in troop numbers is not to save Iraq, it is the bare minimum to prop up the government long enough for the United States to leave and to save face for Bush. There is an important lesson we should all take from this: Saddam Hussein paid for his arrogance (i.e., stupidity) with his life, Bush will pay for his arrogance (i.e., stupidity) with his legacy.

When we look back at every former president we have had since Nixon we see a group of elder statesmen who dedicate their lives to bettering either the lives of the underprivileged or improving global conditions facing humanity. Bush lacks the ability and stature to do any of that. His legacy will be the general erosion of the American image in the eyes of the world, and that is a sad commentary on our President, our nation, and our electorate.

The Bush administration is in a real pickle this week over the leaking of classified intelligence documents that were critical of the President’s war in Iraq. (If Vietnam was Johnson’s war, why shouldn’t Iraq be Bush’s war?) Al Kamen, at WashingtonPost.com did an excellent piece this morning where he examines the administration’s use of shock that someone would leak such a document, considering this administration’s spotty history of cracking down on leaks.

Sadly, this is not the first time such damaging leaks of sensitive information — information jihadi recruiters couldn’t possibly have known — have occurred shortly before an election. Four years ago this month, back in September 2002, a leak of secret intelligence on Saddam Hussein ‘s efforts to get “specially designed” aluminum tubes to make nuclear weapons showed up in the New York Times.

As recounted in the new book “Hubris,” by Michael Isikoff and David Corn , a White House official worried in the Times article that the tubes might mean that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ might be a mushroom cloud.” The brilliant line (later used by Rice) was conceived by White House chief speechwriter Michael Gerson , according to the book, and had been discussed in a White House meeting a few days earlier.

Vice President Cheney , on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” cited it to moderator Tim Russert as backing for the claim that Hussein was trying for atomic weapons. “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning,” Cheney noted when asked about Saddam’s push for nukes.
Unclear why no one went after the leaker…

Great discussion over at Daily Kos on how Bush is perceived to be more responsible than Bill Clinton for not capturing bin Laden and heading off 9/11.

Of course, partisanship plays a role in the answers. 71 percent of Republicans are too stupid too realize that Bill Clinton hasn’t been in office the last six years and blame him rather than the guy currently in office. You know — the one that talks a big game but hasn’t delivered squat.

Three things come to mind. First, Republicans generally point fingers and assign blame when things go wrong and Bill Clinton continues to be that scape-goat for their inability to govern. Remember, it was the Republicants who raised hell over Monica Lewinsky because it “dirtied” the Presidency, all the while you never heard a peep from one Republican about national security or concerns over al Qaeda. Second, George W. Bush has never delivered a single promise he has made while in the White House or while in the Governor’s mansion in Texas. I never understood what the big deal was with him running for President. Seriously, I cannot recall a single measure he put before the legislature During his time as Governor.  And finally, there is plenty of blame to pass around on this issue with every administration, Democrat and Republican since Truman and the creation of the Israeli state. As a nation we have done a poor job of trying to deal with the issues in an honest and unbiased manner.

Do you remember what you were doing in the summer of 2001? More importantly, do you remember what your President and his Congress were doing in the summer of 2001? I do.

Just a few short weeks before 9/11 our President was perched at his Crawford, Texas ranch enjoying a very long vacation (5 weeks if I remember correctly). His attention was focused on the moral dilemma of stem cell research and how he could use the Christian cloth he had wrapped himself in to suppress promising research for curing diseases. This topic was so important that he took time away from chopping wood and barbecuing to address the nation in primetime.

If the Bush administration was so focused on terrorists (namely al Qaeda) why did he never once speak to the American people about the problem? After all, Bush knew that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in the Fall of 2000. Why did he not go on national television to the tell the American people that he knew who attacked our service men and women? Why did the President not speak directly and openly to the American people and our enemies alike and say that the United States was not going to take it and that he would develop a master plan for eliminating terror from the face of the Earth? Why was Bush and Company not more proactive in their approach to the war on terror?

This is the kind of questioning that conspiracy theorists love to hear, because it is so easy to say that the President wanted to be attacked. Personally, I just think the President was distracted with giving tax breaks to the most wealthy and in becoming our moral leader on deeply personal issues and that he simply could not be bothered with the big picture.

Five plus years is a long time ago for some of us. Perhaps our memories have been clouded over with more recent events. So I ask then, what were the Republicans (Bush and Company) concerned with in the Spring of 2005? Was it the war in Iraq? Was it Afghanistan? Osama bin Laden? Was it on protecting our borders? Was it beefing up security on freight shipments and cargo ships that enter our ports everyday? The answer is no. The Republicans were worried about the obviously brain-dead Terri Schiavo and having her feeding tube removed. They [Republicans] simply could not stand to have a moral and personal decision go with intervening by creating bogus laws for one specific case. Once again the GOP decided to wrap itself in the Christian cloth of morality in hopes of undermining the personal freedoms and personal relationship between an individual choice and their belief system.

How is that related to the war on terror? Does this demonstrate that the Republicans are the party of protecting the American people? Again, no. But as long as the “war on terror” is being fought, the Republicans know that they have a banner to wave that proclaims them as the gladiators that are going to save us all.

In 2004 the GOP pulled out all of the stops and forced the same-sex marriage debate front and center for the general election. The plan was to stir fear that the American family was somehow threatened by two loving people sharing in the same rights (not privileges, but rights) as everyone else. The summer of 2006 started out the same way. The GOP was down in the polls and it needed a boost, so twice the House of Representatives passed bills to amend the Constitution to ensure that same-sex couples never receive any rights at all, and twice the Senate rejected the same initiative. When that didn’t work, the GOP turned to protecting our borders. The President even went before the nation on primetime (something he likes to do for political reasons and seldom out of the collective interest of the citizenry) to spell out his plan for protecting the border with Mexico and to lay out his plans for immigration. But in the spirit of true Republicanism, the House has spent the entire summer touring the country talking about the issue but doing little else. Now there isn’t enough time to act on any legislation, so Congress has delayed the vote until after the election.

How is any of this serving the needs of this country in the war on terror? The Republicans are not about protecting anyone but themselves and their financial supporters. Good people with good common sense and the ability to think critically should remember all of this as they head to the polls in November.

President Bush’s comments on the state of the world last week at the United Nations raise some interesting thoughts about not only his own personal view but of America‘s collective view of the world around us. 

To say that the mission of this government is to eradicate tyranny from the face of the Earth sounds great. It is the battle call of so many wars before, and yet it is almost a hollow message. In World War II the allies pulled their resources to combat a common external enemy. The campaign was costly but effective in removing true fascists from the grips of power around the globe. Storming cities across Europe and invading islands throughout the South and North Pacific were all tasks that in themselves created a culture of appreciation for the West. But this war on terror is not as simple. 

The world we live in is a very complicated and often caustic world filled with hate and distrust for one another, not as nations but as people. William Arkin points this out rather eloquently in his blog posted today on The Washington Post website. 

Bush has an incredible knack for saying things that are throw-backs to the WWII era, but never really delivers any substance that supports his rhetoric. Many people were completely surprised and shocked to hear Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez refer to Bush as the devil last week, but really if examine the root cause of this language we can see that Chavez is merely expounding the underlying feelings of many around the globe that find themselves pointed out as the enemy in increasingly generic language used by Bush. Our global war strategy in terms of WWII is no longer sufficient. Instead, we need to take notice of the historical definition of war back to the middle-centuries when wars were more tribal and the underlying cause of such wars was religion and moral values. The people that Bush calls “extremists fascists” are the same people who were slaughtered by the Spanish and Romans centuries before our continent even existed on the map. Centuries of hatred and distrust are bubbling to the surface, and those “warriors” fighting this war are well-learned in the historical purpose of their cause.

The enemy is not one country. The enemy is not even a public state that can be pin-pointed on a map. The enemy is something much more dangerous and elusive and deserves a different approach militarily and politically. As Americans we really need to understand the world a little better, and as citizens, we need to demand that our government take a much more diplomatic and constructive approach to squelching the volume on extremist groups and not annihilating entire societies to eradicate the few and ultimately creating more “extremists”.

For years the Republicans have run around screaming about the wonderful job they are doing with terrorism, and how the country would not be in this mess were it not for Bill Clinton. Earlier this month they coaxed ABC to run a mocumentary about the lead up to the attacks on 9/11, with many parts that were out right fictional, much to the pleasure of the likes of Rush “Drug King” Limbaugh.

So, finally, Bill Clinton has his say, and he has it on Fox News, where it tells Chris Wallace to “sit there with that smug look on your face”. (By the way, there is a point where Bill Clinton asks Chris Wallace why he has never asked a Bush administration representative the same questions he is asking him, to which Wallace replies that he has and Clinton basically calls him a liar. Think Progress has done fact checking, and it looks like Clinton wins this round. Wallace in fact has had at least three opporunities to ask the same questions surrounding the 9/11 attacks and has never done so.)

And so the Republicans line up to cheer on Fox News (the same people who jeered them last week for contributing money to a gay journalists group), and point at Clinton as coming unhinged on the program. To me Bill Clinton appears to be more eloquent, more articulate and demonstrates a greater grasp of reality than George W. Bush ever has. Over on YouTube, there is a right-head who actually said:

His [Clinton's] narcissism, rambling answers and physical intimidation of Wallace are ridiculously embarrassing and far beneath a President.

WTF Mary! Um, if you exchanged “Wallace” with any global leader’s name you would have described George W. Bush.