Really?
George Bush cared enough about what this ignorant nobody says to the point that it was one of the most disgusting moments of his presidency? I would have thought there were far worse moments for President Bush over his eight years .
Who the hell is Kanye West and why does George Bush care about him? He is a hip hop singer.
George Bush goes on national television to repeat his whining about what a hip hop singer said about him?
Here is what was said:
Perhaps taking on hip hop singers should be left to other hip hop singers? Even 50 Cent knew how to handle Kanye West.
...and someone named Pink had something to say about Kanye West, the disturber of President George W. Bush.
Perhaps George Bush should quit whimpering and get down with all the sober freaks.
Just when people were beginning to forget about the ex-president that made President Barack Obama possible, he returns to the national scene.
ReplyDeleteThe Obama Administration could not have hired anyone better to divert attention from the drubbing they just received, and along comes Georgie Boy.
George Whimpering Bush taking the wind out of the Republican and conservative sails.
...because his feelings were hurt by a hip hop singer.
ReplyDeleteI don't want a nice guy. I want a smart tough guy who has his priorities in order and when he sits in the Oval Office he does not get diverted by nobodies.
ReplyDeleteIt makes you wonder about how easy it would be to twist such a man.
Jeb is a "nice guy", too.
ReplyDeleteOr so 'they' say.
The ineffective campaign against aQ, the trillion USD wasted in Iraq along with the blood spilled, that does not "bother" George W Bush.
Maybe because that was the "Plan", from the get go.
But being called names, by an ignorant product of the hip hop culture, that cuts George W Bush to the core of his being. That bothers George W Bush.
He is not a "nice guy".
He is an abomination that led US to a financial disaster that was unprecedented.
He fell into the Saudi/Wahhabi trap and got US bogged down, militarily and financially, in ways that we will never recover from.
Obama is even an improvement in terms of managing Idaho's public lands. The elk herds have never done better, than under Obama's Care.
A long time ago I had access to classified CIA and DIA daily assessments of the current political, social and military systems in the Soviet Union.
ReplyDeleteThese were mostly very dry, very technical and packed with statistics and raw data. Every once in a while there would be biographical analysis on ranking military and political figures, some of it scary and some laughable about mostly the banality of the gray men who ran the Soviet Union.
The reports speculated about the decision making and frame of mind of these leaders based on the analysis of what was publicly known about them.
Shock and awe has nothing on this.
That interview will be used by Obama in 2012 to remind everyone why they elected him in the first place.
ReplyDeleteWho the hell is Kanye West
ReplyDeleteThat's what I'd like to know. Never heard of him till a couple days ago.
The elk herds have never done better, than under Obama's Care.
hahahahahaha
That's really funny. I doubt O knows what an elk is. Somebody in his ad. took the wolves off the Endangered Species List, and the court put them back on.
Your argument about wolves is like your statement that the Romans had the Jewish interest at heart.
Obama hasn't had anything to with any of it, really, about the wolves and elk.
Elk - from over 16,000 to around 2,000, just in my part of the place.
Deuce's attitude toward elk is I think a kind of carrying over of his basic Any Rand outlook back to the world of nature, from whence most of it came.
Be kind to the animals. In this case by getting the wolves off the backs of the elk.
Bush's talk with Hannity was a lot of it, about going into Iraq.
We tend to forget how many UN Resolutions and such Saddam had violated. If Bush 1 hadn't kicked him out of Kuwait, he'd probably be in eastern Saudi Arabia by now. I'm not saying it was a great idea, but it was certainly defensible. Not much of anybody in Congress bitched much about it at the time.
As far as China is concerned, wasn't it Nixon who made the initial opening? Doesn't Congress have a say in our trade policies? The thing built up for a long long time.
I'm taking WiO's advice towards rat from here on. It isn't worth it.
The Romans had the Jewish interest at heart.
Christ.
Far as this West fellow - whoever he is - we live in a hip hop world anymore.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Obama's had him to the White House for a gig. He's had a lot of the others.
bob discounts both the harvest and size of the herds, as measures of the elk herd health.
ReplyDeleteBoth are larger than ever before.
As reported in the local news, from Idaho. Perhaps the reports are all corrupted, by the power of the O, but I doubt it.
If they have been, the only solution would be to eliminate the massive power of Federal interests that permeate Idaho, such as Federal ownership and control over 64% of the land.
I am not sure about Kanye West playing at the White House, but Brad Paisley, Alison Krauss and Union Station played Obama White House
ReplyDeleteNot to be called a racist, though President Obama included performance by Grand Ole Opry Star Charlie Pride At The White House, too.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThat the land management folks from DC want to include wolves in the Idaho environment, just a part of their vision of our national, natural, American Heritage.
ReplyDeleteDoing what they can, to preserve the "Real" America. Not one that was artificially manipulated by the locals. Locals not worthy of either ownership nor management responsibilities of the Public Lands.
Locals that do not understand the true Heritage of the United States, how important it is to school children in NYCity that wolves range free, on the publicly owned lands of Idaho.
We must preserve the free ranging wolves in Idaho, for the children that own them, in New York City.
Preserving for their posterity the lands and resources that they subsidize. An integral part of the American Heritage, those wolves.
If God did not want wolves in Idaho, he'd have not put them there, in the beginning.
ReplyDeleteI am a contrarian.
ReplyDeleteI look at the Katrina situation and saw an amazing multistate rescue.
From the total destruction of Gulfport MS, to the 100's of miles of coast line scrubbed like a tsunami hit it, I watch the videos of the Coast Guard, Navy and others rescuing and saving 10's of thousands.
I watched how the storm PASSED over N.O. without a breach. I watch how that criminal Roy Nagan ran New Orleans as the water came into sections of N.O.
I remember how he did NOT evacuate the city's poor areas, and how 500 school buses sitting idle..
The FED performed amazing. helping 100,000's of thousands of citizens with homes, trailers, cash, food and medical care.
I remember the fraud by the citizens, I remember the screams from the minority community that they did not get assistance for a whole 5 days...
Call me jaded...
No one starves to death in 5 days.
Sure there could have been better organization.
Where was the State of LA?
The State and City were criminal in their lack of planning and more importantly their engaging in the emergency.
The State and City services are to be the organization of 1st response.
The FED comes in afterwards.
We need to be honest...
Looters are what looters do...
You can't make this stuff up.
ReplyDeleteObviously there's an historical context - call it a dialectic - that exerts a momentum of it's own. Wretchard is well known for his analogies to information systems - manufacture, processing and distribution of information as a commodity within chaotic systems subject to unsteady and temporal equilibria. Gets to be a mouthful but the signal to noise idea in the public domain is valid I think. Or possibly an excuse.
However one chooses to define the modern context (in terms of apolitical elites versus the BC preference for ideological distinctions), the psychological explanation for the multiple failures we are witnessing is lack of seriousness, totally subsumed by the reach for economic growth and expansion, at any cost.**
I think of it as extrapolating the Robber Baron role-playing onto the global stage where the competition is more serious and the players are simply better. Deuce has already listed the various venues where we're getting our asses handed to us. The Robber Barons can be admired as you wish, but the whining when this country gets out-played is ... unseemly. And right now that's all we're doing - whining - because the federal infrastructure is not equipped to respond to the challenges of the modern world.
**(The only brake applied so far to unrestrained economic expansionism has been the Green Movement but it is flawed in ways that have been discussed to death.)
All of which is typically shortened to 'lack of leadership' or sometimes 'lack of political will.' So you're left questioning decision-making at the collective level, typically within a bureaucracy, which is where wretchard's information processing analogies come in, as a way of framing the analysis.
Re-evaluating granularity of decision-making as a function of organizational size and architecture is one approach. Another, less deconstructive, approach is getting back to basics. Some argue no going back; we - the USA - have become too big to retrench along any vector - economic, military, foreign assistance and policy. All of which may be 'true,' but it would be hard to argue that we are not being cut down to size by external forces anyway.
I thought GWB was going to be a 'get back to basics' kind of President, until he got co-opted by the forward thinkers in Washington.
But - and little of the public rhetoric reveals acknowledgment of or agreement with this point - reform begins not with the executive, but the federal infrastructure - Congress, the military, and the combined intel agencies. I don't see anyone on the then current political landscape that would have done anything much differently from GWB, the Washington currents being too strong. One man is not going to change what half a century has consolidated.
The lack of gravitas is damaging and the Shitty Little Wars just keep getting shittier and shittier.
Read what Dick Cheney said, back in the day, referencing Bosnia.
ReplyDeleteNow one can insert the name of any country one wishes into the slot. The truth of what he said, it remains the same.
That Mr Cheney and Bush abandoned this core policy statement, when they came to power, the truth behind the Systematic dysfunction.
Nobody answered these questions with respect to any of the Bush/Cheney Wars.
Before you commit U.S. forces, there are certain questions you need to be able to answer.
You need an objective that you can define in military terms.
Our military knows how to liberate a country, destroy a navy, take down an air force; those are militarily achievable objectives. But if you say, "Go in and stop the bloodshed in Bosnia," that's not sufficiently clear to build a mission around. Does that mean you're going to put a U.S. soldier between every Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Muslim?
A second requirement is to specify rules of engagement. The soldier or marine in the trenches needs ground rules -- what we call "rules of engagement" -- about how he is to achieve his mission. Whom does he shoot? How much force can he use, and under what circumstances? That's very difficult to define in this nebulous kind of civil war that's been raging in Bosnia.
Who's the enemy? And how do you tell the good guys from the bad guys? Is this a three-sided conflict among Serb, Muslim, and Croat, or a two-sided conflict between Muslim and Serb? That's never been very well defined.
You also need to know what constitutes victory.
How would you define it?
How would you know when you had achieved it?
And finally, how do you get out? What's the end game?
How do you wrap it all up?
And what's the cost in terms of American lives in that involvement?
Nobody answered these questions with respect to Bosnia.
Is there any reason to expect that an age-old conflict based on animosities that go back for hundreds of years is going to be ameliorated or ended by the temporary presence of U.S. military force? I don't think so. And for all of those reasons, I was, and still am, very reluctant to see us rely on U.S. forces to solve Bosnia's problems.
I am afraid we would have an ill-defined mission, we would take significant casualties, and would get involved without knowing how we were going to get out.
The valid complaints made by Mr Cheney, referencing whom he called a "new and green" Bill Clinton can certainly be laid upon the Bush Administration.
ReplyDeleteAn administration which was neither "new" nor "green".
Which makes one assume that the abandonment of core military principles, it was just part of their "Plan".
That they did not just "fall into" a series of sound bites that made them look stupid and inexperienced. They charted the course of the "Shitty Wars", with forethought and deliberation.
They well knew that the very concept of the "Long War" violated every precept and obligation of leadership that Mr Cheney had laid out as a requirement for a serious leader to fulfill, prior to engaging the US military in foreign conflicts.
The performance of Bush/Cheney mirrored that of Clinton/Gore, except that Bush/Cheney took US much deeper into the shit.
ReplyDeleteBoth Administrations ignored what Mr Cheney said were certain questions you need to be able to answer ... Before you commit U.S. forces
I agree with both WIo, on Katrina, and CL on: I thought GWB was going to be a 'get back to basics' kind of President, until he got co-opted by the forward thinkers in Washington. But - and little of the public rhetoric reveals acknowledgment of or agreement with this point — reform begins not with the executive, but the federal infrastructure - Congress, the military, and the combined intel agencies. I don't see anyone on the then current political landscape that would have done anything much differently from GWB, the Washington currents being too strong. One man is not going to change what half a century has consolidated.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of gravitas is damaging and the Shitty Little Wars just keep getting shittier and shittier.
I did in fact vote for Bush twice. What did I expect? Personally, he began to lose me at Tora Bora. I could not understand the decision to subcontract the use the Northern Alliance to do what should have been done to extract revenge for 911.
Guantanamo signaled to me the same thinking as the Reagan decision to support the Contras indirectly and through artifice. If American interests are at stake, we do not need to take prisoners to Cuba to question them.
I held contempt for Lyndon Johnson on his guns and butter philosophy of financing wars. GWB and Johnson were one and the same.
GWB did nothing to correct our structural problem with imported oil.
Financing two wars by borrowing from China, sacrificing American industry in the process, was either a bad plan or no plan.
Pursuing the dream of Democracy may have worked in Eastern Europe and did work for different reasons. Applying the goal to Arab countries and China was naive.
Do I expect too much from an American President? Did GWB do the best job possible or at least a reasonably acceptable job?
Assume that he did. What are the implications of that?
Why does GWB worry about what a hip hop rapper says about him?
ReplyDeleteI would be curious to see what, if anything GW has to say about being drafted to run in 2000. As I recall there as a dearth of candidates to oppose Al Gore and GW was drafted. He was the "best" the party had.
ReplyDeleteIf nothing else, he prevented Gore from taking the Office. I can't imagine eight years of that man.
Eight years of Gore could be quite comparable to eight years of Obama, who if you will recall had the most liberal voting record of any man in the Senate.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that an interesting thing about Obama's books and his campaign is how they tried to obfuscate his real beliefs and background.
With Bush, what you see is what you get. With Obama, the Socialists' trojan horse, manchurian candidate, it's another matter.
He also defeated John Kerry in 2004.
ReplyDeleteWhy does GWB worry about what a hip hop rapper says about him?
ReplyDeleteThe charge was racism, after katrina?
I don't know, pissed him off I guess. Got his goat. He isn't a racist.
He probably shouldn't have worried about it. After all if you worry about what every half wit says, if you're the Prez, that's all you'll do.
Laura was the better First Lady, compared to our current.
I believe I remember Bush 1 being asked whether it was boxers or briefs - he got pissed and chewed the reporter out.
ReplyDeleteClinton, asked the same question, laughed it off, and answered.
Charlie Breaks House Rules To Pay For His Defense Against Breaking House Rules
ReplyDeleteTrial starts tomorrow. Seems Charlie raided his own PACs to pay for some lawyers, a no - no.
I predict there will be some highly entertaining moments in the coming days.
News of tomorrow ---
ReplyDeleteAfter his conviction today for ethics violations, Charles Rangel said, cracking a smile, "Well, boys, I had a hell of a run."
Personally, he began to lose me at Tora Bora. I could not understand the decision to subcontract the use the Northern Alliance to do what should have been done to extract revenge for 911.
ReplyDeleteThat was definitely really badly handled. Should have crossed the threshold and used some nukes.
Biblical plague down Sam's way. They make a pretty good bait if you are a bait fisherman --
ReplyDeleteSydney -
Melbourne commuters marvelled on Friday at locusts landing on the streets of Australia's second-biggest city.
“We've had lots of reports this morning,” a Victoria state government spokeswoman said. “The hot northerly wind has been a perfect vehicle for them to be flown into Melbourne.”
Abundant rainfall in the south-east of the continent has provided ideal breeding for the formation of swarms that can number 50 million and devastate crops as well as pester motorists and pilots.
With the worst plague in 30 years predicted as the southern hemisphere summer hots up, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) warned pilots that swarms made flying hazardous.
“They can get sucked into intakes, they can get sucked up tubes that feed the airspeed indicators,” CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said. “Obviously if you get enough of them it restricts visibility if they splatter all over the windscreen.”
I would be curious to see what, if anything GW has to say about being drafted to run in 2000.
ReplyDeleteI heard that Jeb Bush was being groomed for a presidential run but GWB got the nod at the last minute surprising GOP insiders.
You balance the budget with this interactive at the NYTimes
ReplyDeleteThe only reason I can think of that Bush doesn't criticize Obama is he thinks the Office of the Presidency is More Important than the Country.
ReplyDeleteHe is just what Rat said he was all along, a cog in the machine.
Jeb Bush was elected Governor in 1998. This was his first tour in elected office. He had previously run for Governor in 1994.
ReplyDeleteRunning for President in 2000 was pretty much out of the question.
As is Obama.
ReplyDeleteThe long-term thinking was that no Republican candidate was expected to win against the VP of a (reasonably) popular Clinton. So they ran Bush in 2000 thinking that Jeb would make the more successful run in 2004.
ReplyDeleteAs is Obama
ReplyDeleteI thought from the beginning that Obama's handlers, especially but not limited to the star-struck Valerie Jarrett, were making a seriously rookie mistake by overselling their man. Not simply the overwhelming and overweening and preening religious iconography noticed by more than a few watchers, but considering just the secular 'hope and change' message of Obama and his administration being an historical pivot point in history was truly setting themselves up for a fall.
But discretion and politics seldom go together. His team could have 'cooled' it though once they got over the initial hurdles. Instead they passed health care.
Right. The new King shouldn't show himself so damn much, and promise nearly nothing, it's old wisdom.
ReplyDeleteThen if you actually somehow accomplish something, it looks good.
Memento mori. Respice post te, hominem te memento
It is fascinating that Drudge is highlighting the continued outrage by the TSA because of the political correctness of random searches as opposed to targeting obvious high risk passengers.
ReplyDeleteThese random intimate pat downs of passengers way outside of known terrorist types are breaking public support for the entire TSA mission.
Or as I like to say quis est tua pater nunc?
ReplyDeleteSometimes a not-so-good president (we've had a few of those) is just a 'cog in the wheel.'
ReplyDelete(But don't tell the boyz@BC who are outdoing themselves on the subject of Obama's psychological pathologies.)
The Republicans are making the identical mistake. If by some miracle they take back the executive office in 2012 it'll all be Obama's fault. Rather than identify, groom, support, and elect a leader with the skills to execute and the connections to surround himself with competent staff and bench depth, the GOP generals are flailing their arms with profiles and rhetoric.
Rather than identify, groom, support, and elect a leader with the skills to execute and the connections to surround himself with competent staff and bench depth, the GOP generals are flailing their arms with profiles and rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteThat would make a good post. Who would it be?
to surround himself
ReplyDeleteto surround herself
You'll have to excuse me for awhile. I'm going outside to dig my bomb shelter now.
ReplyDeleteToo late, you're already posted.
ReplyDeleteRE: the pronoun agreement.
ReplyDeleteI was taught - way back in jr high school - that the masculine can be used in a generic context to include all leanings. I have done that ever since and been called on it almost every time. I refuse to this day to sabotage the rhythm of my prose with distractions. Only exception is formal documents where the company style sheet demands it.
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ReplyDeleteRather than identify, groom, support, and elect a leader with the skills to execute and the connections to surround himself with competent staff and bench depth, the GOP generals are flailing their arms with profiles and rhetoric...
It's always a crap shoot. When Bush picked his cabinet in 2000, everyone gave him high praise including the Dems. It included smart guys with experiance. The fact that they all had little quirks that made them disfunctional as a working team was not recognized until later.
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Of course it's not easy. That's why it's a job for professionals who know how to execute in spite of the quirks. Dysfunction is not an option as they say in corporate training classes.
ReplyDeleteBush's biggest staffing problem, IMO, was Cheney and his 'stovepiping' trick. Unbalanced the entire administration. Wouldn't have been as tempting for him, if the military and intel agencies had been a hair more competent, which, considering their salaries and benefits, is not too much to ask. Part of the problem is that the public, for whom Washington works, has not demanded performance. I *think* that is about to change.
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ReplyDeleteCheney as 'dark emmience', the Darth Vader pulling all the strings in the administration?
I don't think so.
Was he influential? Sure. Was he (and still is) an idealogue. Sure. But then the administration was filled with neocons who were all idealogues.
One can just as easily blame Condi Rice. She was NSA Advisor. When it came to foreign policy, she had the responsibility to get all the players to work together. She didn't do it.
All the cabinet had their own strengths and weaknesses. The real responsibility rests with GWB in not recognizing that the team wasn't working and being too stubborn (or loyal if you like) to not change things up.
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ReplyDeleteI've mentioned that I like what I've seen from Jeb Bush. Admitttedly not a lot since he was governor in Forida not Michigan. However, I haven't heard many negatives about the guy.
Rat, you have taken the opposite side of that argument. What are your objections to Jeb based on?
Just wondering.
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ReplyDeleteBe kind to the animals. In this case by getting the wolves off the backs of the elk.
Bobbo, outdoorsman and animal lover, who when hunters lack the skill to take down a wolf, advocates poisoning them.
(Poisoning the wolves that is, as opposed to certain PETA members who might advocate poisoning the hunters.)
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ReplyDeleteObviously there's an historical context - call it a dialectic - that exerts a momentum of it's own...
...the psychological explanation for the multiple failures we are witnessing is lack of seriousness, totally subsumed by the reach for economic growth and expansion, at any cost.**
...And right now that's all we're doing - whining - because the federal infrastructure is not equipped to respond to the challenges of the modern world...
One man is not going to change what half a century has consolidated...
Lacking seriousness? I don't see it. I believe the people currently in power are very serious. Blaming the system doesn't do it for me. In my opinion, it is the elected who have been gaming the system in a very serious way and that has been our problem.
Power, perks, and prestige may not be what brings most politicians to D.C. but it is what keeps them there. Pacs, panderers, and pimps then enable them. Over time they become prodigal, profligate, and porcine. Then the preening, pork, and peculation follows.
Can it change? Will the Tea Party make a difference? Possibly, but for how long? Like most countries, we currently have a plutocracy of elites for the elites. Will the puissant purveyors of the party-line precipitate change in the Tea Partiers and turn them into pawns or proselytes of their own pecuniary version of patronage and perfidy?
The premise that the political system is at fault is piddle. It is the quality of the elected officials that is to blame. Only the plebs can change this. It will take time but term-limits promulgated by the proletariate on a continuous basis can result in a non-violent putsch that is the precursor to a new paradigm that washes away the pathetic pontificate we are currently plagued with.
:)
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P'yooh
ReplyDeleteBobbo, outdoorsman and animal lover, who when hunters lack the skill to take down a wolf, advocates poisoning them.
ReplyDeleteA typical city fool's opinion.
Poison them in winter, when the bears are asleep.
It's too rugged to hunt them out of there. You couldn't do it with a helicopter gunship. You are forgiven for not knowing that.
ReplyDeleteIf a wolf kills, say, 20 elk a year, you are saying it's being 'kind to the animals' to trade away 20 elk versus one wolf.
When do the elk get a vote? Where are their animal rights?
They are quit peaceful, and only rut about among themselves in the fall.
The forest is now a hell for the elk, and the wolves we have introduced, are the devils, tormenting them.
It's the way most of us around here look at it. we peaceful farmers and ranchers, and lawyers too, like my new Mrs. Law.