Is George Bush's Mission Accomplished?

Published on Monday, December 22, 2008 by The Toronto Star

Bush's Mission Accomplished?

As the U.S. president prepares to depart, his legacy is undergoing a major round-the-clock renovation

by Tim Harper

WASHINGTON – The inaugural viewing stands are rising along Pennsylvania Ave., but the real heavy lifting is going on inside the White House in the final days of the Bush administration.

U.S. President George W. Bush meets with the crew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, left, where he announced the end of all major combat in Iraq on May 1, 2003. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters File Photo)

There, the round-the-clock renovation is continuing at a frantic pace, the scraping, scrubbing, whitewashing and painting of the George W. Bush legacy.

In this view of the world as the clock ticks toward midnight, illegal wiretaps, waterboarding, Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons, Abu Ghraib, the stripping of Geneva Convention rights and illegal detentions are all worth it because Americans have been spared another terror attack for 7 1/2 years.

Iraq and Afghanistan are brave "partners in freedom" and important strategic allies, only flawed intelligence is ever regretted, presidents don't get "do-overs," others are always blamed, and Osama bin Laden is downgraded to a mere cog in a damaged Al Qaeda.

It is in many ways a brazen rewriting of history while the history is still unfolding.

"While there's room for honest and healthy debate about the decisions I've made – and there's plenty of debate – there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe," Bush proclaimed last week at the U.S. Army College in Carlisle, Pa.

The legacy chorus in the final days features U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former political adviser Karl Rove.

Bush is in the midst of a rite for all two-term U.S. presidents, who, unlike prime ministers in the Canadian system, leave office on a fixed date beyond their control.

Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have all done this in recent history and Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien tried it in Canada.

Some U.S. presidents try a late game stab at Middle East peace, some ride off in a cloud over controversial pardons, but no one in American history has had a steeper climb at cleansing his image than George W. Bush.

He is fighting to the end.

Yesterday, in the wake of a front-page New York Times story blaming much of the economic crisis on Bush, the White House responded by saying the story was an example of "hindsight with blinders on and one eye closed."

Bush leaves office with the lowest popularity rating since such measures were first formulated.

He leaves behind three images seared in the world's consciousness. There was Bush in the flyboy suit on the aircraft carrier declaring Mission Accomplished in the Iraq war on May 1, 2003.

There was Bush on Aug. 30, 2005, hamming it up on the guitar in California while New Orleans drowned.

And there was Bush, the champion of the free market, pleading with Congress to agree to an unprecedented government intervention in an economy teetering on the edge of Depression.

He is the man who brought us "Bring It On," to an Iraqi insurgency who did just that, promised to capture the still-free bin Laden "dead or alive," and praised his incompetent patronage appointee Michael Brown with a "heckuva job, Brownie," as Louisiana and the U.S. Gulf Coast suffered with the carnage of Katrina.

Even his high moments were only reminders of failure to come.

He soared with the bullhorn in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and his subsequent address to Congress, but that is now a symbol of goodwill squandered.

His final, would-be victory tour of Iraq will always be remembered for him ducking shoes.

He will not get credit for other accomplishments. His efforts in helping Africa cope with HIV/AIDS went largely unnoticed and his unprecedented effort to smooth the transition to the Barack Obama administration will be a footnote.

All this from a man who used to dodge questions about his place in history because in history "we'll all be dead."

Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar and former White House adviser, says Bush is following presidential precedent, but he wonders if anyone is paying attention.

"You can't worry about your place in history, because it will be out of your hands," says Hess, now at the Brookings Institution and author of What Do We Do Now? A Workbook for the President-Elect. "But it would be an unnatural act to become president of the United States and not wonder how history will judge you."

All two-term presidents do the same, Hess says, because they are not defeated at the polls, but watch the sands of time run out.

Hess recalls writing a State of the Union message for Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, a report sent to Congress after the election of John F. Kennedy. Although Eisenhower did not read it, it was entered in the record as a rendering of eight years of Eisenhower accomplishments.

It is Iraq and the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that will always define the Bush presidency.

The Pew Research Center found that only 11 per cent of Americans believe Bush will be remembered as an outstanding or above-average president, by far the lowest positive end-of-term rating for any of the past four presidents.

Under Bush, the American view of the presidency as an institution has plummeted but not nearly as far as the world's perception of the U.S.

Still, the Pew study found that Americans support Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes after 9/11 and about half the country still believes in torture as a means of extracting information from terrorists or terror suspects.

In the Carlisle speech, Bush proclaimed the U.S. had removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, shut down terrorist training camps and liberated 25 million Afghans.

That ignores the fact the war in Afghanistan is going so poorly Obama will substantially beef up the American troop presence in the country to try to turn things around.

Bush's version of Iraq involves the liberation of 25 million Iraqis and the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein, but he overstates the coalition that joined him in the war and does not mention weapons of mass destruction, the 4,210 U.S. deaths or the 98,000 Iraqi deaths, as tabulated by icasualties.org.

Moira Whelan, director of strategy at National Security Network, says Bush is "rewriting history," ignoring the fact Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and that the invasion of Iraq was a major recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

When Bush tried to claim in an interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz that Iraq turned out to have been a major haven for Al Qaeda, she pointed out that was not until the U.S. invaded.

"Yeah, that's right. So what?" Bush replied. The point, he said, was that Al Qaeda had made a stand.

No weapons of mass destruction?

"That's true. Everybody thought they had them," Bush said in the same interview. The point, he said, was that Saddam had the capability to produce such weapons.

In a C-SPAN interview last week, Bush said the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks "came out of nowhere." On Aug. 6, 2001, however, at his Crawford, Tex., ranch he was presented with an intelligence brief entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

As he rides into the sunset, this is a much more reflective man, a guy who unexpectedly grabbed CNN interviewer Candy Crowley's hand and walked with her hand-in-hand last week.

"I suspected there would be a good-size crowd once the word got out about my hanging," he said Friday, as his portrait was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

He lamented all those banquets where comics make fun of the president, then he gets up and makes fun of himself and "everybody has a jolly time, except the president."

He said prayer gives him strength and says every day of his life is joyous, "some days happy, some days not happy; every day joyous."

And he might take one last stab at a joyous valedictory address.

He said last week he has talked to a speechwriter about delivering a farewell address to a nation which seems to be collectively saying "good riddance."

                          © Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2008

Technorati Tags: George Bush,Mission Accomplished,Iraq,Bush Legacy,History

WTF is going on with Foreign Auto Companies in the U.S.A. ?....

Original Article

by PatriotsFightTheIronHeel     Mon Dec 22, 2008

    After the Big 3 finally got their bailout you would think on the face of it that the problem is solved. Judging by the newspapers we can now move on the next topic. Compromise has been reached and the best possible solution has been found.
    The meme that everybody in the industry has to chip in and sacrifice in order to keep it alive has been tried over and over. A company would for some reason be near destruction and the line is 'labor has to give something(wages,benefits) just like everyone else or risk losing everything'. We are seeing the first battles now in the fight for the life of the UAW, which is arguably the cornerstone of the American labor movement. If they die, you can kiss the American middle class goodbye.
    Of course, the death of the Big 3 would be the death of The American Auto industry. This cannot be allowed. America must bailout Detroit, we are told, and even Bush Jr knows it, which means it must be as obvious as remembering to breathe. So the question I have to ask is simple enough. If American taxpayers and American laborers have to sacrifice in order to save the American Auto industry ?

  Free market pure capitalism economics as a system teaches that unions, government interference and tariffs all act to distort the true sense of the marketplace. The less the marketplace is polluted with the obstruction of regulation the more balanced the system will become, we are told, and with more competition consumers will have better options among both price and quality of products. Free market capitalists will tell you this and more, their cheerleaders such as the late Milton Friedman, or living dinosaurs Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, and since their advice worked so well all over the world in the past leading up to this point, we should take their advice a little longer.
    The fact of the matter is that the American Auto industry IS vital to the American Economy.
    But according to the actions of a powerful few, the American middle class is not.

    Case in point.
    Foreign owned auto manufacturers such as Toyota and Saab can afford to pay non-union American laborers to build their cars here in America. They receive tax breaks in many states where labor laws are enacted to handicap unions. They are given resources that are not available to the American owned companies. This hurts American business. These American business used to send their factories overseas because they could not afford to pay for American labor, something they never actually claimed except for in their actions. How ironic is it that we used to open GM factories in Asia to pay Asian laborers to build cars for Americans, and now Asian companies open Asian factories in America and pay American laborers who work for slightly less to build our own cars for us.
    Where is the protectionism there? Where is the necessary sacrifice we all have to make together? My money went for bailouts. Where is your commitment? By the way, southern and western right to work states, I'm looking in your direction.
    I thought this was the entire reason we have tariffs. If a foreign company has an unfair advantage over an American one we used to be allowed to place a tax on their goods as they entered the country. I guess that doesn't apply if that company tricks our citizens into building their productys here for them. Want to protect the AMerican Auto industry without cutting our own fiscal throats to do it? Tariff the hell out of foreign auto companies. This is how we kept Britian and France from dominating us financially during our nations first years, we had just won independence militarily, we could not afford to lose our independence finacially, then or now.
    But multinational corporations have no fear of losing their independence, do they? If anything, they are entirely independant of everyone. The pay little or no taxes. If one country goes to the wolves economically they can pick up and set up shop somewhere else. The American middle class, on the other hand, has everything to lose, and the UAW is where it will start. If the middle class is personified by skilled labor, professional and educated labor, and they have no voice to negotiate with the management of these multinational corporations, well, isn't that the end of the middle class and the three clas Upper-middle-poor construct? Better yet, at that point, are we not the have's and the have nots, or is it time to call ourselves indentured servants yet? How about wage slaves?
    A moderated capitalism can be moral and provide for all. I'm not making this up. Neither did Karl Marx. It was Adam Smith's idea, or the gist of it. The Friedman free market baloney is economic rape, taking by force through theory and lies, and right now the middle class is facing the battlefront on all sides, but most notably, unions are at risk. The UAW, the UFT and other intergral unions are all that stand in the way of us and the CEO's who would take from the poor and give to the rich, modern day Sherrifs of Nottingham all of them.

    So where does Mazdanomics come in. It is the title of the latest series of commercials running on several channels, including FOX, where the ad states something along the lines that for 0% APR and no payments until March 2009 you can walk away with any one of five new Mazda's, and in this uncertain economy, who could turn their back on a deal like that!

    As of now it should be the duty of the American middle and working class to buy American made products, and now more than ever from Detroit. We should be able to claim a tax credit if we do so, or something. The only reason auto employees in non union shops get paid as much as they do is because unions like the UAW exist. If the UAW disappeared tomorrow those Toyota jobs in Kentucky would be paying $7.50 p/hr with no benefits before lunch break.
    But, striking deeper to the root of the problem, how the hell can Mazda give out 0% APR and no payments till after Obama is in charge? Don't you get the feeling that they know you can't afford it now, and you definitely won't be able to afford it three monts from now. It is just like the housing industry, or Wall St., or every other piece of shit that will blow up in our face (Surprise!) in the next few months. Are the foreign auto companies waiting to get more sales on the books now, just to see the financing fall apart months from now when they can step right back on the never ending corporate bread line again. You know, the one that isn't available to anyone else. Isn't this the same problem with housing, you know, people couldn't afford it anyway they shouldn't have been buying that house in the first place and all that line of bull. Are we not being set up again. And again.
    So call the foreign auto makers bluff. They know they can offer you free cars till March because Detroit has a bad reputation right now and Obama is gonna have to fix EVERYTHING BUSH FUCKED UP, except Bush didn't fuck this one up, it started years ago with free market pure capitalism economics, and from Reagan to Bush Jr it has turned into this.

     Hold them accountable. Do not buy foreign cars. It isn't the end-all-be-all answer, but until we get green energy efficient vehicles coming out of Detroit, the least we can do is keep gas guzzling foreign crap from ruining our middle class jobs, our national budgets with bailouts and getting Republicans re-elected with their lobbying money. Or, better yet, if you can, take mass transit, or even more, ride a bike. I would rather walk to work for the rest of my life than think I bought a foreign car made in a non union factory in a Republican Senators state. Ouch!

Technorati Tags: Big 3 Automakers,UAW,Unions,Economy,Bailout