Bush’s top aide Karl Rove just wrote a memoir, entitled Courage and Consequence, in which he claims that Bush 43 did not mislead the nation about weapons of mass destruction as a way to “lie us” into a war.

Crap! Remember the memoirs by other neocons, such as Douglas Feith, who has denied any responsibility in the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal and really any responsibility for anything altogether?

While defending the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, Rove concedes that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction damaged the administration’s credibility. And he blames himself for failing to set the record straight.

Yes, Karl, please DO blame somebody for not finding stacks and warehouses full of WMDs. You might as well blame yourself too for a very different than expected – by people like you – Iraqi reception of our invading troops. After all, some neocons claimed that the Iraqi people would line the streets and welcome us with flowers and tears in their eyes.

“When the pattern of the Democratic attacks became apparent in July 2003, we should have countered in a forceful and overwhelming way,” wrote Rove. “We should have seen this for what it was: a poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency.”

Rove also comes up with all kinds of lame excuses for the administration’s abject failure after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf coast.

We’ll keep this short and succint: Don’t waste your money buying another neocon memoir.

Technorati Tags: bush, Iraq War, justifying, Karl Rove, Katrina, memoir

From top left: Kue Bui for Newsweek; Andrew Hetherington / Redux; James Keyser / Time Life Pictures-Getty Images; Richard A. Bloom / Corbis; Ahmad Al-Rubaye / AFP-Gettty Images; Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images

Newsweek magazine has a very interesting and lengthy article, entitled “The Return of the Neocons” by David Margolick.

Here’s a short excerpt: “One prominent activist on the libertarian end of the party – who hates what he sees as their costly foreign – policy adventurism and the GOP electoral losses (i.e., the presidency and both houses of Congress) he attributes to them – calls them ‘parasites’: with little electoral power of their own, he claims, they have had to attach themselves to others, like George W. Bush. Comfortably ensconced behind a cloak of anonymity, he bristles, but also marvels, at their endurance and effectiveness, comparing them to ‘an infection that keeps coming back.’ “They’ve perfected this absolutely incredible thing: they announce who they are, how powerful they are, how influential they are, and get people to write articles about them,” he says. “But when their policies are perceived to have caused mass chaos, they don’t exist, they didn’t have anything to do with it, they weren’t there, and they get really snotty. And anyone who attacks them is anti-Semitic.”

Worth a read we think.

Technorati Tags: neocons, Newsweek, return

A day before President Obama’s State of the Union address, we pretty much already know that the Massachusetts Senate election results seemed to have greatly influenced what the president is going to actually address.

Under mounting pressure to curb government spending, the president is to propose in his State of the Union address a three-year freeze on federal funding that is not related to national security. That being clearly a concession to public concern about government spending and which could dramatically curtail Obama’s legislative ambitions.

The freeze would take effect in October and limit the overall budget for agencies other than the military, veterans affairs, homeland security and certain international programs to $447 billion a year for the remainder of Obama’s first term.

On the surface it sounds like a step ahead, doesn’t it? But do your math. $447 billion per year, as compared to the ever-rising national debt – as of today already surpassing $13 trillion…

At the same time, when “overseas contingency operations” expenses are added to the U.S. defense budget, it comes up to $663.8 billion for 2010 alone. As a matter of fact, the real figure is even higher, reaching between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010.

All in all the 2009 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined and is variously calculated as being some nine times larger than the military budget of China. The United States and its close allies are responsible for about two-thirds of the world’s military spending – of which, the U.S. is responsible for the majority of the expenditures.

Understandably, this is a huge and seemingly never-ending source of income for our overbuilt defense industry. Seemingly the very appropriate warning of President Dwight Eisenhower went unheeded. Eisenhower three days before the end of his second term has warned among other things about the military/industrial complex, saying: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

If Eisenhower only knew how much the influence of the military/industrial complex has grown since his day…

At least it could seem to be a step in the right direction for President Obama to propose some saving measures in the State of the Union address. Unfortunately, the spending freeze will only address about 1/8 of our total budget and might actually cut into programs and operational budget of needed and necessary agencies, in many case to the detriment of us all.

Meanwhile, we still have well over 100,000 troops in Iraq, along with an even larger number of mercenaries, are beefing up our forces and spending for the most likely unwinnable war in Afghanistan and are maintaining the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the FBI, recently made famous by the discovery that it has been collaborating with telecom companies to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.

Let’s not forget the case of the Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares, who learned that the FBI used an online photograph of him to create an image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today.

The image using Llamazares’ photo appeared on a wanted poster updating the U.S. government’s 1998 photo of the al Qaeda leader.

FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman acknowledged that the agency used a picture of Llamazares taken from Google Images.

Let’s hope that we are not rewarding incompetence, with ever-larger budgets.

Meanwhile, we don’t really know where more than $3 trillion in bailout money has disappeared to and whether it has done anybody – besides the people and the corporations, who have caused the crisis – any measurable good.

As the popular saying goes: “easy come, easy go”.

Technorati Tags: bailout, defense budget, military/industrial complex, money, President Obama, spending freeze, State of the Union address

It is not that we didn’t expect it. After all, evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson has said many a dumb thing in the past, but his latest opinion on the Haiti earthquake, simply goes way beyond any boundaries of civility, decency, taste and common sense.

Robertson has said and we quote: “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” he said. “They were under the heel of the French … and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal,’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

After 9/11, after Katrina, or after Ariel Sharon’s stroke Robertson was there to explain to the victims and to anyone who would listen why they deserved it.

And they do listen. Pat Robertson is not only one of “our” televangelists, he is also founder and chairman, of The Christian Broadcasting Network, making it very easy to express his opinions.

We always wondered how and why did these “men of God” felt that they “knew” something more that the rest of us, or why do they feel that they are authorized by anyone, particularly God to express their harebrained points of view.

Even though he wasn’t a televangelist, George W. Bush did mention that God told him to invade Iraq. We always thought that was the low point of our presidential history as a whole.

Don’t also forget for a minute that Robertson has also run for the White House at one time…

At the same time, the darling of the conservatives Rush Limbaugh has voiced the opinion that…”We’ve already donated to Haiti “It’s called the U.S. income tax.”

Technorati Tags: 9/11, bush, evangelical, Haiti Quake, Katrina, Pat Robertson, tasteless, televangelist

Anne Applebaum wrote a very insightful op-ed piece in the Washington Post today, basically about how different events influence our policies post factum. We fully agree with the notion that such knee-jerk reactions, which are usually implemented way after the fact are too often bound to fail.

Here’s Anne Applebaum’s article:

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All of you frequent fliers out there, you know the drill. Take off your shoes, because of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber.” Remove your hair gel from your backpack because of the bombers who targeted Heathrow using liquid hydrogen peroxide. When you get on a plane, you must also, from now on, be prepared to remove any blankets from your lap before landing – too bad if you’re asleep! – because of the Christmas Day underwear bomber.

When someone invents a way to hide explosive powder inside a toothbrush case, prepare to remove your toothbrush. And while you’re at it, throw a pinch of salt over your left shoulder as you board the plane. But never, at any moment, imagine that the rigamarole of airport security is guaranteed to make you safer – for no one knows which of these measures, if any, is actually necessary.

Worse, no one has any financial or political incentive to find out. The fact is, since the hurried and heavily politicized creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration, neither their priorities nor their spending patterns has been subject to serious scrutiny. They have never been forced to make hard choices. On the contrary, both have been encouraged by their congressional funders to spend money in reaction to every perceived new threat, real or otherwise: Thus full-body scanners, unacceptable as recently as last summer, will now be rushed into use. In just a few years – under a Republican administration and mostly Republican Congresses – these institutions thus grew into vast, unruly bureaucracies, some of whose activities bear only a distant relationship to public safety.

So customary has it become to repeat old, familiar lists of ludicrous public projects that readers who cannot bear to read the litany one more time might want to skip to the next paragraph. For yes, it is true: Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and in the process of its expansion the organization found it had money for all kinds of extras. As I wrote in 2005, some $350,000 of its $6 billion budget once was spent on a gym; $500,000 was spent on artwork and silk plants, and untold millions are annually spent in overhiring, since determining when there will be long security lines at an airport has never been the sort of thing at which the federal government excels.

As for the DHS, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion, some of which (according to the economist Veronique de Rugy, writing in 2006) will invariably be spent on things like the $63,000 decontamination unit in rural Washington, where no one was trained to use it, more biochemical suits for Grand Forks, Nev., than the town has police officers to wear them and $557,400 worth of rescue and communications equipment for some 1,500 residents of the town of North Pole, Alaska. Not to mention what is spent on the “needs” of the constituents of other important members of Congress.

It is not actually DHS or TSA employees who are at fault for these kinds of decisions. From the very beginning, security experts and even the agencies’ own inspectors general have pointed to the absurdity of TSA and DHS spending patterns, many of which are driven by the latest scare story (I wish I’d been at the celebratory New Year’s Eve party undoubtedly thrown by the manufacturers of those full-body scanners). And from the very beginning, Congress has fought back against critics, repeatedly allocating funds to unnecessary local projects, reacting to sensational news stories, spending money in ways that suit its members and then declaring itself shocked – shocked! – to discover that our multibillion-dollar homeland security apparatus was unable to stop a clearly disturbed Nigerian from boarding a Detroit-bound plane.

Imagine if the TSA’s vast budget were dedicated to the creation of a cutting-edge computer network that could have made security officers in Amsterdam instantly aware of the warning from the Detroit bombing suspect’s father. Imagine that, instead of relying on full-body X-ray scanners or long-haul flight-blanket deprivation, we had highly paid and trained consular officers in places such as Nigeria. Even then security would not be perfect (and I’m not sure that airborne terrorism is even the worst thing we have to worry about). But it would make sense to have a smaller, less expensive and less wasteful system. It would make sense to have a system based on real risks and priorities, instead of the stories featured on cable news. It would make sense to fight the next battle, for once, instead of the last one. “Sense,” though, is not the criterion by which public money is spent in this country – and hasn’t been for a long time.

Technorati Tags: airline security, Anne Applebaum, knee jerk reactions