While perusing some other parts of the blogosphere, we have encountered some fresh postings challenging readers to come up with things that George W. Bush did wrong. Therefore it appears advisable to re-post this article, which originally has run here on October 1, 2008.

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Lets add up the very dubious “achievements” of the last eight years.

First: The stolen election of 2000, which started it all.

Second: The attacks of September 11, 2001.

Third: The approval of the Patriot Act and its effects on our democratic system, including the creation of the all-encompassing Department of Homeland Security, illegal wiretapping and domestic spying, the firing of U.S. Attorneys, Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, creation of a police state and an atmosphere of overall paranoia and so forth, and so on.

Fourth: The push towards the invasion of Iraq, along with totally untrue “justifications”, such as the presence of weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaida being centered in Iraq and the “urgent” need to depose Saddam, etc, etc.

Fifth: The inept and I mean INEPT attempts at nation building, which of course – besides the actual conquest of Iraq – have caused the longest-lasting war in U.S. history and have cost the lives of approximately one million men, women and children and over 4,000 American soldiers, with tens of thousands of young men and women being crippled for life.

Sixth: The total monetary cost of this artificially created conflict is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars and counting. Making certain specific, but often not even specified corporations very, very rich in the process – with U.S. taxpayer’s money, of course.

Seventh: Causing the United States to slide from a position of a beacon of freedom to most of the world, to a universally despised entity, which allows and in fact employs torture, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons and all kinds of nasty methods, formerly the domain of the most unsavory of regimes.

Eight: The deregulation of all kinds of industries, including the airlines and of course, the financial (read: debt repackaging mills) sector.

Ninth: The creation of the largest national debt and government deficit in the history of the known world. As a matter of fact, the debt clock on Wall Street – which has been switched off during the Clinton administration, because it wasn’t needed – was turned off again, this time, because they run out of digits….Yes, folks. Our national debt now totals some $56 trillion. That’s about $480,000 for every household in the U.S.  Isn’t it amazing that we had a surplus under the philanderer Clinton and a totally crippling debt under the teetotaler Bush?

Tenth: Becoming an economic cripple, with foreign creditors holding huge chunks of whatever real wealth remains in the U.S.

Eleventh: Not producing very much of anything any longer, allowing other countries to take the technological lead in many areas, allowing our infrastructure to crumble (besides the anti-terrorist barriers in front of government buildings), having an educational system that continues to produce illiterate adults, who often have no idea what lies beyond the borders of their counties and spend an incredible amount of time watching the moronic offerings of the television industry. And lets not forget the government’s peerless performance during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Twelfth: And this is the crowning, but not surprising touch of the last eight years: The seeming collapse of the debt repackaging mills, which George W. Bush had the gall to call “our financial system” and of course, another super urgent call to bail it out at a cost of another $700 billion, to a trillion dollars of taxpayer’s money. This, after bailing out Bear Stearns, Fannie May, Freddie Mack, AIG and others.

I will leave the 13^th point out of this discussion, as we all fervently hope that it won’t be needed and that point number 12 is the last serious point of damage that the present occupant of the White House and his corporate masters will cause to all of us.

In closing, allow me to congratulate all of those who have re-elected Bush in 2004!

Technorati Tags: 9/11, afghanistan, bush, damage, iraq, neocons, patriot act, torture, war

We still have a whole lot of totally unresolved issues in our country.

Small issues for some, such as torture, invading and destroying other countries, killing hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people, destroying the U.S. and the world economies and so forth.

At the same time, those with a bit more decency, brains and no criminal streaks in their makeup, might consider these issues not to be so small after all. We certainly hope that you belong to the second category.

Along with out friends at BadGalsRadio we have been creating and collecting all kinds of materials on these subjects and placing them on the Neocons on Parade website.

Technorati Tags: bush, Cheney, neocons on parade, Rumsfeld, torture, war crimes, Wolfowitz

It seems like the efforts of many people – and although we are not presumptuous enough to claim too much of a credit – to finally establish a truth commission and investigate the Bush era interrogation practices might be paying off.

Attorney General Eric Holder appears to have changed his mind and reportedly is considering pushing ahead with a criminal investigation of torture of terrorism suspects.

Here is a fragment of an AP story on the subject:

“Contrary to White House wishes, Attorney General Eric Holder may push forward with a criminal investigation into the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation practices used on suspected terrorists.

Holder is considering whether to appoint a prosecutor and will make a final decision within the next few weeks, a Justice Department official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on a pending matter.

A move to appoint a criminal prosecutor is certain to stir partisan bickering that could create a distraction to President Barack Obama’s efforts to push ambitious health care and energy reform.

Obama has repeatedly expressed reluctance to having a probe into alleged Bush-era abuses and resisted an effort by congressional Democrats to establish a “truth commission,” saying the nation should be “looking forward and not backwards.”

Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said Holder planned to “follow the facts and the law.”

In the meantime, it appears that the Attorney General’s plate is rather full. Here’s a July 14, 2009 article from the Washington Post:

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See some of our earlier articles on this issue:

Neocons’ Shameful Failure

Government-Sponsored Torture, a Stain on America’s Honor

Americans Say ‘Dig Up Those Skeletons, Leahy’

Douglas Feith – Guiltier Than Most People Think

Torture Fiends Don’t Want to Give Up

Bush, Cheney, Condie, Laura and Karl to Write Books Explaining ‘Everything’

Cheney War Crimes: Just Look at the Statute

Technorati Tags: bush, holder, investigation, practices, probe, torture, truth commission

Just for you edification, all those neocons, made sort of famous during the Bush years, started doing their evil much, much earlier.

Come to think of it, there’s got to be something very wrong with our system of government and justice. Why haven’t these people been locked up for high treason, instead of getting re-appointed to high positions time after time?

Technorati Tags: bush.cia, crimes, failure, iraq, neocons, prosecution, torture, treason, war

Some of the information contained in this post is partly based on the excellent reporting by Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy Newspapers as well as from democrats.com.

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After the release of the torture memos and thanks to the constant efforts of many individuals and groups we now not only know, but also have tangible proof that the Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Such information would have provided a foundation for one of Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

Dick Cheney and others, who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions and waterboarding, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

Now we also know that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly – Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003.

The former intelligence official said:  “there was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder. Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

Dick Cheney claimed that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

In short: all of the neocon’s efforts to justify the modifications to the U.S. Constitution, the lies leading up to the launching of the war in Iraq, the justification of torture – against both the U.S. and international laws, the diminishing of the American standing in the world, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – mostly civilians, the black prisons, the expenditures of trillions of dollars and the entire “war on terror” enterprise seemed to have failed all across the board. All we have left now is a really bad taste in our collective mouths, a failed economic system and a huge number of troops deployed throughout the world,  fighting a probably impossible to win war. In addition, we still don’t know for sure the details of what really happened before, during and after 9/11.

After all of this, nobody, except Scooter Libby has been convicted of anything as yet.

There is of course hope that these people – who have invariably and blatantly dared to wear the pins with the American flags in their lapels – will be finally brought to justice. The statements of President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the efforts of Senator Patrick Leahy and other members of Congress seem to point in that direction.

Just to remind you of whom we are talking about, here’s a short, albeit incomplete list of some of the most influential neocons:

The neocons, who worked directly for Cheney included Scooter Libby, David Addington, John Hannah, and Cathie Martin.

Those under Rumsfeld included Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Stephen Cambone, William Haynes, John Bolton, and David Wurmser. But there were many more neocons in other key positions, including Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle.

They relied on authorizing memos drafted by lawyers like John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury, and John Rizzo. David Addington directed the work of these lawyers.

The actual torture was directed by CIA Director George Tenet, whose infamous “slam-dunk” remark about Iraq’s WMD’s now has acquired a double meaning: head-slamming and head-dunking.

The White House Iraq Group (WHIG), led by founder Andy Card and chair Karl Rove masterminded the whole “War on Terror” enterprise, including torture and the insane invasion of Iraq. The other key members were: Karen Hughes, James Wilkinson, Mary Matalin, Nick Calio, Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice, and Ari Fleischer. The invisible powers behind the scenes were Henry Kissinger – who met regularly with Cheney – his partner Paul Bremer, who was chosen by the neocons to destroy Iraq, James Baker, weapons contractor Frank Carlucci, and media baron Rupert Murdoch.

They also worked with a powerful neocon network inside the corporate media, among them with Bill Kristol, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Charles Krauthammer, and Fred Barnes, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon (NY Times), the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, and Col. Jack Jacobs (MSNBC).

One pundit who deserves special mention is William Safire of the NY Times, who did more than anyone else to create the myth of the Prague Conspiracy between al Qaida and Iraq, based entirely on the fantasies of Laurie Mylroie, Meyrav Wurmser, Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen.

Of course George Bush was The Decider who had to sign the ultimate authorizations to nullify the Geneva Conventions and thereby legalize war crimes.

Technorati Tags: bush.cia, crimes, failure, iraq, neocons, prosecution, torture, treason, war