“We have no choice but to approve it. If we fail to raise the debt ceiling soon, the U.S. Treasury will default for the first time in its history.” Here we go again: The Senate votes 53-42 to raise America’s debt ceiling by $850 billion “to $9.815 trillion, the fifth increase in the U.S. credit limit since President George W. Bush took office…[This,] the second largest since Bush took office, should be enough to last the government through next year’s congressional and presidential elections. U.S. debt stood at about $5.6 trillion at the start of Bush’s presidency.“
Category: The Dubya Era
Bizarro Dubya?
Some good news on the domestic policy front: Pushed forward by a veto-proof majority in Congress, Bush signs a Democratic Pell Grant increase into law. “The increase in financial aid is designed to come from cuts in subsidies that the government makes to banks, totaling roughly $20 billion…Bush at one point threatened to veto the bill on grounds that it included hidden costs and was an expensive expansion of federal programs.” In addition, an expansion of the State Child Health Insurance Program is now on Dubya’s desk after passing the Senate 69-30 and House 265-159, and also looks to become law despite the White House’s original opposition. “Bush and GOP leaders said the measure would push children already covered by private health insurance into publicly financed health care, while creating an ‘entitlement’ whose costs ultimately would outstrip the money raised by the bill’s 61-cent increase in the federal tobacco tax. But Republican opposition is increasingly isolated.“
And if passage of affordable college education and child health care bills by Dubya — however reluctantly — isn’t through the looking glass enough for ya, check this out: “The world must cut emissions or sacrifice the planet, Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State, told a meeting of governments on Thursday, in the most strongly worded statement on global warming yet made by the US administration….Her words reflected how far US rhetoric on climate change has moved in the past six months.”
Update: Ah, there’s the Dubya we know and…know. Despite its bipartisan backing, Bush vetoes the child health insurance bill, arguing that it was an attempt to “federalize” medicine. “‘I think that this is probably the most inexplicable veto in the history of the country. It is incomprehensible. It is intolerable. It’s unacceptable,’ said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who pleaded with Republicans to help overturn the veto.”
She Ain’t Like Ike.
“Bush has long taken solace in the example of Harry S. Truman, whose foreign policy was deeply unpopular in his time but is now recalled as far-sighted and sage. Now Bush is stretching the comparison still further beyond the historical pale.” After (Dem strategist?) Dubya hints that a forthcoming Clinton presidency will play Ike to his Truman, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan cries foul. If the next prez channels Eisenhower, Kaplan contends, “it would be not as a continuation of Bush’s Truman but rather as a reversal of Bush’s Dulles.“
Outside the Law?
“The problem is that no one seems quite sure what law, if any, would apply to security firm contractors, and any potential applications are untested and would be vigorously challenged.” A murky incident involving Blackwater USA over the weekend, which resulted in the deaths of eight alleged Iraqi civilians, raises questions about the legality of private security firms working in Iraq (on whom the well-being of most American diplomats in the region depends.) “Should any Iraqis ever seek redress for the deaths of the civilians in a criminal court, they will be out of luck. Because of an order promulgated by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the now-defunct American occupation government, there appears to be almost no chance that the contractors involved would be, or could be, successfully prosecuted in any court in Iraq.” Needed or not, having privately-held American militias operating outside the bounds of the Iraqi legal system isn’t going to elicit much respect for the rule of law in the region.
Here Comes the Judge.
“In making this selection, I think President Bush has made a very…deliberate effort to choose someone who would not be controversial,” Sidestepping the political firestorm a Ted Olsen nod would have unleashed, Dubya chooses retired judge Michael B. Mukasey to be Gonzales’ replacement at the Justice Department. While conservative, particularly on national security issues, Mukasey is “‘not an ideologue for the sake of being an ideologue,’ said Andrew Ruffino, a former law clerk of the nominee’s. Said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor who was a classmate of Mukasey’s: ‘He is not a hyper-charged Federalist Society type. He is not a glad-hand networker.‘” (He does, on the other hand, have strong ties to Rudy Giuliani.)
Imperial Krongard?
“Since your testimony at the Committee’s hearing on July 26,2007, current and former
employees of the Office of Inspector General have contacted my staff with allegations that you
interfered with on-going investigations to protect the State Department and the White House
from political embarassment…The allegations made by these officials are not limited to a single unit or project within your office.” In a detailed and damning letter to the suspect, Henry Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announces it is investigating attempts by the Dubya State Department’s Inspector General, one Howard J. Krongard, to shield the administration from political trouble. “One consistent element in these allegations is that you believe your foremost mission is to support the Bush Administration, especially with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than
act as an independent and objective check on waste, fraud, and abuse on behalf of U.S.
taxpayers.” Innocent until proven guilty, of course, but this sounds all too plausible, given what we’ve already seen from this bunch.
Morning in Baghdad: The Petraeus and Crocker Show.
Declaring that “the military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met” (an assertion which rests, of course, on how one jukes the stats and skews the benchmarks), Army General David Petraeus, Dubya’s most recent man in Iraq, tells Congress he’s recommending a drawdown of troop levels in Iraq to pre-surge levels — around 130,000 troops — by July of next year. [Transcript.] Not a huge surprise — As Fred Kaplan noted both a few weeks ago and in his quality preview of today’s testimony, the Army would run out of troops by April anyway, so this was a foregone conclusion. Also, obviously, not what you’d call a real withdrawal (although the WP story’s cited experts suggest it may be taken as the “beginning of the end” by interested parties in Iraq…and Iran.) So, in effect, Petraeus punted to next July.
For his part, US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker backed Petraeus’ “Things are Getting Better” remarks in his own testimony, and intimated that the surge had staved off a near-total collapse. He also warned the nation about the nature of our continuing commitment there: “‘There will be no single moment in which we can claim victory,’ and any turning point will be recognized only ‘in retrospect.’“
Juking the Stats in Iraq.
Are things getting better in Iraq? If so, it’ll be hard to prove with the statistics lately offered by the US military, which critics claim once again have been cherry-picked and “selectively ignore negative trends.” “In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified ‘significant underreporting of violence,’ noting that ‘a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack’…Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have [also] called the military’s findings into question.“
In any case, it seems that, despite Dubya and Gen. Petraeus’s claims to the contrary, Iraqi security forces are nowhere close to being able to handle the load in Baghdad, according to a new report by a commission of retired military officers. “The report expresses concern about what it calls the massive U.S. military logistical ‘footprint’ in Iraq and its effect on perceptions and problems. ‘The unintended message conveyed is one of “permanence,” an occupying force, as it were,’ the report says. It recommends reconsideration of ‘efficiency, necessity…and cost’ and calls for ‘significant reductions, consolidations and realignments” of U.S. forces.’”
The WMD Lie, exposed.
“On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.” Did Dubya know for a fact that Iraq possessed no WMD prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq? With two CIA sources to back him up, Sidney Blumenthal says so. “‘The real tragedy is that they had a good source that they misused,’ said one of the former CIA officers. ‘The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear.‘”
Black Addington.
“We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop,” Addington said at one point.” The Terror Presidency, a new book by disgusted conservative and former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, further details the role played by Cheney henchman David Addington in this administration’s rolling back of the rule of law.”‘We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,’ Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.”