Obama appears to be doing well. He, like Clinton before him, took advantage of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade in order to rescind the Global Gag Rule. I wonder if all the Hillary groupies will now stop writing letters to Ms. Magazine bitching about their Obama cover. Probably not.
He signed an order to close Gitmo as soon as we can figure out where to send all the scary dudes we've been keeping in there for all these years. I vote Texas. In fact, now that the cowboy charade is over, I hear the Bushes will be moving to the manse in Dallas and won't have much use for their Crawford brush-clearing photo op staging area and oppressively patriarchal wedding location. Maybe the former detainees could turn it into a going concern. I'm not sure they deserve such a fate, but I am sure that the Bushes sure as hell deserve to live in Dallas, and Dallas probably deserves them as well. Never in my life have I visited such a souless/lifeless/humorless berg. When the highlight of your city is a museum devoted to an assassination, you might want to have the chamber of commerce make a tiny bit more of an effort. Of course, Dallas was the site of my run-in with a rifle-wielding Guardsman at airport security. Dude actually pointed his M16 at me, I think because I had crossed over some invisible line on the agressively patterned airport carpeting in order to help my then-husband with the bags that they had just finished searching because we had flown in from Los Angeles and therefore = terrorists. My brother, who many years ago was in the National Guard, reassured me that a Guardsman in a civilian facility would never have been issued actual bullets, but I dunno. We are talking about Texas, after all, where they have ammo cozies for sale at the airport giftshop.
Obama also ordered federal employees to disclose more information to the public, and he shut down the Penn. Ave. to K Street superhighway and gift registry. Along the way, he also slyly confirmed, just in case we'd heard anything to the contrary, that the Vice President is indeed a member of the executive branch and as such, subject to its rules. Just, you know, FYI. Not like anyone's planning anything.
Plus, he reiterated that non-administration federal employees should be hired for their skills and experience, not for whether they dress left or right.
Yeah, so that's Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld AND Gonzalez, in case anyone's counting.
It's a nice start, except for the fuss accompanying the flubbing of the oath of office by CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES Roberts. A friend of mine compared Roberts to those pretentious waiters who refuse to write your order down in order to impress you, and then get it wrong. It's 35 words, dude. Either memorize it for real, or fucking read it. Plus his "So help you god?", while no doubt intended to come off as "playful" and "not stodgy!" instead read as pretty solidly toolish. Roberts, it's not about you, dude. If anyone comes away from the ceremony remembering the Justice who administered the oath...UR DOIN IT WRONG.
Drudge's headline for the re-swearing that was done in the Oval Office yesterday out of "an abundance of caution" noted that Obama did not use a Bible. Which, constitutionally speaking, matters not a whit, although the freepers tried their best to whip up some outrage. I guess Rick Warren's invocation with helpful Son of God pronunciation guide wasn't enough for them.
Quelle surprise!
That's French. I'm assuming Obama's made it okay again to be French, or at least snotty.
Of course ex-president W, who elevated churlishness to an art form, could not resist an attempt to rebutt Obama's inauguration speech. Before a friendly crowd in his boyhood home of Midland, Texas on inauguration day, he said:
"We worked to extend freedom and human liberty as the alternatives to tyranny and terror. No matter whether or not you agree with my decisions or not, one thing you have to agree with is that we have not been attacked in the last seven years."
No, we have not. At least, not on our own soil. That doesn't mean we haven't died. 4200 US soldiers have died in Iraq. 30,000 have been wounded. Iraqi civilian deaths are approaching 100,000.
Let us not forget that this war was not sold to us as a means by which to liberate Iraqis from an oppressive regime. Because we would not have bought it. It was marketed to us, carefully and deliberately, as a necessary measure to strike down a country intent on striking us, a charge we now know to have been not only false, but manufactured.
This is the truth. Whether Bush was your guy or not, this is the truth. Whether you voted for Obama or not, this is the truth. Whether you espouse "America - love it or leave it," or believe that BushCo brought down the twin towers with hidden explosives and had the passengers of those four flights shot by their own countrymen, this is the truth. We were lied to.
And they will never be punished for it -- not in their lifetimes, and unfortunately for me, not in mine.
10 comments:
They shouldn't close Gitmo. They should send Bush and his cronies there to live with the inmates, then make money for the country by selling pay per view of what goes down.
So, what's your beef with multiple concentric rings of 8-lane highways with 6-lane access roads running alongside, and miles and miles of sprawl? Sheesh.
For what it's worth, I do think Crawford would make a great Gitmo west.
Here's my theory about prosecutions, and why I'm not as upset today at the lack of prosecution talk as I was a few days ago.
My favorite order so far is this one Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked
I think, I hope, that this is a very clever political move by Obama. Obama has to be aware of the desire for hearings and prosecutions on the left. He's also aware that he needs all the focus he can muster on getting his agenda through. SO...
By dumping the secrecy order and exposing all of Bush's presidential records, he's opening up all the dirt Bush hid to the legion of "journalists" who've been pissed on these past 8 years. I think Obama figures that, with the media having a steady stream of previously unknown outrages to report, there will be such widespread public outrage that he won't HAVE to take any position on hearings or prosecutions. After a year or two of new revelations, and after he's tackled the economy and health care, the public will be screaming for prosecutions and what's left of the rightwing echo chamber won't be able to dismiss us all as vengeful left wing kooks.
That's what I hope, anyway.
You won't see 2010 without seeing massive destruction in the Middle East. It won't be Iraq, but only because that regime has fallen.
Have fun with your "lies" theory. Just remember that the original "lie" was by Saddam himself. And just remember that that lie was not a lie. Saddam really did have those weapons, and he really did use them, and up until the very end of his reign of terror, he continued to insist that he had them.
...looks like you have your own y-martin now, Vikki. (inside joke here, don't be alarmed non-Vikkis)
Hey--at least it's not no_slappz or whatever his name is. I'm still getting his shit comments.
I too am loving Obama's dismantling of Chimpy's Brush Pile o' Secrecy.
And yes, Crawford would make an excellent Gitmo West! It's hot as hell too!
SkyDad: You should be a television executive.
Bubs: That's a very good take, although I expect we will shortly hear from the previous administration in the form of some legal action blocking the release.
Mr.R: Your comment adds nothing to the argument. You're simply rehashing the old "Saddam was a bad guy" schtick, which is, as I said, NOT the justification for war that we were given. But I'm not going to argue with someone who is obviously so emotionally invested in Bush being a good guy that he just simply refuses to see the truth. Have fun with your convoluted rationalizations and your pitiful defensiveness, dude.
SJ: Yeah, I think the inaugural has frightened them out from under the floorboards.
DGuz: I have found that I can usually get rid of the freeperz by just telling them to go play on Little Green Footballs or some other site where logic doesn't apply.
Not bad in a day's work... even for a phony. ;)
If Bush was all that confident about how history will treat him, he wouldn't be trying so hard to revise it. But that is his only straw to grasp.
He had to sit on the dias at the inarguration and listen to Obama, in so many words, explain how he was going to correct his faults in front of one of the largest supporting crowds ever in American history as they appauded their approval. It was a "the king has no clothes" moment.
You have to have built up some pretty strong defensives to let these words just slide off. So when you hear Bush speak in the future, you can count on him being defensive. That way, the light of truth will be walled up.
he is gone gone gone - and now cheney is showing his sour grapes about libby
ex president bush sounds so nice
Yeah, what happened to all that loyalty Bush was supposed to engender. Is that the right word? Anyway, the trash hadn't even been cleared off the Mall, and Cheney was already slagging Bush for not pardoning his BFF.
Post a Comment