bush administration

If you haven't heard yet, there's a good, old fashioned filibuster going on right now. The filibuster is over confirmation of John Brennan to head the CIA. It is being lead by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and other Republicans, such as Ted Cruz (R-TX) have now joined in.

The filibuster started almost 12 hours ago and is going in full force.

Now I want to take a page from the Republican playbook of the last decade. We are currently embarked in a global war on terror. At such a time we need someone to lead out main foreign intelligence agency. So why are Republicans trying to prevent that intelligence and aide terrorists?

Now do I believe that? No I don't, but it is the exact thing Republicans accused Democrats of over and over again during the Bush years.

But let's look into the reason for this filibuster. It boils down to 2 paragraphs from a response Attorney General Eric Holder gave to Rand Paul on the drone program:

“The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”

“For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001,” Holder continued.

The news is full of coverage of the anniversary of 9/11. You can change the channel without being reminded of what happened 10 years ago today. It was one of the most tragic days in American history and one none of us will ever forget.

And while we spend the day remembering this anniversary, let’s not lose sight of what else we lost on this day 10 years ago – America.

Since 9/11 this country has become increasingly more divided. We got a severely broken government that can’t operate due to partisan bickering. We saw the birth of this not long after the attacks 10 years ago. The Bush administration became hell bent on attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, Iraq. People who disagreed with that war were called terrorists or even accused of treason. This wasn’t limited to bars or living rooms. We even heard the vice-President of the country, Dick Cheney, as well as other officials from the administration and politicians use the same harsh language against those opposed to Iraq.

That’s right – 9/11 changed America and not for the better. We became a nation where disagreeing with the President was tantamount to wanting to overthrow the government. We had a government turn to the same thinking as the Middle Eastern governments we were going after. Freedom started a quick death on that day and America is worst off because of it.

Erick Erickson on CNN:

here is not in any way, shape, or form any rational explanation for the United States engaged in Libya to do nothing except for one I can think of — Barack Obama's re-election.

…

Suddenly Obama can look Presidential again — all through manufacturing the need for American involvement where there was no need. Barack Obama wants to be re-elected. The best playbook for his re-election is that of Bill Clinton. But Clinton had a government shutdown and Kosovo. In the absence of either, Barack Obama must manufacture them.

And he has.

From a 1998 Washington Post article:

In August 1998, when [Clinton] ordered missile strikes in an effort to kill Osama bin Laden, there was widespread speculation — from such people as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) — that he was acting precipitously to draw attention away from the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, then at full boil. Some said he was mistaken for personalizing the terrorism struggle so much around bin Laden. And when he ordered the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House after domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City, some Republicans accused him of hysteria.

Whenever a Democrat takes military action, the right takes to their aluminum foil hats to create any conspiracy theory they can. Of course Erickson is one of those that still believes we found WMD in Iraq, despite the Bush administration even admitting we never did. Aren’t you glad he works for the “most trusted name in news”?

Following up on my earlier post about the Republicans not worrying about the deficit if it helps the rich, I decided to post this little graph. It really puts a perspective on the current budget deficit and who is ultimatley responsible for it.

Fareed Zakaria, writing an article entitled “Raise My Taxes, Mr. President!” in Newsweek, sums it up perfectly:

The Bush tax cuts remain the single largest cause of America’s structural deficit—that is, the deficit not caused by the collapse in tax revenues when the economy goes into recession. The Bush administration inherited budget surpluses from the Clinton administration. What turned these into deficits, even before the recession? There were three fundamental new costs—the tax cuts, the prescription-drug bill, and post-9/11 security spending (including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars). Of these the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly half the cost of all legislation enacted from 2001 to 2007 can be attributed to the tax cuts.

I noticed a general message giving birth today – that we should have started focusing on Yemen back in the beginning of the whole war on terror. I can’t say I entirely disagree with that, but what makes it post-worthy is that I am hearing this argument from a lot of GOPers, the same ones who were cheerleading for us to go to war in Iraq.

Given the fact that fighting Iraq stripped our resources from Afghanistan, a fact that is extremely obvious, wouldn’t it have been better for these former Iraq cheerleaders to speak up back in 2002? Instead they took to backing the Bush administration, no matter what. I can only assume that is because “you don’t question the commander in chief at a time of war”, yet that is exactly what they are doing now.

So would someone in the media please ask these people when they spin this whole “we should have been in Yemen for years” mantra, why didn’t they push for this instead of Iraq? Also ask them if they think we could have fought Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq all at once.

We are talking about terrorism and people’s lives, so it’s time to stop the bullshit talking points game and actually address the situation. The best people to do that is the media and after they were accomplice number 1 in lying this nation into war with Iraq, they sure as hell better stand up now and do their jobs.

Can we have more of this please?

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.

That is exactly the right statement to make. Cheney and Bush used terrorism as a political game, instead of taking it seriously. For proof of that look no further than Afghanistan. We need to remind the American people that the President, the very one that Cheney is accusing of being “weak on terrorism”, has expanded the war on terrorism after Bush and Cheney ignored the real front line for years so they could launch a pet-project called Iraq.

People also need to be reminded that chances are the co-conspirators of the Christmas day attempt were released from Gitmo under the Bush administration, and there is a big chance that they became much more radicalized (or maybe even just became radicalized) while in Gitmo. We have seen a serious trend of this happening in the past and the Bush administration chose to ignore it. They turned Gitmo into a terrorist factory, which is why it needs shut down.

We saw it after Ft. Hood and now we are seeing it again – a Republican Party that cares nothing about actual terrorism, but rather playing politics with it. A perfect example of this is Mary Matalin, who said on CNN yesterday that Bush “inherited” the 9/11 attacks.

Inherited to the point that Bush ignored a memo in August of 2001 stating “Bin Laden determined to attack the United States” and even that he was going to use airplanes.

But it’s interesting. I have heard numerous Democrats talk about the failures of the Bush administration and Clinton administration when it comes to the 9/11 attacks. That’s just like Ft. Hood and Detroit – both men were “on the radar” under the Obama administration and Bush administration, yet if you bring that up to Republicans you get accused of “shifting the blame” or “looking backwards”.

Instead of addressing the problems that allowed both men to slip through the system, the Republicans would much rather play politics. This is also evident when Republicans claim that Detroit was a terrorist attack, yet Richard Reid wasn’t. Both cases are extremely similar and to claim one was an attack and the other wasn’t is again, playing politics with the issue.

I keep thinking back to the Bush years and every time someone in Congress wanted someone from the Bush administration to testify the Republicans would give cover to Bush by arguing about “executive privilege”. At that time so many of us on the left kept thinking “I wonder if they will do the same when we have a Democrat in the White House”. Well now we know:

Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, joined Sanchez in demanding Rogers' testimony on Friday, a day after Secret Service director Mark Sullivan took responsibility for the incident in an appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee.

Peter King was one of those that constantly helped Bush with cover from congressional testimonies. Apparently to King the White House should only be exempt if a Republican is in it. Forget what the actual issue is, because he sure didn’t want Bush officials to testify when it was about Walter Reed or the failing wars. Those issues are no where as important as someone showing up uninvited at the White House.