president bush

That image is the iconic mark of the end of World War 2, when Americans took to the streets to celebrate. Yesterday President Obama announced that the rest of the U.S. troops serving in Iraq will be home by year’s end. He didn’t top gun onto an aircraft carrier and stand in front of a “mission accomplished” banner and make the announcement, but rather just informed the American people from the White House. The country responded pretty much with crickets.

After almost 9 years of the Iraq war, Americans were never once asked to sacrifice. This wasn’t a war waged by a nation, but rather by a President and his authority over the military.

During World War 2 taxes were high to help offset the costs of the war. Every family had risk of a loved one serving in the war when 10 million Americans were drafted into service. Every American had to give in one way or another.

During Iraq we saw taxes go down and our soldiers being forced to fight longer than they agreed to through stop loss. We dare not ask the American people to sacrifice while our soldiers are making the ultimate sacrifice.

Yesterday, before this announcement, I was in a discussion with a Republican friend on Facebook. He gave me one of the typical lines from Republicans that President Obama doesn’t support the troops. When pushed for facts to back up his claim, I never heard one. I would now like to show some ways President Bush didn’t support the troops:

There is no doubt that the Tea Party has become hell bent on destroying America. Proof of that can be seen in this video from Wisconsin, where members of the Tea Party Express cheered the downgrade of the United States credit rating:

Yes, let's cheer on something that can cost our nation an additional $100 billion a year, destroy the stock markets and people's retirements and send the world economy into a death spiral. Are these people really this stupid? Why yes they are.

Here's a perfect example of the stupidity that plagues the Tea Party. In the recent debt ceiling debate there were fears that things like the military and social security might not be paid. Tea Party members in Congress drafted legislation to force the President to pay these items in case of default. The only problem is that the cost of these items are greater than the income of our nation, so we must borrow just to pay them each month. A case of very simple math and the Tea Party once again let failed ideology trump simple fact.

The right wing media is in a frenzy today over the plan to send homeland security and disaster alerts to your cellphone. Listen to Limbaugh going off on the “regimes” plan today:

I really hope that Limbaugh is talking about the Bush regime. This plan was authored by Tea Party poster boy, Jim DeMint in 2006 and passed by Congress and also supported by an executive order signed by President Bush. In 2006 the GOP controlled all of Congress and the White House. This is a GOP plan, not a Democratic one.

Of course the apologists will start claiming that we are “blaming Bush” again, despite the fact that this plan was when President Obama was still Senator Obama – not even candidate Obama. Facts are a really hard thing for these people to stomach.

As we get ready to roll into 2011 the fringe wingnuts have decided it’s time to come up with some brand new conspiracy theories about the President:

The good news is that the right-wing isn't talking about President Obama being a secret Muslim right now. The bad news is that they're now concerned that he's going to use his honorary status as a Crow Tribe Indian to return the United States to Native Americans.

The outrage began after the President announcedon December 16 that the U.S. would reverse course and support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The Declaration was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2007, but the U.S., under President Bush, opposed it.

I really think the wingnuts would embrace this idea. They always seems so hell bent on taking the U.S. back to the days of the wild west, so why not?

Rep. Keith Ellison is unleashing at Robert Gibbs over his comments to The Hill. From The Huffington Post:

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), an active member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Gibbs went too far. "This is not the first time that Mr. Gibbs has made untoward and inflammatory comments and I certainly hope that people in the White House don't share his view that the left is unimportant to the president," he said. "I understand him having some loyalty to the president who employs him, but I think he's walking over the line."

Ellison said that Gibbs's resignation would be an appropriate response. "I think that'd be fair, yeah. That'd be fair, because this isn't the first time. And, again, people of all political shades worked very hard to help the president become the president. Why would he want to go out and deliberately insult the president's base? And why would he confuse legitimate critique with some sort of lack of loyalty. Isn't this what the far right does? Punishes people who are not ideologically aligned with President Bush?"

I got a feeling this is just the start of Democrats in Congress wanting to see Gibbs hit the unemployment line. I wonder if anyone at the White House will listen?

Last night the New York Times published a late night bombshell:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

I’m sure we will hear a lot of right wingers saying this is a failure of the Obama administration and his policies towards Iran, but let’s think a little further into history. Iran revved up their nuclear ambitions in 2003. A majority of President Bush’s tenure was having to figure out how to deal with a nuclear Iran, yet they never came up with a plan either. If so, then we would have a plan. So all this started before President Obama was even Senator Obama.

And 2003 is an important year to remember, since that’s the year that we invaded Iraq and changed the political landscape of that part of the Middle East. Any plans that existed at the time were pretty much nullified with the changes that were happening by the tip of our sword.

John McCain blasted off a campaign email last night that stated the following:

During his first year in office, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have amassed a $12.4 trillion deficit that is growing each day.

A trillion dollars a month? Wow that’s amazing for a party that hasn’t accomplished that much due to Republican obstructionism. So we need to mark that as a flat out lie.

But it gets even better. This is from Media Matter’s fact check:

In fact, the FY 2009 deficit, which totaled $1.4 trillion, was already estimated to be $1.2 trillion when Obama came into office and "virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years" are due either to policies implemented under President Bush or to the recession, which began during Bush's tenure, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Now what big policy implemented under Bush would have raised it so much? Maybe TARP – the bank bailout. And yes this would be the very same bank bailout that McCain suspended his campaign to go to Washington and help make sure it passed.

I would much rather see some tea bagger win McCain’s seat than him get sent back for another term. This guy isn’t just a hypocrite – he’s a flat out liar.

(h/t Cesca)

It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril.

-Joe “the faux” Lieberman in 2005.

Funny how he felt that way then and now he is one of the leading voices criticizing our commander in chief.