George W. Bush

We saw today what it was like when politics don’t matter as two former presidents appeared with President Obama:

Now if only the rest of our country could do the same.

It takes a nation being in rubble, millions suffering and tens of thousands dead, but we finally get a Sunday talking heads line up absent John McCain and Joe Lieberman this week.

The show to watch will be This Week when Jake Tapper talks to former presidents Bush and Clinton about their Haitian relief fund.

President Obama just announced that tomorrow former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton will be at the White House to discuss the Haiti relief efforts the two former presidents will lead. It’s great to see our leaders put politics aside to focus on the humanitarian crisis underway in the battered nation of Haiti, especially in a time of such polarized politics in our nation.

UPDATE:

The official “Clinton Bush Haiti Fund” site is up and running here.

Chuck Todd reported on MSNBC this morning that President Obama called former President George W. Bush last night and asked him to help former President Clinton with Haiti, much the same way his father helped Clinton. Bush has said he will do “whatever is necessary”. In a time when our nations is so polarized, it’s great to see two former Presidents put politics aside to help out people in need.

The party of family values:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) - A onetime top attorney to former President George W. Bush is accused of trying to kill his wife at their Connecticut home by beating her with a flashlight and choking her.

Fifty-seven-year-old John Michael Farren is charged with strangulation and attempted murder. He was ordered held Thursday on $2 million bail.

His lawyer Eugene Riccio calls it "a tragic situation."

Farren was deputy White House counsel to Bush. He also worked on the campaign and transition for former President George H.W. Bush.

I been meaning to post about the whole notion the wingnuts (including Lieberman) have been pushing; that we should go to war in Syria. Let’s think about this for a minute. The war started in Afghanistan. That then pushed the terrorists in Pakistan. We are fighting some in Pakistan and now they are moving to Yemen. This is the problem with fighting a war on an ideology – it’s very mobile.

So if President Obama decided that we are going to start fighting in Yemen, then where will the terrorists move next? Maybe Syria or Nigeria. Will we then expand the war into those countries? If we had President McCain right now, I’m sure we would already be in those places. We would be stretching our military so thin that Afghanistan would again descend further and we have to start all over again.

The focus to fight terrorism shouldn’t be the brute force of the military, but rather the surgical approach of law enforcement and intelligence.

It sounds like Bush is going to come out of hiding:

Nearly 10 months after leaving office, former President George W. Bush plans to emerge from self-imposed political hibernation on Thursday as he starts a new public policy institute to promote some of the domestic and international priorities of his presidency.

You mean the very same priorities that helped make him when of the most disliked Presidents in history? Well that should be a great success.

But in this very same article there is a little quote that will certainly make you all laugh:

Former aides said Mr. Bush remained attentive to news developments, even if publicly quiet. “I get a lot of e-mails from him now,” said Michael J. Gerson, his former senior adviser. “He responds to the news. He’s very engaged.”

This must be a new development since January 20th. If they are trying to claim that he has always been this way, then please explain Katrina? How about his very failed push for his social security overhaul program?

Engaged is something Bush never was. He is a man that hid from reality, like a child with his fingers in his ears going “na na na na”. That fact doesn’t matter now because we are entering the age of “rewriting history”, and we will see the loyal Bushies make an extra hard push for that.

This tidbit from a new CNN poll shows that Obama actually has more support down south than the very Republican George Bush did:

Fifty-seven percent say Obama has been a better president than George W. Bush; only a third say Bush’s track record was better.

“Compared to Obama, Bush does fairly well among southerners and rural voters. But even in those categories, a majority still says Obama has done a better job than Bush,” says Holland.

That should make the Beck type people out there stop and pause for a second. A black “liberal” is rated higher than a white “conservative” in the south.

(h/t Plumline)

That was President Obama sneaking out last night to witness the return of our fallen troops. How many times did Bush did this in either of the wars that he started?

The dramatic image of a president on the tarmac was a portrait not witnessed in years. Former President George W. Bush spent lots of time with grieving military families but never went to Dover to meet the remains coming off the cargo plane. Obama did so with the weight of knowing he may soon send more troops off to war.

NONE! This is the difference between a Commander in Chief and a war mongering idiot.

From the typical type of garbage headline I have come to expect from the Politico:

PRESIDENT OBAMA TIES GEORGE W. BUSH ON GOLF 

President Barack Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he's already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

Needless to say the wingnuts, lead by Drudge, are jumping on this as the indication of major fail of our new President. Of course they seem to overlook minor things like Bush spending weeks on end playing rancher in Crawford. There’s a big difference from being a few miles from the White House playing golf and being thousands of miles away playing cowboy.

But like I said at the beginning, this is the garbage we have come to expect from the newest tabloid called The Politico.

The news of the day hands down is the news that Iran has been working on a second nuclear plant. This comes as a surprise to the world, but not the world leaders and intelligence communities:

American officials said that they had been tracking the covert project for years, but that Mr. Obama decided to make public the American findings after Iran discovered, in recent weeks, that Western intelligence agencies had breached the secrecy surrounding the project. On Monday, Iran wrote a brief, cryptic letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying that it now had a “pilot plant” under construction, whose existence it had never before revealed.

Of course this covert project that has been underway for several years is going to somehow become the fault of President Obama, and evidence of that lie has already started on Drudge:

The construction of this plant started and mostly occurred while George Bush was in the White House and has been no secret to the government, yet Drudge wants us to think that Iran pulled a quickie on the administration. If this is a surprise to Obama then it should be a down right shocker to Bush.

When will we see former President George W. Bush travel the world and successfully negotiate the release of prisoners in a foreign nation?

I was just reading this story in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

LEXINGTON - A Lexington gynecologist has been stripped of his license to practice medicine by the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that Dr. Hamid Sheikh was accused of having a dirty office, not giving women proper pain medication and other violations.

An administrative hearing in the case ended when Sheikh notified the board that he would not continue attending. As a result, the board issued an order late last month revoking his license.

And it just got me thinking about this:

Isn’t it weird not having such a moron as our President?

I was checking out Gallup’s site and saw this:

No Mandate for Criminal Probes of Bush Administration

Most favor investigations into controversial terror techniques, possible abuse of Justice Dept.

Sounds like America just doesn’t want to see Bush punished – doesn’t it? Well now, let’s have a quick gander at the actual poll results:{[}]lt;/p>

HMMM – looking at that, it does appear that “most” favor investigations, but also most favor criminal investigations, not some panel.

So now that American’s want to see justice served for the abuses by the last administration, will our new administration and Congress act on the people’s will? For their own good, I certainly hope so.

Bob has found a couple of interesting articles. It turns out back during the last census, the Bush administration made decisions involving the decision that made it so the Census Bureau no longer had the authority to adjust the count. This was after this:

[Bush Commerce Secretary Don Evans] Friday issued a rule that makes him the final arbiter over the hotly contested political issue of whether the initial population count is accurate or needs to be statistically adjusted. The move removes from the Census bureau the decision over whether to adjust the 2000 count to guard against an undercount of minorities and low income Americans.

So if the Republicans want to claim that Obama is trying to play politics with the census, then I say fine, but let's not act like he is doing some "big illegal move". Bush did far worse, including trying to disparage minority counts, and not one Republican bitched. Why? Because they got more seats.

In the very least, Obama is being open and transparent about his decision. We sure didn't see that under George "signing statement" Bush.