Quote of the day: Hearts and minds, greeting us as liberators, yada, yada, yada

“Today I feel so happy,” said Salim Hamid, 44. “It is like a wedding to me to see the person who destroyed my country being nervous because of being asked a lot of questions.”

Mr. Hamid said he wished he could throw a shoe at Mr. Blair — a grievous insult in the Arab world — just as an Iraqi journalist did to President George W. Bush when he visited Baghdad in 2008.

- Salid Hamid, Iraqi citizen and a man after my own heart, reflecting on the Chilcot Report forcing former British Prime Minister and Bush Administration lap poodle to take "full responsibility" for Britain's part in Bush's invasion of Iraq, which he adds he would do all over again if he were faced with the choice, so that's nice.

p3 Pro tip: Mr. Blair, never repeat the charge while denying the charge.

Quote of the day: And Kicking off George Bush's sorta sad week

(Updated below)

Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.

- That's the first sentence of the preface to Jean Edward Smith’s biography of George W. Bush. After this, one supposes, Smith really settles down to rendering a judgment on Bush's presidency. (Hat-tip to Thomas Mallon's review in The New Yorker.)

Smith's line is also being added to my collection of great opening sentences (non-fiction division).

Poor Dubya hasn't been having a very good week, has he? Smith's bio came out on Monday the 4th. Then, on Wednesday, the day Bush turned 70 – a day when more reflective people than Dubya (which is to say, almost anyone) might want to pause and consider how they've spent their time on this old world – the Chilcot Report dropped, providing a withering assessment of the British role in the Iraq War (pdf).

The Chilcot Report mainly takes the actions of the Blair government to task, leaving to the US the task of producing a similar official accounting of the mendacity, incompetence, and barefaced illegality by the Bush Administration before, during, and after the war. (Not gonna happen, I'm afraid.)

I should note that the Report has a pretty pedestrian first sentence: "We were appointed to consider the UK’s policy on Iraq from 2001 to 2009, and to identify lessons for the future." Less of a Jane Austen, as these things go, more of a Richard Nixon. So it wasn't placed in competition with other worthy opening lines. But you don't have to read far into the executive summary to get to the zingers – and they seem all the more harsh to my American ear by their understatedness.

(Update:  And here's the last sentence of Smith's biography. Serves me right for waiting until the book comes to my local library:

Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

A quantum of umbrage: Wait – Alberto Gonzales is still alive?

Seriously?

It seems like not that long ago that he was the former Bush AG (who made his bones reading death penalty appeals to the reading-disabled Governor of Texas and who later became famous for claiming "I don't remember" under oath more times than Ronald Reagan, who, unlike Gonzales, probably didn't), and who couldn't find work as a practicing lawyer because no law firm, now matter how sleazy and connected, would bring him on. After which, he had to struggle to find a publisher for his <airquotes>tell-all book</airquotes> about his good times with Dubya.

But now -- rumors to the contrary notwithstanding -- Alberto is back, to hump the leg of whoever's in charge now, with this offer that he's still for sale. 

As CNN’s Jake Tapper points out during the interview, Trump’s position is pretty much the epitome of racism. That, however, didn’t stop former George W. Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from trying to defend Trump in a Washington Post op-ed published Saturday.

Gonzales’ argument rests on largely ignoring Trump’s own words and inventing new reasons for Trump’s objection that, even if true, seem irrelevant. He discusses Curiel’s affiliation with a San Diego-based Latino lawyers group and suggests that association might render him unable to render a fair judgment.

“If judges and the trials over which they preside are not perceived as being impartial, the public will quickly lose confidence in the rule of law upon which our nation is based,” Gonzales writes. “For this reason, ethics codes for judges — including the federal code of conduct governing Curiel — require not only that judges actually be impartial, but that they avoid even the ‘appearance of impropriety.'”

The Unforgiving Minute: The homecoming

Let's set the stage first:

Nevertheless, Jeb is a Bush. And if Bushes are anything, they are a family of super-competitors. Ferociously so, across the board.

“At everything from tiddlywinks to backgammon,” says former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, a Bush family friend. They take their contests so seriously they give no quarter even to the youngest members of the family. Which George H.W. learned the hard way when he was just a small boy and his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, beat him mercilessly at tennis, “right-handed and left-handed,” Barbara says.

I have this picture in my head of the next Bush family get-together up in Kennebunkport. For Easter, maybe. Yeah, Easter. That'd be good.

The servants retire and the family sits down at the dinner table. On a signal from Poppy, he and Dubya put on their "41" and "43" caps. Barbara then scales a cap over the carved ham and into Jeb's lap. He picks it up and discovers it's a mate to his father's and brother's caps – except it has the number "0" stitched on the front.

"You want us to clap now?" smirks his brother.

"Or maybe we should see how you do in the Easter egg hunt first," chips in his dad, with his trademark crooked grin.

Minute's up.

Shifty. Untrustable.

So this happened:

At the recent CPAC gathering, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a likely Republican presidential candidate, seemed to stumble on one of the basic facts of the Middle East. “The reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” the Florida Republican said.

Alas for Senator Rubio, Iran and ISIS are enemies. (Much like al Qaeda under bin Laden and Iraq under Saddam were , although that didn't stop the Cheney-Bush administration, did it?)

Still. Iraq, Iran, ISIS -- all four-letter adversaries beginning with "I." You know who's next, don't you?

Ikea.

I mean, seriously -- what's the deal with those sneaky Swedes?

Winifred Ames: What have they done to us?

Conrad 'Connie' Brean: What have they done for us? What do you know about them?

Winifred Ames: Nothing.

Conrad 'Connie' Brean: See? They keep to themselves. Shifty. Untrustable.

No, Luke -- I am your father!

Digby has uncovered the best reason to keep Jeb Bush out of the White House.

It's this:

[W]hat does all this have to do with Jeb? Well, he happens to be the only Bush who was a card-carrying member of the PNAC. He was a neocon long before neocons were cool. In fact, one must suspect that his early defiance of his father and brother in this regard signals the act of a True Believer. He didn’t need to do it. He was Governor of Florida, not head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He must have really thought the cause was righteous.

Now he’s in the terrible position of having to distance himself from the reckless foreign policy mistakes of his brother — mistakes that were initiated by the neoconservative claque of which he is a charter member. He’s forced to pretend that he’s actually an adherent of his father’s foreign policy school when in fact he was among those who rejected it with disdain back in the 1990s, an act which led to his brother’s fateful decision to invade Iraq without good cause.

God save and protect the United States of America from another round of the Bush sons working out their daddy issues in the Oval Office.

The unforgiving minute: In fairness to Mr. Williams

While he did tell what Huckleberry Finn called "a stretcher" regarding his time in Iraq in 2003, Brian Williams was a piker compared to the top eight members of the Bush Administration during the same time.

One wonders if any of them -- Dubya, Cheney, Condi, Rummy, or the rest -- considered taking themselves off the air for a few days.

One doubts it. One doubts it very seriously.

Williams only egged on, and surfed on, their crimes. He's a sad case -- albeit a sad case with magnificent hair -- but he's not the one who belongs in a cell in The Hague.

A quantum of umbrage: Mistakes

This has got to be the lamest excuse for telling a self-aggrandizing lie that I've ever heard.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.

“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

He calls his choice a mere "mistake"? A mistake in which he "conflated" two aircraft - the one he wasn't on (that got shot down) and the one he was on (that didn't)? That's quite a slip-up, there, Sparky.

On the other hand, Williams can at least claim that his wasn't the worst, most shameful, indeed most despicable lie about Iraq told to the American public in 2003 by a famous person who left it out there and never paid a price for doing so. So there's that.

Quote of the day: Moses

Updated below.

I've made it through the first chapter of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge, the third of his four-book history of the modern conservative movement. (The first two were Before the Storm and Nixonland.) I'm already amazed at how much I had forgotten about what an evil, manipulative, sadistic bastard spiteful bastard Nixon was.

As someone said, in a quote from an article about Nixon's funeral that I still can't find, even in death, Nixon brings out the worst in us.

General Taylor had once been a favorite general of Kennedy-era liberals. Robert F. Kennedy had called him "relentless in his determination to get at the truth," and name one of his sons after him. Now Maxwell Taylor was a tribune of the other tribe, the one that found another lesson to be self-evident: never break faith with God's chosen nation, especially in time of war – truth be damned.

This was Richard Nixon's tribe. The one that, by Election Day 1980, would end up prevailing in the presidential election. Though Richard Nixon, like Moses, would not be the one who led them to the promised land.

And the amazing thing is, Nixon scarcely appears in that chapter. But his influence – the politics of resentment that he created and perfected – was lasting.

Update: On reflection, it's clear that it wasn't really fair to call Nixon sadistic. Sure, he liked to see his enemies suffer – I mean, who can make it to the Oval Office without feeling that way a little, amiright? – but it wasn't that he specifically did the things he did because he enjoyed seeing his enemies suffer. He just wanted them crushed, and if that could be done for the same price without suffering, that was fine. Dubya was the sadist. Everyone here at p3 regrets the error.

 

Saturday morning tunes: I ain't no senator's son

Via Roy Edroso and many others comes the story of rightwing bloggers, most of whom came of age after the Vietnam War ended the second time, and after the military draft, who were deeply, deeply offended that Bruce Springsteen, David Grohl, Zac Brown, and other musicians used the Veterans Day concert on the National Mall – called Concert for Valor so that no one would mistake it for a mattress sale event – to perform the CCR classic "Fortunate Son."

Contrary to their fervid belief, the song "Fortunate Son" was not written to disrespect veterans, nor was it written in opposition to war, strictly speaking. It was written in opposition to the cheap tub-thumpers for war who remain secure in the knowledge that neither they nor their children will ever have to go anywhere near a war zone. 

People like this:

And this:

And, of course, this:

Oh, and definitely this:

You want to see some serious vet disrespecting, start there.

In the little Indiana town where I grew up during the Vietnam era, there were families with connections at the county seat (where the draft board sat) whose sons never saw military service, let alone went into harm's way. It was a source of genuine irritation to my father, not so much for my sake, I think, as for the daily indignation of a being Democrat in a Republican county. As it turned out, I didn't serve either, although that was far more a matter of dumbass luck than anything remotely resembling political connections.

Part of the current problem, of course, is that Republicans have a long history of appropriating rock songs they haven't listened to all the way through. And that's what's happening here; ask John.

So here's the original:

Oh, and by the way:

Saturday morning tunes: I met your children – what did you tell them?

Thirty-three years ago yesterday, MTV was launched, and this was the first song they played. Slightly over a decade later, MTV killed the music video until it was miraculously revived last month.

Also, 42 years ago yesterday, George W. Bush, son of former U.S. Congressman George H. W. Bush, was suspended from flying with the so-called "Champagne Unit" of the Texas Air National Guard after failing to show up for his annual medical exam. Must have been some pretty important reason to make him give up such a sweet gig.

Nine years ago in p3: The Hobby Lobby cards were already on the table

Everything you needed to know about last week's Supreme Court decision on health care, corporations, and contraception was right there in 2005.

There are actually two sharks swimming in the waters of the commonwealth -- the Theocratic Right, yes, but also the Corporate Right (whose issues are deregulation, lowering what's left of corporate taxes, and curbing consumer rights--especially our rights to bring corporations to court).

Quote of the day: Why is the Iraq War like using a CB radio?

No elite voice in this country seems capable of coming to terms with the fact that the Iraq war was "lost" the moment it was launched. It was lost because it was based on lies and deception. It was lost because it violated international law. What a pathetic narrative people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham regurgitate this late in the game: that things were "won" in Iraq by Bush the Younger and then "lost" by Obama with the US withdrawal. We lose IQ points even listening to that drivel.

- Joseph A. Palermo, winding up one of the best – of many, many, many – essays this week on why no one anywhere should be listening to the opinion of the Zombie Iraq Warhawks.

Palermo's piece is going on the p3 Readings list.

A quantum of umbrage: The revised "Pottery Barn rule"

Yes, yes, it's got nothing to do with the actual policy of the actual Pottery Barn stores. But then, Pottery Barn stores aren't barns and don't have very much pottery, either, so there's no reason for any of us to be putting on airs.

Anyway, here's the old "Pottery Barn rule:"

[O]nce you break it, you are going to own it, and we’re going to be responsible for 26 million people standing there looking at us.

Secretary of State Colin Powell

to President Bush, August 2002

And this, apparently, is the new "Pottery Barn rule:"

If you break it, the next guy who walks through the door owns it.

Or, put plainly:

Nine years ago in p3: Countdown to the one-party state

The State Department playing political games, desperately stonewalling to cover its ass. And the wall between church and state was under attack.

The year was 2005.

But Republicans were running the show, so these were not widely perceived as problems.

The unforgiving minute: Still waiting

As we all settle in to watch Jeb "The Smarter One" Bush begin his dance of the seven veils, this might be a good time to recall that, after packing an extraordinarily high number of gaffes and missteps into a comparatively short Wyoming Senatorial primary campaign last fall, Bush's fellow legacy Republican Liz "Spawn of Dick" Cheney pulled out of the race in early January, offering this explanation:

Citing health concerns in her family, Cheney said the issues arising prompted her to end her GOP primary challenge to Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.).

“Serious health issues have recently arisen in our family, and under the circumstances, I have decided to discontinue my campaign. My children and their futures were the motivation for our campaign and their health and well-being will always be my overriding priority,” Cheney said in the statement.

Three months and one day later, we're still waiting for any particulars on the needy-relative story to emerge. . . .

Nine years ago in p3: I find the job I want, and coin a brand-new word in the process

It was in the days of the newly-reelected Dubya's surprise plan to turn all the money in the Social Security fund over to the same sociopaths whose unregulated speculation with Other People's Money would, a mere four years later, nearly collapse the global economy and remove an incredible amount of wealth from the American economy -- including home equity,the one place other than pensions and Social Security where most Americans put their money away for retirement, as opposed, to say, the Cayman Islands.

But Frank Luntz, the René Emile Belloq of political rhetoric, felt that all this talk of "privatization" by Democrats -- and worse,by  the media! as if there was no honor among thieves anymore! -- was getting a little too close to home. A little uncomfortable. A little too . . . real.

So, because I was more dripping with the milk and honey of bipartisanship in those days, I offered some suggestions.

I'm still a little disappointed that the word didn't catch on. True, it was meaningless, but I hardly expected that to be a deal-killer in Frank Luntz's line of work.

The unforgiving minute: This was utterly foreseeable

Charles Pierce quotes Rep. Paul Ryan (R - Innumeracy) on something most Oregonians would prefer to forget:

In 2011, Oregon's Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and I offered ideas to reform Medicare. We had different perspectives, but we also had mutual trust. Neither of us had to betray his principles; all we had to do was put prudence ahead of pride.

(Briefly lapses into W.C. Fields impression) Ahhhhh, yessss. (Regular voice resumes) This was one of Ryan's previous scams, and he still hasn't learned that I Found A Sucker isn't a demonstration of bipartisan problem-solving. The Ryan-Wyden plan, which would have mixed private plans with a Medicare "public option," thereby blowing a hole in the Medicare guarantee, attracted the support of exactly nobody and went exactly nowhere. (In fact, to this day, it's hard to see what Wyden ever got out of the deal.)

I liked to think, then and now, that this unforced error by Wyden is attributable to: (1) his not having kicked the “senatorial courtesy” fetish that made him never turn down a photo op invitation with Oregon's then-Junior senator Gordon Smith, whether Smith was sticking to Bush like the skin on a weenie or desperately trying to put daylight between himself and Bush as re-election time grew near; (2) his evident and lingering disappointment that his Healthy American Act had been overwhelmed by events, including Obama's health care plan, to which Wyden's HAA was in some ways superior; combined with (3) a desire to stay relevant in the health care conversation.

Whatever the reason, it was inevitable that Senator Wyden's move would accomplish nothing he wanted as far as policy goes, while handing Ryan a free ticket to claim his plan to eliminate Medicare enjoyed “bipartisan support.” And it certainly left a lot of dents in a lot of desks that perfectly matched the foreheads of a lot of Oregon Democrats.

Minute's up.

A quantum of umbrage: Colin Powell's unhappy? Who will that inconvenience?

So the former general and Secretary of State has unburdened himself of his feelings about North Carolina's SCOTUS-approved headlong rush back into the era of Jim Crow:

Moments after Gov. Pat McCrory left the stage, former Secretary of State Colin Powell took aim at North Carolina's new voting law Thursday, saying it hurts the Republican Party, punishes minority voters and makes it more difficult for everyone to vote.

"I want to see policies that encourage every American to vote, not make it more difficult to vote," said Powell, a Republican, at the CEO Forum in Raleigh.

"It immediately turns off a voting block the Republican Party needs," Powell continued. "These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away."

The retired general served as the keynote speaker at the event and made his remarks moments after McCrory finished his remarks. His comments represent the most high-profile criticism of the Republican-crafted law that requires voters to show photo identification at the polls, cuts early voting days and makes it harder for students to vote.

Here's a list of reasons this doesn't matter, despite the fact that many commentators are making it sound like Powell went all Thunderdome on McCrory and the rest of his demented tribe:

First, it certainly doesn't matter to the NC legislators and governor.  "Punishing minority voters" and “turning people away” is the entire point of the exercise.

Come to that, Powell is exactly the sort of voter – if you know what I mean – that the NC laws were designed to disenfranchise anyway. His dismay and anger are their personal triumph.

Second, it doesn't matter to their base because Powell is part of the old Republican establishment, which the base now loathes, and he was part of the Bush II administration, which the base now pretends never happened.

Third, objecting to McCrory's claim that NC's new vote suppression laws are actually aimed at curbing voter fraud, Powell said this:

"You can say what you like, but there is no voter fraud," Powell said. "How can it be widespread and undetected?"

And there – right there – is why the rest of America doesn't care, either. Too many of us remember that presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003, when Powell insisted that Saddam's regime had an active WMD program – which, although he claimed it to be widespread, remains undetected to this day. Powell later called that speech a "blot" on his record, but he was wrong: That is his record. Karma's a bitch.

Even if he's on the right side of history – as he happens to be in this instance – he has pretty much no moral or political authority left to buttress his case. He has only his celebrity, and good luck with that. Perhaps he rues the day he ever met the Bush family, as well he might, but that's where things stand.

The unforgiving minute: “. . . but I play one on TV.”

Regarding the possibility (at the moment, the far-too-remote possibility) of popular backlash against the increased level of warrentless surveillance directed upon Americans, or anyone else who gets sucked up in the Great National Security Hoover, no less an authority on liberty, common defense, and domestic tranquility than Karl Rove recently spoke up with some impatience:

You cannot turn on a cop drama on television where there is not somebody who’s pinging somebody’s cell phone or taking a look at the phone calls made from some landline or telephone booth to help solve some crime on television.

Now, I know what you're going to say: Those examples are ridiculous. They prove nothing. Jack Bauer and Chloe O'Brien weren't really government counterterrorism agents. Abby Sciuto and Tim McGee aren't really forensics specialists with mad hacker skillz working for NCIS.

Fair enough.

But on the other hand, Rove worked as chief of staff for a man who wasn't really elected President of the United States, and no one seems to care much about that niggling detail anymore.

So cut my man Karl some slack. He's been there.

Minute's up.