In an article today on the George W. Bush presidential library, McClatchy notes that “[t]he present hasn’t worked out so well” for Bush. “So now he’s banking on a kinder and gentler future.” Bush library foundation president Mark Langdale says he is “confident that people will come to change their mind about the president and some of the decisions he made.” How will the Bush library accomplish this task? Spin. And Langdale has already begun, calling the debacle surrounding Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina “the limitations of government assistance”:
Langdale says the Bush museum will not avoid the most divisive episodes of the president’s eight years in office, such as the administration’s much-criticised humanitarian response to Hurricane Katrina. […]
“There’s an interesting lesson about Katrina and the limitations of government assistance to respond to big natural disasters,” Langdale said. “They are acts of God, and they are tough. It’s definitely a story line I would not shy away from addressing somehow in the museum.”
Indeed, this doesn’t seem to be Langdale’s first act of Bush celebration. Pictured behind him in a photo accompanying a separate article on the library last week was a photo of Bush superimposed over Martin Luther King Jr.
(ThinkProgress has been keeping a close eye on developments with the Bush library, and we will continue to do so. Read our related posts here.)
Last night on Fox News, former Bush political operative Karl Rove tried desperately to link President-elect Obama to the scandal surrounding Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL). When co-host Alan Colmes noted that conservatives are “looking for anything they can to try to drag him into this,” Rove obliged, saying that Obama is “parsing words” and “making it look like there was no contact” between Obama’s team and the Illinois governor.
Rove also said that Obama should ignore U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s request to not discuss the case, saying “the president-elect ought to decide what is in his best interest.” Further suggesting that Obama has something to hide, Rove — who knows a little bit about hiding information — claimed that he doesn’t “buy” that Obama’s team “is resisting giving out this information only because they’re being held back by the prosecutor’s office,” later adding that the whole affair is “troubling.”
But just last week on Fox, Rove stated with absolute certainty that Obama “is not involved” in any way with the Blegojevich scandal and said he would not try to link Obama to Blagojevich:
COLMES: [I]s there going to be — are you — are there going to be an attempt to link Obama to this?
ROVE: No, no, look. I think, I think we’ve got to be careful about this because, look, I think Fitzgerald went out of his way today to basically say none of this touches President-elect Obama. None of these actions that Blagojevich was involved in were — you know were made to President-elect Obama and President-elect Obama is not involved in these specifically actions.
Watch it:
Indeed, conservatives (and many in the media) are trying every which way to link Obama to Blagojevich’s corruption scandal even though absolutely no evidence exists to suggest such a link. Even Newt Gingrich has called such efforts a “destructive distraction.” In fact, Fitzgerald himself advised against such actions, warning to “not cast aspersions on people for being named or being discussed” in the criminal complaint against Blagojevich.
Yet it seems that Rove just can’t give up his perch as the Right’s attack dog point man.
During today’s White House press briefing, spokesperson Dana Perino echoed President Bush’s claim that Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi’s frustrations are not representative of the Iraqi public’s sentiments. She pointed out that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki apologized for the mistreatment of his guest. When reporter Helen Thomas pointed out that U.S. forces are actually “occupiers,” Perino bristled:
QUESTION: Why not worry about it? Does it reflect the feelings of the people?
PERINO: I don’t think that you can take one guy throwing his shoe as representative of the people of Iraq.
And I will tell you that Prime Minister Maliki and the journalists who were there in the room, who apologized on behalf of the Iraqis, saying this is not how they would treat a guest. […]
QUESTION: But he wasn’t a guest. We’re occupiers.
PERINO: No, we’re not. We are absolutely a guest.
Watch it:
Perino later added, “If — if the Iraqis didn’t want us there, we wouldn’t have been signing that agreement that allows our troops to operate there for the next three years,” ignoring the fact that Iraqis primarily supported the agreement because it set a firm deadline for U.S. withdrawal.
Just a few moments ago, President-elect Barack Obama announced Arne Duncan – the superintendent of the Chicago schools – as the next Secretary of Education. Duncan is being described as someone “known for taking tough steps to improve schools while maintaining respectful relations with teachers and their unions.” During the press conference to announce his choice, Obama was asked to lay out his vision on education reform:
OBAMA: What we can expect is that each and every day, we are thinking about new and innovative ways to make schools better. … One of the things that Arne and I share is a deep pragmatism in terms of how we go about this. If pay-for-performance works and we can work with teachers so that they don’t feel like it’s being imposed on them, but instead, they’ve got an option for different compensation mechanisms in order for us to encourage high performance, then that’s something we should explore.
If charter schools work, let’s try that. Let’s not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids.
Watch it:
The Wonk Room has more details on Duncan’s background.
Last night on “The O’Reilly Factor,” host Bill O’Reilly slammed Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush, and said that if he had been there, he “would have physically taken the guy down.” Guest Juan Williams agreed, but he widened his condemnation to Iraqis in general, who he said were behaving like “ingrate[s]” for not appreciating what the United States has done for them:
WILLIAMS: But on a serious level, how many American lives have been sacrificed to the cause of liberating Iraq? How much money has been spent while they’re not spending their own profits from their oil? American money. So I just think it’s absolutely the act of an ingrate for them to behave in this way. Just unbelievable to me.
Watch it:
Last month, National Review’s Andy McCarthy was similarly frustrated by Iraqis’ failure to shower their occupiers with thanks and gratitude:
Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous…and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.
Even President Bush is confused about Iraqis’ frustration, telling Bob Woodward, “I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them.” Woodward explained, “He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.”
An Oxfam report from February 2008 put into startling focus what the U.S. invasion has really meant for Iraqis:
– More than four million Iraqis forced to flee either to another part of Iraq or abroad.
– Four million Iraqis regularly cannot buy enough food.
– 70 percent are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50 percent in 2003.
– 28 percent of children are malnourished, compared to 19 percent before the 2003 invasion.
– 92 percent of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, mostly due to the climate of fear.
The Brookings Institute’s Iraq index also notes that the national unemployment rate is somewhere between 25 and 40 percent. Fifty-six percent of Iraqis say things in Iraq are going “quite bad” or “very bad.” Sixty percent rate economic conditions as “poor” and 75 percent rate security conditions “poor.”
In an interview with RealClearPolitics, President Bush vouched for the bona fides of his brother, who is considering a run for the U.S. Senate. “He would be an awesome U.S. Senator,” the president said. “He is a proven leader who, when given responsibilities, succeeded,” Jeb’s older brother said. (HT: The Hill’s Briefing Room)
Earlier this month at a debate on President Bush’s legacy in New York, Karl Rove claimed that if the Bush administration had known before the war that Iraq did not possess WMD, the U.S. would likely not have invaded:
QUESTION: Had the intelligence been accurate prior to the invasion of Iraq, would the invasion have still taken place, in your view?
ROVE: No. … I suspect the administration’s course would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him than he’d been constrained in the nineties.
In a new interview with ABC News, however, Vice President Cheney disputed Rove’s assessment. Asked specifically about Rove’s comment, Cheney said that the U.S. would have invaded regardless of whether or not Saddam Hussein possessed WMD because he retained the “capability to produce weapons of mass destruction“:
CHENEY: As I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren’t any stockpiles. What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stock.
Watch it:
Cheney appears to be confusing “capability” with “desire.” Indeed, in 2004, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) — which searched Iraq for Hussein’s supposed WMD stockpiles — concluded in a 1,000 page report that Iraq “had the desire but not the capability to create weapons that could attack the west” at the time of the U.S. invasion. Additionally, the ISG confirmed that Iraq’s WMD capabilities were “essentially destroyed” in the 1991 Gulf War:
Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed.
Five years later, Cheney still can’t bring himself to admit he was wrong about Iraq.
Muntader al-Zaidi, the now-infamous shoe-hurling Iraqi journalist, has reportedly been “beaten in custody,” according to the BBC. Al-Zaidi’s brother reports that the journalist is suffering from a broken hand, broken ribs, and internal bleeding. Yesterday, TV al-Sharqiya in Iraq reported that the al-Zaidi had “signs of tortures on his thighs.” Meanwhile, thousands of Iraqis have taken to streets on Tuesday for second day to demand al-Zaidi’s release.
70 percent: The share of Americans who say that President-elect Obama “should fulfill his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. forces from the country within 16 months.” Two-thirds continue to believe that the war in Iraq is not worth fighting, whereas a majority supports the efforts in Afghanistan. As the Washington Post notes, these views “appear to largely dovetail with the views expressed by Obama.”
The Interior Department’s inspector general “has found that agency officials often interfered with scientific work in order to limit protections for species at risk of becoming extinct, reviving attention to years of disputes over the Bush administration’s science policies.” The report “found serious flaws in the process that led to 15 decisions related to policies on endangered species.”
Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) has accepted a Cabinet appointment as Interior Secretary pending the outcome of a background check. Salazar, who was the Colorado Attorney General before becoming a senator, has been an outspoken critic of environmentally-destructive energy policies like oil shale development.
Minnesota’s state canvassing board will start inspecting as many as 1,500 disputed ballots one-by-one beginning today. “Both campaigns had pledged to abandon many of the challenges lodged during the recount.” Norm Coleman leads Al Franken by 188 votes at this time.
Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced committee chairmanships for the next Congress yesterday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) will lead Intelligence, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) will lead Appropriations, while Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) will take over for Vice President-elect Biden as head of Foreign Relations. See a complete list of committee assignments here. More »
Last week, in an interview with the National Review, President Bush defended his failed nomination of Harriet Miers, saying she “absolutely” would have made an “excellent” Supreme Court justice. On Laura Ingraham’s radio show today, conservative pundit George Will — who called the Miers pick worse than the administration’s response to Katrina — said he had spoken to a historian who has consulted Bush on his memoirs and learned Bush will continue to defend such “insufficiently appreciated” decisions:
WILL: He’s planning — I know that he’s talked to a historian with whom I’ve talked. He’s planning to write his memoirs based around certain decisions, the genius of which was insufficiently appreciated by the American public –
INGRAHAM: Oh god.
WILL: –near the top of which was the nomination of Harriet Miers. … That occurred just about the time of Katrina and in my judgment was worse than the Administration’s response to Katrina.
Listen here:
Publishers have indicated they’re not very interested in Bush’s memoirs, recommending that he “take [his] time” before starting to write.
In a message on his Twitter account today, former Arkansas U.S. attorney and Karl Rove-protege Tim Griffin hinted that he is considering a “senate run” in 2010 against Sen. Blanche Lincoln. In an interview with the AP, Griffin confirmed that he was indeed mulling a run, saying that he was “certainly thinking about it“:
“I am certainly thinking about it,” Griffin said. “I’m going to spend some time going around the state and talking to folks and getting an idea of the interest level. … I’m going to try and hit all 75 counties as soon as possible and I know that’s a tall order trying to hit all of those in the next few months.
Griffin is controversial beyond his involvement in the U.S. attorney scandal. As RNC research director in 2004, Griffin reportedly led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters, including African-American service members in Florida.
Today, Vice President Cheney continued the Bush administration’s legacy tour by appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Limbaugh’s hard-hitting questions included, “What are you most proud of?” and praise such as, “Over the years when I’ve spoken to you, you have purposely avoided any partisanship, because I know that this has been a policy of the administration.
At one point, Limbaugh mocked President-elect Obama’s promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Cheney agreed and defended Guantanamo, saying that it has been “very well run”:
CHENEY: I think so. I think Guantanamo has been very well run. I think if you look at it from the perspective of the requirements we had, once you go out and capture a bunch of terrorists, as we did in Afghanistan and elsewhere, then you’ve got to have some place to put them. If you bring them here to the U.S. and put them in our local court system, then they are entitled to all kinds of rights that we extend only to American citizens. […]
So Guantanamo has been very, very valuable. And I think they’ll discover that trying to close it is a very hard proposition.
Listen here:
One reason that Obama has a better chance of closing Guantanamo is that he won’t have Cheney over his shoulder. President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have all said that they would like to close the detention facility. However, these efforts have been repeatedly blocked by officials in Cheney’s office, who object to moving detainees into the United States.
Guantanamo is not well-run, and its presence is putting U.S. servicemembers at risk rather than saving lives. As former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora has explained, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are “the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq.” (CAP’s Ken Gude has put together a plan on how to safely close Guantanamo and transfer the detainees.)
In recent months, other current and former White House officials have been out highlighting Guantanamo as a positive part of Bush’s legacy. Last week, former attorney general John Ashcroft said that detaining terror suspects has been a “humanitarian act,” and Rice disputed that the U.S. image has been “tarnished” by torture.
Transcript: More »
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has been a key source of the Bush administration’s right-wing policies and personnel. Last year, Bush told AEI, “I admire AEI a lot. … More than 20 AEI scholars have worked in my administration.” These ideologues include Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Doug Feith, and John Yoo. On Thursday, Bush will thank AEI with a speech on domestic policy:
Not surprisingly, Bush’s Domestic Policy Council director, Karl Zinsmeister, worked at AEI for 12 years.
On his radio show today, conservative talker Glenn Beck complained that the media is not talking about the “real issues.” To make his point, Beck wondered allowed about why the media isn’t “leading every news cast” with the apparent arson incident at Gov. Sarah Palin’s church. He concluded with a plug for his new network, Fox News Channel, saying that in comparison to other morning news shows, Fox and Friends is like a “think tank.” Listen here:
Mr. Beck, we know think tanks…and Fox News is no “think tank.”
CNN Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware reports that Muntader al-Zaidi — the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush yesterday during a press conference — “is being investigated for possible charges not connected to assaulting President Bush, but for doing it in front of the Iraqi Prime Minister and hurling the shoes in the Prime Minister’s general direction rather than at President Bush’s head.” After CNN host T.J. Holmes clarified that “just because the Iraqi Prime Minister was in the vicinity that might really be what gets him in trouble,” Ware responded, “Yeah brother, this is Iraq.” Watch it:
This morning Ware reported the Maliki’s office explained the charges by arguing that “it’s not easy to say who exactly he threw the shoes at.”
Early this morning, during a press conference in Kabul with Afghan President Karzai, President Bush attempted to paper over his previous declarations of victory over the now-resurgent Taliban. Bush claimed emphatically, “I never said the Taliban was eliminated.” Watch it:
In fact, Bush used the word “eliminated” to describe the state of the Taliban on several occasions:
September 2002: “The Taliban’s ability to brutalize the Afghan people and to harbor and support terrorists has been virtually eliminated.”
April 2002: “With the Taliban eliminated and al-Qaida badly damaged, we have moved into the second stage of our war on terror.”
At other times, Bush prematurely declared victory using similar language:
September 2004: “And as a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence. And the people of Afghanistan are now free.”
December 2004: “In Afghanistan, America and our allies, with a historically small force and a brilliant strategy, defeated the Taliban in just a few short weeks.”
October 2005: “Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago.”
While coalition forces made significant early progress against the Taliban, President Bush allowed the situation to deteriorate after deciding to invade Iraq in 2003. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, troops and resources have been diverted from Afghanistan. Consequently, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated dramatically in recent years. Currently, the Taliban has a “permanent presence” in 75 percent of the country and exercises control over the country’s “political and military dynamic.”
Likewise, the still-classified Afghanistan NIE reportedly paints a “grim” picture of the country. While Bush deserves credit for trying to bring his current rhetoric more in line with reality, he isn’t allowed to pretend that his past rhetoric wasn’t false.
In recent weeks, GOP senators have been balking over the scheduled Jan. 8 confirmation hearings for Eric Holder, President-elect Obama’s nominee for attorney general. Following the lead of Karl Rove, these senators have been claiming that they need more time to prepare their attacks on Holder. Today, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced that he has decided to postpone the hearings one week until Jan. 15:
The Committee has not yet received the names of other designees for high-ranking Department of Justice officials that we had anticipated and more time is now available to the Judiciary Committee. Therefore, to accommodate the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, at their request we are delaying the hearing, again, until January 15. The Assistant Republican Leader said last year that ‘attorney general nominees have been confirmed, on average, in approximately three weeks.’
Nonetheless, in order to accommodate the Republicans members, I am rescheduling the hearing on Mr. Holder for twice that long, until more than six weeks after his official designation. It is disappointing to me that they are insisting that we delay at a time when the nation needs its top law enforcement officer and national security team in place and working. I trust that with this additional time to prepare, they will cooperate in proceeding promptly to Committee and Senate consideration of the historic Holder nomination as Democrats did for President Bush.
In a Washington Post op-ed today, Lawrence Di Rita, former special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, decries the “myth” surrounding Gen. Eric Shinseki’s February 2003 statement that “several hundred thousand troops” would be needed secure Iraq. Di Rita claims that Shinseki in fact supported the Rumsfeld plan because he did not speak up against it in meetings. The former Rumsfeld aide calls Shinseki’s opposition “one of the most enduring myths of the Bush presidency” and “a legend”:
Here are some facts: First, Shinseki, as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supported the war plan. . … There was ample opportunity for the chiefs to express concerns and propose alternatives. There is no record of Shinseki having objected.
In reality, Shinseki and Rumsfeld had a fundamental disagreement on strategy. In his testimony, Shinseki stated that “hundreds of thousands” of troops would be needed for “post-hostilities control” over land “that’s fairly significant [in size] with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems.” The Pentagon, in contrast, assumed that there would be minimal internal resistance, thus, there would be no need for so many troops. In July 2003, for example, Paul Wolfowitz admitted that Pentagon officials “turned out to underestimate the problem.”
Di Rita also fails to mention that the Pentagon quickly “castrated” Shinseki by ridiculing him publicly. While Di Rita claimed that “Sinseki was not forced from office, as ThinkProgress has documented, Rumsfeld announced Shinseki’s successor 18 months prior to Shinseki’s retirement — a signal that dissent would not be tolerated:
Feb. 27, 2003: Wolfowitz “opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, ‘wildly off the mark.’”
March 19, 2003: A senior Pentagon official dismissed Shinseki’s comments as “bullshit from a Clintonite enamored of using the army for peacekeeping and nation-building and not winning wars.”
March 29, 2003: “For the past two years Gen Shinseki has been in total eclipse.” Shinseki “had already been turned into a lame duck (’castrated’, according to the same Pentagon source) by the apparently unprecedented Rumsfeld decision to announce his successor 18 months in advance.”
Unfortunately, the media have also picked up on the false meme that Shinseki’s silence was indicative of support. “Shinseki never objected to the war plans, and he didn’t press for any changes,” CNN’s Jamie McIntyre wrote in a Dec. 8 piece titled, “Myth of Shinseki Lingers.” Similarly, President Bush remarked yesterday, “I don’t remember him coming to talk to me specifically with the other generals on the joint chiefs.”
I know of nothing, other than the failure to plan adequately for the war in Iraq, that upset the retired community nearly as much as Mr. Rumsfeld's treatment of the chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Shinseki. Just irate. I've been in meetings and breakfasts and lunch where this is a subject of conversation and just a very, very bitter feeling that he would treat someone like that.
Dubai is planning to construct the world’s first refrigerated beach. A system of heat-absorbing pipes and giant wind blowers will “keep tourists cool in the searing 40-50C heat.” Soheil Abedian, president of Palazzo Versace hotel that will be home to the refrigerated beach, said: “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on. This is the kind of luxury that top people want.” Critics have argued that Dubai’s design lacks regard for the environment:
Rachel Noble, of Tourism Concern, said: “Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so people can continue destructive lifestyles.” […]
The city’s continued expansion will also add to its huge carbon footprint. Each person living in Dubai has a carbon footprint of more than 44 tons of CO2 a year.
Yesterday, Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi threw his shoes at President Bush and shouted, “This is a farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” Bush said that he was unfazed by the incident.
Afterward, Bush continued to dismiss the incident to reporters aboard Air Force One. He said that Zaidi’s actions were “bizarre” and had no larger significance:
Q Well, not to belabor the point too much, on this man, but I have a serious question about it. Obviously he’s expressing a vein of anger that exists in Iraq, and —
BUSH: How do you know? I mean, how do we know what he’s expressing? Who — […] I’ve heard all kinds of stories. I heard he was representing a Baathist TV station. I don’t know the facts, but let’s find out the facts. All I’m telling you, it was a bizarre moment. […]
I don’t think you can take one guy throwing shoes and say this represents a broad movement in Iraq. You can try to do that if you want to. I don’t think it would be accurate. … That’s exactly what he wanted you to do. Like I answered on your question, what he wanted you to do was to pay attention to him. And sure enough, you did.
Similarly, in an interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz yesterday, Bush laughed off Zaidi’s actions as “amusing.” “I don’t know what his beef is,” said Bush. “But whatever it is I’m sure somebody will hear it.” Watch it:
Zaidi’s actions were not “bizarre” or “amusing.” In fact, they were “[t]wo of the worst insults in Islam.” Additionally, Zaidi is not a lone protester with his own radical “Baathist” agenda. Since the incident, thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets to demand the release of Zaidi, who is now being interrogated by Iraqi authorities. These protesters include Shiites in Sadr City, who “are fed up with U.S. policy in the region” and calling Zaidi a “hero.” NPR reported that every single person they interviewed in Baghdad had “nothing but praise” for Zaidi.
Bush is still unable to grasp the “beef” that the Iraqi people have with him: their extreme frustration and unhappiness with the U.S. invasion and its subsequent mismanagement and occupation. Tellingly, one of the last high-profile shoe-throwing incidents occurred in April 2003, when Iraqis took their shoes and hit Saddam Hussein’s falling statue.
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