Matt Latimer Book: Bush Knocked Other Pols While President »
Posted By bluetexasvalley 3 months, 3 weeks ago in Arts & Entertainment
President Bush mocked other prominent politicians behind their backs while in office, according to a new book by former speechwriter Matt Latimer. Last month, the Washington Post reported that ex-Bushies were feeling a "growing nervousness" over what might be in their old colleague's tome.
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bluetexasvalley
I am a 60-plus widow, retired after almost 40 years in the newspaper business. My love of politics was learned, first, from my father, a ...
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bluetexasvalley3 months, 3 weeks ago
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FTA:
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Of Obama, Latimer writes that Bush came in to rehearse a speech fuming. The New York Daily News reported:
This is a dangerous world," he said for no apparent reason, "and this cat isn't remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you."
Bush thought Hillary would be the Democratic nominee. "'Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk,' he once said (except he didn't say 'keister')," Latimer wrote.
But Bush was perhaps most critical of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin:
"I'm trying to remember if I've met her before. I'm sure I must have." His eyes twinkled, then he asked, "What is she, the governor of Guam?" [...]
"This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for," he said. "She hasn't spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let's wait and see how she looks five days out." It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party. -
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diogenes21st3 months, 2 weeks ago
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Yes it is. It's amazing the true attitudes that are spoken when they think no one's going to find out. Karl Rove and many other White House officials openly mocked right-wing religious believers during West Wing meetings, for instance, bragging about how they exploit and use them but really think they're a bunch of dopes. If the people who support politicians -- sure liberals, too, but especially the nonsense that gets peddled from the right -- really knew what their officials truly thought about them and the country, well maybe then we really could get some Hope & Change without all the mudslinging and backsliding.
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hyperbola3 months, 3 weeks ago
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Well blue, this article might better be titled: Bush left the economy in the hands of a Wall Street coterie that crashed the economy.
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What seems not to have dropped for the "committed conservative" that wrote this is that that corruption is a constantin American politics - and has been ever since about Reagan. Until we root this coterie of "corrupt oligarchs" (many of them zionists of dubious loyalty to America) out of our politics, media and government, we are unlikely to have a democracy in America that actually cares about the majority of the American population.
Stop Begging Obama to be Obama and Get Mad
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/09/15/stop-beg...
The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state.
The right wing is not wrong. It is not the problem. We are the problem. If we do not tap into the justifiable anger sweeping across the nation, if we do not militantly push back against corporate fraud and imperial wars that we cannot win or afford, the political vacuum we have created will be filled with right-wing lunatics and proto-fascists. The goons will inherit power not because they are astute, but because we are weak and inept.
Violence is a dark undercurrent of American history. It is exacerbated by war and economic decline. Violence is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.-
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hyperbola3 months, 3 weeks ago
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...There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about "service." But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth. The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality. And so these veterans nurse their fantasies of power. They begin to hate those who sent them as much as they hate those they fought. Some cannot distinguish one from the other.
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As I stared into the faces of the men from A Gathering of Eagles on Saturday at a protest calling for the closure of the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, I recognized these emotions. These men had arrived on black motorcycles. They were wearing leather jackets. They had lined up, most holding large American flags, to greet the protesters, some of whom were also veterans. They chanted "Traitors!" at the seven people who were arrested for refusing the police order to leave the premises. They sought vindication from a system that had, although they could not admit it, betrayed them. They yearned to be powerful, if only for a moment, if only by breaking through the police line and knocking some God-hating communist faggot to the ground. They wanted the war to come home.
It is we who are guilty, guilty for sending these young men and women to wars that did not have to be fought. It is we who are guilty for turning away from the truth of war to wallow in a self-aggrandizing myth, guilty because we create and decorate killers and when they come home maimed and broken we discard them. It is we who are guilty for failing to defy a Democratic Party that since 1994 has betrayed the working class by destroying our manufacturing base, slashing funds to assist the poor and cravenly doing the bidding of corporations. It is we who are guilty for refusing to mass on Washington and demand single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. It is we who are guilty for supporting Democrats while they funnel billions in taxpayer dollars to sustain speculative Wall Street interests. The rage of the confused and angry right-wing marchers, the ones fired up by trash-talking talk show hosts, the ones liberals belittle and maybe even laugh at, should be our rage. And if it is not our rage soon, if we continue to humiliate and debase ourselves by begging Obama to be Obama, we will see our open society dismantled not because of the shrewdness of the far right, but because of our moral cowardice.
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