Terrorism is Not the Greatest Threat to Liberty

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. -James Madison, fourth US president, known as "Father of the Constitution" for drafting the that document and authoring the Bill of Rights.

When the Bush administration declared a "Global War on Terror," Madison's words should've echoed from every corner of Washington and from every voice in the media. If there was ever a case of Madison's "continual warfare," the GWoT was it. Other Presidents had declared wars on concepts -- a war on crime, war on poverty, war on drugs, etc. -- and those wars did not go (or have not gone) well. When the goal is the complete eradication of a problem, failure becomes extremely easy. The goal should always be to mitigate the problem to as close to nonexistence as reality will allow. This is not the definition of war.

Of course, these other "wars" launched by other presidents were mostly metaphorical. They weren't actually launching a war, but announcing an increased focus on a problem and an increased effort to eliminate it. Bush's War on Terror was quite different. He meant it as a literal war. "Americans are asking, how will we fight and win this war?" Bush explained to a joint session of congress. "We will direct every resource at our command, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war, to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network."

This wasn't "war" as a rhetorical device, this was actual, people-are-going-to-die war.

And Madison's warning has proven true through every stage of this thing. The forces of liberty don't torture, they don't build concentration camps. The debt and deficits created by this War on Terror have been tremendous and bog us down to this day. To make things worse, Bush decided to cut taxes during a time of increased wartime spending -- an unprecedented and tremendously irresponsible act of fiscal malpractice.

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Republicans Need to Dig Up Some Better 'Scandals'

Want a scandal? Here's a scandal:

Salon: Try, if you can, to ignore all the lurid coke-and-sex bombshells contained in the three Department of Interior Inspector General reports about the shenanigans at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS). The program director who snorted speed off a subordinate’s toaster oven, and made her give him a blow job while driving around the neighborhood. The two “MMS Chicks” who were notorious for getting plastered at conventions and having one-night stands with oil industry employees.

Try — and yes, I know it’s hard — try even to ignore the allegation that one program director told a subordinate that if she could score him some coke during the MMS performance appraisal period, he would increase her performance award. What’s the big deal? Who wouldn’t be motivated by such an incentive? And what’s a little drunken sex and coke binging on government time among friends? It happens to the best of us.

The significance of the three reports delivered by the inspector general to Congress on Wednesday lies not in the prurience of some of the indiscretions, but in the symbolism. The Royalty-in-Kind Program of the U.S. Minerals Management Service is where offshore drilling meets the U.S. government. And gosh, is it ever one heck of a mess. You want a toxic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Just read the reports.

You'll happy to know that this isn't happening now, but in the misty, far-flung past of bustling 2008. This was the Bush administration's scandal and it was bad. The MMS was responsible for leasing federal land for oil and natural gas drilling. And it was corrupt nearly beyond belief. An Inspector General found not only ethical breaches, but criminal misconduct in an agency who's mission had changed under the Bush administration from serving the interests of the American people to making as much money as possible for the oil and gas industry. The agency was basically run by lobbyists, practically guaranteeing malfeasance. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the agency was finally eliminated under Interior Department restructuring.

I don't bring this up to try to distract from the current controversies plaguing the White House, but to make a simple point; as salacious and shocking as it was at the time, no one talks about the MMS scandal anymore. Of course, the Bush administration had four colossal scandals that leap immediately to mind: the failure to take terrorism seriously, resulting in 9/11; the lies and hype about WMD that led to the invasion of Iraq; the awful response to Hurricane Katrina; and the use of torture. There were also warrantless wiretaps, blowing the cover of Valerie Plame, Dick Cheney getting hammered and shooting some poor guy in the face, and some I'm either forgetting or skipping over for the sake of brevity. In the scandal-production department, the Bushies were overachievers.

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Ryan and Medicare: A Recipe for Increased Costs

Against the background of Mitt Romney's continuing attacks on Barack Obama and Medicare, PolitiFact checked a statement by Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter. "You know, I heard Mitt Romney deride the $700 billion cuts in Medicare that the president achieved through health care reform," Cutter told Face the Nation. "You know what those cuts are? It’s taking subsidies away from insurance companies, taking rebates away from prescription drug company. Is that what Mitt Romney wants to protect? And interestingly enough Paul Ryan protected those cuts in his budget."

Not surprisingly -- since they also rated Romney's statements on this subject "mostly false" - PolitiFact rated this as "true."

But none of this is extremely surprising. It's a well-established fact that the Romney campaign is built on a mountain of lies. And this is yet another -- PolitiFact goes further than Cutter and argues that it's dishonest to even call the amount a cut. "Well, there are cuts and then there are CUTS. Neither Obama nor his health care law literally 'cut' a dollar from the Medicare program’s budget," the editors write. "Rather, the health care law instituted a number of changes to reduce the growth of Medicare costs. At the time the law was passed, those reductions amounted to $500 billion over the next 10 years."

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Mitt Bush

Sometime in 1998 0r '99, a group of lunatics plagued with the curse of certainty discovered the perfect presidential candidate. He was an amiable, likeable guy, but more importantly he was dumber than a box of rocks. He believed rightwing talking points with all his simple heart and had guaranteed name recognition. He wasn't the shoe-in they thought he was, though. After actually losing the popular vote, he became president anyway -- thanks to five Supreme Court Justices with no respect for democracy. Their candidate was eventually sworn in as the President of the United States and quickly proved the depth of his competence by losing a fair fight to a pretzel. By the time George W. Bush left office, America had suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, was engaged in two wars, was having a debate over whether it was OK to torture people, and had a smoking ruin where the economy used to be.

In a more rational world, the lunatics plagued with the curse of certainty -- or "neoconservatives," as they're more commonly known -- would be out of politics for good. Any hint of neocon influence on a candidate would be the first sign of the death of the campaign and children would point and laugh at them when they walked down the street.

But this is not a more rational world. These guys show up all the time on talking head shows, where they're treated as oh-so-serious political minds, rather than the complete and utter failures that history shows they to be. And oftentimes the other talking heads are the boneheaded pundits who cheered on the neocon idiocy. Thanks to a media all too happy to allow people to fail upward -- or, at least, laterally -- neocon clowns can continue their neocon clown show, without fear that anyone will point out just how completely incompetent they've proven to be. Meanwhile, the media's neocon cheerleaders get to keep their pundit jobs, despite the fact that they've just spent the last twelve years at least getting nearly everything exactly wrong.

And so the cycle rolls on. Bush's inner circle seeks to become some other candidate's inner circle, hoping no one will notice. They seek to rebuild the neocon machine, to begin anew the work of The Vulcans, to try again at that New American Century, and to find another patsy to take the fall in the history books should it all go haywire again. And they've found one. One Willard Mitt Romney.

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George W. Bush, Mitt Romney's Running Mate

Recently, I titled a post, "We’ll stop blaming Bush when it stops being Bush’s fault." That is, when we finally get dug out from under the wreckage of mismanagement of the economy, whatever happens afterward will no longer be Bush's fault. The economic craphole we're in now? Bush's fault. Obama may not be fixing it faster enough for you, but he's not the guy who crashed it.

Americans agree.

Gallup:

Americans continue to place more blame for the nation's economic problems on George W. Bush than on Barack Obama, even though Bush left office more than three years ago. The relative economic blame given to Bush versus Obama today is virtually the same as it was last September.

Gallup first asked this "blame assessment" question in July 2009, six months after Obama became president. At that point, 80% of Americans gave Bush a great deal or a moderate amount of blame, compared with 32% who ascribed the same level of blame for the bad economy to Obama. The percentage blaming Bush dropped to about 70% in August 2010, and has stayed roughly in that range since. Meanwhile, about half of Americans have blamed Obama since March 2010, with little substantive change from then to the present.

[...]

The relative amount of blame Americans give to Obama and to Bush has largely stabilized over the last two years. It remains to be seen whether Americans are open to further discussion of those issues in the months remaining before the Nov. 6 election, or whether their minds are made up.

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