Post-presidential Bush

Henry Rollins, writing in Vanity Fair, reflecting briefly on George Bush’s future life as Citizen W.  says, in part: 

Bush was never a man I hated. I always thought that he was perhaps not the worst person in the world but was surrounded by earth scorchers who played the hardest of hardball.

 

…my mind wandered to thoughts of George and Laura Bush and what their lives will be like weeks from now, when they leave Washington. I wondered if it will be a stoic and resigned life, walking condominium hallways, the ghosts of thousands of dead soldiers quietly shuffling by. I wondered if their marriage will last. All that time to think about the carnage of those eight years, all the death and destruction, the waste, the ruin, and the misery. The horror.

 

Bush is no doubt a moral person and on those long, quiet Texas evenings, he will have time to contemplate what he is—the ultimate patsy. The product of privilege, power, and an agenda he did little more than sign off on. He is a man-child who left his humanity at the crossroads when he sent young men and women to be mutilated and killed in a foreign land. Their blood permanently stains his hands.

 

George W. Bush is about to start the longest single term of his life. 

 

My own feeling about Bush is that while he’s not consciously evil, he is intellectually and morally indolent.  Because he either does not have the ability to think for himself or is too lazy to do so, he has allowed himself to be manipulated by stronger personalities.  These people are, as Rollins said, hardball-playing scorched earthers.  Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, et al found him to be very malleable putty indeed.  

I doubt he’s going to be troubled by any feelings of guilt for all the suffering and mayhem and death he’s caused because he totally lacks empathy.  For his own purposes, that’s probably a good thing. 

I think his post-presidential life will be an absolutely wretched existence.  The man has lived in a special, privileged bubble for the last eight years, constantly fawned over by sycophantic courtiers reinforcing his belief that he is a Very Important Person.  Those who manipulated and exploited him did it very deferentially, I’m sure.  

But on January 20, 2009, he will begin to discover that he is, in a sense, a pariah.  The only people that will show him deference will be those who are paid to do so.  The neocons will dump him faster than you can say PNAC, and the mainstream of the Republican party will do its very best to forget he ever existed.  Nobody will trot him out as an elder statesman.  Nobody will seek his advice or his views.  And as he said of himself earlier this year when he was disparaging Bill Clinton, he won’t be hanging around the lobby of the UN.

I imagine he'll lead a sort of OJ Simpson-like existence – OJ Simpson pre-prison, that is.  I don't think Laura will leave him, but I don't think any woman would want to be in her shoes.  It’s hard to believe that Bush will bear the change in his circumstances with stoicism.   

Deja vu all over again

On the night of October 23, 1989 Charles Stuart of Boston called police saying that a black gunman with a raspy voice had shot Stuart in the stomach and his wife Carol in the head during the course of a robbery.  Carol later died at the hospital.  A black man named William Bennett was later arrested after Stuart picked him out of a lineup.  The story later unraveled, however, after Stuart’s brother, Matthew admitted to getting rid of the gun used in the crime and the valuables that were allegedly taken in the theft.  Charles Stuart jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge in Boston just ahead of his arrest for murder by the Boston police. 

Nineteen years later, to the day, Ashley Todd, a 20-year old McCain campaign volunteer from College Station, Texas, told Pittsburgh police that she had been accosted by a 6’ 4” black man as she was leaving an ATM, who robbed her, then upon seeing the McCain bumper sticker on her car, beat her and carved a backwards B on her face.

Take it away, Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette: 

Almost from the start, Pittsburgh police were skeptical about a young woman's claim that she had been mugged and a "B" carved into her cheek by an attacker who was provoked by the sight of a John McCain bumper sticker on her car.

 

Yesterday, their doubts were confirmed when 20-year-old Ashley Todd, a McCain volunteer from College Station, Texas, admitted that she made the whole thing up.

 

There was no black man with a knife, no robbery, no physical assault. 

And the backwards "B" on her cheek? She's not sure, she told police, but assumes she did that herself. As for the black eyes, police assume they likewise were self-inflicted. 

Her story quickly became political fodder on the Internet and spread around the world, fueled by the presidential campaign and Ms. Todd's political connections as a field representative for the College Republican National Committee and McCain volunteer.

 

But in less than a day, the international story of a McCain volunteer being attacked, traumatized and disfigured for her political beliefs deflated into a sad tale of a troubled woman with a history of mental problems.

 

Police were sensitive to that fact yesterday, saying that while Ms. Todd would face at least a charge of filing a false report with police, she would not be released until she had a mental health evaluation.

 

"We don't feel she should be able to walk out onto the street," said Pittsburgh Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant. "We wouldn't want any further harm to come to her."

 

Ms. Todd was in the Allegheny County Jail last night on $50,000 bond after her video arraignment before District Judge John N. Bova. Judge Bova requested that she undergo an evaluation by the jail's behavior clinic. She'll return to court on Thursday.

 

The day after the purported attack, both Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin called Ms. Todd, offering words of comfort. Yesterday, McCain-Palin campaign spokesman Peter Feldman issued a statement: "This is a sad situation. We hope she gets the help she needs."

 

Ms. Todd told police a black man with a knife approached her at a banking machine at Citizens Bank at Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street in Bloomfield shortly before 9 p.m. Wednesday. She said after she gave him $60, the robber spotted the McCain stickers on her car, became enraged, knocked her to the ground and punched and kicked her.

 

She quoted him as saying "You are going to be a Barack supporter," as he sat on her chest, pinning both of her hands down, and scratched the letter "B" on her right cheek.

 

First among the problems with her story was the fact that the "B" scratched on her face was backwards -- as it might be if she had done it herself using a mirror.

 

"The backwards 'B' was the obvious thing to us when we first saw her. Something just didn't seem right," Assistant Chief Bryant said. "And, first of all, with our local robbers, they take the money [and flee]. They're in and out. They're not stopping to do artwork."

 

Additionally, said Lt. Kevin Kraus, investigators were struck "that it was a superficial, pristine 'B,' which seemed highly inconsistent with the story she reported that it was a violent attack, basically in which she was fighting for her life."

 

Nevertheless, Assistant Chief Bryant said, Ms. Todd reported herself as a victim, so police began an investigation. Then they found more and more inconsistencies.

 

Ms. Todd underwent five hours of questioning at police headquarters on the North Side Thursday night and submitted to a polygraph. Her story kept changing -- the attack happened before she got to the bank machine; she was hit from behind and rendered unconscious; she didn't know she had been cut or robbed until she went to the apartment of a friend, Dan Garcia; the attacker had sexually fondled her.

 

Yesterday, she told detectives she was driving alone in her car when she looked in the rearview mirror and saw the letter on her cheek. She didn't remember how it got there but assumed she had done it because she had incidents of memory loss in the past. The letter made her think of "Barack," Assistant Chief Bryant said, so she concocted the story before going to Mr. Garcia's house. 

Now here’s my favorite part of the story: 

Once she had told the story to police, "she told lie after lie and the situation compounded to where we are right now," said Lt. Kraus. He added that Ms. Todd showed no remorse for her actions but was angry with the media, saying they blew the story out of proportion. 

She showed no remorse.  It was the media’s fault.  They blew it out of proportion. 

Assistant Chief Bryant said the false report created "a huge waste of time, with many man-hours and people coming in on overtime just to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible."

 

"It created intensive national and international attention," Lt. Kraus said. "We've had detectives working around the clock since she made the bogus allegation. The cost to the city of Pittsburgh has been many, many dollars and resources."

 

Ms. Todd's job as a field representative for the College Republican National Committee brought her to Pittsburgh about two weeks ago to recruit college students. She had worked for the committee since August. Yesterday, the organization fired her.

 

Ashley Barbera, the organization's communications director, said workers initially were concerned for Ms. Todd's safety.

 

"We are as upset as anyone to learn of her deceit. Ashley must take full responsibility for her actions," she said.

 

In March, Ms. Todd was asked to leave a grass-roots group of Ron Paul supporters in Brazos County, Texas, group leader Dustan Costine said. He said Ms. Todd posed as a supporter of former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and called the local Republican committee seeking information about its campaign strategies.

 

"She would call the opposing campaign and pretend she was on their campaign to get information," Mr. Costine said last night. "We had to remove her because of the tactics she displayed. After that we had nothing to do with her."

 

About a month earlier, he said, Ms. Todd sent an e-mail to the Ron Paul group saying her tires were slashed and that campaign paraphernalia had been stolen from her car because she supported Mr. Paul.

 

"She's the type of person who wants to be recognized," Mr. Costine said. 

Fortunately, Ashley Todd was such a stupid, inept liar that there was no William Bennett in this case.  One wonders, if the police had been less efficient and more credulous, would she have picked somebody out of a lineup?

It appears that her desperate need for attention, her absolute lack of remorse, and her refusal to take responsibility for her actions do constitute a mental problem.  But it’s very hard to feel sympathetic to a person who chooses Charles Stuart for a role model.

 

George W. Bush post-presidency

GOP fretting about one party rule

There’s a story in The Washington Post this morning – the GOP is worried about one party rule.  Now that is pretty rich.  Up until two years ago, we HAD one party rule – by the GOP Taliban, who did enough harm to last us through the rest of this century and well into the next. 

Although I normally think balance in the government is desirable, I have no problem with Democrats running things for the next two years, so they can begin to repair the damage inflicted by the 6 year GOP reign of terror without Republican obstructionism.  Meanwhile the grown-ups in the GOP can take their party back and re-form it into some semblance of a responsible organization.

Such a week for the GOP!

The RNC paid $150,000 for Sarah Palin’s wardrobe, purchased with the assistance of Jeff Larson, the McCain campaign’s favorite loathsome robocaller.  And, according to The New York Times, some of the items charged apparently did not go to Palin – it’s a wardobe mystery.

 

According to The New York Times, Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist (classified as “Personnel Svc/Equipment” in the campaign filings) Amy Strozzi, made $22,800 in the first two weeks of October, more than anyone else in the entire McCain campaign organization.  That’s a lot of Cover Girl.  And Palin's traveling hair stylist (classified as ”communications consultant” in the campaign filings), Angela Lew, made $10,000 in the same period.

 

Michele Bachmann (MN, 6^th district) told Chris Matthews on October 17^th, that she is "very concerned" that Obama "may have anti-American views" and that the media ought to investigate Congress to see who is pro-American and who is anti-American. 

 

With these statements, Bachmann managed to raise $1.4 million from outraged voters all over the country – for her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg.  She had been expected to cruise to victory, but now the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee) has pulled their advertising on her behalf, and Tinklenberg is now running neck and neck with her in the polls.

 

Speaking of the NRCC, bowing to financial realities, they've  also pulled funding for a bunch of other incumbents including the hateful and homophobic Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado’s 4^th district. 

 

What else?  Oh, yeah.  John McCain’s brother Joe, younger, but also possessing the infamous McCain temper and arrogance, called 911 in Communist Northern Virginia to complain about a traffic blockage approaching the Wilson Bridge.  When the 911 operator pointed out that 911 is for emergencies only, Mr. McCain replied “Fuck you,” and disconnected. 

 

“I don't know why I called 911,” McCain says. “I've never called 911 before. I guess I thought they might have some explanation.”

After dialing 911, McCain called Alexandria Police to ask them about the traffic on the bridge, calling the situation an “absurdity.”  

 

Alexandria Police:  "Did you just call 911 in reference to this?  911 is used for emergencies only, not because you're just sitting in traffic."

 

Joe McCain: “This isn't traffic. This is a pretty serious malfunction.... Do we just sit here indefinitely while this bridge malfunctions?”

 

To finish off the week, there’s the lovely and talented Ashley Todd.  She’s the McCain campaign volunteer, who reported to Pittsburgh police that she was robbed by a big, scary black man who subsequently beat her and carved a backwards B on her face because she had a McCain bumper sticker on her car.  After receiving sympathetic phone calls from both McCain and Palin and a WHOLE LOTTA media attention, she admitted to police that she made the whole thing up.  She added that she has mental problems.  To the extent that anybody who still supports John McCain is crazy, I suppose that’s true.

 

She has been charged with filing a false police report and is in jail awaiting a psychiatric evaluation.

 

Can't wait to see what next week brings.

Voter fraud

Finally!  An arrest for voter fraud--now those Obamaloving hippies at Acorn will be brought to book.  Oh, wait...

October 20, 2008

SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.

Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP.

Dan Goldfine, an attorney for Jacoby, on Sunday denied any wrongdoing by his client and called the charges "baseless."

He said the arrest outside an Ontario hotel, which involved seven squad cars and nine police officers, was part of a "long pattern of harassment against Mr. Jacoby for an entirely valid voter registration effort."

Goldfine said the case that prosecutors are bringing against his client involves charges that are rarely pressed.

Jacoby was released on bail Sunday evening from the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, Goldfine said.

After complaints by voters and Democratic Party officials, several agencies launched investigations into Jacoby's activities. They included the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, which issued the warrant for his arrest earlier this month on felony charges of voter registration fraud and perjury.

"We contacted people at the addresses where he registered, and they have no idea who he is," said Dave Demerjian, head deputy of the public integrity unit at the L.A. County district attorney's office.

Goldfine said his client does business in many states, traveling frequently, and his permanent address has been his parents' Los Angeles County home, where he received mail and registered to vote.

Demerjian said his office is continuing to investigate allegations that YPM workers improperly re-registered voters with the GOP.

Several dozen voters recently told The Times that YPM workers said they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Other voters said they had no idea their registration was being changed.

YPM has been accused of using bait-and-switch tactics across the country. Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit.

In a written statement Sunday, the state Republican Party called the charges against Jacoby "politically motivated." The party said the charges do not support accusations from voters and Democratic officials that YPM has been duping voters into joining the GOP.

The statement accused Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who announced the arrest, of "using her office to play politics."

Bowen is a Democrat.

McCain's base--with video

From the Washington Times via Political Animal: 

PRINCETON, W.Va. — Over the last few days I've been through Southwest Virginia, down in North Carolina and now back up into the mountains on the West Virginia side near Bluefield for some stories about the political climate in red states.

 

Sen. Barack Obama has set up a massive organization across the country, and especially in North Carolina.

 

The campaign has given supporters lists with hours and locations of early voting sites, and collected the names, e-mail address and cell phone number of each attendee at the Fayetteville rally Sunday afternoon. (There were a few thousand who had to listen to his speech from the parking lot after the coliseum hit about 10,000 capacity.)

 

An organizer at the rally rattled off the addresses of early vote sites nearby that would be open after the event.

 

Photographer Joe Eddins and I headed over to the closest one and found a steady line of voters hoping to cast ballots early. Most seemed to be Obama supporters and several had come from the rally. Nearly all the voters were black.

 

Also at the polling site was a group of loud and angry protesters who shouted and mocked the voters as they walked in. Nearly all were white.

 

As you can see from these videos, no one held anything back. People were shouting about Obama's acknowledged cocaine use as a young man, abortion and one man used the word "terrorist." They also were complaining that Sundays are for church, not voting.

Takes you back around 50 years--ah, the good old days, when racists felt free to intimidate black voters.  These are John Sydney McCain's peeps.  Take a good, long look.

Here's some video:

John McCain's base

Via Americablog again, from the Citizen-Times of Asheville, NC:

A dead bear was found dumped this morning on the Western Carolina University campus, draped with a pair of Obama campaign signs, university police said.

 

Maintenance workers reported about 7:45 a.m. finding a 75-pound bear cub dumped at the roundabout near the Catamount statute at the entrance to campus, said Tom Johnson, chief of university police.

 

“It looked like it had been shot in the head as best we can tell. A couple of Obama campaign signs had been stapled together and stuck over its head,” Johnson said.

 

University police called in N.C. Wildlife Resources officials to remove the body and help in the investigation. Bear season is currently under way in Western North Carolina.

But when will it be open season on ignorant louts?

Big time neocon to vote for Obama

He may say he's not a neocon but he is--he's one of the Cheney/Rummy/Wolfowitz Pax Americana  coterie.  Anyway, via Americablog, I saw this story in The New Yorker:

Ken Adelman is a lifelong conservative Republican. Campaigned for Goldwater, was hired by Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon, was assistant to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld under Ford, served as Reagan’s director of arms control, and joined the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld’s second go-round at the Pentagon, in 2001. Adelman’s friendship with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their wives goes back to the sixties, and he introduced Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in. 

In recent years, Adelman and his friends Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz fell out over his criticisms of the botching of the Iraq War. Still, he remains a bona-fide hawk (“not really a neo-con but a con-con”) who has never supported a Democrat for President in his life. Two weeks from now that’s going to change: Ken Adelman intends to vote for Barack Obama. He can hardly believe it himself.

 

Adelman and I exchanged e-mails today about his decision. He asked rhetorically,Why so, since my views align a lot more with McCain’s than with Obama’s? And since I truly dread the notion of a Democratic president, Democratic House, and hugely Democratic Senate?

 

Primarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment.

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

 

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

McCain's base - three stories

First story   

Mike Lunsford hung the display at a home at Symmes and Hicks Road in Fairfield this week.  His neighbors called Local 12 to express their shock, saying the display is racist and offensive. 

But Lunsford, who spoke to Local 12's Shawn Ley spoke isn't shy about his views.

The make-shift ghost hangs from a noose above an"McCain-Palin" sign. A Barack Obama sign attached upside down. Obama's middle name: "Hussein" spray painted and misspelled above.

Mike Lunsford hung the ghost in his yard. He spoke to us off-camera, saying his views could hurt his employers business ... but he says make no mistake: He doesn't want an African American running the country.

Lunsford says he believes Barack Obama is not a "full blooded American." And he says the United States is a white, Christian nation - and only with white Christians should be in power. 

Second story

CALEDONIA, Wis. -- Police in Caledonia are investigating the assault of a campaign volunteer as she was canvassing for Senator Barack Obama Saturday afternoon.

In an exclusive interview with 12 News, 58 year-old Nancy Takehara of Chicago says she was going door-to-door when she came across a disgruntled homeowner.

“The next thing I know he’s telling us we’re not his people, we’re probably with ACORN, and he started screaming and raving,” Takehara said. “He grabbed me by the back of the neck. I thought he was going to rip my hair out of my head. He was pounding on my head and screaming. The man terrified me.”

The man eventually stopped and the Caledonia police were called. Takehara was asked if she needed medical assistance, but she was not seriously injured. Instead, she says she was shaken up by the homeowner’s reaction.

“This negative stuff has to stop,” said Takehara. “We’re all Americans. This is all about protecting our democracy, not about attacking each other.”

Third story

WASHINGTON — An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group's Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month.

Attorneys for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now were notifying the FBI and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division of the incidents, said Brian Kettenring, a Florida-based spokesman for the group.

Republicans, including presidential candidate John McCain, have verbally attacked the group repeatedly in recent days, alleging a widespread vote-fraud scheme, although they've provided little proof. It was disclosed Thursday that the FBI is examining whether thousands of fraudulent voter-registration applications submitted by some ACORN workers were part of a systematic effort or isolated incidents.

 

Kettenring said that a senior ACORN staffer in Cleveland, after appearing on television this week, got an e-mail that said she "is going to have her life ended."

A female staffer in Providence, R.I., got a threatening call from someone who said words to the effect of "We know you get off work at 9," then uttered racial epithets, he said.

 

McClatchy is withholding the women's names because of the threats.

 

Separately, vandals broke into the group's Boston and Seattle offices and stole computers, Kettenring said.

 

The incidents came the day after McCain charged in the final presidential debate that ACORN's voter-registration drive "may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history" and may be "destroying the fabric of democracy."

 

McCain's comments provoked a response from ACORN.

 

"I would not say that Senator McCain is inciting violence," Kettenring said, "but I would say that his statements about the role of this manufactured scandal were totally outlandish. We would call on Senator McCain to tamp down the fringe elements in his party."

 

McCain's campaign didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

 

Kettenring said that ACORN had received growing amounts of hate mail in recent weeks, but "the campaign debate sort of tipped it over to a scary point, where raising allegations of voter fraud went from a cynical campaign ploy to really inciting racial violence."

 

Since McCain's remarks, ACORN's 87 offices across the country have received hundreds of hostile e-mails, many of them containing racial slurs, Kettenring said. "We believe that these are specifically McCain supporters" sending the messages, he said.

 

The e-mail to the Cleveland employee was traced to a Facebook Web page in the name of a Baltimore man. It featured a photo of a McCain-Palin sign.

 

Kettenring said that the bulk of the e-mails had been either "flat-out racist" or had racial overtones. Most of the group's 400 members and about 80 percent of the 13,000 voter-registration canvassers are African-American or Latino.

 

It's unclear whether the alleged threats violated federal law, but Jonah Goldman, the director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan, nonprofit legal organization that battles discrimination, argued that the Voting Rights Act should apply.

  

"A real concern is the impact that these terrible acts have on the people who registered through these registration drives," Goldman said. "Legitimate, eligible voters who sign up through these registration drives may be understandably intimidated and choose not to show up at the polls, and the Voting Rights Act prevents voter intimidation."

Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.