it’s over

1 day and counting – staggering to the finish

Next stop: The Hague?

We can hope.

2 days and counting – ‘a disastrous eight years’

Editorial from today’s SF Chronicle:

A Failed Presidency

It is hard to imagine that one U.S. presidency could leave more wreckage than George W. Bush’s did during his eight years in the White House.

By his own yardsticks, his administration was an abject failure. He was a divider, not a uniter. He was “the decider” who led the country into a war of choice on what proved to be false pretenses. His administration was neither compassionate nor conservative. It ran up record deficits while giving tax breaks to the wealthy and creating a culture of government neglect that left some Americans trapped in a netherworld of neglect after Hurricane Katrina, and continues to keep all of us gripped by the angst of an economic system that remains on the brink of collapse…

You can read the rest of the editorial here.

It’s worth noting that the Chronicle doesn’t accurately reflect San Francisco’s liberal tradition. This is a paper that publishes the putrid Debra J Saunders, a right-wing hack if there ever was one, and relegates columnist Mark Morford to its online edition only — no print — in order to avoid upsetting its Republican readers. Presumably these Repugs are too old and entrenched in their ways to stumble across Morford and his heresies (read: anti-Bush screeds) online. Out of sight, out of mind.

It’s a paper owned by the Hearst Corporation.

And yet even the Chronicle levels Bush in their farewell editorial.

“Bush” and “farewell.” Damn it feels good to write this. After a harrowing eight years, it’s about time.

4 days and counting – bush farts and calls it perfume

Bush is such a f*ck-up, he thinks he can fart and call it perfume.

Reaction to last night’s farewell address of The Worst President Ever™ was fairly uniform. In Salon, here’s what BabyGrumpus had to say:

I would throw my shoe at that idiot, but I might need it for standing on the breadlines of the coming depression that the stupid, incompetent fuck created. So I guess I’ll have to settle for a hearty one finger salute to the worst President in American history. Good riddance to bad rubbish. And fuck every Republican until the end of time.

When one of that unfathomable 34 percent of Americans who still support Bush tried to claim that he kept us safe from terrorism, tbone 99 called bullshit:

I beg to differ.

We have had a terrorist in the WH for 8 (years), he has destroyed our Constitution, our moral standing, alienated allies, killed and displaced millions, and emptied the Treasury for his cronies.

He has contributed to the death and destruction of plants and animals in wilderness areas and sentenced future generations of our descendants to early death by toxins.

Our economic system will never recover to be what it was and we still have to see the full impact of this slow motion disaster upon American lives.

I would say The Terrorist won.

Boxorox was more succinct:

Bush hasn’t protected us since 9/11. He’s protected us since 9/12.

What a difference a day makes.

Boxorox is actually being generous, overlooking the anthrax attacks that took the lives of five people in the weeks after 9/11.

Personally, I think Santos L. Halper comes closest to expressing the zeitgeist when it comes to responding to Republicans and their continued support for Bush and failure. Halper:

Who the fuck cares what you think? Pack a lunch, you assholes are going on a one-way ticket to the Shitcan of History come Tuesday.

You people had your chance and you Failed in such a mind-blowing, uncomprehensible way it boggles the mind. There has never been a bigger Failure in the history of Fail than GWB, and all of the idiotic assholes who support him.

My feelings towards Bush have been clearly expressed over the past year, but my final impression will be colored by his stupifying cynicism, cluelessness, apathy, stupidity, criminality, inhumanity… whatever it is that causes this inert pustule to turn a blind eye to the mass murder going on in Gaza right now under America’s sponsorship.

Bush will be vacationing at Camp David during his final weekend in office, and that is a fitting coda for the man. Never in our nation’s history have we had such a slacker in the Oval Office. Not even Reagan qualifies. This guy sat out the early bombing of Gaza at his fake ranch in Crawford and refused to engage in crisis management. From Think Progress:

While Bush has been briefed on the situation by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, he has opted not to interrupt his final vacation as president to make a public statement on the crisis. For someone who has enjoyed the most vacation days as sitting president — including days spent relaxing in comfort during Hurricane Katrina and in the lead-up to 9/11 — it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Bush prioritizes vacationing over crisis management.

More practical folks than I have pointed out that if we had just paid Bush a ginormous sum to drink beer and ride his bicycle (in traffic, one hopes, or is that too much to ask?) for the past eight years, the country might still be standing. I mean, given the number of vacation days he took, it’s not like he was earning his pay anyway.

You have to marvel at Bush’s efficiency: If a guy can do this much damage working only 70 percent of the time, imagine what he could have accomplished had he been working full-time. The imagination reels.

Four more days. There are four more days for Bush to reflect upon the criminality of the past eight years and start issuing some genuine apologies.

Expect pardons instead. Lots of them.

This man could be very busy.

How ironic.

5 days and counting – summing up a presidency

Bush’s presidency began with the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil and ends with the worst economic collapse in three generations.

How to sum up a presidency in one sentence, from Salon.

But the cartoon works also.

•••••

Suck on this, Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg:

“To follow up on the Tom Friedman claim from yesterday that Hamas will lose support if Israel kills enough Palestinian civilians, The New York Times today reports that “The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority.”  This was the (self-evident) point made so well yesterday by Daniel Larison:  if a foreign power drops lots of bombs on a population (to say nothing of stories like this and this), they tend to become more hostile to those doing the bombing and more supportive of their own leaders, especially if those leaders vow retribution against the attackers.  As Jonathan Schwarz recalls, Tom Friedman’s own demented reaction to the 9/11 attacks illustrates exactly how that dynamic works.”

Read the rest of this post by Glenn Greenwald.

•••••

Three weeks in and Israel continues to pound the snot out of Gaza. And it’s hardly only Hamas that’s being targeted. Last week it was a school. Now the hospitals and relief agencies have bulls-eyes on their backs also:

Israelis shell hospitals and UN HQ.

All of the food and medicine was destroyed.

You da shit, Israel.

And the US Congress is right behind you, because there’s nothing that gives them a bigger hard-on (yes, even the women) than the prospect of more AIPAC money flowing into their bank accounts. Until the Arabs are willing to match the Zionists dollar for dollar, the Gazans are toast.

Have another missile.

This one’s on Mitch ($107,956 from AIPAC, 2007-08).

6 days and counting – village idiot bush on the economy

From Scott Bateman, a blast from the past:

This was in the days when TARP was being created. TARP, of course, being the tool that enabled the same dickheads who triggered our financial armageddon to complete their life’s work by siphoning another several hundred billion into their private bank accounts. Terrific oversight, Hank. Oversight was your intent, wasn’t it?

Otter to Flounder: “You fucked up. You trusted us!” (Except we didn’t, really. Millions of us exhorted our representatives not to buy into the bailout. Lot of good that did.)

7 days and counting – bush to olmert: drop trou

The final ignominy: Olmert throws a fit and Bush drops to his knees to polish his knob.

Olmert Says He Made Rice Change Vote

WASHINGTON — In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Israel opposed the resolution, which called for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, because the government said it did not provide for Israel’s security. It passed 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining.

Mr. Olmert claimed that once he made his case to Mr. Bush, the president called Ms. Rice and told her to abstain. “She was left pretty embarrassed,” Mr. Olmert said, according to The A.P…

Meanwhile, the war crimes of Israel’s Stormtroopers continue unabated:

Paging Edward Gibbon.