The GOP? They've come a long way, baby.

A few months ago:

[ + ]

A few years ago:

(pic. sources: top | bot)

Rick Perry and George W. Bush once went out drinking ...

... but only had 5 bucks between them. So Bush took the fiver and bought a sausage.

MORE »

I got your Decision Point right here

How can we miss him, when he'll never leave?

Reuters:

Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday.

Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say.

[...]

"He's avoiding the handcuffs," Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

[...]

Brody is an American-trained lawyer specialized in pursuing war crimes worldwide, especially those allegedly ordered by former leaders, including Chile's late dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chad's ousted president Hissene Habre. Habre has been charged by Belgium with crimes against humanity and torture, and is currently exiled in Senegal.

"President Bush has admitted he ordered waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law. Under the Convention against Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush," Brody said.

There's more.

(h/t: @Mrxk and @pwire | pic. source | x-posted)

Tales of Your New Old Republican Majority

If there was ever something that deserved to be filed under News of the Unsurprising, it's this, but still, it's worth noting for the record.

Bush White House Broke Elections Law, Report Says

WASHINGTON — The Bush White House, particularly before the 2006 midterm elections, routinely violated a federal law that prohibits use of federal tax dollars to pay for political activities by creating a “political boiler room” that coordinated Republican campaign activities nationwide, a report issued Monday by an independent federal agency concludes.

The report by the Office of Special Counsel finds that the Bush administration’s Office of Political Affairs — overseen by Karl Rove — served almost as an extension of the Republican National Committee, developing a “target list” of Congressional races, organizing dozens of briefings for political appointees to press them to work for party candidates, and sending cabinet officials out to help these campaigns.

The report, based on about 100,000 pages of documents and interviews with 80 Bush administration officials in an investigation of more than three years, documented how these political activities accelerated before the 2006 midterm elections.

This included helping coordinate fund-raising by Republican candidates and pressing Bush administration political appointees to help with Republican voter-turnout pitches, particularly in the 72 hours leading up to the election ...

[...]

The report found that during the Bush administration, senior staff members at the Office of Political Affairs violated the Hatch Act by organizing 75 political briefings from 2001 to 2007 for Republican appointees at top federal agencies in an effort to enlist them to help Republicans get elected to Congress.

[...]

The investigators also found evidence that the Bush White House improperly classified travel by senior officials as official government business, “when it was, in fact, political,” and the costs associated with this travel were never reimbursed.

Another one for the book.

(h/t: Jack Stuef | x-posted | pic. source | pic. source)

Yeah, and he never invented a pendulum, either

Oh, wait. That was that other Foucault.

Anyway, marking a new record for casting swine before pearls, W's record of presidentin' is examined at length in the London Review of Books, by Caspar Eliot Weinberger. Here's an excerpt:

Decision Points holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. The words themselves have been assembled by Chris Michel (the young speechwriter and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown Publishing (who reportedly paid $7 million for the book); a team of a dozen researchers; and scores of ‘trusted friends’. Foucault: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ ‘The mark of the writer is … nothing more than the singularity of his absence.’

As a postmodern text, many passages in the book are pastiches of moments from other books, including scenes that Bush himself did not witness. These are taken from the memoirs of members of the Bush administration and journalistic accounts such as Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Bush at War. To complete the cycle of postmodernity, there are bits of dialogue lifted from Woodward, who is notorious for inventing dialogue.

We need a word like schadenfreude to describe the feeling of taking delight in intellectual elitism without even a shred of guilt.

(h/t: Ken Layne)

This is even better than the story about the "Mission Accomplished" banner

Funny at first glance, yes ...

... but take a second look.

His legamacy is secure.

Swiped from Frontburner, via The Awl, via email from Jinnet. Thanks everybody! Made my day.

(title: cf.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I love it.

Click pic to read the actual post.

Bush Courage

Must have a book to sell or something.

(embiggen)

(h/t: Chris Bodenner via Riley Waggaman)

Better reinforce those remainder bins

Won't be out for another four months, and already cut to half-price:

Also, I think the cover pre-print has a typo. Shouldn't that be Delusion Points?

Maybe they didn't want that big a book.

While you're waiting, though, Laura's book is already out!

Say, Mr Orwell: Got a handy new term for "Liberal Media?"

I'm in the middle of an argument over at the Bh.tv forums that started with the Dave Weigel nonsense and has since broadened into a larger discussion about what journalists should and should not do. I am at loggerheads with a woman who has a couple of years under her belt as a working journalist. What follows is a straight copy of the most recent reply I posted over there. I apologize if you feel dropped into the middle of something, but I wanted to call your attention to this story I just heard about as soon as possible, and it has made me too angry to be able to rework my post for a different set of readers.

One note for clarification: where I refer to the phrase "working with," I am referring to my earlier objection to her use of this term to describe how she sees her relationship to those whom she is covering. For more on this, and in a more extreme sense, see Matt Taibbi commenting on Lara Logan's recent disturbing comments, and zero in on where he uses the phrases "work for" and "working for."

__________

@PMP:

Before I get to reading what you've posted in response, let me just quote a bit from my earlier post:

"Working with" is, to me, in the abstract at least, only a short step away from "working for." There is a reason access has become such a loaded term when talking about Teh Media.

and then add this:

“In any dispute, their view is not: What is true? But: How can we preserve our access to the political right and not lose pro-torture readers?"

(Andrew Sullivan via email to Michael Calderone, via Jason Linkins.)

You and everyone else who cares about journalism should read both, but to get you started, here's a bit from the first, to give you some context:

“From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture,” the study noted. But the study found that things changed in the years when “war on terror” became part of the American lexicon.

The New York Times defined waterboarding as torture, or effectively implied that it was, 81.5 percent of the time in articles until 2004, the study found. But during 2002-2008 — when the George W. Bush White House made a concerted effort to normalize harsh interrogation methods for use on terror detainees — the Times “called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles." That’s 1.4 percent of the time.

I should point out that the NYT was hardly alone in this quisling behavior, although sadly, the WaPo was not examined.

The study from which Calderone draws his stats is here: (PDF).

More commentary: Sully, Glenn Greenwald, Adam Serwer, and Marcy Wheeler (who observed the missing WaPo aspect).

If my next responses to you in this thread are a bit surly, now you know why: there is no other way to describe what these papers were doing during the Bush years except to say they were "working with" the people they were covering.

[Added] Happy Independence Day, if I forget to say so in a couple of days.

What part of NO don't you understand?

(From ... and then I found five dollars, a page worth skimming, at least.)

And posted three tweets!!! You forgot about Poland Twitter!!!1!

Now that there's no brush left to cut pose in front of, man's gotta do somethin' while waitin' fur them ghostwritin' fellers to giddyap on his memoirs.

Not sure why he's suddenly taken to calling himself George Bush Support Check, but I can probably hazard a pretty good guess …

(previously)

(title: cf. | h/t: Attaturk, and yeah, that other tab is not by coincidence)

"Facebook For Dummies" Takes On A Whole New Meaning

The only thing I think of when I look at that is, "This is is his response to 'Okay, George. Look at the camera.'"

[Added] Oh, it gets worse.

Double Shoutout

Andrew Leonard reminds us that one of the three winners of this year's Nobel Prize in medicine, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, deserves extra recognition: she was one of the first scientists to expose the Bush Administration's "war on science" mentality. She criticized Bush's "President's Council on Bioethics" for being little more than a front for parroting the preconceived political notions the Bushies had on such issues as stem cell research. For speaking out in this manner, she was fired from the Council.

Definitely worth reading and following the links within.

[Added] For historical interest, and for a reminder of the importance of what was at stake, you might also see this post from the Union of Concerned Scientists, this article in USA Today, and especially this column from Farhad Manjoo, all published shortly after the firing, to see how Blackburn's courage in publishing her views and taking the Bush bullet led numerous other scientists to wake up to what was going on.

So far, this valuable reminder from Leonard hasn't caused the usual suspects to ramp up their usual howl: "The Nobel Prize is liberally biased!!!1!" Nope. For the moment, at least, they're working another meme: because the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine are Americans, this proves our health care system is ALREADY THE BEST IN THE WORLD!!!1! Yup. Jammie Wearing Fool went there, and so did Althouse.

No need to click those last two links unless you don't believe me, or have yet to be convinced of the depths of idiocy to which the denizens of Wingnuttia will descend.

(h/t: KK, via email)

"Excellent nature photography not by me" ...

... sez the subject line of a KK email, in which the following was enclosed. Click it to big it.

Small Sign of Hope

The lede from a story in today's NYT:

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft may face personal liability for the decisions that led to the detention of an American citizen as a material witness after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.

In the decision, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, was sharply critical of the Bush administration’s practice of holding people it suspected of terrorism without charges, as material witnesses.

“We find this to be repugnant to the Constitution, and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history,” said the opinion, written by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr.

Seriously, Can The MSM Ever Get Anything Right?

Or is it that they're all still terrified of Dick Cheney?

Wheels of Justice ... How Do They Grind Again?

I confess that my first reaction to the news about Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that he had appointed "a prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses, including episodes that resulted in prisoner deaths" was about the same as Jim Newell's headline on Wonkette:

VERY LIBERAL ERIC HOLDER TO APPOINT INVESTIGATOR TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER THERE IS ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO TO HAVE AN INVESTIGATION FOR CRIMES, SUCH AS TORTURE, BUT ONLY THE STUFF THAT GEORGE W. BUSH DIDN’T SAY WAS A-OKAY

I expect to see ten Fox News stories over the next couple of days howling that this is an attempt by Obama to "distract." And I expect a dozen gross of stories from the so-called liberal media JUST ASKING "is it fair to ask whether this an attempt by Obama to distract?"

However, I just ran across a somewhat encouraging post by Zachary Roth of TPM that has official statements from several prominent Congressional Democrats (Feingold and Leahy from the Senate and Conyers and Nadler from the House) that express hopes that the investigation will not be as limited as Holder's initial statement indicates.

So, not holding my breath quite yet, but maybe, just maybe …

Unsurprising Headline of the Day

From Think Progress via DougJ:

Ridge admits Bush administration pushed to raise security alert for political reasons on eve of re-election.

Worth reading the post just to marvel at Tom Ridge's "courage:" he (now) says he considered resigning because of this.

[Added] See also.

The Best Part About Cheney Writing A Book ...

... is that Doghouse Riley will be tracking its progress.

[Added] Oh, and TBogg will, too.