Some good coverage of the George W. Bush library thing today. Jim Newell’s excellent live blog. An amazing photo from TPM.
I can remember thinking, for a brief time, in 2008 and 2009, that we’d turned the corner as a civilization.
We haven’t.
Today was filled with attempts to rehab W. And there was an even more pathetic attempt to rehab Kissinger, which thankfully was eviscerated here.
Roger Moore
The only thing that photo is missing is some marshals to march the subjects off to the Hague.
Baud
I wonder if Blair always wears a W pin.
PsiFighter37
I have no idea what was going through Tony Blair’s mind when he decided it would be a good idea to join in on the Iraq debacle. He was basically like Bill Clinton domestically (i.e. a centrist), but he bet big and bet wrong on Iraq. For that alone, people will have the same kind of reaction in Britain when he goes that they had to Thatcher.
No matter how hard Condoleezza Rice sings “God Bless America” or whatever the fuck is going on there, it won’t be enough to erase from history that she was Bush’s lapdog for all the shitty stuff he got wrong. Hope she doesn’t pine after her ‘husband’ too hard.
Dick Cheney still looks like Darth Vader, but wearing a cowboy hat and aviators instead of a black mask. It’d be so funny if it wasn’t so sad how evil a person he is.
Sad_Dem
Kissinger is one of the few people on earth who makes Donald Rumsfeld look less evil.
Michael G
You could take Blair and/or Rice and cast them as zombies with very little additional makeup. I hope this is the result of them being tortured by their consciences every night.
And I guess Cheney looks the same as ever–yet another upside to not having a conscience, I guess.
raven
@efgoldman: Hey, is it pretty easy to get from downtown to the airport on the train?
Mr Stagger Lee
Thank George Michael for his skewering of Shrub and Good Puppy Tony in his song Shoot the Dog!
Richard Shindledecker
Let’s be honest – in 4 years we (someone, not me)will be rehabing BO.
Schlemizel
I believe we are very near several tipping points in the environment that will bring a mass extinction event on a scale not seen since the dinosaurs came to an end. It is doubtful any humans will make it through. If any do it will be isolated tribes of hunter-gatherers.
Looking over what humans have become, the distillation of shit we have been swimming in the last 20 years or so I can only say it can’t come soon enough.
lawguy
All the former and the current democratic presidents were there to say nice things about him. Tell me again that we live in a two party state.
Baud
@Richard Shindledecker:
That’s so original. Completely different from the snide remarks we typically see from our firebaggers.
muddy
@PsiFighter37: I think he liked being one of the boomer cool kids with Clinton, and thought it’d be the same with the shrub. Still a boomer, but really uncool.
Baud
@lawguy:
We live in a two party state.
PsiFighter37
@lawguy: That’s more a matter of being polite than anything. I’m sure none of the three (except for Billy Boy, who has a complex about having a ‘normal’ family) actually care much for him.
I didn’t see anything Carter had to say, but he probably doesn’t give two shits about him.
Davis X. Machina
@PsiFighter37:
A national obsession with ‘punching above your weight’, with proving that Britain still matters, that it’s better than those gutless Frenchmen…
If we’re still fighting Vietnam, the UK is still fighting WWII, and even more so, Suez and the Falklands. And the ghost of Old Labour needed laying — Michael Foot and Tony Wedgwood-Benn wouldn’t have invaded Iraq at the behest of anyone.
gbear
Tony Blair isn’t singing ‘God Bless America’. What a socialist heathen he is.
Frankensteinbeck
@lawguy:
We live in a two party state. Not pissing on other presidents in public is called ‘having class’. Obama has said plenty of nasty things about Bush’s policies and legacy, but I’m glad that unlike Republicans he knows how to not act like a spoiled child.
NotMax
Reminder that in the linked photo, Cheney is holding his hand over someone else’s heart.
That factoid fits his persona rather well, IMHO.
Frankensteinbeck
The media hasn’t turned a corner, and probably won’t – they’ll just wither away and die, every-so-slowly. They are not, despite what try so hard to convince you is true, reflective of America itself.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
This. The last election proved that conclusively.
mouse tolliver
Chris Hayes summed it up nicely. The Bush rehab amounts to people stating emphatically that he made decisions. Period. Decisions. Not good decisions. Just decisions.
Faint praise like that reminds me of Bette Davis’s (probably apocryphal) eulogy for Joan Crawford. “She was always on time.”
Maude
@NotMax:
#19
LOL. The heart is prolly trying to escape.
ETA When Cheney was Sec Def, he got lost at the Pentagon, someone had to go find him.
raven
@efgoldman: Hmm, I have a chance to go to a thing at the Capitol at 1pm and can get a 5:30 flight. Looks like there is a dead spot just when I would need it so I better stick to the rental car.
eta I got a decent deal at the Sheraton at the airport. It looks like I’m going to stay an extra day.
catclub
@mouse tolliver: Wouldn’t the proper addition be “…although at the moment she is late.”
cmorenc
@Richard Shindledecker:
But BO (unlike Shrub) isn’t going to need any rehabilitation for getting this country into expensive wars not only without any provision for paying for them, but accompanied by deliberate fiscal irresponsibility by blowing a surplus which would have paid off the then-existing national debt in a decade by giving huge tax breaks to high-income people and refusing to scale them back to pay for his wars.
Instead, BO might need a bit of rehabilitaton from the accusation that he tried to meet the Republicans halfway, despite massive evidence the GOP’s idea of “halfway” vacillated between “hell no to everything you try to do, whatever it is”, and “halfway is adopting 99% of our position and agenda on everything”.
Maude
@raven:
Tell us all about it when you get home. And hello to the Princess and may her pain go completely away.
ETS I couldn’t figure out why I had such serious pain in the back of my legs. My shoes are worn down and so I’ll get new ones.
raven
@Maude: Thanks, it’s not till the 10th. She is feeling better.
Redshirt
Jenna’s lookin’ plump! Or at least compared to the row of evilly eviscerated ghouls beside her.
raven
@efgoldman: Aha, well I’m sure wearing my jungle fatigue’s and unit hat will get me right through!
NotMax
@Maude
Would that that person had failed in the task, and Cheney wandered endlessly like a grotesque doppelganger of Charlie on the MTA in the classic folk song.
Did he ever return?
No, he never returned.
And his fate is still unlearned
Redshirt
@mouse tolliver: He was The Decider, after all. That’s what Deciders do – decidify!
liberal
@PsiFighter37:
I’m only speculating here, but ISTR that he was religious in a way that’s odd for a Brit. Maybe that had something to do with it. (Apart from the usual “Atlantic relationship” BS.)
SiubhanDuinne
The WaPo opinion page was
well-nighfucking unreadable today. I’m still throwing up in my mouth,ChrisNYC
@lawguy: You’re forgetting about the “state” part of “two party state.” This was about the state part, which seems solid, seems a given, seems sure to continue, but is, in fact, very much not. It needs feeding, reaffirmance, reminders. This was one of those.
SiubhanDuinne
Punctuation Fail. Period, not comma. I blame Obama, and this is good news for John McCain, also too.
Maude
@NotMax:
A fitting end.
Maude
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hey, the booze rehab didn’t work, why would this one work any better. He is despised and that won’t go away. Also, Tunch is floofy.
ETA Senate passed FAA fix bill.
Splitting Image
@mouse tolliver:
I had a couple of people on my FB praising Thatcher like that after she died. “I didn’t agree with much of what she did, but I respected the fact that she was determined to get it done and was in power for three times as long as she might have been.”
Mandalay
@PsiFighter37:
It will be worse. Blair is hated far more than Thatcher.
Many disagreed with Thatcher’s policies, but nobody thought she was a lying, cocksucking, servile lapdog who needlessly sent British forces to their death.
The hatred for Thatcher was along party lines, but even those in Blair’s party hate Blair.
Hal
I was thinking about Shrubs image after that post on Jennifer Rubin’s idiotic column, and one of the things that dawned on me has to do with all of the right wing whining about how all Obama does is blame Bush.
It suddenly occurred to me that these jackasses are embarrassed. They voted for Bush not once, but twice. By the second time they had more than enough warning of what type of President Bush was and expecting any better was pure folly.
I think that’s part of the reason the right is so desperate to push the dumb, naive Obama narrative. That way they can point to any Democrat and say “Well, you’re guy isn’t any better.” Of course that crap doesn’t hold up, but what else are you going to do? Admit you’re partially responsible for the current state of the country because John Kerry annoyed you for some reason, or you though Al Gore was too uppity to have a fucking beer with?
Better to just pretend the shit hit the fan Jan 2009, and everything before than was kinda ok. After all, other than 911, Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, economic collapse, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Woo, Citizens United etc; GWB has a pretty good legacy.
Cacti
@Baud:
Why, back in 2000, our progressive betters were telling us that there was no difference between candidates Bush and Gore.
MomSense
@Roger Moore:
Along those lines I was thinking it was missing orange jump suits and chains.
Chris
@mouse tolliver:
Mostly decisions put in front of him by Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the gang, and that he didn’t much understand himself.
I think Bush’s detachment – the fact that he really didn’t give a shit about what he was doing and spent most of his time in office just kicking back and letting his cabinet run the show – might just be the most horrific thing about the guy. I can just picture the fascists bringing him the orders to invade, torture, detain indefinitely etc and him signing them distractedly and then waving them out of his office so he could get back to his video game or whatever it is that frat boys do when they’re in their fifties.
Somehow, that just makes him seem even worse to me than if he was a Nixon-like character hurting people because he hated them. Bush hurt people because he just didn’t care.
PsiFighter37
After today, I don’t want to think or hear about George W. Bush for a long, long time. Living in a country that is dealing with the aftermath of his decisions is more than enough.
PF37 +2 beers + half bottle of wine
Morzer
@NotMax:
Dick Cheney has always regretted that he never had his chance to be an Aztec priest.
Chris
@Mandalay:
I don’t know much about British politics but I figured that Thatcher would be less hated simply because of all the Conservatives who still love her.
Whereas Tony Blair was a Third Way triangulator AND Bush’s obedient lapdog in an enormous crime that most of the British public was against, so I imagine the bulk of Labour voters hate him by now; AND for all that he was still registered under Labour, so I imagine the Conservatives would still hate him too.
Morzer
@Mandalay: Lots of people in Britain thought Thatcher was Reagan’s bitch – and said so at the time. And no, I don’t think people hated Blair more than they hated and still hate her. Blair seems to be generally despised, but Thatcher’s name still provokes incandescent loathing.
Jennifer
Damn. We’ll have to wait until Monday to see what Jon Stewart has to say about it. Probably that’s why they decided to open on a Thursday.
Just curious, did the Big Dog shove W aside and enter the library first, like W did at the dedication of Clinton’s library in 2004?
Also, compare and contrast: W’s dedication featured the lineup of ghouls; Clinton’s featured Bono and The Edge.
Chris
@Hal:
Oh, of course. That’s exactly what it is.
Why do you think all the Obama scandals they try to drum up immediately get baptized “Obama’s Watergate,” “Obama’s Iran-contra,” “Obama’s Katrina…”
Lolis
@Redshirt:
Jenna just had a baby. I actually like the Bush daughters. You can’t fault them for loving their dad, and they are way less annoying about it than the Huntsman daughters and Meghan McCain.
SiubhanDuinne
@Maude:
Tunch being floofy is rapidly becoming my go-to answer for everything. But yeah, that dry-drunk thing was scary 12 years ago and remains so today.
But … TUNCH IS FLOOFY.
PsiFighter37
@Lolis: Dare I say Barbara not only got the better genes of the twins, but (at least based on what few public statements she’s made) her politics may have turned out at least slightly better than her lineage.
catclub
@Maude: How likely is it to a) get through the house b) get signed by Obama?
I just don’t see Obama approving little fixes of that sort.
SiubhanDuinne
@Lolis:
Jenna is floofy.
Maude
@Lolis:
The other Bush daughter is making her way in fashion. A rough business. Good on her.
@Chris:
Begazibostonbengaziboston.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Morzer: Hey you just decided my entertainment tonight, I am going to watch Apocalypto on the DVVD
Maude
@catclub:
I don’t know. The Senate is leaving town. They take more vacations than W.
NotMax
OT:
Admitting that I don’t read through every single thread, has there been mention of the clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh which killed well over 200 and injured more than 1000 of the 3100+ workers inside?
Baud
@catclub:
It passed unanimously. I think every one wants this fix. Of course, the House could add a rider to repeal Obamacare or ban abortion.
Hill Dweller
@catclub: Depending on the House margin, it will likely be veto proof.
Mr Stagger Lee
Well the Steelers are next on the board, pick Manti Te’o hee hee!
michelle
@Richard Shindledecker: I don’t really think so.
PsiFighter37
@NotMax: Don’t you know that the only time people dying counts is if it’s brown people inflicting less death and destruction than a plant blowing up in the country? Much less on another continent?
#Feeling_cynical_tonight
NotMax
re: #62
Suppose a link would help those who may be unaware of the grim and grisly Bangladesh incident.
AxelFoley
@Richard Shindledecker:
Unfunny troll is unfunny.
mdblanche
@Maude: Pocket veto?
AxelFoley
@NotMax:
LOLOLOLOL
NotMax
@PsiFighter37
As it is not an isolated case, and as it is part and parcel of retailers (U.S. and others) racing to have goods produced by the lowest wage workers possible ($37 per month in this case), in Dickensian conditions, perhaps a front page post is in order, should any FPers be seeing this.
Yutsano
@Maude:
Wait until they get constituents squaking because they can’t get through to the IRS. Although that’s been happening now and they still slashed our budget. Sigh. This pisses me off and I hope it dies quickly in the House.
Maude
@mdblanche:
I don’t know. People standing in line waiting hours for flights might not benefit Obama. Esp. with the Republicans claiming Obama did it.
It does get Congress to start breaking the sequester.
Maude
@Yutsano:
The sequester is so wrong.
If someone needs to to talk to IRS, they have to wait and wait. The IRS is important to getting in revenue to the gov’t and the Repubs don’t seem to understand that.
I don’t know what I’d do if I was Obama if this passes the House.
Could be up for a vote on Friday.
Maude
@NotMax:
#72
I’ve been following the story. Dozens more have been dug up.
Corporate retail has a lot to answer for. Awful greedy, craven CEOs.
catclub
@Maude: You can also go to LGM for lots of threads on it. Yglesias does not end up well in most of them – for good reasons.
mark
Tony Blair? 2 words = Carlyle Group
look it up if you don’t believe me.
Boudica
@Redshirt: She had a baby 12 days ago. Let’s cut her some slack.
ETA: Already been noted, I now see.
catclub
@Maude: “Repubs don’t seem to understand that.”
They understand it perfectly. That is why they cut the IRS budget and force it to emphasize small fry in audits. Client service.
Mandalay
@Morzer:
That’s not my recollection, and time has done nothing to give any substance to that claim that I am aware of. In fact, as Reagan dithered over supporting Britain over the Falklands invasion she politely told him and his Administration to go fuck themselves. She was many ugly things, but she was never Reagan’s bitch.
You underestimate the hatred of Blair in Britain.
Maude
@catclub:
I can’t read stuff like LGM.
Matthew I is someone who has never struggled for anything.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@catclub: Their posts on “brogressive” Sirota are pretty funny too.
Suffern ACE
I’m going to go OT cause I’m cranky. People who develop powerpoint templates to gather information and then expect me to stay up til dawn placing those slides into Excel so that I can provide financial summaries before my vacation need to be struck down by some form or godly punishment.
That’s all. Return to your regular Bush library snark.
jl
@Mandalay:
I remember reading that Thatcher was the pioneer in engaging with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Thatcher persuaded Reagan that the reformers were the real deal. And that prompted one of Reagan’s very few good decisions that rescued his administration from total mess.
And didn’t Thatcher make some comment that Reagan’s heart was in the right place but, sadly, there was nothing upstairs?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Sad_Dem:
at lest Kissinger was competent. That’s the worst part of this current bunch, they are evil and inept.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandalay: I do think there is a difference between despising someone, as Britons do Blair, and have visceral loathing for that person, as for Thatcher.
Omnes Omnibus
Why is there no NFL Draft thread?
David Koch
@Maude:
yup, even the liberal Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders caved and voted for it.
sad.
Omnes Omnibus
Never mind
mdblanche
@Frankensteinbeck: The media has the same old white people problem the GOP does. Neither one is reaching out to a changing country and so they’re making many of the same false assumptions. They’re both in a death spiral and could be replaced by a growing share of the population that no longer has any use for them. Frankly I think the media is in more trouble from this long term.
NotMax
Y’know, now that I’ve had the chance to listen to some of the speechifying at the ceremony, I find Dubya’s repeated emphasis on “convictions” an odd (almost Freudian) evocation, perhaps even a deliberate in-yer-face raspberry to his detractors.
Because convictions are what were/remain most deserved to be laid upon so many of that woebegone administration.
Mandalay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well I’m not sure which is preferable: to be despised or to be loathed. Thatcher was hated only by the left, and only because of her policies. Note that some of the working class actually supported Thatcher, especially because she enabled the poor to buy government housing at low prices.
Blair, in contrast, was and is despised by all because:
– He lied to the nation about Iraq.
– Unlike Thatcher, he is perceived as being weak (the absolute worst thing a politician can be), and having been America’s bitch/lapdog/poodle.
– He is widely perceived as a phony, a fraud and a hypocrite.
The hatred for Thatcher was narrow but deep, based on her policies. The hatred for Blair is wide and deep, and very personal.
mai naem
Am I the only one who thinks the whole lot of them at the library dedication ceremony(incl.the GDub supporters in the audience) except for the Carters should be shoved into a couple of military aircraft and parachuted into some Taliban controlled area in Afghanistan with no MREs and no weapons for self protection.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandalay: I guess our difference of opinion is on the real depth of the feeling against Blair. The impression I have gotten from people is that they wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire. With Thatcher, the impression I get is that people would have willingly set her on fire in order to not piss on her.
srv
@Omnes Omnibus: Forget who had that great twitter, something akin to “I supported cremating Thatcher right up to the point she died”
Thor Heyerdahl
@srv: I believe that was Frankie Boyle
Bob h
The Smirk was smirking while Jimmy Carter was speaking. Juvenile asshole to the end.
Nickws
@Mandalay:
You’re right about Blair having none-party-specific fury directed at him, but dude, no, the pretty incredible amount of hatred the Poodle gets is nowt compared to what the Milk Snatcher got (and hopefully will continue to get). She’s probably at 200% in that area next to what Blair cops.
You American liberal anti-war folk, I don’t think you really understand the all-important class element of British political tradition—Thatcher set herself up as the final ever class enemy, the boss fight against Brit social democracy. That was her thing. And she was all too successful.
OTOH the UK Left don’t disdain Blair as comprehensively for his economic policies. Sure, a large minority think he waged class warfare on them, but it’s by no means a consensus thing. These days there are just as many Labourites who are like to say, “he was complicated on domestic policy, he did some good things there.”
Overall I don’t think Americans progs, many of whom tend to think “Labour party? That’s all white racist politics, isn’t it, like Reagan Democrats?” should go around minimising Thatcherism (e.g. you seeming to credit her with being a harmless ‘decider’, as per the bit of your quote I bolded) merely because Blair fucked up bigtime in Iraq.
I’m not excusing the man, just putting him into some context for yanks who only see his self-destructive Dubya fixation.
Fort Geek
@PsiFighter37:
At least he’s not duded up like he’s headed out huntin’, like he did at the Auschwitz ceremony.
McJulie
@Frankensteinbeck: I don’t know, I think we did turn a corner, sort of. It’s just that there’s always another corner coming up — in this case, the 2010 midterms were that other corner.
But progress happens that way. Three steps forward, two steps back. Action, reaction.
I think the big liberal disappointment since Obama took office has been that we imagined he would be the complete anti-Bush, that his power to do good would equally match and negate Bush’s power to do bad. But it doesn’t usually work like that, in part, because it’s harder to do good than to do bad. Destruction is easy. Creation is hard.
I tend to see it like this: in general, the Republicans are wrong about everything, and the Democrats are half right. Half right is obviously a huge improvement over all wrong, but it’s still only half right.