Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

All the evidence you'll ever need that Bush's economic policies suck leper donkey dick:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks struggled Monday at the end of the worst June for the S&P 500 and the Dow industrials since the Great Depression, amid rocketing oil prices and ongoing financial market woes.

Consider that a moment. The worst June since the Great Depression. If the neocons want us plunged back into the Middle Ages, they're making progress: we've arrived at the 1930s. Thanks so very fucking much.

Right now, of course, the mainstream media's too fixated on General Clark's perceptive comments about McCain's military service and its applicability to leadership to notice, but it's way past time to start a national dialogue on just how disasterous this regime has been to America. Luckily, the nation's been bitch-slapped on the opinion pages - maybe it'll wake the pseudojournalists from their faint:

Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich has an important op-ed today that strikes some painfully obvious notes, which seem to go entirely overlooked in our political discourse.

Bacevich notes the “considerable legacy” on foreign and national security policy that Bush will soon leave the nation, including an open-ended “global war,” the perception of an “age of terror,” a doctrine of preventive war, a limitless Pentagon budget, and an abandonment of checks and balances when it comes to presidential power and national security. Bacevich
explains:

Bush’s harshest critics, left liberals as well as traditional conservatives, have repeatedly called attention to this record. That criticism has yet to garner mainstream political traction. Throughout the long primary season, even as various contenders in both parties argued endlessly about Iraq, they seemed oblivious to the more fundamental questions raised by the Bush years: whether global war makes sense as an antidote to terror, whether preventive war works, whether the costs of “global leadership” are sustainable, and whether events in Asia rather than the Middle East just might determine the course of the 21st
century.

Now only two candidates remain standing…. The burden of identifying and confronting the Bush legacy necessarily falls on Obama. Although for tactical reasons McCain will distance himself from the president’s record, he largely subscribes to the principles informing Bush’s post-9/11 policies…. The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an
approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping
Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

[snip]

By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the election into a referendum on the current administration’s entire national security legacy. By articulating a set of principles that will safeguard the country’s vital interests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while preserving rather than distorting the Constitution, Obama can persuade Americans to repudiate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.

Not that I'm all that hopeful our MSM assclowns will notice any of that. They'll be too busy bashing Obama for not being "centrist" enough, I'm sure. Remember that in their minute minds, "center" means "not quite all the way to the right, but close."

We've got a Tweedledee press corps, and a Tweedledum administration. It's only appropriate, then, that even one of our federal appeals courts is comparing Bush's bullshit to a Lewis Carroll poem:

When a federal appeals court bench, including one of the circuit’s most conservative jurists, openly mocks the Bush administration, you know the government’s position is pretty weak. (thanks to K.Z. for the tip)

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

With due respect to the court, which made the right call, I don’t think the Bush administration was “suggesting” that everything officials say should be treated as fact, they insist that everything they say must be treated as fact. Fortunately, this appeals court panel recognized the flaws in this approach.

Note to Bush & Co.: Lewis Carroll's stories and poems are fiction, not legal treatises. Repeating made-up shit doesn't make it true. Writing down made-up shit, ditto. And this country has had quite enough smoke blown up its arse, thanks so very much.

I think it's time we start treating the entirety of the last seven years of Bush administration policy fuckery as a piss-poor novel written by some complete hack, throw it out, and start the fuck over. This is no way to run a country.