Even the Surrender Monkey’s cousin, who posed for the banner, can’t believe the idiocy and Bush Derangement Syndrome from Paul Krugman and the NY Times. For people who claim to be progressives and liberals, who look towards the future, they just can’t let go of the past. Nor can they join people here in Reality Land: Forgive and Forget?
Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,†he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.â€
I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.
Can you provide some examples of the “Bush administration’s abuses on environmental policy to voting rights,” Paul? No? Not a one in your deranged article? Ooooooookay!
It’s funny, because this is from a paper (with massively declining off-line readership and stock that is in the junk bond rating arena) that mostly avoided the Clinton impeachment issues prior to being hauled kicking and screaming, and then still had no problem with what Slick Willy did. They still think that the Duke Lacrosse players are guilty. They have avoided much of the negative, and possibly criminal, issues surrounding Charles Rangel. And if it is a Democrat in trouble, the word “Democrat” rarely appears.
At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans†— their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.
Examples, please? None? Not even a link?
The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.
Ah. Politics 101. Thanks for playing, Paul. Will you be saying the same thing about Obama, who, like pretty much every politician, will do the same thing. Such as the mass firings at the Pentagon, based on “policy change, not performance.” And let’s not forget Clinton’s firing of all the U.S. Attorneys in 1993, a massive breach of tradition? All three presidents were well within their rights to do so, BTW.
Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.
Yaaaarh! Halliburton. Say, Paul, can you name the other companies that could do what they did in Iraq? American ones? That’s what I thought.
There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?
Does anyone seriously doubt that Paul Krugman is off his meds, believes that 9/11 was an inside job, actually thinks Pinch Sulzberger is doing a bang up job, and that this will be his last column featuring BDS and discourse that, not that long ago, would belong in the Weekly World News rather then the NY Times?
Related, Michelle Malkin has the AP’s last BDS shot at Bush.
