Things that make me want to sanitize my brain by dunking my head in a bucket of iodine:
As George W. Bush’s public image improves, more former Bush officials are running for office — and are starting to tout their connections to the former president rather than running from them.
Top former Bush advisor Ed Gillespie included photos with his old boss and talked of his work in the White House in the video announcing his Virginia Senate bid on Thursday.
Gillespie isn’t the only Bush alumni looking to be on the ballot this fall. The former Republican National Committee chairman joins a long list already looking to launch their own electoral careers: Alaska Senate candidate Dan Sullivan (R); Elise Stefanik, the current GOP front-runner for retiring Rep. Bill Owens’s (D-N.Y.) seat in upstate New York; North Carolina congressional candidate Taylor Griffin (R) and West Virginia House candidate Charlotte Lane.
Former Bush officials Tom Foley (R) and Asa Hutchinson (R) are also running for governor in Connecticut and Arkansas. Neel Kashkari, who served both the Bush and Obama administration as assistant Treasury secretary running the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is mulling a bid to the GOP nominee for governor in California. One of Gillespie’s little-known Republican primary opponents, Howie Lind, served in Bush’s Department of Defense.
I know it is unrealistic to think that the Republican Party could field a nation of candidates without using anyone who served in the Bush administration, but it galls me that it might be anything but a liability.
There was way too little legal accountability for the various crimes of the Bush administration, and the effort to reach out (remember the vote on the Stimulus?) was met with a petulant stiff-arm. The result is that the Bush Era has begun to take on less of the flavor of criminality and more of mere incompetence. In reality, it was a lethal combination of both, and we should have never let America develop amnesia about that fact.
What’s the statute of limitations on war crimes, torture and crimes against humanity?
One would think it’s quite long.
Depends on whether you’re a developing third world country, or one with nuclear weapons.
What he said.
AG
If you or your friend has their finger on the nuclear launch button, nothing you do is a crime.
When the GWB era starts to look like the good old days, you know that something is wrong.
They’re not the good old days. The DSCC will have reams of material to bury Gillespie and others; the DCCC should have the same. This is just the latest example of self-destructive GOP hubris; I see no way the GOP helps themselves by supporting W.-associated candidates.
The Bush administration made an active habit of promoting people after they committed particularly egregious crimes or fuck-ups. So after a few years of cashing in, why shouldn’t their alums assume Congress is their rightful next home?
Also, too, in the primaries chances are good that stories detailing the Bush cabal’s massive criminality and incompetence – government by cronyism – would be an asset with the base. Really, in the end, loyalty to the tribe seems to be the only thing they genuinely care about. Anything else can be forgiven. Or cheered. A story detailing that, say, someone stole a shitton of money from lib’rul taxpayers or managed to get a whole bunch of dark-skinned people killed is probably worth three points all by itself.
I think this gets it right. Under Bush/Cheney we moved as close in our history to a criminal fascist state as I pray we ever do. War crimes, torture and crony capitalism, as well as stupendous politicization and corruption in the “Justice Dept.” were the order of the day.
Think of 9/11 as our Reichstag Fire and the grotesquely named “PATRIOT Act” as our Enabling Act of March 23, 1933. Picture Cheney as a combination of Goering and Himmler; David Addington as our Reinhard Heydrich; and private “military contractors” like Blackwater as our SS and the picture is almost complete. Consider our invasion of Iraq as the analog to Hitler’s attack on Poland, replete with false charges of threats to the aggressor as the justification for starting a war of choice and (let’s face it) conquest by creating a puppet state ally (Ahmed Chaliby, or so they thought) rather than a “Lebensraum” Generalgouvernement. The only missing piece is concentration camps, with Abu Gharib standing in for our Dachau (though not Auschwitz) and our CIA “dark sites” as kind of an American Gulag.
Of course the comparison is extreme, maybe even obscene, but the enduring scandal and disgrace of the Bush Administration is the fact that it can be made at all. Bush really did preside over war crimes and wholesale violations of the Anti-Torture Act, and he and his fellow co-conspirators will never be called to account for it, at least here in America. But don’t expect any of this gang to be taking foreign vacations anytime soon.
We were so close to seeing Rove indicted. That would have been important.
That’s because Patrick Fitzgerald’s not as good a prosecutor as reputation would have one believe.
Actually, it’s because Mike Allen used his colleague (her name was Novak) to tip Rove’s lawyer that Rove’s grand jury statements would not be protected by Allen’s statements / not revealing sources.
And then he “fixed” his GJ statements on some other pretext.
That was a very big chip Allen got in the Village by getting Rove off.
How would Mike Allen have come into possession of that information? And didn’t Fitzgerald flub by letting Allen get away with “fixing” his statements?
AM I the only guy old enough here to remember Lieutenant Calley?
There are 70 million people — and a lot of them vote — who worship ‘toughness’ and ‘decisiveness’, and believe that, Kant be damned, the Categorical Imperative is either “Just win, baby!” or ‘The ends justify the means.’
We were able to pull off Nuremburg, or the Yamashita Manilla trials, only because those were foreigners in the dock, not Americans.
No, I remember him too.
Do you think there’s 70 million people who understand Kant?
If Kid Koenigsburg is right, they don’t have to understand him — it’s intuitive.
“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
Touche. That said I’m a Rawlsian, as I don’t have absolute power.
Maybe we can get Michael “Heck of a job Brownie” Brown to run for Senate in Louisiana.
He could save money by dismantling all the levees. I am only half joking.
He would flood the field.
All the new republicans are crazy teabaggers. Where else are they going to go for establishment GOP assholes these days? Supplies are low.
I’ll believe being associated with the GWB administration is not a massive liability when I see the polling numbers.
Running against Mark “Me Too” Warner, Gillespie might give him a scare. These guys pretty much are limited to running where Democrats have not reminded voters about what life under Bush was like.
Need to Look Forward! http://youtu.be/0K27oIJlAlA