Bush Links Faith and Agenda In Speech to Broadcast Group

By: Dana Milbank  

In recent speeches, Bush has read passages from Isaiah and from the hymn "How Great Thou Art". At last week's prayer breakfast, he said that when he is told by citizens that they are praying for him, he tells them "It is the greatest gift you can give anybody, is to pray on their behalf." Today, Bush thanked his listeners for their prayers, suggesting he would need them in the days ahead. "Let us pray for strength equal to our tasks", he said.

J. Mark Horst, who has a radio ministry in Breezewood, PA, said faith is what makes Bush propose seemingly unreachable goals and defy odds to reach them. "As Christians, we're commanded to be of strong courage", Horst said. "He's taking what he reads in the Word and saying: 'This is what I believe, and I'm going to go for it.'"

By: P.M. Carpenter  

Should your social history recall be a bit rusty, not to worry, for the Bush administration is doing its damnedest to recreate America in the image of Grover Cleveland. The Boy King hasn't read of, and doesn't understand the lessons of, the past, so he admires it immensely. His 2004 budget plan - which, with Republican control of both houses, is likely to survive largely intact - is a reactionary blueprint for the reconstruction of Gilded Age social brutality.

Combined with the effects of 2001's tax cuts, Bush proposes slashing nearly $3 trillion from federal revenues over the next 10 years. Since the mother lode of those lost revenues will wind up in fat-cat bank accounts, tax-free inheritances, and gauche consumption, someone else must sacrifice for Croesus's good. According to compassionate conservative doctrine, that someone else is properly the poor - and anyone else dangling below the plutocratic poverty line - as the President's budget makes clear.

By: Richard Reeves  

But I did realize that I have become just another enemy or warrior in the class wars dividing America these days. The warrior in the White House now, a graduate of both Yale and Harvard Business School, says that people like me are attacking tax breaks for the rich because we are just economic class warriors who resent and envy anyone with more money than we have.

But the President and his soldiers are no different. They are busily waging cultural and intellectual class war, perhaps resenting and envying anyone with more ideas and fewer repressions than they have - or anyone who questions the dumbing-down of America.

But what does that matter? If you take a broader, dispassionate view of these things, you realize that the Bush side sees no need for class war because they have already won and are tired of rearguard skirmishes with losers on the West Side and the beach...

George W. Bush just can't stop pushing more harmful tax cuts for the rich.

Robert S. McIntyre  

If, like our President and Vice President, you strongly believe that cutting taxes leads to higher tax revenues, the past year and a half must have been very disappointing. Despite the huge tax cut enacted in the spring of 2001, personal income-tax collections have plummeted since George W. Bush took office, dropping from 10.1% of the economy in fiscal 2000 to 9.6% in fiscal 2001 to only 8% in fiscal 2002. But, sadly, dashed hopes haven't led to second thoughts. On the contrary, Bush has decided that our economy is lagging because his 2001 tax cut simply wasn't big enough. So now he wants to increase it - by more than half.

Bush's original 2001 tax-cut plan will cost $1.35 trillion over this decade, or $1.6 trillion including interest. The President puts the 10-year price tag on his new tax-cut package at another $674 billion - $900 billion with interest. That, plus Bush's $114 billion in corporate tax cuts enacted a year ago, brings his hoped-for tax cuts to a total of $2.6 trillion - so far. Absent a supply-side miracle, Bush seems willing to condemn our country to huge budget deficits forever as long as taxes on the best-off Americans go down.

"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka: 'Christians', and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or 'PP's'... What has allowed so many PP's to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!"

- Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse Five

By: punpirate  

Your mission, should you accept it, is to ask your representative why he or she could not resist the illegitimate power of George W. Bush, could not vote for common sense and vote against war, and would not vote against everything and anything George W. Bush has ever suggested. It should not take an international catastrophe for us to find the national political will to deny George W. Bush his ambitions, for power, for money, for the transformation of our democracy into a fascism last defined by Mussolini (the merger of corporation and state).

It's important to remember: George W. Bush is a small man made larger by the magnification of office and by the press, and only the people can cut him down to his actual size. Your mission, should you accept it, is to drive from office Bush and the people who are Bush's enablers, his magnifiers, the people who make power their own for their own purposes, rather than for yours, which true democracy demands for the people. The insanity can stop, in 2004.

"It is quite funny how ChevronLeeza and the rest of the 'educated' Bush crew keep yelping at Europe to stop acting like pre-WWII appeasers of the Nazis. They aren't. They are taking a stand against against a hegemonic nation (sector) that wants an unneeded war to bolster its position of power. Gee, that is quite the opposite of what they did during the rise of Hitler. Good for them. Saddam is a sick and pathetic figure, but he is not the only one in this story and he is definitely not the aggressor."

- Hostage, in the Smirking Chimp forum

"Ashcroft raised the nation's terror alert from yellow to orange. Or as they call it when they explain it to Bush - changing from Bert to Ernie."

- Conan

By: Stephen V. Kane  

Few have said it yet. Somebody needs to. We are on the verge of WWIII.

The signs are here. Armies massing in a tinderbox around the oil fields of the Mideast. Armies massing on the India-Pakistan border, another flash point in the world. Amidst a war of words that has ended in war before, the two sides are sending each other's diplomats home. North Korea is busily turning its nuclear facilities to the sincere task of creating enriched uranium for nuclear missiles. America the just has seen the rise to power of a dangerously misdirected mind, amidst an election sham, while U.S. Senate power balance changes due to airplanes falling out of the sky, electronic ballot machines whose code is posted on unsecured servers, and vituperative character attacks against decent men and women seeking office for the good of the majority. That government has now turned bellicose, a dangerous development considering the awesome military hardware it commands.

By: Mary McGrory  

Fresh from his Broadway triumph - his indictment of Iraq at the United Nations - Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was pelted with flowers - and questions about our incomprehensible policy on North Korea. Even the most persuasive man on the planet cannot sell this mix of huffiness and obtuseness, which Sen. John Kerry, in an excess of charity, called "fuzzy".

President Bush is casual about inconsistencies. His policies are highly personal and shamelessly political. On North Korea, he has outdone himself. He insists that the problem of an outlaw dictatorship that has gone nuclear with a vengeance can be solved with diplomacy - but he refuses to talk to North Koreans. They are so desperate for dialogue that they dispatched two envoys to New Mexico to talk to an American they knew would speak to them, Bill Richardson, the new governor of his state and Clinton's U.N. ambassador.

Bush's paper-thin evidence to justify a war has fallen apart.

By: Robert Scheer  

From the beginning, the 9/11 attacks that horrified the world have been cynically exploited by this administration as a golden opportunity to settle an old Bush family score with Hussein. Even as we went justifiably to war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the White House kept inexplicably hinting that Iraq would be next. But why? After all, Iraq's arsenal, eviscerated by war, inspections, and bombing raids, was not a pressing threat.

One answer is that Hussein, hunkered down in Baghdad, was a handy stand-in for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, both of whom have not been brought to account as promised by George W. Bush. This was especially convenient for a powerful clique of White House "chicken hawks" - so called because they are quick to support war but managed to avoid service themselves - who were eager to dust off a decade-old plan to seize Iraq as the first step in redrawing the map of the Middle East and, incidentally, gaining control of its oil.

Depressing as it is to acknowledge, it now seems clear we are witnessing the tantrum of a woefully untutored and inexperienced President whose willfulness rises in direct proportion to his inability to comprehend a world too complex for his grasp.

By: Mark Benjamin  

"The department's handling of this matter has only lent credence to suggestions that this administration is intent on using the war on terrorism as a partisan political tool and the Justice Department is waiting to spring this bill on the Congress when the nation once again has endured a terrorist attack or is in the midst of war", wrote House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member John Conyers, D-MI.

Justice Department officials didn't return calls seeking comment Monday.

Civil libertarians also blasted the substance of the draft as a serious erosion of constitutional guarantees. The bill has a series of aggressive new provisions, according to reviews by civil libertarians.

By: Thomas Oliphant  

The successful program her husband promoted in the 90's to help localities hire more officers would be all but eliminated. The national program that assists local fire departments would be cut in half. The administration trumpets a "new" proposal to combine federal law enforcement assistance money into one of those block grants conservatives love, hiding the fact that the proposed grant contains well over a half-billion dollars less than what's in the programs it would replace. In all, Clinton estimates the cost at some 4,000 cops not hired nationally, plus untold thousands of firefighters. Clinton proposes that all these federal cutbacks be rejected, a minimalist idea that at least avoids harm.

But it also helps to remember that this shell game is being played while the worst fiscal crisis in 60 years is creating a hole that is certain to exceed $100 billion in state and local budgets, for which law enforcement will suffer its share of further cutbacks. And this limited discussion doesn't cover vital matters like poorly guarded ports, the unfunded mandate on state labs because of chemical and biological scares, and the impact on local law enforcement of reserve call-ups for war.

It is as if the administration had announced a greater danger of attack and the President had announced that in response he was reducing our preparedness. There's a word for this - nuts.

By: Paul Krugman  

George W. Bush's admirers often describe his stand against Saddam Hussein as "Churchillian". Yet his speeches about Iraq - and for that matter about everything else - have been notably lacking in promises of blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Has there ever before been a leader who combined so much martial rhetoric with so few calls for sacrifice?

Or to put it a bit differently: Is Mr. Bush, for all his tough talk, unwilling to admit that going to war involves some hard choices? Unfortunately, that would be all too consistent with his governing style. And though you don't hear much about it in the U.S. media, a lack of faith in Mr. Bush's staying power - a fear that he will wimp out in the aftermath of war, that he won't do what is needed to rebuild Iraq - is a large factor in the growing rift between Europe and the United States.

By: Bryan Zepp Jamieson  

There was another oddity about the New Years' celebration in San Francisco. This lunar year coming up is known throughout most of the world as the "Year of the Ram". But not in San Francisco, where the parade organizers are referring to it as the "Year of the Sheep". Seems that one of the parades' main sponsors, the Ford Motor Company, didn't like the prominent display of the word "Ram". They were afraid that it would put everyone in mind of a competitor's hyperadrenal pickup truck, instead of their own hyperadrenal pickup truck.

Well, if the folks celebrating the New Year aren't upset, then it's certainly not a problem for me. Turns out it isn't even the first time this has happened. A few (Chinese) years ago, they decided the "Year of the Rat" should, at Disney's request, be called the "Year of the Mouse". Again, same ideogram for both. But one thing that Disney and I have in common is that we can discern substantial differences between a rat and a mouse. With my glasses on, I can tell the difference from forty feet away. Maybe China has hell'a big mice. Or maybe their rats are real small and docile. Chinese zoology is starting to strike me as being a bit slap-dash. I bet teaching evolution is not easy there. Not to mention bovine husbandry.

Editorial from:  

The government is fast running out of money to meet its bills. Treasury officials warn that the nation will bang up against the legal debt ceiling of $6.4 trillion before the end of this month. There is little doubt Congress will back into its duty and vote to raise the debt limit, even as President Bush blithely compounds the deficits deep into the decade with new untax-and-spend stratagems. But the lawmakers' partisan shucking of responsibility for the rising tide of red ink promises to be exquisitely hypocritical this time around.

While much of the government has been getting ready for a war whose price tag has not been included in the presidential budget, the House Republican leaders quietly reinforced their political defenses. They passed a rule letting lawmakers raise the debt ceiling automatically with each spending resolution. Constituents can only wish their ATM's were so forgiving.

By: Rich Procter  

We've got to invade Iraq! They're in bed with al-Qaeda! They're not? Ahhhhh... they've got atomic weapons! They don't? Ahhhhh... they won't let U.N. weapons inspectors in! They will? Ahhhhh... they're restarting their atomic energy program, to make nuclear weapons! Ooops! That's North Korea! Ahhhhhh...

This is the most insane idea of all. Who wants this war? Our allies? Nope. The American people? I don't think so. A small group of chickenhawk think-tank ideologues eager to try out their bizarre cocktail party theories? Like how people in the Middle East are going to embrace western-style Democracy after we rain fiery death down on innocent civilians in a Dresden-style bombing of Baghdad, and use "tactical nuclear weapons" to get at those poison gas bunkers?

What's most horrifying about all this is that, if every calamitous situation Bush has created goes from horrible to catastrophic, his solutions are going to be exactly the same. The man lives in an echo chamber of right-wing wishful thinkers telling him how right he is, and how his mobius-strip logic is infallible. Too bad reality doesn't agree with him.

By: Dennis Rahkonen  

I won't mince words. George Bush is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein, and consequently more "evil" as well.

While the latter is a thoroughly unsavory fellow, and a harsh dictator, he's rationally bound by the constraints of reality, as evidenced by Iraq's obvious lack of external harm to anyone during the past decade. It wasn't true back in the Cold War when a similar cry was raised against the Russians, and "The Iraqis are coming!" is just so much propagandistic nonsense now.

Bush, however, disregards objective circumstances - and the international community's overwhelming will - with that complete contempt that's always been shown by abject minions of special-interest avarice throughout history. Never mind the peasants, the workers, the children innocently playing when the bombs begin to fall. Forget washerwomen hanging their clothes, or the elderly musing in the warming sun.

Editorial from:  

The homeland security law enacted last year contains a miserable provision that weakens important federal regulation and public access to information. Congress should act soon to repair the damage.

The collective impact will be to put in the hands of a regulated party the power, simply by turning over information, to shield that information from legitimate law enforcement purposes and from public disclosure. Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) and Robert F. Bennett (R-UT) had negotiated a compromise that would accomplish the reasonable purpose without such broad harmful effects. It should be restored before the government finds its hands tied - and the public finds itself out of the loop - on important regulatory matters.

"I have to make sure that he has time to do all that he needs to do and enough time to eat, sleep, and be merry so he can be in the frame of mind to make the right decisions."

- White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, in the Kansas City Star, Feb. 3, 2003

Editorial from:  

At next year's projected level, Washington will be spending nearly as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. With Al Qaeda not yet defeated, war looming with Iraq and tensions mounting with North Korea, America obviously needs to spend generously on defense. The armed forces deserve decent pay, up-to-date ships, planes and tanks, and cutting-edge technologies designed to minimize vulnerability and assure battlefield superiority. But all of that can be had for tens of billions of dollars less than what President Bush proposes.

The $15 billion increase in next year's Pentagon budget is almost equal to the entire increase proposed for domestic discretionary spending. It's a bonanza for defense contractors, a wish list come true for the military services, and a costly extravagance for a nation sorely in need of more federal spending on education, health, and other concerns.

"Christianity... [has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man... Rogueries, absurdities, and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and imposters led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus."

- Thomas Jefferson

From:  

We skipped a week last week, so there's quite a mishmash of idiocy to be found in this week's Top Ten. First place was an easy choice - Bill O'Reilly's unbelievably hypocritical performance on The O'Reilly Factor last week propels him straight to the top. Meanwhile, Tom DeLay (2) has a new take on racial quotas, Clayton Floyd (3) hates peace, Dick Cheney (4) has got his head in the sand, and Mark Sanford (5) is a chickenhawk extraordinaire. Two weeks ago you saw the State of the Union speech, but what's the real state of the union? Well George W. Bush is in sixth place, and if his portrayal of himself as a compassionate warmongering bleeding-heart liberal conservative is accurate, it ain't up to much (special bonus: the graphic for last week's nonexistent Top Ten). Elsewhere, Laura Bush (7) is scared of poetry, Ari Fleischer thinks that Nelson Mandela is a "do-nothing", and Jim Saxton (10) has come up with a great way to stick it to the French.

"A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness."

- Gee Dubya Bush, Sept. 18, 2000

By: Luke Harding  

If Colin Powell were to visit the shabby military compound at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain, he might be in for an unpleasant surprise. The U.S. Secretary of State last week confidently described the compound in north-eastern Iraq - run by an Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam - as a "terrorist chemicals and poisons factory".

Yesterday, however, it emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind - more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere - only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.

By: Paul Corrigan  

The Bush proposal to eliminate the "double taxation" of dividends is the key component in the tax package sent to Congress by the administration. The administration's political spin is that the proposed legislation will unleash billions of dollars of retained corporate earnings into the economy. Critics of the proposal have compared the legislation to the bursting of a dam: some people will be helped, but the majority will be hurt. Don't kid yourself that the administration or our representatives on Capital Hill have thought out the ramifications of the program on the lives of American citizens. The Bush administration is oblivious to the adverse ramifications of the proposed legislation. The cowboy in Bush chooses a course of action and then searches for a marketing spin to justify the action.

If enacted in its present form, the administration's proposal to eliminate double taxation of corporate dividends would have an adverse impact on the federal and state program that is responsible for virtually all of the affordable rental housing stock built or rehabilitated in the United States since 1987...

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