bush

High Bribery?

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Maybe, maybe not.
But in whose pocket is this money ending up:

In fact, however, a considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers.

Shouldn’t there be some public accounting of how this money, or any foreign aid, is being used?
dear leader and his little helpers would argue that once they have taken it from us or borrowed it from the Chinese we have no right to know. This is, of course, wrong. A government doing the people’s business must be completely transparent!

Via Danger Room.

Just Say No!

This entry was posted in bush bush administration Domestic Terrorism Government Iraq US Foreign Policy US Politics War on Terrorism World Affairs on by

It is time for congress to just say no to the misadministration’s request:

The Bush administration has earlier this year said it would need $147.5 billion for fiscal 2008, but the estimates have been raised by another $47 billion. This request is in addition to the Pentagon’s nearly half-trillion annual budget, which omits war spending but covers routine costs, including training, payrolls and weapons procurement.

If congress doesn’t do its job then, as we fire the congress critters, we should petition the bushies Chinese financiers to put an end to the waste.

Brin on bush’s Accomplishments

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David Brin on the accomplishments of the bush administration::

Our topic is the number one accomplishment of the George W. Bush administration. Not the record deficits, or stagnant science, or rampant theft, or even a legacy of nation-dividing Culture War. Rather, it is something that until a few years ago seemed downright impossible — bringing low the finest and most professional national military the world has ever seen.

Read the rest. It is quite good and thought provoking.
For your leisure time I highly recommend Brin’s Uplift series! Read his more recent The Kiln People only if you become a Brin completist.

Via Robert Farley.

What, tenet Should Have Resigned?

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Nora Ephron is right that we set our expectations too high if we expect government officials to resign as a matter of principle:

The notion that George Tenet — or Colin Powell, to take another example of a person we keep asking this question about — would have resigned just because he knew that the administration was lying about weapons of mass destruction, is truly laughable. …
…
We have such affection for the idea that people will quit on a matter of principle that it’s almost sweet. We believe that they quit for moral reasons, that they quit because they want to take a stand against impropriety, that they quit, willingly quit, because they know right from wrong. Once again, let me say this: no one quits.

This administration doesn’t even fire people until the last ounce of incompetence is wrung out of them.*
Unfortunately she becomes an apologist for the bush war when she says:

And in fairness to Tenet and Powell, what’s clear now wasn’t so clear back in the day. That image of the two of them at the United Nations is today such an indelible marker on the road to war. But they couldn’t have known at that time that the war would be such an unmitigated disaster; they surely couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t even be a July 4th sparkler found in all of Iraq;

Sure, the full scope of the bush administration’s incompetence was not yet obvious but, yes, they should have known the sparkler bit. That was tenet’s job….
More importantly even if they had found sparklers that would not have provided a moral excuse for the invasion, for the wasted Iraqi and American lives.

*Given how many of the incompetents are left this is a truly depressing thought.