Rating Bush, on a scale of 1 to 10

Note from Greetings: More nuggets of wisdom from Dan Froomkin. This time in Nieman Watchdog. Why DOESN'T the press ask the Republican candidates what they think about Bush's policies... why didn't they oppose them at the time... did they vote for them, etc? I believe they need to answer now for their actions and inactions over the last 8 years. And why is the press afraid to ask these questions? It doesn't seem to have come up in any of the debates...articles...or anywhere. Was Bush a ghost?

ASK THIS December 13, 2007 Dan Froomkin, www.NiemanWatchdog.org
Republican presidential candidates avoid talking about President Bush, for obvious reasons. But journalists should press them to say what they think of Bush's legacy, which elements of his presidency they would emulate, and which they would reject.

By Dan Froomkinfroomkin@niemanwatchdog.org

The Republican candidates for president rarely mention their party’s deeply unpopular standard-bearer these days, particularly in their debates. In Harry Potter-speak, President Bush has become He Who Must Not Be Named for Republicans.

Bush’s name was uttered only twice during the GOP’s two-hour-long CNN/YouTube debate on Nov. 8. CNN correspondent Carol Costello observed: "It sure seems like Bush has become a four letter word you don't want to mention if you're a Republican running for office. They've taken to talking about him in code -- not daring to say Bush, but not shy about promoting his agenda.”

At the Dec. 9 Univision debate in Miami, the name Bush was mentioned once, by Sen. John McCain. And McCain was referring to the president’s brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida.

At yesterday’s Des Moines Register debate, the Bush name again came up only once. This time, it was former governor Mitt Romney talking about the current president's dad.

The reasoning is obvious. Publicly identifying with Bush is a losing proposition overall, given his dismal job-approval ratings. But attacking the president risks upsetting the Bush loyalists who, while few in number, make up a good chunk of Republican primary voters.

Furthermore, keen political observers have noted that Republicans are very eager not to make 2008 a referendum on Bush, because on those terms, there is little doubt they would lose.

And yet, what the GOP candidates think of the Bush presidency – what they consider its strengths and weaknesses, which elements they would emulate, which they would reject – is crucial information for anyone trying to figure out what they would be like as president themselves. In fact, it’s hard to imagine what could be more important.

As it happens, there is one way to get the candidates to address the Bush legacy in their debates or elsewhere.

And that’s to ask them. Here are some possible questions:
Q. Do you approve of disapprove of the job President Bush is doing?
Q. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Bush as president?
Q. What would you consider some of Bush’s greatest successes?
Q. What would you consider some of Bush’s greatest failures?
Q. Had you been president, would you have invaded Iraq?
Q. If you had to give President Bush a grade for how he managed the war in Iraq, would it be an A, B, C, D or F?
Q. What decisions if any would you have made differently if you had been in charge these past seven years?
Q. How would you assess President Bush’s credibility? High? Low?
Q. Do you approve of the job Vice President Cheney is doing?
Q. Historically, the vice president has been in a more subordinate role. Do you think Bush was overly influenced by his vice president? Would you expect your vice president to serve a similar function?
Q. Historically, a main job of national security adviser has been to serve as an honest broker between other parties, to make sure the president was making decisions based on accurate information, and to present the president with alternative options and dissenting views. By most accounts, Condoleezza Rice was not that sort of national security adviser. Do you think Condoleezza Rice did a good job as national security adviser? Would you expect your national security adviser to operate differently?
Q. Do you feel President Bush has been operating in too much of a bubble?
Q. President Bush rarely ventures out in public, and almost always talks to invitation-only audiences. Historically, presidents have appeared at events that were open to the public, at least in part to make it clear that they had been chosen to represent the whole country, not just those who voted for them. Would you return to this tradition?
Q. Would you continue President Bush’s practice of using signing statements to quietly assert his right to ignore legislation passed by Congress?
Q. President Bush’s lawyers have asserted that there are few Constitutional checks on a wartime president. Do you agree? And would you consider yourself a wartime president?
Q. Do you think President Bush is within his rights to assert executive privilege to block the testimony of White House aides in the investigation of the politically-motivated firings of U.S. Attorneys? Would you do likewise in similar circumstances?
Q. Some critics have accused the Bush White House of being dominated by politics, at the expense of policy. Do you think Bush got the balance between campaigning and governing about right?

Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons - What is a Terrorist?

Note from Greetings: This is a WONDERFUL OpEd from the NY Times. As you read about what lead up to (and followed) the French Revolution, below, does any of it sound a bit too familiar?

October 28, 2007 From the NY Times
By FRANÇOIS FURSTENBERG Op-Ed Contributor

Montreal

MUCH as George W. Bush’s presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11, 2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining Mr. Bush’s presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism.

Soon after the storming of the Bastille, pro-Revolutionary elements came together to form an association that would become known as the Jacobin Club, an umbrella group of politicians, journalists and citizens dedicated to advancing the principles of the Revolution.

The Jacobins shared a defining ideological feature. They divided the world between pro- and anti-Revolutionaries — the defenders of liberty versus its enemies. The French Revolution, as they understood it, was the great event that would determine whether liberty was to prevail on the planet or whether the world would fall back into tyranny and despotism.

The stakes could not be higher, and on these matters there could be no nuance or hesitation. One was either for the Revolution or for tyranny.

By 1792, France was confronting the hostility of neighboring countries, debating how to react. The Jacobins were divided. On one side stood the journalist and political leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, who argued for war.

Brissot understood the war as preventive — “une guerre offensive,” he called it — to defeat the despotic powers of Europe before they could organize their counter-Revolutionary strike. It would not be a war of conquest, as Brissot saw it, but a war “between liberty and tyranny.”

Pro-war Jacobins believed theirs was a mission not for a single nation or even for a single continent. It was, in Brissot’s words, “a crusade for universal liberty.”

Brissot’s opponents were skeptical. “No one likes armed missionaries,” declared Robespierre, with words as apt then as they remain today. Not long after the invasion of Austria, the military tide turned quickly against France.

The United States, France’s “sister republic,” refused to enter the war on France’s side. It was an infuriating show of ingratitude, as the French saw it, coming from a fledgling nation they had magnanimously saved from foreign occupation in a previous war.

Confronted by a monarchical Europe united in opposition to revolutionary France — old Europe, they might have called it — the Jacobins rooted out domestic political dissent. It was the beginning of the period that would become infamous as the Terror.

Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism — Le Patriote Français was the title of Brissot’s newspaper — and to promote their political program through a tightly coordinated network of newspapers, political hacks, pamphleteers and political clubs.

Even the Jacobins’ dress distinguished “true patriots”: those who wore badges of patriotism like the liberty cap on their heads, or the cocarde tricolore (a red, white and blue rosette) on their hats or even on their lapels.

Insisting that their partisan views were identical to the national will, believing that only they could save France from apocalyptic destruction, Jacobins could not conceive of legitimate dissent. Political opponents were treasonous, stabbing France and the Revolution in the back.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”

Robespierre — now firmly committed to the most militant brand of Jacobinism — condemned the “treacherous insinuations” cast by those who questioned “the excessive severity of measures prescribed by the public interest.” He warned his political opponents, “This severity is alarming only for the conspirators, only for the enemies of liberty.” Such measures, then as now, were undertaken to protect the nation — indeed, to protect liberty itself.

If the French Terror had a slogan, it was that attributed to the great orator Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” Saint-Just’s pithy phrase (like President Bush’s variant, “We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself”) could serve as the very antithesis of the Western liberal tradition.

On this principle, the Terror demonized its political opponents, imprisoned suspected enemies without trial and eventually sent thousands to the guillotine. All of these actions emerged from the Jacobin worldview that the enemies of liberty deserved no rights.

Though it has been a topic of much attention in recent years, the origin of the term “terrorist” has gone largely unnoticed by politicians and pundits alike. The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor of course to “Islamofascism.”

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.

François Furstenberg, a professor of history at the University of Montreal, is the author of "In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation."Op-Ed Contributor

Cheney's Secret Escalation Plan?

Note from Greetings: Scary stuff....go to Froomkin's website for the entire article. This is an excerpt. I recommend it anyway, as well as his daily blog for the Washington Post. I know many of you read it. However, I hope the press asks questions THIS time around, and the public discusses it long before we find ourselves involved in a 2nd war.

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.comFriday, August 10, 2007; 1:44 PM
for entire article, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/08/10/BL2007081001161.html

At yesterday's press conference, President Bush announced that he had put Iran on notice: "One of the main reasons that I asked [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan] Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq was to send the message that there will be consequences for people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs [improvised explosive devices] that kill Americans in Iraq."

Describing Iran as "a very troubling nation right now," largely because of its nuclear program, Bush warned its leaders that "when we catch you playing a non-constructive role [in Iraq] there will be a price to pay."
White House Watch

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So what price is Bush prepared to exact? Is this saber-rattling a harbinger of war? And perhaps most to the point: What is Vice President Cheney up to?

Warren P. Strobel, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef write for McClatchy Newspapers today that "the president's top aides have been engaged in an intense internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy. . . .

"Cheney, who's long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

"The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly about internal government deliberations. . . .

"Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokeswoman, said only that 'the vice president is right where the president is' on Iran policy."

As the McClatchy reporters point out: "The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media. It isn't clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.

"Nor is it clear from the evidence the administration has presented whether Iran, which has long-standing ties to several Iraqi Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Badr Organization, which is allied with the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is a major cause of the anti-American and sectarian violence in Iraq or merely one of many. At other times, administration officials have blamed the Sunni Muslim group al Qaida in Iraq for much of the violence."

for rest of article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/08/10/BL2007081001161.html