McCain and the Abramoff Affair

Sure, John McCain investigated and called to task a number of figures involved in the Abramoff Indian gaming scandal that stole $80 million from the tribes. Not Ralph Reed, however. Quaintly, CNN hired Reed as political commentator. That might end up being quite fortunate for McCain. (via BookForum).

Functionaries, consultants, lawyers and lobbyists testified before McCain's committee. Yet Reed—like Grover Norquist whose Americans for Tax Reform served as a conduit for more than $1 million in Indian gaming money for Abramoff—was never called to testify.

McCain's reluctance to get all the way to the bottom of the scandal is understandable. The millions Abramoff and his associates were donating to the Republican Party was building the permanent majority that Texas Congressman Tom DeLay promised would be paid for by lobbyists.

While John McCain is running for president on his success in pursuing Jack Abramoff, some reporter will inevitably ask him why he failed to pursue big funders who were considered too powerful to challenge.

Don't expect to hear Ralph Reed raise that question as a news analyst for "the most trusted name in news."

Details here.

Stealing Elections Handbook

A nifty little guide from Foreign Policy on how to steal elections, if you're in that game. And remember,

‘Only amateurs steal an election on election day'

Kiwi Berries

Undividing?

Jonathan Raban (via Sullivan):

...there is one major social divide, almost as important in its way as race itself, that Obama has already proved he can bridge, though the significance of his success has gone largely unnoticed. To see it clearly, you have to look closely at the results of the Nevada caucuses, which Obama narrowly lost to Clinton because he failed to carry Clark County, site of Nevada's only big metropolitan city, Las Vegas, with its enormous population of Hispanic voters. But in more rural counties he beat Clinton decisively - 63% to her 37% in Elko, 51% to 34% in Humboldt, 50% to 40% in Washoe (the missing percentages belong to John Edwards). I've been to those counties, their miles of lonely roads where you can drive for half an hour before encountering another vehicle, their scattered ranches and isolated towns, their seasonal creeks marked by lines of spindly cottonwood trees, the overwhelmingly Caucasian cast of their people. Out there in the mountains, sagebrush and high desert, Obama carried the day by far greater margins than his overall loss of the popular vote to Clinton across the state, and came out of the caucuses with one more delegate than she did.

Remember that in 2004 every American city with a population over 500,000 voted Democrat, and the Republicans won by taking the countryside and the outer suburbs. The blue state/red state division is better expressed in terms of the persistent conflicts between the big cities and their rural hinterlands, over land use, water rights and environmental, class and cultural issues. Red states are simply those where the country can outvote the urban centres, while in blue states the opposite is true. The perception that America has liberal coasts and a conservative interior merely reflects the fact that the coastal states are home to the largest metropolitan areas with the most electoral muscle. Last time around, for instance, Bush easily won the heartland state of Missouri, but was as crushingly defeated by Kerry in St Louis as he was in the cities of New York, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.

So Obama's victory over Clinton in rural Nevada says something important about his ability as the apostle of national reconciliation. To win against Clinton in Elko County (black population: 0.8%), he had to convert not only white Democrats, but a large number of independents and people who had voted Republican until caucus day; a feat he pulled off with dazzling facility. Any Democrat nominee who can do that, deep in Republican country, is likely to gain the presidency; and Obama has proved that he can. Clinton, laden with the moral, cultural and political baggage of the 1990s, is likely to fare as badly in Elko County as Kerry did in 2004, when he collected just 20% of the vote.

The entire article is great.

Dreadful Politics

It's depressing to see John Edwards bow out of the race for the Democratic nomination. Just a couple of months ago, this presidential campaign season looked exciting. There were good candidates on the Democratic side speaking to serious issues. With the collection of fanatical yahoos on the Republican side, a Democratic president looked assured. Foreign commentators were equally relieved. Spiegel stumbled over itself in joy that American democracy did indeed still seem to work. After eight years of the Bush Administration, the worst and most comprehensively damaging presidency in the history of the United States, it seemed that we were awakening from our dogmatic slumber... or, rather, stupor. Even as we sit here twiddling thumbs, Judge Mukasey continues typically Bushian evasive maneuvers on a most basic of moral questions. And the policies of this president continue the slow slide towards catastrophic failure (see here for the latest on Afghanistan... or open pretty much any reputable newspaper). The Republican Party was fundamentally bankrupt. The Democratic Party through it all was conspicuous in its absence. Lies, deceit, secrecy, terror, authoritarianism, immorality, idiocy, greed, fanaticism,.... But finally - finally! - we were going to do something.

I might be mistaken, but I now sense dread creeping back into the picture. As of today at least, it appears that we'll have a McCain vs. Clinton race for the presidency. Flip a coin. It just doesn't matter all that much. As Dennis Perrin puts it,

...Two nearly identical choices for imperial manager, the one slight difference being that McCain says he's opposed to torture, while Hillary must wait to check wind velocity and direction. I can see the liberals twisting themselves into numerous knots trying to justify a Hillary vote over McCain, assuring each other that it's the right thing to do, and of course reaching back to Bill's criminal years for inspiration. You mules better hope that Saint Obama gets the nod instead. At least with him, the fantasy is easier to pull off. Change! Hope! Stardust! Ponies! If I ruled the world . . .

"Saint Obama," perhaps. As everyone complains, Obama is short on details and long on rhetoric (but what rhetoric!). Look, campaigns aren't about making particularly detailed policy proposals. Every campaign knows this. All that does is leave your candidacy open to attack by your opponents. Every genuine policy option in real life comes with its detractors. The only real option in a campaign is to walk a thin line between promising and hopeful rhetoric and just enough tread on proposals to give them political traction. In my view, Obama has run a smart campaign. He certainly has grassroots support. It's genuine. And, granting that the term "change" is meaningless (change can be positive or negative, backwards or forwards, after all), Obama nonetheless represents the only possible choice we have for a presidency of decency and intelligence with a chance at some needed progressive policies.

McCain is right on two things that I can think of: torture is wrong, and we need campaign finance reform. But, regarding the former, it's more a sign of the moral corruption of our current president and his party and ideologues that we have to say that torture is wrong. It's simply a sign of our current debasement, a predicament that this president has gotten us into. And campaign finance reform? No doubt. But this message also gives McCain good reason to be tight-lipped about the financing of his own presidential campaign. But McCain - regardless of what some of the shrieking pundits say - is fundamentally conservative. This is another matter of perspective - many on the right have driven the country past a reasonable conservatism, thus making McCain appear rather liberal by comparison. Yet, McCain is fundamentally for the Iraq War, which is at the very core of our current condition, suggesting even that it could last 100 years. War is the health of the state, after all. With a McCain presidency, we might have a relatively decent guy, but we'll also have an eternally conservative judicial branch, continuing a tradition of failure that President Bush has instigated with his atrocious choices of judges and his operation of the Justice Department.

McCain is establishment. So is Hillary Clinton. What does this mean? It means that a collection of ideas attached to particular fixed interests will be continued into the ground when they have actually already run their course and desperately need reconstruction. These ideas extend from war to economy, education to business, crime to disease. On these issues there's really very little difference between Clinton and McCain.

So, what? In the general election, McCain will defeat Clinton. In the general election, Obama can defeat McCain. We've seen that the Democrats are fully capable of shooting themselves in the head. Much as I'd also like to see a woman as president, you'd have to be an idiot now to be a Democratic supporter of Clinton over Obama. The bright spot is that the gap between Clinton and Obama in national polls is slowly closing. The dread is that we'll end up with McCain vs. Clinton. What the latter scenario would do to our political hope is unthinkable.
...

And yes, I've thought about this:

As Whiskey Fire puts it so pithily:

Anyway, the reason McCain is the GOP nominee is that they have no one else.

And the reason they have no one else? Because they got nothing.

The GOP is running on fumes, and not in their usual sense, where they're huffing straight from the propane tank.

In a followup post, Whiskey Fire notes the recent uptick in violence in Iraq and what it may auger for the candidacy of the lesser of several evils:

St. John McCain has made his enthusiasm for The Surge the centerpiece of his argument about why he should be Grand Moff CIC. This strikes me as risky -- it's putting all his eggs in one basket, and it's not even his basket. The people holding it are the Iraqis, and if they want to ramp up their civil war, they will, and all the preznit's horses and all the preznit's men won't be able to keep them from blowing the shit out of each other. Then McCain will have egg on his face. Also there will be many, many dead people.

Also Teh Surge! ends in the summer. Right before the September-November campaign season gets going. A hell of a time to be running on War Forever, as McCain is doing.

So he's in trouble. Of course the GOP candidate was always going to be a total fucknozzle, anyhow.

I still think McCain is the one fucknozzle who beats Hillary in the general election. Clinton's own record on the war is simply too murky.
...
There's also this crucial element - the youth vote and who gets them going (via Peter Levine):

UPDATE (2 Feb. 2008):

Where Phronesisaical goes, Foreign Policy Passport follows.

A Little SOTU Reality Check

Last night in Bush's State of the Union address, he gave the impression once again that "The Surge" has achieved a certain level of peace and prosperity in Iraq. Given that this president has a reputation for deceit in regard to failures and embellishment in regard to successes, it pays to ask what Iraqis in Iraq have to say about such claims. Dahr Jamail does just that in this TomDispatch piece.

"What kind of normal life can you live when you have to bid farewell to your family each time you go out to buy bread because you don't know if you are going to see them again? What is a normal life to Mr. Bush? If we're lucky, we get a few hours of electricity a day, barely enough drinking water, no health care, no jobs to feed our kids…

"Little teenage girls are given away in marriage because their families can't protect them from militias and troops during raids. Women cannot move unescorted anymore. What kind of educations are our children getting at universities where 60% of the prominent faculty members have been driven out of their jobs -- killed or forced to leave the country by government militias? Is it normal that areas [on the outskirts of Baghdad] like Saidiya and Arab Jubour are bombed because the occupation forces are afraid to enter the areas for fear of the resistance? It is always easier to control ghost cities. It becomes very peaceful without the people."

More here.

UPDATE:

Check out this more eloquent assessment too (via Wolcott):

It was a night of vintage George W. Bush -- which is to say he was arrogant, alarmist, petty, presumptuous, preposterous, predictable, pompous, bombastic, belligerent, bellicose, dogmatic, defensive, delusional, disingenuous, duplicitous, self-righteous, swaggering, stammering, smug, smarmy, irrational, illogical, impervious, insincere, manipulative, maudlin, far-fetched, taunting, threatening, intellectually bankrupt, ethically bereft, factually impoverished, jingoistic and awful. He gave a performance for the ages and the ages will neither forgive nor forget him for it.

On the up side, so what? There's no longer any need to go after this clown on a lie-by-lie basis. Everyone know he's a joke. Everyone knows there's no salvaging his...

Paw Paw

Our Candidates: Mike Huckabee

Mitt Romney's failure to eat fried chicken with the skin on is nothing short of blasphemy here in the South, according to GOP rival Mike Huckabee.

Romney, of Massachusetts, dug into a piece fried chicken at KFC while campaigning in Lutz, Florida on Saturday, but not before peeling off what most would consider the best part — the crispy skin.

Admittedly, KFC's chicken doesn't exactly stack up against the delectable kind that comes out of deep fryers in kitchens around the South, and Romney said he was looking for the healthiest option available to him for lunch.

Huckabee, looking ahead to a flotilla of southern states up for grabs on Super Tuesday, was told about the move by a reporter here in the Florida panhandle.

"I can tell you this," he said, "any Southerner knows if you don’t eat the skin don’t bother calling it fried chicken."

"So that's good. I'm glad that he did that, because that means I'm going to win Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma … all these great Southern states that understand the best part of fried chicken is the skin, if you're going to eat it that way."

Our Candidates: John McCain

Crist was asked if McCain used that tenacious, unyielding persistence in seeking the guv’s endorsement.

“Well, not that much,” Crist began answering.

“It was just waterboarding,” McCain interjected.

Double Standard Dictatorships

Photo: Larry Burrows / Getty Images

The death of Indonesia's former dictator, Suharto, yesterday is another reminder of the brutality of the twentieth century and how the West picks and chooses its megalomaniacs. Suharto is another case of the West - particularly the U.S. - supporting a dictator in the face of full evidence of crimes against humanity. (see also obituaries here and here).

The Suharto family was and continues to be notoriously corrupt, having siphoned international funds intended for humanitarian relief, to name but one common instance. Worse, obviously, is that Suharto committed one of the worst genocides of the last century. During the 1960s, he led the massacres and tortures of an estimated 600,000 to over 1 million Indonesians, mainly suspected communists and Islamists. Another 200,000 were killed in East Timor from the mid-1970s to 1999, another 100,000 in West Papua, and an estimated 15,000 in Aceh. Throughout it all, the support of the United States, Britain, Australia, and other countries was unbending. John Pilger writes,

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto's takeover in 1965-6 as "the model operation" for the US-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list" of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, BBC south-east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. "British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time ... There was a deal, you see."

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia". In November 1967 the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto's US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on "a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened". Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil".

Photo: AP

The ubiquitous Henry Kissinger was yet again at the heart of human rights violations.

Suharto gained his biggest reward for destroying the Indonesian left when he invaded East Timor in December 1975, only a day after the US president, Gerald Ford, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had dined with him.

As secret documents obtained in 2001 by the independent Washington-based National Security Archive would reveal, Suharto asked for US "understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action". In reply, Ford told Suharto: "We will understand and will not press you on the issue."

With Suharto's death, amidst the grotesque international eulogies from foreign leaders, a few journalists have thought to revisit the stories of those who suffered under the dictator.

In recent interviews around the city of Blitar, a former communist stronghold, survivors of the atrocities recounted a life on the run, living in caves, being beaten and beheadings of other captives.

"I am disappointed. I saw great cruelties and am lucky I am not dead," said Talam, whose simple two-room home overlooks a valley dotted with overgrown mass graves.

Dragging on a clove-cigarette with trembling hands, he described how he was detained by police but escaped. He stumbled across dead bodies in shallow graves and slept in dank caves with hundreds of others, eating what the jungle had to offer for 50 days, until being picked up.

Talam, a former member of a left-wing union for park rangers, said he was tortured and beaten repeatedly during interrogations while detained on remote Buru island, where about 12,000 political prisoners were held, 1,100 miles east of the capital, Jakarta. "Why has no one been put on trial?" he asked.

In fact, the dark era remains largely unknown to many Indonesians. Those believed responsible still wield influence in politics and the courts. Details of the communist purge are banned from school books, and the military has blocked efforts by relatives to unearth mass graves....

Compare Suharto to, say, Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein, both considered to be the epitome of evil by the civilized world. One could be forgiven for mistaking evil as a relative term of economics and geopolitics, rather than morality.

The Fed's Secret Weapon

The story of Jérôme Kerviel becomes more fascinating by the day. Kerviel is the 31-year-old French trader for Société Générale who, it was first claimed, lost $6 billion through secret stock trades. Despite the knee-jerk reaction of some of the usual suspects on the US right claiming that "the French" were now trying to destroy the American economy, there's now talk of Kerviel actually helping to avert global recession.

Société Générale's chairman, Daniel Bouton, yesterday dismissed as "absurd" suggestions that his decision to dump more than €50bn in unauthorised trades by Mr Kerviel early last week had plunged European stock exchanges into a tailspin. Market experts pointed out, however, that heavy selling by SocGen on Monday – especially of German shares futures – reinforced a mood of panic and helped push all markets down.

This in turn jolted the US Federal Reserve into cutting its interest rates sharply on Tuesday, preventing a copycat crash on Wall Street and possibly also steering the world out of recession.

As a result, some respected US economists are now feting Mr Kerviel as an unwitting saviour. "Merci, Jérôme," said the influential economic analyst, Ed Yardeni, former head economist of Deutsche Bank Securities. "The recession is almost over, thanks to Jérôme Kerviel in Paris and the panic reaction [of the Fed] in Washington... I cannot remember any precedent for such strong support for the economy before the evidence of a recession became manifest."

Maybe. Who knows? But there is, of course, a downside.

A junior trader at his desk on the sixth floor of a building just west of Paris accidentally nudged the steering wheel of the entire world economy. What does that tell us about the uncontrolled might of the immense sums of "electronic" money now being traded on futures and hedge funds?

Shifting to a different story for a bit of perspective, we find the gleeful American celebration of greed even in the face of failure.

Under the stewardship of Dow Kim and Thomas Maheras, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup built positions in subprime-related securities that led to $34 billion in write-downs last year. The debacle cost chief executives their jobs and brought two of the world's premier financial institutions to their knees.

In any other industry, Kim and Maheras would be pariahs. But in the looking-glass world of Wall Street, they — and others like them — are hot properties. The two executives are well on their way to reviving their careers, even as global markets shudder at the prospect that Merrill and Citigroup may report further subprime losses in the coming months.

Obama Wins SC

This citizen-blogger has made up his mind. (photo snagged from Sullivan).

A McCain Supreme Court

Via Bean at LGM, McCain goes for a Bushian model:

On the issue of appointments to the Supreme Court, McCain mentioned that Sam Brownback would play an advisory role in helping decide who he should nominate for the Supreme Court. As models of who he would select, John McCain pointed to Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia.

While McCain may be a decent guy and all, a McCain presidency would be a disastrous continuation of Bush 2.

What Is Mauve?

Contusions and confusions. Half-mourning and melancholia. Twilight and adolescence, home decorators and homosexuals. Drag queen hair, cheap swag, braggadocio. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (that “monstrous orchid,” said Wilde). Orchids, especially Cattleya labiata. All things orchidaceous, including the word “orchidaceous.” Prose just shy of purple. According to Nabokov, time itself.

A young chemist tinkering with coal tar, hoping to find a way to synthesize quinine to treat the malaria felling British soldiers stationed in India, discovers, instead, a color. Mauve, the color of disappointment.

But, “strangely beautiful,” thinks the chemist, and dips some silk in it, finds the color takes. He sends a sample to a Scottish dyer, who sees possibilities. The color lasts like no natural purple. And the ladies seem to like it.

Mauve, the color of opportunity...

...Mauve is the color of suspended choice and uncertain boundaries. One of the few colors permitted to women in half-mourning, the period of transition between black crêpe and the full spectrum, mauve signals the transition from despair to reconciliation. A transition that recapitulates the dye’s own emergence from a beaker of black gunk. The association with death is not just metaphorical. Only a few years after Perkin’s discovery, suspicions arose that mauve, and the other new dyes it led to, could raise real rashes, that the efflux of factories could poison villages. And Pynchon traces an arc in Gravity’s Rainbow from mauve to the dye industry, from the dye industry to IG Farben, from IG Farben to Zyklon B.

More here at Cabinet.

Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

Rollo sends an email with a Rabbie Burns poem wishing a happy Robby Burns Day. And this provides us with the Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper just at the moment I was rooting around for one. Thanks, Rollo!

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!
Aboon them a' yet tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o'a grace
As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin was help to mend a mill
In time o'need,
While thro' your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An' cut you up wi' ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin', rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an' strive:
Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
Bethankit! hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad make her spew
Wi' perfect sconner,
Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckles as wither'd rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash;
His nieve a nit;
Thro' blody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll mak it whissle;
An' legs an' arms, an' hands will sned,
Like taps o' trissle.

Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o' fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer
Gie her a haggis!

Unaccountable Private Invasion

Regarding the implications of the FISA amendment, Elliot Cohen writes, in "The End of Privacy," that,

President Bush has already made clear he would veto any FISA bill that did not give retroactive immunity to the telecoms. However, if McConnell’s soon to be unveiled spy-at-will plan is turned into law, a separate law giving retroactive immunity to the telecoms would be unnecessary. All Bush and Cheney would need to do to protect themselves from criminal liability would be to make the new spy-at-will law retroactive in effect from the inception of the illegal NSA surveillance program. This would also be sufficient to deflate the civil suits filed against the telecoms because the past illegal spying activities that these companies conducted on behalf of the government would then become “legal.” Indeed, the Bush administration has already done this sort of legal retro-dating and nullifying of civil rights and gotten it through Congress.

And we'll all go back to pencil and paper, smoke signals, and hollering across the valley.

Allez, Tsonga!

A nice story from the Australian Open. Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, unseeded at the beginning of the tournament (ranked #38), a guy who's never been beyond the fourth round of a Grand Slam, is in the final against Roger Federer. Before we write him off against the mighty Federer, however, keep in mind that Tsonga beat #9 Andy Murray, the dangerous Guillermo Garcia-Lopez, #8 Richard Gasquet, #14 Mikhail Youzhny, and just routed world #2 Rafael Nadal last night to get to the final. He's a good kid and we have a new tennis star in front of us.

UPDATE: Oops. I was a little too quick to put Federer in the final. Sorry, Djokovic.

Out of Iraq

Read this fine discussion at Mother Jones on how to get out of Iraq. After all, "we all own it now."

The Cost of 935 Lies

Scott Horton:

Surely no more than 110,000 people killed, 300,000 casualties and $2.5 trillion in direct costs and likely long-term debt incurred. A pittance. Of course, it will mean a recession—probably a very nasty one. But look at the wonderful things the Bush Administration has achieved? When Clinton left office, gasoline was $1.39/gallon, and today it’s more than doubled, to $3.10, as oil company profits skyrocket. Clinton reduced the national deficit by running up $431 billion in surpluses in his last three years. Bush has run up the deficit by $734 billion in his last three years, and the national debt has swollen under his presidency by $3.5 trillion (it’s much more than that when we tally up the indirect costs incurred, by the way, such as healthcare for the returning veterans. . . but then the Bush Team isn’t so wild about furnishing them with healthcare, as we see from the developments out at Walter Reed). But why should we worry? That will all be left for future generations to cope with, just like the consequences of his misadventures in warfare. Under President Bush the median income in the United States fell by roughly 2%, while the allocation of the nation’s wealth shifted much more dramatically: the poor got much poorer, while the wealthiest 1% of the population got exponentially richer. (Call them the base.) When Clinton left office, the United States was admired and respected by nations around the world, and particularly by our key allies. And after seven years of Bush, the United States is loathed by most of the world and viewed with closely guarded suspicion in the alliances that three generations of Americans sacrificed to forge. This is quite a tally. And it shows the only a part of the costs associated with those 935 lies.

Further, even Bush's "a charge to keep" painting hanging in the Oval Office has a story that doesn't fit with the Leader's fantasy. While Bush says,

I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

The story behind the painting is really this:

...that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

W.H.D. Koerner, “A Charge to Keep” (1916)

Mangosteen