The Failed Presidency.

Yes, but, Timber( I just looked it up)

In BOTH cases, Clinton's refusal to release all of the material on Espy and Bush's refusal to release the records concerning the members meeting with Cheney in Energy meetings, a federal court judge

upheld the right of both presidents to invoke Presidential Executive Privilege.

Now, if a President would not release material after a judge had said that Executive Privilege did not apply in a certain case, that would indeed be unlawful.

But, I am sure you will agree, Timber, we must proceed according to the "rule of law".

Ahhh, yes ... 'The Rosemary Woods Medal for Creative Editing this year goes to .... "

Absolutely, Italgato ... matters should and will proceed as prescribed by law, and be decided by same if appropriate.

Italgato wrote: "Angie said that Bush's quote made it seem not only that Saddam had WMD's but that he was going to use them. Really?"

yes.


And Italgato wrote: "Well, Angie, who said the following? ..... Who said it, Angie? President William Jefferson Clinton in his speech on 12/16/1998. "

I will gladly take your word on the veracity of this quote. And I will add that Clinton was apparently as wrong as Bush. Of course, Clinton did not use his belief as a justification to invade anything, did he Italgato, did he, did he, did he ?

Say'n some'n and not acting on it is a different animal from say'n some'n and acting on it - especially when the say'n some'n is all wrong.

Oooops, we killed over 7,000 people on wrong information.

BillW,

Did you know that Arlo Guthrie was talking to Chip Carten at his father's inauguration party and Chip mentioned to Arlo that he had found a copy of Arlo's 1969 Alice's Restaurant in the WH library? Well, according to Arlo in his 1996 CD Alice's Restaurant The Massacre Revisited, in order to make the point to his live audience that a "movement" can change the course of the world, Arlo tells about this conversation. He goes on to remember that many years later on the occasion of Nixon's death, he and a group of his friends were sitting around talking about the WH tapes and how there was an 18 minute and 2 second blank space on those tapes. It wasn't until the middle of the night, that Arlo put these two peices of information together. Alice's Restaurant (the 1969 version) played for exactly 18 minutes and 2 seconds! So you see, a movement, An Alice's Restaurant movement can make a difference and change the world for the better. It's not always necessary to be pessimistic.

While Cowboy Bush is acting like Don Quixote fighting windmills the nation flounders. Our educational system is not producing a quality product, the economy is in shambles, joblessness abounds and medical care which is allegedly the best in the world is not available to a large percentage of our population. Is this the mark of a successful administration?
Mr Bush it would seem has a set of confused priorities.

Atlantic Unbound | September 24, 2003

Politics & Prose | by Jack Beatty

"A Miserable Failure"

Will Bush be re-elected? Only if voters wittingly ignore his long list of failures while in office

.....

ith one phrase Dick Gephardt has defined the issue to be decided next November. Can a "miserable failure" of a president win re-election? Bush's victory would testify to a civic failure more dangerous to the American future than any policies implemented or continued during a second Bush term. A majority would have demonstrated that democratic accountability is finished. That you can fail in everything and still be re-elected president.

You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing. Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to "bring it on." Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building—and pass the bill to America's children. (Asked to consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said no; that would slow growth.) You can lose more jobs than any other President since Hoover. You can cut cops and after-school programs and Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires. You can wreck the nation's finances, running up the largest deficit in history. You can permit 17,000 power plants to increase their health-endangering pollution of the air. You can lower the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric. Above all, you can lie the country into war and your lies can be exposed—and, if a majority prefers ignorance to civic responsibility, you can still be reelected.

Even Republicans must be capable of applying a cost-benefit analysis to this record of miserable failure. Their tax cuts on one side, the burden of Bush-begotten debt on their children on the other. And surely even Republicans breathe the air befouled by those power plants. I have it on good authority that the conservatives in the party do as well. Surely they must question the judgment of a President who proposes to turn Iraq into what James Fallows calls "the fifty-first state" in order to bring democracy to the Middle East—the kind of do-gooder fantasy conservatives have long ridiculed in liberals.

But the election won't be decided by Republicans and conservatives. Most will sacrifice independent judgment to ideology or party and vote for Bush. No, swing voters will pick the next President. They vote the man not the party, character not ideology. Many voted for Bush in 2000 because they liked him better than Al Gore—applying the standards of product acceptability to a job that entrusts its holder with the power to blow up the planet. Well, do they still "like" Bush? I fear many do. After all, he has spared them the embarrassment of having to discuss sex with their children. Swing voters like Bush's "image" as a strong leader, a CNN pundit claims. Are they incapable of looking behind that image and seeing the weak President who stayed away from the White House on September 11 because his Vice President said it was not safe for him to be there and whose PR people lied to cover up his failure of leadership? John F. Kennedy, as R. W. Apple wrote on the front page of The New York Times on September 12, remained in the White House throughout the Cuban missile crisis knowing that it would be hit in any nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

The Founders feared that the republic would succumb to corruption without republican citizenship—without citizens who could transcend privatism and hold elected officials to account, demanding probity and competence, and judging their performance against both the clamorous necessities of the time and the mute claims of posterity. They made property a criterion for voting because it secured a measure of economic independence. Property-less wage laborers, they feared, would vote as their employers instructed them to. The extension of democracy to those who could not rise to the responsibilities of republican freedom would corrupt the republic—hasten its decay into oligarchy or mob rule.

For all their worldliness the Founders were naïve to regard property as a shield of incorruptibility or the property-less as inherently corruptible. Their core insight, however, remains valid. A republic can be corrupted at the top and bottom, by leaders and led. The re-election of George W. Bush would signal that a kind of corruption had set in among the led. Our miserable failure as republican citizens would match his as President.

Now, that certainly reads like a setup piece for the Democrat's post-election whining. Now, its understandable The Demcrats and The Republicans will have some friction. Its natural in matters of dispute and contention for a pary perceiving disadvantage attribute to the advantaged party such things as deceit, treachery, venality, and assorted other corruptions. Now the Democrats posit that only a failure of the people could account for Republican success.


And, now, c'mon .... " ... corruption had set in among the led" ? What's that about ... the electorate at large is mindless as sheep and as despicable as Republicans? Yeah, right ... that'll drive the swing voter, the all-importatant, poorly understood, vastly underestimated center straight into the Democratic camp. Sure it will. Go for it. Please.

I really get the sense the Democrats, naturally who don't like what The Current Administration is doing, are sorely dismayed that he's doing well enough at it as to be of significant inconvenience to the prosecution of their own partisan agenda. The foreseeable political future lies with credibility, probity, and demonstrated performance, in equal amount. I can understand why The Democrats are convinced we are in the midst of a calamity. It sure must look like one to them.

Poll Shows Drop in Confidence on Bush Skill in Handling
Crises
By TODD S. PURDUM and JANET ELDER
Thirteen months before the 2004 election, a solid majority
of Americans say the country is seriously on the wrong
track.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/03/national/03POLL.html?th

Shall we call this an awakening?

More Bad NEWS for those hoping for bad news:

Timber
Bad news regarding the economy has been with us so long that anything positive is like a port in a storm.
Don't crow too soon it maybe just a hiccup. After all a little blip does not a recovery make.

interesting and i assume it to be good news, but why is it that we can take an indicator of such news and use it to forecast what may lay ahead while at the same time take other indicators such as no WoMD found and reserve judgement with a wait and see perspective? are we being a bit over-selective about omens of future tense? is this a consistent methodolgy?

Trade and Industry Editor

INTEREST rate cuts, attractive incentive packages and low levels of consumer debt helped boost sales of new cars to a seven-year high last month.

The jump in sales has led the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of SA (Naamsa) to predict that annual sales growth this year will reach 5%.

Naamsa's latest figures, released yesterday, show that sales of all new vehicles climbed 14,7% in September, from the 35173 sold a year ago. New car sales shot up 19,9% to 24020, thanks to "continued high demand from rental companies, improved vehicle affordability, attractive incentive packages, together with recent interest rate reductions and expectations of further interest rate cuts".

"Interestingly, the September 2003 new car sales performance represented the highest monthly new car market in just under seven years since October 1996," Naamsa said.

The September vehicle sales showed an increase for the third successive month.

I don't know about anyone else but unless there is a sustained improvement over one or two quarters, they can "revise" statistics until they are blue in the face. I'm not a pessimist but although I'm not from the "show me" state -- show me the money. The deficit continuing to rise will still be working as a damper on the economy. As usual, the alchemists...er...economists are polarized and this administration isn't any less polarized.

With this administration, forecasting the state of the economy is like forecasting the weather using no instruments but a wet finger thrust up in the air.

'in THE AIR'!? Damn, that explains a lot of washed out picnics!

I think I know where they've actually got their finger and it ain't in the air!

General: 3-6 GIs die each week in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An average of three to six Americans are killed each week in Iraq and another 40 are wounded by a foe that has become more lethal and sophisticated since the fall of Baghdad in April, the commander of coalition forces said.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/02/sprj.irq.casualties.ap/index.html

I am still waiting for Bush to comment on the loss of American life and casualties in his war. Bad press I would suppose.