George W Bush Is Worried about His Hamstrings

Reuters Image via The Telegraph

There is no wingnut on the face of the earth that we want to keep talking more than GW Bush, who's George W. Bush Presidential Center, Steve Benen notes, opens on May 1st, 10 years to the day after the "Mission Accomplished" moment. May the first is also May Day, which has pagan roots, but in this context is best remembered as International Workers Day, this year in honor of the millions of workers who lost their jobs in the Little Bush Depression. Irony abounds.

In 1958, Eisenhower, worried about the communist influence of May Day, decided to make May 1st "Law Day, U.S.A." It's the day we contemplate the importance of law in our society. You know, laws like anti-fraud statutes that the Bush administration ignored while letting Wall Street stamp crap paper AAA so they could sell it to their unsuspecting customers (your retirement fund) while they shorted it. Like laws against torture, war crimes, lying to congress, and other fun conventions that Ike thought were important.

"Laws are silent in times of war."--Cicero

All those pesky laws were "just a spring clean for the May queen" George Bush, who, to be fair, was simply following the if-the-President-does-it-it's-not-illegal Nixonian logic that's been screwing us for decades. In Bush's case, it led to justifications for hypothetical child testicle crushing. Talk about compassionate conservatism.

Reuters image via the WSJ

But we're here to let Bush do the talking, which he did in length to the Dallas Morning News.

"People ask me, ‘What about the economy?'" Bush said. "My answer is, 'Why don’t you go hire an economist? Or hire five economists and get 15 different opinions?'"

W with the defensive misdirect!

Bush's monthly job creation average in non-recession months was 68,000. When Obama's monthly total dropped to 80 some-odd thousand, the right wing went nuts.

That was the commie Ezra Klein being nice to the former President. Let's see what the nice folks at the conservative Wall Street Journal had to say about the George W Bush Memorial Crater Economy:

The current President Bush, once taking account how long he’s been in office, shows the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records.

Seems liberals and conservatives agree. We could ask 13 more economists about the Bush economy, which ended in the biggest recession since the Great Depression (bigger than the previous four recessions combined) and we'd get the same answer. Bush's final GDP, in 4Q2008, was negative 9%. We were shedding jobs at about 800,000 per month when Obama took over. No economist worth his weight in bullshit would try to make that disaster look good.

"My only point," Bush said, "is that when there’s an objective analysis of our fiscal record, people will say, 'Well, that’s different than I thought.'"

AP image via Maddow Blog

I hope that's not his only point, but even wingnut economists tend to frown on negative 9% GDP.

The great thing about the quote "Or hire five economists and get 15 different opinions?" is that it tells us that GW Bush is either bullshtiting, or he thinks economists all give three answers to every question. If that's the kind of economists he was listening to (Glenn Hubbard, et al) then that certainly explains the Little Bush Depression.

The quote is classic Bush, blaming the fact that Bushonomics didn't work on his economists, who apparently could never give him a good marketing strategy for explaining their systematic looting of trillions of dollars.

Wearing a light blue, open-collar shirt, Bush, 66, said repeatedly that he’s "comfortable" with both life and legacy. Among his most pressing concerns was whether his hamstrings were ready for a mountain bike ride later that day.

Bush "repeatedly" saying that he's comfortable is a tell that he's not comfortable, but he wants us to think he is. He wants us to think that his contemplative self portrait from the shower isn't guilty self reflection. He wants us to think that painting his feet in the bathtub isn't some kind of sign that he feels guilty for all the Iraq war veterans who lost their feet. His eagerness to assure us of his comfort is oddly reminiscent of how the God of the Bible seems really concerned that we might not believe in him.

I like to think that any human who lied his country into a $6 trillion dollar war that maimed and killed millions would have more pressing concerns than hamstrings. Either GW is bullshtiting us, or he really does worry about the persistent violence in Iraq. Maybe he does feel guilty about the millions of people whose lives were ruined by the war.

Or maybe he's just a sociopath.

"Much of my presidency was defined by things that you didn't necessarily want to have happen," he said.

I think I actually missed the guy.

He didn't necessarily want 9-11 to happen, but he didn't do much to stop it. In fact, he didn't listen to the people who were trying to warn him it would happen, having famously said to the CIA operative who gave him the daily briefing, on Aug 6, that Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the US: "You've covered your ass, now." He didn't necessarily want 9-11 to happen, but since the PNAC was saying we'd need a "new Pearl Harbor" to get involved in the middle east the way the neo-cons really wanted to, well, it was convenient.

GW Bush being greeted as a liberator, image via The Telegraph

And he didn't necessarily want a housing bubble that would ruin the world economy, but it's not like he did anything to stop it. He didn't necessarily want to ignore Afghanistan for most of a decade, or let Bin Laden get away from Tora Bora, or waste trillions rebuilding Iraq and making his war contractor friends rich, but, you know, he's comfortable with it.

He likewise reiterated his support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, saying that he’s "confident the decisions were made the right way."

That's Bushian code for "we did exactly what we wanted to do and you guys can all suck it if you don''t like it."

"I’m comfortable with what I did," he said. "I’m comfortable with who I am."

I'm comfortable with letting him talk. After all, there's no better advertisement for voting for Democrats than this war mongering, veteran ignoring, economy destroying, upward redistributing hamstrung wingnut who, thank goodness, will probably keep talking until the day he dies, which, with any luck, will be a long time from now.

That's right, you just heard me wish GW Bush a long life. After all, if he died young, he wouldn't get to worry about his hamstrings, which must be torture.

Rand Paul Gets It Partly Right, Jeb Bush Adds a Footnote

Sen. Rand Paul and Bong, image from Salon.com 

Senator Rand Paul (just saying that gives me the giggles) told keep-the-wingnuts-talking champion Chris Wallace that the last two Presidents could have gone to jail for drugs (odd that he didn't mention his own past drug use). While I appreciate the Wingnut Party Senator for his correct conclusion that the drug war is a bad thing, I would like to point out that he should keep talking about this because it's an important subject, and because he apparently has no freaking clue about why people get arrested for drugs.

When George W Bush¹ was snorting coke, drinking whiskey, breaking SEC regulations, and God-knows-what-all, his Daddy was head of the CIA, Vice President of the United States, and, eventually, President, although W had supposedly become a cold-turkey dry drunk by the time he was a President's son. The odds of George W Bush being arrested for anything are so small that not even a penny bet to win $9.99 at Intrade would even get close to approximating them. Obama, on the other hand was approximately 12 times more likely to go to jail for drugs than a white man.

...although Whites and African Americans use and sell drugs at about the same rates, Black men in 2003 were almost 12 times as likely to go to prison as White men. Although Black people are 12 percent of the population and 14 percent of drug users, according to Mauer and Cole, they comprise 34 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 45 percent of those incarcerated in state prisons for such offenses.

1. Jeb Bush provided some context on GW's state of mind Friday, talking to Jake Tapper on CNN.

JEB BUSH: He is like the most focused, disciplined guy to imagine being a former president and not having an opinion on anything over the last four years, really? I mean, to have that discipline, to be respectful of the president that hasn't been as respectful of him as he should have been? Man. I could have never done that.

Either GW's smarter then Jeb and realizes he should keep his fool mouth shut after lying us into a $6 trillion dollar unpaid-for war and crashing the world economy with a recession bigger than the last 4 combined, or he's on some serious meds, the abuse of which is fast becoming the biggest addiction problem in America (20% of all Americans have used a prescription drug for non-medical reasons), and prescription drug abuse is predominantly a white suburban problem. Since we don't police the white suburbs like we do the black inner cities, we don't see as many arrests of prescription drug crimes as we do for other illicit drugs more popular in those inner cities. And, since rich white suburbs in the Dallas area probably have very little police presence (of the kind looking for drug abusers, at least), then GW Bush could be tripping on Oxycontin all day and never get busted for it. Come to think of it, that might help explain why W is painting puppies and scenes of his guilty mind reflected in a shower mirror, instead of talking to the press every time he gets a buzz on, like Jeb apparently does.