One Utah

Barney says: “I knew what to expect, but I never get invited to National Security Council meetings.”
From the Associated Press:
In a speech he was giving later Friday about his Middle East policies, Bush said …his Middle East policies — which have not always been popular and have not always gone according to plan — in [...]

The great spinners of the Bush administration, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, are back in the White House with a team working on the Bush Legacy Project to put a positive spin on the last eight years. I.e., rewriting history. Rachel Maddow is keeping them honest (video below).
Bush in an interview blames faulty [...]

Via Think Progress, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates held a press conference today and effectively declared that President-elect Obama’s 16-month Iraq withdrawal plan is a “go.”

Yesterday, President-elect Obama said that “16 months is the right time frame” for withdrawing all U.S. combat troops from Iraq, noting that he would “listen to the recommendations” his commanders [...]

We now have President George W. Bush’s self-evaluation on the record. Without a doubt, he is the worst U.S. president in history. On his watch, we experienced:

The biggest terrorist attack ever on American soil, with a death toll worse than Pearl Harbor in 1941
A failed “war on terror” — after 7 years, al-Qaeda [...]

McClatchy reports that the Iraq withdrawal treaty doesn’t really mean what Iraqi politicians think it means, according to officials not authorized to talk publicly. This is why an official English translation is being kept out of the news media, to stifle a debate over the exact wording of certain provisions. Badger of Missing Links [...]

The cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq:

More than 4,000 American fatalities
More than 30,000 wounded
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths
Millions of Iraqis displaced or refugees
$1-$3 trillion in costs to the U.S. economy
An empowered Iran
A deteriorating situation in Afghanistan

Massive damage to America’s image around the world
Loss of U.S. strategic readiness

A forthright, insightful journalist, Ezra Klein [...]

Is this any way to support our troops?

The SL Trib has an article about the toxic conditions caused by the burn pit at Balad Air Base in Iraq. It’s a familiar theme to read about a high rate of illnesses among soldiers returning from war zones. Some of these issues have been blamed [...]

Ahmed Benchemsi, writing for Newsweek, explains why Ayman al Zawahiri went after President-elect Obama in a recent Web message. Zawahiri clumsily denounced Obama as a “house slave” or “abeed al-beit” in Arabic. An English subtitle provided by Al Qaeda’s propaganda arm translates the term as “house Negro.”
Benchemsi wrote:

Al Qaeda and all its followers badly [...]

A protester uses his shoe to strike an effigy of U.S. President George. W. Bush, in an expression of contempt, as thousands of followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, Iraq for a mass prayer to protest a proposed U.S.-Iraqi security pact on Friday, Nov. 21, 2008.(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

From [...]

President Bush, May 1, 2007 (emphasis added):
It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing. All the terrorists would have to do is mark their calendars and gather their strength — and begin plotting how to overthrow the government and take control of the country of Iraq. I believe setting [...]

National Review contributing editor Andrew J. McCarthy imparts the following words of wisdom:
INCONVENIENT FACT: THE IRAQIS DON’T LIKE US

Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in [...]

At today’s White House press conference, Press Secretary Dana Perino tried to claim that the Bush administration has not really agreed to a “surrender date” (the term she used last year to describe a deadline for troop withdrawal from Iraq).

QUESTION: The President has said for months that he opposes [...]