Bush’s Memoir

Steve Benen says that publishers aren’t too excited about getting Bush’s memoir. I find this curious. Just because a public figure is unpopular doesn’t necessarily mean people won’t want to read that public figure’s memoir, does it? Bush may have been a horrendous president, but he’s still a fascinating guy, in my view.

What I’ll Miss About President Bush

I’ll make my entry to this brief: I’ll miss the fodder for jokes.

About Obama’s Aunt

TPM notes that it was illegal for Bush admin officials to leak the info about the immigration case of Obama’s aunt.

Bush at the Wheel

It sounds like Gordon Brown is not such a change of pace from Tony Blair after all, as he largely took his speaking cues from Bush in their public remarks Monday. Dan Froomkin asks whether Brown will be “Bush’s new poodle.”

Is Bush Even Trying Any More?

Fred Kaplan on today’s Bush speech in Cleveland:

Unlike earlier talks of this sort, in which Bush’s speechwriters at least assembled some stray facts and passed them off as evidence of progress, this speech—which seemed entirely improvised—was founded on nothing but faith.

“We can accomplish and win this fight in Iraq,” Bush said at one point in the speech. “I strongly believe we will prevail … that democracy will trump totalitarianism every time,” he said later, as if the war in Iraq is somehow about democracy and totalitarianism.

I caught a portion of the speech on TV this afternoon, and I felt like I was in a time warp from a year or two ago. The rhetoric is all the same about Al Qaeda having no regard for human life, that’s how they differ from us, fight them there instead of over here, on down the line. Can he really keep going to the same old rhetorical well for another 18 months and pass the mess on to a successor?

I also wonder if Chertoff’s remarks were coordinated.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune that he had a “gut feeling” about a new period of increased risk.

Is there any point to issuing these vague warnings about possible terrorist strikes without any specific information at all? Other than stirring up the media and getting people scared? It’s like Groundhog Day with these people.

$250,400

Don’t you wish you could just go down to the bank and get them to issue a cashier’s check for that sum?

Libby’s friends and supporters have raised more than $5 million to cover legal fees and were continuing to raise money but Libby paid the fine himself, according to someone close to the fund who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the account are private. The cashiers check filed with the court was issued in Libby’s name.

Meanwhile, Tony Snow called “chutzpah” on the Clintons for criticizing the commutation, predictably bringing up Marc Rich, just like the cranks who write in to the Boston Globe (third item). The fun response: do you remember that Rich’s lawyer was none other than Scooter Libby? The serious response: Clinton’s act was payback for receiving campaign cash from Rich’s wife, which is bad, but Bush’s act shielded his own White House from the legal consequences of its law-breaking, which is shameful.

And while I’m at the Globe, here’s the Wasserman cartoon from July 4.

Bush’s Arguments on Libby Make No Sense

Instead of that more straightforward statement, Adam Liptak’s NYT article on the subject goes under the headline of “Bush Rationale on Libby Stirs Legal Debate.” Here is a part of it:

Given the administration’s tough stand on sentencing, the president’s arguments left experts in sentencing law scratching their heads.

“The Bush administration, in some sense following the leads of three previous administrations, has repeatedly supported a federal sentencing system that is distinctly disrespectful of the very arguments that Bush has put forward in cutting Libby a break,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who writes the blog Sentencing Law and Policy.

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Bush’s decision to grant a commutation rather than an outright pardon has started a national conversation about sentencing generally.

“By saying that the sentence was excessive, I wonder if he understood the ramifications of saying that,” said Ellen S. Podgor, who teaches criminal law at Stetson University in St. Petersburg, Fla. “This is opening up a can of worms about federal sentencing.”

Yes, I wonder. Based on watching his comments today, I have a feeling Bush might not be so conversant in the federal sentencing system. (Nice touch being at Walter Reed to discuss this.) Tony Snow did his best to obfuscate matters at the press briefing too. Rather than “stirring a legal debate,” I would refer to the White House actions as disingenuously putting forth a bogus rationale for political payback and stonewalling on the important questions about this disgracefully corrupt decision. But hey, I don’t get to write the headlines.

Keith Olbermann thinks Bush and Cheney should resign. Dan Froomkin asks “what is more corrupt than using the powers of the presidency for personal benefit?” And the Daily Kos front page is even giving impeachment a full discussion. Just when you think it can’t get any worse…

ADDENDUM: I am reproducing David R. Dow’s letter to the New York Times, and then I’m done with this story.

To the Editor:

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he presided over more than 150 executions. In more than one-third of the cases — 57 in all — lawyers representing condemned inmates asked then-Governor Bush for a commutation of sentence, so that the inmates would serve life in prison rather than face execution.

Some of these inmates had been represented by lawyers who slept during trials. Some were mentally retarded. Some were juveniles at the time they committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.

In all these cases, Governor Bush refused to commute their sentences, saying that the inmates had had full access to the judicial system.

I. Lewis Libby Jr. had the best lawyers money can buy. His crime cannot be attributed to youth or retardation. He has expressed no remorse whatsoever for lying to a grand jury or participating in the administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq. President Bush’s commutation of Mr. Libby’s sentence is certainly legal, but it just as surely offends the fundamental constitutional value of equality.

Because President Bush signed a commutation, a rich and powerful man will spend not a day in prison, while 57 poor and poorly connected human beings died because Governor Bush refused to lift a pen for them.

David R. Dow
Houston, July 3, 2007

The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who represents death row inmates, including several who sought commutation from then-Governor Bush.

How Low Can He Go?

With the baldly political act of keeping Scooter Libby from prison time — the kind of thing you normally see in the final days of a presidency, when there are no more elections one can affect — it looks like Bush is shooting for Nixon’s 23 percent national polling record after all. Soft on crime, indeed.

Meanwhile, lots of good pardon/clemency background info is here. Roger C. Adams should be expecting a busy Fourth of July, I suspect.

UPDATE: Or maybe Adams is purely superfluous; Bush made the Libby decision without even consulting the Justice Department.

The Black Sheep and the Queen

In recounting the Queen’s trip to the US, the BBC shares this story.

Reputedly, when they met in 1991 during the Queen’s visit to the White House of George Bush senior, George junior introduced himself to the Queen as the “black sheep of the family”, and asked the Queen who was his equivalent in the Windsor family.

Sadly, the Queen’s reply is not recorded, but young George’s unconventional approach to the British monarch on that occasion was said to have earnt him a very stern look from his mother, the redoubtable Barbara Bush.

The article goes on to review the gaffe Bush made in yesterday’s Rose Garden in painstaking detail, and it also notes that the Queen barely mentioned Iraq during her visit.

This is one area in which I’m behind the president. Certainly his goofs on the world stage can be embarrassing, but I don’t consider standing on ceremony for a queen to be the most pressing item on the national agenda — especially when she timed her visit to go hang out with the silly people at the Kentucky Derby this past weekend. The shame of not mentioning Iraq is the real story here.

What Does Paul Rieckhoff Want?

Bob Herbert’s column is a synopsis of an interview with the leader of an Iraq and Afghanistan veterans group.

There’s a gigantic and extremely disturbing disconnect, he says, between the experiences of the men and women in uniform and the perspective of people here at home. “We have a very diverse membership in I.A.V.A.,” he said. “We’ve got Republicans and Democrats and everything in between. But one of the key things we all have in common is this frustration with the detachment that we see all around us, this idea that we’re at war and everybody else is watching ‘American Idol.’

…

“It’s tough to have such a serious sense of commitment,” Mr. Rieckhoff said, “and then come home and see so many people focused on such frivolous things. So I think that frustration is serious and growing. And I’ll tell you the truth: I blame the president for that. One of the biggest criticisms of the president, and I hear this across the board, is that he hasn’t asked the American people to do anything.”

Although Bush has spoken over and over again about how important he thinks the war is to the U.S. national interest, I agree that he could have done more to promote a sense of shared sacrifice. He could have raised taxes to finance the war effort, called on young people to enlist in the armed forces (or as humanitarian workers), and promoted conservation and alternative energies at home (fat chance!) to limit the country’s dependence on Middle East oil.

But even if Americans had been drawn into these efforts in greater numbers, there is always going to be some amount of disconnect between those who were at war and the majority who stayed home. That is inevitably going to be the case when you have a group of people who have first-hand experience with something and a group that does not. There may be some ignorance of what troops go through, but there certainly isn’t a lack of sympathy and gratitude for members of the armed forces. That’s why the Walter Reed situation became such a big scandal. Anyone who challenges the “support the troops” consensus these days will be pretty loudly denounced.

What I don’t understand is why it bothers Rieckhoff that Americans are into “frivolous things” like “American Idol.” While I agree that American Idol is stupid, I’m not going to give up my evening leisure time watching the NBA playoffs so that I can hold a vigil for the troops and educate myself further about the progress of the surge in Baghdad.

Look, I hope the troops get home safely and that they aren’t unduly traumatized by the combat experience. I don’t think they should ever have been sent to war with Iraq, and I think their presence over there continues to be counterproductive today. I will continue to monitor the news from the war with the hope that somehow U.S. military involvement can be wound down without causing too much harm in the process. I will support candidates for office who share this goal. Beyond that, I don’t really know what Rieckhoff wants me to do, and I don’t see why he needs to snidely belittle the American public.