RT: Bush attempting to rewrite history of "disastrous presidency"

Published 13 November, 2009, 04:55 Edited 13 November, 2009, 14:30

Former US President George W. Bush wants to  rewrite the history of his presidency, which was a “disaster for America,” US radio host and author Thom Hartmann told RT.

The University of Virginia has announced it will put together an oral history of Bush's presidency. It will work together with the George Bush Foundation and is planning around 100 interviews with leading members of his administration.

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“Rather than a presidential library, like most presidents have, which basically just chronicle the presidency, George Bush is going to be spending several hundred million dollars to hire so-called scholars to rewrite his legacy and to re-invent the history of his administration,” said radio host and author Thom Hartmann.

The reality is, he went on, that “the biggest legacy of his administration right now is what we saw last week in Fort Hood, Texas,” where a Muslim American officer murdered more than a dozen fellow soldiers.

Hartmann believes Bush should have dealt with “Osama bin Laden and his small radical Islamic mafia” in a different way. Had he “asked for international cooperation from police agencies, labeled them criminals, arrested them, had them tried and put them in jail, the 9/11 victims would have closure and Muslims around the world would not only not hate America and be afraid of it –as so many of them do right now – but we would probably see a renaissance in Islam.”

“Bush was the worst president of America, and if not the total worst, the second worst behind John Adams. His presidency was a disaster – it was a disaster for working people, it was a disaster for the military… for our international relations… for us economically,” Hartmann said.

“I guarantee it is going to cost him at least a couple of hundred million dollars… to re-spin that history,” Hartmann said. “He is going to do his best to do it, and he will accomplish it.”

Rightardia doubts that Bush will get away with this historical revisionism. You can only do so much with a president who left office with a 20 per cent approval rating.

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George H.W. Bush calls Olbermann and Maddow 'sick puppies'

MSNBC cable news has developed as a counterpoint to Fox News.  If George H. W. Bush wants to finger some real 'sick puppies,'  Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, come to mind.

Does the right wing really expect there will be no push back for all for all the name calling and disinformation the GOP has generated for the past 50 years? The GOP is used to giving it out, but is not so used to taking it in the chin like Dubya and Sarah Palin did!

George W. Bush was one of the worst American presidents in US history. He was clearly not up to the job of running the country and nearly led the US into a depression. He also started a pointless war in Iraq that will cost the US taxpayer more than $ 1 trillion dollars. Neither Bush had the 'right stuff' to lead America. It is unlikely that any other Bush will ever be elected president because of Bush Junior. Bush Senior diminished himself by attacking Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann.

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The Bush Doctrine in the Middle East

Sarah Palin didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was. The Nazis invented it in World War 2 and called it blitzkrieg. Republicans called this pre-emptive war the Bush Doctrine.

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GOP: Shameful Opposition

by Amitai Etzioni

Author of Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy Posted: June 23, 2009 09:24 am

Editor's Note: I agree with Dr. Etzioni. First of all, Iranians have good reason to be suspicious of the US. We undermined a democratically elected government in Iran and replaced it with a monarchy. Second, US intervention in international affairs has rarely succeeded. In most cases we have made things worse. We trained the Mujahadeen to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan who became the Taliban. We are now fighting the people we trained. The US needs to show much greater restraint in international affairs.

Republicans have been criticizing President Obama for not having been more outspoken in support of the masses in the streets of Iran. They choose to ignore what happened when Republican presidents encouraged the rising of the Shia in southern Iraq in 1991 and, indirectly, of Hungarians in that country in 1956. In both cases the people involved assumed that the United States would come to their rescue and instead were slaughtered en masse by Saddam in Iraq and by the Soviet forces in Hungary.

On February 15, 1991, President George H.W. Bush appeared on the Voice of America radio station to tell Iraqis "There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: And that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside..."

Assuming the nearby US forces would come to their help, Shiite Iraqi soldiers returning from their defeat in Kuwait joined with civilians in a number of cities in the southern part of Iraq to attack Saddam loyalists, engaging them in street battles with small arms.

However, these freedom fighters were lacking in firepower, and the government counterattacked with heavy weaponry, killing many thousands of Shia. In retaliation for the uprising, upon reentering the Southern cities government troops summarily executed large numbers of civilians. The Shia felt betrayed by the United States, and this became but one more reason they are still leaning toward supporting Iran.

The Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination took place against the backdrop of Dwight Eisenhower's administration's campaign of public diplomacy promoting freedom for the people of Eastern Europe. The president noted at the time that the US had a mission "to help those freedom-loving peoples who need and want and can profitably use our aid that they may advance in their ability for self-support and may add strength to the security and peace of the free world."

During the uprising, Radio Free Europe aired several broadcasts giving combat advice to Hungarian fighters and encouraging their campaign, and many Hungarians thought that the US would offer more active support .Despite its rhetoric, the US did not extend any actual assistance, and the movement was crushed by Soviet troops with over 2,000 Hungarians killed and hundreds of thousands later fleeing the country.

Now the Republicans cry "The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free world, not follow it...He's been timid and passive more than I would like," (Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.). And, "[Obama] needs to speak to the people of Iran, the people of the Middle East, and he has to make a forceful statement on behalf of the people on the streets for freedom and democracy," (Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.).

They disregard, in their desperate quest to find a political foothold that even if the president did listen to them and his words did not lead to even more bloodshed, he surely would discredit the uprising in the eyes of many Iranians who are suspicious of Western intentions, for some very good reasons.

The GOP should learn the difference between a loyal opposition that raises serious objections in a sensible manner--and a crazed one that is foaming at the mouth, and feels free to endanger masses of good people, of freedom fighters. This is especially true in dealing with foreign policy, where the stakes are so high, grandstanding is particularly shameful, and hardly a way to win points for the next election.

**I will respond to the comments of those persons who are willing to identify themselves, because I hold this essential for a civilized dialogue.

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international affairs at The George Washington University and the author of Security First (Yale, 2007). He can be contacted at icps@gwu.edu.

In 2001, Etzioni was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Also in 2001, Etzioni was awarded the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences as well as the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was also the recipient of the Seventh James Wilbur Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the Appreciation and Advancement of Human Values by the Conference on Value Inquiry, as well as the Sociological Practice Association's Outstanding Contribution Award.



www.huffingtonpost.com/amitai-etzioni/gop-shameful-opposition_b_219432.html

www.amitaietzioni.org/

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