Hooray for Jimmy Carter

Former President Jimmy Carter's criticism of President Bush was completely justified, even if he toned down some of it later, as the Washington Post reports. Maybe it's debatable whether Bush is the worst president ever, but he is certainly one of the worst ones.

With all his talk about fighting the war in Iraq or the war on terror, Bush is a coward. He dodged the draft during Vietnam, and when the US was attacked on 9/11 he went missing. He quit reading My Pet Goat and started flying around the country, to Louisana, Nebraska, and who knows where else. A real man would have returned to Washington, stepped before the TV cameras and said "I'm in charge; I will protect you." He showed up in New York several days later and did the PR thing long after the all clear had sounded.

His position on the Iraq war was, "I'm right, and everybody else (the UN, old Europe, etc.) is wrong." It turned out that Bush was wrong. There were no WMD; we were not greeted as liberators. What really irks me is that Bush did not attempt to be polite or work with other countries. He basically stuck his finger in the eye of anybody who didn't agree with him. So, he and Tony Blair went to war together with a few token troops from some little countries trying to curry favor with the US for whatever reason, in most cases having nothing to do with the war on terror.

In the process, Bush turned his back on US (and British) legal protections like habeas corpus, and instituted torture as an instrument of the US government. He turned the US into one of those outlaw states that we had criticized for the last 50 years. Why? Because he was scared. Many bullies are cowards, and Bush seems to belong to that group. He's a bad, bad man.

Diego Garcia Cigar

The BBC is reporting that US occupation of the island of Diego Garcia is being challenged in British courts. I remember when the US was planning to set up a base on Diego Garcia and sent a cable to all embassies around the world asking what their host governments thought of Diego Garcia. In a classic cable, one of the embassies replied that its government thought Diego Garcia was a cigar.

Lt. Col. Accuses Generals of Failure in Iraq

The Washington Post reports that a scathing attack on military leadership in Iraq will be published in the Armed Forces Journal. This is what happens when you have a war started by two cowardly Vietnam War draft dodgers, Bush and Cheney, who pick yes-men as their generals. Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs Myers and Pace were picked by Rumsfeld because they did as they were told and did not talk back. And look what they got us into! The one general who was brave enough to speak his mind, Shinseki, got fired for his efforts.

Ironically, the author of the article, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, got a masters degree from the University of Chicago, the home of the neo-cons.

Russia, Neo-Cons and Jews

Chrystia Freeland writes in the Financial Times today that Russia needs the neo-cons, because it needs someone to help fight for its liberty, but that the neo-cons have been reigned in by their failures in Iraq. Then she goes on to say, "Most damaging [in Russia] was the creation of the oligarchs - an act based partly on an extreme, Chicago-school-inspired faith in the power of private ownership, no matter who the owner was or how the property was acquired." What she doesn't say is that most of the neo-cons were Jews, and that most of the Russian oligarchs were Jews. Furthermore, many of the neo-cons came out of the University of Chicago, where they studied politics under Leo Strauss, rather than economics under Milton Friedman. I think it's a good thing for the US and Russia that the neo-cons' wings have been clipped. Democracy is in much better shape in Europe than in America, where George Bush is following some sort of Stalinist model embracing torture, restrictions on civil liberties, and other un-American attacks on the Constitution; let Europe help the Russians.