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Vanity Fair Finds Attempts Comprehensive Bush Hit Piece, Misfires Badly
NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal Media Bias — Well, it seems that the folks at Vanity Fair realized that they won't have George W. Bush to kick around any more. So they decided to launch the journalistic equivalent of thermonuclear war against him in an attempt to get its shot at a "draft of history." In a 14 web-page tome (the photo at the top right is at its beginning) that fancies itself an "oral history," the magazine hauls out every criticism, real or imagined, hurled at the president during the past eight years. It reminds everyone that the media's favorite stereotype of conservatives and Republicans is that they're dumb (I guess Ike's orchestration of D-Day was some kind of accident, and ...

What Went Wrong
Taegan Goddard's Political Wire — Vanity Fair runs a must-read oral history of the Bush administration in which two key advisers say that it was Hurricane Katrina that ultimately broke the back of George W. Bush's presidency. Said former White House communications director Dan Bartlett: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin."

Morning Swim: Trippin’
Firedoglake — Here's what I found in the news this morning: Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House. Iraqi shoe thrower Muntazer al-Zaidi's trial has been delayed pending an appeal over whether the tossing of footwear amounted to an assault. Pakistan cut off US/NATO supply route through the Khyber Pass due to an "operation against militants and armed groups in Jamrud." Evangelicals don't like the Green Bible. The Treasury gives $5 billion to GMAC and $1 billion to ...

'Not a big reader'
Political Animal — 'NOT A BIG READER'.... As part of its end-of-presidency wrap-up, Vanity Fair notes this interesting tidbit from Richard Clarke, the former chief White House counterterrorism adviser. "We had a couple of meetings with the president, and there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. With the cyber-security meeting, he seemed -- I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. It was as though he wanted these experts, these White House staff guys who had been ...

History Written Today
N/A — In case you forgot: This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job. The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 ...

Katrina and Bush
Paul Krugman — So everyone is talking about the Vanity Fair article in which Bush aides say that Katrina is what did him in. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but what I’d like to focus on is why Katrina was such a problem for Bush. Above are two photos. The second one shows Bush flying over New Orleans; it was widely regarded as a PR disaster, because he seemed so disconnected. But it looks an awful lot like the first photo, of Bush on Air Force One on 9/11. And that photo was considered a wonderful picture of leadership in action — so much so that there was a mini-scandal when the GOP ...

Blix.
INSTAPUTZ — Vanity Fair's oral history of the Bush Administration is uniformly fascinating. I particularly like this: Hans Blix: In March 2003, when the invasion took place, we could not have stood up and said, There is nothing, because to prove the negative is really not possible. What you can do is to say that we have performed 700 inspections in some 500 different sites, and we have found nothing, and we are ready to continue. If we had been allowed to continue a couple of months, we would have been able to go to all of the some hundred sites suggested to us, and since there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, that’s what we would have reported. And ...

Change and Change: 2008 and 1968
The Moderate Voice — ... Now the Bush years have discredited the backlash of neo-con politics that brought another miserable military misadventure and the rollback of many hard-won individual rights in the name of keeping us safe from terror. ...

Social Security was the death knell of Bush
Newshoggers.com — ... Vanity Fair has an interesting article comprised of various players in and around the Bush Administration on what went right and what went wrong.  As we should expect, everyone has an agenda, and for the Bush loyalists, part of the agenda is a long term rehab of their work and Bush's reputation.  I think this is an impossible task, but if they are able to blame acts of God for their downfall, and have it accepted, the task becomes slightly easier: ...

Quote of the day
Hot Air » Top Picks — Quote of the day posted at 9:31 pm on December 30, 2008 by Allahpundit Send to a Friend | Share on Facebook | printer-friendly “The real change in the president, in my opinion, didn’t actually happen until that Friday, when he traveled to New York. The situation on Tuesday was so—you really didn’t have time to reflect. In New York, the range of emotions that he went through—standing on the rubble, the bullhorn moment, but just as important, when he sat there in that room in private and met with those people who were still trying to learn the whereabouts of their loved ones, and hugging them, and where he got the badge. He always gets asked, Have you changed?, and he ...

They’re Calling It An “Oral History” … Oh, It’s “Oral” Alright
Pat Dollard | Young Americans — We Called It “The Telephone Game” As Kids Do you remember that game? You passed a sentence along from person to person, and by the time it got to the last person the original sentence was completely changed and wrong? Here’s some of that “Change” we’ve been hearing about for months … Guess they’re starting with the ‘history’ of the George W. Bush Presidency. Brief quotations plucked out of 8 years of ‘context’ and served up as main courses. Call Me ‘Paranoid’ … Accuse Me Of A ‘Persecution Complex’ The following is the left’s ...

Some Interesting Reading For the End of the Year
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES — ... This Vanity Fair article looks back on the last eight years by using quotes from all sorts of powerful people. Ver-ry interesting though perhaps not reassuring reading. ...

Crank Up the Way Back Machine
Corrente — Vanity Fair has posted an oral history of the Bush Administration In retrospect, seeing it all written down is just as bad as it was living through it.

Bob Burnett: Bush's Day of Reckoning
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com — When Barack Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States, he'll face daunting challenges: a shattered economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and global climate change, to mention only three. Nonetheless, many Americans feel Obama should immediately address the improprieties of the Bush Administration, particularly authorization of the use of torture. There's increasing support for a day of reckoning for George Bush and his cohorts. While Americans have a long list of complaints about Bush, there are two central grievances. One is that the 43rd President proved incompetent as the Federal "CEO." While disastrous, his ineptitude was not a violation of the law. The ...

The Strangeness of the Bush Era
Matthew Yglesias — After something happens, it can begin to seem inevitable. The extent to which the actual has its origins deep in the past, and the present-day has been unfolding for decades, becomes clear to us all. On occasion, it’s useful to have a jarring reminder that things didn’t always seem that way. Here, for example, Joschka Fischer, a very admirable and savvy foreign policy thinker and the German Foreign Minister who tried to lead opposition to the invasion of Iraq, recalls how things seemed to him eight years ago: We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, ...

auld lang syne
Bitch. Ph.D. — My frirend G.D. over at Postbourgie recommended reading Vanity Fair's Oral History of the Bush Administration, and boy howdy. The article is essentially a series of statements from high-level former whitehouse officials, state department and justice department folks, etc. Some choice quotes from the part I've read so far: this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was. . . . there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. . . . he seemed—I was ...

Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
Daily Kos — Saturday, but no rest for punditry with the inaugural coming up. L and R Blogistan via National Journal: Guess who thinks Obama will do well? Guess who doesn't think so? Gail Collins: if you didn't vote for Obama, your cult deprogramming starts Tuesday. Maya Angelou: Obama is the real deal. Mark Blumenthal: A review of a treasure trove of election data. For example, Obama did well everywhere relative to 2004, but whites making less than 25K were not his strongest supporters. Rich Lowry: Barack Obama’s lefty admirers are agitating for a new New Deal. ...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — An excerpt: Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was. . . .

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — An excerpt: Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: I was called with the specific question of whether or not the F.B.I. on the ground could interrogate [Lindh] without counsel. And I had been told unambiguously that Lindh’s parents had retained counsel for him. I gave that advice on a Friday, and the same attorney at Justice who inquired called back on Monday and said ...

An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — From Joschka Fischer: An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com: Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: I was astonished that the Americans used Curveball, really astonished. This was our stuff. But they presented it not in the way we knew it. They presented it as a fact, and not as the way an intelligence ...

Matthew Owen: Baby Steps for Obama
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com — Last Tuesday morning, people on the Mall wept and cheered for the coronation of a new king, laughed and booed for the send-off to an old one, and the American people all over the country seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Tuesday night everyone partied and by Wednesday's early hours, D.C. returned to its boring, stuffy, beautiful-people-less normalcy. During that day, Americans waited with baited breath for the initial visit to the Oval Office, those introductory calls to foreign dignitaries and those newly signed executive orders. In the U.S. and abroad, we were like new parents, mouth agape, filled with awe, hope and excitement, ...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — An excerpt: Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: On September 4 [2001], we had a principals meeting. The most telling thing for me about the attitude of these people was on the decision that had been pending for a long time to resume Predator [remote-controlled drone] flights over Afghanistan, and to now do what we couldn’t have done in the Clinton administration ...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — ... Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality-game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement, and staggering ignorance. ...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — An excerpt: Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: Christine Todd Whitman, the E.P.A. administrator, was one of several people in the Cabinet, along with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who strongly supported a proactive position on climate change. And she was, I think, in Europe telling European governments that the U.S. position was to regulate carbon dioxide. And ...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — An excerpt: Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. . . . he seemed—I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. . . . The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to ...

I Agree with Hank Paulson, not Paul Krugman
Angry Bear — ... Brad DeLong has been running excerpts from the February 2009 Vanity Fair "Oral History" of the Bush White House. Time and priorities being what they are, I didn't get a chance to read the whole piece until today—coincidentally, right after ...

"Cabinet Room" Revisited
BAGnewsNotes — I thought it was worth taking another look at the Leibovitz "Cabinet Room" portrait, which was not only shot right after the start of the Afghan invasion but was also captured -- in terms of present context -- four months after the Bybee torture memo was written. (Sorry I don't have a larger size. Leibovitz and VF have been very protective of the image, even though it's now been run twice by VF.) Because the Bush Administration's war crimes have survived so many periods of brief and intense attention while cycling through the public and media sphere, it's hard to imagine a final reckoning this time. I do find solace in the fact, however, that history (as exemplified by the ...