Why America Resists Learning From Other Countries

One of the aspects of the United States that I find most annoying and arrogant and at times down right dangerous is the myth of American exceptionalism and a refusal to learn from the experiences of other countries, many of which have existed for centuries longer than America (e.g., the Romanov family ruled Russia for 60 years longer than America has existed; the Byzantine Empire lasted over 1000 years).  Sadly, both political parties cite this myth, but it is most popular on the right where Europe - which now has more upward social mobility than in America - is derided and the mindset is that American do everything better and has nothing to learn from others.  Time and time again, factual reality proves this myth wrong and now, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, if anything, America is showing that it is exceptional in its bungling of its response to the pandemic.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at America's continued refusal to learn from other countries, often to its own detriment.  Here are article highlights:

Americans have long considered their nation a shining “city upon a hill,” with the “eyes of all people … upon us,” as the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop put it almost 400 years ago. Now those eyes are riveted on the United States for all the wrong reasons. The country is consumed by the worst COVID-19 outbreak on the planet, and the beacons of light are popping up elsewhere in the world.

R. Daniel Kelemen, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has studied what the United States could learn from European public policies, told me that those who subscribe to the ideology of American exceptionalism, or as he described it, “the notion that the United States is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations,” have traditionally resisted seeking out lessons from other countries’ experiences. At the very least, “this view leads many to think that the U.S. is simply so different that policies that might work in other countries could simply never work here,” he wrote in an email.

American exceptionalism has been pronounced dead numerous times, from the Vietnam War through the global War on Terror, and nevertheless managed to stick around through those difficult periods. But the coronavirus crisis may pose the greatest threat yet to the belief that America has little to learn from the rest of the world.

American politicians typically resist engaging with ideas from abroad. Most U.S. public-policy debates, on matters including education reform and social mobility, occur in a bizarre vacuum, as if the encounters (good and bad) of the large majority of humankind with these same challenges yield no useful insights for the United States. On the rare occasions that politicians do invoke the policies of other governments, they often wield them as political props during highly polarized debates over issues such as health care and gun control.

And many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.

This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College (and a former contributing editor at The Atlantic), told me by email.

Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

Instead, the United States squandered that advantage on many fronts. The Obama administration had developed a playbook for pandemic response that drew in part on lessons from other countries’ experiences, but the Trump administration disregarded it. When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March. “We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.” By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country, despite Donald Trump’s assertions since March that anybody who wants a test can get one. It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. . . . . He has stated, referring to America’s coronavirus response, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and “so many” other world leaders, “almost all of them—I would say all of them; not everybody would want to admit it—but they all view us as the world leader, and they're following us.” Even after he has asked the South Korean government to send tests and medical equipment to the United States to help combat the coronavirus, Trump is insisting that the country cough up much more money for the privilege of stationing U.S. troops there. It’s a measure of traditional American hard power that seems obsolete these days, relative to South Korea’s newfound clout as a world leader in addressing COVID-19. My colleague Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump’s proposal in April that people inject themselves with disinfectant, to the horror of scientists and laughter of people at home and abroad, marked an “acceleration point” for a “post-American, post-coronavirus world … in which American opinions will count less.”

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton critiqued Bernie Sanders’s proclivity to look to other countries for policy insights and innovations (“We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America,” Clinton said), but many of Sanders’s fellow candidates during the 2020 Democratic primary echoed his admiration for other countries’ achievements. “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

The United States, of course, still has tremendous capacity to teach. But it also may need to emerge from this crisis recognizing that it has equal capacity to learn. To learn is to admit room for improvement, and thus to improve, especially in dealing with modern-day threats such as pandemics, which America doesn’t have much experience contending with as a superpower. The United States could, for example, easily seize on the momentum among many of its allies to pool lessons learned and coordinate policies to combat the virus and reopen economies.

I will not hold my breath waiting for Americans - especially those who support the GOP and its growing embrace of ignorance and white nationalism to learn from others anytime soon.  Meanwhile, people will literally dies because of the belief in American exceptionalism. 

Lest We Forget the Ugliness of War: Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

The image above reminds us of the ugliness and death that accompanies war, something Der Trumpenführer seems to have forgotten as he inflames relations with North Korea and tries to ignite a conflagration in the Middle East with his declaration that the United States will move its embassy to Jerusalem.  

Brief statistics on the damage done by the attack on Pearl Harbor:  All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. All but the USS Arizona were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship,^{[nb 5]} and one minelayer. One hundred eighty-eight U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed (the vast majority aboard the Arizona) and 1,178 others were wounded.

Three days later, British Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales (which earlier in the year damaged the German battleship Bismark and led to its demise) and battlecruiser HMS Repulse were sunk by land-based bombers and torpedo bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy as the Japanese swept into  French Indo-China and  Britain's fortress at Singapore.

Frighteningly, Der Trumpenführer  knows little of history or of the true situation in the Middle East.  As always, satiating his ego and narcissism - and on occasion throwing bones to his evangelical Christian supporters - is all that really motivates his actions.  

As we remember the dead today, we must remember that we have an occupant of the White House who truly cares nothing about the lives that may be lost all because of his arrogance and ignorance.

Why Do Conservatives Care More About Benghazi Than About The Iraq War?

Outside of perhaps Fox News, a/k/a, Faux News, and some of the lunatic fringe elements of the far right, it is now widely accepted that the Iraq War was launched by George W. Bush/Dick Chaney based on lies and manufactured intelligence.  The financial cost to America ranges between $1.7 to $3.0 trillion dollars.  In terms of casualties, a total of 4,491 U.S. service members were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2014, and more than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the Iraq war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment.  The Benghazi incident in Libya, in comparison, saw four (4) deaths.  Yet American conservatives remain obsessed over Benghazi even though eight committees have failed to show  fault on the part of Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.   Why the obsession on the one and near total silence on the other?  The Foreign Policy offers some thoughts:

I don’t understand the disproportionate focus on a half day in Benghazi vs. more than a decade in Iraq.

When people say they just want the facts, I think: We still don’t know when the decision was made to invade Iraq, or who was involved. We still don’t know why the intelligence was so warped. We don’t even know how many Americans died in Iraq, because there has been very shoddy record-keeping on contractors’ deaths.

Yet some people, many of them in Congress, keep on calling for more info about Benghazi. What am I missing?

I asked some smart friends recently. One, retired Army Col. Charles Krohn, wrote back that:

Tom, it’s easier to understand the simple (Benghazi) than the complicated (Iraq). On the scale of misleading the Republic into acting against its best interests, however, Iraq is a million times more shocking, exactly as you suggest.

There’s another issue, somewhat sensitive. A lot of us (me included) supported the war in Iraq because we believed the WMD argument, especially after Colin Powell embraced it. So it’s a trifle embarrassing for the masses to acknowledge we were manipulated. For those who lost life or limb, embarrassing is hardly an appropriate expression.

That’s disturbing.

The other possible answer?  The reptilian brains of the far right who STILL have not gotten over a black man occupying the White House and the agitators of talk radio.. 

Jeb, Your Brother Did Not Keep Us "Safe"

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As noted in the prior post, one of the most idiotic things said during the GOP presidential "debate" on Wednesday was Jeb "Jebbie" Bush's delusional statement that his brother had kept Americans "safe."  That kind of statement is only true in the alternate universe of today's GOP and ignores the reality that George "Chimperator" Bush had warnings of a threat of an major Al Quaeda attack and ignored it.  After allowing 9-11 to happen, Jebbie's idiot brother lied and mislead the nation into an unnecessary War that took the lives of thousands of Americans and cost the nation billions and billions of dollars better spent on rebuilding America domestically.  Oh, and did I mention that the Chimperator set the stage for the rise of ISIS?  Only in an alternate universe is this keeping us "safe."  Think Progress delves further into the insanity of Jebbie's statement which shows his total unfitness for the White House.  Here are excerpts:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush doubled down on the idea that his brother “kept us safe” as president on Thursday — making an even more explicit connection to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center — the day after he made the claim during the second Republican presidential debate on CNN.

His campaign tweeted a graphic with the phrase “he kept us safe” paired with the carnage after the attacks. . . . . It’s a whitewashed version of history. 

Much of the analysis following the World Trade Center attacks revealed that the Bush administration ignored warnings that such a plot could be in the works. Declassified documents indicate that Osama bin Laden had been planning the attacks for years. But rather than preparing for potential terrorist attacks, reports indicated that the Bush administration was more focused on missile defense. 

Furthermore, even if Bush is trying to argue that it was his brother’s post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy that kept America “safe,” most evidence indicates that the war in Iraq was dangerously misguided. The Iraq war wasn’t linked to the attacks on U.S. soil, and a 2006 intelligence report indicated that the U.S. presence in Iraq actually worsened the threat of terrorism. Ultimately, nearly 5,000 American troops and other allied troops gave their lives during the war in Iraq. 

Jebbie Bush's Idea of a "Good Deal"

Perhaps I am biased since I have a son-in-law who was seriously wounded in Afghanistan.  But in retrospect, he was one of the lucky ones - he had a miraculous recovery.  He had friends who lost their lives and others who lost multiple limbs.  All for nothing in the grand scheme of things.  Yet Jeb "Jebbie" Bush believes that the Iraq War and the fool's errand launched by his idiot brother and Emperor Palpatine Cheney was overall a good Deal.  The question is, for who - Halliburton and its shareholders like Cheney?  

A reader sent me the above image from a Facebook post that lays out what assholes like Jebbie conveniently forget.   Read it carefully.  It is an indictment against Jebbie and other Republicans who are all too eager to throw away more American lives and to squander billions, if not trillions of dollars, by sending American troops back into the Middle East.

The last think America needs is another idiot Bush in the White House.  Let's hope Jebbie's poll numbers keep falling.

Scott Walker: War With Iran On Day One

The GOP clown car of presidential candidates is full of idiots, but some are more dangerous than others.  Case in point?  Scott Walker who seemingly cannot discern the difference between waging war on public sector labor unions and going to war against a relatively educated nation of over 80 million people.  How else to explain Walker's boast that he'd wage war against Iran on the first day of his presidency if he's elected.   It's all part and parcel with Walker's not ready for prime time stature and cretinous mindset.  Yes, such idiocy plays well with the GOP base comprised of Christofascists who love slaughtering Muslims (including women and children) and those clinging to the myth of American exceptionalism, but for rational, logical, thinking individuals, Walker's bluster ought to be frightening and immediately disqualify him from the presidency.  Here are highlights from a piece in Huffington Post:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) said over the weekend that the next president of the United States needed to be prepared to take aggressive military action on their very first day in office, including against Iran.

The presidential contender, who had promised to "terminate" the nuclear agreement with Iran upon his inauguration, made the remark while speaking with reporters at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on Saturday. Walker was asked about a criticism from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who asserted during a town hall last week that unwinding the agreement on day one was an unrealistic promise.

Asked about Bush's remarks on Saturday, Walker argued -- without mentioning Iran directly -- that a president ought to be ready to take action from the moment they step foot into the Oval Office.

"He may have his opinion. I believe that a president shouldn't wait to act until they put a cabinet together or an extended period of time, I believe they should be prepared to act on the very first day they take office," he said. "It's very possible, God forbid that this would happen, but very possible, that the next president could be called to take aggressive actions, including military actions, on their very first day in office."

After Walker aides accused Bush of softening on his opposition to the agreement, the former Florida governor issued a statement to The Weekly Standard assuring that he “would begin immediately to responsibly get us out of this deal.”

The dispute between the two early GOP frontrunners comes just weeks before the first debate, hosted by Fox News in August. It also follows Walker's efforts to bone up on foreign policy, positioning himself as one of the most hawkish candidates in the 2016 Republican presidential field. Addressing conservatives at the Family Leadership Summit on Saturday, Walker said the U.S. needed "a foreign policy that puts steel in the face of our enemies," and one that unapologetically asserted power across the globe.

Note that the forum where Walker spoke was the Iowa Family Leadership Summit which was sponsored by a who's who of hate groups and extreme right Christofascist organizations. These people literally love the idea of killing Muslims no matter the financial or human life cost involved for America. 

CIA Briefer Admits Bush and Cheney Lied to American Public on WMD Intelligence

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell is sworn in as he testifes before the House Intelligence Committee. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

With Jeb "Jebbie" Bush already suffering severe political turbulence over the failed policies of his idiot brother, now George W. Bush's CIA briefer has admitted on national television that Bush and Dick Cheney knowingly lied to the American public about weapons of mass destruction  in Iraq.  And Jebbie is already on record that he sees his lying brother as his "go to adviser" on Middle East policy.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at the CIA briefer's admissions.  Here are excerpts:

For a dozen years, the Bush-Cheney crowd have been trying to escape—or cover up—an essential fact of the W. years: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants misled the American public about the WMD threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein in order to grease the way to the invasion of Iraq. For Bush, Cheney, and the rest, this endeavor is fundamental; it is necessary to protect the legitimacy of the Bush II presidency. Naturally, Karl Rove and other Bushies have quickly tried to douse the Bush-lied-us-into-war fire whenever such flames have appeared.

[N]ow there's a new witness who will make the Bush apologists' mission even more impossible: Michael Morell, a longtime CIA official who eventually became the agency's deputy director and acting director. During the preinvasion period, he served as Bush's intelligence briefer.

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball on Tuesday night, Morell made it clear: The Bush-Cheney administration publicly misrepresented the intelligence related to Iraq's supposed WMD program and Saddam's alleged links to Al Qaeda.

Host Chris Matthews asked Morell about a statement Cheney made in 2003: "We know he [Saddam Hussein] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Here's the conversation that followed:

MATTHEWS: Was that true?

MORELL: We were saying—

MATTHEWS: Can you answer that question? Was that true?

MORELL: That's not true.

MATTHEWS: Well, why'd you let them get away with it?

MORELL: Look, my job Chris—

MATTHEWS: You're the briefer for the president on intelligence, you're the top person to go in and tell him what's going on. You see Cheney make this charge he's got a nuclear bomb and then they make subsequent charges he knew how to deliver it…and nobody raised their hand and said, "No that's not what we told him."

There's the indictment, issued by the intelligence officer who briefed Bush and Cheney: The Bush White House made a "false presentation" on "some aspects" of the case for war. "That's a big deal," Matthews exclaimed. Morell replied, "It's a big deal."

And there's more. Referring to the claims made by Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials that Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda, Morell noted, "What they were saying about the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda publicly was not what the intelligence community" had concluded.

Jeb Bush, Endless War and the Neocon Trap

Jeb Bush claims to be "his own man" but on foreign policy so far, he looks to be a retread of the disastrous policies of his brother, the Chimperator, and we all know what those policies cost America in terms of squandered lives and treasure.  How else to explain Jebbie surrounding himself with the same group of advisers who proved wrong on virtually every aspect of the Bush/Cheney Middle East policy. Worse yet, these advisers still refuse to admit how wrong they were.  There's much to dislike about Jebbie, but the prospect of more Middle East disasters along suggests he should never make it to the White House.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the frightening situation.  Here are excerpts:

Are the neoconservatives turning on Jeb Bush? It would be ironic, considering the men his brother turned to for foreign policy advice. It would also be highly problematic—since foreign policy establishment hawks should represent one of Bush's few natural constituencies on the right. But it's hard to observe recent developments and not suspect something is afoot.

I've often observed that Sen. Rand Paul has to walk a fine line in order to keep all the disparate elements of his coalition together, but it's increasingly looking like Jeb Bush is having to do the same thing. He has the legacies of his father and brother to contend with. And while these legacies aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, they aren't necessarily complimentary, either. And therein lies the trap for Jeb: does he alienate the GOP’s main cadre of foreign policy activists and thinkers, or does he saddle up with them and risk being seen as the second coming of his brother?

The foreign policy "realist" community hopes Jeb will be the "smart" son and follow the "prudent" footsteps of his father. . . . . But neoconservatives prefer George W. Bush's more aggressive foreign policy, and want the GOP to nominate a hawk in 2016. Now Jeb Bush's campaign needs to figure out what kind of President Bush he would be, and he likely won’t be able to assuage the concerns of both camps.

[T]he Washington Free Beacon, which is widely thought of as a neoconservative outlet, recently noted: "Jeb Bush’s selection of Baker as a foreign policy adviser has sparked concern among conservatives and in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities. Baker is infamous for his hostility to Israel, having said during his tenure as secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, 'F--k the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.' Baker is also a supporter of President Obama’s Iran negotiations."

The comparatively moderate, intellectually inclined Jeb Bush would seem like a natural candidate for neoconservatives to rally behind. But Baker speaking at J Street while working for the campaign in some capacity is cause for concern. This is dangerous if prominent hawks start to suspect that Jeb might not be as friendly to their cause as the Ted Cruzes of the world. Kristol and Rubin would seem to be sending a message that Bush that he can't take their support for granted. They need him to prove that he's a lot more like Dubya than his dad.  

Politico is already reporting that Jeb Bush is distancing himself from Baker, noting that he "disagrees" with him on Israel. And writing at National Review Wednesday morning, Jeb is made his pro-Israel position clear. Let's see if that’s enough for the critics. If Jeb really wants to win the nomination, he might have to drop Jim Baker like a bad habit. 

The take away?  We don't need another Bush in the White House - never, ever. 

Taliban and Extremists Retake Parts of Iraq

Some - I for one  - saw the Iraq War as a fool's errand from the out set.  Those who pushed for war and manufactured false information with which to dupe the American public, including the delusional Chimperator Bush and megalomaniac  Dick Cheney, ignored history and saw only what they wanted to see.  Now, with America finally out of Iraq after squandering the lives of thousands of American lives and billions of dollars in tax dollars, what everyone sane should have foreseen is happening: the Taliban and religious extremists are resurgent and retaking portions of the country.  The reality is that as horrible as he and his regime were, Saddam Hussein was the force that held these forces in check. Now Hussein and American forces are gone and we are about to reap what Bush/Cheney sowed.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post on the collapsing situation in Iraq:

An eruption of violence in Iraq is threatening to undo much of what U.S. troops appeared to have accomplished before they withdrew, putting the country’s stability on the line and raising the specter of a new civil war in a region already buckling under the strain of the conflict in Syria.

In the western Iraqi province of Anbar, Sunnis are in open revolt against the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Militants affiliated with al-Qaeda have taken advantage of the turmoil to raise their flag over areas from which they had been driven out by American troops, including the powerfully symbolic city of Fallujah, where U.S. forces fought their bloodiest battle since the Vietnam War.

On Monday, Maliki urged the people of Fallujah to expel al-Qaeda-­affiliated militants to avert a full-on attack, echoing calls made by U.S. forces a decade ago when they warned residents to leave the city or suffer the consequences. . . . . Instead, most residents were trying to leave, packing their possessions into cars and fleeing in any direction they could, just as they did ahead of the U.S. assault on the city in November 2004.

[M]ost analysts and Iraqis say the problem is rooted, above all, in the Maliki administration’s failure to reach out to Sunnis and include them in the decision-making processes of the coalition government, thereby enhancing a sense of Sunni alienation from the authorities in Baghdad that began when U.S. troops invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003.

“Extra weapons and drones are not going to solve this problem. In fact, they will make it worse, because it will encourage Maliki to believe there is a military solution to this problem, and that is what perpetuates civil wars,” said Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The Iraqi army, demoralized and running short of supplies, has proved unable to dislodge the militants, and the ad hoc tribal militias confronting them lack weapons and ammunition, said retired Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former deputy police chief in Ramadi who is working with the tribal forces battling the al-Qaeda fighters.

Since 2011, the war in neighboring Syria has compounded security troubles in Iraq by creating an atmosphere of lawlessness that has allowed al-Qaeda space to organize, train and recruit just across the border. In April, the group’s Iraq affiliate renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, signaling its expanded ambitions and reach, and it has since redoubled its efforts, seizing territory in Syria and embarking on an intensified campaign of bombings against mostly Shiite targets in Iraq.

The situation is a disaster - a disaster brought to us by the Bush/Cheney regime and Congressional Republicans who rubber stamped anything and everything Bush/Cheney asked for.

George W. Bush’s Legacy Keeps Getting Worse

With the opening of his presidential library, George W. Bush, a/k/a the Chimperator, is trying to enhance his legacy and somehow drag his sorry ass from the rankings of one of the worse presidents in American history.  But the man remains delusional and has even said he wants his brother Jeb Bush to run for president, a proposal that his mother squashed immediately recognizing that W has poisoned the Bush name for years to come.  Much of the nations continuing fiscal woes track back directly to the feckless Chimperator and his evil partner in war crimes, Dick Cheney.  A piece in the Washington Post reminds us of what George W. and the Republicans brought to America.  Here are highlights:

[A]nyone tempted to get sentimental should remember the actual record of the man who called himself The Decider. Begin with the indelible stain that one of his worst decisions left on our country’s honor: torture.

Hiding behind the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Bush made torture official U.S. policy. Just about every objective observer has agreed with this stark conclusion. The most recent assessment came this month in a 576-page report from a task force of the bipartisan Constitution Project, which stated that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.”

We knew about the torture before Bush left office  .   .   .   .  the Constitution Project task force — which included such figures as Asa Hutchinson, who served in high-ranking posts in the Bush administration, and William Sessions, who was FBI director under three presidents — concluded that other forms of torture were used “in many instances” in a manner that was “directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.”   .   .   . It may be years before all the facts are known. But the decision to commit torture looks ever more shameful with the passage of time.

Bush’s decision to invade and conquer Iraq also looks, in hindsight, like an even bigger strategic error. Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction still have yet to be found; nearly 5,000 Americans and untold Iraqis sacrificed their lives to eliminate a threat that did not exist.
We knew this, of course, when Obama became president. It’s one of the main reasons he was elected. We knew, too, that Bush’s decision to turn to Iraq diverted focus and resources from Afghanistan.

Bush didn’t pay for his wars. The bills he racked up for military adventures, prescription-drug benefits, the bank bailout and other impulse purchases helped create the fiscal and financial crises he bequeathed to Obama. His profligacy also robbed the Republican Party establishment of small-government credibility, thus helping give birth to the tea party movement. Thanks a lot for that.

As I’ve written before, Bush did an enormous amount of good by making it possible for AIDS sufferers in Africa to receive antiretroviral drug therapy. This literally saved millions of lives and should weigh heavily on one side of the scale when we assess The Decider’s presidency. But the pile on the other side just keeps getting bigger.

Bush and Cheney with the rubber stamp of the GOP controlled Congress did immense damage to America and cost thousands of young American lives in the quest to satiate their hubris.  This is something that must continue to be underscored over and over again.

 

Washington Post All Wrong on Afghanistan

Much of the time I agree with the Washington Post's editorial board on an range of issues, but today's column sniping at the Obama administration's plans for troop withdrawals suggests that the editorial board must have been drinking large quantities of far right Kool-Aid.  Ditto for the Obama administration when it comes down to it.  Both views describe a desired kind of Afghanistan that has never existed throughout thousands of years of history, but at least the Obama troop withdrawals will lessen the squandering of young American lives in a country that sadly has always been a rat hole and likely always will be thanks to the backwardness of the nation's predominant religion and the endemic corruption that dates back almost 2,400 years.  "A stable, sovereign Afghanistan that is a responsible international actor" is nothing more than a pipe dream and if Obama were honest, he would admit that the last 12 years have been a fool's errand brought on by two men, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who ought to be standing trial for war crimes.  Here's a sampling of the Posts idiotic whining:

IN DESCRIBING the U.S. mission in Afghanistan after meeting President Hamid Karzai last week, President Obama said that “it was in our national security interest to have a stable, sovereign Afghanistan that was a responsible international actor, that was in partnership with us, that . . . [had] its own security capacity and [was] on a path that was more likely to achieve prosperity and peace for its own people.” What he didn’t say was that his administration is well on its way to abandoning that interest.

To preserve a stable Afghanistan after 2014, the United States and its allies would have to leave behind sufficient forces to enable the Afghan army — which currently boasts only one brigade able to act independently — to operate effectively enough to prevent the Taliban from retaking the southern and eastern territories it has been driven out of since 2009. Such a resurgence would likely plunge the country back into the civil war that raged during the 1990s and allowed al-Qaeda to create a haven.

Just eight months ago, U.S. and NATO military officials were anticipating that it would take an international force of around 30,000 soldiers, including 20,000 Americans, to accomplish that mission while also continuing to train the Afghan forces and carrying out counterterrorism missions against al-Qaeda. Since then, however, the White House has quietly changed course, overruling the generals and insisting that plans be drawn up for a far smaller contingent. Mr. Obama’s civilian aides are reported to be pushing for 3,000 or less; last week, a National Security Council spokesman told reporters a “zero option” would also be considered.

[W]ithout U.S. support Afghan forces would almost certainly lose substantial ground to the Taliban — losses that U.S. policy would essentially concede. 

But Mr. Obama has not been clear. Though he appears to be considering options for a future U.S. presence that would make meaningful training and assistance to Afghan forces impossible, he has not stated, much less justified, an intention to abandon that mission.

One can only assume the editorial board is listening to the lies of the military leadership which will never ever concede the reality that more men, more time, and more squander treasure and lives will not make a damn bit of difference in Afghanistan.  I would also like to know if anyone on the editorial board has family members serving in Afghanistan - I suspect not.  Obama's biggest mistake has been to fail to exit from Afghanistan much earlier and concede that that nation is a snake pit of corruption and extremism that cannot be redeemed with American blood and money.  Just image if the billions of dollars squandered in Afghanistan had been invested in America instead.  And imagine if we had not sacrificed thousands of troops for absolutely nothing.

The Pentagon's F*cked Up Priorities - Banning LGBT Sites While Squandering American Lives

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Supposedly American troops in Afghanistan and other parts of the world are fighting and risking their lives to protect American values.  Values like religious freedom, freedom of thought and opinion and freedom from state sponsored censorship.  At least that's the message trumpeted by politicians ranging from Barack Obama to far right wing nuts in the House GOP.  But apparently, the Pentagon hasn't received this message.  Or the message that honoring and supporting our men and women in uniform means not sending them out on futile fools' errands in unwindable wars like the fiasco in Afghanistan foisted on America by Chimperator George Bush and Emperor Palpatine Dick Cheney. 

First, with respect to the Pentagon's disdain for claimed American values, Towleroad and Americablog are both reporting that the Pentagon is blocking blogs and webs sites labeled as "LGBT" - a label that certainly applies to this blog.  Seemingly, some folks at the Pentagon did not get the news alert that Don't Ask, Don't Tell has been repealed and that LGBT service members can come out of the closet and that they should be freely able to surf the Internet for LGBT news and outlets (some do somehow make it to this blog from Afghanistan).  It's also disturbing that far right GOP sites are not being blocked.  Here are highlights from Americablog:

It’s bad enough the United States Department of Defense censors Towleroad and AMERICAblog – banning the gay civil rights Web sites from being accessed on DOD computers – and it’s even worse that the Pentagon has no problem permitting their computers to access Ann Coulter’s and Rush Limbaugh’s hate-filled Web sites.

But what’s really offensive is that at least one of the Pentagon’s safe-surfing Internet filters has a censorship category called “LGBT.” And if you’re deemed “LGBT” by the Pentagon, they ban you.

I wonder if the Pentagon has a censorship category titled “Jewish,” “African-American,” or “Latino.”

The LGBT filter existed before the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but still has not been fixed. And the Pentagon was notified of the problem as early as last summer, 2012. Yet no one’s gotten around to doing anything about it. I’m also told that the censorship varies depending on service and geographical region – it’s not entirely clear why the Pentagon doesn’t use the same bans/filters nationwide and agency-wide, if it’s going to censor the Internet at all. This problem has to be fixed Pentagon-wide.

Our site, AMERICAblog, was previously banned for being “LGBT,” but now we’re only banned at least by the Air Force, for being “political” and “activist.” The Air Force is banning my Web site for being “political” while permitting other Republican “political” Web sites. Daily Kos is banned as well. Anyone else smelling a Big Brother constitutional problem with that?

I had a few different contacts try accessing a variety of sites on DOD computers, in order to confirm this, including Zeke Stokes, communications director for OutServe-SLDN, who confirmed via one of their military members. Note what they found. Towleroad – Banned for being “LGBT”

While the Pentagon worries about censoring LGBT sites, liberal "activist" sites and liberal political sites, it still has absolutely no problem throwing away the lives of young Americans not to mention billions of dollars which might just as well be put in a huge piled, doused with gasoline and burned.  Here's the latest sacrificial offering to American hubris and the Pentagon's betrayal of our troops:

 Pfc. Markie T. Sims, 20, of Citra, Fla., died Dec. 29 in Panjwal, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 38th Engineer Company, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, under control of the 7th Infantry Division, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.

For regular readers, you guessed it.  Sims was in my son-in-law's Company and while my son-in-law is lucky enough to be recovering (he still has a long way to go even after 7 weeks), Pfc. Sims will not have that option.  Dead at 20 years old for, in my opinion, absolutely nothing.  This country and most certainly the Pentagon learned nothing from the Vietnam fiasco as we repeat the same exact disaster except in an arid climate rather than in the jungle.  Meanwhile, as always, the generals strut around like peacocks surrounded by attendants while lying to the American public and those only too happy to believe the lies in the White House and Congress.  We are not "making progress" in Afghanistan.  We are merely squandering young lives and bankrupting the country.