Monday, January 14, 2008

The Scariest News Story Last Week

Maybe I'll make this a regular feature. No shortage of candidates these days, obviously. AP:
A teary-eyed President Bush stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz on Friday at Israel's Holocaust memorial and said the U.S. should have sent bombers to prevent the extermination of Jews there.

Bush twice had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of the museum, said Shalev, who guided Bush through the exhibits.

Upon viewing an aerial shot of Auschwitz, taken during the war by U.S. forces, he said Bush called the decision not to bomb it "complex." He then called over Rice to discuss President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision, clearly pondering the options before rendering an opinion of his own, Shalev said.

Shalev quoted Bush as asking Rice, "Why didn't Roosevelt bomb it?" He said Rice and Bush discussed the matter further and then the president delivered his verdict.

"We should have bombed it," Shalev, speaking in Hebrew, quoted Bush as saying.

Briefing reporters later on Air Force One, Rice said Bush was talking about the rail lines to the camp.

"We were talking about the often-discussed 'Could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks?'" Rice said. "And so we were just talking about the various explanations that had been given about why that might not have been done.

"It was an exhibit about the train tracks. And so we were just talking about the various explanations because, you know, there are three or four different explanations about why the United States chose not to try to bomb the train tracks," she said.
The image of Bush pulling aside his Secretary of State to demand answers about the selection of bombing targets during World War II is surely one that deserves a mention in any historical retrospective of this presidency. On its own, it might be nothing more than poignant. The scary quotient comes from reading it in the context of this Michael Hirsh story in Newsweek:
But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity....Bush told Olmert he was uncomfortable with the findings and seemed almost apologetic....But the president may be trying to tell his allies something more: that he thinks the document is a dead letter.
In this president's mind, the "gathering storm" and the 1930's have now passed, and the sleepy masses -- misled by his own intelligence community -- failed to meet the challenge. It's the summer of 1944 and those train tracks are in plain sight, waiting for a leader in search of a legacy.

10 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I keep thinking that the reign of Bush the Lesser is nearly over... and then I shudder to realize we have a whole year to go.

1/14/2008 5:03 PM  
Blogger LFC said...

Bush is the poster-child for "willful ignorance". He knows what he knows, and none of those liberal, elitist, pansy-assed facts are gonna' get in his way.

1/14/2008 5:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.mainandcentral.org/archives/2008/01/the_exit.html

1/14/2008 5:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for flagging this, CR. I wasn't picking up on the scary part at first. Despite all the evidence so far, I was viewing the scene as though Bush was a normal human..........

The odds of him ordering some kind of stupid, futile gesture are uncomfortably high.

1/14/2008 6:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And in today's WaPo, there's pressure from the Israelis again for Bush to pardon Jonathan Pollard before he's out of office.

1/15/2008 7:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I found the comment extremely funny. I mean...he's got the US mixed up in a 100 years war with Islam and he wants to go back and fight WW2 also!!! Infreakincredible. No amount of war is ever enough! Iran, Syria, North Korea, Nazi Germany...bring em all on!!! The US can always do more war!!! The ignorance is incredibly stunning also. What would bombing the lines do? Now they couldn't get supplies or anything to the camps...so why not close down the camps...dig a big hole out back...shoot all the jews...and move back to town. Does no good to bomb it unless you send in an invasion force right behind it. It wasn't a unipolar world back then...the Germans had to suffer their defeat in Russia before we could land our troops in France. These are our leaders. We are soooo doomed. Not only do we have to fight a never ending war against "terrorism" but we also have to go back and fight the wars we won again? LOL.

1/15/2008 12:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My father said the other day something that I'd never thought I'd hear a man who served in the Navy say... "If Ron Paul doesn't win, I might move to Canada." He wasn't saying that to be unpatriotic... he is expressing his lack of confidence that the U.S. is going to survive with its liberties intact another 8 years of FUBAR. That scares me, to hear my father say this, because he is usually the one I have to convince there are really serious problems undermining the U.S. Are things really so bad that those of us with foresight need to get out?

1/15/2008 3:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Note something else: Bush's comment takes for granted the absolute knowledge of historical hindsight. The subtext seems to be that military intelligence is always perfect and that U.S. intel, at least, knows everything worth knowing, and knows it with absolute certainty. This man has learned absolutely nothing in the past seven years.

1/15/2008 4:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

anonymous...have you read my posts? Nobody is more so called "anti-American" than me. And I'm a Gulf war veteran! Once you start thinking about things with an independent mind the smoke starts to clear...and as the smoke starts to clear you begin to see how ugly things really are. Ron Paul has been marginalized by ignoring him and slandering him. NBC makes a rule saying only the top 4 candidates in Nevada are invited to the debates. Richardson drops out and that moves Kucinich into 4th. NBC changes the rules to keep Kucinich out...when a judge orders them to they appeal and say if we don't win the appeal we are going to cancel the debate. They won their appeal. They had their debate. We are all just cogs in our ivy league educated elites machine. Freedom in the US has been an illusion for some time. We are manipulated and controlled now. You don't really have to leave though. Just make sure you have a rifle, a pail, and buy gold with all your earnings. Keep rifle in hands, Gold in a sack, Pail onto of sack, your butt on the pail. Do this and you will come out OK. It makes things nice a work too. Nobodies dumb enough to bother a guy sitting on a pail with a rifle in his hands.

1/16/2008 12:56 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Everytime I see Bush talking on television he reminds me of a 9 year old child stamping his feet. The man is a total moron and an embarrassment to the world as our president.

To think that Evangelical Christians would have Mike Huckabee follow up their beloved George W. Bush is just beyond frightening. It's amazing how Evangelicals are destroying the country when they think they are saving it.

1/19/2008 10:18 PM  

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