Sunshine, high, fluffy clouds and a cool breeze this Saturday afternoon on California’s north coast — we’re supposed to have comparable conditions the next couple of days, but weather’s still weather, especially this close to the shoreline.
A chance of rain by Tuesday.
Along with the gut-wrenching, flinging bad shit into a high-tempered fan last Tuesday, George Jr. takes an ironic, clueless bow — no regrets invading Iraq, he scoffs, but contrite for the horror created by invading Iraq.
“No, I think it was the right decision,” President Bush said. “My regret is that — a violent group of people have risen up again. This is ‘Al Qaeda plus.’ I put it in the book, they need to be defeated. And I hope we do. It’s – I hope that the strategy works.”
(Illustration: ‘George W. Bush,’ by Tonio, found here).
The boy’s got an interview with CBS News, scheduled for tomorrow, where he talks more shit like that above, dumb-ass and ignorant. He’s on a puff tour for his new book, “41: A Portrait of My Father,” a skip down memory lane, a biographic jewel to his dad, HW, set for release next Tuesday. and being termed “surprisingly emotional” in a George Jr. nit-twit kind of way.
And yesterday, he visited Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where Ebola was the big story not so long ago — Thomas Eric Duncan died there, two nurses later came down with the virus, but survived — so George Jr. gave one of the nurses, Amber Vinson, a kiss and hug during his sojourn. He himself was a patient at the hospital last year, having undergone a heart procedure.
From the Dallas News:
Bush, known for his sense of humor, made sure to joke about his time at Presby, when he had a stent put in his heart.
Walking into one nondescript hospital hallway, he drew laughter by saying, “Feels like home.”
“I guess it’s hard to say I loved my time here,” he said.
“But if I had to be somewhere, I’m thrilled it was here.”
Hi-larious. And hilarious is this from Richard Clarke, longtime chief White House counterterrorism adviser, in an oral history piece at Vanity Fair in February 2009:
“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 around for a long time before he got there — didn’t want them buying the rumor that he wasn’t too bright.
He was trying—sort of overly trying—to show that he could ask good questions, and kind of yukking it up with Cheney.
The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked.
And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader — well, shit.
I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?”
Yes, indeed — George Jr. is a “book lover” ha!
Book further, another memory waltz to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (via Slate):
As a result, the report concludes, “the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years” and is, even now, “in a heightened threat environment.”
This is bad enough news for President Bush, who has tried to bank support for his policies on the claim that the terrorist threat has diminished.
Worse news still is the report’s further observation — never stated explicitly but clear nonetheless — that the threat has re-emerged as a result of the war in Iraq.
My underline, but it really can’t be emphasized enough, the horrible tragedy on a such wide-open scale was the invasion of Iraq. Even from the US Senate in June 2008: “There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”
When President Obama didn’t pursue the truth about Iraq, he left open a hideous door, and not real funny in a funny, ha-ha-ha, kind of way, either.