Truthout exposes how 2004 vote was hacked for surprise Bush win

It looks very much like the electronic vote counting in Ohio in 2004 was hacked in order to change a Kerry win to Bush win. This is from Truthout based on documents provided to the court in a lawsuit.

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."

Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."

Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."

Spoonamore concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.

Spoonamore claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston where he was giving a seminar in data security. "Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you," he wrote to Arnebeck.

Read the email correspondence here [pdf].

The conservative Republicans are a voting minority. Any win they have on a mass basis probably involves a stolen election. This is another indication of their criminal behaviors.

A Man-in-the-middle attack is a classic method of hacking into a system and changing or stealing data.

Is Bush a criminal?

McCain, speaking to Bob Scheiffer on Face the Nation yesterday said that Bush is a criminal on the same level as the disgraced Richard Nixon.

Is McCain right?

Blackwater in Baghdad - "may be worse that Abu Ghraib"

Now even the military is privately piling on the Blackwater cowboyswho shot up civilians in Baghdad, and the Department of State has gone into "hunker-down" mode. Here are a few choice quotes from the Washington Post:

In high-level meetings over the past several days, U.S. military officials have pressed State Department officials to assert more control over Blackwater, which operates under the department's authority, said a U.S. government official with knowledge of the discussions. "The military is very sensitive to its relationship that they've built with the Iraqis being altered or even severely degraded by actions such as this event," the official said.

"This is a nightmare," said a senior U.S. military official. "We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we're trying to have an impact for the long term."

In last week's incident, Blackwater guards shot into a crush of cars, killing at least 11 Iraqis and wounding 12. Blackwater officials insist their guards were ambushed, but witnesses have described the shooting as unprovoked. Iraq's Interior Ministry has concluded that Blackwater was at fault.

"This is a big mess that I don't think anyone has their hands around yet," said another U.S. military official. "It's not necessarily a bad thing these guys are being held accountable. Iraqis hate them, the troops don't particularly care for them, and they tend to have a know-it-all attitude, which means they rarely listen to anyone -- even the folks that patrol the ground on a daily basis."

the military has long been wary of private security guards, especially those who, in the military's view, don't follow the rules of engagement that govern soldiers. Often, private guards quickly drive away from the scene of an incident, leaving soldiers to deal with the aftermath, officials said.

"I personally was concerned about any of the civilians running around on the battlefield during my time there," said retired Army Col. Teddy Spain, who commanded a military police brigade in Baghdad. "My main concern was their lack of accountability when things went wrong."

"They are immature shooters and have very quick trigger fingers. Their tendency is shoot first and ask questions later," said an Army lieutenant colonel serving in Iraq. Referring to the Sept. 16 shootings, the officer added, "None of us believe they were engaged, but we are all carrying their black eyes."

"Many of my peers think Blackwater is oftentimes out of control," said a senior U.S. commander serving in Iraq. "They often act like cowboys over here . . . not seeming to play by the same rules everyone else tries to play by."

"The deaths of contractors from Blackwater helped precipitate the debacle in Fallujah in 2004 and now the loss of Blackwater is causing disruptions in the war effort in 2007," a military intelligence officer said. "Why are we creating new vulnerabilities by relying on what are essentially mercenary forces?"

It should not be forgotten that this Blackwater incident occurred as they were providing security to officials from the Department of State and Blackwater was working under a contract with the Department of State, not the Department of Defense. While the Iraqi people are going to blame "The American Troops" for what Blackwater did, The Blackwater cowboys were not operating under the control of the U.S. military. They are the responsibility of Condi Rice and the Department of State.

So what reaction have we gotten from Condi and the DoS? Josh Marshall writes:

the Department of State is telling Blackwater the company may not answer Congress's question without the specific approval of the State Department. What's more, Condi Rice has told Chairman Waxman (who plans an investigation of the incident) that she will not testify about Blackwater or contracting corruption cases in general.

Congress and Henry Waxman have the Constitutional power to perform oversight hearings as needed at their discretion.

There is no legal justification for Condi or Blackwater to defy a subpoena from Henry Waxman's committee. Does Condi expect the Department of Justice to simply not act on Congressional legal action to enforce a subpoena?

If so, then the cowboy antics of Blackwater become very clearly reflective of the Unconstitutional cowboy antics of the Bush White House in general. This administration was also responsible for Abu Ghraib. The timing of these incidents may be accidentle, but they are the natural outcome of the mismanagement, incompetence and crony-capitalist corruption of the Bush administration.

Psychotic individuals often don't remember their mistakes

From the New York Times article of the interviews with Bush about his Presidency, one thing is clear. He takes responsibility for the decisions which have come out of the White House.

And in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, he [Bush}continued, “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president.”

Yet when asked if he directed that the Iraqi Army be disbanded, this was his reply:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

So according to Bush, he did not direct the disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But he is the only one who can 'decide.' So it must have been a decision made by Paul Bremer, the Proconsul in Iraq, right?

Bremer refuses to take the blame, and he has the documents to prove the decision came out of the White House. From today's New York Times article:

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had distanced themselves from his order. “This didn’t just pop out of my head,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding that he had sent a draft of the order to top Pentagon officials and discussed it “several times” with Mr. Rumsfeld.

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House is not commenting on Mr. Draper’s book, said Mr. Bush indeed understood the order and was acknowledging in the interview with Mr. Draper that the original plan had proved unworkable.

“The plan was to keep the Iraqi Army intact, and that’s accurate,” the official said. “But by the time Jerry Bremer announced the order, it was fairly clear that the Iraqi Army could not be reconstituted, and the president understood that. He was acknowledging that that was something that did not go as planned.”

But the letters, combined with Mr. Bush’s comments, suggest confusion within the administration about what quickly proved to be a decision with explosive repercussions.

Indeed, Mr. Bremer’s letter to Mr. Bush is striking in its almost nonchalant reference to a major decision that a number of American military officials in Iraq strongly opposed. Some senior administration officials, including the secretary of state at the time, Colin L. Powell, have reportedly said subsequently that they did not know about the decision ahead of time.

Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2004 that the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was made without the input of the joint chiefs. “We were not asked for a recommendation or for advice,” he said. [Snip]

Mr. Bremer said he sent a draft of the proposed order on May 9, shortly before he departed for his new post in Baghdad, to Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials.

Among others who received the draft order, he said, were Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas J. Feith, then under secretary of defense for policy; Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, then head of the American-led coalition forces in Iraq; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Bremer said that he had briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on the plan “several times,” and that his top security adviser in Baghdad, Walter B. Slocombe, had discussed it in detail with senior Pentagon officials as well as with senior British military officials. He said he received detailed comments back from the joint chiefs, leaving no doubt in his mind that they understood the plan.

Josh Marshall at his TPM makes the following points:

in pretty much all the books on the Iraq fiasco it's clear that this was a decision that came with Bremer from Washington. And my recollection at least is that this very much came out of the Chalabi/Feith/Wolfowitz 'clean slate' approach that dominated the early days of the occupation. So the idea that Bremer somehow came up with this on the fly or that the Americans were forced to confirm some sort of fait accompli flies in the face of all the evidence and, it would seem now, ample documentary evidence in Bremer's possession.

So Bush is the President and 'The Decider.' He takes responsibility for what his administration does.

He just doesn't remember doing it. Is that a lie or a symptom of psychosis?

Insiders suggest that Barney considering leaving position as first dog

Think Progress reports that Tony Snow on the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show

...signaled that he will not stay until the end of the term. He also mentioned that there are “probably a couple” of other high-level resignations “coming up in the next month or so.”

Most of the key players in the Bush White House are gone or stepping out the door.

Can Barney be far behind?

ThinkProgress has compiled a list of some of the key resignations:

• White House Senior Political Adviser Karl Rove
• White House Counselor Dan Bartlett
• White House Budget Director Rob Portman
• White House Counsel Harriet Miers
• White House Political Director Sara Taylor
• White House Director of Strategic Initiatives Pete Wehner
• White House Deputy National Security Adviser J.D. Crouch
• Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty
• Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer
• Justice Department White House liaison Monica Goodling
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Army Secretary Francis Harvey
• Joint Chief of Staffs Chairman Peter Pace
• Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson
• U.N. Ambassador John Bolton
• USAID Director Randall Tobias

With so many key staff departures, the AP reports that “Bush has decided he might get more done in his final months by going it alone,” making increased use of executive orders and veto power.

Can you say "Lame Duck President?"

More on Rove - the Republicans don't like him either

David Frum has published an Editorial in The New York Times entitled "Building a Coalition, Forgetting to Rule." David Frum is, of course, and ex-Bush speech writer and a fellow at the Neocon American Enterprise Institute.

AS a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question.

The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?

The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it? [Snip]

Instead of seeking solutions to national problems, “compassionate conservatism” started with slogans and went searching for problems to justify them. To what problem, exactly, was the faith-based initiative a solution?

This was a politics of party-building and coalition-assembly. It was a politics that aimed at winning elections. It was a politics that treated the problems of governance as secondary. But of course governance is what incumbents get judged on — and since 2004, the negative verdict on President Bush’s governance has created a lethal political environment for Republican candidates.

David explains that Karl Rove practiced "political polarization" rather than "Wedge Politics."

Wedge politics unites a large constituency on one side, while splitting the coalition on the other side. In the 1970s, crime was a wedge issue: pushing white urban Democrats away from their black and liberal New Deal allies. In this strict sense, the only wedge issue Mr. Rove deployed was immigration, and he deployed it against his own side, dividing business donors from the conservative voting base.

Polarization, however, is Karl Rove’s specialty. He united his own base on one side — and united his opponents on the other. Al Gore and John Kerry each won 48 percent, the best back-to-back performance by a losing party since the 19th century. Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. The Democrats are the party of the top and bottom of American society; the Republicans do best in the great American middle, which is losing ground.

Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.

In my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a breakthrough among Hispanic voters. We were so mesmerized by the specious analogies between 1996 and 1896 that we forgot that analogies are literary devices, not evidence.

In 2006, Republicans and conservatives paid the price for this we-know-best attitude. I fear that we will pay an even higher price in 2008.

While I admit that I am personally suspicious of anything that David Frum writes or says, this seems like a pretty straight forward analysis of how Rove has operated and what the results have been.

So why does the Bush White House refuse to gather information from outside experts? The answer is "attitude." They have a bad case of the "Not invented here" attitude. A story told by Dick Armey to NJosh Green (and published by Kevin Drum) demonstrates it.

"For all the years he was president," Armey told me, "Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we'd do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn't like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president's autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it."

Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. "Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, 'It would probably wind up on eBay,'" Armey continued. "Do I give a damn? No. But can you imagine refusing a simple request like that with an insult? It's stupid. From the point of view of your own self-interest, it's stupid. I was from Texas, and I was the majority leader. If my expectations of civility and collegiality were disappointed, what do you think it was like for the rest of the congressmen they dealt with? The Bush White House was tone-deaf to the normal courtesies of the office."

Not only were Bush and Rove not interested in obtaining information from outside the White House as Frum pointed out above, they did not even practice the the normal civilities that ease working together with people they disagree with, and if they treated the conservative Republican Speaker of the House that way, they disagreed with everyone.

For the conservatives who decry the "Bush haters," they need to remember that a person gets back the same behavior he demonstrates towards others. There is nothing in the Constitution that even hints that the President should be treated with a level of respect and civility he fails to demonstrate to others.

Let's not forget that Rove put Bush into the office he now holds, and Rove has also set the standards for how to treat those with whom he disagrees. Bush is responsible for this, the most disastrous Presidency in America's history, but Rove is right up there in line for blame with Bush himself.

SMU to become a Texas Disneyland

It looks like Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas is in line to land the George W. Bush Presidential Library. For background see:

• The Dallas Morning News,
• The bush Library blog
  and
• The Economist.

Of course, The Bush Library will only be co located with the University. It will be run independently, with no control by the University. Quite a few of the SMU faculty have been extremely unhappy about the set of arrangements. They appear to be designed to adopt the academic reputation of SMU, yet be under the control of Bush apologists rather than responsible academics. The purpose of the Bush library will be to get out "The Bush Message" rather than being a source of good historical research. In the latter function it will be much like the approach the Nixon Library has taken to presenting the Watergate Scandal which knowledgeable historians consider to be a joke. Which brings up the LA Times article from July 8, 2007.

The LA Times offers a description of the sad Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda. California.

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.

Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a "coup" engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — without evidence — of "offering bribes" to further their famous coverage.

Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate.

This was history as Nixon wanted it remembered, a monument to his decades-long campaign to refurbish his name. Nixon himself approved the exhibit before the library's 1990 opening.

"Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke," one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. "You didn't know whether to laugh or cry."

Then the article goes on to describe the takeover of the previously privately owned and operated Nixon Library by the presidential library system of the National Archives, so there may be some hope for the Nixon Library in the future. The Bush apologists can be expected to fight any such intrusion by professional historians.

---

Comments on this LA Times article can be found at:

• The Left Coaster
  and at
• Digby

NY Times (finally) advocates setting deadline to get out of Iraq

Editor and Publisher allows us to get around the New York Time subscription wall and learn that their editorial writers have had it with the Bush/Cheney idiocy in Iraq. In their Sunday edition for July 8th They advocate setting a firm deadline to get out of Iraq.

A lengthy excerpt follows. The entire editorial is posted at www.nytimes.com
•

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.

Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

The Mechanics of Withdrawal

The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.

The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.

Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic. The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now....

The Question of Bases

The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.

There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy — and too tempting — to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washington’s real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations’ governments.

The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

The Civil War

One of Mr. Bush’s arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening.

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq’s political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done. The administration should use whatever leverage it gains from withdrawing to press its allies and Iraq’s neighbors to help achieve a negotiated solution.

Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.

The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war....

The Neighbors

One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors — America’s friends as well as its adversaries.

Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories.

For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq’s borders.
•

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

After their own Judith Miller was so deeply involved in lying to get us into the mess in Iraq, now, at last, after over four years the New York Times is publishing something reasonable.

Combine this with the reports that polls now show that close to half the American public thinks that Congress should begin hearings into impeaching both Cheney and Bush and it looks like it is time to stick a fork into the Bush administration. They are finished.

Will someone please knock on the door and wake Congress up? It's time they started earning their pay and taking action.

Bush poll approaching lowest ever Presidential polls

Bush has dropped in the polls again, so that only Truman and Nixon are lower - and not by much.
This is from MSNBC:

2. Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

Breakdown	Approve	Disapprove	Don't Know
Current Total	26%	65%	9%
Republicans	60%	25%	15%
Democrats	8%	87%	5%
Independents	20%	71%	9%

Trends

Dates	Approve	Disapprove	Don't Know
6/18-19/07	26%	65%	9%
5/2-3/07	28%	64%	8%
3/28-29/07	33%	60%	7%
3/14-15/07	30%	60%	10%
2/28-3/1/07	31%	61%	8%
1/24-25/07	30%	64%	6%
1/17-18/07	31%	62%	7%
12/6-7/06	32%	60%	8%
11/9-10/06	31%	63%	6%
11/2-3/06	35%	56%	9%
10/26-27/06	37%	53%	10%
10/19-20/06	35%	57%	8%
10/5-6/06	33%	59%	8%
8/24-25/06	36%	56%	8%
8/10-11/06	38%	55%	7%
5/11-12/06	35%	59%	6%
3/16-17/06%	36%	58%	6%
11/10-11/05	36%	58%	6%
9/29-30/05	40%	53%	7%
9/8-9/05	38%	55%	7%
8/2-4/05	42%	51%	7%
3/17-18/05	45%	48%	7%
2/3-4/05	50%	42%	8%
12/2-3/04	49%	44%	7%

Nixon got down to 23% just before he resigned, and Truman was at 22% in 1952. My bet is that Bush will continue to drop, and may plumb the depths not previously seen.

That's not is a difficult prediction considering that Bush is the worst American President ever.

What's wrong with conservatism and why are so many of us angry at Bush and the Republicans?

America has some real problems, most of which have become a lot worse since the beginning of the Bush administration. This is a three-part post starting with Glenn Greenwald explaining the reasons for the rising criticism of America and the Bush administration around the world, then going to Rick Pearlstein's explanation of why the failures of the Bush administration are in fact proof that conservatism is a failed and unrealistic ideology. I finish up with an explanation of why so much of the set of problems the Bush administration is demonstrating appear to be the result of managerial incompetence, but in fact stem from the choice of personnel and decisions required to try to force a failed ideology into existence.

Contrary to the rather childish conservative argument that all the criticism of Bush is instigated by a group of "Bush-haters" who are out to get him no matter what he does, there is a really good basis for believing that Bush and the conservatives are stealing the dream of an America which really was, in many ways, unique and special in the world. Glenn Greenwald started discussing this yesterday and continues today. Here is a key part of his post from today:

So much of the intensity and anger driving the criticisms of the Bush presidency -- certainly my own, and much of what I read (as exemplified above) -- is grounded in a fervent belief in American political values, its political principles and its constitutional framework. The anger comes not from a belief that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt entity, but from the opposite view. It comes from witnessing the all-out assault on these vaunted political principles and values and the complete corruption, close to the destruction, of our country's national character that has made the U.S. such an important and admired presence in the world for so long.

To believe in America's political values and to observe the importance of its role in the world is not "American exceptionalism." [Link added - Editor WTF-o] Like all countries, America has erred many times and has been capable of evil. Other countries have critically important virtues that America lacks. As I detail in my book, America has been far too quick to use war as a foreign policy option and has become increasingly imperialistic in precisely the way the Founders so stridently warned against.

But those who focus on America's flaws to the exclusion of its virtues are but the opposite side of the same Manichean coin from the American exceptionalists who believe that we can do no wrong, that America is inherently Good independent of our conduct in the world. What the Pew poll demonstrates is that the face America has shown to the world during the Bush presidency -- at least insofar as the world perceives it, a vitally important metric -- is a fundamentally different one than they saw previously.

I find the secrecy and willingness to abandon historically successful institutions and legal precedents that are characteristic of this administration to be shocking and exceedingly stupid. The current conservatives are not people willing to establish a fair and effective process and then trust the outcome to that process. Instead they believe that the outcome is all that matters, and any restriction that leads to alternative outcomes must be trampled or eliminated. Unfortunately their view of the appropriate outcomes is based on ignorance, fear, greed and corruption.

The real problem is that by eliminating any sense of justice and fairness in the process sacrifices the real needs of large groups of people. Since those people do not accept the conservative views of appropriate outcomes, the conservatives see them as just additional impediments to what they want. As they ignore the needs and desires of more and more groups who think they are getting a raw deal, the conservatives are learning the true meaning of "No justice. No Peace." A modern nation cannot be governed to suit a small aristocracy. There are too many others who have a real stake in the process and the nation, and their cooperation cannot be ignored.

In addition to Glenn Greenwald, Rick Pearlstein is writing a series of posts that makes the point that the problem of America is not conservatives. The problem is the conservatism of Goldwater, Reagan and the think tanks. On July 4 Rick wrote Independence Day in which he describes the idea behind Daniel Brook new book The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America. The conservatives want to make everything of any importance in America into a question of financial wealth. Bush has specifically spoken of creating the "Ownership Society" in which a person's value is nothing more than the numerical value of the wealth he personally controls. This is a system which eliminates individual Liberty and replaces it with a society run by and for the wealthy and the bankers. This is also the message of Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative" which has large portions about such things as eliminating free and low-cost individual education.

Rick further explains in his post today entitled Big Con Manifesto. A lot of people feel that the problems America is having with the Bush administration are just Bush and Cheney who are abandoning conservatism. This is very far from the truth. This administration is doing its damnedest to implement as much of the canon of conservatism as possible and conservatism itself is proving to be a total failure!

The effort to blame the failures of the Bush administration merely on the failures of Bush and his administration to follow conservative ideology rest on the clear incompetence repeatedly demonstrated by members of the Bush administration. Let's never forget Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Mike Brown, or the sadly incompetent Jerry Bremer who so badly screwed up the early occupation of Iraq. But the problem is not just the incompetence of many Bush appointees. The problem stems from why they were appointed in the first place.

The incompetence demonstrated repeatedly by so many Bush administration appointees comes from two sources. First, Bush and his supporters do not believe in government. They are conservatives, and remember well that both Goldwater and Reagan stated "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem."

Since the conservative appointees consider the very existence of government to be the source of most American problems, they try to solve problems that really need government solutions without using government. This leads to the second problem. Since the demand to eliminate government is not supported by either facts or experience, it has become necessary to appoint to senior government positions ideologues who ignore facts and experience. Those are the only kind of government administrators conservatives can find to try to implement policies which the preponderance of facts and experience show will not work. The result is the utter incompetence demonstrated in the occupation of Iraq and the failures in the Gulf Coast (and especially the Democratic stronghold of New Orleans.) This isn't government administrators who abandon conservatism and thus fail. This is administrators who fervently believe in the conservative ideology and keep trying to implement the ideology in spite of its' failures. [This same procedure was a major reason why the Soviet Union failed. Marxist-Leninism Communism was every bit as much a failed ideology as is modern American conservatism., and similarly required the promotions and appointments of true-believers over experts in their field.]

In short, what Glenn Greenwald is saying is that the criticism of the Bush administration is based on the criminally irresponsible and ignorant conservative government run by Cheney and Bush. The criticism comes from those of us who believe that America was and still could be a very special nation, but conservatives are stealing that specialness from America. Rick Pearlstein goes further to demonstrate that the real problem is not the failure of the Bush administration to properly implement conservatism. It is the utter failure of conservatism itself that is the source of America's major problems today. My final addition to that is to show that the incompetence demonstrated by almost every act of government that the Bush administration has attempted is not based on the incompetence and wrong headed failure to implement conservatism. The demonstrated incompetence is a necessary result of attempting to apply a failed ideology in spite of all factors that show it is not working and cannot work.