The president’s two first round “upset” picks really don’t amount to much. He has the 11th-seeded Temple Owls, a streaking squad that won last weekend’s Atlantic-10 tournament, knocking off Arizona State, a team whose down-the-stretch underachievement culminated in an embarrassing Pac-10 title game loss to USC (a team that otherwise wouldn’t have made the field).

Scoreboard, baby!

And Mr. President, with all due respect, I hope you get booed in May (we kid because we love!).

Russia flexed its muscles in America’s backyard yesterday as it sent one of its largest warships to join military exercises in the Caribbean. The nuclear-powered flagship Peter the Great set off for Venezuela with the submarine destroyer Admiral Chabanenko and two support vessels in the first Russian naval mission in Latin America since the end of the Cold War.

With his consistent disregard for America’s true interests, Bush has failed America completely.

This is a sad era in our history.

“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. “And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”

Bush is claiming that the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner was not specific enough, that it was properly referring to the mission of the aircraft carrier, and not to the war more generally.  Riiiiiight.

And, of course, who could possibly be more objective then a guy who was a random three-star general just 4 years ago? It’s not like Petraeus owes his whole career to Bush or anything…

Finally, one last bit of snark here: this nomination is classic Bush: look around the room and point to the first person you see. Need a Supreme Court Justice? Just walk into the hallway outside the Oval Office and point to the first lawyer you spot… Harriet Meyers, of course! No? Okay, how about Al Gonzales?

Like all good satire, the story [in the Onion] made me both laugh and cry, because it reflected something so true — how much, since 9/11, we’ve become “The United States of Fighting Terrorism.” Times columnists are not allowed to endorse candidates, but there’s no rule against saying who will not get my vote: I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.

What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don’t. Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers. But we also need our old habits and sense of openness. For me, the candidate of 9/12 is the one who will not only understand who our enemies are, but who we are.

Before 9/11, the world thought America’s slogan was: “Where anything is possible for anybody.” But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”

Friedman goes on to discuss some of the real economic consequences of America’s shifting brand identity. It’s a good read.

Good leaders in time of war, after all, construct a vision for the future — what are we fighting for? Bush promises only decades of endless struggles against some vast and largely unseen Islamo-fascist conspiracy.  But upon what foundation are we to build our will to continue to fight?  I know that there are bad people out there who want to kill us, but what do we accomplish in the victory against them?  To focus merely on our survival belies the fundamental spirit of our people.  Thoman Paine said, “give me Liberty, or give me death.”  Bush says, “please don’t kill me.”  There is no victory without freedom, and since 9/11, our leaders have acted like the scared bullies they undoubtedly have always been.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

[sigh]

Look, Blackwater may not (yet) be Executive Decisions,  but Krugman’s right — these guys (like many others in the Bush administration) simply don’t feel themselves bound by the rule of law, Iraqi or otherwise.

Way to go, Georgie boy.  Sell that “democracy” at gunpoint to a world increasingly skeptical of American intentions.  It’ll take us a generation to clean your mess, asshat.

I file this set of random thoughts under “Your Dumb President”. Great nations do not lash out in fear and anger after the socio-economic equivalent of an infected mosquito bite. Only people with small, er, “minds” think a nation’s strength lies in the height of its Towers. And yet this is what your president and mine led us all to do.

Meanwhile, I’ll loves me some farce. How many inquiries do you think I could get if I posted the following ad for a faux vacation property?

Prime beachfront property available now! Want a family vacation getaway where the emphasis is on “family”? Join other god-fearing vacationers just like you. Your women will enjoy the delicious freedom of servitude while you spend your days contemplating the joy of the Lord. No Jews/no gays. Enjoy daily religious services all with a view of the ocean’s splendor. Call for free brochure.

**Edit**

Here’s the actual quote. Keep in mind that this is posted on Breitbart, and I was linked to the story via Drudge. Again, I point out the irony of Ahmadinejad basically saying what Drudge and many of his ilk would no doubt applaud in our own country. Responding to a question about gays in Iran, Ahmadinejad deflects it with a denial that Larry Craig or Ted Haggard might love:

In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that like in your country. … In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.

Always remember, kids, that the Nazis went from laughingstocks to the ruling class in less than five years.

But Bush — and, under his watch, America — has forgotten this most basic lesson. In following Reagan’s “voodoo economics” (decried as such by his own father), Bush has cut taxes while increasing spending. And American consumers have followed suite, indulging in an unprecedented borrowing binge, the hangover from which is just beginning to be felt.  The national debt and current account imbalance have grown dramatically under Bush’s reign.  If you spend more than you make, you’re borrowing, and in the case of the American government, we’ve largely been borrowing from China.

At some point, the chickens come home to roost [please insert your favorite folksy cliche' here], and lenders stop lending. Writ small: poor Americans are unable to get credit for a home purchase, and some go under, the victims of predatory practices designed to somehow underwrite the previously marginal borrower. Writ large: China says “America – you my b*tch”:

The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.

Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning – for the first time – that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress. Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.

Described as China’s “nuclear option” in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.

I have no idea if this is a credible threat, but it certainly is a realistic one.

More proof that George W. Bush is and always shall be: Worst. President. Ever.

Once you’ve accepted this basic truth, it’s time to get a grip on your expectations. Bush and his cronies persist in the fallacy that it’s possible always and everywhere to create a perfect outcome (i.e., no future terror incidents in the U.S.). But this outcome is not possible. As I’ve argued previously, terrorism, like the plague, can be analyzed from a statistical perspective. Even if you can stop 99.99% of terrorists, you’ve still got to worry about terrorist 10,000. If, indeed, there are the thousands of evil doers monkey man would have you see lurking behind every brown-skinned face, then even a 1 in 10,000 chance of an incident means that it’s highly likely an incident of some kind will happen.

So let’s identify (yet another) failure of the Bush administration: failure to properly set expectations regarding the statistical likelihood of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Now, maybe it’s a bit odd that I can simultaneously decry Bush’s “Intelligence” Estimate on the grounds that it overstates the threat coming from one direction, while also pointing out that the threat is probably much greater than Bush himself is letting on. The reason I can get away with that is that Bush is trying to overstate the likelihood of a terrorist incident originating from a certain situation (Iraq) in order to continue justifying The Worst Decision in American History — the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It’s highly concerning to me that Bush is more interested in justifying the crap he took on our collective lawn than he is in providing real security, an effort which, as Michael Rose pointed out in the New York Times, would be greatly aided by a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

Instead of doing his best CYA (“cover your ass” … a skill he undoubtedly learned from his time at Harvard Business School) on Iraq, Bush SHOULD be providing leadership by correctly setting the expectations of the American people.

A friend of mine who works in the Seattle policy community (it’s small, but there is one here) introduced me yesterday to the concept of “resilience.” Resilience accepts the inevitability of a future terrorist incident (or natural disaster) and — instead of setting the impossible goal of 100% protection — seeks to mitigate the damage from any such incident. Thus we have a focus on overcoming and preparedness, rather than a false sense of security and invisible boogeymen.

Strength, fortitude, and determination in the face of gathering darkness, or smoke, mirrors, and invisible terror with collective self-delusion? I ask you — which set of values represents the America of your aspirations? How do you want to live?

As the New York Times notes:

If the report is given an honest reading, it is a powerful rebuke to Mr. Bush’s approach to the war on terror. It vindicates those who say that the Iraq war is a distraction from the real fight against terrorism — a fight that is not going at all well.

The administration, however, seized on the report and, through bald political timing, tried to use it to dampen calls for an end to Mr. Bush’s catastrophic war. That required some particularly twisted logic. Ms. Townsend, for example, dismissed a reporter who asked whether the fact that Al Qaeda has regrouped in the area from which it planned the 9/11 attacks suggested that it was a mistake to divert American forces to Iraq. She said Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden and the terrorists in Iraq that use the name Al Qaeda are the same.

In fact, we’ve seen no evidence of that, and none was in the intelligence report, at least the page and a half of conclusions released to the public.

And, the Washington Post reports that the military’s own assessments indicate that the fear-inspiring outcomes most discussed by the President — takeover of Iraq by al Queda or Iran — are both highly unlikely, if not impossible.

If U.S. combat forces withdraw from Iraq in the near future, three developments would be likely to unfold. Majority Shiites would drive Sunnis out of ethnically mixed areas west to Anbar province. Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups. And the Kurdish north would solidify its borders and invite a U.S. troop presence there. In short, Iraq would effectively become three separate nations.

That was the conclusion reached in recent “war games” exercises conducted for the U.S. military by retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson. “I honestly don’t think it will be apocalyptic,” said Anderson, who has served in Iraq and now works for a major defense contractor. But “it will be ugly.”

Stay tuned.

“Of note,” the [report] said, “we assess that al-Qaida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the homeland.”

The [report] also found that al-Qaida’s association with its Iraqi affiliate helps the group to energize the broader Sunni Muslim extremist community, raise resources and recruit and indoctrinate operatives—”including for homeland attacks.”

Lest we forget*, there was NO terrorist threat from elements within Iraq before our ill-begotten invasion. What’s ironic here is that the above quote comes from Breitbart, like Drudge, something of a mouth piece for the populist right. Of course, the article itself fails to note that al Qaida in Iraq DID NOT EXIST prior to 2003, but ah well.

The point is, Bush’s strategy has made us less safe — maybe a lot less safe — than we were before 9-11.

* Apologies to my co-collaborators on this blog, and to answer your question — yes — I’m on a one-man mission to permanently sully this president’s memory and reputation. We lefties simply cannot allow this pea-brain to become, like Reagan, a symbol for the right.

It’s also true that for a two term president who enjoyed GOP congressional control for several years, he really does have remarkably few legislative accomplishments. Where other leaders would have seen an opportunity to push a governing agenda, Bush saw an opportunity to evade congressional oversight as he used the executive branch to commit crimes against the constitution, fill many executive agencies with incompetents, and fill others with people who helped his campaigns’ financial backers rob the public. Which leads us to what’s probably the most important aspect of Bush’s non-Iraq legacy, his decision to provide an elegant demonstration of public choice theory and destroy public faith in the possibility of government action by showing exactly how poorly a government can be run.

I think that last one is what they call a “feature, not a bug.”

“The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Well, I’m glad that the Second Amendment is safe. Too bad about those 29 (and counting) kids, though. [/sarcasm]

There’s such a bald logical fallacy in the NRA’s favorite platitude “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” … yeah, but only people with guns use guns to kill people.  [sigh]

What is it with these Bush guys?  I just can’t tell.  It’s not really your garden variety white guy sense of entitlement.  There’s something deeper and more sinister to it.  In any sane world these guys would all be middle managers at Lockheed Martin or Dow Chemical, characters for a Michael Douglass movie set in O.C., frustrated at their boring workaday lives and overcompensating with Hummers and cheap Vegas whores.  Yet here they are running the world.

And the worst part is that, to a man (woman, in the case of Condi), not a single one of them is smart enough to even understand just how truly awful they are.  America is a far worse place today than it was at the beginning of this century, and it’s not because of Al Qaida.  Bad men with impoverished minds have cheapened our Democracy and trampled our values; I doubt we will ever recover.

It seems unconscionable that anyone, for whatever purpose, could consider such a prank funny in this era.

Consider this in context. Is 9/11 far enough in the past that it’s now acceptable — at least in the commercially-driven creative mind — to jest about it? Have five+ years of uncorraborated threat warnings desensitized us to the very real dangers we face? Is it possible that Bush is actually succeeding in his Reagan-esque attempts to make us believe we are somehow protected from a fundamentally unwardable danger?

Laughing about 9/11 at this point is akin to thanking the President for a job well done. His efforts — or “bungled attempts” as they may more properly be called — are not, and should not be, worthly of the confidence which inspires our laughter.