On "Hardball," Michael Morell concedes the Bush administration misled the nation into the Iraq War.…
Morell's remarks support the basic charge: Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed intelligence; they used the flawed intelligence to mislead.Mother Jones
If you thought it was "Blood for Oil"--you're wrong. It was far, far worse.Greg Palast
This neat ideological package asserted the unchallengeable power of a “unitary executive” above constitutional checks and balances, national law, and international treaties. Echoing Richard Nixon’s circular self-justification of three decades earlier, Justice Department lawyer Steven Bradbury told Congress: “The president is always right.”
The Project for the New American Century, a think tank with which Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other officials were associated, laid down intellectual covering fire for these policies. With the United States the only superpower left, the PNAC apparently concluded that history was over and that the Bush administration had an unprecedented opportunity to remake the world in its own image and demonstrate the futility of resistance.
The policies it engendered effectively said to the international community: “The rules we used to agree on no longer apply to us. Here’s exactly how far above international law we are. What are you going to do about it?”
Strategically, the Bush-Cheney project targeted conceptual smart bombs on the very idea of human rights. The rest of the world got the message, and the cracks in the foundations of U.S. national security have yet to be repaired.…Consortium News
Here is a chart that I constructed from the Treasury's own data that looks at Federal spending. It goes all the way back to 2001, which was the start of the Bush Administration.
As you can see, spending under George W. Bush went up every single year of his presidency, then spending peaked in 2009 and has been going down ever since.
Yet Obama has allowed Conservatives to dictate the national conversation on this and has labeled him an "out of control" spender when it is completely not true.
Let me be clear: I am not making a political statement here. I did not vote for Obama in the last two presidential elections. (In the last one I didn't even vote.) This is merely about the truth and it reflects the Obama Administration's utter ineptitude at getting the truth out.
