Hersh is worried that America doesn't have good intelligence within the Iraqi insurgency. "We don't know what's going to happen next," he says. "We have no endgame."
Whether you agree with him or not, this kind of frankness makes Hersh an anomaly among his tightly buttoned investigative peers.
"The fragility of our government is terrifying," he tells his U. of C. audience. A handful of neoconservatives took control of the levers of government "without a peep from the bureaucracy, the Congress, the press," he says. "It was so easy. . . . What is it about us that made us so vulnerable to these people?"
The Bush administration announced Thursday that it would conduct a lottery to select 50,000 people who will receive Medicare coverage of prescription drugs in the next 18 months, before drug coverage becomes available to all Medicare beneficiaries in 2006.
The lottery is part of an unusual experiment to test the new benefit among people with cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis and a few other diseases.
In authorizing the experiment, Congress provided $500 million. Forty percent of the money, or $200 million, is earmarked for oral cancer drugs that patients can take on their own, as a replacement for drugs they receive by injection or infusion in a doctor's office.
Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, said that 500,000 to 600,000 people might be eligible to compete for the 50,000 slots.
The government, Mr. Thompson said, will select participants at random from the pool of applicants, alternating between cancer patients and those with other serious diseases.
It's the Bush administration's new reality TV show: "Competing for Chemotherapy."
This compassionate conservativism know no boundaries. They can take away Grandma Millie's cancer medicine at the same time they're cutting her electricity: "Just cut 'em off. They're so f----d. They should just bring back f-----g horses and carriages, f-----g lamps, f-----g kerosene lamps."
Senate aides with knowledge of the encounter Tuesday said the vice president confronted [Democratic Sen. Patrick] Leahy about some of the Democrat's criticism about alleged improprieties in Iraq military contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. (HAL). Cheney, who as vice president is president of the Senate, is a former chief executive officer of Halliburton.
Leahy responded by saying the vice president had once called him a "bad" Catholic.
Cheney then responded, "F--- off" or "F--- you," two aides said, both speaking on condition of anonymity.
When Cheney has a "cardiac incident" later this summer so John McCain can become the new Republican vice presidential candidate and messiah, the Republican hate machine will blame Leahy (who, with Tom Daschle, was one of two senators targeted by the still-unsolved anthrax assassination attempt in October 2001) and continue to call him a "bad" Catholic.
And, even with Cheney in retirement, Halliburton will continue to siphon billions from the US Treasury.
Phyllis Schlafly, one of the chief agitators for Clinton's impeachment, told the Sun-Times she still supports Ryan because the charges are unproven and were made during a custody fight. "Sure they're disturbing. They're unpleasant," said Schlafly. "But considering where they're coming from, I would wait for the proof before judging him."
Robert Novak, the conservative commentator, said on Crossfire, "The judge allowed joint custody of their now nine-year-old son to the two parents. Number two, it was Mrs. Ryan, not Jack Ryan, who was guilty of adultery. … Jack Ryan, unlike Bill Clinton, did not commit adultery and did not lie."
House Speaker Dennis Hastert "still has a Thursday fund-raising event for Ryan on his calendar," according to Wednesday's Sun-Times. Hastert's spokesman told reporters Hastert had no comment.
Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., who voted to find Clinton guilty on both articles of impeachment five years ago, said, "Divorce cases and child custody cases are by nature acrimonious, and allegations on all sides are often unreliable or sensationalized. The Jack Ryan that I know very well is a good and decent man. … I support him and continue to support him with enthusiasm and confidence."
Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News host, fretted about the politics of personal destruction. After O'Reilly's legal analyst pointed out that Ryan hadn't denied the story and "in a Clintonesque way, splits hairs" about it, O'Reilly complained, "Just think about it, any politician or somebody thinking about running for office, if they have an ex-wife who is mad at them or an ex-girlfriend, they are dead, they are toast, because you can make any accusation in the world. … It discourages everybody from getting into the arena."
Now we know why Bill Clinton got impeached. He was in the wrong club.
The reaction to Jack Ryan right now has everything to do with the insane, trumped-up perjury entrapment of Bill Clinton by Kenneth Starr six years ago. No one really gives a shit about Jack Ryan's stupid sex life, but a lot of us are still quite angry that 1998 was a wasted year in American discourse and progress, a year in which Clinton attacked Osama bin Laden (remember him?) and was loudly accused of wag-the-dog tactics.
If the arena gets smaller, as Bill O'Reilly complains, the Republican hate machine has only itself to blame.
Presidential poop. No, not gossip, we're talking $3,000 presidential toilets at the Crawford ranch where after a quick photo-op of brush clearing or bicycle crashing, Bush can luxuriate in defecatory splendor among "...vanity mirrors, flushable toilets, full sinks, piped-in music, air conditioning and dishes of potpourri [that] make the restrooms almost indistinguishable from those in a home or nice hotel." And you thought John Kerry was spoiled!
On the June 18 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Limbaugh spoke to a caller who posed a hypothetical question: What if the caller were a liberal U.S. soldier in Iraq who had been exposed to an hour per day of Limbaugh's rants that "liberals are bad for America" -- broadcast by the American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) -- and then was killed. Limbaugh responded that the soldier should "[b]e a man about it ... laugh it off and be wrong about it. If the bomb goes off, the bomb goes off. You chose to be there."
Rush says, "I don't say the words Liberals are bad for America."
But, in the fashion of a true cowardly hypocrite, Rush waits until he has safely hung up on his insightful caller to say, "Liberal ideology is dangerous for America."
Declaration of [ex-wife] Jeri Ryan, dated June 9, 2000.
I made it clear to [Jack Ryan] that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York and one to Paris, [he] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. These were surprise trips that [he] arranged. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways.
The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. [He] had done research.
[Jack Ryan] took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. . . . It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.
[He] wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused.
[He] asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset.
We left the club and [he] apologized, said that I was right and he would never insist that I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.
Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill.
[He] became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.
"He had done research."
Obviously this is bad behavior. But it only becomes politically accountable hypocritical behavior when politicians' private indulgences contradict the public piety and prescriptive moralism of their political party, a sad fact for the candidacy of Jack Ryan.
I'm not inclined to look the other way, explicitly because of Kenneth Starr.
Scott Turow’s remarks on John Kerry and why he is the right person to be President:
I could say the following without blushing: He is running against a man who was not fit for duty in 1968 and is not fit for duty today, a man who lacked the qualifications for the office when he was elected and has demonstrated it. We have been through a skein of national disasters, for which he accepts no blame, because he literally doesn’t understand enough about the job to realize how a better President would have responded. John Kerry has been in public life for 35 years.. He was a prosecutor when GWB was running an oil company into the ground. And he was already a seasoned United States Senator when GWB decided it was time to give up abusing substances. JK has a sharper grasp of foreign policy, and more experience with it, than any candidate for President in the last 50 years, with the possible exception of GHWB (see today’s NYT). His dedication to the cause of our military and veterans is long established. And his commitment to economic and social justice for all Americans cannot be doubted. A man can’t be the committed liberal Bush sometimes maintains Kerry is, and also the unprincipled waffler. Life and public service are complicated, as GWB doesn’t understand. JK does. He has a sense of nuance, and the experience and values to improve the life of the country.
You're at a photo op, reading a book with schoolchildren and an aide suddenly whispers that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. "America is under attack."
You're the president of the United States. What do you do?
There have been other moments like this in American history, when the chief executive was suddenly plunged into a crisis, but they weren't caught on videotape. George W. Bush was on camera in an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He could see the pagers of reporters and photographers going off, one by one. He was on the spot like few people have ever been.
From two different angles, Americans have new glimpses of that historic moment. One comes from rabble-rousing Michael Moore, whose Bush-eviscerating film "Fahrenheit 9/11" premieres next week, and includes an uninterrupted seven-minute segment showing Bush's reaction after hearing the news of the attack. He doesn't move.
Instead he continues to sit in the classroom, listening to children read aloud. Moore lets the tape roll as the minutes pass painfully by.
And now from a second angle: The staff of the 9/11 Commission this week released a report that summarizes Bush's closed-door testimony about his thoughts as he sat there.
"The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis . . . The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."
This makes no sense whatsoever. If you're reading with a bunch of kids and the nation is attacked, what you do is excuse yourself from work, just like several million others did that morning, and go find out what the fuck is happening.
Bush's freakish behavior could represent cluelessness, fear, cowardice, second thoughts ("Dang, wasn't there that Presidential Daily Briefing a month ago...?") or even complicity, but nothing at all resembling leadership.
[June 13, 2004] Not since the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations has Houston hosted such a wealth of dignitaries as the flock that winged through town over the weekend for 41's 80th birthday. And that made for some very interesting beneath-the-radar partying.
Five former heads of state, the sitting president and vice president all popped in at one time or another to honor former President George H.W. Bush.
Vice President Dick Cheney, secretary of defense under 41, and his wife, Lynne, all but sneaked into town for the Saturday afternoon reunion of the former president's cabinet. Mica and Bob Mosbacher, Bush's secretary of commerce, hosted the powerful get-together that included the former president and Barbara Bush, Brent Scowcroft, James A. Baker III, C. Boyden Gray and others.
Texas A&M University cadets sang Happy Birthday, and Max Fisher of Franklin, Mich., a Republican stalwart who at 95 is the oldest person on Forbes' 400 wealthiest list, was there to offer many happy returns.
The previous night, the congenial Mosbachers hosted the more intimate after-party that followed the 41@80 VIP reception for 400 that had been held across the street in the home of Nancy and Rich Kinder.
Billionaires Nancy and Rich Kinder, former president of Enron, are Dubya’s top career patrons, with over $400,000 in contributions through July 2000 alone (not including the last four years).
The House voted 251 to 178 yesterday to replace an export subsidy with a major tax cut for domestic manufacturers and multinational corporations, setting up difficult negotiations with the Senate on one of the most significant corporate tax bills in 20 years.
Passing a corporate tax measure has become imperative. Since the World Trade Organization ruled existing export subsidies illegal, retaliatory sanctions by the European Union have tacked 8 percent onto the price of a variety of U.S. exports, from leather and jewelry to timber and thoroughbreds. The penalty will rise by 1 percentage point a month until the subsidy is lifted.
But the push to repeal a $5 billion-a-year subsidy has allowed lobbyists and lawmakers to dust off tax favors that have languished for years. The centerpiece of both the House bill and the Senate's version would cut the top tax rate for domestic manufacturers from 35 percent to 32 percent, but other provisions have pushed the final House bill to 496 pages and the Senate-passed bill to 930.
[...]
The House bill would cut business taxes by more than $143 billion over the next decade, although a series of revenue raisers and tax-loophole closures would reduce the cost to the Treasury to $34.4 billion. The measure must be reconciled with a broader Senate version that would hand out $167 billion in tax cuts but more than offset that cost with tax increases and loophole closures.
Critics of both bills say the true costs will be significantly higher, since both phase in some tax cuts over 10 years while Congress is likely to extend other tax breaks set to expire after a short time as the legislation is currently written. If all those temporary provisions were implemented immediately and extended over 10 years, the bipartisan Joint Tax Committee estimated, the cost of the House bill would reach $260 billion.
But the main criticism focused on the special-interest provisions secured by business lobbyists or added in the past few days to secure votes. The House bill includes measures tailored to help restaurant owners, makers of private jets, bank directors, timberland owners, liquor distillers, Native American whalers, commodity traders and shipping conglomerates, to name a few. One last-minute provision, pushed in part by Home Depot, temporarily lifts customs duties on Chinese-made ceiling fans.
"Christmas has come on the 17th of June," said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.).
House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) declared it the worst tax bill he has seen in his 24 years in the House and "an orgy of self-indulgence."
Although House Republicans are chiefly accountable for this blatant irresponsibility, Democrats are not blameless: "...House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) secured the votes of 48 Democrats, largely with a $9.6 billion bailout for tobacco farmers and a temporary $3.6 billion measure to allow residents of states with no income tax to deduct state and local sales taxes from their federal income taxes. Those Democrats more than offset the 23 Republicans who voted against the bill."
In a Republican orgy, which is always behind closed doors, there is no sex — only the unseemly transmission of vast amounts of money.
Under Republican leadership the US Treasury has become a corporate ATM, but at least our president's God in His infinite mercy has seen to it that Home Depot has a duty-free supply of Chinese ceiling fans.
When Darleen Druyun talked, chief executives of the world's largest defense companies listened.
She held a somewhat obscure post, as the Air Force's principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions, and turned it into one of the Pentagon's most powerful civilian jobs. She controlled a $30-billion-a-year procurement budget and could make or kill a military project.
In August, she could be sentenced to as many as five years in prison.
Druyun pleaded guilty two months ago to one federal count of criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, admitting that she tried to cover up that she had brokered a $250,000-a-year executive position with Boeing Co. at the same time that she was signing off on multibillion-dollar contracts with the company.
Now she is cooperating with federal prosecutors looking into a $23-billion Air Force pact to lease aerial refueling tankers from Boeing, which hired the 56-year-old after she retired from her federal job.
[...]
In August of that year [2002], Druyun told the assistant secretary of the Air Force that she planned to retire and was talking to Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. about possible jobs. She recused herself from handling any Pentagon matters involving those two companies but not, at the time, Boeing.
The next month, her daughter, Heather McKee, "acting as Druyun's agent," sent an e-mail to Boeing CFO [Michael] Sears, according to an Air Force memo. McKee — still working for Boeing in St. Louis — said Druyun was planning to leave the Pentagon and was discussing a job with Lockheed.
"We need to talk to her," McKee wrote. Two days later, she e-mailed Sears to say that Druyun was seeking a chief operating officer-level job, according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents.
In another e-mail, Druyun's daughter informed Sears that her mother was "VERY, VERY excited" about the prospects of a job at Boeing. McKee added that Druyun "leaves for Brussels Tues.," referring to a NATO meeting at which Druyun discussed the AWACS contract revision with Boeing executives.
Don't you think Druyun's daughter McKee should be investigated too? I must admit, I do. After all, "acting as her agent," Heather found her mom a sweet little job with one of the vendors who sought what she controlled: a mere $30 billion in payroll deductions from the American middle class.
Maybe somebody from the GAO or an oversight committee ought to call her up:
Heather McKee
SM&P Resource Management
Integrated Defense Systems
The Boeing Company
(314)233-3168
heather.l.mckee@boeing.com
UPDATE: On Friday, June 18, 2004, I found this (Susan Chandler, Chicago Tribune, April 23, 2004):
Darleen Druyun, a former senior Air Force official who was fired from Boeing Co. last year, has taken great pains to protect her daughter from the fallout of an ethics scandal involving a $23.5 billion Pentagon contract.
On Tuesday, Druyun pleaded guilty to a criminal conspiracy count for discussing a Boeing job while she was negotiating a lease for 100 Boeing tanker aircraft. As part of her plea deal, prosecutors agreed not to go after Druyun's daughter, Heather McKee, who has worked at Boeing for more than three years.
But federal court documents released this week show McKee played a central role in the secret negotiations that resulted in the hiring, and later firing, of her mother. Michael Sears, Boeing's chief financial officer and the executive who recruited Druyun, also was fired for violating Boeing's ethics policies.
Now, the dilemma for Boeing is what to do with McKee, a 27-year-old employee who works in St. Louis, the headquarters of Boeing's booming defense business, known as Integrated Defense Systems. A Boeing spokesman declined to discuss McKee's status, citing concerns about the privacy of employees.
Others argue McKee gave up her privacy when she participated in clandestine efforts to engage Boeing in a bidding war for her mother.
"I would fire her in a second. She is the center point for the unethical conduct between her mother and Mike Sears," said Keith Ashdown, a defense expert with Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group.
When I google the numbers, I get this amazing page about fax.com, written by the kind of thorough investigators we would have on the FCC if Michael Powell weren't so dead-set on censoring Howard Stern and working on behalf of media consolidators instead of the people whose air he sells to the highest bidder.
A KPMG LLP tax shelter that the Internal Revenue Service last year declared abusive had attracted an array of prominent U.S. companies, a sign of how popular and widespread efforts to shave corporate-tax bills have become.
The IRS has said the shelter generated at least $1.7 billion in tax savings for more than two dozen companies. Previously undisclosed internal documents from KPMG, which marketed the shelter, list a host of brand-name companies that agreed to buy it.
Delta Air Lines, Whirlpool Corp., Clear Channel Communications Inc., WorldCom Inc., Tenet Healthcare Corp. and the U.S. units of AstraZeneca PLC and Fresenius Medical Care AG all used the shelter, according to the companies and the KPMG records, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The KPMG documents show that Qwest Communications International Inc., Washington Mutual Inc., Global Crossing Ltd., Lennar Corp. and the U.S. units of Cemex SA and Siemens AG signed agreements to buy the shelter, but those companies wouldn't say whether they implemented it.
The internal KPMG records, covering the years 1999 through 2001, offer a rare look at the inner workings of a highly aggressive shelter that KPMG sold under the name "contested liability acceleration strategy," or CLAS. The records also provide a look at what nearly all the past year's government investigations into KPMG and other tax-shelter promoters have kept a well-guarded secret: the identities of companies that bought so-called abusive tax shelters.
According to a July 2002 sworn statement filed by an IRS agent with a federal district court in Washington, 29 corporations bought CLAS from KPMG, realizing at least $1.7 billion in tax savings. The statement, based on information KPMG provided in response to an IRS summons, didn't name the companies.
By that measure, CLAS was more costly to the federal Treasury than any of the four KPMG tax shelters that were the subject of hearings held last November by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which focused mainly on shelters sold to wealthy individuals.
Flag-waving, tax-cheating Clear Channel is about as unpatriotic as it gets, rallying for a war that someone else pays for.
Former Halliburton Co. workers are raising new allegations about company waste and mismanagement in Iraq, including abandoning an $85,000 truck because of a flat tire, paying $45 for a case of soda and providing laundry service for a cost equivalent to $100 per 15-pound bag.
The Halliburton whistle-blowers accused the company of ruining expensive equipment by failing to provide basic maintenance, turning a blind eye to theft and retaliating against workers who tried to control costs.
"There are structural problems with the way Halliburton does business that must be fixed," Marie deYoung, who dealt with Halliburton subcontractors while working in Kuwait, told House staffers.
DeYoung is a former military officer and chaplain.
DeYoung is a chaplain, so he wouldn't lie, right?
It's about time real Christians realized that the Bushies aren't doing them any favors.
The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, "I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn't know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy." As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States--more then 70,000 of them had died.
A federal grand jury indicted a government ink expert on charges he lied during his testimony in the Martha Stewart trial, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Larry Stewart [no relation], who was the chief forensic scientist for the U.S. Secret Service, was arrested last month and accused of perjury during his testimony in February.
Manhattan federal prosecutors said Larry Stewart lied when he testified he examined a document the government offered into evidence.
The chief forensic scientist for the US Secret Service lied under oath to put Martha Stewart away.
Let's say that again, this time together: The chief forensic scientist for the US Secret Service lied under oath to put Martha Stewart away.
The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.
Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned "any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues."
Under sharp questioning from Democratic senators, Attorney General John Ashcroft reiterated Bush administration claims that it doesn't allow prisoners to be tortured to extract information.
But he also refused to release internal policy documents that assert the president's power to disregard laws and international conventions prohibiting torture.
[...]
When pressed by Sen. Edward Kennedy to say whether he agreed with the conclusions of the internal legal memo, Mr. Ashcroft declared that "first of all, this administration rejects torture."
But, of course, "...he declined to say what advice he has given the president or the Pentagon on the topic."
The administration says what it thinks we want to hear in public and disregards laws and international conventions in private, secreting all evidence of its actual attitudes and behavior. The precedent of flagrant lawlessness was set when Dick Cheney allowed campaign contributor and Enron chairman Ken Lay to determine national energy policy, six months before 9-11-01. And everything the administration has done since then, from the tax cuts to the Medicare bill to the environmental policies to the whopper, the Iraq invasion, furthers the pattern.
Lea Fastow shouldn't receive special treatment, but she also shouldn't be treated more harshly than anyone else serving the same sentence. What's next, will Martha Stewart be sent to MCC Manhattan? This is overkill. The Bureau of Prisons should reconsider.
Skimbleland is not exactly a teacup of sympathy for the Fastows, but neither do we wish Abu Ghraib on her, despite her complicity as part of Enron in creating the conditions for this administration to produce those two ugly new household words and all they symbolize.
Timing is everything. According to AdRants, the $226 million Homeland Security advertising campaign was delayed for 17 months to coincide with the launch of the Iraq war, creating a false sense of linkage between the domestic duct tape hysteria and the attacks on Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11 or the anthrax postal crisis of 2001. Via Plep.
The President's abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.
"Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'that's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now."
Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will."
God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”
“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”
But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”
“The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”
If polls are any indication, a majority of Americans are now enemies of the United States.
Barron's: Is this market keeping you young or making you older? Glickenhaus: We like the market best when the pluses far outweigh the negatives, and we don't have overhanging fears of negatives that can bite us. […]
Q: Would you like to enumerate the pluses and minuses? A: The political picture has never been as negative as it is today.
Q: Does that matter to the market? A: It matters tremendously. If Kerry is elected, the doctrinaire Republicans will sell stocks for a day or two, but then the market will go up considerably.
Q: Because? A: Because Bush has been worse than zero as a president. He is bush-league. No. 1, he got us into a war and spent billions of dollars, dollars unfortunately which don't have any positive offset in better housing, schools and infrastructure. And people are being killed. It is a war without any purpose other than to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
Secondly, he spent all his time campaigning for his next election, rather than overseeing the various departments of government. The military has many internal problems, which are surfacing in Iraq and Afghanistan. He hasn't consolidated and integrated the CIA and the FBI and his new department of Homeland Security, all the military intelligence, which he desperately needs to do.
He has alienated foreign countries. He has failed to address environmental concerns. And in his approach to the Israel-Palestine War, he has been unaware that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policy of non-negotiation is destined to fail, resulting in increasing mutual hatred and many more deaths and no solution. Fiscally, Bush has been totally irresponsible.
Q: And Kerry? A: Kerry is a mediocrity. He is a typical senator who votes for the moment. He isn't a statesman.
Q: If Bush gets re-elected, what happens? A: If Bush gets re-elected, he will see it as a total affirmation of all his policies, and the deficits will grow. Perhaps we will have another war in addition to the two that exist, however preposterous this seems.
We wrote about Sandra Ward's coverage of Glickenhaus before.
