Uggabugga is to me about the oddest name for a blog. But whoever s/he is, s/he has a way with charts. This week's winner is a chart showing how the single hour that GW Bush says is all he can spare to speak to the 9/11 commission compares to his pre-9/11 vacation time.
I suppose it's sort of a cheap shot in that the better comparison would probably post-9/11 vacations (although there have also been plenty of those), but it's effective.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the White House could peddle any sort of unrealistic political garbage, and the press mostly ate it up. The National Guard issue, falling poll numbers, and not least pressure from big-time bloggers, has changed all that.
So today the Republicans caved on the insult-to-the-intelligence story that Speaker Hastert was refusing the White House request to extend the life of the 9/11 commission.
The reason for the cave-in is that the mainstream press got the bit between its teeth, and the White House realized that having to brag about an inability to controll the House — which may soon be the truth on spending and maybe even taxation — would not advance its electoral prospects, and if believed would only embolden the would-be House rebels.
(NPR's corrective of its earlier unquestioning acceptance of a falsehood peddled by RNC Chair Racicot is also a sign of the same phenomenon. The ice is melting….)
The stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission continues.
Bush to Limit Testimony Before 9/11 Panel: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have placed strict limits on the private interviews they will grant to the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that they will meet only with the panel's top two officials and that Mr. Bush will submit to only a single hour of questioning, commission members said Wednesday.
I have no idea what they think they gain by this. Is it easier to intimidate two people? Is it easier to stonewall without more live witnesses? Is there some other member of the commission who's being particularly agressive whom they want to keep out? Or is it just reflexive antagonism — fight about the shape of the table to distract from the substance?
Josua Marsahll has a way not just with ideas but with words. What better phrase than “dingbat kabuki” to describe the bizarre and transparently fraudulent claim that House Republicans are rebelling against GW Bush's earnest and assertive request to extend the life of the 9/11 commission?
The White House's suggestion that Andrew Card's personal appeal to Speaker Hastert to make good on Bush's pledge to deliver an extra 60 days for the commission fell on deaf ears would be funny if the issues — the extent to which 9/11 was preventable, and what we can learn from the failure to prevent it — were not so serious.
So now I have two questions. First, which one of these three scenarios is at work:
My second question is whether, after being continually shafted by non-cooperation from the White House (refusal to testify, refusal to provide documents, bait and switch on the terms by which Commission members could see documents), and now by this latest promise reneged upon, even the Republican members of the committee — or at least one of them — won't develop enough patriotism to denounce the White House's sabotage of their efforts.
Four notes culled from the latest spate of Bush-records and did-he-serve stories.
At first glance it is very difficult to accept that two very minor traffic accidents and two speeding tickets (as a teenage driver) is all that the Bush folks could have been hiding. Even if it demonstrates that he was illegally or improperly admitted to the guard. (We knew that.) They gotta be smarter than that?
Bush's driving records disclosed: The White House disclosed information in documents Thursday showing that President Bush had been arrested once for a college prank and was cited for two automobile accidents and two speeding tickets before he enlisted in the National Guard.
The accidents and tickets were disclosed for the first time in response to questions about a portion of Bush's military record that had been blacked out when the file was made public during the 2000 presidential campaign.
The traffic violations are significant in the context of Bush's military career. At the time Bush enlisted in the Texas National Guard, the Air Force typically would have had to issue a waiver for an applicant who had multiple arrests or driving violations.
An officer who served at the same time as the president, former Texas Air National Guard pilot Dean Roome, was required by the Air Force to get a waiver for a $25 speeding ticket when he enlisted in the Air National Guard in 1967.
There is no record of an enlistment waiver in Bush's military file.
Critics have charged that Bush received favorable treatment to get into the National Guard and avoid serving overseas at the height of the Vietnam War. His father was in Congress at the time.
…
White House press secretary Scott McClellan showed a small group of reporters a copy of Bush's application to be an officer, with nothing blacked out, after USA TODAY published a picture of the blacked-out document Thursday. The accompanying report said that Guard officials in Texas had been concerned about embarrassing information in Bush's military records before the files were released to the public beginning in 1999, according to two former Guard officials. Bush aides denied there was any effort to suppress any potentially embarrassing information.
One of the Guard officials told the newspaper that senior officers in Texas were especially concerned about a question on the form asking about arrests.
The White House denied there was any effort to cleanse Bush's record. “I'm just amazed by the kinds of conspiracy theories that some have chosen to pursue,” McClellan said Thursday. “The facts are very clear. But there are some that are simply not interested in the facts.”
The White House described the four traffic incidents as two “negligent collisions” in July and August 1962 and two speeding tickets in July and August 1964. Bush was a teenager at the time.
McClellan did not indicate any cause of the accidents. He said Bush paid a $10 fine for the speeding tickets and a $25 fine for the collisions. It was not immediately clear whether the amounts were for each incident or combined.
Maybe it's the medical records? Either that or they are even more arrogant that smart over in the White House PR office… Update: And, let's not forget we have not yet seen Bush's separation codes.
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