But, ultimately, the strain was simply too much. After all these years during which all the key members of the Bush administration — Georgie himself, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney — stoically took the blame for allowing 9/11 to happen even though they were not responsible in any way, shape or form, Cheney abruptly broke the code of silence today, and revealed to the world who was really responsible for missing all the warning signs about imminent al-Qaeda attacks during the first seven and a half months of the Bush administration:

You know, Dick Clarke. Dick Clarke, who was the head of the counterrorism program in the run-up to 9/11. He obviously missed it. The fact is that we did what we felt we had to do, and if I had to do it all over again, I would do exactly the same thing.

Funny, isn’t it, how neither Cheney nor anyone else in the Bush administration ever said any such thing back in March 2004 when Richard Clarke became a household name overnight, “when he appeared on the 60 Minutes television news magazine, released his memoir about his service in government, Against All Enemies, and testified before the 9/11 Commission. In all three instances, Clarke was sharply critical of the Bush Administration’s attitude toward counter-terrorism before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the decision to go to war with Iraq.”

Back then, everyone in America was too sharply aware of Richard Clarke’s strenuous efforts to catch the new administration’s attention and get them to focus on the al-Qaeda threat. Even the supine mainstream media of 2004 would not have allowed Cheney (or anyone else in the Bush administration) to get away with such a obvious, blatant, bald-faced falsehood.

But Cheney probably figures that by now many Americans will have forgotten the truth of the matter. Besides, the asinine mainstream media of 2009 will immediately put Liz Cheney on every conceivable TV channel to confirm and defend Dick Cheney’s rantings. After which a sizable percentage of Americans have to take Prick Cheney’s claim seriously, because, hey:
— the Vice President said it,
— conservatives who have no other claim to fame apart from having received half their DNA from him are in full agreement with him,
— and sure, sane people disagree, but sane people always seem to disagree with everything Cheney says, so you really can’t take them very seriously, can you?

Which is why it’s helpful for ThinkProgress to remind everyone of this list of “some of Clarke’s emphatic e-mails warning the Bush administration of the al Qaeda threat throughout 2001″:

“Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack” (May 3)

“Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot” (May 23)

“Bin Ladin’s Networks’ Plans Advancing” (May 26)

“Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” (June 23)

“Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (June 25)

“Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (June 30)

“Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays” (July 2)

And unless Condi Rice was in the habit of periodically disappearing from public view to do who-knows-what with who-knows-who, leaving Richarde Clarke to put on blackface and high heels to sub for her and make all the decisions that history has mistakenly recorded as being made by Condi Rice, it wasn’t Richard Clarke who decided to:
— blow off the briefing of July 10, 2001 when George Tenet personally came to the White House, to push the panic button, and try and get the Bush administration to understand the urgency of the al-Qaeda threat
– ignore the well-known PDB of August 6, 2001, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

And unless George Bush was also in the habit of periodically disappearing from public view to do who-knows-what with who-knows-who, leaving Richarde Clarke to put on his best smirk and his best my-IQ-is-half-my-age act, and make all the decisions that history has mistakenly recorded as being made by George Bush, it wasn’t Richard Clarke who delivered the famous “All right … You’ve covered your ass, now” line to the CIA officials who “flew to Crawford [Texas] to personally brief the President — to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.”

Ehud Olmert‘s yanking of Bush/Rice‘s chain over the U.N. Security Council resolution, and his juvenile bragging about it later, provides a perfect example.

The spoke-squirming started on Friday, after Rice abruptly abstained from voting on the Security Council resolution, but before Olmert bragged about how he has the President of The United States in his pocket.

Sean McCormack, State Department spokesman, spent a good long time at his daily press briefing on Friday trying to fend off criticism that the spin he was trying to give to Condi’s failure to vote for the resolution she had worked so hard to put together made no sense at all. Finally, he just seems to have thrown up his hands (this excerpt comes at the end of a long, futile run-around):

QUESTION: Well, what kind of message are you trying to send –

MR. MCCORMACK: The message we’re trying –

QUESTION: — with this abstention?

MR. MCCORMACK: The message we’re trying to send, Matt –

QUESTION: If you’re trying to confuse people, you’ve done a good job.

MR. MCCORMACK: We want an effective resolution to the situation on the ground, so that’s what we want.

QUESTION: So when the Secretary comes out, and you come out, and you say we support this resolution, we support the language in it, we support the goals, why – what message does it send when you don’t vote for it? I mean, it just – it’s completely inconsistent.

MR. MCCORMACK: Matt, well, you’re certainly welcome to your interpretation.

Yesterday, White House spokesmen got into the act. The best punch Gordon Johndroe could throw was: “I’ve seen these press reports, they are inaccurate”. He was unable to explain what part of them was inaccurate.

Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto went through the same unconvincing motions (but even more unconvincingly) at the morning press briefing:

Q Tony, President — Prime Minister Olmert says that it was a phone call from him to President Bush that forced President Bush to ask Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to change the U.S. position on the resolution working its way through — on Gaza at the U.N. Security Council. Is that –

MR. FRATTO: Look, I think I’ve seen some of the reporting on this. I want to say that some of what we’ve seen is not accurate. I’m not going to get into discussing — I know the State Department has done that and Secretary Rice was asked about it last night. And I don’t really have more to add to it. But there is –

Q When you say reporting on this, I mean, these are actually Olmert’s words. I mean, he actually said this.

MR. FRATTO: Yes, there are inaccuracies.

Q In what Olmert said?

MR. FRATTO: Yes. (At this point Fratto was rescued by an unrelated question.)

He’s seen some of the reporting, and some of what he’s seen is not accurate? So Tony, is the some of the parts greater than the hole (the one you kept wishing would open up at your feet)?

Sean McCormack was grilled about Olmert’s statement yesterday at the State Department’s daily press briefing. His action plan was evidently to hypnotize reporters by repeating the phrase “100 percent” over and over again:

QUESTION: Yeah. Given Prime Minister Olmert’s comments yesterday, why should – why should anyone still – or why should anyone not believe that Israel is controlling U.S. foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East?

MR. MCCORMACK: I did see the reports of his comments, and let me just start off by saying I don’t know the context of the comments. I don’t know if they are reported accurately. I don’t know if the Israeli Government would say, yes, that is an accurate quote.

What I can tell you is that the quotes as reported are wholly inaccurate as to describing the situation – just 100 percent, totally, completely not true. And I can – you know, I can vouch for that, having been up there at the United Nations the entire time, witnessed Secretary Rice’s deliberations with her advisors. …
[...]
… that afternoon, all that afternoon, Thursday afternoon, Secretary Rice’s recommendation and inclination the entire time was to abstain, for the reasons that she described both during the Security Council session and subsequently in interviews. So I can tell you with 100 percent assurance that her intention was 100 percent to recommend abstention. She, of course, consulted with Steve Hadley at the White House as well as with the President. I’ll let the White House describe any interactions between the President and Prime Minister Olmert. But – so this idea that somehow she was turned around on this issue is 100 percent, completely untrue.

Somehow what’s 100% missing in all of the vague denials is anything resembling a direct statement (by anyone) that Olmert never said to Bush what he publicly crowed about saying. But McCormack didn’t even have his heart in the vague denial he had offered. Pressed on how Olmert could say what he did if it isn’t true, McCormack’s final statement was:

And again, I can’t – you know, I can’t posit and vouch for the – whether those remarks are accurate.

So apparently he can’t 100% vouch for the quotes as reported being “just 100 percent, totally, completely not true.”

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.

“She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour,” Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza where hundreds have been killed.

Fourteen of the council’s 15 members voted in favour of the resolution, which was later rejected by both Israel and Hamas.

The United States, Israel’s main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Rice later became the sole abstention.

“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour,” Olmert said.

“I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone’. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now’. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

“I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour.”

We’ve always known that the U.S. government is firmly in bed with Israel. I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t previously aware how kinky the relationship was, and that we were the submissive. But Olmert leaves no doubt at all. “I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone’. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now’. He got off the podium and spoke to me. Wow!

Let it be noted that the State Department denies Olmert’s claim.

“Mr. Olmert is wrong,” the official said.

Even if everything had gone according to plan, “she would have abstained. That was the plan,” said the official. “The government of Israel does not make US policy.”

Let it be noted too that Condi Rice’s State Department has a long history of denying things that were in fact true.

Last but not least, the Security Council vote took place on Thursday. Olmert made the claim in a speech on Monday, but the U.S. abstention on the vote was described as curious and unexpected well before that. Here’s Reuters late Thursday night:

In an apparent reversal of earlier promises to Arab states, the United States on Thursday abstained from voting on a Gaza ceasefire resolution at the United Nations Security Council.
[...]
Western and Arab diplomats said they had expected Rice to vote for the resolution and cited a phone call she had with U.S. President George W. Bush immediately before the vote.

The circumstantial evidence seems to support Olmert’s claim.

President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert, I pledge to devote my effort during my time as president to do all I can to help you achieve this ambitious goal. I give you my personal commitment to support your work with the resources and resolve of the American government.

That ambitious goal was achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians by January 2009 (which both Bush and Condi Rice cheerfully declared to be eminently doable).

Looks like Bush lost interest in that goal at some point, and privately canceled his pledge. For one thing, as he’s twiddled his thumbs the last few months, none of that twiddling has involved anything to do with the Middle East. For another, when Hamas and Israel erupted in a new episode of the same old violence last weekend, the president was resolved only to not interrupt his vacation. Not even to make a formal statement calling for restraint, etc.

Between all the clearing of brush and the riding of bikes, he did somehow muster up the energy to speak on the phone to his old pal King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. But that seems to have exhausted his resources and resolve.

Even an emerging crisis in the Middle East, one he pledged to resolve just 13 months ago, has not drawn President George W. Bush from his final vacation before leaving office. Despite his personal pledge at Annapolis last year to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinians before 2009, this weekend Bush sent his spokesmen to comment in his stead.

Bush’s determined avoidance came even as the “two-day death toll in Gaza rose Sunday to an estimated 300, the largest in more than 40 years” and the “possibility of a full-out ground operation rose as Israel’s cabinet approved plans to call up more than 6,000 reservists.”

Bush still managed to manfully go on twiddling, even through the third day of Israeli airstrikes.

And the official U.S. position continues to be “we want to see the violence stopped, but in a way that leads to a durable and sustainable cessation of violence”. And if there’s no clear way that leads to a durable and sustainable cessation of violence? Why, then, we don’t much care whether the violence continues or stops, do we? Especially since Hamas is a lousy stinking terrorist organization, and Israel is an oh-so-friendly government, even if they have a regrettable tendency to regularly wipe out women and children on the other side.

I think generations pretty soon are going to start to thank this president for what he’s done. This generation will.

And since Condi is so smart, and always right, and certainly never lies to us about anything, I figured I may as well steal a march on everyone else and start my thank-you now.

So thank you, George Bush, for bringing us fair-and-balanced government.

Take OSHA, for instance. Old, unenlightened administrations ran OSHA with reckless disregard for how all the regulations and warnings were affecting the companies who, after all, are the backbone of the economy. Not so the Bush administration, which fully understands the importance of giving everyone a voice and a seat at the table:

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day’s exposure at the agency’s permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease.

After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country’s principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. The epidemiologist, Peter Infante, incorporated what he considered reasonable changes requested by the company and won approval from key directorates, but he bristled when the private firm complained again.

“In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay,” Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency’s director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from “the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues,” to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton’s tenure, according to White House lists.
[...]
“The legacy of the Bush administration has been one of dismal inaction,” said Robert Harrison, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the occupational health section of the American Public Health Association. It has been “like turning a ketchup bottle upside down, banging the bottom of the container, and nothing comes out. You shake and shake and nothing comes out,” Harrison said.

Giving credit where it is due, the Bush administration pretty much pioneered the fair-and-balanced approach of allowing affected companies equal say in the drafting of rules and regulations. This, let us remember, is the thinking that brought us some of the most cherished economic highlights of the Bush presidency. The mortgage market meltdown, for example.

And so I say to George Bush — and I hope you will join me — “For everything you did, George Bush, thanks! In fact, thanks a lot!”

Could it have been outrage at this ludicrously false statement that prompted Israel and Hamas to jump right back into the endless cycle of senseless violence just “eight days after a six-month Egypt-brokered cease-fire between Hamas and Israel expired”?

Personally, I look forward to a statement from Madame Secretary explaining how the chances to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have actually improved in the last three days, and how George Bush deserves all the credit.

100% of the people married to him say he’s “a natural athlete.”

12.7% of the people not married to him, asked what is the top word that comes to mind in describing Bush, went with one of the following: incompetent, idiot, ignorant, stupid, ass, dishonest, liar.

The most commonly used word (out of all responses, positive and negative) was incompetent. And it was a runaway winner, being chosen by 5.6% of respondents.

64% of the people not married to Bush also say the Bush administration “will be remembered more for its failures than its accomplishments.”

(Disambiguation alert: The 100% statistic refers to people actually married to Bush, not people who may have mistakenly referred to him in public as their husband. To be precise, it’s Laura Bush, not Condi Rice, Ph.D.)

Yesterday, they had another sloppy post about Condi Rice.

The headline reads: Report: Gonzales And Rice Appear To Have Lied To Congress About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims.

But the post only talks about an apparent lie by Gonzales on Rice‘s behalf:

On January 6, 2004, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) on behalf of Condoleezza Rice that claimed the CIA had “orally cleared” the uranium claim for two of Bush’s speeches.

But in a new memo, House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) says that he has found evidence contradicting Gonzales’ assertions…

Nowhere in the post is there any mention of any lies by Condi.

As best as I can figure out, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked Condi Rice to provide examples of times that the CIA had cleared references to Saddam Hussein’s attempts to purchase uranium from Africa for use in speeches. Condi Rice declined to reply directly. Alberto Gonzales replied on her behalf, and his reply does not appear to uniquely comport with the truth.

I’m not sure how that becomes a lie by Gonzales and Rice. ThinkProgress does not explain.

They also had a sloppy post about George Bush. It claims that 56 percent of respondents to a Pew poll described Bush as “incompetence”, although the numbers in the table presented obviously add up to much more than a hundred, and the table clearly says it represents not percentages but “standardized numbers out of 1,000 responses”. That 56% is actually 5.6%. Which seems to materially change the whole meaning, doesn’t it?

Both these posts, incidentally, were by Matt Corley. Maybe he needs a vacation? Or just a good night’s sleep?

*** Update, 7:35 a.m. ***

The 56% error has been suddenly corrected this morning, without any indication that the post was edited/corrected. Not exactly in the “best practices” handbook to do it that way.

*** Update #2, 7:51 a.m. ***

In the Tuesday post referred to in the first para of this post, I had written:

I can’t imagine how ThinkProgress got it wrong (ascribing Condi’s speech to Bush), but I do find it interesting that when you click on the link in their post, it just takes you to an error message (typo in the URL, don’t you know?), so you would never find yourself looking at a headline reading “National Security Advisor Speaks at Texas A&M”.

The URL didn’t work because instead of reading “http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020408-6.html” the URL had an extra bit of html code stuck on at the end.

One, I can’t imagine how that html code could have ended up there. I can’t imagine any innocent cut-and-paste that would have produced that result. (Previous two paragraphs edited at 8:03 a.m. for clarity.)

Two, this URL has also been corrected without any acknowledgment of any change.

Three, I have never before had any reason to go back and look at ThinkProgress posts and see if they were changed ex-post, and if this was acknowledged. I am extremely taken aback at the fact that when I did it now for the three posts mentioned in this post, two of the three show unacknowledged ex-post changes. Needless to say, my confidence in the integrity and credibility of the ThinkProgress blog has dropped sharply.

When right-wing blogs behave like this, liberal blogs typically (and quite rightly) express outrage. It will be interesting to see if anyone else taxes ThinkProgress with unacceptable conduct. And whether ThinkProgress itself acknowledges this criticism and responds to it.

*** Update #3, 7:59 a.m. ***

I should point out that when the error ascribing Condi’s speech to Bush was corrected, that was duly acknowledged (even if it wasn’t time-stamped).

*** Update #4, 8:35 a.m. ***
This is brilliant. Now the headline on the Gonzales-Rice post has been changed from “Report: Gonzales And Rice Appear To Have Lied To Congress About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims” to “Report: Gonzales Appears To Have Lied To Congress For Rice About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims“.

Once again, without acknowledgment.

I never said the Taliban was eliminated, I said they were removed from power.

Trying to impeach Bush, ThinkProgress pulled out this quote from April 2002

With the Taliban eliminated and al-Qaida badly damaged, we have moved into the second stage of our war on terror.

That clearly says the Taliban was eliminated, in so many words, and without any ifs or buts. The only problem? The statement was made not by Bush but by Condi Rice.

I can’t imagine how ThinkProgress got it wrong, but I do find it interesting that when you click on the link in their post, it just takes you to an error message (typo in the URL, don’t you know?), so you would never find yourself looking at a headline reading “National Security Advisor Speaks at Texas A&M“.

However, on September 27, 2004, in Springfield, OH, Bush did indeed say:

And as a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence. And the people of Afghanistan are now free.

And no matter how you twist and turn the phrase, “Taliban no longer is in existence” parses out only to “Taliban was eliminated” and not “Taliban was removed from power”.

So what Bush said in Kabul yesterday is categorically untrue. (Yes, I know. Me too, deeply shocked.)