This chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities via ThinkProgress, sure puts the national debt in perspective.
In other words, thank you George W. Bush for this particular mess.
The debt chart
Reply
Category Archives: George Bush
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Power is always abused, eventually.
So be afraid, be very afraid, about what our national security apparatus is up to these days. When you have too many law enforcement types chasing too few bad guys, as the US government does now, you are going to end up with bored or corrupt federal agents going after the wrong people through ineptitude, spite or ideology.
Scarier yet: first the Bush administration, then the Obama administration, knocked down rules and the rule of law to give this overpopulated policing world more power and the policed world far less protection from its protectors.
Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek, laid out some details:
Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.
Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers.
Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.
Everyone feel safer now?
Books! Or, life behind the best-seller curve
A would-be terrorist tries to blow up a plane on Christmas Day and Americans are scared again.
Scared enough to return to the torture sanctioned by the Bush administration?
Anyone even thinking that might be a good idea needs to read “The Dark Side,” by Jane Mayer. (PBS’ “Frontline covered aspects of the Iraq war using “The Dark Side” name. More information about it is here.) Mayer’s book sets out a compelling case for rejecting the Bush doctrine that advocated imprisoning people without charges or hope, whether or not they were seriously suspected of wrongdoing; and committing the grossest violations of international law and the Geneva conventions in the nane of national security.
“The Dark Side” a fascinating, eminently readable and really, really scary account of what the CIA and military did after Sept. 11 and the machinations the Bush bureaucrats went through to unleash the worst of American policies. Dick Cheney, John Yoo and David Addington are almost ludicrous in their macho efforts to tear down the boundaries of the constitution. If the consequences of their White House power plays so grave, their overall incompetence might seem comical. Yoo’s outlandish legal analyses of presidential power and other related topics got adopted by the White House not because his reasoning was sound — it simply wasn’t — but because they said what Cheney et al wanted them to say. The boys with the power simply rolled over any one who didn’t agree with them.
Terrorism is, to our great misfortune, going to happen. Security will fail on occasion as long as human beings are involved. Crazies and zealots and just plain old soldiers will risk everything to strike at America in retaliation for harm done, either real or perceived. How we respond to the attacks will define America more than the attacks themselves will. This book is an excellent primer on how fear and swagger can guide us into the wrong policies, and why we should not let that happen.
Quote of the day
“It’s going to be about the 12 toughest decisions I had to make. I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened.”
– Former President George W. Bush, discussing the book he is going to write
Indeed.
The last Bush-backer
My sister and I stopped in a West Allis pet store yesterday so she could buy a teddy bear dog (anyone looking for a pet can get a really good deal now because economic distress had led a whole lot of people either decide not to buy a pet or to give up the ones they had).
Anyway, as we were checking out with Harley the teddy bear, the clerk asked us if we liked the new president.
I said yes, I did, and she said she preferred President Bush, that she did not like the new president. I told her I did not want to have this conversation with her. She said the new president wanted to take away everyone’s guns and she especially did not like that he wanted to ban all hunting totally.
Yup, Bush still has backing among people who do not know what the hell they are talking about.