Tremonton Utah’s indefatigible satirist Jesus’ General (“an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender”) posts his review of George Bush’s Decision Points at Amazon.com.  A taste:

The presidential memoir serves an important function in our society. It provides a former president with an opportunity to shape how we will be viewed by history.

They aren’t easy books to write. Facts create roadblocks that the ex-president must overcome. Most attempt to do so by twisting and tearing at the facts until an acceptable truth emerges. My president, Our Glorious Leader George W. Bush, boldly took another approach. He tortured the facts until they confessed to their treachery. Then, He summarily executed them with a Hellfire-C missile launched from a Predator drone.

And the results are breathtaking. I stood up and cheered when I read His claim that waterboarding isn’t torture because He paid His lawyers to say it isn’t. That’s chutzpah, my friends. It’s a zen kind of chutzpah, one that is only achieved when self-delusion and a supreme lack of self-awareness come into perfect balance.

We can’t let this Remembrance Day pass without citing George W. Bush’s latest so-sue-me confession to war crimes.

The gorge-filling moment comes when Bush explains his decision to waterboard  prisoners by passing the buck to those who provided him with legal opinion on the matter: “I’m not a lawyer.” It wasn’t Bush after all.  The President of the United States of America pursued a policy of torture on the advice of counsel.

The war criminals at Nuremburg claimed to be subordinates following the orders of the executive.  Bush may be the first executive war criminal to claim to be following the orders of subordinates.

Jeff Mahoney reminds us that the values people fought and died for in two world wars somehow got lost in the peace thanks to corporate indifference to the common good.

Money quote:

We know it so well here. Siemens is pulling out of the city. This week Maple Leaf sold its meat plant in Burlington.

When these things happen I like to go to the company websites and read their value and mission statements. U.S. Steel: “ … guided by a new vision for its second century of business. Building value for its stakeholders.”

Siemens: “Values: Highest performance with the highest ethics. Excellent: Achieving high performance and excellent results.” Wow, the specificity!

Maple Leaf: “Six Sigma embodies our commitment to continuous improvement and provides our people with the discipline to never accept status quo . . . .”

Six Sigma? Did they get that from one of Keanu Reeves’ Matrix movies?

Please, captains of industry, spare us the halo-polishing and bust down your zen-for-dummies rhetoric costs. Here, have this one on me: “Valuing excellence, excelling at values, valuing valuable values, excelling at most excellent excellence, Teletubbies, big hug.”

Translated it means “more gold faucets in the yacht — we remain leaders in the all-important layoff sector of the economy.”

Remembrance of sacrifice on the battlefield is supposed to instil in us  the value of courage and honour in the pursuit of social justice.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3hMODMyed8

In just 38 seconds you can witness the way Fox News cuts and pastes its lies together

Rick Perlstein explains how a mendocracy works:

Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.

But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—”civil,” just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.

Frye cites Orwell on the social degradation of language in “The Primary Necessities of Existence”:

Then there are various epidemics sweeping over society which use unintelligibility as a weapon to preserve the present power structure.  By making things as unintelligible as possible, to as many people as possible, you can hold the present power structure together.  Understanding and articulateness lead to its destruction.  This is the kind of thing George Orwell was talking about, not just in 1984, but in all his work on language.  The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication.  The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking.  It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness. (CW 12, 747)

I’m a partisan but have been making, I hope, fair comments about the Republicans and the way they are enabled by the mainstream media, thanks primarily to the toxic relationship of both with Fox News.

However, there is an x factor that the Democrats never fail to contribute and is best expressed by the quote, reproduced above, by the great American humorist, Will Rogers.

That’s not to draw a false equivalence: the Republicans are unregenerate cynics perpetually on the take from rapacious corporate interests whose lobbyists now write “legislation” whenever Republicans hold a majority.  But it would help if the Dems were not such trembling feebs when it comes to a fight it matters to win.  Does anyone think, for example, that just because the Dems did not prosecute the Bush administration for the war crimes it undoubtedly committed, the House Republicans will not now use its restored subpoena power to create the impression that Democrats are responsible for every crime dating back to original sin?  The Republicans are unsurpassed at the narcissistic art of projection: they attribute to the Dems the crimes they are actually guilty of and thereby inoculate themselves against accusation.  If the Democrats had bothered just to investigate the Bush administration and exposed its crimes until they could no longer be credibly denied, that’d have been much harder to ignore on Tuesday.

Remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the ultimately bogus Whitewater “scandal.”  That is always how it’s played.  Minority Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky declared late in the campaign that his one priority is to “ensure that Obama is a one-term president.”  That’s the priority.  Not the stagnant economy.  Not nighmarishly chronic unemployment.  Not the unimaginably vast corruption on Wall Street.  Not two losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  His one fully declared aim is to destroy the Obama presidency.  And he’ll do that while pursuing an agenda to maintain a ridiculously low and crippling tax rate for the richest 5% of the population; and he’ll do that while refusing to cut entitlements or defence spending.  Because although the Teabaggers talk a good game about fiscal responsibility, it’s clear they want their entitlements: they just don’t want others (people with dark skin, the poor, the young) to have them.

Again, the Republicans are nihilists, the party of nothing.  And, as Edmund Spenser observed, that kind of evil is a sort of inflated absence of goodness that requires just one prick to make it pop into its proper non-existent state.

That makes being a prick in this instance a virtue.

Andrew Sullivan has a post up today demonstrating that while it did not affect the outcome, two pollsters — Fox and Rasmussen (essentially the propaganda wings of the Republican party) — skewed Republican support by 3-4% throughout the entire election cycle by not including any cell phone-only users in their data at any point.  That’s why we saw numbers like these in amalgamated poll results: Republicans, 50%; Democrats 41%.  The actual numbers were 49% and 43%.  But Fox and Rasmussen were providing the GOP with ludicrous 13% leads, and that tilted all of the data heavily in the party’s direction.  And it can’t be that they didn’t know what they were doing — they were outliers the entire time and they knew what the effect on polling averages would be.

Now, again, it didn’t affect the outcome directly, but the Dems nevertheless had more support than was registered — and, by no coincidence — among the demographic Republicans fear most and have a self-interest to exclude: young, urban, liberal.

There’s also a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy about all of this; if people think an election’s a forgone conclusion (which of course is what Fox was screaming at the top of its lungs for weeks on end), then the so-called “enthusiasm gap” (also shrieked about endlessly) may be fed until it is feeding itself.

The point is that this is a familiar Republican trick: voter caging — to keep, by whatever means possible, either directly or indirectly, Democrats away from the polls.  And it is, moreover, enabled by a lazy and incompetent mainstream news media which prefers “narratives” to facts.

At the very least, it demonstrates that pollsters must now make a point of polling cell phone-only users.  If they do not, they are effectively staking the Republicans an advantage every time that does not actually represent voter intent — which of course makes pollsters not only useless, but dangerous to the democratic process.