George Bush Bucks the Buck

I wonder what ever happened to that sign President Harry Truman is said to have kept on his desk, the one that said "The Buck Stops Here." Obviously, it is nowhere to be found on the presidential desk of George W. Bush. No, when his State of the Union address lie about Iraq seeking nuclear material in Africa was exposed, Bush was happy last week to let CIA director George Tenet take the blame.

I don't know which I find more disgusting: Bush's small-minded shirking of responsibility and insistence that others take the blame for his screw-ups, or the blase way in which he as much as admits that he is too ill-informed, unintelligent and incurious to question anything put in front of him.

It's bad enough that Bush allows others to have their reputations besmirched to protect his own butt, but unfortunately he plays more dangerous games of letting others bear responsibility for his ignorance. Witness his now-famous remarks at the White House on July 2:

"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation."

The people who are going to bear the responsibility for his childish and mindless machismo are the soldiers who are injured or who die in Iraq and elsewhere when the enemy does indeed bring it on. His behavior belongs on an elementary school playground rather than in the White House press room.

George Bush loves to play the big military hero, with all his macho posturing and his photo ops in military garb on aircraft carriers. Of course, his real military record is one of cowardice and deceit, for which he really should have been court-marshalled. It is a story that bears constant repeating, so here it is.

A recent letter by military man M.G. Johancen to the Annapolis Capitol states the facts very succinctly, so I will reproduce them below. (The original letter can be read in the newspaper's archive HERE at the bottom of the page, and thanks to the blog williamp.blogspot.com for the original tip.)

"President Bush's theatrics aboard an aircraft carrier were yet another effort to portray him as a warrior. This is his "military record":

--Despite scoring 25 out of 100 points on the National Guard's entrance exam, he jumped 500 qualified men for a commission.

--Former Texas House speaker Ben Barnes testified under oath that he exerted influence to get Mr. Bush a slot in the unit.

--In Mr. Bush's final year of obligated service (1972-73), he did not fly at all and absented himself from duty. He lost his flying status in 1972 after failing to appear for his annual physical.

--According to his commander, there was no record of Mr. Bush attending training for that period. We in the military call that being absent without leave.

--During Mr. Bush's presidential campaign, his staff couldn't provide any proof of service for that period.

Instead of being a top gun, Mr. Bush appears to be the little man who wasn't there."

If these few tidbits make you want to read more deeply about Bush's desertion of duty, the following links will provide more info: tompaine.com, motherjones.com, or talion.com.

Back to the Blog

My apologies for the six week hiatus from this blog. It's been a busy period of family obligations, home repairs and job changes, and I've felt a bit distracted. Perhaps a bit overwhelmed by a sense of futility as well, reading the newspaper or surfing the web every day and seeing the frighteningly bad politics, greedy self-serving policies and outright lies and deceit that this non-elected U.S. president and his cronies are foisting on the world. It's enough to send a left-minded activist into a funk once in a while, but enough! I'm back and ready to blog.

There has been one big change in our lives that will necessitate a few changes in the mission of this blog. Our credit card debt is gone. POOF!

Well, it sort of disappeared. Actually, we just folded it into a new mortgage, in effect mortgaging our future. Here's the deal in a nutshell: Our old mortgage had about $29,000 left to go. In the meantime, property values had risen to make our house worth more than we'd originally paid for it. So we refinanced our mortgage at a new higher loan based on the higher property value. Borrowed $60,000, of which $29,000 paid off the old mortgage, $2500 went for fees, and $25,000 went to pay off the credit card debt.

What did we get out of this deal? An interest rate on our mortgage almost 3% lower than our previous one, and a little bit lower than the excellent interest rates I'd had the credit card debt locked into (Click Here to get the details on the debt interest rates). A monthly mortgage payment around $130 per month more than our old one, but now without not also having to come up with at least $500 per month of minimum payments on the credit cards.

What did we lose? Well, we lost all the equity we'd built up after years of paying our old mortgage. So the debt really didn't disappear, wasn't actually paid off in the truest sense. We simply mortgaged our future, gave up the equity we'd built in our home, to get rid of a present burden. Although the interest rates on the debt had been as favorable as you're going to get, the minimum payments were incredibly burdensome. Getting so deep into debt had been a mistake, and the burden had become such that trying to undo the mistake was so constricting our lives that we had to do something.

So now it's a fresh start. As for the blog, yes, the debt had been a sort of organizing principle for it, a hook by which to examine the politics, economics and social forces of this consumer culture we live in. That will remain the focus of this blog.

Some readers may feel nevertheless that the blog has been drained of its drama. Sure, the political commentary and social rants might be interesting, but what you really wanted to know was whether or not we could ever get out of debt. I confess that in a perverse way even I kind of miss having that huge debt...it becomes a source of perverse pride, of identity, almost an addiction.

Well, maybe the debt is gone, but some drama remains. After all, we managed to get ourselves into a financial mess before (Read How Here), and there's no guarantee that it won't happen again. The consumer culture beast is devious and powerful, and life can be full of some unpredictable twists. Stay tuned....