Miscellaneous notes on my mind

• Re the DHS report (which was initiated under Geo. Bush): Hey, wingnuts: If your hero is Ronald Reagan and you're collecting Ayn Rand books, you're fine. If your hero is Timothy McVeigh and you're collecting fuel oil and fertilizer, you're not.
  
  Why do Republicans want to be associated with Timothy McVeigh, the KKK, and Stormfront? Can't they just say "Good: keep us sane conservatives safe from those violent kooks?"
  
  
• Re the OLC torture memos: really disgusting stuff from a bunch of sadistic cowards. I would hope that Yoo, Bybee, and especially Addington could be prosecuted.
  
  But I'm with Kevin Drum's current thinking on whether the CIA operatives should be prosecuted: " It just seems as if tackling the practical issues involved in figuring out who did what, and under what circumstances, is too vast an undertaking for too small a probable return. "
  
  You'd basically shut down the CIA during the investigation.
  I figure there's a better than 50/50 chance the CIA operatives would be acquitted anyway, thereby legitimizing torture by a jury of their peers.
  
  If there weren't 20 other epochal crises left to Obama by Bush, I'd be more inclined to say go for the prosecutions of the CIA guys.
  
  
• Related: I'm still stunned about the absolutely horrible collection of shit-hurricanes that Bush and his Fox News government left behind. Not just a wretched recesssion, but a financial crisis that cripples attempts to ease recession (Federal Reserve interest rate at zero -- for the first time ever -- by the time Obama took office), and a huge deficit to boot, during the only time when governments must spend massively to prevent collapse.
  
  From the big things to the smaller things. For instance, here's George W. Bush in 2001, speaking to the President of Mexico:
  

  Mr. President, you and I are keeping the pledges we made in Guanajuato this past winter to expand the freedom of trade, to build an equitable prosperity, and to honor the rule of law.
  
  We have before us a great prospect, an era of prosperity in a hemisphere of liberty. In this task, our cooperation is broad and unprecedented. Our sense of trust is strong, and it's growing.

  
  
  Then 9/11 happened, Bush got all "Let's get Saddam for no good reason," then Bush got tired of playing President and Mexico has gone to hell just like nearly everything else the idiot touched.
  
  
• Following from the above: I've long been a partisan Democrat, but I've voted for a handful of Republicans in the past. After seeing how horrendously these people can clusterfuck everything they touch, I'll sit out an election with a bad Democrat rather than vote for another Republican, no matter how anodyne they seem. The "decent" republican I vote for (say, if I had the opportunity to vote for Olympia Snow, though I don't live in Maine) may end up supporting the countricidal lunatics years down the road. They're unsafe in positions of power.
  
  If the scale of the failures weren't so immense, I probably wouldn't feel that way. But they are immense, they were supported by nearly every elected Republican for nearly eight years, and I do feel that way.
  

I've seen various wingnuts complaining that Democrats keep pointing an accusing finger at Bush when discussing America's current problems. Well, I'm pointing at the problems he created or exacerbated. The economy and foreign policy are the main things the President has to pay attention to, and he didn't just fuck them up in ways that ended in January 2009. The consequences of Bush will last for years if not decades.

I'm still hearing giggles from wingnuts about the horrible deeds of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and neither of them left the steaming pile of fetid sewage behind that Bush and Cheney did.