President Obama’s balancing act

Despite receiving a thumbs up from a number of conservative foreign policy observers, and the public at large, for his handling of the current Iranian domestic turmoil, the wingers seem to have settled on a narrative that President Obama has been too timid in his response to same.

It was a theme dutifully picked up by the MSM at Tuesday’s presser at the White House. Asked by CBS’ Chip Reed about John Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran McCain’s criticisms, Obama swatted him down, reminding him about who is president. When pressed by MSNB’s Chuck Todd about why he wouldn’t identify specific consequences, Obama replied that unlike the reporters, he’s not lashed to the wheel of a 24 hour news cycle. (Snap!) And when Fux News reporter Major Garret rudely demanded to know why it took him so long to ratchet up his condemnation of violence against protesters, O pointed out that his rhetoric has evolved in phase with– “tracked”– unfolding events.

After eight years of self-defeating Dick swinging, cowboy diplomacy, it’s obviously going to take some time to re-introduce the press to the idea of a measured, tempered response to international events. Events over which the US, despite all its military might and self-importance, has little, if any, ability to influence; and can make a whole lot worse by indulging the kind of rhetoric that flows unhindered from the McCaniac id.

Noted Middle East scholar Professor Juan Cole in his blog yesterday reminds us how the Rethugs responded to US protesters when they were running things and the legacy they left behind:

At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul,  250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, ‘protest zones’ were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated ‘protest zones’ would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

I applaud the Iranian public’s protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a ‘Homeland Security’ national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word ‘terrorist’ around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.

Cole recommends the following:

American politicians should keep their hands off Iran and let the Iranians work this out. If the reformers have enough widespread public support, they will develop tactics that will change the situation. If they do not, then they will have to regroup and work toward future change. US covert operations and military interventions have caused enough bloodshed and chaos. If the US had left Mosaddegh alone in 1953, Iran might now be a flourishing democracy and no Green Movement would have been necessary.

Bombing Iran back into the stone age has been a longtime dream of the warmongering denizens of the wingnut universe. Naturally, they have seized on the current turmoil inside the country as a means of pushing that agenda forward.

While the increasingly brutal repression of the Iranian people is something the whole world should condemn (and is), Obama has additional concerns– preventing a war between Israel and Iran, the closing of the Persian Gulf to 25% of the world’s oil supplies, stopping nuclear weapons proliferation throughout the Middle East, and (per Bob Baer)  preventing a new cold war that would pit the US against an anti-US Russo-China-Iran coalition.

When walking a tightrope, sometimes you have to lean a little one way or the other. Right now the president is striking the proper balance between confrontation and cooperation.

(Click for maximum gross-out.)

Newt Gingrich as the avenging Sumerian god, Gozer the Traveler

In their devastating November 4th defeat at the hands of an inexperienced, junior senator from Illinois, the Rethuglicans are in desperate search of a leader, someone that can match the intelligence, boldness, charm, and overwhelming popularity of Barack Hussein Obama. While their own humiliated presidential candidate, the anachronistic John McCain decomposes like so much roadkill in the hot Arizona sun, a furious competition for the 2012 election has begun.

Lord of the Flies comes to mind.

Newcomers like current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and former Arkansas preacher turned governor Mike Huckabee vie for the allegiance of Christian fundamentalist “value voters” (probably 50% of what’s left of the party membership). Current Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney vie for the ‘competency vote.’ South Carolina Governor and plantation owner Mark Sanford showboats about not taking government stimulus funds for his state’s increasingly desperate unemployed, despite the fact that his state has the 4th highest unemployment rate in the country; and a social safety net next to none. (SC ranks 48th in TANF-Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, f/n/a AFDC))

But looming above them all like the avenging Stay Puft Marshmallow man from the movie Ghostbusters is the former Speaker of the House, the ethically compromised, moral and political hypocrite par excellence, Newt “Dr. No” Gingrich.

The disastrous events of his political and personal life are well known, which for the last dozen years or so had kept him on the political sidelines. (According to Tom Delay, Newtie, in a fit of pique, shut down major parts of the US government in 1995-6 because he didn’t like his seating assignment on Air Force One, the political equivalent of seppaku.)  But Newt re-emerged during the 2008 presidential election campaign, even dipping his toe into the water of a possible candidacy. Realizing that he didn’t have chance back then, he became a regular guest on Fux News and other wingnut media outlets.

Earlier this year, Gingrich criticized Notre Dame University for inviting Obama to speak there, claiming he embraced “anti-Catholic values.”  He was immediately criticized by Catholic leaders for sticking his then-Baptist nose where it didn’t belong.  Not wanting to alienate a valuable voting constituency, a small majority of whom voted for Obama, Newtie quickly apologized (even converting to Catholicism a few days later).

During Obama’s recent trip to Latin America, he lashed into the president, excoriating him for “bolstering the enemies” of the US by shaking hands with Hugo Chavez.  Newtie seems to have forgotten that in 2007, when George W. Bush was president, he proudly proclaimed that he had grown up “. . .in a world, you know, where politics ended up at the water’s edge and overseas we had to try to find ways to be Americans and to work together.

On the matter of national security, he has accused Obama of having a “a dangerous fantasy that runs an enormous risk. … Not since Jimmy Carter have we had an administration this out of touch with reality.”

Such risky behavior includes wanting to hold a world security summit and working towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, such as was the goal of Newtie’s own hero, Ronald Reagan.

Given his highly partisan track record as House Speaker, denying practically everything President Clinton ever proposed, it should come as no surprise that “Dr. No” Newtie is shaping the current Rethuglican redemption strategy of trying to block Obama’s foreign and domestic agenda at every turn.

Make no mistake about it. Like the angry Sumerian god Gozer the Traveler, who made a dramatic comeback after being temporarily forced into inter-dimensional exile by the Proton Pack wielding Ghostbusters, Newtie is back with a vengeance.

Dr. Egon Spengler: Vinz, you said before you were waiting for a sign. What sign are you waiting for?

Louis: Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

All Newtie has to do to terrify us beyond the capacity for rational thought is to come back as himself.

UPDATE: The lead story in today’s LA Times is titled CIA reportedly declined to closely evaluate harsh interrogations. It documents an investigation in early 2003 by the then-CIA’s Inspector General, John L. Helgerson , that seriously questioned both the efficacy of torture and whether alternatives existed. It was circulated within the agency, the Defense Department, and Justice Department in draft form, setting off alarm bells within the Administration. It was quashed. In its place?

One report by a former government official — not an interrogation expert — was about 10 pages long and amounted to a glowing review of interrogation efforts.

That official was Gardner Peckham, national security advisor to–you guessed it– Newt Gingrich.

Right now, Dick and George may still be enjoying their fun in the sun, barbecuing kittehs; but those days are numbered.

The chances they’ll be arrested and charged with war crimes are growing stronger every day. . .

Because people are starting to understand the things they said. . .

“Let’s roll,” indeed.

Demonstrating an “enhanced interrogation technique”

In 1999, Bush’s family biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, reports that W. told him he was intent on invading Iraq, saying that his status as a war time president would give him enough political capital to push through his conservative domestic agenda.

(That would include the privatization of social security whose blood rich corpse would be served up to his Wall Street vampire buddies to feast upon. Not to mention the Oedipal angle of wanting to do his daddy one better by “finishing” the job of deposing Saddam Hussein.)

Fast forward to 9/11/01. The dust of the collapsed Trade Towers hadn’t even settled when W. ordered his terrorism Czar Richard Clarke to find a link to Saddam in the attacks. Clarke was dubious, but ordered a review anyway, producing a dry hole (something which Bush the failed oil tycoon was all too familiar with).

Meanwhile, US troops were sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Usama bin Laden. SECDEF Rumsfeld complained that there were no good targets left to bomb there and rapidly warmed to the idea of invading Iraq.  Special ops troops that were originally set to finish off Al Qaeda in Tora Bora were instead reassigned to prepare for Iraq, allowing them to escape and regroup in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (where they have grown even stronger and now threaten to bring down the nuclear armed government of Pakistan).

Despite efforts to provoke Saddam into providing an overt rationale for an invasion, he lay low, forcing the Bushies to explore other means around which a rationale for war could be devised— fixing the facts around the policy, as the Downing Street Memo so artfully put it.

Discussions were had with the Brits to paint a UN logo on a drone and send it flying lazily over Iraq air space where it could be shot down. Ahmed Chalabi was paid $300,000 a month to produce ex-pat informants like “Curveball” to ‘prove’ that Saddam was actively engaged in producing WMD.  Ex-military “consultants” (with monetary ties to defense contractors ready to make a killing supplying product and services to the war effort) flooded the network and cable news shows warning of dire consequences if we didn’t depose Saddam.

Neocons like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, administration officials like Condi Rice and Darth Cheney, egged on by war mongering talking heads too numerous to mention, took to the airways wielding images of mushroom clouds and cartoons of mobile bio-weapons labs to create an aura of dread in the American people.  Homeland Security helped keep fear alive with their color coded threat charts, displayed so helpfully on the evening news.  Cable news networks ratings soared as they created “war rooms” tricked out with state of the art graphics and martial theme music, eagerly awaiting the latest nosecone videos of missiles slamming into buildings in an orchestrated spectacle of “shock and awe.”

Which brings us to the latest dot in the narrative, the so-called “torture memos.”  The lead story in today’s NY Times reveals that the methods, further detailed in a now declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY used what are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were originally developed by the ChiComs and North Koreans in the 1950s, and used as a training regime called SERE (Search, Evade, Rescue, Escape) by our own military to help captured troops resist interrogation.

Apparently, some genius in the Bush Administration figured that adopting those same techniques for offensive purposes would mitigate objections that they constituted torture. “Hey, we use them on our own guys, and they don’t suffer any long term effects.” Three major problems with that theory: [Read more →]

Judge Bybee wearing missing part of his judge’s robe

The NY Times has an editorial today calling for the impeachment of Judge Jay “Dungeon Master” ByBee:

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity. Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history

[...]

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

[...]

Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

[...]

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

I can handle it. I assure you, I can handle it.

[Image credit: sinestra]

George “W” Teh Failure Bush

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Now that Bush the War Criminal President has been sequestered behind the federally funded gate on the dead end street in Preston Hollow or whatever the fuck the place is called, conservative revisionists are hard at work trying to wrap the stinking reality of the last eight years in a pleasant smelling blanket of denial.  And the good toads who exclusively wrap Republicans like Teh Chimpy in pleasing graphics for their campaigns hate to see their mawkish gravy dry up, so they’re marketing a bunch of useless ersatz crap to squeeze whatever blood they can out of the 22 percenters who are teh stoopid enough to buy it.

I am not making this up;  it’s here.  But rather than going  there and having to shower afterward, we’ve done a little revising of our own and bring you some of our commemorative products, products that never let you forget what teh evil stoopid can do when they manage to get a hold of our political and financial power.

Premium handmade Cigars made by genuinely poor folk in the Dominican Republic. A tasty Sumatra wrapper masks the horrible-shit tobacco inside.  The gold wax seal will preserve and protect this Dubious Dubya collectible for years to come, making sure you never forget what the monkey did to the nation. Imprinted with Commemorative “W.T.F.” logo and inauguration dates.
Single: $12.00 •• 10 Cigars: $95.00 •• 25 Cigars: $225.00

If you can still afford bumpers, then you can afford this reminder. The “W.T. F.” bumper Sticker.  4″ X 4″ black vinyl. Price: $5.50 ea.

Remind your buds WTF Bush did to us every time they see your topknot. Black micro-poison-fiber cap made in China and embroidered with “W. T. F.” on the front and “Teh Criminal” on the back.  Not adjustable;  one size force-fit for all. Price: $14.95

When you think you just can’t stand it anymore, get your booze on with these 13.5 oz. W.T.F. glass bourbon buckets, and drown your sorrow the way W tried to drown our government in a bathtub. Price: $24.95

Chillin’ means you’ll need a lot of ice, too. Here’s a “heavy mouth-blown glass ice bucket.” Measures 7″ H x 8″ W. Etched with Commemorative “W.T.F.” logo. Price: $99.95

Imagine the good life you’ve missed with this “W.T.F.” 30 oz. decanter. 22% lead-in-teh-head crystal, hand blown (natch).  Glass will ring when pinged as long as you’re drunk on your ass.  Measures 10.75″ H x 3.5″ W. Price: $114.95

As you know, it took an enormous amount of shiny white boy balls for Bush to spawn the clusterphuque of the past eight years, and now they’re for sale.   Just the kind of thing you’d like to lay a big four wood into for a satisfying smack down the fairway;  if you can still afford the green fees. Price: $9.95

But if none of this crap quite gets it done for you, you may need the expensive but reliable old stand-by:

Washing away the slime of corrupt politicians since the Reagan era, SLIME-A-WAY Evil Politician Cleaner has an all-new formula for the virulent W. T. F. strain of Bush politics. This stuff has what it takes to get clean again. Price: $17900
(Yes, it’s expensive;  but that’s the price you pay when eternal vigilance is neglected and the inmates run the asylum.)

Men can suck the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure— failures are the most conceited of men.
—D. H. Lawrence

Bush shorter . . . and worser . . . and eviler . . . than you ever imagined.
(Even worse than the clip right below this one, because more of it will sink in.)

Tuesday, George W. Bush held his final cabinet meeting where he said:

I tell people I leave town with a great sense of accomplishment and my head held high.

The problem with that is, well, obvious.

George W. Bush in a rare moment of introspection

As the worst president in US history winds down his delusional legacy protection tour, he continues to downplay the few mistakes he’ll admit to, referring to them as “disappointments.” For example, his “disappointment” that WMDs were never found in Iraq.

(Imagine expressing “disappointment” after torching your neighbor’s home and finding out that it really didn’t contain armed gang members but rather a defenseless family.)

The one “accomplishment” that he and his enablers keep touting above all others is the fact that the US hasn’t been attacked on its own soil since 9/11. One has to wonder when one of these interviewers will ask him about the August 6, 2001 presidential briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside US.”

Let me address a point I haven’t heard discussed yet. Seems I recall that al-Qaeda statement that their post-9/11 strategy was twofold: to hurt the US where it would count the most, its economy; and, after Bush’s invasion of Iraq, to punish its allies who supported it with troops of their own.

Regarding the latter, terrorist attacks were indeed launched against two such countries on their home soil, Britain and Spain. Spanish voters dumped their president and the large Spanish military contingent was withdrawn shortly thereafter. Britain is all but gone, with the US forced to allocate additional troops to maintain their strategic base outside Basra.

Think about it: Why attack the American homeland again, when the world, including Iran, rallied around the US after the first attack? That alone would have been sufficient reason to direct its fire elsewhere. And when the Oedipally challenged Bush Jr. decide to one-up his dad and invade Iraq (a goal of W’s before he even won the presidency) using 9/11 as an excuse, ”the Qaidas“  reaped a propaganda and recruitment bonanza that continues to this day. Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006 and its current slaughter of the inhabitants of Gaza, executed with the full approval of the Bush Administration, is sure to amp their numbers up even further.

Regarding attacking the US economy, recall Bush’s exhortation to Americans to “go shopping” right after 9/11, to show them thar terrarists that they couldn’t win. Given the current US economic crisis (and the world’s by extension), no help needed there.

In other words— Mission Accomplished.

I really can’t yet determine which Bush action was worse: his decision to invade Iraq; or his destruction of the world’s economy. (Katrina, as bad as it was, has to rank a distant third though otherwise notable as the tipping point where Bush’s popularity began to plummet to the worst levels in modern polling history [CNN], never to recover.)

Said Bush at his final presser (where two of the seven rows in the White House briefing room were empty until filled at the last moment by wide-eyed White House interns.

“When I get out of here, I am getting off the stage,” he said. “I have had my time in the Klieg lights.”

Well Georgie, don’t let door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

Then again….

Controversial sculpture highlights the Bush Liebrary courtyard.
(Click)

DALLAS — The “Mission Accomplished” Sculpture Garden Annex to the George W. Bush Liebrary® was dedicated this week on the campus of Southern Methodist University, in a very brief ceremony honoring the achievement[s] of the outgoing chief executive.  The Annex is a publicly funded project which apposed the building of an oxymoronic “library” honoring a president for whom reading was synonymous with cleaning the bottom of a toaster;  i.e., it was not done.

The houseienda-style sculpture courtyard, which adjoins the actual subterranean main liebrary®, contains several controversial pieces in what some are calling “the most psychologically upsetting display of bronze casting ever seen.”  But then, it’s obvious they haven’t seen what’s in the liebrary® itself.

At nothing even approaching great personal cost, Urantian Sojourn has obtained a packet of several of the more bizarre inclusions in the liebrary® papers of George Bush. Frankly, we were well-nigh speechless after examining the packet.

“Cowboy Pony Rider Guy”  •  February 2002

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the liebrary’s® contents is the extensive and deeply disturbing collection of coloring book pages, which the president has colored with crayolas over the last eight years, ostensibly as a means of stress release and relaxation. The collection, numbering an astonishing 8,937 separate pages, were all rendered in the Oval Office or the president’s study at the Crawford ranch.

“Red Reagan”  •  July 2001

Purple Rain Tinkerbell  • January 2004

While the coloring technique is what the president’s analyst called “energetic and methodical,” psychologists with actual degrees have called it “hasty and careless, exhibiting a near-pathological disdain for staying within the lines.”  Beyond technique, however, experts are confounded over the erratic and often deranged use of color.  A number of ponies are yellow and blue with brown rumps.  A Ronald Reagan portrait is entirely pink and red.  Childish angels are monochromatic brown;  Tinkerbell has an artificially large purple butt.  A library that at first blush seemed a shoe-in as a mausoleum for the president, now appears to be providing staggering new insights into Bush’s brain.

Remarkably, almost none of the thousands of renderings have been “finished.”  The one exception seems to be several hundred copies of a George Bush image that the president was evidently very fond of coloring.  Critics are roundly criticizing the president as a “childish narcissist with a shockingly inept grasp on reality,” and have lambasted the fact that he has spent an enormous amount of time in the past eight years just “fucking off.”

“W.”  Number 665  •  December 2008

When asked if he planned to continue his therapeutic coloring once he retired from the White House, Bush said, “Maybe.  Maybe not.  It depends on how stressful things get down there in our gated community.  I don’t anticipate problems, but this job has taught me that problems do happen.”

Hyeah.

Jeb Bush stuck like glue to his brother’s catastrophic legacy

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

1/6/09 [C.U. NEWS]  In a tacit admission of the sulphurous stench that accompanies the name “Bush” in the political realm, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush filed a petition today with the state of Florida for a name change.

Apparently Jeb was taking a hint from a television interview done with his father, the former 41st us President George W. H. Bush, conducted by  Fox News Sunday night.

“I’d like to see him be president some day,” the elder Bush told the astonished interviewer, Chris Wallace.

“Really?”,  exclaimed Wallace. To which Bush Sr. responded: “Yes, I would. He is as qualified and as able as anyone I know in the political scene.”

And then in an understatement for the ages, Bush added: “Right now is probably a bad time because maybe we’ve had enough Bushes in there.”

He also blasted The New York Times for its “grossly unfair” criticism of his eldest son, the odds-on favorite of US historians to claim the title “Worst President in US History.”

No word yet as to when and from which Circle of Hell the award is to be given.

•

THE WHITE DOG HOUSE — The annual revelation that a little black scottie dog runs the White House was again met with shock and anger by too few normal human beings.
“Barney,” aka “Bushmaster,” was again portrayed as merely the driving force behind the White House Christmas celebration by a cloying gaggle of the Bush family, gathered around the fireplace.

The disturbing video, produced by “Barney Productions,” was leaked to an eager lapdog press core that took turns slobbering over surreal segments of the Bushes, their children, and new in-law Henry Hager talking to Barney, the obsequious Miss Beasley, and a cat named “Willard,” amid poorly produced visions of grandeur of Barney winning several aquatic Olympic events.

Barney’s paper-thin veneer of social dogitude was apparently stretched to the breaking point recently when he attempted to violently amputate a few digits of Reuters reporter, Jon Decker.  This latest rupture of his genteel facade pales when compared to his attack on liberal Boston Celtics public relations director, Heather Walker on September 19th, 2008, who was savagely bitten on the wrist, elbows, knees, ear, nose, and throat, and lost several pints of blood before being ferreted off to an undisclosed location.  The incident was brushed under the rug until the Decker mauling brought several previous attacks to national attention, exposing a pattern of unprovoked attacks on random dweebs.

The reason Bush sounds as dumb as a hound.

A rift between Barney and Karl Rove became public shortly after Rove’s resignation, when Rove publicly lashed out at the terrier, calling him “a lump.” Back-channel reports said that was coded talk by Rove, that alluded to the fact that Barney used Rove’s White House office as his toilet of choice.

Perhaps the most controversial of Barney’s run-ins with politicos is his public spat with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who publicly ridiculed Barney as a “smaller breed,” unworthy of real world leaders.  Barney responded by challenging Putin’s “mutt” to a no-holes-barred dog fight.  Putin’s black bitch labrador, Koni, was said to have been amused by the challenge, but only said, “Драка с чем? Тот маленький приклад-smeller? Отсутствие fucking путя.”*

•

•

*”Vight wit vhat? Dot little butt-smeller?  No voocking vhay.”

President Chimpy leaving his impact on the economy

During his frat brat days, George W. Bush was famous for his binge drinking and pranksterism, reportedly leaving one of his fraternity houses in such a state of ruin that his Daddy had to pony up big bucks for the repairs.

Well, his legacy continues to grow. Thanks to a privileged birth, Georgie has been free to project his self-destructiveness on the world at large, unburdened by any measure of individual accountability, aided and abetted by his family’s disdain for self-reflection and their obsession with public ass-covering. (So much for them replacing the Kennedy’s as the nation’s first family.)

The latest exhibition of Bush’s catastrophic policies can be seen in the release of today’s horrendous unemployment numbers. Taken together with the collapse of the financial markets and the international blowback from his failed “war on terror”, the outlines of the Great Bush Recession are becoming all too clear.

AP reports:

Employers ax 533,000 jobs in Nov., most in 34 years; unemployment rate rises to 6.7 percent

JEANNINE AVERSA
Dec 05, 2008 09:28 EST

Skittish employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years, catapulting the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent, dramatic proof the country is careening deeper into recession.

The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, showed the crucial employment market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid clip, and handed Americans some more grim news right before the holidays.

As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high.

“These numbers are shocking,” said economist Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economics Advisors. “Companies are sharply reacting to the economy’s problems and slashing costs. They are not trying to ride it out.”

The unemployment rate would have moved even higher if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force. Economists thought many of those people probably abandoned their job searches out of sheer frustration. In November 2007, the jobless rate was at 4.7 percent.

The U.S. tipped into recession last December, a panel of experts declared earlier this week, confirming what many Americans already thought.

Since the start of the recession, the economy has lost 1.9 million jobs, the number of unemployed people increased by 2.7 million and the jobless rate rose by 1.7 percentage points. [Read more →]