George Will doesn't like it either

George Will is not known as a flaming leftist liberal.
But he has often been a harsh crisitc of GW Bush.

And he thinks very little of the administration's use of TARP funds for the auto industry. At least the fact that the administration has made Congress moot:

The president is dispensing money from the $700 billion Congress provided for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The unfounded assertion of a right to do this is notably brazen, given the indisputable fact that if Congress had known that TARP -- supposedly a measure for scouring "toxic" assets from financial institutions -- was to become an instrument for unconstrained industrial policy, it would not have been passed...

The administration has not confined its aggrandizement of executive power to national security matters....

Most of the administration's executive truculence has pertained to national security, where the case for broad prerogatives, although not as powerful as the administration supposes, is at least arguable. With the automakers, however, executive branch overreaching now extends to the essence of domestic policy -- spending -- and traduces a core constitutional principle, the separation of powers...

Read the whole article here.

Blunders everywhere

An unpublished, 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.


This report was written by a Republican, and contains many quotes attributed to men like Rumsfeld and Powell. The accuracy of those quotes is not denied. They are shocking.

Click here for the article and to read the actual report.

The hanging

President Bush is almost gone.
On Saturday a painting of him was unveiled in the White House.
He began his remarks like this:

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Welcome to my hanging. (Laughter and applause.)

Finally.

(Note: please do not think I want the President dead. That is not the intention of this blog post. I repeat: I DO NOT want the President dead. I prefer he serve out his sentence as most impopulair president ever while remaining alive.)