Dick Cheney Slams Condi Rice & Colin Powell In New Memoir! Still Supports Waterboarding

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Cheney says he urged Bush to bomb suspected Syria nuke site

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.

“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.

Pugnacious

Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues. While he praises Mr. Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney, who made guarding the secrecy of internal deliberations a hallmark of his time in office, divulges a number of conflicts with others in the inner circle.

He wrote that George J. Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, resigned in 2004 just “when the going got tough,” a decision he calls “unfair to the president.” He wrote that he believes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to undermine President Bush by privately expressing doubts about the Iraq war, and he confirms that he pushed to have Mr. Powell removed from the cabinet after the 2004 election. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney writes. His resignation “was for the best.”

He faults former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for naïveté in the efforts to forge a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea, and Mr. Cheney reports that he fought with White House advisers over softening the president’s speeches on Iraq.

Mr. Cheney acknowledged that the administration underestimated the challenges in Iraq, but he said the real blame for the violence was with the terrorists.

He also defends the Bush administration’s decision to inflict what he called “tough interrogations” — like the suffocation technique known as waterboarding — on captured terrorism suspects, saying it extracted information that savedlives. He rejects portrayals of such techniques as “torture.”

In discussing the much-disputed “16 words” about Iraq’s supposed hunt for uranium in Niger that were included in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address to help justify the eventual invasion, Mr. Cheney said that unlike other aides, he saw no need to apologize for making that claim. He writes that Ms. Rice eventually came around to his view.

“She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk and tearfully admitted I had been right,” he wrote.

Detailed account of Sept. 11 response

The book opens with an account of Mr. Cheney’s experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government’s response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush — who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns — played a peripheral role. But Mr. Cheney wrote that he did not want to make any formal statement to the nation that day.

“My past government experience,” he wrote, “had prepared me to manage the crisis during those first few hours on 9/11, but I knew that if I went out and spoke to the press, it would undermine the president, and that would be bad for him and for the country.

“We were at war. Our commander in chief needed to be seen as in charge, strong, and resolute — as George W. Bush was.”

Mr. Cheney appears to relish much of the criticism heaped on him by liberals, but reveals that he had offered to resign several times as President Bush prepared for his re-election in 2004 because he was afraid of becoming a burden on the Republican ticket. After a few days, however, Mr. Cheney said that Mr. Bush said he wanted him to stay.

Waning influence

But in the Bush administration’s second term, Mr. Cheney’s influence waned. When Mr. Bush decided to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense after the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Cheney said he was not given a chance to object.

Mr. Cheney praised Barack Obama’s support, as a senator from Illinois, for passing a bank bailout bill at the height of the financial crisis, shortly before the 2008 election. But he criticizes Mr. Obama’s decision to withdraw the 33,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan in 2009 by September 2012, and writes that he has been “happy to note” that Mr. Obama has failed to close the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as he had pledged.

Mr. Cheney’s long struggle with heart disease is a recurring theme in the book. He discloses that he wrote a letter of resignation, dated March 28, 2001, and told an aide to give it to Mr. Bush if he ever had a heart attack or stroke that left him incapacitated.

And in the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.


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Sources: MSNBC, NY Times, Telegraph.co.uk, Zimbio, Youtube, Google Maps

America's Debt Crisis Worsens While Europe Progresses: "Black Swan"

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Europe Making More Progress On Debt Than US: Black Swan


Europe is ahead of the United States in its debt crisis in that it at least has identified the problem and is taking steps to correct it, "Black Swan" author Nassim Taleb told CNBC.

The two regions differ in that the US instead has chosen to bail out institutions, which Taleb, promoting his latest book "The Bed of Procrustes," said is immoral.

"At least we know that we need austerity there. People can't spend money they don't have," he said. "They're ahead of us in that they have identified the problem further. We over here still don't know that we're living on borrowed money and we're borrowing more."

Taleb spoke as global policy makers are working through a plan to help troubled countries such as Ireland, Portugal and Italy deal with their sovereign debt issues. The debt problems have caused wide swings in the stock market as investors try to get a handle on where the crisis is heading.

The US, meanwhile, is working on a far-reaching plan to cut U.S. deficits and slow the growth of long-term debt. The plan, announced earlier this week by a commission appointed by President Obama, gained crucial support from two key Republican senators on Thursday but remained short of votes needed to trigger congressional action.

Taleb rose to prominence with this 2007 book in which he cautioned against excessive risk-taking. The title arose from the discovery of black swans that were thought not to exist, and the philosophy espoused in the book cautions investors that such unpredicted events have the greatest consequences.

In his latest piece, he takes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to task for engineering the bailouts of institutions that got into trouble through excessive risk.

Whether the gamble turned out to work in the end is immaterial, Taleb said. The larger point is moral hazard—that Bernanke used the money of innocent taxpayers and investors to rescue those who jeopardized the system in the first place.

"He's trying to bail out those who made mistakes with retirees' money," Taleb said. "We have a subsidy...of those who made a mistake, taking money away from those who are innocent. To me that is immoral...it's beyond unwise.

He advocated austerity measures such as program cuts undertaken during the Ronald Reagan presidency, reasoning that Americans would willingly accept "the pill knowing it's the remedy."

As for those on Wall Street and in Washington who caused the financial crisis, he recommended stiff retribution.

"You need to go after people promoting risk management methods that don't work, that help hide risk and at the same time have no downside," Taleb said. "The best way to get rid of the problem is the captain goes down with the ship—every captain, every ship."


Sources: CNBC, MSNBC

"Extraordinary, Ordinary People", Condolezza Rice's Well-Bred Life

Growing Up Condi


Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir is a fascinating look into her childhood and reveals a much misunderstood woman, says bestselling author Stephen Carter.

Midway through Condoleezza Rice’s briskly written new memoir, "Extraordinary, Ordinary People", comes a scene that captures the central contradiction of her life, and of her career. She is reflecting on why her “conservative, Republican father” was on such good terms with “radicals such as Stokely Carmichael.” The answer the Reverend John Rice gave his daughter was that he loved the battle of ideas. Rice herself offers a quite different explanation. Her father, she says, “admired the willingness of radicals to confront America’s racism with strength and pride rather than with humbleness of supplication.”

Her father pastored a black Presbyterian church in Birmingham, Alabama, which was, Rice reminds us twice, the most segregated city in America in the 1950s and early 1960s, the period in which she came of age. Today, of course, every schoolchild has heard of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail. But back in Rice’s childhood, when the middle-class black neighborhood of Titusville was under constant assault by the terrorist bombers of the Ku Klux Klan, her father refused to join King’s nonviolent activism. He believed in meeting violence with violence. He used to sit on the front porch with a gun, and helped organize bands of armed black men to patrol the streets of Titusville.

These and other tales of Rice’s youth make the memoir surprisingly engrossing, once the reader gives up any hope of learning the inside story of national-security policy in either of the two Bush administrations she served. For the book, although told in the first person, is not really about Condoleezza Rice. It is about her parents, John and Angelena—about the forces that shaped the generation of black middle-class families who did not become politicians and civil-rights leaders.

The self-reliance Rice learned at the feet of her parents helped to form the poised, powerful, and complicated woman who rose to prominence under two Republican presidents, and, in between, served as the youngest provost in the history of Stanford University. And although so fiercely partisan an observer as Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, told a reporter that she had “chills” up and down her spine when Rice was sworn in as the first black woman to serve as secretary of State, the fact remains that a thread of controversy seems to have followed Condoleezza Rice throughout her career.

The pattern began when she was young. Like other middle-class black parents of their day, the Rices were determined to build for their only child a world of limitless possibility. They refused to allow the oppression under which they lived to impinge on their daughter’s life. When it did—as, for example, when the Santa Claus at a downtown department store refused to let Condoleezza sit on his lap, or when a clerk in a dress shop declined to let the child use the fitting rooms—her parents fought back, often forcing the whites of the community to change their ways.

Their fight, however, was not through organizing and marching. (They did join the boycott of Birmingham stores at Christmas.) They relied instead on force of presence—and surprise. Rice’s schoolteacher mother came from a family that had insisted that all the children speak English precisely, as a means of earning the respect of skeptical whites. Many of the tales Rice tells of her childhood involve proving herself to be smarter and more capable than teachers or counselors or other adults imagined. We see an echo of these formative experiences when Rice the graduate student allows her temper to flare at an unhelpful gasoline station attendant in South Bend, Indiana—and then, still later, when Boris Yeltsin, at that time a reformer not yet running the Soviet Union, shows up for his first White House meeting, and expresses his annoyance at being greeted by Rice (at that time a deputy to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft) at the basement entrance. She gives Yeltsin a tongue-lashing—in fluent Russian.

As Stanford provost, Rice dismissed, on budgetary grounds, a popular Latina administrator. (Full disclosure: I knew and admired the administrator.) When a student protester questioned Rice’s commitment to minority rights, she responded with that same sharp tongue. A few pages later, Rice admits that she probably dealt with the student too harshly. But the silly student comment was simply a dialed-down version of the bizarre attacks Rice has faced from fellow African Americans. (Rice, by the way, rejects this term, which she thinks too easily lets white Americans off the hook for slavery and Jim Crow, by making the black community seem like any other group of immigrants.)

Civil-rights leaders, black politicians, black journalists, and talk-show hosts have all had their innings, calling Rice an Uncle Tom (gender notwithstanding), a traitor, and an Aunt Jemima. White liberals, given cover by this cruel silliness, have too often hopped on the bandwagon. Some reviews of Marcus Mabry’s biography of Rice, published three years ago, took the opportunity to psychoanalyze her, in the way liberals like to do with black people, trying to figure out what in her background caused her to think as she does—free will and reason and choice, evidently, being limited to whites.

All of this rancor, from what I can tell, arises from Condoleezza Rice’s attachment to Republican politics, and, in particular, her service in George W. Bush’s administration. But the tenor of the criticism is peculiar. Here is Rice, one of the nation’s leading experts on the Soviet Union, a tenured professor at Stanford, called upon by the president-elect: What, precisely, is she supposed to say? “I won’t help with foreign policy because we disagree on tax cuts”?

Indeed, what emerges from the memoir is a passionate commitment to racial justice, forged in her Titusville youth, where her parents taught that the path to justice is education. Rice battled Bush advisers over affirmative action. She helped found, and has tirelessly raised money for, the Center for a New Generation, which has prepared scores of disadvantaged children in the Stanford area for college and careers. Critics who say she has turned her back on the race quite literally have no idea what they are talking about.

True, Rice is a Republican. She tells us that she voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976—her first presidential election—but abandoned him for Ronald Reagan in 1980 because of her disappointment in what she considered Carter’s weak response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. From the clues she drops in the memoir, she remains, on domestic issues, far closer to the liberal than the conservative side of the ledger. (To take the two most obvious examples, she is pro-choice, and supports affirmative action in college admission and hiring.) In another era, she would have likely been a “Scoop Jackson Democrat,” but the party’s shrinking tent seems to have no room for such complex creatures anymore.

To be sure, the Republican Party’s tent is also shrinking. Politics gets uglier and uglier as the parties themselves grow narrower and narrower. But the notion, propounded by self-appointed guardians of the race, that no sane black person could ever vote Republican stands on a level of cleverness with the drunken football fans who pummel supporters of the visiting team who find their way to the stadium. Among the intellectually serious, it as about as worthy of respect.

I use a football metaphor because football runs through the book. Rice’s father loved the sport, and so does she. Nearly every boyfriend or crush she lists—and she lists a lot of them—was an athlete. Rice dated for a while, and may have been engaged to (the book is unclear on this point) Rick Upchurch, once a star wide receiver for the Denver Broncos. She has been quoted as saying that her dream job would be commissioner of the National Football League. But her jobs, in and out of academia, have revolved instead around foreign policy, where ambition, talent, and a love for the subject have combined to carry her far.

Rice’s career has had its great successes, including her involvement in the winding down of the Cold War. But her work is not above criticism. In one of the book’s few “inside” stories, she freely admits that during the administration of the first President Bush, when she basically ran Soviet and Eastern European affairs for the National Security Council, she and her staff were scooped by CNN on the fall of the Berlin Wall. (True, so were the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.) And, of course, Rice was national security adviser at the time when the colossal intelligence failure over Saddam Hussein’s programs to develop weapons of mass destruction helped launch the Iraq War. But readers hoping for an inside account of those harried days will be disappointed: The memoir, as I said, is dedicated not to Rice’s own life, but to her parents, and ends when her father dies, in December 2000, just before the second Bush took office.

The portrait of her father is, overall, more fully drawn than that of her mother. Her schoolteacher mother seems to have been a proper and reserved woman, swift to judgment, awesome in her wrath, and unfailing in pushing her gifted daughter toward more achievement, whether in figure skating, piano, or the classroom. The father we meet is gregarious and affectionate, passionately involved in the community, constantly working, whether in Birmingham, Denver, or Palo Alto, for the betterment of the race.

One senses a romantic softness at the core of the steely woman Americans met during her years of public service. Rice’s reverence for her parents is touching, as is her abiding love for the Titusville of her youth, where segregation was held to be no barrier to achievement, no matter what white people might think. (The story of Birmingham in those days is elegantly told in Glenn Eskew’s prize-winning history, But for Birmingham, a source Rice says she consulted.) Her love for John and Angelena, and her pain at their passing, is obvious. Yet here we meet a wall that is perhaps the book’s greatest flaw: One has the sense that as much is withheld as disclosed.

The prose has a punchy, journalistic tone: One simple and clear declarative sentence following another. When Rice is laying out a narrative of the events of her fascinating life, this style is a strength, and the book itself eminently readable. But when she turns to moments of great emotion, the prose becomes a weakness. Rice tells us how she ached when her mother’s breast cancer metastasized to her brain, or when a guidance counselor suggested vocational school, or when girls she knew were blown to bits in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. She tells us, but does not show us—Rice informs the reader of her feelings but withholds her inner self, so that we acknowledge her suffering but never quite share it.

Perhaps this reserve is to be expected, given the complexities of her upbringing and of the career and political paths she has chosen. But it comes as a disappointment all the same. The more one reads of Rice, the more one wants to get inside her head. She was raised, however, to keep much to herself; and she does. There is something quaintly appealing about the way Rice insists on the privacy of her innermost motives and emotions. But contemporary America believes in its right to know everything. What you decide not to tell, reporters nowadays believe you are covering up. A pity, that; because whatever critiques one might offer of Rice the policymaker, Rice the American has an engaging and important story to tell. One would like to have more of it.


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Sources: Amazon.com, Daily Beast, PBS, TIME, Youtube, Google Maps

Bush Forgives Kanye West: Kayne Apologizes

Bush Forgives Kanye West For Calling Him A Racist


It looks like George W. Bush and Kanye West have buried the hatchet—at least for now.

In a taped interview on NBC's "Today" show, the often-impulsive rapper told Matt Lauer that he now regrets having said after Hurricane Katrina that Bush "doesn't care about black people."

"I would tell George Bush: In my moment of frustration, I didn't have the grounds to call him a racist," West said. "I believe that in a situation of high emotion like that, we as human beings don't always choose the right words."

In Bush's new memoir, "Decision Points," Bush calls the moment "disgusting" and the lowest ebb of his presidency.

Appearing separately on "Today," Bush, upon seeing a video of West's remarks, replied, "I appreciate that." But he added: "It wasn't just Kanye West who was talking like that during Katrina. I cited him as an example."

Asked if he forgives West, Bush said "absolutely."

"I'm not a hater. I don't hate Kanye West," he said. "But I was talking about an environment in which people were willing to say things that hurt. Nobody wants to be called a racist, if in your heart you believe in the equality of race."

It's a little unclear how sorry West really is. He has said repeatedly over the last week that he's "empathetic" toward Bush--but the rapper took to Twitter on Tuesday to criticize NBC. He said (in all capital letters) that Lauer "tried to force my answers."

He continued: "It was very brutal, and I came there with only positive intent."


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Sources: MSNBC, US Weekly, Yahoo News, Youtube, Google Maps

"Damn Right!" Bush On Waterboarding Terrorists; Gave It His All

Bush On Waterboarding: "Damn Right!"


Former President George W. Bush has stayed out of politics since he left the White House and, except for his own career, he largely keeps the subject at arm's length in his new memoir, "Decision Points."

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey to air on Tuesday when the book is to be released, Bush said he is "through with politics" and refused to offer an opinion on the 2012 presidential election.

"I am not a Political Pundit. I'm really not," Bush said. "A lot is gonna happen between now and the nominating process."

He also passes on commenting on President Obama, saying he wants to treat his successor the way, "I'd like to have been treated."

"I don't think it's good for a former president to be out there opining on every darned issue," Bush told Winfrey. "He's got a plenty tough job. Trust me. And there's gonna be plenty of critics and he doesn't need me criticizing him."

In the 481-page book Bush compliments Obama's political skills during a meeting before the 2008 election as the Financial crisis was coming to a head. He also criticizes the performance of his party's nominee, John McCain, in the same meeting.

He criticizes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the failure of his efforts to Reform Immigration laws in 2006.

Bush takes responsibility for giving the go-ahead for Waterboarding terror suspects, which has touched off a new round of criticism of Bush and calls for his prosecution. He says that he did decide not to use two more extreme interrogation methods, but did not disclose what those were.

Here are excerpts from the book, which CNN obtained on Friday:

'The choice between security and values was real'

Bush reveals the decision points that led him to choose Waterboarding as an Interrogation technique.

"CIA experts drew up a list of interrogation techniques. ... At my direction, Department of Justice and CIA lawyers conducted a careful legal review. The enhanced interrogation program complied with the Constitution and all applicable laws, including those that ban torture.

"There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them. Another technique was Waterboarding, a process of simulated drowning. No doubt the procedure was tough, but medical experts assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm."

Though Bush confirms that he knew the use of Waterboarding would one day become public, and acknowledges that it is "sensitive and controversial," he asserts that "the choice between security and values was real," and expresses firm confidence in his decision. "Had I not authorized Waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked. In the wake of 9/11, that was a risk I was unwilling to take," he writes.

Bush further declares that the new techniques proved effective, yielding information on al Qaeda's structure and operations, and leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, the logistical planner of the 9/11 attacks who was captured on the first anniversary of 9/11.

And if there were any lingering doubts or conflict about the use of Waterboarding, Bush discloses that he received reassurance from an unlikely source: terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.

The former president writes, "His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist Interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate." Bush elaborates that Zubaydah gave him a direct instruction, "'You must do this for all the brothers.'"

Intelligence gleaned from Interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and other suspects led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bush writes. During a raid on Mohammed's compound, agents discovered more plans for terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Prompted by the discoveries, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding on Mohammed.

Bush exposes his inner thoughts on what led him to reach this decision: "I thought about my meeting with Danny Pearl's widow, who was pregnant with his son when he was murdered. I thought about the 2,971 people stolen from their families by al Qaeda on 9/11. And I thought about my duty to protect my country from another act of terror.

"Damn Right" I said."

An early political lesson

The president's political education is rounded out with anecdotes from early races, including a loss to state Sen. Kent Hance in a bid for a West Texas congressional seat.

Despite warnings that he was likely to lose, Bush writes that he felt compelled to run.

"I was having my first experience with the political bug, and it was biting hard." Fighting off accusations that he was "an East Coast outsider," he tried to change the conversation by running an ad showing him jogging to emphasize his "energy and youth."

Hance quickly turned the ad against him with one simple line, "'The only time folks around here go running is when somebody's chasing them.'" The experience, he writes, taught him that he was capable of moving on after a loss, and to never let his opponent define him.

An earlier Bush-Cheney ticket

Bush writes candidly about the ups and downs of his father's presidential campaigns and the personal toll they took on him. On a fishing trip during his father's third year in the White House, Bush tells of a conversation in which President George H.W. Bush briefly toyed with the idea of not standing for re-election.

Bush writes that his father's doubts were attributed to blame he felt for the intense media scrutiny his son Neil had gone through during the savings and loan crisis. But the notion is quickly forgotten when in the next paragraph Bush describes his relief "when Dad told the family he had one last race in him."

In the summer of 1992, as the presidential race was heating up, Bush expressed concern that the campaign was languishing.

"I told Dad he ought to think about a bold move to shake up the dynamics of the race," Bush writes. "One possibility was to replace Vice President Dan Quayle, whom I liked and respected, with a new running mate." Bush's suggestion was Secretary of State Dick Cheney, and although his father dismissed the idea because it would look "desperate and embarrass Dan," Bush later admits that he "never completely gave up on my idea of a Bush-Cheney ticket."

The struggles of his father's campaign effected Bush emotionally. He confesses that he felt the media were treating his father unfairly, and on a last-minute campaign trip with his father in the days before the election, he "unleashed" an angry outburst on two reporters who asked about the mood on the campaign plane. "What the press did not understand was that my outbursts were driven by love, not politics," he writes.

After his father's loss in 1992, Bush says this love turned to "pain," and then ultimately to "the itch to run for office again," and a "sense of liberation," that he was out from under his father's shadow. "I could lay out my policies without having to defend his," Bush writes. "I wouldn't have to worry that my decisions would disrupt his presidency. I was free to run my own life."

Bush writes that the loss had a similar effect on his brother Jeb, "What had first seemed like the sad end to a great story now looked like the unlikely beginning of two new careers. Had dad won in 1992, I doubt I would have run for office in 1994, and I almost certainly would not have become president."

'Marquee event' in political theater

During the battle over passage of his 2008 "financial rescue package," Bush describes a heated White House meeting between congressional leaders and both presidential candidates. Despite warnings from several of his top advisers about the effectiveness of such a meeting, the president agreed to convene the group at John McCain's request for fear of the public message it would send if he rejected the suggestion of his party's nominee.

Bush describes the event as "the marquee event in Washington's political theater," and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as "a volcano ready to erupt" prior to entering the Cabinet Room. Following remarks by the president and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the speaker deferred to Obama, her party's nominee, whom Bush portrays as having a "calm demeanor" while speaking about the scope of the proposal.

From a political perspective, Bush says that Obama was "smart when he informed the gathering that he was in constant contact with Hank," giving the impression that he was "aware, in touch, and prepared to get a bill passed."

In a somewhat harsher description of his party's nominee, Bush recalls that he was "puzzled" with McCain's decision to pass when it came his turn to speak next. "He had called for this meeting," Bush writes. "I assumed he would come prepared to outline a way to get the bill passed." In Bush's telling, the meeting quickly devolved into a "verbal food fight, which would have been comical except the stakes were so high."

Why Immigration Reform failed

Bush blasts Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for letting a comprehensive immigration reform bill die in the Senate.

At one point during his push to get the legislation passed, Bush reached out to the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy -- urging him to ask Reid to keep the Senate in session before the July 4 recess.

"Given the importance of this legislation, I thought it would be worthwhile to allow them a little extra for the bill to pass," Bush writes.

"Apparently, Harry Reid did not ... If Ted Kennedy couldn't persuade the majority leader of his party, my odds were not good."

And he was right. The Nevada Democrat called for a vote to end debate, which failed. The Senate then adjourned.

"Senators went home and listened to angry constituents stirred up by the loud voices on radio and TV," he writes. "By the time they came back to Washington, immigration reform was dead."

And because of that failure, Bush says "coyotes are still in business, immigrants continue to cross the border illegally, and a divisive political issue remains unsolved."





Bush Writes Of Anger, Resolve After Sept. 11 Attacks

The terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001, gave his administration a clear goal and him the resolve to find out who was responsible and "kick their ass," former President George W. Bush writes in his new book.

In "Decision Points," Bush describes his reaction when his then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice informed him of the crash of a third airplane into the Pentagon.

"I sat back in my seat and absorbed her words. My thoughts clarified: The first plane could have been an accident. The second was definitely an attack. The third was a declaration of war," the former president writes in his 481-page book, which goes on sale Tuesday.

"My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass," Bush writes.

"In a single morning, the purpose of my presidency had grown clear: to protect our people and defend our freedom that had come under attack."

CNN on Friday obtained a copy of the book, being released by Crown Publishers.

In the book, Bush also recounts the government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

He calls the response "not only flawed" but "unacceptable," and describes his own failures in this way: "As the leader of the federal government, I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster. I prided myself on my ability to make crisp and effective decisions. Yet in the days after Katrina, that didn't happen. The problem was not that I made the wrong decisions. It was that I took too long to decide."

Bush writes he also failed to "adequately communicate my concern for the victims of Katrina" -- a problem he calls one of "perception, not reality."

"Yet many of our citizens, particularly in the African-American community, came away convinced their president didn't care about them."

The former president recently told NBC's Matt Laurer that the "worst moment" of his administration was when rapper Kanye West declared during a Katrina celebrity telethon that "George Bush does not like black people." West this week expressed a sympathetic view of Bush's reaction to the comment.

Bush writes the Katrina had a lasting legacy on his second term.

"Just as Katrina was more than a hurricane, its impact was more than physical destruction. It eroded citizens' trust in their government. It exacerbated divisions in our society and politics. And it cast a cloud over my second term."

In "Decision Points," Bush also details how he came to utter those infamous words "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" about Michael Brown, the FEMA chief who was leading the government's response to Katrina in the days immediately following the storm.

Bush writes that he was in Mobile, Alabama, meeting with the Alabama and Mississippi governors and asked them if they were getting adequate federal support. "'That Mike Brown is doing a heck of a job,' Bob said," referring to Alabama governor Bob Riley. "I knew Mike was under pressure and I wanted to boost his morale," Bush writes, so he repeated Riley's words a few minutes later when he spoke to the press.

"I never imagined those words of encouragement would become an infamous entry in the political lexicon. As complaints about Mike Brown's performance mounted, especially in New Orleans, critics turned my words of encouragement into a club to bludgeon me."

The former FEMA head, who resigned two weeks after the compliment, told CNN in August that he winced when Bush uttered the line.

"I knew the minute he said that, the media and everybody else would see a disconnect between what he was saying and what I was witnessing on the ground," Brown said. "That's the president's style. His attitude and demeanor is always one of being a cheerleader and trying to encourage people to keep moving. It was just the wrong time and the wrong place."

Bush in recent years has talked about his past problems with alcohol abuse and his 1986 decision to give up drinking completely.

Just days before the 2000 presidential election, news broke that Bush had been arrested for driving under the influence in Maine in 1976. In his memoir, Bush writes, "Not disclosing the DUI on my terms may have been the single costliest political mistake I ever made."

He says he had decided against doing so because he didn't want to undermine his admonitions to his daughters about drinking and driving.

After the news came out -- so close to election day, Bush writes, he went to bed that night on the campaign trail thinking, "I may have just cost myself the presidency."


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Sources: Amazon.com, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, Google Maps

Bush Discusses Waterboarding, Other Decisions & Mistakes

Bush Says New Orleans Flyover After Katrina A "Huge Mistake"

Former President George W. Bush said he made a “huge mistake” in not stopping in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and allowing photographers to take pictures of him looking at New Orleans as he flew over the city.

The photograph, taken on board Air Force One, made him look “detached and uncaring,” Bush said in an interview scheduled for broadcast on NBC next week in connection with the Nov. 9 release of the former president’s book, “Decision Points,” about his time in office.

Bush was widely criticized for the federal government’s botched response to the 2005 storm that devastated New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf of Mexico coast and for not going to the area soon after the hurricane hit.

“I should have touched down in Baton Rouge, met with the governor and walked out and said, ‘I hear you. We understand. And we’re going to help the state and help the local governments with as much resources as needed,’” Bush, 64, said according to excerpts from the interview with Matt Lauer scheduled to air at 8 p.m. New York time on Nov. 8.

In his book, Bush writes that a low point in his presidency was a remark by rapper Kanye West shortly after Katrina hit that the government’s response to the disaster showed Bush “doesn’t care about black people.”

“I faced a lot of criticism as president,” Bush wrote, according to the NBC excerpt. “I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all- time low.”

‘Not True’

In the interview Bush said, “I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency.”

The former president, who served two terms in office, defended his decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, saying the world would be much more unstable if Saddam Hussein were still in power.

Bush began the U.S.-led attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003, because, he said, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had scorned the United Nations’ 12 years of mandates to get rid of its chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

He wrote that he felt “sickened” when the U.S. found no weapons of mass destruction. In the interview, Bush said he never considered apologizing for the decision to go to war.

“Apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision,” he said. “And I don’t believe it was the wrong decision.”

In the interview and in his memoir, Bush talked about his struggles with alcohol. Drinking “became a love,” he said, according to interview excerpts. “And therefore, began to compete for my love with my wife and my daughters.”

He said he was able to quit on his own because he was never “chemically addicted.” He described himself as a “habitual drinker” before stopping at the age of 40. He said he has not had “a sip” of alcohol since 1986.


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Sources: Bloomberg.com, MSNBC, National Geographic, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

Laura Bush Reveals She Was Poisoned, Talks Pelosi & Reid

Laura Bush Says She, Former Pres. George W. Bush May Have Been Poisoned


Former First Lady Laura Bush is suggesting she, her husband, and several aides were poisoned during a 2007 visit to Germany for the G8 summit -- one of several new details in the former first lady's forthcoming memoir, "Spoken from the Heart."

Due to be released May 4 but acquired early by The New York Times, Mrs. Bush says she and former President George W. Bush became mysteriously sick on the Germany trip to such a degree that the president became bedridden. According to Mrs. Bush, doctors and the Secret Service investigated the possibility that a poisoning had occurred but were unable to make a definitive conclusion.

News reports filed during the event show that the White House did disclose that Bush missed a series of morning sessions at the summit because he had contracted an apparent virus, but White House officials did not provide further details at the time.

"We never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one," Mrs. Bush writes in the new book, according to the New York Times excerpts.

The memoir also covers Mrs. Bush's involvement in a tragic 1963 car collision in Midland, Texas, that killed a schoolmate. The spotty details surrounding the accident became fodder for Bush's opponents during his first run for the White House, and Mrs. Bush rarely addressed the matter in public.

But Mrs. Bush covers the accident extensively in the new memoir, revealing that it occurred after she ran a stop sign in a rush to a drive-in theater. She was 17 years old when her car collided with that of Mike Douglas, who was pronounced dead when he arrived at a hospital.

"In those awful seconds, the car door must have been flung open by the impact and my body rose in the air until gravity took over and I was pulled, hard and fast, back to earth," she writes, according to the Times.

"The whole time ... I was praying that the person in the other car was alive. In my mind, I was calling 'Please, God. Please, God. Please, God,' over and over and over again," Bush also writes.

According to The New York Times, Mrs. Bush writes that she and her friends were talking when she ran the stop sign, but she also says the intersection was highly dangerous, the road was dark and the stop sign was small.

Bush says she was guilt-ridden and lost her faith for "many, many years."

"It was the first time that I had prayed to God for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wishing on a star but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard. My begging, to my seventeen-year-old mind, had made no difference. The only answer was the sound of Mrs. Douglas's sobs on the other side of that thin emergency room curtain."

Mrs. Bush also takes aim at some of the former president's most vocal congressional critics, specifically Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Reid once called Bush a "loser," while Pelosi said he was an "incompetent leader."

"The comments were uncalled for and graceless," Bush writes. "While a president's political opponents, as well as his supporters, are entitled to make what they see as legitimate criticisms, and while our national debates should be spirited, these particular worlds revealed the petty and parochial nature of some who serve in Congress."


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Sources: ABC News, AP, CNN, Google Maps

Karl Rove On Obama: "Obama Is Condescending, Lies, Thinks I Hate Him"

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Rove-elations: Former Bush Adviser Opens Up About Obama, Katrina, WMDs, Obama


President Obama thinks Karl Rove "hates" him; President Bush should have declared a "federal takeover" in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; and the Iraq war never would have happened without those pesky WMDs -- which were never found. Those are just some of the "Rove-elations" in Rove's new book.

President Obama thinks Karl Rove "hates" him; President Bush should have declared a "federal takeover" in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; and the Iraq war never would have happened without those pesky WMDs -- which were never found.

Those are just some of the "Rove-elations" Republican strategist and longtime Democratic antagonist Karl Rove provides in his new book, "Courage and Consequence."

Rove writes that the Bush administration mishandled several aspects of the response to Katrina, including allowing the president to survey the devastation from Air Force One. Rove says it was a mistake to allow Bush to fly over the storm-ravaged area, which resulted in a photograph of Bush that critics said showed him as aloof in his response.

"We shouldn't have dropped into New Orleans, because it would have been disruptive, but we should have gone to Baton Rouge, the site of Louisiana's disaster command center. I'm one of the people responsible for this mistake," Rove wrote. "Our decision was right for the relief effort but wrong for President Bush's public standing."

Rove, now a Fox News contributor, also hammers Obama as "loose with the facts," defends the Bush administration from a number of Democratic criticisms and acknowledges that the war in Iraq probably never would have happened without the "threat" of weapons of mass destruction. Here's more:

-- Rove writes that in the aftermath of Katrina, the administration was hindered by infighting and ineptitude on the local level. He says Bush should have ordered a "federal takeover" in response.

"Behind the scenes, the White House staff engaged in a complicated, high-stakes legal and constitutional battle with Louisiana's governor -- which had huge ramifications for New Orleans and the administration. As events unfolded, it became clear that Ray Nagin was no Rudy Giuliani and Kathleen Blanco was no Haley Barbour ... their respective staffs were extremely critical of each other, which made cooperation even more problematic."

He continues: "Our biggest mistake was that we did not seize control of the situation in Louisiana sooner. As the Air Force One meeting showed, Nagin and Blanco couldn't even agree on who was responsible for public safety in New Orleans. The president should have ordered a federal takeover and taken the heat for pushing Louisiana officials aside."

-- Rove admits that weapons of mass destruction were the linchpin of the Iraq war, even though they were never found.

"Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it: Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the threat of WMD."

But he says the administration was convinced about the weapons' existence, and so it did not knowingly lead the nation into war on false pretenses.

"So, then did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not," he writes.

-- Rove claims the Bush administration did not act forcefully enough in rebutting Democrats' claims about the president's approach to the Iraq war.

"When the pattern of the Democratic attacks became apparent in July 2003, we should have countered in a forceful and overwhelming way. The assault was worthy of significant attention by the entire White House, including a rebuttal delivered in a presidential address. We should have seen this for what it was: a poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency," Rove writes.

"By not engaging, we let more of the public come to believe dangerous falsehoods about the war: that Bush lied, that Saddam Hussein never had and never wanted WMD, that we claimed Iraq had been behind 9/11. These attacked undermined support for the war and public confidence in the president. So who was responsible for the failure to respond? I was. I should have stepped forward, rung the warning bell, and pressed for full-scale response. I didn't."

-- Rove disputes an accusation from Obama's memoir "The Audacity of Hope" that Rove and fellow conservatives Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist once declared, "We are a Christian nation."

"I certainly don't believe and have never said, 'We are a Christian nation,'" Rove insists in "Courage." "What happened to the Jews? The Muslims? The Hindus? The Buddhists? The skeptics and nonbelievers?"

Rove says he confronted Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, about the quotation during a chance encounter in the White House cafeteria. According to Rove, Obama initially denied attributing the quote to Rove, who then showed Obama the page in question.

"He looked surprised and began insisting he really wasn't saying what he had quoted me as saying," Rove writes. "After a few moments, the conversation drew to an awkward and unsatisfactory conclusion; he was unwilling to acknowledge the mistake or apologize. It seemed to me he didn't much care that he had attributed to me something I had never said and found offensive."

-- Rove writes that Obama once confided via an e-mail to adviser Valerie Jarrett, "Rove hates me." Rove claims the sentiment was rooted in their "run-in" over Obama's book.

Sources: Fox News, MSNBC, Youtube

Mark Halperin Calls Obama "Thin-Skinned"...Charlie Rose

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Sources: Charlie Rose, The Daily Beast, Colbert Nation