Jeb Bush on Foreign Policy:'This parlor game is kind of a tough game for me to be playing...'

[seafan]

'... so I've got Paul Wolfowitz on board, and a team of young people in Miami.'


Would that 'team' involve any of THESE people, Jeb?




Iraq war questions follow Bush to state fair, August 14, 2015


Win McNamee/Getty Images via WMTW

DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) —Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's brother's legacy in the Iraq War continued to haunt his candidacy Friday, when he faced questions from an audience at the Iowa State Fair about his relationship to the policies of President George W. Bush.

One of the fair-goers asked the Republican presidential candidate during his appearance on the Des Moines Register Soapbox whether he was being advised by Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush's deputy secretary of defense and the architect of his Iraq War policy.

Jeb Bush tried to spin the question away from his legacy as the son and brother of the last two Republican presidents, but he did so awkwardly.

"Paul Wolfowitz is providing some advice," Bush said. "I get most of my advice from a team that we have in Miami, Florida. Young people that are going to be ... they're not assigned, have experience either in Congress or the previous administration."

He continued: "This game, the parlor game that's played, you know, where you have 25, 30 or 40 people that are helping you with foreign policy, and if they have any executive experience, they've had to deal with two Republican administrations -- who were the people that were presidents, the last two Republican? I mean, this is kind of a tough game for me to be playing, to be honest with you."

Does anyone understand that garbage syntax?

"So here's the deal: my email address, write it down and send me your thoughts: [e-mail]," he said, noting he had made his email address and archives available as governor of Florida as well.

Not ALL of your archives, Jeb.

And you DID compromise the social security numbers of innocent Floridians who are now trying to protect themselves from identity theft. Thanks, Jeb, for that brainless stunt you pulled in your vociferously touted email dump. Just to make the point unmistakable, this is what he thinks of regular people. But he just thinks his email dump was just peaches and cream.

A trove of 250,000 emails released by prospective 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush includes the sensitive personal information of several Florida residents, leaving them vulnerable to identity thieves.

A scan of the email dump by technology blogs The Verge and Gizmodo revealed names, emails and in some cases, Social Security numbers of Bush's correspondents. Many appear to be normal Florida residents unaware their messages to the then-governor would eventually become public.

.....

Bush was already in the spotlight Tuesday for acknowledging in an e-book that he spent "30 hours a week" answering email as governor, but tech blogs were taking far greater interest in the details of the email dump by the afternoon.

Many posts were critical of Bush, who is expected to be a major contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

"Even if most of these emails are subject to Sunshine Law disclosure, a public request for specific information is not the same as a huge, indiscriminate data dump being made for political reasons," wrote T.C. Sottek with The Verge, which first reported the presence of Social Security numbers in the trove.

"At minimum, it shows a serious ignorance of the volume of sensitive information in the records and a carelessness about their disclosure — not a good look for someone who may want to sit in the White House," Sottek wrote.

At the time of this post, the messages still included some Social Security numbers, leaving individuals vulnerable to identity theft. Some messages also included sensitive personal stories, and many explicitly ask that their contents do not become public.

A note on Bush's site said he was posting the emails "in the spirit of transparency."

"Emails kept me connected to Floridians and focused on the mission of being their governor," Bush said in a statement on the site. "Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in frustration. But they're all here so you can read them and make up your own mind."

So, beware of sending your personal info to Jeb Bush.

"Transparency", Jeb?

How about... Arrogant. Careless. Politically motivated. Cherry-picked.

What a #$^&*#@ liar.


And another thing. While Jeb Bush is out there sniping at Hillary Clinton about her emails, he seems not to have thought of his own vulnerability on this same issue:

Jeb Bush flubs test of self-awareness

Revisiting our coverage from March, the Washington Post reported the details that show just how vulnerable Bush is on the issue he’s now focusing attention on.

Jeb Bush used his private e-mail account as Florida governor to discuss security and military issues such as troop deployments to the Middle East and the protection of nuclear plants, according to a review of publicly released records.

The e-mails include two series of exchanges involving details of Florida National Guard troop deployments after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the review by The Washington Post found.

The Washington Post’s report on the security risks surrounding Jeb Bush conducting official business on his private account coincided with a New York Times article, which noted that it took the former governor more than seven years “to comply fully with a Florida public records statute” on email disclosure.

The report quoted a non-partisan expert with the Florida-based First Amendment Foundation who said Bush’s disclosure policy was “a technical violation of the law.” The governor was required to turn over records pertaining to official business “at the expiration of his or her term of office,” and the Republican waited more than seven years to meet these obligations.

By some accounts, Bush “did exactly what Hillary did.” After he and his team went through official emails, they decided “what were public-record emails and what wasn’t.” The fact that he also appears to have ignored state law and created security risks only complicates matters further.

Stepping back from these relevant details, I’m also struck by Bush’s truly bizarre judgment as a national candidate. When he went on the offensive on the Clinton email story, did he not think his own, nearly identical problems would emerge? Or was this a case in which Team Jeb went on the attack without bothering to recognize their vulnerability?

But wait! Maybe Jeb! Bush will be smarter when it comes to Iran?

After giving a detailed answer about nuclear weapons in Iran, he said, "The more I get into this stuff, there's some things you just go, you know, 'holy schnikes.' This is, like, serious stuff."

Jeb Bush is infinitely vulnerable on:

1. The Iraq disaster deliberately created by his brother, particularly as Jeb was a PNAC signatory ahead of time, and has recently supported his brother's choice to wage aggressive war against Iraq, saying that he would have done the same.

2. His own e-mails, in that he "chose" which ones to release, and not until 7 years after leaving office; using unsecured connections for security-related reasons in the aftermath of September 11, 2001; AND, oddly, Jeb Bush released NO emails sent during the Election 2000 fiasco and aftermath, as he and his GOP legislature plotted to assign state electors to George W. Bush before the statewide recount could be completed, as ordered by the Florida Supreme Court.

3. Extensive minority Voter disenfranchisement under his rule in Florida while he was governor.

4. His role in shutting down the vote counting in 2000, and forcing his brother into the White House.

5. His embarrassing ignorance of foreign policy.


But, you see, these are all parlor games to him.


I don't know how many more ways this self-entitled, money-greased, mean-hearted traitor can demonstrate his inferiority for the office of the presidency.

I hope the country is paying attention.

[Octafish]

1. Young People experienced in making money in Iraq?

Leave me your parents' Who's Who ref and I'll get right back with you.

The Great Iraq Swindle

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

--From Rolling Stone Issue 1034
Posted Aug 23, 2007 8:51 AM

EXCERPT...

Custer Battles had lucked into a sort of Willy Wonka's paradise for contractors, where a small pool of Republican-friendly businessmen would basically hang around the Green Zone waiting for a contracting agency to come up with a work order. In the early days of the war, the idea of "competition" was a farce, with deals handed out so quickly that there was no possibility of making rational or fairly priced estimates. According to those familiar with the process, contracting agencies would request phony "bids" from several contractors, even though the winner had been picked in advance. "The losers would play ball because they knew that eventually it would be their turn to be the winner," says Grayson.

To make such deals legal, someone in the military would simply sign a piece of paper invoking an exception. "I know one guy whose business was buying ­weapons on the black market for contractors," says Pratap Chatterjee, a writer who has spent months in the Mideast researching a forthcoming book on Iraq contracts. "It's illegal -- but he got military people to sign papers allowing him to do it."

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."

The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport ­security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad's airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse to sniff the vehicles" -- as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

Like most contractors, Custer Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled. In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax­payers as new equipment. Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. "Yes -- $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while."

The Custer Battles show only ended when the pair left a spreadsheet behind after a meeting with CPA officials -- a spreadsheet that scrupulously detailed the pair's phony invoicing. "It was the worst case of fraud I've ever seen, hands down," says Grayson. "But it's also got to be the first instance in history of a defendant leaving behind a spreadsheet full of evidence of the crime."

CONTINUED @ Archive: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18261.htm

Wolfowitz? He loves the guy.

[seafan]

2. Ah, yes, Viceroy L. Paul Bremer.

Octafish, thank you for this valuable historical reminder of what George W. Bush and his stampeding herd of greedsters wrought on Iraq. We all need to revisit the wholesale theft of Iraq's resources, artifacts, protective army, oil and banking sectors, and everything else the Bushes got their blood-sucking teeth into, under the "leadership" of L. Paul Bremer.

And that includes sending a wave of twenty-something neocons to "serve as managerial advisers" at the Ministry of Finance in Iraq, as well as carving up the functions of many other branches of the Iraqi government.


More, from December, 2003:

Simone Ledeen is serving her country. She is the daughter of Michael Ledeen, the Iran-Contra luminary, AEI scholar, and all-around capo in the neocon mafia. She's 29, a freshly-minted M.B.A., with little to no experience in war-torn countries. But as an advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad, she is, in essence, helping shape one quarter of that nation's economy.

When the history of the occupation of Iraq is written, there will be many factors to point to when explaining the post-conquest descent into chaos and disorder, from the melting away of Saddam's army to the Pentagon's failure to make adequate plans for the occupation. But historians will also consider the lack of experience and abundant political connections of the hundreds of American bureaucrats sent to Baghdad to run Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority.

It's not that Americans lack such experience. In the last decade particularly, many American officials acquired a great deal of expertise in post-conflict reconstruction in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and in post-Communist countries in Eastern Europe and around the globe--expertise that could have been put to good use at the CPA. Names frequently mentioned are those of General Bill Nash, who commanded troops in the Gulf War and NATO operations in Bosnia; Robert Perito, former senior foreign service officer and deputy director of the Justice Department's international police training program, who helped advise peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, and helped organize post-conflict police training in Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia; Bob Gelbard, former U.S. presidential envoy to the Balkans; and retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Jacques Klein, who served in various capacities in the Balkans under the United States and the United Nations. Yet according to experts in the field, few of those with experience in these various deployments got the call to serve or even had their opinions solicited.

In their place, the architects of the war chose card-carrying Republicans--operatives, flacks, policy-wonks and lobbyists--for almost every key assignment in the country. Some marquee examples include U.S. civil administrator Paul Bremer's senior advisor and liaison to Capitol Hill, Tom Korologos, one of the most powerful GOP lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Then there's the man in charge of privatizing Iraq's 200-odd state owned companies, Tom Foley, a venture capitalist and high-flying GOP fundraiser. Foley was one of the Bob Dole's top-ten career donors, Connecticut finance chair for Bush 2000 and a classmate of the president's from Harvard Business School.

The chief advisor to the Agriculture Ministry is Dan Amstutz, a Reagan administration veteran who until recently served as the president of the North American Export Grain Association. Oxfam's Director of Policy Kevin Watkins recently quipped that with his record of opening up developing economies to cheap American agricultural exports, "putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission." The presence of so many GOP lobbyists and fat-cats on the CPA roster has led many to suspect that the staffing was driven by the desire to award prized contracts to friendly companies and campaign donors. There is more than a little truth in those impressions. But a closer look paints a more complex picture.

.....

This makes me SICK to this day.

God knows we have to tear these people out of our government; prosecute, imprison and hold them up to the rest of the world in repudiation, as they represent the very worst in what has happened to Americans' lives and reputation, and the lives of innocent Iraqis.

I hope that we as a people are able to wrest power away from people like this, for all time, because now, just as surely as the sun will rise with or without us, we are currently on the path to destruction if we do not do that.


We will do everything we can to include Jeb Bush in that group.

[alphafemale]

3. Don't some of the people on the Jeb! team also date back to Reagan and Nixon?

The corruption runs deep with this slime.

[panader0]

4. Paul Wolfowitz spits on his comb:

[Octafish]

5. The Comblicker is a Warmonger Supreme - BWTM*!

*But Wait, There's More!

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception

Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.

By Jim Lobe / AlterNet May 18, 2003

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?

A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.

The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.

Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.

Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/leo_strauss%27_philosophy_of_deception

PNAC is undemocratic as all hell. And that's what they're making our world. And it's on-purpose.

[panader0]

6. I always read and appreciate your posts.

I think if anyone could ever unravel the can of worms it would be you. I read about Leo Strauss
on DU before, possibly from one of your earlier posts. Thanks for what you do.

[Octafish]

10. You are most welcome, panader0!

DU is amazing. I've learned more here about the Way the Thing Works than at college and grad school (drop-out) combined.

Democracy is what's at stake. Those who think things are A-OK either have no idea or are part of the problem.

Thank you for standing up. And thank you for teaching me and DU.

[Rex]

7. He is stating that he is an idiot and cannot compete in word games.

Fuck that crook and his fucked up, warmongering family!

[Frank Cannon]

8. That this goof is even running is just unbelievable.

That the useless American media is even asking the question "Would Jeb!? make a good President?" with a straight face just boggles the mind.

If someone had written this campaign into a script for The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling would have rejected it as just being too crazy.

The entire Bush family should have had to change their names to Kowalski and move to Dubai right after his moron brother slinked away from office. Jeb!? should be limiting his appearances to only those where he is wearing a nose and glasses, so he won't be recognized and instantly tarred and feathered by an angry mob.

Yet, here we are.

[gratuitous]

9. Just a parlor game to the Bush clan

I wonder how it's scored in the parlor at Kennebunk? Does Barbara get points for yukking it up over flood victims? Do Jenna and Bar Jr. get points for public drunkenness? I mean, it seems a little unfair to the womenfolk, but maybe they don't get to play with the big boys. How much Treasury money got flushed down the toilet? How big were the bonuses paid out at Halliburton and other contractors? Deaths by torture scored higher or lower (probably higher, is my guess)? Who's the highest ranking administration official who went out and flat-out lied, a lie that was exposed in real time but that was swallowed whole by the popular media? So many ways to play!

It's everyone else who has to kill and die for the Bush parlor game. Not really their concern. They're gearing up for another round in 2016 if the electorate lets them.

[Octafish]

12. Parlor Game

Curious choice of words, like from another time and place.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

11. He's morphing into a Chimp before our eyes

Next thing we know, he'll be hiring Condi Rice to toilet train him.