The Bush Briefs
President Bush has celebrated his 61st birthday, but few noticed. Bush took in a Chicago Cubs game and caught up with his twin daughters, and some golfer buddies, back at the White House, before heading to Camp David. The 387th day Bush has spent there during his presidency.
Bush is amazed to be 61, "60 is old!" He may have the heart rate and health of an athlete, but he bears the face of a much older man.
Will the president enter the last year of his presidency fronting a trade war against China? A growing number of financial experts and economic analysts think so. The Chinese save their money, the Americans spend all their money and more, thanks to the credit they get from China. But China is starting to sell American debt. It looks bound to get ugly.
Republican Party stalwarts and conservative senators continue to desert President Bush over the Iraq War. Two more have joined the resistance.
Why has President Bush given an obscure government office stunning new powers to control regulation over the environment and worker health and safety? Because he can.
How low can Bush go in the polls? He's now at 30% job approval rating. But he's unlikely to sink much lower. 30% represents the absolute die-hard Republican Party support base. Unless, of course, he really starts to piss all them off as well.
An editorial from the Daily Star argues that President Bush's "duplicitous nature" has reduced the war on terror to a battle between moderate and extremist Muslims. Why did Bush so enthusiastically support democratic elections in Palestine and yet deny the results of democracy when Hamas won the majority vote? Many in the Middle East, and particularly Palestine, are still wondering.
Paul Krugman in the New York Times argues that the 'Bushies' like starting fights, but don't pay any of the costs. In Bush world, says Krugman, it's only the little people who are made to make all the sacrifices. Well, what does Krugman expect, the Bush's are, after all, the closest thing America has to a royal family.
American conservatives were very excited when France elected a right-wing president recently. They might not be so excited to learn that a key official in the Sarkosky cabinet, Christine Boutin, the minister for housing and urban development, has been raising questions about whether the Bush administration were involved, as in involved, in the 9/11 terror attacks.
Has President Bush been abusing his Executive Privilege during his seven years in the White House? But of course. However, the Democratic-heavy Congress is now moving to curtail the president's "campaign to trample all legal and constitutional restraints on his power".
President's Bush Independence Day speech, before US service men and women, has stirred all sorts of controversy, and we'll come back to it in a future post, but this CBS News columnist calls it "incredible"....but not in a good way. Bizarrely, Bush stated in his the Independence Day speech that he actually believes there is still a military victory to be found in the Iraq War. Yes, really.
