Turd Blossom Strikes Again

From Arianna Huffington:

Karl Rove, President Bush's top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn't allowed to report on.

On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government...

On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally...

On Bush's Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don't mean anything...

On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East...

On Judy Miller And Plamegate: Judy Miller is in jail for reasons I don't really understand...

On Joe Wilson: Joe Wilson and I attend the same church but Joe goes to the wacky mass...

In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.

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Perusing the ever bountiful Datalounge led to this from The Vermont Guardian
[yikes! Although some have suspected as much.]

Evidence mounts about Bush’s obscene outbursts

WASHINGTON DC – Beneath his well-known smirk, Pres. George Bush is wearing an angry frown these days over mounting opposition to his war in Iraq. But according to Capitol Hill Blue, a political e-zine, the problem goes deeper, and White House aides are scrambling behind the scenes avoid publicity about frequent obscenity-filled outbursts at anyone who dares disagree with him.

“Who gives a flying **** what the polls say,” he reportedly screamed at a recent strategy meeting. “I’m the President and I’ll do whatever I goddamned please. They don’t know ****.” When aides suggested that he meet with Cindy Sheehan, the war-protesting mother whose son died in Iraq, Capitol Hill Blue claims that he responded, “I’m not meeting again with that goddamned bitch. She can go to hell as far as I’m concerned!”

While preparing for a summer photo op, Bush flipped an extended middle finger to reporters, a gesture that was caught by a photographer. Aides acknowledge that the President often “flips the bird” to show his displeasure and tells aides who disagree with him to “go to hell” or to “go **** yourself.” His habit of giving people the finger goes back to his days as Texas governor, aides admit, and videos of him doing so before press conferences were widely circulated among TV stations during those days.

When Veterans of Foreign Wars members wore “bullshit protectors” over their ears during his speech to their annual convention, he told aides to “tell those VFW ******** that I’ll never speak to them again if they can’t keep their members under control.”

According to Washington psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, the behavior is typical of an alcohol-abusing bully ruled by fear. In his book, Frank speculates that Bush, who claims that he gave up booze, may be drinking again.

Last year, Capitol Hill Blue reported that the White House physician prescribed anti-depressant drugs for the President to control what aides called violent mood swings. “In writing about Bush's halting appearance in a press conference just before the start of the Iraq War, Washington Post media critic Tom Shales speculated that ‘the president may have been ever so slightly medicated,’” Frank notes.
Washington Prowler
That Sinking Feeling
By The Prowler
Published 9/19/2005 12:10:33 AM
DEAD AGENDA
Publicly, the White House will tell you that it intends to push ahead with two of its big legislative issues throughout the fall: making permanent the first term tax cuts and Social Security reform.

Even privately, with the political and policy debacle that the White House created with its Clintonian response to Hurricane Katrina, policy and political types at 1600 Pennsylvania insist what's left of an agenda is still viable.

But at this stage of the game, barring some imaginative political moves that bear some resemblance to the Bush Administration circa 2002, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even some longtime Bush team members in various Cabinet level departments say this Administration is done for.

"You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking," says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. "You get the impression that we're more than listless. We're sunk."

Too pessimistic? Maybe not. Rumors are flying through various departments of longtime senior Bush loyalists looking to jump, but with few opportunities in the private sector to make the jump look like anything more than desperation. Almost daily, complaints from Cabinet level Departments come in to the White House about lack of communication coordination on even basic policy matters.

"What happened was that some of the best people who were working in the Administration during the first term, but who weren't necessarily Bush campaign members or weren't particularly close to the White House, jumped when they saw opportunities being filled by under-qualified but more politically connected people," says a current Administration senior staffer in a Cabinet department. "In this department we lost three quarters of the people who should have been encouraged to stay, and most of them left simply because they had received no indication they would be considered for better or different opportunities. And many of these folks would have stayed."

But enough about the lack of a team to implement a message. Let's look at the mission.

Congressional committee sources on both sides of Capitol Hill predict tough slogging on anything of policy consequence. "Social Security is dead as far as my chairman is concerned. So are the tax cuts," says a Ways and Means staffer of Chairman Bill Thomas.

Before hurricane season wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast and in Washington, the thinking was that Thomas was poised to take up a major tax bill that might feature several critical components of the Bush Administration's Social Security reform. Now those plans appear to have dimmed considerably.

According to one school of thought, some GOP tax policy changes might have contributed to a more market-oriented approach to reconstruction efforts in the Katrina recovery. Instead, Republicans were stunned to hear about programs that read as if cribbed from the Clinton Administration.

Although Republicans on the Hill are left with a bit of wiggle room to make adjustments to the Bush proposals, they will need political cover if they are to successfully navigate a path made difficult by the Bush team's allowing the media and Democrats to paint the GOP into a corner.

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