El Presidente Roundup

America Likes the Boomy-Boomy

The Bush Administration's Approach to Governance Involves High Explosives and Very Few Questions

Bush Says We Should Have Bombed Auschwitz
Rice does a good job spinning it though.

Bush: US should have bombed Auschwitz

Bush Visits Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial; Says US Should Have Bombed Auschwitz

...

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

...

"We were talking about the often-discussed 'Could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks?'" Rice told reporters later aboard Air Force One. "And so we were just talking about the various explanations that had been given about why that might not have been done."

Yes, I'm sure that Bush was really into those wonky, difficult moral policy questions from over half a century ago. Then he wrote a thesis on high energy particle physics before putting in a couple of hours experimentation on neurobiology.

Riiiight.

I admit, I skimmed the headline and didn't go down to Rice's explanation at first, which makes it sound a lot better, but do you believe her? This is the same White House that claims Chimpy is a genius who reads several books a day. You've seen the man; do you believe that?

Of course not.

As to whether the US should have bombed the train tracks leading to the death camps, that's a much harder dilemma. Would it have helped? Or would the Nazis have shrugged their shoulders and just shot the Jews wherever they were currently stuck, and the war ground on a bit longer without that aerial support hitting their cities and industry?

Ending the war ended the Holocaust. Anything else would have only slowed it. I'm not sure you can condemn either course of action... it's not like we can turn back time and try out alternate scenarios.

Personally I think Bush meant it literally; he thinks that you can save anyone, liberate anyone, by blowing the crap out of them. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of how bombs work; he thinks they give off magical freedom rays and candy, not fire, shrapnel and concussive death.

Idiot.

Source: Raw Story

IU Student Finds TSA Website Screws You Twice
So the TSA set up a website to protest your being on the no-fly list.

They set this site up in a highly insecure fashion, so you could phish the names of the people who wanted off the list to abuse however you saw fit.

Coincidence? Or pouring salt in the wounds of people they already didn't like?

Perhaps just usual Bush corruption:

The report, posted Friday on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Web site, also found that TSA awarded a no-bid contract to a small Virginia-based company to run the program.

Investigators found one of the senior program managers at TSA who oversaw the launch of the redress site is a former employee of Desyne Web Services — the company that received the $48,816 contract to develop the site and continues to do business with TSA today. The employee is also a high school friend of the company's owner, according to the report.

Wow, nobody could have forseen that going badly.

A graduate student in Indiana discovered the site's security vulnerabilities last February while researching a paper on boarding pass security. Chris Soghoian — who is getting his doctorate in information security at Indiana University — noticed that the redress site was not secure, yet it asked for names, Social Security numbers and birth dates. Soghoian said when he sees a site like this "alarm bells go off in my head."

Good on you, Chris.

Source: Raw Story

Oh, Is That All?
Bush says we could be in Iraq 'easily' another ten years.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush said on Friday the United States would have a long-term presence in Iraq that could "easily" last a decade, but that it would be at the invitation of the Iraqi government.

Source: Reuters (duh)

Jimmy Carter Responds
Courtesy of The Onion.