More Proof

that George W. Bush screws up everything he comes into contact with. Seriously, it's like he's making these shortsighted, impractical, wrongheaded decisions on purpose because no one can be as wrong as he is. Or maybe he's just a "moran."

Take this excerpt from the Vanity Fair article as an example, under the headline "Everyone Was Against the Elections":

"In a speech in the White House Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, President Bush announced that American policy in the Middle East was turning in a fundamentally new direction.

Arafat was still in power at the time, and many in the U.S. and Israel blamed him for wrecking Clinton’s micro-managed peace efforts by launching the second intifada—a renewed revolt, begun in 2000, in which more than 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians had died.

Bush said he wanted to give Palestinians the chance to choose new leaders, ones who were not “compromised by terror.” In place of Arafat’s all-powerful presidency, Bush said, “the Palestinian parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body.”

Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his replacement as Fatah leader, was elected president in January 2005. Elections for the Palestinian parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ”

First of all, I'm sick and tired of hearing that "few in the administration had predicted the result" of the Palestinian elections. Spending one week (or less) in the middle east and reading the newspaper would have told them quite clearly what was about to happen: Hamas would win handily. If they weren't able to see that - after seeing the results of elections in Iraq, where the religious Islamic parties did extremely well - then they deserved to be fired for being so stupid and incompetent. Period.

Secondly, it's become obvious that George W. Bush has no idea what the fuck he's doing. The economy is in the toilet, the dollar is in so much trouble other countries are begging us to help raise its value, the good news never stops coming out of Iraq, Iran grows stronger by the day, and our country is unable to respond to any other crisis that arise any where in the world due to our military overcommitments.

There is some discussion of letting George Bush become the Commissioner of Baseball after he's done at the White House. For the love of all that is good and holy, I sincerely hope that the powers that be NEVER ALLOW HIM ANYWHERE NEAR MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL - he's a jinx like Cousin Oliver! If he's hard up for a job after January 20, 2009, let him go here and be the new Ambassador.