Why the World Should Be Glad George W Bush is No Longer President

American style magazine GQ, has pulled off a great scoop. It has published the covers of the extremely Top Secret Briefing papers issued by the Pentagon not long after the Iraq invasion. The papers known as the “Worldwide Intelligence Update” were so secret they were (according to the magazine) “circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House”.

Now the crucial thing is the covers of these papers. They were not just your standard brief, they had photos on the front to set the mood, as it were. The article states:

These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of Defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer’s staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle.

Just think about that for a minute – humorous covers on the most secretive papers dealing with the most serious of issues… Think about how scary that sounds? That these guys needed a cartoon to make sure they didn’t get too stressed about the idea of sending people to die in a war?

Don’t worry, if that thought scares you, it gets worse:

Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed biblical passages more suitable.

Here’s an example of one of the covers:

Yep in his briefings for the War against Iraq, Bush was getting them with a nice Biblical passage on the front to make the whole thing seem all the more nice, all the more right.

Not bad for a nation that believes in the separation of Church and State. Not bad for a nation that is supposedly fighting against religious extremists. Not bad for a nation that keeps telling the Islamic world it is not fighting against Islam. Not bad for a nation that has a plentiful number of non-Christians fighting in its own army unaware their Commander in Chief thought they were doing the Lord’s work.

So did anyone question doing this? Well yes:

Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—“would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

Did this cut any ice? Err no:

But the Pentagon’s top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush’s public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because “my seniors”—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages.

If you click on the link, you will see the most disturbing imaginable. Photos of aircraft carriers above a passage from Psalms; a picture of a tank with a passage from Ephesians; this passage from Proverbs: “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed”, over the top of a photo of a GI with a machine gun. They look like covers some from the tracts of sick extremist groups who go around stockpiling weapons and preparing to blow themselves up in a mass suicide ritual.

It is obvious from the covers that Bush and his cohorts viewed the Iraq War as a religious crusade. They were out to convert the world to Christianity.

It is also obvious from the covers that they were the biggest bunch of fools ever to be the world’s misfortune to find themselves congregated in the White House.

As a Christian, these covers make me want to vomit. Bush and Rumsfeld were as dumb and ignorant as those religious cultists who deny medical care to their sick children because “the Lord never needed antibiotics”, or those nutjobs who try and cross the Nullarbor without food or water because “the Lord will provide all we need”. Christianity has nothing to do with those people. And let me tell you, it has nothing to do with what Bush and Rumsfeld were doing.

The difference between Bush and Co and the religious nutters though is those lunatics don’t get to run the biggest nation on earth. They don’t get to send people off to die.

One of my favourite quotes from Shakespeare is from The Merchant of Venice:

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Shakespeare certainly knew what he was talking about…

UPDATE

Reader Tomkidd gave me a nice heads up about a NY Times article on the same story. It takes a more balanced tone than I did (as it should).

It featured this response by a former Rumsfeld aide:

“Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman during Mr. Rumsfeld’s time as secretary of defense, said that he had no recollection of the biblical briefs, but that he doubted the famously acerbic and sometimes cranky secretary would have tolerated them for long, much less shared them with Mr. Bush.

“The suggestion that Rumsfeld would have used these reports to somehow curry favor over at the White House is pretty laughable,” Mr. Di Rita said. “He bristled anytime people put quotes or something extraneous on the reports he wanted to read.”

Now my take on the original story wasn't that Rumsfeld was doing it to curry favour, but more that Bush (and Rumsfeld) liked them.

I also love that the spokesperson suggests Rumsfeld wouldn't have tolerated them for long - because he bristled anytime people put "something extraneous" on reports. No worries though about the gross inappropriateness of using Biblical passages on a Defence document, or having photos of soldiers overlaid with quotes about the righteousness of their actions, just that they would be extraneous.

I stand by my title.

Newspoll: ALP 56-LNP 44

This week's Newspoll was expected to show a drop in the ALP's support. It didn't. In fact it increased from 55-45 to 56-44, which in reality means no real change.

The big news as far as the media was concerned was the fall in Kevin Rudd's satisfaction rating. He went down from 64% to 58%. And the dissatisfaction went from 26% to 31%. In the Preferred PM stakes, Rudd went from leading Turnbull by 64%-19% to a slightly less ludicrous lead of 58%-24%.

The media got a little giddy about this; especially over at The Oz. Lenore Taylor, who usually keeps her analysis quite level-headed, suggested that the results showed "more people have started listening to Malcolm Turnbull, but they haven't yet decided to vote for him".

Essentially that is a meaningless statement. So satisfaction now is a barometer of people listening to him?? Turnbull's satisfaction rating has always had low levels of people uncommitted - especially for an opposition leader. People have been listening to him - they don't like him.

In this latest poll, his satisfaction rating did rise - up from 36% to 40% - and his dissatisfaction rating did fall - down from 45% to 42%. But just look at that - after supposedly a strong week, during which people had "started listening to him", more people still are dissatisfied with what he has to say than are satisfied.

And if we go back a couple months we see nothing much has changed (nothing that is all that good for Turnbull anyway). In the 6-8 March Newspoll, Turnbull's satisfaction rating was 44% (4 points higher than it is now). His dissatisfaction rating was 39% (3% lower than it is now). So in the last two months he's actually gone backwards!

Back then the preferred PM score was 61%-21%, so yes he has picked up 3% there. But do you really think that is a sign of him getting momentum?

The fact is these were good polls for the ALP. A collection of voters didn't like the Budget, but instead of saying they'd change their vote, they merely gave Rudd a bit of a cuff behind the ear.

Wouldn't be too worried were I in the ALP headquarters.

The other questions asked in the poll about the Budget are more illuminating. When asked if the Budget will be good or bad for the economy, 45% said good or extremely good; 33% said bad or extremely bad, 7% said neither, 15% said dunno.

When compared with previous years, this rates it just above the average reception to the last 17 Budgets of 43% good. Last year's Budget was given a 49% good rating.

The crucial question asked though was whether the Liberal Party have delivered a better budget. Only 33% said yes, and 51% said no. So while 44% would vote for the LNP, only 33% of voters think they would deliver a better budget. That's not a good ratio. Only one age group gave the ALP a less than 50% mark on the who would deliver a better budget question - and that was the traditional Liberal friendly 50+ age bracket. And even that group still gave the ALP a 49% vote (compared to 37% for the LNP).

So the media can talk all they like, but I will say this right now - if the Liberals can't even get more pensioners thinking they would deliver a better budget, if more people think Turnbull is doing a poor job than a good one, and if Rudd has a 30+% gap in the Better PM stakes, then any talk of an election win for the Liberals is just a fantasy - especially with the ALP Primary vote at 46%. (That last point is enough to render everything else irrelevant.)

At this point you can't even say they're back in the game; I'm not sure if I'd even say they've made it out of the changerooms and are waiting on the sidelines. The best I can say is they're looking like they might be about to come out of the changerooms. Perhaps.

Where are you on the politics scale?

Over on Poll Bludger a few posters were talking about a politics quiz on the excellent site, Oz Politics. It's a fun activity that gives you a bit of a guide about which political party best represents your values, both socially and economically. It only takes a couple minutes to do (if that), so have a go.

You don't have to register or anything - just have to give yourself a name at the end, though it can be anything anonymous if you want.

My score was as follows:
Party preference

Greens: 65.9%
Australian Democrats: 80.1%
Labor Party: 75.5%
Family First: 64.2%
Liberal Party: 62%
National Party: 53.8%
One Nation: 41.1%

Which is about right I think. I never voted for the Democrats, but I am certainly more on the left side of the ALP than the right (on some things). Glad to see One Nation came a distant last!

The other scores were:

Political outlook
Your broad political orientation score is -18.4%, which equates to a ‘Centre Left’ position

This is pretty spot on.

Economic policy
Your economic policy score score is -5.3%. This equates to a ‘Centre’ position

Again, about right - I am actually more Centre when it comes to economics than I am with other aspects of politics (no doubt a hang over from my Bachelor of Economics days).

Social policy
Your social policy score is 1.1%. This equates to a ‘Centre’ position

Which means I don't really think the Govt should interfere in the social lives of people, but it's not a strong belief. Again, about right, I guess.

Traditional values
Your traditional values score is -18.2%. This equates to a ‘Centre Left’ position

Apparently this means that I think the state should not overly intervene in the moral lives of its citizens. Again largely true.

Anyhoo, it's all good fun, and might make you think a bit about who you vote for and why.

AC Neilsen: ALP 53 - LNP 47

Today, the Fairfax papers released an AC Nielsen poll that had the ALP's lead down from 58-42 back in March to 53-47.

I generally don't bother with AC Nielsen polls because they come out so irregularly that it's hard to draw any real trends from them.

They are the only poll that the Fairfax papers have, so when a result comes out like this they plug it for all it's worth.

So they pretty much down-played the fact that the ALP was still in an election winning position, and that Kevin Rudd is still at the stratospheric heights of 64% approval. And leads Turnbull 64-28 as preferred PM.

The dopiest comment came from the SNH's Peter Hartcher:
KEVIN RUDD has descended from the realm of the gods and become a political mortal.

Polled support for Rudd and his Government had been at unearthly levels since the day he took power a year and a half ago, a political infinity.

But in today's results we discover that Rudd's poll numbers, in just two months, have become distinctly earthy.

Earthy? Just ask yourself when 64% of the population agreed on anything. At the start of the film The American President, the President (played by Michael Douglas) is basking in giddy joy the fact that the latest poll has his job approval rating at 64%. But when Rudd gets a 64% rating? Accroding to the media, time to break glass and declare panic. I think not. But Hartcher doesn't see it that way:

Today's poll appears to confirm the expectation of a senior Liberal that the budget would mark the return to "normal politics."

If so, power in Australia is once more contestable rather than being a Rudd monopoly.

It might be an aberration, but two factors give some confidence that the poll marks a threshold, not a detour.
...
It seems more likely that the last year and a half has been the aberration, that we have now entered normalcy.

Get that? The last year and a half has been an aberration! You couldn't put the amount of delusion contained in that statement into a warehouse without some spilling out the doors.

But anyhoo, the Newspoll will come out late tonight, and will be in Tuesday's Australian. I'm predicting a 52-48 return on 2 party preferred (and for The Oz to go absolutely nuts). Rudd's satisfaction rating last time was 64%, I doubt there'll be much movement. And the Preferred PM? Last time 64-19. No real change is my prediction.

I also predict Turnbull will stay in negative net satisfaction territory.

We'll see.

UPDATE:

Well I was wrong - the Newspoll is 56-44, an improvement (of sorts) from the last one.

It seems the voters decided not to punish the ALP for the Budget, but merely to give Rudd a bit of a poke in the eye. His satisfaction rating fell from 64% to 58%.

Turnbull stays in net negative satisfaction territory.

More tomorrow.

AFL Power List: Round 8 Power List - Or the Top 8 is almost set.

Two weeks ago I wrote that the Crows, Brisbane and Sydney are fighting for the final spot in the finals. After this week we can remove the Crows from that list. I also said Collingwood would make the finals. Now I’m not so sure.

Top 2 – Cats and Saints (obviously). Certs for the finals – Bulldogs, Carlton, Port, and Hawthorn. So let’s put the Pies in with Brisbane and Sydney in the fight for the last two spots. The rest are playing for a glimmer of hope and for pride. Richmond and the Demons of course, should be playing for priority picks.

	Rank	LW	Team	Record	Comment
	1	1 ↔	Geelong	8-0	Hardly even raised a sweat.
	2	2↔	St Kilda	8-0	Big first quarter, never troubled after that.
	3	6↑	Carlton	4-4	A huge win for the Blues. And now they face a demoralised Crows outfit.
	4	3↓	Bulldogs	5-3	They won, but not a real impressive performance when you next have to face the Cats.
	5	4↓	Port Adelaide	6-3	They got the 4 points, but not how they would have liked.
	6	5↓	Hawthorn	4-4	The Hawks now play Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane. That month against the capitals will tell us whether they’re top 4 or just top 8.
	7	7↔	Brisbane	5-3	When they got going, they really got going, but now they face the big test of the Saints.
	8	8↔	Collingwood	3-5	Too many injuries, not enough class. This week in Perth is suddenly a must win.
	9	10↑	Sydney	4-4	The Swans held on in a tight one over the Eagles. Big game against Port this week to get above 50%.
	10	9↑	Essendon	4-4	A valiant effort, but they were out of their depth. The next 4 weeks are Tigers, Geelong, Adelaide and Melbourne. If the win 3 they will still be a big show for the finals.
	11	12↑	Fremantle	3-5	Freo weren’t bad, just too wasteful and they lost it in the 2nd quarter when the Hawks kicked 6 in a row. Now they travel to Melbourne to play the Roos.
	12	11↓	Adelaide	3-5	When they got going, they didn’t really get going. Next 4 weeks – Carlton, Hawks, Essendon, Roos. Can only afford to drop one.
	13	14↑	West Coast	3-5	West Coast just couldn’t do enough to get ahead and stay there against the Swans. Now they meet the Pies at Subiaco in a must win for both sides.
	14	13↓	North Melbourne	3-5	Hardly gave a yelp. Lose to Freo this week and the season is over.
	15	15↔	Richmond	1-7	Geez that hurts – 16 points up mid way through the last quarter should be enough. But sides like the Tigers get into a habit of losing from such positions.
	16	16↔	Melbourne	1-7	A well played loss. Not the kind of thing you really are after though.

Economic History Lesson: The Howard/Costello Era

Along with Peter Martin, my favourite economics journalist is The Australian's George Megolagenis.

He is consistently unbiased. He'll call it like he sees it, and isn't afraid to bag either side. Generally on his blog he gets criticised for being a left winger - this is because right wingers hate anyone who does not bow down before the supposed greatness of Howard and Costello.

His article in yesterday's Oz is a great case in point. He absolutely skewers the argument that Howard and Costello were good economic managers:

We were told there would be surpluses into the next decade. In fact, the budget was shot at the time of the election because too much of the revenue windfall from the resources boom had been handed back as tax cuts and increased spending.

"The structural budget balance deteriorated from 2002-03, moving into structural deficit in 2006-07," Treasury said in budget paper No1 on Tuesday night.

The Coalition will resist this reading of recent history. It will want to argue that a larger surplus on paper in the good times would have been untenable because the electorate wanted its money back.

It should give up now. Peter Costello left a trail of clues in the extensive interviews he gave to authors before and after the election that John Howard's mania for spending was damaging the integrity of the budget.

What he is stating when he means the Budget in 06-07 was in structural deficit, is that if tax receipts were at average levels rather than mining boom levels, then the budget would be in deficit. The reason for this is the tax cuts upon tax cuts given out by Howard and Costello, and the masses of middle-class welfare that they put into the system.

It is truly damming (though I'd suggest most people won't grasp the facts).

To illustrate his point, Megalogenis works out what the Budget situation would be if the Govt had done what Turnbull (and Costello) have been arguing - ie not do the stimulus package - the "cash splashes" and the infrastructure spending:

A stimulus-free budget would have faced deficits of $25.6 billion in 2009-10, $38.4billion in 2010-11 and $31.3 billion in 2011-12. That was, in effect, the Costello trajectory. It would have been worse, of course, because no spending would have made the recession deeper and crunched revenues by even more.

So we're still in deficit, but we're in a worse position economically because there has been no stimulus, no lift in retail sales, no lift in housing, and no lift in building works.

But just to show he's not a Labor hack, Megalogenis turns the torch onto Rudd and Swan as well:
Swan understood the problem before Treasury did. Yet he dodged the logic of his revelation by increasing government spending in the years of the recovery.

Swan's second budget delivered in deficit what Howard and Costello were not prepared to secure in surplus: a massive pay rise for pensioners.
...
Swan's budget is gambling that our long boom won't lead to a long bust. Recovery is assumed to be around the corner, and the surplus is meant to follow, eventually. The journey to surplus is expected to be completed six years from now, roughly the same timeline it took to balance the books after the last two recessions.

But those two fiscal repair jobs required horror budgets: Paul Keating's in a series of statements between 1986 and 1988, and Costello's in 1996.

Swan didn't deliver a horror budget on Tuesday, although the savings on the part-pension, on the health insurance rebate and family payments should not be underestimated. They are meaner than they appear on paper and do their work in the next decade. But Swan did bring the Government one baby-step closer to the breakthrough reform the thinkers on both sides of politics are quietly willing him to embrace.

So yes Swan did OK in the Budget, but he and Rudd have a long way to go to get the Budget into structural surplus. To do that is going to be really tough.

However the ALP's cause isn't helped by the fact that the Liberal Party is still living in Budget fairy land. Their decision to vote against the means testing of the private health rebate suggests they still think the mining boom years are going strong.

But that is how it always is. No opposition is going to come out in support of big spending cuts - it's up to the Government to do them, and it's up to the Government to sell them.

Good luck with that.

A Song a Year: 1989, "The Look"

Whew, finally we can leave 1988 and High School behind. 1989 was a big year for me. I spent the year in Japan on a student exchange, and perhaps for the first time started looking elsewhere for music than the Top 40.

Sure up till that point I was into some older stuff, but by and large my music came from the radio rather than a record collection. In Japan a big thing at the time was CD rental stores, which meant you could rent out a CD, copy it onto tape and thus within a short period of time I had a pretty wide collection.

But this is about songs linked to that year, so while The Who's Tommy is indelibly linked for me with 1989 it hardly is a 1989 album.

I did listen to a lot of radio that year as well - mostly the Armed Forces radio Network that the US has in Japan to be listened to by all those on the many Army bases they have there. The AFN played a number of programs from US radio, and the one I listened to pretty regularly was Rick Dees Weekly Top 40.

Now back in those dark ages, music rarely got released in Australia at the same time as in the US, so it meant I was hearing songs about 5 months before my friends back in Australia. In my letters back home I would give tips of songs to look out for, and one tip I distinctly remember writing was to look out for a Swedish band called Roxette, and the prediction that their song "The Look" would be huge.

When it did become a big hit, none of my friends of course could recall me telling them so, and thus my career as a guru of the pop music industry came to a halt. Probably just as well given my magical predictive powers were based purely on seeing what was a hit in America.

But be that as it may, Roxette, that funky duo from Sweden get my Song a Year, in competition form other worthies as Paula Abdul's "Straight Up", Fine Young Cannibals, "She Drives Me Crazy", Skid Row,'s "18 and Life" and anything by Tone Loc. What a year!

Roxette of course would actually be a band that would go on to bigger and better things. The singles off their "Look Sharp" Album were pretty infections - Dangerous, Dressed for Success and Listen to Your Heart, and then in 1990 they had a huge hit from the Pretty Woman soundtrack, "It Must Have Been Love".

You'd never die in a ditch for Roxette - they weren't that kind of band. But for a good while in the early 90s you could scarce go into a pub or nightclub without hearing at least one Roxette song. And generally they were pretty decent listening.



One other song is 1989 for me. In the middle of the year, my sister sent over a tape of one morning of the SAFM Morning Zoo (hosted by the recently dearly departed John Vincent). It was a very treasured tape for me at the time - back in the days long before the internet and live streaming. On the tape, just before the 7:30 news break was played a song I hadn't heard before. I was sure it was by U2, but the DJ's didn't mention the name or the band. It certainly wasn't on any of the U2 albums, so I assumed it was a B-side.

I played the tape over and over, and especially this myseterious U2 song. That year for my birthday I was given by my host parents a walkman that was amazingly small compared to the big clunky ones available in Australia. In truth I think I didn't see the type available in Australia for another 2-3 years.

It was my most treasured possession (there it is on the right wih a tape of Madonna's Like a Prayer" for scale).

Then I went on a school camp to Nagasaki (amazing experience). In the bus as we toured around I would put in the Morning Zoo tape and try and get it in sync with the actual time, and thus was able to feel like I was for that 60 minutes, back home.

On the Bullet Train home however I decided to put the Walkman in a small carry bag I had. When I got off the Bullet Train, I left the Walkman in the bag on the seat and thus forever had to say goodbye to my most treasured Walkman, and the wonderful SAFM tape with the great mysterious song by U2. (I think I cried a bit).

When I got back to Australia, I discovered the song was the B-side of the "All I want is You" single (do they even have B-sides anymore?) - "Everlasting Love". I quickly bought the "cassingle", and the song to this day makes me think of how I dopily left that bag on the Bullet Train, and I pine a little for that great Walkman. (It's also a damn fun song):