Bush memoir coming with huge first printing
We’re one month and a day away from the launch of George W. Bush’s presidential memoir “Decision Points.”
The former president’s book, which goes on sale on Nov. 9, will have a huge first printing of 1.5 million copies, Crown Publishers said in a statement on Thursday.
Bush writes about crucial points in his life and presidency including his decision to run for the highest office in the country; 9/11; the decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq; his response to Hurricane Katrina; and his relationship with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, Crown said.
But there’s so much more than just a book (and book tour) coming next month. The publishers are simultaneously rolling out the whole kit and caboodle — across multiple platforms — with the hardcover version, an e-book edition, a Deluxe e-book edition and an audiobook (from RandomHouse), read by the author himself.
Somewhat gaffe-prone during his presidency, Bush has had plenty of time to practice joining Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in another exclusive club — presidents who’ve recorded audiobooks. And maybe another group — presidents who’ve won Grammy Awards.
The current president and the two former presidents (Democrats) have all won “Best Spoken Word” Grammys for their audiobooks on tape.
No Republican politician has won the category since Everett Dirksen, an Illinois congressman and senator, in 1968.
Obama to call Bush ahead of Iraq speech
Just a friendly chat between two commanders in chief over a 7-1/2 year Iraq war…
President Barack Obama plans to call former President George W. Bush and discuss Iraq where he is ending combat operations that his predecessor began.
Whether or not Obama will mention Bush in his primetime Oval Office television address at 8 p.m. Tuesday is unclear. But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the ex-president will be among the people Obama calls before giving the speech.
Republicans have criticized Obama for what they say is a failure to acknowledge the success of Bush’s troop surge in bringing down violence in Iraq.
Gibbs was pressed during a briefing with reporters on whether Obama, who opposed the Iraq troop increase, now believes it worked.
Gibbs said additional troops were one element that contributed to the reduction in violence, but there were a “host of factors” that also played a role, such as the Sunni Awakening and an improved political environment.
“The president always believed that you would change part of the security situation by vastly increasing the number of troops,” Gibbs said.
I don’t quite understand why Obama wants to chat with Dubya. It would be interesting to hear what they say….
“Yo! George!”
“Whoze this?”
“The President!”
“Whish one?”
“Ah, Barak?”
“Oh, yea, what it is?”
“Well, I’m bringing back those troops you sent over to Iraq seven years ago.”
“WHUT? WHY??? Therz still eve-eel axis’es and “Weapons Of Mash Disstruction” over there…ah, aren’t there? Do I git to keep Husshein’s gun?”
“Well, I don’t know about that. But I’ll be on TV at 8 pm tonight, Eastern Standard Time.
“8?…What time’ul that be here in Dallush?”
“Have another beer, George…Goodbye.”
Laura Bush says every president faces unfair criticism
Former first lady Laura Bush says every president is unfairly criticized and it comes from both friends and foes.
She spoke to ABC’s “Good Morning America” from the Gulf Coast, where she is on a visit for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Her husband, former President George W. Bush and his administration were sharply criticized for slow federal response to the disaster.
“The differences are huge now, five years later. Each time I came there was a little bit of improvement, but really now I think after five years things are starting to look great,” she said.
She was asked about writing in her book about the criticism her husband faced for flying over New Orleans after Katrina and not stopping, but said there was a purpose behind that.
“If Air Force One had landed in New Orleans that day, all of the assets that were actually being used to help people, the first responders, many of those first responders would be required to go to the airport even just from Air Force One landing. And he knew that and he didn’t want to use any of the assets that were being used in other ways to rescue people,” she said.
Laura Bush says her husband writes about it in his upcoming book as well — “that he realizes that that was a mistake, that it looked like he didn’t care.”
She was asked whether she felt the Obama family was now experiencing the criticism from all sides that her family had during their White House years.
Clinton: do you really need all those SUVs?
Emma Ashburn covered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in which she defended international health spending at a time of domestic belt-tightening.
“At a time when American unemployment is recorded as slightly less than 10 percent, and we know structural unemployment is worse, and we’re asking hard-working, maybe unemployed Americans, to keep paying their taxes, some of that money will go to fund our development and diplomacy efforts worldwide.”
“I have to be able to look them in the eye and tell them they’re getting their money’s worth,” Clinton said.
In pressing for the Global Health Initiative, which provides $63 billion over 2009-2014 to combat health problems like malaria and HIV/AIDS, Clinton drew some chuckles when she suggested that aid workers could tighten their belts a little too.
“If we’re going to have a country team, in a country, working together, they don’t all need their own SUVs. We have got to get smart about how we spend our money,” she said.
Cutting back supplies in, say, Nigeria would mean more money could be spent in places like Afghanistan, where the life expectancy is about 44 years. Ten aid workers, including six Americans, were killed two weeks ago in Afghanistan where they were treating eye diseases and other ailments.
The U.S. government’s health assistance in places like Afghanistan “gives you an opportunity to connect with segments of the population that may or may not be particularly supportive of anything else that we and others are doing,” Clinton said.
Or, we could look closely and find a vast amount of humans just as human as us stuck in a life of hell under corrupt “governments” whose decisions they have no control over.
Than we could look to history and find that it was violent colonisation that resulted, through the raping of native freedom and resources, that resulted in the situation now being experienced. Who raped them? The countries who now hold all international sway due only to their monetary power gained through stealing the lives (slavery) and natural resources of the individuals you describe as ‘unappreciative’. Without this period of history our economies and lives would be nothing like we experience them today.
And THEN you could look closely at the current international industrial relations and find that the vast majority of our affluence is STILL based on the suffering of those in struggling nations, due to the goods we consume being so relatively inexpensive because of inhumanely poorly paid labout (of which we see nothing, we just happily take), and the externalising of environmental costs (we’ve ruined ours so we’ve started on overseas environments long ago..).
I think it does us well to look a little closer at our involvement sometimes before we throw away our compassion.
If you’re interested Phillip McMichael has written a great book “Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective” which sets a lot out really clearly, helped me understand anyway.
Peter Peterson says Republicans and business need to step up
Peter Peterson knows a little something about Republicans, Wall Street, and American business. He’s a former Commerce Secretary under Republican President Richard Nixon, a former New York Federal Reserve chairman and a former chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers.
And what he sees right now is that Republicans and business are not stepping up to the plate.
“One of the things that troubles me about the position of the Republicans is they’ve also been the party of ‘yes,’ not just the party of ’no’,” he said in an interview with Reuters Insider TV.
Peterson gave as an example a rise in discretionary spending and the enactment of the Medicare prescription drug bill “without paying for it” during the administration of former Republican President George W. Bush.
“So one of my big concerns about the Republican Party – it’s one thing to state a principle called fiscal conservatism, and it’s another thing to come up with a program to do something about it. And like the Democrats, they have been very lacking in coming up with such a plan,” Peterson said quite bluntly.
American business groups criticize Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration for not being very receptive to their needs, but Peterson turned that around and said it was business groups who needed to step up to the plate.
“I’ve been a businessman virtually my entire life, and I would like to suggest some things that business might do that’s somewhat different than what they’re now doing,” Peterson said.
Bush says “tired of politics”
Former U.S. President George W. Bush said in Dallas on Thursday that he was weary of politics but hoped his institute would play a role in public policy debates. “The truth of the matter is, I am tired of politics,” Bush, back to his Texas energy roots, told a conference on natural gas sponsored by the George W. Bush Institute and Southern Methodist University’s Cox Maguire Energy Institute.
But he said he and his wife Laura were “not just interested in retiring” to the family ranch in Crawford, Texas.
“We want to be active participants in the debate that affects America. We wanted to have a policy center … out of which will come action plans,” Bush said. The institute is the policy arm of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which is being built in Dallas.
Photo credit: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz (Bush in Haiti on March 22)
Just keeping you honest. Which is a monumental task. Impossible, really.
No. 43 slips under the radar in DC
Ole 43, otherwise known as former President George W. Bush, was in Washington today to address hundreds of people who worked for him over the years.
The whole thing was closed press and so we don’t have a complete read-out of the proceedings but suffice to say that Bush steered clear of the current volatile political climate in Washington.
This has been a consistent position of Bush. While he might chafe privately at some of the blame tossed his way by President Barack Obama, he doesn’t talk about it publicly. Having seen how tough the job is being president, he reckons Obama doesn’t need one more critic telling him how to do it.
Anyway, he spoke for a half hour then took questions for perhaps another 40 minutes to update people on what he’s been up to in the past year since leaving the White House.
His book about 12 monumental decisions he made as the POTUS is coming out Nov. 8. Laura Bush’s book is coming out in May.
Seen in the crowd of about 700 were two former chiefs of staff for him, Andy Card and Josh Bolten, and a deputy COS Joe Hagin.
Presiding was former White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto, who is president of the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association.
Crikey, talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing revisiting the scene of the crime…
About the best thing anybody can say for George W. Bush is: “At least he’s not Dick Cheney!”
Obama plants a piece of New Jersey on White House lawn
Kind of a quiet day at the White House today. Hey, why not plant a tree?
President Obama was on hand for a commemorative tree planting on the White House front lawn.
There’s always a good tale behind these things and here’s this one: Benjamin Harrison planted a Scarlet Oak tree in the same spot in 1889. There it stood through good times and bad, triumph and tragedy, rain and shine, and, well, you get the idea.
Then it rotted straight through and tumped over in a 2007 rainstorm. George W. Bush planted a Scarlet Oak in the same spot as a replacement in 2008, but it didn’t take hold.
Thus came Obama with a Little Leaf Linden tree donated from Halka Nurseries Millstone Township, New Jersey.
It’s supposed to be a sturdier tree so maybe this one will take root. We hope so, because in Washington, if you want a friend, get a tree. Wait a second, that doesn’t sound right.
White House waffles on Guantanamo Bay closing deadline
President Barack Obama is finding out what his predecessor experienced — closing Guantanamo Bay is easier said than done.
As early as May 2006, former President George W. Bush said he wanted to close the prison for terrorism suspects in Cuba that was constructed during his administration after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
But the Bush administration found it was not easy getting other countries to accept some of the prisoners and faced a dilemma of what to do with other prisoners who could not be released.
When Obama came into office in January, one of his first edicts was to close Guantanamo Bay by January next year. Now that the deadline is four months away, his administration is acknowledging that it will be difficult to meet that goal.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who also served under Bush, said on Sunday that it would be tough to meet the January deadline.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was peppered with questions about Guantanamo Bay closing at his media briefing today, but refused to get cornered into saying the deadline would be missed.
Question: Robert, back in June, when you were asked about whether or not the deadline to close down Gitmo could be reached, you said, “absolutely.” Over the weekend, I’m sure you heard the secretary of defense saying that it’s going to be tough. What happened?
Of course Obama needs more time.
Logically if Obama is going to close Guantanamo, he needs to set up a new extra-judicial location to shift all the prisoners.
Thus his election promise to close the site down will be completed to the letter. And the Obama-fans will realise they finally got the president they deserve.
Do-over on missile defense — reading between the lines
President Barack Obama’s new missile defense plan is an exercise in reading between the lines.
Does it signal a diminished threat from Iran if he is scrapping the Bush-era system that was to be based in Poland and the Czech Republic? Obama’s plan would use missile interceptors based on ships.
Former President George W. Bush would rattle off Iran and threats in the same sentence so often that sometimes it seemed all roads to fear led to Tehran. He wanted the missile shield as protection.
Obama said one factor guiding his decision was updated intelligence assessments of Iran’s missile programs that emphasized the threat of short- and medium-range missiles capable of reaching Europe.
So the unsaid line appears to be that the threat from a long-range missile is not prevalent.
Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence official, said it became evident that Iran was not reaching some of the milestones needed to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile before 2015 as an intelligence estimate in 1999 had predicted.
On the nuclear threat, we’ve learned that key judgments still stand from a 2007 intelligence report that said “with moderate confidence” Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007.
It is going to be perfectly obvious sooner than we think that unlike what we were told by the democrats that all this countries problems in the world were the sole responsibility of George Bush.Although Obama has only been in power for 8 months in that short time the impact that we were told that his new “smart talk” policies would have made have not shown any results .World leaders are now increasingly showing disregard to any accords or proposels that he releasing. Ahmadinejad knows that this president has not got the resolve that the last president had, and we will see this played out down the road mark my words!
