Sunday, November 14, 2010

George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books

When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn't getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises "gripping, never-before-heard detail" about the former president's key decisions, offering to bring readers "aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America's most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq," and other undisclosed and weighty locations.

Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir.

Bush, on his book tour, makes much of the fact that he largely wrote the book himself, guffawing that critics who suspected he didn't know how to read are now getting a comeuppance. Not only does Bush know how to read, it turns out, he knows how to Google, too. Or his assistant does. Bush notes in his acknowledgments that "[m]uch of the research for this book was conducted by the brilliant and tireless Peter Rough. Peter spent the past 18 months digging through archives, searching the internet[s], and sifting through reams of paper." Bush also collaborated on the book with his former speechwriter, Christopher Michel.

Many of Bush's literary misdemeanors exemplify pedestrian sloth, but others are higher crimes against the craft of memoir. In one prime instance, Bush relates a poignant meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a Tajik warlord on Karzai's Inauguration Day. It's the kind of scene that offers a glimpse of a hopeful future for the beleaguered nation. Witnessing such an exchange could color a president's outlook, could explain perhaps Bush's more optimistic outlook and give insight into his future decisions. Except Bush didn't witness it. Because, as he himself writes later in the book, he wasn't at Karzai's inauguration.

His absence doesn't stop Bush from relating this anecdote: "When Karzai arrived in Kabul for his inauguration on December 22 - 102 days after 9/11 - several Northern Alliance leaders and their bodyguards greeted him at an airport. As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were. Karzai, responded, 'Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.'"

That meeting would sound familiar to Ahmed Rashid, author of "The Mess in Afghanistan", who wrote in the New York Review of Books: "At the airport to receive [Karzai] was the warlord General Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley .... As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim looked confused. 'Where are your men?' he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. 'Why General," he replied, "you are my men--all of you are Afghans and are my men.'"

Bush's lifting of the anecdote, while disappointing on a literary level, does raise the intriguing possibility that Bush actually read Rashid's article. Doubtful. It was excerpted in the Googleable free intro to his NYRB story. (Still, thinking of Bush browsing the NYRB's website almost makes it worthwhile.)

In a separate case of scene fabrication, though, Bush writes of a comment made by his rival John McCain as if it was said to him directly. "The surge gave [McCain] a chance to create distance between us, but he didn't take it. He had been a longtime advocate of more troops in Iraq, and he supported the new strategy wholeheartedly. "I cannot guarantee success," he said, "But I can guarantee failure if we don't adopt this new strategy." A dramatic and untold coming-together of longtime rivals? Well, not so much. It comes straight from a Washington Post story. McCain was talking to reporters, not to Bush.

In most instances of Bush's literary swiping, he was at least present for the scene. But the point of a memoir is that it is the author's version of events. Bush's book is a collection of other people's versions of events. But that's not what Bush promises readers. "Decision Points is based primarily on my recollections. With help from researchers, I have confirmed my account with government documents, personal interviews, news reports, and other sources, some of which remain classified," he offers. Bush, in his memoir, confesses to authorizing waterboarding, which is a war crime, so the lifting of a few passages might seem like a minor infraction. But Bush's laziness undermines the historical value of the memoir. Bush "recollects" - in a more literal sense of the term - quotes by pulling his and others verbatim from other books, calling into question what he genuinely remembers from the time and casting doubt on any conclusions he draws about what his mindset was at the time.

George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books

First Posted: 11-12-10 01:48 PM | Updated: 11-13-10 12:27 PM

1139

8,143

18,867views

13,444

Read More: Bush Book, Bush Books, Bush Lifted Passages, Bush Memoir, Bush Memoir Plagiarism, Bush Memoir Plagiarized, Bush Plagiarism, Decision Points, George Bush, George Bush Book, George W. Bush, Slidepollajax, Politics News

In a final irony, Bush appears to draw heavily from several of Bob Woodward's books and also from Robert Draper's "Dead Certain". The Bush White House called the books' accuracy into question when they were initially published.

The similarities between the way Bush recollects his and other quotes may be a case of remarkable random chance or evidence that he and his deputies were in an almost supernatural sync. If so, he essentially shares a brain with General Tommy Franks.

Bush writes: "Tommy told the national security team that he was working to apply the same concept of a light footprint to Iraq... 'If we have multiple, highly skilled Special Operations forces identifying targets for precision-guided munitions, we will need fewer conventional grounds forces,' he said. 'That's an important lesson learned from Afghanistan.' I had a lot of concerns. ... I asked the team to keep working on the plan. 'We should remain optimistic that diplomacy and international pressure will succeed in disarming the regime,' I said at the end of the meeting. 'But we cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of terrorists. I will not allow that to happen.'"

Franks, in his memoir American Soldier, writes: "'For example, if we have multiple, highly skilled Special Operations forces identifying targets for precision-guided munitions, we will need fewer conventional ground forces. That's an important lesson learned from Afghanistan.' President Bush's questions continued throughout the briefing.... Before the VTC ended, President Bush addressed us all. 'We should remain optimistic that diplomacy and international pressure will succeed in disarming the regime.' ... The President paused. 'Protecting the security of the United States is my responsibility,' he continued. 'But we cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of terrorists.' He shook his head. 'I will not allow that to happen.'"

A Crown official rejected the suggestion that Bush had done anything inappropriate, suggesting that the similarities speak to its inherent accuracy. The editor of Bush's book wasn't immediately able to comment.

But if you already bought Bush's book thinking you were getting only his own thoughts, you haven't entirely wasted your money. Finding lifted passages in Bush's book is like an Easter egg hunt. Look for passages with a number of quotes back to back and then slap the passage into Google Books or plagiarism detection software you might have access to. The slideshow below shows what HuffPost has found so far. If you find any more, send the passage to ryan@huffingtonpost.com and we'll verify it and add it to the list.

From Decision Points, p. 205: "When Karzai arrived in Kabul for his inauguration on December 22 – 102 days after 9/11 – several Northern Alliance leaders and their bodyguards greeted him at an airport. As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were. Karzai, responded, 'Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.'"

From Ahmed Rashid’s The Mess in Afghanistan, quoted in The New York Times Review of Books: “At the airport to receive [Karzai] was the warlord General Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley …. As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim looked confused. 'Where are your men?' he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. 'Why General,' he replied, “you are my men—all of you are Afghans and are my men...'"

Bush was not at Karzai’s Innauguration.

Two Georgia banks closed to push total to 146

(Reuters) - Regulators closed three banks in the United States on Friday, bringing the number of closures this year to 146.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp has said it expects bank closures to peak this year after 140 closures in 2009. The bulk of this year's closures have been smaller institutions, each with less than a billion dollars in assets.

The FDIC announced the following closures on Friday:

* Darby Bank & Trust of Vidalia, Georgia. Had assets of $654.7 million and deposits of $587.6 million. Ameris Bank of Moultrie, Georgia, agreed to assume the deposits.

* Tifton Banking Company of Tifton, Georgia. Had assets of $143.7 million and deposits of $141.6 million. Ameris Bank of Moultrie, Georgia, agreed to assume the deposits.

* Copper Star Bank of Scottsdale, Arizona. Had assets of $204.0 million and deposits of $190.2 million. Stearns Bank National Association of St. Cloud, Minnesota, agreed to assume the deposits.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said recently that while the number of failures will exceed last year's tally, the total assets of this year's failures will likely be lower.

Community banks continue to be hit hard by the weak economy and the amount of bad loans on their books. Their recovery has lagged behind that of larger institutions and the broader economy.

Washington Mutual, which had $307 billion in assets when it was seized in September 2008, remains the largest bank to fail during the financial crisis.

A trouble spot for community banks is the problems in the commercial real estate market as they tend to have higher concentrations of these loans than larger banks.

The FDIC last month lowered its estimate to $52 billion from $60 billion for the cost of bank failures for the five years through 2014.

The agency's Deposit Insurance Fund, financed by banks that pay into the fund, guarantees individual accounts up to $250,000.

The FDIC is in the process of changing the way it collects money from banks, as required by the law passed earlier this year overhauling the way U.S. financial institutions are regulated.

The law requires the FDIC to base the assessments it charges for the fund on a bank's total liabilities rather than on the amount of domestic deposits held by an institution. The result is that some large banks, those that primarily rely on funding other than from deposits, will pay more.

(Reporting by Corbett B. Daly; Editing by Carol Bishopric, Gary Hill)

The Demons Among us at the Cannibal Feast.

Dog Poet Transmitting…….

When you look up into the night sky there is a predictable symmetry. The moon has its reliable phases. The planets can be seen in their courses by those informed enough, or technically empowered enough, to view them. Astronomers see one section of bandwidth and astrologers see another and what is stated to be so and what is intuited to be possible, are both extreme limitations placed upon the unknown and life goes on independent of the findings of either. The sun appears every morning, as the Earth rotates into it. You would have to say that balance is the key to the whole apparatus, independent of understanding it. Balance expresses itself in the cyclic repetition of seasons and events. It all has the appearance of being arranged. Someone like me would say it’s all under control.

We’ve heard that evil destroys itself. That implies that components within the schematic are in opposition to other components in terms of intention and agenda. You can think of evil as something like cancer, where the host body is attacked by elements which compose it. Ergo, you get people like Glenn Beck attacking George Soros. A representative of Little Georgie Sorrows told Glenn Beck that he was hurting Georgie’s business. The implication of a dead fish coming in a UPS truck is not to be missed.

The main feature that you notice about Wall Street and the multinationals; the bankers and other major players on the world stage is that there is no limit to their need to acquire at the expense of others and each other. Some of them have tens of millions of dollars. Some of them have hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of them have billions of dollars and some of them have tens of billions of dollars and all of them want hundreds of billions of dollars and more and more and more.

They will do anything to get more. They will steal and kill. They will engineer wars in which millions die and millions more are enslaved in crushing debt, just to increase their holdings of something they already possess far more of than they will ever need. They turn to philanthropy, in which none of what is given away reaches the target audience, except when they are building hideous monuments to themselves, in buildings and institutions, under the guise of education, the arts and medicine, which not only do not serve the needs of the public but maliciously attack the essence of what they presume to edify and disseminate. They are a breed apart, a monstrous amplification of Fred C. Dobbs, on a lunatic rampage amidst the winds of Heaven.

The public information channels have been routed through the municipal sewage systems so that it’s shit in and shit out every day. These mincing martinets prance upon the stage, in the gravitas of dung golems, whose reek is barely masked by the distance provided through the mediums of transmission. They bedeck themselves in bling that would make a gangsta rapper blush, as they applaud one another on their vast accomplishments on the public’s behalf. It’s no time at all before large numbers die, as the result of fountain pens following the pronouncements at some narcissistic conclave of self congratulation.

They present themselves as spokes-personages for the equality of all, which is nothing more than a push for the preeminence of minorities, whose agendas stand in direct conflict with the lives and traditions of the majority. They seek to destroy everything that does not represent their personal vision of how it should be, in order to grant them an unopposable, imperial hand over the destiny of everyone beneath them. It’s no time at all before they then present these minorities as the enemy of the masses, in order to manifest a blood bath of guilt among the populace, who are mystified at their own capacity for violence and who then cry out for a more pervasive hand of leadership from the very fiends who orchestrated it in the first place.

A reasonable mind would quickly understand that all bankers, lawyers, politicians and priests should be quarantined for the good of humanity and that there can be no extremes in the definition of such quarantine because, quite frankly, they are the enemy of life, of balance and symmetry and of every good thing imaginable.

In the middle of the chaos of the moment, with the full evidence of mass murder, felony fraud and unbridled greed, these desperate creatures lobby for immunity from their deeds, while seeking unlimited license to commit more of the same. In the middle of plunging the world into chaos, they demand further freedom to accelerate the process, so that no one remains, except a manageable servant class to administer to their needs. They define evil simply through their efforts to kill whatever good they encounter. Even in their dreams they plunder and murder, as if there were no portion of their mind that did not meditate upon these things.

Mass opposition and expedient death are the least of what they deserve and gaining this, they have one final victory in which they have turned their destroyers into monsters, just like themselves. Do they know all of this? They do not. It is the atavistic, reptile mind behind the façade of their human masquerade that manipulates them in a simulacrum of Fred C. Dobbs, screaming into the maelstrom. They are fiends unknown to themselves. They go through the motions of terrible acts, in a loop of cognitive dissonance, where they cannot hear or see themselves as they are, nor the effect of their behavior. This means nothing in terms of the necessity for them to be gone, anymore than does the unawareness of a mad dog, concerning its hydrophobia.

The most grievous thing is the mass of the ordinary, who wish for nothing more than to be like them; who would leap at the opportunity to replace them, independent of the skills or capacities needed to do so. Sarah Palin and the legions that support her are a clear evidence of this. They are all bound together for a common land where revelation will at last descend upon all of them.

I am already supposed to be somewhere else for several weeks now. I can’t seem to manage it. I’m completely ready and my car is packed, with all manner of items that I have needed for the last several weeks (grin) and don’t want to go after because, any day, I may know that that is the day when I am meant to leave. I’ve never been in this position before. Whenever I am intending to go somewhere, I do. It may sometimes be a day later but never more. Why is that? I keep expecting something to happen. I don’t actually expect something to happen. Something is keeping me in a place where I don’t actually need to be and keeping me from somewhere else that it seems I really ought to be, for all sorts of good reasons from property maintenance to potentially inspired actions.

I think something would have happened by now but there are too many eyes. What might have been easily accomplished in the past, now carries trepidation of discovery that has hamstrung the vile and irredeemable among us. The governments of many countries are alerted to the dark possibilities. There are none who will remain unaffected by what hangs in suspension, seeking the dark of the moon or a moment of fell opportunity.

Evil does destroy itself and it knows that something is up, with all of the long awaited and intricately researched realization of their plans. Something doesn’t feel right and they are waiting like I am waiting. They can’t possibly restrain themselves. They are compelled to carry out the destiny of their destruction. They are as eager as goats in rut, pissing all over themselves, as goats do, in anticipation. There’s no consideration that perhaps they might be wrong and that discretion might actually prove the better part of valor. No, they are committed but nervous. They reason that even if they are caught; what difference would it make? Such is not the case of course and some part of them knows this.

So we sit here. The world and its tormenting fiends and sleeping heroes, wait like incipient cold sores, hot and pregnant with pulsing discomfort. Cold sores aren’t romantic but neither are the times in which we find ourselves, surrounded by cowards and cretins and hedonistic louts who don’t even know how to enjoy what they take so many liberties with. These people with everything do not even have the capacity to enjoy it. They have no idea who the enjoyer is.

Well… so it goes. One more posting about the unpredictable, the inevitable and the inexplicable, in search of motive and meaning. Sooner or later we pass the point of no return, just as these demons in human form, lash themselves toward the righteous entrance to their own version of the Ring Pass Not. We won’t be breaking for commercial. We are the commercial.

End Transmission…….