For weeks, former Bush administration officials have been attacking President Obama for “dithering” on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, with Vice President Cheney saying that “signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries.” But these Bush officials are also facing criticisms for largely neglecting Afghanistan in order to invade Iraq. In response, they have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward. From Cheney’s recent remarks to the Center for Security Policy:

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.

Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:

PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

Watch it:

Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:

KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.

Also on This Week, conservative pundit George Will praised Obama’s process on Afghanistan, stating, “Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point.”

Transcript:

WILL: Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action.

The question of whether an actual troop request was made with any sense of urgency is not clear to me. The fact that one is being made by McChrystal — and whether it’s 40,000 or whether the 40,000 represents a negotiated down from 80,000 request is something that I don’t know and we should know after careful, protracted deliberation.

PODESTA: I think that the deliberation that’s going on is actually exemplary, and I completely agree with George on this. It seems that the Bush administration, for eight months, did sit on Gen. McKiernan’s request for more troops, which Obama —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s because the troops just weren’t there. It wasn’t the President saying, “I’m not going to do this if the troops are there.” They just didn’t have them.

PODESTA: Well, I don’t know, I never heard Vice President Cheney going off and giving a speech assaulting President Bush for not acting on those requests at that time. And they did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

So they handed him off a problem, and it’s a deep and difficult one, and I think he’s doing the appropriate thing by taking his time before he commits to not what looks to be surge, but what looks to be something that would commit the United States to these high troop levels for a very long time in Afghanistan.

Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the Spanish newspaper El Diario La Prensa on Thursday, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera said, “One of the aspects of our reality in the United States now is the defamatory tone of the immigration debate and how that immigration debate has slandered an entire race of people.” Rivera proceeded to lay much of the blame at the feet of CNN’s Lou Dobbs:

Lou Dobbs, a man who was an accomplished journalist, and who left to go and start his own venture in the digital media, having to do with space, I believe, and then came back to CNN, and nobody was watching his program. He discovered that one of the way to get people to watch was to make of the image of a young Latino trying to get into this country a profoundly negative icon. Lou Dobbs is almost single-handedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat for everything that ails this country.

Rivera’s criticism echoes that of his Fox colleague John Stossel, who said he doesn’t “subscribe to Lou Dobbs-kind of rants about immigrants wrecking America.” (Dobbs subsequently called Stossel a “self-important ass” with “myopic idiocy.”

The New York Times reported recently that Dobbs met with Fox News chief Roger Ailes to discuss possibly joining the Fox Business network. Rivera said in his speech that he was so opposed to Dobbs joining Fox News that he called his boss and received assurance that the network was not going to hire the CNN host:

No more of these lies, no more of this slander, no more of this stereotyping. I can tell you proudly, when this man [Dobbs] was widely rumored to be coming to my network, I called my boss couple of weeks ago, and he said it’s absolutely untrue. Lou Dobbs is not coming to Fox News. He belongs at CNN if they can justify his presence there that’s their problem.

Watch it:

Latino and pro-immigrant activists have launched two campaigns, Drop Dobbs and Basta Dobbs, which are aimed at pressuring CNN to “hold Mr. Dobbs to journalistic standards” or dump him altogether.

On Thursday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) became the Republican Party’s lead man on technology issues (and probably made Glenn Beck a happy man) by introducing the “Internet Freedom Act.” The legislation would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from making sure that Internet service providers don’t create a pay-for-play system where they could selectively block or slow content and applications. McCain called these net neutrality rules a “government takeover of the Internet.” From his press release:

This government takeover of the Internet will stifle innovation, in turn slowing our economic turnaround and further depressing an already anemic job market. Outside of health care, the technology industry is the nation’s fastest growing job market. Innovation and job growth in this sector of our economy is the key to America’s future prosperity. In 2008, while most industries were slashing jobs in the worst economy in nearly 30 years, high tech industries actually added over 77,000 good high-paying jobs. Just this month, Google and Yahoo both released positive earnings reports.

First of all, it’s ironic that McCain cites Google and Yahoo as examples of why net neutrality rules need to be blocked. In fact, both companies have said that without such measures, the “longstanding openness of the Internet” will be threatened. From a letter they wrote to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2006:

Until FCC decisions made last summer, consumers’ ability to choose the content and services they want via their broadband connections was assured by regulatory safeguards. … This “innovation without permission” has fueled phenomenal economic growth, productivity gains, and global leadership for our nation’s high tech companies.

To preserve this environment, we urge the Committee to include language that directly addresses broadband network operators’ ability to manipulate what consumers will see and do online.

However, telecoms largely support blocking net neutrality rules, and McCain is a long-time friend of these businesses. McCain was the top recipient of campaign contributions from the telecom industry, taking in $894,379 in the past two years.

Even as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee from 1997 to 2001 and again from 2003 to 2005, McCain made sure to craft technology rules that benefited his campaign donors. He opposed a program designed to provide discounts to schools and libraries to connect to the Internet and supported large telecom mergers.

Of course, the GOP point man on technology issues is someone who, just last year, called himself a computer “illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get.” In July 2008, he said he has “never felt the particular need to e-mail.” As former FCC chairman Reed Hundt has explained, “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it” — and we’re now supposed to trust him to shape the way we use the Internet.

During his Fox News show on Tuesday night, right-wing pundit Sean Hannity attacked a new ad campaign soon to be appearing in New York City subway stations that raises awareness about atheism. The ad, sponsored by The Big Apple Coalition of Reason, reads: “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?”

“These ads inform New Yorkers that a million or more of their neighbors are good without God,” said Michael De Dora Jr., the executive director for the New York branch of the Center for Inquiry. “That is, a million of us have found or created natural morality, and lead good, productive, and meaningful lives without appeal to religious dogma or God.”

Sensing an opportunity to exploit the ads for political benefit, Hannity told his audience that a Christian group could never get away with airing ads like that:

Can you imagine the outrage if a Christian group put pro-God ads in the New York City subways? What outrage.

Watch it:

But as Subway Sights — a blog about the NYC subway system — explains, “The problem with this thinking is that Christians have been putting up pro-Christianity ads in the subway for years and nobody cares.” The blogger continues, “There are ads for all kinds of competing churches, each offering their own flavor of Christianity and their own path to salvation,” and offers this photograph as evidence:

Subway Sights concludes, “Of course, Sean Hannity doesn’t factor this into his argument because he doesn’t ride the subway and has no idea what he’s talking about.”

Indeed, Hannity doesn’t seem to ride the subway. He has said, “I travel on private planes, I have an SUV that I’m proud of.” But his lack of knowledge never stops him from opining on things he knows little about.