DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Sept 18, 2006 17:14:49 GMT 4
The Dog Ate Bush's WAR CRIMES Defenseby thepen www.opednews.com PLEASE NOTE THERE ARE TWO SEPARATE ACTION PAGES IN THIS ALERT Call Congress NOW at 888-355-3588 or 800-828-0498There is an apocryphal tale about a child who, having failed to perform an assigned task, invented the most outlandish excuse for why he could not produce the required finished work. We cannot say if there ever was an actual child who claimed that the dog had eaten his homework. But we have its equivalent now in the current president of the United States. The incredible world spectacle we have is this. First, the president demands that the War Crimes Act, the law of the land, be changed to accommodate the crimes that have ALREADY been committed at his direction, specifically to authorize methods of torture previously and rightfully considered verboten. If this is not a naked admission that he has broken the law in the most hideous way we don't know what is. Second, and at the same time, he is demanding that new laws enacted be to hotrod the prosecution of those he personally deems enemies of the state. What is he trying to tell the world, that those people CANNOT be convicted of an offense under our current law, but that he himself cannot ESCAPE conviction under that same law for what he has done? Shame on any member of Congress who signs on to any of this in any part. Let us address each of these two points in turn. THE WAR CRIMES ACT MUST NOT BE CHANGED AT ALLACTION PAGE 1: www.usalone.com/wright/pnum500.phpIf there was an Olympic event for hypocritical lying, the Bush administration would have no peer anywhere. But perhaps the biggest honking lie of all is that the torture of our detainees has given us any intelligence to make us safer. Indeed, it was information extracted by torture (of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi) that was used as an EXCUSE by the Bush and Cheney that it was so drop dead critical to attack and occupy Iraq, now recognized by all with an honest bone left in their body as the greatest strategic blunder in our nation's military history. It is all contained in the Phase 2 Senate Intelligence Committee Report, which Cheney claims not to have read himself. Those who really know interrogation know that information extracted by such means is BAD intelligence, notwithstanding the most extreme "ticking time bomb" scenario they constantly throw in our faces. But just as they have systematically done in every other policy area without exception, those who actually know what they are talking about have here again been muscled out of government decision making. We are told for example that the military JAG attorneys were held for hours in a meeting and not allowed to leave until they signed on to the president's demands. And now Bush directly threatens the American people by saying if they will not rubberstamp his torture program as is, he will scuttle it. That's exactly akin to a bank robber threatening to stop robbing banks unless we change the laws to his specifications. Of course it has to stop. When we have a program that is so destructive to our REAL national security it absolutely MUST stop. Maybe then, just maybe, we could get back to obtaining good intelligence of actual value. But Bush in his patented flim-flam way would make it sound like his critics would have us stop all intelligence operations to protect our families. They have their talking point, that the law needs to be "clarified", and they are going to keep repeating it like a broken record until we all run screaming from the room. The problem is that they KNEW they were breaking international and U.S. law when they did it, in the most premeditated way, and were so warned in advance by their own attorney general in no uncertain terms. Part of the language they would now unilaterally and retroactively excise from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions refers to "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating . . . " At Abu Ghraib, Bush administration henchmen DESIGNED methods of treatment with the deliberate intent of being maximally offensive to their Muslim victims, most of whom were innocent of any crime whatsoever. If war itself were not enough of an atrocity, when the depth of the horrors of World War II came to light some of the greatest legal minds ever labored to define in words what civilized people must forever proscribe, even in war. And in the Geneva Conventions they succeeded. Any who dare to violate these mutually accepted definitions of despicable behavior are guilty of war crimes on their face. We need NOT behave as monsters ourselves to protect our people. Such acts only lead to the remaining civilized people in the world shunning us as pariahs, to never again volunteer the good intelligence we really need to thwart those who mean us harm. In fact, the Bush administration has repeatedly jeopardized intelligence operations of REAL value to score media propaganda points. The British were furious two years ago when they outed a very valuable mole in Al Qaeda, thereby doing incalculable damage to our ability to stop the bad guys. And they did it again by pressuring the British to move prematurely on the recent airline plot, related to so-called "liquid explosives" which had no chemical possibility of ever being operational. The case against those plotters and their associates is accordingly weaker than it would have been otherwise. Keep in mind that in both the above situations informants were gained by winning people to our side. Such intelligence losses cannot be compensated for by stooping to torture methods which have the exact OPPOSITE effect. DETAINEES MUST BE PROSECUTED UNDER CURRENT LAWACTION PAGE 2: www.usalone.com/wright/pnum501.phpThe fact that the detainees HAVE been tortured is precisely the reason why the Bush administration is so determined to deny them any rights they have under current law to see the evidence against them, or to have any other protections thereunder. Secret evidence means keeping also secret their own war crimes. Either we are a nation of laws or we are not. And to butcher the law "ex post facto" (after the fact) anytime the result will not be as we would like is to render our entire legal system of no force and effect. It is to tell the world that we have laws of convenience only, and that they are subject to change without notice. There are disreputable precedents in world history, the Star Chamber, kangaroo courts and show trials. The Supreme Court, even stacked as it is already is with Bush beholden appointees, has ruled that the military tribunals proposed are contrary to the Constitution itself, let alone statutory law. The solution is not to enact further Constitutional outrages in the Congress, perhaps in hopes of stacking a reversing fifth additional vote by the time it arrives back at the Supreme Court. The detainees must be prosecuted under existing law. To do otherwise is to send the loudest message possible to the entire world that we believe THEY HAVE COMMITTED NO CRIME FOR WHICH THEY CAN BE PROSECUTED. Some who were irrefutably innocent have already been released after years of torture, and with no apology or compensation for their ordeal. If the truly guilty cannot be found so under current law, we have no moral standing in the world left at all. There's a ticking time bomb alright, but unfortunately it's our own current president of the United States. Day by day he becomes more pugnacious and more defiant. It is just a matter of time before he commits an atrocity in our name so heinous that no American will ever be safe ever again anywhere in the world, unless he is peacefully and swiftly removed from office. And if a dog did eat his homework, it would have been a dog of war. If not now,then when? Call Congress NOW at 888-355-3588 or 800-828-0498 www.usalone.com
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DT1
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Post by DT1 on Sept 20, 2006 9:28:25 GMT 4
A POX ON THE SENATE!
Demand they NOT Pass a Bill Pardoning Bush for Wiretappingby Robert Raitz www.opednews.com Hey there! My friends, I am feeling such shock and outrage, I can't believe I have not come apart at the seams! I just read perhaps the most distressing thing I have ever read in the time I have been receiving email updates from MoveOn.org. It seems that this week, the Senate is planning to, "quietly hold a vote that would pardon DUBYA for breaking the law by illegally wiretapping innocent Americans without warrants." This bill would "'...immunize officials who have violated federal law by authorizing such illegal activities,'" according to Senator Leahy. What? This is so wrong, I can't even begin to fathom that it would gain any kind of real consideration. However, it is getting something akin to that. First of all, the fact that the bill "pardons" DUBYA tells me that those who sponsored the bill (Arlen Specter and Dick(LESS) Cheney) are admitting that the law was broken. Now, they want to effectively say that the law is without merit, and that they can pardon a criminal even before he is investigated, or put on trial. "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" These words were spoken by Special Counsel for the Army, Joseph N. Welch, during the famous McCarthy Communism hearings in the Senate. They effectively ended the communist witch-hunt that was being carried on by Senator Joe McCarthy. What would Mr. Welch have to say about this present plan by the senate to allow a criminal to get off even before he's investigated or tried? I think he'd probably say the same thing, especially given the circumstances surrounding the illegal wiretaps of American citizens. Perhaps he'd say even more. We will never know, as Mr. Welch is dead. However, I'd sure like to know what happened to decency. I'd like to know what happened to the rule of law. I'd love to know how it is our federal government has come to such a sad state of existence. I'd love to know what it is abut DUBYA that makes him so frigging (I meant the other "F" word, but I didn't want to be too rude) special that he can get away with breaking the law whenever it suits him. Please, I beg of each and every one of you, go to the link below and sign the petition! We have to stop this criminal from being pardoned for crimes which he hasn't been investigated or tried for as of yet. Further, since the language of the bill in question affirms that DUBYA did, in fact, break the law, then the Senate is OBLIGATED to write articles of impeachment, and begin the impeachment process. If they don't, then I am sure that Joseph N. Welch is going to begin spinning in his grave! I'll ask myself, for Mr. Welch, and for every American who still believes in the rule of law. Senators, have you no sense of decency, sirs, at long last? Has our country's governing bodies sunk to such a low that they would pardon a lawbreaker who has so heinously broken the law repeatedly? Would you actually consider pardoning a traitor, a man guilty of criminally negligent homicide, and a man also guilty of war crimes? Do you care nothing about the oaths you all swore on the bible; a book you presumably hold sacrosanct? Would you so wantonly slap your own god in the face, as well as every American who abides by the law, no matter how unjust or arbitrary it may be? Is this really and truly the message that you want to transmit to the world, that we in America will allow our elected officials to break the law and go unpunished? There is no defense that can be offered if you allow brazen criminal activity to go unpunished. Do you truly want to be the legislative body that effectively neutralizes the rule of law which is supposed to guide our land? Never have I been so ashamed of being a citizen of a country that is supposed to be THE model for law and order. I am tired of being ashamed of my citizenship! For once, will you do the proper and decent thing? This is wrong, and you all know it! Have you left no sense of decency, sirs at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? Please take the time to click on the link below and add your voice! We need to stop this now! The criminal DUBYA must PAY for his high crimes, misdemeanors, and out and out treason NOW! pol.moveon.org/dontpardon/?id=8810-6874312-_gbbwisgwshads3b8hjxea&t=2Blessed be! Pappy radfaepappy.livejournal.com/Harpist, unemployed blue collar worker, and Bush basher living deep in the heart of Texas.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Dec 13, 2006 5:50:56 GMT 4
Pinochet's Death Spares Bush Family
I'm so glad when anyone writes anything exposing the Bush Family. [cough, I mean.. Dynasty]
Did anyone see the film of Bush, Sr. breaking down and crying when a reporter basically asked him what he thought of G.W. being such an idiot, and did he think it would hurt son Jeb's shot at the White House? Bush Sr, during his crying jag, was extremely upset that someone could ask such a question because he was giving a talk on his family. PLEASE, spare me the fake melodramatics!
Does anyone remember Barbara Bush speaking about her sons, how fortunate they were, and how she and her husband raised them to give something back to the world? Well, let's see what these 'fortunate ones' gave us: G.W. gave us endless war, death and destruction. Jeb gave us a rigged stolen election which put his brother in the White House. Neil gave us the S&L scandal. And who's the other one? I can't remember his name, but I'd lay odds that he's a crook too! And they all gave us that dismal failure and stellar piece of legislation, No Child Left Behind, where each and every one of the family is making barrels of cash from our crumbling educational system that makes our kids jump through useless abundant testing hoops, which you can read about here at FH in various posts under:
Educating a Democracy and How Not To tinyurl.com/yh98p4
What a family; what a monarchy! ....Michelle----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pinochet's Death Spares Bush FamilyBy Robert Parry December 12, 2006 Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile’s notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush. Although Chilean investigations against other defendants may continue, the cases against Pinochet end with his death of a heart attack at the age of 91. Pinochet’s death from natural causes also marks a victory for world leaders, including George H.W. and George W. Bush, who shielded Pinochet from justice over the past three decades. The Bush Family’s role in the Pinochet cover-up began in 1976 when then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush diverted investigators away from Pinochet’s guilt in a car bombing in Washington that killed political rival Orlando Letelier and an American, Ronni Moffitt. The cover-up stretched into the presidency of George W. Bush when he sidetracked an FBI recommendation to indict Pinochet in the Letelier-Moffitt murders. Over those intervening 30 years, Pinochet allegedly engaged in a variety of illicit operations, including terrorism, torture, murder, drug trafficking, money-laundering and illicit arms shipments – sometimes with the official collusion of the U.S. government. In the 1980s, when George H.W. Bush was Vice President, Pinochet’s regime helped funnel weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels and to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, an operation that also implicated then-CIA official Robert M. Gates, who will be the next U.S. Secretary of Defense. When Pinochet faced perhaps his greatest risk of prosecution – in 1998 when he was detained in London pending extradition to Spain on charges of murdering Spanish citizens – former President George H.W. Bush protested Pinochet’s arrest, calling it “a travesty of justice” and joining in a successful appeal to the British courts to let Pinochet go home to Chile. Once Pinochet was returned to Chile, the wily ex-dictator employed a legal strategy of political obstruction and assertions of ill health to avert prosecution. Until his death, he retained influential friends in the Chilean power structure and in key foreign capitals, especially Washington. Read it all:www.consortiumnews.com/2006/121106.html
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DT1
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Post by DT1 on Dec 13, 2006 13:16:04 GMT 4
"And who's the other one? I can't remember his name, but I'd lay odds that he's a crook too!"Please allow me to point out that in 2001, Marvin Bush was director of the security firm...(drumroll)... AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. reopen911.orgSmall world,huh?
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Jan 7, 2007 9:47:17 GMT 4
Published on Saturday, January 6, 2007 by the Guardian/UK US: They Have Made a KillingThe US has spent a million dollars for every dead Iraqi - is that what they mean by value for money? by Terry Jones commondreams.org Early this year the Bush administration is to ask Congress to approve an additional $100bn for the onerous task of making life intolerable for the Iraqis. This will bring the total spent on the White House's current obsession with war to almost $500bn - enough to have given every US citizen $1,600 each. I wonder which the voters would have gone for if given the choice: shall we (a) give every American $1,600 or (b) spend the money on bombing a country in the Middle East that doesn't use lavatory paper? Of course, there's another thing that George Bush could have done with the money: he could have given every Iraqi $18,700. I imagine that would have reduced the threat of international terrorism somewhat. Call me old-fashioned, but I can't help thinking that giving someone $18,700 brings them round to your side more quickly than bombing the hell out of them. They could certainly buy a lot of lavatory paper with it. In 2002 the house budget committee and the congressional budget office both guesstimated the cost of invading Iraq at approximately $50bn; $500bn seems a bit wide of the mark. What's more, with over half a million dead, it means that the world's greatest military superpower has spent a million dollars for every Iraqi killed. That can't be value for money! So how on earth could such a vast overspend occur? After all, the US is the flagship of monetary common sense. Well, for starters, in 2003 the White House refused to allow competitive bidding for contracts in Iraq, which is odd for the champions of free enterprise. Then the White House ensured there would be no overseeing of what was spent. In the original Iraq spending bill, which earmarked the first $87bn to go down the drain, there was a provision for the general accounting office to keep a check on things, but that provision was stripped from the bill - even though the Senate had originally voted for it 97 to 0. But what I want to know is: how do they actually spend all that money? Well the answer is: they don't. According to the website Halliburtonwatch, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR bills the US taxpayer for $50-$80 per day for labourers working for it in Iraq, but pays them only $5-$16 per day. It's the same with Halliburton. In December 2003 the US army discovered that the company had overcharged by $61m for fuel transportation and $67m for food services in Iraq. Then there is good old-fashioned incompetence. Take the al-Fatah pipeline: KBR went through $75.7m of taxpayers' money, supposedly trying to replace a pipeline across the river Tigris that US forces had blown up. They never finished the job, but still got paid. With all this double-dealing and incompetence, you'd expect that those responsible would have been penalised by now. But that's where the mystery deepens. Companies such as Halliburton and its subsidiaries have never had it so good. In January 2006 the Bush administration intervened in a dispute between the Pentagon and Halliburton, and agreed to pay the company $199m in disputed charges. On January 26 2006 Halliburton announced that its 2005 profits were the "best in our 86-year history". And to date KBR has received around $16bn from its contracts in Iraq. Vice-President Dick Cheney, formerly CEO of Halliburton, has not had a bad war either. His tax returns for 2005 show that he earned $194,862 from his Halliburton stock options alone. Mind you, it's small change compared to his $36m payoff when he left the firm. Was that for his past role, or was Halliburton anticipating further services from the future vice-president of the US? Perhaps it's just as well that in 2003 the White House removed from the Iraq spending bill any provision to penalise war profiteers who defrauded US taxpayers. Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python www.terry-jones.net
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Feb 6, 2007 16:27:40 GMT 4
Game Over: Thirty-Six Sure-Fire Signs That Your Empire Is CrumblingDavid Michael GreenSo. You’ve built yourself an empire, eh?
Well, bully for you!What’s next, you ask? Well, now you’ve got to do what everybody does when they have an empire, of course. You’ve got to worry about it falling apart, mate! But how to tell for sure? Let me see if I can be helpful. Here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind, thirty-six sure-fire indicators that your empire is falling apart: You know your empire’s crumbling when the folks who are gearing up their empire to replace yours start blowing up satellites in space. And then they don’t bother to return your phone calls when you ring up to ask why. You know your empire’s crumbling when those same folks are cutting deals left, right and center across Asia, Latin America and Africa, while you, your lousy terms, and your arrogant attitude are no longer welcome. You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending your grandchildren’s money like a drunken sailor, and letting your soon-to-be rivals finance your little splurge (i.e., letting them own your country). You know your empire’s crumbling when it’s considered an achievement to pretend that you’ve halved the rate at which you’re adding to the massive mountain of debt you’ve already accumulated. You know your empire’s crumbling when you weaken your currency until it looks as anemic as a Paris runway model, and you’re still setting record trade deficits. (Hint: Because you’re not making anything anymore.) You know your empire’s crumbling when “the little brown ones” (thank you George H.W. Bush – certainly not me – for that lovely expression) in country after country of “your backyard” blow you off and proudly elect anti-imperialist leftist governments. You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t topple those governments and replace them with nice puppet regimes – like in the good old days – even if you wanted to. And you badly want to. You know your empire’s crumbling when one of their leaders comes to the United Nations and makes fun of your emperor, calling him the devil, and joking about smelling sulphur where he just stood. And though a few folks cringe, everybody laughs. You know your empire’s crumbling when just about your entire military land force is tied up in a worse-than-useless war launched on the basis of complete fabrications, that every day is actually making you less – not more – secure from external threat. You know your empire’s crumbling when almost half the soldiers in that war are high-paid mercenaries, and you don’t dare institute a draft. You know your empire’s crumbling when you send soldiers into war with two weeks training and a lack of armor, and then you keep them there for three, four and five rotations. You know your empire’s crumbling when a member of the Axis of Evil can test missiles and explode nuclear warheads, and all you can do about it is mumble some pathetic warnings about how they better not do that again or there will be consequences. You know your empire’s crumbling when you even think that there is an Axis of Evil. You know your empire’s crumbling when a rag-tag military hodge-podge of irregulars has you pinned down in an endless fight you can’t win, but also can’t lose. You know your empire’s crumbling when you're too dumb to even ban Humvees as a first step toward ending your dependency on a foreign-owned crucial resource. You know your empire’s crumbling when you trade your prior moral leadership on human rights issues for global disgust at your torture, ‘extraordinary rendition’ (a.k.a. kidnaping for torture) and the dismantling of nine centuries worth of civil liberties progress. You know your empire’s crumbling when you blow off international law that you once helped create, and undermine the institutions of international governance that you once helped build. You know your empire’s crumbling when opinion polls confirm that every month you’re more and more despised throughout the world. You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t even pull off the hanging of a tin-pot murderous former dictator without turning him into a hero. You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re the richest country in the world, but nearly 50 million of your people don’t have basic health care coverage. You know your empire’s crumbling when the World Health Organization ranks your healthcare system 37th ‘best’ in the world, just above Slovenia, and just below Costa Rica. (And far below Colombia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.) You know your empire’s crumbling when instead of making it easier for citizens to obtain a higher education, you’re making it harder and more expensive. You know your empire’s crumbling when your government gives tax breaks to industries as a reward for exporting your jobs elsewhere. You know your empire’s crumbling when the so-called ‘opposition’ party can’t even turn that obscenity into a viable campaign theme and use it to clobber the worst emperor in your history. You know your empire’s crumbling when your middle class has been stagnant for three decades, while the wealth of the hyper-rich continues to climb through the roof. You know your empire’s crumbling when your reaction to that is to exacerbate the problem by enacting tax policies that massively increase further still the gap between the rich and the rest. You know your empire’s crumbling when the predatory class has taken over your government and is stripping the country of everything not bolted down to the floor. And then it sells the floor itself, as well, to your rivals. You know your empire’s crumbling when you're spending tens of billions of dollars you don’t own on new nuclear warheads and space weapons that don’t work, to be used against an enemy you don’t have. You know your empire’s crumbling when one of your cities drowns and your government does next to nothing before, during and after. You know your empire’s crumbling when a massive environmental nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only ignores it, but claims it isn’t real while taking steps to exacerbate it. You know your empire’s crumbling when your emperor is warned by a CIA briefer of an imminent terrorist attack of vast proportions, and responds by remaining on vacation and dismissing the briefer with the words: “All right. You've covered your ass, now.” You know your empire’s crumbling when the same emperor drops everything to fly across the country from his vacation home in order to sign a bill intervening on the wrong side of a personal medical drama involving a single family. You know your empire’s crumbling when gays and immigrants are used as diversionary issues to keep people from thinking about the pillaging of their country and their wallets actually taking place. And it works. You know your empire’s crumbling when people are getting more religious and less scientific, not the other way around. You know your empire’s crumbling when your political leaders start to be chosen by dynastic rules of succession. And you especially know your empire’s crumbling when the most idiotic child of one of the least accomplished leaders in its history is not only crowned as the next emperor, but is even revered for a time by most of the public as a great one. Rome? Britain? Spain? At this rate we’ll be lucky to end up like Belgium. Source: www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Game%20Over.html
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Feb 7, 2007 10:15:27 GMT 4
somemebody owes me a new laptop... Must stop sneezing beer now.... AHHHHHHHHHHHH... ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D Wrong,yet Right on so many levels... Bravo!!!
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Feb 17, 2007 12:14:12 GMT 4
Ssshhh! You'll Hurt the Troops' Feelings and MoraleA. Alexander, February 16th, 2007 progressivedailybeacon.com If people are wondering, Republicans aren't putting on an act; they're really that delusional. Only delusional people would claim that the way to defend freedom and liberty is by not using it, or to surrender it all to a single branch of government. Only delusional people publicly admit that they aren't sure whether or not a President's war escalation plan is going to work, but that they'll vote for it 'cuz it seems like maybe they oughta. Only delusional people would rationalize sending people into a war to defend "freedom and liberty" and then attack and belittle anybody that actually tries using their freedom and liberty. No, that isn't an act that the Republicans are putting on; they're really that delusional. The Republican Party's leaders are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. When it was their turn to serve their country, one guy leveraged Daddy's wealth and position in order to worm out of Vietnam and to score a cushy Air National Guard spot. That guy, however, couldn't be bothered to get out of bed one weekend per-month and ended up failing to fulfill his service to country. Since nobody can say for certain where that guy was when he wasn't where he was supposed to be, rational people consider him to have been AWOL. The other guy, the fatter and angrier guy, requested and received five -- count 'em FIVE! -- Vietnam draft deferments and later said he didn't serve because he had other things going on...like, perhaps, keeping his cowardly fat ass alive? These two super patriots were too good to serve side-by-side with America's combat forces, but now Congressional Republicans are worried that someone might say something that hurts the "troops'" feelings? "Sshh," they insist, "the 'troops' might here you talking about how we teamed up with Mister Bush and Cheney and lied the nation into war and then turned a blind eye, while the administration totally screwed up the tactical execution of that war. And ALL that TALK will hurt the 'troops'' feelings and morale. So, just shut up!" Could the Republicans be anymore irrational and delusional? They sent the "troops" into Iraq based on a stack of lies piled higher than the Empire State Building; insisted that the country, Democrats, and military "stay the course" no matter how flawed and failed that course has been; refused to do so much as lift a finger while some 3,100 "troops" were senselessly killed and another 30,000 permanently injured - and NOW the Republicans and administration are concerned about the "troops'" morale? Republicans have been perfectly willing to sit idly by while Vietnam avoiding George W. Bush and Dick Cheney fabricated evidence that sent thousands of soldiers, sailors and Marines to their deaths, but dare debate the war and the GOP becomes indignant because it might hurt the "troops'" morale? That not only seems delusional, but, too, it smacks of disingenuous political opportunism! Supposedly the troops are in Iraq defending our "freedom and liberty" and our "way of life," but if Democrats or anybody else dares to engage in that freedom and liberty and attempts to live that way of life by holding an open debate - Republicans scream bloody murder! Do the Republicans really believe our fighting men and women can handle three or four tours in a combat zone, but aren't emotionally strong enough to withstand Congress debating a failed war? Does this delusional Republican logic make sense to anybody? Of course, it doesn't...but don't think for a minute the Republicans are putting on some kind of act; they're really that delusional.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Feb 23, 2007 8:39:05 GMT 4
Yes! I'm so liking this author! Here's another one for your reading pleasure. I think I'll just let the title speak for itself!....MichelleKarl Rove Killed Anna Nicole Smith!By: David Michael Green Well, probably not. I mean, maybe he did, for all I know – though I doubt it. What is clear is that he couldn’t have been more delighted that she died her splashy death. Or that the Super Bowl was all the rage just before that. Or that big snow storms hit just after. Or that Anna Nicole’s body has returned to making headlines in death, just as it did in life. Anything – anything! – to divert attention from his personal train wreck is just fine with Karl. It is crucial for him that you not be paying attention to the disaster he has created in Iraq and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue generally. Hence all the recent drum beating on Iran, as well. Unfortunately for Karl – but luckily for the rest of the planet – it ain’t working. And, the more you know of Rove and his ambitions, the more you realize just how much it ain’t working. This guy had really, really big plans. Like his 19th-century hero, Mark Hanna, he was going to build a Republican majority that would last a generation. He has instead brought the party to ruin, quite possibly destroying it forever. But Rove was always way overrated, anyhow. And that is true, even taken on his own cynical terms. It is, of course, especially true if one considers such hopelessly idealistic factors like providing for the welfare of the country, improving the quality of our political discourse, or maintaining the semblance of truth that is necessary to sustain democracy. But even if we forget all that good stuff and adopt Rove’s own scorched earth approach to politics, where winning is everything and any means to that end is fair game, he is still a disaster. Only worse – he is a scorched earth disaster. Bush now has job approval ratings in the low thirties and falling – on a good day. He singlehandedly delivered both houses of Congress to the opposition party in 2006. Serious academic historians are already describing him as the worst president in American history, with a fourth of his presidency still to go. And the chances that he will be impeached rise with each week. Quite an impressive record, eh? But the single best evidence of Rove’s failure is, ironically, the election he (supposedly) won in 2004. This election was most remarkable for what didn’t happen, namely that Bush didn’t win in a landslide. Here was a guy who had been at ninety percent approval ratings three years earlier. Here was a guy who managed to fool the country into thinking he was some kind of hero before and after 9/11. Here was a war president – with all the rally-round-the-flag benefits associated with that status – also presiding over a decent enough economy. Here was an incumbent who could bring Air Force One to your town, and could make nationally televised speeches – before Congress, in massive churches, on the deck of aircraft carriers. Here was a candidate running against an opponent so embarrassingly lame he couldn’t find a punch to throw if it had been given to him gift-wrapped, and who couldn’t decide what he stood for and so tried to stand for everything all at once. If that isn’t a recipe for a blow-out, I don’t know what is. And yet Rove only barely managed to push Bush across the finish line in a nail-biter. And even that only if we ignore the compelling evidence that Ohio was stolen. The true measure of Rove’s failure is that he should have presided over the very landslide he had long envisioned, perhaps even complete with the generation-long realignment of American politics he craved. Instead, he had to send out the Swift Boaters and all the other dirty tricks from his famous repertoire of black bag operations in order just to barely hang on to a twice-stolen White House. And you know they had Scalia on deck, too, ready to perform his little magic trick again, if necessary. The story is told that shortly after the Selection of 2000 Rove’s analysis of the voting patterns convinced him that BushCo needed to govern from the far right in order to win reelection. His data showed him that the center had evaporated from the American political landscape, and that from this point forward the winning party would be the one that most successfully mobilized its base, rather than the one that could best appeal to the uncommitted middle. But while there may have been some shred of truth to that in January of 2001 (and even then there were better alternatives), it was certainly not the case by December of that year (regardless of who was responsible for 9/11). Apart from the fact that he did manage to sell a near complete moron to 50 million American voters in 2000, Rove’s reputation as a master strategist has been a joke, advanced by the fawning fearful in the mainstream media. This president – Rove’s racehorse – could perhaps have even been considered by many to be one of the historical greats (gulp) if he had tacked toward the center, uniting the country and the world, and taking off from the lofty launching pad that widespread sympathy abroad and unified public support at home provided in the wake of 9/11. Had they pursued a centrist agenda, had they not excluded and demonized their opponents while questioning their patriotism, had they foregone their breathtaking arrogance, and had they genuinely and competently pursued national security at home and abroad, Bush and the GOP would have been unbeatable in 2004 and 2006, and Rove might have had his realignment for the history books. But there were two reasons that didn’t occur. One is Iraq, where in a sense it is inaccurate to say that Bush is now doubling down with his escalation, but only because he had doubled-down once already, making the escalation a quadrupling of his wager. The very invasion itself was the original all-or-nothing bet of the entire Bush presidency, and not necessarily a bad one, really, from the ultra-cynical Rovian perspective. Had the war actually ended when Bush stood on the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring “mission accomplished”, Rove might have achieved what he set out to do. My guess is that each of the principals in the administration brought to the table their own reason for wanting to invade Iraq. For Bush it was to do something better than Daddy for once in his life. For Cheney, oil and contractor bonanzas. For Wolfowitz and Perle, defeating an enemy of Israel. And for Rumsfeld, proving his theory about the application of 21st century military power. For Rove, though, it was to enhance and consolidate the president’s power – allowing Bush to jam his domestic agenda down the throats of the American people, via a compliant and very Republican Congress – and solidifying the foundation for his restructuring project. Bush and Rove believed they had learned from history that a quick little rout of some punk country somewhere Americans couldn’t find on a map (which is to say, just about all of them) was a damn good elixir for a presidency. According to Mickey Herskowitz, who interviewed Bush and crew extensively in 1999, the gang was amazed at the domestic political benefits that had accrued to Margaret Thatcher from winning the Falklands War, and believed, conversely, that Jimmy Carter’s problem was that he didn’t do the same. In Russ Baker’s stunningly revelatory article on candidate Bush, www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-01.htm Herskowitz quotes him as saying “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander‑in‑chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.” The great irony, and one of the enduring historical puzzles of our time, is that it might well have worked, had they done the thing right. What makes the sheer absurdity of their Keystone Kops-quality efforts in Iraq so mysterious is that so much was at stake for them, as we’ve now seen. It was an all-in bet. You either win the whole jackpot and rule the world, or you go home in just your underwear (if you’re lucky) or perhaps an orange jumpsuit (if you’re not). Imagine if you were sitting at that table. Would you somehow pass on drawing a crucial card to which you were entitled? Would you casually neglect to protect against tipping your hand to your opponent, with so much at stake? Of course not. So why did BushCo screw it up so badly? The answer to that question brings us to the second reason for the failure of the administration, and of the movement it spearheaded: They don’t care about good governance. In fact, they don’t even care about it enough to practice it sufficiently to feed their true lust. Like, say, Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s sometime guru and sometime nemesis, Rove may ultimately prove to be rather more nonideological than not, in the same way (“Power! I must have more power!”) that he is profoundly amoral. Cheney, of course, certainly is not nonideological, though he is definitely as amoral as it gets this side of Dachau. But the whole lot of them represent utter throwbacks to the nineteenth century (on a good day, more like the twelfth most of the time), when the game of politics in America was far more about capturing government spoils for pillaging by your team’s special interests than it was about governance in the public interest. It seems likely in retrospect that the real reason everything they touch fails – Katrina, global warming, North Korea, deficits and more, no less than Iraq – is because they never came to Washington to make any of it succeed. The fact that Bush is the very antithesis of a policy wonk is only partly explained by the same set of characteristics that account for him literally not reading books or newspapers. It’s not just that he famously lacks intellectual curiosity. It’s also that he just doesn’t give a damn about your boring little bourgeois problems, dude. You know, like having a job, educating your kids or accessing quality health care. And why should he? He and his people are taken care of, thank you very much. In this sense, David Kuo’s outing of the administration’s treatment of even its religious conservative allies was paradigmatic. The attitude has been, essentially: “We’ll pretend to care about your pathetic obsessions with embryos and queers and all things sexual just long enough for you freaks and your shock troops to deliver us power at the ballot box. Then we’ll throw the occasional Supreme Court justice your way, but otherwise, shut up already, wouldya? Why don’t you guys go off in the corner and pray or something?” Apply that same governmental nonchalance mentality to Iraq, and what you get are a bunch of very bad decisions made by a bunch of completely unqualified cronies sent there to advance Bush family loyalty and Cheney style kleptocracy, rather than competent governance on behalf of the Iraqi people. But who cares? If you don’t give a damn about the American middle class, you sure as hell don’t care about a bunch of miserable Arabs, right? Right. Except that Colin Powell actually got one thing correct in his life when he told Bush, “You break it, you own it”. And so, in one of the great cosmic comeuppances of all time, the same predatory indifference with which BushCo has been skewering all of us for six years came back to bite them, hard. In fact, hard enough to destroy this political disease masquerading as a presidency, as well as the horse it rode in on. Bush is over. The only remaining accomplishment possibly within his and Cheney’s grasp would be the miraculous completion of their term. Meanwhile, both the movement of the regressive right and the Republican Party itself might be over, as well, especially if the Jim Webb wing (stones) can wrest the Democratic Party from the Harry Reid wing (sans stones), and start calling things for what they are in this country. It’s the thirteenth round now, and bloodied Democrats have mostly forgotten how to slug their opponent, not having employed that particular technology for about twenty-five years. Republicans, meanwhile, drunk silly on their own hubris, teeter senselessly about the ring, waiting for a mere exhalation from the other guy to knock them over and out. Americans know they hate Iraq. They know they hate national debt. They’re pissed off about Katrina and global warming. Their children’s schools suck, their healthcare security is crumbling and their income streams feel precarious. And there’s a lot more where all that came from. All that’s missing now is for the Democratic Party having the courage to weave all of this together into an integrated narrative frame. On the day that happens, this sick monster that has haunted America and the world for a quarter-century will crawl back under the rock from which it came. On the day you hear Democrats talking about the failure of conservatism as an ideology – in the same fashion that Republicans have so successfully wrongly articulated a general failure of liberalism – on that day this nightmare will be over. The only thing saving regressive conservatism today is the knock-kneed weakness of the alleged opposition party. And even that seemingly intractable pattern of political cowardice now appears to be thawing, as a disgusted public leads its Democratic (and, increasingly, Republican) ‘leaders’ in a serious course correction – a wee bit of national behavior modification, you might say – to the point where even the New York Times is now getting it and running op-eds pondering whether America is turning left. Progressives just need to regain the courage of the correct convictions, and start verbalizing those straightforward notions in ways that they (or at least Democrats) have not since Ronald Reagan rode into town selling his feel-good tonic of one part voodoo economics (“Hey, free money!”) and one part Hollywood jingoism (“Hey, kick ass!”). It fairly boggles the mind that such a patently bogus ideology could be so successful for so long, based more or less exclusively upon Madison Avenue magic. But then I guess if P.T. Barnum could keep the gawkers moving by painting "This Way To The Egress!" over the exit door, the ability to sell political snake-oil by employing a combination of primal fear, Oscar-caliber stagecraft, and sophisticated computer and communications technology shouldn’t be so surprising. In any case, the regressive cancer which has been too long ripping apart this country and the world is today just one good framing away from the ash bin of history. If we could just move the genteel and ineffectual Harry Reids of this world gently aside, we could stick a fork in this beast once and for all. I think the public is already there, in pieces (Iraq, debt, Katrina, global warming, etc.). What is lacking now is the unifying narrative to weave together those pieces into the general discourse of a failed ideology. Meanwhile, boy, that Karl Rove sure is a genius, isn’t he? What else but genius does it require to take a president from ninety percent to thirty percent job approval ratings? Who else but a genius could make a country loved worldwide in 2002 into a country hated by 2003? What else but genius is needed to unravel a political party that has been around for a century and a half, the party of Abraham Lincoln, a party which controlled both houses of Congress and has historically won better than 60 percent of the presidential elections it contested, including seven out of the last ten? How ‘bout that, eh? This guy’s a one man weapon of mass destruction! If only Bush had sent Rove to Iraq as a political advisor, instead of deploying 150,000 American troops, Saddam’s regime might have been destroyed without any loss of life. Instead, after six years of disastrous policy, after six years of arrogant determination to do everything different than the hated Clinton administration no matter how absurd (like the Contraries in "Little Big Man", who bathe with dirt, dry themselves off with water, and ride their horses facing backwards) – after all that, there’s Bush and his minions now desperately trying – on Palestine/Israel, on North Korea and, truth be told, on Iraq – to scramble back to where Clinton left off in 2001. Good one, guys! Nice try at that whole shuttle diplomacy thing, Condi. Those issues were hard enough to resolve back then. Add in six years of Bush administration neglect (in the best case scenarios) or foolish meddling (in the worst), and they’ve become hopelessly intractable now. It’s worth remembering that when the Bushistas came to town – false arrogance borne of personal insecurity oozing from their every pore – they literally told the press that everyone could now relax because “the grownups were back in charge”. How ‘bout them apples? Yeah, sure, technically these are grownups – but then so was Anna Nicole Smith. If these are grownups, I’m ready to take my chances on a bright teenager or two. And if these are geniuses, I’m the Queen of England. (Hint: I’m not the Queen.) Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Karl_Rove_Killed_Anna_Nicole_Smith.html
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 27, 2007 11:13:28 GMT 4
Schadenfreude Is My Middle Name David Michael GreenI’m not an angry man. But I am angry.
I’m not a bitter person. But, boy, am I bitter.And I’m not generally given to vindictiveness. But, you know what? Right now I’m open to persuasion. The Bush administration is now beginning an inexorable process which will change its status from the worst administration in American history to the publicly-acknowledged worst administration in American history. I, for one, couldn’t be more delighted. That delight is only partly based on having been on the receiving end of their atrocities these last six years. And it is only partly based on the assurance that those gifts will keep giving for decades into the future, like a bad case of political herpes. And that delight is also only partly based on their motivations and the scale of their transgressions. People who believe that the regressive right came to Washington to implement a legitimate ideology that just happens to be different from ours, or who believe that they meant well but, ironically, the first MBA president couldn’t manage his way out of an empty wading pool, even with the entire federal bureaucracy to assist him – such people fundamentally misunderstand this administration and the movement which they spearhead. These are sociopathic predators – nothing more, nothing less – and we are foolish, to the point of acting as enablers, if we fail to call this what it is. This administration is a kleptocracy which came to town to grab everything it could grab, operating behind a hideously deceitful veil of generated fear and false security provision. Boiled down to its essence, this is little more than a classic protection racket writ large. Whether history will reveal that they manufactured 9/11, or purposely stood by and allowed it to happen, or simply screwed up the job of actually providing real national security, they in any case then milked that tragedy for everything it was worth, constantly sowing fear in the heartland, and offering the false promise of protection to a frightened public. For all these reasons, they are surely getting what they deserve. But, finally, my delight in watching the long-deserved implosion of this American tragicomedy is also partly based on attitude. Never in my life have I seen such high-handed arrogance, such disrespectful condescension for the loyal opposition, such destructive shredding of the very core institutions of Western political culture, such cavalier disregard for the lives of anyone, including Americans. No, I’m not generally angry, bitter or vindictive. But you rub your noxious garbage in my face for six (if not twenty-five) years and arrogantly dismiss me as an unpatriotic retread for opposing your transparent predations, then, yeah, I’m going to rejoice in your getting what you deserve. And, right now, I’m rejoicing. Right now, schadenfreude is my middle name. The fun has only just begun, but nevertheless the wheels are already coming off the wagon. The dominoes are already falling, and Henry Waxman has only just begun to issue subpoenas. The water’s rapidly rising, and is now splashing the dirty faces of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and even George W. Bush. We’re running out of metaphors to mix here, but fortunately not jail cells. You wouldn’t want to face what they’re facing over the next twenty-one months under the best of circumstances. But you especially wouldn’t want to go there with your popularity in the toilet, your credibility so shot that even Republican senators are disbelieving you in public, a corrosive war that, at best, cannot possibly regain public support, and members of your own party seeing that their association with you, your arrogance, your screw-ups and now your scandals all roll up together into a giant freight train called the 2008 Express, rapidly steaming their direction. Who will be left to throw Bush a rope when he’s finally going down? Trent Lott? No, they burned him, and something tells me he hasn’t forgotten. John Kerry? Maybe he’ll FedEx over some Band-Aids. Jacques Chirac? That’s Old Europe, people. Saddam Hussein? His rope is in use elsewhere. So one by one they come down, and no one is even going after the big questions yet, like what happened before and during 9/11, what’s happened before, during and after Katrina, the failure of the Afghan war, and the marketing of the Iraq war. Whether we ever get to those or not, we can at least take pleasure in the just desserts already being served, and relief in the enfeebling of Bush and his destructive agenda. Rumsfeld’s gone. Without question, forced retirement in failure to some corporate pastureland is far too good a punishment for him, even if he does carry the shame of being one of the few people on this planet moronic enough to get fired by George W. Bush. Nor is he necessarily out of the woods, either. If even the merest approximation of the truth ever makes it to a grand jury, Rummy will want to be investing in some very high-powered legal Dobermans. He’ll need them. Scooter Libby is now gone, and while it’s true that his crimes greatly exceed his likely punishment, even assuming no pardon, it is something. And let us all laugh collectively at the absurd claims of the right, trying desperately to defend him. “Valerie Plame wasn’t actually undercover!” Well, except that she testified she was. And it was the CIA which had initiated the investigation in the first place, out of concern about having its spy networks exposed. “Libby had lots of important stuff on his plate and just didn’t remember!” Yeah, except that what he just didn’t remember was nine conversations with eight different people on the same subject. (Aren’t these the same people who vitiated Clinton for lying about consensual oral sex under oath? Did I miss something here? When did treason get to be the lesser offense?) No one on the jury believed Libby’s lies for even a second. Indeed, they all felt sorry for what was transparently a case of Libby taking a bullet for his boss, Dick Cheney. Now comes Wolfowitz and Gonzales. I doubt either can last very long, particularly the former, who has more constituents than just the thumb-sucker at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and whose staff is in outright mutiny against the head pirate. It’s breaking my heart, in a schadenfreude kind of way, to see Wolfie hoisted on his own petard, and now flapping in the wind of shame for a third week running. Given his evident insularity of breathtaking proportions (talk about not being able to take a hint!), he probably doesn’t have the decency to be embarrassed for himself yet. And even when he’s unceremoniously tossed overboard, it won’t begin to atone for the destruction listed next to his name in the Big Book of Death. (With apologies to Nathan Hale, I regret that Wolfowitz has but one life to give for all the ones he’s taken.) But it is a start. After what we’ve been through, it’s amazing and unfortunate how little it takes to provide a measure of satisfaction. Just the same, the visage of European governments and World Bank staff (not exactly paragons of liberalism, either of them) growing nauseous from the smell of rotting predator is always encouraging. And seeing the great anti-corruption crusader indicted for practicing the crassest form of nepotism is only icing on the cake. Then there’s Alberto Gonzales, for whom the oft-employed term ‘consigliere’ was always far too generous. Sure, the guy makes things happen for his boss, but he’s far more the simple soldier than the clever counselor in Bushland. And since nobody in that sad country is actually principled enough to be a soldier for any cause other than lining their own pockets, we ought to just identify this guy for the sycophant that he is, pure and simple. But he also happens to be the highest ranking law enforcement official in the land, and if that doesn’t send shivers up your spine you might want to cut back on whatever is your self-medicating substance of choice. Silly Al put on such a show before Congress last week that even Republican senators were eying the political egress, wondering how they could possibly get the stink of Bushism out of their clothes and hair (as if they weren’t one hundred and ten percent culpable themselves, back when Bush walked on water). No less than seventy-one times, Gonzales’s memory evaded him as he tried to recall the firing of key members of his staff, in the biggest credibility meltdown since... well, since the Libby trial. Imagine a guy who really had a memory that bad arguing the government’s position before the Supreme Court. “I’m sorry, your honor, I don’t recall which side of this case I’m on here.” “I’m sorry, your honor, I haven’t been able to keep all those amendments straight since I lost the cheat sheet I used on my law school finals.” Perhaps we would have gotten some different answers if the attorney general was subjected to a little of his own justice. Perhaps a few days at Guantánamo would have changed his tune. Maybe the rigors of a torture program he once claimed it was “quaint” and “obsolete” to oppose would stimulate his memory. But, of course, his absurd testimony was all just dandy for the one guy besides Gonzales himself who could put an end to this embarrassment. Bush’s take was that “the attorney general went up and gave a very candid assessment, and answered every question he could possibly answer, honestly answer”. Bush concluded that Gonzales’s testimony had “increased my confidence in his ability to do the job”. This last line in particular is just the most recent example of the utterly juvenile content of regressive politics, and the sheer contempt with which we in the body politic are held by these folks. As if Gonzales’s lies to Congress had anything whatsoever to do with Bush’s assessment of him. As if Bush was sitting there watching the television, hoping his attorney general would set the record straight, explain why all of this is not a scandal, and win back his job on the basis of his commitment to good governance. As if the president actually thinks Gonzales told the truth on Capitol Hill. As if that is what he wanted him to do. I don’t remember a looking glass, but surely there must have been one along the way somewhere. On top of all the injuries of the Bush administration, these childish rhetorical turns only add insult in the sheer contempt they demonstrate for we owners of American democracy. Maybe for the thirty percent of Americans who still support this guy, it works. Maybe for the sheep who are so willfully naive that they let their pastors tell them what to believe politically, it’s okay. But for the rest of us with our very own brains, this is politics that wouldn’t be fit for a sixth grade civics class. Rumsfeld, Libby, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, DeLay, Brown, Ney, Abramoff, Cunningham and more. Bush, Cheney and Rove are unquestionably next. Even if they are lucky enough to survive the next couple of years in office, they will be damaged goods to an extent we’ve never seen before, reviled and despised, first a joke and then too destructive to any longer be funny. The clock is now actually their only friend. If they had 41 months left to go, rather than 21, I have no doubt whatsoever there would be impeachments. As it is, we may be stuck with them for the duration. Which is not necessarily such a bad thing. The longer these guys are around (within severe limits, of course), the more thorough a job they do in discrediting themselves and their regressive politics. Let the revelations drip out, one by one, corroding the foundations of their destructive project. Let them stew in the very acids they themselves have injected into American democracy. It is not enough just to destroy Bush, because there will always be more Bushes (starting with a real one – Jeb). It is Bushism itself – the entire regressive political project – which must be beaten into irrelevance, so that it never resurfaces to bring us this ruin again. And at the moment, no one – not the press and not the Democrats – is doing a better job of destroying regressivism than the regressives themselves. I’m not an angry person, but if it sounds like I’m angry now, I am. I’m furious for the lies which have been told. I’m indignant about the manipulation of our best instincts as a society by the world’s most cynically destructive government this side of the 1930s. I’m outraged that probably a million people are now dead in order to satisfy the personal insecurities of one individual who is the most powerful amongst us, but at the same time also the weakest, the worst and the most emotionally bankrupt. I’m irate that my country has become hated in the world, known now for its human rights violations, its arrogant disdain for the institutions of international cooperation, and its practice of cheap pretext-driven invasions of sovereign states of the sort that was already becoming morally inexcusable back in the nineteenth century. I’m enraged that my country is seen as the most hypocritical on Earth, calling for democracy abroad while undermining it even at home, ranting on and on about terrorism while protecting terrorists from justice, railing about weapons proliferation in other countries while building new classes of nuclear warheads and leading the process of weaponizing space, yet another frontier of our physical environment to be turned into a battlefield. I’m ashamed that it was not already embarrassing enough that my country, five percent of the world’s population, produces twenty-five percent of its greenhouse gases, but that our government then also had to scuttle even the wimpy Kyoto attempt at remedying the problem, all the while lying to us about the disaster itself. I’m incensed at the fiscal, environmental, governmental and moral mess that we are leaving to our children. We are saddling them with our debts instead of trying to advantage the next generation, like every generation prior has done, and this government’s policies are responsible for that. We are leaving them a planet which will be wracked by the effects of global warming, and this administration is responsible for that. We are bequeathing to them an America which is deeply divided and widely hated, and that is the legacy of the Bush government. So, yeah, as a matter of fact, I’m pissed. Three things happened on the same day this week. The first was that the stories of the two most visible faces of the Iraq war were exposed as complete, and completely intentional, lies, manufactured for the purpose of selling the war. Army Ranger Bryan O'Neal told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “I was ordered not to tell” the family of Pat Tillman the truth about how he died by friendly fire. Indeed, Tillman’s uniform was immediately burned and other evidence destroyed, so that a tale of his heroic death in battle with the enemy could be fabricated, complete with the awarding of a Silver Star. Meanwhile, Private Jessica Lynch testified to the same panel that her heroic story was also manufactured, as were the lies about the abuses of the Iraqis holding her, people who in truth tried to help her and to return Lynch to her unit. “Tales of great heroism were being told. My parent’s home in Wirt County was under siege of the media all repeating the story of the little girl Rambo from the hills who went down fighting. It was not true.” To this day, Lynch says, “I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend“. Perhaps I can help here. Can you say “Old Shoe”? Does Robert DeNiro have to walk onto the set to get the American public to realize just how wholly fabricated everything about this war has been? Everything, that is, but the death and destruction, which has been all too real. The second thing that happened that day was that nine more Americans were killed in Iraq, and twenty more seriously wounded. We don’t ever get to know how many Iraqis are consumed in Mr. Bush’s Mesopotamian conflagration (for the same reason we couldn’t be told the truth about Tillman and Lynch), but based on the best and most scientific research on this question, a reasonable estimate is that about 685 are killed every day. Not a bad day’s work for a contemporary Caligula, eh? And the third thing that happened that day, while the administration’s lies were being exposed, and while those lies harvested their inevitable grinding, grim reapings yet again, is that the very same people who brought us this deceit and destruction continued their campaign to annihilate the remnants of American democracy through the use of yet further Orwellian rhetoric. “What’s most troubling about Senator Reid’s comments yesterday is his defeatism”, said America’s vice-president. “It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage. Leaders should make decisions based on the security interests of our country, not on the interests of their political party.” The president added that the he was disappointed in Congressional Democrats for using the spending bill to make “a political statement”. It would not be possible for Cheney’s assertions to be more polar opposite from the truth. It would not be possible for him to be more culpable of doing exactly what he accuses the Democrats of doing, for we know for a fact that much of the purpose of this fabricated war (or, at least, the quick and successful war they thought they were fabricating) was to make Bush and his GOP machine invincible in the context of domestic politics, so he could ram through predatory legislation like his raid on Social Security. And we know that the war has in fact been extremely damaging to the security interests of the United States. And we know that when Bush says that, because he will veto a bill it is therefore a “political statement”, he’s actually desperately trying to intimidate Congress into abdicating its voice on policy questions, to prevent them from forcing him to demonstrate before the public the very obstinance he seeks to hide. All this in one day. So, yeah, you’re damn right I’m angry. My question is, what in the world is wrong with anyone who isn’t? And you’re damn right that I get a little thrill from seeing the slightest punishments meted out to the greatest of our criminals. Even if good news hadn’t been so entirely rare these last six years, it would be appropriate. For these are not ordinary fools, and this is something that Americans haven’t really begun to appreciate yet. If these folks were mere bunglers with proper intentions, I could forgive them. If they were true patriots who simply believed fervently in a different ideology than mine while all their policy ideas turned out to be wrong, I could even forgive that. But they are none of these things, and the measure of that is to be found precisely in the inversion of truth which is at the core of regressive politics as practiced by Bush, Rove and their fellow predatory kleptocrats. In the marketplace of ideas, lies don’t have to be told to sell policies. In the domain of good governance, memories don’t have to be conveniently erased in order to cover up incompetence and malfeasance. And this, ultimately, is why I am so angry. These aren’t boobs who couldn’t shoot straight, though they are that as well. And they aren’t true believers of a stupidly destructive ideology suitable only for the most emotionally stunted amongst us, though they are that too. Instead, fundamentally, they are simply greedy marauders who have come to plunder America for all it’s worth. If they were Russians, or Chinese, or Muslims, our response would be to hate such imperialist exploiters accordingly, and to seek their destruction expeditiously. But because they are Americans, and because they have ironically expropriated all the historic symbols of American patriotism, and because they have so massively and cynically exploited one of the greatest tragedies in American history, and, especially, because the magnitude of their crimes is too existentially debilitating for most Americans to permit themselves to comprehend – because of all these things, we merely revile them, rather than hating them and destroying their movement. But that is our mistake, and it has already become a lethal one for so many innocent victims of the regressive machine. It’s time for this to stop, and it’s time for us to label this chapter in our history for what it is. We have a word for Americans who sell out their country for their own profit.
They are traitors.
And we have a word for what these traitors do when they betray our country, our values and our Constitution to pursue their agenda of personal aggrandizement.
It’s called treason.Source: www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Schadenfreude_Is_My_Middle_Name.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 26, 2007 15:01:31 GMT 4
Winston Churchill Bush?
Nah. Guess Again. David Michael Green5/24/07 George W. Bush’s all-in gamble of other people’s stakes in Iraq has become the mother of all disasters. Even relatively conservative members of the Washington establishment have labeled it the biggest foreign policy debacle in American history. Heck, even Henry Kissinger has consigned it to Bummerville. If you’re a Republican president, you know you’re hurting when your foreign adventure is too stinky for even the likes of Kissinger – a guy who hardly ever met an American invasion he didn’t applaud. Indeed, so ugly is the situation in Iraq, there’s just about only one good thing that can still be said about it, which is that it is not yet nearly as bad as it could turn out to be. One country has been destroyed and turned into a textbook case of a failed state. Perhaps a million of its people have been murdered, several million more have departed as refugees from the violence, and there are now multiple civil wars going on, alongside other wars between Americans and Iraqi forces and militias and al Qaeda elements. Could even Hobbes have envisioned this Hell? Probably not. Probably it’s more Dali’s speed. But that’s the good news, ladies and gentlemen. The bad news is that the potential for this first-class debacle to go world-class is quite significant. Among the possible exponential exacerbations we’re staring at here is the potential to bring on World War III, pitting Sunnis versus Shiites in a Muslim version of Christianity’s devastating Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants. Fortunately, only some of those countries have nukes, so we can all breathe a big sigh of relief there. And now that gasoline prices have doubled in the United States, it’s also not hard to envision a serious global depression whacking industrialized countries everywhere, not unlike the effects produced when OPEC cranked down on the spigot twice in the 1970s. So, in short, there are basically two possible outcomes here. Iraq either turns out to be just a giant disaster, or – instead – it becomes an epic disaster. A thing of biblical proportions. Something for people to fight over two thousand years from now. This, of course, leaves certain folks in a rather uncomfortable position – namely, George W. Bush and the conservative clones who have celebrated his depravities. In order to avoid appearing (at least to themselves – most of the rest of us are not fooled) as the purveyors of catastrophe they actually are, they are desperately scrambling to find some sort of cover for their cataclysmic foreign policy disasters.These face-saving inanities take multiple forms, but the leading explanation offered by Bush and his neocon acolytes for their grand failure is that it is actually a brave success that historians will later recognize, even if we wimpy appeasers of the present tense lack the wisdom to recognize Great George’s leadership, courage and prescience. The model for this, of course, is Winston Churchill, who got a lot of things wrong in his political career, but managed to get one big thing right. While the rest of the world was either admiring Hitler or hoping that if they pretended hard enough he’d just go away, Churchill identified – accurately and early – what was perhaps the greatest menace in human history. Now comes George W. Bush, comparing himself to Churchill, believing that he (almost) alone recognizes the new epochal peril, and that his policies in Iraq and elsewhere will be judged by history just as Churchill’s lonely vigil of the 1930s has been, despite – or especially because of – the effete public indifference during our time to the grave existential threat only the solitary seer Bush wisely divines. Laughable, eh? It’s actually even worse than that. At least Churchill never claimed – that I know of – that god told him to go fight Hitler. Not so Bush, who has said that his “higher father” told him, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq". Probably you think I’m making this up, huh? I wish. Apart from the effect that such a comparison to Churchill has of causing legions of people to fall off their chairs in shock and hurt themselves (could that be part of their secret plan for defeating progressives and other thinking members of the species?), this claim has all sorts of logic problems associated with it. Not that either logic nor fact matter any more to our good friends of the post-empirical right, but for those of us still proudly inhabiting the “reality-based community”, a little analysis of this proposition might prove more than a bit enlightening (which is precisely why the other guys find it so very frightening). So let’s unpack this hail-mary desperation pass attempt at saving the right’s reputation, and see what we find. And what we find are a whole bunch of built-in assumptions that we’re not supposed to question. There’s very good reason for that, of course. The notion of Bush as some sort of latter-day Churchill unravels faster than Jerry Falwell’s soul went south if one departs even slightly from gross superficialities to examine these assumptions. We have, unfortunately, to start with the assumption that 9/11 was perpetrated by bin Laden and his merry band of jihadists. Most Americans can’t even go there, but if you do, you find that – at the very least – the story told to us by the government as to who did 9/11 (and, more importantly, who didn’t), and how, is chock full of some jaw-dropping anomalies and enormously suspicious behaviors. I’m not prepared to render a verdict on what happened that awful day – and neither are the best scholars on the subject, whose commitment to truth and integrity rightly constrains them from making conclusions which out-run the presently available facts, however tempting such determinations may be. But I would say that there is enough in question from what I’ve read to wonder about the deepest assumption of all – that we’ve even attacked the proper enemy, on any of the fronts of the so-called “war on terror”. Which brings us to the second great assumption – this one patently bogus – that the war should be against terrorism in the first place. Terrorism is a tool, a weapon, a strategy – and one, by the way, which is almost always employed by the weakest of adversaries, who would otherwise be using conventional weaponry if they had it. So why fight a weapon, rather than those who wield it? If our enemy chose a different weapon, would we be okay with them killing us, as long as it wasn’t by terrorism? And what about when we use terrorism, or Israelis do, or when we harbor an admitted terrorist from extradition? Isn’t it odd that we haven’t been called to a war against al Qaeda (whom we don’t even seem to be concerned about anymore, anyhow) or even Islamofascism? Yes it very much is, but only until you realize that the broader rubric of a supposed war on terror gives you better leverage for selling a war in Iraq that was pre-planned well before 9/11. Then it makes perfect sense.Third, is Islamofascism really a threat to the United States? Probably, yes, at some level. But the insanity of gun policy in this country takes out ten times the number of people killed in the 9/11 attack, every single year. Cigarettes claim more than one hundred times the three thousand lives lost on September 11th, year in, year out. And while I might actually favor sending the Marines in to invade the NRA building or RJ Reynolds boardroom, I never hear the Bush crowd doing anything other than helping these guys pimp their death machines. So, yeah, there are enemies to America’s health and welfare both at home and abroad, and yeah, we ought to combat them. But we ought to do so in proper proportion to the threat. I do believe that al Qaeda means us harm. But they ain’t Nazi Germany, and this ain’t Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations either, though we can certainly turn it into that if we’re stupid enough. Without question, our invasion of Iraq has pushed us far further down that path than we’ve ever been previously. Even our own intelligence agencies – not exactly bastions of lily-livered, bleeding-heart Neville Chamberlain groupies – have said so. The most credible reckoning recently produced estimates that global terrorism has increased seven-fold since the invasion of Iraq, and in large part because of the invasion of Iraq. If Bush wants to play at being Sir Winston, fine. That makes this his Global Gallipoli. Next, even if we assume that Islamic radicalism represents a serious enemy for the United States to deal with, the fourth assumption built into the conservative face-saving program is that conventional warfare is the proper strategic response to that threat. So foolish is that assumption that it is hard to imagine it took the Iraq meltdown to make it plain to most Americans. Would anyone believe in advance that you could throw a rock to the moon if you just ate enough Wheaties? Would anyone need to actually test that proposition before dismissing it out of hand? What a surprise, then, to learn from the Washington Post this week that two intelligence assessments from before the invasion predicted chaos in Iraq and a boost to Islamic extremists from the occupation. John Kerry was much ridiculed in 2004 for discussing terrorism as a scourge best (though not exclusively) fought using the tools of intelligence assets and police work. Much as it pains me to say anything nice about Kerry after he ran a campaign so abysmal that it bequeathed us another four years of the Creature from Crawford, in this case he was right. Fifth, this ridiculous Churchill proposition requires us to assume that any kind of warfare, not just conventional, is the only response to the threat. Bushoids want you to believe that what we do as our country gaily cavorts about the world has nothing to do with the hostility found out there toward the United States. Anytime you hear somebody say something as manifestly absurd as “they hate us for our freedoms” you should immediately have a powerful sense of how bankrupt their casus belli actually is. Is it really imaginable that young people with their whole lives before them would regularly volunteer to blow themselves up into hamburger meat because they’re – what, anyhow? jealous? – of somebody else’s freedoms? I absolutely believe there is plenty of sickness going around amongst Muslim religious radicals. Indeed, I am quite well acquainted with what it looks like from observing our own homegrown religious radicals. But is it such a far fetched idea that Americans would be hated for toppling Middle Eastern governments or propping up brutal and hated puppet regimes in order to drain the region of its one valuable natural resource? (And, no, I’m not thinking of sand.) Is it so absurd to imagine that being the primary sponsor of Israel, and winking as it builds nuclear warheads and colonial settlements in occupied territories, that these aren’t factors driving the hostility America encounters in the Muslim world? And, therefore, would it be such a stretch to reject this assumption that the problem is entirely on their side and can only effectively be countered with more violence? George Bush says yes. In fact, George Bush hopes you’re dumb enough never to even consider the question. My own answer is somewhat different. He also hopes that you don’t notice what is actually happening in the supposed war on terror. The sixth assumption behind any attempt to equate Bush to Churchill presumes that the former is actually making any sort of serious attempt to deal with terrorists in general, or even just the ones he claims did 9/11. In fact, though, just the opposite is true. He’s even once admitted, regarding bin Laden, “I truly am not that concerned about him”. I would have loved to have been monitoring Ari Fleischer’s EKG when Bush dropped that particular stinker. The poor SOB was probably wondering if there was enough Spic-N-Span in the whole world to clean up that mess. But even leaving rhetoric aside, it’s been clear since 2002 that Bush doesn’t really give a damn about terrorism or even al Qaeda. His long-time obsession has been Iraq and Saddam – neither of which had anything to do with terrorism – and he pulled forces from Afghanistan to indulge that obsession, leaving Osama to roam, and paving the way for a wholesale Taliban/al Qaeda resurgence already rolling across the country. Moreover, he’s never done a damn thing about his pals in the House of Saud, whose relations to Islamic radicalism are far stronger than Saddam’s ever were. Sorry, man, but here’s the deal: If you’re gonna claim that you’re Churchill incarnate, you can’t be doing the WWII equivalent of indulging your personal obsession over Finland, while the Wehrmacht rolls across France, Poland and the rest of Europe. Which brings us to an entire series of assumptions about the Iraq war, none of which bear any relationship to the truth, whatsoever. If Bush is Churchillian, then Iraq had to have had something to do with Islamofascism. In fact, it actually did, in an inverse way. The guy we removed and replaced with a Category Five Hurricane happened to have feared and loathed al Qaeda types a lot more than we actually do. That is, not only did Iraq have nothing to do with 9/11, but Saddam hated al Qaeda more than we do. Hey, what’s that old line about your enemy’s enemy?If Bush is a great leader navigating his nation through the perilous waters of mortal danger, based on his uniquely prescient grand vision, then his claim that we only invaded Iraq because he had no choice has to be true. In fact, it is preposterous. We know for a fact that the Bush team knew Iraq was no serious threat. We know for a fact that they had decided long prior to the actual invasion that they were going in, but pretended to still be keeping all the options open, saying they hoped to avoid war. We know for a fact that they were never serious about the WMD inspections, and indeed had only even called for them in order to “wrongfoot” Saddam into rejecting them and thus providing the necessary pretext for a war they craved. We know that it was a lie of the most obscene proportions to claim that we couldn’t have waited another month or two for the inspectors to finish their jobs, so urgent was the Iraqi threat. (All this while North Korea actually exploding a real nuclear warhead produced only endless diplomatic kabuki dances of surreal non-confrontation.) For Bush to be a great visionary of geopolitics whose learned scholarship (imagine using that phrase in the same sentence as this president’s name) and heightened powers of perception prepared him to see what we mere mortals do not, all of these assumptions must prove true about Iraq. In fact, none of them are remotely truthful, nor was there ever anything remotely accidental about their falsity. But Bush is also the commander-in-chief, regardless of whether history should somehow someday declare him visionary-in-chief. Even if we assume that by some miracle he manages to achieve that latter reputation, can you imagine what will be said of his management of this war? Even if we were to leave aside the fact that his entire legacy is irrevocably joined at the hip to the war’s outcome, it nevertheless remains astonishing how badly Bush has bungled this initiative at every conceivable juncture. From sending in insufficient forces, to allowing looting, to putting complete know-nothing sycophantic boobs in charge of the occupation, to staffing the CPA with an entire legion of more know-nothing sycophantic boobs chosen for their loyalty to the Republican party, to the wholesale dismissal of the Iraqi Army, to alienating friend and adversary alike across the planet, to bungling every rebuilding project while permitting war profiteering American (not Iraqi) contractors to clean out the Treasury – is there anything at all these guys got right in Iraq? This has been a four year long Three Stooges movie. With blood.Finally, of course, for Bush to be judged by history to have been the Churchill of our time, he bears the burden of showing that his Iraq adventure has left his country more safe, rather than less. This is manifestly not true, and it will become significantly less true as the months tick down to January 2009 when we are rid of this right rollicking cock‑up of a pretend president, this American Janjaweed, blighting his global sandbox at every turn. Leaving aside the moral balance sheet, the war has already cost half a trillion dollars, and even if it were to end now, the costs in sustained medical care, lost contributions to the economy and the replenishment of war materiel will be staggering, perhaps two trillion altogether, according to the most scholarly estimate. Meanwhile, the Army and the Marines are wrecked, 3,400 good people the less, ten or twenty thousand more gravely wounded, and recruitment is increasingly dependent on lowered standards and increased bonuses. American good will and credibility are spent across the planet. Only six years ago we were the object of near universal affection and sympathy. Now we are hated. Meanwhile, at home, America has never been so badly divided since the last time our presidents lied us into a major war. In sum, Bush and his army of Stepford robots may think he is the next coming of Sir Winston, but that last-ditch effort to fool us and – especially – themselves depends on a huge series of false assumptions. We have to believe the many absurdities about who did 9/11, how, and why. We have to believe that a ‘war on terror’ is the appropriate response to such an attack. We have to believe that such a war effort has been proportionate to the threat involved, and that the use of massed conventional forces is the best way to fight that war. Indeed, we have to believe that war itself – as opposed to policy changes – is the only appropriate response to such a threat. We have to believe that the US is actually fighting such a war, and that it is winning it. And last, to buy this insulting analogy one has to believe that all the fairytales we’ve been told about Iraq are true, and that in addition to the war having been an absolute necessity, it is being managed well, and is succeeding in improving America’s national security. But none of this is true. None of it. And therefore neither is it true that George W. Bush is some sort of Churchillian visionary whose keen intellect and learned wisdom allows him to perceive an existential threat that you and I somehow cannot see. How blotto do you have to be to envision that absurd scenario? How falling-down wrecked do we all have to get to blur our eyes sufficiently to see this little punk – lazier and less intellectually engaged than any president in American history – as remotely thoughtful and informed, let alone prescient?Which brings me to one other thing. In addition to being a famous statesman, Winston Churchill was also a scholar of great repute. George Bush, on the other hand, got “gentleman’s C’s” in college (which means he actually got F’s before his daddy stepped in and bought him a GPA). Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and wrote his monumental “History of the English-Speaking Peoples”. It’s hard to imagine George Bush even speaking English to people. Sorry, Fool. I can’t say that I served with Winston Churchill. I didn’t know Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was not a friend of mine. Still, one thing is abundantly clear: You’re no Winston Churchill. Hell, you’re not even a Dan Quayle. Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Winston_Churchill_Bush_-_Nah.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jun 17, 2007 13:35:52 GMT 4
The Twelve Main Failures of the Bush-Cheney Administration: A Terrible Legacyby Rodrigue Tremblay -- June 3, 2007 "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation and around the world, this [Bush II] administration has been the worst in history."— Jimmy Carter, 39th U.S. President "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeating it."— George Santayana (1863-1952) "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."— George Tenet, ex-CIA Director under George W. Bush "The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist."— Sir Winston Churchill - (1874-1965) The accomplishments of the Bush-Cheney administration are very few, if any, but its wrongdoings are numerous and comprehensive. This administration has been a virtual wrecking crew for anything it has put its hands on. Here is a summary of the twelve most glaring failures of this administration.1. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an aggressive militarist and imperialist administration, reverting to the old gunboat diplomacy. First of all, the central mistake of President George W. Bush was to abdicate the function of governing to "steamroller" Vice President Dick Cheney, who then used his vast experience in government to create a parallel government. This administration will be referred to historically as the "Bush-Cheney administration", because the Vice president has had more concrete influence in running the government than the incumbent President. The rest follows: The Bush-Cheney administration, which gained power in 2000 with the help of a one vote majority of the U.S. Supreme Court (on December 10, 2000), after having lost the popular vote, will also be remembered as the one that adopted a hegemonic foreign policy and issued the totalitarian "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive wars, of international unilateralism, and of American assertive military supremacy around the world. If this hubristic doctrine is not officially repudiated soon, the United States will take its place in history along (Adolf) Hitler's Nazi Germany and (Joseph) Stalin's Soviet Union. As a concrete step in implementing the infamous "Bush Doctrine", the Bush-Cheney administration then discarded any notion of law and morality and launched a war of aggression abroad in order to impose an imperial control of oil-rich countries that are neighbors to the state of Israel. Against the advice of military, legal and intelligence experts, but coaxed by Neocon ideologues who were anxious to promote Israeli interests, the Bush-Cheney administration violated the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg Charter and launched an illegitimate, illegal and immoral war of aggression, a war of choice and not of necessity, against Iraq. This is a throwback to the dreadful days of the old and much maligned gunboat diplomacy of more than one hundred years ago. And talking about a quagmire, White House's Neocons are even pushing the idea of having American soldiers in Iraq for the next fifty years! 2. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has betrayed democracy because it has relied on lies, deceit, propaganda and manipulation in a way that would have been worthy of a totalitarian regime: The illegal Iraq war was justified with lies and exaggerations about Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction and supposed links to al Qaeda. This is a war that has been marred with reliance on torture and by immoral behavior by American soldiers in Iraq. The result is a worldwide explosion of hatred against the United States. As a consequence, the reputation of the United States has been seriously damaged among free nations and all around the world. Domestic examples of the Bush-Cheney administration's tendency to rely on deceit were exposed by the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman affairs. And former CIA Director George Tenet has confirmed that the Bush-Cheney White House was bent on "selling" a war against Iraq to the American public using lies and cooked intelligence data. Such behavior is contrary to the basic spirit of democracy that dictates that rulers must justify their decisions to the citizenry by spelling out clearly the ends being pursued, the means chosen to achieve the ends, and the reasons for taking a chosen action. For a public official, to lie is to be undemocratic. 3. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has destroyed the more than two century-old American tradition of separation of church and state: Soon after it gained power, President George W. Bush chose a theologian to write his speeches. This was followed by the Bush-Cheney administration entirely discarding the principle of separation of church and state by channeling billions of dollars of public money to religious organizations, thus insuring the support and votes of unscrupulous religious leaders. Indeed, the Bush-Cheney administration created the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, an outfit that helped sectarian religious charities receive $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005 alone, to be used for the benefit of their own particular group of believers in their own particular religion. George W. Bush stands alone among all American presidents for having done so. 4. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration accused of a criminal construct worthy of impeachment: George W. Bush has flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution." Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE report to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nevertheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush signed a secret executive order authorizing the new policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries such as Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing. Within the USA, the Bush-Cheney administration undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on these activities. These actions were in direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution. 5. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has used fascist-like, McCarthyite tactics and suspended fundamental liberties at home, including the nearly millennium-old Right of Habeas Corpus. When president George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to proceed with warrantless domestic wiretapping, he knew he was establishing an illegal wiretapping program to spy on Americans, and that he was placing himself in a situation of illegality. If this had not been illegal, his Attorney General would not have felt obliged to cover up the entire affair in order to protect the administration. In fact, under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. department of Justice has lost its long-held tradition of independence, and embarked upon a long list of politicized operations. Once a politician embraces illegality, there are no limits. For instance, George W. Bush has paved the way for exercising martial law powers, first by de-facto repealing the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the deployment of soldiers on American soil for domestic law enforcement, [and, second, by signing last October (2006) the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA: HR 6166). Under this act, the President has granted himself almost-dictatorial powers to arrest and detain indefinitely any American citizen, without constitutional protections. To top things off, President George W. Bush has relied on signing statements to assert that he has the power to disobey newly enacted laws in a manner that no previous president would have ever thought of doing. 6. As if to prove the "Peter Principle", the Bush-Cheney administration has displayed a surprisingly high level of incompetence: Because the Bush-Cheney administration chose to make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise a far second, it has been plagued with an unheard-of display of incompetence at all levels. They have appointed unqualified loyalists to key positions, such as Gonzales at Justice, Feith at the Pentagon, Brown at FEMA, Bolton at the U.N., Bremer in Iraq, Wolfowitz at the World Bank, etc., all disaster-prone individuals who dutifully extended the incompetence at the top. 7. The Bush-Cheney administration has been a scandal- and corruption-prone administration. Contrary to other U.S. administrations involved in a war, the Bush-Cheney administration did not take any serious steps to prevent influence peddling and corruption. To the contrary, it seems that corruption was expected, possibly with the knowledge that some of the money floating around would find its way back into the political system. The Enron scandal, the Abramoff scandal, the Tom Delay scandal and the U.S. Attorney Scandal were all consequences of this negligence. At the same time, the Bush-Cheney administration has allowed the aristocracy of big money to dominate politics and the public discourse. 8. The Bush-Cheney administration has nearly completely destroyed a foreign country that had done no harm to the United States. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has militarily conquered and thoroughly destroyed the country of Iraq, and refused to leave when asked by the Iraqi parliament, all the while pretending they were occupying this country for the sake of "democracy". In fact, the Bush-Cheney administration has dutifully worked to take over Iraq's oil resources, first, by pressuring the regime under occupation in Iraq to pass a law called "The Hydrocarbon Act", and second, by threatening to block dearly needed reconstruction funds of more than a billion dollars earmarked for the ravaged country, if the proposed privatization of Iraqi oil did not go forward. 9.- By its ill-advised military invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Cheney administration has triggered a civil war in Iraq that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Indeed, the Bush-Cheney's military invasion of Iraq is responsible for having deteriorated the relations between all religious communities in Iraq and succeeded in unleashing a sectarian religious war between Iraqis in many regions of the country. 10. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has shown contempt for international treaties and for international law, demonstrating an abysmal lack of judgment in world affairs, while withdrawing from already signed international treaties. The list of international treaties—which are "the law of the land" according to the U.S. Constitution (Art. VI, para. 2) and the U.S. Supreme Court—that George W. Bush has unilaterally disregarded, cancelled or violated, is very long. They include: -The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia, -the 1997 Kyoto treaty on global warming, -the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, -the 1997 Land Mine Treaty, -the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, -the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, -the Geneva conventions of Aug. 12, 1949, -the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the 2001 UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms, -the 1998 International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty, -the 1996 Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty, -the 2001 International Plan for Cleaner Energy, -the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, -the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal Charter against wars of aggression, etc. —It has even violated the spirit of the 1967 “Outer Space Treaty” (OST) by indicating its intention to assert American military control of Outer Space. By its actions around world and by its attitudes, the Bush-Cheney team has also fed the flames of Islamist terrorism and has even succeeded in rekindling the flames of the Cold War with Russia, with his ill-advised and provocative plan to station anti-missile bases in eastern Europe at Russia's doorstep. A new arms race has been started. —It is a fact that US Relations With Russia have gone steadily downhill under the Bush-Cheney administration. In so doing, the Bush-Cheney administration has made the world a more dangerous place. 11. Economically, the Bush-Cheney administration will be remembered for two things: massive budgetary deficits and big increases in oil prices. In 2000, the U.S. government had a fiscal surplus, a legacy of the Clinton administration. If we consider only the 2002-2006 period, since budgets are prepared long in advance, the cumulative budget deficit over the Bush-Cheney period has exceeded one and a half trillion (1,500 billion) dollars. Similarly, in 2000, oil prices were about $28 a barrel; in 2006, they reached close to $70 a barrel under the Bush-Cheney watch. They are still hovering above $60 a barrel, and could climb much higher if the Bush-Cheney administration acts upon the neocon plan to attack Iran. On the other hand, profits of Halliburton, a company that Vice President Dick Cheney headed, have exploded and so has the price of Halliburton shares, going from the mid-tens in 2001 to the mid-30s in 2007. While the massive Bush-Cheney budgetary deficits have given a keynesian-like boost to the U.S. economy and also to the world economy through the large U.S. trade deficit, they have contributed to exacerbating income and wealth disparities within the U.S. and have created large financial imbalances in the world, with Japan and China becoming huge financial creditors. Indeed, the impetus for large U.S. fiscal deficits came mainly from three sources: massive tax cuts, especially targeted for the very rich, massive military spending required for financing never-ending wars of choice in the Middle East and increases in the cost of the major domestic entitlement programs. Similarly, the tightening of the supply-demand equation in the international oil market is also related to oil output disruptions in the Middle East and to lukewarm domestic steps to economize fossil energy. 12. Economically also, the Bush-Cheney administration has strongly contributed to the stalling of the international trade liberalization process under the World Trade Organization (WTO). For the first time in fifty years, thanks to the neglect and lack of leadership from the Bush-Cheney administration, a major global trade liberalization round, the Doha Round has been derailed. This is occurring at a critical juncture, because most prosperous economies, and this includes China and India, have now adopted the export-led growth model, doubling the overall share of exports in their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That share is about 25 percent of GDP. Indeed, as a consequence of global trade liberalization efforts and of new export-led growth strategies, world exports have exploded over the last half-century. For instance, in the early 1960s, total world exports were in the vicinity of $1 trillion a year (in 2000 dollars); nowadays, they are ten times larger at about $10 trillion a year, growing at the fast pace of 5.5 percent a year, much faster than global output growth at around 3.0 percent a year. In conclusion, it is hard, objectively, not to conclude that George W. Bush and his far right administration have been a disaster for America and for the world, and the consequences will linger on for years to come. They have been agents of uncontrolled greed, of uncontrolled militarism, of massive incompetence and of illegal policies. —By any account, this is a most dismal record.Source: www.thenewamericanempire.com/tremblay=1067.htmMany, many links embedded in this article at the URL above___ Rodrigue Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.comVisit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog. Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
Posts: 428
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Post by DT1 on Jun 22, 2007 5:37:47 GMT 4
WORST.
PRESIDENT.
EVER.
Can you hear us now? We have only been screaming it at the top of our lungs for seven years now... Repubs...Do you smell the betrayal? You have been sold out to the Corporate State. You should be more furious than we are. Oh,never mind... Go back to sleep..............
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Dec 10, 2007 5:53:58 GMT 4
NEW CREW DHS REPORT DETAILS MASSIVE FAILURES AND BILLIONS WASTED -- UPON AGENCY’S FIFTH YEAR ANNIVERSARY5 Dec 2007 // Homeland Security for Sale - DHS: Five Years of Mismanagement Washington, DC – Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released a new report entitled Homeland Security for Sale – DHS: Five Years of Mismanagement, an accompanying website, www.homelandsecurityforsale.org and a video created and produced by Brave New Foundation. The report and video document the past five years of the agency’s most serious problems and troubling practices. Every day, the American people read new stories about DHS and its gross overruns on projects, the worst employee morale in the federal government, the inoperability of information technology, our exposure to cyber-terrorism or FEMA’s fake press conference. CREW is releasing its report to hold those who run the agency accountable for its massive failures and to spark a public debate about how DHS can and must be improved in the next administration. In its report, CREW details billions of dollars in waste and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars, for example: $24 billion has been spent, and at least $178 million wasted, on the failed Coast Guard Deepwater program; over $600 million has been allocated for unworkable radiation border scanners; $1.3 billion has been lost on the US-VISIT program, which was never fully implemented and projected $2 billion loss on the SBInet “virtual fence” border program. CREW’s report consists of five sections: I. Most Troubled DHS Component: FEMA -- Dishonorable Mention: TSA II. Most Outrageous Contract: Deepwater -- Dishonorable Mention: Radiation Detection Portal Monitors III. Failed Program: US-VISIT -- Dishonorable Mention: SBInet IV. Component with the Most Serious Crime Problem: CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) -- Dishonorable Mention: TSA V. Beneficiary of the Revolving Door: Tom Ridge -- Dishonorable Mentions: Holman, Buchholz, Davis, Hutchison “While the Bush administration continues to protest that there is not enough funding for programs including veteran’s healthcare, wasteful and ineffective DHS projects continue to be funded at extraordinary levels,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW. “The Department of Homeland Security is an embarrassment that would be comical if only our national security were not at stake. The agency and its leadership must be held accountable for its failures and pushed to do better.”“The question now is how will the next administration fix DHS? The presidential candidates must do more than simply complain about the state of the agency. They should provide the American people with a blueprint – just like some have on healthcare – explaining how they would address this national security crisis.”Rand Beers, former NSC staff member in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and president of the National Security Network, is available for analysis on CREW’s report. Beers can be reached at 202.289.7211. The video, full report and exhibits can be viewed at www.homelandsecurityforsale.org. *** Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions.
For more information, please visit www.citizensforethics.org or contact Naomi Seligman Steiner at 202.408.5565/nseligman@citizensforethics.org.Source: citizensforethics.org/node/30544
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jan 26, 2008 17:08:36 GMT 4
Now what's wrong with this picture?....in our reality, I mean.Paul Wolfowitz named to chair advisory panel Thu Jan 24, 6:43 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war who was forced to resign from the World Bank because of an ethics scandal, will chair a U.S. advisory panel on arms control, the State Department said on Thursday.
The former deputy secretary of defense and advocate of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq will head the State Department's International Security Advisory Board, which gives the department independent advice on arms control, disarmament, international security and other matters.Wolfowitz was forced to resign as president of the World Bank last year after a bank panel found he broke several of its rules by involving himself in the promotion of his companion Shaha Riza, a Middle East expert at the bank. The controversy sparked outrage among some of the bank's 10,000 employees and prompted senior staff to write to its board complaining the leadership crisis had undermined their work, especially in fighting corruption. (Editing by Todd Eastham) Source:news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080124/pl_nm/usa_wolfowitz_dc_1------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In their reality, it makes perfect sense to assign Paul Wolfowitz to chair a U.S. advisory panel on arms control because they think:What A Great Freakin' War!!David Michael Green 1/24/2008 7:20:23 PM Eastern Standard Time What a ding-dong I am!For months – nay, years! – I’ve been ranting about how screwed up the war in Iraq has been, and how disastrous have been its consequences. What a fool I’ve been! In reality, it’s actually turned out pretty great. That’s what I learned when I read William Kristol’s recent New York Times piece, “The Democrats’ Fairy Tale”. In a stroke of thoughtfulness, generosity and uncanny prescience, the Times was kind enough recently to hire Kristol to write a regular column for their op-ed page. I guess that’s because Ariel Sharon was unavailable and David Duke was on vacation. And bless his little heart, Kristol knows a thing or two about a thing or two. Heck, he’s the one who got us into Iraq in the first place! He’s been telling us for a long time what a cool thing it would be to knock over that tin-pot Saddam Hussein crank, and damned if he didn’t convince the president to do it, despite Bush’s decades of foreign policy experience. But it’s been a rough couple of years for Ol’ Bill, ‘cause the whole damn country went into some sort of narcoleptic, apoplectic, pathogenic tizzy about the war, crying fickle and foul at every turn and seeming like all everyone wanted was to end the darned thing. Imagine that. What a bunch of whiney little self-interested twits, squealing like a continent full of Europeans, and utterly failing to see the great wisdom of Young William’s Grand Adventure In Mesopotamia. It’s really quite nauseating, isn’t it? In his article, Kristol really rips the Democrats, and don’t they ever deserve it. Now that Iraq appears to be marginally more peaceful than it was last year at this time, Kristol is angry because, as he puts it: “It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge – let alone celebrate – progress in Iraq”. Bill is angry because the Democrats (and the public – but, oddly, he doesn’t mention that part) still want to end the war – even though it’s been a huge success! They should “celebrate” it, instead! Fortunately, he is clever enough to suss out the real reason for this childish intransigence. It’s not, as Hillary put it, because the Iraqis know the Democrats will shut off the supply valve of endless wasted dollars and soon-to-be casualties headed to Baghdad. As Kristol notes, “That is truly a fairy tale. And it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of ... George W. Bush. The horror!” I must admit I’ve suffered from some of the same confusion as the Dumb Dems, whom I think we can all agree are simply hopelessly naive pacifists intent on allowing our country to be taken over by Very Bad People (of less than fully white complexion) who mean us harm. You know the type I mean, like George McGovern, who flew all those bombing missions during World War II while Little Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Kristol and the rest fought ... valiantly ... in ... Viet ... oh, never mind. Anyhow, that hopeless and dangerous idealism is why, just one year before the Iraq war, every single Democrat in the Congress opposed the invasion of Afghanistan except for ... well, except for ... every single Democrat in Congress other than one. Okay, never mind on that one too. Look, let’s get down to brass tacks here. Kristol just gets it. The rest of us don’t. He realizes that in the grand scheme of things – “World War IV” as his pappy likes to call it – what’s important is not the big picture, but the very narrowest. You may think, for example, that promulgating egregious lies in order to shove your way into am Iraq war that no one else wants is stupid and counterproductive, damaging the credibility and interests of the United States, and probably accounting for the lack of allied support in a more credible war in Afghanistan. But Bill Kristol knows better. You may think that fighting a war that massively drains military, diplomatic and financial resources away from the real enemies of the country in order to pursue a pet project that has nothing to do with those genuine threats would be idiotic and suicidal. But that’s ‘cause you’re not as smart as William Kristol. You might believe that it was a ludicrous waste of blood and treasure to kill 4,000 Americans and one million Iraqis, while borrowing and spending a trillion bucks (fast going up to two) in order to invade a country that had neither attacked us nor threatened us. And that doing so was an extremely poor choice of resource allocation, especially when we have tens of millions of children doing without healthcare in this country. But if you were a clever neoconservative like Bill Kristol you’d know better. You might think that wrecking our military and compromising American security over a non-problem – indeed, a problem that people like Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds and Reagans once very much created and encouraged – would be a stupid choice of priorities. But that’s only because you don’t have the foreign policy insight of someone like Bill Kristol. And let me guess – I bet you also think that launching a war that brings chaos to a vital and volatile area, and that massively increases the power of an Iran run by radical theocrats was a really, really dumb idea. But if you were Bill Kristol you’d realize that all we need is a third war against an Islamic country, and we can clean up the whole mess all at once! Or maybe you’re like all those American intelligence agencies, who collectively reported last year that the Iraq war was actually creating anti-American terrorists rather than eradicating them. But if you were as smart as Mr. Bill and his Kristol Ball, you’d know that they’re all just a bunch of long-haired and bearded blame-America-first left-wing Berkeley rejects running covert ops for the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies. Of course they’re going to diss the war! It’s going well, and those unpatriotic spooks can’t stand that because they hate America! Maybe you’re angry because you think the same American soldiers whom people like George W. Bush are always hiding behind should actually have adequate armor to fight the war they’ve been thrust into, rather than their families having to hold bake sales to buy it for them. And maybe you also think they should be treated a wee bit better than they have been at Walter Reed (and far beyond) when they come home wounded, or they have to fight harder than in Anbar to get the benefits owed to them out of the military. But what Bill Kristol knows is that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs! So lighten up on that whole concern-for-the-troops thing already. (Unless you’re the president doing a photo-op, of course.) Don’t tell me you’re chagrined at the idea that American forces may be in Iraq for another decade, or even for a full “generation”. Probably that’s just because you or someone you know might have to go fight there. People like Kristol never do, of course, so why should he worry? Are you angry that well-connected cronies and corporations got rich off this war? That eight billion dollars in cash went completely missing in Iraq? That multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts got paid out for jobs never done? That American soldiers worked and bled and died for peanuts alongside mercenaries making four times as much salary? That we will be paying for this war in interest on loans and expensive treatment of the wounded for generations to come? Yeah? Well Bill Kristol thinks you should get your priorities straight! Have you somehow come to the conclusion that turning one-fifth of Iraq’s 25 million people into either corpses or refugees hasn’t exactly been a great liberating service to that country? You know, sorta like when we told them to rise up but then stood by and watched Saddam mow them down. Or when we turned a blind eye to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against his own people, and even protected him from condemnation for those crimes at the UN? Bill Kristol thinks that’s because you just don’t know the true value of freedom and democracy. Oh, and you put too much emphasis on that whole not-getting-killed thing. Are you one of those whiney liberals who believe that this war – whether one supported the idea of it originally or not – has been ridiculously mishandled from the beginning? That there were never enough troops sent in? That allowing rampant looting was stupid? That failing to have plans for the occupation of a country of 25 million people constitutes criminal negligence? That firing the Iraqi army was just as idiotic as sending thousands of armed and angry men home unemployed sounds like it would be? That purging the national government and infrastructure of all Baath Party members was a prescription for chaos? That allowing civil war between Sunni and Shiite was disastrous? Yeah, well, Bill Kristol knows better. He understands that what’s really important is that the massive levels of violence and pandemonium of these last FIVE years (count ‘em) are now possibly slightly lower than the outrageous levels they’ve long been at, and could conceivably stay that way. Can’t you see the small picture here? Kristol can. I guess that’s why he has a New York Times column and you don’t. I guess that’s why the president listens to his advice and not yours. Who could blame him for being angry and vituperative toward dangerously silly Democrats who don’t see the peril facing our civilization? Such quibblers! So what if the war was sold on completely fabricated lies, was supposed to be a cakewalk but has now lasted longer than World War II, has divided the country and made the world hate us, has squandered our (borrowed) resources and broken our military, has brought instability to a volatile and crucial region and allowed a real national antagonist to double its power, has diverted our resources from the still-uncaptured guy who supposedly attacked us on 9/11, has become a factory for producing anti-American terrorists, has wiped out over a million innocent people and turned more than four million into refugees? So what if this war has now supposedly been ‘saved’ by precisely the same strategy that was vehemently rejected by the same people in the beginning? Let’s keep our priorities straight here, people. All that really matters is that we’ve seen a possible slight improvement in levels of violence in Iraq over the last couple of months (all of which may be due to a host of possible factors, including that there aren’t many people left alive to fight there anymore). Get it? Some people think that burning down your neighbor’s house and having your own catch fire as a result is a highly stupid and really criminal thing to do. What neocons like Bill Kristol understand, though – and what naive liberals will never get – is that what really matters is whether you can slightly diminish the rate at which the flames consume those dwellings, five years after starting the fire. That’s what’s genuinely important – not the ashes where the houses once stood. If you understood that simple principle, you wouldn’t be complaining about this war so much. Rather, you’d be “celebrating” how well it’s going. If you understood this logic, you’d have supported the war from the very beginning, as William Kristol did. (Which of course has nothing to do with his apparent defensiveness about it today, we can all rest assured.) In fact, if you were as smart as Bill Kristol and the other fine folks who brought you the invasion of Iraq, you’d quit with all your smug complaints, once and for all. And you’d realize what a great freakin’ war this really is! Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/What_A_Great_Freakin'_War.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Also, check out Anwaar's recent post:How to Sink AmericaBy Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt Within the next month, the Pentagon will submit its 2009 budget to Congress and it’s a fair bet that it will be even larger than the staggering 2008 one. Like the Army and the Marines, the Pentagon itself is overstretched and under strain and like the two services, which are expected to add 92,000 new troops over the next five years (at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion per 10,000), the Pentagon’s response is never to cut back, but always to expand, always to demand more.
After all, there are those disastrous Afghan and Iraqi wars still eating taxpayer dollars as if there were no tomorrow. Then there’s what enthusiasts like to call “the next war” to think about, which means all those big-ticket weapons, all those jets, ships, and armored vehicles for the future. And don’t forget the still-popular, Rumsfeld-style “netcentric warfare” systems (robots, drones, communications satellites, and the like), not to speak of the killer space toys being developed; and then there’s all that ruined equipment out of Iraq and Afghanistan to be massively replaced and all those ruined human beings to take care of.
You’ll get the gist of this from a recent editorial in the trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology: Continue reading: truthspring.info/2008/01/26/how-to-sink-america/url for this post: tinyurl.com/yv2mtu
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