Brent Budowsky: 62 DEMOCRAT Senators in 2010?
(Only if the creek don't rise, or there is not a 'new 9-11'...)
62 Democratic Senators
by Brent Budowsky
September 13, 2007
http://pundits.thehill.com/2007/09/13/62-democratic-senators/
The resounding Democratic victory in the 2006 Senate campaign creates a historic anomaly in which the Senate Democratic Caucus could increase to more than 60 senators, with historic implications for American politics and all three branches of government.
The media are simply focusing on the 22 Senate Republican seats at stake in 2008. But the Republican senators considering whether to retire, and the smart K Street money, are homed in on the 2010 elections as well, where another 19 Republican Senate seats are at stake.
Do the math. Locked into the fate of one of America’s most unpopular presidents in history, with the national mood favoring a tidal wave of change, with Republicans plagued by endless scandals, and with a president pushing a disastrous war onto the desk of his successor, 41 Senate Republican seats are in jeopardy in 2008 and 2010.
Of course, many of the most distinguished Republican senators choose to retire, fearing they will spend in the rest of their careers in a shrinking Republican minority.
Of course, the smart-money contributors on K Street increasingly tilt toward Senate Democrats, a trend that will accelerate going into November 2008 and skyrocket off the charts by 2010.
In Washington politics, if you want a friend, buy a dog, and if you want influence, don’t bet on the loser. With 41 Republican seats in jeopardy in the next two elections under extremely unfavorable circumstances, with business money wanting friends in the right places, and with a tidal wave of grassroots money from the often-maligned Democratic base, the money advantage to Democrats becomes exponential.
The actions of Senate Republicans on Iraq are inexplicable. Most of them believe the policy is a disaster and know that the overwhelming majority of military leaders (including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Fallon and Gen. James Jones) privately disagree with the proposals of Gen. David Petraeus, and even Petraeus tells Congress that he does not know whether his proposals make America safer.
Nevertheless, close to 100 percent of the Senate Republicans have voted for the Bush blunders close to 100 percent of the time for 100 percent of the duration of the war. When the president puts the day of military reckoning on the desk of his successor in January 2009, he puts the day of political reckoning on the backs of Republicans in November 2008.
From the summer before the 2006 elections through Election Day in 2008 the Republicans endure a news-flow nightmare. From sex scandals to war scandals, from corruption in Iraq reconstruction to corruption on Capitol Hill, the nightmare escalates as the Bush years come to a close with score-settling daggers and scandal-revealing leaks that will reach a crescendo in November 2008.
The demeaning attacks on Democrats by Republican propagandists only backfire, with 70 percent of the nation disapproving their policies, and 60 percent of the nation distrusting their integrity. Giant swaths of American society, from homeowners to Hispanics to military moms, feel threatened by Republican rule.
Republicans think they demean Democrats; 70 percent of Americans think they are demeaning them. Republicans think they outmaneuver Democrats on the Senate floor with endless obstructionist filibusters, while in fact, they fall into the political trap set by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and look to Americans like the party of incumbency blockading the nation’s hunger for change.
The president continues to try to exploit the Sept. 11 terror attacks while every American sees Osama bin Laden on television, intelligence reports detail al Qaeda’s resurgence on the Bush watch, analysts detail weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security, and Petraeus struggles with the question of whether his plan makes America more safe.
The stage is set for a Senate tsunami.
If Republicans are smart, they will listen to Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), meet with Reid, respect the true opinion of the majority of military leaders, fight to change the policy in Iraq, and recognize that the carnage in Iraq is not only bad for the nation but a cause of the carnage that is headed for the Senate Republican Conference like a freight train coming around the bend.
Note: The preceding post originally appeared in The Hill’s print edition on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007. — Ed.
Archived under: Campaign
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) CONFLICT OF INTEREST, BILLION DOLLAR DEFENSE CONTRACTS....
Senator Dianne Feinstein's billion-dollar conflicts of interest: she and her husband PROFIT from military contracts awarded by HER COMMITTEE, the Senate Military Appropriations Subcommittee.
http://www.metroactive.com/feinstein/
http://www.metroactive.com/feinstein/
Pat Buchanan: Under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, RETREAT is the signature of the Democrat "majority"
Nancy Pelosi's reign as first female Speaker of the House of Representatives (leader of Congress), and as the Democratic Party's de facto leader, is marked by FAILURE. Speaker Pelosi had one option open to her to restrain the power of the Bush White House without making the Democrats look like "cut and runners" fleeing from the Iraq war: she could COORDINATE and FOCUS the many congressional INVESTIGATIONS into CRIMINAL CONDUCT by the Bush administration, FORCING the press and media to cover those hearings and report on White House transgressions, leading to an IMPEACHMENT of the president for "High Crimes and Misdemeanors."
Ms. Pelosi not only took "impeachment off the table" (breaking the cardinal Washington political rule of "Power: USE it or LOOSE it"), but went OUT OF HER WAY to UNDERCUT coordination and prosecution of those investigations. Even when embattled Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald took on the role of David vs. the Philistine White House (that is, Fitzgerald taking on the ENTIRE powers of the federal government at the disposal of President Bush or Vice President Cheney) and came back with a magnificent legal victory: PROVING that there was PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE at the very top tiers of the White House (what is seldom remarked on is that Lewis "Scooter" Libby was one of the President's SENIOR ADVISORS at the same time he was the Vice President's most senior advisor, or Chief of Staff) , Speaker Pelosi PRETENDED NOT TO NOTICE! and effectively ALLOWED President Bush to write a conditional pardon (a "commutation of sentence" which preserved Mr. Libby's 5th Amendment rights, which a pardon would not have done) WITH NO POLITICAL COST.
Likewise, Speaker Pelosi has ALLOWED the PERJURY, OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, CIA agent 'outing' scandal; Iraq war contracts; distortions-to-war; Torture, and other Congressional investigations to be relegated to BACK PAGE NEWS, as the media can now focus on its favorite subjects, America's imperial military might (huge contracts for American defense corporations which filter down to America's media conglomerates, i.e., Boeing and Lockheed-Martin 'soft advertisements' on local TV) and the 2008 election HORSE RACE. The media loves to cover a "he said, she said" horse race, because it is easy: merely invite a candidate or analyst in to the production studios, and ask them questions on their policy positions and agenda. THAT'S IT! That's the media's total cost for covering a horse-race election, apart from hiring a few "experts" and talking heads to spin the race in the network's favor, and airing some video footage of local campaign events. Far, far easier than sending reporters and production teams to distant, dangerous locations. Also, we humans are biologically predisposed to look at faces. There is compelling drama in a human face that even explosions and war footage cannot supplant. As every movie director knows, the close-up and cut-in are the keys to a good movie - and the networks well understand that putting faces on the small screen is all it takes to draw viewer attention.
For these reasons, Nancy Pelosi has completely fallen into the "best possible outcome" scenario of the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House. Impeachment is forever off the table as America races towards election 2008; the conduct if not crimes that warranted impeachment are "back page news" if not already forgotten; the president has wielded his PARDON pen unmolested, and will do so again; Congressional investigators (Waxman, Conyers, etc.) now look like clowns in a three-ring circus, from the sheer overwhelming number of investigations they are running, if not because their conclusions will be toothless (no impeachment); the Republican VOTE STEALING machines and methods are still in place, and American public can no longer tolerate the arcane and disjointed investigations into those many methods and tactics (again, without the coordination and direction of small investigations into a larger whole, the public can not pay attention indefinitely); and even President Bush's party hack replacements for PURGED prosecutors remain in place, with the sole exception of Tim Griffin, who resigned in disgrace as US Attorney for Arkansas when it was disclosed that not only was he Karl Rove's assistant, but that his entire legal career had included not one single prosecution.
Today, not only has Speaker Pelosi FAILED to enact JUSTICE against the many wrongdoings of the Bush-Cheney White House, but she has thus prepared the ground for future Republicans to LAY THE BLAME FOR THE IRAQ DEBACLE - on DEMOCRATS.
==================================
Pelosi: General Patraeus' plan effectively means TEN MORE YEARS OF WAR. (She is CORRECT about that.)
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jLlOEu91_VfGVnA_RLQLmGfxsVxQ
General Patraeus MISLEADS in his Congressional testimony: The Iraq army and police are some of the WORST ELEMENTS of the Iraq problem:
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Iraqi_Reporter_Situation_100_times_worse_0910.html
America as "the new Rome" - << These days, in the imperial America of George W Bush, all you have to do is stave off total disaster and make the case that the troops should stay in a faraway country even longer. >>
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/international/article2953590.ece
Like the Clintons in the 1996 reelection campaign, Representative Pelosi has become MESMERIZED by the Democrat's ability to RAISE MONEY, in this case because of an unpopular war and administration. But the Clinton's wallowing in fundraising and cash in the mid-90's left them open to the most sensational Right-Wing accusations - that they had "sold out to China" ("TREASON!") for Chinese money
Even those Americans who didn't believe the "Treason!" accusations looked with scorn on the Clinton's fundraising neediness. (Yesterday, Hillary Cliton was forced to return $850,000 to donors "bundled" by a tainted campaign fundraiser, giving more ammunition for the Hillary-haters out there.)
Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats need to realize that there is more to leadership than fundraisers, looking pretty, and winning popularity contests. Sometimes you must FORCE the media to look in dark corners, and GO OUT ON A LIMB to PROSECUTE government misconduct, as Patrick Fitzgerald did. Speaker Pelosi took the most powerful arrow in the congressional quiver (impeachment) broke it, and threw it on the ground before she was even inaugurated, and then NEGLECTED to coordinate and FOCUS the many investigations into impeachable offenses, thereby making those investigations look useless, petty, mean, partisan, vindictive, and wasteful.
Indeed, Speaker Pelosi has almost completely duplicated the great failure of the incoming 1993 Clinton administration, as detailed in Chapter 1. of Robert Parry's book, "Secrecy and Privilege." Parry notes that in 1993 there were a HOST of high-level CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS into the previous Republican administrations (Bush Sr. and Reagan), but that starting in 1993 President Clinton effectively pulled the rug out from under those investigations: THEREBY EMPOWERING Republican critics to throw accusations and investigations against his own administration!
The history of the Democratic Party, post Watergate, may well be that it has utterly failed to reign in the worst impulses of an imperial, unaccountable government, because every time the Democrats were in a position to push a successful criminal prosecution to its full political outcome, they refused to do so, by undercutting the prosecution.
And now, as the America media and political parties race to election 2008, it will be up to individual candidates to make up the slack - in impossibility, given the media's tendency to hyper-examine if not distort Democratic candidates' positions and comments - and the Bush administration remains in full control over the ENTIRE federal government and bureaucracy, including UNCONTESTED CONTROL of the US military and nuclear arsenal.
Having undercut the prosecutions of criminal misconduct by the Bush administration, will Speaker Pelosi's 110th Congress now go down in history as the Congress that DID NOTHING to stop the US-Iran war?
===========================================
Retreat of the (Antiwar) Democrats
by Patrick Buchanan
Tue Sep 11, 2001
http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20070911/cm_uc_crpbux/op_333787
In November 2006, Republicans were voted out of power in the Congress and Democrats installed to bring an end to U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq.
ADVERTISEMENT
The war had been going on as long as America's war on Nazi Germany. No end was in sight. U.S. casualties and costs were rising. Bush's approval rating had sunk to record lows.
The day after the GOP rout, Bush cashiered his war minister, Donald Rumsfeld. In December, the Iraq Study Group, chaired by Bush I Secretary of State James Baker, released its report.
"The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. ... A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian disaster. ... The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire. ... Pessimism is pervasive. ... Violence is increasing in scope, complexity and lethality."
His policy collapsing, Bush made a last throw of the dice. Gen. David Petraeus was named to command U.S. forces, and his request for a "surge" of 21,500 additional U.S. troops accepted. Petraeus also demanded and got 10,000 more support troops.
Still, by April, as the "surge" brigades began to arrive, Harry Reid, Senate majority leader, was declaring, "This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything." Democrats, the party base goading them on, tried to impose upon Bush, as a condition of further funding for the war, deadlines for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Bush vetoed the bill. He was sustained. Then, he rubbed the Democrats' noses in their defeat by demanding and getting $100 billion more to finance the surge and the war. There are today 30,000 more troops in Iraq than when the Democratic Congress was elected.
As Petraeus testifies, the antiwar movement appears broken. Reid has said his party will not try to de-fund the war or impose new deadlines. It will follow GOP Sen. John Warner, who has suggested it might be helpful if the president withdrew a brigade by Christmas, to signal the Iraqi government to get its house in order. Petraeus has agreed to that.
Next April is the date when the Iraq Study Group said all U.S. combat brigades should be out of Iraq. By then, Bush and Petraeus will have tens of thousands more troops in Iraq than when the Democrats were elected and the ISG reported. The lame duck is not all that lame.
What happened to the party of Speaker Pelosi and Reid, which was going to end U.S. involvement in the war and not permit Bush to pursue victory the way Richard Nixon pursued it in Vietnam for four years?
Answer: Terrified of the possible consequences of the policies they recommend, Democrats lack the courage to impose those policies.
When it comes to issues of war, Democrats are an intimidated lot. Sens. Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Dodd and Reid were all stampeded by Bush into voting him a blank check for war in October 2002. Why? Because they feared Bush would declare them weak or unpatriotic if they denied him the authority to go to war, at a time of his choosing, until he had made a more compelling case for war.
Now they regret what they did. But, in a showdown, they will do it again. For Democrats have been psychologically damaged by 60 years of GOP attacks on them as the party of retreat and surrender.
Their hero, FDR, was posthumously ripped apart for Yalta, the appeasement of "Uncle Joe," and the abandonment to communism of Poland and Eastern Europe. Truman fired Gen. MacArthur, fought a no-win war in Korea and was savaged, along with Gen. Marshall and Dean Acheson, by Joe McCarthy. By 1952, Truman was at 23 percent and finished. In January 1954, the Tailgunner was riding high at 50 percent.
Came then Vietnam and the credible charge that the Liberal Establishment, The Best and the Brightest, had marched us in, then cut and run, abandoning our Vietnamese and Cambodian allies to a holocaust, and bringing on the worst strategic defeat in U.S. history.
When Ronald Reagan, in the closing days of the 1980 campaign, declared Vietnam a "noble cause," the liberal media leapt on it as a gaffe. It wasn't. Reagan was wired in to Middle America.
John Kerry understood this. Thus, he ran in 2004 as a decorated Vietnam vet, not the onetime icon of the antiwar movement.
Bush is winning today because he has jettisoned the jabber about global democracy and argues that a U.S. withdrawal risks a strategic disaster, national humiliation, massacre of our friends and triumph for al-Qaida. Democrats, fearing he may be right, are in paralysis.
Scourged for 20 years over "Who Lost China?" they don't want to spend the next 20 years answering "Who Lost the Middle East?"
Thus the rout of the peace Democrats. But the movement will be back. For, Petraeus' good news notwithstanding, there is no light yet visible at the end of this tunnel.
To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
Ms. Pelosi not only took "impeachment off the table" (breaking the cardinal Washington political rule of "Power: USE it or LOOSE it"), but went OUT OF HER WAY to UNDERCUT coordination and prosecution of those investigations. Even when embattled Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald took on the role of David vs. the Philistine White House (that is, Fitzgerald taking on the ENTIRE powers of the federal government at the disposal of President Bush or Vice President Cheney) and came back with a magnificent legal victory: PROVING that there was PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE at the very top tiers of the White House (what is seldom remarked on is that Lewis "Scooter" Libby was one of the President's SENIOR ADVISORS at the same time he was the Vice President's most senior advisor, or Chief of Staff) , Speaker Pelosi PRETENDED NOT TO NOTICE! and effectively ALLOWED President Bush to write a conditional pardon (a "commutation of sentence" which preserved Mr. Libby's 5th Amendment rights, which a pardon would not have done) WITH NO POLITICAL COST.
Likewise, Speaker Pelosi has ALLOWED the PERJURY, OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, CIA agent 'outing' scandal; Iraq war contracts; distortions-to-war; Torture, and other Congressional investigations to be relegated to BACK PAGE NEWS, as the media can now focus on its favorite subjects, America's imperial military might (huge contracts for American defense corporations which filter down to America's media conglomerates, i.e., Boeing and Lockheed-Martin 'soft advertisements' on local TV) and the 2008 election HORSE RACE. The media loves to cover a "he said, she said" horse race, because it is easy: merely invite a candidate or analyst in to the production studios, and ask them questions on their policy positions and agenda. THAT'S IT! That's the media's total cost for covering a horse-race election, apart from hiring a few "experts" and talking heads to spin the race in the network's favor, and airing some video footage of local campaign events. Far, far easier than sending reporters and production teams to distant, dangerous locations. Also, we humans are biologically predisposed to look at faces. There is compelling drama in a human face that even explosions and war footage cannot supplant. As every movie director knows, the close-up and cut-in are the keys to a good movie - and the networks well understand that putting faces on the small screen is all it takes to draw viewer attention.
For these reasons, Nancy Pelosi has completely fallen into the "best possible outcome" scenario of the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House. Impeachment is forever off the table as America races towards election 2008; the conduct if not crimes that warranted impeachment are "back page news" if not already forgotten; the president has wielded his PARDON pen unmolested, and will do so again; Congressional investigators (Waxman, Conyers, etc.) now look like clowns in a three-ring circus, from the sheer overwhelming number of investigations they are running, if not because their conclusions will be toothless (no impeachment); the Republican VOTE STEALING machines and methods are still in place, and American public can no longer tolerate the arcane and disjointed investigations into those many methods and tactics (again, without the coordination and direction of small investigations into a larger whole, the public can not pay attention indefinitely); and even President Bush's party hack replacements for PURGED prosecutors remain in place, with the sole exception of Tim Griffin, who resigned in disgrace as US Attorney for Arkansas when it was disclosed that not only was he Karl Rove's assistant, but that his entire legal career had included not one single prosecution.
Today, not only has Speaker Pelosi FAILED to enact JUSTICE against the many wrongdoings of the Bush-Cheney White House, but she has thus prepared the ground for future Republicans to LAY THE BLAME FOR THE IRAQ DEBACLE - on DEMOCRATS.
==================================
Pelosi: General Patraeus' plan effectively means TEN MORE YEARS OF WAR. (She is CORRECT about that.)
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jLlOEu91_VfGVnA_RLQLmGfxsVxQ
General Patraeus MISLEADS in his Congressional testimony: The Iraq army and police are some of the WORST ELEMENTS of the Iraq problem:
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Iraqi_Reporter_Situation_100_times_worse_0910.html
America as "the new Rome" - << These days, in the imperial America of George W Bush, all you have to do is stave off total disaster and make the case that the troops should stay in a faraway country even longer. >>
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/international/article2953590.ece
Like the Clintons in the 1996 reelection campaign, Representative Pelosi has become MESMERIZED by the Democrat's ability to RAISE MONEY, in this case because of an unpopular war and administration. But the Clinton's wallowing in fundraising and cash in the mid-90's left them open to the most sensational Right-Wing accusations - that they had "sold out to China" ("TREASON!") for Chinese money
Even those Americans who didn't believe the "Treason!" accusations looked with scorn on the Clinton's fundraising neediness. (Yesterday, Hillary Cliton was forced to return $850,000 to donors "bundled" by a tainted campaign fundraiser, giving more ammunition for the Hillary-haters out there.)
Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats need to realize that there is more to leadership than fundraisers, looking pretty, and winning popularity contests. Sometimes you must FORCE the media to look in dark corners, and GO OUT ON A LIMB to PROSECUTE government misconduct, as Patrick Fitzgerald did. Speaker Pelosi took the most powerful arrow in the congressional quiver (impeachment) broke it, and threw it on the ground before she was even inaugurated, and then NEGLECTED to coordinate and FOCUS the many investigations into impeachable offenses, thereby making those investigations look useless, petty, mean, partisan, vindictive, and wasteful.
Indeed, Speaker Pelosi has almost completely duplicated the great failure of the incoming 1993 Clinton administration, as detailed in Chapter 1. of Robert Parry's book, "Secrecy and Privilege." Parry notes that in 1993 there were a HOST of high-level CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS into the previous Republican administrations (Bush Sr. and Reagan), but that starting in 1993 President Clinton effectively pulled the rug out from under those investigations: THEREBY EMPOWERING Republican critics to throw accusations and investigations against his own administration!
The history of the Democratic Party, post Watergate, may well be that it has utterly failed to reign in the worst impulses of an imperial, unaccountable government, because every time the Democrats were in a position to push a successful criminal prosecution to its full political outcome, they refused to do so, by undercutting the prosecution.
And now, as the America media and political parties race to election 2008, it will be up to individual candidates to make up the slack - in impossibility, given the media's tendency to hyper-examine if not distort Democratic candidates' positions and comments - and the Bush administration remains in full control over the ENTIRE federal government and bureaucracy, including UNCONTESTED CONTROL of the US military and nuclear arsenal.
Having undercut the prosecutions of criminal misconduct by the Bush administration, will Speaker Pelosi's 110th Congress now go down in history as the Congress that DID NOTHING to stop the US-Iran war?
===========================================
Retreat of the (Antiwar) Democrats
by Patrick Buchanan
Tue Sep 11, 2001
http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20070911/cm_uc_crpbux/op_333787
In November 2006, Republicans were voted out of power in the Congress and Democrats installed to bring an end to U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq.
ADVERTISEMENT
The war had been going on as long as America's war on Nazi Germany. No end was in sight. U.S. casualties and costs were rising. Bush's approval rating had sunk to record lows.
The day after the GOP rout, Bush cashiered his war minister, Donald Rumsfeld. In December, the Iraq Study Group, chaired by Bush I Secretary of State James Baker, released its report.
"The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. ... A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian disaster. ... The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire. ... Pessimism is pervasive. ... Violence is increasing in scope, complexity and lethality."
His policy collapsing, Bush made a last throw of the dice. Gen. David Petraeus was named to command U.S. forces, and his request for a "surge" of 21,500 additional U.S. troops accepted. Petraeus also demanded and got 10,000 more support troops.
Still, by April, as the "surge" brigades began to arrive, Harry Reid, Senate majority leader, was declaring, "This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything." Democrats, the party base goading them on, tried to impose upon Bush, as a condition of further funding for the war, deadlines for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Bush vetoed the bill. He was sustained. Then, he rubbed the Democrats' noses in their defeat by demanding and getting $100 billion more to finance the surge and the war. There are today 30,000 more troops in Iraq than when the Democratic Congress was elected.
As Petraeus testifies, the antiwar movement appears broken. Reid has said his party will not try to de-fund the war or impose new deadlines. It will follow GOP Sen. John Warner, who has suggested it might be helpful if the president withdrew a brigade by Christmas, to signal the Iraqi government to get its house in order. Petraeus has agreed to that.
Next April is the date when the Iraq Study Group said all U.S. combat brigades should be out of Iraq. By then, Bush and Petraeus will have tens of thousands more troops in Iraq than when the Democrats were elected and the ISG reported. The lame duck is not all that lame.
What happened to the party of Speaker Pelosi and Reid, which was going to end U.S. involvement in the war and not permit Bush to pursue victory the way Richard Nixon pursued it in Vietnam for four years?
Answer: Terrified of the possible consequences of the policies they recommend, Democrats lack the courage to impose those policies.
When it comes to issues of war, Democrats are an intimidated lot. Sens. Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Dodd and Reid were all stampeded by Bush into voting him a blank check for war in October 2002. Why? Because they feared Bush would declare them weak or unpatriotic if they denied him the authority to go to war, at a time of his choosing, until he had made a more compelling case for war.
Now they regret what they did. But, in a showdown, they will do it again. For Democrats have been psychologically damaged by 60 years of GOP attacks on them as the party of retreat and surrender.
Their hero, FDR, was posthumously ripped apart for Yalta, the appeasement of "Uncle Joe," and the abandonment to communism of Poland and Eastern Europe. Truman fired Gen. MacArthur, fought a no-win war in Korea and was savaged, along with Gen. Marshall and Dean Acheson, by Joe McCarthy. By 1952, Truman was at 23 percent and finished. In January 1954, the Tailgunner was riding high at 50 percent.
Came then Vietnam and the credible charge that the Liberal Establishment, The Best and the Brightest, had marched us in, then cut and run, abandoning our Vietnamese and Cambodian allies to a holocaust, and bringing on the worst strategic defeat in U.S. history.
When Ronald Reagan, in the closing days of the 1980 campaign, declared Vietnam a "noble cause," the liberal media leapt on it as a gaffe. It wasn't. Reagan was wired in to Middle America.
John Kerry understood this. Thus, he ran in 2004 as a decorated Vietnam vet, not the onetime icon of the antiwar movement.
Bush is winning today because he has jettisoned the jabber about global democracy and argues that a U.S. withdrawal risks a strategic disaster, national humiliation, massacre of our friends and triumph for al-Qaida. Democrats, fearing he may be right, are in paralysis.
Scourged for 20 years over "Who Lost China?" they don't want to spend the next 20 years answering "Who Lost the Middle East?"
Thus the rout of the peace Democrats. But the movement will be back. For, Petraeus' good news notwithstanding, there is no light yet visible at the end of this tunnel.
To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
General Patraeus Lied in Testimony to Congress: Iraq Army is PART OF THE PROBLEM of insurgency and death squads....
After supporing Saddam's Baathist, Sunni-dominated secular regime in Iraq for over two decades - including through Saddam's brutal suppression of Shiite rebellions, and his genocidal ANFAL campaign that used poison gas on Kurdish towns and refugees (insert photo "Don Rumsfeld, personal emmissary from President Reagan, shakes Saddam's hands" here), the United States under George W. Bush invaded Iraq and REVERSED that policy, eliminating even street-level Baathists from the Iraqi army and police, and inserting SHIITE men and officials in to those positions. The Shiites well remembered not only Saddam's repression, but American tolerance of those mass executions; and (spurred to some extent by Sunni fundamentalists, eg Al Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni attacks), many Shiites formed death squads to ethnically cleanse Baghdad or other towns and cities, just as Arab Sunnis (and Shiite conscripts) had ethnically cleansed Kurds from towns and villages in Northern Iraq during the genocidal "Anfal" camapaign. (Halabja the most well known example of Saddam's poison-gas attacks on Kurdish towns.)
This basic, simple debacle - a massive purge of even street level Sunni officials from government by the American occupation - was greatly encouraged by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz led early occuption, which featured:
#1. GROSS CORRUPTION in handing out reconstruction contracts, most of which went to politically connected American companies - the 20th Century equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush, where White settlers were given permission by the federal government to homestead territories recently cleansed of native American Indians. Perhaps a more fitting comparison would be to "bleeding Kansas," where the governments of both Slave and Free states encouraged their own citizens to settle in Kansas and Nebraska, leaving the question of legalized slavery to the voters of those states. The violence created by this contest for supremacy on both sides was at times genocidal (massacres and 'ethnic cleansing'), as Southern states were determined to expand slavery, and northern states were determined to prevent that expansion. In Iraq, the Bush administration saw an opportunity to reward supporters with billions of dollars of federal (tax dollar) contracts, in a barely hidden effort to turn Iraq into an American colony.
#2. The Gross INCOMPETENCE of the occupation. Even today, it is scarcely believable that DON RUMSFELD allowed Iraqi insurgents and common looters to cart off tons and tons and tons of explosives, artillery shells, and other munitions from Saddam's ammunition bunker complexes; not only under the gaze of US spy satellites, but even as IAEA weapons inspectors, in both Iraq and in Washington, DC, were BEGGING the US military to SECURE THOSE BUNKERS! Rumsfeld, Wolfotitz, Perle, Feith, and other Penatgon leaders were so enamored of their "crony corruption for administraton supporters" and "Iraq as clean slate to demonstrate Privatization economics" agenda, that they actually allowed massive looting of not only government offices in cities, but ammunition bunkers in the countryside that could be easily guarded! This was but the tip of the iceberg of gross US leadership incompetence in the early Iraq occupation, which incompetence included spending millions of dollars for US contractors to not do work that local, Iraqi contractors would have done for one-tenth the money; failing to get the water, sanitation, and electrical systems up and running in towns and cities; encouraging looting as reprisals against Baathists and Sunnis; and NINE BILLION DOLLARS of Iraqi assetts (cash from US) distributed throughout Baghdad and other cities - with NO ACCOUNTING, oversight, or even receipts! American soldiers and families are today daily paying the bill for the GROSS INCOMPETENCE and CORRUPTION of that early occupation - with Dick Cheney and George Bush touting Iraq as their "leadership success."
<< When asked about General Petraeus' suggestion last week that "Iraqi soldiers and police are very much in the fight," Nuri replied, "I think that's not true at all. ... I have to be honest with you and with everyone else in the world. When I was traveling around Iraq, in Baghdad or anywhere else, I was afraid of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police more than I was afraid of a militia or unknown men." >>
=============================
Iraqi reporter: Baghdad '100 times worse' than a year ago
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Monday September 10, 2007
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Iraqi_Reporter_Situation_100_times_worse_0910.html
Ayub Nuri, an Iraqi journalist residing in the United States, told CNN on Monday that even when he was last in Baghdad in 2006, "the situation was very, very dangerous," but that things are much worse now.
"When I speak to my friends and family these days on the phone, they tell me that it is 100 times worse than when I was there," Nuri stated. "Even the regular people cannot leave their own neighborhoods. ... If you go to another neighborhood, that's completely unknown to you, and you might not be able to come home alive."
When asked about General Petraeus' suggestion last week that "Iraqi soldiers and police are very much in the fight," Nuri replied, "I think that's not true at all. ... I have to be honest with you and with everyone else in the world. When I was traveling around Iraq, in Baghdad or anywhere else, I was afraid of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police more than I was afraid of a militia or unknown men."
Nuri explained that after the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded Saddam's army, "They were desperate to recreate another Iraqi army, and in case of desperation, of course, you accept anyone to join your army, and many of them were criminals, many of them were drug dealers, and many of them had ... affiliation only to their own areas." He said that as a result, many Iraqis these days would prefer to have their neighborhood patrolled by a US unit rather than an Iraqi unit.
"I personally do not have any faith or any hope in the Maliki government," Nuri stated, though he emphasized that the problem wasn't just with Maliki. "The Iraqi government is neither willing nor they are able to do anything," he concluded.
The following video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast on September 10.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Iraqi_Reporter_Situation_100_times_worse_0910.html
This basic, simple debacle - a massive purge of even street level Sunni officials from government by the American occupation - was greatly encouraged by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz led early occuption, which featured:
#1. GROSS CORRUPTION in handing out reconstruction contracts, most of which went to politically connected American companies - the 20th Century equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush, where White settlers were given permission by the federal government to homestead territories recently cleansed of native American Indians. Perhaps a more fitting comparison would be to "bleeding Kansas," where the governments of both Slave and Free states encouraged their own citizens to settle in Kansas and Nebraska, leaving the question of legalized slavery to the voters of those states. The violence created by this contest for supremacy on both sides was at times genocidal (massacres and 'ethnic cleansing'), as Southern states were determined to expand slavery, and northern states were determined to prevent that expansion. In Iraq, the Bush administration saw an opportunity to reward supporters with billions of dollars of federal (tax dollar) contracts, in a barely hidden effort to turn Iraq into an American colony.
#2. The Gross INCOMPETENCE of the occupation. Even today, it is scarcely believable that DON RUMSFELD allowed Iraqi insurgents and common looters to cart off tons and tons and tons of explosives, artillery shells, and other munitions from Saddam's ammunition bunker complexes; not only under the gaze of US spy satellites, but even as IAEA weapons inspectors, in both Iraq and in Washington, DC, were BEGGING the US military to SECURE THOSE BUNKERS! Rumsfeld, Wolfotitz, Perle, Feith, and other Penatgon leaders were so enamored of their "crony corruption for administraton supporters" and "Iraq as clean slate to demonstrate Privatization economics" agenda, that they actually allowed massive looting of not only government offices in cities, but ammunition bunkers in the countryside that could be easily guarded! This was but the tip of the iceberg of gross US leadership incompetence in the early Iraq occupation, which incompetence included spending millions of dollars for US contractors to not do work that local, Iraqi contractors would have done for one-tenth the money; failing to get the water, sanitation, and electrical systems up and running in towns and cities; encouraging looting as reprisals against Baathists and Sunnis; and NINE BILLION DOLLARS of Iraqi assetts (cash from US) distributed throughout Baghdad and other cities - with NO ACCOUNTING, oversight, or even receipts! American soldiers and families are today daily paying the bill for the GROSS INCOMPETENCE and CORRUPTION of that early occupation - with Dick Cheney and George Bush touting Iraq as their "leadership success."
<< When asked about General Petraeus' suggestion last week that "Iraqi soldiers and police are very much in the fight," Nuri replied, "I think that's not true at all. ... I have to be honest with you and with everyone else in the world. When I was traveling around Iraq, in Baghdad or anywhere else, I was afraid of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police more than I was afraid of a militia or unknown men." >>
=============================
Iraqi reporter: Baghdad '100 times worse' than a year ago
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Monday September 10, 2007
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Iraqi_Reporter_Situation_100_times_worse_0910.html
Ayub Nuri, an Iraqi journalist residing in the United States, told CNN on Monday that even when he was last in Baghdad in 2006, "the situation was very, very dangerous," but that things are much worse now.
"When I speak to my friends and family these days on the phone, they tell me that it is 100 times worse than when I was there," Nuri stated. "Even the regular people cannot leave their own neighborhoods. ... If you go to another neighborhood, that's completely unknown to you, and you might not be able to come home alive."
When asked about General Petraeus' suggestion last week that "Iraqi soldiers and police are very much in the fight," Nuri replied, "I think that's not true at all. ... I have to be honest with you and with everyone else in the world. When I was traveling around Iraq, in Baghdad or anywhere else, I was afraid of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police more than I was afraid of a militia or unknown men."
Nuri explained that after the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded Saddam's army, "They were desperate to recreate another Iraqi army, and in case of desperation, of course, you accept anyone to join your army, and many of them were criminals, many of them were drug dealers, and many of them had ... affiliation only to their own areas." He said that as a result, many Iraqis these days would prefer to have their neighborhood patrolled by a US unit rather than an Iraqi unit.
"I personally do not have any faith or any hope in the Maliki government," Nuri stated, though he emphasized that the problem wasn't just with Maliki. "The Iraqi government is neither willing nor they are able to do anything," he concluded.
The following video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast on September 10.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Iraqi_Reporter_Situation_100_times_worse_0910.html
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
REPUBLICANS Sharply Question Gen. Patraeus, Amb. Crocker re open-ended Iraq occupation..
Illustrating the growing strain the Iraq war and occupation has on American households, REPUBLICAN Senators Chuck Hagel,Richard Lugar, Norm Coleman, and John Sunnunu, all on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, grilled the Administration's spokesmen, General David Patraeus and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, about the long term plans for the US military in Iraq, where General Patraeus is the US commander who has been reporting directly to the White House in past weeks.
Senator Hagel has announced his frustration with the US political process, and is not running for an almost assured re-election campaign. Norm Coleman, whose victory over former Vice President Walter Mondale had suspicious election returns (in an election shortly after the untimely death of incumbent Senator Paul Wellstone in a fatal campaign flying crash), is now facing a well funded and articulate Democratic oppenent in liberal Minnesota. While John Sunnunu represents the fickle, independent voters of New Hampshire, Richard Lugar represents the rock-red state of Indiana.
Republicans sharply question Iraq policy
By Ann Flaherty, Associated Press Writer
9-11-2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq
WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans sharply challenged President Bush's top military general and ambassador in Iraq on Tuesday in a sign that some within the GOP retain serious misgivings about the protracted war.
"Are we going to continue to invest blood and treasure at the same rate we're doing now? For what?" asked Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who supports legislation setting a deadline to bring troops home.
The deep-seated doubt expressed at the hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reflected just how far Congress had come since the war began over four years ago. And Republican senators raised tough questions that rivaled those asked by Democratic presidential hopefuls on the panel.
The exchanges came just a day after the top U.S. war commander, Gen. David Petraeus, recommended keeping the bulk of U.S. forces in Iraq — some 130,000 troops — deployed there through next summer.
Whereas Republicans were once deferential to the thinking of officials running the war, particularly uniformed officers, Hagel and other GOP senators on the panel said they doubted that simply giving war commanders more time would necessarily yield results.
"In my judgment, some type of success in Iraq is possible, but as policymakers, we should acknowledge that we are facing extraordinarily narrow margins for achieving our goals," said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the committee.
Sen. Norm Coleman said he appreciates plans to return troop levels to 130,000 — down from the 168,000 currently in Iraq — but that he wants a longer-term vision other than suggestions that Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will return to Capitol Hill in mid-March to give another assessment.
"Americans want to see light at the end of the tunnel," said Coleman, R-Minn.
Echoing testimony given to the House on Monday, Petraeus and Crocker acknowledged that Iraq remains largely dysfunctional but said violence in recent months had decreased since the influx of the added 30,000 troops deployed earlier this year.
Crocker said he believed Iraq had "almost completely unraveled" in late 2006 and early 2007. The increased security, if given more time, could pave the way for political reconciliation, he said.
The ambassador said he fears that announcing troop withdrawals, as Democrats want, would focus Iraqi attention on "building the walls, stocking ammunition and getting ready for a big nasty street fight" rather than working toward reconciliation.
"I do believe that Iraq's leaders have the will to tackle the country's pressing problems, although it will take longer than we initially anticipated because of the environment and the gravity of the issue," Crocker said.
The stakes are high, he added.
"An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering — well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq's borders," Crocker said.
Hagel asked Petraeus why his view of conditions on the ground in Iraq was more positive than independent assessments on the war, as well as assessments of some outspoken noncommissioned officers.
"We've got too many disconnects here, general," Hagel said.
At one point in the hearing, Petraeus said "there are 165,000 different views on the ground" and it can change daily.
When asked by Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., what factors would influence further drawdowns of troops, Petraeus said the strain on ground forces would be a factor as it was with his latest recommendations. Iraq's ability to make political progress also will be considered, he said.
The hearing fell on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The fact of the matter is that American lives remain in jeopardy and, as I said, if every single jihadi in the world was killed tomorrow, we'd still have a major, major war on our hands," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Republican support for the Iraq war remains on shaky ground in Congress, epitomized by Lugar's opening statement Tuesday and Hagel's heated questioning of the general's recommendations. But that support wasn't lost.
Many rank-and-file Republicans — like Lugar — said they still were uneasy about the lack of political progress in Iraq. But they also remained reluctant to embrace legislation ordering troops home by next spring, increasing the likelihood that Democrats will have to soften their approach if they want to pass an anti-war proposal.
Democrats had anticipated that a larger number of Republicans by now would have turned against Bush on the war because of grim poll numbers and the upcoming 2008 elections.
Without GOP support, Democrats repeatedly have fallen short of enough votes to pass legislation ordering troop withdrawals to begin this fall and be completed by spring.
In Baghdad, the Iraqi government on Tuesday welcomed Petraeus' testimony and said the need for U.S. military support would decrease over time.
National Security Adviser Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, reading from a government statement, said the Iraqis believed that "in the near future" the need for U.S. and other coalition forces "will decrease."
Moderate lawmakers say there is plenty of room for compromise in the deeply divided Congress. Aides say bipartisan proposals are in the works and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has reached out to several GOP senators to discuss potential common ground. However, a major hurdle remaining are politically influential organizations like MoveOn.org who say Democrats shouldn't water down the debate with more moderate legislation.
Alternative legislative proposals on Iraq include:
_Ordering troop withdrawals to begin this fall, but set the spring date of completion as a nonbinding goal.
_Limit the mission of U.S. troops to training the Iraqi security forces, fighting terrorists and protecting U.S. assets, but leave it up to military commanders to determine force levels.
_Demanding Bush submit a new war strategy to Congress by fall that would limit the mission of U.S. forces and begin drawing down force levels in coming months.
Senator Hagel has announced his frustration with the US political process, and is not running for an almost assured re-election campaign. Norm Coleman, whose victory over former Vice President Walter Mondale had suspicious election returns (in an election shortly after the untimely death of incumbent Senator Paul Wellstone in a fatal campaign flying crash), is now facing a well funded and articulate Democratic oppenent in liberal Minnesota. While John Sunnunu represents the fickle, independent voters of New Hampshire, Richard Lugar represents the rock-red state of Indiana.
Republicans sharply question Iraq policy
By Ann Flaherty, Associated Press Writer
9-11-2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq
WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans sharply challenged President Bush's top military general and ambassador in Iraq on Tuesday in a sign that some within the GOP retain serious misgivings about the protracted war.
"Are we going to continue to invest blood and treasure at the same rate we're doing now? For what?" asked Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who supports legislation setting a deadline to bring troops home.
The deep-seated doubt expressed at the hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reflected just how far Congress had come since the war began over four years ago. And Republican senators raised tough questions that rivaled those asked by Democratic presidential hopefuls on the panel.
The exchanges came just a day after the top U.S. war commander, Gen. David Petraeus, recommended keeping the bulk of U.S. forces in Iraq — some 130,000 troops — deployed there through next summer.
Whereas Republicans were once deferential to the thinking of officials running the war, particularly uniformed officers, Hagel and other GOP senators on the panel said they doubted that simply giving war commanders more time would necessarily yield results.
"In my judgment, some type of success in Iraq is possible, but as policymakers, we should acknowledge that we are facing extraordinarily narrow margins for achieving our goals," said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the committee.
Sen. Norm Coleman said he appreciates plans to return troop levels to 130,000 — down from the 168,000 currently in Iraq — but that he wants a longer-term vision other than suggestions that Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will return to Capitol Hill in mid-March to give another assessment.
"Americans want to see light at the end of the tunnel," said Coleman, R-Minn.
Echoing testimony given to the House on Monday, Petraeus and Crocker acknowledged that Iraq remains largely dysfunctional but said violence in recent months had decreased since the influx of the added 30,000 troops deployed earlier this year.
Crocker said he believed Iraq had "almost completely unraveled" in late 2006 and early 2007. The increased security, if given more time, could pave the way for political reconciliation, he said.
The ambassador said he fears that announcing troop withdrawals, as Democrats want, would focus Iraqi attention on "building the walls, stocking ammunition and getting ready for a big nasty street fight" rather than working toward reconciliation.
"I do believe that Iraq's leaders have the will to tackle the country's pressing problems, although it will take longer than we initially anticipated because of the environment and the gravity of the issue," Crocker said.
The stakes are high, he added.
"An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering — well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq's borders," Crocker said.
Hagel asked Petraeus why his view of conditions on the ground in Iraq was more positive than independent assessments on the war, as well as assessments of some outspoken noncommissioned officers.
"We've got too many disconnects here, general," Hagel said.
At one point in the hearing, Petraeus said "there are 165,000 different views on the ground" and it can change daily.
When asked by Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., what factors would influence further drawdowns of troops, Petraeus said the strain on ground forces would be a factor as it was with his latest recommendations. Iraq's ability to make political progress also will be considered, he said.
The hearing fell on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The fact of the matter is that American lives remain in jeopardy and, as I said, if every single jihadi in the world was killed tomorrow, we'd still have a major, major war on our hands," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Republican support for the Iraq war remains on shaky ground in Congress, epitomized by Lugar's opening statement Tuesday and Hagel's heated questioning of the general's recommendations. But that support wasn't lost.
Many rank-and-file Republicans — like Lugar — said they still were uneasy about the lack of political progress in Iraq. But they also remained reluctant to embrace legislation ordering troops home by next spring, increasing the likelihood that Democrats will have to soften their approach if they want to pass an anti-war proposal.
Democrats had anticipated that a larger number of Republicans by now would have turned against Bush on the war because of grim poll numbers and the upcoming 2008 elections.
Without GOP support, Democrats repeatedly have fallen short of enough votes to pass legislation ordering troop withdrawals to begin this fall and be completed by spring.
In Baghdad, the Iraqi government on Tuesday welcomed Petraeus' testimony and said the need for U.S. military support would decrease over time.
National Security Adviser Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, reading from a government statement, said the Iraqis believed that "in the near future" the need for U.S. and other coalition forces "will decrease."
Moderate lawmakers say there is plenty of room for compromise in the deeply divided Congress. Aides say bipartisan proposals are in the works and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has reached out to several GOP senators to discuss potential common ground. However, a major hurdle remaining are politically influential organizations like MoveOn.org who say Democrats shouldn't water down the debate with more moderate legislation.
Alternative legislative proposals on Iraq include:
_Ordering troop withdrawals to begin this fall, but set the spring date of completion as a nonbinding goal.
_Limit the mission of U.S. troops to training the Iraqi security forces, fighting terrorists and protecting U.S. assets, but leave it up to military commanders to determine force levels.
_Demanding Bush submit a new war strategy to Congress by fall that would limit the mission of U.S. forces and begin drawing down force levels in coming months.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Cowardly Senate Democrats prepare to GROVEL before Bush's AG replacement nomination...
The clueless, spineless, craven Democrats of the US Sente prepare, yet again, to REPLAY the appaling winter of 2001, when they APPROVED OF EVERY BUSH Righ-Wing nominee, the Democrats then REFUSING TO GET VIDEOS of then Texas Governor George W. Bush pledging "A NEW, MORE BIPARTISAN TONE IN WASHINGTON"
BETRAYING rank and file Democratic voters is what THE CRAVEN DEMOCRAT SENATE DOES BEST.
And that, unfortunately, includes ALL FOUR of the SENATE Democratic PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDERS, who between them couldn't sponsor and uphold a filibuster to prevent Dick Cheney from skinning, gutting, and roasting Lassie on the White House lawn (much less lead one from the shadows using other senators to press such a filibuster.)
==================================================
Wingnut, Nuttier and Nuttiest
Susan Madrak Sat Sep 8, 2:13 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20070908/cm_huffpost/063575
Now, you know our hero well enough by now that you already knew he wouldn't nominate a moderate for Attorney General. But it's hard to imagine three worse nominees than this gang:
President Bush is expected to choose a replacement for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales by the middle of next week, and former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson has emerged as one of the leading contenders for the job, according to sources inside and outside the government who are familiar with White House deliberations. Other candidates still in the running include former deputy attorney general George J. Terwilliger III and D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Laurence H. Silberman, according to the sources, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
The Washington Post ever so eagerly finds a Clintonite to say good things about Olsen:
But Olson, who represented Bush in the legal battle over the 2000 presidential election, also is widely admired by members of both parties for his legal skills and sharp intellect. Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton, endorsed Olson for the attorney general's job in a recent opinion article, calling him "a principled and independent thinker who will focus on the word 'Justice' in the Department's name."
Ding ding ding! Did your alarm go off, too? "Widely admired by members of both parties." Hmm. Isn't that exactly how they described stealth wingnut John Roberts before they threw the roses in his path for the Supreme Court?
How else would you describe a judicial nominee with a long history of lying in the service of his king? Why, as "widely admired," of course.
But Olson's troubles with Congress shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed his career, because they bear remarkable similarity to the behavior that got him into hot water more than a decade ago, and almost led to perjury charges. A careful examination of that episode raises serious questions about not merely his integrity but the legendary legal prowess to which even his critics defer. Indeed, the last time Olson served as a top presidential legal counselor, he left behind a political disaster area strewn with bad legal advice, wrecked careers and lingering scandals.
As assistant attorney general to President Reagan from 1981 to 1983, Olson advised the president to claim executive privilege to block an investigation by congressional Democrats into the scandal-plagued Superfund program, based on assertions that later proved fatally false -- largely because Olson, apparently eager to force a political fight with Congress, failed to double-check key information.
And of course, both Olson and Silberman were closely involved in the Arkansas Project, the proverbial right-wing conspiracy to take down Bill Clinton.
Larry Silberman? Overturned Oliver North's conviction on what is seen as very shaky legal grounds, part of the illegal arms-for-hostages deal that helped Reagan win the 1980 election, and coordinated the attacks on Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. (I'd love to see Media Matter's David Brock testify against his character if nominated.)
Terwilliger isn't as famous a wingnut, which makes him the most likely nominee. They do like their unknowns, don't they? And after facing the twin specters of Olson and Silberman, the oh-so-predictable Democratic Congress will heave a sigh of relief and roll over on this nomination.
That would be a big mistake. He's also highly partisan (as in Federalist Society partisan) and loyal (as in, Bush Family Criminal Enterprise-loyal). He was the attorney leading the Florida recount effort for Bush. Let's put it this way: despite his backing by some prominent conservatives, John Ashcroft opposed him as FBI Director.
That's why I think he'll be the nominee, and that's why I'm sure the Democrats will support him if nominated. After all, if he's not wearing a black hat, it will be too difficult to explain why we're not confirming him and then people would be mad at us!
As opposed to that "protecting the Constitution" thing? No contest. PR always comes first.
BETRAYING rank and file Democratic voters is what THE CRAVEN DEMOCRAT SENATE DOES BEST.
And that, unfortunately, includes ALL FOUR of the SENATE Democratic PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDERS, who between them couldn't sponsor and uphold a filibuster to prevent Dick Cheney from skinning, gutting, and roasting Lassie on the White House lawn (much less lead one from the shadows using other senators to press such a filibuster.)
==================================================
Wingnut, Nuttier and Nuttiest
Susan Madrak Sat Sep 8, 2:13 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20070908/cm_huffpost/063575
Now, you know our hero well enough by now that you already knew he wouldn't nominate a moderate for Attorney General. But it's hard to imagine three worse nominees than this gang:
President Bush is expected to choose a replacement for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales by the middle of next week, and former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson has emerged as one of the leading contenders for the job, according to sources inside and outside the government who are familiar with White House deliberations. Other candidates still in the running include former deputy attorney general George J. Terwilliger III and D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Laurence H. Silberman, according to the sources, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
The Washington Post ever so eagerly finds a Clintonite to say good things about Olsen:
But Olson, who represented Bush in the legal battle over the 2000 presidential election, also is widely admired by members of both parties for his legal skills and sharp intellect. Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton, endorsed Olson for the attorney general's job in a recent opinion article, calling him "a principled and independent thinker who will focus on the word 'Justice' in the Department's name."
Ding ding ding! Did your alarm go off, too? "Widely admired by members of both parties." Hmm. Isn't that exactly how they described stealth wingnut John Roberts before they threw the roses in his path for the Supreme Court?
How else would you describe a judicial nominee with a long history of lying in the service of his king? Why, as "widely admired," of course.
But Olson's troubles with Congress shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed his career, because they bear remarkable similarity to the behavior that got him into hot water more than a decade ago, and almost led to perjury charges. A careful examination of that episode raises serious questions about not merely his integrity but the legendary legal prowess to which even his critics defer. Indeed, the last time Olson served as a top presidential legal counselor, he left behind a political disaster area strewn with bad legal advice, wrecked careers and lingering scandals.
As assistant attorney general to President Reagan from 1981 to 1983, Olson advised the president to claim executive privilege to block an investigation by congressional Democrats into the scandal-plagued Superfund program, based on assertions that later proved fatally false -- largely because Olson, apparently eager to force a political fight with Congress, failed to double-check key information.
And of course, both Olson and Silberman were closely involved in the Arkansas Project, the proverbial right-wing conspiracy to take down Bill Clinton.
Larry Silberman? Overturned Oliver North's conviction on what is seen as very shaky legal grounds, part of the illegal arms-for-hostages deal that helped Reagan win the 1980 election, and coordinated the attacks on Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. (I'd love to see Media Matter's David Brock testify against his character if nominated.)
Terwilliger isn't as famous a wingnut, which makes him the most likely nominee. They do like their unknowns, don't they? And after facing the twin specters of Olson and Silberman, the oh-so-predictable Democratic Congress will heave a sigh of relief and roll over on this nomination.
That would be a big mistake. He's also highly partisan (as in Federalist Society partisan) and loyal (as in, Bush Family Criminal Enterprise-loyal). He was the attorney leading the Florida recount effort for Bush. Let's put it this way: despite his backing by some prominent conservatives, John Ashcroft opposed him as FBI Director.
That's why I think he'll be the nominee, and that's why I'm sure the Democrats will support him if nominated. After all, if he's not wearing a black hat, it will be too difficult to explain why we're not confirming him and then people would be mad at us!
As opposed to that "protecting the Constitution" thing? No contest. PR always comes first.
US now BRIBING Insurgent Sunnis to attack Al Qaida in Iraq.....
US bribe insurgents to fight Al-Qaeda
by Marie Colvin and Sarah Baxter
UK Times on-line
September 9, 2000
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2413200.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=2015164
AMERICAN forces are paying Sunni insurgents hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to switch sides and help them to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
by Marie Colvin and Sarah Baxter
UK Times on-line
September 9, 2000
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2413200.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=2015164
AMERICAN forces are paying Sunni insurgents hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to switch sides and help them to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Friday, September 7, 2007
America INCAPABLE of rational analysis re the Bush-Cheney disastrous, criminal administration.....
America INCAPABLE of rational analysis re the debacle wrought by the Bush-Cheney administration's disastrous war in Iraq....
by Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/090107.html
<< But the United States, circa 2007, doesn’t appear capable of acting expeditiously on behalf of its citizens or its national interests.
The importance of timely action in terminating the Bush-Cheney administration is brushed aside as unworthy of discussion, impossible, crazy. It is far simpler to condemn Larry Craig for his stall-to-stall footsie with a plainclothes cop than to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for an illegal war and a variety of other high crimes and misdemeanors.
So the drift toward the precipice continues with almost no one taking note of the chasm below. >>
<< In a nation that cared more about its soldiers and its long-term interests, the news shows and the political class would be exploring how these present-and-future disasters might be averted or reversed, how Bush and Cheney could be presented with “an offer they can’t refuse,” either resign or face the humiliation of bipartisan impeachment.
But the United States, circa 2007, doesn’t appear capable of acting expeditiously on behalf of its citizens or its national interests. >>
Thursday, September 6, 2007
High Crimes & Misdemeanors! Bush KNEW that Saddam HAD NO WMDs! But pushed for the illegal invasion/occuption of Iraq regardless....
Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction
Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Sept. 5, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/
Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Sept. 5, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
97 to 0: Senate supports Bush-Cheney war vs Iran....
Americans want mideast oil. We will kill thousands of civilians to get it. And the United Nations, which was set up specifically to prevent stronger aggressor nations from bombing and invading weaker nations, will once again be no more than a captive prostitute to American ambitions.
Nothing better illustrates the "belly of the beast" tendencies of Democratic "leaders" - to sign on to the goals and actions of the imperium Americana - better than this stark, glaring, 97-0 vote in the US senate to give George W. Bush the authority (as he sees it, which is all that counts) to bomb Iran, and thus ratchet up a nuclear war in the mideast with an unprovoked first strike on Iranian infrastructure, an infrastructure attack as the United States did to Serbia 5 year before it bombed Iraq.
This excellent article by David Bromwich, one of many now cropping up on the subject, also details the "VERBOTTEN!" subject of America's foreign policy alignment with that of Israel and the American-Israel (Jewish) lobby. This is a story that American corporate "MAJOR MEDIA" relentlessly SUPPRESSES.
=======================================
Iraq, Israel, Iran
by David Bromwich
September 4, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/iraq-israel-iran_b_62995.html
When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's article on the Israel Lobby appeared in the London Review of Books, after having been commissioned and killed by the Atlantic Monthly, neoconservative publicists launched an all-out campaign to slander the authors as anti-Semites. Now that their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has appeared--a work of considerable scope, carefully documented, and not just an expanded version of the article--the imputation of anti-Semitism will doubtless be repeated more sparingly for readers lower down the educational ladder. Meanwhile, the literate establishment press will (a) ignore it, (b) pretend that it says nothing new or surprising, and (c) rule out the probable inferences from the data, on the ground that the very meaning of the word "lobby" is elusive.
The truth is that many new facts are in this book, and many surprising facts. By reconstructing a trail of meetings and public statements in 2001-2002, for example, the authors show that much of the leadership of Israel was puzzled at first by the boyish enthusiasm for a war on Iraq among their neoconservative allies. Why Iraq? they asked. Why now? They would appear to have obtained assurances, however, that once the "regime change" in Iraq was accomplished, the next war would be against Iran.
A notable pilgrimage followed. One by one they lined up, Netanyahu, Sharon, Peres, and Barak, writing op-eds and issuing flaming warnings to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was a menace of world-historical magnitude. Suddenly the message was that any delay of the president's plan to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq would be seized on by "the terrorists" as a sign of weakness. Regarding the correct treatment of terrorists, as also regarding the avoidance of weakness, Americans look to Israelis as mentors in a class by themselves.
So a war projected years before by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz--a war secured at last by the fixing of the facts around the policy at the Office of the Vice President--was allowed to borrow some prestige at an intermediate stage by the consent of a few well-regarded Israeli politicians. Yet their target of choice had been Iran. They accepted the change of sequence without outward signs of doubt, possibly owing to their acquaintance with the Middle East doctrine espoused by the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--a doctrine which held that to create a viable order after the fall of Iraq, regime change in Iran and Syria would have to follow expeditiously.
To sum up this part: the evidence of Mearsheimer and Walt suggests that Israel was never the prime mover of the Iraq war. Rather, once the Cheney-Wolfowitz design was in place, the Israeli ministers who trooped through American opinion pages and news-talk shows did what they could to heat up the war fever. This war was on the cards before they threw in their lot with Cheney and Bush; by their efforts they merely helped to confer on the plan an aura of legitimacy and worldly wisdom.
But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno, it threatens "to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has "authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." Those words come close to saying not that a war is coming but that it is already here. No lawmaker who reads them can affect the slightest shock at any action the president takes against Iran.
Admittedly, it was a showdown speech, reckless and belligerent, to a soldier audience; but then, this has been just the sort of crowd and message that Cheney and Bush favor when they are about to open a new round of killings. And in a sense, the Senate had given the president his cue when it approved, by a vote of 97-0, the July 11 Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran. It is hardly an accident that the president and his favorite tame senator concurred in their choice of the word "confront." The pretext for the Lieberman amendment, as for the president's order, was the discovery of caches of weapons alleged to belong to Iran, the capture of Iranian advisers said to be operating against American troops, and the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources--claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified. Still, the vote was 97-0. If few Americans took notice, the government of Iran surely did.
That unanimous vote was the latest in a series of capitulations that has included the apparent end of resistance by Nancy Pelosi to the next war. After the election of 2006, the speaker of the house declared her intention to enact into law a requirement that this president seek separate authorization for a war against Iran. On the point of doing so, she addressed the AIPAC convention, and was booed for criticizing the escalation of the Iraq war. Pelosi took the hint, shelved her authorization plan, and went with AIPAC against the anti-war base of the Democratic party.
This much, one might know without the help of Mearsheimer and Walt. But without their record, how many would trace the connection between the removal of Philip Zelikow as policy counselor of the state department, at the end of 2006, and a speech Zelikow had given in September 2006 urging serious negotiation and a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine? The ousting of Zelikow was a blessing to the war party, since it freed them from a skeptical confidant of Secretary of State Rice--perhaps the only person of stature anywhere near the administration whom she treated as an ally and friend. And the meaning of the change was clear when Zelikow's replacement turned out to be Eliot Cohen: a neoconservative war scholar and enthusiast, an early booster of the "surge" on the pundit shows, and incidentally a shameless slanderer of Mearsheimer-Walt ("Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," Washington Post, April 5, 2006).
From Zelikow to Cohen was only a step on the long path of humiliation that now stretched before Condoleeza Rice. When, in March 2007, amid suggestions of a renewal of diplomacy, she intimated that talks might be helpful in dealing with the Hamas-Fatah unity government (whose formation the Arab world had greeted as offering a promise of peace), she was demolished by an AIPAC-backed advisory letter bearing the signatures of 79 senators, which directed her not to speak with a government that had not yet recognized Israel. From that moment Rice was effectively neutralized.
The hottest cries for another war have been coming this summer from Joe Lieberman. He has called for attacks on Iran, and for attacks on Syria. It is as if Lieberman, with his appetite for multiple theaters of conflict, spoke from the congealed memory of all the wars he never fought. But Joe Lieberman is a stalking-horse. He would not say these things without getting permission from Vice President Cheney, a close and admired friend. Nor would Cheney permit a high-profile lawmaker whom he partly controls to set the United States and Israel on so perilous a course unless he had ascertained its acceptability to Ehud Olmert.
Yet the chief orchestrater of the second neoconservative war of aggression is Elliott Abrams. Convicted for deceptions around Iran-Contra, as Lewis Libby was convicted for deceptions stemming from Iraq--and pardoned by the elder Bush just as Libby had his sentence commuted by the younger--Abrams now presides over the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. All of the wildness of this astonishing functionary and all his reckless love of subversion will be required to pump up the "imminent danger" of Iran. For here, as with Iraq, the danger can only be made to look imminent by manipulation and forgery. On all sober estimates, Iran is several months from mastering the nuclear cycle, and several years from producing a weapon. Whereas Israel for decades has been in possession of a substantial nuclear arsenal.
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.
Among many possible lines of inquiry, the senators might begin by recognizing that the United States has other allies in Asia besides Israel. One of those allies is India; and there is a further point of resemblance. In a distinct exception to our anti-proliferation policy, we have allowed India to develop nuclear weapons; just as, in an earlier such exception, we allowed Israel to do the same. But suppose we read tomorrow a statement by the director of the South Asia desk of the National Security Council which declared: "There can be no doubt that Hindus are to stand apart from any nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Hindu to be apart--except in India--from the rest of the population." Suppose, further, we knew this man still held these beliefs at a time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan; and that he had recently channeled 86 million dollars to regional gangs and militias bent on increasing the tension. Would we not conclude that something in our counsels of state had gone seriously out of joint?
The Mearsheimer-Walt study of American policy deserves to be widely read and discussed. It could not be more timely. If the speeches and saber-rattling by the president, the ambassador to Iraq, and several army officers mean anything, they mean that Cheney and Abrams are preparing to do to Iran what Cheney and Wolfowitz did to Iraq. They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran. Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen.
Nothing better illustrates the "belly of the beast" tendencies of Democratic "leaders" - to sign on to the goals and actions of the imperium Americana - better than this stark, glaring, 97-0 vote in the US senate to give George W. Bush the authority (as he sees it, which is all that counts) to bomb Iran, and thus ratchet up a nuclear war in the mideast with an unprovoked first strike on Iranian infrastructure, an infrastructure attack as the United States did to Serbia 5 year before it bombed Iraq.
This excellent article by David Bromwich, one of many now cropping up on the subject, also details the "VERBOTTEN!" subject of America's foreign policy alignment with that of Israel and the American-Israel (Jewish) lobby. This is a story that American corporate "MAJOR MEDIA" relentlessly SUPPRESSES.
=======================================
Iraq, Israel, Iran
by David Bromwich
September 4, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/iraq-israel-iran_b_62995.html
When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's article on the Israel Lobby appeared in the London Review of Books, after having been commissioned and killed by the Atlantic Monthly, neoconservative publicists launched an all-out campaign to slander the authors as anti-Semites. Now that their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has appeared--a work of considerable scope, carefully documented, and not just an expanded version of the article--the imputation of anti-Semitism will doubtless be repeated more sparingly for readers lower down the educational ladder. Meanwhile, the literate establishment press will (a) ignore it, (b) pretend that it says nothing new or surprising, and (c) rule out the probable inferences from the data, on the ground that the very meaning of the word "lobby" is elusive.
The truth is that many new facts are in this book, and many surprising facts. By reconstructing a trail of meetings and public statements in 2001-2002, for example, the authors show that much of the leadership of Israel was puzzled at first by the boyish enthusiasm for a war on Iraq among their neoconservative allies. Why Iraq? they asked. Why now? They would appear to have obtained assurances, however, that once the "regime change" in Iraq was accomplished, the next war would be against Iran.
A notable pilgrimage followed. One by one they lined up, Netanyahu, Sharon, Peres, and Barak, writing op-eds and issuing flaming warnings to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was a menace of world-historical magnitude. Suddenly the message was that any delay of the president's plan to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq would be seized on by "the terrorists" as a sign of weakness. Regarding the correct treatment of terrorists, as also regarding the avoidance of weakness, Americans look to Israelis as mentors in a class by themselves.
So a war projected years before by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz--a war secured at last by the fixing of the facts around the policy at the Office of the Vice President--was allowed to borrow some prestige at an intermediate stage by the consent of a few well-regarded Israeli politicians. Yet their target of choice had been Iran. They accepted the change of sequence without outward signs of doubt, possibly owing to their acquaintance with the Middle East doctrine espoused by the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--a doctrine which held that to create a viable order after the fall of Iraq, regime change in Iran and Syria would have to follow expeditiously.
To sum up this part: the evidence of Mearsheimer and Walt suggests that Israel was never the prime mover of the Iraq war. Rather, once the Cheney-Wolfowitz design was in place, the Israeli ministers who trooped through American opinion pages and news-talk shows did what they could to heat up the war fever. This war was on the cards before they threw in their lot with Cheney and Bush; by their efforts they merely helped to confer on the plan an aura of legitimacy and worldly wisdom.
But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno, it threatens "to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has "authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." Those words come close to saying not that a war is coming but that it is already here. No lawmaker who reads them can affect the slightest shock at any action the president takes against Iran.
Admittedly, it was a showdown speech, reckless and belligerent, to a soldier audience; but then, this has been just the sort of crowd and message that Cheney and Bush favor when they are about to open a new round of killings. And in a sense, the Senate had given the president his cue when it approved, by a vote of 97-0, the July 11 Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran. It is hardly an accident that the president and his favorite tame senator concurred in their choice of the word "confront." The pretext for the Lieberman amendment, as for the president's order, was the discovery of caches of weapons alleged to belong to Iran, the capture of Iranian advisers said to be operating against American troops, and the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources--claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified. Still, the vote was 97-0. If few Americans took notice, the government of Iran surely did.
That unanimous vote was the latest in a series of capitulations that has included the apparent end of resistance by Nancy Pelosi to the next war. After the election of 2006, the speaker of the house declared her intention to enact into law a requirement that this president seek separate authorization for a war against Iran. On the point of doing so, she addressed the AIPAC convention, and was booed for criticizing the escalation of the Iraq war. Pelosi took the hint, shelved her authorization plan, and went with AIPAC against the anti-war base of the Democratic party.
This much, one might know without the help of Mearsheimer and Walt. But without their record, how many would trace the connection between the removal of Philip Zelikow as policy counselor of the state department, at the end of 2006, and a speech Zelikow had given in September 2006 urging serious negotiation and a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine? The ousting of Zelikow was a blessing to the war party, since it freed them from a skeptical confidant of Secretary of State Rice--perhaps the only person of stature anywhere near the administration whom she treated as an ally and friend. And the meaning of the change was clear when Zelikow's replacement turned out to be Eliot Cohen: a neoconservative war scholar and enthusiast, an early booster of the "surge" on the pundit shows, and incidentally a shameless slanderer of Mearsheimer-Walt ("Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," Washington Post, April 5, 2006).
From Zelikow to Cohen was only a step on the long path of humiliation that now stretched before Condoleeza Rice. When, in March 2007, amid suggestions of a renewal of diplomacy, she intimated that talks might be helpful in dealing with the Hamas-Fatah unity government (whose formation the Arab world had greeted as offering a promise of peace), she was demolished by an AIPAC-backed advisory letter bearing the signatures of 79 senators, which directed her not to speak with a government that had not yet recognized Israel. From that moment Rice was effectively neutralized.
The hottest cries for another war have been coming this summer from Joe Lieberman. He has called for attacks on Iran, and for attacks on Syria. It is as if Lieberman, with his appetite for multiple theaters of conflict, spoke from the congealed memory of all the wars he never fought. But Joe Lieberman is a stalking-horse. He would not say these things without getting permission from Vice President Cheney, a close and admired friend. Nor would Cheney permit a high-profile lawmaker whom he partly controls to set the United States and Israel on so perilous a course unless he had ascertained its acceptability to Ehud Olmert.
Yet the chief orchestrater of the second neoconservative war of aggression is Elliott Abrams. Convicted for deceptions around Iran-Contra, as Lewis Libby was convicted for deceptions stemming from Iraq--and pardoned by the elder Bush just as Libby had his sentence commuted by the younger--Abrams now presides over the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. All of the wildness of this astonishing functionary and all his reckless love of subversion will be required to pump up the "imminent danger" of Iran. For here, as with Iraq, the danger can only be made to look imminent by manipulation and forgery. On all sober estimates, Iran is several months from mastering the nuclear cycle, and several years from producing a weapon. Whereas Israel for decades has been in possession of a substantial nuclear arsenal.
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.
Among many possible lines of inquiry, the senators might begin by recognizing that the United States has other allies in Asia besides Israel. One of those allies is India; and there is a further point of resemblance. In a distinct exception to our anti-proliferation policy, we have allowed India to develop nuclear weapons; just as, in an earlier such exception, we allowed Israel to do the same. But suppose we read tomorrow a statement by the director of the South Asia desk of the National Security Council which declared: "There can be no doubt that Hindus are to stand apart from any nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Hindu to be apart--except in India--from the rest of the population." Suppose, further, we knew this man still held these beliefs at a time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan; and that he had recently channeled 86 million dollars to regional gangs and militias bent on increasing the tension. Would we not conclude that something in our counsels of state had gone seriously out of joint?
The Mearsheimer-Walt study of American policy deserves to be widely read and discussed. It could not be more timely. If the speeches and saber-rattling by the president, the ambassador to Iraq, and several army officers mean anything, they mean that Cheney and Abrams are preparing to do to Iran what Cheney and Wolfowitz did to Iraq. They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran. Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
GENOCIDE: the killing of huge numbers of Iraqis is the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz led US invasion and occupation....
In 1987, at the height of Saddam Hussein's use of poison gas to kill off entire Kurdish towns and Iranian army positions, President Reagan (and Vice President George H.W. Bush, Sr., who, along with fellow Texan James Baker were the foreign policy experts of the Reagan administration) sent DONALD RUMSFELD to Iraq to greet the Iraqi dictator and tell Saddam "no matter the world opinion against you for your war crimes, WE WILL CONTINUE TO SUPPORT YOU and supply you with Agricultural credits (worth millions of dollars and as fungible as cash), equipment, and even WMD-PRECURSOR technologies and supplies, especially those chemicals and labs needed to produce the POISON GASES with which Saddam's army drenched Iranian positions during the 8 long years of the Iran-Iraq war. See "Spiders Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq."http://www.amazon.com/Spiders-Web-Secret-History-Illegally/dp/0553096508
#1. How the Bush-Cheney administration may have ENCOURAGED LOOTING in Baghdad and Iraq after the successful invasion in 2003, hoping to DESTROY IRAQI INFRASTRUCTURE more than US bombings had already done, in an effort to make Iraqis jobless, homeless, stateless, economically disenfranchised war refugees who, in turning to the insurgency, could be killed en masse.
http://www.thebluestate.com/2007/09/the-darkest-of-.html
#2. Contrary to US 'news' reports, Iraq civilian DEATH RATE SOARS in Summer of 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003634166
#3. Family of US Marine killed by insurgents in Haditah calls Marine's reaction massacre of 24 Iraqis in Haditha a "HEROIC ACTION"!!
Family Of Marine Killed In Haditha Slaying 'Outraged'
POSTED: 1:10 pm PST December 30, 2006
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/10636883/detail.html
#4. http://noendinsightmovie.com/ video clip, Movie preview "NO END IN SIGHT" - how careful planning for the post-invasion rebuilding of Iraq was DISCARDED... IN FAVOR OF CHAOS !!
The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz led INVASION and OCCUPATION of Iraq hoped to achieve its first objective - complete control of Iraqi oil and Iraq strategic territory - by KILLING AS MANY IRAQIS AS POSSIBLE. That goal was accomplished by CREATING A SITUATION OF CHAOS, disbanding the military, disbanding the police, and ENCOURAGING LOOTING. All of which led to an INVIGORATED INSURGENCY, which gave the administration the cover to CONTINUE TO DESTROY IRAQI INFRASTRUCTURE.
The huge Iraq RECONSTRUCTION programs by American companies WERE INTENDED TO BE A SHAM - like New Orleans, their first priority was to REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH UPWARDS, from taxpayers to Bush-Cheney cronies such as Halliburton corporation, a company which is STILL PAYING DICK CHENEY in "deferred stock options" which go up in value with every billion-dollar government contract that Halliburton receives but doesn't complete.
Like Vietnam, today entire swaths of Iraq are considered "FREE FIRE ZONES" where the US military has unlimited authority to kill anyone, with very little oversight, and what little oversight there is provided only by the military itself.
========================================
The darkest of all suspicions about Rumsfeld's postwar strategy
Why the Administration may have purposely encouraged looting after the fall of Baghdad.
http://www.thebluestate.com/2007/09/the-darkest-of-.html
Over the last four years, I have been personally conflicted over which was more outrageously horrible: the decision to go to war in the first place, or the manner in which postwar planning was executed? Both were bad, no doubt there. But there was something said about the latter last night on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher that jolted my emotions. Let me say that as someone that follows politics on a daily basis, I am rarely shocked. But what I heard last night personally disturbed me, and will get all of you grinding your teeth.
Remember all the looting throughout Iraq after the US invaded? Many Pentagon-types concede that the US should have done a better job protecting the Iraqi infrastructure. Well, according to former U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, one of the three panel guests on the show, the Administration actually wanted there to be mass looting in Baghdad because it would help downsize government. In other words, Rumsfeld wanted to implement Ronald Reagan's limited government model in Iraq.
So I did some digging on the issue. I found a 2003 story in The Nation magazine that confirmed this strategy. It's quite disturbing that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would want there to be looting. But it all makes perfect sense:
As the Bush Administration becomes increasingly open about its plans to privatize Iraq's state industries and parts of the government, Bremer's de-Baathification takes on new meaning. Is he working only to get rid of Baath Party members, or is he also working to shrink the public sector as a whole so that hospitals, schools and even the army are primed for privatization by US firms? Just as reconstruction is the guise for privatization, de-Baathification looks a lot like disguised downsizing.
We need to ask ourselves what the purpose was behind Reagan's ideology? Why do conservative Washington insiders want limited government? Is it because their brand of government would be more efficient, or because the phrase "limited government" is code for selling democracy to the highest bidder?
Republican leaders want you to think that less government means less spending and more rights for you. But actually, there will be spending no matter what. It's just a question of who will be in charge. Do you want government, which is bound by disclosure laws, to do the work? Or do you want corporations, whose motives are less about spreading democracy than making a profit on Wall Street? Oh boy have we been used!
But the main idea is that Rumsfeld wanted this "limited government" model to be implemented. He tried. He failed. Now there is no end in sight.
======================================================
#2. DEATH TOLL in Iraq SOARING
AP's Count: Contrary to Claims -- Civilian Deaths Soaring in Iraq
Published: September 01, 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003634166
BAGHDAD Civilian deaths rose in August to their second-highest monthly level this year, according to figures compiled Saturday by The Associated Press. That raises questions about whether U.S. strategy is working days before Congress receives landmark reports that will decide the course of the war.
At least 81 American service members also died in Iraq during August — an increase of two over the previous month but well below the year's monthly high of 126 in May. American deaths surpassed the 80 mark during only two months of 2006.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Democrats outraged over Party's deference to Bush, major-media "Conventional Wisdom"....
Terrorism Policies Split Democrats
Anger Mounts Within Party Over Inaction on Bush Tactics
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 30, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/29/AR2007082902355.html?hpid=topnews
A growing clamor among rank-and-file Democrats to halt President Bush's most controversial tactics in the fight against terrorism has exposed deep divisions within the party, with many Democrats angry that they cannot defeat even a weakened president on issues that they believe should be front and center.
The Democrats' failure to rein in wiretapping without warrants, close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay or restore basic legal rights such as habeas corpus for terrorism suspects has opened the party's leaders to fierce criticism from some of their staunchest allies -- on Capitol Hill, among liberal bloggers and at interest groups.
At the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress yesterday, panelists discussing the balance between security and freedom lashed out at Democratic leaders for not standing up to the White House. "These are matters of principle," said Mark Agrast, a senior fellow at the center. "You don't temporize."
The American Civil Liberties Union is running Internet advertisements depicting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) as sheep.
"Bush wanted more power to eavesdrop on ordinary Americans, and we just followed along. I guess that's why they call us the Democratic leadersheep," say the two farm animals in the ad, referring to Congress's passage of legislation granting Bush a six-month extension and expansion of his warrantless wiretapping program.
Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), who leads a newly created House select intelligence oversight panel, lamented, "Democrats have been slow to recognize they are in the majority now and can go back to really examine the fundamentals of what we should be doing to protect democracy."
Reid and Pelosi promised last week that they would at least confront the president next month over his wiretapping program, with Pelosi taking an uncompromising stand in a private conference call with House Democrats. When lawmakers return in September, Democrats will also push legislation to restore habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects and may resume an effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But conservative Democrats and some party leaders continue to worry that taking on those issues would expose them to Republican charges that they are weak on terrorism. And advocates of a strong push on the terrorism issues are increasingly skeptical that they can prevail.
"I don't think it's that we're reluctant to take on Bush," said Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), a senior member of the House intelligence committee. "I think it's we are reluctant to take on each other. . . . If I can fast-forward to September, October, November, December and see where we'll be, we'll be nowhere."
Said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (Va.): "I would've thought the administration would have been bereft of credibility by now, but they seem to be able to get what they want from this Congress."
The terrorism issue came to a head early this month in an explosive final closed-door House Democratic Caucus meeting before the August recess. Reps. Hastings, Moran, Melvin Watt (N.C.), John F. Tierney (Mass.) and Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) pleaded with party leaders not to bring to a vote a White House bill extending the administration's authority to listen in on electronic communications from abroad without a warrant.
Conservative Democrats, including Rep. Allen Boyd (Fla.), argued just as vociferously that Democrats dare not leave on vacation without passing the White House bill.
"The most controversial matters are the ones that people use to form their opinions on their members of Congress," said Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), who voted for the administration's bill. "I do know within our caucus, and justifiably so, there are members who have a real distaste for some of the things the president has done. But to let that be the driving force for our actions to block the surveillance of someone and perhaps stop another attack like 9/11 would be unwise."
The administration's bill passed 227 to 183, with 41 Democrats joining all but two Republicans in favor.
Such divisions will not be easy to bridge in the coming weeks. Republicans have said that Democrats who are trying to close the Guantanamo Bay prison want to import terrorists to Americans' back yards. And they have said that those pushing to restore habeas corpus rights want to give terrorists the legal rights of U.S. citizens.
"People say to me, 'Well, what about the 30-second spots?' " said Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, referring to attack ads. He is pushing a bill to restore habeas corpus.
"If you just say you're standing up for civil liberties, the American people are with you, but if you say terrorism suspects should have civil liberties, it stretches Americans' tolerance," said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who along with Hastings represents Congress on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a human rights monitor. "It's a tough issue for us."
Pelosi signaled last Thursday that she is serious about revisiting the warrantless-wiretapping law, which expires in January. In a rare recess conference call with House Democrats, she opened the session by having John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, lay out his schedule for hearings on the issue, starting right after the break. She also instructed Conyers; Silvestre Reyes (Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee; and other committee chairmen to move quickly on draft legislation.
In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) are reviving their bill to give the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court exclusive authority over wiretapping, with new provisions to enhance the government's ability to tap e-mail and other modern forms of communication.
Because the January deadline will force legislative action, some Democrats are cautiously optimistic that they can prevail this time. "I'm hopeful. Am I sanguine? Certainly not," Nadler said.
But others are pessimistic. Hastings said that Congress will probably be consumed with the Iraq war through the fall. He predicted that administration officials will announce that the current permissive law has thwarted terrorist attacks and saved lives but will withhold details as classified.
"Then Bush walks all the way to the end of his administration with no changes," he said.
If anything, the habeas corpus and Guantanamo Bay issues will be tougher. In June, nearly 150 House Democrats signed a letter by Moran urging the shuttering of the prison. But Moran said last week that he no longer thinks he could muster the votes to pass the measure, even though the move is supported by former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Republicans appear to have won the argument with their accusation that Democrats want to import terrorists.
A restoration of habeas corpus rights may have a better chance. Leahy said he will push the issue next month, and legislation co-sponsored by Conyers and Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is likely to move through their committees this fall.
But political fear still hovers over any legislation that touches on the fight against terrorism, which, for Democrats, may be the new third rail of politics.
"We can do this, but you have to keep in mind Republicans care more about catching Democrats than catching terrorists," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "They have spent years taking Roosevelt's notion that we have nothing to fear but fear itself and given us nothing but fear.
Anger Mounts Within Party Over Inaction on Bush Tactics
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 30, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/29/AR2007082902355.html?hpid=topnews
A growing clamor among rank-and-file Democrats to halt President Bush's most controversial tactics in the fight against terrorism has exposed deep divisions within the party, with many Democrats angry that they cannot defeat even a weakened president on issues that they believe should be front and center.
The Democrats' failure to rein in wiretapping without warrants, close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay or restore basic legal rights such as habeas corpus for terrorism suspects has opened the party's leaders to fierce criticism from some of their staunchest allies -- on Capitol Hill, among liberal bloggers and at interest groups.
At the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress yesterday, panelists discussing the balance between security and freedom lashed out at Democratic leaders for not standing up to the White House. "These are matters of principle," said Mark Agrast, a senior fellow at the center. "You don't temporize."
The American Civil Liberties Union is running Internet advertisements depicting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) as sheep.
"Bush wanted more power to eavesdrop on ordinary Americans, and we just followed along. I guess that's why they call us the Democratic leadersheep," say the two farm animals in the ad, referring to Congress's passage of legislation granting Bush a six-month extension and expansion of his warrantless wiretapping program.
Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), who leads a newly created House select intelligence oversight panel, lamented, "Democrats have been slow to recognize they are in the majority now and can go back to really examine the fundamentals of what we should be doing to protect democracy."
Reid and Pelosi promised last week that they would at least confront the president next month over his wiretapping program, with Pelosi taking an uncompromising stand in a private conference call with House Democrats. When lawmakers return in September, Democrats will also push legislation to restore habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects and may resume an effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But conservative Democrats and some party leaders continue to worry that taking on those issues would expose them to Republican charges that they are weak on terrorism. And advocates of a strong push on the terrorism issues are increasingly skeptical that they can prevail.
"I don't think it's that we're reluctant to take on Bush," said Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), a senior member of the House intelligence committee. "I think it's we are reluctant to take on each other. . . . If I can fast-forward to September, October, November, December and see where we'll be, we'll be nowhere."
Said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (Va.): "I would've thought the administration would have been bereft of credibility by now, but they seem to be able to get what they want from this Congress."
The terrorism issue came to a head early this month in an explosive final closed-door House Democratic Caucus meeting before the August recess. Reps. Hastings, Moran, Melvin Watt (N.C.), John F. Tierney (Mass.) and Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) pleaded with party leaders not to bring to a vote a White House bill extending the administration's authority to listen in on electronic communications from abroad without a warrant.
Conservative Democrats, including Rep. Allen Boyd (Fla.), argued just as vociferously that Democrats dare not leave on vacation without passing the White House bill.
"The most controversial matters are the ones that people use to form their opinions on their members of Congress," said Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), who voted for the administration's bill. "I do know within our caucus, and justifiably so, there are members who have a real distaste for some of the things the president has done. But to let that be the driving force for our actions to block the surveillance of someone and perhaps stop another attack like 9/11 would be unwise."
The administration's bill passed 227 to 183, with 41 Democrats joining all but two Republicans in favor.
Such divisions will not be easy to bridge in the coming weeks. Republicans have said that Democrats who are trying to close the Guantanamo Bay prison want to import terrorists to Americans' back yards. And they have said that those pushing to restore habeas corpus rights want to give terrorists the legal rights of U.S. citizens.
"People say to me, 'Well, what about the 30-second spots?' " said Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, referring to attack ads. He is pushing a bill to restore habeas corpus.
"If you just say you're standing up for civil liberties, the American people are with you, but if you say terrorism suspects should have civil liberties, it stretches Americans' tolerance," said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who along with Hastings represents Congress on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a human rights monitor. "It's a tough issue for us."
Pelosi signaled last Thursday that she is serious about revisiting the warrantless-wiretapping law, which expires in January. In a rare recess conference call with House Democrats, she opened the session by having John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, lay out his schedule for hearings on the issue, starting right after the break. She also instructed Conyers; Silvestre Reyes (Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee; and other committee chairmen to move quickly on draft legislation.
In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) are reviving their bill to give the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court exclusive authority over wiretapping, with new provisions to enhance the government's ability to tap e-mail and other modern forms of communication.
Because the January deadline will force legislative action, some Democrats are cautiously optimistic that they can prevail this time. "I'm hopeful. Am I sanguine? Certainly not," Nadler said.
But others are pessimistic. Hastings said that Congress will probably be consumed with the Iraq war through the fall. He predicted that administration officials will announce that the current permissive law has thwarted terrorist attacks and saved lives but will withhold details as classified.
"Then Bush walks all the way to the end of his administration with no changes," he said.
If anything, the habeas corpus and Guantanamo Bay issues will be tougher. In June, nearly 150 House Democrats signed a letter by Moran urging the shuttering of the prison. But Moran said last week that he no longer thinks he could muster the votes to pass the measure, even though the move is supported by former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Republicans appear to have won the argument with their accusation that Democrats want to import terrorists.
A restoration of habeas corpus rights may have a better chance. Leahy said he will push the issue next month, and legislation co-sponsored by Conyers and Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is likely to move through their committees this fall.
But political fear still hovers over any legislation that touches on the fight against terrorism, which, for Democrats, may be the new third rail of politics.
"We can do this, but you have to keep in mind Republicans care more about catching Democrats than catching terrorists," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "They have spent years taking Roosevelt's notion that we have nothing to fear but fear itself and given us nothing but fear.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Democrats FAIL to Hold Bush Accountable for dismal Katrina - New Orleans redevelopment debacle...
In one of the textbook examples of Democratic Party COMPLICITY with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration, Democrats in Washington DC are practically VOICELESS at expressing OUTRAGE over the CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT rebuilding and redevelopment efforts in New Orleans following the August 2005 disaster when rains from Hurricane Katrina weakened the levees - the FEDERAL LEVEES - around New Orleans and burst those levees, drowning huge swaths of the city. The Democratic "leaders" in the Senate have YET TO APOLOGIZE to American taxpayers for ALLOWING the CONFIRMATION of Republican crony Michael Brown - "Heckuva job, Brownie" to be the nation's FEMA Director - Brown having NEVER HAD ANY DISASTER EXPERIENCE.
HOW could such an unqualified HACK become the director of the nation's multi-billion dollar civilian disaster relief organization?
answer: BECAUSE OF DEMOCRATIC "leadership" NEGLIGENCE if not corruption and Dereliction of Duty, the abject FAILURE of Democrats to FILIBUSTER the Brown nomination to be the Director of FEMA, despite is gross lack of qualification!
Anger, sadness mark Katrina anniversary
By Cain Burdeah, Associated Press Writer
August 28, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070829/ap_on_re_us/katrina_anniversary;_ylt=AugfsH8g9z9dqyViOsOqXCKs0NUE
NEW ORLEANS - On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable throughout a city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss for flooded homes, schools, snow cone stands, old-time hairstylists and hardware stores doesn't seem to subside...
HOW could such an unqualified HACK become the director of the nation's multi-billion dollar civilian disaster relief organization?
answer: BECAUSE OF DEMOCRATIC "leadership" NEGLIGENCE if not corruption and Dereliction of Duty, the abject FAILURE of Democrats to FILIBUSTER the Brown nomination to be the Director of FEMA, despite is gross lack of qualification!
Anger, sadness mark Katrina anniversary
By Cain Burdeah, Associated Press Writer
August 28, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070829/ap_on_re_us/katrina_anniversary;_ylt=AugfsH8g9z9dqyViOsOqXCKs0NUE
NEW ORLEANS - On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable throughout a city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss for flooded homes, schools, snow cone stands, old-time hairstylists and hardware stores doesn't seem to subside...
Demcrat "leaders" do NOTHING to reverse "PRIVATIZATION" of US military, giving life-and-death powers to MERCENARIES in war zone...
Make no mistake: the Democratic "leadership," which is to say the inside-the-beltway Democrats, are doing NEXT TO NOTHING to CONFRONT and slow-down the relentless Bush-Cheney administration attempts to PRIVATIZE functions that for 2 centuries Americans assumed were part of the US military:
<< Taking private enterprise way beyond what is reasonable, or desirable, or safe, the CheneyBush Administration has turned over a huge raft of national-security functions to those not adequately trained, not accountable to the public or the law, not showing up on the political radar.
In short, CheneyBush have created what amounts to their own private legions — soldiers, intelligence analysts, security guards, construction experts, supply specialists, et al. — in effect, a “mercenary” force bought and paid for by the American taxpayer. >>
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/28/3466/
Indeed, regarding Iraq and the Bush-Cheney occupation of that country, Democrats in Congress - and on the campaign trail - are now jumping on the "COUP! - REMOVE MALAKI!" bandwagon, once again carrying water for the latest Bush/neo-con dreams of expanded occupation and imposition of a neo-colonial "anschloss," or seizure, of the real levers of Iraq's power and economic resources (oil).
It is, once again, a FULL-COURT PRESS of the same characters who got us into the Iraq war in the first place: the Bush-Cheney administration and Republicans in Congress; the war-cheerleading corporate media, and Democrat "leaders" such as Dick Durbin, Pattrick Leahy, Joe Biden, Kent Conrad, and others, who believe that "bipartisanship" on Capital Hill is MORE IMPORTANT than providing America with a GENUINE OPPOSITION PARTY regarding the gross failures and criminal corrupton of the Bush-Cheney administration.
<< Taking private enterprise way beyond what is reasonable, or desirable, or safe, the CheneyBush Administration has turned over a huge raft of national-security functions to those not adequately trained, not accountable to the public or the law, not showing up on the political radar.
In short, CheneyBush have created what amounts to their own private legions — soldiers, intelligence analysts, security guards, construction experts, supply specialists, et al. — in effect, a “mercenary” force bought and paid for by the American taxpayer. >>
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/28/3466/
Indeed, regarding Iraq and the Bush-Cheney occupation of that country, Democrats in Congress - and on the campaign trail - are now jumping on the "COUP! - REMOVE MALAKI!" bandwagon, once again carrying water for the latest Bush/neo-con dreams of expanded occupation and imposition of a neo-colonial "anschloss," or seizure, of the real levers of Iraq's power and economic resources (oil).
It is, once again, a FULL-COURT PRESS of the same characters who got us into the Iraq war in the first place: the Bush-Cheney administration and Republicans in Congress; the war-cheerleading corporate media, and Democrat "leaders" such as Dick Durbin, Pattrick Leahy, Joe Biden, Kent Conrad, and others, who believe that "bipartisanship" on Capital Hill is MORE IMPORTANT than providing America with a GENUINE OPPOSITION PARTY regarding the gross failures and criminal corrupton of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Ted Nugent, promoting "American values" talks about KILLING Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama...
Ted Nugent: "Hillary, you might want to ride one of these (machine guns) into the sunset, you worthless bitch." STUPID, COWERING Democrat "leaders" have NO RESPONSE, NO PUSHBACK, NO OUTRAGE to such blatantly hate-mongering comments by a noted REPUBLICAN PARTY and NRA SPOKESMAN.
The damn Democratic "leadership" STILL has no reliable media stream to COUNTER the DISGUSTING Right-Wing attack politics, of which Ted Nugent talking about using a MACHINE GUN on Hillary Clinton and/or Barak Obama is only the latest example.
Democratic "leaders" like Senator Biden, Senator Durbin, Senator Leahy, Senator Kerry, and others always manage to NOT NOTICE as Right-Wing Republican Party SPOKESMEN make horrendous comments (or, in this case, threats) against Democrats. Just the other day, Senator Leahy praised Seantor Lieberman, who is only one-half step away from Republican 2004 convention keynote speaker Zell Miller who shouted during that keynote Republican speech that "Democrats want to arm the troops with spitballs!"
The fact that Zell Miller had been a former DEMOCRATIC governor only proves the DEMOCRATIC TENDENCY to BETRAY Democratic voters and American citizens who depend on an HONEST, AGGRESSIVE, and VOCAL _OPPOSITION PARTY._
Earlier this week, Senator Dick Durbin said he considered Republican death-squads advocate JOHN BOLTON to be a "close friend and an honorable man" - despite Bolton's frequent characterizations of Democrats as godless appeasers if not cowards, and Bolton's recurrent insistence that the United States should immediately bomb Iran (without UN approval, a declaration of war, or any formalities of international statesmanship.)
AS LONG AS THEY CAN STAY OUT OF THE LINE OF FIRE, established, Senior Democratic leaders PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE the GROSS OUTRAGES and ABUSES of the Republican Party and its atrocious spokespersons.
Even when former Vietnam DRAFT EVADER Ted Nugent makes BLUNT THREATS to the safety of two of this year's top Democratic presidential candidates.
FOR SHAME, DEMOCRATS! You have SURRENDERED the HIGH GROUND in the "moral values" battle to those whose hypocrisy is glaring and obvious to the whole world!
=======================================
Facing a draft, Nugent bravely wet his pants
Rocker Ted Nugent is all talk as he calls Obama, Hillary vile names
BY RICHARD ROEPER Sun-Times Columnist
August 27, 2007
http://www.suntimes.com/news/roeper/529419,CST-NWS-roep27.article
So Ted Nugent roams a concert stage while toting automatic weapons, calls Barack Obama "a piece of -----" and says he told Obama to suck on one of his machine-guns. He also calls Hillary Clinton a "worthless bitch" and Dianne Feinstein a "worthless whore."
That Nugent, he's a man's man. He talks the talk and walks the walk, right?
Except when it was time to register for the draft during the Vietnam era. By his own admission, Nugent stopped all forms of personal hygiene for a month and showed up for his draft board physical in pants caked with his own urine and feces, winning a deferment. Creative!
Ah, but that was a long time ago. Nugent isn't just a washed-up rocker -- he's a right-wing madman who's not afraid to call out some of the leading Democrats in language so vile it makes the Dixie Chick Natalie Maines' comments about President Bush sound like a love poem.
You'd think even someone such as Sean Hannity would dismiss Nugent as a macho clown, desperate for attention.
Yeah, right.
In a discussion on his show last week, Hannity refused to condemn Nugent's remarks, saying, "I like Ted Nugent . . . he's a friend of mine," and even laughing loudly as Alan Colmes read the transcript of some of Nugent's remarks.
Funny. I don't remember Hannity being so cavalier about the Dixie Chicks went they criticized Bush.
Not that he's operating under a double standard or anything.
A different kind of high school text
If you're the parent of a junior high or high school student and your kid has a cell phone, odds are you can tell some version of this story.
Your child reaches a certain birthday, and you agree it's time for the kid to have that cell phone she's been asking for since she was about 4.
When she opens the present, she tells you how much she loves you.
As soon as the phone is activated, she disappears into a world of frantic text-messaging with her friends. When they call the house, she says, "Text me!" and hangs up immediately -- because today's kids are much more comfortable texting or instant messaging than talking on the phone, let alone interacting in person.
A month goes by. The first bill arrives at the house. It's thicker than an issue of Vanity Fair.
Somehow, your child has managed to rack up thousands of text messages.
Next comes the sitdown with the child, in which you attempt to put limits on the number of calls (and especially the number of text messages) per month.
Either the child adheres to the new rules -- OK, stop laughing -- or you get another statement listing thousands of text messages and calls. (Teenagers have a unique ability to operate in a state of denial. They KNOW that bill will arrive, but they'll worry about it later.)
Texting one two three
At that point, the parent takes away the cell phone, and the child tells the parents they are the worst parents in the history of parenting.
I have heard amazing stories about teenagers and text messaging. Stories of kids who rack up 7,000 messages in a single month. Stories of high school students visiting college campuses -- and never looking up during the visit because they're too busy texting. Stories of kids attending baseball games, weddings, birthday parties, etc., and spending the entire event hunched over the communications device, firing away message after message after message.
According to Guinness, the world record for most text messages in a single month is a ridiculous 182,689, held by one Deepak Sharma, a teenager from Ludhiana, India. That's a new SMS message every 14 seconds, which seems impossible, but there you have it.
I'm sure it hasn't gotten that crazy in your house. But I would like to hear your horror tales of teen texting gone mad.
If you're a teenager (or a twentysomething) and you were/are addicted to texting, I'd like to hear your all-time record for most messages logged in a month.
If you're the parent of such a child, I'd like to hear from you as well. I'll publish some of the stories in a future column -- but I won't embarrass anyone, and I'll protect your identity, if you so desire.
Probably the best way to reach me is via text message -- kidding. You know how to get in touch with me.
Richard Roeper will be a guest on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" today on NBC.
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