May 20, 2003
The Chicks Conspiracy
An article in Counterpunch quotes record industry sources who show that the campaign against the Dixie Chicks was orchestrated by a small group of Republicans, not a spontaneous expression of the country music audience. Right on! Expose those bastards! Looks like Ari F-word, presidential prick and prevaricator, has given notice, saying he is moving to the greener pastures of the private sector. Can't say I will miss his face, but all good things must end. Who will Bush replace him with? I was thinking about it. Why not me? I wonder if I could get my name in there. What a great movie that would be, some guy getting that job who is not really in the Bush fold, looking for an opportunity to expose the crimes of the administration, waiting for the big chance, because so many crimes are already exposed and they are still in power. So if you see my face there, don't blow my cover! Check out Arundhati Roy! Here is a quote from a recent speech: "Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba'ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq." Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the "Allies" fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal." See The Center for Economic and Social Rights.
For an archive of recordings of Roy, see Democracy Now.
The venerable Smithsonian Institution is just another political football to the power politicians of the right wing. The Institution recently put an exhibit of beautiful photographs of the wildlands of Alaska in the basement. They had previously planned to give it a much more prominent showing. But it showed the beauty of the preserve that the oil barons want to dig up, therefore it assumed a political meaning. If people see how beautiful it is, they may care that you are going to tear it up for the oil industry. See The Times Union.
Whose afraid of Helen Thomas? Bush. Knoxnews.com.