November 2, 2005
The World Closes In on the Rogue Administration
The New Pearl Harbor -- by David Ray Griffin, is now posted online in its entirety. Jim Oberg: "When our vote is taken away or made meaningless, as has now happened, our reality in America is changed in a fundamental way. No longer can we, the citizens, hold those in government accountable for their actions. That is what has happened in America, I am now certain, after examining the many studies done following this election. We now must face the terrible fact that we are ruled by a regime that claims a mandate to do as they please, when in fact they represent an illegitimate and criminal tyranny over us. And look what they have done with that unchallenged power: Established torture as a policy of interrogation; instituted concentration camps around the world where those simply accused are sent to languish with no defense or hope of exoneration; illegally invaded a country based on fabricated intelligence, killing many thousands of innocents and turning the entire world community against us; pillaged our treasury and transferred untold wealth to their cronies, supporters and our largest corporations; devastated our environment by removing all protections that guard the very life support system of our planet. The list is long." It was Rove -- Time reporter Matt Cooper said it was Rove who gave him Plame's name. ABC What Did Cheney Know and When? Truthout
November 3, 2005
"In our system each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial," said Bush, defending the criminals in his administration. This is one of the principles he has fought hard to destroy for others in America, throwing hundreds into prison without charges, and standing hard for his right as president to throw anyone in jail he deems an enemy. The Geneva Convention, a document designed to prevent a recurrence of the Nazi nightmare, is "quaint," Bush's Attorney General Gonzales said. Don't try take away our right to torture, they scream.Great to see the Democrats pulling out the stops, playing a little brinkmanship of their own. Shutting down the Senate over the Republicans' unwillingness to confront the criminal activity in the White House was a "stunt", the Republicans said. Yes indeed, but what is Bush's campaign about Avian flu? What is every photo op every day of the Bush administration? None of it has anything to do with the reality of the Bush administration.
Links:
We're Incompetent, Not Evil -- Ted Rall chimes in that this CIA-outing scandal is, indeed, Bigger than Watergate. The World Can't Wait -- "George W. Bush is becoming a uniter, not a divider, after all. It's just that he's uniting the country against himself," writes David Swanson at Truthout. "They knew they were lying. The world told them. We told them. Courageous members of the US Congress told them." Still to Come: Bigger Fish, Deeper Water -- CityPages
November 9, 2005
John McCain went on the Larry King show to market himself as a presidential candidate and of course he got some mileage on the amendment he introduced that explicitly states what used to be beyond question in America: torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners is not acceptable.McCain made a good show of it with that amendment and the discussion of it on the Larry King show provided a good opportunity to play some tapes of young McCain, the just-released prisoner of war, which will be an essential building block in the mythmaking machinery to install McCain as the next anointed master of the corporatocracy. But McCain was not able to go the distance to support the principle that is the essence of the question: that it is not acceptable to torture people, no matter who they are.
McCain actually quoted Bush: "These are bad people..." he seemed to be backing off the commitment to ban torture. Who says they are "bad people"? The fact is, during the several years that the Bush administration has been throwing brown-skinned people in jail without charge or access to attorneys, many of them have turned out to be guilty of no crime at all. And if they are, does that make torture an acceptable practice? Why is John McCain saying this?
McCain also quoted Bush's Rove script during the 2004 campaign, saying the war in Iraq is a battle "between good and evil". What crap! With the latest revelation of U.S. forces using white phosphorous bombs in Iraq to burn the flesh off men, women and children, who is good? Who is evil?
Just another atrocity, just one more damn war crime. McCain is a terrible disappointment. McCain the self-styled "Reagan conservative." Ah, fond memories of Reagan! When the issue of the destruction of the ozone layer came up, the Reagan administration's policy was for people to use sunscreen and sunglasses. Tell that to the victims of Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Beta.
Everyone has a place. There had to be a worst president at some point. A president so evil and shallow and careless that he brought the United States to its knees. George Bush gets to play that role in history.
November 9, 2005
Republicans Feel the Heat -- Democrats won most of the big election races this time around. SF Gate Meanwhile, Blair -- who is increasingly getting the diabolical face he deserves -- is pushing to follow in Bush's footsteps in taking away due process in Britain. But his support is caving in and he may have to drop it. CTV Feel the Heat -- "With pressure mounting on the Bush administration over its detainee policies, Republican House and Senate leaders asked Tuesday for an investigation into who leaked information to the Washington Post about CIA-run secret prisons abroad." Of course Republicans are not concerned about the criminal activity of the administration, only on finding out who let the cat out of the bag. CTV
November 10, 2005
Good News: Can you believe it? There is good news. More than in a long time. Even though the trial of Lewis Libby is on the back burner and no other indictments have yet come forth, that looms like a giant shoe, ready to fall on the house of sticks built by Bush-Cheney and the other neocon lunatics.
White House Mole -- Bernard Weiner, co-editor of The Crisis Papers, says he has a relationship to a White House mole, a moderate Republican who is ready to bury the neocons. This alleged source, called "Shallow Throat" by Weiner, has some interesting things to say. "'The wheels are coming off the bus,' a giddy Shallow Throat said. 'Now that the Bush Administration is imploding from within, it's time for those of us on the outside to set more political charges. So many who have wanted to get these creeps, but who have been silent before, are leaking damaging information about them. The Establishment conservatives -- those who were pushed out of influence and power by the neo-cons who hijacked our party -- are getting their message out daily: It's OK to get rid of these Bush guys because if we don't, they'll take us all down with them -- the party, the economy, the Constitution, the military, the veterans, whatever's left of respect for the U.S. in the world." Hmmmm... Interesting. (crisispapers.org) Do where's a good place to strike the Bush administration? "Their main points of weakness?," says Shallow Throat. "Try anywhere. Their whole foundation, built on lies and fraud and corruption and in-your-face arrogance and bullying, has rampant dry-rot at the core. Just hit it hard, anywhere, and more structure will fall off, by this time almost on its own." This has a ring of truth, a very pleasant ring. That slimy Bush clone disguised as Hugh Grant, Tony Blair, tried to put his own Patriot Act into effect in Britain, to curtail due process of law and consolidate nearly absolute power in the hands of the despot -- but he failed. Hats off to the British Parliament for standing up to this punk. Enough is enough. Of course when the American congress voted on it they were shell-shocked by 9/11, the thing was pushed on them in the middle of the night and forced to vote on it the next day without having a chance to read it, and several major Democratic legislators were attacked with anthrax letters, that turned out to be a U.S. government strain. Somehow Bush and the Rad Republicans forgot to investigate that terrorist activity, since all lines of inquiry led to them. Same as 9/11, but there were no New Jersey widows coming at them in the anthrax case, shaming them into holding something that could be called an investigation, no matter how rigged and tightly controlled by the White House it really was. So getting back to the point, Blair, or Baby Bush, was unable to pull the same crap over the Brits. The whole world seems to be catching onto the neocons. Their days certainly seem numbered. Associated Press And talk about Good News -- Judith Miller, who did incalculable damage when she hijacked the New York Times front page to push the neocon agenda in Iraq, has now "retired." Praise the Lord! Washington Post May we some day look back at this time as the days when the Bush administration just fell to pieces. Ahh what pleasure to see it! It's some sort of perverse pleasure to know that the bastards have three more years to weather before they can safely escape to pasture. And if there's any guts or sense of justice left in the American people, they will not escape. This time let's see the process of justice through. Not like with Nixon and Reagan, letting them off the hook for the highest of crimes. Let's for once apply the standard of justice to them they would gladly apply to anyone not part of their crowd. Let's rout out the Nazi infection in our government that first took in the first moments after World War II ended. Every time we refuse to face the rot and thoroughly clean it out, it just continues to fester and stink and grow into new cancers. Terminated -- One of the most pleasant pieces of news is stated best in this Bloomberg headline: "Schwarzenegger's Entire Agenda Is Rejected by California Voters". Couldn't happen to a more unprincipled fake. Thank you. Truth is Busting Out All Over -- But then, who could beat this headline? Stated plainly, "The Vice President Lied About What He Knew" Jason Leopold in Counterpunch Vice President Cheney in Trouble -- writes former CIA agent Ray McGovern. "Cheney's current situation has the makings of a Greek tragedy in the way he is about to self-destruct. The tragic flaw of overweening arrogance - the Greeks called it hubris - did not begin with Euripides. Nor will it end with the inexorably approaching demise of the vice president and other leaders of the current US administration."
November 14, 2005
The One Good Thing About the Bush Administration
Once or twice that phrase has come to mind, but I can never complete a full sentence. I've never been able to think of much good about it. And there still isn't really any. The One Good Thing is yet to fully manifest, but we are seeing it in its early stages -- the evil mob's spectacular collapse. No one has ever better deserved the torment the Bush boys are beginning to go through.Now that things are starting to shake loose, the whole house of cards, built on arrogant bullying, is falling down. They didn't earn many real friends. A lot of robots doing the goose step with them, they can easily be swayed to a different beat.
Now we read in The Hill, "House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.) yesterday threatened to subpoena three members of the Bush Cabinet and White House counsel Harriet Miers if they do not comply with document requests issued by his select committee on Hurricane Katrina response." It's coming in from all sides now. All it took was a chink or two in the monolithic power structure, and all the people they have stomped on are ready to strike their own blows.
Meanwhile, "Steven E. Jones, Brigham Young Physics Professor, Thinks Bombs, Not Planes, Toppled WTC". See 911blogger.com, Desert News. The paper itself is here. "New book, 9-11: Tragedy & Treason, Blows the Lid Off the Government Story! by Kip Rudhard" Melbourne Indymedia Feel Good News -- William Rivers Pitt: "This may make me a bad person, but I get a warm feeling in the center of my soul when I watch right-wing maniacs freak out in frustration and lose their so-called minds. It just makes me smile". Truthout Bush's lame attempt to defend his defenseless war took a very desperate turn when he tried to put the blame on Democrats for going along with him. {Orlando Sentinel) The intelligence he used to decide to go to war was the same information Congress had when it voted to authorize him to go to war against Iraq, he said. On whose authority were they getting that information? Who was trying to sell them? And who did take the country to war? The Senate was lame, indeed, voting to grant Bush the authority to charge into his absurd war that he could never seem to decide the justification for. They weren't born yesterday. It wasn't that mysterious what was happening. Bush is not that hard to see through. His history is available to anyone who wants to look into it. No senator should be voting to go to war based only what is given to him by a known prevaricator like Bush. But still, Bush is in no position to criticize them. Their crime was that they authorized him to do as he saw fit. They gave him a vote of confidence. It seems as if they really believed him, or they respected him too much to challenge the phony story he was weaving, or perhaps they were just giving him enough rope to hang himself. That would have been a pretty cold, calculating political decision, to let thousands of people die needlessly in order to let Bush destroy his own presidency with an act so spectacularly catastrophic as to ensure his destruction. I'm afraid that was about as far as some of the opportunistic politicians were thinking. The Senators are worthy of plenty of criticism, but not from Bush. He's the one person who has no room to criticize them. He's the one who did it. They only authorized him to take the ultimate step if he exhausted all other options, which he clearly did not, as he leaped eagerly into his new role as "War President." It must have all looked so much easier than it is turning out to be.
November 15, 2005
George Needs Another Terrorist Attack -- According to Capital Hill Blue, "A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and 'restore his image as a leader of the American people.' The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could 'validate' the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to 'unite the country' in a 'time of national shock and sorrow.' The memo says such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections." How far will they go? And what does this say about the background of 9/11? Was that the "new Pearl Harbor" the neocons pined for in their Project for a New American Century?
November 30, 2005
Links of Interest --
Really good, important journalism: "The Man Who Sold the War Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war" Rolling Stone The Real McCain -- The Nation Huffington on Woodward The Mystery of Woodward's Three Sources -- Robert Parry On Bush's outrageous plans to physically destroy Al Jazeera, one of the only media channels that doesn't kowtow to him, and on Blair's attempt to outlaw the freedom of the press to publish the memo: Wikipedia.org Another Republican politician bites the dust through corruption. These guys were having such a sweepstakes ripping off taxpayers, they got careless. dcnewsonline.com Bush On the Run -- "George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate." Frank Rich Torture Came from the Top -- "A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that "the President of the United States is all-powerful" and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant." Associated Press His Paranoidship -- No one can fly over Cheney's Wyoming place -- pnionline.com
