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Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!)

12.31.04 (5:01 am) [edit]

[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]

* The U.S. military suffered at least 348 deaths in Iraq over the final four months of the year, more than in any other similar period since the invasion in March 2003.

* The number of wounded surpassed 10,000, with more than a quarter injured in the last four months as direct combat, roadside bombs and suicide attacks escalated. When President Bush (news - web sites) declared May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were over, the number wounded stood at just 542.

* The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November.

That's serious attrition. But of course, "we're making progress". - http://www.dailykos.com

[b]And Bush is gonna' party, party, party at the most expensive inaugural coronation in our nation's history!!! No stopping the laughing, dancing, gorging & swilling-- while others die and disaster afflicts so many!!![/b]

Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!)

12.31.04 (5:01 am) [edit]

[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]

Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!)

12.31.04 (4:59 am) [edit]

[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]

Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!)

12.31.04 (4:54 am) [edit]

[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]

Herr Fuhrer Bush's Fascist State of Chaos ...

12.30.04 (5:29 am) [edit]

[b]George (Herr Fuhrer) Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies: [/b]

The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.

At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scowcroft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.

"Words like 'incoherent' come to mind," one top state department official told me about Rice's effort to organise her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.

Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November. Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. "Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public," a state department source said.

Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons. Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but "he colourfully said he would not", a state department official told me. Rice's radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.

Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.

In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush's conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age." And they wrote: "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns."

The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush's campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Junior in Florida. In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration's "overriding strategic concern in the [first] Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonisation of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare."

In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated.

Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged. Those who advised Bush that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a "cakewalk", and that capturing Baghdad was "mission accomplished", are rewarded.

The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about "victory". Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/com...,3604,1380713,00.html

Herr Fuhrer Bush's Fascist State of Chaos ...

12.30.04 (5:28 am) [edit]

Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!]

12.30.04 (5:23 am) [edit]

[b]To answer the question posed by Dr. Juan Cole: Where's Bush?... The callous, craven & corrupt Bush is partying [i]and [/i]planning for the largest and most lavishly obscene "inauguration" parties, balls, fancy food-fests in our nation's history, while Iraq is a bloodbath aborting the lives of our U.S. Soldiers, innocent Iraqis-- and the tsunami disaster is reeking death, illness, and dire misery... But, the fucking Useful Idiot, Der Fuhrer Bush doesn't care:[i] he's partying[/i]!!![/b]

The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.

The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don't mourn being dead, that is left to the living.

Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.

As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).

Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.

The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.

Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.

Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!]

12.30.04 (5:19 am) [edit]

Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!]

12.30.04 (5:16 am) [edit]

Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's "Christian" Bush? [Partying!!!]

12.30.04 (5:11 am) [edit]

Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!]

12.30.04 (5:01 am) [edit]

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card

12.19.04 (6:16 am) [edit]

I got mine early:

"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...

But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:

[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]

To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.

Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.

The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.

[b]Sources:[/b]

TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...

Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...

[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card

12.19.04 (6:15 am) [edit]

I got mine early:

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card

12.19.04 (6:14 am) [edit]

I got mine early:

HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card

12.19.04 (6:14 am) [edit]

I got mine early:

TIME Magazine's NON-"Person" of 2004: Biggest Asshole of the Year!!!

12.19.04 (6:11 am) [edit]

[u][b]Bush Named Time's Person of 2004[/b][/u]

NEW YORK - After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush (news - web sites) for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.

The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes — and ours — on his faith in the power of leadership."

Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.

In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites).

"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.

After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.

"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."

In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.

"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."

Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and Bill Clinton (news - web sites). Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.

Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.

"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."

The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.

Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.

This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI (news - web sites) agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

TIME Magazine's NON-"Person" of 2004: Biggest Asshole of the Year!!!

12.19.04 (6:11 am) [edit]

Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops

12.18.04 (5:35 am) [edit]

[b]U.S. obviously didn't do all it could to protect troops[/b]

This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.

Start with the centerpiece, the Q & A in Kuwait with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 2,300 National Guard soldiers soon to be headed to Iraq. Among his fellow troops, Tennessean Thomas Wilson's query about why they had to scrounge through landfills to find armor for their trucks and Humvees was right on the money.

Rumsfeld's reply: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Those words will certainly be in the first paragraph of his obituary.

For families of National Guard serving in Iraq, Wilson's question came as no surprise. They have been hearing from their sons and daughters about equipment deficiencies since the war began. But the question uncovered the sad fact that less than one-third of the 19,389 Humvees in Iraq are fully armored. Once the insurgency hit, the Army found it needed 35 times the number of armored Humvees than originally planned.

Letters to the editor asked: "Shouldn't they have considered the Army they had before the war?" And: "Did Rumsfeld have nothing to do with planning for the war?"

Rumsfeld also noted that you "can have all the armor in the world" on a vehicle and it still can be blown up. But Wilson's question had a profound result. The Pentagon suddenly announced it found $4.1 billion, immediately earmarked to armor up Humvees.

Then there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.

One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.

Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?

The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!

Thus President Bush puts an official stamp of success on a war whose endgame grows more uncertain day by day. The people who know that best are the families of the reservists who drive most of the unarmored trucks and Humvees.

President Bush said, "As I have told many families I met with, we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones in a mission that is vital and important." In fact, until Wilson's question, we obviously were not.

That brings us to the final headline: "At Bush Inauguration, Lunch Will Set You Back $250,000."

This is a lunch with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, obviously exclusive to the high tax brackets. There will also be a "Salute To Those Who Serve," with free tickets for the military.

The arithmetic is too tempting. It costs $25,000 to fully armor a Humvee. Each $250,000 lunch ticket could go straight to equipping 10 vehicles, so our reservists and Guards in Iraq won't have to ride around with homemade sandbags on the floor.

Do it, Mr. Bush. Donate your lunch money to the troops. - http://www.indystar.com/artic...

Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops

12.18.04 (5:34 am) [edit]

Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops

12.18.04 (5:33 am) [edit]

Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops

12.18.04 (5:33 am) [edit]

Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: America Fails Again & Loses Control of Mosul ...

12.18.04 (5:29 am) [edit]

[b]Westerner beheaded on Mosul street as American forces lose control of key city[/b]

Gunmen raked a car with machine-gun fire in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, killing three foreigners and their driver. They then cut off the head of one of their victims.

The killings show that at the same time as the US was recapturing Fallujah in a heavily publicised assault it largely lost control of Mosul, Iraq's northern capital. Though US troops launched a counter-attack, their grip on the city remains tenuous. The four men who died yesterday were travelling in a white sedan when it was attacked with automatic weapons and set on fire at a traffic intersection in Mosul.

One of the foreigners was briefly captured by the insurgents, according to an eyewitness. When he tried to escape they cut his head off and left his body in a pool of blood.

A photographer for Reuters news agency saw four bodies lying beside the burning car. Three of those who died appeared to be foreigners, one of whom looked Turkish and the other two European. The fourth body, possibly of the driver, was partly burnt, but appeared to be that of an Arab.

The men were carrying small automatic weapons, indicating that they may have been working for one of the private security companies in Iraq.

Mosul, a city on the Tigris river with a population of 1.2 million, is largely populated by Sunni Muslims but has a large Kurdish minority. It has increasingly fallen into the hands of Sunni insurgents over the past six weeks.

Insurgents launched an uprising on 10 November, two days after the US Marines started their attack on Mosul, and stormed 10 police stations. Out of a local police force of 8,000, all but 1,000 have deserted and only 400 of those remaining are considered reliable.

Earlier in the year, the US occupation of Mosul by the 101st Airborne was presented as a model of what the occupation should have been in the rest of the country. Several thousand army officers publicly renounced Baathism. The local police force was being built up. The unpopular political parties of returned exiles in Baghdad were kept at bay.

Until the past few months, guerrilla attacks in Mosul were both less frequent and less effective than further south around Baghdad. This may have been because Mosul and Nineveh province, of which it is the centre, was never seen as a bastion of support for Saddam Hussein. But the city was always a nationalist centre and a recruiting ground for the officer corps of the Iraqi army. The defence minister under the old regime was usually from Mosul.

Unlike Fallujah, the guerrillas did not contest the recapture of Mosul by US and Iraqi forces in November. Leaflets were issued instructing fighters to hide their weapons and stay in the city. Since then 150 bodies have found, many of them members of the National Guard or other security forces. US forces in Iraq are being built up from 138,000 to 150,000 men and are already stretched trying to hold Sunni Muslim cities and towns around Baghdad. They were never able to surround Fallujah, even at the height of the battle last month, and many fighters escaped.

Much of the US Army in Iraq is tied down providing support services, guarding fixed positions or protecting convoys that are frequently attack. US patrols often seem to serve no particular purpose but severely disrupt traffic because Iraqi drivers do not want to get close to the American vehicles in case they are attacked.

In Fallujah, the mayor, Mahmoud Ibrahim, said the first families would start to return to the south of the city yesterday. But this may be in doubt because there is shelling is continuing in northern Fallujah.

There are more than 250,000 refugees who fled the city to seek shelter in Baghdad 35 miles away or the nearby city of Ramadi. Others are in camps on the city outskirts or in neighbouring villages. Fallujah has had no power or water since the US assault and these will take time to restore. - http://news.independent.co.uk...

Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: America Fails Again & Loses Control of Mosul ...

12.18.04 (5:29 am) [edit]

The Three Stooges -- (Bush Pisses on the Medal of Freedom to Reward Asslickers)

12.18.04 (5:26 am) [edit]

Anybody who has any doubts that George Bush is a true believer in himself should finally be convinced by his awarding the Medal of Freedom to the three blunderers of the war in Iraq.

Gen. Tommy Franks allowed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to browbeat him into planning a war with fewer troops than were needed. He no doubt noted that when Gen. Eric Shinseki and the secretary of the Army publicly said many more troops were needed, they were gotten rid of. Shinseki was humiliated when the Pentagon announced his replacement a year and a half before he was due to step down. Secretary of the Army Thomas White was fired.

Today, there is no doubt that Shinseki and White were correct, but Franks, who sacrificed his professional judgment to Rumsfeld's ideological rigidity, gets the medal.

Then there's Paul Bremer. Nobody could have made more mistakes as head of the occupation than Bremer. He and Franks allowed the looting that proved disastrous. He fired all the civil servants who could have helped run the government, and he disbanded the army. All the problems we face today in Iraq stem directly from these blunders. But he gets the medal.

And finally there is George Tenet, the former CIA director. He failed to detect the attack on 9/11, and he padded the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to please the president. "It's a slam-dunk," he said. Sure. He makes a blunder of stupendous importance and gets the medal.

What should alarm people, but probably won't, is not the series of blunders in Iraq. Anyone and any administration can make mistakes. No one is infallible or omniscient. What should alarm people is the president's iron-tight refusal to acknowledge that any mistakes have been made. That's exactly what he was saying when he handed out those three medals: I have not made any mistakes whatsoever. Rumsfeld, Franks, Tenet and Bremer have made no mistakes. The only people who are wrong are people who disagree with me.

Such arrogance is characteristic of fanatics. I'm not suggesting that the president should agonize in public about his decisions. The public wants a leader with self-confidence. But this arrogance is present behind the scenes. All during the buildup to the war, people with advice to be cautious or even with professional judgments about what would be required were dismissed out of hand if their ideas conflicted with preconceived notions.

Apparently, when the president and his ideologues get an idea into their heads, they view any facts to the contrary as evidence of hostility and disloyalty. Nobody in recent history has been more arrogant and more wrong than the Bush administration has been in its dealing with Iraq.

Unfortunately, this same mind-set will be present in dealing with all of the problems and crises of the future. I recognize that Bush's partisans strongly disagree with me and are overjoyed by his re-election. Truly, I hope they are right, because if I am right, then we're in for more hatred, more death, more destruction and more economic hardship. Iraq was not a cakewalk, and neither will be Syria, Iran and North Korea. Furthermore, if Bush can't summon the courage to force the Israelis to get rid of all of their settlements in the West Bank, that fire will continue to burn, and as much as American politicians wish to deny it, that conflict is the fuel of terrorism.

When a leader makes it clear that he doesn't want anyone around who will tell him things he doesn't want to hear, he guarantees that he will be surrounded by sycophants and manipulators. Great leaders, whether military or civilian, do exactly the opposite. They surround themselves with smart people who aren't afraid to speak up during the decision-making process.

Humans succeed when they adapt to reality, and that involves taking into account feedback. Oh, this wasn't so; that didn't work, so now I have to adjust. People who take no notice of reality's feedback usually fail. They are like a ship sailing at full speed with no rudder and no radar.

Let us all pray that there is nothing but open sea in the path of Bush's second term. - http://www.antiwar.com/reese/...

The Three Stooges -- (Bush Pisses on the Medal of Freedom to Reward Asslickers)

12.18.04 (5:25 am) [edit]

Presidential Medals of Failure (For Bush Ass-lickers Willing to Betray the U.S.A. for Der Fuhrer)

12.16.04 (12:38 pm) [edit]

Where's Kerik?

This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my computer screen. First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States sent too few troops to Iraq.

One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue velvet ribbon with the ornate medal -- one failure after another, each now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a bestseller.)

I braced myself. Could Bernard Kerik be next? Would we skip the entire process of maladministration, misjudgments in office and sycophantic admiration of the current president and go straight to the celebrated failure? After all, what seems to matter most to this president is not performance -- certainly not excellence -- but a matey kind of loyalty and obsequiousness, of which Kerik had plenty.

"Bernie," Bush called out at a White House ceremony last year.

Kerik, who was walking away, stopped. "Yes, sir," he said.

"You're a good man," the president said.

It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of youth and then -- wow! -- this explosive career, coming out of the starting gate like Seabiscuit, another runt with something less than an elite East Coast pedigree. What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.

Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot -- on the face of it -- both deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United States did not use enough troops there. "We never had enough troops on the ground," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency. For the record, Franks -- prodded by Donald Rumsfeld -- is the guy who never had enough troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither.

The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?

To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it -- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal as any of the others.

Maybe next year. - http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Presidential Medals of Failure (For Bush Ass-lickers Willing to Betray the U.S.A. for Der Fuhrer)

12.16.04 (12:38 pm) [edit]

For Their Faith And Their Country: Insurgents Fight On

12.16.04 (11:22 am) [edit]

[b]As a US general conceded Iraqi cells are getting more effective, Rory McCarthy speaks to two fighters[/b]

He sat at a plain white table in a deserted building not far from Haifa Street, a stronghold of militancy in the heart of the Iraqi capital. Before him was a tray bearing cups of sweet dark tea and a plate of bananas, and as American helicopter gunships carved circles in the sky above, he described how he had become the commander of a hardline Islamic cell in the Iraqi insurgency.

The man, in his mid-30s with a trimmed dark beard, studious black-rimmed spectacles and a red-and-white keffiyeh thrown loosely over his shoulders, gave his name only as Abu Mojahed.

Before the war he had been a labourer in Baghdad and was jailed four times under Saddam Hussein's regime because of his adherence to the Salafi creed of Sunni Islam, a strict and conservative belief. He would gather with friends for secret Salafi classes and discussions.

He did not fight when America invaded last year, but did not welcome the war either. "I didn't fight. I stayed at home. If you fight for Saddam and he wins, you are not winning. If America wins, you are not winning," he said. "They freed us from evil but they brought more evil to the country."

As the weeks passed, the clerics in the mosques instructed him and his friends to take up arms."We fight the Americans because they are non-believers and they are coming to fight Islam, calling us terrorists," he said.

[b]The real resistance [/b]

Theirs is a story rarely told, a brief insight into the lives of thousands of Iraqi men who have spent the past 18 months fighting a costly guerrilla war against the most powerful army in the world.

Their motivations vary: some are undoubtedly from Saddam's military and intelligence apparatus, others fight to defend tribal or nationalistic honour, but alongside them a much more extreme Islamic militancy has emerged.

The US military has in the past dismissed the fighters as "anti-Iraqi forces" and "terrorists". Several US commanders announced that the back of the insurgency has been broken by the assault on Falluja.

However, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, deputy chief of US central command, told Reuters yesterday: "[The insurgency] is becoming more effective. They may use doorbells today to blow things up. They may use remote controls from toys to morrow. And as we adapt, they adapt."

The Iraqi fighters, who describe themselves as the "mujahideen", the holy warriors, or for the more secular, the "muqawama", the resistance, insist there is more fighting still to come.

In the past year Haifa Street, in an area full of narrow alleyways in a poor Sunni area on the banks of the Tigris river, has become a focal point - even though it is near the heavily-fortified Green Zone, which houses the US and British embassies and the Iraqi interim government.

Insurgents have laid dozens of bombs beneath the road surface and still appear to be largely in control of the area.

Three groups are understood to operate there: Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; the Islamic Army, another extreme group also responsible for kidnappings and beheadings; and a third group of fighters whose name is unclear. Abu Mojahed said he spoke for all three groups, whom he called the "Haifa mujahideen".

He said his targets were the US military and "those supporting them", and that his men had attacked helicopters, tanks and individual soldiers, although he would not describe specific incidents. Unlike other more secular elements in the insurgency, the Salafis have their own agenda for the future of their country, shaped in a language of anger, revenge and rigid Islamic conservatism.

"We fight for our land, against those who are fighting Islam, for our country and for our women," he said.

"Our goal is to fight whoever fights us and not just the Americans. And we want this country ruled by the Tawhid and Sunna," he said. The two words are fundamentals for the Salafis: Tawhid meaning monotheism and Sunna the ways of the Prophet Muhammad. "If that doesn't happen, that means all of us die because we fight until the last breath," he said.

In a second interview, conducted several miles away, a young fighter from a different group spoke of his motivation. He said he fought for his religion. He used a more secular Arabic vocabulary and, typical of many in the insurgency, appeared to have no clear agenda for his country's future.

He gave his name as Abu Abdul Rahman, and sat with a red-and-white keffiyeh wrapped so uncomfortably tight around his face that his dark brown eyes were only occasionally visible.

"Before the war I was an ordinary person living my life and minding my own business," he said. "After the Americans came and invaded my country there was no war to go to except jihad."

Abu Rahman, 25, had been a student, working occasionally. He said he had not supported Saddam, but had chosen not to fight the regime.

[b]From bad to worse [/b]

"You could say we were hypnotised by it," he said. Like others, he was grateful that the war brought the dictator's fall, but was angered by the American occupation that followed. "Thanks to the Americans for getting rid of Saddam, but no thanks for still staying in Iraq," he said.

"The idea of jihad came step by step as I watched what the Americans were doing to our country," he said. "In the beginning we were only cousins and friends, and later other people came to join us, people who were presented to us by the sheikhs."

He appeared undeterred by the strength of the US military arsenal, and spoke keenly of martyrdom. "My group and I, we always race to death, so we may die and go to heaven. Our goal is to get the invaders out of our country, and from all the Arab countries, and I hope that after we get them out we will have a couple of moments of peace in our life."

He fought in Falluja in April, during the first attempt by the US marines to take control of the city. "There are many people who have died in my group," he said. "But only one of them really broke my heart. He was a cousin of mine, but it was written for him to be in heaven." The emir, or commander, of their group was also killed in Falluja in April. "He was a friend from childhood," Abu Rahman said.

Because of the intense fighting, it took five days to retrieve the emir's body. "He was always telling us to pray for him to die that day. He would fight with us, not like those leaders who stay in the back. We made a celebration like a wedding party when he died."

Abu Rahman said that although he belonged to a tribe, his motivation was religious, not tribal. He also said some Iraqi police and soldiers should not be touched, and were "serving for the good of their country". Foreign contractors should not be targeted either, he said.

In the end, he said, it was the lack of reconstruction and the continued occupation that had left people so embittered.

"We don't want them, thanks. We can rebuild our own country, we have a long and ancient history. All we are asking is for them to pull out." - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Bush Fucks America (Again): War Funding Request May Hit $100 Billion!!!

12.16.04 (7:20 am) [edit]

The Bush administration plans to ask for between $80 billion and $100 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, rather than the $70 billion to $75 billion the White House privately told members of Congress before the election, according to Pentagon and White House officials.

Administration officials said yesterday they have not concluded how much money they will request in a "supplemental" spending package that is scheduled to go to Congress in January.

"There's work going on inside the department to understand what's needed, and there's work going on with the Office of Management and Budget," the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters yesterday.

But some analysts and government officials said the request is expected to run as high as $100 billion, bringing the total cost of operations in Iraq alone to well over $200 billion since the March 2003 invasion.

Earlier this fall, members of Congress said the Defense Department told them in private briefings the supplemental package would be between $70 billion and $75 billion. The budget request will be higher, sources said, because of the greater number of soldiers -- temporarily boosted to 150,000 -- needed to provide security around the time of the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections, and the loss of equipment due to the vigorous insurgency there.

In June, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 2005 supplemental to be submitted this January for Iraq and Afghanistan would be between $55 billion and $60 billion.

The January supplemental will be the third special budget request to cover the military costs of Iraq. The administration asked for $55.8 billion in April 2003 and $71.8 billion in November 2003. In May of this year, Congress added $25 billion in war costs to the fiscal 2005 defense budget. In total, $152.6 billion in military funding for Iraq has been provided through the end of this year.

Those statistics do not include emergency money to support the 20,000 US troops in Afghanistan, which brings the total bill to $162.3 billion.

In addition, the military has been spending more than was approved for 2004, in anticipation of a fresh infusion of funds in early 2005.

"They ran out of the 2004 budget a month early [and] had to borrow [from] 2005," said John Pike, a defense specialist at the military think tank GlobalSecurity.org, a military think tank in Alexandria, Va. "They're already starting to suggest that the 2005 budget is going to be $100 billion for one year alone."

The Iraq operation, he said, has "been running over a billion a week thus far. I think we're probably getting up to $2 billion a week fairly soon."

Few analysts expect the Iraq mission to be wrapped up in a year, and many question why the Bush administration is continuing to budget its war costs through supplementals -- usually reserved for one-time, emergency expenses -- rather than include them in the annual budget request that is sent to Capitol Hill every February.

Democrats and some fiscally conservative Republicans believe the administration is trying to hide the effects of rising war costs on the federal deficit, thereby justifying President Bush's calls for making some tax cuts permanent and spending more on education and other domestic priorities.

Although war costs ultimately get added to the deficit, keeping them off the annual budget creates a false picture of the government's commitments at a time when Congress is making funding decisions, critics said.

Brian Reidl, an economist with the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, said the Iraq funding should be put in the defense budget, because the Pentagon knows it will need money to pay for the operation. Leaving it out masks the true size of the deficit, he said.

"There's an argument to be made that [early in the year] you don't know what you'll need" for Iraq funding, Reidl said. But "there's no reason why you can't put in a place-holder to at least estimate the cost."

The administration separates the Iraq funding because "it's easier to sell the budget resolution with a smaller deficit and a smaller spending total because Iraq is excluded," Reidl said.

Steve Kosiak, a defense budget specialist at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, added that "the idea is [supplementals] are supposed to be used when there is a surprise. This is no longer a surprise that we are in Iraq."

The actual cost of the military operations in Iraq is higher than any of the supplementals suggest, analysts said, because the wartime wear and tear on people and equipment will require expenditures long after the war ends.

A soon-to-be-completed classified study by the Government Accountability Office requested by Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee concludes that the cost of "resetting" the worn-out armed forces for peacetime will require billions more than the money needed simply to maintain combat operations, according to congressional officials.

"They will need new training and the sense is that the longer this thing goes on the deeper the problems get," said a congressional staff member who has been briefed on the GAO study.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon yesterday alerted more units to be ready for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tens of thousands of Army soldiers from Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New York, and Texas -- including a brigade of the Army's 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum in New York -- will prepare to deploy overseas by the middle of 2005. The planned rotations, and others to be announced in the coming weeks, would maintain a force of 138,000 US troops in Iraq well into 2006.

However, Di Rita called the notifications "prudent planning" and cautioned that it does not necessarily mean the United States will need all those forces.

"It would be wrong to say that, as far as the eye can see, this is the number," Di Rita said. "It may very well be less than this. It may be the same amount. It may be more." - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Bush Fucks America (Again): War Funding Request May Hit $100 Billion!!!

12.16.04 (7:19 am) [edit]

Arrogant, Incompetent, Corrupt War Criminal Rummy (Secretary of Torture) Back on the Rocks?

12.15.04 (5:35 am) [edit]

Despite being asked by President George W. Bush to stay in his post, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld appears to be in growing political trouble, and not just because of his cavalier reply last week to a question posed by a member of the Tennessee National Guard in Kuwait about the lack of armored vehicles to protect U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Senior Republican lawmakers, including two of the most highly decorated Vietnam veterans in the U.S. Senate, have hardened their criticism of Rumsfeld's performance, with one of them, Senator John McCain, telling Associated Press this week he has "no confidence" in the defense secretary.

Calling some of Rumsfeld's actions in the Iraq war "irresponsible," the second senator, Chuck Hagel, stressed that his critique "goes beyond" the question of armor for the troops or the failure to anticipate an escalating and increasingly deadly insurgency.

Asked if he was disappointed Bush had asked Rumsfeld to stay on, Hagel replied, "The president's decision is his decision. He will live with that decision. He'll have to defend that decision. And that's all I want to say about it."

Those attacks followed the defense chief's brusque reply in a question and answer session to the soldier, Specialist Thomas Wilson, who asked why troops in Iraq had to armor vehicles themselves with scrap materials they found in garbage dumps. "You go to war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld responded, "not the Army you might want or wish to have."

Discontent is also growing over the ballooning price tag for the war: latest reports indicate the Pentagon will ask for as much as $90 billion more to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005, bringing the total in over three years to close to $250 billion.

Yet another major factor that is churning the waters of discontent against Rumsfeld is the still growing and strategically costly scandal over the abuse by U.S. soldiers of detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Iraq and Afghanistan, new details of which appear to drip out virtually daily.

On Tuesday, to take the latest example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFr... that documents obtained from the U.S. Navy revealed that the abuse and even torture of detainees by U.S. Marines in Iraq has been widespread.

Among the worst mistreatment reported in the documents were mock executions of juvenile detainees, electric shock, beatings, and forcing hooded and shackled prisoners to kneel for up to 24 hours while awaiting interrogation.

"Day after day, new stories of torture are coming to light, and we need to know how these abuses were allowed to happen," said ACLU Director Anthony Romero in a statement. "This kind of widespread abuse could not have taken place without a leadership failure of the highest order."

That failure, according to rapidly accumulating evidence, can be located behind Rumsfeld's office door, according to Scott Horton, the head of a task force of the New York City Bar Association http://www.abcny.org/ that has been investigating U.S. detention and interrogation practices in the "war on terrorism" for almost three years.

"His strategy of blaming it all on a handful of grunts has collapsed," said Horton, who says he has interviewed many senior career military and government lawyers who have been outraged by Rumsfeld's disregard for the Geneva Conventions and other protections that have traditionally been accorded prisoners of war.

Horton pointed in particular to a series of recent disclosures – some of them leaked to the press, others turned over to the ACLU as part of a lawsuit – that pointed to Rumsfeld and two top aides, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, and Cambone's deputy, Gen. William Boykin, as apparently having authorized the worst practices by military Special Operations Forces (SOF).

The latest disclosures come from records and documents of three agencies – the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – that have worked with the military at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The first, a classified June 25 memo from DIA Director Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby to Cambone, complained that a clandestine military task force in Iraq had beaten detainees, expelled DIA officials from interrogation rooms, confiscated any evidence they collected of abuse, and threatened them with retaliation if they reported what they had seen to their superiors.

Another set of documents obtained by the ACLU described heated objections by FBI and DIA officers to the violence of interrogation methods used by the military task force – apparently SOF personnel – in which they argued the techniques were both potentially illegal and counterproductive in terms of producing reliable intelligence.

When a senior FBI official took his agency's complaints to a meeting last May with the two top officers at the Guantanamo detention facility – one of whom, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, was sent to oversee detention operations in Iraq a few weeks later – the two generals concluded by saying, "The [FBI] has their way of [doing] business and the DoD [Department of Defense] has their marching orders from the Sec Def," a reference to Rumsfeld himself.

A July 14 letter from a senior FBI counter-terrorism official to a military counterpart, obtained by the Associated Press last week, described a case at Guantanamo where an FBI agent observed a female interrogator squeezing a male detainee's genitals and bending back his thumbs, as well as other "highly aggressive" interrogation techniques, including the use of a dog to intimidate another detainee.

Finally, the [i]New York Times [/i]reported Tuesday that the CIA had issued a secret directive in August 2003 to all its personnel in Iraq to avoid any military interrogations in Iraq that involved techniques "beyond questions and answers."

"The new disclosure," the[i] Times [/i]wrote, "is the latest sign of long-standing unease in intelligence circles about the military's interrogation techniques in Iraq." The CIA, it reported, also barred its personnel from even entering a secret SOF interrogation facility in Iraq.

"The CIA has a reputation for dealing with detainees in a very rough and aggressive way, and for it to say that what's going on with the SOF is way over the top and we can't allow our people to be involved with it really turns on alarm signals," Horton told IPS.

"So we've got all three agencies concluding that detainees are being abused; we don't want our employees involved; and, by the way, Donald Rumsfeld seems to be personally approving this," he continued, adding that several dozen SOF task forces appear "to have been given clearance to do whatever they want against 'high-value' suspects" in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.

Moreover, he added, internal investigations of SOF teams in which torture and even murder have been alleged have either been dealt with administratively or stalled. Ordinarily, he said, the military is very efficient in dealing with cases very quickly, as it did with the half dozen low-ranking Army personnel responsible for the Abu Ghraib abuses that were disclosed earlier this year.

Horton said that at a meeting he attended last May between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and representatives of various human rights groups, a deputy White House counsel had himself complained that his office could not get answers to key questions about interrogation policy and practices from the Pentagon. "You're having problems," Horton quoted the official as saying. "We're also having problems getting information, and we're the White House."

According to Horton, "We're in the final scenes of the [i]Wizard of Oz[/i], and the curtain has just been pulled back to show who has been pulling the levers." - http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?...

Arrogant, Incompetent, Corrupt War Criminal Rummy (Secretary of Torture) Back on the Rocks?

12.15.04 (5:33 am) [edit]

Arrogant, Incompetent, Corrupt War Criminal Rummy (Secretary of Torture) Back on the Rocks?

12.15.04 (5:29 am) [edit]

Arrogant, Incompetent, Corrupt War Criminal Rummy (Secretary of Torture) Back on the Rocks?

12.15.04 (5:29 am) [edit]

The Neocons Haven't Won Yet

12.15.04 (5:20 am) [edit]

With Bush's 51 percent victory, Colin Powell's departure, and the purge at CIA, many on the Old Right seem sunk in Bunyan's Slough of Despond http://www.bartleby.com/81/15... . They assume the neoconservatives are now free to pursue war without end.

Yet, six weeks have now passed since Nov. 2, and there is as yet no conclusive evidence George Bush is looking to widen the war in Iraq or launch wars on other axis-of-evil nations. Consider:

With the recapture of Fallujah, U.S. generals have indicated a need for more troops to neutralize other strongholds and pacify the Sunni Triangle before January elections. John McCain told [i]Meet the Press [/i]that we may need 40,000 to 50,000 more. In The [i]Weekly Standard[/i], Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk of AEI http://www.weeklystandard.com... have called for an enlargement of the U.S. Army of 480,000 and pumping up defense spending from 4 percent to the 5 percent or 6 percent of GDP Reagan spent in the decisive years of the Cold War.

Why do we need the ground troops? Because, write Donnelly and Serchuk, our real war is "a contest between liberalism and radical Islam to supplant the crumbling autocracies that have dominated the region since the fall of the Ottoman Empire." Our war is about "preserving Pax Americana."

The neocons have in mind taking down Middle East regimes and occupying their nations with U.S. troops, who would train and fight with indigenous forces to crush insurgents who resist American "hegemony."

"[America] will continue to contribute the lion's share of the blood and treasure in the effort to transform the greater Middle East," write Donnelly and Serchuk, but it's "impossible to have a Bush Doctrine world with Clinton-era defense budgets. The problem for the United States is not imperial overstretch, it's trying to run the planet on the cheap."

To which some of us might respond: The problem for the United States is trying to run the planet in the first place.

What is critical, however, is not what neocons say, but what Bush does. And while he still rhapsodizes about democratizing the world, he has yet to will the actions to attain the neocons' ends. There is no evidence of any large imminent increase in U.S. forces, or of 40,000 more troops embarking for the Sunni Triangle, or of a Bush plan to raise defense spending to Donnelly's "$500 or $600 billion for the foreseeable future."

Consider Iran. Relying on reports from an exile group we once labeled terrorist, Powell has warned that Iran may be at work on a nuclear warhead for its Shahab-3 http://antiwar.com/justin/?ar... missile, which can reach Israel. The neocons and Sharonites have been howling for Bush to effect the nuclear castration of Iran by bombing now.

Yet, there is no evidence Iran is working on a warhead, or has built a bomb, or has the fissile material for a bomb or the operational facilities to create the weapons-grade uranium or plutonium needed for a bomb.

The heavy water plant at Arak that would produce plutonium does not come on-stream until 2014. And while Iran has apparently converted "yellowcake" to uranium hexaflouride, the first step in producing highly enriched uranium, there is no evidence Iran has constructed a cascade of thousands of centrifuges needed to extract critical U-235 from U-238 and enrich it to 90 percent.

Thus, Iran has no nuclear arsenal. And as President Bush has yet to warn us to brace for the consequences of a U.S. strike, it would appear his near-term agenda does not include a Bush Doctrine preventive war on the mullahs' regime.

The same seems true for North Korea. In that same [i]Weekly Standard[/i], AEI's Nick Eberstadt calls Bush's approach to Pyongyang "dangerously flawed." http://www.weeklystandard.com... He urges the "readying [of] non-diplomatic instruments for North Korea threat reduction" – i.e., sanctions, blockade, air strikes, or invasion.

But again, there is no evidence Bush is contemplating any such action, which could ignite a Korean war we are unprepared to fight.

What appears to be happening is this: While there is no shortage of neocon war plans for a Pax Americana, President Bush is bumping up against reality – a U.S. Army tied down and bleeding in Iraq, the rising costs of war, soaring deficits, a sinking dollar, and an absence of allies willing to fight beside us or even help. He is facing the Vietnam dilemma.

Does he plunge deeper into Iraq in hope of victory, risking all, or cut his losses and revert to a more affordable, less ambitious foreign policy that secures the nation, but no longer seeks to convert the world to the American idea of democracy?

For 15 years, some of us have warned that if we fail to adopt a traditionalist foreign policy, the world will, to our humiliation, impose such a policy upon us.

Bush is at a crossroads. Conservatives, rather than wringing our hands, must re-engage the debate. All is not lost. All is never lost.

[b]Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of the new magazine, The American Conservative. Now a commentator and columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national television shows, and is the author of seven books[/b]. - http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a...

The Neocons Haven't Won Yet

12.15.04 (5:18 am) [edit]

The Neocons Haven't Won Yet

12.15.04 (5:18 am) [edit]

Prince Neil Bush - Far From Charming (Crime Family Slut-Fucker Like Mad King George)

12.14.04 (5:34 am) [edit]

[i]Once Upon A Time In The Bush Family Series[/i]

Once upon a time, Prince Neil Bush was best-known for his role in the collapse of the Silverado Savings and Loan. But here come to find out, he is actually the romeo of the Bush Royal Family.

I say this because last year his videotaped divorce deposition became public and quite frankly, the revelations in it do not paint a picture of strong moral values. As it turns out, while still married to his wife, Princess Sharon, Neil had what can only be described as random sex with a number of women, contracted a venereal disease, had an affair with his mother's married secretary, and was accused of fathering a child out of wedlock.

I guess the lectures delivered by Neil's "I'm not an obnoxious drunk anymore brother George," missed the mark. So much for abstinence and safe sex in the First Royal Family.

Although Neil also testified about several highly questionable business deals in which he received huge amounts of money for little (if any) effort, they were completely overshadowed by the tales of his sexual liaisons with the gals in Thailand and Hong Kong.

I will never forget what W said back when the Clinton pardon scandal hit the headlines with charges that brother-in-law Hugh Rodham had accepted $400,000 to lobby for clemency for two felons. When reporters asked W what advice he would give to his own family members, he said: "My guidance to them is, 'Behave yourself.' And they will."

Oh is that right? ha.ha.ha.ha.ha. The absurdity of that statement is almost as funny as the jokes made about their dad's "read my lips" comment.

[b]A Match Made In Heaven[/b]

Prince Neil met Sharon during the 1980 presidential campaign. After a brief courtship, they married, moved to Colorado, had 3 children and remained happily married (or at least Sharon did) for 23 years.

The whole divorce saga began in May, 2002, when Neil informed Sharon that he wanted a divorce in an e-mail. The actual email makes for one hell of a "Dear John" letter. The following is in part, what he had to say to Sharon:

"Your comments at our pool-side dinner with the kids that you and I should race to see who could make a million dollars faster, your belief expressed in different ways that I have not made enough money, your belief that it was easy to make money, and that Jamal Daniel's plotting or Dad's influence will be the magic answer to our financial woes all cause me consternation and reflect the bitterness and anger that has come from the loneliness you described Friday," Neil wrote.

"It is very clear that we are failing to meet each other's core needs. We're almost out of money and I've lost my patience for being compared to my brothers, for being put down for my inability to make money, and tired of not being loved. I'm sure you have felt abandoned and a deep sense of loneliness," he wrote.

Of course, Neil forgot to mention a few things in the email. Like he didn't tell Sharon about his Asian sex romps or that he was already having an affair with Maria Anderson, wife of Robert Andrews, a woman Sharon once regarded as a friend, but who she would later call "Neil's Mexican whore."

In fact, he forgot to mention quite a few things. A review of exhibits from Maria's divorce deposition, reveals that at the same time that Neil penning the Dear John email to Sharon, he was also writing love letters to Maria, evidently looking to get his "core needs" met with her. In one email he tells Maria, "My heart is breaking with solitude. I can't wait to be free to dedicate all of my passion to love you. I hurt to have you in my arms, to make love with you and be a part of your life." Prince Neil almost puts Prince Charles to shame.

Neil said he met Maria in 2001 while she was working in his mother's office. He claims the affair did not begin until January 2002, when they ended up together at a fundraiser for brother Jeb. A few weeks later Neil went to the Maria's house looking to raise money for his new company and I guess it was Andrew's unlucky day. For when Neil left that day, he not only walked out with $100,000 of Andrew's money, he also bagged his wife, Maria.

A few weeks later, Maria and Neil took a pre-divorce Honeymoon to Mexico and the rest is history. Neil soon fired off his parting email to Sharon and when he returned to the US from Dubai, he set up a bachelor pad in Houston.

And get this, court records show that Neil and Maria both filed for divorce on the same day, August 26, 2002. What a sentimental couple.

In a July, 2002 interview on KHOU TV in Texas, Sharon said that she had never expected a divorce, "It was totally out of the blue," she said.

However, Neil told a different tale. Apparently unbeknownst to Sharon, the marriage had been on the rocks for years. In his 270 page deposition, Neil testified that there was "no affection" and "very little sexual activity over the past 10 or 12 years." He told Sharon's attorney, "Our marriage has been broken. It's loveless. And there is nothing left to it."

When she got the email, Sharon says she was taken off guard because 2 days earlier, Neil had given her a ring and said he loved her. When she reached out to her in-laws she claims, "I just really basically was turned off, turned away," Sharon said.

She talked about a conversation between her and Queen Barbara Bush, "I said I think Neil is having a mid-life crisis. You know, I'm worried about his business and maybe stress was leading to this e-mail. And she basically said, you talk to your mother and Neilsy will talk to me. And Neilsy will never abandon his children. And that was it," according to ABC News on Oct 10, 2004.

As late as April 28, 2003, the day the divorce became finalize, Sharon was telling the judge that she wasn't sure she wanted the divorce. "I believe in working through a marriage," she testified, "and I don't believe in divorce with three children." The judge showed no sympathy and granted the divorce anyways.

[b]All Out War[/b]

After Sharon learned of Neil's affair with Maria, she went on a rampage. She made no secret of the fact that she did not want a divorce, and launched an all out attack on the 2 love-birds. She hired top PR man Lou Colasuonno, a former editor of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

Colasuonno's first move was to announce that Sharon was looking for a publisher for a book she planned to write. "This is a woman who has had some wonderful times with the Bushes," Colasuonno told the New York Observer. "But she has seen the dark side, too. And she intends to provide a view of the family that everyone will want to read."

Next he set up a lunch date for his client to meet with the famous author, Kitty Kelley, who was already working on a book about the Bush family. Then he hinted that Sharon might be feeding Kelley Bush family secrets.

Sharon and Kelley enjoyed a 4 hour lunch and Kelley couldn't say enough about how badly poor Sharon was being treated. "I learned a great deal about the Bush family from Sharon," Kelley told The Washington Post. "She told me he's only offering $1,000 a month in support -- take it or leave it. . . . She said that when she told Neil she needs more to live on, Neil Bush said, 'Just get remarried.' Sharon was sobbing as she told me, 'Kitty, I just won't sell my body!' "

PR guy Colasuonno claims that Kelley's disclosure to the Post, prompted the Prince to more than double his offer of settlement to about $30,000 a year. In her interview with ABC on Oct 10, 2004, Sharon said her final divorce settlement allowed for 4 years of alimony at $2,500 a month, and that she may soon have to sell the family home in Houston.

When it was released this year, Kelley's book contained quotes attributed to Sharon that included the allegation that W snorted cocaine with his brother at Camp David during the first Bush presidency. Sharon quickly denied making that allegation but her PR guy Colasuonno, and 2 others who were at the lunch, backed Kelley's version of the conversations.

Sharon also told Kelly that at one point, she had even received an implied death threat from Neil. According to Sharon, he left a message on her answering machine telling her that if she didn't shut her mouth, she would find herself "in a dark alley."

So here we have the brother of the current president and the son of an ex-president threatening his soon to be ex-wife with death if she doesn't keep quiet about the family secrets. Are we talking about the Royal First Family here? Or the Mafia?

Kelley and Sharon were both interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC's Today Show on Sept 13 and 14, 2004, and both ladies stuck to their story, as far as what was said at their 4 hour lunch.

The April 22, 2003 Washington Post, reported that Sharon also met with another author, Julie McCarron, in Houston on April 14, 2003, to explore writing a memoir of her life in the Bush family.

McCarron wrote a memo about their day long session together to Michael Viner, who had agreed to a $200,000-plus book deal to publish Sharon's book "First Family." According to McCarron, they ran into Neil's mistress Maria that day at a restaurant called Grotto. "This was very upsetting to Sharon," McCarron wrote in the memo. In the end, Viner withdrew from the book deal, according to the Post.

McCarron memo said that she met Sharon at the Bush family home in Houston. "She was very teary as we toured her house and looked at the hundreds of framed family photos on the wall," McCarron wrote. "She swore that she had been an excellent wife and mother for more than twenty years. . . . She was very upset that the woman her husband was having an affair with had been on Barbara Bush's staff -- how could she not have known?"

According to McCarron, Sharon "stated that the only thing the Bush family cares about is their money and their public image," McCarron continued. "She was devastated over the end of her marriage and the emotional state of her children. As far as writing a book went, she hadn't thought too much about specifics. She did not want to be perceived as a woman scorned. . . . She wanted to write the story of . . . how a 'perfect' marriage can explode after 22 years . . . how she bought into the image of the perfect family, but couldn't cope when everyone in that family turned against her. The Bush family preached family values while she practiced them," wrote McCarron, as reported in the Post.

"They were my family for almost a quarter-century," Sharon said of the Bushes. "I believed in families, and I believed in the family values. And I thought they did, too. So, I thought I would get help from them," according to ABC News.

I guess poor Sharon thought wrong.

[b]What? No Pillow Talk?[/b]

During the deposition, when asked by his wife's attorney whether he'd had affairs during his marriage, Neil disclosed a string of sexcapades that could almost put Bill Clinton to shame. And they were all by chance.

During his business trips to Hong Kong and Thailand, Neil said that he would be sitting in his hotel room, just minding his own business, when all of a sudden there would be a knock at the door and a woman would be standing there wanting to have sex with him. He testified that he had no idea who they were or why they showed up.

Neil told his wife's attorney, "I had sexual intercourse with perhaps three or four, I don't remember the exact number, women, at different times. In Thailand once, I have a pretty clear recollection that there was one time in Thailand and in Hong Kong."

I wonder why he has "a pretty clear recollection" of certain encounters. Or is it because they were such memorable events or is it because he caught venereal disease during one of those particular trists?

Attorney Brown asked Neil about this, "Is that where you caught the venereal diseases?" and Neil said, "No." Brown asked, "Where did you catch those?" And Neil replied, "Diseases plural? I didn't catch..."

Brown apologized, I guess for being insensitive, "Well, I'm sorry. How ... how many venereal diseases do you suffer from?" Neil said, "I've had one venereal disease." To which Brown asked, "Which was?" "Herpes," he said.

I've got news for Neil. Had is past tense. Somebody better inform him that once you have Herpes, its a life-long affliction.

A little later, Sharon's attorney tried to get Neil to explain more about who these women were, "Were they prostitutes?" he asked. "I don't -- I don't know," Neil replied. Brown asked, "Did you pay them for that sex?" And Neil said, "No, I did not."

Brown then asked did you, "Pick them up in a sushi house?"

Bush: "No. ... My recollection is, where I can recall, they came to my room."

You can tell that Brown is having a good time at Neil's expense by the way he ridicules him: "Do you know the name of that hotel? I may go to Thailand sometime."

I think its fairly obviously that some of Neil's foreign business deals came with perks that he was more than happy to take advantage of.

When asked how he knew what to do when a woman came to the door, Neil replied, "Whatever happened, happened." That snide comment could lead the mind to any number of visions. If need be, Prince Neil could probably make a few extra bucks by publishing his deposition and marketing it as a soft porn novel.

Sharon's attorney was amazed at Neil's Asian romps, "you have to admit that it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," he said.

"It was very unusual," Neil replied.

That right there was lie under oath in a civil deposition. Also known as perjury during the Clinton years. How can Neil claim the events were unusual when by his own admission, they happened at least 3 or 4 times? I say arrest the Prince for lying under oath, and if by any chance he holds a license to practice anything, revoke it.

For those wondering how Sharon felt sitting there listening to the details of Neil sexcapades, she said, "I was totally devastated, and so were our children upon learning this," reported the New York Post's PAGE SIX. "I trusted him while he was on all those foreign trips and kept the home fires burning while raising three great children . . . His behavior has been appalling. Where are the family values?"

That is a very good question. Where's the moral outrage from the Bush family over Neil's behavior?

In fairness to Neil, the Asian trips were not all play and no work. Its just that the sex stories overshadow the curious financial deals that were discussed in same deposition.

So if these women were not perks from foreign investors seeking to gain influence through the President's brother, who were they? Wasn't there any pillow talk whatsoever?

What does Neil expect us to believe? That 3 or 4 different women spotted him in a hotel lobby and found him so irresistible that they slipped a bellhop 50 bucks to get his room number? For anyone even considering this scenario, go take a good look at Neil Bush and decide if anyone would willingly pay one dime for a romp in the sack with him.

In July 2002, Sharon appeared for a live interview on KHOU-TV News. By that time, the TV station had obtained a copy of Neil's videotaped deposition and it played excerpts from the deposition that contained his own accounts of the Asian sexcapades.

After that, an all-out publicity war began. Neil's Attorney, John Spalding, called reporters with a story that Sharon had yanked hair out of Neil's head so she could make a voodoo doll and put a curse on him. "It was bizarre," he said, "She literally pulled his hair and yanked it out of his head. He told me about it."

Sharon admitted that she took some of Neil's hair, but said it came from his barber's floor and that it was not for a voodoo doll. She told the Houston Chronicle that because Neil was acting so erratic, she wanted to test the hair for drug use. The tests were inconclusive, she said.

[b]The 3-Some Gangs Up On Princess Sharon[/b]

When Sharon found out about Neil and Maria's affair, she began claiming that Neil and Maria had been sleeping together for years and that Neil was the father of Maria's 2 year old son.

Next thing you know, Maria's husband, Robert, who just happened to also be a business associate of Neil's, claimed that Sharon defamed his son by saying the boy was fathered by Neil and filed a defamation lawsuit against her.

This set off a sandstorm of accusations and demands from all sides. A Texas judge granted Sharon's demand for DNA samples from Andrews and his son, and even though Neil had already given one DNA sample, Sharon's attorney got the judge to make him give another. "We require he be forced to give a sample under court supervision," Attorney David Berg, told UPI on Nov 26, 2003. "He voluntarily did it before we got to court but not under court supervision. It was a good first step, but we want it under court supervised conditions," Berg said.

The Houston Chronicle reported the story that, "Neil provided a tissue sample Friday that will be used to determine whether he fathered a child by his girlfriend while she was still married to another man. He hopes the results will settle a paternity question that is at the core of an $850,000 defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife," according to a statement issued by Neil's attorney, John Spalding.

The suit alleged that Sharon had spread the rumor to news outlets, friends and "fast food restaurant employees." The amount that Andrews demanded from Sharon in damages was significant for 2 reasons. First of all, as part of the divorce settlement, Sharon was allowed to buy the family home from Neil for $850,000. On the exact same day that she closed on the house, Andrews filed the lawsuit and guess how much he asked for? $850,000.

The second reason the demand was significant was that Andrews apparently decided to team up with the guy who stole his wife and help Neil and Maria kill 2 birds with one stone. To stop Sharon from writing a book, Andrews asked that he be awarded all royalties that she might earn from writing any book about the case, according to UPI.

Sharon's attorney was quick to call foul. "We consider it (the suit) vindictive and an attempt to shut her up," Berg said. "You'd have to be blind not to understand the message when they sued her on the same day that she closed on the house for the same amount of money, an identical amount," he claimed. "They are sending a message ... It sounds like Andrews is a stalking horse for Bush." Then Andrew's attorney, Dale Jefferson, thought he'd drive the lets-humiliate-Sharon-kni fe a little deeper, and went public with a "put-up-or-shut-up" settlement offer: "We'll put up $850,000 and Sharon Bush can put up $850,000," Jefferson said. "And if she's right and Neil Bush is the father of that child, she gets Mr. Andrews's $850,000, and if we're right, we get her $850,000."

Today, Sharon Bush is not only divorced from Neil, she told 20/20, but completely cut out of the larger Bush clan, what she calls the Bush corporation. She say it is a tight-knit family that sticks together financially, socially, and of course, politically. "Well, you know, we all work together to support George and get him elected. And my father-in-law, to get him elected. It's a family affair. You work hard," Sharon recalled.

All I can say is that I think the Princess deserved a much better retirement package for 23 years of service in the Bush Corporation.

As for the happy couple, on March 6, 2004, Neil and Maria tied the knot. The wedding took place in Houston with most of the Bush clan there to celebrate. Described as a Dom Perignon affair, the wedding was attended by family patriarch and former President George H.W. Bush, as well as prominent guests from the Middle East and China, according to ABC New on Oct 10, 2004. Jeb, George and Laura apparently had other plans because they were no shows.

As always with the Bush family, and especially when folks from foreign countries attend a Bush Bash, the Prince and his new Princess were showered with presents. "There were also very lavish gifts," said Mimi Swartz, of Texas Monthly. "I think the couple got matching Bulgari watches, I think someone else gave them an SUV."

Meanwhile, Neil and his new wife are building a multi-million dollar house next door to his parents, reports ABC, where I assume they plan to live happily ever after, or at least until Neil travels to Asia again.

The moral of this story is I guess its better if half of a couple lives happily ever after than no one at all. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Prince Neil Bush - Far From Charming (Crime Family Slut-Fucker Like Mad King George)

12.14.04 (5:31 am) [edit]

Prince Neil Bush - Far From Charming (Crime Family Slut-Fucker Like Mad King George)

12.14.04 (5:31 am) [edit]

Prince Neil Bush - Far From Charming (Crime Family Slut-Fucker Like Mad King George)

12.14.04 (5:31 am) [edit]

Rummy Rumsfailed May Soon Regret His Neo-Fascist Arrogance Toward U.S. Troops

12.14.04 (5:20 am) [edit]

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- By the early 1970s, after seven long and savage years of fighting in Vietnam, the phrase that came to characterize the pitiful hopelessness and absurdity of that conflict was, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

Unbelievably, our secretary of defense has just given us the existential phrases for the Iraq (news - web sites) war: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have ... not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

How could Donald Rumsfeld, a smart and savvy man despite his perverse fascination with conflict, possibly say such an insulting and arrogant thing to American soldiers? Is he really trying to tell them, as it surely sounded last Wednesday when he addressed American troops in Kuwait, that they are not the Army he wanted, but he had to put up with them?

Well, just maybe, if the cavalier attitude of the civilians in this administration toward American troops continues, there will come a time when our soldiers will not put up with THEM! Perhaps that was beginning last week in Kuwait.

To briefly review, one soldier in Kuwait, Spc. Thomas Wilson, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, confronted "Rummie" with a pointed question. "We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait," he said. "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?

"We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal ... that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat."

Rumsfeld then made his incredible comment, pointing out to any rational person the degrees to which this administration is not so much lacking battlefield intelligence but basic human instinct. Even President Bush (news - web sites), whose own responses to the troops, despite his melodramatic public "emotion," are cool and distant, seemed to realize that Rumsfeld had gone too far.

"If I were a soldier overseas wanting to defend my country," he said from Washington, "I'd want to ask the secretary of defense the same question." (At this point, some of would like to ask him the question of why, as commander in chief, he hasn't asked it himself?).

Then it was revealed that the question had been worked out in concert with a journalist covering the troops, Edward Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga Times Free Press -- and this fact was somehow meant to discredit the whole encounter. Sorry about that! Such exchanges of ideas -- and especially of complaints -- are not only part of the war scene, they are central and appropriate to it.

But let us not forget the context of Rumsfeld's words. This is Rumsfeld's war -- not America's, but his. He and his pugnacious neocon cohorts -- all of them still reigning in the Pentagon (news - web sites), and none of whom having ever served in the military -- ran all around the uniformed military's and the State Department's warnings about this war. They got exactly what they asked for: an adventure, a thoroughly unnecessary "war of choice," and a growing disaster-in-the-making.

Senators Joseph Biden Jr. and Chuck Hagel just returned from Iraq, saying that not one American general said we were winning. Other warnings are the same. Rumsfeld's answer to everything is to train Iraqi forces to take the place of ours (perhaps because we, poor guys, only have "the Army we have"), but they are falling apart in many Iraqi cities.

And then Rumsfeld made things even worse. Responding to questions as to why he did not even remotely anticipate these intense "insurgencies," he answered blithely: "I don't think anyone would say that the intelligence left anyone with the impression that you'd be in the degree of insurgency you're in today." No look at Iraqi history, no attempt to match ambition to potential, no common sense --and surely no apologies!

You can see the anger beginning to build in the armed forces, with the "stop-loss" policies that force men and women to stay in uniform long after their terms are over, with the callousness about the armor, with the ludicrous analysis by the civilians in the Pentagon of what Iraq and its history were really like.

Now his unfortunate quote will go down in history to show how much he and his group, most of them remote and self-interested intellectuals, look at battlefield soldiers as chess pieces at their disposal. In the end, they care about nothing except their game. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

Rummy Rumsfailed May Soon Regret His Fascist Arrogance Toward U.S. Troops

12.14.04 (5:20 am) [edit]

Herr Fuhrer Bush's "Nation-Building" Is NOT Conservative Says A Conservative

12.14.04 (5:16 am) [edit]

A recent study [ .pdf http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/re... ] by the Pentagon's Defense Science Task Force on Strategic Communications concluded that in the struggle for hearts and minds in Iraq, "American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended." This Pentagon report flatly states that our war in Iraq actually has elevated support for radical Islamists. It goes on to conclude that our active intervention in the Middle East as a whole has greatly diminished our reputation in the region, and strengthened support for radical groups. This is similar to what the CIA predicted in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, before the invasion took place.

Then, earlier this month we learned that the CIA station chief in Baghdad sent a cable back to the U.S. warning that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating, and not expected to improve any time soon. Other CIA experts also warn that the security situation in Iraq is likely to get even worse in the future. These reports are utterly ignored by the administration.

These recent reports are not the product of some radical antiwar organization. They represent the U.S. government's own assessment of our "progress" in Iraq after two and a half years and the loss of thousands of lives. We are alienating the Islamic world in our oxymoronic quest to impose democracy in Iraq.

This demonstrates once again the folly of nation-building, which is something candidate Bush wisely rejected before the 2000 election. The worsening situation in Iraq also reminds us that going to war without a congressional declaration, as the Constitution requires, leads us into protracted quagmires over and over again.

The reality is that current-day Iraq contains three distinct groups of people who have been at odds with each other for generations. Pundits and politicians tell us that a civil war will erupt if the U.S. military departs. Yet our insistence that Iraq remain one indivisible nation actually creates the conditions for civil war. Instead of an artificial, forced, nationalist unity between the Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds, we should allow each group to seek self-government and choose voluntarily whether they wish to associate with a central government. We cannot impose democracy in Iraq any more than we can erase hundreds of years of Iraqi history.

Even opponents of the war now argue that we must occupy Iraq indefinitely until a democratic government takes hold, no matter what the costs. No attempt is made by either side to explain exactly why it is the duty of American soldiers to die for the benefit of Iraq or any other foreign country. No reason is given why American taxpayers must pay billions of dollars to build infrastructure in Iraq. We are expected to accept the interventionist approach without question, as though no other options exist. This blanket acceptance of foreign meddling and foreign aid may be the current Republican policy, but it is not a conservative policy by any means.

Non-interventionism was the foreign policy ideal of the Founding Fathers, an ideal that is ignored by both political parties today. Those who support political and military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere should have the integrity to admit that their views conflict with the principles of our nation's founding. It's easy to repeat the tired cliché that "times have changed since the Constitution was written" – in fact, that's an argument the left has used for decades to justify an unconstitutional welfare state. Yet if we accept this argument, what other principles from the founding era should we discard? Should we reject federalism? Habeas corpus? How about the Second Amendment? The principle of limited government enshrined in the Constitution – limited government in both domestic and foreign affairs – has not changed over time. What has changed is our willingness to ignore that principle.

[b]Ron Paul is a Republican Congressman from Texas. He was the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for President[/b]. - http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?...

Herr Fuhrer Bush's "Nation-Building" Is NOT Conservative Says A Conservative

12.14.04 (5:15 am) [edit]

Evangelical Neo-Fascist Nazis & Neo-Con Whackos On The Rampage!!!

12.13.04 (5:34 am) [edit]

[b][u]Christian conservatives turn to statehouses[/u][/b]

Energized by electoral victories last month that they say reflect wide support for more traditional social values, conservative Christian advocates across the country are pushing ahead state and local initiatives on thorny issues, including same-sex marriage, public education and abortion.

"I think people are becoming emboldened," said Michael D. Bowman, director of state legislative relations at Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian advocacy group based in Washington. "On legislative efforts, they're getting more gutsy, and on certain issues, they may introduce legislation that they normally may not have done."

It is on the state level "where most family issues are decided," Mr. Bowman said. And it is there that local advocacy groups hope to build quickly on the momentum from the election when legislatures convene in the new year.

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

[u][b]Anti-Darwinians step up challenge in school crusade[/b][/u]

[i]Evangelicals take evolution fight to Supreme Court[/i]

Jeff Brown is a passionate defender of the borough where he lives. Dover, tucked away in the rural hinterland of Pennsylvania, is a conservative place, he says.

It has never been the sort of place to attract attention. Until now. Dover is becoming famous, after its school board decided to introduce an alternative to evolution in parts of its biology curriculum. The furore caused Brown and his wife, Carol, to resign from the board. Extremist Christians, he believes, have taken it over with an agenda to undermine the teaching of evolution. Now he is angry. 'This community is going to rebel,' he said. 'People believe your religion is your own private business.'

Dover has been catapulted into the centre of a renewed battle over the teaching of evolution in schools. The religious right, emboldened by its spreading influence in the Republican party and an explosive growth in the number of evangelical Christians, has launched a major push to get an alternative to evolution - which they believe denies the biblical version of God's creation of the world - into the classroom. At least 40 US states have faced legal challenges in recent months.

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

[u][b]'God returns! America saved!'[/b][/u]

[i]An Interview With God: Supports Bush 100 Percent[/i]

God has returned to America. His interest in this nation and its people is the subject of much discussion here in this country mainly from those disgruntled Americans who, in the 2004 national elections, lost to God's choice, President George W. Bush. Anyway, the losers can't figure out why God cares about this place. After all, they say, Earth is located in the outer realm of the Milky Way galaxy--the Orion Arm to be exact---along with the 100 billion stars and billions of other objects that make up the Milky Way. The Milky Way is one of at least 125 billion other galaxies that are known at the present time. All of which is to wonder why God bothers with Americans and, more interestingly, how God covers the unfathomable distances between galaxies.

God consented to an interview on this matter and visited me at my home in Virginia.

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Evangelical Neo-Fascist Nazis & Neo-Con Whackos On The Rampage!!!

12.13.04 (5:32 am) [edit]

Evangelical Neo-Fascist Nazis & Neo-Con Whackos On The Rampage!!!

12.13.04 (5:32 am) [edit]

Evangelical Neo-Fascist Nazis & Neo-Con Whackos On The Rampage!!!

12.13.04 (5:29 am) [edit]

Evangelical Neo-Fascist Nazis & Neo-Con Whackos On The Rampage!!!

12.13.04 (5:29 am) [edit]

NEWS: 8 Marines Killed in Iraq, Military Says ... Why Don't Jenna & Barbara Bush Join Up???

12.13.04 (5:21 am) [edit]

[b]Aren't Bush's slutty, drunkardly daughters "patriotic"??? Since the war in Iraq ain't going well, why don't Jenna & Barbara Bush join up??? Maybe because they are cowardly opportunistic pieces-of-trash like their Poppy, who was AWOL during Vietnam!!! Anybody want to consider that???[/b]

[b]Eight Marines killed in Iraq, military says

U.S., Iraqi forces clash with insurgents in Fallujah, call in airstrikes[/b]

Seven U.S. Marines were killed in two separate incidents in Iraq's restive Anbar province, the military said today, a day after American warplanes pounded Fallujah with missiles as insurgents continued to battle coalition forces in the city.

The military had earlier reported another U.S. Marine death yesterday in Anbar.

It was unknown if the deaths were connected to the fighting in Fallujah. In a statement, the military said that the seven Marines with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died while conducting "security and stabilization operations" in Anbar province, a vast region that comprises Fallujah and Ramadi.

The statement gave no other details about the deaths, saying that the release of more information could place U.S. personnel at risk.

As of today, at least 1,296 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Fallujah was the scene of a weeklong U.S.-led offensive last month to uproot insurgents based in the city.

The latest violence began when American and Iraqi forces clashed with guerrillas in several suburbs and ended with U.S. airstrikes on suspected insurgent hideouts.

"The strikes were conducted throughout the day and were called in by troops in (armed) contact with and observing the enemy moving from house to house," spokesman Lt. Lyle Gilbert said.

Abdullah Ahmed, a Fallujah resident, said that the fighting started after U.S. soldiers brought 700-800 men into the city to clear rubble from damage caused by November's offensive.

"The clashes started as soon as the young men entered the city," Ahmed said. "The American troops were surprised and decided to launch military operations."

Elsewhere in Iraq, several detained leaders of Saddam Hussein's regime began refusing meals in apparent protest against their upcoming trials, U.S. military officials and a lawyer said yesteray. Saddam was not among them.

In Jordan, Saddam's attorneys argued ahead of today's anniversary of his capture that the former president was being held illegally by U.S. and Iraqi authorities.

"It was more of a forced abduction that later became compulsory concealment and solitary confinement, acts rejected by all international conventions," said a statement released yesterday by the team, which cited human-rights conventions that Washington allegedly had violated.

Saddam's attorneys were appointed by his wife, Sajida, but have not been able to contact him. None were at his side when he was arraigned July 1 in Baghdad on preliminary charges, including killing rival politicians, gassing Kurds, invading Kuwait in 1990 and suppressing popular uprisings in 1991.

The U.S. military said yesterday that a soldier was killed a day earlier in a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad's northern suburbs. Three other soldiers also were wounded in the ambush.

Iraq's postwar political hopefuls continued jostling for position ahead of Jan. 30 elections, the first such polls to be held since Saddam's overthrow.

Two moderate, mainly Sunni Muslim parties announced that they would field slates for the polls, indicating an apparent strengthening of support for the vote among the religious minority, despite calls from some Sunni politicians for a boycott.

Sunnis traditionally have enjoyed significant privilege in Iraq, but have lost their political ascendancy since Saddam's fall. The country's majority Shiites - numbering about 60 percent of the population - are expected to dominate the post-election legislature.

"They (the Sunnis) realized that there was no chance for postponing and that it's better to participate," said Nehro Mohammed Abdul-Karim Kasnazan, a leader of the Coalition of Iraqi National Unity, which is fielding a 275-member slate for the polls.

The Constitutional Monarchy Movement, a moderate Sunni-dominated group seeking the restoration of a constitutional monarchy, also announced a list of 275 candidates.

The slate is headed by Sharif Ali, a cousin of Iraq's last king - who was killed in a 1958 military coup, and includes Kurds and Shiites.

A former Governing Council member, Naseer al-Chadarchi, announced that his Patriotic and Democratic Party, another moderate Sunni fringe movement, would field at least 40 candidates, including Shiites from southern Iraq, according to aide Omar al-Ma'arouf.

"Despite the party's insistence on postponing the elections, it will participate with a separate list" of candidates, al-Ma'arouf said.

Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government has said that the Jan. 30 vote must go ahead, despite an insurgency fueled mainly by Sunni extremists targeting U.S. forces and Iraqi security forces.

"We have a full desire that all Iraqis will participate, despite their color, sex, race, religion or their political background, because Iraq belongs to all Iraqis," interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said on Iraqiya TV.

Elsewhere, two insurgents died after detonating their explosives-packed car alongside an American M1 Abrams battle tank in Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, at about 10:45 a.m., military spokesman Staff Sgt. Robert Powell said. No soldiers were wounded and the tank sustained negligible damage.

Four decapitated bodies in civilian clothes were found south of Baghdad and their identities were unclear, police said. The victims, believed to be Iraqis, were found in Haswa, about 25 miles south of Baghdad. - http://www.journalnow.com/ser...!nationworld&s=1037645509 161

NEWS: 8 Marines Killed in Iraq, Military Says ... Why Don't Jenna & Barbara Bush Join Up???

12.13.04 (5:21 am) [edit]

DimWit Bush & FuckWit Cheney Said Capturing Saddam Hussein Was "Turning Point" in Iraq? THEY LIED

12.13.04 (5:15 am) [edit]

[b]One year on, the capture of Saddam Hussein can be seen as a false dawn for Iraq[/b]

A year ago yesterday, a bedraggled Saddam Hussein was dragged from a hole in the ground to a chorus of self-congratulation from US officials claiming his capture was a turning point in the Iraq war.

"In the history of Iraq, a dark and painful era is over," declared George Bush the day after the former Iraqi leader was seized. "A hopeful day has arrived. All Iraqis can come together and build a new Iraq."

The optimism of US military commanders was extraordinary. Major General Ray Odierno, whose 4th Infantry Division was credited with arresting Saddam, declared a month later that the insurgency was "on its knees" and only "a sporadic threat". He went on to assure the press in Washington that "in six months you are going to see some normalcy".

A year later, American casualties showed how little the war was affected by the imprisonment of Saddam. Of the 1,283 US soldiers who have died in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003, 821 of them were killed since his capture.

Six months on, the US fully controlled only islands of territory in Iraq. All the main roads leading out of Baghdad were unsafe. The resistance felt strong enough to openly establish checkpoints around the capital.

Why did Saddam's capture accomplish so little compared to the expectations of the White House? It believed much of its own propaganda about the resistance being orchestrated by remnants of Saddam's regime.

But it was never likely that Iraqis who failed to fight for Saddam when he was in power were doing so after he was overthrown.

During the invasion last year, the roads of Iraq were choked with abandoned tanks and armoured vehicles. Most of the Iraqi army, including the supposedly elite Republican Guard, simply went home.

Saddam was a highly convenient enemy for Washington. He was easily demonised. He was also militarily incompetent.

The very fact that his hiding place was betrayed and he was captured alone shows that he had no secret infrastructure for a guerrilla war after he fled Baghdad. His sons Uday and Qusai were also betrayed to the US army.

At the heart of the US miscalculation of the impact of Saddam's capture was ignorance about the simple reason for the rising strength of the Iraqi resistance: outside Kurdistan the great majority of Iraqis, whatever they thought of Saddam, were against the US occupation.

This is true of the majority Shia Muslims, as well as the Sunni Arabs who have risen in rebellion. A main demand of the Shia electoral list, likely to attract the most votes in the 30 January election, is for an end to the occupation.

The famous pack of cards showing the senior members of the former regime - Saddam was, of course, the Ace of Spades - is now something of an embarrassment. Most have been caught or given themselves up, but it has not affected the uprising.

At first, it appeared possible that Saddam would play a role in the US presidential election in November. His trial could have been portrayed as evidence of the victory of the administration in Iraq. But his appearance in court last July largely backfired.

US officials failed to turn off the sound equipment of television crews in the court. As a result, instead of the beaten and bewildered Saddam of seven months before, Iraqis saw a pugnacious figure decrying his judges as US dupes.

At the same time the Iraqis in charge of the trial, notably Salem Chalabi, the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, once favoured by the Pentagon, had themselves been purged. Now men loyal to Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi Prime Minister, will be in charge of the proceedings.

But the arrest anniversary was marked by some of Saddam Hussein's old lieutenants, among them Tariq Aziz, who went on hunger strike over access to lawyers and fears of being handed over to Iraqis. - http://news.independent.co.uk...

DimWit Bush & FuckWit Cheney Said Capturing Saddam Hussein Was "Turning Point" in Iraq? THEY LIED

12.13.04 (5:14 am) [edit]

Herr Fuhrer Bush & His Neo-Con Nazis Endanger America and the World (NOT the U.N.!) ...

12.12.04 (2:17 pm) [edit]

[b]Falluja Atrocities Expose True Face of U.S. War [/b]

Images of a U.S. marine killing an unarmed wounded prisoner during the recent battle for Falluja resulted in widespread shock, leading the Pentagon to withdraw the soldier from battle and launch an investigation. However, the issue--similar to Abu Ghraib--has served as a smokescreen, diverting attention from much larger atrocities and the very nature of war.

No doubt many U.S. soldiers took care in Falluja--as elsewhere in Iraq--to respect international humanitarian law and avoid injuring civilians. But as throughout the U.S. invasion and the ongoing conflict, war crimes and civilian casualties were frequent and often systematic, rather than rare and exceptional.

In breach of the Geneva Conventions, for example, U.S. troops refused to allow males of "military-age" (16 to 55)--defining them all as potential enemy combatants--to flee Falluja. Given the heavy American bombardment of the city, one wonders how many of these men are among the estimated 1,200 to 1,600 categorized by U.S. authorities as dead insurgents.

American military commanders first stated there was no evidence of civilian casualties in Falluja. Now, the Pentagon has accepted responsibility and offered compensation for the death of a family of seven, including a three-month-old baby. Yet it still only admits to having killed a few.

Press accounts, however, described Fallujas streets as littered with corpses. One high-level International Committee of the Red Cross official in Iraq estimated in mid-November that there were "at least 800 civilians" among the dead. More recently, the Iraqi Red Crescent estimated that more than 6,000 people may have died in the battle.

Eyewitness and survivor reports make clear that U.S. forces were responsible--often deliberately--for most of the victims.

At least five fatalities were patients at a Falluja clinic bombed by U.S. forces--despite promising that they would spare the facility. A clinic doctor stated that American snipers killed many civilians, the youngest a four-year-old boy. An Associated Press photographer described U.S. helicopters shooting people trying to ford a river to safety. Among those slain was a family of five.

Similar to the free-fire zones of Vietnam, U.S. forces in Falluja had instructions that they could shoot anyone under the assumption that those left in the city were hostile. As a teacher who witnessed two civilians shot and killed by American troops told the Independent of London, "The only way to stay alive was to stay inside and hope your house did not get hit by a shell."

Given such rules of engagement and what war does to those who wage it, it would be foolhardy to see the execution of the wounded prisoner as an isolated occurrence. Indeed, some of the fellow marines of the soldier who pulled the trigger openly support his actions: "I would have shot the insurgent too. Two shots to the head," stated one. "You can't trust these people."

Such callousness combined with deadly firepower have led to an Iraqi death toll of horrific proportions. An October article in Britain's most respected medical journal, The Lancet, estimated 100,000 Iraqis had died due to war-related violence, mostly from aerial bombings. Over two-thirds of the fatalities have been women, children or elderly--non-combatants, in other words.

The Geneva Conventions require occupying militaries to protect civilians from violence and prohibit the use of disproportionate and indiscriminate force. As the death toll in Falluja and throughout Iraq shows, the Pentagon has failed to comply. When such transgressions are isolated, they are war crimes. When they are systematic, they constitute crimes against humanity.

From Vietnam to Nicaragua to Washington's ongoing efforts to undermine the International Criminal Court, American political and military leaders have long insulated themselves from accountability for their illegal behavior overseas. The resulting culture of impunity permitted the Bush administration to launch its illegal invasion of Iraq and has allowed the Pentagon to commit atrocities with little fear of punishment.

Failure to combat official crimes has exacted high costs--at home and especially abroad--and will continue to do so barring far-reaching change. Because Congress is unwilling to hold accountable high-level officials for war-related crimes, it is the American public's political and moral responsibility to reign in Washington. By acting upon this responsibility, a mobilized citizenry can help end the Iraq debacle and lessen the likelihood that U.S. soldiers are even in a position to commit future atrocities.

[b]Joseph Nevins is an assistant professor of geography at Vassar College. Cornell University Press will release his latest book, A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, in early 2005. [/b] - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

The 12 Days of Rummying ...

12.12.04 (9:38 am) [edit]

On the first day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree.
Not knowing Osama's address,
Rummy hastened to 'Potamia - and a mess,
exhorting his pal Cheney,
"Let's bomb Baghdad again, golly gee!"

On the second day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
two dead-ender turtle doves
(Colin and Kofi),
flowers and chocolates from the ninny Chalabi,
and a billion Arabs mad at me.

On the third day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
three French henpeckers and imaginary W.M.D.
And 300 tons of lost explosives
going BOOM! everywhere.
Rummy tried for a Vin Diesel movie,
when he should have heeded General Shinseki.

On the fourth day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
four cuckoo birds -
Wolfie, Perle, Feith and Condi.
The cost of empire on the cheap will be steep.
How did Rummy get a job guarantee?

On the fifth day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
five Pentagon rings.
Rummy wanted to go down in history
by transforming the military.
But many G.I.'s feel cheated,
that their forces and matériel are depleted.
Stop Loss and Stuff Happens, by Jiminy!

On the sixth day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
six German shepherds teeth a-baring.
A hooded man attached to wires,
Abu Ghraib and Army liars,
Red Cross in the dark
about dogs that liked to bark.

On the seventh day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
regime change that wasn't free,
our troops sitting ducks for I.E.D.
(Improvised Explosive Devices,
dear me)
Rummy is another sort of I.E.D.
(Instant Excuses for Disaster,
"I'm an old man, don't you see?")

On the eighth day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
eight Osama videotapes.
The Bushie fever with Saddam
left Osama free to scram.
Invading Iraq was an Xmas gift
for bin Laden - a recruiting lift.

On the ninth day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
Iran and North Korea
on a nuclear buildup spree.
Nine mullahs a-proliferating,
as our military's straining.
The Bushies were fixated on Iraq,
but Saddam's weapons were merely the mock.

On the tenth day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
ten Gitmo lawyers a-leaping.
What cares he
about civil liberty?

On the eleventh day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
eleven generals a-hyping that the war is just dandy,
while our spooks are warning
that civil war and theocracy are a-borning
as the Kid in the Oval feels free
to consult a Higher Authority.
Burkas, turbans and beards you'll see
after the puppet Allawi.

[b]-- Maureen Dowd, NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... [/b]

The Future of the Democratic Party

12.10.04 (4:36 am) [edit]

[b]Remarks made by Governor Howard Dean on the Future of the Democratic Party. Given at The George Washington University on December 8, 2004[/b]

Thank you for that introduction. It's a pleasure to be here.

Let me tell you what my plan for this Party is:

We're going to win in Mississippi
...and Alabama
...and Idaho
...and South Carolina.

Four years ago, the President won 49 percent of the vote. The Republican Party treated it like it was a mandate, and we let them get away with it.

Fifty one percent is not a mandate either. And this time we're not going to let them get away with it.

Our challenge today is not to re-hash what has happened, but to look forward, to make the Democratic Party a 50-state party again, and, most importantly, to win.

To win the White House and a majority in Congress, yes. But also to do the real work that will make these victories possible -- to put Democratic ideas and Democratic candidates in every office -- whether it be Secretary of State, supervisor of elections, county commissioner or school board member.

Here in Washington, it seems that after every losing election, there's a consensus reached among decision-makers in the Democratic Party is that the way to win is to be more like Republicans.

I suppose you could call that philosophy: if you didn't beat 'em, join them.

I'm not one for making predictions -- but if we accept that philosophy this time around, another Democrat will be standing here in four years giving this same speech. we cannot win by being "Republican-lite." We've tried it; it doesn't work.

The question is not whether we move left or right. It's not about our direction. What we need to start focusing on... is the destination.

There are some practical elements to the destination.

The destination of the Democratic Party requires that it be financially viable, able to raise money not only from big donors but small contributors, not only through dinners and telephone solicitations and direct mail, but also through the Internet and person-to-person outreach.

The destination of the Democratic Party means making it a party that can communicate with its supporters and with all Americans. Politics is at its best when we create and inspire a sense of community. The tools that were pioneered in my campaign -- like blogs, and meetups, and streaming video -- are just a start. We must use all of the power and potential of technology as part of an aggressive outreach to meet and include voters, to work with the state parties, and to influence media coverage.

The most practical destination is winning elective office. And we must do that at every level of government. The way we will rebuild the Democratic Party is not from consultants down, but from the ground up.

We have some successes to build on. We raised more money than the RNC, and we did so by attracting thousands of new small donors. This is the first time in my memory that the DNC is not coming out of a national campaign in debt. We trained tens of thousands of new activists. We put together the most sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation our Party has ever had. We registered millions of new voters, including a record number of minority and young voters. And we saw those new voters overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

Now we need to build on our successes while transforming the Democratic Party into a grassroots organization that can win in 50 states.

I have seen all the doomsday predictions that the Democratic Party could shrink to become a regional Party. A Party of the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest.

We cannot be a Party that seeks the presidency by running an 18-state campaign. We cannot be a party that cedes a single state, a single District, a single precinct, nor should we cede a single voter.

As many of the candidates supported by my organization Democracy for America showed -- people in places that we've too long ignored are hungry for an alternative; they're hungry for new ideas and new candidates, and they're willing to elect Democrats.

Since we started Dean for America last March, we raised over $5 million, mostly from small donors. That money was given to 748 candidates in 46 states and at every level of government.

We helped a Democratic governor get elected in Montana and a Democratic mayor get elected in Salt Lake County, Utah.

We helped Lori Saldana in San Diego. Lori, a Latina grassroots environmental organizer was outspent in both the primary and the general, won a seat on the state assembly.

We also helped Anita Kelly become the first African-American woman elected to her circuit court in Montgomery Alabama.

Fifteen of the candidates who we helped win last month never ran for elective office before.

And in Texas, a little known candidate who had been written off completely ran the first competitive race against Tom Delay in over a decade.

There are no red states or blue states, just American states. And if we can compete at all levels and in the most conservative parts of the country, we can win ... at any level and anywhere.

People will vote for Democratic candidates in Texas, and Alabama, and Utah if we knock on their door, introduce ourselves, and tell them what we believe.

There is another destination beyond strong finances, outreach, and campaigns.

That destination is a better, stronger, smarter, safer, healthier America.

An America where we don't turn our back on our own people.

That's the America we can only build with conviction.

When some people say we should change direction, in essence they are arguing that our basic or guiding principles can be altered or modified.

They can't.

On issue after issue, we are where the majority of the American people are.

What I want to know is at what point did it become a radical notion to stand up for what we believe?

Over fifty years ago, Harry Truman said, "We are not going to get anywhere by trimming or appeasing. And we don't need to try it."

Yet here we are still making the same mistakes.

Let me tell you something: there's only one thing Republican power brokers want more than for us to lurch to the left -- and that's for us to lurch to the right.

What they fear most is that we may really begin fighting for what we believe -- the fiscally responsible, socially progressive values for which Democrats have always stood and fought.

I'll give this to Republicans. They know the America they want. They want a government so small that, in the words of one prominent Republican, it can be drowned in a bathtub.

They want a government that runs big deficits, but is small enough to fit into your bedroom.

They want a government that is of, by, and for their special interest friends.

They want a government that preaches compassion but practices division.

They want wealth rewarded over work.

And they are willing to use any means to get there.

In going from record surpluses to record deficits, the Republican Party has relinquished the mantle of fiscal responsibility.

And now they're talking about borrowing another $2 trillion to take benefits away from our Senior Citizens.

In going from record job creation to record job loss, they have abandoned the mantle of economic responsibility.

In cutting health care, education, and community policing programs... and in failing to invest in America's inner cities, or distressed rural communities... they certainly have no desire to even claim the mantle of social responsibility.

In their refusal to embrace real electoral reform or conduct the business in government in the light of day, they are hardly the model of civic responsibility.

In their willingness to change the rules so that their indicted leaders can stay in power, they have even given up any claim on personal responsibility.

And in starting an international conflict based on misleading information, I believe they have abdicated America's moral responsibility, as well.

There is a Party of fiscal responsibility... economic responsibility.... social responsibility... civic responsibility... personal responsibility... and moral responsibility.

It's the Democratic Party.

We need to be able to say strongly, firmly, and proudly what we believe.

Because we are what we believe.

And we believe every person in America should have access to affordable health care. It is wrong that we remain the only industrialized nation in the world that does not assure health care for all of its citizens.

We believe the path to a better future goes directly through our public schools. I have nothing against private schools, parochial schools and home schooling. Parents with the means and inclination should choose whatever they believe is best for their children. But those choices must never come at the expense of what has been -- and must always be -- the great equalizer in our society -- public education.

We believe that if you put in a lifetime of work, you have earned a retirement of dignity -- not one that is put at risk by your government or unethical business practices.

The first time our nation balanced its budget, it was Andrew Jackson, father of the Democratic Party, who did it. The last time our nation balanced its budget, it was Bill Clinton who did it. I did it every year as Governor. Democrats believe in fiscal responsibility and we're the only ones who have delivered it.

We believe that every single American has a voice and that it should be heard in the halls of power everyday. And it most certainly must be heard on Election Day. Democracies around the world look to us as a model. How can we be worthy of their aspirations when we have done enough to guarantee accurate elections for our own citizens.

We believe in a strong and secure America... And we believe we will be stronger by having a moral foreign policy.

We need to embrace real political reform -- because only real reform will pry government from the grasp of the special interests who have made a mockery of reform and progress for far too long.

The pundits have said that this election was decided on the issue of moral values. I don't believe that. It is a moral value to provide health care. It is a moral value to educate our young people. The sense of community that comes from full participation in our Democracy is a moral value. Honesty is a moral value.

If this election had been decided on moral values, Democrats would have won.

It is time for the Democratic Party to start framing the debate.

We have to learn to punch our way off the ropes.

We have to set the agenda.

We should not hesitate to call for reform -- reform in elections, reform in health care and education, reforms that promote ethical business practices. And, yes, we need to talk about some internal reform in the Democratic Party as well, and I'll be discussing that more specifically in the days ahead.

Reform is the hallmark of a strong Democratic Party.

Those who stand in the way of reform cannot be the focus of our attention for only four months out of every four years.

Reform is a daily battle.

And we must pursue those reforms with conviction -- every day, at all levels, in 50 states.

A little while back, at a fundraiser, a woman came up to me. She identified herself as an evangelical Christian from Texas. I asked her what you are all wondering -- why was she supporting me. She said there were two reasons. The first was that she had a child who had poly-cystic kidney disease, and what that illness made it impossible for their family to get health care.

The second thing she said was, "The other reason we're with you is because evangelical Christians are people of deep conviction, and you're a person of deep conviction. I may not agree with you on everything, but what we want more than anything else from our government is that when something happens to our family or something happens to our country -- it's that the people in office have deep conviction."

We are what we believe. And the American people know it.

And I believe that over the next two... four... ten years...

Election by election...

State by state...

Precinct by precinct...

Door by door...

Vote by vote...

We're going to lift our Party up...

And we're going to take this country back for the people who built it. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

The Future of the Democratic Party

12.10.04 (4:35 am) [edit]

Herr Fuhrer Bush's Blood-thirsty Occupation, Not Islam Is Iraq's Problem

12.10.04 (4:29 am) [edit]

Is ''Islamic democracy'' really possible? Or is it something meaningless, like ''Jewish science,'' say, or contradictory, like ''people's democracy'' under Communism? This is the question that will determine the future of Iraq, since the man with the greatest credibility in that broken country is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite cleric, who refuses to run for office himself but says that he supports the idea of Islamic democracy.

The ayatollah insists that an Iraqi constituent assembly must be chosen through direct elections and that ''any basic law written by this assembly must be approved by a national referendum.'' He makes only cursory reference to Koranic law as the basis for that legal code. Any attempts to postpone general elections because of security concerns, especially in the Sunni areas, have also been fiercely resisted. In mid-October, he issued a fatwa requiring all men and women to vote, equating voting with such basic religious duties as fasting during Ramadan. It is the duty of the Shiites, according to the ayatollah, to protect Sunni and Christian interests as well. And although he opposed a plan to allow Kurds, who make up 15 to 20 percent of the Iraqi population, veto power over the constitution, he has not squelched Kurdish hopes of preserving some degree of autonomy under a new government. All these are fine words, of course, yet to be tested in reality. But they are remarkable words for a Shiite cleric born in Iran and should be taken seriously.

Despite the recent surge of conservative Christian activism in the United States, the received opinion in the Western world is that in democracies, church and state do not mix. Islam, we are often told, is particularly unsuited to democracy because in Muslim countries the state was never untangled from the clergy. But Iraq was supposed to be a special case, because it was largely secular. In fact, both these assertions were too sweeping. Muslims have rarely been ruled by clerics. Worldly and spiritual authority have usually been kept separate in the Middle East. And until not so long ago, religious minorities, like Jews, were treated with more tolerance in the Muslim world than in Christendom. When worldly authority becomes intolerably oppressive, however, religion is often the only base of resistance. Such was the case in Poland under Communist rule, when the Catholic Church provided a source of dissent. Under Saddam Hussein, the mosque had begun to play a similar role. Political Islam was a way to fight back against secular Baathism, and Ali al-Sistani was its main Shiite spokesman. The pope played a somewhat comparable role under Communism.

Still, the neoconservatives around President Bush mostly favored a secular route toward democracy in Iraq. In the early days of the war, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz frequently cited Turkey as a ''useful model for others in the Muslim world,'' and the administration pinned its hopes on secular exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, not Shiite mullahs exiled to London and Tehran. This line of thinking fell in easily with the views of another administration favorite, Bernard Lewis, the Princeton scholar who says that Kemal Ataturk got it right in Turkey: to promote modernism, religious authority must be forcibly expunged from politics. Ataturk said in 1917 that he would change Turkish social life in one blow. And that, in 1923, is what he proceeded to do. Women were stripped of their veils, Islamic schools were closed and dervish brotherhoods were banned. Even wearing the Turkish fez was forbidden in the new society ruled by ''science, knowledge and civilization.''

Similar revolutions happened or were tried elsewhere. After the Meiji Restoration in Japan in the 1860's, Buddhist temples were razed in the name of civilization and enlightenment. The May 4, 1919, students' revolt in China was an attempt to replace Confucian tradition and religious ''superstition'' with ''Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.'' In Persia, during the 1920's, Reza Shah Pahlevi tried to modernize his nation, later to be called Iran, by leveling mosques, murdering or arresting clerics and banning the chador. And the pan-Arabism of the early Baathists, some of whom were Christians in Syria, was a secular movement inspired by pan-German nationalism.

Unfortunately, what came out of all this secularizing zeal was not democracy but militarism, absolute monarchy, fascism and variations of Stalinism. The religious revolution that now stalks the Muslim world has come as a reaction, in part, to the failure of modern secular politics. And yet many Middle East analysts sympathetic to the Bush administration, like Daniel Pipes, see a secular strongman, along the lines of Ataturk or Chiang Kai-shek, as the best option in Iraq, since elections in the short term would bring ''Khomeini-like mullahs'' to power. Neoconservatives are not alone in their distrust of clerics. This distrust split the left-leaning anti-Communist opposition in Poland too. It was hard for some dissidents to support the priests against the commissars. As Jerzy Urban, one of the last spokesmen for the Communist regime there, once remarked, it's either us or the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. But does it always have to be one or the other? Is the choice in Iraq really between Ataturk and Khomeini?

[b]FOR THE FULL STORY ... Check-it-out [/b] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1...

Herr Fuhrer Bush's Blood-thirsty Occupation, Not Islam Is Iraq's Problem

12.10.04 (4:28 am) [edit]

Even Conservative U.K. Times Says Bush Should Have Dropped "Deadbeat" Rumsfailed!

12.10.04 (4:18 am) [edit]

[b]Bush should have dropped Rumsfeld, the deadbeat dad of the Iraq war[/b]

GEORGE W. BUSH does not look like your average Millwall fan (i.e. football hooligan). But one glance at his new Cabinet suggests that the President must at least share the thugs’ insouciance. “No one likes us — we don’t care!” they chant on the terraces. That could be Mr Bush’s mantra for his second term.

To lose Colin Powell — Europe’s one ally in the Administration — might be seen a misfortune. It means that the President will hear no dissenting views to challenge his neocon beliefs. The promotion of Condoleezza Rice, a Bush loyalist above all, to Secretary of State shows that the President plans to run his own foreign policy without the inconvenience of it being disputed from below. But it is the retention of Donald Rumsfeld as Defence Secretary that proves beyond doubt that Mr Bush does not give a monkey’s what the rest of the world thinks of America.

You don’t have to disagree with the war against Iraq to believe that Mr Rumsfeld has been a blight on the Bush record. Sure, the very fact of invading Iraq made the US unpopular in some quarters. But it was the bungled — and sometimes brutal — way in which it was done that turned many erstwhile supporters against America. That was Mr Rumsfeld’s fault.

The failure to commit enough troops to Iraq has contributed significantly to the chaos there. On Wednesday, the US Defence Secretary disreputably shrugged off responsibility for this decision. “The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that’s really out of my control,” he said. Hello? Remind me what job you still hold, Mr Rumsfeld?

The Defence Secretary blamed his own generals (always a shameful ploy) for going to war with too few troops. Yet, according to the former head of US Central Command, General Anthony Zinni, the Pentagon plan for invading and occupying Iraq when Mr Rumsfeld took office in 2000 required roughly 400,000 troops, three times the number there now. It was the new Defence Secretary who repeatedly insisted that the plan be redrawn to require far fewer soldiers.

Just a month before the war started, the Army Chief of Staff, Eric Shinseki, told Congress that “hundreds of thousands” of troops would be needed to occupy Iraq. He was swiftly slapped down by Mr Rumsfeld, who described the claim as “far off the mark”. The Army Secretary, Thomas White, was then forced from office for coming to General Shinseki’s defence.

If the military planning was woeful, the treatment of prisoners was an utter disgrace. Neocons such as Mr Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney had portrayed the war as a moral battle between good (freedom, democracy) and evil (tyranny, dictatorship). Once the evidence of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison started to emerge in the spring, America’s claim to moral superiority was badly dented. It is tyrants who are supposed to torture and degrade the inmates of their jails, not freedom-loving democrats.

The young reservists who were caught in those photos have now been charged. But what about their superiors? A disturbing trail of evidence, forced out of the Bush Administration by the courts, suggests that, far from being an isolated incident, Abu Ghraib was typical of the abuse that has been meted out in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan as well as Iraq. What is more, the high command at the Pentagon seems to have known about it.

This week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) won a long court battle to see documents under the Freedom of Information Act, showing that prisoners continued to be beaten in Iraq even after Abu Ghraib became public. Two Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) interrogators saw members of a detention task force “punch a prisoner in the face to the point that the individual needed medical attention” while questioning him. Other prisoners had burn marks on their backs, bruises and kidney pain.

When the DIA men told a supervisor, he confiscated the photos that they had taken of the prisoner. They were then ordered not to talk about what they had seen, banned from leaving the compound and had their car keys taken away. The memo detailing their experience, written by the director of the DIA, Vice-Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, was sent to Stephen J. Cambone, Under-Secretary of Defence for Intelligence. This man reports directly to Mr Rumsfeld.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that a fact-finding mission for American generals had said last December that the same task force was beating prisoners in a secret facility. The task force is still active in Iraq.

The memos unearthed by the ACLU also show that FBI interrogators sent to Guantanamo Bay were troubled by the practices they saw and reported back. One FBI agent said that Major-General Geoffrey D. Miller, who was running Guantanamo Bay, had cited Mr Rumsfeld as the source of the authority to use techniques that the FBI regarded as potentially illegal and ineffective in producing reliable intelligence. Major-General Miller also visited Abu Ghraib to advise on interrogation techniques.

A confidential Red Cross report on Guantanamo Bay, published by The New York Times last week, cited extensive physical and psychological abuse, which “cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatement and form of torture.”

When those shocking photos of abuse in Abu Ghraib were published, Mr Rumsfeld promised to take “full responsibility”. So far, he seems to have taken about as much responsibility as a deadbeat dad does for the child he deserts. You get the impression that the Defence Secretary does not so much regret the torture, as the fact that it has been revealed.

I could see why Mr Bush was reluctant to dismiss his Defence Secretary in an election year. I thought instead that Mr Rumsfeld might step down now, citing his age (72) as an excuse. Instead Mr Bush has decided to ignore the taint that Mr Rumsfeld casts on America’s reputation. It is a bizarre decision for a President supposedly elected on the basis of his “moral values”. - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...,,1071-1396798,00.html

Even Conservative U.K. Times Says Bush Should Have Dropped "Deadbeat" Rumsfailed!

12.10.04 (4:18 am) [edit]

The Mad King Georgey-boy Bush Continues his Insane Mission: DESTROY AMERICA!

12.10.04 (4:13 am) [edit]

WHY DON'T we Americans look directly at the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence among Iraqis would surely qualify as civil war -- except that only one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone. Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war.

Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months, overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was never addressed.

Astoundingly, the Democrats cooperated with the Republicans in assuring that the war in Iraq -- the one thing that might have defeated Bush -- was not an issue. That marginalization of the anti-war impulse continues in the suspended animation of a period after the American election and before the Iraqi election.

The new Bush administration has moved to reconfigure itself in most ways but one. The president's affirmation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in combination with his naming of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, reflects a blind determination to "stay the course" in Iraq, never mind that the course is heading off a cliff.

The main US news media treat the "story" of Iraq as if it is a morality tale about 20-year-old Americans -- a few of whom are shown making bad choices, but most of whom are lionized as heroes. When their deaths are mourned on television each night -- that heartbreaking silence under those smiling commissary snapshots -- the effect is to deepen the paralysis of the American public, which can only look away.

The barbarity of the Iraqi insurgency has been a particular source of repugnance. First it was hostage-taking, and beheading -- low-tech "shock and awe" assaults aimed at "foreigners," precisely to terrorize their sponsoring populations. The apparent murder of the admirable Margaret Hassan, war-opponent and humanitarian worker, was especially deplorable.

Then it was systematic attacks on Iraqis themselves, anyone daring to cooperate with the "coalition" occupiers. The execution-style murders of Iraqi police recruits and soldiers in recent weeks has been chilling, and now workers on a bus are massacred. What makes these tactics so appalling is their intensely personal character.

But it takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery, and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the "coalition" is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement.

The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in the "normalcy" of the news.

On the other side, it is the proliferation of suicide-bombing that has come to seem normal. Soldiers commonly risk their lives for nation, honor, or buddy -- but they will not kill themselves with forethought, in large numbers, except for the most transcendent of reasons. The United States has given itself an enemy that shows by its central tactic that it is fighting for God.

Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have just been through an election in which "religious values" were defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the discussion. America's purpose in Iraq is a compound of such deflection, self-deception, half-measures, and shallow thinking. The opposition, meanwhile, is absolute and unblinking. That difference partly answers the question with which this column began, but mainly we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back. - http://www.boston.com/news/gl...

Defense Contractors' (i.e. Corporate Pimps') Slut Rummy Rumsfeld Already Backtracking

12.09.04 (12:57 pm) [edit]

"Yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attempted to diminish a troop's concern that the army was short of fully armored vehicles, saying, "if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can still be blown up." http://www.dod.gov/transcript... Of course, when the Defense Secretary comes to Iraq, he travels in fully "up-armored" vehicles." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1...+b+9yVeoxQ&pagewanted=pri nt&position= ...[i][b] Too bad [/b][/i]...

[b]Maybe there [i]is[/i] http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... more the US can do for our troops in Iraq:[/b]

Under fire from troops who complain they are being sent to war in Iraq with inadequate gear, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised on Thursday that more would be done to protect forces.

[b]Yesterday Rumsfeld essentially called our troops, laboring under impossible conditions in Iraq, girly men http://www.abqtrib.com/archiv... for demanding better equipment and armor.[/b]

[b]Stung by the negative attention his insensitive comments generated, he's now being forced to admit that "more is being done". But check this out:[/b]

Teams in Washington have been working for months on how to protect forces from roadside bombs and similar explosives, he said.

[b][i]Months????[/i]

Our troops have been getting killed by IEDs for years, and it's just recently that the Pentagon has started researching countermeasures?

And Bush has rewarded Rummy for this incompetence with a second four-year stint. [/b]

[b]But then the sluts (for their corporate pimps, the Defense Contractors: Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Carlyle Group, etc. whose Executives are getting rich from the war, while our U.S. Soldiers are cannon-fodder exposed since the money goes to the rich, and [i]not [/i]for the protection of U.S. Troops putting their lives [i]on-the-line [/i]for US), Bush and Rummy [i]stick together[/i] like sleezy slime ...[/b]

While the Bureaucrats Talk ... Herr Fuhrer Bush Commits Mass-Murder ...

12.08.04 (1:01 pm) [edit]

[b]Killed Unarmed Iraqis, Ex-Marine Tells Hearing

U.S. deserter was right to flee his post, immigration and refugee board told[/b]

A former U.S. marine testified yesterday that the U.S. military "murdered" civilians in Iraq and that he pumped 500 rounds of bullets into vehicles that failed to stop at military checkpoints.

Jimmy Massey, a former marine staff sergeant, told an immigration and refugee board hearing in Toronto that he and his fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children and even shot a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms in the air.

"We killed the man. We fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle," testified Mr. Massey, a marine for 12 years who was honourably discharged last year. "The company gunnery sergeant came running over and began yelling, 'You just shot a guy with his hands up.' "

Mr. Massey testified in the refugee claim of U.S. army deserter Jeremy Hinzman, 26, who sought asylum in Canada after his application to be a conscientious objector was rejected. Mr. Hinzman said he did not want to be deployed to Iraq with his 82nd Airborne Division because he feared he would be forced to commit war crimes and atrocities in a conflict he considered illegal.

IRB member Brian Goodman has said he won't consider evidence about the legality of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, but yesterday Mr. Massey was permitted to testify about the killing of civilians.

The former marine said none of the Iraqis they shot had suicide bombing materials in their vehicles. He speculated that they didn't understand the hand signals and signage indicating they should stop.

On another occasion, marines reacted to a stray bullet by killing a small group of unarmed protesters and bystanders, said Mr. Massey, who said he has nightmares and posttraumatic stress disorder. "I was deeply concerned about the civilian casualties," he said. "What they were doing was committing murder."

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Bush "Won" the Election & Wouldn't Recognize a Promise He Made if it Hit Him in the Ass!!!

12.08.04 (12:21 pm) [edit]

"[i]You can't say one thing and do another[/i]." — George W. Bush, 10/31/00

During the presidential campaign and his first year in office, George W. Bush made a number of promises affecting American families, but he has failed to keep them. From breaching the Social Security lockbox to making it harder for middle class families to pay for college and leaving out millions of seniors from his prescription drug proposal, Bush has made a habit out of saying one thing and doing another. Here is a catalogue of Bush's broken promises revealed in his FY 2003 budget and in other key policy areas. In contrast to Bush's failures, Democrats have a strong record of progress on these issues.

[b]Bush's Broken Promises [/b]

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.failureisimpossibl...

Also, take a look at another [b]Bush's Broken Promises [/b] http://www.democrats.org/spec...

Psst! Hey buddy, did you hear how well Bush's Iraq war's going? Someone please tell Fucker BUSH!

12.08.04 (9:59 am) [edit]

[i][b]American Fantasies[/b][/i]

Here are some thoughts for the holidays:

Word that the Army's psy-op propagandists and perception mongers in the Pentagon had manufactured a fraudulent hero legend around the "friendly fire" death of footballer-turned special forces combatant Pat Tillman--much like the fraudulent tale woven about "rescuing Pvt. Lynch" during the Iraq war's initial days--should have us all on our guard regarding the stories out of Washington purveyed to us by a willing and gullible corporate media. If we take this scummy scam conducted at the late Tillman's expense as a starting point, we might go on to ponder some other things. Among them:

A majority of us Americans think that the unprovoked invasion of Iraq was a mistake--a mistake that has cost nearly 1300 American lives so far, with no end in sight, and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi lives (right up there on a scale comparable to the butchery of Saddam Hussein himself)--yet we just re-elected the man who is responsible for this colossal crime.

Americans continue to flock to auto dealerships to buy SUVs and trucks even though it is common knowledge that the money they pay to fuel these gas-guzzling behemoths goes straight into the pockets of the corrupt, dictatorial regimes, like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, that are breeding and even financially backing the terrorists who have been attacking Americans at home and abroad.

A decisive majority of Americans believe that healthcare should be a right, and that the solution to America's healthcare crisis is to have a nationalized medical system like Canada's, yet such an idea isn't even on the table in Washington, and is not even discussed by the two parties during national campaigns.

A majority of Americans believe that anything that federal or state government runs is bound to be heavy-handed, bureaucratic and prone to corruption, and yet a majority of Americans also supports having those same governments administer the death penalty.

Government statistics keep telling us that the national income is rising, but the average American family today, with both parents working their butts off, is spending 75 percent of its disposable income on housing, food and transportation, compared with less than 50 percent of income back in 1960, when most families were supported by only one job. (Explanation for this enigma: the national income is an average, but with the rich getting unprecedentedly richer and the poor poorer, you can quickly see where the missing income is going.)

Most Americans continue to believe the fantasy that they have the best lifestyle in the world, but in fact, people in Europe and even in countries like Japan and Taiwan, in many ways, live better than do we Americans, in terms of diet, leisure time, old age security, healthcare, and even safety from terrorism.

With a dogmatism that resembles religious zealotry, American schools teach (or preach to) U.S. students that capitalism is the best economic system, and that the American political system is a model for the world, yet bombed-out-looking American inner cities shock visitors from Europe and even from the more advanced countries of Asia. Poverty in the U.S., while hidden from public view, is the equivalent of a mid-sized third world nation in our midst, with millions of American children growing up hungry, ill clothed, uneducated, and trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair.

In the land of the free, an employer is free to fire an employee for wearing a button supporting a political candidate disliked by her boss. Verbally criticizing a "superior" (there's a great term, like "boss", to find still in circulation in what is supposed to be a democratic society or equals) on the job is grounds for dismissal. The much celebrated freedom of speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights applies only to those few waking hours when citizens are asleep or during those few hours when they are either on their commutes to and from work or at home with their families.

And now this: After taking over the airwaves, taking over the print media, and dominating even the Internet, American corporations are now moving to conquer that last bastion of freedom of expression and information--the grapevine. In a cover story in last Sunday's New York Times, it was disclosed that companies with names like BzzAgent and Tremor are using tens of thousands of weird but willing volunteers to spread product advertisements by word of mouth, pretending that they are simply voicing their own independent opinions.

Since Washington, particularly these days, is little more than a particularly large corporate monopoly, we shouldn't be surprised to find its PR and image-control agents adopting the same techniques to promote the kind of scams we saw in the just-exposed Tillman saga. Expect volunteers in your community to begin soon talking in the check-out line about how well the war is going, and about how exciting the Iraqi experiment in democracy is.

Or maybe about how brilliant our maximum leader is.

Happy Holidays!

[b]Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" to be published this fall by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net [/b] - http://counterpunch.org/lindo...

Perverse Neo-Con Bloodsuckers Find Whipping-Boy for (Divert Attention from) Bush's War Crimes

12.08.04 (9:52 am) [edit]

[b]The secretary general of the United Nations fights a war on many fronts in his crusade to bring human rights and peace to the world. But Kofi Annan's latest front isn't Sudan or Iraq, it's Washington, where right-wingers and spin doctors are plotting to overthrow him[/b].

Kofi Annan is sitting in a jet at 24,000 feet when we talk. It's late November and the United Nations secretary general is on a diplomatic tour of Africa that, over the course of nine days, will take him to Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Chad, Eritrea, Sudan, Morocco, and Burkina Faso. Most of his time has been spent on the plane. Below is the Africa of Kilimanjaro and the Great Lakes. It's also the Africa where wars are being waged, people are dying of AIDS and refugees are dragging themselves across the Sahara.

At one stop, he meets with the entire Security Council and with representatives of the rebels and the government parties in Sudan's civil war. Other meetings will sometimes put him in uncomfortable company -- with leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Rwanda's Paul Kagame and Umar al-Bashir from Sudan. But Annan is diplomat and he knows how to put on a show and a smile. For even after 42 years with the UN, many of them spent in the United States, he still considers Africa his home.

But there's a storm cloud lingering over his trip: the UN's oil-for-food program. The latest name to surface in the corruption scandal is that of the 66-year-old secretary general's son, Kojo Annan. The implication of the 29-year-old in the scandal -- the largest to strike the UN in years -- has undermined Annan's credibility and many in the US are calling for his resignation. Of course, that chorus has been growing in numbers since Annan told the BBC in September he believed the Iraq war had been "illegal."

Thousands of feet above his homeland -- he was born in Ghana, which was then the British Gold Coast Colony in 1938 -- Annan admits his job has grown more difficult.

"It can be very frustrating; you can lose your patience," Annan says, addressing his fatigue. In jobs like these, he says, it's important to be able to keep your balance. But these days he manages that less and less frequently. The old days in Switzerland, when he could go up into the mountains where cell phones don't work are a distant memory.

[b]Washington's whipping boy[/b]

How do you react to fatigue? I ask. "You keep going. You look for new ways. You try to connect with those who have the means to achieve certain goals," he says. But as relaxed as he may seem on this flight, these are troubling times for Annan. The United Nations' secretary general, appointed with the backing of the United States eight years ago, has now become Washington's favorite enemy. And though Annan may be able to make it through the battle, he can't win the war. The United Nations is no match for the American spin doctors -- and the scandal-plagued organization has become an easy and vulnerable target.

Annan is still in office -- his ethical principles and ability to speak out are intact -- but without an army or even a vote in the Security Council, he has virtually no power. The greatest weapon in his arsenal is his character. Not even his biggest detractors would contest the sincerity of his conviction in the creation of a peaceful world -- a concept he sees as more than a mere ideal. He is also a man of remarkable self-composure -- he never gets angry, never raises his voice, he doesn't hurt people's feelings and doesn't allow anyone to hurt his. Every now and then Annan says, "joking aside," and it's only then you realize he's just told a joke.

Those close to Annan admire him as a boss and a leader. Escinder, an Ethiopian photographer for the UN, says he can see Annan's exhaustion in his pictures. "We have to protect him," he says. Joe, Annan's American bodyguard, declares that he would "take a bullet" for Annan without a moment's hesitation because this boss was the first head of the UN to invite all the bodyguards and their families to come to his home for Christmas. "And he always says 'please' and 'thank you'."

There's no question that American right-wingers, accustomed to swaggering Texan talk, consider a man like Annan to be a weakling. The lapel pins tell the whole story: George W. Bush wears an American flag, Kofi Annan a dove, the symbol of peace. They are increasing the stakes, and during his flight, Annan at one point even uses the word "campaign" to describe their actions. "We are not prepared for such a confrontation," he says. "I prefer to be careful about what I say because I don't want an escalation."

When his trip began, the secretary general was under fire because of attacks on his organization. For too long, critics complain, he has stood by people who made too many mistakes. His enemies want to weaken him, and their hour has come.

[b]A tattered world[/b]

Annan wanted to go to Africa to help bring peace to his continent and to strengthen the United Nations. But the speeches he gives these days include words like "urgency" and "responsibility" and "the international community." The secretary general is "concerned," "indignant," "disappointed." The words are threadbare and they show how thoroughly messed up the world is in 2004.

The declaration signed at the International Conference on the Great Lakes region in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which calls on countries in the area to respect each other's borders in order to prevent further conflict, has been precooked in Kofi's world kitchen. It's always the same at these conferences -- the outcome is predetermined. Things proceed slowly at the UN. Things aren't done in the American way, and there is no flexing of muscles to force solutions. But it is certainly a step forward that Africa's rulers are talking to one another, that they are actually signing documents and commiting themselves to democracy. "This isn't the end, it isn't even the beginning of the end, it is the beginning of a beginning," Annan says.

Elisabeth Lindenmayer, the head of Annan's cabinet, says he leads in what she describes as the "African" style. "He asks us what we think, listens, is silent and thinks, and then he announces clear decisions." It's a trait his critics don't care for -- they often complain there is too little debate at the UN. Take, for example, the decision to send UN staff to Iraq -- most of the people in New York were against the decision, but Annan favored it and so there was no debate.

These differences of opinion are whittling away at Annan's influence and what used to be his most powerful currency: the amount of time he was alloted for meetings with the world's decision-makers.

How long can the secretary general speak; how long is each bilateral meeting? When will Colin Powell have time to see him; where is Joschka Fischer waiting; who gets how many minutes with whom? The currency is diminishing, but his people do what they can.

[b]Reforming the UN[/b]

Kofi Annan has two more years before his second and last term in office ends. He has made some changes. For example, he has slimmed down the organization. What he still wants to do is institute genuine reform: to expand the Security Council to 24 members, to make it more representative so that the developing countries of the Southern Hemisphere will respect it. Annan would like to help Germany get a seat on the Council, and he wants to do the same for Africans and Asians. He's also aiming to make all the arms of the behemoth and bureaucratic UN quick and efficient. "The world has changed and the UN must change," he says -- to universal agreement.

But to accomplish this he must have power. Annan's appointment was approved by 191 nations, and in accordance with the UN charter he briefs the Security Council on conflicts that endanger world peace. That is why he constantly finds himself between two camps, and why he must constantly forge alliances. He needs the support of two-thirds of the General Assembly and the entire Security Council to pass his reforms. A veto would ruin everything. But when was the last time the Americans voluntarily surrendered any of their power?

Annan's people think he is "the best secretary general there ever was." He's not a visionary, but a practical man who is a skilled persuader. But his power is diminishing. Under his tenure as secretary general, the UN has been plagued by sex scandals among peacekeeping troops, mismanagement and, now, possibly corruption. - http://service.spiegel.de/cac...,1518,331280,00.html

[b]Part 2. Painful attacks against Kofi Annan & the U.N.[/b] http://service.spiegel.de/cac...,1518,331280-2,00.html

Where are the Billions Bush-the-War-Criminal Stole in his 'OIL FOR HALLIBURTON' Program???

12.08.04 (9:44 am) [edit]

[b]Hypocritical neo-con war-mongers, arm-chair chicken-hawks, and mother fucking assholes are complaining about Kofi Annan-- (to punish him for condemning Herr Fuhrer Bush's insane neo-con war-mongerings)-- but fail to condemn Fucker Bush for doing worse!!!

What happened to Iraq’s oil money?

Former U.S. official says billions of dollars were ‘squandered’ (i.e. stolen) ...[/b]

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United States took control of all of the Iraqi government’s bank accounts, including the income from oil sales. The United Nations approved the financial takeover, and President Bush vowed to spend Iraq’s money wisely. But now critics are raising serious questions about how well the United States handled billions of dollars in Iraqi oil funds.

Iraq's oil resources generate billions of dollars — money the United States promised to protect after overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Now, Frank Willis, a former senior American official in Iraq, tells NBC News the United States failed to safeguard the oil money known as the Development Fund for Iraq.

"There was, in my mind, pervasive leakage in assets of Iraq, and to some extent, those assets were squandered," says Willis.

Willis helped run Iraq’s Transportation Ministry. He says government agencies and private contractors had to be paid in cash because Iraq’s banking system was decimated.

"A lot of money did get to the Iraqi people at the grass-roots level, and a lot of it got into the wrong hands," he says.

In one photograph, Willis and colleagues showed off a $2 million payment to a security contractor.

"It was time for payment," he remembers. "We told them to come in and bring in a bag. It reminded me of the Wild West."

In a series of reports on U.S. management of the oil money, auditors working for the United Nation's Iraq Advisory and Monitoring Board and the Inspector General of the Coalition Provisional Authority found:

1. Insufficient controls
2. Missing records
3. Two sets of books at Iraq's Finance Ministry, which did not match

In one example of insufficient controls, the United States stored hundreds of millions of oil dollars in a vault in a Baghdad palace. Government auditors found that the key to the vault was kept “unsecured” — in a U.S. official’s backpack.

Iraq’s U.S. administrator, Paul Bremer, pledged last year to hire a certified public accounting firm to ensure proper controls. But the United States gave the contract not to an accounting firm but to a tiny consulting company, Northstar — which NBC News found is headquartered at a private home near San Diego.

"They violated the rules. They picked a contractor who didn’t meet their requirements," says Paul Light, a government contracting expert and professor at New York University.

Northstar’s president says the Pentagon knew Northstar was not a certified public accounting firm and that four experienced employees went to Iraq and did a good job. However, one audit notes that a single Northstar employee maintained spreadsheets tracking billions of dollars.

Bremer would not comment. His aides say Iraq is a war zone and their top priority was getting money quickly where it was needed, even if the accounting wasn't perfect.

But NBC News has learned that a draft government audit faults the United States for “inadequate stewardship” of up to $8.8 billion in oil money, handed over to Iraq’s ministries but never fully accounted for. - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6...

Neo-Con Nazis in Bush Regime (Rumsfeld, etc.) Under Investigation For War Crimes

12.08.04 (9:36 am) [edit]

[b]Center for Constitutional Rights Seeks Criminal Investigation in Germany into Culpability of U.S. Officials in Abu Ghraib Torture[/b]

[u][b]German Prosecutor Asked to Meet Obligations Under Law Requiring Investigation into Torture and War Crimes[/b][/u]

[b]Doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction Permits Prosecution of Suspected War Criminals Wherever They May Be Found[/b]

NEW YORK - November 29 - In a historic effort to hold high ranking U.S. officials accountable for brutal acts of torture including the widely publicized abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib, on Tuesday, November 30, 2004, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and four Iraqi citizens will file a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office at the Karlsruhe Court, Karlsruhe, Germany. Under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, suspected war criminals may be prosecuted irrespective of where they are located.

The four Iraqis were victims of gruesome crimes including electric shock, severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation, hooding and sexual abuse. (Further details of the treatment of the complainants will be provided at the press conference.)

The U.S. officials charged include Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Former CIA Director George Tenet, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Dr. Steven Cambone, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Major General Walter Wojdakowski, Major General Geoffrey Miller, Brigadier General Janis L. Karpinski, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry L. Phillabaum, Colonel Thomas Pappas, and Lieutenant Colonel Stephen L. Jordan.

WHAT: News Teleconference

WHEN: Tuesday, November 30, at 12:00 PM

WHO: Attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights and attorneys calling in from Berlin including CCR’s Michael Ratner and Peter Weiss, and Wolfgang Kaleck of Germany.

GUIDELINES FOR TELECONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

Pass code for all callers: 108538

To call in from outside the U.S., please call the number of the region closest to you:

Local - Frankfurt, Germany: +49-69-36507-2080
Local - Hong Kong: +852-300-80-300
Local - London, United Kingdom: +44-207-663-2210
Local - Paris, France: +33-1-7304-1400
Local - Singapore: +65-64193720
Local - Sydney, Australia: +61-282078340
Local - Tokyo, Japan: +813-4455-1250

To call in from the U.S. ONLY: Toll Free: 1-888-288-9321 - http://www.commondreams.org/n...

Corrupt Bush War Criminals Responsible for Crimes Against Humanity in Neo-Con Iraq War

12.08.04 (9:28 am) [edit]

Why don't we Americans look directly at the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence among Iraqis would surely qualify as civil war -- except that only one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone. Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war.

Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months, overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was never addressed.

Astoundingly, the Democrats cooperated with the Republicans in assuring that the war in Iraq -- the one thing that might have defeated Bush -- was not an issue. That marginalization of the anti-war impulse continues in the suspended animation of a period after the American election and before the Iraqi election.

The new Bush administration has moved to reconfigure itself in most ways but one. The president's affirmation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in combination with his naming of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, reflects a blind determination to "stay the course" in Iraq, never mind that the course is heading off a cliff.

The main US news media treat the "story" of Iraq as if it is a morality tale about 20-year-old Americans -- a few of whom are shown making bad choices, but most of whom are lionized as heroes. When their deaths are mourned on television each night -- that heartbreaking silence under those smiling commissary snapshots -- the effect is to deepen the paralysis of the American public, which can only look away.

The barbarity of the Iraqi insurgency has been a particular source of repugnance. First it was hostage-taking, and beheading -- low-tech "shock and awe" assaults aimed at "foreigners," precisely to terrorize their sponsoring populations. The apparent murder of the admirable Margaret Hassan, war-opponent and humanitarian worker, was especially deplorable.

Then it was systematic attacks on Iraqis themselves, anyone daring to cooperate with the "coalition" occupiers. The execution-style murders of Iraqi police recruits and soldiers in recent weeks has been chilling, and now workers on a bus are massacred. What makes these tactics so appalling is their intensely personal character.

But it takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery, and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the "coalition" is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement.

The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in the "normalcy" of the news.

On the other side, it is the proliferation of suicide-bombing that has come to seem normal. Soldiers commonly risk their lives for nation, honor, or buddy -- but they will not kill themselves with forethought, in large numbers, except for the most transcendent of reasons. The United States has given itself an enemy that shows by its central tactic that it is fighting for God.

Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have just been through an election in which "religious values" were defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the discussion. America's purpose in Iraq is a compound of such deflection, self-deception, half-measures, and shallow thinking. The opposition, meanwhile, is absolute and unblinking. That difference partly answers the question with which this column began, but mainly we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back.

[b]James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War." [/b]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...

Understanding English

12.07.04 (4:27 pm) [edit]

[b]Check-it-out [/b] Republican Dictionary: Parts 1 & 2 http://www.tblog.com/template...

The White House Meaning of Christmas

12.07.04 (4:18 pm) [edit]

A White House transcript of President Bush's speech at the Christmas tree lighting on Thursday originally read, "We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits http://www.washingtonpost.com... and lived in joyful expectation." Nineteen minutes later, a corrected transcript changed "profits" to "prophets." http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Obviously Bush wrote his own mediocre, cliche-ridden speech[i] this [/i]time-- and really meant every ugly Un-Christian word he babbled mindlessly ... Too bad the White House minions changed his words (as they [i]often [/i]do ...), for history should show that we've been saddled with a greedy, supercilious asshole for President ...

[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]

Michael Moore: Made over and moving on ... (Don't let the bastards get you, Michael!) ...

12.07.04 (4:07 pm) [edit]

On the evening of November 29, a made-over Michael Moore appeared on the Tonight Show. With a haircut, cleanly-shaved and dressed in a smart looking suit, dress shirt and striped tie, Moore had shed his familiar baseball cap, ill-fitting jeans and baggy jacket, and the unshaven, shaggy-haired look that has been his inimitable fashion statement and sartorial calling card for years.

Tonight show host, Jay Leno, stirred by the newly made over Moore, joked that the filmmaker looked like Denny Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. When Leno asked Moore if he had turned Republican, Moore responded, "If you can't beat 'em," he said, "you might as well try to look like 'em."

According to a transcript of the program -- recorded by the folks at Brent Bozell's right wing media watchdog group, Media Research Center -- Moore appeared to be in a pretty darn good mood, considering the outcome of the election. And considering that he has been taking a verbal pounding from right wing critics -- as well as the folks over at the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of so-called moderate Democrats -- for contributing to Kerry's loss. For many, Moore had become the new Ralph Nader.

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

The Indelible Evil Of Neo-Fascist Bush's War

12.07.04 (4:03 pm) [edit]

Like Shakespeare's Brutus, [i]I am sick of many griefs[/i].

An incurious, narcissistic psychopath sits in the Oval Office - an office he did not legitimately win four years ago - an office that he may have seized last month through massive, many-faceted electoral manipulation and fraud.

Forty million of our citizens are without health insurance, one out of six American children live in poverty, uncounted millions are out of work as still more jobs are exported overseas. The median family income declines as the nation's wealth continues to "percolate up" from the pockets of the needy and the productive middle class to the wealthy.

The list of horrors continues: the environment ravished, our natural heritage sold off, education starved of funding, our civil liberties casually violated as if the Bill of Rights had never been ratified, scientific expertise and research set aside in favor of dogma, both religious and secular.

[b]Check-it-out [/b] http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...