September 30th, 2006
Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent, wonders out loud, Just what does it mean to be a Republican nowadays? And questions those that still, with a straight face, claim to be part of the GOP. Larry Johnson writes:
I once considered myself a Republican. In light of the record of the Bush Administration and the Republican controlled congress, I can no longer claim to be a Republican. Now we have George “AWOL” Bush and his sidekick, Dick “Five-Deferment” Cheney calling Democrats who question their failed Iraq strategy, “cut and runners”.
[...]
If you start a war in Iraq while lying to the American people that Saddam was tied to Osama Bin Laden, you might be a Republican.
If you failed to complete your own National Guard service and your Vice President received five deferments to avoid service in Vietnam, but accuse political opponents who challenge your failed foreign policy in Iraq of being cowards, you might be a Republican.
If you call dark skinned people Macacas and Niggers, you might be a Republican.
If you ignore intelligence community warnings that Bin Laden is determined to strike inside the United States, you might be a Republican.
If you follow policies that squander a budget surplus and create an $8.5 trillion dollar budget deficit, you might be a Republican.
If you expose the identity of an undercover CIA officer in charge of tracking down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, you might be a Republican.
If you believe the President should be entitled to jail, without recourse to Habeus Corpus, anyone he decides is a threat, you might be a Republican.
Oh, and given recent reports that Republican representative Mark Foley has stepped down from his congressional seat, after revelations of repeated attempts to seduce teenage boys, Larry Jonhson wonders:
If you enjoy soliciting teenagers and children for sex over the internet, you might be a Republican:
Congressman Mark Foley. Republican Rep. Mark Foley resigned yesterday after the exposure of several sexually suggestive messages he sent to underage boys. Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican and chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus, led efforts to overhaul sex-offender laws, apologized in a brief statement that did not mention the electronic correspondence with the former congressional pages.
(http://washingtontimes.com/national/
20060930-010821-5764r.htm)
Randall Casseday. Metropolitan Police today charged the director of human resources at The Washington Times with one count of attempting to entice a minor on the Internet. Randall Casseday, 53, was arrested at 9:45 p.m. yesterday in the 1300 block of Brentwood Road NE, where police said he had arranged to meet who he thought was a 13-year-old girl. He had actually exchanged Internet messages and photographs with a male police officer posing as a girl.
(http://washingtontimes.com/metro/
20060927-054303-9103r.htm)
Brian J. Doyle. The deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday for using the Internet to seduce what he thought was a teenage girl, authorities said. Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested in Maryland where he lives on charges of use of a computer to seduce a child and transmission of harmful material to a minor. The charges were issued out of Polk County Fla.
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/04/05/
department-of-homeland-se_n_18517.html)
So, who are those people that still call themselves Republicans without shame?
September 7th, 2006
I’ve not followed the brouhaha over ABC’s fictional recreation of the events that, according to Disney, led to 9/11. You can read some of the controversy here:
Former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright called one scene involving her “false and defamatory.” Former national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger said the film “flagrantly misrepresents my personal actions.” And former White House aide Bruce R. Lindsey, who now heads the William J. Clinton Foundation, said: “It is unconscionable to mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies our country has ever known.”
In fact, the screenwriter of what’s being called the 9/11 fakeumentary is reported to having invented an event which is presented in the Disney drama as if it had actually occurred — Crooks and Liars brings us the tape.
But that’s not what I originally wanted to write about. Instead, I’m more interested in some of the images I’ve seen in response to Disney’s propaganda in support of the Republican party. Here are two examples:
These are just two examples of the sort of images that are being generated by the grassroots in an effort to fight back against Disney’s GOP campaign. I think it would be great if the Disney brand took a hit — a bad hit — after being so closely associated with such an unpopular president.
As I mentioned elsewhere, if you have a blog, please post these images everywhere.
April 19th, 2006
Don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself.
George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
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And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq.
[...]
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off.
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More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton — a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
[...]
On September 10th, 2001, [Bush] held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush’s presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush’s simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
[...]
The heart of Bush’s domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts — a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush’s father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush’s tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion’s share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration’s original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
[...]
[T]he Bush administration — in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" — threatens to overturn the Framers’ healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president’s powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress.
[...]
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
April 11th, 2006
Some items from around the blogsphere, and elsewhere, worth checking out this morning:
- Veredictum: The corporate media dutifully reported The President’s misleading remarks without correcting his misinformation. The Bush Administration is built on lies and, yesterday, Bush added another lie.
MSNBC’s Countdown correctly points out that only specific parts of the NIE were leaked to a few sympathetic reporters. The leaked information provided a defense for statements the President made that exaggerated Iraq’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons. Other parts of the same NIE that was not given to reporters, show that the leaked information was false.
- AP: Phone Jamming Case Touches White House: The AP has a story this afternoon about James Tobin’s contacts with the White House around Election Day, 2002, the day that the New Hampshire GOP jammed the phones for Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts.
[...]
Tobin was in very close touch with the White House’s political affairs office around the same time that he helped plan the jamming. As we noted then, he called the White House twelve times on the big day.
Democrats are pressing a civil suit against the GOP in New Hampshire, and they plan to ask a federal judge tomorrow "to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud."
- Gallup: Most Americans Critical of President in CIA Leak Case: NEW YORK A new Gallup poll released today finds that most Americans are critical of President Bush’s actions in the Plame/CIA leak scandal, but only one in four is following the matter closely.
[...]
The more closely people are following the issue, the more likely they are to say he did something illegal rather than merely unethical.
- Powell: U.S. mistakes hurting Iraq now: U.S. mistakes in the invasion of Iraq led to the current insurgency and sectarian fighting, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell says.
- Gingrich: Pull out of Iraq: Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, told students and faculty at the University of South Dakota Monday that the United States should pull out of Iraq and leave a small force there, just as it did post-war in Korea and Germany.
"It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003," Gingrich said during a question-and-answer session at the school. "We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it."
- The New Yorker: The Iran Plans: The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
- TalkingPointsMemo.com: This post is, hopefully, nothing more than stating the obvious. But let’s just put down for the record that when President Bush calls recent reports of White House plans to attack Iran "wild speculation" that means absolutely nothing.
It’s not just that the president has now earned a well-deserved reputation for lying. It is because he and his chief aides lied to the country about a more or less parallel situation — the build up to war on Iraq — only four years ago. We now know that the fix was in on the Iraq War as early as September/October 2001. And the president and his crew kept up the charade that no decisions had been made long after those claims became laughable.
March 30th, 2006
Recently we’ve seen the Bush Administration and its supporters go after journalists for, in the war supporters’ minds, focusing too much on the negative news coming out of Iraq and neglecting all the good that’s going in that country following the invasion. Now, god knows I’ve criticized journalists, mainly so-called TV-journalists, though for entirely different reasons, such as, failing to do their watchdog duty PRIOR to the invasion (when it was plainly clear that our country was not getting the straight story from the republican White House on why they were forcing us into a war of choice). However, to even suggest that what is now occurring in Iraq is the press’ fault is absurd and nothing less than self-delusion. Then again, Bush supporters, and conservatives in general, are not known for their level-headed and well reasoned thinking — just remember the overly rosy predictions made before the war when, for example, Cheney mentioned that US forces would be greeted as liberators with petals and candy. In response to criticism coming from the republican White House and from its conservative media surrogates, some journalists have stepped forward to confront their critics and remind them that this has been one of the deadliest wars for journalists with over 40 dead, and many more wounded.
Of course, the real aim of such criticism coming from this republican administration and its supporters is to distract the American public from the utter mess that Bush’s war of choice in Iraq has wrought in that country. Aside from the 2,325 American and the over 30,000 Iraqi dead since the start of the war, daily life in Iraq has been anything but the la la-land that that Cheney painted before the start of the war. Just to give you a taste what Liberated Iraq™ looks like see this video here and this other one here.
The videos show one side of the story, a side of the story that the Bush White House and his conservative supporters don’t want Americans to even think about. Meanwhile, half way around the world, Iraqis in their now liberated country must deal with disconcerting messages like this streaming across their TVs:
Here’s the translation:
“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
The source of this message is Riverbed, a girl living in Iraq that’s maintained a blog since the start of the war, where she routinely posts what daily life is like in Iraq.
In the post where she provides the message quoted above, she goes on to describe what she and her cousin did after they read that message as it scrolled across the bottom of their TV:
We discussed it today as it was repeated on another channel.
“So what does it mean?” My cousin’s wife asked as we sat gathered at lunch.
“It means if they come at night and want to raid the house, we don’t have to let them in.” I answered.
“They’re not exactly asking your permission,” E. pointed out. “They break the door down and take people away- or have you forgotten?”
“Well according to the Ministry of Defense, we can shoot at them, right? It’s trespassing-they can be considered burglars or abductors…” I replied.
The cousin shook his head, “If your family is inside the house- you’re not going to shoot at them. They come in groups, remember? They come armed and in large groups- shooting at them or resisting them would endanger people inside of the house.”
“Besides that, when they first attack, how can you be sure they DON’T have Americans with them?” E. asked.
We sat drinking tea, mulling over the possibilities. It confirmed what has been obvious to Iraqis since the beginning- the Iraqi security forces are actually militias allied to religious and political parties.
But it also brings to light other worrisome issues. The situation is so bad on the security front that the top two ministries in charge of protecting Iraqi civilians cannot trust each other. The Ministry of Defense can’t even trust its own personnel, unless they are “accompanied by American coalition forces”.
It really is difficult to understand what is happening lately. We hear about talks between Americans and Iran over security in Iraq, and then American ambassador in Iraq accuses Iran of funding militias inside of the country. Today there are claims that Americans killed between 20 to 30 men from Sadr’s militia in an attack on a husseiniya yesterday. The Americans are claiming that responsibility for the attack should be placed on Iraqi security forces (the same security forces they are constantly commending).
All of this directly contradicts claims by Bush and other American politicians that Iraqi troops and security forces are in control of the situation. Or maybe they are in control- just not in a good way.
Of course, to hear the Bush Administration tell it, Iraq is just fine, nothing to see here, move along, move along.
