Saturday, November 05, 2005

There's nothing new under the sun

Bush's fabrication of evidence to support the invasion of Iraq has been compared to Lyndon Johnson's prevarication about the events in the Bay of Tonkin. But here's an even earlier plot, a CIA justification for invasion of Cuba.

LOL

Ethics lessons?

Piling on, or Kick 'em while they're down, or Don't get mad, get even

Some such adage characterizes the following dream sequence:

1) Fitzgerald makes a deal with Libby, Rove and others, resulting the indictment of Cheney for some subversive crime, followed by the submission of articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives.

2) The ACLU wins the appeal of its FOIA case against Rumsfeld, requiring the release of the four videotapes and 87 photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib, film that is shown on all networks (even Fox, which has by now turned on the administration) and depicts abuse that makes the earlier pictures look like a Winnie the Pooh cartoon.

3) Cheney, Libby, Rove and others plead guilty, counting on pardons from Bush, which Bush, citing their "unswerving governmental service," grants.

4) Within minutes, articles of impeachment against Bush are filed in the House. Condi Rice, fearing for her future as a black female inmate of Leavenworth, makes a deal with the House Counsel, and presents evidence of Bush's deliberate distortion of pre-Iraq-invasion evidence to justify war.

5) Both John Roberts and Samuel Alito, having been confirmed, are videod with Scalia and Thomas in an orgy with a bunch of mixed-gender, mixed-race ten-year-olds, and Fox News plays the videos in prime time.

6) Iraq is taken over by Iran, which demands that the US appoint a new president in order for the US to have any oil from either country.

At which point, I awoke, screaming in delight.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Uh oh.

You need to read this piece about Iran's decision to create an oil "bourse," or market, and to take as currency the euro, as opposed to the dollar. There are numerous reasons why this is a good deal for Iran--which holds a high percentage of proven oil reserves and a higher percentage of natural gas--as well as for its many European trading partners.

And so, as the author points out, we might want to be on the lookout for an attack on Iran by the US, in the guise of disarming its nuclear threat, just as the US attacked Iraq in 2003, using WMD as the excuse, in the wake of Iraq's decision to utilize the euro as its exchange.

Stay tuned.

I told you so

Here's a quote from an article reporting what a National Guard general who recently returned from a trip to Iraq said about the US military presence there.

He said there are signs of how the U.S. presence is likely to change in the
future. He visited a base in southern Iraq that will expand from 6,000 to
16,000
soldiers, drawing them from northern parts of the country. He expects
U.S.
forces will consolidate in two or three major, well-protected bases,
with Iraqi
troops eventually taking over operations in the rest of the
country.

You see, this stuff you'll be hearing from Washington about "withdrawal" of US forces after the upcoming December 15 election (another election in Iraq? God, they've got to be tired of voting!), simply means withdrawing them to fortified perimeter zones inside the country, where the US will be able to control all events throughout the Middle East. This was one of the major reasons Bush invaded Iraq, and it's the major reason Muslim radicals--especially bin Laden--have given for terrorist actions against the US.

So, the US will continue on its road to empire, and the terrorists' attacks will continue. A perfect recipe for ongoing dictatorship in our nation, and war throughout the world.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Tipping point?

Check out these poll numbers. Really horrendous for Bush, and consistent across the various pollsters' results. At what point are these figures irreversible? I wasn't poll-watching during the nadirs of Clinton, Reagan, Bush I, Nixon and Carter. But I'll betcha, they didn't get much worse than this.

And isn't Bush II supposed to have a "base," an insane/ignorant bunch of Christian radicals that constitute 40-plus percent of the electorate? Could they finally be catching on--or bailing out?

Right on

In this essay, the author excoriates "useful idiots," the "hand-wringing liberals" like Joe Biden (and, he failed to mention, Hillary Clinton) who condemn facets of Bush's Iraq policy, such as the failure to plan for post-invasion reconstruction and the Abu Ghraib outrages, but continue to maintain that the war was properly waged and that we must "stay the course" to complete the job there.

I couldn'ta said it better myself.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Jimmy Carter, Christ and other guys

I just watched Larry King's interview of President Carter (Carter's got a new book out). Yeah, the guy's a human being, really close to an enlightened being. But he's stuck in politics, and on Iraq he's way off base. He wants us to withdraw eventually, but he doesn't talk about the thousand-plus kids who'll die in that process. So--for me, he gets a solid B.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Rogue nation

The United States, founder of the United Nations, site of its headquarters, its historical supporter, has, under George Bush, determined to move out of the realm of lawful governments. Another step toward fascism, just like Nazis in 1938.

The source for this report isn't the MSM, of course. Leave it to Islam Online to tell us what America has become.

Monday, October 31, 2005

Speaking of short memory

Already the Libby indictment, three days old, is eclipsed by Bush's latest outrage, nominating a Fascisti to the Supreme Court, so that the Left's talking-points about the indictment are forgotten and relegated to complaints that prosecutor Fitzgerald didn't go far enough, and isn't likely hereafter to dig deep enough, to charge any other crimes, much less to dig out the falsehoods that Bush/Cheney made up to hype the case for invading Iraq.

Fifteen minutes of fame? Not even that, nowadays.

Who will tell the people?

On our weekly peace march, and during my various vigils in SB--a town that's got four colleges and presumably a knowledgeable, even somewhat liberal, citizenry--I routinely encounter people who're unaware that we're still fighting and dying in Iraq, or who believe that we're in the last throes of our operation there. There is certainly no awareness of the level of the continuing death toll, and so when I tell them that we lost more soldiers (227) during the last three months of the occupation (August through October, 2005) than we lost (176) during the first three months (March through May, 2003, which includes the invasion itself!)--they are flabbergasted.

Ya gotta hand it to the MSM, they're right on the spot with the latest hot story, but the moment it cools, fuggetaboutit.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Okay, it's mean spirited, I admit

but watching Bush's fall from grace is sure fun. Help him along with your cursor, if he gets hung up.

Letter to the editor

The following is the text of a letter to the editor of the SB News Press that I sent today. Probably too long to be published, so I thought I'd send it into cyberspace. What the hell, it was fun writing it.

To the editor, Santa Barbara News Press

Re the indictment of
Scooter Libby.

To those who contend—I’m talking about Limbaugh, Hannity and their ilk—that Scooter Libby’s misstatements to the FBI and grand jury about the leak of Valerie Plame’s status with the CIA are inconsequential crimes, reflect on this.

We must first address the Why Bother? question. Why would anyone—Cheney, Libby, Rove, all of whom discussed the matter at length—bother to delve into the employment of the Joe Wilson’s wife? Because, of course, by arguing that as a CIA employee she was instrumental in
arranging Wilson’s trip to Niger, they could cheapen Wilson’s negative report on the Niger-yellowcake deal, devaluing his effort as simply the result of a familial junket, devaluing him as a nobody, merely a beneficiary of a well-positioned bureaucrat.

But why try to devalue Joe Wilson, and so his report? I’ll tell you why.

First, it’s undisputed that the famous “16 words” of Bush’s State of the Union address were critical, in the view of those in his administration—notably Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle and Libby—to establishing the case for war against Iraq. These words raised the specter of nuclear explosions on American soil, demolishing whole cities, not just toppling towers, not just clogging subways. So important was Bush’s phrase, that Iraq had sought “significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” that it was much massaged by his handlers to be attributed to the
Brits, because the CIA disputed the evidence and indeed had insisted that the reference be stricken in an earlier Bush speech—and Colin Powell didn’t touch it in his watershed speech to the UN Security Council some weeks later. Indeed, as later conceded by CIA Director George Tenet, those words should never have been included in Bush's address—a concession made, however, only after the invasion.

Second, what would be the repercussions of such a revelation, that is, that the executive branch of the US government, to which its foreign policy is entrusted under our Constitution, purposefully misstated the evidence for war in a crucial address to the Congress and the nation to support the invasion? I’ll tell you what.

It’s not just a lie—although it certainly was a lie. It’s not just an impeachable offense—although it’s certainly that, if Clinton’s lies about his sexual encounters were impeachable. No, it’s worse,
much worse: It’s direct evidence of a war crime, no less obvious than the Nazis’ falsification of evidence of Poland’s border incursion to justify Germany’s unprovoked invasion of that nation in 1939. To those who followed the Nuremberg trials, Germany’s invasion of Poland was a principal count of the indictment of the Nazis for war crimes, i.e., “waging a war of aggression.”

So, when the Bush/Cheney cabal drafted those 16 words, and Bush delivered
them—cleverly crafted, dramatically delivered—they knowingly risked everything, including exposure as war criminals, in furtherance of their ambition to take over Iraq and, with it, dominion over the assets and politics of the Middle East.

So—enter Libby. He’s among those who promoted the Iraq invasion, according to his own account, but Wilson’s yellowcake report disputed the basis for it. Libby then confered with Cheney and others, who determined to nip the report in the bud, to dispute its validity by
questioning the veracity, the solidity, of its author. Not a new concept: When you don’t like the news, kill the messenger. A ploy that had been used by the Bush administration to fine effect in the past, too numerous to mention.

And it worked, for a time. Joe Wilson’s negative report about the Niger-yellowcake deal wallowed among the myriad of other stories questioning Bush’s case for war, including the aluminum-tubes debate, the mobile biological-labs chase and the long-range drones silliness. The neo-cons, of which Libby was an avid member, had waged their war and it was underway.

But by the time Joe Wilson’s report was published in the major media, in a New York Times editorial, no less—and no WMD’s had yet been found in Iraq—the neo-cons were worried, worried bigtime, that their pre-war lies would be found out. And so—kill the messenger.

Who was behind Libby’s leaks, and who was he protecting with his lies to the FBI and the grand jury? His boss Cheney, of course; and no doubt he acted with Rove’s approval and
Bush’s concurrence. There’s no way Cheney’s first deputy would take on such a
project on his own.

Will we ever know who, exactly? Maybe not. But we know why, exactly. So that Libby, Cheney, Bush and Rove, as well as the entire cabal in the Pentagon--and without--who caused this nation to invade Iraq based on lies, would escape exposure as war criminals, war criminals under the same legal principles that international law applied in the past to those who lied to provoke invasion of a sovereign nation.