Monday, December 25, 2006
Most horrific Right-Wing comments BROADCAST by the WHORE corporate media in 2006... top 11 whore 'news' stories as compiled by Media Matters.org
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Most outrageous comments of 2006
compiled by MediaMatters.org
Fri, Dec 22, 2006
http://mediamatters.org/items/200612220013
How extreme were conservative commentators in their remarks this year? How about calls to NUKE the Middle East and an allegation that a "gay ... mafia" used the congressional page program as its own "personal preserve." Right-wing rhetoric documented by Media Matters for America included the nonsensical (including Rush Limbaugh's claim that America's "obesity crisis" is caused by, among other things, our failure to "teach [the poor] how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter"), the offensive (such as right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel's question about "Barack Hussein Obama": is he "a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?"), and the simply bizarre (such as William A. Donohue's claim that some Hollywood stars would "sodomize their own mother in a movie"). Since there were so many outrageous statements, we included a list of honorable mentions along with the top 11, which, if not for Ann Coulter, we might have limited to 10.
The top 11 (in chronological order):
William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights: "Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn't care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face." [2/9/06]
Fox News host John Gibson: "Do your duty. Make more babies. That's a lesson drawn out of two interesting stories over the last couple of days. First, a story yesterday that half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably, the ones Hispanics call 'gabachos' -- white people -- are having fewer." [5/11/06]
Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on The New York Times' decision to report on the Bush administration's warrantless domestic wiretapping program and a Treasury Department financial transaction tracking program: The Times had done "something that could have gotten them executed, certainly did get [Julius and Ethel] Rosenberg[] executed." [7/12/06]
Coulter responding to Hardball host Chris Matthews' question, "How do you know that [former President] Bill Clinton's gay?": "I don't know if he's gay. But [former Vice President] Al Gore -- total fag." [7/27/06]
Nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage: "That's why the department store dummy named Wolf Blitzer, a Jew who was born in Israel, will do the astonishing act of being the type that would stick Jewish children into a gas chamber to stay alive another day. He's probably the most despicable man in the media next to Larry King, who takes a close runner-up by the hair of a nose. The two of them together look like the type that would have pushed Jewish children into the oven to stay alive one more day to entertain the Nazis." [8/7/06]
Coulter on Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), an African-American: "Congresswoman Maxine Waters had parachuted into Connecticut earlier in the week to campaign against [Sen. Joseph I.] Lieberman because he once expressed reservations about affirmative action, without which she would not have a job that didn't involve wearing a paper hat. Waters also considers Joe 'soft' on the issue of the CIA inventing crack cocaine and AIDS to kill all the black people in America." [8/9/06]
Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh, blaming America's "obesity crisis" on "the left," "liberal government," and "food stamps": "Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn't teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn't teach them how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter. The real bloat here, as we know, is in -- is in government." [8/29/06]
Coulter on Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI): "They Shot the Wrong Lincoln." [8/30/06]
Conservative pundit and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan: "Look, [Rep. Jim] Kolbe [R-AZ] is gay. He is an out-of-the-closet gay. [Rep. Mark] Foley [R-FL] was gay. The House clerk who was in charge of the pages [Jeff Trandahl] was gay. Foley's administrative assistant, Mr. [Kirk] Fordham, The New York Times tell us, was gay. You hear about a lot of others. What's going on here, Joe [Scarborough, MSNBC host], is basically these, this little mafia in there looked upon the pages, I guess, as their -- sort of their personal preserve. And it stinks to high heaven what was done. And it stinks to high heaven that it was not exposed and these types of people, thrown out by the Republican Party." [10/9/06]
CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck to Rep.-elect Keith Ellison (D-MN): "OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. ... With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, 'Let's cut and run.' And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with ourenemies.' " [11/14/06]
Right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel on Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL): So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian ... is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father's heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?" [12/18/06]
Honorable mentions (also in chronological order):
Beck: "Cindy Sheehan. That's a pretty big prostitute there, you know what I mean?" [1/10/06]
Republican strategist Mary Matalin: "I mean, you know, I think these civil rights leaders are nothing more than racists. And they're keeping constituency, they're keeping their neighborhoods and their African-American brothers enslaved, if you will, by continuing to let them think that they're -- or forced to think that they're victims, that the whole system is against them." [2/8/06]
Pat Robertson, host of the Christian Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club: "But it does seem that with the current makeup of the court, they still don't have as many judges as would be needed to overturn Roe [v. Wade]. They need one more, and I dare say before the end of this year there will be another vacancy on the court." [3/7/06]
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and host of the daily Christian radio show The Albert Mohler Program: "Well, I would have to say as a Christian that I believe any belief system, any world view, whether it's Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or dialectical materialism for that matter, Marxism, that keeps persons captive and keeps them from coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, yes, is a demonstration of satanic power." [3/17/06]
Nationally syndicated radio host Neal Boortz on Rep. Cynthia McKinney's (D-GA) hairstyle: "She looks like a ghetto slut. ... It looks like an explosion in a Brillo pad factory. ... She looks like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence. ... She looks like a shih tzu!" [3/31/06]
Boortz on McKinney's hairstyle (again): "I saw Cynthia McKinney's hairdo yesterday -- saw it on TV. I don't blame that cop for stopping her. It looked like a welfare drag queen was trying to sneak into the Longworth House Office Building. That hairdo is ghetto trash. I don't blame them for stopping her." [3/31/06]
Limbaugh discussinga videotape released by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the then-leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq: "[I]t sounds just like the DNC [Democratic National Committee] is writing his scriptsnow." (4/26/06)
Beck: "Blowing up Iran. I say we nuke the bastards. In fact, it doesn't have to be Iran, it can be everywhere, anyplace that disagrees with me." [5/11/06]
Jonathan Hoenig, managing member of Capitalistpig Asset Management LLC, on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto: "I think when it comes to Iran, the problem is we haven't been forceful enough. I mean if you -- frankly, if you want to see the Dow go up, let's get the bombers in the air and neutralize this Iranian threat." [6/5/06]
Fox host Geraldo Rivera: "I've known [Sen.] John Kerry [D-MA] for over 35 years. Unlike me, he is a combat veteran, so he gets some props. But in the last 35 years, I've seen a hell of a lot more combat than John Kerry. And for a smart man like that in a political ploy to set a date certain only aids and abets the enemy, and the Democrats are at their own self-destructive behavior once again." [6/22/06]
Savage: "I don't know why we don't use a bunker-buster bomb when he comes to the U.N. and just take [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] out with everyone in there." [7/21/06]
Boortz: "I want you to think for think for a moment of how incompetent and stupid and worthless, how -- that's right, I used those words -- how incompetent, how ignorant, how worthless is an adult that can't earn more than the minimum wage? You have to really, really, really be a pretty pathetic human being to not be able to earn more than the human wage. Uh -- human, the minimum wage." [8/3/06]
Syndicated columnist and Fox News host Cal Thomas on businessman Ned Lamont's victory in Connecticut's Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate: "It completes the capture of the Democratic Party by its Taliban wing. ... [T]hey have now morphed into Taliban Democrats because they are willing to 'kill' one of their own, if he does not conform to the narrow and rigid agenda of the party's kook fringe." [8/10/06]
Fox News host Sean Hannity, two months before the November midterm elections: "This is the moment to say that there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of 'em is making sure [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] doesn't become the [House] speaker." [8/29/06]
Beck: "The Middle East is being overrun by 10th-century barbarians. That's what I thought at 5 o'clock this morning, and I thought, 'Oh, geez, what -- what is this?' If they take over -- the barbarians storm the gate and take over the Middle East (this is what I'm thinking at 5 o'clock in the morning) -- we're going to have to nuke the whole place." [9/12/06]
Savage: "My fear is that if the Democrats win [in the November midterm elections], and I'm afraid that they might, you're going to see America melt down faster that you could ever imagine. It will happen overnight, and it could lead to the breakup of the United States of America, the way the Soviet Union broke up." [10/13/06]
Republican pollster Frank Luntz on Nancy Pelosi's appearance: "I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, 'You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn't work the first time, let it go.' " [10/31/06]
Limbaugh on the Middle East: "Fine, just blow the place up." [11/27/06]
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly (on his radio show): "Do I care if the Sunnis and Shiites kill each other in Iraq? No. I don't care. Let's get our people out of there. Let them kill each other. Maybe they'll all kill each other, and then we can have a decent country in Iraq." [12/5/06]
New York Post columnist Ralph Peters on Iraq Study Group co-chairman James Baker: "The difference is that [Pontius] Pilate just wanted to wash his hands of an annoyance, while Baker would wash his hands in the blood of our troops." [12/7/06]
Conservative syndicated radio host Michael Medved on the animated movie Happy Feet: The film contains "a whole subtext, as there so often is, about homosexuality." [12/11/06]
Fox captions
Additionally, although these are not examples of specific conservative commentators making outrageous comments, we would be remiss if we did not mention that Fox News made a regular practice of attacking Democrats or repeating Republican talking points in on-screen text during its coverage of political issues.
Some examples:
"All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?" [2/23/06]
"Attacking Capitalism: Have Dems Declared War on America?" [2/18/06]
"Dems Helping the Enemy?" [5/22/06]
"A Lamont Win, Bad News for Democracy in Mideast?"
"Have the Democrats Forgotten the Lessons of 9/11?"
"Is the Democratic Party Soft on Terror?" [8/8/06]
"The #1 President on Mideast Matters: George W Bush?" [8/14/06]
"Is the Liberal Media Helping to Fuel Terror?" [8/16/06]
—M.M.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Saddam hanged in American lynch-mob prison by a US controlled Iraqi kangaroo court. Saddam's partner in war crimes, Don Rumsfeld, gets 19-gun salute.
Masters of creating Disasters: Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld at Rumsfeld's 19-gun farewell ceremony at the Pentagon mere days ago. (The official salute to heads of state is just two guns more, for 21.)
In earlier times, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush Sr. were partners with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. As recently as the late 1990s, Dick Cheney was dealing with Saddam, skirting the US-enforced UN economic sanctions on Iraq as Cheney's Halliburton corporation used European subsidiaries to supply Saddam's regime with modern oil-drilling technology. That Al Gore (and joe lieberman and the whore press/media) DID NOT make an issue of Dick Cheney's Halliburton DEALINGS WITH SADDAM in 1998 as Chairman and CEO of HALLIBURTON company; or Rumsfeld's infamous shaking-hands with Saddam video from 1983, is one of the great political blunders of the past century.... and that is saying a lot.
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(update 12-31-06: cellphone video posted showing moments of Saddam's execution, and Riverbend's translations of Saddam's last words that contradict CNN sloppy editorializing, at bottom of this post.)
(click on our headline link above for the BBC video of the moments leading up to the execution.)
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The Saddam Hussein trial and execution were a gross travesty of justice this last week of 2006, if only because if Saddam was on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, he should have been taken to the Hague and given a proper, internationally supervised trial. Instead the US government of George W. Bush opted for pushing a speedy mock trial for Saddam, and an even more speedy execution.
Although the Bush administration (i.e. the United States government) pretends that the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi affair, by the "SOVEREIGN NATION of Iraq," only the American whore/press media are stupid enough to believe that Saddam's hanging that took place in an AMERICAN RUN PRISON in Iraq was the doing of a "SOVEREIGN" Iraqi government.
In other words, America's great "Decider In Chief" HAS SCREWED UP YET ANOTHER major propaganda issue, for the next 100 years Sunni hate-America terrorists (al Qaida, who ironically hated Saddam almost as much as they hated America) will be able to point out to the CHARADE of a "sovereign government of Iraq" being forced to hang Saddam in an American prison as the Bush administration and Maliki puppet government rushed to have Saddam hanged.
Nine of ten of "Saddam hanged" news stories in the US don't even mention that Saddam's last words were a muttered rebuttal to the words of a hangman, who shouted "Long live Muqtada al Sadr!" at Saddam moments before the trapdoor sprung for Saddam's fatal fall. Muqtada al Sadr is the SHIITE "radical" anti-American cleric whose forces have been having running gun battles with US soldiers in Iraq since the earliest days of the occupation. Al Sadr's Shiite cleric father was killed by Saddam in one of the dictator's many reprisal/mass murder episodes - a piece of history (the execution of an al Sadr cleric) that many Americans are clamoring for today, especially the "expert commentators" hired by Rupert Murdoch at FOX 'news.'
Indeed, a NEW YORK TIMES report LIES about the circumstances of Saddam's execution, reporter Marc Santora saying about the hanging that "the details were unknown and SHROUDED IN MYSTERY," even though this website was able to view video of the execution, and dozens of much better reports, within a 20 minute web search.
SUCH is the state of "reporting" at the whore New York Times. (Video link to Santora's report at bottom of this post.)
(The BBC video has a far better report than the Times' typically propagandistic non-informative, few details report.)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_6210000/newsid_6218700/nb_rm_6218731.stm
Regardless, the fact remains that under Saddam's SECULAR Baathist regime, WOMEN were among the most empowered in the Arab and Muslim world - while across the border in America's "friendly" allies Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, women are not even permitted to drive autos. They (women) are ONE HALF of the population, so it will be a long, long time before that segment of the population (women) in Iraq (or Afghanistan) will see as much "freedom" as they once enjoyed under Saddam's regime. Stalin, too, as well as Turkey's regime under Attaturk, executed many radically conservative (reactionary) mullahs for whom keeping women as chattel property was an inherent element of their "religious" society.
Regardless of the 'freedom' or lack thereof for women in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Arab world, the Muslim world, in Central Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, the fact remains that the US administrations of George H. W. Bush (Sr.) and Ronald Reagan were STAUNCH SUPPORTERS of Saddam's regime, all the way until Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in early 1991. (Saddam justified his invasion by accusing the Kuwaiti emir of reneging on war repayment billions owed to Iraq, and for Kuwaiti "SLANT DRILLING" into Iraq. (Which Kuwait is almost certainly doing at the present, slant-drilling technology being 20 years more advanced than it was in 1991.)
The Reagan/Bush administrations were SUCH staunch supporters of Iraq, that they glossed over the Iraqi Mirage Exocet missile attack on the USS Starke in the 9180s, and the US government continued to fund and equip Saddam with __ WMD PRECURSOR TECHNOLOGIES__ during the entire Iran-Iraq war time frame. It was during this period of US FINANCIAL and WEAPONS SUPPORT FOR SADDAM's REGIME that President Reagan SENT DON RUMSFELD as PERSONAL EMISSARY to Saddam, to say in effect to Saddam: "Continue to use poison gas and aerial bombings of Iranian positions as you need - WE (America) will look askance and continue to support your efforts in the war despite world-wide outrage at your use of poison gas on Kurdish towns and villages and Iranian positions."
This American Machiavellian double-dealing and support for mass-murder continued into the early 1990s when George H. W. Bush was president, even after Saddam's forces had been defeated militarily by the US coalition in the Kuwait war. According to the US imposed cease fire treaty, Saddam's forces were prohibited from using aircraft and attack helicopters after the war. But despite President Bush encouraging Shiite, Kurdish, and other minorities to rebel against the Saddam regime, the Bush/Chenny/Rumsfeld Department of Defence DID NOTHING as Saddam unleashed his savage reprisals on those Kurdish and Shiite rebels following the rebellion immediately after the US-Iraq ceasefire. Indeed, the US command was well aware of the reprisals, which killed up to 300,000 Shiites alone, as some of the mass-executions took place in full view of US infantry positions, some of which US positions were still within the Iraq border at that point. See Galbraith's "The End of Iraq" for a first-person witness report of the carnage carried out with the APPROVAL of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney Department of Defense in 1991 as Saddam killed thousands during the rebellion encouraged by President George H. W. Bush (Sr.)
One man hanged for his war crimes... another given a full pomp-and-circumstance 19-gun celebrity send-off from the US military Department of Defense despite launching a brutal war on false pretenses, with NO plan for a safe and secure post-invasion occupation; and representing two decades of US double-dealing with the very dictator hanged for his crimes. Such is "justice" in god's brutal world.
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NYT reporter Marc Santora LIES about the details of Saddam's executions, saying they were "unknown" and "shrouded in mystery" although the entire world is able to view the video:
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a28ed9693:10fd45c42da:-36ff&st=1167504611471&mp=FLV&cpf=false&fvn=9&fr=123006_112601_20ca33a9x10fd42175c1xw29ce&rdm=528946.8772378503
In a similar vein, New York's old grey whore, the New York Times, published photos of Saddam's hanging on the front page, above the fold, to mark their joy for the lynching of America's old war partner. Not even New York TABLOIDS the Post or Sun (nor any other national paper) followed the Times' whorific lead.
Saddam's execution, no audio:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=670967824425254759&q=saddam+hanged&hl=en
BBC's posting of the above Iraqi feed video, with some BBC commenary.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_6210000/newsid_6218700/nb_rm_6218731.stm
BBC's relatively informative article (5 times as informative as the Whore NY Times article):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6218875.stm
The Nation (US magazine) editorial "A Show Trial and Show Execution"
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15
purported cell-phone video of Saddam's hanging in US prison, posted on the web:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5543085919122001921&q=saddam+hanging&hl=en
Baghdad Burning's translation from Arabic of Saddam's last moments:
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_riverbendblog_archive.html
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
The Republican Right-Wing THREE BILLION DOLLAR propaganda machine, by the loony foreign cult-leader in the nation's capitol....
During the late 1990s, NEW YORK TIMES columnist WILLIAM SAFIRE tried to turn the Democrats receiving a few thousand dollars from an American-China company into a MAJOR SCANDAL - Safire wrote "THAT FOREIGNERS [China] TRYING TO INFLUENCE AMERICAN ELECTIONS IS BEYOND THE PALE."
- Never mind that at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal the Saudi King is reported to have visited the Reagan White House, and, literally, dumped millions of dollars in money bags on Reagan's desk to support the Iran-Contra wars. ("Anti-communist" was then the Holy Grail of those Republicans doing business with Mideast theocratic dictators whose version of "freedom" prohibited half the population - women - from even driving cars in public.)
- Never mind that the VATICAN and Roman Catholic Church contribute MILLIONS of dollars every year to defeat Democratic 'liberal' candidates and leaders. (The Catholic Church in 2004 was one of the nails in the coffin of the timid and tepid John Kerry campaign.)
- Never mind that the NEW YORK TIMES (and other American media tycoons) RECEIVE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS from Jewish owned businesses in return for supporting and ADVOCATING the Likud RIGHT-WING REACTIONARY Israeli policies here in America - a result of BILLIONS of American taxpayer dollars going to Israel, and coming back as KICKBACK, SLUSH FUND lobbyist funds and campaign donations.
- Never mind that RUPERT MURDOCH is an Australian media tycoon who destroyed English press unions before coming to America with his anti-worker Right-Wing jihad. (Ironically, Murdoch has made MILLIONS broadcasting China official state party propaganda, i.e. 'news', to China's one billion "workers proletariat" communist nation.)
- Never mind that KOREAN loony cult leader SUN YUNG MOON (self-proclaimed god on earth) has also funnelled BILLIONS into America's Right-Wing Rethuglican politics...
WILLIAM SAFIRE and the WHORE NEW YORK TIMES will make a few thousand dollars from an American-Chinese company to the Democrats into a MAJOR SCANDAL, while TURNING A BLIND EYE to the influence of far greater magnitudes from the above foreign Right-Wing media advocates.
(note: President Clinton PROHIBITED the importation of Chinese produced AK-47s into Long Beach Harbor early in his administration, but somehow the Right-Wing demagogues of "Clinton Sold America out to China!" rhetoric forget those facts. In Right-Wing lynch-mob rhetoric, importing China Communist machine-guns into America is far less of a sin than taking a $2,000 campaign donation from an American business with China ties.)
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The GOP's $3 Billion Propaganda Organ
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
December 27, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122706.html
The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, the Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.
George Archibald, who describes himself “as the first reporter hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group” and author of a commemorative book on the Times’ first two decades, has now joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who departed and warned the public about extremism within the newspaper..... [cont'd at the above link]
- Never mind that at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal the Saudi King is reported to have visited the Reagan White House, and, literally, dumped millions of dollars in money bags on Reagan's desk to support the Iran-Contra wars. ("Anti-communist" was then the Holy Grail of those Republicans doing business with Mideast theocratic dictators whose version of "freedom" prohibited half the population - women - from even driving cars in public.)
- Never mind that the VATICAN and Roman Catholic Church contribute MILLIONS of dollars every year to defeat Democratic 'liberal' candidates and leaders. (The Catholic Church in 2004 was one of the nails in the coffin of the timid and tepid John Kerry campaign.)
- Never mind that the NEW YORK TIMES (and other American media tycoons) RECEIVE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS from Jewish owned businesses in return for supporting and ADVOCATING the Likud RIGHT-WING REACTIONARY Israeli policies here in America - a result of BILLIONS of American taxpayer dollars going to Israel, and coming back as KICKBACK, SLUSH FUND lobbyist funds and campaign donations.
- Never mind that RUPERT MURDOCH is an Australian media tycoon who destroyed English press unions before coming to America with his anti-worker Right-Wing jihad. (Ironically, Murdoch has made MILLIONS broadcasting China official state party propaganda, i.e. 'news', to China's one billion "workers proletariat" communist nation.)
- Never mind that KOREAN loony cult leader SUN YUNG MOON (self-proclaimed god on earth) has also funnelled BILLIONS into America's Right-Wing Rethuglican politics...
WILLIAM SAFIRE and the WHORE NEW YORK TIMES will make a few thousand dollars from an American-Chinese company to the Democrats into a MAJOR SCANDAL, while TURNING A BLIND EYE to the influence of far greater magnitudes from the above foreign Right-Wing media advocates.
(note: President Clinton PROHIBITED the importation of Chinese produced AK-47s into Long Beach Harbor early in his administration, but somehow the Right-Wing demagogues of "Clinton Sold America out to China!" rhetoric forget those facts. In Right-Wing lynch-mob rhetoric, importing China Communist machine-guns into America is far less of a sin than taking a $2,000 campaign donation from an American business with China ties.)
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The GOP's $3 Billion Propaganda Organ
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
December 27, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122706.html
The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, the Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.
George Archibald, who describes himself “as the first reporter hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group” and author of a commemorative book on the Times’ first two decades, has now joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who departed and warned the public about extremism within the newspaper..... [cont'd at the above link]
WEAK on National Security: Bush leaves USA with ZERO combat units not already in Afghanistan or Iraq...
A TERRIFIC short, little post by Mark Kleiman over at HuffingtonPost reveals the TRUE agenda of the Bush-Cheney-NeoCon-NeoConfederate Right-Wing in America: PUSH America into situations of international WEAKNESS (via illegal, corrupt wars, incompetent economic policies, possibly even PROVOKING terrorist attacks, as Mr. Bush INGNORED the Al Qaida threat in August of 2001 - and than as America becomes more ENDANGERED, call up a draft, and shfit over to a full-on war economy.
Politically, for now, the Right-Wing is opposed to RATIONING, a war-tax, and the draft, because it would politically counter their "FREE MARKET" private property rhetoric and loose even more support for their policies than they have already lost.
BUT if America WERE in a World War II type FULL-WAR ECONOMY, the Republican (and Democrat) Right-Wing COULD IMPOSE all the above: RATIONING, war-taxation, THE DRAFT, and POLICE STATE rule, even to prohibiting protests!
THIS IS THE HOLY GRAIL of the Radical Right-Wing, the IDEAL of those neo-Confederates who are unapologetic about SLAVERY and who look back fondly on the SEGREGATION era (where LYNCH MOBS were effectively STATE SANCTIONED extra-legal violence, reprisal, and intimidations), or of those neo-conservatives who DESIRE an apartheid national security state as exists in Israel and Israeli occupied Palestine today.
Republican Right-Wingers who support incarcerating TWO MILLION Americans in the "war on drugs" are not, of course, ideologically opposed to a wartime draft - they are just politically opposed to it, for now, because it would be unpopular and detract from their power.
But at one time, trying to dismantle Social Security was considered the "THIRD RAIL" of American politics, and for trying to destroy it, Mr. Bush has only lost a one-vote majority in the US Senate, and a slim 15 vote majority in the Congress. (And that due more to his appalling war leadership than his attacks on Social Security.)
Republicans WOULD LOVE to DRAFT millions of Americans, an involuntary draft being as close as SLAVERY as they can get.
While all the above editorializing might be considered PARANOID BABBLING, one fact is indisputable: The US military has ZERO combat infantry reserves not already committed to combat.
THAT IS NOT "STRONG" ON NATIONAL SECURITY!
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Weak on national security
by Mark Kleiman
26 December 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/weak-on-national-security_b_37198.html
The United States currently has no combat-ready units not already deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Aren't you glad we have a President who's devoted to protecting the national security? Imagine how much worse things would be if we had elected a Democrat instead.
Oh, wait. How much lower could we go than zero available units?
Somehow, I doubt the "security moms" are going to be pleased to hear this
Politically, for now, the Right-Wing is opposed to RATIONING, a war-tax, and the draft, because it would politically counter their "FREE MARKET" private property rhetoric and loose even more support for their policies than they have already lost.
BUT if America WERE in a World War II type FULL-WAR ECONOMY, the Republican (and Democrat) Right-Wing COULD IMPOSE all the above: RATIONING, war-taxation, THE DRAFT, and POLICE STATE rule, even to prohibiting protests!
THIS IS THE HOLY GRAIL of the Radical Right-Wing, the IDEAL of those neo-Confederates who are unapologetic about SLAVERY and who look back fondly on the SEGREGATION era (where LYNCH MOBS were effectively STATE SANCTIONED extra-legal violence, reprisal, and intimidations), or of those neo-conservatives who DESIRE an apartheid national security state as exists in Israel and Israeli occupied Palestine today.
Republican Right-Wingers who support incarcerating TWO MILLION Americans in the "war on drugs" are not, of course, ideologically opposed to a wartime draft - they are just politically opposed to it, for now, because it would be unpopular and detract from their power.
But at one time, trying to dismantle Social Security was considered the "THIRD RAIL" of American politics, and for trying to destroy it, Mr. Bush has only lost a one-vote majority in the US Senate, and a slim 15 vote majority in the Congress. (And that due more to his appalling war leadership than his attacks on Social Security.)
Republicans WOULD LOVE to DRAFT millions of Americans, an involuntary draft being as close as SLAVERY as they can get.
While all the above editorializing might be considered PARANOID BABBLING, one fact is indisputable: The US military has ZERO combat infantry reserves not already committed to combat.
THAT IS NOT "STRONG" ON NATIONAL SECURITY!
-----------------------------------------------
Weak on national security
by Mark Kleiman
26 December 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/weak-on-national-security_b_37198.html
The United States currently has no combat-ready units not already deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Aren't you glad we have a President who's devoted to protecting the national security? Imagine how much worse things would be if we had elected a Democrat instead.
Oh, wait. How much lower could we go than zero available units?
Somehow, I doubt the "security moms" are going to be pleased to hear this
Monday, December 25, 2006
A Christmas wish 2006- Dear Santa: Please take away Tom Friedman's lying, New York Times' poison pen....
Thomas Friedman has a message for "the grunts" fighting the long, bloody war of attrition in Iraq:
"Thanks, suckers, for fighting and dying on shoestring pay scales as the Republican war department SLASHES supplies to combat troops, outsources American jobs, Slashes health care and benefits for your families, and as the Republican Congress shifts the burden of paying off America's huge deficits from the wealthy to the middle-class and working-class; and that Republican Congress even slashed COMBAT PAY for those stuck in MANDATORY REPEAT second, third and fourth tours in the war that Don Rumsfeld got a 15-gun salute for leaving in a mess." "Your sacrifice, while UNAPPRECIATED in Republican big-donor and neo-con circles, continues to add to my millions in earnings in book and syndication sales for advocating OUTSOURCING ***MORE*** American jobs, as the war also continues to add millions to the profits of the SULZBERGER FAMILY and NEW YORK TIMES company, and continues to add to the billion-dollar wealth of my wife's family."
========================================
OK, we apologize at the start of this post for taking on the racist stereotypes of "the Jewish Controlled Media" on Christmas Day, much less linking our rather dour post to such a good, lighthearted, understated op-ed by Nina Burleigh over at HuffingtonPost.com
But MUST WE here at mwUSA be the ones to point out how completely the "Jewish controlled media" accusation IS TRULY falling into the STEREOTYPES of "THE JEWISH CONTROLLED MEDIA AND EVIL FINANCIERS CONSPIRACY!" as harangued by at least a century of anti-Jewish scapegoating of the past century (centuries)??
Those "anti-Jewish racists" who at one time of course included Henry Ford, along with Hitler, Goebbels, the Nazis, and countless others?
(Note: We use "anti-Jewish" instead of "anti-Semitic", because the term "anti-Semitic" as it is commonly used EXCLUDES, devalues, and thus DEHUMANIZES the non-Jewish Semitic races, including millions 0f Arabs, in the very same manner that Jewish writers complain that "anti-Semitic writers" try to dehumanize Jews. Indeed, according to genographic human migration studies, many modern Jewish families have ZERO Semitic genealogy in them!) But we digress.
What is important is that, as the Bush administration and Rethuglican Party spend BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars digging America DEEPER into the murderous, corruption, torture, blood, and ****-stained quagmire that is the Iraq war, the Robber Barons of Wall Street CHEER as Mr. Bush gives TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES and NO BID CONTRACTS to WAR PROFITEERS, while average Americans can no longer afford health insurance, much less higher education and other basic goals that were once considered an integral part of "the American dream."
And WHO are the HEAD CHEERLEADERS of this American NIGHTMARE?
Why, the NEO-CONS who designed, packaged, and sold Mr. Bush's dreams of war - the Wolfowitzs and Perles and Feiths and Kristols and Krauthammers and Safires and Sulzbergers and Kurtzs, and even the so-called "moderates" like Koppel and Cohen and Wolf Blitzer have been unabashed apologists for the invasion of Iraq and the LIES leading to it. (And none of them put up much of a fuss for reporting on the recounting of votes in the Florida 2000 disenfranchisement debacle.)
Which brings us to TOM FRIEDMAN, who once held the chair of the token liberal/progressive/moderate of the New York Times editorial columns. We have saved a clipping from the early 1990s of a Friedman op-ed, published in a syndicated paper, under a photo of a Liberian militia "soldier" walking down a devastated bombed-out street in that country, holding by the hair severed heads, one in each hand. The Friedman article explained that when you have NO government you have CHAOS, of which the Liberia ruled by gun battles and murderous warlords was a perfect example. In the early 1990s - the era when convicted Republican Watergate burglar and former CIA operative G. GORDON LIDDY actually broadcast on his Right-Wing radio talk-show "when shooting at jackbooted federal government agents, AIM AT THE HEAD to avoid hitting their body-armor" - Thomas Friedman actually felt compelled to write an editorial DEFENDING THE BASIC NEED for and goodness of AMERICAN GOVERNMENT!
How times have changed. Now Mr. Friedman is the very exemplar of a LAISSEZ FAIRE "government's sole function is as loan enforcer, tax collector, and military-industrial-complex warlord" Right-Wing Republican.
Far from OPPOSING COMMUNIST CHINA's draconian FORCED LABOR CAMPS, Mr. Friedman now believes that CHEAP LABOR, even FORCED LABOR with zero-to-no human rights, is the wave of the future. What in the old days was called SLAVE labor, whether in Hitler's death camps, Stalin's death camps, of in the slave states of America. (Which, during colonial times, did indeed include most colonies.)
We don't know if they realize it, but today the NEW YORK TIMES is fulfilling, in spades, the caricature stereotype of the "RUTHLESS JEWISH FINANCIERS and MEDIA OWNERS" who would "promulgate ANY LIE to justify HOARDING their wealth and profits at the expense of society."
It doesn't help that GOLDMAN SACHS just posted a THIRTEEN BILLION DOLLAR profit QUARTER, in a year when the vast majority of Americans have seen a GROSS DECLINE in their actual (adjusted) incomes. For example, in the early 1990s tradesmen earned typically $15-20/hour in many American cities. Fifteen years later, they are often lucky to earn $20/hour... WHILE GAS, INSURANCE, HEALTH CARE, education, and almost all other expenses HAVE MORE THAN DOUBLED in that 15 years. Wages up 33% (IF you are lucky), while expenses are DOUBLE or even TRIPLE what they were in the early 1990s!
(These statistics are even easier to compile, and more dire, for MINIMUM WAGE earners, who haven't seen an increase in wages in years due to the Rethuglican majority in Congress under Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and the Cheney-Bush White House.)
***THOMAS FRIEDMAN is the self-annointed LEADING APOLOGIST in all of America for advocating this GROSS DECLINE in America's standard of living***
although of course he has plenty of company in the ranks of the Right-Wing, corporate & robber-baron funded think-tanks, media, press, and universities.
The era most Right-Wing Americans look back on as the "glory years" of American power and prestige were during the two terms of President Eisenhower; the years after the Korean War ended when America still had a commanding edge in technology and strategic military (nuclear) power if not in raw numbers vs. the Warsaw Pact and Communist China. The USA was also then the undisputed lead of the "free world" and the global economy in those years. Yet the post-WWII 1950s also saw THE HIGHEST PERCENTAGE of the American workforce as UNION employees, over 30% of the American workforce were union members, and in that era the US government was also taking SOCIAL SECURITY, the GI bill, and OTHER ***LIBERAL SOCIAL WELFARE PROGRAMS*** to levels far higher than where they had been in the pre-WWII depression era.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN and THE NEW YORK TIMES are constantly and continually TRYING TO UNDERCUT that "liberal" agenda of a HALF CENTURY OF AMERICAN PROGRESS.
They constantly argue that AMERICA should follow the EXAMPLE OF COMMUNIST CHINA and other "third-world nations" in THE RACE to GUT worker's rights, SLASH environmental protections, DISCARD the social safety net, and indeed SHRINK ALL forms of corporate responsibility to the public welfare and common good.
In doing so, they are making HONEST men of those demagogues of the past century who shouted about the abusive, dehumanizing, merciless attributes attributed to "the scheming Jew."
Again, we apologize to Nina Burleigh & Huffpost for linking to their post, and for writing an "anti-semitic" post here on Christmas Day, and to all those Jewish writers and activists we admire for fighting for social justice and American progress. But, again, so many fighting the good fight are being DROWNED OUT by the Friedmans, Safires, and Sulzbergers of the NEW YORK TIMES, and by the Kristols, Krauthammers, Kurtzs, and Finemans of the FOX 'news' network and WASHINGTON POST group, etc.
Are we the ONLY ones noticing how much the New York Times, Goldman Sachs, the "don't count the votes" neo-cons and so many other influential, entrenched writers of "the chosen faith" seem to be FULFILLING the racist, pejorative STEREOTYPES laid out by Henry Ford and so many other demagogues and race-baiters of the past century?
----------------------------------------------
Henry Ford INVENTS a Jewish Conspiracy
http://www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=275
Sociopaths Have Taken Over the Op-Ed Pages
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/2006/11/29/the-sociopaths-that-have-taken-over-the-op-ed-pages/
[Including the Sulzberger-owned New York Times, with all apolgies to Mr. Krugman]
[note: When the NY Times hired Paul Krugman for the economist slot on the NYT editorial page, they thought they were getting someone with expertise in the "economic hit-man" model of extorting a third-world nation's wealth by bribing its wealthiest families with insider deals and sweetheart loans, because Mr. Krugman had written several academic papers on the bankruptcy and debt of those "debtor nations." Little did the NYT owners realize that Krugman would become reknown worldwide as an economist with a conscience and an encyclopedia of economic statistics of userous loan terms and predatory financing for the editors at the news desk to IGNORE every single damn day of the year.]
====================================
Dear Santa: It's Been Awhile
by Nina Burleigh
Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nina-burleigh/dear-santa-its-been-awh_b_36905.html
To: Santa Claus
North Pole
Dear Santa,
Forgive me for not writing to you in almost 40 years. I'd been mis-led to believe that we live in a reality-based world, and that you didn't exist. Shame on me! Please put some extra candy canes in the White House stockings to reward the occupants for helping me understand that the world of make-believe never had to end.
I know you've been watching, but I'll remind you that I've been a nice girl most years since you last heard from me. I show up on time, share malicious gossip, and have two cute little kids, who, as you know, do believe in you whole-heartedly.
I pretty much have everything I want right now, so I'm hard to shop for. I hope you won't mind this little existential wish list instead. If you can deliver even one of these gifts, I'll never forget to leave out cookies for you and the reindeer again.
I'll start with the easy ones first.
In L.A., please drop an Oscar down Clint Eastwood's chimney for his utterly amazing, transgressively anti-war film, Letters from Iwo Jima.
Could you please alight on the roof of the Washington office of the New York Times and hustle down the heat vent and onto Thomas L. Friedman's desk. Once there, please remove his passport and press pass and replace them with a lifetime entrance ticket to Disney World or someplace fun where he can do less harm. It's really awful, Santa, to see a pundit who claims expertise on the Middle East, slurring, as he did the other day, the entire Arab race with generalities only some overpaid, overachieving, parachuting hack would conceive. There are a lot of warring, tribal, conspiracy theorists on the Arab "street" - there are also sane, educated, decent people, Tom, who want peace and democracy. Santa, help Tom step outside the embassy parties and think tank seminars and listen to them for a change.
While you're over at the Times, Santa, drop in on the copy desk and remove the words "fight terror" from the headline copy-writers' lexicon. In fact, if you could do the same at CNN, Gannett, the AP and the rest of the mainstream media you visit, that would be great. Then we'll stop seeing headlines like this, explaining why the president wants more soldiers in Iraq: "A Long-Term Plan to Fight Terror." If headlines must contain the word "Terror" in relation to any of Mr. Bush's plans, please give them accuracy, i.e.: "A Long-Term Plan to CREATE Terror."
I'm guessing you generally bring lumps of coal to Congressional offices, at least before the anthrax scare, when a sooty fat man in a furry red suit could still get into the hallowed halls with a bulging pack on his back, but if you do feel like visiting Nancy Pelosi's office this year, could you drop off a teeny-tiny, nicely-wrapped Articles of Impeachment?
As you cross the United States, could you sweep up the X-boxes and Playstations from under all the trees and replace them with books? That would help our democracy a lot, and, I know it sounds selfish, but it also ensures a future living for me and mine.
When you and your reindeer get over to the Middle East, please give the radical mullahs and the al Qaeda boys what they really want, lifetime subscriptions to Playboy Magazine. Give their women drivers' licenses. No, give them cars too, and visas to the West.
I suppose IED's don't affect you and the reindeer, but do be extra-careful in Iraq, and Santa, if you don't get me anything else on this list, please try to deliver this: bring those miserable people, whose only crime was being born on a crust of earth atop a sea of oil, some peace.
Cookies and milk are on the counter.
Thank you and Merry Christmas!
Bush's BIGGEST, worst lies of 2006... by Eleanor Clift
For months if not years, Elanor Clift has been, if not the most outspoken, then at least one of the least egregiously obsequious (boot-licking) of the pundits on the DC/NY "major media" talk shows.
Here, she documents the servility of much of her industry, highlighting Bush's WORST LIES of 2006, the OBVIOUS stories the WHORE media REFUSES to publicize to even 1/100th the extent they blared ever accusation against the Clinton White House in the late 1990s.
Eleanor Clift: Bush's Worst Lies of 2006
A look back at some of the biggest falsehoods of 2006.
By Eleanor Clift
Dec. 22, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16326716/site/newsweek/
In the spirit of holding our political leaders accountable, this year-end review will tabulate the worst lies told by Bush and company, along with several stories that were underreported in the media. Much of what was generated got lost in the fog of war, but the long arm of history will retrieve these moments. As the president said in his news conference this week, if they’re still writing about No. 1—George Washington—there’s plenty of time before the historians can properly evaluate No. 43. Judging by the mess in Iraq, it could be 200 or 300 years—if ever—before Bush is vindicated.
Bush has shifted his rhetoric in deference to the grim and deteriorating reality on the ground in Iraq. Asked by a reporter on Oct. 25 if we are winning the war, Bush said, “Absolutely, we’re winning.” Offered the opportunity at his press conference to defend that statement, Bush has adopted a new formulation. He now says, “We’re not winning, but we’re not losing.” That sounds like the definition of a quagmire.
Exploitation of the war gained Republicans seats in ’02 and got Bush a second term in ’04, but it wasn’t enough in ’06. Karl Rove decided the best way for Republicans to retain control of the House and Senate was to embrace the war in Iraq and run against the Democrats as “Defeatocrats” and “Cut and Runners.” It might have worked, had not most Americans decided they did indeed want to cut and run. Not right away—the voters want an orderly exit—but they weren’t buying Bush’s big lie about the Democrats.
Bush campaigned this fall as though the Democrats were the real enemy, not the terrorists. “They [Democrats] think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we’re attacked again…If you don’t want your government listening in on terrorists, vote for the Democrats.” Now that the Democrats have won, watch Bush try to off-load blame for the failure in Iraq. If the Democrats won’t go along with whatever cockamamie scheme he comes up with, he can always accuse them of losing the war.
Days after giving Defense Secretary Rumsfeld a ringing endorsement, declaring he would be there until the end, Bush fired him. It was the most obvious lie of his presidency. And it tripped so easily off Bush’s tongue. There was none of the stammering that usually accompanies his public utterances. It was as big a lie as Rove’s assertion on National Public Radio that all the public polls pointing toward a rout for the GOP were wrong. “I have the math,” Rove proclaimed. A lot of people believed Rove, but the voters didn’t.
The administration had the media snookered much of the time. Stories that were underreported largely because they ran counter to administration spin include:
A study that shows the death toll among Iraqis has reached as high as 655,000. Extensively researched by teams of doctors commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., the study—and the controversy over its sampling methodology—was given scant attention by the media because it was so far out of line from the administration’s projection of perhaps 50,000 civilian deaths. That’s still a horrendous death toll of innocents in a country the size of Iraq. Now, 100 bodies routinely turn up every day in Baghdad’s morgues, the victims of sectarian violence, and the report, published in October in The Lancet medical journal, seems to be closer to the truth than anything the Bush administration has acknowledged.
Private contractors in Iraq. There are 100,000 government contractors in Iraq, a number that rivals the 140,000 U.S. soldiers in the country. It’s dangerous work; some 650 contractors have died there. They do a lot of the jobs the military used to do, everything from providing security and interrogating prisoners to cooking meals for the soldiers. They work for military contractors like KBR and DynCorp International, which are helping train the Iraqi police force. This is the largest contingent of civilians ever operating in a battlefield environment, and there’s been no congressional oversight or accountability. That should change with the Democrats taking over the investigative committees on Capitol Hill. The abuses may be just waiting to be uncovered.
America’s secret torture prisons, whose existence Bush acknowledged as part of his tough-guy campaigning this fall. Set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely, the legality, morality and practicality of these so-called “black sites” have come under scrutiny. After a brief flurry about the use of torture tactics like “water boarding,” where a prisoner is made to feel he’s drowning, the story of these CIA-operated overseas prisons faded. Yet they contributed to the central tragedy of the Bush administration, the collapse of America’s standing around the world.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16326716/site/newsweek/
Here, she documents the servility of much of her industry, highlighting Bush's WORST LIES of 2006, the OBVIOUS stories the WHORE media REFUSES to publicize to even 1/100th the extent they blared ever accusation against the Clinton White House in the late 1990s.
Eleanor Clift: Bush's Worst Lies of 2006
A look back at some of the biggest falsehoods of 2006.
By Eleanor Clift
Dec. 22, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16326716/site/newsweek/
In the spirit of holding our political leaders accountable, this year-end review will tabulate the worst lies told by Bush and company, along with several stories that were underreported in the media. Much of what was generated got lost in the fog of war, but the long arm of history will retrieve these moments. As the president said in his news conference this week, if they’re still writing about No. 1—George Washington—there’s plenty of time before the historians can properly evaluate No. 43. Judging by the mess in Iraq, it could be 200 or 300 years—if ever—before Bush is vindicated.
Bush has shifted his rhetoric in deference to the grim and deteriorating reality on the ground in Iraq. Asked by a reporter on Oct. 25 if we are winning the war, Bush said, “Absolutely, we’re winning.” Offered the opportunity at his press conference to defend that statement, Bush has adopted a new formulation. He now says, “We’re not winning, but we’re not losing.” That sounds like the definition of a quagmire.
Exploitation of the war gained Republicans seats in ’02 and got Bush a second term in ’04, but it wasn’t enough in ’06. Karl Rove decided the best way for Republicans to retain control of the House and Senate was to embrace the war in Iraq and run against the Democrats as “Defeatocrats” and “Cut and Runners.” It might have worked, had not most Americans decided they did indeed want to cut and run. Not right away—the voters want an orderly exit—but they weren’t buying Bush’s big lie about the Democrats.
Bush campaigned this fall as though the Democrats were the real enemy, not the terrorists. “They [Democrats] think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we’re attacked again…If you don’t want your government listening in on terrorists, vote for the Democrats.” Now that the Democrats have won, watch Bush try to off-load blame for the failure in Iraq. If the Democrats won’t go along with whatever cockamamie scheme he comes up with, he can always accuse them of losing the war.
Days after giving Defense Secretary Rumsfeld a ringing endorsement, declaring he would be there until the end, Bush fired him. It was the most obvious lie of his presidency. And it tripped so easily off Bush’s tongue. There was none of the stammering that usually accompanies his public utterances. It was as big a lie as Rove’s assertion on National Public Radio that all the public polls pointing toward a rout for the GOP were wrong. “I have the math,” Rove proclaimed. A lot of people believed Rove, but the voters didn’t.
The administration had the media snookered much of the time. Stories that were underreported largely because they ran counter to administration spin include:
A study that shows the death toll among Iraqis has reached as high as 655,000. Extensively researched by teams of doctors commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., the study—and the controversy over its sampling methodology—was given scant attention by the media because it was so far out of line from the administration’s projection of perhaps 50,000 civilian deaths. That’s still a horrendous death toll of innocents in a country the size of Iraq. Now, 100 bodies routinely turn up every day in Baghdad’s morgues, the victims of sectarian violence, and the report, published in October in The Lancet medical journal, seems to be closer to the truth than anything the Bush administration has acknowledged.
Private contractors in Iraq. There are 100,000 government contractors in Iraq, a number that rivals the 140,000 U.S. soldiers in the country. It’s dangerous work; some 650 contractors have died there. They do a lot of the jobs the military used to do, everything from providing security and interrogating prisoners to cooking meals for the soldiers. They work for military contractors like KBR and DynCorp International, which are helping train the Iraqi police force. This is the largest contingent of civilians ever operating in a battlefield environment, and there’s been no congressional oversight or accountability. That should change with the Democrats taking over the investigative committees on Capitol Hill. The abuses may be just waiting to be uncovered.
America’s secret torture prisons, whose existence Bush acknowledged as part of his tough-guy campaigning this fall. Set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely, the legality, morality and practicality of these so-called “black sites” have come under scrutiny. After a brief flurry about the use of torture tactics like “water boarding,” where a prisoner is made to feel he’s drowning, the story of these CIA-operated overseas prisons faded. Yet they contributed to the central tragedy of the Bush administration, the collapse of America’s standing around the world.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16326716/site/newsweek/
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Sloberball: Chris Mathews gushing over Bush is so obscene, he should be FINED by the FCC far in excess of Janet Jackson's momentary flash of a nipple
Kudos to Cenk Uygur at HuffPost for pointing to these Media-Matters catches of Chris Mathews failing to use kneepads gushing over the "heroic" qualities of the AWOL C-in-C.
Mathews obsequious fawning is all the more revolting because;
#1., he presumes to call his slober-fest "HARDBALL"; and
#2. he got his start as a cable media "star" (whore) amplifying the "sin" of Clinton's brief affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Matthews "felt sensitive" with Bush: "It's like Santa Claus, and he's always very generous and friendly"
http://mediamatters.org/items/200512200010
First O'Donnell, now Matthews: "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs"
http://mediamatters.org/items/200511290001
Matthews: Bush sometimes "glimmers" with "sunny nobility"
http://mediamatters.org/items/200510250003
Mathews obsequious fawning is all the more revolting because;
#1., he presumes to call his slober-fest "HARDBALL"; and
#2. he got his start as a cable media "star" (whore) amplifying the "sin" of Clinton's brief affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Matthews "felt sensitive" with Bush: "It's like Santa Claus, and he's always very generous and friendly"
http://mediamatters.org/items/200512200010
First O'Donnell, now Matthews: "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs"
http://mediamatters.org/items/200511290001
Matthews: Bush sometimes "glimmers" with "sunny nobility"
http://mediamatters.org/items/200510250003
Bravo! The Washington whore Post FINALLY does an article on modern SLAVERY in the nation's capitol - foreign workers held as indentured servants...
Well, twice a day even a broken clock tells the right time, and in a 'news' (propaganda) organization as big as the Washinton Whore Post, every so often even they will write a timely and informative article. But note how the Post editors put this important story... on page A-21, where only determined readers will find it.
And so it is with today's "The Slaves in our Midst" by WP reporter Colbert I. King. We will let King's report provide the details (click on our headline link or past the url from below, or visit the similar AOL story we highlight below), but the greater issue is that during the "Cold War" America needed and courted third-world friends and allies, meaning programs that BOOSTED THE STANDARD OF LIVING of those living in 'underdeveloped' regions of the world. Once the Soviet Union and "Iron Curtain" collapsed in the early 1990s, America's Right-Wing politics was suddenly DEPRIVED OF AN ENEMY TO HATE, and therefore deprived of an issue to rouse the troops (home-town political supporters) and focus their political identity on. And, just as importantly, Third-World "brown-skin" peoples, instead of being important ALLIES in the war on global terrorism, now become economic adversaries if not potential ENEMIES. Of course the Reagan-Bush administration continued the American tradition of supporting pro-business dictators in South- and Central America, and we Americans financed the genocidal killing of 200,000 highland Guatamalans not as "allies in the war against global communism" but as outright pro-communist enemies in the first place.
THE BOTTOM LINE is that we, the America nation, no longer believes in the Christian precepts of helping the poor and suffering, and instead we have reverted to a Right-Wing agenda of treating local peoples as potential enemies to be contained and controlled by our dictator "friends." Thus the American focus in Afghanistan is NOT one of modernizing that Nation's infrastructure, but instead of attempting to kill all insurgents. The Bush model of "crony contracts and profits for Ameican companies first, modernizing the occupied nation last" is of course also evident in Iraq, a land and culture that had modern agriculture and civilization at a time when the forefathers of many of America's modern business and political leaders were considered savages... by the Romans! (Hadrian's wall was built in 122 AD to keep northern "savages" in what is today England and Scotland out of Roman-occupied England.) Even undert the constraints of the US enforced UN economic sanctions on post-Gulf War1 Iraq, Iraqi craftsment, architects, and engineers were able to create world-class palaces and other modern constructions. Admittedly not the best use of Iraq's limited embargo era funds, but the current American occupation has been marked by giving huge, multi-million dollar contracts to AMERICAN contractors to build even basic schools - schools that never get built, because GRAFT and PROFITEERING are the FIRST PRIORITY of contractors in that nation under the Bush occupation. (Which has contributed significantly to the terrible security situation there.)
American men and women are being killed in Iraq because of the terribly led occupation, and foreign workers right in the nation's capitol are being treated as salves and endentured servants, by the GREED of American employers looking to get something (labor, servants, and "help") for nothing.
========================
BOSTON (Dec. 22) - A Saudi Arabian princess accused of breaking U.S. immigration laws by locking up her domestics' passports and forcing them to work for low pay was ordered to be deported, prosecutors said Thursday.
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/judge-orders-saudi-princess-deported/20061222031009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001
==========================
The Slaves in Our Midst
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, December 23, 2006; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/22/AR2006122201019_pf.html
Last Tuesday morning, one mile north of the White House, I sat in the upstairs dining room of a Dupont Circle cafe having a cup of tea with a slave. Well actually she's now a runaway slave who's living in the Washington area home of a good Samaritan.
But yes, she could have been considered a slave, if you define that as being bound to a specific area of land, forced to work without compensation, stripped of her passport and left at the absolute disposal of a master.
She is African. However, unlike her ancestors who arrived in America on slave ships, she came here voluntarily. She was, however, deceived about her working conditions, and she began her involuntary servitude once she entered her master's suburban Maryland household.
Our meeting took place in the presence of her lawyer, Elizabeth Keyes of CASA of Maryland Inc.'s Domestic Worker and Trafficked Persons Project. CASA and the Break The Chain Campaign of Washington, D.C., have represented dozens of immigrant domestic workers held in similar slavelike conditions.
The ground rules for the interview limited the amount of information that could be disclosed in today's column because a lawsuit against her alleged employer-master won't be filed in federal court until next month.
But details about the exploitation and degrading treatment of this young woman, and women from other impoverished nations, will appear in future columns devoted to the topic of 21st-century slavery in the nation's capital.
America prides itself on being among the nations that "have eliminated servitude as a state-sanctioned practice," to quote the State Department's June 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report, which documents such abuses in foreign countries. Truth is, traffickers are also at work in the nation's capital. What's worse, they couldn't get away with their abusive practices without the weak oversight of the U.S. government. Chief among the federal enablers: Condoleezza Rice's State Department.
The State Department gets fingered because so many of today's human traffickers and slavers are diplomats, flaunting U.S. and local laws, under the protective shield of the department's interpretation of diplomatic immunity.
Here's a case I can tell you about.
The lawsuit does not allege trafficking or slavery, but it aptly illustrates the claims of egregious labor exploitation by diplomats in Washington.
Lucia Mabel Gonzalez Paredes of Paraguay says she was hired in Argentina two years ago by Jose Luis Vila and his wife, Monica Nielsen, to perform housework and take care of their soon-to-be born baby. Vila, learning he was being posted to the Argentine Embassy in Washington, asked Gonzalez to move here with him and his wife to take care of the infant, because his wife wanted to pursue a legal education in the United States.
To obtain a State Department visa for Gonzalez, Vila and Gonzalez signed a contract specifying that she be paid $6.72 an hour to work a 40-hour week, with overtime pay for extra hours.
In fact, once here, Gonzalez was paid $500 a month for cooking, housecleaning, running errands, doing laundry and caring for the baby, including providing physical therapy. She says she actually worked an average of 77 hours a week performing all of those duties, receiving an average wage of $1.60 an hour. Oh yes, she was promised health insurance, but she ended up having to pay all of her medical bills.
These allegations are contained in a lawsuit that Gonzalez brought against Vila and Nielsen in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The defendants have not responded directly to the charges; instead they have claimed diplomatic immunity at the request, they say, of the government of Argentina. Fortunately for Gonzalez, a very good federal judge, Paul Friedman, is hearing the case.
Gonzalez's claims mirror those made by thousands of other women brought to Washington from impoverished countries. They say they are lured here under false guarantees, exploited with impunity -- sometimes sexually -- and then must endure their abusers dancing away under the defense of diplomatic immunity.
Condoleezza Rice can change all that.
The State Department routinely recommends immunity for diplomats in lawsuits brought by domestic servants, finding that contracts for services, including the hiring of domestic help, don't fall within the meaning of the "professional and commercial activity" exception to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
If Rice wants to show the world that the Bush administration's concerns about trafficking in people and labor and sexual exploitation apply equally in America -- and if she wants to ensure that women such as Lucia Gonzalez have legal redress for violations of their rights -- then the secretary of state has an opportunity.
Judge Friedman has asked for the State Department's views in the Gonzalez case. All that Rice has to do is interpret labor contracts for domestic servants as within the scope of the commercial activities exception. That will keep America from siding with the exploiters.
Even that, as future columns will show, would be only a first step. Much more is needed to end this scourge.
kingc@washpost.com
And so it is with today's "The Slaves in our Midst" by WP reporter Colbert I. King. We will let King's report provide the details (click on our headline link or past the url from below, or visit the similar AOL story we highlight below), but the greater issue is that during the "Cold War" America needed and courted third-world friends and allies, meaning programs that BOOSTED THE STANDARD OF LIVING of those living in 'underdeveloped' regions of the world. Once the Soviet Union and "Iron Curtain" collapsed in the early 1990s, America's Right-Wing politics was suddenly DEPRIVED OF AN ENEMY TO HATE, and therefore deprived of an issue to rouse the troops (home-town political supporters) and focus their political identity on. And, just as importantly, Third-World "brown-skin" peoples, instead of being important ALLIES in the war on global terrorism, now become economic adversaries if not potential ENEMIES. Of course the Reagan-Bush administration continued the American tradition of supporting pro-business dictators in South- and Central America, and we Americans financed the genocidal killing of 200,000 highland Guatamalans not as "allies in the war against global communism" but as outright pro-communist enemies in the first place.
THE BOTTOM LINE is that we, the America nation, no longer believes in the Christian precepts of helping the poor and suffering, and instead we have reverted to a Right-Wing agenda of treating local peoples as potential enemies to be contained and controlled by our dictator "friends." Thus the American focus in Afghanistan is NOT one of modernizing that Nation's infrastructure, but instead of attempting to kill all insurgents. The Bush model of "crony contracts and profits for Ameican companies first, modernizing the occupied nation last" is of course also evident in Iraq, a land and culture that had modern agriculture and civilization at a time when the forefathers of many of America's modern business and political leaders were considered savages... by the Romans! (Hadrian's wall was built in 122 AD to keep northern "savages" in what is today England and Scotland out of Roman-occupied England.) Even undert the constraints of the US enforced UN economic sanctions on post-Gulf War1 Iraq, Iraqi craftsment, architects, and engineers were able to create world-class palaces and other modern constructions. Admittedly not the best use of Iraq's limited embargo era funds, but the current American occupation has been marked by giving huge, multi-million dollar contracts to AMERICAN contractors to build even basic schools - schools that never get built, because GRAFT and PROFITEERING are the FIRST PRIORITY of contractors in that nation under the Bush occupation. (Which has contributed significantly to the terrible security situation there.)
American men and women are being killed in Iraq because of the terribly led occupation, and foreign workers right in the nation's capitol are being treated as salves and endentured servants, by the GREED of American employers looking to get something (labor, servants, and "help") for nothing.
========================
BOSTON (Dec. 22) - A Saudi Arabian princess accused of breaking U.S. immigration laws by locking up her domestics' passports and forcing them to work for low pay was ordered to be deported, prosecutors said Thursday.
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/judge-orders-saudi-princess-deported/20061222031009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001
==========================
The Slaves in Our Midst
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, December 23, 2006; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/22/AR2006122201019_pf.html
Last Tuesday morning, one mile north of the White House, I sat in the upstairs dining room of a Dupont Circle cafe having a cup of tea with a slave. Well actually she's now a runaway slave who's living in the Washington area home of a good Samaritan.
But yes, she could have been considered a slave, if you define that as being bound to a specific area of land, forced to work without compensation, stripped of her passport and left at the absolute disposal of a master.
She is African. However, unlike her ancestors who arrived in America on slave ships, she came here voluntarily. She was, however, deceived about her working conditions, and she began her involuntary servitude once she entered her master's suburban Maryland household.
Our meeting took place in the presence of her lawyer, Elizabeth Keyes of CASA of Maryland Inc.'s Domestic Worker and Trafficked Persons Project. CASA and the Break The Chain Campaign of Washington, D.C., have represented dozens of immigrant domestic workers held in similar slavelike conditions.
The ground rules for the interview limited the amount of information that could be disclosed in today's column because a lawsuit against her alleged employer-master won't be filed in federal court until next month.
But details about the exploitation and degrading treatment of this young woman, and women from other impoverished nations, will appear in future columns devoted to the topic of 21st-century slavery in the nation's capital.
America prides itself on being among the nations that "have eliminated servitude as a state-sanctioned practice," to quote the State Department's June 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report, which documents such abuses in foreign countries. Truth is, traffickers are also at work in the nation's capital. What's worse, they couldn't get away with their abusive practices without the weak oversight of the U.S. government. Chief among the federal enablers: Condoleezza Rice's State Department.
The State Department gets fingered because so many of today's human traffickers and slavers are diplomats, flaunting U.S. and local laws, under the protective shield of the department's interpretation of diplomatic immunity.
Here's a case I can tell you about.
The lawsuit does not allege trafficking or slavery, but it aptly illustrates the claims of egregious labor exploitation by diplomats in Washington.
Lucia Mabel Gonzalez Paredes of Paraguay says she was hired in Argentina two years ago by Jose Luis Vila and his wife, Monica Nielsen, to perform housework and take care of their soon-to-be born baby. Vila, learning he was being posted to the Argentine Embassy in Washington, asked Gonzalez to move here with him and his wife to take care of the infant, because his wife wanted to pursue a legal education in the United States.
To obtain a State Department visa for Gonzalez, Vila and Gonzalez signed a contract specifying that she be paid $6.72 an hour to work a 40-hour week, with overtime pay for extra hours.
In fact, once here, Gonzalez was paid $500 a month for cooking, housecleaning, running errands, doing laundry and caring for the baby, including providing physical therapy. She says she actually worked an average of 77 hours a week performing all of those duties, receiving an average wage of $1.60 an hour. Oh yes, she was promised health insurance, but she ended up having to pay all of her medical bills.
These allegations are contained in a lawsuit that Gonzalez brought against Vila and Nielsen in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The defendants have not responded directly to the charges; instead they have claimed diplomatic immunity at the request, they say, of the government of Argentina. Fortunately for Gonzalez, a very good federal judge, Paul Friedman, is hearing the case.
Gonzalez's claims mirror those made by thousands of other women brought to Washington from impoverished countries. They say they are lured here under false guarantees, exploited with impunity -- sometimes sexually -- and then must endure their abusers dancing away under the defense of diplomatic immunity.
Condoleezza Rice can change all that.
The State Department routinely recommends immunity for diplomats in lawsuits brought by domestic servants, finding that contracts for services, including the hiring of domestic help, don't fall within the meaning of the "professional and commercial activity" exception to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
If Rice wants to show the world that the Bush administration's concerns about trafficking in people and labor and sexual exploitation apply equally in America -- and if she wants to ensure that women such as Lucia Gonzalez have legal redress for violations of their rights -- then the secretary of state has an opportunity.
Judge Friedman has asked for the State Department's views in the Gonzalez case. All that Rice has to do is interpret labor contracts for domestic servants as within the scope of the commercial activities exception. That will keep America from siding with the exploiters.
Even that, as future columns will show, would be only a first step. Much more is needed to end this scourge.
kingc@washpost.com
Russert, media whore, effectively CENSORS important news by using another weekend to talk about "faith in America"...
Hat-tip to HuffingtonPost and Rachel Sklar for this text-book example of how the "mainstream media" (aka "corporate media") effectively CENSORS important news, and an HONEST discussion of important issues - by talking MUSH and FLUFF, in this case Tim Russert devoting an entire weekend's show to "FAITH IN AMERICA."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-sklar/russertwatch-wherein-th_b_37056.html
<< Back then [her first assignment as HuffingtonPost's Russert-watcher] I was still pretty new to my Russert-watching, I'll admit it, and I found the discussion [on Faith in America] pretty interesting and relevant. THE FIRST TIME. Even then, though, I noted _WHAT HAD BEEN GIVEN UP [news NOT discussed] in order to chat about what religion the Founding Fathers wanted Americans to be:
"[W]hile this topic is no doubt relevant, it is an evergreen one; a lot of stuff happened this week that was not addressed. Calls for Rumsfeld's dismissal? Check. Bush authorizing Cheney authorizing Libby to leak? Check. And isn't Brangelina having a baby? OUT OF WEDLOCK? I know Tim likes to stick to his pre-prepped talking points, but there was some news this week. Ah, well. Stuff happens."
Haven't we had a sort of eventful week [this Christmas week of 2006]? What happened, let's see...ah, yes: Bush finally admitted that America was not winning the war in Iraq (his kingdom for a Mission Accomplished banner). Despite a really, really big vote of non-confidence in November (House, Senate, Democrats — remember that?), plans are solidifying to send more troops to Iraq, and the U.S. is beefing up its presence in the Persian Gulf in a "show of strength" to Iran, because escalating international hostilities is AWESOME. Oh yeah, the White House also censored a New York Times editorial (talk about meeting the press! Oh, wait, that's totally NOT meeting the press. Never mind.) >>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-sklar/russertwatch-wherein-th_b_37056.html
<< Back then [her first assignment as HuffingtonPost's Russert-watcher] I was still pretty new to my Russert-watching, I'll admit it, and I found the discussion [on Faith in America] pretty interesting and relevant. THE FIRST TIME. Even then, though, I noted _WHAT HAD BEEN GIVEN UP [news NOT discussed] in order to chat about what religion the Founding Fathers wanted Americans to be:
"[W]hile this topic is no doubt relevant, it is an evergreen one; a lot of stuff happened this week that was not addressed. Calls for Rumsfeld's dismissal? Check. Bush authorizing Cheney authorizing Libby to leak? Check. And isn't Brangelina having a baby? OUT OF WEDLOCK? I know Tim likes to stick to his pre-prepped talking points, but there was some news this week. Ah, well. Stuff happens."
Haven't we had a sort of eventful week [this Christmas week of 2006]? What happened, let's see...ah, yes: Bush finally admitted that America was not winning the war in Iraq (his kingdom for a Mission Accomplished banner). Despite a really, really big vote of non-confidence in November (House, Senate, Democrats — remember that?), plans are solidifying to send more troops to Iraq, and the U.S. is beefing up its presence in the Persian Gulf in a "show of strength" to Iran, because escalating international hostilities is AWESOME. Oh yeah, the White House also censored a New York Times editorial (talk about meeting the press! Oh, wait, that's totally NOT meeting the press. Never mind.) >>
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Shiites ETHNIC CLEANSING Sunnis from Baghdad. SO THAT is what the Bush-war in Iraq is for..!
Of course the flip side of this coin is that, just as Bush-Wingo Americans would be (_are_) more than happy to witness the slow-burn genocide ("ethnic cleansing") of Sunnis from Baghdad, so in the future they wouldn't mind "ethnically cleansing" Shiites from the land of great oil fields, either. THAT would be quite a trick of course (neutron bombs anyone?), a "trick" that the US effectively accomplished politically if not physically by supporting the Saddam Hussein regime.
Don't forget: as recently as _1991_ the Bush (Sr.)/Rumsfeld/Cheney administration (both Rumsfeld and Cheney were Secretaries of War under Bush1) ALLOWED SADDAM TO CRUSH the Shiite/Kurd rebellion, without the US lifting a finger, much less preventing Saddam's military from using helicopter gunships to attack the rebels.
=========================
Shiites Remake Baghdad in Their Image
By Sabrina Tavernise
December 23, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/world/middleeast/23shiites.html
BAGHDAD, Dec. 22 — As the United States debates what to do in Iraq, this country’s Shiite majority has been moving toward its own solution: making the capital its own.
Large portions of Baghdad have become Shiite in recent months, as militias press their fight against Sunni militants deeper into the heart of the capital, displacing thousands of Sunni residents. At least 10 neighborhoods that a year ago were mixed Sunni and Shiite are now almost entirely Shiite, according to residents, American and Iraqi military commanders and local officials.
For the first years of the war, Sunni militants were dominant, forcing Shiites out of neighborhoods and systematically killing bakers, barbers and trash collectors, who were often Shiites. But starting in February, after the bombing of a shrine in the city of Samarra, Shiite militias began to strike back, pushing west from their strongholds and redrawing the sectarian map of the capital, home to a quarter of Iraq’s population.
The Shiite-dominated government publicly condemns violence against Sunnis and says it is trying to stop the militias that carry it out. But the attacks have continued unabated, and Sunnis have grown suspicious.
Plans for a new bridge that would bypass a violent Sunni area in the east, and a proposal for land handouts in towns around Baghdad that would bring Shiites into what are now Sunni strongholds underscored these concerns.
Sunni political control in Baghdad is all but nonexistent: Of the 51 members of the Baghdad Provincial Council, which runs the city’s services, just one is Sunni.
In many ways, the changes are a natural development. Shiites, a majority of Iraq’s population, were locked out of the ruling elite under Saddam Hussein and now have power that matches their numbers.
The danger, voiced by Sunni Arabs, is that an emboldened militant fringe will conduct broader killings without being stopped by the government, or, some fear, with its help. That could, in turn, draw Sunni countries into the fight and lead to a protracted regional war, precisely the outcome that Americans most fear.
“They say they’re against this, but on the ground they do nothing,” said Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, a Sunni. He moved his family to the better-protected Green Zone in October.
The debate reaches to the heart of the American enterprise here. While President Bush is considering more troops, some in the Shiite-dominated government say the Americans should stay out of the sectarian fight in Baghdad and let the battle run its course. Getting involved would simply prolong the fight, they say.
At an army base in northern Baghdad, an Iraqi general moved his hand across a map of the capital. The city is dividing fast, he said, writing, “Sunni” and “Shiite” in graceful Arabic script across each neighborhood.
“Now we face a new style of splitting the neighborhoods,” said the general, a Shiite. “The politicians are doing this.”
Neighborhoods in the east — most vulnerable to Shiite militias from Sadr City, the largest eastern district and one of its poorest — have lost much of their minority Sunni populations since February. Even the solidly middle-class neighborhoods of Zayuna and Ghadier, very mixed as little as six months ago, are starting to lose Sunnis.
In Baladiyad, a once-mixed area of eastern Baghdad, workers smoothed mortar onto brick. A Shiite mosque was taking shape.
On the same block, a half-finished Sunni mosque stood deserted, its facade hung with peeling posters of last year’s leaders. Less than a mile away, another mosque has never been used.
“They can’t come here now,” a Shiite worker said. “They are Sunni.”
Further south, in the neighborhood of Naariya, a Shiite refugee family sat in a darkened living room in a house they recently occupied.
The house belonged to a Sunni family, but they had fled after a spate of killings, and the local office of Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric, had arranged for Shiites to move in.
The new family’s scant belongings hung on the wall: a portrait of the father, now dead, and a broken revolver. Somebody else’s clock chimed. Mattresses and couches of the previous owners packed the room.
“They told us it’s safe here, it’s a Shiite neighborhood,” said Mustafa, one of the sons. “The Mahdi Army is protecting the area,” he said, referring to Mr. Sadr’s militia. Family members declined to give their name for safety reasons.
The family has no sympathy for the Sunnis. They fled Baquba, a relentlessly violent town north of Baghdad, after Sunni militants killed their father, a man in his 70’s; kidnapped a brother; and shot another brother dead.
Around 400 Shiite families have fled from Baquba to Naariya and a nearby neighborhood, Baghdad Jedidah, over the past few months, said Mustafa, citing local officials in Mr. Sadr’s office.
“We are a ship that sank under the ocean,” said his mother, Aziza, 46.
Besides, Mustafa said, Shiite militias pursue only Sunnis with suspicious affiliations. The Sunni militias, on the other hand, “are killing anyone who is Shiite,” Aziza said. (A relative in a separate conversation said one of Aziza’s sons had killed more than 10 Sunnis since coming to Baghdad this fall. The family denied any involvement in militias.)
Aziza added, “My husband was an ordinary man.”
But a divided Iraq can destroy ordinary people.
A Sunni man named Bassim, his Shiite wife and their three small children said Shiite militiamen forced them to leave their home in Huriya, west of the Tigris, one chilly afternoon this month. Bassim left two jobs as a butcher and a hospital cleaner because they were in very Shiite neighborhoods.
“My husband is a Sunni, but he has nothing to do with insurgents,” said his wife, Zahra Kareem Alwan, holding her sobbing daughter on her hip in a school in Adel, a Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad where families took temporary refuge. Boxes of water were stacked in a corner.
Last week, the family was moved to an empty house farther west. They did not know the owner.
Shiite leaders argue that the Iraqi Army would not allow massacres. They say Americans will be embedded with units as a safety check.
In Huriya, it was an Iraqi Army unit that helped Ms. Alwan and other families into trucks and brought them to Adel. An American colonel advising the Iraqi Army unit that controls the area said that Shiites occupied the houses within 48 hours. Americans counted about 180 families who had fled. The Iraqi general said it was 50.
Shiite political leaders were skeptical.
“These are lies,” said Hadi al-Amiri, head of the security committee in Parliament and of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite parties.
“It’s merely propaganda to create fears among Arabs,” he added, a reference to Sunni Arab countries.
The main problem, Mr. Amiri said, was Sunni insurgents and their suicide bombs.
“They want to go back to the old equation, when they were the officers and the Shia were just soldiers and slaves,” Mr. Amiri said, with an intensity that spoke of deep scars inflicted by the past government, referring to the loyalists to Saddam Hussein. “This will never happen again. They should believe in the new equation.”
Using the unlikely analogy of Mr. Hussein draining the marshes in southern Iraq to destroy the marsh Arabs, Mr. Amiri talked about ways that Baghdad could be encircled to choke off the supply lines of Sunni militants, for instance, by fortifying a network of rivers, a dam, and several highways.
“He divided it, drained the water, and within two to three years it was a desert,” he said. “I believe Baghdad will be like this.”
Militias are already doing their part to defend Shiites. In a Shiite mosque in northern Baghdad, refugees from the embattled northern village of Sabaa al-Bour, many of them women in black abayas, gathered in October asking for food and shelter.
Killings of Shiites in the town had enraged leaders in Baghdad. But weeks had dragged on, and one morning in October, a volunteer walked through the refugees telling them to go back home.
The Mahdi Army was there now, she said. The town was now safe for Shiites.
Shiites are also making inroads on local and federal levels. Baghdad’s municipal government is taking bids for designs of a bridge that would connect Greyat with Kadhimiya, two major Shiite areas in northern Baghdad on opposite sides of the Tigris River. Adhamiya, a Sunni area where the bridge is now and where it has been closed, would be bypassed altogether.
“The former regime refused to make the connection because it would strengthen the Shia,” said Naem al-Kaabi, a deputy mayor of Baghdad.
In another plan that appears intended to repopulate heavily Sunni-controlled areas with Shiites, the Ministry of Public Works has proposed giving land to victims of violence inflicted by Mr. Hussein and by insurgents since 2003. The plots would be in six towns outside Baghdad — Abu Ghraib, Taji, Salman Pak, Husseiniya, Mahmudiya and Latifiya, according to a local official familiar with the plan.
Sunni militants now control the towns and have conducted brutal campaigns to eliminate Shiites. Mr. Hussein gave favors to Sunni tribes there to protect against Shiites from the south. Few Sunnis claim compensation as victims of violence, since the application requires visits to police stations and hospitals, places no longer safe for Sunnis.
It was not clear how soon the plan would be carried out. A previous proposal, made by the Iraqi cabinet last year, would give some land in heavily Sunni west Baghdad to about 3,000 families, but names are still being registered.
In another indication of the current mood, a popular cellphone ring in eastern Baghdad, now largely Shiite, is a tune with the words: “If you can’t beat me, don’t fight me.”
The Sunni houses in Naariya did not empty easily. A college student with a Sunni name said he hid in his house, as Shiite militiamen went into homes on his block in late September and marched people away. A few days later, his uncle, a 35-year-old refrigerator repairman, was taken. The body was found in Ur, a Shiite stronghold in north Baghdad.
But unlike a bomb blast, where everybody remembers how someone died, the Sunnis’ losses seems to melt away. The Mahdi Army-controlled police station had no record of them.
Terrified, the men of the family scattered, settling on couches and in a garage of friends and family.
The student, Omar, is keeping a diary.
“One day I’ll be a teacher,” he said. “I should teach children what we passed through.”
Qais Mizher and Hosham Hussein contributed reporting.
Don't forget: as recently as _1991_ the Bush (Sr.)/Rumsfeld/Cheney administration (both Rumsfeld and Cheney were Secretaries of War under Bush1) ALLOWED SADDAM TO CRUSH the Shiite/Kurd rebellion, without the US lifting a finger, much less preventing Saddam's military from using helicopter gunships to attack the rebels.
=========================
Shiites Remake Baghdad in Their Image
By Sabrina Tavernise
December 23, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/world/middleeast/23shiites.html
BAGHDAD, Dec. 22 — As the United States debates what to do in Iraq, this country’s Shiite majority has been moving toward its own solution: making the capital its own.
Large portions of Baghdad have become Shiite in recent months, as militias press their fight against Sunni militants deeper into the heart of the capital, displacing thousands of Sunni residents. At least 10 neighborhoods that a year ago were mixed Sunni and Shiite are now almost entirely Shiite, according to residents, American and Iraqi military commanders and local officials.
For the first years of the war, Sunni militants were dominant, forcing Shiites out of neighborhoods and systematically killing bakers, barbers and trash collectors, who were often Shiites. But starting in February, after the bombing of a shrine in the city of Samarra, Shiite militias began to strike back, pushing west from their strongholds and redrawing the sectarian map of the capital, home to a quarter of Iraq’s population.
The Shiite-dominated government publicly condemns violence against Sunnis and says it is trying to stop the militias that carry it out. But the attacks have continued unabated, and Sunnis have grown suspicious.
Plans for a new bridge that would bypass a violent Sunni area in the east, and a proposal for land handouts in towns around Baghdad that would bring Shiites into what are now Sunni strongholds underscored these concerns.
Sunni political control in Baghdad is all but nonexistent: Of the 51 members of the Baghdad Provincial Council, which runs the city’s services, just one is Sunni.
In many ways, the changes are a natural development. Shiites, a majority of Iraq’s population, were locked out of the ruling elite under Saddam Hussein and now have power that matches their numbers.
The danger, voiced by Sunni Arabs, is that an emboldened militant fringe will conduct broader killings without being stopped by the government, or, some fear, with its help. That could, in turn, draw Sunni countries into the fight and lead to a protracted regional war, precisely the outcome that Americans most fear.
“They say they’re against this, but on the ground they do nothing,” said Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, a Sunni. He moved his family to the better-protected Green Zone in October.
The debate reaches to the heart of the American enterprise here. While President Bush is considering more troops, some in the Shiite-dominated government say the Americans should stay out of the sectarian fight in Baghdad and let the battle run its course. Getting involved would simply prolong the fight, they say.
At an army base in northern Baghdad, an Iraqi general moved his hand across a map of the capital. The city is dividing fast, he said, writing, “Sunni” and “Shiite” in graceful Arabic script across each neighborhood.
“Now we face a new style of splitting the neighborhoods,” said the general, a Shiite. “The politicians are doing this.”
Neighborhoods in the east — most vulnerable to Shiite militias from Sadr City, the largest eastern district and one of its poorest — have lost much of their minority Sunni populations since February. Even the solidly middle-class neighborhoods of Zayuna and Ghadier, very mixed as little as six months ago, are starting to lose Sunnis.
In Baladiyad, a once-mixed area of eastern Baghdad, workers smoothed mortar onto brick. A Shiite mosque was taking shape.
On the same block, a half-finished Sunni mosque stood deserted, its facade hung with peeling posters of last year’s leaders. Less than a mile away, another mosque has never been used.
“They can’t come here now,” a Shiite worker said. “They are Sunni.”
Further south, in the neighborhood of Naariya, a Shiite refugee family sat in a darkened living room in a house they recently occupied.
The house belonged to a Sunni family, but they had fled after a spate of killings, and the local office of Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric, had arranged for Shiites to move in.
The new family’s scant belongings hung on the wall: a portrait of the father, now dead, and a broken revolver. Somebody else’s clock chimed. Mattresses and couches of the previous owners packed the room.
“They told us it’s safe here, it’s a Shiite neighborhood,” said Mustafa, one of the sons. “The Mahdi Army is protecting the area,” he said, referring to Mr. Sadr’s militia. Family members declined to give their name for safety reasons.
The family has no sympathy for the Sunnis. They fled Baquba, a relentlessly violent town north of Baghdad, after Sunni militants killed their father, a man in his 70’s; kidnapped a brother; and shot another brother dead.
Around 400 Shiite families have fled from Baquba to Naariya and a nearby neighborhood, Baghdad Jedidah, over the past few months, said Mustafa, citing local officials in Mr. Sadr’s office.
“We are a ship that sank under the ocean,” said his mother, Aziza, 46.
Besides, Mustafa said, Shiite militias pursue only Sunnis with suspicious affiliations. The Sunni militias, on the other hand, “are killing anyone who is Shiite,” Aziza said. (A relative in a separate conversation said one of Aziza’s sons had killed more than 10 Sunnis since coming to Baghdad this fall. The family denied any involvement in militias.)
Aziza added, “My husband was an ordinary man.”
But a divided Iraq can destroy ordinary people.
A Sunni man named Bassim, his Shiite wife and their three small children said Shiite militiamen forced them to leave their home in Huriya, west of the Tigris, one chilly afternoon this month. Bassim left two jobs as a butcher and a hospital cleaner because they were in very Shiite neighborhoods.
“My husband is a Sunni, but he has nothing to do with insurgents,” said his wife, Zahra Kareem Alwan, holding her sobbing daughter on her hip in a school in Adel, a Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad where families took temporary refuge. Boxes of water were stacked in a corner.
Last week, the family was moved to an empty house farther west. They did not know the owner.
Shiite leaders argue that the Iraqi Army would not allow massacres. They say Americans will be embedded with units as a safety check.
In Huriya, it was an Iraqi Army unit that helped Ms. Alwan and other families into trucks and brought them to Adel. An American colonel advising the Iraqi Army unit that controls the area said that Shiites occupied the houses within 48 hours. Americans counted about 180 families who had fled. The Iraqi general said it was 50.
Shiite political leaders were skeptical.
“These are lies,” said Hadi al-Amiri, head of the security committee in Parliament and of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite parties.
“It’s merely propaganda to create fears among Arabs,” he added, a reference to Sunni Arab countries.
The main problem, Mr. Amiri said, was Sunni insurgents and their suicide bombs.
“They want to go back to the old equation, when they were the officers and the Shia were just soldiers and slaves,” Mr. Amiri said, with an intensity that spoke of deep scars inflicted by the past government, referring to the loyalists to Saddam Hussein. “This will never happen again. They should believe in the new equation.”
Using the unlikely analogy of Mr. Hussein draining the marshes in southern Iraq to destroy the marsh Arabs, Mr. Amiri talked about ways that Baghdad could be encircled to choke off the supply lines of Sunni militants, for instance, by fortifying a network of rivers, a dam, and several highways.
“He divided it, drained the water, and within two to three years it was a desert,” he said. “I believe Baghdad will be like this.”
Militias are already doing their part to defend Shiites. In a Shiite mosque in northern Baghdad, refugees from the embattled northern village of Sabaa al-Bour, many of them women in black abayas, gathered in October asking for food and shelter.
Killings of Shiites in the town had enraged leaders in Baghdad. But weeks had dragged on, and one morning in October, a volunteer walked through the refugees telling them to go back home.
The Mahdi Army was there now, she said. The town was now safe for Shiites.
Shiites are also making inroads on local and federal levels. Baghdad’s municipal government is taking bids for designs of a bridge that would connect Greyat with Kadhimiya, two major Shiite areas in northern Baghdad on opposite sides of the Tigris River. Adhamiya, a Sunni area where the bridge is now and where it has been closed, would be bypassed altogether.
“The former regime refused to make the connection because it would strengthen the Shia,” said Naem al-Kaabi, a deputy mayor of Baghdad.
In another plan that appears intended to repopulate heavily Sunni-controlled areas with Shiites, the Ministry of Public Works has proposed giving land to victims of violence inflicted by Mr. Hussein and by insurgents since 2003. The plots would be in six towns outside Baghdad — Abu Ghraib, Taji, Salman Pak, Husseiniya, Mahmudiya and Latifiya, according to a local official familiar with the plan.
Sunni militants now control the towns and have conducted brutal campaigns to eliminate Shiites. Mr. Hussein gave favors to Sunni tribes there to protect against Shiites from the south. Few Sunnis claim compensation as victims of violence, since the application requires visits to police stations and hospitals, places no longer safe for Sunnis.
It was not clear how soon the plan would be carried out. A previous proposal, made by the Iraqi cabinet last year, would give some land in heavily Sunni west Baghdad to about 3,000 families, but names are still being registered.
In another indication of the current mood, a popular cellphone ring in eastern Baghdad, now largely Shiite, is a tune with the words: “If you can’t beat me, don’t fight me.”
The Sunni houses in Naariya did not empty easily. A college student with a Sunni name said he hid in his house, as Shiite militiamen went into homes on his block in late September and marched people away. A few days later, his uncle, a 35-year-old refrigerator repairman, was taken. The body was found in Ur, a Shiite stronghold in north Baghdad.
But unlike a bomb blast, where everybody remembers how someone died, the Sunnis’ losses seems to melt away. The Mahdi Army-controlled police station had no record of them.
Terrified, the men of the family scattered, settling on couches and in a garage of friends and family.
The student, Omar, is keeping a diary.
“One day I’ll be a teacher,” he said. “I should teach children what we passed through.”
Qais Mizher and Hosham Hussein contributed reporting.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Bush LIES badly YET AGAIN, the WHORE media PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE....
Put on the Spot, Our Punk President Lies Yet Again
Walter C. Uhler
12.21.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/walter-c-uhler/put-on-the-spot-our-punk_b_36920.html
Whenever I hear President Bush tell another lie (or read that he has told another lie) I'm reminded of the Liar-in-Chief's former professor at the Harvard Business School, Yoshi Tsurumi, and his spot-on recollection of this president's punk past. According to Professor Tsurumi, Bush "showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases.
He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." [Mary Jacoby, "The Dunce," Salon.com, 16 September 2004]
Tsurumi concluded: "Behind his smile and his smirk...he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy." "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion." [Ibid] In conservative Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where I grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, such people were called "punks."
Perhaps, it's fair to say that the world would be a much better and safer place if America's mainstream news media had challenged Bush as much as Professor Tsurumi and his classmates did. Alas, it let the punk candidate slide during his first run for president, notwithstanding such smug and asinine assertions as: "I may not know where Kosovo is, but I know what I believe." Thus, alas, many Americans voted for an admitted alcoholic (and, allegedly, a former drug using) twit, who would come to believe that God spoke directly to him and wanted him to be president.
The mainstream news media also failed to challenge seriously the Bush administration's campaign of lies, which it employed to frighten witless Americans into supporting an unprovoked - and, thus, illegal, immoral -- invasion of Iraq. Specifically, the news media paid insufficient attention to an outrageous assertion by Bush that proved he was either a bald-faced liar or an extremely reckless ignoramus.
On September 7, 2002, President Bush asserted: "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
Yet, not only was there no such report, but the report actually written by the IAEA in 1998 reached precisely the opposite conclusion: "Based on all credible information available to date...the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." [MSNBC.com, 7 Sept. 2002]
And although a White House official subsequently admitted that the IAEA report did not say what Bush claimed, the spokesman's own dissembling shed further light on the dishonesty driving Bush's push for war: "What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report."[Ibid] Why this entire episode failed to send red flags of suspicion flying across our entire news media remains an open question.
Yet, worse was to come. On October 2, 2002, Bush lied when he told Congressional leaders: "None of us here today desire to see a military conflict." How do we know he lied? Because in March 2003, in the moments "before he gave his national address announcing that the war had just begun, a camera caught Bush pumping his fist as though instead of initiating a war he had kicked a winning field goal or hit a home run. 'Feels good,' he said." [Paul Waldman, Fraud, 2004, p.8] Once a punk, always a punk?
In December 2003, months after the Bush administration's reckless assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction proved to be false, ABC's Diane Sawyer pressed Bush about justifying a war to the American public by stating "as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he [Saddam] could move to acquire those weapons." Put on the spot, Bush resorted to his punk college ways by responding: "So what's the difference?"
Two months later, Bush weaseled again. When put on the spot by Tim Russert, of Meet the Press, Bush justified his illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq by asserting: "Saddam Hussein was dangerous, and so I'm not going [sic] leave him in power and trust a madman...He had the ability to make weapons, at the very minimum." Such a snotty and infantile excuse for sending thousands to their deaths should have persuaded even the most brain-dead of Bush supporters that he had wasted his vote on a reckless punk.
In late 2005, Bush told another lie, when attempting to justify his unconstitutional order permitting the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining the required court-approved warrants. Bush defended his directive as a "vital tool" in the war against terrorism, evidently forgetting that, in April 2004, he assured an audience in Buffalo, New York: "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
Bush lied again on December 14, 2005, when discussing what intelligence was available to Congress, when it voted to support his decision to invade Iraq. Bush lied when he asserted: "Some of the most irresponsible comments - about manipulated intelligence - have come from politicians who saw the same intelligence I saw and then voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein."
In fact, the Congressional Research Service (CSR) released a report the very next day that exposed his lie: "The President and a small number of presidentially designated cabinet-level officials, including the vice president ...have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive information, including intelligence sources and methods." In all, the report identified "nine key U.S. intelligence 'products' not generally shared with Congress."
And Bush lied again, on the eve of the November 2006 mid-term elections, when he said that he wanted Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to stay on until the end of his presidency. In fact, Bush already had commenced work on replacing Rumsfeld and knew he was lying when he said Rumsfeld would stay on. Bush even admitted to this deliberate deception.
Two days ago, Bush lied again. In a December 19, 2006, interview with the Washington Post, America's Liar-in-Chief was once again put on the spot. According to the Post, when he was asked to reconcile his "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq assertion of October 25, 2006, with his new assertion, "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush "recast" his former assertion "as a prediction rather than an assessment."
Bush's Harvard classmates and Professor Tsurumi would have understood all too well: Once a punk, always a punk.
Indeed, if "once a punk, always a punk," then columnist Joseph L. Galloway is on to something when he asks: "Can nothing save this man from himself?" [See Galloway's splendid article, "Desperation in the White House." ] And, indeed, if nothing can save Bush from himself, the citizens of the United States have an obligation to remove him from office - impeach, convict, remove - before he does more damage to American and the world.
But only after first removing the thug, who has so perniciously enabled the punk.
Walter C. Uhler
12.21.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/walter-c-uhler/put-on-the-spot-our-punk_b_36920.html
Whenever I hear President Bush tell another lie (or read that he has told another lie) I'm reminded of the Liar-in-Chief's former professor at the Harvard Business School, Yoshi Tsurumi, and his spot-on recollection of this president's punk past. According to Professor Tsurumi, Bush "showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases.
He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." [Mary Jacoby, "The Dunce," Salon.com, 16 September 2004]
Tsurumi concluded: "Behind his smile and his smirk...he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy." "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion." [Ibid] In conservative Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where I grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, such people were called "punks."
Perhaps, it's fair to say that the world would be a much better and safer place if America's mainstream news media had challenged Bush as much as Professor Tsurumi and his classmates did. Alas, it let the punk candidate slide during his first run for president, notwithstanding such smug and asinine assertions as: "I may not know where Kosovo is, but I know what I believe." Thus, alas, many Americans voted for an admitted alcoholic (and, allegedly, a former drug using) twit, who would come to believe that God spoke directly to him and wanted him to be president.
The mainstream news media also failed to challenge seriously the Bush administration's campaign of lies, which it employed to frighten witless Americans into supporting an unprovoked - and, thus, illegal, immoral -- invasion of Iraq. Specifically, the news media paid insufficient attention to an outrageous assertion by Bush that proved he was either a bald-faced liar or an extremely reckless ignoramus.
On September 7, 2002, President Bush asserted: "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
Yet, not only was there no such report, but the report actually written by the IAEA in 1998 reached precisely the opposite conclusion: "Based on all credible information available to date...the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." [MSNBC.com, 7 Sept. 2002]
And although a White House official subsequently admitted that the IAEA report did not say what Bush claimed, the spokesman's own dissembling shed further light on the dishonesty driving Bush's push for war: "What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report."[Ibid] Why this entire episode failed to send red flags of suspicion flying across our entire news media remains an open question.
Yet, worse was to come. On October 2, 2002, Bush lied when he told Congressional leaders: "None of us here today desire to see a military conflict." How do we know he lied? Because in March 2003, in the moments "before he gave his national address announcing that the war had just begun, a camera caught Bush pumping his fist as though instead of initiating a war he had kicked a winning field goal or hit a home run. 'Feels good,' he said." [Paul Waldman, Fraud, 2004, p.8] Once a punk, always a punk?
In December 2003, months after the Bush administration's reckless assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction proved to be false, ABC's Diane Sawyer pressed Bush about justifying a war to the American public by stating "as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he [Saddam] could move to acquire those weapons." Put on the spot, Bush resorted to his punk college ways by responding: "So what's the difference?"
Two months later, Bush weaseled again. When put on the spot by Tim Russert, of Meet the Press, Bush justified his illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq by asserting: "Saddam Hussein was dangerous, and so I'm not going [sic] leave him in power and trust a madman...He had the ability to make weapons, at the very minimum." Such a snotty and infantile excuse for sending thousands to their deaths should have persuaded even the most brain-dead of Bush supporters that he had wasted his vote on a reckless punk.
In late 2005, Bush told another lie, when attempting to justify his unconstitutional order permitting the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining the required court-approved warrants. Bush defended his directive as a "vital tool" in the war against terrorism, evidently forgetting that, in April 2004, he assured an audience in Buffalo, New York: "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
Bush lied again on December 14, 2005, when discussing what intelligence was available to Congress, when it voted to support his decision to invade Iraq. Bush lied when he asserted: "Some of the most irresponsible comments - about manipulated intelligence - have come from politicians who saw the same intelligence I saw and then voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein."
In fact, the Congressional Research Service (CSR) released a report the very next day that exposed his lie: "The President and a small number of presidentially designated cabinet-level officials, including the vice president ...have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive information, including intelligence sources and methods." In all, the report identified "nine key U.S. intelligence 'products' not generally shared with Congress."
And Bush lied again, on the eve of the November 2006 mid-term elections, when he said that he wanted Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to stay on until the end of his presidency. In fact, Bush already had commenced work on replacing Rumsfeld and knew he was lying when he said Rumsfeld would stay on. Bush even admitted to this deliberate deception.
Two days ago, Bush lied again. In a December 19, 2006, interview with the Washington Post, America's Liar-in-Chief was once again put on the spot. According to the Post, when he was asked to reconcile his "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq assertion of October 25, 2006, with his new assertion, "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush "recast" his former assertion "as a prediction rather than an assessment."
Bush's Harvard classmates and Professor Tsurumi would have understood all too well: Once a punk, always a punk.
Indeed, if "once a punk, always a punk," then columnist Joseph L. Galloway is on to something when he asks: "Can nothing save this man from himself?" [See Galloway's splendid article, "Desperation in the White House." ] And, indeed, if nothing can save Bush from himself, the citizens of the United States have an obligation to remove him from office - impeach, convict, remove - before he does more damage to American and the world.
But only after first removing the thug, who has so perniciously enabled the punk.
James Zogby documents the amazing, racist bigotry of NY Times writer Thomas Freidman, and Sec. State Condoleeza Rice...
Friedman and Rice - Seeking Absolution through Arrogance and Bigotry
by James Zogby, of Zogby polls USA
12.21.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/friedman-and-rice-seeki_b_36886.html
An article by Tom Friedman and a quote from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice hit in one day this week reminding me how tolerant our national discourse has become of bigotry toward Arabs and Muslims and how condescending policy-makers and analysts have become in their dealings with the Middle East region.
Tom Friedman's Article [distilled comments]:
In the lead up to the Iraq War, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman was one of the invasion's strong advocates. Friedman has now figured out why the war has gone so badly and so in a rather remarkable piece appearing in the Times this week, he offers advice to President Bush.
Never known for humility or apologies, here's what Friedman has concluded: it's the Arabs' fault. I said the article was remarkable, and it was, not for its wisdom, but for its shameless self-serving bigotry.
Here's why.
The article "Mideast rules to live by" makes the following observations:
Arabs are dishonest (they say one thing in private, another in public);
Arabs are illogical (prone to conspiracies);
Arabs are weak-kneed, without principles ("moderates", in particular, are dissemblers, with no backbone);
Arabs are more violent and vengeful that "we" are;
Arabs are petty and tribal, and so on.
The Friedman lesson for the President appears to be, "It's not your fault, sir, it's them. You and I weren't wrong about the war; they weren't ready for the gift you were giving them." I have often been disturbed by Friedman's dismissive tone coupled with his weird obsession with all things Arab. With this piece my reaction went from disturbed to outraged.
As I read through Friedman's 14 rules for dealing with "Middle Easterners" (as he terms the objects of his condescension), I wondered, "what if an Arab had written a comparable piece about Jews?" The reaction would have been swift and justifiable condemnation.
European imperialists wrote this way about their subject natives. And whites at one time, wrote much the same was about blacks. But, this is the 21st century and here in the "enlightened" New York Times is bigotry and condescension on display - passing as enlightened analysis.
Which brings me to...
Secretary Rice's Quote
In a long interview with the Washington Post Rice notes "The old Middle East was not going to stay. Let's stop mourning the old Middle East. It was not so great and it was not going to survive anyway."
The condescension and arrogance at work here is stunning. In one sweeping stroke, Rice dismisses the tens of thousands who have died, the civil war in Iraq and the volatile mess left by our neglectful and misguided policies in Lebanon and Palestine as the mere passing of the "old Middle East", which wasn't "so good" anyway. There is, therefore, no need to beat our breasts with mea culpas, no reason to fret about the fairness and the devastating consequences of our misguided policy.
It is not our fault, it is theirs. And, in any case, things are better off now, because we said they were.
Thank you for the clarification and the history lesson, Madame Secretary. You and Tom have a lot to share.
by James Zogby, of Zogby polls USA
12.21.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/friedman-and-rice-seeki_b_36886.html
An article by Tom Friedman and a quote from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice hit in one day this week reminding me how tolerant our national discourse has become of bigotry toward Arabs and Muslims and how condescending policy-makers and analysts have become in their dealings with the Middle East region.
Tom Friedman's Article [distilled comments]:
In the lead up to the Iraq War, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman was one of the invasion's strong advocates. Friedman has now figured out why the war has gone so badly and so in a rather remarkable piece appearing in the Times this week, he offers advice to President Bush.
Never known for humility or apologies, here's what Friedman has concluded: it's the Arabs' fault. I said the article was remarkable, and it was, not for its wisdom, but for its shameless self-serving bigotry.
Here's why.
The article "Mideast rules to live by" makes the following observations:
Arabs are dishonest (they say one thing in private, another in public);
Arabs are illogical (prone to conspiracies);
Arabs are weak-kneed, without principles ("moderates", in particular, are dissemblers, with no backbone);
Arabs are more violent and vengeful that "we" are;
Arabs are petty and tribal, and so on.
The Friedman lesson for the President appears to be, "It's not your fault, sir, it's them. You and I weren't wrong about the war; they weren't ready for the gift you were giving them." I have often been disturbed by Friedman's dismissive tone coupled with his weird obsession with all things Arab. With this piece my reaction went from disturbed to outraged.
As I read through Friedman's 14 rules for dealing with "Middle Easterners" (as he terms the objects of his condescension), I wondered, "what if an Arab had written a comparable piece about Jews?" The reaction would have been swift and justifiable condemnation.
European imperialists wrote this way about their subject natives. And whites at one time, wrote much the same was about blacks. But, this is the 21st century and here in the "enlightened" New York Times is bigotry and condescension on display - passing as enlightened analysis.
Which brings me to...
Secretary Rice's Quote
In a long interview with the Washington Post Rice notes "The old Middle East was not going to stay. Let's stop mourning the old Middle East. It was not so great and it was not going to survive anyway."
The condescension and arrogance at work here is stunning. In one sweeping stroke, Rice dismisses the tens of thousands who have died, the civil war in Iraq and the volatile mess left by our neglectful and misguided policies in Lebanon and Palestine as the mere passing of the "old Middle East", which wasn't "so good" anyway. There is, therefore, no need to beat our breasts with mea culpas, no reason to fret about the fairness and the devastating consequences of our misguided policy.
It is not our fault, it is theirs. And, in any case, things are better off now, because we said they were.
Thank you for the clarification and the history lesson, Madame Secretary. You and Tom have a lot to share.
Friday, December 15, 2006
"12 Reasons for reinvading Iraq" satire asks THE OBVIOUS QUESTIONS the whore media is TOO DAMN COWARDLY to ask of Bush about his war....
Need we say more? Nothing illustrates the CRAVEN, SELL-OUT WHOREISHNESS of the American press-media and DC press corpse than those questions the whore media DOES_NOT_ASK of the self-styled "WAR PRESIDENT!" commander in chief.
The president who as a Texas Air National Guard pilot not only DODGED the Vietnam War, but REFUSED A DIRECT ORDER to take a flight physical exam; then, having failed to make good on his committments as an recipient of tens of thousands of dollars (in 1970s money) of flight training, refused to show up at a make-work ground assignment in the Alabama Air National Guard as ordered; now that same president uses an INVOLUNTARY DRAFT of Guard and Reserve troops to CALL THEM BACK TO DUTY long after they have departed the service(s).
Mr. Bush sees himself as a wealthy Southern plantation owner lording it over his slaves; an "owner" with absolute power of life and death over every one on the plantation.... and the COWARDLY US press-media can't even ask the OBVIOUS questions, such as "HOW CAN YOU DRAFT "ready reserve" troops back to INVOLUNTARY DUTY in a bloody war of attrition... WHILE GIVING TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES, giving DICK CHENEY a FREE PASS TO PROFIT FROM HALLIBURTON's NO-BID, NO OVERSIGHT (profiteering unlimited) CONTRACTS, and SO BOTCHING the reconstruction of Iraq that you FUEL THE INSURGENCY there??
===========================================
Twelve Conditions for Re-invading Iraq
by John Seery at Huffington Post
12.14.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seery/twelve-conditions-for-re_b_36343.html
Folks, all indicators suggest that it's going to happen anyway--the Decider wants to be the Decided--so we might as well lay down some markers in advance. I submit the following as conditions (in no particular order) that need to be agreed upon before Bush starts sending in more troops:
1) At least one of the Bush twins needs to sign up for military service.
They are able-bodied, and they apparently have some discretionary time on their hands. It doesn't matter whether they get stateside or some paper-pushing detail, as long as they volunteer to serve their country in a time of war. The larger point is that President Bush needs to be able to explain and convince one of his own family members that his mission in Iraq is absolutely noble and necessary before he will have any credibility with other parents and family members (deeds, not words). Come January, can he really look the American public in the eye (through the TV camera lens) and avoid the issue about whether Jenna and Barbara will be gallivanting in Argentina while more of their peers are being shot and maimed in Iraq at their Daddy's behest? Advance memo to the press: Will somebody please ask the President a direct question about whether he has asked his own family to share in the national sacrifice? Note to Bill O'Reilly: Please ask Jenna and Barbara Bush: Yes or no, do you want victory in Iraq? Follow-up: What are you going to do about it?
2) Pay as you go. No more deficit spending to pay for this calamity, no more gluttonous giveaways to the rich. If this war is so damn important for future generations, then stop mortgaging their future to pay for it. What will this mean for Bush? Read Pappy Bush's lips: taxes. That would be a bitter pill to swallow for Junior. But Pappy was man enough to make that call. Suck it up, Junior. It's your war: put your money where your mouth is.
3) Cut, cut, cut domestic oil consumption. Engage in an all-out national campaign to reduce our reliance on foreign oil so that we can stop sponsoring both sides of this conflict. In fact, send all of the Hummers on our streets over to Iraq (after retrofitting them with the proper armor, of course--shouldn't take too much pimping, though).
4) Cut the PR crap. Don't call it, for instance, Shock and Awe, Part II.
5) No more no-bid contracts. Better yet: no Halliburton contracts.
6) Lose the pretense that we are supported by a "Coalition of the Willing."
7) Support the troops by giving them proper and sufficient equipment.
8) Support the vets by giving them proper and sufficient medical care and educational opportunities.
9) Honor and acknowledge the dead. The public should understand the full costs of this war, and mourn accordingly. At the very least, release the pictures of the caskets. That doesn't diminish the dignity or gravity of the deaths of these fallen soldiers. Sweeping them under the rug, as it were, is a national shame.
10) Repudiate all long-term designs on the U.S. military bases in Iraq--and on Iraqi oil. Make it crystal clear that our ultimate goal is not simply "troop reduction" but to extricate ourselves from Iraq altogether.
11) Establish an Executive Branch moratorium on all golfing, hunting, and celebrity bicycling junkets during a time of war. (That shouldn't be such a HUGE personal sacrifice, would it?)
12) Finally, give us not just a frat-boy pep talk about the importance of achieving victory, but give us a clear exit strategy (déjà vu all over again). Envisioning victory in advance is not as important, this time around, as being able to identify what will constitute failure. Let's at least insist on a firm timetable for this second go-around: the 2008 elections. Leaving Iraq and losing Iraq should be on George W. Bush's clock, and no one else's.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Sheldon Drobny at Huffpost: a Typical Lefty rant that EMPOWERS Right-Wing dissing of Democrats and moderates...
OK, we hate to include Sheldon Drobny among our "Media Whores USA," he has done some good things for the liberal/Democratic message in America, including his affiliation (as a cofounder) with Air America radio.
BUT! When a "lefty" message, such as the Nader campaign of 2000, ENABLES the Right-Wing propaganda and lust-for-power machine, we must confront it.
In this case, Drobny includes President Harry S. Truman at THE VERY BOTTOM of the US presidents list... below even George W. Bush!
All we can say is, "WTF, Sheldon!" and "Thank god for the David McCullough bio of Truman, which dispels so much of Sheldon Drobny's bunk!"
http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205
So here goes. "THANKS," Sheldon, for providing a text-book example of a smart guy being completely clueless on such an important subject. To Begin with, try three words: "THE MARSHALL PLAN." In the video biography of his life (a must see for anyone interested in the post-WWII balance of world power) Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff and later Secretary of Defense and State George C. Marshall said that the European reconstruction miracle that bore his name should really have been called "THE TRUMAN PLAN." Original plans for the US reconstruction of Europe called for PUNITIVE occupations of Germany and Japan (see "The Conquerors" by Michael Beschloss), but Truman swiftly changed that policy (in consensus with other US leaders) when he realized that European reconstruction (and a strong barrier to Soviet designs on Western Europe) depended on Germany's successful reconstruction as well.... Leading to the greatest humanitarian success story in world history.
Russia and the SSR's were ALSO INVITED TO PARTICIPATE in the "European Recovery Act" but Molotov (under orders from Stalin of course) declined and disparaged the US plan. IF that's not refutation enough for Mr. Drobny's "Russia as nice guy" see also the biography of UAW President Walter Reuther, who actually went to Stalin's Russia as a top machinist to help industrialize "the workers paradise," but returned to America a determined anti-Communist after witnessing his friends being dragged off into oblivion for daring to protest factory conditions or party policies in the 5-year plan factories. (This writer) is such a liberal that we still suspect BOBBY KENNEDY for his role as lead counsel on Senator Joe McCarthy's House un-American Activities Committee, but underestimating Stalin's ruthlessness and expansionism is myopic at best. See how Stalin purged Red Army WWII hero General Zhukov simply for being popular, how Stalin was preparing to purge the "Jewish doctors plot" in the early 1950s, which in turn was just an excuse for the paranoid dictator to embark on another massive, wholesale round of purges. Here's the first sentence of Publisher's Weekly review for the Amazon listing of "Stalin's Last Crime" << Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin's purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. >> Which reviews also speculate that the dictator may have been poisoned by his terrified aides, who calculated their chances of survival were bleak if Stalin did enact a new wave of purges and/or a (big) war. (Note: Stalin was a Central-Asian warlord first, in the manner of the Mongols, Turks, and Persians (etc.), and a "Communist" socialist, or industrialist second.)
Getting back to Truman, the Junior Senator from Missouri DID NOT WANT the VP nomination in 1944, and his wife detested Washington. (She would leave him behind, alone in DC, for months at time.) Roosevelt insisted on Truman's nomination and is reported to have said "If Harry Truman wants to be the destruction of the Democratic Party [by not accepting the nomination], let it be on his head!"
Truman reluctantly accepted the nomination... and upon Roosevelt's death, went on to lay the Western foundation for winning the Cold War (the "containment" strategy, which beats the hell of Bush Jr.'s "attack first" or "One-percent solution" strategy), Europe's post-war recovery, the GI Bill, Truman DESEGREGATED the US military, oh, and he courageously WON REELECTION DESPITE the defection of Strom Thurmond's "segregation today, tomorrow, and forever!" Dixiecrat Party, Thurmond taking almost every one of the Deep South states away from the Democratic roster in the 1948 presidential election, which Truman miraculously won. (Insert photo, Truman holding newspaper headline "Dewey Defeats Truman!" here.)
Not bad for an over-the-hill horse soldier who commanded an artillery battalion in brutal conditions in WWI France, paid off his Depression era business debts on Depression-era wages, a man whose grandmother recalled "The Bluebellies" (Yankee soldiers) burning the family farm during the Civil War in slave state Missouri.
Compared to Harry S. Truman, what has Sheldon Drobny accomplished? What has George W. Bush accomplished compared to the 33rd president? Truman was not responsible for the Korean War, it was the American public who DEMANDED that the troops be brought home after WWII, leaving a vacumn (skeleton US presence) in South Korea (a nation that was only partitioned at the whim of Russia and America in the first place.) Indeed, we suppose Drobny will somehow blame the North Korean attack on South Korea on Truman as well... supplies and blessings of Uncle Joe Stalin notwithstanding!
It is such sweeping, unsubstantiated claims as Drobny's op-ed blaming Harry Truman for the ENTIRE Cold War, which have allowed the Righties in the press and corporate media over the past two decades to entirely DISMISS the "lefty," progressive, or Democratic POV as easily as they do.
http://www.amazon.com/Biography-General-George-C-Marshall/dp/B000006QIA
http://www.amazon.ca/Bt-Conquerors-Michael-R-Beschloss/dp/B000C25VRS
http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205
NOTE: According to the Marshall bio-video, President Roosevelt selected Marshall to the ultra-hyper-crucial job of Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; precisely because Marshall refused to agree with Roosevelt during a White House meeting of senior military commanders. As Marshall left the WH grounds, his fellow generals and admirals sympathized with him, such a refutation of the Commander in Chief was a one-way ticket to professional exile or retirement. Instead, Roosevelt was impressed by Marshall's honesty and outspokenness, and selected him to be the nation's highest uniformed officer during WWII. Marshall survived the Pearl Harbor disaster, fired a lot of senior generals as "deadwood" unable to adapt to the raging worldwide war, and promoted dozens of junior officers to high command slots. Including a certain colonel from Kansas, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower may have been a "Republican" president, but he was promoted over dozens of senior officers by a Democratic president, a president who accepted opposition members into his cabinet (Secretary of War Henry L Stimson) and who didn't surround himself with yes-men.
=============================
The Worst POTUS - [TRUMAN!]
by Sheldon Drobny
12.13.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldon-drobny/the-worst-potus_b_36264.html?p=2#comments
Many people on both sides of the "aisle" have debated recently about Bush being the worst POTUS. Although W is a strong candidate for that dishonored position, my vote would go to Harry Truman. W is probably psychologically unbalanced and represents the last in a breed of failed post WW II Presidents. But, it was Truman who started this disastrous policy and condemned us to a phony confrontation with the Soviet Union. People talk today about the failed and skewed intelligence concerning the threat of WMD from Iraq in 2002. That pails by comparison to the skewed intelligence that was used to make the Soviet Union our mortal enemy between 1945 and 1950. The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA was the final "nail in the coffin" concerning our post war relationship with the USSR. And although the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship, that country was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and they were not a threat to the U.S.
America was at a critical juncture at the end of the war, in terms of its relationship to the Soviet Union. According to Alderman Edwin M. Burke, co-author of a 1996 book with R. Craig Sautter and Richard M. Daley called, Inside the Wigwam, the 1944 Chicago Democratic Convention was the stage on which the very political future of America itself was played.
Burke's book is a history of Chicago Presidential Conventions from 1860-1996. At the Democratic convention of 1944, the party bosses around the country knew FDR was seriously ill and was likely not to finish his fourth term. The idea of Wallace being the next President was a terrifying thought to those in the conservative and southern wing of the Democratic Party. They were strongly anti-Soviet and knew Wallace was disposed towards normalizing relations with the USSR.
Unlike Roosevelt, who was a shrewd politician, Wallace was a true idealist. Although Roosevelt was very progressive in his policies, he knew that the coalition of southern and conservative Democrats was necessary for the Democrats to win a national election. The party bosses in Chicago, including Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly, intervened just as Wallace was about to be re-nominated. Kelly instructed the Chicago Fire Commissioner at the time to close down the convention hall. The party bosses wanted Harry Truman to be nominated because Truman was part of Missouri machine politics and could easily be manipulated in the postwar policy toward the Soviet Union.
The party bosses succeeded in getting Truman to be FDR's running mate in a dramatic and brilliant series of political maneuvers. As Wallace was being nominated, Mayor Kelly had the fire commissioner evacuate the Chicago Stadium. He did it by engineering an artificially created fire hazard. The Chicago Stadium doors were opened to the skid row bums in the neighborhood. People poured into the convention in droves causing the overcrowding of the building, which then had to be evacuated because of fire hazard limits. That nomination was postponed for a day. Party bosses quickly took over the process by "influencing" the delegates to switch their allegiance to Truman. And the nomination of Harry Truman as Vice President and the death of FDR in April, 1945 made it much less likely that Wall Street would be exposed to a scandal that would have exposed their support of Hitler before the War.
It is clear from archival records that Prescott Bush helped finance Germany's military buildup. But, he was not alone. The Dulles brothers were instrumental in representing many firms that did business with the Nazis. Unfortunately, Allen and John Dulles became powerful influences in skewing the intelligence against the Soviet Union. The U.S. had the atomic bomb in 1945 and the Soviets were only interested geo-politically in protecting themselves from another invasion from Germany, something that had happened 3 times in the 20th Century. So the CIA got to work on this and fed the people with skewed intelligence about the Soviet threat. They even kept this up during the Reagan years when all of our real intelligence had shown that the USSR was on the verge of collapse. They just could not out spend us for 50 years militarily.
ALLEN DULLES
In the 50 years that followed WW II, the CIA was busy exporting terrorism throughout the world on the false premise that so-called monolithic Communism was threatening the world. Reagan praised the so-called freedom fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting the USSR. In fact, Reagan's freedom fighters were the extreme Muslims that were responsible for the rise of Muslim extremism and 9/11. At the time, we could not conceive of the idea that the USSR was defending its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to support a secular government there that was aligned with the Soviet Union. When it came to Soviet Russia, an entire generation of Democrats and Republicans supported the idea of containment of the USSR that was expressed in NSC Directive 68.
One of my good friends, John Loftus, was working in the Justice Department in the 1970s. He was assigned to the division that was prosecuting former Nazi war criminals. John has written about this in his book, The Secret War Against The Jews. It is a great read about the intelligence community and the Justice Department's views concerning the Nazi Genocide. John, who is not Jewish, told me that secret intelligence documents showed that the CIA in its pursuit of Soviet confrontation actually used many of the former Nazi war criminals in their anti-soviet covert operations. When it came to a choice between prosecuting war criminals and using Nazis as covert agents, the choice was easy for the Dulles controlled CIA.
Perhaps G.W. Bush will at long last be the end to an era of failed Presidents that have deprived the American citizens with the truth and more importantly the fruits of their labors to make this country so great. Today we honor Truman and his legacy of Cold War Presidents who won the "Cold War." We especially honor Ronald Reagan, the man who armed Saddam Hussein, and the Afghanistan Mujahaden.
The truth be told, the U.S. has been responsible for a post war foreign policy that has caused the death and starvation of millions of people, far more than any other country in the world since 1945. And it all started with a political hack, Harry S. Truman
BUT! When a "lefty" message, such as the Nader campaign of 2000, ENABLES the Right-Wing propaganda and lust-for-power machine, we must confront it.
In this case, Drobny includes President Harry S. Truman at THE VERY BOTTOM of the US presidents list... below even George W. Bush!
All we can say is, "WTF, Sheldon!" and "Thank god for the David McCullough bio of Truman, which dispels so much of Sheldon Drobny's bunk!"
http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205
So here goes. "THANKS," Sheldon, for providing a text-book example of a smart guy being completely clueless on such an important subject. To Begin with, try three words: "THE MARSHALL PLAN." In the video biography of his life (a must see for anyone interested in the post-WWII balance of world power) Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff and later Secretary of Defense and State George C. Marshall said that the European reconstruction miracle that bore his name should really have been called "THE TRUMAN PLAN." Original plans for the US reconstruction of Europe called for PUNITIVE occupations of Germany and Japan (see "The Conquerors" by Michael Beschloss), but Truman swiftly changed that policy (in consensus with other US leaders) when he realized that European reconstruction (and a strong barrier to Soviet designs on Western Europe) depended on Germany's successful reconstruction as well.... Leading to the greatest humanitarian success story in world history.
Russia and the SSR's were ALSO INVITED TO PARTICIPATE in the "European Recovery Act" but Molotov (under orders from Stalin of course) declined and disparaged the US plan. IF that's not refutation enough for Mr. Drobny's "Russia as nice guy" see also the biography of UAW President Walter Reuther, who actually went to Stalin's Russia as a top machinist to help industrialize "the workers paradise," but returned to America a determined anti-Communist after witnessing his friends being dragged off into oblivion for daring to protest factory conditions or party policies in the 5-year plan factories. (This writer) is such a liberal that we still suspect BOBBY KENNEDY for his role as lead counsel on Senator Joe McCarthy's House un-American Activities Committee, but underestimating Stalin's ruthlessness and expansionism is myopic at best. See how Stalin purged Red Army WWII hero General Zhukov simply for being popular, how Stalin was preparing to purge the "Jewish doctors plot" in the early 1950s, which in turn was just an excuse for the paranoid dictator to embark on another massive, wholesale round of purges. Here's the first sentence of Publisher's Weekly review for the Amazon listing of "Stalin's Last Crime" << Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin's purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. >> Which reviews also speculate that the dictator may have been poisoned by his terrified aides, who calculated their chances of survival were bleak if Stalin did enact a new wave of purges and/or a (big) war. (Note: Stalin was a Central-Asian warlord first, in the manner of the Mongols, Turks, and Persians (etc.), and a "Communist" socialist, or industrialist second.)
Getting back to Truman, the Junior Senator from Missouri DID NOT WANT the VP nomination in 1944, and his wife detested Washington. (She would leave him behind, alone in DC, for months at time.) Roosevelt insisted on Truman's nomination and is reported to have said "If Harry Truman wants to be the destruction of the Democratic Party [by not accepting the nomination], let it be on his head!"
Truman reluctantly accepted the nomination... and upon Roosevelt's death, went on to lay the Western foundation for winning the Cold War (the "containment" strategy, which beats the hell of Bush Jr.'s "attack first" or "One-percent solution" strategy), Europe's post-war recovery, the GI Bill, Truman DESEGREGATED the US military, oh, and he courageously WON REELECTION DESPITE the defection of Strom Thurmond's "segregation today, tomorrow, and forever!" Dixiecrat Party, Thurmond taking almost every one of the Deep South states away from the Democratic roster in the 1948 presidential election, which Truman miraculously won. (Insert photo, Truman holding newspaper headline "Dewey Defeats Truman!" here.)
Not bad for an over-the-hill horse soldier who commanded an artillery battalion in brutal conditions in WWI France, paid off his Depression era business debts on Depression-era wages, a man whose grandmother recalled "The Bluebellies" (Yankee soldiers) burning the family farm during the Civil War in slave state Missouri.
Compared to Harry S. Truman, what has Sheldon Drobny accomplished? What has George W. Bush accomplished compared to the 33rd president? Truman was not responsible for the Korean War, it was the American public who DEMANDED that the troops be brought home after WWII, leaving a vacumn (skeleton US presence) in South Korea (a nation that was only partitioned at the whim of Russia and America in the first place.) Indeed, we suppose Drobny will somehow blame the North Korean attack on South Korea on Truman as well... supplies and blessings of Uncle Joe Stalin notwithstanding!
It is such sweeping, unsubstantiated claims as Drobny's op-ed blaming Harry Truman for the ENTIRE Cold War, which have allowed the Righties in the press and corporate media over the past two decades to entirely DISMISS the "lefty," progressive, or Democratic POV as easily as they do.
http://www.amazon.com/Biography-General-George-C-Marshall/dp/B000006QIA
http://www.amazon.ca/Bt-Conquerors-Michael-R-Beschloss/dp/B000C25VRS
http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205
NOTE: According to the Marshall bio-video, President Roosevelt selected Marshall to the ultra-hyper-crucial job of Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; precisely because Marshall refused to agree with Roosevelt during a White House meeting of senior military commanders. As Marshall left the WH grounds, his fellow generals and admirals sympathized with him, such a refutation of the Commander in Chief was a one-way ticket to professional exile or retirement. Instead, Roosevelt was impressed by Marshall's honesty and outspokenness, and selected him to be the nation's highest uniformed officer during WWII. Marshall survived the Pearl Harbor disaster, fired a lot of senior generals as "deadwood" unable to adapt to the raging worldwide war, and promoted dozens of junior officers to high command slots. Including a certain colonel from Kansas, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower may have been a "Republican" president, but he was promoted over dozens of senior officers by a Democratic president, a president who accepted opposition members into his cabinet (Secretary of War Henry L Stimson) and who didn't surround himself with yes-men.
=============================
The Worst POTUS - [TRUMAN!]
by Sheldon Drobny
12.13.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldon-drobny/the-worst-potus_b_36264.html?p=2#comments
Many people on both sides of the "aisle" have debated recently about Bush being the worst POTUS. Although W is a strong candidate for that dishonored position, my vote would go to Harry Truman. W is probably psychologically unbalanced and represents the last in a breed of failed post WW II Presidents. But, it was Truman who started this disastrous policy and condemned us to a phony confrontation with the Soviet Union. People talk today about the failed and skewed intelligence concerning the threat of WMD from Iraq in 2002. That pails by comparison to the skewed intelligence that was used to make the Soviet Union our mortal enemy between 1945 and 1950. The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA was the final "nail in the coffin" concerning our post war relationship with the USSR. And although the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship, that country was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and they were not a threat to the U.S.
America was at a critical juncture at the end of the war, in terms of its relationship to the Soviet Union. According to Alderman Edwin M. Burke, co-author of a 1996 book with R. Craig Sautter and Richard M. Daley called, Inside the Wigwam, the 1944 Chicago Democratic Convention was the stage on which the very political future of America itself was played.
Burke's book is a history of Chicago Presidential Conventions from 1860-1996. At the Democratic convention of 1944, the party bosses around the country knew FDR was seriously ill and was likely not to finish his fourth term. The idea of Wallace being the next President was a terrifying thought to those in the conservative and southern wing of the Democratic Party. They were strongly anti-Soviet and knew Wallace was disposed towards normalizing relations with the USSR.
Unlike Roosevelt, who was a shrewd politician, Wallace was a true idealist. Although Roosevelt was very progressive in his policies, he knew that the coalition of southern and conservative Democrats was necessary for the Democrats to win a national election. The party bosses in Chicago, including Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly, intervened just as Wallace was about to be re-nominated. Kelly instructed the Chicago Fire Commissioner at the time to close down the convention hall. The party bosses wanted Harry Truman to be nominated because Truman was part of Missouri machine politics and could easily be manipulated in the postwar policy toward the Soviet Union.
The party bosses succeeded in getting Truman to be FDR's running mate in a dramatic and brilliant series of political maneuvers. As Wallace was being nominated, Mayor Kelly had the fire commissioner evacuate the Chicago Stadium. He did it by engineering an artificially created fire hazard. The Chicago Stadium doors were opened to the skid row bums in the neighborhood. People poured into the convention in droves causing the overcrowding of the building, which then had to be evacuated because of fire hazard limits. That nomination was postponed for a day. Party bosses quickly took over the process by "influencing" the delegates to switch their allegiance to Truman. And the nomination of Harry Truman as Vice President and the death of FDR in April, 1945 made it much less likely that Wall Street would be exposed to a scandal that would have exposed their support of Hitler before the War.
It is clear from archival records that Prescott Bush helped finance Germany's military buildup. But, he was not alone. The Dulles brothers were instrumental in representing many firms that did business with the Nazis. Unfortunately, Allen and John Dulles became powerful influences in skewing the intelligence against the Soviet Union. The U.S. had the atomic bomb in 1945 and the Soviets were only interested geo-politically in protecting themselves from another invasion from Germany, something that had happened 3 times in the 20th Century. So the CIA got to work on this and fed the people with skewed intelligence about the Soviet threat. They even kept this up during the Reagan years when all of our real intelligence had shown that the USSR was on the verge of collapse. They just could not out spend us for 50 years militarily.
ALLEN DULLES
In the 50 years that followed WW II, the CIA was busy exporting terrorism throughout the world on the false premise that so-called monolithic Communism was threatening the world. Reagan praised the so-called freedom fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting the USSR. In fact, Reagan's freedom fighters were the extreme Muslims that were responsible for the rise of Muslim extremism and 9/11. At the time, we could not conceive of the idea that the USSR was defending its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to support a secular government there that was aligned with the Soviet Union. When it came to Soviet Russia, an entire generation of Democrats and Republicans supported the idea of containment of the USSR that was expressed in NSC Directive 68.
One of my good friends, John Loftus, was working in the Justice Department in the 1970s. He was assigned to the division that was prosecuting former Nazi war criminals. John has written about this in his book, The Secret War Against The Jews. It is a great read about the intelligence community and the Justice Department's views concerning the Nazi Genocide. John, who is not Jewish, told me that secret intelligence documents showed that the CIA in its pursuit of Soviet confrontation actually used many of the former Nazi war criminals in their anti-soviet covert operations. When it came to a choice between prosecuting war criminals and using Nazis as covert agents, the choice was easy for the Dulles controlled CIA.
Perhaps G.W. Bush will at long last be the end to an era of failed Presidents that have deprived the American citizens with the truth and more importantly the fruits of their labors to make this country so great. Today we honor Truman and his legacy of Cold War Presidents who won the "Cold War." We especially honor Ronald Reagan, the man who armed Saddam Hussein, and the Afghanistan Mujahaden.
The truth be told, the U.S. has been responsible for a post war foreign policy that has caused the death and starvation of millions of people, far more than any other country in the world since 1945. And it all started with a political hack, Harry S. Truman
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