OK, we here at MediaWhoresUSA realize that calling George Will THE penultimate media/DC press whore of Washington is quite a claim, given the stiff competition in DC press-whoredom.
In fact, Will is smart enough, and insulated enough by his position, years in trade, and wealth, to avoid being as straight-forward belligerant as a Rush Limbuagh or Sean Hannity or even a William Safire, the recently retired New York Times headline columnist who was once a Nixon speechwriter, and probably would have loved the Nazis had he lived in Germany in the 30's and only belonged to the "right" race.
But George Will is truly the ROLE MODEL for swarmy, arrogant, unethical, disinformative media pundits. The other weekend on his ABC Sunday morning perch ("This Week") he solemnly intoned that MINIMUM WAGE puts workers well above the poverty line, that only teenagers and retirees receive the minimum wage anyways, and that those TRYING to make ends meet on minimum wage SIMPLY DON'T COUNT in official, craven DC media world that Will so condescendingly inhabits.
On all three Will was, flat-out WRONG. He is often, almost always WRONG, about everything. He is simple the epitomy of right-wing pundits who believe that the public purse and public treasury (and taxpayer dollars) exist ONLY TO SERVE THE WEALTHY.
====================================
George F. Will: His Unethical Behavior in 1980 Made Him the Role Model For a Pundit Generation
RJ Eskow
11.30.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/george-f-will-his-unet_b_35251.html
Smart people are talking about the dishonesty in yesterday's column by George F. Will. Although I was shocked by it, too, it was a minor lapse by Will's standards. This is a good time to remember his enormous breach of ethics in 1980 - one which made him the role model for a generation of cynical, dishonest, and self-serving journalists and pundits.
Yesterday, Will altered quotes from his own paper's reporting in order to make Sen-elect Jim Webb look ruder (and the President more polite) during their encounter. In fact, Webb was direct and Bush was - I can't put this more politely - a dick.
The press has tried to cover up W's nasty streak for six years, but it does slip out from time to time - often with the people whose children are fighting his war. But whether you agree with my assessment of the President and Webb or not, quote-doctoring is a journalistic lie.
Yesterday's mendacity was nothing for George F. Will, however. He has been a disgrace to his once-honorable profession for a long time. His sleazy behavior in years past helped pave the way for the debased media of today.
The Carter/Reagan debate, and Will's role in it, changed journalism forever. Will went on national television that year to comment live and "objectively" on Ronald Reagan's debate performance - without disclosing that he was working for the Reagan campaign and had helped Reagan prepare for that very debate - using stolen property.
This unethical behavior set a new low for journalistic ethics. What was equally ground-breaking was the fact that, once his behavior was made public, he paid absolutely no professional price for it. No censure, no widespread criticism, no loss of employment.
Here's what's known, and not in question, about Will's behavior in 1980:
He was an advisor to the Reagan campaign, and specifically coached Reagan on how to handle the one debate he held with Jimmy Carter.
He appeared on Nightline as part of a panel to review the debate the night after he coached Reagan.
Ted Koppel noted that Will "met with Reagan" the previous day, and said that Will was known to have "affection" for Reagan - but did not disclose he was working for the campaign in a professional capacity. (That's an enormous omission - and Koppel appears to have helped "spin" the "disclosure" in Will's favor.)
Will, Reagan, and the rest of the team used a Carter debate briefing book which was clearly stolen property. The result? Reagan's effective "there you go again, Mr. President" routine.
Will praised Reagan highly on Nightline, saying "his game plan worked well." (Viewers didn't know at the time that this "game plan" was Will's own creation.)
The consensus today is that Reagan won that debate overwhelmingly. But, as often happens, it wasn't all that clear at the time. Yes, Carter was weaker than expected and Reagan beat expectations (which, as with W, were deliberately pre-set at a low level by spin doctors.) But the overwhelming Reagan victory pundits recall today was partially the product of contemporary chatter that turned into consensus.
Will's self-serving praise for his candidate (and himself) contributed to the perception that Reagan won - and that, despite popular perceptions, he was actually "Presidential."
What were the repercussions for this shocking breach of journalistic ethics, which included lying by omission, misrepresentation, breach of the public trust, and use of stolen property? How did the journalistic community punish its own?
Will won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary the following year!
With that award, the editorial community made it clear that issues like disclosure, conflict of interest, and lying by omission no longer mattered. Ethical breaches were no impediment to either honor or success in American journalism. ((And they wonder why the profession has lost public respect.)
Washington insiders like to say that Will, unlike many other conservative commentators, is a "decent" guy. I don't think so. Decent human beings don't lie, and they don't behave unethically. It's true that Will is sometimes willing to deviate from conservative orthodoxy, and that's a good thing.
I suspect it's also possible to meet him at a cocktail party and have a very pleasant talk about baseball or other side topics. (Well, probably not possible for me, after today - but that wasn't too likely to happen anyway.) Beltway pundits notwithstanding, however, one cannot be a decent human being while behaving in this manner.
Honesty, morality, and fair play are the true marks of decency. In those areas Mr. Will - and those journalists and pundits who follow in his footsteps - are sadly lacking.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Monday, November 27, 2006
Bush and the Republicans ENDANGER AMERICA's SECURITY. The media spin that presents them as "competent" is gross propaganda...
Bush and the Republicans ENDANGER AMERICA's SECURITY.
The Bush-Republicans are so marked by greed, arrogance, incompetence, and corruption, that at every turn they ENDANGER AMERICA's SECURITY.
ONLY the "major media" operating in FULL TIME PROPAGANDA MODE can paint this national security nightmare as "competence" in handelling the nation's short-term and long-term security.
==========================================
Larry Beinhart: Republicans are Bad on National Security
by Larry Beinhart, BuzzFlash op-ed
author of Wag the Dog and Fog Facts
Sun, 08/13/2006
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/354
Say it loud, say it often, "Republicans are bad on national security." Every Democrat running for national office – and local offices too, why not? – should say, "I'm running because Republicans are bad on national security."
Then they should go on to say, here's why I’m saying it:
1. 9/11 happened on their watch. Of course, we can’t say, absolutely, that it would not have happened if they had not been asleep at the wheel. But we can say that they did not do all they could have done to prevent it. We can say that Bush literally pushed away the warnings.
2. George Bush and the Republicans failed to get Osama bin Laden. We got both Hitler and Hirohito in less time than we’ve been chasing bin Laden. Every day that bin Laden’s out there, he’s proof that you can attack the United States and get away with it. That’s a bad message to send, and believe me, people in the terrorist world have heard it loud and clear. That’s very bad for national security.
3. George Bush and the Republicans gave Osama bin Laden what he wanted. Bin Laden wanted the US to get into a quagmire. He wanted our troops tied down in an Islamic country so that an insurgency could do to them what the Afghanis did to the Russians and to the British before them.
A modern, hi-tech army is very good at invasions. It’s also good for fighting back against other armies. But a modern hi-tech army is not good at occupying a country against the will of the population. Even if the army is as violent and ruthless as the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan were.
4. George Bush and the Republicans squandered America’s power and prestige. Before 9/11 most people in the world probably thought that America’s intelligence services were able and astute, agencies to be feared. The Bush administration has made them appear bumbling and inept. They did this, first, by ignoring their warnings and then, second, by making them the fall guys for 9/11.
After 9/11 most of the world feared America's wrath and America's might. By failing to get bin Laden and his gang, then by attacking the wrong country, unleashing chaos, and getting our armed forces into a situation that they can’t win, the administration showed the world they have less to fear than they imagined.
5. The Bush administration empowered Hezbollah. The 'insurgency' in Iraq was Hezbollah's textbook and their inspiration. If Iraqis could do that to Americans, surely they could do the same to the Israelis. And they have. It's not yet on the record, but it's clear from everyone's conduct, that the administration encouraged the Israelis to 'unleash' their forces against Hezbollah. They probably thought Israel's modern hi-tech armies would quickly smash their enemy.
6. The Bush administration radicalized Hamas. Hamas was elected. Sworn to the destruction of Israel or not, they should have been encouraged to become responsible players with carrots as well as sticks. Instead the administration put them up against the wall, hoping to starve the Palestinian people into voting for a different group. Would that work if someone tried to do it to us?
7. Bush and the Republicans tied down our forces in Iraq while Iran and North Korea invested in nuclear technology. That made North Korea feel secure enough to test ICBMs. If they had been successful, they would have had a delivery system for their nuclear weapons. That would be incredibly bad for national security. Iran, with American forces tied down in Iraq, feels secure enough to defy the UN as well as the US. Very bad for national security.
8. By the way, every major European nation has had successful arrests and real trials of real, dangerous terrorists. People on the level of this group that the British just took down. The most ferocious terrorist arrested in the United States since 9/11 has been the shoe bomber. Ten, twenty, forty, a hundred billion dollars, a trillion dollars, and the best we have to show for it is the shoe bomber?! Republicans are bad on national security.
9. We have trashed the bill of rights. We have trashed the Geneva conventions. We have a president and a vice president willing to go the mat to fight for the right to torture people.
We have spent a fortune on illegal wiretaps.
We have spent a fortune on collecting everyone’s telephone data.
And what have we achieved by all of this?
A quagmire in Iraq. Dishonor. Debts. An empowered al Qaeda. A new war in Lebanon. The inability to stand up to Iran and North Korea. Osama bin Laden at large, an inspiration to extremists everywhere.
Republican are unimaginably bad on national security. Say it loud. Say it often, it’s the truth, Republicans are bad on national security.
The Bush-Republicans are so marked by greed, arrogance, incompetence, and corruption, that at every turn they ENDANGER AMERICA's SECURITY.
ONLY the "major media" operating in FULL TIME PROPAGANDA MODE can paint this national security nightmare as "competence" in handelling the nation's short-term and long-term security.
==========================================
Larry Beinhart: Republicans are Bad on National Security
by Larry Beinhart, BuzzFlash op-ed
author of Wag the Dog and Fog Facts
Sun, 08/13/2006
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/354
Say it loud, say it often, "Republicans are bad on national security." Every Democrat running for national office – and local offices too, why not? – should say, "I'm running because Republicans are bad on national security."
Then they should go on to say, here's why I’m saying it:
1. 9/11 happened on their watch. Of course, we can’t say, absolutely, that it would not have happened if they had not been asleep at the wheel. But we can say that they did not do all they could have done to prevent it. We can say that Bush literally pushed away the warnings.
2. George Bush and the Republicans failed to get Osama bin Laden. We got both Hitler and Hirohito in less time than we’ve been chasing bin Laden. Every day that bin Laden’s out there, he’s proof that you can attack the United States and get away with it. That’s a bad message to send, and believe me, people in the terrorist world have heard it loud and clear. That’s very bad for national security.
3. George Bush and the Republicans gave Osama bin Laden what he wanted. Bin Laden wanted the US to get into a quagmire. He wanted our troops tied down in an Islamic country so that an insurgency could do to them what the Afghanis did to the Russians and to the British before them.
A modern, hi-tech army is very good at invasions. It’s also good for fighting back against other armies. But a modern hi-tech army is not good at occupying a country against the will of the population. Even if the army is as violent and ruthless as the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan were.
4. George Bush and the Republicans squandered America’s power and prestige. Before 9/11 most people in the world probably thought that America’s intelligence services were able and astute, agencies to be feared. The Bush administration has made them appear bumbling and inept. They did this, first, by ignoring their warnings and then, second, by making them the fall guys for 9/11.
After 9/11 most of the world feared America's wrath and America's might. By failing to get bin Laden and his gang, then by attacking the wrong country, unleashing chaos, and getting our armed forces into a situation that they can’t win, the administration showed the world they have less to fear than they imagined.
5. The Bush administration empowered Hezbollah. The 'insurgency' in Iraq was Hezbollah's textbook and their inspiration. If Iraqis could do that to Americans, surely they could do the same to the Israelis. And they have. It's not yet on the record, but it's clear from everyone's conduct, that the administration encouraged the Israelis to 'unleash' their forces against Hezbollah. They probably thought Israel's modern hi-tech armies would quickly smash their enemy.
6. The Bush administration radicalized Hamas. Hamas was elected. Sworn to the destruction of Israel or not, they should have been encouraged to become responsible players with carrots as well as sticks. Instead the administration put them up against the wall, hoping to starve the Palestinian people into voting for a different group. Would that work if someone tried to do it to us?
7. Bush and the Republicans tied down our forces in Iraq while Iran and North Korea invested in nuclear technology. That made North Korea feel secure enough to test ICBMs. If they had been successful, they would have had a delivery system for their nuclear weapons. That would be incredibly bad for national security. Iran, with American forces tied down in Iraq, feels secure enough to defy the UN as well as the US. Very bad for national security.
8. By the way, every major European nation has had successful arrests and real trials of real, dangerous terrorists. People on the level of this group that the British just took down. The most ferocious terrorist arrested in the United States since 9/11 has been the shoe bomber. Ten, twenty, forty, a hundred billion dollars, a trillion dollars, and the best we have to show for it is the shoe bomber?! Republicans are bad on national security.
9. We have trashed the bill of rights. We have trashed the Geneva conventions. We have a president and a vice president willing to go the mat to fight for the right to torture people.
We have spent a fortune on illegal wiretaps.
We have spent a fortune on collecting everyone’s telephone data.
And what have we achieved by all of this?
A quagmire in Iraq. Dishonor. Debts. An empowered al Qaeda. A new war in Lebanon. The inability to stand up to Iran and North Korea. Osama bin Laden at large, an inspiration to extremists everywhere.
Republican are unimaginably bad on national security. Say it loud. Say it often, it’s the truth, Republicans are bad on national security.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Meida whores continue to foster Iraq war "illusions" to minimize disaster Bush has wrought there...
A good article by John Brown and Ray McGovern over at TomPaine.com illuminates the "mainstream media's" typical methods of MIS-REPORTING the news:
#1. report "ILLUSIONS" and chimeras as factual reporting....
#2. portray right-wing Republican foreign policies & economic policies as "BIPARTISAN"
#3. by using the code-word "bipartisan," ATTEMPT TO LAY THE BLAME for BUSH-REPUBLICAN DISASTERS, SCANDALS, and ATROCITIES - AT THE FEET OF Democrats (and the American public).
David Sirota is correct once again: the whore media is TRYING to spin election 2006 as a triumph of "BIPARTISANSHIP," when in fact for millions upon millions of American voters, it was a WHOLESALE REJECTION of Republican CORRUPTION, PARTISAN DEMAGOGUERY, incompetence, and lies.
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/2006/11/23/bipartisanship-hides-the-real-power-equation-that-no-one-talks-about/
TomPaine.com:
<< Three persistent illusions—which, intentionally or not, serve to cover up or minimize the mess President George W. Bush has created in Iraq—stand out:
The Baker/Hamilton Commission is our way out. The possibility afforded by the James Baker/Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group (ISG) for a new approach has been met with knee-jerk optimism in the media. This is especially true of newspapers like The Washington Post whose editorial pages present apologias, rather than the mea culpas more appropriate to the paper’s three-year varsity cheerleading for the war.
Bush can use the ISG to good advantage. It gives him some time to sort out the implications of the severe Republican election losses; it makes Iraq not just a Republican problem, but a “bipartisan” (read: also Democratic) one; and, perhaps most importantly, it serves as a vehicle to take the bloody situation in Iraq itself off the headlines. Instead, the media can be directed to what is being said in Washington about Iraq (always of greater interest to our domestically-focused news corporations than what is actually happening abroad). All the while, of course, Americans are being encouraged to buy into the illusion that the ISG is doing something concrete to find a successful way out of Iraq. >>
===========================
Washington's Iraq Chimeras
John Brown and Ray McGovern
November 22, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/22/washingtons_iraq_chimeras.php
John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who practiced public diplomacy for over twenty years, now compiles the "Public Diplomacy Press Review," which can be obtained free by e-mail. Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.
The war in Iraq began as a war based largely on illusions. But now most Americans realize that the always-illusory option of “staying the course” in Iraq will never work. This was the main message of the recent Congressional elections. Still, there is a great danger that we will fall victim to additional Iraq-related illusions—illusions fostered by the administration, Congress, the Pentagon and the mainstream media.
Three persistent illusions—which, intentionally or not, serve to cover up or minimize the mess President George W. Bush has created in Iraq—stand out:
The Baker/Hamilton Commission is our way out. The possibility afforded by the James Baker/Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group (ISG) for a new approach has been met with knee-jerk optimism in the media. This is especially true of newspapers like The Washington Post whose editorial pages present apologias, rather than the mea culpas more appropriate to the paper’s three-year varsity cheerleading for the war.
Bush can use the ISG to good advantage. It gives him some time to sort out the implications of the severe Republican election losses; it makes Iraq not just a Republican problem, but a “bipartisan” (read: also Democratic) one; and, perhaps most importantly, it serves as a vehicle to take the bloody situation in Iraq itself off the headlines. Instead, the media can be directed to what is being said in Washington about Iraq (always of greater interest to our domestically-focused news corporations than what is actually happening abroad). All the while, of course, Americans are being encouraged to buy into the illusion that the ISG is doing something concrete to find a successful way out of Iraq.
What the Iraq Study Group can actually do, though, is quite limited. There simply are no good options. This or that recommendation may be able to provide cover, should the White House decide to choose what it considers a lesser evil.
But the administration itself seems to be moving to tamp down expectations that the Baker-Hamilton group is primus inter pares among the burgeoning number of commissions and committees on Iraq, and that the ISG will provide the panacea solution for which the mainstream press lusts.
In an effort to portray the president as something more than a bit player, the White House announced yesterday that he will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Amman on November 29-30 to focus on "progress made to date in the deliberations of the high-level joint committee on transferring security and responsibility, and the role of the region in supporting Iraq." National security adviser Stephen Hadley told the press that the idea for a summit meeting "came up ... maybe a little longer than a week ago. But, obviously, things accelerated as you do on these things in the last couple days." Asked to elaborate on the timing and venue, Hadley lamely explained that the president would fly to Amman after the November 28-29 NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, since "the president was going to be in the region [sic]." Hadley stressed, "There are many voices the president will want to listen to," besides the Baker-Hamilton study group and, in his determination to "draw from a varietyof sources," Bush will "want to hear what Primer Minister Maliki wants to say."
The administration recently established an "Iraq Policy Review" to harness expertise from within the government; the Pentagon has completed its own study, with planners said to be favoring a hybrid strategy labeled by one defense official “Go Big But Short While Transitioning to Go Long [sic]”; Dr. Victory-is-the-Only-Outcome and presidential adviser Henry Kissinger now says military victory is impossible; and the languishing final draft of last summer’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq can also be put in play should any of its conclusions lend themselves to supporting the preferred policy adjustment.
Thus, there is varied counsel to choose from, with the wisdom of the Iraq Study Group just one among many places to go for it; in effect, the ISG has been deliberately taken down a peg. So, illusions, politically useful as they are for the short term, are kept under long-term control through "other views," lest they actually lead to questioning the administration's policies, whatever they may be.
Training Iraqis will save the day. Training Iraqi troops to replace American ones has long been touted by the administration and the Pentagon as key to success in Iraq, a view reiterated last week by General John Abizaid in his testimony before Congress. On the surface, U.S. training of Iraqi soldiers and police seems like a viable option: It takes Americans out of the line of fire, it “softens” the impact of the U.S. occupation, making American soldiers appear to be instructors rather than aggressors, and, most importantly, it ideally gives Iraqis themselves responsibility for safety and order in their own country.
But there are many reasons to be skeptical about the effectiveness of U.S. training. First, report after report indicates the limited success—and notable failures—of U.S. training, including a recent article by Michael Scherer in Salon and yesterday's Washington Post report by Thomas E. Ricks.
Second, it is doubtful that American forces, the object of much hostility in Iraq, are sufficiently familiar with local conditions and traditions (not to mention the language) to impart even specialized military knowledge to Iraqi counterparts. Third, U.S. military training itself is by no means perfect or necessarily applicable, as a recent article in The Weekly Standard by Eric Egland, “Six Steps to Victory: The bottom-up plan to defeat the insurgency” suggests. Egland writes that:
According to one soldier in Iraq, his unit spent days going over how to clear a foxhole, something many had already trained to do numerous times in their careers. The problem is that the enemy we face in Iraq is not entrenched in foxholes, but moves fluidly and blends into the civilian population.
Of course, the key issue regarding creating a reliable home security force in Iraq is not “training” but—as neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer points out in one of his rare insightful moments—allegiance.
The chances of members of the various Iraqis under arms giving genuine allegiance to a central Iraqi government—or to any likely Iraqi government in the foreseeable future—range from slim to non-existent.
Indeed, ethnic and religious differences and widespread infiltration of the army—not to mention the police—by sectarian forces are so pervasive that it is debatable whether one can accurately speak of an “Iraqi Army.”
We Will Keep Some Kind of Control No Matter What. There is a deeply ingrained belief, perhaps rooted in eternal American optimism, that the U.S.still has the ability to control developments in Iraq to a greater or lesser degree. Advocates for different policies—augmenting U.S. troops or withdrawing them—seldom consider the possibility that local conditions could turn out to be so chaotic that we could not do what we want to do once we have decided to do it. This Green-Zone naiveté may be psychologically soothing, but it is dangerously divorced from reality in Baghdad, which is becoming more violent and fragile each day. In The Guardian (November 15), Simon Jenkins wisely warns against the “we’re in control” illusion:
As we approach the beginning of the end in Iraq there will be much throat clearing and breast-beating before reality replaces denial. For the moment, denial still rules. In America last week I was shocked at how unaware even anti-war Americans are (like many Britons) of the depth of the predicament in Iraq. They compare it with Vietnam or the Balkans—but it is not the same. It is total anarchy. All sentences beginning, "What we should now do in Iraq ... " are devoid of meaning. We are in no position to do anything. We have no potency; that is the definition of anarchy.
In sum, at a time when the American public has said “no” to what passes for administration policy on Iraq, we must be on the alert for shimmering chimeras—illusions about what the U.S. can still accomplish in that troubled country. Only then can we safely sort out and choose among the best approaches—ranging from talking with “enemies” like Syria, Iran and the “insurgents” themselves, to international conferences.
Our aim must be the quickest possible withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, letting Iraqis themselves decide the fate of their country. The urgency of achieving this becomes even more acute in light of the heavy-handed demagoguery already in evidence from prospective presidential candidates in 2008. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for example, has chosen to play fast and loose with the lives of Americans and Iraqis alike, in calling for sending substantially more troops to Iraq.
If McCain really thinks the situation can be rescued by more troops he needs a tutorial on counterinsurgency. Rather, his appeals seem motivated primarily by a wish to escape responsibility for “losing Iraq” when electoral politics heat up again. If that is his calculation, what he will not escape is responsibility for any delay this crass political tactic causes in getting our country out of this misbegotten adventure and bringing our troops home, as soon as this can be done in an orderly way.
#1. report "ILLUSIONS" and chimeras as factual reporting....
#2. portray right-wing Republican foreign policies & economic policies as "BIPARTISAN"
#3. by using the code-word "bipartisan," ATTEMPT TO LAY THE BLAME for BUSH-REPUBLICAN DISASTERS, SCANDALS, and ATROCITIES - AT THE FEET OF Democrats (and the American public).
David Sirota is correct once again: the whore media is TRYING to spin election 2006 as a triumph of "BIPARTISANSHIP," when in fact for millions upon millions of American voters, it was a WHOLESALE REJECTION of Republican CORRUPTION, PARTISAN DEMAGOGUERY, incompetence, and lies.
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/2006/11/23/bipartisanship-hides-the-real-power-equation-that-no-one-talks-about/
TomPaine.com:
<< Three persistent illusions—which, intentionally or not, serve to cover up or minimize the mess President George W. Bush has created in Iraq—stand out:
The Baker/Hamilton Commission is our way out. The possibility afforded by the James Baker/Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group (ISG) for a new approach has been met with knee-jerk optimism in the media. This is especially true of newspapers like The Washington Post whose editorial pages present apologias, rather than the mea culpas more appropriate to the paper’s three-year varsity cheerleading for the war.
Bush can use the ISG to good advantage. It gives him some time to sort out the implications of the severe Republican election losses; it makes Iraq not just a Republican problem, but a “bipartisan” (read: also Democratic) one; and, perhaps most importantly, it serves as a vehicle to take the bloody situation in Iraq itself off the headlines. Instead, the media can be directed to what is being said in Washington about Iraq (always of greater interest to our domestically-focused news corporations than what is actually happening abroad). All the while, of course, Americans are being encouraged to buy into the illusion that the ISG is doing something concrete to find a successful way out of Iraq. >>
===========================
Washington's Iraq Chimeras
John Brown and Ray McGovern
November 22, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/22/washingtons_iraq_chimeras.php
John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who practiced public diplomacy for over twenty years, now compiles the "Public Diplomacy Press Review," which can be obtained free by e-mail. Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.
The war in Iraq began as a war based largely on illusions. But now most Americans realize that the always-illusory option of “staying the course” in Iraq will never work. This was the main message of the recent Congressional elections. Still, there is a great danger that we will fall victim to additional Iraq-related illusions—illusions fostered by the administration, Congress, the Pentagon and the mainstream media.
Three persistent illusions—which, intentionally or not, serve to cover up or minimize the mess President George W. Bush has created in Iraq—stand out:
The Baker/Hamilton Commission is our way out. The possibility afforded by the James Baker/Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group (ISG) for a new approach has been met with knee-jerk optimism in the media. This is especially true of newspapers like The Washington Post whose editorial pages present apologias, rather than the mea culpas more appropriate to the paper’s three-year varsity cheerleading for the war.
Bush can use the ISG to good advantage. It gives him some time to sort out the implications of the severe Republican election losses; it makes Iraq not just a Republican problem, but a “bipartisan” (read: also Democratic) one; and, perhaps most importantly, it serves as a vehicle to take the bloody situation in Iraq itself off the headlines. Instead, the media can be directed to what is being said in Washington about Iraq (always of greater interest to our domestically-focused news corporations than what is actually happening abroad). All the while, of course, Americans are being encouraged to buy into the illusion that the ISG is doing something concrete to find a successful way out of Iraq.
What the Iraq Study Group can actually do, though, is quite limited. There simply are no good options. This or that recommendation may be able to provide cover, should the White House decide to choose what it considers a lesser evil.
But the administration itself seems to be moving to tamp down expectations that the Baker-Hamilton group is primus inter pares among the burgeoning number of commissions and committees on Iraq, and that the ISG will provide the panacea solution for which the mainstream press lusts.
In an effort to portray the president as something more than a bit player, the White House announced yesterday that he will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Amman on November 29-30 to focus on "progress made to date in the deliberations of the high-level joint committee on transferring security and responsibility, and the role of the region in supporting Iraq." National security adviser Stephen Hadley told the press that the idea for a summit meeting "came up ... maybe a little longer than a week ago. But, obviously, things accelerated as you do on these things in the last couple days." Asked to elaborate on the timing and venue, Hadley lamely explained that the president would fly to Amman after the November 28-29 NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, since "the president was going to be in the region [sic]." Hadley stressed, "There are many voices the president will want to listen to," besides the Baker-Hamilton study group and, in his determination to "draw from a varietyof sources," Bush will "want to hear what Primer Minister Maliki wants to say."
The administration recently established an "Iraq Policy Review" to harness expertise from within the government; the Pentagon has completed its own study, with planners said to be favoring a hybrid strategy labeled by one defense official “Go Big But Short While Transitioning to Go Long [sic]”; Dr. Victory-is-the-Only-Outcome and presidential adviser Henry Kissinger now says military victory is impossible; and the languishing final draft of last summer’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq can also be put in play should any of its conclusions lend themselves to supporting the preferred policy adjustment.
Thus, there is varied counsel to choose from, with the wisdom of the Iraq Study Group just one among many places to go for it; in effect, the ISG has been deliberately taken down a peg. So, illusions, politically useful as they are for the short term, are kept under long-term control through "other views," lest they actually lead to questioning the administration's policies, whatever they may be.
Training Iraqis will save the day. Training Iraqi troops to replace American ones has long been touted by the administration and the Pentagon as key to success in Iraq, a view reiterated last week by General John Abizaid in his testimony before Congress. On the surface, U.S. training of Iraqi soldiers and police seems like a viable option: It takes Americans out of the line of fire, it “softens” the impact of the U.S. occupation, making American soldiers appear to be instructors rather than aggressors, and, most importantly, it ideally gives Iraqis themselves responsibility for safety and order in their own country.
But there are many reasons to be skeptical about the effectiveness of U.S. training. First, report after report indicates the limited success—and notable failures—of U.S. training, including a recent article by Michael Scherer in Salon and yesterday's Washington Post report by Thomas E. Ricks.
Second, it is doubtful that American forces, the object of much hostility in Iraq, are sufficiently familiar with local conditions and traditions (not to mention the language) to impart even specialized military knowledge to Iraqi counterparts. Third, U.S. military training itself is by no means perfect or necessarily applicable, as a recent article in The Weekly Standard by Eric Egland, “Six Steps to Victory: The bottom-up plan to defeat the insurgency” suggests. Egland writes that:
According to one soldier in Iraq, his unit spent days going over how to clear a foxhole, something many had already trained to do numerous times in their careers. The problem is that the enemy we face in Iraq is not entrenched in foxholes, but moves fluidly and blends into the civilian population.
Of course, the key issue regarding creating a reliable home security force in Iraq is not “training” but—as neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer points out in one of his rare insightful moments—allegiance.
The chances of members of the various Iraqis under arms giving genuine allegiance to a central Iraqi government—or to any likely Iraqi government in the foreseeable future—range from slim to non-existent.
Indeed, ethnic and religious differences and widespread infiltration of the army—not to mention the police—by sectarian forces are so pervasive that it is debatable whether one can accurately speak of an “Iraqi Army.”
We Will Keep Some Kind of Control No Matter What. There is a deeply ingrained belief, perhaps rooted in eternal American optimism, that the U.S.still has the ability to control developments in Iraq to a greater or lesser degree. Advocates for different policies—augmenting U.S. troops or withdrawing them—seldom consider the possibility that local conditions could turn out to be so chaotic that we could not do what we want to do once we have decided to do it. This Green-Zone naiveté may be psychologically soothing, but it is dangerously divorced from reality in Baghdad, which is becoming more violent and fragile each day. In The Guardian (November 15), Simon Jenkins wisely warns against the “we’re in control” illusion:
As we approach the beginning of the end in Iraq there will be much throat clearing and breast-beating before reality replaces denial. For the moment, denial still rules. In America last week I was shocked at how unaware even anti-war Americans are (like many Britons) of the depth of the predicament in Iraq. They compare it with Vietnam or the Balkans—but it is not the same. It is total anarchy. All sentences beginning, "What we should now do in Iraq ... " are devoid of meaning. We are in no position to do anything. We have no potency; that is the definition of anarchy.
In sum, at a time when the American public has said “no” to what passes for administration policy on Iraq, we must be on the alert for shimmering chimeras—illusions about what the U.S. can still accomplish in that troubled country. Only then can we safely sort out and choose among the best approaches—ranging from talking with “enemies” like Syria, Iran and the “insurgents” themselves, to international conferences.
Our aim must be the quickest possible withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, letting Iraqis themselves decide the fate of their country. The urgency of achieving this becomes even more acute in light of the heavy-handed demagoguery already in evidence from prospective presidential candidates in 2008. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for example, has chosen to play fast and loose with the lives of Americans and Iraqis alike, in calling for sending substantially more troops to Iraq.
If McCain really thinks the situation can be rescued by more troops he needs a tutorial on counterinsurgency. Rather, his appeals seem motivated primarily by a wish to escape responsibility for “losing Iraq” when electoral politics heat up again. If that is his calculation, what he will not escape is responsibility for any delay this crass political tactic causes in getting our country out of this misbegotten adventure and bringing our troops home, as soon as this can be done in an orderly way.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
LA Times: "Bomb Iran now!" op-ed demonstrates where CRAVEN GREED takes a once-great American news paper...
That this op-ed has been published by the LA Times demonstrates how CRAVEN, CORRUPT, and GHOULISH the LA Times has become... and indeed, is an example or 'indicator' of how base the rest of the US 'major media' is as well.
The LA Times SHOULD have spent the past decade documenting, detailing, and writing about how the Republican Party here in America has SYSTEMATICALLY sought to UNDERCUT and SABOTAGE the world's
NUCLEAR_NON-PROLIFERATION_ACCORDS.
The basis for this steadfast Republican policy is simplicity itself: Republicans favored a "MUSCULAR" foreign policy of "DO AS WE (the United States of America) SAY... OR ELSE!"
That "or else!" policy of course includes outright bombings (Iraq, Afghanistan), or economic sabotage (Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela) or coup attemps (Haiti, Venezuela. Haiti's American sponsored coup was successful, Haiti is now ruled by death squads who answer to the military.)
These hypocritical, greedy, and destructive tendencies are demonstrated in the recent Bush/US policy of selling FIVE BILLION DOLLARS worth of General Electric co.'s latest, most high-tech NUCLEAR PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY to India... with the "understanding" that INDIA WILL USE THE TECHNOLOGY and materials in its 17, SEVENTEEN "secret" MILITARY REACTORS... that is, to PRODUCE MORE WEAPONS-GRADE materials for more bombs!
For an ENTIRE DECADE the right-wing of the Republican Party has been on an insane JIHAD _AGAINST_ ALL nuclear non-proliferation agreements... and the cowardly, lying, disgraceful LA Times (along with the rest of America's craven "mainstream media") have joined in with this anti-humanity greed and dicatorial (new) nuclear brinksmanship,,, in the name of profit, "free enterprise," and world peace, of course.
Also, Mr. Maravchik's op-ed FAILS to mention that Iran now has US COMBAT FORCES on TWO of its borders (Afghanistan AND Iraq), and that neo-con writers such as himself would LOVE to see America's "Iraq treatment" - death squads, torture, sadism, looted infrastructure, CIVIL WAR - inflicted on Iran. Mr. Maravchik obsesses about Iran's nuclear program.. but where is the outrage for ISRAEL's ILLEGAL nuclear program? Israel is nominally a "democracy," but even though the majority of Israeli voters do NOT support settlements in occupied territory, the LIKUD (reactionary right-wing) party COMPLETELY DOMINATES Israel politics, just as the Republican Party entirely dominated American politics and power until November of 2006.
Again, the US press & media MUST compile the long, sorry story of how REPUBLICANS and neo-cons have SABOTAGED the world's nuclear nono-proliferation agreements, leading to a situation where Mr. Marachik is practically lusting for a US sponsored IRAQ style CIVIL WAR in Iran. Hell, at least Iran SUPPORTED THE US WAR AGAINST THE TALIBAN in Afghanistan... unlike our Pakistan "allies," who contribute (through their ISI secret police) to the Taliban (and Al Qiada) both in Afghanistan and within Pakistan's own borders. Remember, the TALIBAN as a political-military force WAS CREATED BY Pakistan and Saudi funding as a reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. Speaking of SAUDI ARABIA, they too, along with SIX other Arab nations, have announced that they seek full-scale NUCLEAR PROGRAMS.
Since India is ramping up their nuclear program, Pakistan must surely soon follow.
WHY DOES'NT Mr. Muravchik encourge a US bombing and invasion of PAKISTAN, then, a nation which also hase a nuclear bomb program and harbors radical Islamic terrorists??!
Heck, why doesn't he volunteer his own precious behind, and LEAD THE CHARGE!
========================================
BOMB IRAN [now]
Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer.
By Joshua Muravchik, JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
November 19, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-muravchik19nov19,0,1681154.story?coll=la-opinion-center
WE MUST bomb Iran.
It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere.
First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel — except for humanitarian or religious reasons — and outside countries would have been required to refrain from aiding some, but not all, Iranian nuclear projects.
But even this was too much for the U.N. Security Council. Russia promptly announced that these sanctions were much too strong. "We cannot support measures … aimed at isolating Iran," declared Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov.
It is now clear that neither Moscow nor Beijing will ever agree to tough sanctions. What's more, even if they were to do so, it would not stop Iran, which is a country on a mission. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it: "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen…. The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes and tyranny and injustice has reached its end…. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world." There is simply no possibility that Iran's clerical rulers will trade this ecstatic vision for a mess of Western pottage in the form of economic bribes or penalties.
So if sanctions won't work, what's left? The overthrow of the current Iranian regime might offer a silver bullet, but with hard-liners firmly in the saddle in Tehran, any such prospect seems even more remote today than it did a decade ago, when students were demonstrating and reformers were ascendant. Meanwhile, the completion of Iran's bomb grows nearer every day.
Our options therefore are narrowed to two: We can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it. Former ABC newsman Ted Koppel argues for the former, saying that "if Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it." We should rely, he says, on the threat of retaliation to keep Iran from using its bomb. Similarly, Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria points out that we have succeeded in deterring other hostile nuclear states, such as the Soviet Union and China.
And in these pages, William Langewiesche summed up the what-me-worry attitude when he wrote that "the spread of nuclear weapons is, and always has been, inevitable," and that the important thing is "learning how to live with it after it occurs."
But that's whistling past the graveyard. The reality is that we cannot live safely with a nuclear-armed Iran. One reason is terrorism, of which Iran has long been the world's premier state sponsor, through groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Now, according to a report last week in London's Daily Telegraph, Iran is trying to take over Al Qaeda by positioning its own man, Saif Adel, to become the successor to the ailing Osama bin Laden. How could we possibly trust Iran not to slip nuclear material to terrorists?
Koppel says that we could prevent this by issuing a blanket warning that if a nuclear device is detonated anywhere in the United States, we will assume Iran is responsible. But would any U.S. president really order a retaliatory nuclear strike based on an assumption?
Another reason is that an Iranian bomb would constitute a dire threat to Israel's 6 million-plus citizens. Sure, Israel could strike back, but Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who was Ahmadinejad's "moderate" electoral opponent, once pointed out smugly that "the use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while [the same] against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable." If that is the voice of pragmatism in Iran, would you trust deterrence against the messianic Ahmadinejad?
Even if Iran did not drop a bomb on Israel or hand one to terrorists, its mere possession of such a device would have devastating consequences. Coming on top of North Korea's nuclear test, it would spell finis to the entire nonproliferation system.
And then there is a consequence that seems to have been thought about much less but could be the most harmful of all: Tehran could achieve its goal of regional supremacy. Jordan's King Abdullah II, for instance, has warned of an emerging Shiite "crescent." But Abdullah's comment understates the danger. If Iran's reach were limited to Shiites, it would be constrained by their minority status in the Muslim world as well as by the divisions between Persians and Arabs.
But such ethnic-based analysis fails to take into account Iran's charisma as the archenemy of the United States and Israel and the leverage it achieves as the patron of radicals and rejectionists. Given that, the old assumptions about Shiites and Sunnis may not hold any longer. Iran's closest ally today is Syria, which is mostly Sunni. The link between Tehran and Damascus is ideological, not theological. Similarly, Iran supports the Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which are overwhelmingly Sunni (and as a result, Iran has grown popular in the eyes of Palestinians).
During the Lebanon war this summer, we saw how readily Muslims closed ranks across the Sunni-Shiite divide against a common foe (even as the two groups continued killing each other in Iraq). In Sunni Egypt, newborns were named "Hezbollah" after the Lebanese Shiite organization and "Nasrallah" after its leader. As Muslim scholar Vali Nasr put it: "A flurry of anti-Hezbollah [i.e., anti-Shiite] fatwas by radical Sunni clerics have not diverted the admiring gaze of Arabs everywhere toward Hezbollah."
In short, Tehran can build influence on a mix of ethnicity and ideology, underwritten by the region's largest economy. Nuclear weapons would bring regional hegemony within its reach by intimidating neighbors and rivals and stirring the admiration of many other Muslims.
This would thrust us into a new global struggle akin to the one we waged so painfully with the Soviet Union for 40-odd years. It would be the "clash of civilizations" that has been so much talked about but so little defined.
Iran might seem little match for the United States, but that is not how Ahmadinejad sees it. He and his fellow jihadists believe that the Muslim world has already defeated one infidel superpower (the Soviet Union) and will in time defeat the other.
Russia was poor and weak in 1917 when Lenin took power, as was Germany in 1933 when Hitler came in. Neither, in the end, was able to defeat the United States, but each of them unleashed unimaginable suffering before they succumbed. And despite its weakness, Iran commands an asset that neither of them had: a natural advantage in appealing to the world's billion-plus Muslims.
If Tehran establishes dominance in the region, then the battlefield might move to Southeast Asia or Africa or even parts of Europe, as the mullahs would try to extend their sway over other Muslim peoples. In the end, we would no doubt win, but how long this contest might last and what toll it might take are anyone's guess.
The only way to forestall these frightening developments is by the use of force. Not by invading Iran as we did Iraq, but by an air campaign against Tehran's nuclear facilities. We have considerable information about these facilities; by some estimates they comprise about 1,500 targets. If we hit a large fraction of them in a bombing campaign that might last from a few days to a couple of weeks, we would inflict severe damage. This would not end Iran's weapons program, but it would certainly delay it.
What should be the timing of such an attack? If we did it next year, that would give time for U.N. diplomacy to further reveal its bankruptcy yet would come before Iran will have a bomb in hand (and also before our own presidential campaign). In time, if Tehran persisted, we might have to do it again.
Can President Bush take such action after being humiliated in the congressional elections and with the Iraq war having grown so unpopular? Bush has said that history's judgment on his conduct of the war against terror is more important than the polls. If Ahmadinejad gets his finger on a nuclear trigger, everything Bush has done will be rendered hollow. We will be a lot less safe than we were when Bush took office.
Finally, wouldn't such a U.S. air attack on Iran inflame global anti-Americanism? Wouldn't Iran retaliate in Iraq or by terrorism? Yes, probably. That is the price we would pay. But the alternative is worse.
After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, a single member of Britain's Cabinet, Winston Churchill, appealed for robust military intervention to crush the new regime. His colleagues weighed the costs — the loss of soldiers, international derision, revenge by Lenin — and rejected the idea.
The costs were avoided, and instead the world was subjected to the greatest man-made calamities ever. Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him.
The LA Times SHOULD have spent the past decade documenting, detailing, and writing about how the Republican Party here in America has SYSTEMATICALLY sought to UNDERCUT and SABOTAGE the world's
NUCLEAR_NON-PROLIFERATION_ACCORDS.
The basis for this steadfast Republican policy is simplicity itself: Republicans favored a "MUSCULAR" foreign policy of "DO AS WE (the United States of America) SAY... OR ELSE!"
That "or else!" policy of course includes outright bombings (Iraq, Afghanistan), or economic sabotage (Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela) or coup attemps (Haiti, Venezuela. Haiti's American sponsored coup was successful, Haiti is now ruled by death squads who answer to the military.)
These hypocritical, greedy, and destructive tendencies are demonstrated in the recent Bush/US policy of selling FIVE BILLION DOLLARS worth of General Electric co.'s latest, most high-tech NUCLEAR PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY to India... with the "understanding" that INDIA WILL USE THE TECHNOLOGY and materials in its 17, SEVENTEEN "secret" MILITARY REACTORS... that is, to PRODUCE MORE WEAPONS-GRADE materials for more bombs!
For an ENTIRE DECADE the right-wing of the Republican Party has been on an insane JIHAD _AGAINST_ ALL nuclear non-proliferation agreements... and the cowardly, lying, disgraceful LA Times (along with the rest of America's craven "mainstream media") have joined in with this anti-humanity greed and dicatorial (new) nuclear brinksmanship,,, in the name of profit, "free enterprise," and world peace, of course.
Also, Mr. Maravchik's op-ed FAILS to mention that Iran now has US COMBAT FORCES on TWO of its borders (Afghanistan AND Iraq), and that neo-con writers such as himself would LOVE to see America's "Iraq treatment" - death squads, torture, sadism, looted infrastructure, CIVIL WAR - inflicted on Iran. Mr. Maravchik obsesses about Iran's nuclear program.. but where is the outrage for ISRAEL's ILLEGAL nuclear program? Israel is nominally a "democracy," but even though the majority of Israeli voters do NOT support settlements in occupied territory, the LIKUD (reactionary right-wing) party COMPLETELY DOMINATES Israel politics, just as the Republican Party entirely dominated American politics and power until November of 2006.
Again, the US press & media MUST compile the long, sorry story of how REPUBLICANS and neo-cons have SABOTAGED the world's nuclear nono-proliferation agreements, leading to a situation where Mr. Marachik is practically lusting for a US sponsored IRAQ style CIVIL WAR in Iran. Hell, at least Iran SUPPORTED THE US WAR AGAINST THE TALIBAN in Afghanistan... unlike our Pakistan "allies," who contribute (through their ISI secret police) to the Taliban (and Al Qiada) both in Afghanistan and within Pakistan's own borders. Remember, the TALIBAN as a political-military force WAS CREATED BY Pakistan and Saudi funding as a reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. Speaking of SAUDI ARABIA, they too, along with SIX other Arab nations, have announced that they seek full-scale NUCLEAR PROGRAMS.
Since India is ramping up their nuclear program, Pakistan must surely soon follow.
WHY DOES'NT Mr. Muravchik encourge a US bombing and invasion of PAKISTAN, then, a nation which also hase a nuclear bomb program and harbors radical Islamic terrorists??!
Heck, why doesn't he volunteer his own precious behind, and LEAD THE CHARGE!
========================================
BOMB IRAN [now]
Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer.
By Joshua Muravchik, JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
November 19, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-muravchik19nov19,0,1681154.story?coll=la-opinion-center
WE MUST bomb Iran.
It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere.
First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel — except for humanitarian or religious reasons — and outside countries would have been required to refrain from aiding some, but not all, Iranian nuclear projects.
But even this was too much for the U.N. Security Council. Russia promptly announced that these sanctions were much too strong. "We cannot support measures … aimed at isolating Iran," declared Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov.
It is now clear that neither Moscow nor Beijing will ever agree to tough sanctions. What's more, even if they were to do so, it would not stop Iran, which is a country on a mission. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it: "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen…. The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes and tyranny and injustice has reached its end…. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world." There is simply no possibility that Iran's clerical rulers will trade this ecstatic vision for a mess of Western pottage in the form of economic bribes or penalties.
So if sanctions won't work, what's left? The overthrow of the current Iranian regime might offer a silver bullet, but with hard-liners firmly in the saddle in Tehran, any such prospect seems even more remote today than it did a decade ago, when students were demonstrating and reformers were ascendant. Meanwhile, the completion of Iran's bomb grows nearer every day.
Our options therefore are narrowed to two: We can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it. Former ABC newsman Ted Koppel argues for the former, saying that "if Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it." We should rely, he says, on the threat of retaliation to keep Iran from using its bomb. Similarly, Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria points out that we have succeeded in deterring other hostile nuclear states, such as the Soviet Union and China.
And in these pages, William Langewiesche summed up the what-me-worry attitude when he wrote that "the spread of nuclear weapons is, and always has been, inevitable," and that the important thing is "learning how to live with it after it occurs."
But that's whistling past the graveyard. The reality is that we cannot live safely with a nuclear-armed Iran. One reason is terrorism, of which Iran has long been the world's premier state sponsor, through groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Now, according to a report last week in London's Daily Telegraph, Iran is trying to take over Al Qaeda by positioning its own man, Saif Adel, to become the successor to the ailing Osama bin Laden. How could we possibly trust Iran not to slip nuclear material to terrorists?
Koppel says that we could prevent this by issuing a blanket warning that if a nuclear device is detonated anywhere in the United States, we will assume Iran is responsible. But would any U.S. president really order a retaliatory nuclear strike based on an assumption?
Another reason is that an Iranian bomb would constitute a dire threat to Israel's 6 million-plus citizens. Sure, Israel could strike back, but Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who was Ahmadinejad's "moderate" electoral opponent, once pointed out smugly that "the use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while [the same] against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable." If that is the voice of pragmatism in Iran, would you trust deterrence against the messianic Ahmadinejad?
Even if Iran did not drop a bomb on Israel or hand one to terrorists, its mere possession of such a device would have devastating consequences. Coming on top of North Korea's nuclear test, it would spell finis to the entire nonproliferation system.
And then there is a consequence that seems to have been thought about much less but could be the most harmful of all: Tehran could achieve its goal of regional supremacy. Jordan's King Abdullah II, for instance, has warned of an emerging Shiite "crescent." But Abdullah's comment understates the danger. If Iran's reach were limited to Shiites, it would be constrained by their minority status in the Muslim world as well as by the divisions between Persians and Arabs.
But such ethnic-based analysis fails to take into account Iran's charisma as the archenemy of the United States and Israel and the leverage it achieves as the patron of radicals and rejectionists. Given that, the old assumptions about Shiites and Sunnis may not hold any longer. Iran's closest ally today is Syria, which is mostly Sunni. The link between Tehran and Damascus is ideological, not theological. Similarly, Iran supports the Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which are overwhelmingly Sunni (and as a result, Iran has grown popular in the eyes of Palestinians).
During the Lebanon war this summer, we saw how readily Muslims closed ranks across the Sunni-Shiite divide against a common foe (even as the two groups continued killing each other in Iraq). In Sunni Egypt, newborns were named "Hezbollah" after the Lebanese Shiite organization and "Nasrallah" after its leader. As Muslim scholar Vali Nasr put it: "A flurry of anti-Hezbollah [i.e., anti-Shiite] fatwas by radical Sunni clerics have not diverted the admiring gaze of Arabs everywhere toward Hezbollah."
In short, Tehran can build influence on a mix of ethnicity and ideology, underwritten by the region's largest economy. Nuclear weapons would bring regional hegemony within its reach by intimidating neighbors and rivals and stirring the admiration of many other Muslims.
This would thrust us into a new global struggle akin to the one we waged so painfully with the Soviet Union for 40-odd years. It would be the "clash of civilizations" that has been so much talked about but so little defined.
Iran might seem little match for the United States, but that is not how Ahmadinejad sees it. He and his fellow jihadists believe that the Muslim world has already defeated one infidel superpower (the Soviet Union) and will in time defeat the other.
Russia was poor and weak in 1917 when Lenin took power, as was Germany in 1933 when Hitler came in. Neither, in the end, was able to defeat the United States, but each of them unleashed unimaginable suffering before they succumbed. And despite its weakness, Iran commands an asset that neither of them had: a natural advantage in appealing to the world's billion-plus Muslims.
If Tehran establishes dominance in the region, then the battlefield might move to Southeast Asia or Africa or even parts of Europe, as the mullahs would try to extend their sway over other Muslim peoples. In the end, we would no doubt win, but how long this contest might last and what toll it might take are anyone's guess.
The only way to forestall these frightening developments is by the use of force. Not by invading Iran as we did Iraq, but by an air campaign against Tehran's nuclear facilities. We have considerable information about these facilities; by some estimates they comprise about 1,500 targets. If we hit a large fraction of them in a bombing campaign that might last from a few days to a couple of weeks, we would inflict severe damage. This would not end Iran's weapons program, but it would certainly delay it.
What should be the timing of such an attack? If we did it next year, that would give time for U.N. diplomacy to further reveal its bankruptcy yet would come before Iran will have a bomb in hand (and also before our own presidential campaign). In time, if Tehran persisted, we might have to do it again.
Can President Bush take such action after being humiliated in the congressional elections and with the Iraq war having grown so unpopular? Bush has said that history's judgment on his conduct of the war against terror is more important than the polls. If Ahmadinejad gets his finger on a nuclear trigger, everything Bush has done will be rendered hollow. We will be a lot less safe than we were when Bush took office.
Finally, wouldn't such a U.S. air attack on Iran inflame global anti-Americanism? Wouldn't Iran retaliate in Iraq or by terrorism? Yes, probably. That is the price we would pay. But the alternative is worse.
After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, a single member of Britain's Cabinet, Winston Churchill, appealed for robust military intervention to crush the new regime. His colleagues weighed the costs — the loss of soldiers, international derision, revenge by Lenin — and rejected the idea.
The costs were avoided, and instead the world was subjected to the greatest man-made calamities ever. Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Wave of REVULSION and criticism at $3 million Rupert Murdoch - OJ Simpson tell-all story deal....
For more than a decade now, any Americans who have been paying attention have realized that the more that Right-Wing writers, authors, think-tanks, and celebrities (not to say 'leaders') crank out and throw charges and accusations against "liberals" and Democratic leaders, the MORE THE RIGHTIES are REALLY TALKING ABOUT THEIR OWN arrogant actions and base motivations.
At the very height of the Republican IMPEACHMENT crescendo against President Bill Clinton (based on Republican "independent" prosecutor SHIFTING his $70 million investigation from the "Whitewater" financial losses to the Monica Lewinsky affair) Republican House Speaker designate Congressman Robert Livingstone had to RESIGN from Congress when it was revealed that he, too, was LYING ABOUT an ONGOING AFFAIR... an ongoing affair! As were a dozen other Republican House leaders, including Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, and even the de facto House Republican leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, he of "HOT TUB TOM" infamy before he was accorded his more well-known nickname, "The Hammer" for relentlessly demagoguing "Moral Values" issues to enable Repubican "pay to pay" bribery and extortion scandals. (Namely the "K-Street Project," of which convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff was only one part; and Vietnam Navy war hero and Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham was yet another part of the ongoing Republican Congressional BRIBERY scandals.)
For her part, Right-Wing pundit provocateur ANN COULTER relentlessly decries the "LIBERAL" assault on America's morality and "moral values," although she remains single, is rumored to have an insatiable appetite for sex with many different partners, and (no rumor here) appears on morning talk shows and at public appearances wearing the skimpiest, shortest cocktail dresses imaginable, provocatively waving her legs and blond locks at the camera's TV audience. FOX 'news' commentator Bill O'Reilly also enjoys flirting with his TV viewers, with his sensuous, darting (not to say, 'snakelike'?) tongue, and O'Reilly was captured on tape talking phone-sex to his female assistant (behind his wife's back, we assume).
And of course radio "commentator" and Right-Wing "MORAL VALUES" demagogue blowhard RUSH LIMBAUGH is a divorce attorney's dream, and more to the point not only consumed Oxycontin "hillbilly heroin" pills by the handful, BUT SENT HIS house maid OUT TO PURCHASE THOUSANDS of such pills "on the street" for him, a crime for which thousands of Americans are doing long stretches in prison in America's gruesome "Drug Wars" as we speak! And for YET ANOTHER Limbaugh level Republican hypocrite, there is Right-Wing self-appointed defender of "moral values" BILL BENNETT, decrying the "LIBERAL" contempt for "Moral Values" one day, and then sitting naked in his Las Vegas suite, pulling the handle of a slot machine into which he is voraciously feeding quarters the next!
As these and 100 other examples illustrate, when Righties shout "LIBERAL DEMOCRATS ARE DEFILING AMERICA's CULTURE!" they are often talking about THEIR OWN base motivations and habits.
And SO IT IS WITH RUPERT MURDOCH, who is doing his own level best to turn America into "POTTERSVILLE," the nightmare gangster-ridden town featured as an alternative reality to the quite, dignified small town we see at the beginning of the film in the James Stewart movie, "It's a Wonderful Life." According to the wikipedia entry for the movie, Director Frank Cappra had to skirt the MPAA movie association rules in force at the time, that held that criminals must always be punished for their crimes; in this case that Mr. Potter was never caught or punished for stealing the $8,000 from Uncle Bernie that led to George Bailey's suicide attempt and the alternate reality bestowed on Bailey - "I wish I had never been born!" - by his guardian angel, Clarence.
Director Cappra received more mail about Mr. Potter's ill-gotten money than about any other subject in the movie that is now considered an iconic part of America's film culture.
Today, we wonder if America's evil Mr. Potter incarnate - Rupert Murdoch - will profit from his latest ghoulish, hypocritical debasement of America's culture.
=======================================
News that Murdoch organisations have scooped a book and TV deal based on the OJ Simpson [MURDER] case has prompted a US-wide wave of revulsion
OJ 'confession': now US turns on Murdoch
by Paul Harris in New York
Sunday November 19, 2006
The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1951831,00.html
It must have seemed like a good idea to someone. The man most Americans believe is behind their country's most infamous murder agrees to a virtual confession in a book and TV interview. Surely it would be a ratings and publishing smash.
Not quite so fast. For in reality OJ Simpson has succeeded where millions of angry liberals have always failed: striking a direct blow at the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, and especially its controversial broadcasting arm, headed by Fox television.
A wave of revulsion and open criticism, reaching a climax this weekend, has swept America in the wake of revelations that Simpson intends to capitalise on the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman with a book and TV 'confession' in a £1.8 million deal brokered by Murdoch-owned companies. So widespread is the condemnation that even some of the top names on Murdoch's own cable channel, Fox News, have urged viewers not to buy the book or watch the interview.
It is no surprise. In both book and interview Simpson describes how he would have murdered Brown and Goldman. But only if 'hypothetically' he had done it. He even describes the amount of blood that would have been caused by slashing the pair to death.
The extent of the reaction perhaps typifies a case that has both outraged and enthralled Americans.
Certainly, the public vilification of Simpson seems to have taken its toll on Judith Regan, the controversial US book publisher who conducted the interview and whose Murdoch-owned ReganBooks is behind the deal. She has issued a bizarre eight-page defence of the deal in which she confessed to being a battered wife and that she felt the spirit of the slain couple in the room with her as she spoke to Simpson.
Given the scale of the backlash, it is no surprise that Regan is feeling the pressure. Murdoch and Fox must have been taken aback at the sheer speed at which the publishing scoop of the century has turned into a potential public relations disaster.
Local TV stations have already been swamped by complaints from the public, prompting many to opt out of showing the interview.
The outrage has spread to the publishing world, where revulsion at the book itself, entitled If I Did It, has already seen some stores start sending it back.
The anger was sharpened by publicity stunts such as the colouring of the 'I Did It' part of the book's title in red, and the fading of the 'If' into a pale white. In California the owner of Brentwood Bookstore, near where the murders took place, has refused to stock it, while the Northern California Independent Booksellers' Association, made up of some 240 bookstores, has emailed its members suggesting cash generated by the book be donated to domestic violence charities. Even some of the biggest media names in Murdoch's own empire have joined the fray, though the cynical might interpret that as a clever media ploy to have one's cake and eat it.
Bill O'Reilly, the conservative and outspoken anchor of a talk show on Fox News, called for a boycott of advertisers who buy ad space during the two-hour long interview. Another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, famous for his patriotic stance on the war on terror, declared that the Simpson deal was 'appalling' and vowed to oppose it.
The Fox channel has long been a liberal bete noire and the subject of numerous documentaries about its obvious conservative bias. But the Simpson scandal is different, with the sheer involvement of Murdoch's empire striking at the heart of middle America. It was controlled from the start by disparate elements of Murdoch's News Corp empire: ReganBooks is owned by Murdoch's HarperCollins. The interview is to be shown on two separate shows on Murdoch's Fox network, just in time for a vital ratings boost that will set lucrative future advertising rates. And news of the deal was first revealed in the Murdoch-owned New York Post last week.
The New York Daily News, bitter rival to the Post, immediately came out blasting both its editorial barrels at Murdoch and Regan. In an editorial directly addressed to Regan, the newspaper accused her and her boss of making blood money. 'He did it for buckets of bloody bucks, just as you and Murdoch are,' the paper thundered.
But Murdoch is used to media storms. Fox, too, has long revelled in controversial attention. Both have often trusted the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity, even when it involves Simpson's hypothetical confession of a murder that was all too real. But if millions of Americans still tune in to watch or buy the book, then Murdoch will have had the last laugh over his critics.
It would not be the first time.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
George Stephanopoulos WHORING right-wing economic lies again....
IF it's Sunday, it must be GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC) and TIM RUSSERT (nbc) WHORING LIES for the right-wing agenda again. We don't want to spend too much time on sell-out George or "Monica, Monica, Monica, MONICA!" Tim this beautiful Sunday morning, but in this first week after the 2006 election it is indeed good to see pale-face-with-forked-tongue commentator GEORGE WILL on the ABC show, touting his "I'm so concerned for the economic health of America" lies and greed. In this case, Will flat out asserted "MOST OF THOSE EARNING MINIMUM WAGE ARE WELL ABOVE THE POVERTY LINE."
This simple assertion is based on several popular FALLACIES, such as that only teenagers and those on secure retirements accept minimum wage job; or that minimum wage in a full-time job is _NOT_ BELOW THE POVERTY LINE, or that minimum wage jobs are NOT the main source of income for hundreds of thousands of American families.
ALL OF THESE ASSSERTIONS ARE FALSE, and overpaid George Stephanopoulos has NO BUSINESS letting them go buy uncontested on his show without CHALLENGING THEM and DEMANDING that George Will back up his stats. (We remind that Stephanopoulos was part of the Clinton-Gore 'war room' of 1992 that made "It's the ECONOMY, STUPID!" that campaign's central theme, and that it was that campaign and campaign theme that boosted Stephanopoulos to the national attention from which he got his current job lying for ABC, selling out the very principles and policies he fought for in 1992.)
George Will and George Stephanopoulos: If it's Sunday morning, they must be LYING for ABC 'news' again!
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/ Transcript posted when available.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Media Matters catches TIME magazine whoring "the muddled middle" conservative narrative for Election 2006...
TIME magazine doing what they do best: LYING and DISTORTING the 'news', trying to rob millions of Americans of their votes, their Social Security, their health care, their affordable prescription drugs, their children's educations and futures... Indeed, TIME and the "major media" are even undercutting the security of our nation, and our nation's good name, in order to promote their amoral big-business/Carlyle/military industrial complex/corporate greed/"major media" agenda. - The media which ran the Clinton-Gore Democratic staffers out of Washington DC in early 2001 with the HOAX "White House TRASHING!" story; the media which mocked at the DISENFRANCHISEMENT of thousands of American voters, the intervention of the callow Supreme Court, and sneered at any calls for a verifibable recount in Florida (and elsewhere) in 2000; the media which CHEERED ON the LIES TO WAR and glossed over the government's incompetence preceding 9-11; the media which BURIES the story of the 9-11 Commission recommendations for post- 9-11 security improvements; the media which CHEERED ON TAX CUTS for CORPORATIONS and CENSORS the true extent of those huge Bush-Republican budget-deficits (or tries to distort the reasons for those trillion-dollar deficits as being because of the $500 billion spent on the Iraq war).... TIME magazine RELENTLESSLY LIES and DISTORTS _ALL_ of these stories, for one reason only: for sheer, abject greed, a bowing-before-Mamon lust for the money that flows into corporate media coffers every year from tax cuts, from selling Americans our "consumer uber alles" lifestyle, and from holding a monopoly position in America's bi-annual election process, which forces even those who oppose some corporate policies to ENRICH the very corporations they seek to restrain and provide oversight for.
=======================================
Another TERRIFIC article by the good folks at MediaMatters.org; the same folks who in our previous post researched the campaign news and policy statements of 27 Democratic winners from Election 2006 to DISPROVE the notion that those candidates won espousing a "centrist" or even 'conservative' agenda. (In review, Media Matters found that all 27 winning Dem. candidates FAVORED such "liberal" issues as raising the minimum wage, saving Social Security, changing course in Iraq, and using federal funds for stem cell research. Only 5 of the 27 opposed the reproductive rights associated with abortion.)
THIS MediaMatters story catches Time magazine WHORING the conservative narrative that 2006 was somehow a "muddled middle" (or even "conservative") election. In their cover story after the 1994 Newt Gingrich "contract on America" election, TIME portrays a rampaging elephant stomping towards the reader, taking up the entire cover of the magazine - quite a graphic image! Indeed, in TIME's cover illustration for that first post-election 1994 issue, the giant elephant has completely crushed and killed a (Democratic) donkey under one of it's monstrous feet. Yet in this election, with the Democrats seeing gains and wins comparable to the '94 Republican takeover of Congress, TIME opts to present as wishy-washy and muddled a cover image as possible: two EQUAL overlapping circles, one red and one blue, representing "conservative" and "liberal" respectively, with the central, overlapping portion being the focus of the cover and of Time's take on the election - the purple of "MUDDLED MIDDLE."
"MUDDLED MIDDLE" our dierierres, TIME! THERE YOU GO AGAIN, WHORING the right-wing "miltiary industrial compllex and big-money uber-alles" agenda that President Eisenhower warned us about in his final (farewell) presidential speech.
Terrific Media-Matters survey DECONSTRUCTS the Media's notion that Dem candidates were "conservative"
This terrific MediaMatters.org story DECONSTRUCTS the notion- put foward by Republicans AND the "Major Media" that this election was about CONSERVATIVE issues and so-called "conservative values."
In short, of the 27 Dem candidates who defeated Republican incumbents or won open seats, ALL TWENTY SEVEN supported
1.) RAISING the MINIMUM WAGE,
2.) CHANGING COURSE IN IRAQ,
3.) OPPOSE "privatizing" Social Security, and
4.) support (only 2 opposed) STEM CELL RESEARCH.
Those are all "LIBERAL" positions, and what is really notable about America's right-wing media bias, no doubt among the millions of Americans in the minority who voted AGAINST some of those progressive polices, ARE Voters voting AGAINST Social Security and other liberal programs WHO DEPEND ON THOSE VERY PROGRAMS!
2006 Election Candidates
http://mediamatters.org/items/200611090003
Following the November 7 midterm elections, Media Matters for America examined the policy positions of those Democratic House candidates who, as of the morning of November 8, had defeated Republican incumbents or been elected to open seats previously held by Republicans. This survey of the Democrats' campaign websites, candidate questionnaires, and statements in news reports found that these incoming lawmakers agree on a set of issues central to the Democratic platform, including raising the minimum wage, changing course in Iraq, and protecting Social Security:
ALL 27 candidates support raising the minimum wage.
ALL 27 candidates advocate changing course in Iraq.
ALL 27 candidates oppose efforts to privatize Social Security.
Only two of the 27 candidates do not support embryonic stem cell research.
Only five of the 27 candidates describe themselves as "pro-life."
Following is a list of the 27 candidates and their respective positions:
Harry Mitchell (AZ-05)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Jerry McNerney (CA-04)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Contra Costa Times, 10/14/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Ed Perlmutter (CO-07)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Chris Murphy (CT-05)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Tim Mahoney (FL-16)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Jupiter Courier, 9/17/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Ron Klein (FL-22)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Palm Beach Post, 11/5/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Joe Donnelly (IN-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Brad Ellsworth (IN-08)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Baron Hill (IN-09)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Bruce Braley (IA-01)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Dave Loebsack (IA-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Nancy Boyda (KS-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
John Yarmuth (KY-03)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Tim Walz (MN-01)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Heath Shuler (NC-11)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Paul Hodes (NH-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
John Hall (NY-19)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-20)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Michael Arcuri (NY-24)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Zack Space (OH-18)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Jackson County Times-Journal, 11/2/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Jason Altmire (PA-04)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Joe Sestak (PA-07)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Chris Carney (PA-10)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Nick Lampson (TX-22)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Steve Kagen (WI-08)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10/27/96]
Pro-choice
In short, of the 27 Dem candidates who defeated Republican incumbents or won open seats, ALL TWENTY SEVEN supported
1.) RAISING the MINIMUM WAGE,
2.) CHANGING COURSE IN IRAQ,
3.) OPPOSE "privatizing" Social Security, and
4.) support (only 2 opposed) STEM CELL RESEARCH.
Those are all "LIBERAL" positions, and what is really notable about America's right-wing media bias, no doubt among the millions of Americans in the minority who voted AGAINST some of those progressive polices, ARE Voters voting AGAINST Social Security and other liberal programs WHO DEPEND ON THOSE VERY PROGRAMS!
2006 Election Candidates
http://mediamatters.org/items/200611090003
Following the November 7 midterm elections, Media Matters for America examined the policy positions of those Democratic House candidates who, as of the morning of November 8, had defeated Republican incumbents or been elected to open seats previously held by Republicans. This survey of the Democrats' campaign websites, candidate questionnaires, and statements in news reports found that these incoming lawmakers agree on a set of issues central to the Democratic platform, including raising the minimum wage, changing course in Iraq, and protecting Social Security:
ALL 27 candidates support raising the minimum wage.
ALL 27 candidates advocate changing course in Iraq.
ALL 27 candidates oppose efforts to privatize Social Security.
Only two of the 27 candidates do not support embryonic stem cell research.
Only five of the 27 candidates describe themselves as "pro-life."
Following is a list of the 27 candidates and their respective positions:
Harry Mitchell (AZ-05)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Jerry McNerney (CA-04)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Contra Costa Times, 10/14/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Ed Perlmutter (CO-07)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Chris Murphy (CT-05)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Tim Mahoney (FL-16)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Jupiter Courier, 9/17/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Ron Klein (FL-22)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Palm Beach Post, 11/5/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Joe Donnelly (IN-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Brad Ellsworth (IN-08)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Baron Hill (IN-09)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Bruce Braley (IA-01)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Dave Loebsack (IA-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Nancy Boyda (KS-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
John Yarmuth (KY-03)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Tim Walz (MN-01)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Heath Shuler (NC-11)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Paul Hodes (NH-02)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
John Hall (NY-19)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-20)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Michael Arcuri (NY-24)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Zack Space (OH-18)
Supports raising the minimum wage [Jackson County Times-Journal, 11/2/06]
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Jason Altmire (PA-04)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Joe Sestak (PA-07)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Chris Carney (PA-10)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Nick Lampson (TX-22)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research
Pro-choice
Steve Kagen (WI-08)
Supports raising the minimum wage
Advocates changing course in Iraq
Opposes efforts to privatize Social Security
Supports embryonic stem cell research [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10/27/96]
Pro-choice
Friday, November 17, 2006
CBS mea culpa: for past 12 years, media has HIDDEN the ugly warts of the Republican House leadership...
A terrific Mea Culpa by CBS news' Dick Meyer, who writes "The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years [since the Newt Gingrich "Contract on America revolution" Republican takeover of the Congress] were a group of WEIRDOS. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, THE MEDIA DIDN'T CALL A DUCK A DUCK, because that's not something we're supposed to do."
note: "Calling a duck a duck" could mean "calling a hypocrite a hypocrite," or "calling a racist a racist," or "calling a homophobe a homophobe," or calling a "tax and spend Libruls!" demagogue the "PORK BARREL SPENDER" that he/she decreis in others. BUT this article is a great step in the right direction...!
___________________________________________________________
Good Riddance To The Gingrichites
GOP 'Club' Ruled The House For 12 Years And Won't Be Missed
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2006
Former Rep. Newt Gingrich led the "Contract With America" crowd in 1994. (AP)
Commentary by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/15/opinion/meyer/main2182755.shtml
Quote
History reveals that often great leaders and intellectuals appear in clusters, inspiring and motivating each other to extraordinary achievement ... The opposite is also true.
___________________________________________________________
This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.
Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.
I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99 percent of the population — if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies — would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections.
I'm confident that if historians ever spend the time on it, they'll confirm my thesis. Same with forensic psychiatrists. I have discussed this with scores of politicians, staffers, consultants and reporters since 1994 and have found few dissenters.
Politicians in this country get a bad rap. For the most part, they are like any high-achieving group in America, with roughly the same distribution of pathologies and virtues. But the leaders of the GOP House didn't fit the personality profile of American politicians, and they didn't deviate in a good way. It was the Chess Club on steroids.
The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government.
Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace.
Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of '94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime.
More than the others, Newton Leroy Gingrich lived out a very special hypocrisy. In addition to the above biographical dissonance, Gingrich was one of the most sharp-tongued, articulate and persuasive attack dogs in modern politics. His favorite target was the supposed immorality and corruption of the Democratic Party. With soaring rhetoric, he condemned his opponents as anti-American and dangerous to our country's family values — "grotesque" was a favorite word.
Yet this was a man who was divorced twice — the first time when his wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment, the second time after an affair was revealed.
Gingrich made his bones in the party by relentlessly attacking Democratic corruption, yet he was hounded from office because of a series of serious ethics questions. He posed as a reformer of the House, yet championed a series of deforms that made the legislative process more closed, more conducive to hiding special interest favors and less a forum for genuine debate.
And he did it all with epic sanctimony.
These squirrelly guys attracted and promoted to power similarly odd colleagues: birds of a feather, you know, stick together. Bill Clinton of Monica Lewinsky fame had no more zealous and moralistic critic than Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who ran a then-powerful committee. In the course of his crusade, Burton was forced to admit he had actually fathered a child in an extramarital affair.
The man who led the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings with equal, if saner, bloodlust was Rep. Henry Hyde. In the midst of this, Hyde was forced to admit to a five-year affair.
When Gingrich stepped down, Republicans turned to a master Louisiana pork-barreller, Robert Livingston. That lasted a day or so, until Livingston (you guessed it) admitted to having extramarital affairs.
Livingston was succeeded by Dennis Hastert, perhaps the most, well, conventional of the GOP leaders of his era. Still, Hastert was a hawk with no military service and a defender of the rich with no money or experience in business.
In this year's election cycle, House Republicans were justly vilified for their subservience to the corruptions of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay's entire K Street project. While extreme, there have been many other periods of extreme corruption in Congress.
What marked this Republican cadre was not their corruption, but the chips on their shoulders.
It was a localized condition. It didn't spread to the Senate. The Republican leaders there — again, suspend your ideology and just look at biography — were pretty typical American politicians.
Bob Dole, Trent Lott and Bill Frist were not acting out in office. They were not ideologues and did not use the rhetoric of the righteous. The colleagues that wielded the most power — like McCain, Simpson, Lugar, Specter, Stevens, Warner — have had long runs of service in several arenas relatively free of public and private embarrassment and hypocrisy — and even some substantial accomplishments pre-Senate.
History reveals that great leaders and intellectuals often appear in clusters, inspiring and motivating each other to extraordinary achievement. American historians have focused on this in recent books looking at the "founding brothers," Lincoln's "team of rivals," the 19th-century pragmatist philosophers called "the metaphysical club," Roosevelt's New Dealers and Kennedy's "best and the brightest."
The opposite is also true.
What's next for the House is of course uncertain, but an undistinguished chapter has come to a close. Good riddance.
Dick Meyer is the editorial director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.
note: "Calling a duck a duck" could mean "calling a hypocrite a hypocrite," or "calling a racist a racist," or "calling a homophobe a homophobe," or calling a "tax and spend Libruls!" demagogue the "PORK BARREL SPENDER" that he/she decreis in others. BUT this article is a great step in the right direction...!
___________________________________________________________
Good Riddance To The Gingrichites
GOP 'Club' Ruled The House For 12 Years And Won't Be Missed
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2006
Former Rep. Newt Gingrich led the "Contract With America" crowd in 1994. (AP)
Commentary by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/15/opinion/meyer/main2182755.shtml
Quote
History reveals that often great leaders and intellectuals appear in clusters, inspiring and motivating each other to extraordinary achievement ... The opposite is also true.
___________________________________________________________
This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.
Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.
I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99 percent of the population — if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies — would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections.
I'm confident that if historians ever spend the time on it, they'll confirm my thesis. Same with forensic psychiatrists. I have discussed this with scores of politicians, staffers, consultants and reporters since 1994 and have found few dissenters.
Politicians in this country get a bad rap. For the most part, they are like any high-achieving group in America, with roughly the same distribution of pathologies and virtues. But the leaders of the GOP House didn't fit the personality profile of American politicians, and they didn't deviate in a good way. It was the Chess Club on steroids.
The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government.
Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace.
Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of '94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime.
More than the others, Newton Leroy Gingrich lived out a very special hypocrisy. In addition to the above biographical dissonance, Gingrich was one of the most sharp-tongued, articulate and persuasive attack dogs in modern politics. His favorite target was the supposed immorality and corruption of the Democratic Party. With soaring rhetoric, he condemned his opponents as anti-American and dangerous to our country's family values — "grotesque" was a favorite word.
Yet this was a man who was divorced twice — the first time when his wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment, the second time after an affair was revealed.
Gingrich made his bones in the party by relentlessly attacking Democratic corruption, yet he was hounded from office because of a series of serious ethics questions. He posed as a reformer of the House, yet championed a series of deforms that made the legislative process more closed, more conducive to hiding special interest favors and less a forum for genuine debate.
And he did it all with epic sanctimony.
These squirrelly guys attracted and promoted to power similarly odd colleagues: birds of a feather, you know, stick together. Bill Clinton of Monica Lewinsky fame had no more zealous and moralistic critic than Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who ran a then-powerful committee. In the course of his crusade, Burton was forced to admit he had actually fathered a child in an extramarital affair.
The man who led the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings with equal, if saner, bloodlust was Rep. Henry Hyde. In the midst of this, Hyde was forced to admit to a five-year affair.
When Gingrich stepped down, Republicans turned to a master Louisiana pork-barreller, Robert Livingston. That lasted a day or so, until Livingston (you guessed it) admitted to having extramarital affairs.
Livingston was succeeded by Dennis Hastert, perhaps the most, well, conventional of the GOP leaders of his era. Still, Hastert was a hawk with no military service and a defender of the rich with no money or experience in business.
In this year's election cycle, House Republicans were justly vilified for their subservience to the corruptions of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay's entire K Street project. While extreme, there have been many other periods of extreme corruption in Congress.
What marked this Republican cadre was not their corruption, but the chips on their shoulders.
It was a localized condition. It didn't spread to the Senate. The Republican leaders there — again, suspend your ideology and just look at biography — were pretty typical American politicians.
Bob Dole, Trent Lott and Bill Frist were not acting out in office. They were not ideologues and did not use the rhetoric of the righteous. The colleagues that wielded the most power — like McCain, Simpson, Lugar, Specter, Stevens, Warner — have had long runs of service in several arenas relatively free of public and private embarrassment and hypocrisy — and even some substantial accomplishments pre-Senate.
History reveals that great leaders and intellectuals often appear in clusters, inspiring and motivating each other to extraordinary achievement. American historians have focused on this in recent books looking at the "founding brothers," Lincoln's "team of rivals," the 19th-century pragmatist philosophers called "the metaphysical club," Roosevelt's New Dealers and Kennedy's "best and the brightest."
The opposite is also true.
What's next for the House is of course uncertain, but an undistinguished chapter has come to a close. Good riddance.
Dick Meyer is the editorial director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Glen Beck, CNN document Islamic HATE propaganda....
WE WELCOME the discussion of propaganda, hate, and authortarian, dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, but can't help but wonder... WHY have CNN and Glen Beck given A FREE PASS to the SAUDI FUNDING of Wahabi Madrasses (religious schools) throughout the region, including those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Asia, that teach intolerance, hatred, and the ideology of "Jihad" conquest of non-believers?
Indeed, WHY has CNN and the entire "major media" given such a huge FREE PASS for the Bush administration's CLOSE LINKS to the Saudi regime before, during, and after the 9-11 terrorist attacks? (17 of the twenty 9-11 terrorist hijackers CAME FROM SAUDI ARABIA).
WHY do we know SO LITTLE about the 9-11 hijackers and their funding back in Saudi Arabia?
WHY does Mr. Beck not mention that KUWAITIS are close allies of the US as well, even though the Kuwaiti Iman pictured in the CNN "Extremist Agenda" video is calling for hate and destruction of Isreal?
note: We are under no illusion as the to potential for Islamic radical hate. Political Science professor, Conflict Resolution researcher, and Nobel Prize nominated author Rudy Rummel has documented Pakistan's brutal "mega-genocide" against East-Pakistan before India intervened in that bloody operation and helped the Bengalis declare independence from Pakistan, India's intervention in the brual genocide in East Pakistan led to the creation of the independent nation of Bangladesh, but only after up to ONE MILLION Bengalis, Hindus, intellectuals, and other minorities were killed by Pakistan's military.
Statistics of Pakistan's 1971 Democide in East Pakistan, (modern Bangladesh), 1,500,000 killed in less than 267 days
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP8.HTM
(Excerpt at bottom of this post)
However, such murderous intent is far from restricted to Islamic states, as we well know from even a passing review of Hitler or Stalin's regimes. Perhaps an even more valid comparison would be the carnage inflicted on the African peoples of the Congo river basin by Belgian King Leopold II after he hoodwinked European powers and religious leaders into giving him sole, uncontested rule of what he would cleverly label "The Free Congo Republic" in 1878. What was labelled "Congo Free State" was in fact a vast slave gulag where the good king owned EVERYTHING throughout the land, and the natives were not permitted to own even the trees in their villages. Leopold's hired soldiers and "company administrators" would routinely wipe out half of any given village in any given week's conquest. According to some of the statistics, the Congo region declined in population from as much (or more than) 20 million Africans, to less than 8 million under Leopold's murderous, MASS-MURDEROUS rule. That is, at least from 5 to 15 million Africans perished under the insanely murderous regime of King Leopold II and wholesale European neglect of those systematic atrocities.
Indeed, Professor Rummel is a specialist on the subject of "DEMOCIDE" - murder (mass-murder) by government - and as astoishing at it seems, Hitler and Stalin don't even break into the Top-Three of most murderous regimes in history.
Mr. Rummel brings up the point, "How can such a massive destruction and genocide, for greed and profit, slip down the memory hole of our western conciousness?" And the answer is clearly, (our words) "Citizens and the public hear what they are told from the mass communication media, and if the mass media trumpets for a decade or two only those stories of our alleged 'moral values' superiority, then they (the media and consumers) don't have the time to examine the other side of the story.
______________________________________
Up to, or more than 10 million Africans killed under Belgian King Leopold's ruthless rule of the Belgian Congo/Congo Free State
http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/12/reevaluating-colonial-democide.html
====================================
GLENN BECK
Exposed: The Extremist Agenda
Aired November 15, 2006 -
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/15/gb.01.html
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
GLENN BECK, HOST: For the next 60 minutes, you are going to see video of Islamist extremists that you have probably never seen before. Video that personifies hate and rage. Video like this one from inside a Baghdad mosque that has made me believe that we must not only listen to these people, we must take them at their word.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (speaking foreign language)
GRAPHIC: The Americans and their president and the British and their allies and the Zionists, the spoiled offspring of this entity, Allahu Akbar! (Allah is the greatest). If Allah permits us, oh, Nation of Mohammad, even the stone will say, Oh Muslim, a Jew is hiding behind me, come and cut off his head, and we shall cut off his head. By Allah, we shall cut it off!
Oh Jews, Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Jihad for the sake of Allah! Victory to Allah! Allahu Akbar! The believers [Muslims] will triumph!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BECK: A few months ago my producers showed me a video of Islamic extremists leading a massive rally against Israel and the U.S. in the Middle East. It shocked me to my core. Not just because of the size of the crowds and the depth of their hatred, but it was beyond that. (continued at
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/15/gb.01.html
===================================
Statistics of Pakistan's 1971 Democide in East Pakistan
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP8.HTM
In 1971 the self-appointed President of Pakistan and Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and his top generals prepared a careful and systematic military, economic, and political operation in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). They also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide.
After a well organized military buildup in East Pakistan the military launched its campaign. No more than 267 days later they had succeeded in killing perhaps 1,500,000 people, created 10,000,000 refugees who had fled to India, provoked a war with India, incited a counter-genocide of 150,000 non-Bengalis, and lost East Pakistan.
Indeed, WHY has CNN and the entire "major media" given such a huge FREE PASS for the Bush administration's CLOSE LINKS to the Saudi regime before, during, and after the 9-11 terrorist attacks? (17 of the twenty 9-11 terrorist hijackers CAME FROM SAUDI ARABIA).
WHY do we know SO LITTLE about the 9-11 hijackers and their funding back in Saudi Arabia?
WHY does Mr. Beck not mention that KUWAITIS are close allies of the US as well, even though the Kuwaiti Iman pictured in the CNN "Extremist Agenda" video is calling for hate and destruction of Isreal?
note: We are under no illusion as the to potential for Islamic radical hate. Political Science professor, Conflict Resolution researcher, and Nobel Prize nominated author Rudy Rummel has documented Pakistan's brutal "mega-genocide" against East-Pakistan before India intervened in that bloody operation and helped the Bengalis declare independence from Pakistan, India's intervention in the brual genocide in East Pakistan led to the creation of the independent nation of Bangladesh, but only after up to ONE MILLION Bengalis, Hindus, intellectuals, and other minorities were killed by Pakistan's military.
Statistics of Pakistan's 1971 Democide in East Pakistan, (modern Bangladesh), 1,500,000 killed in less than 267 days
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP8.HTM
(Excerpt at bottom of this post)
However, such murderous intent is far from restricted to Islamic states, as we well know from even a passing review of Hitler or Stalin's regimes. Perhaps an even more valid comparison would be the carnage inflicted on the African peoples of the Congo river basin by Belgian King Leopold II after he hoodwinked European powers and religious leaders into giving him sole, uncontested rule of what he would cleverly label "The Free Congo Republic" in 1878. What was labelled "Congo Free State" was in fact a vast slave gulag where the good king owned EVERYTHING throughout the land, and the natives were not permitted to own even the trees in their villages. Leopold's hired soldiers and "company administrators" would routinely wipe out half of any given village in any given week's conquest. According to some of the statistics, the Congo region declined in population from as much (or more than) 20 million Africans, to less than 8 million under Leopold's murderous, MASS-MURDEROUS rule. That is, at least from 5 to 15 million Africans perished under the insanely murderous regime of King Leopold II and wholesale European neglect of those systematic atrocities.
Indeed, Professor Rummel is a specialist on the subject of "DEMOCIDE" - murder (mass-murder) by government - and as astoishing at it seems, Hitler and Stalin don't even break into the Top-Three of most murderous regimes in history.
Mr. Rummel brings up the point, "How can such a massive destruction and genocide, for greed and profit, slip down the memory hole of our western conciousness?" And the answer is clearly, (our words) "Citizens and the public hear what they are told from the mass communication media, and if the mass media trumpets for a decade or two only those stories of our alleged 'moral values' superiority, then they (the media and consumers) don't have the time to examine the other side of the story.
______________________________________
Up to, or more than 10 million Africans killed under Belgian King Leopold's ruthless rule of the Belgian Congo/Congo Free State
http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/12/reevaluating-colonial-democide.html
====================================
GLENN BECK
Exposed: The Extremist Agenda
Aired November 15, 2006 -
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/15/gb.01.html
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
GLENN BECK, HOST: For the next 60 minutes, you are going to see video of Islamist extremists that you have probably never seen before. Video that personifies hate and rage. Video like this one from inside a Baghdad mosque that has made me believe that we must not only listen to these people, we must take them at their word.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (speaking foreign language)
GRAPHIC: The Americans and their president and the British and their allies and the Zionists, the spoiled offspring of this entity, Allahu Akbar! (Allah is the greatest). If Allah permits us, oh, Nation of Mohammad, even the stone will say, Oh Muslim, a Jew is hiding behind me, come and cut off his head, and we shall cut off his head. By Allah, we shall cut it off!
Oh Jews, Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Jihad for the sake of Allah! Victory to Allah! Allahu Akbar! The believers [Muslims] will triumph!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BECK: A few months ago my producers showed me a video of Islamic extremists leading a massive rally against Israel and the U.S. in the Middle East. It shocked me to my core. Not just because of the size of the crowds and the depth of their hatred, but it was beyond that. (continued at
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/15/gb.01.html
===================================
Statistics of Pakistan's 1971 Democide in East Pakistan
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP8.HTM
In 1971 the self-appointed President of Pakistan and Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan and his top generals prepared a careful and systematic military, economic, and political operation in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). They also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation to come. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide.
After a well organized military buildup in East Pakistan the military launched its campaign. No more than 267 days later they had succeeded in killing perhaps 1,500,000 people, created 10,000,000 refugees who had fled to India, provoked a war with India, incited a counter-genocide of 150,000 non-Bengalis, and lost East Pakistan.
Fox 'news', Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly LEAD THE RACE to media "Moral Values" gutter!
This article by Steve Young should be titled "Bill O'Reilly cowardly SELLS OUT his "Moral Values Guardian" role to Fox 'news' vulgar, garish and ghoulish race to the Media Gutter."
Indeed, in the first 3 days of this week, Fox (billionaire Rupert Murdoch's privately owned media network) is in the news for TWO major stories that defy their own bombastic propaganda that "liberals and Democrats are destroying the fabric of America's moral values, and helping to destroy America's national security."
For, you see, Murdoch and Fox are going to air a special interview with... OJ Simpson, of the Nicole Simpson/Ron Goldman murder case infamy. Not only is Murdoch's Fox LEADING the race to the media's ghoulish gutter, but there is another story floating around out there.. that Fox news paid a TWO MILLION DOLLAR RANSOM to the kidnappers of Fox mideast reporter Steve Centanni.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-08-14-gaza-kidnapping_x.htm
Since those insurgents are already bragging that the $2 million ransom WILL be used to buy more weapons for the anti-Israel jihad, that leaves open the possibility (by the draconian standards of the Bush administration's Patriot I & II acts, the MCA act, and the latest horror, the US Insurrection Act) that FOX could be accused of AIDING THE TERRORISTS.
Fox- it's hard to determine WHICH IS WORSE: LEADING the race to America's "moral values" MEDIA GUTTER, or actually AIDING TERRORISTS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eop8O__XiU
Click here for an awesome compilation of FOX TV productions, including continual themes of sex, drugs, violence, and FOX's GROSS HYPOCRISY in EXPLOITING THOSE THEMES for PROFIT in its entertaiment divisions, while criticizing them in its "news" divisions...
------------------------------------------------------
Lipservice Cultural Warrior: Hypocrite O'Reilly Sheds Traditionalist™ Garb When It Comes To Protecting His Own Paycheck
by Steve Young, HuffingtonPost
11.15.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-young/lipservice-cultural-warri_b_34195.html
Interesting, Bill O'Reilly has no problem calling for a boycott of a country...France; or calling out states...Vermont, or clamoring for the firing of a TV anchor...MSNBC 's Keith Olbermann. But when it comes to the parent company of Fox News, the network where Bill's "Factor," resides, he claims no power.
On his radio show today Bill decried the Fox Network's interview with O.J. Simpson ("If I Did It, Here's How It Happened") where O "hypothetically describes" how the double murder would have come down IF he had committed them.
Shameful. Besides the concept, how in the world will Simpson figure out how it happened? It just begs for a Fred Goldman interview directly after called, "If There Is A God, Here's How O.J. Simpson Would Die a Thousand Deaths," where he "hypothetically describes" how the Simpson jurors would have decided the case if they had half-a-brain
Did O'Reilly call for a boycott of Fox? Did he call for the firing of the Fox executives who made the deal with Simpson? Did he ask his viewers to not advertise on Fox like he does with the far-left liberal newspapers who write something he questions? Did he even call for someone from Fox to come in the studio so he could shout over them and kick them out? Nope. While he felt it unseemly, Bill said that he has no influence over the network to keep them from airing the show. He would take no action.
If it were Ludacris using lyrics Bill felt obscene, or Jeremy Glick giving his point of view, or a store bearing a "Happy Holidays" sign, or a judge who made a decision Bill didn't agree with, who was behind airing the show, perhaps he would call the "folks™" to arms. But when it comes to a television network that exists under the same corporate umbrella that hovers above his income, his bravado sinks into a gutless fetal position.
Some Cultural Warrior.
Indeed, in the first 3 days of this week, Fox (billionaire Rupert Murdoch's privately owned media network) is in the news for TWO major stories that defy their own bombastic propaganda that "liberals and Democrats are destroying the fabric of America's moral values, and helping to destroy America's national security."
For, you see, Murdoch and Fox are going to air a special interview with... OJ Simpson, of the Nicole Simpson/Ron Goldman murder case infamy. Not only is Murdoch's Fox LEADING the race to the media's ghoulish gutter, but there is another story floating around out there.. that Fox news paid a TWO MILLION DOLLAR RANSOM to the kidnappers of Fox mideast reporter Steve Centanni.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-08-14-gaza-kidnapping_x.htm
Since those insurgents are already bragging that the $2 million ransom WILL be used to buy more weapons for the anti-Israel jihad, that leaves open the possibility (by the draconian standards of the Bush administration's Patriot I & II acts, the MCA act, and the latest horror, the US Insurrection Act) that FOX could be accused of AIDING THE TERRORISTS.
Fox- it's hard to determine WHICH IS WORSE: LEADING the race to America's "moral values" MEDIA GUTTER, or actually AIDING TERRORISTS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eop8O__XiU
Click here for an awesome compilation of FOX TV productions, including continual themes of sex, drugs, violence, and FOX's GROSS HYPOCRISY in EXPLOITING THOSE THEMES for PROFIT in its entertaiment divisions, while criticizing them in its "news" divisions...
------------------------------------------------------
Lipservice Cultural Warrior: Hypocrite O'Reilly Sheds Traditionalist™ Garb When It Comes To Protecting His Own Paycheck
by Steve Young, HuffingtonPost
11.15.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-young/lipservice-cultural-warri_b_34195.html
Interesting, Bill O'Reilly has no problem calling for a boycott of a country...France; or calling out states...Vermont, or clamoring for the firing of a TV anchor...MSNBC 's Keith Olbermann. But when it comes to the parent company of Fox News, the network where Bill's "Factor," resides, he claims no power.
On his radio show today Bill decried the Fox Network's interview with O.J. Simpson ("If I Did It, Here's How It Happened") where O "hypothetically describes" how the double murder would have come down IF he had committed them.
Shameful. Besides the concept, how in the world will Simpson figure out how it happened? It just begs for a Fred Goldman interview directly after called, "If There Is A God, Here's How O.J. Simpson Would Die a Thousand Deaths," where he "hypothetically describes" how the Simpson jurors would have decided the case if they had half-a-brain
Did O'Reilly call for a boycott of Fox? Did he call for the firing of the Fox executives who made the deal with Simpson? Did he ask his viewers to not advertise on Fox like he does with the far-left liberal newspapers who write something he questions? Did he even call for someone from Fox to come in the studio so he could shout over them and kick them out? Nope. While he felt it unseemly, Bill said that he has no influence over the network to keep them from airing the show. He would take no action.
If it were Ludacris using lyrics Bill felt obscene, or Jeremy Glick giving his point of view, or a store bearing a "Happy Holidays" sign, or a judge who made a decision Bill didn't agree with, who was behind airing the show, perhaps he would call the "folks™" to arms. But when it comes to a television network that exists under the same corporate umbrella that hovers above his income, his bravado sinks into a gutless fetal position.
Some Cultural Warrior.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
CNN mainlines right-wing extremist propaganda: Glen Blen Beck pimps WAR vs IRAN and his own hysterical "EXTREMIST AGENDA" CNN special...
Where do we start when discussing GLEN BECK's one-hour "MORE WAR!" harangue yesterday (November 13) except to point out that CNN has seen fit to give their ignoramus blowhard a full hour to air his Rush Limbaugh-Bill O'Reilly-clone hysterical, extremist talking points. Clearly, CNN is going all out to emulate the reactionary, radical, extremist rhetoric of ANN COULTER, RUSH LIMBAUGH, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Weiner ("Michael savage"), et al., in a LUDICROUS attempt to BLAME THE DEMOCRATS for the MASSIVE LIES, FAILURES, CORRUPTION, and PROPAGANDA of the Bush-Republican Party.
- WHERE is Glen Beck's OUTRAGE that President George Bush and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld ALLOWED Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaida leadership to ESCAPE FROM THE TRAP at Tora Bora, Afghanistan? (Bush and Rumsfeld were so busy lusting for their pending war with Iraq, that they WITHDREW US troops allocated by Congress to Afghanistan, from Afghanistan, for the Iraq buildup.)
- Where is Glen Beck's OUTRAGE that the gruesome, sadistic, humiliating, degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners at ABU GHRAIB has HARDENED the willingness of Iraqi insurgents (and, yes, foreign terrorists) to risk their lives CONFRONTING superior American firepower?
- WHERE is Glen Beck's OUTRAGE that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have SO PROSTITUTED the US occupation of Iraq to HALLIBURTON, BECHTEL, CACI, BLACKWATER and other "PRIVATE" company profits, i.e. gross corruption, that Iraqis now SCORN America's ability to provide BASIC SERVICES?
- Where is Glen Beck's OUTRAGE that the Cheney/Rusmfeld/Baker/Bush Sr. administration were ALLIES and SUPPLIERS of Saddam Hussein's ruthless regime ALL THROUGH THE 1980s, INCLUDING shipping "WMP PRECURSOR TECHNOLOGIES" to Saddam's weapons programs in those years?
- WHERE is Glen Beck's OUTRAGE that DICK CHENEY sold Saddam's Iraq top technology oil field equipment, IN DEFIANCE OF THE US ENFORCED UN EMBARGO on that country, all through the late 1990s. Cheney as Chairman and CEO of HALLIBURTON used EUROPEAN SUBSIDIARIES to skirt the UN EMBARGO on Iraq to sell millions of dollars worth of equipment to Saddam's regime.
The answer to all this of course is that Glen Beck uses SELECTIVE OUTRAGE to fuel his viewer's rage... rage which Righties always focus against "Liberals" and "Democrats", NO MATTER HOW DISASTROUS for America are the policies of the Bush-Republican administration.
__________________________________
Transcript for the Monday 13 November CNN Glen Beck "news" show
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/13/gb.01.html
Glen BECK: I get that. I got to tell you, my friend, I think -- I think Iraq is a small piece of the puzzle. They are BEING CONTROLLED BY IRAN and Syria, and they -- they are trying to do what we, I believe, were trying to do to Iran -- plant democracy on both sides and squeeze their head and pop it. They're doing that to us now.
[note: Iraq was NOT "BEING CONTROLLED BY IRAN and SYRIA" _UNTIL_ George W. Bush and Dick Cheney LIED America into war against that hapless nation!]
[note: WHERE is Glen Beck's OUTRAGE that our "war on terror" ALLY, PAKISTAN, is rumored to be at the very heart of the AFGHAN RESISTANCE to US/NATO forces, which is to say the Taliban/Al Qaida RESURGENCE there? WHERE is Beck's OUTRAGE that PAKISTAN PROMOTED NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION while the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld admin. were DISTRACTED with their lust for starting a war against Iraq? WHY are Beck and guest Babbin WORRIED ABOUT IRAN's nuclear program, AND NOT India or Pakistan's???
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/world/asia/14afghan.html
Pakistan Link Seen in Afghan Suicide Attacks]
Beck guest JED BABBIN, FORMER DEPUTY UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE:
You have its interfering neighbors, Syria and Iran, and frankly, we are fighting a PROXY WAR against our principal enemy's proxy. You can't defeat the principal enemy if you're only fighting his proxies. We are at a point where we have to go and take this war to the center of gravity, of the enemy. That's in Tehran and Damascus.
[note: There are critics who claim that AMERICA is fighting a PROXY WAR for ISRAEL. We Americans HAD the Baathist (Saddam) regime offering SOME counterbalance to Shiite Iran in the region.. UNTIL the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz war against Iraq began in March 2003.]
GLEN BECK: Ay-ay-ay. So tell me why we SHOULDN'T KILL al-Sadr where he stands.
[note: the Alpha and Omega of Right-Wing America: the power to KILL anyone they want, anywhere in the world. Al Sadr is indeed a dangerous THUG, but his leadership IS 'courageous' in that he COULD, indeed, be assassinated at any time. Which would make him a martyr, like his father was under Saddam's regime.]
BABBIN: It doesn't matter, in the short run, or really in the long run, what happens to "Mooki." The fact of the matter is that he's getting money and people and weapons FROM IRAN every day.
[note: America launched an ILLEGAL and AGGRESSIVE war against Iran's neighbor, Iraq, AND Israel ROUTINELY KILLS Palestinian civilians, AND the US aided, directly or indirectly (through billions of dollars in financial assistance) ISRAEL'S ILLEGAL nuclear program]
BECK: Not much. I got to tell you, I cannot believe that people are missing the APOCALYPTIC speech and actual views of the people we are dealing with.
BABBIN: Well, that's part of the problem we have here. The president has not led us as a war leader should. He's not taking our enemies at their word. If you look at al-Sadr, you look at Ahmadinejad, I mean, the APOCALYPSE is a career objective for this guy. And we have to make sure he didn't have the means to pull it off.
BECK: Could you -- could you just restate that again? I think so many people will hear me say something like that, and go, "Oh, come on, the APOCALYPSE, doomsday."
[note- here is the heart-and-soul of American/Isreali PROPAGANDA: OUR OWN fundamentalist religious groups spout APOCALYPTIC DOCTRINE, WE invade Muslim nations; and now Beck and Babbin want to use the Muslim response apocalyptic rhetoric AS AN EXCUSE TO START ANOTHER WAR, making our/their APOCALYPTIC rhetoric BEAR FRUIT!]
BECK: Could you please reiterate that these people really do believe in THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH, and they want to bring it on?
[note- "The Return of the Messiah" is _THE_ FUNDAMENTAL TENANT of BOTH the Jewish and Christian faiths!]
BECK: You know, we hear in the media a lot about the war in Iraq, and he was just saying it is not about Iraq. It's not just about terrorism in general. YOU DON'T HEAR THE REAL STORY in the mainstream media. Our enemies have a global agenda. That means the end of the West.
[note: ANOTHER Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh/Bill O'Reilly CRYBABY crying about "Liberal Media Bias" when THEY dominate media microphones!!! THE REST OF THE STORY is how THOROUGHLY George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz BOTCHED the invasion, and specifically post-invasion planning, of the Iraq war. THE REAL STORY is how ABU GHRAIB sadism, humiliation, and degradation (by American servicemen and women against Iraqi Muslims) has POWERED Muslim hatred of the US occupation all throughout the region, has EMPOWERED fighters, both Iraqi and foreigners, to RISK THEIR LIVES to try to kill American soldiers. The REAL STORY is how GREED, CORRUPTION, and INCOMPETENCE are the hallmarks of the US efforts to "rebuild" Iraq and take charge of Iraq's economy - RAMPANT, IN-YOUR-FACE CORRUPTION that awards MILLION DOLLAR CONTRACTS to HALLIBURTON and other crony American companies, that Iraqi contractors would have done for thousands, and enlisted their own communities to PROVIDE SECURITY.]
[And, of course, the "REAL STORY" is how the Chinese, Indians, and Russians, among many other powerful empires (Europeans, Japanese, Koreans..), are not exactly planning to role over for the "Muslim world conquest" anytime soon.]
ANNOUNCER: Lies, propaganda, hate.
[note: this segment documents anti-Jewish propaganda being instilled in very young students. Note: #1. "anti-Jewish" is NOT synonymous with "anti-Semitic", because Jews are only one of the Semitic races, ARABS are ALSO SEMITIC, so in APPROPRIATING the term "anti-Semitic" to mean "anti-Jewish", Jewish scholars and writers (and their gentile allies) are effectively trying to DISMISS, as non-relevant or non-worthy, the other Semitic races! Much as the Nazis tried to REWRITE history to EXCLUDE any mention of Jews in Poland, etc.]
IF Glen Beck and CNN are going to devote a ONE HOUR SPECIAL documenting Arab/Muslim/Persian hate/propaganda, WHERE IS THE EQUAL TIME discussing the MASSACRES, MASS-MURDERS, BETRAYALS, and TREACHERIES of the Israelites in the BIBLE? For example the MASSACRE of Jericho, the KILLING of children by the angel of death; the massacre of MEN, WOMEN and CHILDREN at Moses' and Saul's orders; the hacking to death by "prophet" Saul of a hapless prisoner; and DOZENS of other ATROCITIES, COMMANDED by prophets, angels, and/or "God" himself, EMBEDDED throughout the Bible (Old Testament)?
Well, we can end on a lighter note:
BECK: You know, we are in such denial. Look, you are somebody who has actual experience and actual education. You do know what you're talking about. I am -- I'M A RODEO CLOWN who happens to have a radio and TV show.
BABBIN: Well, you're better than Borat.
Note #1: Most of the Right-Wing media pundits are indeed "RODEO CLOWNS," and even ones with advanced degrees (Ann Coulter has a law degree) rely on miserable stereotypes and faulty logic to deride their policy opponents.
Note:#2: Sacha Baron Cohen may have had his comedy moments in his movie "Borat," and may have exposed the bigotry of "Red State America," but in doing so Cohen PERPETUATED the stereotype that Jews can be abusive, boorish, and humiliating of others," for example Cohen's Kazakh character "Borat" handing his dinner host a sock filled with his own human excrement at an upscale dinner party as "a gift;" or Cohen portraying Kazakh villagers as drinking cow urine and having livestock animals living in their own homes.
CNN SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF ITSELF for playing the HYSTERICAL, RANTING, DEMONIZING screed as Primetime "responsible journalism" fare.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Frank Rich: You-Tube replaces whore media and DC sycophants as defining element of political campaigns 2006....
Ironic, isn't it, that the New York Times, self-proclaimed queen of the media WHORES, CENSORS (behind their pay-for-acess firewall) the commentary of one the Times' two honest editorial writers (the other being Paul Krugman), and in this particular commetary Frank Rich discloses that youth-oriented YouTube.com does a BETTER JOB of presenting vital information to American citizens and voters than the Whore media and DC sycophants, COMBINED!
2006, the Year of Macaca
by Frank Rich
NYT 11 Nov. 2006
no url, nyt firewall
<< That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as “macaca, or whatever his name is,” Mr. Allen added, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”
The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com, the wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet heard about from their children. Unlike unedited bloggorhea, which can take longer to slog through than Old Media print, YouTube is all video snippets all the time; the one-minute macaca clip spread through the national body politic like a rabid virus. Nonetheless it took more than a week for Mr. Allen to recognize the magnitude of the problem and apologize to the object of his ridicule. Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew. It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn’t be blamed on the bottle. >>
2006, the Year of Macaca
by Frank Rich
NYT 11 Nov. 2006
no url, nyt firewall
<< That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as “macaca, or whatever his name is,” Mr. Allen added, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”
The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com, the wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet heard about from their children. Unlike unedited bloggorhea, which can take longer to slog through than Old Media print, YouTube is all video snippets all the time; the one-minute macaca clip spread through the national body politic like a rabid virus. Nonetheless it took more than a week for Mr. Allen to recognize the magnitude of the problem and apologize to the object of his ridicule. Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew. It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn’t be blamed on the bottle. >>
Friday, November 10, 2006
Cowardly Wash. Post labels Bush's bold-faced lying as "truth evasion."
"Evasions," "Untuths," "dodges," "not forthcoming," "misleading," "doubts about veracity," "rhetorical devices," "finesse, dodge, weave, and misdirect" - ALL words that Washington Post 'media commentator' Howard Kurtz uses to describe, not only President Bush's latest, bold-faced, in-your-face LIE, but the DC commentariat's OWN methods and tactics as well.
Note to Mr. Kurtz: Why don't you and your lying editors over at the WaHoPost find and run some of those VIDEOS of Gov. Bush pledging, promising that he would be a "MORE BIPARTISAN" leader, a "UNITER NOT a DIVIDER" in his EVERY 2000 presidential campaign appearance??
The greater scandal of 9-11 is not just that President Bush DID NOTHING to prevent the 9-11 terrorist hijackings (NOT_ONE_DAMN_THING to make the terrorist's plot more difficult!), but that President Bush SPENT THE ENTIRE SUMMER of 2001 on _REPUBLICAN_ photo-op, Fundraiser, and BASH DEMOCRATS partisan politics!!!!
NOTHING, Mr. Kurtz, but BLATANTLY PARTISAN POLITCS and fundraising in that critical summer of 2001, WHILE YOU DC PRESS WHORES gave the president a FREE PASS for him so quickly BREAKING his "More Bipartisan Tone in Office" pledge.
The FACT is, that Mr. Bush's BOLD FACED LYING started long before he took his oath of office in Jan. 2001 (Bush touting his "education governor" credentials come to mind, as he SLASHED Texas school budgets), and the new president promptly embarked on his EXTREMELY PARTISAN agenda of early 2001, including his minions concocting the LYING "White House Trashing SCANDAL" OUT OF THIN AIR, a ploy wholeheartedly embraced by the New York Times, WASHINGTON POST, and rest of the whore DC press corpse... a SMEAR campaign that effectively ran popular-vote winner Al Gore OUT OF TOWN on a rail, TARRED AND FEATHERED, with all the Democratic staffers disgraced along with him.
(The hundred-thousand dollar GAO investigation said "there has been NO damage to White House offices not typical of any company leaving offices after 8 years of lease, and the cowardly, whore Post along with the rest of the "major media" didn't publish A SINGLE PHOTO to match their breathless stories and screaming headlines of Democrat 'vandalism' to White House offices and property.)
GEORGE BUSH's bold-faced LYING has been given a FREE PASS by the WHORE Washington Post for SIX long years, and today, in conveniently "forgetting" about Mr. Bush's 2000 "uniter, not divider... MORE BIPARTISAN TONE IN WASHINGTON" pledges, Mr. Howard Kurtz CONTINUES the WaHoPo tradition of WHITEWASHING Republican lies.....
________________________________________________________
President's Evasion Raises Truth Issues
Remarks on Rumsfeld Questioned
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 10, 2006; A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/09/AR2006110901817_pf.html
Did the president of the United States make a rare admission on national television that he had told an untruth?
Or had he merely engaged in a dodge of the sort that is common in politics?
Journalists by nature shy from pinning the "liar" label on any political leader, but President Bush's acknowledgments that he had not been forthcoming about his plans to dump Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have kicked up a fuss at the White House and sparked a debate about the limits of presidential evasion.
Six days before the election, Bush told three wire-service reporters in an interview that Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney were doing "fantastic" jobs.
"You see them staying with you until the end?" asked Terence Hunt of the Associated Press.
"I do," Bush replied.
"So you're expecting Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld, to stay on the rest of your time here?" asked Steve Holland of Reuters.
"Yes, I am," the president said.
On Wednesday, the day after the election, Bush at a news conference said that "that kind of question, a wise question by a seasoned reporter, is the kind of thing that causes one to either inject major military decisions at the end of a campaign, or not. And I have made the decision that I wasn't going to be talking about hypothetical troop levels or changes in command structure coming down the stretch."
The president added that he had not made a definitive decision because he had not held his "last" conversation with Rumsfeld and had not yet spoken to Robert Gates, his nominee to take over the Pentagon.
Was that on par with President Bill Clinton's hair-splitting defense in the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation that "it all depends on what the definition of is is"?
White House press secretary Tony Snow, asked about the matter yesterday, told reporters that "there were conversations going on" with Rumsfeld about quitting at the time of Bush's Nov. 1 interview. Snow said in an interview that Bush was not misleading the wire reporters because "he had not reached a final decision."
"He was not going to use that announcement to try to score political points" and would not be "jerked around into making decisions on the basis of politics," Snow said.
But wasn't saying that Rumsfeld would stay on also a form of scoring political points? Snow said that news organizations were "quibbling" over the wording and that "people understand the practicalities" of the situation.
Presidents' reputations have been tarnished by growing public doubts about their veracity -- Lyndon B. Johnson over Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon over Watergate, Ronald Reagan over the Iran-contra scandal and Clinton over the Lewinsky affair. But every president employs rhetorical devices -- such as refusing to answer hypothetical questions -- when asked about news that he is not ready to announce. Sometimes that can get tricky.
Joe Lockhart, who was Clinton's press secretary from 1998 to 2000, said he was surprised that Bush would "get up and say, 'I didn't tell you that because it wasn't convenient for me to tell the truth.' It's a stunning admission that when something is politically inconvenient, you don't have to be straightforward."
Whereas Clinton was long saddled with an image of being slippery, "Bush came into the White House with the reputation of being a straight shooter and was given the benefit of the doubt," Lockhart said. But after Bush's repeated insistence that things are going well in Iraq and his initial defense of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Lockhart said, "that's gone."
Ron Nessen, President Gerald Ford's spokesman, said he advised public figures to "always tell the truth," or else "you're going to get caught a lot of the time and have to explain your way out of it, and that hurts your credibility."
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said Bush's original answer was "qualitatively different than saying 'I never had sex with that woman,' " as Clinton did about Lewinsky, but still "a knowing falsehood. And it's odd because he could have said it many other ways. One of the ways we judge politicians is how they finesse when they don't want to reveal something, when they want to dodge or weave or even misdirect."
Note to Mr. Kurtz: Why don't you and your lying editors over at the WaHoPost find and run some of those VIDEOS of Gov. Bush pledging, promising that he would be a "MORE BIPARTISAN" leader, a "UNITER NOT a DIVIDER" in his EVERY 2000 presidential campaign appearance??
The greater scandal of 9-11 is not just that President Bush DID NOTHING to prevent the 9-11 terrorist hijackings (NOT_ONE_DAMN_THING to make the terrorist's plot more difficult!), but that President Bush SPENT THE ENTIRE SUMMER of 2001 on _REPUBLICAN_ photo-op, Fundraiser, and BASH DEMOCRATS partisan politics!!!!
NOTHING, Mr. Kurtz, but BLATANTLY PARTISAN POLITCS and fundraising in that critical summer of 2001, WHILE YOU DC PRESS WHORES gave the president a FREE PASS for him so quickly BREAKING his "More Bipartisan Tone in Office" pledge.
The FACT is, that Mr. Bush's BOLD FACED LYING started long before he took his oath of office in Jan. 2001 (Bush touting his "education governor" credentials come to mind, as he SLASHED Texas school budgets), and the new president promptly embarked on his EXTREMELY PARTISAN agenda of early 2001, including his minions concocting the LYING "White House Trashing SCANDAL" OUT OF THIN AIR, a ploy wholeheartedly embraced by the New York Times, WASHINGTON POST, and rest of the whore DC press corpse... a SMEAR campaign that effectively ran popular-vote winner Al Gore OUT OF TOWN on a rail, TARRED AND FEATHERED, with all the Democratic staffers disgraced along with him.
(The hundred-thousand dollar GAO investigation said "there has been NO damage to White House offices not typical of any company leaving offices after 8 years of lease, and the cowardly, whore Post along with the rest of the "major media" didn't publish A SINGLE PHOTO to match their breathless stories and screaming headlines of Democrat 'vandalism' to White House offices and property.)
GEORGE BUSH's bold-faced LYING has been given a FREE PASS by the WHORE Washington Post for SIX long years, and today, in conveniently "forgetting" about Mr. Bush's 2000 "uniter, not divider... MORE BIPARTISAN TONE IN WASHINGTON" pledges, Mr. Howard Kurtz CONTINUES the WaHoPo tradition of WHITEWASHING Republican lies.....
________________________________________________________
President's Evasion Raises Truth Issues
Remarks on Rumsfeld Questioned
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 10, 2006; A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/09/AR2006110901817_pf.html
Did the president of the United States make a rare admission on national television that he had told an untruth?
Or had he merely engaged in a dodge of the sort that is common in politics?
Journalists by nature shy from pinning the "liar" label on any political leader, but President Bush's acknowledgments that he had not been forthcoming about his plans to dump Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have kicked up a fuss at the White House and sparked a debate about the limits of presidential evasion.
Six days before the election, Bush told three wire-service reporters in an interview that Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney were doing "fantastic" jobs.
"You see them staying with you until the end?" asked Terence Hunt of the Associated Press.
"I do," Bush replied.
"So you're expecting Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld, to stay on the rest of your time here?" asked Steve Holland of Reuters.
"Yes, I am," the president said.
On Wednesday, the day after the election, Bush at a news conference said that "that kind of question, a wise question by a seasoned reporter, is the kind of thing that causes one to either inject major military decisions at the end of a campaign, or not. And I have made the decision that I wasn't going to be talking about hypothetical troop levels or changes in command structure coming down the stretch."
The president added that he had not made a definitive decision because he had not held his "last" conversation with Rumsfeld and had not yet spoken to Robert Gates, his nominee to take over the Pentagon.
Was that on par with President Bill Clinton's hair-splitting defense in the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation that "it all depends on what the definition of is is"?
White House press secretary Tony Snow, asked about the matter yesterday, told reporters that "there were conversations going on" with Rumsfeld about quitting at the time of Bush's Nov. 1 interview. Snow said in an interview that Bush was not misleading the wire reporters because "he had not reached a final decision."
"He was not going to use that announcement to try to score political points" and would not be "jerked around into making decisions on the basis of politics," Snow said.
But wasn't saying that Rumsfeld would stay on also a form of scoring political points? Snow said that news organizations were "quibbling" over the wording and that "people understand the practicalities" of the situation.
Presidents' reputations have been tarnished by growing public doubts about their veracity -- Lyndon B. Johnson over Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon over Watergate, Ronald Reagan over the Iran-contra scandal and Clinton over the Lewinsky affair. But every president employs rhetorical devices -- such as refusing to answer hypothetical questions -- when asked about news that he is not ready to announce. Sometimes that can get tricky.
Joe Lockhart, who was Clinton's press secretary from 1998 to 2000, said he was surprised that Bush would "get up and say, 'I didn't tell you that because it wasn't convenient for me to tell the truth.' It's a stunning admission that when something is politically inconvenient, you don't have to be straightforward."
Whereas Clinton was long saddled with an image of being slippery, "Bush came into the White House with the reputation of being a straight shooter and was given the benefit of the doubt," Lockhart said. But after Bush's repeated insistence that things are going well in Iraq and his initial defense of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Lockhart said, "that's gone."
Ron Nessen, President Gerald Ford's spokesman, said he advised public figures to "always tell the truth," or else "you're going to get caught a lot of the time and have to explain your way out of it, and that hurts your credibility."
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said Bush's original answer was "qualitatively different than saying 'I never had sex with that woman,' " as Clinton did about Lewinsky, but still "a knowing falsehood. And it's odd because he could have said it many other ways. One of the ways we judge politicians is how they finesse when they don't want to reveal something, when they want to dodge or weave or even misdirect."
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