Wow! You could hardly ask for a better exposition of the WHORISHNESS of corporate America (and the powerful families/personalities that own those corporations) than this following paragraph about the showdown over ownership at the LA Times. In this (and 2 related articles) NO ONE comes off looking good - both sides are multi-millionaire goons far more worried about their share of profits and tax liability, than they are with PROVIDING GOOD, honest information to the American public and voters.
<< This is what the newspaper business has come to: The descendants of Gen. Harrison Otis, who bought a stake in the Los Angeles Times 124 years ago, want to sell the 159-year-old Tribune Co., and it's all because the two sides can't agree about a tax bill. (There's also a dispute over the value of some preferred shares and real estate that the Tribune would have to buy as part of the transaction.) >>
That paragraph which so encapsulates the Decline of the Roman, er, American empire, leads to our own comments:
Recently, the LA Times FIRED reporter Robert Scheer. You could spend an entire year combing America's "news" press and TV media, and not find a reporter who captures the compelling issues of the day more quickly, insightfully, and thoroughly, or who puts that reporting in "we're all in this together" non-condescending, easily understandable prose than Mr. Scheer. That's what we here at MedaiWhoresUSA do - comb the news every day looking for good, informative articles - and Mr. Scheer is easily on our Top-10 list of American journalists today, probably in the top-5. So why did the LA Times *fire* Mr. Scheer from his editorial position??
The question provides its own answer: the LA Times DOES NOT want an honest, insightful, easily understood investigative reporter. And reading the articles about the pending breakup of the Times parent company, the TRIBUNE Co. of Chicago, points out why: Tribune Co. CEO Dennis FitzSimons has been SLASHING JOBS at the LA Times to meet the ROI demands of owners (including himself), ROI an accounting term meaning "return on investment."
Now here is a case where American corporate capitalism has simply run amok. How many mom and pop companies have a management staff who works their fingers off, and at the end of 10, 20, or 30 years their company has a net worth of a few million dollars? Well, the LA Times is just like any other small newspaper company, except that they are big. Over the years, the stock valuation for the original owners has undoubtably gone into the multi-millions of dollars, even though those owners may not have actually injected much cash money into the company. A generation or two or three later - with an original block of ownership shares now divided between two dozen or more family members - those family members shout in unison "I HAVE TEN MILLION DOLLARS INVESTED IN THIS COMPANY, and all I'm getting for 'my investment' is a lousy 2% ROI!" Actually the WSJ article states that the Tribune co. is getting a TWENTY PERCENT profit margin, although, again, accounting terms can be tricky, profit margin not the same thing as ROI or ROE. ("return on equity.") Here, "investment" and "equity" are being interchanged with "profit" in a case of sloppy reporting; equity over generations being IMPLIED to mean the same as "money invested." But what if the STOCK VALUATION of the LA Times (or corporate parent Tribune Co.) IS OVERRATED?
What if the LA Times was valued based at the true value of the HONEST "news" it produces, news that, for example, would make American voters demand that Enron be punished for looting billions from California's economy via rigged and manipulated energy prices and coordinated plant and electrical-grid shutdowns? What if the LA Times wrote 'news' stories that made California voters DEMAND an HONEST, TRANSPARENT, RELIABLE, ACCURATE, and VERIFIABLE *vote count* each and every election? What if LA Times reporting IMPROVED the pubic's awareness of TRUE NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS, instead of the latest propaganda talking points emananting from the Karl Rove fax machine, the one that PROMISED us that the president was doing his job of "protecting and defending" these United States in August of 2001; the Karl Rove fax machine that PROMISED US that we were "GOING TO GET Osama bin Laden DEAD OR ALIVE!"; the Karl Rove fax machine that PROMISED us that "Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction!" and that the people there would "Welcome us with open arms and flowers" (and that that Iraq occupation would pay for itself in the first few months via Iraqi oil). It is the Karl Rove fax machine that TO THIS DAY PROMISES us that "the President is LEADING the fight against terrorism" - even as he tries to SELL AMERICAN PORTS to DUBAI Ports-World, earns "D" and "F" **FAILING** grades from the tame, lame, in-house 9-11 Commission Final Report on security reforms NOT TAKEN to protect America....
http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_report.pdf,
...and indeed instead of STRENGTHENING our ports, chemical, and powerplant security, the administration is seeking GESTAPO/KGB powers of unlimted arrest, indefinite detention, torture, & summary executions - - - all of which makes us, the USA, NO DIFFERENT than the regime of Saudi Arabia, China.. or SADDAM HUSSEIN and the Taliban?
Mr. Denis FitzSimons of the Tribune Co. - SLASHING LA Times staffing, and FIRING good reporters TO IMPRESS HIS SHAREHOLDERS is only one side of the equation... back in Los Angeles, we learn that the major ownership family there- "The Chandlers, known for their OBSESSIVE DESIRE TO AVOID TAXES, appear to be balking."
The disagreement is not so much about strategy as it is about economics and tax risk," FitzSimons said. >> [Leanord/ CNN article]
We hate to overspimplify the issues of capitalism, profit, ownership, and ROI and ROE, but the bottom line is that the OWNERS and investors of the LA Times and Tribune companies ARE FAR MORE WORRIED about their share of profits, than THEY ARE ABOUT FAIR and HONEST ELECTIONS, the impact of deficits and corporate power have on consumers, or the catch-all use of "WAR ON TERROR" propaganda spin to undermine traditional American notions of democracy and individual and social freedoms.
In Germany under the Nazis the motto was "State Security Uber Alles!" and in corporate America the motto in 2006 is
"PROFIT, return on equity, and return on investment OVER ALL ELSE!" - while the "war on terror" is no more than AN EXCUSE to DIVERT America's attention from the REAL life and death issues that affect our lives.
----------------------------------------
<< This is what the newspaper business has come to: The descendants of Gen. Harrison Otis, who bought a stake in the Los Angeles Times 124 years ago, want to sell the 159-year-old Tribune Co., and it's all because the two sides can't agree about a tax bill. (There's also a dispute over the value of some preferred shares and real estate that the Tribune would have to buy as part of the transaction.) >>
----------------------------------------
Showdown in Chicago
Why do the Chandlers of L.A. want to break up the Tribune Co.?
by Devin Leonard, FORTUNE Magazine senior writer
July 7 2006
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/07/10/8380865/index.htm?postversion=2006070710
Tribune Co. CEO Dennis FitzSimons is now... in a very public battle with the Tribune Co.'s second-largest shareholders, the legendary L.A. newspaper clan called the Chandlers. On June 13, a family representative wrote a letter complaining to the Chicago-based company's board that Tribune shares had fallen more than 38% since January 2003. That, by the way, is when FitzSimons became CEO. The letter said Tribune had pursued a failed business strategy and that it was time to break up the company or maybe just sell the whole thing....
-------------------------------------------
Pressure Builds On Tribune To Sell L.A. Times
Wall Street Journal / CNN Money
Posted Monday September 18, 2006
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115854892438866031-Tlv_BZGjFVnVB8BoNLzKYTNvcGg_20060925.html?mod=blogs
As the Tribune Co. struggles to reach a detente with the Chandler family after this summer's bitter power struggle, it is meanwhile under increasing pressure to sell off its largest paper, the Los Angeles Times. The WSJ's Sarah Ellison reports that, in addition to the Chandlers, there has been "a push by some rich and powerful citizens in Los Angeles" for a sale of the LAT to "local interests." Some of those citizens incude SunAmerica founder Eli Broad, supermarket magnate/Clinton pal/Page Six allegation-maker Ron Burkle, and entertainment mogul (and Sumner Redstone employee) David Geffen. (According to the WSJ, Geffen's offer was an "informal, all-cash offer"; th e paper is commonly estimated at approximately $2 billion. Yowsers.)
The Tribune board is scheduled to meet this Thursday, and it is at that meeting that CEO Dennis FitzSimons is expected to present a plan for the future of the Tribune Co. Tribune Publishing president Scott Smith said that the LAT is essential for its content-generation amongst Tribune papers, and contributes a quarter of annual revenue to the bottom line. But Smith's call for job and cost cuts have been resisted by LAT Editor Dean Baquet and publisher Jeffrey Johnson, who have dug in stubbornly in open defiance of their bosses.
Ellison maps out the LAT's history and vitals here;
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115854892438866031-Tlv_BZGjFVnVB8BoNLzKYTNvcGg_20060925.html?mod=blogs
find the backstory to the Chandler/Trib feud here .
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/07/10/8380865/index.htm?postversion=2006070710
==============================
Tribune Faces Pressure To Sell Los Angeles Paper
Billionaires, Civic Leaders Say Local Control of Times May Prevent Further Cuts
By SARAH ELLISON
WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115854892438866031-Tlv_BZGjFVnVB8BoNLzKYTNvcGg_20060925.html?mod=blogs
Tribune Co., already under pressure from its largest shareholder, the Chandler family, is facing a growing challenge on another front: a push by some rich and powerful citizens in Los Angeles for a sale of the Los Angeles Times to local interests.
The clamor over the nation's fourth-largest newspaper comes ahead of a Tribune board meeting Thursday, at which Chief Executive Officer Dennis FitzSimons is expected to deliver on a directive from the board to present a plan for the future of Tribune. Mr. FitzSimons and other executives have been preparing the plan even as they negotiate with the Chandlers, who formerly owned the Los Angeles Times, over the value of two complex partnerships that set off a bitter public battle between the family and Tribune management in June.
The loose collection of those interested in a sale of the newspaper includes possible billionaire buyers, Times management and civic leaders. The parties say it is unorchestrated. But all say they are concerned that further cuts could harm a prestigious newspaper, and that if Tribune persists, then local ownership may be a possible savior.
In an interview, Scott Smith, president of Tribune Publishing, said the company sees the Times and its staff as a central source of content for other Tribune newspapers, which include the Orlando Sentinel, the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. The bottom line matters too: Tribune Publishing has roughly $4 billion in annual revenue, about a quarter of which comes from the Times; the unit comprises about 75% of the company's total revenue.
"We believe there are opportunities to smartly collaborate on news coverage and editing, and we are doing that in significant ways, largely building off the talents of the journalists of the L.A. Times," he said. "All the advantages of scale clearly apply as we think about the L.A. Times as a part of Tribune. It's our largest newspaper, the largest and most diverse metro area we serve in full."
Though the groups pushing for a sale say they aren't coordinating their efforts, there are some points of contact among them. Two possible buyers, Eli Broad, philanthropist and founder of insurer SunAmerica, and supermarket magnate Ronald W. Burkle, recently sat down with representatives of the Chandler family and their investment bankers to discuss how they might structure a deal to purchase the Times from Tribune, according to people familiar with those discussions. The alliance between Messrs. Broad and Burkle developed this summer after they wrote separate letters to Tribune's board expressing their interest in purchasing the paper. People close to the Chandlers said these talks didn't go far and that the family only wants to talk to them if they are serious bidders. Discussions of a value for the Times are all over the map. Most estimates hover around $2 billion.
At about the same time, entertainment mogul David Geffen made his own separate, informal, all-cash offer to buy the Times, according to people familiar with the situation. In response to all three overtures, Mr. FitzSimons wrote a letter saying the board had decided unanimously to not discuss the transaction "at this time," according to a person who saw one copy. "If our perspective changes, we will contact you," Mr. FitzSimons wrote. People familiar with the matter said Mr. Geffen too has been in contact with the Chandlers.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet and Publisher Jeffrey Johnson have been balking at a recent request for job and cost cuts made by Mr. Smith, arguing that the paper already has made deep cuts. According to people familiar with the matter, Mr. Smith recently broached the idea of job cuts on top of roughly 300 made last year.
The Los Angeles Times is the largest newspaper in Tribune's stable, with a circulation of 851,832 at March 31, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, down 5.4% from a year earlier. Like many other large metropolitan daily newspapers, that circulation has been declining for years. Increasing competition from the Internet and other new media outlets has drawn away readers as well as advertising spending, leaving the newspaper industry struggling to attract readers and keep advertisers it once took for granted. The changing environment has aggravated industry consolidation, while a loss of revenue has prompted deep budget cuts at many newspapers, particularly the large and midsize metro daily newspapers that once dominated their media markets.
The Times currently enjoys a profit margin of about 20%, lower than that of its parent's flagship Chicago Tribune but higher than many metro papers. Nonetheless, Wall Street is worried about the industry's growth and has been punishing newspaper stocks, including Tribune's. At 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading Friday, Tribune shares were at $30.97, down nearly 38% since the beginning of 2003, when Mr. FitzSimons took over. The Chandlers emphasized that point in a June letter outlining dissatisfaction with Tribune management and the performance of their investment.
Tribune paid $5.9 billion for Times Mirror in 2000. Coming at the peak of the Internet bubble, the deal was heralded as a way to benefit from selling advertising across broadcast and newspaper platforms in the same markets. That strategy has faltered. Tribune's two primary businesses -- newspapers and television stations -- are concentrated in big-city markets that have taken a pounding from competitors. TV stations such as KTLA in Los Angeles have lost viewers, while newspapers, including both the Times and Chicago Tribune, have lost readers and advertising.
At the same time, the Chandlers, who hold a 15% stake in Tribune and three of its 11 board seats, have soured over their investment in Tribune as the stock price has fallen. In June, the Chandlers instigated a fierce public battle with Tribune management and its independent directors and have been pushing the company to break itself into pieces. In an open letter to the board, the family invoked the tradition of the newspaper and said further cost cuts would damage its quality -- a tactic some at the Times found ironic but that civic leaders have since echoed.
The growing opposition to Tribune took further shape last week. Tuesday, Mr. Baquet and his Los Angeles city-county bureau chief, Jim Newton, attended a meeting at the City Club at Bunker Hill, one of Los Angeles's exclusive business clubs, with 20 of the city's most prominent civic leaders. Among them were Elise Buik, CEO of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, and Gary Toebben, CEO of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. The purpose of the meeting, according to George Kieffer, a prominent Los Angeles attorney who organized the gathering, was to discuss how the newspaper covers regional and local issues.
At one point, Mr. Baquet noticed a group of people signing a piece of paper in the corner of the room. "I assume you're working on this famous letter," he quipped to Mr. Kieffer, according to several people who were there. "You know I can't talk about that."
The "famous letter," signed by Ms. Buik, Mr. Toebben and 18 other business leaders, was a warning to Tribune that making further cuts in the Times newsroom was a bad idea. Instead, it urged the company "to make an even larger investment in the Times and to resist the financial pressures to make cuts that would harm the paper." If Tribune couldn't do that, the letter said, "perhaps a different mode of ownership would better serve Los Angeles."
The letter was both faxed and sent overnight to the Chicago offices of Tribune's Mr. FitzSimons and copied to the company's board. The Times reported the communiqué in an article on Thursday.
The leaders who sent the letter know each other, people at the Times and prospective buyers -- but say they aren't working in concert with either the paper or the possible buyers. "I have never talked to Ron Burkle, David Geffen or Eli Broad about their interest in purchasing the paper," Mr. Kieffer said. "I have thought that I ought to contact these people and see where their interests really lie," he added. "I don't necessarily believe everything I read in the paper."
Meanwhile, Mr. Baquet has had numerous interactions with Mr. Broad, who is a frequent guest at the paper for editorial lunches to discuss things happening in the city. Most recently, Mr. Broad had lunch with Messrs. Baquet and Johnson and Michael Govan, the new CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. According to several people with knowledge of the interaction, Mr. Broad told Mr. Baquet at that meeting that he thought it would be "great" if the Los Angeles Times were locally owned. Mr. Baquet smiled, but said nothing, these people said.
As for Mr. Geffen, people close to Messrs. Baquet and Geffen said the two have never met. Mr. Baquet learned of Mr. Geffen's interest from DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, a close friend and associate of Mr. Geffen, at lunch a year ago, these people said.
Asked in an interview whether he is pressuring Tribune to sell the Times, Mr. Broad said, "I have no way to pressure them; but they know of my interest, they know of Ron Burkle's interest. They also have a letter from David Geffen. We aren't pressuring them in any manner. It's up to management, the board and their shareholders, what they want to do. I think the paper will be far better off with local ownership."
Besides the Chandlers, some of these shareholders are restive. "The fact that the value of the assets of Tribune significantly exceeds the current stock price is indisputable," said Charles Bobrinskoy, vice chairman of Ariel Capital, which owns roughly a 6% stake in the company. "The market seems to be betting that the board will not take action to realize that value. We at Ariel have every confidence that the board will take those steps. At this time, we are making no specific recommendation as to steps the board should take."
In its article on the letter from the civic leaders to the Tribune, the Los Angeles Times quoted Mr. Baquet on the possibility of making further job cuts. "I am not averse to making cuts," he told the paper. "But you can go too far, and I don't plan to do that. I just have a difference of opinion with the owners of Tribune about what the size of the staff should be. To make substantial reductions would significantly damage the quality of the paper."
For an editor to publicly defy management over budget cuts isn't unheard of. More remarkable was that Mr. Baquet's publisher, Mr. Johnson, joined him in resisting the push for cuts. The article quoted Mr. Johnson saying he agreed with Mr. Baquet that "newspapers can't cut their way into the future. We have to carefully balance economic realities with serving our readers." A Times spokesman said neither Mr. Baquet nor Mr. Johnson would elaborate beyond what they had told their own newspaper.
After decades in which large media conglomerates dominated the industry, "local ownership" has become a common refrain in the newspaper business in recent months. After McClatchy Co. purchased 32 papers from Knight Ridder Inc. this year, the company turned around and sold 12 Knight Ridder papers, some to local owners, such as Brian Tierney in Philadelphia, who purchased the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.
While buying a local paper can bring owners a powerful voice in their community, it also can prove tricky. In 2000, Wendy McCaw, who earned a sizable fortune in her 1997 divorce from telecommunications mogul Craig McCaw, bought the Santa-Barbara News Press from New York Times Co. Since then, she has seen a number of publishers come and go. This summer, much of the newsroom staff walked out and took to picket lines complaining that Ms. McCaw interfered in the editorial process.
Under the Chandlers, the Times had its glory years under famed publisher Otis Chandler in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1995, the family-controlled Times Mirror appointed Mark Willes, a former General Mills executive, as publisher. He pushed to break down the traditional barriers between the editorial and business sides of the publication, leading eventually to the paper's decision to share profit from a Sunday magazine issue with the subject of the issue, the Staples Center sports arena. The incident and subsequent uproar tarnished the paper's editorial integrity and helped spur the Chandlers to put the paper up for sale.
Since the Tribune took over, managers at the paper and in Chicago have clashed over cost cuts and strategy. "I think the Tribune has squandered its good will inside the L.A. Times newsroom," said John Carroll, a former editor of the paper, who was at the helm after the Staples debacle but left last year. "I would say that if you look at the six years Tribune has owned the Times Mirror papers, all those papers have been badly diminished. It's been a worse talent drain than anywhere I've seen."
Says Tribune's Mr. Smith: "It's a better newspaper today in many ways than when we acquired it six years ago."
On the business side of the Times, there is dissatisfaction with Tribune's latest efforts to consolidate and centralize control over strategic decisions and other initiatives, according to several people familiar with the matter. Last year, Tribune laid off roughly 300 people from the Times's staff, or about 8% of its overall work force. Internally, people express doubts over the effectiveness of Tribune's overall strategy and frustration at the Chicago company's efforts to control decision making.
--Rhonda Rundle contributed to this article.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Selection of amazing quotes details: American media's subordination to propaganda, lies, anti-democratic tendencies, and totalitarianism runs deep.
America's anti-democratic, dictatorial, totalitarian tendencies.
Or why the whore Press and "major" media tend to ROLL OVER for Right-Wing follies.
Browsing through the great collection of quotes over at ThirdWorldTraveler.com was almost a revelation: not only has America often been on the totalitarian side of that whole "Freedom & Democracy" thing.... but as these quotes illustrate so effectively, America is usually SYSTEMATICALLY and PERSISTENTLY on the side of dictatorships, anti-democratic juntas, and totalitarian governments. Even America's labor union leadership tend to be on the anti-union, imprison-foreign-labor-leaders side of big business and repressive authortarian regimes.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Authors/QuotationsToMakeUSThink.html
================================
" With unfailing consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests."
Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
============================
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
==============================
"The American press, with a very few exceptions:, is a kept press. Kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man."
Theodore Dreiser, American writer
=====================
"[I] never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
veteran New York Times reporter John Hess
==================================
"In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule."
Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher
*****
"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
Thomas Jefferson
==============================
"Throughout much of its history, the AFL-CIO and other U.S. labor organizations have worked with CIA and multi-national corporations to overthrow democratically-elected governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments, worked with corporate America to organize racist and protectionist campaigns against foreign countries, and encouraged racist campaigns against immigrant workers."
Lee Siu Hin
============================
"Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM."
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
=============================
"All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea... That's the issue that I've been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire ... and how does a democracy become a dictatorship?
Star Wars fimmaker George Lucas, at Cannes film festival 2005
================================
"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
William Blum
==============================
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
=========================
"George Bush and corporate America are intent on eliminating taxes on all capital incomes. Nor do they care if record budget deficits are the result. Many of their more right-wing friends, including those in Congress, actually want larger deficits. They see chronic, record deficits as producing the budget crisis necessary to use as an excuse to privatize Social Security and dismantle what remains of the Roosevelt New Deal programs of the 1930s."
=============================
"Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell."
Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston
===========================
"The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."
Carl Boggs
==========================
"Cheap labor has always been at the heart of U.S.-Haitian relations, ever since the Haitian Revolution in 1804. It was actually a slave rebellion, the first and still the only successful one in modern history. The U.S. sided with French colonialism as the U.S. economy was based on slavery at the time and Haiti represented the first "dangerous example."
Ricky Baldwin
========================
"Expecting FOX News to report real news is about as silly as waiting for George Bush and Dick Cheney to tell the truth... Americans care, but it's tough to care when you don't know what's going on. That ignorance is what the warmakers count on and what the corporate media delivers."
Amy Goodman
===============================
"The U.S. continues to rank last among developed nations in official [international] development assistance, giving only 0.12% of GNP."
Friends Committee on National Legislation
============================
"The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world."
Michael Parenti
==============================
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them."
William L Shirer, author
[of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"]
http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Third-Reich-William-Shirer/dp/0671728687
===========================
"The U.S. is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually subverted. The Bush Administration is now outright rejecting a number of those treaties, and in doing so, places global security in jeopardy, as other nations feel entitled to do the same. The rejected treaties include: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a protocol to create a compliance regime for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The U.S. is also not complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Commission (CWC), the BWC, and the U.N. framework Convention on Climate Change."
Project Censored 2005
=============================================
"To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization."
Jeremy Seabrook, Third World Network
Or why the whore Press and "major" media tend to ROLL OVER for Right-Wing follies.
Browsing through the great collection of quotes over at ThirdWorldTraveler.com was almost a revelation: not only has America often been on the totalitarian side of that whole "Freedom & Democracy" thing.... but as these quotes illustrate so effectively, America is usually SYSTEMATICALLY and PERSISTENTLY on the side of dictatorships, anti-democratic juntas, and totalitarian governments. Even America's labor union leadership tend to be on the anti-union, imprison-foreign-labor-leaders side of big business and repressive authortarian regimes.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Authors/QuotationsToMakeUSThink.html
================================
" With unfailing consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests."
Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
============================
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
==============================
"The American press, with a very few exceptions:, is a kept press. Kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man."
Theodore Dreiser, American writer
=====================
"[I] never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
veteran New York Times reporter John Hess
==================================
"In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule."
Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher
*****
"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
Thomas Jefferson
==============================
"Throughout much of its history, the AFL-CIO and other U.S. labor organizations have worked with CIA and multi-national corporations to overthrow democratically-elected governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments, worked with corporate America to organize racist and protectionist campaigns against foreign countries, and encouraged racist campaigns against immigrant workers."
Lee Siu Hin
============================
"Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM."
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
=============================
"All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea... That's the issue that I've been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire ... and how does a democracy become a dictatorship?
Star Wars fimmaker George Lucas, at Cannes film festival 2005
================================
"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
William Blum
==============================
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
=========================
"George Bush and corporate America are intent on eliminating taxes on all capital incomes. Nor do they care if record budget deficits are the result. Many of their more right-wing friends, including those in Congress, actually want larger deficits. They see chronic, record deficits as producing the budget crisis necessary to use as an excuse to privatize Social Security and dismantle what remains of the Roosevelt New Deal programs of the 1930s."
=============================
"Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell."
Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston
===========================
"The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."
Carl Boggs
==========================
"Cheap labor has always been at the heart of U.S.-Haitian relations, ever since the Haitian Revolution in 1804. It was actually a slave rebellion, the first and still the only successful one in modern history. The U.S. sided with French colonialism as the U.S. economy was based on slavery at the time and Haiti represented the first "dangerous example."
Ricky Baldwin
========================
"Expecting FOX News to report real news is about as silly as waiting for George Bush and Dick Cheney to tell the truth... Americans care, but it's tough to care when you don't know what's going on. That ignorance is what the warmakers count on and what the corporate media delivers."
Amy Goodman
===============================
"The U.S. continues to rank last among developed nations in official [international] development assistance, giving only 0.12% of GNP."
Friends Committee on National Legislation
============================
"The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world."
Michael Parenti
==============================
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them."
William L Shirer, author
[of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"]
http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Third-Reich-William-Shirer/dp/0671728687
===========================
"The U.S. is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually subverted. The Bush Administration is now outright rejecting a number of those treaties, and in doing so, places global security in jeopardy, as other nations feel entitled to do the same. The rejected treaties include: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a protocol to create a compliance regime for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The U.S. is also not complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Commission (CWC), the BWC, and the U.N. framework Convention on Climate Change."
Project Censored 2005
=============================================
"To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization."
Jeremy Seabrook, Third World Network
Sunday, September 17, 2006
"GAPING HOLES" in what we Americans know about 9-11... because whore media would rather bow before the naked emperor....
[note: Robert Scheer was FIRED at the Los Angeles Times for being an aggressive JOURNALIST. The LA Times could earn a Pulitzer Prize by putting together a crack team of reporters and journalists to aggressively pursue the unknown 9-11 story, but like most of the corporate whore media, the LA Times would rather make a sleazy buck selling journo-porno and celebrity info-tainment, and selling MIS-INFORMATION to justify huge tax cuts for wealthy corporations and to allow for continuing media consolidation. So much for the "liberal media" mantra. "Liberal," yes, in that sex (and the supposedly 'lax' moral values that lead to sex) sells, but of course you can have a right-wing culture like imperial Japan, and still have commercialized sex, either for commoners or for the upper crust, such as the Geishas.]
Gaping Holes in the 9/11 Narrative
Robert Scheer
Truthdig.com/HuffingtonPost.com
09.11.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/gaping-holes-in-the-911-_b_29174.html
What we still don't know about 9/11 could kill us. By "we" I mean the public that has been kept in the dark for five years by a president who may know the truth but has chosen to ignore it. Instead of grappling with the thorny origins of that disaster, George Bush willfully turned the nation's attention and resources to a totally unrelated and disastrous imperial adventure in Iraq.
Just how unrelated was definitively established last Friday with the belated release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's second report, which concluded that there not only was zero connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, but that Iraq was the one country in the region where Osama bin Laden could not operate.
Unfortunately, that was not true of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two countries that had recognized and otherwise supported the Taliban government that hosted bin Laden during the run-up to 9/11. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and yet there has been no serious investigation of the extended Royal family's roll in the recruitment of bin Laden's "soldiers" and the ease with which they secured legal visas to enter the United States.
While funds for Al Qaeda emanated from the Saudi kingdom, the essential logistical support for Al Qaeda came from Pakistan. Now, five years later, bin Laden and the remnants of his organization are assumed by the United States to have found refuge in Pakistan's unruly tribal region, where the Pakistan government recently has reduced its forces, conceding that it could not defeat local tribesmen sympathetic to the Taliban.
Nor has there been any credible accounting of the role of Pakistan's intelligence community, then and now, in support of Islamic terrorists on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Or in the passage of Pakistan's nuclear secrets to what Bush refers to as "rogue nations."
Recall that the predominant excuse for invading Iraq was the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would be willing to pass them on to rogue regimes and terrorists. Not only were such weapons not found, but the evidence from the accounts of former Administration insiders and the Senate Intelligence Committee makes clear that the Administration was consciously cherry picking the evidence to shore up its fraudulent case.
There were weapons of mass destruction being shipped to "rogue nations," but they were coming from Pakistan in an extensive program headed by Abdul Qadeer (A.Q.) Khan, the father of the "Islamic bomb." The Pakistan government has admitted that Khan passed on to North Korea, Libya and Iran technical know-how and vital materials for the creation of nuclear weapons. But Khan was pardoned of any crimes by Pakistan's dictator general, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Khan is restricted only by a loose form of house arrest and has never been made available to U.S. investigators. Yet the Bush Administration dropped the sanctions originally imposed on Pakistan in reprisal for its development of nuclear weapons in return for Pakistan's support in the "war on terror."
As for Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the rise. NATO commanders last week urgently requested more troops, and the country is now torn by the anarchy of a narco-state that is supplying 92% of the world's heroin market and generating massive profits for gangsters and terrorists alike. The country is now as dangerous for American soldiers as is Iraq.
Despite this sorry record of neglect in Southwest Asia and the creation of a quagmire and recruiting poster for terrorism in Iraq, Bush once again arrogantly asserts that his policies have made us safer, even as he has undermined our domestic freedoms and mocked the U.S. commitment to international law, particularly concerning the treatment of prisoners.
Last week, Bush conceded that there were indeed secret CIA prisons, when finally announcing that the group of "key witnesses" to the 9/11 disaster would be moved to Guantanamo and for once afforded visits form the Red Cross and minimal legal representation. Some of them have been interrogated in secret for up to five years, with the Bush Administration left as the sole interpreter of what they revealed.
After five years of official deceit, it is not too difficult to believe that the isolation of those prisoners was done less for reasons of learning the truth about 9/11 and more in an effort to politically manage the narrative released to the public.
There is glaring evidence that the latter was the case. The 9/11 Commission report contains a disclaimer box on page 146, in which it is stated that the report's account of what happened on 9/11 was in considerable measure based on what those key witnesses allegedly told interrogators, and that the commissioners were not allowed to meet the witnesses or their interrogators.
"We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting."
In short, the most cited source that we have on what happened on 9/11, the much celebrated 9/11 Commission Report, was stage-managed by the Bush administration, just as it has controlled and distorted so much other information.
In light of that sorry record of the propagandistic exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy for partisan political purpose, is it any wonder that large numbers of Americans have doubts about all of it and that a considerable industry of documentaries and investigative reports has sprung up with alternative theories ranging from the plausible to the absurd?
In the sidebar here, we offer some examples of the better of those efforts, not by way of endorsing them but rather because there is so much reason to doubt the "truth" as the Bush Administration has packaged it.
Gaping Holes in the 9/11 Narrative
Robert Scheer
Truthdig.com/HuffingtonPost.com
09.11.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/gaping-holes-in-the-911-_b_29174.html
What we still don't know about 9/11 could kill us. By "we" I mean the public that has been kept in the dark for five years by a president who may know the truth but has chosen to ignore it. Instead of grappling with the thorny origins of that disaster, George Bush willfully turned the nation's attention and resources to a totally unrelated and disastrous imperial adventure in Iraq.
Just how unrelated was definitively established last Friday with the belated release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's second report, which concluded that there not only was zero connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, but that Iraq was the one country in the region where Osama bin Laden could not operate.
Unfortunately, that was not true of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two countries that had recognized and otherwise supported the Taliban government that hosted bin Laden during the run-up to 9/11. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and yet there has been no serious investigation of the extended Royal family's roll in the recruitment of bin Laden's "soldiers" and the ease with which they secured legal visas to enter the United States.
While funds for Al Qaeda emanated from the Saudi kingdom, the essential logistical support for Al Qaeda came from Pakistan. Now, five years later, bin Laden and the remnants of his organization are assumed by the United States to have found refuge in Pakistan's unruly tribal region, where the Pakistan government recently has reduced its forces, conceding that it could not defeat local tribesmen sympathetic to the Taliban.
Nor has there been any credible accounting of the role of Pakistan's intelligence community, then and now, in support of Islamic terrorists on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Or in the passage of Pakistan's nuclear secrets to what Bush refers to as "rogue nations."
Recall that the predominant excuse for invading Iraq was the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would be willing to pass them on to rogue regimes and terrorists. Not only were such weapons not found, but the evidence from the accounts of former Administration insiders and the Senate Intelligence Committee makes clear that the Administration was consciously cherry picking the evidence to shore up its fraudulent case.
There were weapons of mass destruction being shipped to "rogue nations," but they were coming from Pakistan in an extensive program headed by Abdul Qadeer (A.Q.) Khan, the father of the "Islamic bomb." The Pakistan government has admitted that Khan passed on to North Korea, Libya and Iran technical know-how and vital materials for the creation of nuclear weapons. But Khan was pardoned of any crimes by Pakistan's dictator general, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Khan is restricted only by a loose form of house arrest and has never been made available to U.S. investigators. Yet the Bush Administration dropped the sanctions originally imposed on Pakistan in reprisal for its development of nuclear weapons in return for Pakistan's support in the "war on terror."
As for Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the rise. NATO commanders last week urgently requested more troops, and the country is now torn by the anarchy of a narco-state that is supplying 92% of the world's heroin market and generating massive profits for gangsters and terrorists alike. The country is now as dangerous for American soldiers as is Iraq.
Despite this sorry record of neglect in Southwest Asia and the creation of a quagmire and recruiting poster for terrorism in Iraq, Bush once again arrogantly asserts that his policies have made us safer, even as he has undermined our domestic freedoms and mocked the U.S. commitment to international law, particularly concerning the treatment of prisoners.
Last week, Bush conceded that there were indeed secret CIA prisons, when finally announcing that the group of "key witnesses" to the 9/11 disaster would be moved to Guantanamo and for once afforded visits form the Red Cross and minimal legal representation. Some of them have been interrogated in secret for up to five years, with the Bush Administration left as the sole interpreter of what they revealed.
After five years of official deceit, it is not too difficult to believe that the isolation of those prisoners was done less for reasons of learning the truth about 9/11 and more in an effort to politically manage the narrative released to the public.
There is glaring evidence that the latter was the case. The 9/11 Commission report contains a disclaimer box on page 146, in which it is stated that the report's account of what happened on 9/11 was in considerable measure based on what those key witnesses allegedly told interrogators, and that the commissioners were not allowed to meet the witnesses or their interrogators.
"We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting."
In short, the most cited source that we have on what happened on 9/11, the much celebrated 9/11 Commission Report, was stage-managed by the Bush administration, just as it has controlled and distorted so much other information.
In light of that sorry record of the propagandistic exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy for partisan political purpose, is it any wonder that large numbers of Americans have doubts about all of it and that a considerable industry of documentaries and investigative reports has sprung up with alternative theories ranging from the plausible to the absurd?
In the sidebar here, we offer some examples of the better of those efforts, not by way of endorsing them but rather because there is so much reason to doubt the "truth" as the Bush Administration has packaged it.
Top Ten Worst People in Bush admin... Evildoers All (and all given a "FREE PASS" by media for their sins and/or crimes)
<< Addington and Libby are so high on the list because they were the root of all of the decisions to torture, strip away rights (from United States citizens as well as detainees) and ignore the US constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Along with Dick Cheney they composed the heart of darkness inside the West Wing. >>
<< But most of all, they are high on the list because they DO NOT believe in the American system of government. They believe that an imperial executive with broad, unchecked powers is a better system than the liberal democracy we currently have.
They don't believe in the rights guaranteed by our constitution, THEY DON'T BELIEVE IN THE AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM and they don't believe our democracy is strong enough to fight off our enemies. Simply put, THEY ARE UN-AMERICAN to their core. >>
[note: Author Michael Lind discusses this un-American pathology in his book "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics." Lind notes that, like the Jewish tribes invading and conquering their way to the "Holy Land," White Anglo-Scots Protestant expansion in the Deep South was accompanied by slavery and a radical desire to confront, enslave, and/or destroy neighboring cultures; up to and including non-slavery White Americans in "Bleeding Kansas" and during the Confederacy. The success of the Radical Right agenda over the past decade or two has been in successfully conflating ante-bellum theology, militancy, and 'moral values,' with big business corporate goals and corporate media manipulations that conflate the ideals we once identified as "freedoms," "democracy," and "justice" with the radical right, reactionary agenda of disenfranchisement, poverty-wages, and one-party rule.]
=====================================
Top Ten Worst People in the Bush Administration
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/top-ten-worst-people-in-t_b_29603.html
1. George W. Bush, President
2. Dick Cheney, Vice President
3. Karl Rove, Chief Political Adviser to the President
4. Don Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
5. Paul Wolfowitz, Former Deputy Secretary of Defense
6. David Addington, Chief of Staff to the Vice President
7. Douglas Feith, Former Under Secretary of Defense and Head of the Office of Special Plans
8. John Bolton, UN Ambassador
9. I. Lewis Libby, Former Chief of Staff to the Vice President
10. Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General
You know this list is hideous when John Ashcroft can't crack the Top Ten. John Bolton would finish in the top two of almost any other "worst person" list. But this is a murderer's row of incompetents, fool, knaves, and - in the immortal words of the president - evil-doers.
Other receiving votes include Condoleezza Rice, Mike Brown, Paul Bremer and every person who ever worked in the Vice President's office (yes, that definitely includes Mary Matalin).
In this tough field, people who didn't even merit votes but should get honorable mentions are Harriet Miers, Scott McClellan, David Safavian (the man who set purchasing policy for the entire government and was arrested for taking bribes from Jack Abramoff) and Jeff Gannon (the male hooker that was hired to pose as a reporter at the White House and pitch softballs to McClellan (who presumably caught them)).
Addington and Libby are so high on the list because they were the root of all of the decisions to torture, strip away rights (from United States citizens as well as detainees) and ignore the US constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Along with Dick Cheney they composed the heart of darkness inside the West Wing.
But most of all, they are high on the list because they don't believe in the American system of government. They believe that an imperial executive with broad, unchecked powers is a better system than the liberal democracy we currently have.
They don't believe in the rights guaranteed by our constitution, they don't believe in the American justice system and they don't believe our democracy is strong enough to fight off our enemies. Simply put, they are un-American to their core.
Wolfowitz, Feith and Bolton make the list because they are the arrogant neo-clowns that got us into this Iraq War and would like to invade even more countries. Not only were they hideously wrong but they bullied and intimidated the rest of the government into following the disastrous path they set.
The real question I struggled with was who deserved the top spot. For most of the Bush presidency, Dick Cheney has sat comfortably atop the rankings. He is the author and creator of all of the un-American actions of the last six years. Poor Bush has easily been manipulated into almost any action Cheney has wanted him to take in that time. Cheney is the man who pulls the trigger.
I mainly viewed Bush as a pitiable fool who had no idea what forces put him into office and why they were directing him to do what he was doing. The thought of Bush fancying himself "The Decider" was so comically and pathetically wrong that it was hard not to feel sorry for him.
But lately I have had a change of heart. Yes, I think this was mainly the Cheney administration. No, I don't agree with the mainstream media that George Bush is a cognizant leader who actually directs what happens in his administration. And yes, Cheney, as I explained above, is thoroughly opposed to our system of government.
But for all his greed, lust for power, hubris and dictatorial tendencies, I don't think Dick Cheney believes he is harming the United States. I think in his own twisted mind, he thinks he is the only one who can protect the US (ironically by destroying what it stands for).
On the other hand, I am not convinced that George Bush is acting in the best interest of the country. I think he puts his own interest above those of the country to the point where it is callous indifference.
There is nothing George Bush won't do to cover up his own insecurities. The man has been an abject failure in every aspect of his life. He was terrible at school. He was cowardly in the face of battle. He destroyed every business he ran. And he knows it.
But he buries it deep down inside. He puts on his fake swagger and pretends he earned his place in the world. He was born as American royalty and he thinks he built the empire. He has had everything handed to him and smashed it to pieces.
But a man who cared would look to do the right thing. Would look for help. Would admit he has flaws and bring in people who could help him lead. Instead, Bush, for fear of looking inward, has eschewed all change and all help.
His pride is more important to him than the lives of others, than the United States government and the well being of her citizens. And that is inexcusable.
He thinks politics is a game. And that whoever wins the elections is the better man. But it isn't about winning elections, it's about governing. It's about caring for the people of the United States of America. He has such a colossal responsibility - and he does not care.
That's why he did nothing during Katrina, that's why he had no plan for post-war Iraq, that's why he stayed on vacation when he was warned Al Qaeda was going to attack inside the United States. He does not care.
What is important to him is that he appears powerful and that he wins. What are not important are the consequences of his decisions. The reason we had no post-war plan for Iraq is the same reason Bush had no post-election strategy for governing - because he does not care to govern.
He wants the ticker tape parade, the landing on the aircraft carrier, the hero's welcome. Then what happens afterward is none of his concern. He can't be bothered.
So, I have come to develop a loathing for him. If you want to accuse me of hating George Bush, go right ahead. Guilty as charged. If a man is this indifferent to the people whose lives hang in the balance based on his actions, I think he is a terrible person. If you don't hate him, you're not paying attention.
Congratulations, George W. Bush. You have done what seemed impossible, become less likable than Dick Cheney. You should be proud, you win!
<< But most of all, they are high on the list because they DO NOT believe in the American system of government. They believe that an imperial executive with broad, unchecked powers is a better system than the liberal democracy we currently have.
They don't believe in the rights guaranteed by our constitution, THEY DON'T BELIEVE IN THE AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM and they don't believe our democracy is strong enough to fight off our enemies. Simply put, THEY ARE UN-AMERICAN to their core. >>
[note: Author Michael Lind discusses this un-American pathology in his book "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics." Lind notes that, like the Jewish tribes invading and conquering their way to the "Holy Land," White Anglo-Scots Protestant expansion in the Deep South was accompanied by slavery and a radical desire to confront, enslave, and/or destroy neighboring cultures; up to and including non-slavery White Americans in "Bleeding Kansas" and during the Confederacy. The success of the Radical Right agenda over the past decade or two has been in successfully conflating ante-bellum theology, militancy, and 'moral values,' with big business corporate goals and corporate media manipulations that conflate the ideals we once identified as "freedoms," "democracy," and "justice" with the radical right, reactionary agenda of disenfranchisement, poverty-wages, and one-party rule.]
=====================================
Top Ten Worst People in the Bush Administration
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/top-ten-worst-people-in-t_b_29603.html
1. George W. Bush, President
2. Dick Cheney, Vice President
3. Karl Rove, Chief Political Adviser to the President
4. Don Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
5. Paul Wolfowitz, Former Deputy Secretary of Defense
6. David Addington, Chief of Staff to the Vice President
7. Douglas Feith, Former Under Secretary of Defense and Head of the Office of Special Plans
8. John Bolton, UN Ambassador
9. I. Lewis Libby, Former Chief of Staff to the Vice President
10. Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General
You know this list is hideous when John Ashcroft can't crack the Top Ten. John Bolton would finish in the top two of almost any other "worst person" list. But this is a murderer's row of incompetents, fool, knaves, and - in the immortal words of the president - evil-doers.
Other receiving votes include Condoleezza Rice, Mike Brown, Paul Bremer and every person who ever worked in the Vice President's office (yes, that definitely includes Mary Matalin).
In this tough field, people who didn't even merit votes but should get honorable mentions are Harriet Miers, Scott McClellan, David Safavian (the man who set purchasing policy for the entire government and was arrested for taking bribes from Jack Abramoff) and Jeff Gannon (the male hooker that was hired to pose as a reporter at the White House and pitch softballs to McClellan (who presumably caught them)).
Addington and Libby are so high on the list because they were the root of all of the decisions to torture, strip away rights (from United States citizens as well as detainees) and ignore the US constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Along with Dick Cheney they composed the heart of darkness inside the West Wing.
But most of all, they are high on the list because they don't believe in the American system of government. They believe that an imperial executive with broad, unchecked powers is a better system than the liberal democracy we currently have.
They don't believe in the rights guaranteed by our constitution, they don't believe in the American justice system and they don't believe our democracy is strong enough to fight off our enemies. Simply put, they are un-American to their core.
Wolfowitz, Feith and Bolton make the list because they are the arrogant neo-clowns that got us into this Iraq War and would like to invade even more countries. Not only were they hideously wrong but they bullied and intimidated the rest of the government into following the disastrous path they set.
The real question I struggled with was who deserved the top spot. For most of the Bush presidency, Dick Cheney has sat comfortably atop the rankings. He is the author and creator of all of the un-American actions of the last six years. Poor Bush has easily been manipulated into almost any action Cheney has wanted him to take in that time. Cheney is the man who pulls the trigger.
I mainly viewed Bush as a pitiable fool who had no idea what forces put him into office and why they were directing him to do what he was doing. The thought of Bush fancying himself "The Decider" was so comically and pathetically wrong that it was hard not to feel sorry for him.
But lately I have had a change of heart. Yes, I think this was mainly the Cheney administration. No, I don't agree with the mainstream media that George Bush is a cognizant leader who actually directs what happens in his administration. And yes, Cheney, as I explained above, is thoroughly opposed to our system of government.
But for all his greed, lust for power, hubris and dictatorial tendencies, I don't think Dick Cheney believes he is harming the United States. I think in his own twisted mind, he thinks he is the only one who can protect the US (ironically by destroying what it stands for).
On the other hand, I am not convinced that George Bush is acting in the best interest of the country. I think he puts his own interest above those of the country to the point where it is callous indifference.
There is nothing George Bush won't do to cover up his own insecurities. The man has been an abject failure in every aspect of his life. He was terrible at school. He was cowardly in the face of battle. He destroyed every business he ran. And he knows it.
But he buries it deep down inside. He puts on his fake swagger and pretends he earned his place in the world. He was born as American royalty and he thinks he built the empire. He has had everything handed to him and smashed it to pieces.
But a man who cared would look to do the right thing. Would look for help. Would admit he has flaws and bring in people who could help him lead. Instead, Bush, for fear of looking inward, has eschewed all change and all help.
His pride is more important to him than the lives of others, than the United States government and the well being of her citizens. And that is inexcusable.
He thinks politics is a game. And that whoever wins the elections is the better man. But it isn't about winning elections, it's about governing. It's about caring for the people of the United States of America. He has such a colossal responsibility - and he does not care.
That's why he did nothing during Katrina, that's why he had no plan for post-war Iraq, that's why he stayed on vacation when he was warned Al Qaeda was going to attack inside the United States. He does not care.
What is important to him is that he appears powerful and that he wins. What are not important are the consequences of his decisions. The reason we had no post-war plan for Iraq is the same reason Bush had no post-election strategy for governing - because he does not care to govern.
He wants the ticker tape parade, the landing on the aircraft carrier, the hero's welcome. Then what happens afterward is none of his concern. He can't be bothered.
So, I have come to develop a loathing for him. If you want to accuse me of hating George Bush, go right ahead. Guilty as charged. If a man is this indifferent to the people whose lives hang in the balance based on his actions, I think he is a terrible person. If you don't hate him, you're not paying attention.
Congratulations, George W. Bush. You have done what seemed impossible, become less likable than Dick Cheney. You should be proud, you win!
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Dragon-lady Mo Dowd (Maureen Dowd) notes that Bush "roams the country" but never strays from his Bushworld bubble... i.e., SURROUNDED by SYCOPHANTS
Wake Up, W
by Maureen Dowd,
--The New York Times, September 16, 2006
[URL hidden behind the NY Times' for-profit, editorials only firewall, AS the NY cowardly, lying Times RAMS dozens of misleading and blatantly FALSE stories down the throat of America's barely surviving democracy; INCLUDING the fact that NOT ONE FEDERAL OFFICIAL has been disciplined or reprimanded for the carnage that was THREE-THOUSAND NEW YORKERS incinerated, crushed, and vanished into the pall of smoke and ash that lingered over NY City on 9-11-2001; and that fact that we Americans STILL know NEXT TO NOTHING about the SAUDI and UNITED ARAB EMIRATES LINKS- financial and Al Qaida - to the 9-11 hijackers; and that we Americans have ABSOLUTELY NO assurance that our VOTES will be counted CORRECTLY in election 2006 (or were counted correctly in 2002 and 2004); and that we Americans are being asked to write and approve GESTAPO-esque laws while the Times and Congress pretend ignorance as to the intent or consequences of such laws.... all because the NYT is a lying, FOR PROFIT ONLY corporation that has NOT A LICK OF SHAME or ethics about SELLING LIES, MISINFORMATION, and GARBAGE information if it will boost their corporate bottom-line and goebbels-esque conglomerate profits.]
Wake Up, W
by nyt dragon lady mo "al gore wears earthtones!" dowd:
---------------------------------------
I wish W. would let me help crystallize him.
But, alas, I’m not one of his chosen crystallizers, because he is loath to be exposed to anyone who doesn’t agree with him. He roams the country but never strays from Bushworld, going from military bases to conservative powwows to Republican Hill allies to sworn Bush supporters to sympathetic columnists.
“It helps crystallize my thought to answer your questions,” he told conservative columnists called to the Oval Office this week. But he made it clear that his thoughts were contentedly calcified: “Let me just first tell you that I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions. I’m oftentimes asked about, well, you’re stubborn and all this. If you believe in a strategy, in Washington, D.C., you’ve got to stick to that strategy, see.”
Aside from Dick Cheney and Rummy, who don’t have all their buttons, we all long for W. to find better strategies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, pretty much the rest of the world and national security.
He’s facing a rebellion from big shots in his party who don’t want him to rip up the Geneva Conventions. Lindsey Graham calls it a fight over “who America is in 2006.” John McCain, who has been trying so hard to play nice with W. for the sake of his political future, said the president’s plan risks “our moral standing and the lives of those Americans who risk everything to defend our country.”
Colin Powell, his conscience about Iraq clearly stinging, agreed that “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism” and that undermining the Geneva Conventions “would add to those doubts” and “put our own troops at risk.” (Tony Snow deemed Mr. Powell confused, which is how the Bushies dismiss those who don’t grasp their invisible genius.)
Whenever W. does something legally sketchy and morally ambiguous — from pre-emptive war to spying to torturing — he claims he’s doing it to protect Americans from terrorists. But there’s a more visceral agenda: Vice and Rummy have persuaded W. he will not carry a big stick if bound by Lilliputian legalities, tiresome checks and balances and Kumbaya international conventions. Rather than being alarmed at their battiness, the president naïvely admires what he sees as bravado.
Just as Vice lurked at Langley before the Iraq war, trying to bully reluctant C.I.A. analysts to come up with a Saddam-Osama link, now the White House has maneuvered reluctant J.A.G. lawyers into supporting its dream of undermining justice.
Catching terrorists and protecting Americans can be done without trashing American ideals. This is about throwing off laws to prove that W. is “the Man,” as Vice likes to say, not some wobbly, wavering, multilateral metrosexual.
His counselors have dulled W.’s sense of urgency by persuading him to take the long view and read about Washington and Lincoln, when it would be far better to focus on the Middle East and revise his backfiring policies.
“Ideological struggles take time,” he said, and the world expects “instant success.”
“Maybe it’s because there’s too many TV channels, I don’t know,” he told the columnists, noting that’s why a president must have patience.
Despite his history reading, Mr. Bush seems to have forgotten Vietnam. “It’s impossible for someone to have grown up in the 50’s and 60’s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to our — to modern warfare,” he said. “But it’s real.” Besides saying he’s in “a struggle between good and evil” — which inflames many Muslims — W. told the columnists he thought America might be experiencing “a Third Awakening,” a religious fervor, because people he meets in rope lines tell him they’re praying for him. That could also be because W.’s policies have led to so much global chaos and hatred for America, his supporters know he needs more prayers.
“I got into politics initially because I wanted to help change a culture,” he said. He wanted to banish the old 60’s “if it feels good, do it” culture and “help usher in an era of personal responsibility.”
He has changed American culture, for sure. Bustling under Bill Clinton, the nation is now insecure about its moral force and military force. The president should take responsibility for the hash he’s made, instead of insisting every decision was correct, and come up with more astute cultural and military analyses. The “awakening” should be W.’s.
by Maureen Dowd,
--The New York Times, September 16, 2006
[URL hidden behind the NY Times' for-profit, editorials only firewall, AS the NY cowardly, lying Times RAMS dozens of misleading and blatantly FALSE stories down the throat of America's barely surviving democracy; INCLUDING the fact that NOT ONE FEDERAL OFFICIAL has been disciplined or reprimanded for the carnage that was THREE-THOUSAND NEW YORKERS incinerated, crushed, and vanished into the pall of smoke and ash that lingered over NY City on 9-11-2001; and that fact that we Americans STILL know NEXT TO NOTHING about the SAUDI and UNITED ARAB EMIRATES LINKS- financial and Al Qaida - to the 9-11 hijackers; and that we Americans have ABSOLUTELY NO assurance that our VOTES will be counted CORRECTLY in election 2006 (or were counted correctly in 2002 and 2004); and that we Americans are being asked to write and approve GESTAPO-esque laws while the Times and Congress pretend ignorance as to the intent or consequences of such laws.... all because the NYT is a lying, FOR PROFIT ONLY corporation that has NOT A LICK OF SHAME or ethics about SELLING LIES, MISINFORMATION, and GARBAGE information if it will boost their corporate bottom-line and goebbels-esque conglomerate profits.]
Wake Up, W
by nyt dragon lady mo "al gore wears earthtones!" dowd:
---------------------------------------
I wish W. would let me help crystallize him.
But, alas, I’m not one of his chosen crystallizers, because he is loath to be exposed to anyone who doesn’t agree with him. He roams the country but never strays from Bushworld, going from military bases to conservative powwows to Republican Hill allies to sworn Bush supporters to sympathetic columnists.
“It helps crystallize my thought to answer your questions,” he told conservative columnists called to the Oval Office this week. But he made it clear that his thoughts were contentedly calcified: “Let me just first tell you that I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions. I’m oftentimes asked about, well, you’re stubborn and all this. If you believe in a strategy, in Washington, D.C., you’ve got to stick to that strategy, see.”
Aside from Dick Cheney and Rummy, who don’t have all their buttons, we all long for W. to find better strategies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, pretty much the rest of the world and national security.
He’s facing a rebellion from big shots in his party who don’t want him to rip up the Geneva Conventions. Lindsey Graham calls it a fight over “who America is in 2006.” John McCain, who has been trying so hard to play nice with W. for the sake of his political future, said the president’s plan risks “our moral standing and the lives of those Americans who risk everything to defend our country.”
Colin Powell, his conscience about Iraq clearly stinging, agreed that “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism” and that undermining the Geneva Conventions “would add to those doubts” and “put our own troops at risk.” (Tony Snow deemed Mr. Powell confused, which is how the Bushies dismiss those who don’t grasp their invisible genius.)
Whenever W. does something legally sketchy and morally ambiguous — from pre-emptive war to spying to torturing — he claims he’s doing it to protect Americans from terrorists. But there’s a more visceral agenda: Vice and Rummy have persuaded W. he will not carry a big stick if bound by Lilliputian legalities, tiresome checks and balances and Kumbaya international conventions. Rather than being alarmed at their battiness, the president naïvely admires what he sees as bravado.
Just as Vice lurked at Langley before the Iraq war, trying to bully reluctant C.I.A. analysts to come up with a Saddam-Osama link, now the White House has maneuvered reluctant J.A.G. lawyers into supporting its dream of undermining justice.
Catching terrorists and protecting Americans can be done without trashing American ideals. This is about throwing off laws to prove that W. is “the Man,” as Vice likes to say, not some wobbly, wavering, multilateral metrosexual.
His counselors have dulled W.’s sense of urgency by persuading him to take the long view and read about Washington and Lincoln, when it would be far better to focus on the Middle East and revise his backfiring policies.
“Ideological struggles take time,” he said, and the world expects “instant success.”
“Maybe it’s because there’s too many TV channels, I don’t know,” he told the columnists, noting that’s why a president must have patience.
Despite his history reading, Mr. Bush seems to have forgotten Vietnam. “It’s impossible for someone to have grown up in the 50’s and 60’s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to our — to modern warfare,” he said. “But it’s real.” Besides saying he’s in “a struggle between good and evil” — which inflames many Muslims — W. told the columnists he thought America might be experiencing “a Third Awakening,” a religious fervor, because people he meets in rope lines tell him they’re praying for him. That could also be because W.’s policies have led to so much global chaos and hatred for America, his supporters know he needs more prayers.
“I got into politics initially because I wanted to help change a culture,” he said. He wanted to banish the old 60’s “if it feels good, do it” culture and “help usher in an era of personal responsibility.”
He has changed American culture, for sure. Bustling under Bill Clinton, the nation is now insecure about its moral force and military force. The president should take responsibility for the hash he’s made, instead of insisting every decision was correct, and come up with more astute cultural and military analyses. The “awakening” should be W.’s.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Washington Cowardly Post hires Bush SPEECHWRITER for THEIR editorial board.. as NY Times picked NIXON speechwriter WILLIAM SAFIRE...
Independent writer Jeff Cohen offers up an Excellent Deconstruction of the WASHINGTON POST's latest lying, cowardly SHILLING FOR THE RIGHT-WING TAKEOVER of America and the US government: Mr. Cohen details how the POST is now hiring former *top bush speechwriter* MICHAEL GERSON to BANG THE DRUMS FOR UNLIMITED WAR(s), UNLIMITED POLICE STATE POWERS (Heinrich Himmler powers as "Reichsprotector," of wartime Germany, Himmler answerable to no one but Hitler in his efforts to "cleanse" Germany of terrorists and "enemies of the state"), and aggressive international postures that can only be described at threatening, aggressive, and warlike.
Clearly, Mr. Gerson is intended, at the Washington Post, to take up where WILLIAM SAFIRE at the New York Times left off: Mr. Safire was a relentless brown-shirt Right-Wing Republican THUG in high media (and, ergo, corporate) offices of the NEW YORK TIMES, where Safire relentlessly railed against the Clintons and the Democratic White House. In one infamous column, Safire promised "INDICTMENTS WILL BE HANDED DOWN THIS WEEK!" In another equally infamous editorial, the cowardly lying editors of the TIMES even HEADLINED a Safire editorial, "Hillary is a CONGENITAL LIAR."
(Technically, a "congenital" defect is a genetic defect; thus Safire, for smear-mob effect, was calling Hillary Clinton was a born- and genetically predetermined liar. As is so often the case with Righty thugs and bullies, it was Mr. Safire, hiding behind the respectability of his NEW YORK TIMES desk, who was chronically LYING in most of his editorials, yet there was almost no one in American media-land calling the Times or Safire on their relentless lies, fabrications, smears and grossly misreported reporting.)
Well, in a macabre, sinister way, our hat is off to the TIMES and Mr. Safire - as with Joseph Goebbels and the rise of Adolf Hitler, the TIMES, in the late 1990s has proven that LIES and SMEAR-ATTACKS *work* at determining who wins power in America. Indeed, long before KARL ROVE put Mr. Bush within grabbing distance of the White Housee, the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST were both tilling the ground for Rove's masterpiece 2001 smear-job:
"Clinton staffers TRASHED the White House!"
Of which the NY TIMES and Washington POST were complicit enablers, RUNNING SCREAMING, ACCUSATORY HEADLINES "Departing Clinton Officials TRASHED THE WHITE HOUSE!" (destruction of federal property is a felony)
*** WITHOUT ONE PHOTOGRAPH OF EVIDENCE.*****
The TIMES and POST laid the ground for Mr. Bush's stolen 2000 election by relentlessly hyping and exaggerating anti-Clinton Republican propaganda, including the wholly made-up "Lincoln Bedroom," "Travel-gate" and "Whitewater" stories - Ken Starr spent MILLIONS investigating Whitewater, and besides the hapless Jim McDougal the best conviction Starr could get was - Web Hubbell "OVERBILLING" clients and his own law firm... WITH THE APPROVAL of those clients and law partners???!
Contrast the Times', Post's and KEN STARR's VIGILANCE at prosecuting the hapless Webster Hubbel for "overbilling" clients and partners for a few hours of legal work (in effect, bonus money).... with the BILLIONS in missing Iraq reconstruction funds; or the BILLION DOLLAR Halliburton contracts with NO OVERSIGHT or SUPERVISION, a company that Mr. Cheney STILL HOLDS STOCK IN, and that he benefits from as Halliburton's stock price RISES as he channels billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his former corporation! (Speaking of which, the cowering Dems. and corrupt "major media" have YET to try and hold Mr. Cheney accountable for SELLING OIL TECHNOLOGY EQUIPMENT to Saddam Hussein's IRAQ... WHILE the United States was enforcing an international embargo on Iraq in the late 1990s! IF anyone with links to a Democrat administration had tried such a corrupt scheme, the right-wing press would be foaming-at-the-mouth and shouting "TREASON!" to this day.)
-----------------------------------------
In the entire US media, Mr. Safire was THE MOST animated, extreme, and visible Clinton critic - even the "Vince Foster was murdered by Clintons!" and "Bill Clinton sold missile technology to China!" conspiracy theorists had to take a back seat to Mr. Safire, who included the "China spying!" allegations in his rants - and his NEW YORK TIMES column was perhaps the most widely syndicated in America.
And let us not forget FALLUJAH: After four US mercenaries entered Fallujah ahead of the US military (with their illegal shoot-to-kill-on-sight, no-questions-asked-or-answered paramilitary powers) and were surprised, killed and had their bodies strung up from a bridge by insurgents, WILLIAM SAFIRE and the NEW YORK TIMES were THE FIRST, and MOST VISIBLE voices in calling for RETRIBUTION AGAINST THE ENTIRE TOWN of Fallujah.
INSERT photographs, Fallujah BEFORE THE SAFIRE/NEW YORK TIMES TREATMENT, and Fallujah AFTER THE SAFIRE/NEW YORK TIMES/Rumsfeld/Bush/Cheney/Rove treatment HERE.
Talk about HEAD-HUNTING and SCALP-COLLECTING.... the New York Times entrance foyer and editorial offices should have framed photographs of a bombed and burned Fallujah on the walls, "Look what we can do.. our very own Lidice/Guernica!" (The US Army relied heavily on their "shake and bake" artillery tactics in blasting apart Fallujah: heavy concentrated artillery fire and bombs to weaken shelters and blast standing structures to bits, and then "Willie Pete" white phosphorous shells working as a poison-gas attack on those who survived the high-exposive munitions.)
So, the NEW YORK TIMES and William Safire have quite the credit between them; Safire, THE FORMER NIXON SPEECH WRITER, authoritarian, and antihuman rights military powers advocate, using his TIMES editorial desk to LEAD "mainstream media" antagonists against the Clinton White House, and succeeded in dragging up so much muck on the Clintons that the US Supreme Court ruled that PAULA JONES had a right to sue the president - after a brief, one sentence mention in a William Mellon Scaife funded "ARKANSAS PROJECT" magazine hit-piece (in the 'American Spectator' magazine) that alluded to a brief liaison (or attempted liaison) between then Governor Clinton and some woman named only "Paula"!
From trashing the Clintons for eight years the TIMES shifted their fire in 2000 to the hapless AL GORE. Safire's fellow Times editorial stablemate MAUREEN DOWD has written to knowing that George W. Bush consistently "PLAYED THE CLOWN" in front of reporters on his campaign flights... but she thought it was more important to write column after column about... Al Gore's earth-tone wardrobe, choice of campaign advisors, and Gore's alleged "lying" because Gore forgot which official he had toured which specific disaster site with, out of hundreds of such visits!
ALL OF WHICH "reporting" by the Times and Post put George W. Bush within range of STEALING the presidency, which action was completed when Florida Governor Jeb Bush (brother to George W. Bush) and his Secretary of State KATHERINE HARRIS ILLEGALLY disenfranchised TENS of THOUSANDS of Black voters by using Choice-Point voter-registration purging software and other systematic means (discarded and uncounted ballots) to disenfranchise thousands of likely anti-Bush voters.
That was then - a NIXON speechwriter at the NEW YORK TIMES prepared the ground for the stolen Bush White House, by RELENTLESSLY TRASHING the Clinton administration for 8 years from within the NEW YORK TIMES editorial offices.
TODAY, we learn that the WASHINGTON POST is taking up where SAFIRE and the TIMES left off.. hiring BUSH's LEAD SPEECHWRITER as editorial writer for the WASHINGTON POST.
Well, the good news is, it is all out in the open now - it may take time for the dust (nuclear dust?) to settle, but three, four, or five decades from now, historians will compile the evidence that the AIPAC community, the TIMES, the POST, and other neo-con influences in American media (the Sulzberger owned NEW YORK TIMES and Mr. William Safire at the top of that list) WORKED HARD FOR OVER A DECADE to prepare the way for a Right-Wing restoration to the US presidency, and having obtained that restoration, the United States government has effectively declared that ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD that it so deems is now a FREE FIRE combat zone in the "War on terror," - with COMPLETE SS powers of life-and-death over ANYONE declared an "ENEMY COMBATANT," NO QUESTIONS ASKED, ANSWERED, OR ALLOWED.
THAT is the agenda of the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST, and it is indeed good to know that the Post is hiring Mr. MICHAEL GERSON, Pres. Bush's former speechwriter, just to take up where Nixon speechwriter William Safire left off, and to put that oh-so-holy RELIGIOUS SPIN on the right-wing totalitarian agenda.
We can rest assured that, as he supports polices that GUT the GENEVA CONVENTIONS, treat US military men and women as canon fodder, tax the American public to fund tax-cuts for the hyper-wealthy, dispense with international law and urge UNILATERAL MILITARY THREATS against other nations, Mr. Gerson will continually invoke GOD and religious values for the international bullying and powers that are scarcely indistinguishable from what Himmler sought for the SS.
-----------------------------------
Documentation: [Note: This documentation is mostly regarding the links between the Post, the Times, Mr. Gerson, and the Bush White House-Republican Congress, with the neo-con/Likud agenda of expanding wars under a veil of religious morality. Documenting the Washington Post's and New York Times' decade long tirade of lies and smear-mongering against the Democratic White House would take a separate book. And today, much of the Democratic Party leadership is in complete accord with "Defense of the Reich" wartime powers claimed by the Bush White House, including 'Democratic' Senators Lieberman, Feinstein, Clinton, and Schumer, and others, all of whom are AWOL - missing and nowhere to be seen - re supporting the GENEVA CONVENTIONS or other such other democratic restrictions on the unlimited war-time powers claimed by the Bush White House.]
=======================================
#1. Michael Gerson- The man behind "God" in Bush's speeches."
13 December 2004
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_001368.php
The Washington Post's Alan Cooperman pays for a Key West junket with a puff piece about BUSH SPEECHWRITER MICHAEL GERSON, the MAN BEHIND the GOD IN THE PRESIDENT's RHETORIC. "At a meeting with reporters in Key West, Fla., on Monday and Tuesday [an annual retreat hosted by the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center], Gerson, who has crafted almost all of Bush's major speeches since 2000 but has rarely spoken to the media, defended the president's religious rhetoric. Although the session was off the record, Gerson subsequently agreed to allow some of his main points to appear in print." Sure, why not? Not as if there'd be any serious accountability. "[O]n the whole, the speechwriter argued, Bush's references to the role of providence in human affairs have been carefully calibrated and fully within the tradition of American civic religion." Leaving aside Bush's critics, if that assertion is so, why do so many millions of Bush supporters see in their man a servant of God unlike any previous occupant of the oval office? And why does Prof. David Domke's analysis of 70 years of presidential rhetoric reveal a marked shift toward the prophetic in Bush's speeches?
-----------------------------------------------------
#2. Washington Post HIRES TOP BUSH SPEECHWRITER
by Jeff Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/410
(reprinted in full at bottom this post)
The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson, Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within WHIG -- helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post's laptop warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under the same roof.
---------------------------------------------
#3.
Backstory: Michael Gergan, Compassionate conservatism's voice
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0713/p20s01-lire.html
'Unlike some conservatives, I have seen that government - careful, energetic, effective government - can be a powerful force for good.'
- Michael Gerson, Bush speechwriter, 1999-2006
[note: "careful, energetic, effective goverment' IS AT CROSS-PURPOSES with the radical-right-wing agenda of the Bush-Cheney administration, as expressed in the infamous Grover Norquist mantra "take government and shrink it down to size until you can drown it in a bathtub." (An agenda which is a TOTAL LIE, because Mr. Norquist AND ALL OTHER Radical-right-wing advocates desire a US military/police/intel/national security bureaucracy large enough to spy on anyone, anywhere in the world.) The NEGLECT of flooding victims in New Orleans WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT - New Orleans since the flood has been effectively DEPOPULATED - ethnically cleansed - of its Black (voting) majority, and it is with premeditation and malice aforesight that the Bush admin. has USED the New Orleans floods AS AN EXCUSE to channel huge, multi-billion dollar contracts to HALLIBURTON and other administration-crony companies. In the simplest, crudest terms, "PRIVATIZATION" is effectively an attempt to round up the slaves and put 'em back on the plantation, where they become, not free American citizens, but THE PRIVATE PROPERTY of the plantation owner. According to the Right-WIng agenda, ECONOMIC DISENFRANCHISEMENT, dislocation, resettlement, and depopulation, and of course voting disenfranchisement ARE ALL STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION - just as President Andrew Jackson depopulated the Cherokee tribes from the Carolinas and Georgia on the enforced ethnic cleansing/death march, "The Trail of Tears" from the Carolinas to Oklahoma.)
Mr. Gerson may HIDE all these actions, ommissions, and premediated policy FAILURES or cruelties behind his rhetoric of "compassionate conservativism" and other similar propaganda themes of religous virtues, BUT_HE_IS_LYING.]
-----------------------------------------------------
<< THE PRESIDENT GOEST TO Capitol Hill TO LOBBY *FOR* TORTURE. >>
#4. as this article from the WP documents:
A Defining Moment for America
THE PRESIDENT GOEST TO Capitol Hill TO LOBBY *FOR* TORTURE.
Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401587.html
[note how the cowardly, whore editors of the Post BURY this story.. on page A-18?
By their OWN WORDS, "A DEFINING MOMENT FOR AMERICA" deserves to be... BURIED on page A-18 ??!
What pathetic Himmler-genuflecting WHORES!
-----------------------------------------------------------
#5. Just to prove that the NY Times and Washington Post are working IN PARRALLEL, commenting on (if you read carefully) the rise of Himmler's SS-esque war time powers in America, while actually ENABLING and boosting those very un-opposable wartime powers. (Note the pathetic and misleading NYT headline)
** BUSH WANTS TO GUT GENEVA CONVENTIONS **
(as headline-linked at HuffingtonPost.com)
While the COWARDLY, LYING NEW YORK TIMES headline ACTUALLY reads:
An Unexpected Collision Over Detainees
By CARL HULSE
September 15, 2006
News Analysis
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/us/politics/15assess.html
------------
"AN UNEXPECTED COLLISION over DETAINEES" ??! -
- HOW THE HELL does THAT mean "TORTURE" and SECRET, DRUM-HEAD MILITARY TRIALS??
[Note too, the Times byline reads "NEWS ANALYSIS", but you have to READ WAY past 3 paragraphs to realize that the CLASH-OF-OFFICIAL-PERSONALITIES story that the Times, Post, and WHORE media so love to write, IS ACTUALLY ABOUT *UNLIMITED* GESTAPO powers of DETENTION and TORTURE!
(We apologize for mixing our SS and Gestapo metaphors, which are so direct as to not be metaphors. The SS was Henrich Himmler's private black-uniformed army that swore alliegance to the person of Adolf Hitler before the regular German Army ("Wermacht") was forced to do so. Himmler's SS ascended to power when Hitler decapitated his SA Brown-Shirt street army by having SA leader Ernst Rohm - his ally through a decade of Nazi party rise to power - shot for being a homosexual and for other "crimes of treason." The Gestapo was the Nazi state's secret police, set up by and answerable to Herman Goering, the chief of the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) and, like Rohm, one of Hitler's earliest and most powerful supporters. There was always conflict and tension between the SS, Gestapo, and regular German military organizations, each of which had their own intel services, and all competing for power and turf rights - just as security forces and military compete in all other nations. But if you were a partisan, declared enemy of the state, or innocent bystander, it didn't matter if you were arrested by the SS, SA, Gestapo, or even field units of the Wermacht - THE RESULTS WERE THE SAME. (UN Chairman Kurt Waldheim participated in Wermacht "regular army" counterinsurgency operations as an intel officer in Greece, operations that included the deportation of the Jewish population of Salonika, Greece, to death camps in Eastern Europe.)
The conclusion is unmistakable: USING FUZZY-HEADLINES and MISLEADING REPORTING (that focuses on personality conflicts, NOT the TORTURE and SUMMARY ARREST, DETENTION, and DEATH PENALTY powers sought by the US administration) the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST are in COMPLETE ACCORD with SS/GESTAPO unlimited war-time powers, with NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER with innocent goat-herders and children caught up in the US wars overseas.
----------------------------------------
#6. Bob Herbert, NYT
STRANGER in the MIRROR op-ed, 14 Sept. 2006
Over at the NEW YORK TIMES again, the Times' token Black (African-American) in-house editorialist, BOB HERBERT, snivels about "THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR" - "the fact that "the very character of the United States is changing, and not for the better" as Mr. Herbert writes. We can't LINK to Mr. Herbert's op-ed because the Lying NY Times BURIES all their editorial writers under a "premium" must-pay firewall. No matter, as we have just documented here with #5., Times op-eds are MEANINGLESS unless they fit the template of Safire's unholy JIHAD against democratic goverment and rights; and those (non-Right-Wing) editorials the Times does publish are anyways BURIED under the Times' SHAMELESS editing "An Unexpected Collision Over Detainees" to mean "BUSH ADMINSTRATION SEEKS GESTAPO/SS wartime POWERS!"
[Note #1.- Damn right, the opposition to those powers was "UNEXPECTED" - the Lying Times and Cowardly Post have been SHILLING FOR THOSE nazi-esque r-w powers for a decade now, and are surpised that ANYONE would offer up some "UNEXPECTED" criticism of them!]
Note #2: Mr. Herbert: Jesus admonished us (humans) to "look not the speck in your neighbor's eye, when you have a splinter in your own." Before chasting the American public for "the change in American character" for the worse, not the better... WHY DON'T YOU LOOK AT YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER, EDITORS, and OWNER?!
[note#3: As with NYT op-ed columnist MAUREEN DOWD, Bob Herbert jumped on the "TRASH CLINTON AND GORE" bandwagon in 2000 leading up to the elections of that year... Herbert either too stupid, too arrogant, or too ignorant to realize that DISENFRANCHISING BLACK VOTERS was/would become a CORE ELECTION STRATEGY of the Bush-GOP campaign in Florida and elsewhere... in 2000, much less six years later in 2006!
[Note #4: In a sense, Mr. Herbert is correct: America's character IS changing, and NOT for the better. Even highly placed Black writers such as Mr. Herbert CAN NOT or WILL NOT express outrage over the Bush-Cheney administration funnelling BILLIONS of federal, public tax dollars to Halliburton for New Orleans "reconstruction," even as poor Black families in New Orleans have lost their homes, jobs, voting rights... and hometown, WITH NOT PROSPECT FOR RETURN anytime in the next few years! And today the Jewish-owned NY Times (owned by the Sulberger family) and other AIPAC neo-cons in influential positions in the US media are shamelessly advocating nazi-esque wartime powers for the Bush administration, and MUDDYING the issues at every chance they get. (#4 and #5 above) As they say, s*** roles downhill, and with highly placed media and government "LEADERS" BETRAYING America's democratic principles from the inside-out, from the top down, those of us "working class" Americans at the bottom of the pyramid are in a paranoid state of paralysis, waiting for the next blow to land - and looking suspiciously and reactively at our neighbors, whether next door, across town, or across national borders.)
----------------------------------------------------
#7. Back to the POST again, where the Post actually allows Lawrence Korb and Peter Ogden the editorial space to confront and deconstruct the NEO-CON god-father wannabe WILLIAM KRISTOL's (and Rich Lowry's) call for ** MORE US TROOPS IN IRAQ! **
Why We Can't Send More Troops
By Lawrence J. Korb and Peter Ogden
Thursday, September 14, 2006; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091301575.html
[ Make no mistake, the Bush/NEO-CON agenda is about GRABBING MORE WEALTH AND POWER, and THE ONLY WAY that the Bush-Cheney government will be able to find enough warm bodies to heed WILLIAM KRISTOL's CALL for "MORE TROOPS in Iraq!" is by INSTITUTING THE DRAFT: taking America's young men (and women) out of their homes and hometowns, and shoving them into Uncle Sam's army AT MINIMUM WAGE, there to risk their lives and limbs under the ATROCIOUSLY INCOMPETENT and CORRUPT 'leadership' of Don Rumsfeld's Department of War. Rumsfeld IS SO CORRUPT (and the American press/media SO cravenly COMPLICIT) that no one even notices the irony or outrage, that SECRETARY RUMSFELD ordered his Army to PROSECUTE FEMAL PRIVATE VOLUNTEERS for "abusing" Iraq prisoners held by US forces in KANGAROO COURT Military 'trials'... WHILE Mr. Rumsfeld PROMOTES the US TORTURE GENERALS, and WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH goes hat-in-hand to Capitol Hill (Congress) SEEKING UNLIMITED TORTURE (and, yes, 'abusive,' sadistic, degredation and humiliation) POWERS!]
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#8. Back to the TIMES for this one, ELISABETH BUMLLIER writes an article "explaining" Pres. Bush's use of RELIGIOUS THEMES
and invoking "DEMOCRACY" to JUSTIFY WARS overseas.
Note also that this article notes that NATAN SHARNSKY was "a former SOVIET DISSIDENT, IS NOW A HAWKISH government minister in Israel" !!!
Look at that: "DISSIDENTS" *used to be* SYNONYMOUS with "human rights," but in today's charged Bush/neo-con/Republican/everlasting-war-on-terror atmosphere, you can go from being a "HUMAN RIGHTS DISSIDENT' to a "GESTAPO-POWERS WAR-on-TERROR HAWK" in one easy move!
White House Letter; Bush's Book Club Picks a New Favorite
By ELISABETH BUMILLER (NYT); National Desk
January 31, 2005, Monday
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 21, Column 1, 954 words
DISPLAYING ABSTRACT - Pres Bush says themes of Natan Sharansky's book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, will be invoked in his State of Union address, as it was in his Inaugural address; Sharansky was invited to White House to meet with Bush in Nov; Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, is now hawkish government minister in Israel; his influence on Bush has become part of buzz of Washington (White House Letter)
[note: search for your own link, NY Times puts up a for-pay firewall)
To read this archive article, upgrade to TimesSelect or purchase as a single article.
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#9. And here's the link between Sharansky's former "human rights dissident" now SS/Gestapo UNLIMITED-WARTIME-POWERS Hawk agenda (with a veneer of RELIGIOUS VALUES!) to Mr. Bush's former speechwriter, new WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST Michael Gerson
Closing the Neo-con Circle
Mr. Michale Hersh
Newsweek Jan. 25, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6867187/site/newsweek/
<< In Bush’s speech, drafted by chief White House speechwriter Michael Gerson with input from an old Sharansky ally dating to the Reagan years, National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, Bush in effect declared......
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#10 and here is a more detailed, thorough analysis of the Neo-con/Bush war-on-terror agenda infused with a patina of "spreading freedom and democracy" (at the point of a guns and "shake & bake" treatment for any cities that resist) and "religious values" as espoused by the neo-cons and Republicans:
Natan Sharansky and George W. Bush
The Foreign Policy Diaspora—From Jerusalem to Washington
by Tom Barry | February 8, 2005
IRC Right Web -
http://www.irc-online.org/rightweb/rw/707
The State of the Union Address and Bush’s second Inaugural Address focused U.S. and international attention on Natan Sharansky, author of The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror. Pundits and reporters noted that the president’s lofty rhetoric about “ending tyranny in our world” and guaranteeing “freedom from fear” echoed Sharansky’s language.
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#11. UN's IAEA accuses US Congress subcommittee of releasing a "DISHONEST" and "OUTRAGEOUS" report that would JUSTIFY US "other actions" against Iran... i.e. the US government FABRICATING EVIDENCE to JUSTIFY A WAR (embargo, bombings, or other such "other actions", in the words of US Ambassador (recess apptmnt) to UN John Bolton.)
Not only did such FRAUDULENT Bush administration "WMD" claims lie behind the US war, invasion, and occupation of Iraq in 2003, but it is also starting to sound like Germany's relentless formulation of excuses for occupying first the Sudentenland, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and finally blaming Poland for "an attack which led" to the German invasion of Poland and European phase of WWII.
IAEA: US Report on Iran "DISHONEST"
By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer
15 September 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060915/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_nuclear_us
VIENNA, Austria - A recent House of Representatives committee report on Iran's nuclear capability is "outrageous and dishonest" in trying to make a case that Tehran's program is geared toward making weapons, a senior official of the U.N. nuclear watchdog has said.
The letter, obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday outside a 35-nation board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says the report is false in saying Iran is making weapons-grade uranium at an experimental enrichment site, when it has in fact produced material only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms.
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#12.
- Port Security Won’t Bankrupt Us
NYT unsigned (editorial board) editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/opinion/14thu1.html
Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, seems determined to outdo his commander in chief in RATCHETING UP FEARS of Al Qaeda whenever he wants to score political points. This week, he raised the specter that if the government starts too many expensive antiterrorism programs it could further a plot by Osama bin Laden to “drive us crazy, into bankruptcy” through overspending on homeland defense.
It was particularly ironic that Mr. Chertoff spun this theory while he was FIGHINT OFF [AGAINST] a measure, up for a vote today, THAT WOULD HELP PROTECT OUR PORTS against the threat that he himself deems most worrisome — a nuclear explosion within our borders — without government spending.
[note: the Bush government/congress are so insane with lust for war powers that rival the Gestapo/SS's, and the right-wing is so lustful for using TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS against "enemey targets," that it is hard not to conclude that the Bush administration is almost ROLLING OUT A RED CARPET for the NEXT terror attack on US targets, such as happened immediately leading up to the 19 Saudi terrorists boarding US airliners on 9-11.... With the Bush government DERELICT at providing even a GENERAL TRAVELLER's ADVISORY that Al Qaida hijack plots were filling FBI, NSA, CIA and other agencies' attentions. Such a (future) terrorist attack would of almost certainly and immediately blow away even the minor, timid, and tepid opposition to those war-time powers of absolute totalitarian control as claimed by Mr. Bush and his advisors.
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#13.
9-11 Commission Given "D" an "F" FAILING grades re implementation of counter-terror recommendations by the 9-11 Commission: A.) Official Report Summary, government PDF file"
http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_report.pdf
B.) Washington Post review of same;
"US Given FAILING GRADES by 9-11 Panel" for FAILING "at enacting numerous reforms that could save American lives and prevent another terrorist attack on U.S. soil."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120500097.html
===========================================
Smoking Gun: Washington Post Hires Top Bush Speechwriter
by Jeff Cohen
at BuzzFlash Thu, 09/14/2006 -
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/410
Few media marching bands have beat the Iraq war drums more frantically and with more influence than the editorial pages of the Washington Post. On Monday, the Post announced the hiring of another drummer boy, one who played a key propaganda role inside the Bush White House.
The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson, Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within WHIG -- helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post's laptop warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under the same roof.
In explaining why the Post was adding yet another pro-war voice to its op-ed page, hawkish editorial page editor Fred Hiatt described Gerson as being "a different kind of conservative from the other conservatives on our page." Thanks, Fred, for all the diversity.
In their new book "Hubris," Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that it was Gerson who -
* inserted references to the yellowcake-from-Niger tale into various Bush speeches, including the 2003 State of the Union.
* helped prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell's dishonest and bellicose speech to the U.N.
* conceived Team Bush's trademark paranoid "soundbite" warning of a potential Iraq nuclear program: "The first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud."
According to "Hubris," the "mushroom cloud" line was intended for a Bush speech, but was too good to hold. It was first deployed in September 2002 by anonymous White House aides in a New York Times front-page scare story (by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon) warning that Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons." On CNN that day, Condoleezza Rice declared: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." And Gerson's line became a standard and manipulative war cry from then on.
Speechwriter Gerson should be right at home at the Washington Post. From September 2002 through February 2003, the Post editorialized 26 times in favor of the Iraq war. As Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman have documented, its op-ed page was also dominated by hawks screaming for war. War skeptics were denounced as "fools" and "liars" and worse -- and the skeptics were not given space to respond.
As Gerson's "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" soundbite took flight, Al Gore made an Iraq speech questioning "preemptive war." On the Post op-ed page, Gore's speech was "dishonest, cheap, low" and "wretched...vile...contemptible." And that was all in one column. Another called it "a series of cheap shots."
By contrast, the error-filled Colin Powell speech at the U.N. (that Gerson worked on) was hailed at the Post with almost Pravda-like unanimity. An editorial -- headlined "Irrefutable" -- declared: "It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." And the Post op-ed page from right to "left" embraced Powell's speech.
"When reading the Post's pre-war coverage," summarized journalist Robert Parry, "there was a whiff of totalitarianism in which dissidents never get space to express their opinions but are still excoriated by the official media. When the state speaks, however, the same media hails the government's brilliance."
Gerson and his new colleagues at the Post worked together to help bring us one of the worst foreign policy debacles in our nation's history. Newspapers are supposed to hold discredited public officials to account. The Post is hiring him.
It's partly because of the Post's inexcusable coverage before the war, and its ongoing pro-war editorial bias, that I will be joining Scott Ritter, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and other activists at Camp Democracy in Washington D.C. this Tuesday, Sept. 19, for a public forum on the media's role in Iraq and Iran.
There will also be a protest march to the Washington Post headquarters that evening. With the newspaper's hiring of Gerson, I know an appropriate slogan: "Two, four, six, eight/Separate the press and state."
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, and author of the new book: "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media"
Clearly, Mr. Gerson is intended, at the Washington Post, to take up where WILLIAM SAFIRE at the New York Times left off: Mr. Safire was a relentless brown-shirt Right-Wing Republican THUG in high media (and, ergo, corporate) offices of the NEW YORK TIMES, where Safire relentlessly railed against the Clintons and the Democratic White House. In one infamous column, Safire promised "INDICTMENTS WILL BE HANDED DOWN THIS WEEK!" In another equally infamous editorial, the cowardly lying editors of the TIMES even HEADLINED a Safire editorial, "Hillary is a CONGENITAL LIAR."
(Technically, a "congenital" defect is a genetic defect; thus Safire, for smear-mob effect, was calling Hillary Clinton was a born- and genetically predetermined liar. As is so often the case with Righty thugs and bullies, it was Mr. Safire, hiding behind the respectability of his NEW YORK TIMES desk, who was chronically LYING in most of his editorials, yet there was almost no one in American media-land calling the Times or Safire on their relentless lies, fabrications, smears and grossly misreported reporting.)
Well, in a macabre, sinister way, our hat is off to the TIMES and Mr. Safire - as with Joseph Goebbels and the rise of Adolf Hitler, the TIMES, in the late 1990s has proven that LIES and SMEAR-ATTACKS *work* at determining who wins power in America. Indeed, long before KARL ROVE put Mr. Bush within grabbing distance of the White Housee, the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST were both tilling the ground for Rove's masterpiece 2001 smear-job:
"Clinton staffers TRASHED the White House!"
Of which the NY TIMES and Washington POST were complicit enablers, RUNNING SCREAMING, ACCUSATORY HEADLINES "Departing Clinton Officials TRASHED THE WHITE HOUSE!" (destruction of federal property is a felony)
*** WITHOUT ONE PHOTOGRAPH OF EVIDENCE.*****
The TIMES and POST laid the ground for Mr. Bush's stolen 2000 election by relentlessly hyping and exaggerating anti-Clinton Republican propaganda, including the wholly made-up "Lincoln Bedroom," "Travel-gate" and "Whitewater" stories - Ken Starr spent MILLIONS investigating Whitewater, and besides the hapless Jim McDougal the best conviction Starr could get was - Web Hubbell "OVERBILLING" clients and his own law firm... WITH THE APPROVAL of those clients and law partners???!
Contrast the Times', Post's and KEN STARR's VIGILANCE at prosecuting the hapless Webster Hubbel for "overbilling" clients and partners for a few hours of legal work (in effect, bonus money).... with the BILLIONS in missing Iraq reconstruction funds; or the BILLION DOLLAR Halliburton contracts with NO OVERSIGHT or SUPERVISION, a company that Mr. Cheney STILL HOLDS STOCK IN, and that he benefits from as Halliburton's stock price RISES as he channels billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his former corporation! (Speaking of which, the cowering Dems. and corrupt "major media" have YET to try and hold Mr. Cheney accountable for SELLING OIL TECHNOLOGY EQUIPMENT to Saddam Hussein's IRAQ... WHILE the United States was enforcing an international embargo on Iraq in the late 1990s! IF anyone with links to a Democrat administration had tried such a corrupt scheme, the right-wing press would be foaming-at-the-mouth and shouting "TREASON!" to this day.)
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In the entire US media, Mr. Safire was THE MOST animated, extreme, and visible Clinton critic - even the "Vince Foster was murdered by Clintons!" and "Bill Clinton sold missile technology to China!" conspiracy theorists had to take a back seat to Mr. Safire, who included the "China spying!" allegations in his rants - and his NEW YORK TIMES column was perhaps the most widely syndicated in America.
And let us not forget FALLUJAH: After four US mercenaries entered Fallujah ahead of the US military (with their illegal shoot-to-kill-on-sight, no-questions-asked-or-answered paramilitary powers) and were surprised, killed and had their bodies strung up from a bridge by insurgents, WILLIAM SAFIRE and the NEW YORK TIMES were THE FIRST, and MOST VISIBLE voices in calling for RETRIBUTION AGAINST THE ENTIRE TOWN of Fallujah.
INSERT photographs, Fallujah BEFORE THE SAFIRE/NEW YORK TIMES TREATMENT, and Fallujah AFTER THE SAFIRE/NEW YORK TIMES/Rumsfeld/Bush/Cheney/Rove treatment HERE.
Talk about HEAD-HUNTING and SCALP-COLLECTING.... the New York Times entrance foyer and editorial offices should have framed photographs of a bombed and burned Fallujah on the walls, "Look what we can do.. our very own Lidice/Guernica!" (The US Army relied heavily on their "shake and bake" artillery tactics in blasting apart Fallujah: heavy concentrated artillery fire and bombs to weaken shelters and blast standing structures to bits, and then "Willie Pete" white phosphorous shells working as a poison-gas attack on those who survived the high-exposive munitions.)
So, the NEW YORK TIMES and William Safire have quite the credit between them; Safire, THE FORMER NIXON SPEECH WRITER, authoritarian, and antihuman rights military powers advocate, using his TIMES editorial desk to LEAD "mainstream media" antagonists against the Clinton White House, and succeeded in dragging up so much muck on the Clintons that the US Supreme Court ruled that PAULA JONES had a right to sue the president - after a brief, one sentence mention in a William Mellon Scaife funded "ARKANSAS PROJECT" magazine hit-piece (in the 'American Spectator' magazine) that alluded to a brief liaison (or attempted liaison) between then Governor Clinton and some woman named only "Paula"!
From trashing the Clintons for eight years the TIMES shifted their fire in 2000 to the hapless AL GORE. Safire's fellow Times editorial stablemate MAUREEN DOWD has written to knowing that George W. Bush consistently "PLAYED THE CLOWN" in front of reporters on his campaign flights... but she thought it was more important to write column after column about... Al Gore's earth-tone wardrobe, choice of campaign advisors, and Gore's alleged "lying" because Gore forgot which official he had toured which specific disaster site with, out of hundreds of such visits!
ALL OF WHICH "reporting" by the Times and Post put George W. Bush within range of STEALING the presidency, which action was completed when Florida Governor Jeb Bush (brother to George W. Bush) and his Secretary of State KATHERINE HARRIS ILLEGALLY disenfranchised TENS of THOUSANDS of Black voters by using Choice-Point voter-registration purging software and other systematic means (discarded and uncounted ballots) to disenfranchise thousands of likely anti-Bush voters.
That was then - a NIXON speechwriter at the NEW YORK TIMES prepared the ground for the stolen Bush White House, by RELENTLESSLY TRASHING the Clinton administration for 8 years from within the NEW YORK TIMES editorial offices.
TODAY, we learn that the WASHINGTON POST is taking up where SAFIRE and the TIMES left off.. hiring BUSH's LEAD SPEECHWRITER as editorial writer for the WASHINGTON POST.
Well, the good news is, it is all out in the open now - it may take time for the dust (nuclear dust?) to settle, but three, four, or five decades from now, historians will compile the evidence that the AIPAC community, the TIMES, the POST, and other neo-con influences in American media (the Sulzberger owned NEW YORK TIMES and Mr. William Safire at the top of that list) WORKED HARD FOR OVER A DECADE to prepare the way for a Right-Wing restoration to the US presidency, and having obtained that restoration, the United States government has effectively declared that ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD that it so deems is now a FREE FIRE combat zone in the "War on terror," - with COMPLETE SS powers of life-and-death over ANYONE declared an "ENEMY COMBATANT," NO QUESTIONS ASKED, ANSWERED, OR ALLOWED.
THAT is the agenda of the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST, and it is indeed good to know that the Post is hiring Mr. MICHAEL GERSON, Pres. Bush's former speechwriter, just to take up where Nixon speechwriter William Safire left off, and to put that oh-so-holy RELIGIOUS SPIN on the right-wing totalitarian agenda.
We can rest assured that, as he supports polices that GUT the GENEVA CONVENTIONS, treat US military men and women as canon fodder, tax the American public to fund tax-cuts for the hyper-wealthy, dispense with international law and urge UNILATERAL MILITARY THREATS against other nations, Mr. Gerson will continually invoke GOD and religious values for the international bullying and powers that are scarcely indistinguishable from what Himmler sought for the SS.
-----------------------------------
Documentation: [Note: This documentation is mostly regarding the links between the Post, the Times, Mr. Gerson, and the Bush White House-Republican Congress, with the neo-con/Likud agenda of expanding wars under a veil of religious morality. Documenting the Washington Post's and New York Times' decade long tirade of lies and smear-mongering against the Democratic White House would take a separate book. And today, much of the Democratic Party leadership is in complete accord with "Defense of the Reich" wartime powers claimed by the Bush White House, including 'Democratic' Senators Lieberman, Feinstein, Clinton, and Schumer, and others, all of whom are AWOL - missing and nowhere to be seen - re supporting the GENEVA CONVENTIONS or other such other democratic restrictions on the unlimited war-time powers claimed by the Bush White House.]
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#1. Michael Gerson- The man behind "God" in Bush's speeches."
13 December 2004
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_001368.php
The Washington Post's Alan Cooperman pays for a Key West junket with a puff piece about BUSH SPEECHWRITER MICHAEL GERSON, the MAN BEHIND the GOD IN THE PRESIDENT's RHETORIC. "At a meeting with reporters in Key West, Fla., on Monday and Tuesday [an annual retreat hosted by the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center], Gerson, who has crafted almost all of Bush's major speeches since 2000 but has rarely spoken to the media, defended the president's religious rhetoric. Although the session was off the record, Gerson subsequently agreed to allow some of his main points to appear in print." Sure, why not? Not as if there'd be any serious accountability. "[O]n the whole, the speechwriter argued, Bush's references to the role of providence in human affairs have been carefully calibrated and fully within the tradition of American civic religion." Leaving aside Bush's critics, if that assertion is so, why do so many millions of Bush supporters see in their man a servant of God unlike any previous occupant of the oval office? And why does Prof. David Domke's analysis of 70 years of presidential rhetoric reveal a marked shift toward the prophetic in Bush's speeches?
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#2. Washington Post HIRES TOP BUSH SPEECHWRITER
by Jeff Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/410
(reprinted in full at bottom this post)
The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson, Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within WHIG -- helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post's laptop warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under the same roof.
---------------------------------------------
#3.
Backstory: Michael Gergan, Compassionate conservatism's voice
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0713/p20s01-lire.html
'Unlike some conservatives, I have seen that government - careful, energetic, effective government - can be a powerful force for good.'
- Michael Gerson, Bush speechwriter, 1999-2006
[note: "careful, energetic, effective goverment' IS AT CROSS-PURPOSES with the radical-right-wing agenda of the Bush-Cheney administration, as expressed in the infamous Grover Norquist mantra "take government and shrink it down to size until you can drown it in a bathtub." (An agenda which is a TOTAL LIE, because Mr. Norquist AND ALL OTHER Radical-right-wing advocates desire a US military/police/intel/national security bureaucracy large enough to spy on anyone, anywhere in the world.) The NEGLECT of flooding victims in New Orleans WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT - New Orleans since the flood has been effectively DEPOPULATED - ethnically cleansed - of its Black (voting) majority, and it is with premeditation and malice aforesight that the Bush admin. has USED the New Orleans floods AS AN EXCUSE to channel huge, multi-billion dollar contracts to HALLIBURTON and other administration-crony companies. In the simplest, crudest terms, "PRIVATIZATION" is effectively an attempt to round up the slaves and put 'em back on the plantation, where they become, not free American citizens, but THE PRIVATE PROPERTY of the plantation owner. According to the Right-WIng agenda, ECONOMIC DISENFRANCHISEMENT, dislocation, resettlement, and depopulation, and of course voting disenfranchisement ARE ALL STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION - just as President Andrew Jackson depopulated the Cherokee tribes from the Carolinas and Georgia on the enforced ethnic cleansing/death march, "The Trail of Tears" from the Carolinas to Oklahoma.)
Mr. Gerson may HIDE all these actions, ommissions, and premediated policy FAILURES or cruelties behind his rhetoric of "compassionate conservativism" and other similar propaganda themes of religous virtues, BUT_HE_IS_LYING.]
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<< THE PRESIDENT GOEST TO Capitol Hill TO LOBBY *FOR* TORTURE. >>
#4. as this article from the WP documents:
A Defining Moment for America
THE PRESIDENT GOEST TO Capitol Hill TO LOBBY *FOR* TORTURE.
Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401587.html
[note how the cowardly, whore editors of the Post BURY this story.. on page A-18?
By their OWN WORDS, "A DEFINING MOMENT FOR AMERICA" deserves to be... BURIED on page A-18 ??!
What pathetic Himmler-genuflecting WHORES!
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#5. Just to prove that the NY Times and Washington Post are working IN PARRALLEL, commenting on (if you read carefully) the rise of Himmler's SS-esque war time powers in America, while actually ENABLING and boosting those very un-opposable wartime powers. (Note the pathetic and misleading NYT headline)
** BUSH WANTS TO GUT GENEVA CONVENTIONS **
(as headline-linked at HuffingtonPost.com)
While the COWARDLY, LYING NEW YORK TIMES headline ACTUALLY reads:
An Unexpected Collision Over Detainees
By CARL HULSE
September 15, 2006
News Analysis
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/us/politics/15assess.html
------------
"AN UNEXPECTED COLLISION over DETAINEES" ??! -
- HOW THE HELL does THAT mean "TORTURE" and SECRET, DRUM-HEAD MILITARY TRIALS??
[Note too, the Times byline reads "NEWS ANALYSIS", but you have to READ WAY past 3 paragraphs to realize that the CLASH-OF-OFFICIAL-PERSONALITIES story that the Times, Post, and WHORE media so love to write, IS ACTUALLY ABOUT *UNLIMITED* GESTAPO powers of DETENTION and TORTURE!
(We apologize for mixing our SS and Gestapo metaphors, which are so direct as to not be metaphors. The SS was Henrich Himmler's private black-uniformed army that swore alliegance to the person of Adolf Hitler before the regular German Army ("Wermacht") was forced to do so. Himmler's SS ascended to power when Hitler decapitated his SA Brown-Shirt street army by having SA leader Ernst Rohm - his ally through a decade of Nazi party rise to power - shot for being a homosexual and for other "crimes of treason." The Gestapo was the Nazi state's secret police, set up by and answerable to Herman Goering, the chief of the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) and, like Rohm, one of Hitler's earliest and most powerful supporters. There was always conflict and tension between the SS, Gestapo, and regular German military organizations, each of which had their own intel services, and all competing for power and turf rights - just as security forces and military compete in all other nations. But if you were a partisan, declared enemy of the state, or innocent bystander, it didn't matter if you were arrested by the SS, SA, Gestapo, or even field units of the Wermacht - THE RESULTS WERE THE SAME. (UN Chairman Kurt Waldheim participated in Wermacht "regular army" counterinsurgency operations as an intel officer in Greece, operations that included the deportation of the Jewish population of Salonika, Greece, to death camps in Eastern Europe.)
The conclusion is unmistakable: USING FUZZY-HEADLINES and MISLEADING REPORTING (that focuses on personality conflicts, NOT the TORTURE and SUMMARY ARREST, DETENTION, and DEATH PENALTY powers sought by the US administration) the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST are in COMPLETE ACCORD with SS/GESTAPO unlimited war-time powers, with NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER with innocent goat-herders and children caught up in the US wars overseas.
----------------------------------------
#6. Bob Herbert, NYT
STRANGER in the MIRROR op-ed, 14 Sept. 2006
Over at the NEW YORK TIMES again, the Times' token Black (African-American) in-house editorialist, BOB HERBERT, snivels about "THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR" - "the fact that "the very character of the United States is changing, and not for the better" as Mr. Herbert writes. We can't LINK to Mr. Herbert's op-ed because the Lying NY Times BURIES all their editorial writers under a "premium" must-pay firewall. No matter, as we have just documented here with #5., Times op-eds are MEANINGLESS unless they fit the template of Safire's unholy JIHAD against democratic goverment and rights; and those (non-Right-Wing) editorials the Times does publish are anyways BURIED under the Times' SHAMELESS editing "An Unexpected Collision Over Detainees" to mean "BUSH ADMINSTRATION SEEKS GESTAPO/SS wartime POWERS!"
[Note #1.- Damn right, the opposition to those powers was "UNEXPECTED" - the Lying Times and Cowardly Post have been SHILLING FOR THOSE nazi-esque r-w powers for a decade now, and are surpised that ANYONE would offer up some "UNEXPECTED" criticism of them!]
Note #2: Mr. Herbert: Jesus admonished us (humans) to "look not the speck in your neighbor's eye, when you have a splinter in your own." Before chasting the American public for "the change in American character" for the worse, not the better... WHY DON'T YOU LOOK AT YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER, EDITORS, and OWNER?!
[note#3: As with NYT op-ed columnist MAUREEN DOWD, Bob Herbert jumped on the "TRASH CLINTON AND GORE" bandwagon in 2000 leading up to the elections of that year... Herbert either too stupid, too arrogant, or too ignorant to realize that DISENFRANCHISING BLACK VOTERS was/would become a CORE ELECTION STRATEGY of the Bush-GOP campaign in Florida and elsewhere... in 2000, much less six years later in 2006!
[Note #4: In a sense, Mr. Herbert is correct: America's character IS changing, and NOT for the better. Even highly placed Black writers such as Mr. Herbert CAN NOT or WILL NOT express outrage over the Bush-Cheney administration funnelling BILLIONS of federal, public tax dollars to Halliburton for New Orleans "reconstruction," even as poor Black families in New Orleans have lost their homes, jobs, voting rights... and hometown, WITH NOT PROSPECT FOR RETURN anytime in the next few years! And today the Jewish-owned NY Times (owned by the Sulberger family) and other AIPAC neo-cons in influential positions in the US media are shamelessly advocating nazi-esque wartime powers for the Bush administration, and MUDDYING the issues at every chance they get. (#4 and #5 above) As they say, s*** roles downhill, and with highly placed media and government "LEADERS" BETRAYING America's democratic principles from the inside-out, from the top down, those of us "working class" Americans at the bottom of the pyramid are in a paranoid state of paralysis, waiting for the next blow to land - and looking suspiciously and reactively at our neighbors, whether next door, across town, or across national borders.)
----------------------------------------------------
#7. Back to the POST again, where the Post actually allows Lawrence Korb and Peter Ogden the editorial space to confront and deconstruct the NEO-CON god-father wannabe WILLIAM KRISTOL's (and Rich Lowry's) call for ** MORE US TROOPS IN IRAQ! **
Why We Can't Send More Troops
By Lawrence J. Korb and Peter Ogden
Thursday, September 14, 2006; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091301575.html
[ Make no mistake, the Bush/NEO-CON agenda is about GRABBING MORE WEALTH AND POWER, and THE ONLY WAY that the Bush-Cheney government will be able to find enough warm bodies to heed WILLIAM KRISTOL's CALL for "MORE TROOPS in Iraq!" is by INSTITUTING THE DRAFT: taking America's young men (and women) out of their homes and hometowns, and shoving them into Uncle Sam's army AT MINIMUM WAGE, there to risk their lives and limbs under the ATROCIOUSLY INCOMPETENT and CORRUPT 'leadership' of Don Rumsfeld's Department of War. Rumsfeld IS SO CORRUPT (and the American press/media SO cravenly COMPLICIT) that no one even notices the irony or outrage, that SECRETARY RUMSFELD ordered his Army to PROSECUTE FEMAL PRIVATE VOLUNTEERS for "abusing" Iraq prisoners held by US forces in KANGAROO COURT Military 'trials'... WHILE Mr. Rumsfeld PROMOTES the US TORTURE GENERALS, and WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH goes hat-in-hand to Capitol Hill (Congress) SEEKING UNLIMITED TORTURE (and, yes, 'abusive,' sadistic, degredation and humiliation) POWERS!]
------------------------------------------------
#8. Back to the TIMES for this one, ELISABETH BUMLLIER writes an article "explaining" Pres. Bush's use of RELIGIOUS THEMES
and invoking "DEMOCRACY" to JUSTIFY WARS overseas.
Note also that this article notes that NATAN SHARNSKY was "a former SOVIET DISSIDENT, IS NOW A HAWKISH government minister in Israel" !!!
Look at that: "DISSIDENTS" *used to be* SYNONYMOUS with "human rights," but in today's charged Bush/neo-con/Republican/everlasting-war-on-terror atmosphere, you can go from being a "HUMAN RIGHTS DISSIDENT' to a "GESTAPO-POWERS WAR-on-TERROR HAWK" in one easy move!
White House Letter; Bush's Book Club Picks a New Favorite
By ELISABETH BUMILLER (NYT); National Desk
January 31, 2005, Monday
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 21, Column 1, 954 words
DISPLAYING ABSTRACT - Pres Bush says themes of Natan Sharansky's book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, will be invoked in his State of Union address, as it was in his Inaugural address; Sharansky was invited to White House to meet with Bush in Nov; Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, is now hawkish government minister in Israel; his influence on Bush has become part of buzz of Washington (White House Letter)
[note: search for your own link, NY Times puts up a for-pay firewall)
To read this archive article, upgrade to TimesSelect or purchase as a single article.
----------------------------------------------------------------
#9. And here's the link between Sharansky's former "human rights dissident" now SS/Gestapo UNLIMITED-WARTIME-POWERS Hawk agenda (with a veneer of RELIGIOUS VALUES!) to Mr. Bush's former speechwriter, new WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST Michael Gerson
Closing the Neo-con Circle
Mr. Michale Hersh
Newsweek Jan. 25, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6867187/site/newsweek/
<< In Bush’s speech, drafted by chief White House speechwriter Michael Gerson with input from an old Sharansky ally dating to the Reagan years, National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, Bush in effect declared......
-------------------------------------------------
#10 and here is a more detailed, thorough analysis of the Neo-con/Bush war-on-terror agenda infused with a patina of "spreading freedom and democracy" (at the point of a guns and "shake & bake" treatment for any cities that resist) and "religious values" as espoused by the neo-cons and Republicans:
Natan Sharansky and George W. Bush
The Foreign Policy Diaspora—From Jerusalem to Washington
by Tom Barry | February 8, 2005
IRC Right Web -
http://www.irc-online.org/rightweb/rw/707
The State of the Union Address and Bush’s second Inaugural Address focused U.S. and international attention on Natan Sharansky, author of The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror. Pundits and reporters noted that the president’s lofty rhetoric about “ending tyranny in our world” and guaranteeing “freedom from fear” echoed Sharansky’s language.
------------------------------------------
#11. UN's IAEA accuses US Congress subcommittee of releasing a "DISHONEST" and "OUTRAGEOUS" report that would JUSTIFY US "other actions" against Iran... i.e. the US government FABRICATING EVIDENCE to JUSTIFY A WAR (embargo, bombings, or other such "other actions", in the words of US Ambassador (recess apptmnt) to UN John Bolton.)
Not only did such FRAUDULENT Bush administration "WMD" claims lie behind the US war, invasion, and occupation of Iraq in 2003, but it is also starting to sound like Germany's relentless formulation of excuses for occupying first the Sudentenland, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and finally blaming Poland for "an attack which led" to the German invasion of Poland and European phase of WWII.
IAEA: US Report on Iran "DISHONEST"
By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer
15 September 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060915/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_nuclear_us
VIENNA, Austria - A recent House of Representatives committee report on Iran's nuclear capability is "outrageous and dishonest" in trying to make a case that Tehran's program is geared toward making weapons, a senior official of the U.N. nuclear watchdog has said.
The letter, obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday outside a 35-nation board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says the report is false in saying Iran is making weapons-grade uranium at an experimental enrichment site, when it has in fact produced material only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms.
----------------------------------------
#12.
- Port Security Won’t Bankrupt Us
NYT unsigned (editorial board) editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/opinion/14thu1.html
Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, seems determined to outdo his commander in chief in RATCHETING UP FEARS of Al Qaeda whenever he wants to score political points. This week, he raised the specter that if the government starts too many expensive antiterrorism programs it could further a plot by Osama bin Laden to “drive us crazy, into bankruptcy” through overspending on homeland defense.
It was particularly ironic that Mr. Chertoff spun this theory while he was FIGHINT OFF [AGAINST] a measure, up for a vote today, THAT WOULD HELP PROTECT OUR PORTS against the threat that he himself deems most worrisome — a nuclear explosion within our borders — without government spending.
[note: the Bush government/congress are so insane with lust for war powers that rival the Gestapo/SS's, and the right-wing is so lustful for using TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS against "enemey targets," that it is hard not to conclude that the Bush administration is almost ROLLING OUT A RED CARPET for the NEXT terror attack on US targets, such as happened immediately leading up to the 19 Saudi terrorists boarding US airliners on 9-11.... With the Bush government DERELICT at providing even a GENERAL TRAVELLER's ADVISORY that Al Qaida hijack plots were filling FBI, NSA, CIA and other agencies' attentions. Such a (future) terrorist attack would of almost certainly and immediately blow away even the minor, timid, and tepid opposition to those war-time powers of absolute totalitarian control as claimed by Mr. Bush and his advisors.
----------------------------------------------------------
#13.
9-11 Commission Given "D" an "F" FAILING grades re implementation of counter-terror recommendations by the 9-11 Commission: A.) Official Report Summary, government PDF file"
http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_report.pdf
B.) Washington Post review of same;
"US Given FAILING GRADES by 9-11 Panel" for FAILING "at enacting numerous reforms that could save American lives and prevent another terrorist attack on U.S. soil."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120500097.html
===========================================
Smoking Gun: Washington Post Hires Top Bush Speechwriter
by Jeff Cohen
at BuzzFlash Thu, 09/14/2006 -
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/410
Few media marching bands have beat the Iraq war drums more frantically and with more influence than the editorial pages of the Washington Post. On Monday, the Post announced the hiring of another drummer boy, one who played a key propaganda role inside the Bush White House.
The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson, Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within WHIG -- helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post's laptop warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under the same roof.
In explaining why the Post was adding yet another pro-war voice to its op-ed page, hawkish editorial page editor Fred Hiatt described Gerson as being "a different kind of conservative from the other conservatives on our page." Thanks, Fred, for all the diversity.
In their new book "Hubris," Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that it was Gerson who -
* inserted references to the yellowcake-from-Niger tale into various Bush speeches, including the 2003 State of the Union.
* helped prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell's dishonest and bellicose speech to the U.N.
* conceived Team Bush's trademark paranoid "soundbite" warning of a potential Iraq nuclear program: "The first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud."
According to "Hubris," the "mushroom cloud" line was intended for a Bush speech, but was too good to hold. It was first deployed in September 2002 by anonymous White House aides in a New York Times front-page scare story (by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon) warning that Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons." On CNN that day, Condoleezza Rice declared: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." And Gerson's line became a standard and manipulative war cry from then on.
Speechwriter Gerson should be right at home at the Washington Post. From September 2002 through February 2003, the Post editorialized 26 times in favor of the Iraq war. As Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman have documented, its op-ed page was also dominated by hawks screaming for war. War skeptics were denounced as "fools" and "liars" and worse -- and the skeptics were not given space to respond.
As Gerson's "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" soundbite took flight, Al Gore made an Iraq speech questioning "preemptive war." On the Post op-ed page, Gore's speech was "dishonest, cheap, low" and "wretched...vile...contemptible." And that was all in one column. Another called it "a series of cheap shots."
By contrast, the error-filled Colin Powell speech at the U.N. (that Gerson worked on) was hailed at the Post with almost Pravda-like unanimity. An editorial -- headlined "Irrefutable" -- declared: "It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." And the Post op-ed page from right to "left" embraced Powell's speech.
"When reading the Post's pre-war coverage," summarized journalist Robert Parry, "there was a whiff of totalitarianism in which dissidents never get space to express their opinions but are still excoriated by the official media. When the state speaks, however, the same media hails the government's brilliance."
Gerson and his new colleagues at the Post worked together to help bring us one of the worst foreign policy debacles in our nation's history. Newspapers are supposed to hold discredited public officials to account. The Post is hiring him.
It's partly because of the Post's inexcusable coverage before the war, and its ongoing pro-war editorial bias, that I will be joining Scott Ritter, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and other activists at Camp Democracy in Washington D.C. this Tuesday, Sept. 19, for a public forum on the media's role in Iraq and Iran.
There will also be a protest march to the Washington Post headquarters that evening. With the newspaper's hiring of Gerson, I know an appropriate slogan: "Two, four, six, eight/Separate the press and state."
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, and author of the new book: "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media"
Thursday, September 14, 2006
The Gingrich-Bolton-UJC connection to Bush-Rove-Cheney wars....
To see how America got into the morass of ONE PARTY dictatorial Republican rule of the House, Senate, White House, federal judiciary, executive agencies of the US government (such as the EPA, which nominally are supposed to enforce laws regardless of who is in the White House), and the press/media "4th Estate," one need look no farther than at the appearances of NEWT GINGRICH and JOHN BOLTON before the cameras this week.
NEWT GINGRICH is out there banging the drums for ever-expanding war, in fact, his current claim to fame (besides having the audacity to present himself as a "MORAL VALUES" Rethuglican despite his three different marriages, including presenting his first wife with divorce papers while she was prostate in a hospital bed recovering from a cancer treatment while he was having an affair with the woman who would become his second wife) is that America is ALREADY IN World War III... yet Gingrich IS NOT leading the call for a RENEWED DRAFT, much less a suspension of TAX CUTS FOR THE HYPER-WEALTHY to finance Mr. Gingrich's vision of a war on one billion non-white non-Americans.
It would be quite impossible to come up with a CARICATURE more grotesque than Newt "draft dodger" Gingrich presuming to "LEAD" America into WORLD WAR THREE, without calling for any sacrifice or exertion on the part of voters, citizens, and heavens-forbid the wealthy who comprise the core of the Republican Party, but there he is all over the media, the Media's "Great Pasty-Faced Hope" of a 'senior statesman'!
Just to prove that Newt Gingrich - moral values hypocrite, moral values scold, WWIII scold, and luxury-and-profiteering in time of war hypocrite - isn't entirely an anomaly in this post-stolen election 2000 world, there was JOHN BOLTON at the UJC United Jewish Conference before 1,500 Jewish women voters and donors.
The UJC's "Lions of Judah" conference echoed Newt Gingrich's "WORLD WAR III is HERE!" talking points when Israel Ambassador to the UN DAN GILLERMAN opened the conference addressing the women: "the cease fire between Isreal and Hezbollah is NOT THE END OF THE WAR...[it] may well be JUST THE BEGINNNING."
<< The cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah enacted last month “is not the end of the war, this may be very well be just the beginning,” Gillerman said. “What we saw was just a preview of things to come. The Hezbollah was not just fighting Israel and it was not just the fingers of Hezbollah or the arms of Hezbollah that kidnapped our soldiers and shelled our cities. The Hezbollah is just a proxy, a hired killer, of a far more evil power in the world, and that is Iran. >>
Well, BOY HOWDY! JUST WHAT the hell Does Israel, the UJC, the AIPAC lobby, Mr. Gillerman, and the neo-con/Likud wing of the US government want in South Lebanon - maybe a WARSAW GHETTO style South Lebanon occupation (or even ethnic-cleansing?), embargoed by US/Israeli forces, with SS (er, IDF) troops patrolling the entire region for the next 10,000 years?
Again, just to prove that Mr. Gillerman's opening comments are hardly an anomaly, UN Ambassador (recess appointment) to UN JOHN BOLTON was also given a prominent speakers post at the UJC "LIONS of JUDAH" women's conference, where Bolton advocated "OTHER MEANS" to 'stop Iran's nuclear program' should the United Nations fail to impose sanctions on Iran.
Again, we must ask... WHY is Israel "PERMITTED" to maintain a VAST nuclear arsenal - built in cooperation with the apartheid, dictatorial, rogue (former) South African government - while Iran is "not to be permitted" to conduct nuclear research that even signatories to the NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION PACT **ARE** permitted to conduct?
Oh, excuse us.. that is a VERBOTTEN! question, FORBIDDEN in the pages or airwaves of the American 'news' and media.
Speaking of "NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION PACT," the non-proliferation pact is almost certainly ITEM #1 of the Republican JIHAD ***AGAINST*** international law - so completely beaten, bloodied, and left-for-dead, that the American 'news' media no longer even comments on it, although the US 'news' industry does still mention global warming treaties ("the Kyoto Protocols") and THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS from time to time. (As Harvard university prof. and Human Rights hypocrite Alan Dershowitz says of the Geneva conventions (paraphrasing) "Now that we got more nuclear weapons than anyone else, who needs the stinkin' Geneva Conventions against torture and summary, mass-arrest and detention powers?")
This is NOT Pulitzer-prize worthy investigative reporting here, folks - the UJC, the AIPAC lobby, the Likud government, and the neo-cons in and out of the US government are on a JIHAD ***AGAINST*** international law, while UNILATERALLY THREATENING nations like Iran with "OTHER MEANS" actions should US/Israel DICTATES not be met!
To prove just how pervasive the BOLTON-GINGRICH-WWIII axis of aggressive saber-rattling is in the US government, press/media, and society, one need look no further than at two of the other speakers at the UJC "LIONS of Judah" conference (is it our imagination, or is the use of "lions" as an icon a representation of power and territorial aggression?): BILL CLINTON and closing speaker MADELINE ALBRIGHT.
When you have two of the HEAVIEST HITTERS in the ENTIRE Democratic Party practically ENDORSING the comments of Ambassador Gillerman and JOHN BOLTON as well, you have a de facto COLLAPSE of an opposition party, as least as far as the Gingrich-Bolton-Bush-Cheney-Rove war-uber-alles agenda is concerned.
Yet more evidence that these linkinages are neither tenouous nor amorphorous were the recent mutterings by HILLARY CLINTON and CHARLES SCHUMER - two of THE MOST IMPORTANT Democrats in the US Senate (Schumer as chairman controls the purse-string millions of the DSCC, the Democrat Senate Campaign Committee, while Hillary is the "smother all opposition" front-runner in the Democratic presidential arms race), TO NOT OPPOSE the John Bolton CONFIRMATION hearings.
To review, HILLARY and SCHUMER were trying to take a page out of the JOE LIEBERMAN play book: while saying that they were "opposed" to Bolton's SECOND ROUND for approval confirmation hearings, both Hillary and Schumer were sending up a trial ballon "WE WILL NOT FILIBUSTER Bolton's confirmation."
Well, we now know why! Hillary, Schumer, Lieberman, and the other AIPAC senators are basically IN ACCORD with John Bolton's UNILATERALIST rantings and threats, and by telegraphing "We will NOT filibuster Bolton's second confirmation hearing" they were signalling APPROVAL of Bolton's confirmation!
The old Lieberman trick, "Have your cake" (mouth some stated opposition to a BushCo policy or outrage), "and eat it too!" (while, behind the scenes, GUTTING opposition to that policy or outrage.)
Fortunately, some of the saner Republicans still extant in Congress were also on-board the OPPOSE BOLTON bandwagon, and Hillary and Schumer's trial ballon was shot full of holes. For now, Bolton will remain a recess Ambassador to the UN.
But, as this past week's UJC Lions of Judah conference illustrates, the "drop-bombs on Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon (and can Saudi Arabia and Pakistan be far behind?)!" agenda is ALIVE AND WELL in the persons of Ambassador Gillerman, (recess) Ambassador Bolton, the Bush-Cheney-Rove eternal war room, the hearts of many AIPAC Americans, FIRMLY embedded in the corporate America major media 'news' rooms.... and, as well, is embedded in the very heart and soul of the Democrat Party, which at one time positioned itself as an "OPPOSITION" party, but now can't even find its voice to exprress outrage - as American bodies go floating down flooded New Orleans streets while FEMA's director, after FIVE DAYS of a catagory 5 hurricane swirling in the Gulf of Mexico, was AWOL, dining in a 5-star Baton Rouge restaurant even though he couldn't provide trucks of potable water to the thousands of refugees isolated in the Superdome hurricane shelter. (Which network news trucks were able to drive up to).
=======================================
Bolton: U.S. could pursue other options on Iran
13 September 2006
http://jta.org/page_view_breaking_story.asp?intid=4635
John Bolton said the United States would seek other means to stop Iran’s nuclear program if the U.N. Security Council fails to impose sanctions.
“We will use other steps, other economic activities, we will work with other countries outside the Security Council as well,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told the United Jewish Communities’ Lion of Judah conference Sunday in Washington.
“The Europeans have again asked us if we would give them another opportunity” to press Iran on the matter, he said.
====================================
(UJC United Jewish Conference (Women's Conference) features Ambassadors Dan Gillerman, John Bolton, Madeline Albright, and former Pres. Bill Clinton)
2006 INTERNATIONAL LION OF JUDAH CONFERENCE
OPENS AS 1,500 JEWISH WOMEN LEADERS
BEGIN THREE-DAY CONCLAVE ON
PHILANTHROPY IN ACTION
http://www.ujc.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=193956
UN Ambassadors John Bolton and Dan Gillerman Address Delegates
on Global Threats; Israel Emergency Campaign Highlighted
Lions of Judah, the name given to women philanthropists who give a minimum gift to the UJC annual campaign, donate approximately a quarter of the campaign’s nearly $900 million yearly total, which supports social and humanitarian services, and strengthens Jewish community domestically and worldwide. Besides supporting the UJA Federation Campaign of UJC, Lions of Judah may also exercise their philanthropy through the Spirit of Israel, a campaign of The Jewish Agency, or Keren Heyesod, supporting Jewish communities beyond North America and Israel.
Significant too is the support of woman philanthropists to the UJC Israel Emergency Campaign, which to date has raised $284 million for humanitarian, social service and economic needs of Israelis in the short- and long-term aftermath of Israel’s recent defensive war, and to Operation Promise, which has so far raised approximately $70 million to support Falas Mura émigrés to Israel, the elderly in the former Soviet Union and Jewish community building initiatives there.
In opening addresses on Sunday, Ambassador Dan Gillerman, Israeli representative to the United Nations, and Ambassador John Bolton, American representative, drew attention to threats facing Israelis, Americans and others, and the responsibility of the world community to address these threats.
The cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah enacted last month “is not the end of the war, this may be very well be just the beginning,” Gillerman said. “What we saw was just a preview of things to come. The Hezbollah was not just fighting Israel and it was not just the fingers of Hezbollah or the arms of Hezbollah that kidnapped our soldiers and shelled our cities. The Hezbollah is just a proxy, a hired killer, of a far more evil power in the world, and that is Iran.
“The Hezbollah is only the bloody fingers at the end of the long arm and twisted minds of a president who denies the Holocaust while he very diligently prepares the next one and is continuing on his urgent quest for nuclear weapons,” Gillerman continued, referring to Iranian president Maumoud Ahmadinejad. “The world is still standing by watching as they make progress toward that horrible end which will allow them to be able to carry out what he claims to be his desire, and that is to wipe Israel off the face of the map.”
Howard Rieger, UJC president and chief executive officer, referred to the war on Israel this summer, the attack on the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in July, Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, needs of the Falas Mura and the elderly in the former Soviet Union and other challenges that have confronted the Jewish community just within the past year. But he said that the Jewish community, with the support of Lions of Judah, continues to meet them.
“The UJC and Jewish federation system is in its own way stronger than it has ever been,” he said. “Yes, we’ve had challenges, but we’ve demonstrated that we can respond during times of crisis. We demonstrate that we respond on an ongoing basis with an annual campaign that is reaching toward $900 million, a huge part of which comes from each of you.
“Each of you as leaders of your communities sets the very highest standards for yourself. As Lions of Judah you’ve demonstrated that you know what it means to participate. The adrenalin flowing throughout this conference is the best possible barometer of our success. We’ve always faced challenges. Let’s all be energized by our power to act.”
Participants at this year’s conference represent more than 100 Jewish community federations across North America. Delegates from Brazil, Chile, France, Israel, Mexico, and the United Kingdom are also present.
Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to address participants on Monday, Sept. 11. Program information and conference highlights are posted at www.ujc.org.
====================================
Gingrich says it's World War III
Posted by David Postman
July 15, 2006
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/davidpostman/archives/2006/07/gingrich_says_its_world_war_iii.html
(You can find a follw-up to this post here.)
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/davidpostman/archives/2006/07/a_different_tone_from_gingrich_on_world_war_iii.html
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so. In an interview in Bellevue this morning Gingrich said Bush should call a joint session of Congress the first week of September and talk about global military conflicts in much starker terms than have been heard from the president.
=======================================
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich Addresses Terrorist Threats
Posted: Wednesday, September 13, 2006
AEI Online AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE press release
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.24895/pub_detail.asp
“[T]ime is not on our side. . . .[W]e must confront the reality that we are not where we wanted to be nor where we need to be.”
--Newt Gingrich, 9/11/2006
In a speech given at AEI on the fifth anniversary of the events of September 11, AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich provided an in-depth analysis of the global threats facing the United States today. The following are excerpts from his remarks:
==========================================
Newt Gingrich says U.S. leaders should get tough with Iran's Islamic theocracy
AP September 7, 2006
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20060907-0704-gingrich-iran.html
SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says it's time for the United States to get tough with Iran's Islamic theocracy.
Speaking before a conservative public policy group Wednesday, Gingrich said Americans should take Iranian leaders' threats seriously, before they acquire nuclear weapons.
“We have REAL ENEMIES and they would like to KILL US,” said Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who engineered a GOP congressional takeover in 1994.
Gingrich, attending the Maine Heritage Center Policy Center's annual luncheon, said it's time for Americans to “profoundly rethink” their position on Iran and be prepared to take all necessary steps to safeguard the United States.
NEWT GINGRICH is out there banging the drums for ever-expanding war, in fact, his current claim to fame (besides having the audacity to present himself as a "MORAL VALUES" Rethuglican despite his three different marriages, including presenting his first wife with divorce papers while she was prostate in a hospital bed recovering from a cancer treatment while he was having an affair with the woman who would become his second wife) is that America is ALREADY IN World War III... yet Gingrich IS NOT leading the call for a RENEWED DRAFT, much less a suspension of TAX CUTS FOR THE HYPER-WEALTHY to finance Mr. Gingrich's vision of a war on one billion non-white non-Americans.
It would be quite impossible to come up with a CARICATURE more grotesque than Newt "draft dodger" Gingrich presuming to "LEAD" America into WORLD WAR THREE, without calling for any sacrifice or exertion on the part of voters, citizens, and heavens-forbid the wealthy who comprise the core of the Republican Party, but there he is all over the media, the Media's "Great Pasty-Faced Hope" of a 'senior statesman'!
Just to prove that Newt Gingrich - moral values hypocrite, moral values scold, WWIII scold, and luxury-and-profiteering in time of war hypocrite - isn't entirely an anomaly in this post-stolen election 2000 world, there was JOHN BOLTON at the UJC United Jewish Conference before 1,500 Jewish women voters and donors.
The UJC's "Lions of Judah" conference echoed Newt Gingrich's "WORLD WAR III is HERE!" talking points when Israel Ambassador to the UN DAN GILLERMAN opened the conference addressing the women: "the cease fire between Isreal and Hezbollah is NOT THE END OF THE WAR...[it] may well be JUST THE BEGINNNING."
<< The cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah enacted last month “is not the end of the war, this may be very well be just the beginning,” Gillerman said. “What we saw was just a preview of things to come. The Hezbollah was not just fighting Israel and it was not just the fingers of Hezbollah or the arms of Hezbollah that kidnapped our soldiers and shelled our cities. The Hezbollah is just a proxy, a hired killer, of a far more evil power in the world, and that is Iran. >>
Well, BOY HOWDY! JUST WHAT the hell Does Israel, the UJC, the AIPAC lobby, Mr. Gillerman, and the neo-con/Likud wing of the US government want in South Lebanon - maybe a WARSAW GHETTO style South Lebanon occupation (or even ethnic-cleansing?), embargoed by US/Israeli forces, with SS (er, IDF) troops patrolling the entire region for the next 10,000 years?
Again, just to prove that Mr. Gillerman's opening comments are hardly an anomaly, UN Ambassador (recess appointment) to UN JOHN BOLTON was also given a prominent speakers post at the UJC "LIONS of JUDAH" women's conference, where Bolton advocated "OTHER MEANS" to 'stop Iran's nuclear program' should the United Nations fail to impose sanctions on Iran.
Again, we must ask... WHY is Israel "PERMITTED" to maintain a VAST nuclear arsenal - built in cooperation with the apartheid, dictatorial, rogue (former) South African government - while Iran is "not to be permitted" to conduct nuclear research that even signatories to the NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION PACT **ARE** permitted to conduct?
Oh, excuse us.. that is a VERBOTTEN! question, FORBIDDEN in the pages or airwaves of the American 'news' and media.
Speaking of "NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION PACT," the non-proliferation pact is almost certainly ITEM #1 of the Republican JIHAD ***AGAINST*** international law - so completely beaten, bloodied, and left-for-dead, that the American 'news' media no longer even comments on it, although the US 'news' industry does still mention global warming treaties ("the Kyoto Protocols") and THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS from time to time. (As Harvard university prof. and Human Rights hypocrite Alan Dershowitz says of the Geneva conventions (paraphrasing) "Now that we got more nuclear weapons than anyone else, who needs the stinkin' Geneva Conventions against torture and summary, mass-arrest and detention powers?")
This is NOT Pulitzer-prize worthy investigative reporting here, folks - the UJC, the AIPAC lobby, the Likud government, and the neo-cons in and out of the US government are on a JIHAD ***AGAINST*** international law, while UNILATERALLY THREATENING nations like Iran with "OTHER MEANS" actions should US/Israel DICTATES not be met!
To prove just how pervasive the BOLTON-GINGRICH-WWIII axis of aggressive saber-rattling is in the US government, press/media, and society, one need look no further than at two of the other speakers at the UJC "LIONS of Judah" conference (is it our imagination, or is the use of "lions" as an icon a representation of power and territorial aggression?): BILL CLINTON and closing speaker MADELINE ALBRIGHT.
When you have two of the HEAVIEST HITTERS in the ENTIRE Democratic Party practically ENDORSING the comments of Ambassador Gillerman and JOHN BOLTON as well, you have a de facto COLLAPSE of an opposition party, as least as far as the Gingrich-Bolton-Bush-Cheney-Rove war-uber-alles agenda is concerned.
Yet more evidence that these linkinages are neither tenouous nor amorphorous were the recent mutterings by HILLARY CLINTON and CHARLES SCHUMER - two of THE MOST IMPORTANT Democrats in the US Senate (Schumer as chairman controls the purse-string millions of the DSCC, the Democrat Senate Campaign Committee, while Hillary is the "smother all opposition" front-runner in the Democratic presidential arms race), TO NOT OPPOSE the John Bolton CONFIRMATION hearings.
To review, HILLARY and SCHUMER were trying to take a page out of the JOE LIEBERMAN play book: while saying that they were "opposed" to Bolton's SECOND ROUND for approval confirmation hearings, both Hillary and Schumer were sending up a trial ballon "WE WILL NOT FILIBUSTER Bolton's confirmation."
Well, we now know why! Hillary, Schumer, Lieberman, and the other AIPAC senators are basically IN ACCORD with John Bolton's UNILATERALIST rantings and threats, and by telegraphing "We will NOT filibuster Bolton's second confirmation hearing" they were signalling APPROVAL of Bolton's confirmation!
The old Lieberman trick, "Have your cake" (mouth some stated opposition to a BushCo policy or outrage), "and eat it too!" (while, behind the scenes, GUTTING opposition to that policy or outrage.)
Fortunately, some of the saner Republicans still extant in Congress were also on-board the OPPOSE BOLTON bandwagon, and Hillary and Schumer's trial ballon was shot full of holes. For now, Bolton will remain a recess Ambassador to the UN.
But, as this past week's UJC Lions of Judah conference illustrates, the "drop-bombs on Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon (and can Saudi Arabia and Pakistan be far behind?)!" agenda is ALIVE AND WELL in the persons of Ambassador Gillerman, (recess) Ambassador Bolton, the Bush-Cheney-Rove eternal war room, the hearts of many AIPAC Americans, FIRMLY embedded in the corporate America major media 'news' rooms.... and, as well, is embedded in the very heart and soul of the Democrat Party, which at one time positioned itself as an "OPPOSITION" party, but now can't even find its voice to exprress outrage - as American bodies go floating down flooded New Orleans streets while FEMA's director, after FIVE DAYS of a catagory 5 hurricane swirling in the Gulf of Mexico, was AWOL, dining in a 5-star Baton Rouge restaurant even though he couldn't provide trucks of potable water to the thousands of refugees isolated in the Superdome hurricane shelter. (Which network news trucks were able to drive up to).
=======================================
Bolton: U.S. could pursue other options on Iran
13 September 2006
http://jta.org/page_view_breaking_story.asp?intid=4635
John Bolton said the United States would seek other means to stop Iran’s nuclear program if the U.N. Security Council fails to impose sanctions.
“We will use other steps, other economic activities, we will work with other countries outside the Security Council as well,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told the United Jewish Communities’ Lion of Judah conference Sunday in Washington.
“The Europeans have again asked us if we would give them another opportunity” to press Iran on the matter, he said.
====================================
(UJC United Jewish Conference (Women's Conference) features Ambassadors Dan Gillerman, John Bolton, Madeline Albright, and former Pres. Bill Clinton)
2006 INTERNATIONAL LION OF JUDAH CONFERENCE
OPENS AS 1,500 JEWISH WOMEN LEADERS
BEGIN THREE-DAY CONCLAVE ON
PHILANTHROPY IN ACTION
http://www.ujc.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=193956
UN Ambassadors John Bolton and Dan Gillerman Address Delegates
on Global Threats; Israel Emergency Campaign Highlighted
Lions of Judah, the name given to women philanthropists who give a minimum gift to the UJC annual campaign, donate approximately a quarter of the campaign’s nearly $900 million yearly total, which supports social and humanitarian services, and strengthens Jewish community domestically and worldwide. Besides supporting the UJA Federation Campaign of UJC, Lions of Judah may also exercise their philanthropy through the Spirit of Israel, a campaign of The Jewish Agency, or Keren Heyesod, supporting Jewish communities beyond North America and Israel.
Significant too is the support of woman philanthropists to the UJC Israel Emergency Campaign, which to date has raised $284 million for humanitarian, social service and economic needs of Israelis in the short- and long-term aftermath of Israel’s recent defensive war, and to Operation Promise, which has so far raised approximately $70 million to support Falas Mura émigrés to Israel, the elderly in the former Soviet Union and Jewish community building initiatives there.
In opening addresses on Sunday, Ambassador Dan Gillerman, Israeli representative to the United Nations, and Ambassador John Bolton, American representative, drew attention to threats facing Israelis, Americans and others, and the responsibility of the world community to address these threats.
The cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah enacted last month “is not the end of the war, this may be very well be just the beginning,” Gillerman said. “What we saw was just a preview of things to come. The Hezbollah was not just fighting Israel and it was not just the fingers of Hezbollah or the arms of Hezbollah that kidnapped our soldiers and shelled our cities. The Hezbollah is just a proxy, a hired killer, of a far more evil power in the world, and that is Iran.
“The Hezbollah is only the bloody fingers at the end of the long arm and twisted minds of a president who denies the Holocaust while he very diligently prepares the next one and is continuing on his urgent quest for nuclear weapons,” Gillerman continued, referring to Iranian president Maumoud Ahmadinejad. “The world is still standing by watching as they make progress toward that horrible end which will allow them to be able to carry out what he claims to be his desire, and that is to wipe Israel off the face of the map.”
Howard Rieger, UJC president and chief executive officer, referred to the war on Israel this summer, the attack on the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in July, Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, needs of the Falas Mura and the elderly in the former Soviet Union and other challenges that have confronted the Jewish community just within the past year. But he said that the Jewish community, with the support of Lions of Judah, continues to meet them.
“The UJC and Jewish federation system is in its own way stronger than it has ever been,” he said. “Yes, we’ve had challenges, but we’ve demonstrated that we can respond during times of crisis. We demonstrate that we respond on an ongoing basis with an annual campaign that is reaching toward $900 million, a huge part of which comes from each of you.
“Each of you as leaders of your communities sets the very highest standards for yourself. As Lions of Judah you’ve demonstrated that you know what it means to participate. The adrenalin flowing throughout this conference is the best possible barometer of our success. We’ve always faced challenges. Let’s all be energized by our power to act.”
Participants at this year’s conference represent more than 100 Jewish community federations across North America. Delegates from Brazil, Chile, France, Israel, Mexico, and the United Kingdom are also present.
Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to address participants on Monday, Sept. 11. Program information and conference highlights are posted at www.ujc.org.
====================================
Gingrich says it's World War III
Posted by David Postman
July 15, 2006
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/davidpostman/archives/2006/07/gingrich_says_its_world_war_iii.html
(You can find a follw-up to this post here.)
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/davidpostman/archives/2006/07/a_different_tone_from_gingrich_on_world_war_iii.html
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so. In an interview in Bellevue this morning Gingrich said Bush should call a joint session of Congress the first week of September and talk about global military conflicts in much starker terms than have been heard from the president.
=======================================
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich Addresses Terrorist Threats
Posted: Wednesday, September 13, 2006
AEI Online AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE press release
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.24895/pub_detail.asp
“[T]ime is not on our side. . . .[W]e must confront the reality that we are not where we wanted to be nor where we need to be.”
--Newt Gingrich, 9/11/2006
In a speech given at AEI on the fifth anniversary of the events of September 11, AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich provided an in-depth analysis of the global threats facing the United States today. The following are excerpts from his remarks:
==========================================
Newt Gingrich says U.S. leaders should get tough with Iran's Islamic theocracy
AP September 7, 2006
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20060907-0704-gingrich-iran.html
SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says it's time for the United States to get tough with Iran's Islamic theocracy.
Speaking before a conservative public policy group Wednesday, Gingrich said Americans should take Iranian leaders' threats seriously, before they acquire nuclear weapons.
“We have REAL ENEMIES and they would like to KILL US,” said Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who engineered a GOP congressional takeover in 1994.
Gingrich, attending the Maine Heritage Center Policy Center's annual luncheon, said it's time for Americans to “profoundly rethink” their position on Iran and be prepared to take all necessary steps to safeguard the United States.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Treacherous Media ENABLES the TRAITOROUS Right-Wing's support of Bush-Rove-Cheney's incompetence and corruption in wartime....
Max Blumenthal deconstructs the Right-Wing's TRAITOROUS use of "the war on terror," and national security as a means to SMEAR their opponents and boost the corrupt, counter-productive, and serially incompetent Bush-Cheney-Rove administration.
In this particular case, Blumenthal points out the role that Lt Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson played in SMEARING the Clinton White House on "national security" concerns shortly after Patterson was given the military position of "carrying the football" as it is called; that is, the military officer in constant attendance to the president who carries the briefcase full of nuclear launch codes that would allow the President of the United States to launch a nuclear attack in response to some foreign threat, no matter where that president was or what he was doing. That is, "the football" is the mobile link and launch codes that allow the president to command the US nuclear-armed missiles.
Lt. Col Patteson took advantage of his brief stint in the Clinton White House as this mobile link and launch-codes officer to write a TELL-ALL book entitled "DERELICTION OF DUTY- The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security."
Yet the traitorous Right REFUSES to aknowledge that the Clinton White House PREVENTED the MILLENIUM BOMB PLOT, by publicizing and preparing for the threat, and (as Air-America radio host Randi Rhodes points out) MANNING THE BATTLE STATIONS CONTINUOUSLY, COORDINATING the counter-terror response, on the eve of the millenium New Year's celebrations nationwide. It was this VIGILANCE and ATTENTION TO DETAIL that led a US Customs border guard to CAREFULLY and THOROUGHLY INSPECT a car coming across the Canadian border, and in that inspection the guard found some bomb-making materials, and arrested the car's driver.
George W. Bush on the other hand, after BRAGGING about "meeting with his CIA breifers FACE-to-FACE" in early January of 2001, then IGNORED the CIA briefing "bin Laden DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA" (among only DOZENS of other similar advisaries, warnings, and intel estimates that Al Qiada sought to attack in America), REFUSED TO DO ANYTHING about the Al Qaida threat... In fact, Mr. Bush REFUSED to do ANYTHING about the SUCCESSFUL_AL_QAIDA_BOMBING of the USS Cole in a Yemen harbor in October of 2000, an ATTACk on the UNITED STATES that occurred WHILE Mr.Bush WAS ON THE LAST WEEKS of his 2000 presidential race CAMPAIGN TRAIL, surrounded by all the NATIONAL SECURITY advisors of his own choosing... including FORMER SECRETARIES of DEFENSE Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, and FORMER Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff COLIN POWELL, and FUTURE National Security Advisor CONDOLEEZA RICE.
Rice, Powell, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld: THIS is the team that IGNORED the AL QAIDA ATTACK on the USS Cole in Yemen in October of 2000, yet the Righty HATE-CLINTON/pro-Bush media WILL INVERT THE TRUTH to boost the powers of the Bush administration, and thereby WEAKEN GENUINE NATIONAL SECURITY in favor of a demagogic, secretive, corrupt, and unethical administration in time of war.
(note: for working links, see the original article at Huffingtonpost.com, URL below headline:)
===================================================
The Swift Boat Connection to ABC's 9/11 Deception
by Max Blumenthal
9.12.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/the-swift-boat-connection_b_29314.html
Under pressure about his institutional ties to the conservative movement (see here), The Path to 9/11 screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh now claims, the film he wrote had no political agenda. "This project was generated at ABC at the highest network levels," and brought together people from "broadly different backgrounds," Nowrasteh told the right-wing evangelical publication WorldNetDaily.
Two ABC flacks, meanwhile, told the New York Times that Nowrasteh's politlcal affiliations had nothing to do with The Path to 9/11's content.
But ABC and Nowrasteh have yet to answer for the admission by Lt Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson that significant portions of his anti-Clinton attack books were incorporated into Nowrasteh's script.
Who is Patterson? He is a former military aide to President Bill Clinton who exploited his brief, low-level experience in the White House to ingratiate himself with the far-right. In 2003, Patterson wrote "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security," a polemic rife with distortions about Clinton's record in combating terrorism. A year later, he pumped out "Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security," a book that claimed without basis that terrorists wanted the Democrats to win the 2004 presidential election. Both books were produced by the right-wing publishing house, Regnery.
During the 2004 election, Patterson's second book became a centerpiece of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's campaign to undermine Sen. John Kerry's military record in Vietnam. The book dubiously asserted that after Kerry charged a Vietcong position, he returned from the battle "armed with a Super 8 video camera he had purchased at the post exchange at Cam Ranh Bay, and reenacted the skirmish on film."
Today, Patterson is a board member of Move America Forward, a right-wing group that mounted a PR campaign claiming that Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD's, and falsely claimed a photograph that was later revealed to have been taken in Turkey was a snapshot of a Baghdad pacified by US military forces.
On September 1, while Nowrasteh endured scathing criticism of his falsehood-laden script, he called Patterson at home to tell him that he used his book, "Dereliction of Duty" as a source for the film that was about to air. Later that day, Nowrasteh hosted Patterson at his home for a private screening of The Path to 9/11. Patterson told WorldNetDaily a week after meeting with Nowrasteh that he received a personal phone call from ABC senior vice president Quinn Taylor.
When The Path to 9/11 finally aired with only 70 seconds of falsified footage missing, Nowrasteh declared triumph. "To lose only a minute is a success, is a victory," Nowrasteh told WorldNetDaily. "I think ABC stood tall."
Patterson, for his part, will be a headline speaker at David Horowitz's Renaissance Weekend this year.
In this particular case, Blumenthal points out the role that Lt Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson played in SMEARING the Clinton White House on "national security" concerns shortly after Patterson was given the military position of "carrying the football" as it is called; that is, the military officer in constant attendance to the president who carries the briefcase full of nuclear launch codes that would allow the President of the United States to launch a nuclear attack in response to some foreign threat, no matter where that president was or what he was doing. That is, "the football" is the mobile link and launch codes that allow the president to command the US nuclear-armed missiles.
Lt. Col Patteson took advantage of his brief stint in the Clinton White House as this mobile link and launch-codes officer to write a TELL-ALL book entitled "DERELICTION OF DUTY- The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security."
Yet the traitorous Right REFUSES to aknowledge that the Clinton White House PREVENTED the MILLENIUM BOMB PLOT, by publicizing and preparing for the threat, and (as Air-America radio host Randi Rhodes points out) MANNING THE BATTLE STATIONS CONTINUOUSLY, COORDINATING the counter-terror response, on the eve of the millenium New Year's celebrations nationwide. It was this VIGILANCE and ATTENTION TO DETAIL that led a US Customs border guard to CAREFULLY and THOROUGHLY INSPECT a car coming across the Canadian border, and in that inspection the guard found some bomb-making materials, and arrested the car's driver.
George W. Bush on the other hand, after BRAGGING about "meeting with his CIA breifers FACE-to-FACE" in early January of 2001, then IGNORED the CIA briefing "bin Laden DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA" (among only DOZENS of other similar advisaries, warnings, and intel estimates that Al Qiada sought to attack in America), REFUSED TO DO ANYTHING about the Al Qaida threat... In fact, Mr. Bush REFUSED to do ANYTHING about the SUCCESSFUL_AL_QAIDA_BOMBING of the USS Cole in a Yemen harbor in October of 2000, an ATTACk on the UNITED STATES that occurred WHILE Mr.Bush WAS ON THE LAST WEEKS of his 2000 presidential race CAMPAIGN TRAIL, surrounded by all the NATIONAL SECURITY advisors of his own choosing... including FORMER SECRETARIES of DEFENSE Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, and FORMER Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff COLIN POWELL, and FUTURE National Security Advisor CONDOLEEZA RICE.
Rice, Powell, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld: THIS is the team that IGNORED the AL QAIDA ATTACK on the USS Cole in Yemen in October of 2000, yet the Righty HATE-CLINTON/pro-Bush media WILL INVERT THE TRUTH to boost the powers of the Bush administration, and thereby WEAKEN GENUINE NATIONAL SECURITY in favor of a demagogic, secretive, corrupt, and unethical administration in time of war.
(note: for working links, see the original article at Huffingtonpost.com, URL below headline:)
===================================================
The Swift Boat Connection to ABC's 9/11 Deception
by Max Blumenthal
9.12.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/the-swift-boat-connection_b_29314.html
Under pressure about his institutional ties to the conservative movement (see here), The Path to 9/11 screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh now claims, the film he wrote had no political agenda. "This project was generated at ABC at the highest network levels," and brought together people from "broadly different backgrounds," Nowrasteh told the right-wing evangelical publication WorldNetDaily.
Two ABC flacks, meanwhile, told the New York Times that Nowrasteh's politlcal affiliations had nothing to do with The Path to 9/11's content.
But ABC and Nowrasteh have yet to answer for the admission by Lt Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson that significant portions of his anti-Clinton attack books were incorporated into Nowrasteh's script.
Who is Patterson? He is a former military aide to President Bill Clinton who exploited his brief, low-level experience in the White House to ingratiate himself with the far-right. In 2003, Patterson wrote "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security," a polemic rife with distortions about Clinton's record in combating terrorism. A year later, he pumped out "Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security," a book that claimed without basis that terrorists wanted the Democrats to win the 2004 presidential election. Both books were produced by the right-wing publishing house, Regnery.
During the 2004 election, Patterson's second book became a centerpiece of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's campaign to undermine Sen. John Kerry's military record in Vietnam. The book dubiously asserted that after Kerry charged a Vietcong position, he returned from the battle "armed with a Super 8 video camera he had purchased at the post exchange at Cam Ranh Bay, and reenacted the skirmish on film."
Today, Patterson is a board member of Move America Forward, a right-wing group that mounted a PR campaign claiming that Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD's, and falsely claimed a photograph that was later revealed to have been taken in Turkey was a snapshot of a Baghdad pacified by US military forces.
On September 1, while Nowrasteh endured scathing criticism of his falsehood-laden script, he called Patterson at home to tell him that he used his book, "Dereliction of Duty" as a source for the film that was about to air. Later that day, Nowrasteh hosted Patterson at his home for a private screening of The Path to 9/11. Patterson told WorldNetDaily a week after meeting with Nowrasteh that he received a personal phone call from ABC senior vice president Quinn Taylor.
When The Path to 9/11 finally aired with only 70 seconds of falsified footage missing, Nowrasteh declared triumph. "To lose only a minute is a success, is a victory," Nowrasteh told WorldNetDaily. "I think ABC stood tall."
Patterson, for his part, will be a headline speaker at David Horowitz's Renaissance Weekend this year.
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