FINALLY! Someone makes the connection between the REPUBLICAN PARTY's TRUMPED UP IMPEACHMENT of Bill Clinton and the NIGHTMARE that is the Bush admin.

Bravo! to Brent Budowsky, for being the first to point out the obvious: the REPUBLICAN PARTY _endlessly_ trumped-up charges and accusations against the Clinton White House in a raw display of greed for power (for example, the conviction of JIM McDOUGAL for his Madison Guarantee S&L's $22 million failure in connection with the "Whitewater" routine real-estate flop conveniently eclipsed more monstrous Republican culpability in far larger S&L scandals, including Neil Bush's role in the Silverado $1 billion losses, and President George H.W. Bush's role (Senior) in FIRING the auditor examining Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, costing taxpayers and ADDITIONAL one billion dollars in losses, for a total of $2 billion for Lincoln S&L, alone), paving the way for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to STEAL the election of 2004, and put America on our current path to disaster, including Bush-Cheney searching out ways to effectively DRAFT 40,000 past members of the National Guard and Army Reserve BACK into duty to ship them, UNWILLINGLY, to the Iraq war.

This is all the more egregious, because when he was in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, George Bush REFUSED TO COMPLETE EVEN HIS FIRST tour of duty as ordered... much less being called back to duty after finishing his committments honorably, as the current members of the Reserves retired "Ready Reserve" are being called on.

===========================


Time Person Of The Year: The Republican Party, Which Impeached Bill Clinton For Nothing, Then Gave Us This
Brent Budowsky
12.13.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brent-budowsky/time-person-of-t_b_36281.html

The President, with approval from Republicans in Congress, misrepresented intelligence to drive our country to war, with fear, while the Republicans in Congress, protecting him, covered up the report that would expose it.

The President, ignoring the advice of generals and demeaning those who courageously tried to warn us, with support and silence by the Republicans in Congress, approved a war plan that began with grotesque miscalculation, was


conducted with war on the cheap, used troops like the toy soldiers of ideologues. and risked their safety as the petty cash of their partisan politics.
The President, cheered by the throngs of the one party Republican Congress, instituted an Iraq Reconstruction with the Proconsul he named, staffed that Reconstruction with Republican campaign operatives, stiffed that Reconstruction with war profiteers of gargantuan greed, who stuffed their pockets with taxpayers money while our troops shed their blood in patriotism, and the Republican Congress shed their responsibility for oversight, one of the great derelictions of duty in history.

The President, under the spell of a Vice President who began this war as the Stone Age advocate for torture, and now advocates making catastrophe more catastrophic by intervening on one side of a civil war they say does not exist, with Republicans in Congress who tiptoed through the tulips straight through the eve of this destruction, are on the brink of doing more of the very failures that have taken us to this point.

The President, with White House counsels and Attorney Generals who were accessories to the crimes, with Republicans in Congress who stood supplicant and submissive while he publicly claimed he had the sole power to violate the Constitution, publicly claimed the sole power to violate laws he had signed, publicly claimed he was the sole determinant of whether he should faithfully execute the laws of the land, and publicly charged that those who opposed this were less than patriotic.

The Republican Leader Delay, with the smiling support of the President, with the leering smirk of the political aide who embodies the politics of retribution and dirt, with the full support of the Republican leaders of House and Senate who lead their party even today, instituted the greatest racketeering operation in the history of free nations, known as the K Street Project, engineered one of the great political scandals of our or any age, and huddle nervously today, fearing scales of justice that still await them.

The Republican White House, with the standing ovation of Republicans in Congress, hold secret meetings in their basement, with profiteers who dripped with oil, flowed with money, and gave so generously to their Party while they cheated our people, and made side deals with despots who funnel their money to terrorists, while they plan more attacks on our country.

The Republican President surrounded by war drunk ideologues obsessively planing to drive our country to more and greater wars, with the support of Republicans in Congress, refused to give our troops the armor, vehicles, bandages and helmets it was their duty to provide, then refused to give Democrats the opportunity for honest votes to set things right, then used war itself as a partisan instrument, with lies spread against heroes, who stood in opposition to catastrophe.

The Republican Speaker, the Republicans in Congress, the Republican President, stood united as one in coverup, even when sick and perverted crimes were committed against the young congressional pages, by the man who led the caucus designed to protect the children.

Our Republican President and Republican Speaker had their arms around each other in mutual support, even on these demented abuses.

This list could continue almost indefinitely, to make my point, but need not here, except for this: as the selection committee makes its decision for Time's person of the year there are rightful fears of future investigations, future revelations, future indictment, future conviction at every Republican level of the Republican Administration, Republicans in Congress, and Republican donors who gave dirty money to protect themselves in Republican Washington.

This is the party that impeached Bill Clinton for nothing?

My point is this: America may well be enduring what historicans will call the worst president in American history and the worst Vice President in American history.

America will continue to endure the war so arrogantly and incompetently planned by the man historians may well call the worst Secretary of Defense in American history.

America has had to endure the vacation-like schedule, massive corruptions and failures of duty of a Republican Congress that the historians may well conclude was the worst Congress in American history, a dishonor of some magnitude.

America has had to endure a corrupted politics and a Republican National Committee that ran racist and bigoted ads, with dirty money, from corrupted sources, who have hired armies of criminal lawyers and Washington firms that specialize in defending guilty clients, fearing catastrophic investigations.

If the Time Magazine Person of the Year should name the greatest influence on our country and our world, it is the Republican President, the Republican Vice President, the Republican White House political office, the Republican National Committee, the Republican Senate, the Republican House, the Republican donors, the Republican oil companies, the Republican profiteers in Iraq, the Republican White House counsels who said the wrongs were right, the Republican Attorney Generals who failed to stand up for faithfully executing the laws and for preserving, protecting and defending our Constitution.

What is so extraordinary, with results that are so catastrophic as witnessed every night on our evening news, is this: it was one political party that controlled every branch of our government, and sought permanent one party domination of our democracy, that abused one law and practice after another, that made the assassination of character an art form, and the demeaning of our democracy their mission, and they did it, in unison, together.

Who should be Time's Person of the Year?

The party that impeached Bill Clinton for nothing, and gave us this.

NY Times whores McCain's "MORE TROOPS! ONWARDS TO VICTORY in IRAQ!" mantra. Iraq is a classic guerrilla insurgency that pits 200,000 vs 20 million...

NOTE: SOMEHOW unremarked in the NEW YORK TIMES reporting on the Iraq war is that over 80% - MORE than EIGHT out of TEN Iraqis - wants the US military to LEAVE THAT NATION.

The NY Times WHORES the Bush-Cheney adminstration's TALKING POINTS that we are bringing "DEMOCRACY" to Iraq, but it is the "democracy" of the slave-states "democracy" in the America South before the Civil War, where the elite autocracy defines whose votes count and who could not vote. In the case of Iraq today, if over EIGHTY-PERCENT of the populace WANTS US TROOPS OUT of the country, yet the US and Iraqi government refuse to consider that option... YOU DO NOT HAVE A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY, but a policy and agenda DICTATED to that nation by an external government and admininstration that not only has rock-bottom poll numbers here in America, but may never have "won" an election here in America in the first place. (In 2000, the majority of Floridians who went to the polls on election day intended to vote for Al Gore; and the long lines of voters in minority precincts on election day in Ohio, New Mexico, Florida, and other states suggest that the Republican incumbent might not have won the true vote count in 2004 either.)

Whether American "democracy" was functioning in the 2000 and 2004 elections or not, the Iraq war is a CLASSIC guerrilla insurgency, pitting a relatively small professional army of some 150,000 (less than 200,000) American soldiers against a hostile population that DOES NOT WANT THEM THERE. See the Southern phase of the American revolution, where patriot militia singel-handedly defeated British forces at the Battle of King's Mountain, and the militia companiess were SKILLFULLY used by Continental Army commanders (Gen. Danial Morgan, Gen Nathan Greene) to blunt the professional, world-class Royal Army Redcoat's shock power. Charllotte, North Carolina, proudly wears the nickname "HORNETS," because the British commander during the Revolution remarked that the irate locals were "hot as hornets" over his army's occupation of that city.

==============================


Joining a crowd, NY Times promoted McCain's Iraq proposal without discussing likely unfeasibility or political motivation
by MediaMatters.org
Mon, Dec 11, 2006
http://mediamatters.org/items/200612110004?src=buzzflash

A December 11 New York Times article described as "muscular" Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) push for "an immediate increase in American forces [in Iraq] to try to bring order to Baghdad and crush the insurgency" and stated that McCain rejected the Iraq Study Group's (ISG) recommendations "because they did not present a strategy for victory." The article also quoted Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who described McCain's position as "articulating the strategy for victory in Iraq." But like many other recent news reports, the article did not discuss the feasibility of the senator's proposed strategy or the possible political benefit to McCain of pushing a plan that he claims would bring "victory" but is unlikely to be put to the test.

By contrast, as Media Matters for America has noted, National Public Radio senior news analyst Cokie Roberts stated on the November 20 edition of NPR's Morning Edition that the military is unlikely to adopt McCain's proposal to send thousands more U.S. troops to Iraq because, she said, referring to a comment by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the "Army is so depleted." For that reason, she stated, McCain's plan is "a somewhat convenient position, because he can always say, 'No one tried to win the war the way that I suggested to win it.' " Roberts added: "I think that this is a position that is useful for Senator McCain."

Media Matters has documented repeated examples of media figures who have promoted McCain's Iraq plan but have not mentioned any of the issues involved in actually carrying out his proposed strategy.

From the December 11 New York Times article headlined "Report on Iraq Exposes a Divide Within the G.O.P.":

Senator John McCain of Arizona, a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, rejected the major recommendations of the group because they did not present a formula for victory. Mr. McCain, hoping to claim the Republican mantle on national security issues, has staked out a muscular position on Iraq, calling for an immediate increase in American forces to try to bring order to Baghdad and crush the insurgency.

[...]

Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard and a leading advocate of the decision to invade Iraq, said: "In the real world, the [ISG co-chairman James] Baker report is now the vehicle for those Republicans who want to extricate themselves from Iraq, while McCain is articulating the strategy for victory in Iraq. Bush will have to choose, and the Republican Party will have to choose, in the very near future between Baker and McCain."

The choice Mr. Kristol is describing reflects a longstanding Republican schism over policy and culture between ideological neoconservatives and so-called realists. Through most of the Bush administration, the neoconservatives' idea of using American military power to advance democracy around the world prevailed, pushed along by Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld.

—R.S.K

Righty Media whores blame.. MEDIA for Bush-Cheney-Wolfowitz (et al) Iraq war debacle..

This very good (if long) post by Eric Boehlert at MediaMatters.org demonstratest the Mainstream Media's tendency to
#1.) Act as LAPDOGS for Right-Wing's hate machine; and
#2.) in doing so, to hate & revile themselves.

HATE is THE defining element of the Right-Wing agenda and worldview - only by SUBJUGATION can an elite maintain a system of dominance over the majority, and it takes powerful social factors (in any society) to maintain this elite/subjugated barrier; namely the use of scorn, derision, and might to maintain the "know your place" subjugation. Which is the Right-Wing's stock-in- trade worldwide. This propaganda narrative that subjugates the many to the will of the few is how Righties can mouth the latest catch-phrase of "COMPASSIONATE conservative," while heaping scorn on single mothers (much less on lesbian couples trying to raise children)... EVEN as the Righty press/media IGNORES the even more Right-Wing (authortarian or fundamentalist) polygamist cults with their multi-mothers variation on monogamous father-mother nuclear families! Of course the other instances of RIghty UNCOMPASSIONATE policies are legion, and would fill an encyclopeida, for at heart the most radical Right-Wing advocates would like to take America but to 19th century levels of poverty and cheap, chattle labor.

<< Warbloggers endured a bleak November, watching their political heroes suffer the loss of both houses of Congress, while President Bush's approval ratings fell toward Nixonian levels, the mainstream media finally conceded the battle for Iraq had broken down into a civil war, and even war architect Donald Rumsfeld was tossed overboard. EVERTYHING [the pro-war war-bloggers] WARBLOGGERS HAD CHAMPIONED OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS -- waging war with Islamists and creating a permanent Republican majority inside the Beltway -- came undone, and the CHRONICALLY INCORRECT warbloggers, ANGRY IDEOLOGUES who make Sean Hannity look like a man of reason, slipped into the realm of the LAUGHINGSTOCK.
But then on November 24, a ray of hope appeared, a much-needed spark that self-anointed war scribes rallied around to lift their spirits. Amidst the carnage inside Iraq and the political collapse at home, warbloggers identified America's most treacherous enemy -- [the media!] a stringer for the Associated Press. >>


Michelle Malkin fiddles while Baghdad burns
by Eric Boehlert
Mon, Dec 11, 2006
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200612120001

Warbloggers endured a bleak November, watching their political heroes suffer the loss of both houses of Congress, while President Bush's approval ratings fell toward Nixonian levels, the mainstream media finally conceded the battle for Iraq had broken down into a civil war, and even war architect Donald Rumsfeld was tossed overboard. Everything warbloggers had championed over the past five years -- waging war with Islamists and creating a permanent Republican majority inside the Beltway -- came undone, and the chronically incorrect warbloggers, angry ideologues who make Sean Hannity look like a man of reason, slipped into the realm of the laughingstock.

But then on November 24, a ray of hope appeared, a much-needed spark that self-anointed war scribes rallied around to lift their spirits. Amidst the carnage inside Iraq and the political collapse at home, warbloggers identified America's most treacherous enemy -- a stringer for the Associated Press.

In a November 24 dispatch, the global news giant, quoting Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein, reported that Shiite militiamen had "grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene." Warbloggers were skeptical of the chilling report, in part because no other news organizations could confirm the horrific event. The U.S. Central Command's communications machine then jumped in, issuing a statement that it could not corroborate the killings and that Hussein was not a Baghdad police captain, and even if he were, somebody of his rank was not authorized to speak to the press. Central Command then filed an official complaint with the AP and demanded a retraction.

The AP stood by its story, though, calling CENTCOM's allegations "ludicrous" and noting that Hussein had been providing AP reporters with reliable information for months. The AP also didn't think much of CENTCOM's suggestion that reporters only quote people found on the government's approved list of sources.

For the record, along with Hussein, the AP based its Burned Alive reporting on an account from Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder who told Al-Arabiya television about the killings. (He later recanted his story after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.) The AP also spoke to three independent eyewitnesses (two shopkeepers and a physician) and confirmed the story with hospital and morgue workers. Nonetheless, CENTCOM raised doubts about Hussein, so warbloggers, hearing a reassuring narrative they loved, pronounced the AP guilty of manufacturing news and quickly referred to Hussein as a "fake policeman" and to the Burned Alive story as a "fairy tale."

By inflating the disputed incident into a monumentally important press story, warbloggers, who have excitedly pounded the story for weeks, convinced themselves that blame for the United States' emerging defeat in Iraq lay squarely at the feet of the press. Specifically, warbloggers claim that American journalists, too cowardly to go get the news themselves, are relying on local Iraqi news stringers who have obvious sympathies for terrorists and who purposefully push propaganda into the news stream -- the way Hussein did with the Burned Alive story -- to create the illusion of turmoil. Warbloggers, who have virtually no serious journalism experience among them, announced that what's coming out of Iraq today is not news at all, but simply terrorist press releases -- "a pack of lies" -- regurgitated by reporters (or "traitors") who want to see the insurgents succeed.

"[M]any in the American media ... have a vested interest in exaggerating the violence as much as possible," announced warblogger Michelle Malkin, whose reassuring analysis was echoed by warbloggers such as the Anchoress, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Flopping Aces, Instapundit, Redstate, The Belmont Club, Wizbang, and Pajamas Media, among others. Fox News, the New York Post, The Examiner of the Washington, D.C., area, and National Review Online also gave the story attention.

Should the AP be held responsible for its reporting, and should the global news agency be diligent about whom it hires inside Iraq? Of course. And there should be hell to pay if it's proven any news events were manufactured. But warbloggers aren't interested in an honest, factual debate about a single instance of journalistic accountability. And they're not really interested in the specifics of the Burned Alive story. They're interested in wide-ranging conspiracy theories and silencing skeptical voices.

As American Prospect blogger Greg Sargent noted, "Malkin and her compadres are trying to accomplish one thing, and one thing only: They want to staunch the flow of images back to America of President Bush's disastrous war in Iraq." Indeed, censorship via intimidation -- not authentic media criticism -- has always been atop the warbloggers' agenda. (Their main beef with the press is that it exists.)

It should be noted that Malkin's breathless excitement over the AP story nearly matches the enthusiasm she used to spread online smears about the press in the spring of 2005 during the Terri Schiavo right-to-die controversy. That's when Malkin backed the novel conspiracy theory that press reports about how congressional Republicans had drafted a talking-points memo in order to properly spin the Schiavo story were all wrong. In fact, according to Malkin's fact-free analysis, an unknown Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo and duped the media in order to make Republicans look bad.

Wrong.

Ignoring the carnage

For today's right-wing warbloggers, whose contempt for journalists is matched only by their unbridled hatred of Arabs and Muslims, the AP kerfuffle represented a perfect solution that, at least temporarily, lifted their November blues. By early this month, they had dubbed the scandal "Jamilgate," with Malkin referring to the AP as "The Associated (with terrorists) Press." (Get it?)

Keep in mind that in the seven days surrounding the Burned Alive story, hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis were killed in sectarian violence. Here's a very small sampling, via Reuters, of the bloodshed that flowed around the time of the Burned Alive dispatch:

Mosul -- Police said they recovered 14 bodies, including three women, in different areas of Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad. [November 22]
Baghdad -- Up to six car bombs killed 133 people in a Shi'ite militia stronghold in Baghdad and a further 201 people were wounded, police said. [November 23]
Baghdad -- Baghdad police recovered 30 unidentified bodies around the capital in the 24 hours to late Friday, an Interior Ministry source said. [November 24]
Baghdad -- Baghdad police retrieved 30 bodies of victims of violence on Friday and 17 on Saturday, an Interior Ministry source said. [November 25]
Baquba -- Police in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, found the bodies of 25 people, including seven teenagers blindfolded and each with a single gunshot wound to the head, in various parts of Baquba in the past 24 hours, police said. [November 26]
Baghdad -- Baghdad police retrieved 39 bodies in the 24 hours to Monday evening. [November 27]
To date, warbloggers have not raised serious questions about any of those slayings or the reporting surrounding them. Yet viewing Iraq through the soda straw that is the Burned Alive story, they insist the press, thanks to its pro-terrorist sympathies, is creating the illusion of "chaos" in Iraq.

Whereas readers like you and me might see a completely illogical obsession with the Burned Alive story, given the statistical fact that the Iraqi civil war will likely claim six more victims within the next hour, for the warbloggers the half-dozen fatalities represent something much more important -- an exit strategy, a way out of their own man-made disaster that is Iraq. Because warbloggers think they can claim the whole Iraq fiasco was the media's fault, that the press did the terrorists' bidding, spread their propaganda, turned Americans against their fighting sons and daughters, and ruined what would have otherwise been a brilliant Bush foreign policy maneuver to spread Western-style democracy throughout a troubled part of the world.

In other words, the press lost the war. Period. And worse, the press lost the war through phony, biased reporting. My hunch is the Burned Alive excitement revolves around the fact warbloggers see an opening to try to raise doubts about, and even dismiss, all the Iraq reporting. "In short, the AP has been relying on a bogus source for much of its reporting on Shia violence against Sunnis since at least April," right-wing blogger Jeff Goldstein wrote at Protein Wisdom.

Warblogger Confederate Yankee went one better. Leaning heavily on the CBS Memogate analogy from the 2004 election, the warblogger insisted Jamil Hussein was just one of an army of "phony" sources the AP had been using to manufacture fake reports inside Iraq. "Quite literally, almost all AP reporting from Iraq not verified from reporters of other news organizations is now suspect. ... 'Jamilgate' means the Associated Press may have been delivering news of questionable accuracy to one billion people a day for two years or more." [Emphasis in original.]

Warning: Confederate Yankee is the same warblogger who recently posted a Reuters photo of an elderly Iraqi woman wrapped in a headscarf and crying beside a coffin. Confederate Yankee sensed foul play and claimed the picture had been mischievously doctored by the wire service because the Iraqi woman's face was actually George Bush's mug superimposed onto the picture. I kid you not.

Unhinged

It's clear warbloggers long ago passed the breaking point in terms of Iraq. But to see them recoil and lash out with such unhinged and oddly personal hatred for the press is shocking. While the rest of the real world debates serious options to curtail the losses in Iraq, warbloggers obsess over treacherous journalists who are endangering U.S. forces. At least according to warblogger Anchoress: "I wonder how many of our troops are being further endangered by the fakery we're discovering here? I wonder how many of their deaths in the coming weeks will be due to this sort of stuff? ... The press is literally trying to not simply destroy the man [Bush] but take down his government and surrender a military action that is important to the survival of our identity."

Did you get that? The Associated Press is killing U.S. soldiers, destroying the presidency, taking down the American government, and surrendering its national security. Who knew?

Michael Novak, in what may go down as The Weekly Standard's loopiest Iraq essay ever (no small task), insisted that "[t]o achieve this victory over America, it is not even necessary to create actual 'chaos,' but only its appearance." (Love the quotation marks around chaos, as if it's in doubt.) Adopting the voice of an insurgent, Novak announced, "What we have discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They are Islamists' best friends. ... Without qualm or fear, therefore, they do our bidding day after day. Willingly, gleefully, with much self-congratulation, they pump our storyline into the bloodstream of the Western public."

To watch warbloggers taunt journalists for being cowards is also unsettling. Curt at Flopping Aces wrote: "If the reporters would leave their comfy hotel rooms and actually go out and survey the scenes themselves then I am sure we would get a completely different picture." Honestly, is there any irony sharper than members of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, blogging comfortably from their air-conditioned stateside offices while obsessively googling AP dispatches in search of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that don't meet the right-wing standard of excellence, lecturing on-the-ground news reporters about the need to witness the Iraq conflict up close? (Here's the Crooks and Liar video of neocon columnist Mark Steyn pretty much calling reporters sissies for being "hunkered down" in the Green Zone and not reporting that "most of the schools in Iraq are open, most of the hospitals in Iraq are open.")

The notion is demented, but given their wild online rants, I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that warbloggers want journalists to venture into exceedingly dangerous sections of Iraq because warbloggers want journalists to get killed. That's how deep their hatred for the press runs. (Since March 2003, 126 members of the media -- reporters and their support staff -- have been killed in Iraq.) Also, by publicly demanding the AP "produce" Capt. Hussein -- for him to hold some sort of a press conference and announce his presence at a time when Iraqi police officers are being targeted daily for assassination -- indicates that warbloggers don't much care whether Hussein lives or dies either, as long as they can peddle their anti-media rants.

The truth is that most administration officials, as well as most adults on Capitol Hill, long ago abandoned the meme that the press simply wasn't reporting all the "good news" from Iraq and that Americans were being denied the torrent of feel-good stories blossoming from Basra to Mosul. But not the warbloggers. As the situation in Iraq grows more dire, they simply cling tighter to their Hail Mary claim that American reporters are to blame for a foreign policy debacle.

Of course, the only way the Iraq press hoax can sustain itself is if the entire American media infrastructure is in on it. On that, warbloggers are clear; none of the mainstream media can be trusted. Nobody is telling the truth about Iraq and its non-civil war.

Slight problem with that conspiracy theory: Why haven't openly conservative news outlets like the New York Post and The Washington Times been telling a drastically different story about Iraq? Why haven't they flooded the airwaves and news pages with the obvious "good news" stories the mainstream media won't touch because of their political bias? If the press (not to mention the bipartisan Iraq Study Group) is making up this dark narrative about "chaos" inside Iraq, then why, according to the Nexis electronic database, has The Washington Times published nearly 300 columns and articles in the past two years that contained both "Iraq" and "chaos"? And why did the New York Post on November 27 report that Iraq's prime minister was under increasing pressure to "stem the chaos in his country"? Are The Washington Times and the New York Post now part of the far-reaching liberal media cover-up, too?

A footnote: It's odd that warbloggers have expended an enormous amount of time and energy trying to pick apart a single source from a single, relatively brief AP dispatch, arguing that the misleading information in that article somehow calls into question all of the Iraq reporting, yet warbloggers have been relatively silent about the recent string of book-length critiques of the war. I'm thinking in particular about Thomas Ricks' excellent book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin Press, July 2006), which, in its first 100 pages, tells readers all they need to know about the botched war. Warbloggers either don't read books, or are so completely overwhelmed by the definitive evidence produced in a book like Fiasco, which relies heavily on sources from within the U.S. military to paint its convincing picture of Bush administration incompetence, that warbloggers simply have no choice but to turn away and focus their attention on evil AP stringers.

Gene Lyons reminds us of how abjectly, pathetically, whoreish most DC press sycophants were all through 2002...

Gene Lyons reminds us of how abjectly, cravenly whorish the DC press corps was kissing George W. Bush's grits all through the first two-dozen months of his first term. We regret that we here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot.com aren't nearly as good as MediaWhoresOnline.com was, before they went off the air (web) due to the vitriol directed at them for their ahead-of-the-curve critique of the whore media.

Speaking of "ahead of the curve" that is the very definition of Gene Lyons, who along with Joe Conason wrote the bible of the whore-press fabricating facts, allegations, and innuendos against the Clinton White House during President Clinton's two terms, in their book "The Hunting of the President."




Boys will be boys
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, December 6, 2006
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/175003/

Abbsent what TV football announcers call “incontrovertible video evidence” of what took place between President Bush and Sen.-elect James Webb, D-Va., during their recent dust-up, it’s hard to know quite what to think. As reported by The Washington Post, the president asked Webb at a White House reception about his son, a Marine serving in Iraq. Webb, who’d bitterly criticized Bush’s war policies during his campaign, refused to make nice. “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” he said. “That’s not what I asked you,” Bush replied. “How’s your boy ?” “ That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President, ” Webb answered. A decorated Vietnam veteran and bestselling novelist, Webb says he was tempted to take a punch at Bush, thereby endearing himself to those who see the president as an insolent punk. Less amused was the Post’s persnickety columnist, George Will.

“Webb,” he wrote, “certainly has conveyed what he is: a boor. Never mind the patent disrespect for the presidency. Webb’s more gross offense was calculated rudeness toward another human being... [who ] asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.”

Never mind, too, Bush’s haughty demand that Webb answer him like a servant or a royal subject, which Will evidently thought reflected badly on the president because he discreetly omitted it from his account. Others have noted that the very proper Mr. Will previously failed to object when Deadeye Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to go bleep himself on the Senate floor.

Even so, it’s possible to suspect that both Bush and Webb acted like jerks. Surrounded by the figurative equivalent of the Secret Service all his life, Bush clearly failed to absorb one key lesson of adolescent experience: If you’re not careful who you run your mouth to, you can get your butt kicked. I know a former Yale football jock who claims he introduced the future president to this principle in a frat house bar long ago, but I’ve got no idea if it really happened, or if Bush was sober enough to remember.

Provoking a hothead like Webb would be a bad idea under ordinary circumstances. From long observation, I’m pretty sure how Bill Clinton would have handled the incident. He’d have smiled, patted the senator-elect on the shoulder and allowed as how he looked forward to working with him on the Iraq problem come January. Webb might have fumed, but impotently.

Does that make Clinton a sissy ? No, it makes him an adult, one who understands that pointless confrontations can have unintended consequences.

That said, it strikes me as past time that reality testing returned to Washington, and if it takes a little Webb-style boorishness, then, to paraphrase Bush himself, bring it on.

The nation’s capital is chock-full of etiquette experts, many of whom mistook George W. Bush for a tough guy and treated invading Iraq like a Boy Scout jamboree. It’s the Washington disease: fantasies of omnipotence indulged by persons who themselves put nothing at risk, and who never have, people who confuse talking with doing.

To them, a guy like Webb’s a barbarian, albeit a barbarian with real political skills. Campaigning in his son’s combat boots while simultaneously earning credit from pundits for not trading on the young man’s service was definitely cute.

Nor does a combat record necessarily confer wisdom. Consider Sen. John McCain, another Vietnam veteran currently courting right-wing Republican voters by proposing to increase combat troops in Iraq—troops who happen not to exist in service of an undefined cause that’s already lost.

Looking back, it’s amazing to contemplate the sheer unreality of the political discussion leading up to America’s first “pre-emptive” war. The Post’s Walter Pincus, whose excellent reporting casting doubt upon Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction got buried on Page A 23 back then, recently wrote an interesting piece looking at what some of the 126 House Democrats who voted against Bush’s war were saying at the time.

Some were amazingly prescient. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the incoming Armed Services Committee chairman, wrote that he had “no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam [Hussein ]. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.”

Skelton warned that Iraq’s history of dictatorship and nasty ethnic tensions might cause a U. S.-imposed regime to “be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy.”

None of these misgivings, Pincus noted, was reported in The Washington Post. The White House ignored them. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews lionized Bush as “our young warrior king.” Newsweek’s Howard Fineman discerned in him “a model of unblinking, eyes-on-the-prize decisiveness,” even hinting that Bush’s clothing made him regal. “He’s a boomer product of the ’ 60 s,” the pundit gushed, “but doesn’t mind ermine robes.” They’re not talking that way now.

—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Washington Post whores military story "20 INSURGENTS killed", softens reports that women and children killed in bombing of houses....

Washington Post soft-pedals stories that US actions against "Al Qaida & insurgents" wipe out entire Iraqi families.

In related news, the NEW YORK TIMES _buries_ the news that thousands of Jewish families have been deported from Italy, in cattle cars directed through Switzerland, on their way to death camps in Germany and Eastern Europe late in 1944 and early 1945.

----------------------------------

This WASHINGTON POST article, and its posting on the web, illustrates the Washington Post's function as a propaganda conduit for the US government, and specifically as a propaganda outlet for pro-war reporting.

In our previous post, we attempted to outline that the Iraq War has become a slow-burn genocide or ethnic cleansing, a modern reprise of Saddam's 1991 _Anfal campaign_ that saw the deaths of up to 300,000 Iraqi Shiites put down for rebelling against Saddam's regime, as US forces and commanders did NOTHING to stop the mass-murder executions.

Except this time around, the United States forces are arming and supplying the Shiite death-squads against Sunni religionist (if the US troops aren't dropping the bombs and doing the firing themselves), instead of sitting back as Sunni Republican Guards killed thousands of Iraqi Shiite rebels.

The George Clooney movie "Three Kings" portrays a handful of renegade US troops trying first to steal looted gold from bunkers left behind by Saddam's retreating army, and then modifying their plans to protect some of the victims targeted for extermination by the same Iraqi army returning after the cease-fire with US forces. According to chapters 2 and 3 of Peter Galbraith's first-person witness to Gulf War I Iraq (from his book "The End of Iraq"), the movie is pure Hollywood fantasy, because in fact American troops were PROHIBITED by their commanders from DOING ANYTHING to protect the victims, even though those US commanders going all the way up to the then Secretary of Defense Richard (Dick) Cheney and President George H.W. Bush (Sr.) COULD EASILY HAVE DECLARED Saddam's forces were IN VIOLATION of the Gulf War cease fire treaty, especially regarding the use of HELICOPTER GUNSHIPS to pave the way for tanks and infantry to complete the Anfal scorched-earth campaign - which was witnessed in plain view from the American side of the treaty lines. (Some of which were still in Iraqi territory.)

Cheney- Sec. DoD at end of Gulf War I, as Saddam's Anfal campaign wiped out 300,000 rebels
http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/secdef_histories/bios/cheney.htm
Gates- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1444242
Galbrith- http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=517687

According to DemocracyNow.com, the CIA director at the time was none other than Robert Gates, currently the newly appointed Secretary to replace Secretary Rumsfeld at the DoD. Since Bush, Sr., Cheney, and Gates were AT THE HEART of the US command decision TO DO NOTHING as Iraq's Republican Guards killed up to 300,000 Iraqis, it does not bode well for Iraqis today that the Bush Jr/Cheney/Gates team is now the "new" leadership team commanding the Iraq war today. (As we all know, Bush Jr. is far more obstinate, incurious, inexperienced, and ill-informed than his father ever was.)

Which brings us back to the WASHINGTON POST, in their latest article they severely soft-pedal the possibility that the two alleged "AL QAIDA" homes the US bombed into rubble were in fact the dwelling places of two entire Sunni families.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/09/AR2006120900286_pf.html
<< Controversy erupted over the Tharthar raid.
Ishaqi police Capt. Mohammed Faisal said that two houses belonging to two brothers were destroyed in the bombing. Khalaf Muhammad, 41, a farmer in the Tharthar area, also said that two houses were bombed and that 18 people lived in them. He said neighbors found the bodies of women and children in the rubble.
The Associated Press released a photo of a man holding a dead child at the bombing site. Another news agency, Agence France-Presse, also showed photographs of dead children. >>

NOTE (by going to the Post's online article, URL above) that the whore Post DOES NOT include a decent link to ANY of those international news stories of children and women KILLED IN THE US BOMBING of the two homes.... but instead gives you the Post's in-house link to.... FRANCE !!

We correct that propaganda omission, by including the link and article to an India Telegraph story on the same US mission, below. (As a predominantly HINDU nation with terse relations with Islamic Pakistan, India is probably not overly biased for the Muslim p.o.v. in the Iraq war, if, indeed, there is a singular "Muslim point of view" in the region's current Shiite-on-Sunni (and vice-versa) bloodbath.)

Regarding the Washington Post's PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION function re the Iraq War, we include this line from the first "Spotlight" review of Galbraith's book, at Amazon:

<< The author's basic proposition is that THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC HAS BEEN UNDONE by extraordinary arrogance, ignorance, and political cowardice. >>

That summation certainly applies to the cowardly, lying Washington Post over these past half-dozen (or full-dozen) years.

=================================

Iraq police: Children killed in US attack:
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1061209/asp/foreign/story_7117269.asp


Iraqis inspect bodies of children allegedly killed in the US attack in Ishaqi, 90 km north of Baghdad. (Reuters)
Ishaqi (Iraq), Dec. 8 (Reuters): Iraqi and US officials gave sharply differing accounts of an overnight raid and air strike today in which up to 20 people were killed, with a town mayor accusing American troops of killing five children.

The US military issued a statement saying ground forces with air support killed 18 men and two women in the Thar Thar area of Salahaddin province, north of Baghdad. It suspected all of being al Qaida militants and said it found weapons including rocket-propelled grenades and explosive suicide vests.

In the village of Jalameda, near Ishaqi, 90 km north of the capital, police said they found the bodies of 17 dead civilians in the rubble of the family homes of brothers Mohammed Hussein Jalmoud and Mahmoud Hussein Jalmoud. Grieving relatives showed the bodies of five children wrapped in blankets to journalists.

Captain Nasser Abdul Majeed said that the 17 included six women and five children. They had been sent to the regional capital Tikrit to determine the cause of death.

The houses, surrounded by open fields, were flattened in the raid, leaving little but rubble and twisted steel rods.

Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said the statement on al Qaida referred to the Ishaqi incident. It is an area where the Sunni insurgency is active. Earlier, Ishaqi police and the mayor put the death toll as high as 32.

Punch a Righty (commenator) in the nose..!

Several articles in the past day or two indicate that it is LONG_PAST_DUE for America's blowhard Righty commentators & pundits to face the music for their half-decade (or two) of lies and deceptions, insufferable arrogance, ignorance, and self-righteous bullying and bigotry. People like George Will, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Weiner (aka "Savage"), Bill O'Reilly, William Safire, and all the others from the legions of the Right-Wing punditocracy have been so wrong, for so long, that it is absurd that ANYONE takes them seriously anymore.

First up, we have: "Iraqi police also found 35 bullet-riddled bodies that had been bound and blindfolded and left in different parts of the capital."

That is TODAY's blindfolded, handcuffed, tortured, and murdered bodycount, which is roughly comparable with yesterday's, and the day's before, and from the days before that. This appalling, grisly toll of human victims indicates that Baghdad and Iraq are indeed in a full-scale CIVIL WAR, or to be more precise, a full scale ETHNIC CLEANSING slow-burn genocide.

While item #1. In today's compilation may be just like those from the days before it, article #2. in today's selection is unique... the first time we have heard or seen anything like it breaking the envelope of the mainstream media.

<< SAUDIS REPORTEDLY FUNDING IRAQI SUNNIS >>
By Salah Nasrawi, Associated Press Writer 7 Dec. 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061208/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_insurgency_saudi

THIS IS OF COURSE a "Duh!" story for ANYONE who has been paying ANY attention to the Iraq war, for the simple reason that the Saudis (and Kuwaitis) paid BILLIONS of dollars for SADDAM HUSSEIN to oppose (fight) the Iranian threat to the Arab state(s); including Saddam's ruthless (a wimpy word in this context, we confess) SUPPRESSION of Shiite and Kurd power and influence. JUST BECAUSE les_Americans have killed Saddam's sons and captured (and put on trial in a kangaroo court) their former ally (insert picture Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam here) does NOT mean that the Saudis have developed a newfound approval for either the Shiite majority and their militant mullahs in Iraq, or an approval for the Iranian mullahs whose nation out-populates Iraq by almost three to one, much less the tiny population of those Arabs in Saudi Arabia riding those enormous, liquid gold oil fields .

There have of course been articles which beat around the bush of any flat-out assertion "Saudis AIDING THE IRAQI (Sunni) INSURGENCY," but reading between the lines, this is the unmistakable conclusion when an article reports that Iraqi Sunnis see AL QAIDA as "their LAST HOPE and DEFENDER", one _knows_damn_well_ that the Al Qaida Martyrs (suicide fighters) are being supplied by their Sunni kin across the (Iraq-Saudi) border.

WHAT IS AMAZING, is how thoroughly the American whore press/media CAN B_S_ this simple fact, this fact-of-daily-life so at the very center of the Iraq war insurgency and occupation.

And of course the corollary is, that the BUSH ADMINISTRATION is trying to CENSOR, OBSCURE, MISINFORM, and DISTRACT from the simple fact that Iraq is now a SLOW-BURN GENOCIDE, with the United States AIDING ONE SIDE (the Shiite-dominated government of Al Malaki and (his) government's Mahdi army core supporters) against the other.

Corollary #2. is that, the more the US tries to militarize ("create a working police force and army") its Shiite "allies," THE MORE THEY FEEL COMPELLED TO KILL any (even potential) future opponents, that is whatever Sunnis are still surviving last week's slow-burn ethnic cleansing.

The whore DC punditocracy, in their determination to polish Bush-Cheney's boots, has spent the past 2 or 3 years ignoring and obfuscating these simple facts.

Message to the whore DC punditocracy: Saddam Hussein MAY HAVE REQUIRED US ASSISTANCE to fight a war with Iran and gas the Kurds, but he needed NO help from the United States to QUELL THE SHIITE REBELLION in 1991.

So American pundits LECTURING about the need for the US military to "TRAIN THE IRAQI ARMY AND POLICE" is pure BS... Saddam needed NO "TRAINING" from America to police his regime, and neither does Iran or Libya or Sudan or other "terrorist friendly" nations need ANY US TRAINING to ruthlessly police their respective nations. Indeed, the US aiding and supporting the Sha's secret police, SAVAK, was THE factor which united resentment of ALL Iranian opposition groups against the Sha and the US. (Although we will concede that the Sha and his SAVAK were mere cubs compared to the ferocity of the Iranian revolution's lust for criminal tribunals and summary justice, and many of those who allied with the radical theological militants paid the ultimate price, and came to look back on the Sha's reign as being far more tolerant if not benevolent.)

Next time a DC whore pundit talks about "TRAINING THE IRAQ ARMY AND POLICE TO STAND UP", someone PLEASE give them a friendly punch in the nose! (To ruin only their day and not their entire week or lives, we recommend using 16 oz. boxing gloves and even head protectors.) The Iraqi Shiites DESPISE taking orders from Americans, and every time we "train" them to kill insurgents, they go out and round up as many POTENTIAL insurgents as they can find (surviving Sunnis) AND KILL THEM.

While the DC punditocracy is collecting their $100,000 paychecks every month or two, they are contributing to a NEW ANFAL GENOCIDE in Iraq, this time by the victims of Saddam's 1991 Anfal campaign (Shiites) against those whose clan perpetrated the atrocities. (Sunnis)

Either which way (back then or today), the Punditocracy acts as if they have some inalienable right to spout real-politik BS, and consign the victims of the policies they advocate to the "disappeared and forgotten " bin.

And then of course there is the case of American servicemen stuck in the crossfire, trained to kill "insurgent" Sunnis, but in so doing empowering the Shiite Mahdi army (and other Shiite units).

HOW can the WHORE punditocracy give a FREE PASS to the Bush administration IGNORING THE OBVIOUS, while America's men and women bear the brunt of it?

HOW can the whore punditocracy give a FREE PASS to George W. Bush strutting around claiming to the "the WAR PRESIDENT," while Bush gives NO LEADERSHIP for ANY sense of NATIONAL SHARED SACRIFICE, and instead indeed goes the OPPOSITE direction, giving HUGE TAX CUTS FOR America's wealthiest individuals and corporations?

HOW can the WHORE punditocracy NOT CONTRAST Mr. Bush's "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED _PHOTO-OP_ with his relentless mantra, "We will stay the course" (presumably until the "mission is accomplished")??

IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK OF THE DC WHORE PUNDITOCRACY, to get them to DEMAND of the president even ONE LITTLE ADMISSION that maybe the mission was NOT accomplished, that "BRING IT ON!" was a STUPID case of arrogant bravado, and that the president likewise has FAILED his "GIT 'em DEAD OR ALIVE!" pledge for Osama bin Laden?

---------------------------------------------

(PS: Michael Lind's "George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics" explains how genocide and subjugation of "inferior" races is at the heart and soul of the radical-right (neo-confederat/neo-conservative) worldview. During Manifest Destiny, America could actually try to carry through genocidal policies, even up to (for example) the early 1900's Philippine's war, aka "the Philippine INSURECTION, where US troops dug mass graves for Moro tribesmen slaughtered in the dozens. But manifest destiny, and the ruthlessness behind it, becomes problematic when you pit a professional army of only 150,000 men against a population of at least 20 million, a target population armed not with bows and arrows, but AK47s and IEDs.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunnis

By SALAH NASRAWI, Associated Press Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061208/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_insurgency_saudi

CAIRO, Egypt - Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.

Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.

But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.

Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money comes from private donations, called zakat, collected for Islamic causes and charities.

Some Saudis appear to know the money is headed to Iraq's insurgents, but others merely give it to clerics who channel it to anti-coalition forces, the officials said.

In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said.

Overall, the Iraqi officials said, money has been pouring into Iraq from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a Sunni bastion, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled the Sunni-controlled regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Saudi officials vehemently deny their country is a major source of financial support for the insurgents.

"There isn't any organized terror finance, and we will not permit any such unorganized acts," said Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry. About a year ago the Saudi government set up a unit to track any "suspicious financial operations," he said.

But the Iraq Study Group said "funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states."

Saudi officials say they cracked down on zakat abuses, under pressure from the United States, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

The Iraqi officials, however, said some funding goes to Iraq's Sunni Arab political leadership, who then disburse it. Other money, they said, is funneled directly to insurgents. The distribution network includes Iraqi truck and bus drivers.

Several drivers interviewed by the AP in Middle East capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit money transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses with returning pilgrims.

"They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me to deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq," said one driver, who gave his name only as Hussein, out of fear of reprisal. "I know it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don't take it with me, they will kill me."

He was told what was in the boxes, he said, to ensure he hid the money from authorities at the border.

The two Iraqi officials would not name specific Iraqi Sunnis who have received money from Saudi Arabia. But Iraq issued an arrest warrant for Harith al-Dhari, a Sunni opponent of the Iraqi government, shortly after he visited Saudi Arabia in October. He was accused of sectarian incitement.

Saudi Arabia is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The Iraq Study Group report noted that its government has assisted the U.S. military with intelligence on Iraq.

But Saudi citizens have close tribal ties with Sunni Arabs in Iraq, and sympathize with their brethren in what they see as a fight for political control — and survival — with Iraq's Shiites.

The Saudi government is determined to curb the growing influence of its chief rival in the region, Iran. Tehran is closely linked to Shiite parties that dominate the Iraqi government.

Saudi officials say the kingdom has worked with all sides to reconcile Iraq's warring factions. They have, they point out, held talks in Saudi Arabia with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is accused of killing Sunnis.

These officials say zakat donations are now channeled through supervised bank accounts. Cash donation boxes, once prevalent in supermarkets and shopping malls, have been eliminated.

Still, Iraq's foreign minister expressed concern about the influence of neighboring Sunni states at a recent Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo.

"We hope that Saudi Arabia will keep the same distance from each and all Iraqi parties," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari later told the AP.

Last month, the New York Times reported that a classified U.S. government report said Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency had become self-sufficient financially, raising millions from oil smuggling, kidnapping and Islamic charities. The report did not say whether any money came from Saudi Arabia.

Allegations the insurgents have purchased shoulder-fired Strela missiles raise concerns that they are obtaining increasingly sophisticated weapons.

On Nov. 27, a U.S. Air Force F-16 jet crashed while flying in support of American soldiers fighting Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent hotbed. The U.S. military said it had no information about the cause of the crash. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman, said he would be surprised if the jet was shot down because F-16's have not encountered weapons capable of taking them down in Iraq.

But last week, a spokesman for Saddam's ousted Baath party claimed that fighters armed with a Strela missile had shot down the jet.

"We have stockpiles of Strelas and we are going to surprise them (the Americans)," Khudair al-Murshidi, the spokesman told the AP in Damascus, Syria. He would not say how the Strelas were obtained.

Saddam's army had Strelas; it is not known how many survived the 2003 war. The Strela is a shoulder-fired, low-altitude system with a passive infrared guidance system.

The issue of Saudi funding for the insurgency could gain new prominence as the Bush administration reviews its Iraq policy, especially if it seeks to engage Iran and Syria in peace efforts.

Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, wrote in a recent leaked memo that Washington should "step up efforts to get Saudi Arabia to take a leadership role in supporting Iraq, by using its influence to move Sunni populations out of violence into politics."

Last week, a Saudi who headed a security consulting group close to the Saudi government, Nawaf Obaid, wrote in the Washington Post that Saudi Arabia would use money, oil and support for Sunnis to thwart Iranian efforts to dominate Iraq if American troops pulled out. The Saudi government denied the report and fired Obaid.

New York Times whores the GESTAPO-esque MCA law, by BURYING the story on page A-20 and whitewashing its implications....

<< If you picked up the New York Times on October 18, you'd have had little reason to think it was a particularly significant day in American history. While the front page featured a photo of George W. Bush signing a new law at the White House the previous day, the story about the Military Commissions Act--WHICH THE [LYING, DISGRACEFUL] Times never named--was BURIED in a 750-word piece on page A20. "It is a rare occasion when a President can sign a bill he knows will save American lives" was the first of several QUOTES OF PRAISE [selected for highlight by the Times' writer] from the President that were high up in the article. Further down, a few Democrats objected to the bill, but from the article's limited explanation of the law it was hard to understand why. >>

===============================

Olbermann's Hot News
Daphne Eviatar
Dec. 6, 2006
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061218/eviatar


If you picked up the New York Times on October 18, you'd have had little reason to think it was a particularly significant day in American history. While the front page featured a photo of George W. Bush signing a new law at the White House the previous day, the story about the Military Commissions Act--which the Times never named--was buried in a 750-word piece on page A20. "It is a rare occasion when a President can sign a bill he knows will save American lives" was the first of several quotes of praise from the President that were high up in the article. Further down, a few Democrats objected to the bill, but from the article's limited explanation of the law it was hard to understand why.

But if you happened to catch MSNBC the evening before, you'd have heard a different story. It, too, began with a laudatory statement from the President: "These military commissions are lawful. They are fair. And they are necessary." Cut to MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann: "And they also permit the detention of any American in jail without trial if the President does not like him."

What? Did the Times, and most other outlets, just miss that?

Indeed, they did. Olbermann, who decried the new law as a shameful moment in American history, went on to proclaim that the Military Commissions Act--which he did name--will be the American embarrassment of our time, akin to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 or the 1942 executive order interning Japanese-Americans.

It was a perfect story for the bold and eccentric host of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, which airs weeknights on MSNBC. A former anchor for ESPN's SportsCenter, Olbermann likes to call the news as he sees it--especially when almost everyone else in the media seems to be ignoring a critical play. As it turns out, that tack on the news is increasingly popular these days, upending the conventional wisdom that incisive analysis and intelligent critiques don't win viewers on mainstream television.

Olbermann first cast off the traditional reporter's role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, delivering a powerful indictment of the government's handling of the rescue effort. "These are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping this country safe," he said bitterly. The government "has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water."

At the time, other newscasters, most famously CNN's Anderson Cooper, also unleashed their outrage, spawning speculation that the natural disaster might also become a watershed event for broadcast news. But most anchors quickly returned to business as usual, censoring their own criticisms no matter how bad the news continued to be. Not Olbermann. Encouraged by rising ratings, he's since turned his distinctive take on the government's incompetence into a regular part of his show.

Last August he took the tone up a notch when he aired the first of his hard-hitting Special Comments. Regularly invoking some of the most shameful examples of American history to frame the Bush Administration in historical perspective, he's likened the President's recent acts to John Adams's jailing of American newspaper editors, Woodrow Wilson's use of the Espionage Act to prosecute "hyphenated Americans" for "advocating peace in a time of war" and FDR's internment of 110,000 Americans because of their Japanese descent. Ours is "a government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from," declared Olbermann the day after the President signed the Military Commissions Act.

Since his first Special Comment ripped into Donald Rumsfeld for attacking Americans who question their government, video clips and transcripts of Olberman's commentaries have been zipping around the Internet, a favorite on sites like Crooks and Liars, Truthout and YouTube. (The Rumsfeld commentary was watched more than 100,000 times in the month after it appeared on Countdown.) But it's not just a niche following: Since late August Olbermann's ratings have shot up 55 percent. In November he was named a GQ Man of the Year. When MSNBC teamed him with Chris Matthews to cover the midterms, the network's ratings were up 111 percent from the 2002 election in the coveted 25-to-54 demographic. And certain fifteen-minute segments on Olbermann's show have edged out his nemesis, Bill O'Reilly. (Olbermann deems O'Reilly the "Worst Person in the World" on his popular nightly contest for the newsmaker who's committed the most despicable act of the day.) Unlike O'Reilly, Olbermann doesn't shout over his guests, condescend to his opponents or deliver empty diatribes. Instead, his show--which attracts guests ranging from Frank Rich to John Ashcroft--features in-depth interviews with prominent academics, public officials and journalists on serious, often overlooked events of the day.

"Keith is a refreshing change from most of the coverage of civil liberties since 9/11," says Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and frequent guest on Olbermann's show. "Reporters tend to view these fights in purely political terms, so the public gets virtually no substantive analysis. As long as two people disagree, reporters treat it as an even debate. They won't say that the overwhelming number of constitutional and national security experts say this is an unlawful program--they'll just say experts disagree. It's extremely misleading."

Olbermann, who denies any partisan leanings and whose background doesn't suggest any, insists his job is to report on what's really going on--even if the public is loath to believe it. "We are still fundamentally raised in this country to be very confident in the preservation of our freedoms," he said in a recent interview. "It's very tough to get yourself around the idea that there could be a mechanism being used or abused to restrict and alter the society in which we live." Olbermann credits sportscasting for his candid and historical-minded approach. "In sports, if a center-fielder drops the fly ball, you can't pretend he didn't," he says. "There's also an awareness of patterns, a relationship between what has gone before and what is to come that is so strong in sports coverage that doesn't seem to be there in news reporting."

If history lessons in prime time seem an unlikely sell, it helps that Olbermann's show is also witty, quirky and fast-paced, covering everything from the Iraq War to Madonna's adoption fiasco to pumpkin-smashing elephants--one of his nightly fifteen-second Oddball segments. With a growing number of TV viewers saying they get their news from Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, it's no wonder Olbermann--who's sort of a cross between Edward R. Murrow and Jon Stewart--has a growing audience.

MSNBC seems to be egging him on. "The only issues I've had with my employers is to calm them down and say 'doing this every night won't work,' " says Olbermann, referring to his Special Comments. "I have to do it only when I feel moved to."

"The rise of Keith's skeptical or pointed comments are the mood of the country," says Bill Wolff, MSNBC's vice president for prime-time programming. "He has given voice to a large part of the country that is frustrated with the Administration's policies."

In a pre-election Special Comment about the Republican National Committee's campaign ads featuring menacing images of Osama bin Laden and associated terrorists, for example, Olbermann declared: "You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee." Invoking FDR for contrast, he added: "Eleven Presidents ago, a chief executive reassured us that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. His distant successor has wasted his Administration insisting that there is nothing we can have but fear itself."

Not surprisingly, Olbermann has his critics. National Review recently lambasted him for his "angry and increasingly bizarre attacks on the Bush administration," claiming that he offers nothing in the way of hard news. But the author didn't cite a single fact that Olbermann had wrong. Meanwhile, as the Review acknowledged, O'Reilly's numbers are trending downward as Olbermann's are shooting up.

While his views may seem radical for mainstream television news, they turn out to be a pretty safe bet for him and his network. Which may prove that the American public does have a taste for serious, even high-minded, news--particularly when peppered with a sharp sense of humor. It's another unexpected Olbermann news flash: Dissent sells.

Make no mistake: the Washington Post pimped the WMD LIES-to-WAR stories pushed by the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House in 2002 and 2003...

<< Pincus was one of the few top people at the paper [the WASHINGTON POST] to push for more skeptical coverage of the run up to the war. Now he points out, "The day after the House vote, The Washington Post recorded that 126 House Democrats voted against the final resolution. NONE was [sic] quoted giving a reason for his or her vote except for Rep. Joe Baca (Calif.), who said a military briefing had disclosed that U.S. soldiers did not have adequate protection against biological weapons."
Pincus noted that NO OTHER REASONn given to oppose the resolution by others "WAS REPORTED in the two Post stories about passage of the resolution that day." >>

===========================

Pincus Tweaks 'Post' on War Resolution -- How Did Others Respond?

By Greg Mitchell
Published: December 04, 2006 9:45 AM ET
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003467825

NEW YORK In the Washington Post today, longtime national security reporter Walter Pincus observes that several Democrats who voted in 2002 against giving President Bush authority to attack Iraq are now about to play key roles in the upcoming Congress. He pointedly observes that they were "given little public credit at the time, or since," even though they have "turned out to be correct in their warnings about the problems a war would create."

Pincus was one of the few top people at the paper to push for more skeptical coverage of the run up to the war. Now he points out, "The day after the House vote, The Washington Post recorded that 126 House Democrats voted against the final resolution. None was quoted giving a reason for his or her vote except for Rep. Joe Baca (Calif.), who said a military briefing had disclosed that U.S. soldiers did not have adequate protection against biological weapons."

Pincus noted that no other reason given to oppose the resolution by others "was reported in the two Post stories about passage of the resolution that day." A search of the Washington Post archives finds that the main story was co-authored by Jim VanDeHei, who is now leaving the paper.

But how did the Post, and other papers, cover the critical resolution on their editorial pages?

When Congress in October 2002 voted to give President Bush a free hand to wage war against Iraq, not many in the press saw it as a landmark, perhaps even a turning point, in U.S. history. But ever since the war went bad — more than three years ago now — the vote has gained increased significance, something to hail or lament (as a modern Gulf of Tonkin resolution) or an albatross to hang around a political candidate's neck. John Kerry never could explain his vote in favor of the resolution during the 2004 presidential race. Now he says he regrets his vote, but Hillary Clinton, who is in the same bind, refuses to renounce it.

Those who favor the war, from President Bush on down, frequently invoke the bipartisan vote in both the House and Senate as proof that Democrats, too, believed that Saddam had WMDs and felt he should be removed from power.

But how did newspapers, on their editorial pages, feel about the vote then?

An E&P survey of editorials in more than a dozen major papers around that October 2002 vote finds that few sounded any alarms.

The Washington Post was typical in backing Congress' decision to give Bush "broad authority ... to move against Iraq." The editorial suggested that it was not a "declaration of war" and "the course of U.S. policy is not yet set." Of course, Bush would later act as if it were equivalent to a declaration of war, and there is much evidence that U.S. plans for an invasion were indeed pretty well "set" at that time.

The Post, like most others, reasoned that passing this measure would give the White House a diplomatic club to use against Saddam — and the United Nations — to possibly prevent a war. In the end, it paved the way for using far more lethal "clubs."

At the other end of the spectrum, the Los Angeles Times forthrightly declared that the resolution "gives too much power to this and, potentially, future presidents to attack nations unilaterally based on mere suspicions. This could fundamentally change the nation's approach to foreign policy. ... Now that the resolution has passed, Congress and the American people should urge the president to interpret his mandate narrowly."

The editorial even invoked the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, in which legislators, it recalled, were "misled" into giving President Lyndon Johnson powers in August 1964 to send many more troops to Vietnam. We all know how that turned out.

But the great majority of papers skewed much closer to the hawkish Washington Post line. The Chicago Tribune went so far as to praise "the willingness of Congress to place its faith in Bush." It also approvingly quoted Sen. John Warner advising that a war resolution "is not an act of war. It is an act to deter war." The Wall Street Journal praised Senate Democrats for backing the measure "at crunch time."

Denver's Rocky Mountain News found the administration's case "certainly persuasive." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette expressed approval but warned that Bush "must not imagine that the Iraq resolution can be used" like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution "to proceed to full-scale war."

A New York Times editorial on Oct. 11, 2002, offered no judgment on the resolution, but, accepting the WMD reports by its reporter Judith Miller, among others, noted that for the time being "Saddam Hussein seems unlikely to strike out wildly with his chemical and biological weapons."

But some papers did raise serious concerns about the resolution. The Boston Globe said, "The text is not as restrictive as it should have been," adding that it should have forced the president to come back to Congress and ask for explicit permission to go to war if Saddam ever opened his country to U.N. inspectors (which he did) or if the Security Council refused to back an invasion (it did refuse).

The San Francisco Chronicle saluted those in Congress who "raised the right questions about the propriety of sanctioning a war before all diplomatic options were exhausted." The Chronicle warned that the resolution "emboldens the hawkish factions within the Bush administration who have been agitating for a military confrontation with Iraq since the day of our 43rd president's inauguration."

That editorial closed with a sad reflection: "There were simply too few voices of reason and restraint on Capitol Hill this week." And on the editorial pages of the nation's newspapers. What will they do next time?
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.

Bush Sr. found SOBBING at FL statehouse recounting his sons' political battles..!

Bush Sr. found SOBBING at FL statehouse recounting his sons' political battles..!



Bush Senior sobs (!!) while recounting one of his sons' lost political battles, in this case Jeb Bush's lost election campaign against Florida incumbent Governor Lawton Chiles in 1994.

This article gives us ANOTHER glimpse into the dysfunctional psychology, fragile egos, and sense of entitlement of the Bush family. To begin with, we were appalled at the time (late 1980s) when Washington Post writer and ABC news commentator George Will commented of the elder President Bush "He's a WIMP...."

We thought that George Will's scorn for Bush Sr. was graceless, classless, and unfounded, given that the occasion for Will's derision was that President Bush (Sr.) had gone back on his "no new taxes pledge" to _HELP BALANCE_ US government budgets. WHAT GEORGE WILL and thousands of other LYING Righty commentators FAIL to acknowledge, is that the reason Bush (Sr.) had to renege on his "NO NEW TAXES!" pledge was because of the BILLIONS and BILLIONS and BILLIONS of debt incurred to the US government (and American taxpayers) BY THE S&L debacle - - the BAILOUTS of PRIVATE BUSINESSES by the government and taxpayers. It wasn't the elder Bush's reneging on his pledge that was appalling... it was his arrogance and scorn in delivering the pledge, the infamous "READ MY LIPS- NO NEW TAXES!" scorn and invective the elder Bush was clearly directing at Democratic leaders and voters when he made the pledge in his 1988 presidential campaign.

The S&L DEBACLE of the Bush 1 years was of course preceded by the insistence of Republican S&L operators (campaign donors and hired-gun lobbyists) to "DEREGULATE" the industry during the Reagan years, and the Bush family contributed at least twice to those billions in deficits (some say a TRILLION US dollars in 1980s dollars in S&L defaults) which the American public were forced to bailout in the S&L meltdown when:
#1.) NEIL BUSH, as a director of the Silverado Savings & Loan, was party to that S&L's one_billion_dollars in losses; and
#2.) when President Bush (Sr.) FIRED the San Francisco federal district bank examiner (the SF fed. banking district covers all of California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) and then REPLACED that audit expert examiner with S&L industry super-lobbyist (read, Republican fund-raiser) M. DANNY WALLS, who BURIED the audit-exam of Charles Keating's Lincoln S&L for a full year, costing taxpayers AN ADDITIONAL one billion dollars of debt to be bailed out, for TWO_BILLION_DOLLARS in total losses for Keating's Lincoln S&L, alone, when it finally defaulted (as predicted) a year later. (By contrast, Clinton friend Jim McDougal died, in solitary confinement, in a max-security prison, on a cold concrete floor, denied his heart medication by jailers answering to Republican "Independent Counsel" Ken Starr, for the $22 million in losses the feds attributed to McDougal's Madison Guarantee S&L defaults.)
- - In addition, JEB BUSH stuck American taxpayers with at least $2 million in bailouts, Jeb and his partner walking away with the title to a Miami office building that taxpayers paid the defaulted loan on, Bush and his business partner using insider connections to get that sweet-heart bailout.

It would take several volumes to document all the Bush family bailouts, financial shenanigans, and illegal operations (we will just mention close family friend KEN LAY of ENRON and include President Bush Sr. possibly DEALING WITH IRANIAN TERRORISTS behind the back of President Jimmy Carter in 1980, to have the Iranians HOLD THE AMERICAN HOSTAGES PAST THE 1980 ELECTION to guarantee a Reagan-Bush Republican victory in that election), but what is important to this story of President Bush (Sr.) sobbing about his son's political battles, is that the meat of the "PUSH POLLING" "dirty tricks" attributed to Governor Chiles' 1994 reelection campaign against challenger Jeb Bush WERE ESSENTIALLY TRUE: "...just before the election, the Chiles campaign made 70,000 bogus phone calls to elderly voters claiming to be from independent groups. Callers portrayed Bush as a tax cheat and said his running mate, Tom Feeney, WANTED TO ABOLISH SOCIAL SECURITY and CUT MEDICARE."

BUT IT IS TRUE! George Bush, Jeb Bush, and the Republicans _HAVE_ sought to ABOLISH SOCIAL SECURITY (with their "privatization" schemes, see the "privatization" of post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans, the "privatization" of post-invasion Iraq, and the post-2000 US and Florida state treasury deficits), and HAVE sought to make cuts in Medicare and other health programs. See the Medicare "PART-D prescription COVERAGE GAP", also known as the "DOUGHNUT HOLE" cut right out of the heart of Prescription Medicare coverage for seniors who must now shell out thousands more dollars for their prescription drugs than before President Bush (jr.) and the Republicans passed their infamous "Prescription Drug REFORM bill" in 2005!

Mr. Bush's SOBBING at the recounting of the 1994 Florida governor's race is just another indication of the dysfunctional makeup of his family. Where are the SOBS for the FORTY NINE MILLION American voters, 500,000 more of whom voted for Al Gore than George W. Bush in the 2000 election. only to be told (in essence) by the Supreme Court, Bush campaign, media, and Jeb Bush administration in Florida "YOUR VOTES DON'T COUNT, we are going to STOP THE VOTE RECOUNTING in Florida" (contrary to Florida election law providing for a FULL RECOUNT for ALL candidates who loose elections by less than 1/2 of 1% of votes cast) in order to give George W Bush the electoral college win?

<< He [Bush Sr.] then broke down in tears mentioning his son, Gov. Jeb Bush, as an example of leadership and the way he handled losing the 1994 governor's race to POPULAR incumbent Democrat Lawton Chiles. He vaguely referred to dirty tricks in the campaign. [Note: any Bush, much less the one at the center of the "October Surprise 1980" allegations of treason and dealing with enemy terrorists behind the sitting president's back, crying about "DIRTY TRICKS" is the very height of hypocritical duplicity; not to mention Bush Jr.'s chief campaign strategist has ALWAYS been Karl Rove, who is SYNONYMOUS with divisive, dirty, and often illegal tricks; not to mention which Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris are now synonymous with illegally DISENFRANCHISING thousands of legal Florida voters.]

"He didn't whine about it. He didn't complain," the former president said before choking up in front of lawmakers, Gov. Bush's top administrators and state workers gathered in the House chamber for the last of the governor's leadership forums.
As he tried to continue, he let out a sob and put a handkerchief to his face. When he spoke again, his words were broken up by pauses as he tried to regain composure.

In 1994, Jeb Bush appeared to be on his way to victory. The final debate between Chiles and Bush is largely seen as the turning point in the closest governor's race in state history. But just before the election, the Chiles campaign made 70,000 bogus phone calls to elderly voters claiming to be from independent groups. Callers PORTRAYED Bush as a tax cheat and said his running mate, Tom Feeney, WANTED TO ABOLISH SOCIAL SECURITY and CUT MEDICARE. >>


(Re sobbing about "dirty tricks," how about the White House of George W. Bush and Karl Rove DEMONIZING the funeral services for Senator Paul Wellstone, Mrs. Wellstone, and 3 close campaign staffers during the last-minute Minnesota Senate campaign of 2002? The Bush-Rove White House used Fox news and other right-wing media (and tag-along mainstream-media) to make the Welltone family's grief into the centerpiece of national partisan DERISION and SCORN in a successful attempt to defeat the Democrat's last minute stand-in candidate for that tragedy, former Vice President Walter Mondale... AT THE EXPENSE OF THE GRIEVING WELLSTONE FAMILY and supporters. And of course there is the sorry tale of the Bush-Rove-Cheney White House DEMONIZING the departing Clinton-Gore staffers, WH press spokesman Ari Fleischer relentlessly playing the "TRASHED West Wing offices" story... WITHOUT ONE PHOTOGRAPH or video of evidence! An unsubstantiated smear campaign that humiliated and degraded the departing Democratic staffers.)
===================================

First President Bush Sobs While Talking of Son
By BRENDAN FARRINGTON, AP
Dec. 5 2006
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/first-president-bush-sobs-while-talking/20061204194509990018

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Dec. 5) - Former President George H.W. Bush came here Monday to talk about leadership and opened his remarks with advice on working with rivals, being patient and building personal relationships.

He then broke down in tears mentioning his son, Gov. Jeb Bush, as an example of leadership and the way he handled losing the 1994 governor's race to popular incumbent Democrat Lawton Chiles. He vaguely referred to dirty tricks in the campaign.

"He didn't whine about it. He didn't complain," the former president said before choking up in front of lawmakers, Gov. Bush's top administrators and state workers gathered in the House chamber for the last of the governor's leadership forums.

As he tried to continue, he let out a sob and put a handkerchief to his face. When he spoke again, his words were broken up by pauses as he tried to regain composure.

In 1994, Jeb Bush appeared to be on his way to victory. The final debate between Chiles and Bush is largely seen as the turning point in the closest governor's race in state history. But just before the election, the Chiles campaign made 70,000 bogus phone calls to elderly voters claiming to be from independent groups. Callers portrayed Bush as a tax cheat and said his running mate, Tom Feeney, wanted to abolish Social Security and cut Medicare.

"A true measure of a man is how you handle victory and how you handle defeat, so in '94 Floridians chose to rehire the governor. They took note of a his worthy opponent, who showed with not only words but with actions what decency he had," Bush said before again sobbing.

After his defeat, Jeb Bush formed a group called Foundation for Florida's Future which promoted education policy. He also helped open a charter school in a poor Miami neighborhood, helped the state Republican Party organize a convention and straw poll to have sway in the 1996 presidential election and lobbied for education and campaign finance reform bills. Bush then won the first of his two terms in 1998.

"The moral of the story is to serve with honor and your governor has served with honor," the former president said.

"I'm the emotional one," Bush said later. "I don't enjoy breaking up, but when you talk about somebody you love, when you get older, you do it more."

The former president also answered questions for about a half hour.

When asked about the vision for his grandchildren, he said neither he nor his wife are pushing them toward politics or running for public office.

"But I hope that they will, I hope quite a few of them will," he said before pausing and joking about the current President Bush's daughters. "I'm not sure I'd count on the twins doing this - Jenna and Barbara - but they're full of life and they might."

Six years ago, when the twins were 19, they were charged with underage drinking in an Austin, Texas bar.

"They've calmed way down," their grandfather said. "They're doing great."

He also talked about his recent closeness to former President Clinton and some of the work they've done to help Hurricane Katrina and tsunami victims.

"I apologized to him in Philadelphia the other day. I said, 'Bill, I take it back. My dog Millie did not know more about foreign policy than you do.' And he was very understanding," Bush said before turning serious. "It isn't about politics, it's about trying to do something bigger than ourselves, trying to help people who are devastated and need our support."

He then recalled a political cartoon showing his son the president opposing gay marriage and then walking into a room and finding his father on a sofa with Clinton's arm around him, prompting him to shout, "Dad! What are you doing?"

"(Clinton) cut it out of the paper and said, 'Don't you think we ought to cool it George?"' Bush said.

How we got into this mess: A review of Lies-to-War and the message given to the media's echo/amplification machine by the Bush-Cheney White House....

HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS in one brief page:

Here, in a brief and concise Wikipedia review, is how the press & media echoed and amplified the WMD lies-to-war, and how they have muffled, mixed, confused, distorted, distracted, and ultimately CENSORED, from the mainstream-media, this simple story of how the WMD-lies were indeed presented to the American public as a premeditated con job by the Bush administration, to take America to war on false pretenses.

Note the CENTRAL ROLE played by the NEW YORK TIMES (and especially their "star" international security reporter, JUDITH MILLER) in the LIES-to-war echo and amplification, and the supporting role played by Tim Russert and NBC's "MEET THE PRESS," as well as supporting contributions by CBS and CNN, in creating the drumbeat of WMD stories that were picked up, repeated, echoed and amplified throughout America by local news papers, reporters, TV, and talk radio. Fox 'news' doesn't even make an entry in this brief Wikipedia compilation, although of course they were the most ardent advocates of the need to rush to war based on the 'evidence' supplied by the WHIG group and White House. Notice too how the WHIG group was set up by Andrew Card and Karl Rove, (Card was President Bush's Chief of Staff). Over at the Project for a New American Century ("PNAC") notice how Jeb Bush, I. Lewis Libby, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz all signed the PNAC "statement of principles" calling for a more muscular US foreign policy in June of 1997, ("Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today..."), and how a few short months later (in January of 1998), the group specifically called for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in a letter to President Clinton. (The link is even titled "IraqClintonLetter".) Thus we clearly see how the "MORAL CLARITY" of death squads, torture, mercenaries, (both our own and hiring foreign warlords), and a neo-con economic system imposed under almost farcical extremes of profiteering and no-bid, no-oversight contracts & monopoly resource looting (the later monopoly resource extortion termed, in true Orwellian fashion, "FREE MARKET ECONOMICS," of course); and all the other attributes of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq sprung from the PNAC manifesto and neo-con ideology as early as 1998, and how the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Chief of Staff to the President, Chief of Staff to the Vice President (Lewis "Scooter" Libby), Assistant Secretary of Defense (Wolfowitz), and the president's brother were all signers of either the PNAC statement of principles or the letter to Clinton advocating an Iraq war in 1997 & 1998.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

Note: President Bush continues to talk about staying the course in Iraq until "THE MISSION IS ACCOMPLISHED."

What the president actually means by "WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR" and "UNTIL THE MISSION IS ACCOMPLISHED" is THE IMPOSITION here in America (and throughout the world) of a draconian, dictatorial national security state answering to no one but the president and the inner clique of the Republican Party.

(i.e., the Communist China secular model, or the Saudi Wahabi state sectarian model, both of which are no more apologetic for their use of the death penalty than George W. Bush was when he was governor of Texas, book of which exert absolute control over their press/media, and neither of which will ever apologize for summary arrest and indefinite detention or torture powers.)

The election of a Democratic House and Senate majority may have temporarily DELAYED the reactionary-right's consolidation of one-party rule here in America, BUT the administration's _gutting_ of HABEAS CORPUS continues on only marginally or tokenly impeded. Incoming Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy has pledged to hold hearings limiting or overseeing the government's pervasive, unlimited electronic data and telephone surveillance (aka spying on American citizens and compiling extensive data profiles) but Leahy himself has all but announced that he will rubber-stamp Robert Gates' confirmation to replace Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Gates (as former DCI, or Director of the CIA), James Baker, and even Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton were all at the nexus of the Democrat's abject FAILURE to effectively prosecute the Iran-Contra scandal, and just as importantly (as supplying Central American death squads and Iran's military in the 1980s) the other huge SCANDALS of the 1980s era Republican administrations, including BCCI, Iraq-gate, and the Savings & Loan scandal. All of which, to be sure, included Democratic players enmeshed in the scandals, the most famous of whom was Senator John Glenn who, along with Senator John McCain, were two of the "Keating Seven" senators who, in return for contributions from Charles Keating, effectively LOBBIED their fellow senators on behalf of legislation favorable to Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan, which ultimately collapsed with two billion dollars of taxpayer financed bailouts.
See chapter one of Robert Parry's "Secrecy and Privilege", which outlines how the Democrat's failure to prosecute the criminal web of Republican participation in the Iran-Contra/Iraq-gate/BCCI and S&L scandals helped the Republicans CREATE THE MYTH of Republican "moral values" superiority, and thereby paved the way for the Republican super-Trifecta of one-party rule controlling the entire US government from 2002 to 2006.
(www.ConsortiumNews.com)
Senator Leahy has pledged to conduct hearings to oversee the data-mining and spying on American travelers (and, presumably, non-traveling citizens just as easily),
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/12/02/leahy_to_scrutinize_traveler_screening/
but Leahy's passive reluctance to strenuously investigate the Gates nomination, and this article "Killing Habeas Corpus" by the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin,
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061204fa_fact
suggest that Leahy (and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership) may be unaware about the true extent of the nexus between the electronic surveillance state and the aggressive co-mingling of an aggressive foreign policy and dictatorial police-state powers here in America.

At any rate, here (below) is Wikipedia's brief review, outline and timeline of the premeditated and orchestrated deceptions, prepared from July 2002 to the launch of the US war in Iraq in March 2003, by the WHITE HOUSE INFORMATION GROUP, seeking to justify and bolster support for the US invasion. The WHIG (group) was headed by Douglas Feith out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense as an ALTERNATE INTELLIGENCE SERVICE to the existing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department's own intelligence service, the NSA and the president's own National Security Advisor (then Condoleeza Rice), and undoubtedly the Defense Department's own Intelligence Agency (DIA) was subordinated by Rumsfeld to the WHIG group to support the political objective of justifying the launch of the war. The fact that an intel operation based in the Department of Defense, whose main task was to convince the American media and public of the necessity for war in Iraq (i.e. a propaganda function), was named the WHITE HOUSE Information Group, indicates just how central this propaganda function was to the Bush-Cheney White House.
------------------------------------------
(Today on MSNBC at 11:49 am est. MSNBC reporter Andrea Mitchell asked Wayne Downing "What changes will Robert Gates bring to the Department of Defense when he replaces Don Rumsfeld there" - clearly implying that the Gates confirmation is a forgone conclusion. Mitchell, who is married to former Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and thereby one of the penultimate Washington insiders, didn't even waste her breath mentioning the possibility that Gates would not be confirmed.)

=========================================

White House Iraq Group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Iraq_Group

The White House Iraq Group (aka, White House Information Group or WHIG) was the MARKETING ARM of the White House whose purpose was to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the public. The task force was set up in August 2002 by White House Chief of Staff ANDREW CARD and chaired by KARL ROVE to coordinate all the executive branch elements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. One example of the WHIG's functions and influence is the "escalation of rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the U.S., including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud'"[1].

Similar in name and function, was the 1967 White House Information Group under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
----------------------------------------------
- - "Up to the Invasion"

Soon after WHIG was formed, the Bush Administration's CLAIMS ABOUT THE DANGER IRAQ POSED ESCALATED SIGNIFICANTLY:

* July 23, 2002: The Downing Street Memo was written, in which British intelligence said "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.

* August, 2002: White House Iraq Group formed

* September 5, 2002: In a WHIG meeting, chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson proposes the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor to sell the American public on the supposed nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. According to Newsweek columnist Michael Isikoff, "The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times [NEW YORK TIMES] reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece [about aluminum tubes], one of them leaked Gerson's phrase — and the administration would soon make maximum use of it." (Hubris, p. 35.)[2]

* September 6, 2002: In an interview with the New York Times, Andrew Card did not mention the WHIG specifically but hinted at its mission: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." On September 17, 2002, Matt Miller stated on NPR that the above quote from Andrew Card was in response to the question: "... why the administration waited until after Labor Day to try to sell the American people on military action against Iraq" [3]

* September 7, 2002: JUDITH MILLER of the NEW YORK TIMES reports Bush administration officials said "In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."[4] In fact, many government officials had concluded the tubes were unsuitable for uranium refinement. [note: the tubes had a chromate or anodized finishes that made them entirely unsuitable for use as high-speed centrifuge separation vessels. ed]

* September 7-8, 2002: President Bush and nearly all his top advisers BLANKETED THE AIRWAVES, talking about the dangers posed by Iraq.[5]

* On NBC's "MEET THE PRESS," Vice President Richard Cheney CITED THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE, and accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons over the past fourteen months to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms.
* On CNN, Condi Rice acknowledged that "there will always be some uncertainty" in determining how close Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon but said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
* On CBS, President Bush said U.N. weapons inspectors, before they were denied access to Iraq in 1998, concluded that Saddam was "six months away from developing a weapon." He also cited satellite photos released by a U.N. agency Friday that show unexplained construction at Iraq sites that weapons inspectors once visited to search for evidence Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms. "I don't know what more evidence we need," Bush said.

* October 14, 2002: President Bush says of Saddam "This is a man that we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army." [6]

* January 21, 2003: Bush says of Saddam "He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies." [7]

* February 5, 2003: Colin Powell addresses the United Nations, asserting that there was "no doubt in my mind" that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons.

* March 19, 2003: The U.S. invades Iraq.