Deep Blue Review

2005-03-09T18:31:00.000-08:00

Shoutings From The Grave...
Embedded Americans Speak Out
Compiled by Douglas Herman
3-9-5

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.

If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? Youíre not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you canít face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it or who says it. I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it. An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war. War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrongs and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. What is human warfare but just this: an effort to make the laws of God and Nature take sides with one party. There never was a good war or a bad peace. It is soldiers who pay most of the human cost.

Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world. In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Overgrown military establishments are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. While we are guarding the country, we must accept being the guardian of the finest ethics. The country needs it and we must do it. Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked. But wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. To be a patriot, one had to keep on saying ìour country, right or wrongî, and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. The people of the world want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.

The above quotations were provided by the following embedded Americans: Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ben Franklin, Generals Creighton Abrams, George Washington, and Dwight D. Eisenhower

Douglas Herman is an amateur historian and USAF veteran. You may reach him at douglasherman7@yahoo.com for questions about any quote.

2005-01-30T02:34:00.000-08:00

Torture Chicks Gone Wild by Maureen Dowd

"Who are these women? Who allows this to happen? Why don't the officers who allow it get into trouble? Why do Rummy and Paul Wolfowitz still have their jobs?....."

NYT OP-ED COLUMNIST
Torture Chicks Gone Wild
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: January 30, 2005

WASHINGTON

By the time House Republicans were finished with him, Bill Clinton must have thought of a thong as a torture device. For the Bush administration, it actually is. A former American Army sergeant who worked as an Arabic interpreter at Gitmo has written a book pulling back the veil on the astounding ways female interrogators used a toxic combination of sex and religion to try to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba. It's not merely disgusting. It's beyond belief.

The Bush administration never worries about anything. But these missionaries and zealous protectors of values should be worried about the American soul. The president never mentions Osama, but he continues to use 9/11 as an excuse for American policies that bend the rules and play to our worst instincts.

"I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case," the former sergeant, Erik R. Saar, 29, told The Associated Press. The A.P. got a manuscript of his book, deemed classified pending a Pentagon review.

What good is it for President Bush to speak respectfully of Islam and claim Iraq is not a religious war if the Pentagon denigrates Islamic law - allowing its female interrogators to try to make Muslim men talk in late-night sessions featuring sexual touching, displays of fake menstrual blood, and parading in miniskirt, tight T-shirt, bra and thong underwear? It's like a bad porn movie, "The Geneva Monologues." All S and no M. The A.P. noted that "some Guantánamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by 'prostitutes.' " Mr. Saar writes about what he calls "disturbing" practices during his time in Gitmo from December 2002 to June 2003, including this anecdote related by Paisley Dodds, an A.P. reporter.

more......

2005-01-30T02:12:00.000-08:00

Online Journal Commentary by Micheal Hasty

January 28, 2005 - Protected from the American public by legions of imperial storm troopers in a city that appeared to be the very model of a high-tech police state, George W. Bush used the word "freedom" 27 times in his second inaugural address. The word "liberty" appeared 15 times. Under the circumstances, it's worth recalling that "freedom" was also one of Adolph Hitler's favorite themes.

What is even more disturbing is that Hitler and Bush are in general agreement about the definition of "freedom," in their historic use of the term. For both men, "freedom" refers to a policy of militant nationalist unilateralism, free from the restrictions of international law and treaties. In Hitler's case, besides the open rejection of the constraints on German militarism in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the first World War, "freedom" also applied to the policy of "Lebensraum" (translated as "living space"), by which he meant the preemptive right of the German people to expand into neighboring countries.

Bush's definition is uncannily similar. As Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights has described it, "Spreading freedom is code word to hide the continued drive for American hegemony, riches and resources." The so-called "Bush doctrine" is an official policy of taking preemptive military action to advance American "national security" interests (which have historically included America's interest in Middle Eastern oil), and to protect American "freedom."

Thus, Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia and Bush's invasion of Iraq - both employing the rationale of "freedom" - can be seen to have had identical goals: overtly, the "protection" of their respective citizenries; and covertly, the expansion of national wealth and power, and the geopolitical expression of national "will."

When George W. Bush and his corrupt band of cohorts seized control of the American government in December 2000, in an unconstitutional coup d'etat, America and the world fell into a nightmare rabbit hole, where "freedom" no longer means freedom, and "democracy" no longer means democracy. Words mean whatever the Leader says they mean.

The reason the world was so alarmed by Bush's pedestrian psalm of "freedom" at his imperial coronation, is that it knows from sad experience that Bush is a man who "says what he means, and means what he says."

And when he says "freedom," he means fascism...

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2004-11-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

Political Swirl...Political Swill

In spite of the model lesson of water down a drain, dominant American politics spins in a dyslexic wrong-turn vortex independent of truth, dependent on a reversal of the planetary whirl to change. Nothing short of alchemy can alter this. Physics is beginning to show that we choose our own reality, and we have chosen this one. May God have mercy on us all... and, like it or not, He is firmly entrenched in this - now more than ever.

Nothing is more mystifying to the losing side of the equation than how this perplexing path found its way under our feet and how we arrived at this peculiar place upon it. This will be the topic underlying all the rancorous bickering and backbiting that guarantees to reach levels inversely proportionate to these depths to which we've sunk.

How many buckets of blood will it take? How many foreclosures, bankruptcies, broken families, homeless children, men gone postal? How much stark reality will it take before the light of truth forces its way into the fogged notions and delusional perspective that dominate the picture our leaders portray?

We have become a land guided by propagandists, charlatans, and dangerously misguided fools. Pumped up by the smoke they send up our shorts. Inflated and full of false bravado, preaching fear and the false promise that salvation lies in hating in superior ways. Pretending to love, all the while. But, hating has never been the long suit of true champions...has it? Certainly not fear? And pretending to love is the coldest chill of all. We know that much...don't we? Somewhere deep within the soul of the people, THIS, surely, has not been lost. If THIS somehow has been squandered, in our heady side trip through this ornate yet vacant new wilderness, we truly do have something to fear. And we are, in fact, lost.

2004-06-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

<>

DRY-DRUNK PRESIDENT LOSING HIS GRIP?
By Bill Gallagher
DETROIT -- The lies, delusions and deceptions of George W. Bush have reached a point where the "dry drunk" madness and the "stinking thinking" in his frighteningly flawed mind are what drives all his remarks on the bogus al-Qaida-Iraq connection and the president's rigid, judgmental world view.

In the best of times, George W. can be impatient, self-important and prone to irrational, contorted rationalization. Now that his crazy, unnecessary war in Iraq and grandiose plans to change the Middle East with more violence have clearly failed and he fears that he might get bounced from the White House like his daddy, our president's mental pathology is gaining more control over his behavior.

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks set off the president's panic attack. The commission -- which Bush first opposed and then ostensibly supported, while his minions thwarted its work -- arrived at a conclusion that sent the White House into white heat.

In vividly clear language, the commission reported, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States." That fact is well known to anyone who takes time to pursue the truth and is not blinded by partisan fanaticism.

Even Bush said as much himself in one of the most under-reported stories of our times. Last Sept. 17, the president admitted publicly for the first time that there was "no evidence Hussein was involved" with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The admission got little play in the media. The Wall Street Journal and New York Post didn't even bother to mention it, and many other papers buried it far away from the front page.

But the commission rekindled the issue. Since the panel did exhaustive research and its chairman and half of its members were named by the president, the panel's refutation of the Saddam-al-Qaida connection enraged Bush, and the emperor struck back.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush told reporters at the White House after the commission's findings were announced.

Bush said his most significant evidence of this link is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist the president claimed worked with the Iraqi government as a "senior al-Qaida terrorist planner." He failed to mention that then-CIA Director George Tenet testified before the Senate that Zarqawi is a rogue operative who doesn't work with al-Qaida and was not associated with the Saddam regime.

I noticed Bush had that same look on his face, that same smirk, defiance and "How dare you question me?" pose when he met last year with Polish reporters, who asked him about the phantom weapons of mass destruction. Bush snapped impatiently, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." Bush then went on to cite some mobile trailers his own inspectors had already dismissed as harmless weather labs.

Bush then went on a twisted attempt to redefine the record he and his people had deliberately clouded -- aided, I should add, by most of the mainstream media. Wait a minute, Bush cautioned, saying, "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida."

While that is technically correct, Bush chose to ignore the torrent of rhetoric he and his supporting cast of warmongers used to create just that impression. The administration convinced 70 percent of the American people before the war that Saddam Hussein was linked to Sept. 11 and now Bush is trying to distance himself from the lies and successful propaganda campaign he orchestrated.

Bush said flat-out, one year after bin Laden's terrorists attacked, "You can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

Condoleezza Rice tossed in her contribution to the company line, saying, "Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged."

And, of course, there was Donald's Rumsfeld's wild, unfounded claim that "within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qaida."

Bush likes his enemies evil and simple. Since Saddam was a personal irritant for Bush and sat on the world's second-largest oil reserves, he was going to be the target no matter what.

Unwilling to admit the real reasons for war and with his phony ones now exposed, the president is growing more angry and resentful. In public he can still put on a cheery and likable face -- as he did when unveiling the Clintons' official portraits at the White House -- but privately there is another picture.

Bush has been displaying "increasingly erratic behavior and mood swings," reports Capitol Hill Blue, an Internet news site. Doug Thompson and Teresa Hampton, who once wrote a scathing piece about Bill Clinton's serial groping and sexual attacks on women, have written a chilling account that raises serious concerns about Bush's state of mind these days.

"It reminds me of the Nixon days," one longtime GOP political consultant with White House links told the reporters. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."

White House aides told Thompson and Hampton that Bush is now micromanaging to the extreme, spending hours reviewing attack ads against John Kerry and denouncing Democrats he calls "enemies of the state."

The report notes Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen from grace because of his doubts about the war against Iraq. One White House aide reveals, "We lost focus. The president got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al-Qaida. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war, but the president insisted on those two tenuous items."

But George W. Bush is an unyielding, inflexible and extreme man, who, by his own admission, follows the dictates of his "gut" rather than careful thought and reflection. Bush may be showing more signs of being a "dry drunk," according to Katherine van Wormer, co-author of "Addiction Treatment: A Strengths Perspective." In an article in "Counterpunch" magazine, she writes, "Dry drunk is a slang term used by members and supporters of Alcoholics Anonymous and substance abuse counselors to describe the recovering alcoholic who is no longer drinking, one who is dry, but whose thinking is clouded. Such an individual is said to be dry but not truly sober. Such an individual tends to go to extremes."

She also observes that Bush's obsessions, tunnel vision, single-mindedness and grandiosity point to the "stinking thinking" commonly found in dry drunks. Bush will claim forever that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qaida, that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that his war with Iraq is all about doing God's work and spreading freedom. That's how his damaged mind is programmed.

Dick Cheney is another case. He sets his own course and says what he pleases. The vice president -- or enabler in chief -- has nurtured Bush's obsessions. Cheney is the most strident propagator of the al-Qaida-Iraq-link lie and is sticking with his story in a futile attempt to save his fallen reputation and in the hope that continuing the deception for five more months will salvage the Bush administration's chances for another term in office. His clinging to power and his addiction to his discredited reasons for war drive Cheney.

Two days before the 9/11 Commission debunked the al-Qaida-Iraq connection, Cheney, who surely was tipped off, made a pre-emptive strike, claiming Saddam Hussein "had long established ties with al-Qaida."

Cheney was so enraged with media reports about the commission's findings, he ventured from his usual protected forum, the Rush Limbaugh show, to CNBC, territory where he might even be asked a question.

Asked if Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, in his oh-so-solemn tones, "We don't know." And then, with a smugness that goes with power addiction, Cheney was asked if he knows information the 9/11 Commission does not know. He crowed, "Probably."

Well, if he does, why didn't he share it with the commission? Why doesn't he tell the American people about the previously unknown smoking gun on the al-Qaida-Iraq connection? Will Cheney provide new evidence? Probably not.

With the power-drunk Cheney navigating and the dry-drunk Bush at the helm, our ship of state is in distress. We should throw them both overboard.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@aol.com.
Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com June 22 2004

2004-06-02T06:37:00.000-07:00

Idiot or Liar? Either Way, Bush Is Unfit for Office
John V. Whitbeck • Special to Arab News —

JEDDAH, 19 August 2003 — On July 25, President George W. Bush made a truly staggering statement to the press after a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan: “The fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program?

And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.”

This statement is worth reading carefully. The president of the United States has stated, in a public forum, that he invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein would not allow weapons inspectors back into his country.

So far as I am aware, this statement has not been the subject of any serious critical analysis in the mainstream American media.

I will therefore provide my own brief analysis.

Assuming, as seems reasonable, that the president of the United States was neither drunk nor on LSD, there can be only two possible explanations for this statement:

Explanation 1: The president of the United States believed what he said. In this case, he is so dim-witted and/or totally divorced from reality as to be mentally unfit to hold his current job — or, indeed, any job — and should be taken into medical care.

Explanation 2: The president did not believe what he said but, rather, believes (unfortunately not without compelling post-Sept.11 evidence) that the vast majority of the American people are so dim-witted and/or uninformed and the vast majority of the American media is so sycophantic and/or terrified of being branded “unpatriotic” (or simply losing White House “access”) that he can now tell any lie, no matter how obvious and outrageous, and get away with it. In this case, he is morally unfit to hold his current job and should, by constitutional means, be forced to relinquish it as soon as possible.

Either explanation should scare the wits out of anyone who is not comatose.

When a single individual combines ignorance, immorality, dry-drunk syndrome, a publicly proclaimed commitment to perpetual military domination of the entire world by his country, a publicly expressed belief that God personally instructs him to make war on specific countries and a wildly irrational born-again brand of Christianity that views the Battle of Armageddon and the consequent end of life on earth as desirable developments and, at the same time, has command authority over an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction more than sufficient to achieve the end of life on earth, it is difficult to argue that this individual is not the most dangerous person who has ever lived.

When (if ever) will the American people wake up to the real threat facing America and the world?

— John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer.

2004-05-23T17:28:00.000-07:00

"An Apparent End to Evil?" The Rise and Fall of Neoconservatism

Edited on Sun May-23-04 07:11 PM by thebigidea
An Apparent End to Evil?
The Rise and Fall of Neoconservatism
by andre perkowski

"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
- Dick Cheney

"If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
- Richard Perle

"Perle packs an awful lot into his days. But even he has his limits."
- David Frum

Are those limits finally clear to even the most Hannitized of our citizens?

They were to spread democracy "throughout the Middle East."

They were to be greeted with flowers.

They were wrong, they were naive, they were neoconservative.

The whole Dick Tracy gallery of rogues and global hegemony villains are melting away before our very eyes... the press weasels are the first off the ship, diving into the lifeboats and displacing the women and children:

William Kristol, Weekly Standard editor and PNAC pontiff, seems to be having a hard time grinning like he used to. His Chesire smirk has become a panicked pout - for he smells his own blood in that polluted water, and the sharkish elements are indeed circling.

Tom Friedman, a man known to carry a ridiculous mustache that makes him look like an off-duty rent-a-cop, has started gagging on his own excretions. The man is mired in months of his own meandering bullshit, suffocating on his own screeds. Anonymous eyewitnesses report sad stories about Friedman found wandering somberly down the streets at 4am, looking for just the right man in the street quote to garnish his increasingly pathetic columns. But even fictitious friends are hard to find for Friedman, as each potential "small businessman" or "Expert in Middle East Affairs" he approaches tend to swat him away with a firm hand.

His starry-eyed NY Times collaborator, Judith Miller - is probably removing Ahmad Chalabi's entry in her speed-dialer at this very moment. And as for Chalabi himself, well - lets just say he's examining the trunk capacity of his sedan and looking a bit more furtive.

Christopher Hitchens can still be found intermittently on CSPAN, restraining a boozy belch and reduced to repeating a refrain that suits him well: "Pathetic... just pathetic!"

Tucker Carlson bailed out in favor of upgrading his bowtie collection, his Crossfire cohost Bob "Bile" Novak embroiled in enough controversy to cause denture malfunctions, near-fistfights, and grand juries.

"Richard Perle is a private citizen, who serves the U.S. government without pay, and is entitled to earn a living so long as he avoids conflicts of interest."
- David Frum

Richard Perle, if he already isn't ensconced in his tragically ironic villa in the South of France, is booking passage ASAP. Where has all the evil gone, long time passing? Corruption trails him, and has an easy time of it due to the viscous goo Perle leaves behind like a sickly snail. Mired in lawsuits both real and imagined, Perle will be spending more time attending to his combover than to overambitious ideas about world conquest this summer.

Paul Wolfowitz will soon be mainly inflicting his nasal drone on his ceiling fan alone, nobody left to listen to his mad ravings. Hopefully he'll get some quality time to actually find out how many people his splendid little war were sent to death by his pen.

El Snarlysneer Supremo, Dick Cheney of the Undisclosed Ambition, is pastier than ever and encased in a shroud of shameful scandal. Everywhere he goes, people whisper: "Halliburton!" - and those are just the people slipping him checks! Those that aren't in the bribing mood see him for what he is: the pinnacle of B-movie evil. Only this movie doesn't exactly intend to end without a fight.

Speaking of fights for survival, Donald Rumsfeld is putting the finishing touches on what Tweety Matthews of the Hollerin' Hardball will no doubt label a "strong resignation speech not seen since the likes of General MacArthur" whilst attempting to conceal his erection. Condi Rice is already scoping out replacements, painfully aware of the fact that she herself will be shoved out the door soon enough, ushered into a life of cushy counseling gigs and Stepford/Stanford speaking engagements. And how will her bruised boss cope, consigned to Crawford and continuous games of Tetris?

The Prime Neocon Nitwit himself, our glorious President, George W. Bush - is now showing the signs of his battered image as a "popular wartime President." How fitting that he falls off a bike. The headlines say: "Bush suffers.." - possibly not the only headlines we'll read this year that begin with those two words. For suffer he will, continuously - the accumulated crimes of his time in office have caught up with him. At the same time. In an election year. Needless to say, Karl Rove sleeps a bit less smugly.

The strategy Rove might pull in the coming months will be to try and dissociate Bush from the neocons... he was "led astray" or "given bad advice." Uh uh, Rovey-boy. Bush is part and parcel part of this Project for a New American Idiocy bullshit... he must not be allowed to escape the label: he is a neoconservative, not a compassionate anything.

So perhaps Rumsfeld will be the first offering. Baker will be trotted out to fill the plugs.

But the damage has already been done, the empire has come undone.
The giddy peaks of 2002-2003 already far behind them, the PNAC crowd have a humiliating fall just up ahead. Now we get to watch them squabble for the last remaining parachute... what fun!

But remember, folks: though it may be fun to wallow in their current problems, we aren't in the clear yet. Be careful, the monster might grab your leg just when you think he's dead.

"There comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are. At that point, a gathering danger must be directly confronted."
- Dick Cheney

"I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems..."
- Paul Wolfowitz

So let us remove their sanctuaries, unmask their ringleaders, pull back the curtain and make sure it never happens again. Because there's always Jeb, you know.

2004-05-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

2004-04-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

COMMENTARY:
Some Dare Call It Treason: Wake Up America!
by Dr. Robert Bowman, USAF Ret.

We [who protest the Iraq war] are upholding the spirit of the American Revolution. We are preserving the freedoms that the troops in the desert have a right to come back to.

I am a member of Veterans For Peace, an organization of thousands of combat veterans. All of us have put our life on the line for this country. Most of us opposed the recent invasion of Iraq. We also opposed the first Gulf War, and the sanctions that followed. We opposed the slaughter of fleeing Iraqis on the Road to Basra. We opposed the use of Depleted Uranium munitions. And we opposed the lies upon which the first Gulf War was based. But there was one good thing about that first Gulf War. It ended. And without a wholesale invasion of Iraq. Why?
Here's what the first President Bush wrote about that in his memoirs:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. There was no viable exit strategy we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
My brothers and sisters, it is just too darn bad his son can't read!
I've been severely criticized for speaking out in opposition to this war. So have you, probably. We're told that we're aiding and abetting the enemy. We're told that we should support the president no matter what. We're told that patriotism demands that we support the war. They say that we're abusing the freedoms that our troops are in the Middle East defending. They say we should be ashamed to be protesting while the troops are in the desert protecting our right to do so.

Well I say, Hogwash!

I joined the Air Force to protect our borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita Banana, and Exxon.

I feel an affinity for the troops over there in Iraq. They are my comrades in arms. I admire their sense of honor and sacrifice. I understand why some of them believe they should be there. They have neither the experience nor the wisdom to see past the lies they have been told. The truth is, they are not over there protecting our freedoms. Our freedoms are not under attack from Saddam Hussein or the remnants of his Baathist party. Our freedoms are under attack by John Ashcroft. They are threatened by John Poindexter. They are trampled by Donald Rumsfeld. They are disdained by Dick Cheney. And they are not even understood by George W. Bush. The battle to preserve our freedoms is not taking place in Baghdad and Tikrit. It is taking place in Central Park in New York City, in Lafayette Park in Washington DC, in Ghirardelli Park in San Francisco, and in River Front Park in Melbourne, Florida. The front lines go right down US 1 and up New Haven Avenue.

It is we, here at home, who are the foot soldiers battling to preserve our cherished freedoms by exercising them, in spite of opposition and ridicule. It is we who protect our civil rights through speaking out. We are the Minutemen sounding the alarm against tyranny. We are upholding the spirit of the American Revolution. We are preserving the freedoms that the troops in the desert have a right to come back to. The troops getting shot at in Iraq are not protecting us. We are protecting them, and their honor and their freedoms. We have just completed a forced march through hostile territory to defend their freedoms and ours, and the ideals America was founded on. We are protecting this nation by speaking truth to power. Let us do it loudly and fearlessly and courageously and joyfully, for we are the true patriots!

As a pilot who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam, I can tell you that the best thing our government can do for its combat veterans is to quit making more of them. Peace is patriotic; a preemptive war is immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, a war crime, and TREASON.

Here is the truth that we proclaim. This war has nothing to do with national security or freedom or democracy or human rights or protecting our allies or weapons of mass destruction or defeating terrorism or disarming Iraq. It has to do with money. It has to do with oil. And it has to do with raw imperial power. It is based on a pack of lies. And it is wrong. Those who forced this war on an unwilling world are guilty of flagrantly violating the US Constitution, the UN Charter, and international law. What they have done is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional and TREASON.

It's been said that somewhere in Texas there is a village looking for their idiot. Now that may be funny, but it misses the point. George W. Bush is not an imbecile. He is a TRAITOR.

Before this war started, we knew it would fracture NATO, split the United Nations, separate us from our allies, and destroy the great nation we inherited from our fathers who died in World War II. And it has. We knew it would make our beloved country feared and hated, an outcast from the world community, a pariah among the peoples, and the number one rogue nation on earth. And it has. It has done so based on a pack of lies. My sisters and brothers, that is not stupidity. That is TREASON.

We knew this sadistic corporate war would incense the Arab world, provide thousands of new Osama bin Ladens, and enormously increase the terrorist threat. And it has. We knew it would further endanger the American people and destroy our national security. And it has. That is not stupidity, it is TREASON.

The cabal of neoconservatives at PNAC who planned this war (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Perle, Jeb Bush) even before W became president, knew the American people would not stand for it unless there was a new Pearl Harbor. 9/11 supplied that. Our government was warned. They were warned by the Clinton Administration. They were warned by 11 other countries. And they were specifically warned by an FBI agent that one of them was planning on flying a hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center.

They not only ignored the warnings, they made sure no fighter jets were scrambled to stop it. If they had just done nothing, and allowed normal procedures to be followed, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive. This is not stupidity, it is TREASON.

As a combat veteran, I will not stand idly by and watch our security destroyed by a president who went AWOL rather than fight in Vietnam. Honor requires that I call this by its right name. It is TREASON.

As one who has devoted his life to the security of this country, I will not stand by and watch an appointed president send our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs for the oil companies without calling it by its right name. It is TREASON.

I joined the Air Force to protect our borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita Banana, and Exxon. We've had enough corporate wars. No more Iraqs. No more El Salvadors. No more Kosovos. No more Colombias. These are not isolated incidents of stupidity. They are part of a long, bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial benefit of the wealthy few. It is a new colonialism. It violates our Constitution. It endangers our people. And it is TREASON.

As a pilot who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam, I can tell you that the best thing our government can do for its combat veterans is to quit making more of them. Peace is patriotic; a preemptive war is immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, a war crime, and TREASON. I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That includes a renegade president. Wake up, America! It is time for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the whole oil mafia to be removed from office and indicted for TREASON. We are the people. We are sovereign. We are the patriots. The whole world is with us. Never allow anyone to intimidate you into silence. Wake up, America! It's time to speak truth to power. God bless America, and God save us from the traitors in our government.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Robert Bowman was a Col. in the USAF and was Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under President Jimmy Carter. He is Presiding Archbishop, United Catholic Church. He has been president of the Institute for Space and Security Studies since 1982. Before that he was vice-president of Space Communications Company; manager, Advanced Space Programs for General Dynamics; and director, Advanced Space Programs Development for the Department of Defense, directing the "Star Wars" programs. He is also a progressive populist candidate for President of the United States. He may be reached via email at: isss@rmbowman.com, See also his web site: http://www.rmbowman.com.

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2004-04-02T01:42:00.000-08:00

'I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities with aeroplanes'
Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
02 April 2004

A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.

She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".

Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".

She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."

She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers."

The accusations from Mrs Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish and English, will reignite the controversy over whether the administration ignored warnings about al-Qa'ida. That controversy was sparked most recently by Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism official, who has accused the administration of ignoring his warnings.

The issue what the administration knew and when is central to the investigation by the 9/11 Commission, which has been hearing testimony in public and private from government officials, intelligence officials and secret sources. Earlier this week, the White House made a U-turn when it said that Ms Rice would appear in public before the commission to answer questions. Mr Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, will also be questioned in a closed-door session.

Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI's Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa'ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps.

She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. "Most of what I told the commission 90 per cent of it related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well."

"President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.

To try to refute Mr Clarke's accusations, Ms Rice said the administration did take steps to counter al-Qa'ida. But in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: "Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists."

Mrs Edmonds said that by using the word "we", Ms Rice told an "outrageous lie". She said: "Rice says 'we' not 'I'. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible."

It is impossible at this stage to verify Mrs Edmonds' claims. However, some senior US senators testified to her credibility in 2002 when she went public with separate allegations relating to alleged incompetence and corruption within the FBI's translation department.
2 April 2004 03:28

2004-04-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Things Are Getting
Much Worse In Iraq
It's Not Just A 'Spike' Or An 'Uptick' In Violence
Robert Fisk
4-1-4

What has happened to the Coalition Provisional Authority, also known as the occupying power?

Things are getting worse, much worse in Iraq. Yesterday's horrors proved that. Yet just a day earlier, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, America's deputy director of military operations, assured us that there was only an "uptick" in violence in Iraq.

Not a sudden wave of violence, mark you, not a down-to-earth increase, not even a "spike" in violence - another of the general's favourite expressions. No, just a teeny-weeny, ever-so small, innocent little "uptick". In fact, he said it was a "slight uptick".

Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did General Kimmitt take us through the little uptick.

A marine vehicle blown off the road near Fallujah, a marine killed, a second attack with small-arms fire on the same troops, an attack on an Iraqi paramilitary recruiting station on the 14th July Road, a soldier killed near Ramadi, two Britons hurt in Basra violence, a suicide bombing against the home of the Hillah police chief, an Iraqi shot at a checkpoint, US soldiers wounded in Mosul ... All this was just 17 hours before Fallujah civilians dragged the cremated remains of a Westerner through the streets of their city.

When you go to the manicured lawns and villas of the so-called "Green Zone" in Baghdad, you get this odd, weird feeling; that here is a place so isolated, so ostentatiously secure - it is not secure of course, since mortars are regularly fired into the compound - that it has no contact with the outside world. Here the US proconsul. Paul Bremer. lives in Saddam Hussein's former palace. There are fewer than 100 days before he supposedly hands over the "sovereignty" of Iraq to America's own new hand-picked Iraqi government, which will hold elections at an unknown date. And so within the palace walls, the occupying power believes in optimism, progress and political development.

When someone asked - just a few hours before yesterday's horror - about the deteriorating security in Mosul, General Kimmitt snapped back that this was only "an assessment that you may be making".

Every week, it is like this. >From the hot, dangerous streets of Baghdad with their electricity cuts and gunfire - and an awful lot of "upticks" which never get recorded - we make our way through palisades of concrete drums, US Army checkpoints and searches, into a vast, air-conditioned conference centre, a cavernous Saddamite structure built in 1981 for presidential summits.

Next to General Kimmitt often stands Dan Senor, spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority who, with his frameless glasses, unsmiling demeanour and his occasional, fearful glances at the general when the latter faces a dodgy question, resembles the kind of doctor who clears his throat and quietly advises his patients to settle their affairs. He almost smiled when General Kimmitt announced his army's intention to conduct "precision operations" against "anti-Coalition elements and enemies of the Iraqi people". But wasn't this all a bit Soviet? Didn't the Red Army conduct operations against "anti-socialist elements and enemies of the Afghan people"?

But there was an interesting twist - horribly ironic in the face of yesterday's butchery - in General Kimmitt's narrative. Why, I asked him, did he refer sometimes to "terrorists" and at other times to "insurgents"? Surely if you could leap from being a terrorist to being an insurgent, then with the next little hop, skip and jump, you become a "freedom-fighter". Mr Senor gave the general one of his fearful looks. He needn't have bothered. General Kimmitt is a much smoother operator than his civilian counterpart. There were, the general explained, the Fallujah version who were insurgents, and then the al-Qa'ida version who attack mosques, hotels, religious festivals and who were terrorists.

So, it seems, there are now in Iraq good terrorists and bad terrorists, there are common-or-garden insurgents and supremely awful terrorists, the kind against which President George Bush took us to war in Iraq when there weren't any terrorists actually here, though there are now. And therein lies the problem. From inside the Green Zone on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything. How far can the occupying powers take war-spin before the world stops believing anything they say?

At Wednesday's Five o'Clock Follies, two armed American soldiers stood guard at both doors - watching us, not the approach to the doors - while a backdrop carried a vast shield with the words "Equality, Security, Liberty, Justice". Did I detect, among my colleagues, a quickening of our step as we headed back through the thousands of tons of concrete to the smog and fear of the streets outside? Baghdad may be dangerous. But at least it's on Planet Earth.

2004-03-28T21:24:00.000-08:00

Condy Rice Is Not
The National Security Advisor
3-28-4

Abstract: Sender, Berl & Sons Inc. explains that many mysteries are answered understanding that Condy Rice is not the true National Security Advisor. She was hand selected by Bush 41 in the late 90s to spend two years with his son to teach him foreign affairs. When he won the presidency, Bush 41 fully supported her having the NSA position, where she could be with his son constantly to monitor that he would not revert to drugs or alcohol under the pressures that would arise in connection with the events of 9-11. Most significantly, Bush 41 encouraged a close personal relationship between them because it was essential to his son pulling off his assigned role as President of the United States in the NWO quest to obtain control over Middle East oil.

Read the full article...

www.senderberl.com/bushrice.htm

2004-03-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

From Capitol Hill Blue

The Rant
The Most Dangerous Man in the World
By DOUG THOMPSON
Mar 19, 2004, 08:15

A year ago today, “Operation Shock & Awe” began raining cruise missiles, bombs and fear on Baghdad. The invasion of Iraq began.

The invasion was necessary, we were told by our leaders, because Saddam Hussein was “the most dangerous man in the world,” had weapons of mass destruction and had helped Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda kill more than 3,000 civilians in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2004.

President George W. Bush told the nation and the world he had proof of all this and Congress approved the rush to war, even though doing so meant scaling back our search for bin Laden in Afghanistan.

That was then. This is now. Now we know that Hussein’s so-called weapons of mass destruction did not exist because his scientists lacked both the resources and the expertise to actually build them. Now we know that our “proof” of a hard link between Hussein and bin Laden came from faulty intelligence and any real link has yet to be proven.

A war fought on false pretenses is still a war where more than 500 American soldiers have died, billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted and what little remained of this country’s credibility on the world stage has been lost.

One year later, the Bush administration spin machine remains in full cycle, calling the war just, reminding us that “the world’s most dangerous man” sits in a Iraqi jail awaiting trial as a war criminal.

But Saddam Hussein did not plan terrorist attacks that killed 3,000+ on that dark day in 2001. Most intelligence professionals who place reliable reporting above political expediency said early on a link between Hussein and bin Laden was unlikely because a fundamentalist like Osama would not work with a Muslim who drank and chased women (like Hussein).

In order to accept the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq we must believe one of two things happened:

George W. Bush knew his justifications for going to war with Iraq were false and lied to both the American people and our allies, or;
The Bush Administration was too inept to know the intelligence information they used for the justifications came from out-of-date and faulty sources.
Neither scenario suggests much reason to either trust Bush or feel any sense of comfort in his leadership abilities.

We are left, instead, with the growing awareness that the President of the United States is a reckless cowboy who charges a hill simply because he wants to and believes he is right even when those who know more about the issue try to tell him he is full of shit.

After 9-11, Bush reacted appropriately in bringing the nation together and going after Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. Then, with that mission still incomplete, he diverted American resources to an ill-conceived war with Iraq, a war that we now know he planned to wage even before the jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania.

We know now that Saddam Hussein did not pose any real imminent threat to the U.S. Hussein was, at best, a sham leader who controlled his country through illusion, deceit and bluster. Ironically, he was brought down by a military sent into battle by another sham leader who controls his country through illusion, deceit and bluster.

On the news talk shows this morning and in speeches throughout the day, the Bush administration tries to justify the war with Iraq by calling Saddam Hussein “the most dangerous man in the world.”

But the most dangerous man in the world is not sitting in a jail cell somewhere in Iraq,

He is not hiding out in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

Not really. The most dangerous man in the world may well be working out of an oval-shaped office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

© Copyright 2004 Capitol Hill Blue

2004-03-19T14:35:00.000-08:00

"Prophecy is the lamp of world's light,
But ecstasy in the same niche has room.
The Spirits is the breath that sighs through me,
And mine the thought that blows the trump of doom.
Vision said it in my eye.
Moses stood on Sinai."

- AL HAJI, a Sufi poet put to death in Baghdad

2004-03-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

Bush: My Kingdom Needs a Horse
by W. David Jenkins III

Well, he did it. We knew he would but some thought maybe - just maybe - he wouldn't sink so low. But now Mr. War President - the guy who's been hiding the returning war dead under the cloak of night - has decided to use the 9/11 dead for his own political purpose. Dead soldiers are "out" but dead American civilians are "in."

NPR's Tavis Smiley recently remarked that he wasn't surprised that Bush Co. would exploit 9/11 during the campaign because "what else do they have to run on?" While that may be true, I can't understand why the Bush Gang doesn't see the obvious. 9/11 only serves their purpose up to a point - before it blows up in their faces.

A few weeks ago, the Bush/Cheney website put Senator Kerry in its crosshairs for the first time. The site featured an ad "exposing" Kerry for having raised more than $640,000 over the last fifteen years in special interest money - more than any other Democratic senator. This piece of information initially served a purpose with their die-hard supporters, but it eventually blew up in their faces when the $6.5 million in special interest money Bush raised in the last year alone became the counterpoint to this argument. As you may have noticed, the Bush campaign isn't using special interest money as a talking point lately.

Prior to this defeat suffered by the Rove Machine, there was the AWOL factor. Bush's allegedly satisfactory service in the Texas Air Guard was brought to the forefront as a topic of discussion and, while the subject isn't headline news anymore, they never did prove Bush wasn't AWOL. In fact, the only witness they could come up with who "remembered" seeing Bush in Alabama during the disputed time frame claimed he "saw" Bush during the time that military records show Bush wasn't even there! So, in order to divert attention from this embarrassing little inconsistency, the right-wing spin machine "found" a photo of Kerry and Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally two years before her infamous trip to Viet Nam. And when that proved not quite good enough, they resorted to the doctored photo of Kerry and Fonda speaking together. Of course, these two little campaign maneuvers managed to label Senator Kerry among the Bush die-hards as "Hanoi John" but really haven't done any serious damage to Kerry's popularity.

One interesting side note on the whole AWOL situation strikes me as odd. Bush's honorable discharge was used as a defense weapon when his supporters would become so exasperated over conflicting "facts" about his AWOL status. They would throw up their hands and scream, "Look! He received an honorable discharge! Get over it already!" Yet, with all the documentation that miraculously emerged after having been missing as far back as 1994, this single piece of evidence Bush supporters kept referring to was never shown to the American public - the much ballyhooed "honorable discharge."

If only someone in the media had asked to see this piece of documentation. You can see it here (http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/ANG22.gif) and then you'll understand why the Bush Gang never produced it for public viewing. You'll notice something odd missing from this document.

Bush's signature.

Apparently he couldn't even be bothered to show up to sign his own discharge. Oops! Oh well, there are more pressing matters out there and this subject should have been more aggressively pursued almost four years ago.

So now they are left with 9/11 as their big selling point but this, like the above mentioned goof-ups, will blow back in their faces. To exploit that day as a testament to Bush's "leadership" might have been acceptable had not only Bush learned from that day but had also done everything possible to help us learn what happened on the terrible day. He didn't. In fact, one of the things that won't be in Bush's ads is that he's done everything possible to keep 9/11 and the American people in the dark. We see that what Bush is really doing with those horrible images is nothing more than exploiting the fear factor of 9/11 - which is exactly how he's governed since that day. If Rove is as careless with 9/11 as he was with special interest money and "Hanoi John," this too will hurt Bush in the long run.

Exploiting 9/11 in order to remind Americans of Bush's leadership is a major mistake that I believe will contribute to a Bush implosion. What they have done is this: instead of using 9/11 as an excuse as they have effectively done for years, they will make it a campaign topic, thus igniting the discussion they've been trying to squash since the tragedy took place. They risk bringing the Bush administration's complete un-cooperation with the 9/11 investigations back into the spotlight. Then there are the continued business ties to the Bush and bin Laden families, the reduction in first-response personnel (firemen, police and medical workers) because state budgets were left dry due to ridiculous tax cuts for the wealthy and so on and so on. After we get over the revulsion caused by these Bush ads, we have to ask ourselves one thing. Are these people crazy?

But in all honesty, what do these guys have to run on? A jobless economic "recovery?" That one's not working very well. They still try to scapegoat Clinton by saying they "inherited a recession" and that may be true. But the counterpoint to that argument is that they also inherited a surplus as well. I would suggest that they blow taps for that talking point.

What else is there? The war - er - invasion of Iraq? Almost six hundred American soldiers dead for what? Sure, the horrible Hussein is gone - along with our credibility in the eyes of the world and many here at home. Bush kissers may say "so what" to that unfortunate result of our reckless foreign policy but all they do is betray an ignorance of our place in the global community. America now suffers from a credibility gap because of these PNAC yahoos so when Colin Powell says that we didn't kidnap President Aristide "and that's the truth," he sounds more like Lily Tomlin's Laugh-In character, little Edith Ann, then he does a believable spokesman.

Iraq has become an unnecessary albatross for America and yet the cost, both financial and in human lives, will continue to rise. As the frequency of attacks on our military ebb, there is a rising tide of terror being unleashed upon the Iraqi citizens by insurgents. In other words, as many had predicted, Iraqis stand on the brink of civil war - their version of Shock and Awe - and it is going to dwarf anything we have done to them. The Bushes are still planning on a cut-and-run plan of throwing responsibility to a hand-picked "Iraqi" government body this spring just to make things look better - for campaign reasons of course - while over one hundred thousand of our troops are left behind in the crossfire caused by Bush and Bremer's "hurry up and fix it" foreign policy.

I don't believe the 2004 version of the New Iraq is going to be a positive focus for the Bush Gang this campaign. Besides, where are all those WMDs anyway? Has anyone else noticed the flip-flop on Bush's part lately? On the one hand, he tells the 9/11 commission to "hurry up" while on the other hand he's telling the Iraq investigators to "take their time." And this doesn't bother anybody?

So, what horse is left for Bush to ride on?

America has become more polluted, less safe, more divided, less prosperous, more despised and less credible under Bush's reign. These guys are running out of options. You know you're in trouble when even the ultra-despicable Tom DeLay doesn't even back you up on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages. If the Pakistanis aren't keeping Osama on ice for a convenient "capture" later this year (as the Kurds were nice enough to do with Hussein), Bush is going to have a serious problem. Even if we do "find" bin Laden, will that be enough? Just as the staged arrest of Hussein proved, the short attention span of the American public can also work against you. So really, what's left?

Well, there's always the efforts of Diebold's Walden O'Dell.

The threat to democracy that is Diebold Corporation (and other touch screen voting machine manufacturers) is another story that won't go away. There have already been reports of irregularities in California during the recent recall election and difficulties other states experienced during this primary season - all caused by these voting machines. Should there be a repeat of the Florida fiasco, in this case caused by the use of these voting machines which leave no paper trail, the backlash from the Bush kissers and the media will help the Boy King sneak right back into the White House.

The frustration and bitterness left by Watergate allowed Reagan to squeeze out of the Iran/Contra scandal. Americans couldn't stomach another government conspiracy, especially when it involved the erroneously respected Ronald Reagan. Another questionable election result involving George W. Bush would result in a similar "oh no, not again" response from the electorate and a new resurgence of calls to "get over it!" The damage done almost four years ago would allow Bush to slither right back into the Peoples' House again.

Another possible plus for Bush is something I don't want to think about.

A few months ago, columnist William Safire wrote that he felt there would be another terrorist attack on America a là 9/11. Although I rarely agree with Mr. Safire, I think he has a point. Nobody has benefited from what happened that tragic day in September. Nobody except the Bush administration and anyone who has a financial stake in the war on terrorism has benefited from the loss we all suffered years ago. Remember all the right wing giggling when Bush joked about "hitting the Trifecta" in the months following 9/11? The only time during Bush's reign when he enjoyed the support of not only the American people, but the world community as well, was in the days after the twin towers fell. Why does anyone think he keeps pointing to 9/11 while he destroys that very support?

9/11 handed Bush every opportunity on a silver platter - something he should be used to. But as his personal and public history shows, Bush is notorious in squandering opportunity simply because he feels he is entitled to it and, when he screws up, there is always someone or something to bail him out. Whether another terrorist attack would be just the kind of bail-out that Bush needs in order to exploit the fear factor necessary to continue his success remains open for debate. But there is no question that, should the subject of 9/11 become another albatross threatening another Bush reselection, a second attack would prove to be a fortunate diversion. And we all know how dependent the Bush Camp is on diversion.

Bush desperately needs a horse to ride on in the campaign yet those horses are few and far between. Besides, rumor has it that the great American cowboy prez is afraid of horses. Seriously though, Bush cannot claim (honestly) one positive result from the mistake made by the Supreme Court years ago. The attack ads they've made early in this campaign season have blown up in their faces because, as imperfect as their competition is, attacking it only sheds light on their own hypocrisy. The reality is that Bush can succeed only by inflicting or exploiting that much more damage to this country - whether through another disputed election, another attack on American soil or by waging a campaign dirtier than any pig sty.

This year's campaign promises to leave America more divided than it's ever been and Bush's success is solely dependent on that damage coupled with exploiting the fear of his damaged electorate. Those, by themselves, should be a good enough for getting rid of Bush.

And the fabled horse he rode in on three years ago? It's been exposed as just another old gray mare, pretty much dead on the political battlefield.

2004-03-15T12:53:00.000-08:00

2004-03-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

March 12, 2004 | Daily Mislead Archive
Bush Threatened to Fire Official for Telling Truth

During this time of record deficits, President Bush promised the country that his drug-industry backed Medicare bill would cost $395 billion.1 But just weeks after he signed the bill into law, his own budget office admitted that the bill would actually cost well over $500 billion.2 And today a new report shows that the President knew that the bill cost more than he had claimed, and yet he deliberately hid the information from the public until the legislation was already signed into law.

As revealed in an exclusive Knight-Ridder report, the White House threatened to fire its own top Medicare actuary "if he told lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates" that priced the bill at more than $500 billion.3 At the time, conservative Republicans had "vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion." This means that the president deliberately misled members of his own party on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry that pushed the bill and has been a top contributor to his campaign.4 As Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) said, "I think a lot of people probably would have reconsidered" voting for the bill had they not been deliberately misled by the White House.

At Knight-Ridder's website you can see the full text of the 6/26/03 email that Medicare's top actuary Richard S. Foster sent to colleagues informing them of the White House threat.5

Sources:
"Federal Deficit Hits Record $374B", CBS News, 10/20/2003.
"Medicare drug plan balloons", Washington Times, 01/29/2004.
"Bush administration ordered Medicare plan cost estimates withheld", Knight Ridder, 03/11/2004.
Open Secrets.Org.
"E-mail from Richard S. Foster, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services", Knight Ridder, 03/11/2004.

2004-03-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

xxx

2004-03-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

Mudfishing in America

Welcome to the World of Mudfish

Feeling rundown?

Soon it will be time to relax with the mudfish. OK, it's time...relax.

Mudfishing is done in all corners of the world, by most cornered folk.

Join in and see what none of the fuss is about.

Follow along, and we'll teach you how.

My Advice

Because mudfishing is such a passion, there are times when medication is necessary to keep the heart-rate within a safe range. Therefore my initial word of advice is to always have an adequate supply of mood alterants ingested or at hand when partaking in this, or any, time-honored passtime fraught with long, crushing spans of abject boredom spiked with brief moments of sheer terror.

Keeping Your Cool

Did you know that in 95 degree heat, the air in your car reaches approximately 146 degrees and the steering wheel can reach 158 degrees? So what can you do about it? First, you can tint your car windows. Clear glass magnifies the sun and intensifies the heat. If that's too expensive, buy manual sunshades. They come in cheap cardboard or reflective material. You can also drink copious amounts of cold beer and sit on popsicles. To avoid hot steering wheels, put a towel over the wheel to absorb sun while your car sits smoldering.

Washing and Waxing Tips

Most fish come with a clearcoat finish, which tricks owners into thinking they don't need wax. Actually, you should wax your fish 3-4 times a year. Most authorities also recommend washing your fish once a week. Remember to start washing your fish only when the surface is cool and only after rinsing the entire fish. Rub gently, one section at a time, and use specific fish wash products--never household cleaners. After rinsing your catch well, dry it with a soft, clean cloth.

Recipe of the week: Thrice Caught Bass

Firstly, catch a bass and release it.

Secondly, wait six months and catch it again...release it.

Thirdly, wait a year and catch the same bass.

Cook it.

..........................................................

More Pictures

I've got all kinds of photo galleries--I'm sure your dream fish is there. Come check it out!

mailto:randomdistress@hotmail.com