A great one from Randy Newman... 'goodbye, goodbye'
Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Memories of some of the best comments and commentary of 2007
Okay, this is actually from 2006, but in light of the preceeding post, Olbermann on Rumsfeld's comments to the American Legion in Salt Lake City:
History has a way of repeating itself...
It seems a "fanciful" idea to look at the chronology of the usurpers administration encroachment on the US Constitution...
"There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater...Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later...."
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages -- in English as "Defying Hitler."
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Haffner's birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush's America...this is almost unbelievable."
More about Haffner below. Let's set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how "odd" it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such "calm, superior indifference."
Goebbels Would be Proud
It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.
In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen's book, "State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs' trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit To Print. (The Times' own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper's explanation for the long delay in publishing this story "woefully inadequate.")
When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least.
Glitches
There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag. So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt (D-N.J.) that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.
Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan) apparently found Holt's scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Bush Takes Frontal Approach
Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance "more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks," and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:
"Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it."
On Dec. 19, 2005 then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a "backdoor approach." He answered:
"We have had discussions with Congress...as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."
Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the "Patriot Act" in record time. James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: "In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America." It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn't have a prayer for passage.
It turns out we didn't know the half of it.
What To Call These Activities
"Illegal Surveillance Program" didn't seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks. It took six weeks to settle on "Terrorist Surveillance Program," with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself. This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president's rhetoric on Dec. 17:
"In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.... The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem..."
And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant. "I had to make this personal decision in early Oct. 2001," said Hayden, "it was a personal decision...I could not not do this."
Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know...
It Started Seven Months Before 9/11
How many times have you heard it? The mantra "after 9/11 everything changed" has given absolution to all manner of sin.
We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001. Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home, as well?
Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony in a case involving Qwest Communications strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans. Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration's radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.
So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us. We know that the Democrats who were briefed on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA). May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?
It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush's first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?
Are They All Complicit?
And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations -- AT&T and Verizon -- who made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution? (Qwest, to it's credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)
What's going on here? Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake? Lately the adjective "spineless" has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats -- no offense to invertebrates.
Nazis and Those Who Enable Them
You don't have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.
In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one's telephone would be tapped, one's letters opened, and one's desk might be broken into."
But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?
In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:
"It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight."
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers -- "for the most part decent, unimportant individuals." In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.
The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that "legalized" Hitler's dictatorship.
As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: "Oh God," writes Haffner, "what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward.... They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews.... They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested." In sum:
"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders...At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.... The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."
This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.
Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.... The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
We cannot say we weren't warned.
------
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A former Army officer and CIA analyst, he worked in Germany for five years; he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
"There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater...Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later...."
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages -- in English as "Defying Hitler."
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Haffner's birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush's America...this is almost unbelievable."
More about Haffner below. Let's set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how "odd" it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such "calm, superior indifference."
Goebbels Would be Proud
It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.
In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen's book, "State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs' trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit To Print. (The Times' own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper's explanation for the long delay in publishing this story "woefully inadequate.")
When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least.
Glitches
There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag. So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt (D-N.J.) that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.
Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan) apparently found Holt's scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Bush Takes Frontal Approach
Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance "more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks," and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:
"Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it."
On Dec. 19, 2005 then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a "backdoor approach." He answered:
"We have had discussions with Congress...as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."
Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the "Patriot Act" in record time. James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: "In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America." It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn't have a prayer for passage.
It turns out we didn't know the half of it.
What To Call These Activities
"Illegal Surveillance Program" didn't seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks. It took six weeks to settle on "Terrorist Surveillance Program," with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself. This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president's rhetoric on Dec. 17:
"In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.... The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem..."
And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant. "I had to make this personal decision in early Oct. 2001," said Hayden, "it was a personal decision...I could not not do this."
Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know...
It Started Seven Months Before 9/11
How many times have you heard it? The mantra "after 9/11 everything changed" has given absolution to all manner of sin.
We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001. Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home, as well?
Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony in a case involving Qwest Communications strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans. Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration's radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.
So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us. We know that the Democrats who were briefed on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA). May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?
It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush's first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?
Are They All Complicit?
And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations -- AT&T and Verizon -- who made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution? (Qwest, to it's credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)
What's going on here? Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake? Lately the adjective "spineless" has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats -- no offense to invertebrates.
Nazis and Those Who Enable Them
You don't have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.
In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one's telephone would be tapped, one's letters opened, and one's desk might be broken into."
But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?
In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:
"It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight."
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers -- "for the most part decent, unimportant individuals." In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.
The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that "legalized" Hitler's dictatorship.
As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: "Oh God," writes Haffner, "what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward.... They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews.... They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested." In sum:
"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders...At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.... The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."
This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.
Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.... The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
We cannot say we weren't warned.
------
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A former Army officer and CIA analyst, he worked in Germany for five years; he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Chickens... home..... roost
"Vatican paper criticises 'anti-Christmas' film 'Golden Compass'"
found not far from the following headline
"Golden Compass" Criticized for Removing Anti-Church Themes"
The movie, produced by the same company that produced the recent CS Lewis adapter Christian-friendly "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", is going to die the death it deserves. It has failed to satisfy the actual fans by watering down implications of the Magisterium, and failed to satisfy the Church, which had read the book instead of seeing the movie when it made its pronouncement.
If someone thought the book was worthy of turning into a movie, they should have done that. If it had elements that made it dicey to turn into a movie, that should have been decided before they tried to "improve" it. This film, as demonstrated in the headlines, won't make anyone happy and, consequently, won't return the investement to its makers, who really didn't deserve it anyway.
found not far from the following headline
"Golden Compass" Criticized for Removing Anti-Church Themes"
The movie, produced by the same company that produced the recent CS Lewis adapter Christian-friendly "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", is going to die the death it deserves. It has failed to satisfy the actual fans by watering down implications of the Magisterium, and failed to satisfy the Church, which had read the book instead of seeing the movie when it made its pronouncement.
If someone thought the book was worthy of turning into a movie, they should have done that. If it had elements that made it dicey to turn into a movie, that should have been decided before they tried to "improve" it. This film, as demonstrated in the headlines, won't make anyone happy and, consequently, won't return the investement to its makers, who really didn't deserve it anyway.
Friday, December 14, 2007
More on the plight of veterans
I've mentioned previously the highly alarming statistics about Iraq veteran suicides, and the administrations reaction to it (the problem your having, soldier, is that you aren't tough enough for this kind of work and you never were). The thing that disgusts me about an administration that is willing to shill out billions and billions of dollars in rebuilding "aid" without asking for a receipt, is unwilling to spend on those few true believers willing to put their lives on the line to make the chicken hawk dream come true. Well, it ain't getting any better...
Commentary: The disgraceful treatment of our veterans
Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: December 14, 2007 07:30:36 AM
As you do your holiday shopping this year and think about a big turkey dinner and piles of gifts and the good life that most Americans enjoy, please spare a thought for those who made it all possible: Those who serve in our military and the veterans who've worn the uniform.
There are some new statistics that give us reason to be ashamed for the way that our country has treated those who've served and sacrificed for us.
Those statistics damn the politicians who start every speech by thanking the troops and veterans and blessing them. They indict our national leaders who turn up at military bases and the annual conventions of veteran's organizations and use troops and veterans as a backdrop for their photo-ops.
Consider this:
An average of 18 veterans commit suicide each and every day of the year, according to recent statistics from the Veterans Administration (VA). That’s 126 veterans who kill themselves every week. Or some 6,552 who take their own lives each year. Our veterans are killing themselves at twice the rate of other Americans.
One quarter of the homeless people in America are military veterans. That’s one in every four. Is that ragged man huddled on the steam grate in a brutal winter wind a Vietnam vet? Did that younger man panhandling for pocket change on the street corner fight in Kandahar or Fallujah?
For the past four years, the Department of Veterans Affairs has been insisting that it’s doing everything it needs to for the nation’s veterans. That's simply not true, particularly when it comes to the VA's treatment of mental health issues.
As my McClatchy colleague Chris Adams has reported in a series of groundbreaking stories this year, the VA mental health system — even by its own measures — wasn’t prepared to give returning veterans the mental health care they need.
The experts say that between 20 and 30 percent of all troops returning from combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But many of VA hospitals didn’t have the special PTSD programs that experts say are vital. Soldiers returning from Iraq are allowed to slip unnoticed into their old lives, and neither the Department of Defense nor the VA does anything to monitor their mental health.
The VA keeps telling Congress that all is well. That's not true, either. As Adams reported, the VA has been using fudged or inflated numbers to do so. And after years of promising that it's getting a growing backlog of disability compensation applications under control, things actually got worse this year.
No matter whether they've been wounded and need follow-up care and support, or whether they're coming apart at the seams and feeling suicidal, they sometimes must wait months for an appointment to be evaluated and treated at VA medical centers.
The same people who don’t blink at spending $3 billion a week on their war of choice in Iraq were the ones who cut the VA budget and privatized maintenance at Walter Reed Army Hospital and opposed every attempt to expand benefits for veterans old and young.
They're the same people who turned a blind eye as their corporate sponsors and private donors looted billions of dollars from the Treasury with no-compete contracts and bloated bills for everything from food for the troops to fuel for their tanks and trucks.
As a wave of wounded troops suffering brain injuries from the blasts of roadside bombs and landmines poured into military hospitals, these people, posing as fiscally responsible budget makers, were cutting in half the money spent on research into brain injuries.
These frauds who love to pose as wartime leaders sat back and did nothing as a cruel bureaucracy sent bill collectors out to harass double amputee veterans for thousands of dollars because they neglected to turn their armored vests and other gear in to the supply sergeant after they were blown apart on the battlefield.
They did nothing as the Army became ever more conservative, even stingy, in the number of injured and wounded soldiers it judged worthy of full disability pensions. Soldiers who suffered brain injuries and PTSD so severe that they couldn't function were put on the street with a 30 percent disability pension — $700 a month — to support a wife and three children.
Neglecting our war veterans and the widows and orphans that result from our wars is as American as apple pie. It’s nothing new. But in the past we always waited until after the war’s end to forget those who'd fought the war.
This may be the first time in our history that we began to neglect and forget our troops during a war.
All of this is shameful — shameful for a people whose freedom and prosperity rests on the backs of those soldiers but who've forgotten them so completely that they haven't held their Congress and their president responsible for this stain on our honor.
The next smarmy politician who shouts, “God bless our troops” ought to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of Washington on a rail for sheer hypocrisy.
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
Commentary: The disgraceful treatment of our veterans
Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: December 14, 2007 07:30:36 AM
As you do your holiday shopping this year and think about a big turkey dinner and piles of gifts and the good life that most Americans enjoy, please spare a thought for those who made it all possible: Those who serve in our military and the veterans who've worn the uniform.
There are some new statistics that give us reason to be ashamed for the way that our country has treated those who've served and sacrificed for us.
Those statistics damn the politicians who start every speech by thanking the troops and veterans and blessing them. They indict our national leaders who turn up at military bases and the annual conventions of veteran's organizations and use troops and veterans as a backdrop for their photo-ops.
Consider this:
An average of 18 veterans commit suicide each and every day of the year, according to recent statistics from the Veterans Administration (VA). That’s 126 veterans who kill themselves every week. Or some 6,552 who take their own lives each year. Our veterans are killing themselves at twice the rate of other Americans.
One quarter of the homeless people in America are military veterans. That’s one in every four. Is that ragged man huddled on the steam grate in a brutal winter wind a Vietnam vet? Did that younger man panhandling for pocket change on the street corner fight in Kandahar or Fallujah?
For the past four years, the Department of Veterans Affairs has been insisting that it’s doing everything it needs to for the nation’s veterans. That's simply not true, particularly when it comes to the VA's treatment of mental health issues.
As my McClatchy colleague Chris Adams has reported in a series of groundbreaking stories this year, the VA mental health system — even by its own measures — wasn’t prepared to give returning veterans the mental health care they need.
The experts say that between 20 and 30 percent of all troops returning from combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But many of VA hospitals didn’t have the special PTSD programs that experts say are vital. Soldiers returning from Iraq are allowed to slip unnoticed into their old lives, and neither the Department of Defense nor the VA does anything to monitor their mental health.
The VA keeps telling Congress that all is well. That's not true, either. As Adams reported, the VA has been using fudged or inflated numbers to do so. And after years of promising that it's getting a growing backlog of disability compensation applications under control, things actually got worse this year.
No matter whether they've been wounded and need follow-up care and support, or whether they're coming apart at the seams and feeling suicidal, they sometimes must wait months for an appointment to be evaluated and treated at VA medical centers.
The same people who don’t blink at spending $3 billion a week on their war of choice in Iraq were the ones who cut the VA budget and privatized maintenance at Walter Reed Army Hospital and opposed every attempt to expand benefits for veterans old and young.
They're the same people who turned a blind eye as their corporate sponsors and private donors looted billions of dollars from the Treasury with no-compete contracts and bloated bills for everything from food for the troops to fuel for their tanks and trucks.
As a wave of wounded troops suffering brain injuries from the blasts of roadside bombs and landmines poured into military hospitals, these people, posing as fiscally responsible budget makers, were cutting in half the money spent on research into brain injuries.
These frauds who love to pose as wartime leaders sat back and did nothing as a cruel bureaucracy sent bill collectors out to harass double amputee veterans for thousands of dollars because they neglected to turn their armored vests and other gear in to the supply sergeant after they were blown apart on the battlefield.
They did nothing as the Army became ever more conservative, even stingy, in the number of injured and wounded soldiers it judged worthy of full disability pensions. Soldiers who suffered brain injuries and PTSD so severe that they couldn't function were put on the street with a 30 percent disability pension — $700 a month — to support a wife and three children.
Neglecting our war veterans and the widows and orphans that result from our wars is as American as apple pie. It’s nothing new. But in the past we always waited until after the war’s end to forget those who'd fought the war.
This may be the first time in our history that we began to neglect and forget our troops during a war.
All of this is shameful — shameful for a people whose freedom and prosperity rests on the backs of those soldiers but who've forgotten them so completely that they haven't held their Congress and their president responsible for this stain on our honor.
The next smarmy politician who shouts, “God bless our troops” ought to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of Washington on a rail for sheer hypocrisy.
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Jena; Sign of the Times
Racism, particularly as it is practiced here in the United States, is a cowards haven. The KKK rose from the ashes of southern pride and sought to, in the dark of night, reverse the decision of the Civil War and halt Reconstruction. It's preferred method? Terrorizing and murdering blacks, usually at night, and accomplished by men wearing masks. The cowardice of America's special brand of racism didn't start there, as "First Nation" peoples remember, or as Latinos know now. But the incarnation of racism for blacks in America has always been particularly ugly. And it's making a comeback...
Hanging Hate
By David A Love
In These Times
Monday 10 December 2007
Backlash against the Jena Six case sparks an epidemic of public nooses.
The noose, that symbol of American racism associated with the Jim Crow South, is making a comeback.
Following the notorious Jena, La., incident, a rash of noose-related hate crimes has surfaced around the country, at times in the unlikeliest of places. These cases are not aberrations, but part of an endemic problem.
On Oct. 9, 2007, in New York City, a noose was found hanging from the office door of a black professor at Columbia University Teachers College. On Oct. 10, an NYPD officer found a noose hanging over his locker. On Oct. 11, a noose was found hanging from a light pole in front of a post office near Ground Zero. On Oct. 22, a noose was sent to a high school principal, a black woman, in Brooklyn.
For African Americans, the noose symbolizes racial intimidation, violence and death-and with good reason. "The noose is among the most repugnant of all racist symbols because it is itself an instrument of violence," noted Judge Robert L. Carter, a black federal district judge, in Williams v. New York City Housing Authority. In this 2001 employment discrimination case, African-American public employees were subjected to a hostile work environment, including the hanging of a noose.
Lynching has been America's own form of domestic terrorism, columnist George Curry wrote recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Far from being merely a prank, the hanging of nooses harks back to a shameful period in American history. It was not until 1952 that the United States went a whole year without a single lynching."
Mark Potok, a staff director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and hate groups, thinks the current noose hangings are a reaction to Jena. "What the nooses represent is a wider and deeper backlash by whites than people recognize," he says. "White people think the events in Jena were whitewashed by an evil and politically correct press."
To track these hate crimes, DiversityInc magazine has initiated "Noose Watch," which catalogues incidents of what it calls a "dangerous racist trend." As of Dec. 5, it had collected information on 61 incidents that have occurred since the beginning of 2006. (The New York Times reports that 50 to 60 noose incidents have occurred since the large Sept. 20, 2007 rally in Jena) Most recently:
On Nov. 20, a city employee in Slidell, La., was fired for allegedly hanging a noose at a job site a few days prior.
On Nov. 13, a college student in Orangeburg, S.C., was arrested for hanging a noose in a classroom.
On Nov. 8, in Beekman, La., high school students discovered a raccoon hanging from a noose on their school's flagpole.
On Oct. 30, a black mannequin with a noose tied around its neck was found in a county landfill building in Sacramento, Calif.
On Oct. 24, a noose was placed around the neck of a bronze statue of Tupac Shakur in Atlanta.
On Oct. 15, a housekeeper at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pa., found a noose hanging in a 10th floor hospital room.
On Oct. 4, a black Verizon employee in Cranberry, Pa., found a doll with a noose tied around its neck, along with a note saying that she did not deserve her promotion.
On Oct. 1, at a construction site in Philadelphia, Pa., a white construction worker held a noose in front of a black co-worker and allegedly said he "wanted to hang someone."
In October 2007, a noose was found hanging from the exit of a Home Depot store under construction in South Elgin, Ill., along with racist graffiti.
On Sept. 28, a noose was found in the men's bathroom of the Hempstead, Long Island, police department.
On Sept. 20, two men were arrested in Alexandria, La., for having nooses in the back of their pickup truck, only hours after an anti-racism march in nearby Jena.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the United States shot up from 602 to 844 between 2000 and 2006-an increase of 40 percent. The group also found that, based on 2005 Department of Justice data, about 191,000 hate-crime incidents are reported each year. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is handling an increasing number of noose cases alone: 24 since 2001. The number of reported workplace racial harassment cases increased from 3,075 in 1991 to 6,000 in 2006.
"The display of nooses does occur anywhere," says Lewis Steel, a civil rights attorney at Outten & Golden in New York City. "African Americans who are exposed to this are infuriated by it. It rubs a nerve, whereas with white people it is just not in their experience."
Steel is representing black and Latino employees in a lawsuit against the New York City Parks Department for racial discrimination and practices-including multiple displays of nooses on city property. He says that combating these incidents in the employment context depends to a large extent on the leadership of the employer.
"Certainly when we originally started the Parks Department case, [former New York City Parks Commissioner Henry] Stern viewed the display of nooses as silly," Steel says. "He did not send a memo around, and no action was really taken against those who displayed them."
Similarly, Reed Walters, the district attorney of LaSalle Parish, La., who prosecuted the Jena Six black teens for a schoolyard brawl with a white classmate, reacted to the hanging of the nooses at Jena High School by telling black students they were making too much of the "prank."
Many black Americans think government officials are treating these noose incidents too lightly.
On Nov. 3, hundreds of people marched in Charleston, W.V., in support of Megan Williams, a 20-year-old black woman whom authorities say was kidnapped, tortured, beaten and raped by six white men and women in a trailer over the course of a week. Williams' captors also allegedly forced her to eat rat, dog and human feces, and placed a noose around her neck. The six suspects, who were arrested and charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, malicious wounding and battery, have not been charged with hate crimes.
"They just kept saying, 'This is what we do to niggers down here,'" Williams told the Associated Press.
On Nov. 16, thousands of community activists, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, marched at the U.S. Department of Justice demanding that the federal government more vigorously prosecute crimes of racial violence.
"When you hang up a noose, it's no joke to us," said Sharpton at the march. "Every noose that's hung should be prosecuted by the law. And we're going to demand that today." According to Sharpton, the federal government has relinquished its responsibility to protect civil rights by relying on states to address hate crimes, something he characterized as a "revival of states' rights."
In response to the march, Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued this statement: "In recent months, there have been reports of nooses and other symbols of racial and religious hate appearing in schools, workplaces and neighborhoods across the country. These symbols of hate have no place in our great country. É Although there are limitations and challenges in bringing successful hate crimes prosecutions, the department takes each case seriously and is prepared to vindicate the rights of the victims when prosecution is warranted by the facts and by federal law."
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has said that "for too long, the Department of Justice failed to confront the serious questions of injustice, inequality and intolerance raised by the troubling events in Jena." She advocates restoring professionalism to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and calls for strengthening the hate crimes laws and voting laws.
In a letter to Mukasey, presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) wrote, "Unfortunately, this administration-and your predecessors as attorney general-have a poor track record in the area of investigating discrimination against racial minorities, while inexplicably focusing resources on a few, exceptional cases involving white victims."
Meanwhile, Steel, who has used the legal system to wage the fight against noose-related hate crimes, thinks that community organizing is needed to get the attention of people in power and bring about change.
"There is a real connection between community organizing and leadership. This kind of conduct ... is really despicable, so you hope the community should protest against this type of thing. It is hateful and it is stomach turning. You want to see communities organizing so this type of thing doesn't happen again."
But why are these racially motivated crimes on the rise at this point in time? Potok suggests that the recent noose incidents reflect not a fringe phenomenon, but a major social problem. "We're looking at an upsurge in racial nationalism," says Potok. "What's going on is a serious backlash against globalization. You have a certain level of economic rage that provides fertile ground for these groups." He says that with more people of color immigrating to the country, "whites are angry and uneasy."
According to Potok, these whites who are scapegoating think, "Our country is being stolen from us. The country my white Christian forefathers built is being taken away." But on Democracy Now!, Malik Shabazz, a member of Black Lawyers for Justice, said: "The hanging of nooses is a sign that there [could] be real bodies under those nooses very soon."
Hanging Hate
By David A Love
In These Times
Monday 10 December 2007
Backlash against the Jena Six case sparks an epidemic of public nooses.
The noose, that symbol of American racism associated with the Jim Crow South, is making a comeback.
Following the notorious Jena, La., incident, a rash of noose-related hate crimes has surfaced around the country, at times in the unlikeliest of places. These cases are not aberrations, but part of an endemic problem.
On Oct. 9, 2007, in New York City, a noose was found hanging from the office door of a black professor at Columbia University Teachers College. On Oct. 10, an NYPD officer found a noose hanging over his locker. On Oct. 11, a noose was found hanging from a light pole in front of a post office near Ground Zero. On Oct. 22, a noose was sent to a high school principal, a black woman, in Brooklyn.
For African Americans, the noose symbolizes racial intimidation, violence and death-and with good reason. "The noose is among the most repugnant of all racist symbols because it is itself an instrument of violence," noted Judge Robert L. Carter, a black federal district judge, in Williams v. New York City Housing Authority. In this 2001 employment discrimination case, African-American public employees were subjected to a hostile work environment, including the hanging of a noose.
Lynching has been America's own form of domestic terrorism, columnist George Curry wrote recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Far from being merely a prank, the hanging of nooses harks back to a shameful period in American history. It was not until 1952 that the United States went a whole year without a single lynching."
Mark Potok, a staff director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and hate groups, thinks the current noose hangings are a reaction to Jena. "What the nooses represent is a wider and deeper backlash by whites than people recognize," he says. "White people think the events in Jena were whitewashed by an evil and politically correct press."
To track these hate crimes, DiversityInc magazine has initiated "Noose Watch," which catalogues incidents of what it calls a "dangerous racist trend." As of Dec. 5, it had collected information on 61 incidents that have occurred since the beginning of 2006. (The New York Times reports that 50 to 60 noose incidents have occurred since the large Sept. 20, 2007 rally in Jena) Most recently:
On Nov. 20, a city employee in Slidell, La., was fired for allegedly hanging a noose at a job site a few days prior.
On Nov. 13, a college student in Orangeburg, S.C., was arrested for hanging a noose in a classroom.
On Nov. 8, in Beekman, La., high school students discovered a raccoon hanging from a noose on their school's flagpole.
On Oct. 30, a black mannequin with a noose tied around its neck was found in a county landfill building in Sacramento, Calif.
On Oct. 24, a noose was placed around the neck of a bronze statue of Tupac Shakur in Atlanta.
On Oct. 15, a housekeeper at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pa., found a noose hanging in a 10th floor hospital room.
On Oct. 4, a black Verizon employee in Cranberry, Pa., found a doll with a noose tied around its neck, along with a note saying that she did not deserve her promotion.
On Oct. 1, at a construction site in Philadelphia, Pa., a white construction worker held a noose in front of a black co-worker and allegedly said he "wanted to hang someone."
In October 2007, a noose was found hanging from the exit of a Home Depot store under construction in South Elgin, Ill., along with racist graffiti.
On Sept. 28, a noose was found in the men's bathroom of the Hempstead, Long Island, police department.
On Sept. 20, two men were arrested in Alexandria, La., for having nooses in the back of their pickup truck, only hours after an anti-racism march in nearby Jena.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the United States shot up from 602 to 844 between 2000 and 2006-an increase of 40 percent. The group also found that, based on 2005 Department of Justice data, about 191,000 hate-crime incidents are reported each year. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is handling an increasing number of noose cases alone: 24 since 2001. The number of reported workplace racial harassment cases increased from 3,075 in 1991 to 6,000 in 2006.
"The display of nooses does occur anywhere," says Lewis Steel, a civil rights attorney at Outten & Golden in New York City. "African Americans who are exposed to this are infuriated by it. It rubs a nerve, whereas with white people it is just not in their experience."
Steel is representing black and Latino employees in a lawsuit against the New York City Parks Department for racial discrimination and practices-including multiple displays of nooses on city property. He says that combating these incidents in the employment context depends to a large extent on the leadership of the employer.
"Certainly when we originally started the Parks Department case, [former New York City Parks Commissioner Henry] Stern viewed the display of nooses as silly," Steel says. "He did not send a memo around, and no action was really taken against those who displayed them."
Similarly, Reed Walters, the district attorney of LaSalle Parish, La., who prosecuted the Jena Six black teens for a schoolyard brawl with a white classmate, reacted to the hanging of the nooses at Jena High School by telling black students they were making too much of the "prank."
Many black Americans think government officials are treating these noose incidents too lightly.
On Nov. 3, hundreds of people marched in Charleston, W.V., in support of Megan Williams, a 20-year-old black woman whom authorities say was kidnapped, tortured, beaten and raped by six white men and women in a trailer over the course of a week. Williams' captors also allegedly forced her to eat rat, dog and human feces, and placed a noose around her neck. The six suspects, who were arrested and charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, malicious wounding and battery, have not been charged with hate crimes.
"They just kept saying, 'This is what we do to niggers down here,'" Williams told the Associated Press.
On Nov. 16, thousands of community activists, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, marched at the U.S. Department of Justice demanding that the federal government more vigorously prosecute crimes of racial violence.
"When you hang up a noose, it's no joke to us," said Sharpton at the march. "Every noose that's hung should be prosecuted by the law. And we're going to demand that today." According to Sharpton, the federal government has relinquished its responsibility to protect civil rights by relying on states to address hate crimes, something he characterized as a "revival of states' rights."
In response to the march, Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued this statement: "In recent months, there have been reports of nooses and other symbols of racial and religious hate appearing in schools, workplaces and neighborhoods across the country. These symbols of hate have no place in our great country. É Although there are limitations and challenges in bringing successful hate crimes prosecutions, the department takes each case seriously and is prepared to vindicate the rights of the victims when prosecution is warranted by the facts and by federal law."
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has said that "for too long, the Department of Justice failed to confront the serious questions of injustice, inequality and intolerance raised by the troubling events in Jena." She advocates restoring professionalism to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and calls for strengthening the hate crimes laws and voting laws.
In a letter to Mukasey, presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) wrote, "Unfortunately, this administration-and your predecessors as attorney general-have a poor track record in the area of investigating discrimination against racial minorities, while inexplicably focusing resources on a few, exceptional cases involving white victims."
Meanwhile, Steel, who has used the legal system to wage the fight against noose-related hate crimes, thinks that community organizing is needed to get the attention of people in power and bring about change.
"There is a real connection between community organizing and leadership. This kind of conduct ... is really despicable, so you hope the community should protest against this type of thing. It is hateful and it is stomach turning. You want to see communities organizing so this type of thing doesn't happen again."
But why are these racially motivated crimes on the rise at this point in time? Potok suggests that the recent noose incidents reflect not a fringe phenomenon, but a major social problem. "We're looking at an upsurge in racial nationalism," says Potok. "What's going on is a serious backlash against globalization. You have a certain level of economic rage that provides fertile ground for these groups." He says that with more people of color immigrating to the country, "whites are angry and uneasy."
According to Potok, these whites who are scapegoating think, "Our country is being stolen from us. The country my white Christian forefathers built is being taken away." But on Democracy Now!, Malik Shabazz, a member of Black Lawyers for Justice, said: "The hanging of nooses is a sign that there [could] be real bodies under those nooses very soon."
Monday, December 10, 2007
Fear itself
Olbermann on the Bush Administrations changing language on Iran and WMD...
"Neocon Job"
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown
Thursday 06 December 2007
Full text of Keith's Special Comment
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the president's cataclysmic deception about Iran.
There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.
We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole - or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked - at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so - whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.
A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.
After Ms. Perino's announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.
In August the president was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what "everybody thought" about Iran might be, in essence, crap.
Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:
"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon."
And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.
Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?
Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used, to scare us about Iraq?
In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.
A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.
Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.
The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.
And the mind reels at the thought of a vice president fully briefed on the revised Intel as long as two weeks ago - briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago - who never bothered to mention it to his boss.
It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan's presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.
Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president's evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.
What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation - or a criminal one?
Mr. Bush - if you can still hear us - if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you're Remington Steele - you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the Intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.
The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you - and your country - blind.
Not merely in monetary terms, Mr. Bush, but more importantly of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.
Mr. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your Administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860's and 1870's and 1880's - the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ...
Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush.
Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them - the opponents whom history proved right.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ... Bush.
Would that we could let this president off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.
But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.
The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post's website.
It is staggering.
March 31st: "Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon ..."
June 5th: "Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons ..."
June 19th: "Consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon ..."
July 12th: "The same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons ..."
August 6th: "This is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon ..."
Notice a pattern?
Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the president, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror - but there may not even be a tree there ...
McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.
August 9th: "They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program ..."
August 28th: "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons ..."
October 4th: "You should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon ..."
October 17th: "Until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon."
Before August 9th, it's: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
After August 9th, it's: Desire, pursuit, want ... knowledge, technology, know-how to enrich uranium.
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003 ...
And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th ...
And that's just a coincidence?
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?
Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true - something like "what the definition of is is" - but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.
Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial ... but ethically, it is a lie.
It is indefensible.
You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.
You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.
And more over, you have just revealed that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.
We are to believe that the Intel community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?
And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?
You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August ...
But you also knew ... it was ... accurate.
And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent ...
You merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside ...
While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of - as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote "nuclear holocaust" - and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: "World War Three."
My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase "George Bush has no business being president."
Well, guess what?
Tonight: hanged by your own words ... convicted by your own deliberate lies ...
You, sir, have no business ... being president.
Good night, and good luck.
"Neocon Job"
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown
Thursday 06 December 2007
Full text of Keith's Special Comment
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the president's cataclysmic deception about Iran.
There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.
We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole - or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked - at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so - whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.
A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.
After Ms. Perino's announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.
In August the president was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what "everybody thought" about Iran might be, in essence, crap.
Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:
"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon."
And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.
Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?
Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used, to scare us about Iraq?
In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.
A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.
Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.
The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.
And the mind reels at the thought of a vice president fully briefed on the revised Intel as long as two weeks ago - briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago - who never bothered to mention it to his boss.
It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan's presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.
Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president's evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.
What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation - or a criminal one?
Mr. Bush - if you can still hear us - if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you're Remington Steele - you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the Intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.
The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you - and your country - blind.
Not merely in monetary terms, Mr. Bush, but more importantly of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.
Mr. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your Administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860's and 1870's and 1880's - the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ...
Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush.
Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them - the opponents whom history proved right.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ... Bush.
Would that we could let this president off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.
But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.
The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post's website.
It is staggering.
March 31st: "Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon ..."
June 5th: "Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons ..."
June 19th: "Consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon ..."
July 12th: "The same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons ..."
August 6th: "This is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon ..."
Notice a pattern?
Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the president, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror - but there may not even be a tree there ...
McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.
August 9th: "They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program ..."
August 28th: "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons ..."
October 4th: "You should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon ..."
October 17th: "Until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon."
Before August 9th, it's: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
After August 9th, it's: Desire, pursuit, want ... knowledge, technology, know-how to enrich uranium.
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003 ...
And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th ...
And that's just a coincidence?
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?
Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true - something like "what the definition of is is" - but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.
Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial ... but ethically, it is a lie.
It is indefensible.
You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.
You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.
And more over, you have just revealed that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.
We are to believe that the Intel community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?
And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?
You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August ...
But you also knew ... it was ... accurate.
And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent ...
You merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside ...
While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of - as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote "nuclear holocaust" - and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: "World War Three."
My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase "George Bush has no business being president."
Well, guess what?
Tonight: hanged by your own words ... convicted by your own deliberate lies ...
You, sir, have no business ... being president.
Good night, and good luck.
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