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Gay marriage is a question of love

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:00:35 -0500

Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.

Some parameters, as preface. This isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics, and this isn't really just about Prop-8. And I don't have a personal investment in this: I'm not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.

And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics. This is about the human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want�a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

Only now you are saying to them�no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights�even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?

I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage. If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it's worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn't marry black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not "Until Death, Do You Part," but "Until Death or Distance, Do You Part." Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are gay.

And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing, centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children, all because we said a man couldn't marry another man, or a woman couldn't marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage.

How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the "sanctity" of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don't you, as human beings, have to embrace... that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate... this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness�this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness�share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate.

You don't have to help it, you don't have it applaud it, you don't have to fight for it. Just don't put it out. Just don't extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don't know and you don't understand and maybe you don't even want to know. It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.

This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.

But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:

"I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam," he told the judge. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all: So I be written in the Book of Love; I do not care about that Book above. Erase my name, or write it as you will, So I be written in the Book of Love."

What is "pro-America", Senator?

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:35:25 -0400

I have frequently insisted I would never turn the platform of the Special Comment into a regular feature.
But as these last two weeks of this extraordinary, and extraordinarily disturbing, presidential campaign project out in front of us, I fear I may have to temporarily amend that presumption.
I hope it will be otherwise, but I suspect this will be the first of nightly pieces, most shorter than this... until further notice. And thus a Special Comment tonight about the last five days of the divisive, ugly, paranoid bleatings of this Presidential race, culminating in the sliming of Colin Powell for his endorsement of Senator Obama.
There was once a very prominent sportswriter named Dick Young whose work, with ever-increasing frequency, became peppered with references to "my America."
"I can't believe this is happening in My America"... -- "we do not tolerate these people in My America" -- "this man does not belong in my America".
His America gradually revealed itself.
Insular. Isolationist. Backwards-looking. Mindlessly flag-waving. Racist. No second chances. A million rules, but only for the other guy.
Dick Young died in 1987, but he has been re-born in the presidential campaign as it has unfolded since last Thursday night.
In that time, Governor Sarah Palin, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, McCain spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer, and Rush Limbaugh, have revealed that there is a measurable portion of this country that is not interested in that which the vast majority view as democracy or equality or opportunity.
They want only... control -- and they want the rest of us, symbolically, perhaps physically... out. Governor Palin:
"We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington D.C.," you told a fund-raiser in North Carolina last Thursday, to kick off this orgy of condescending elitism. "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation." Governor, your prejudice is overwhelming.
It is not just "pockets" of this country that are "pro-America" Governor.
America... is "pro-America."
And the "Real America" of yours, Governor, is where people at your rallies shout threats of violence, against other Americans, and you say nothing about them or to them.
What you are seeing is not patriotism, Governor.
What has surrounded you since your nomination, has been the echoing shout of mob rule. Indeed, that shout has echoed to Minnesota, where the next day an unstable Congresswoman named Michele Bachmann added to the ugly cry.
"I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America, or anti-America. I think people would love to see an expose' like that."
For nearly two years, Ms. Bachmann, who made her first political bones by keeping the movie "Aladdin" from being shown at a Minnesota Charter School because she thought it promoted paganism and witchcraft, has had a seat in the government of this nation, a seat from which she has spewed the most implausible, hateful, narrow-minded garbage imaginable.
Well, Congresswoman, you have gotten that "expose'" you wanted, have you not?
Though not perhaps in the way you imagined.
Since giving voice to your remarkable delusion that there are members of Congress who are "anti-America," and the extraordinary tap-dance of sleaze and innuendo about Senator Obama which followed...
...the challenger for your house Seat, Elwyn Tinklenberg, has been inundated by donations -- 700 thousand dollars in the three days after you spoke.
Because the America you perceive, Congresswoman -- with its goblins and ghosts and vast unseen hordes of traitors and fellow travelers and Senators who won't ban "Aladdin" -- exists only in your head, and in the heads of the others who must rationalize the failures in their own lives and of their own policies as somebody else's fault -- as a conspiracy to deny them an America of exclusionism and religious orthodoxy and prejudice, about which they must accuse, and murmur, and shout threats, and cleave the nation into pro-America and anti-America."
And back it comes to the McCain campaign.
And Senator McCain's talking head, Ms. Pfotenhauer, who on this very network Saturday, and seemingly without the slightest idea that dismissive prejudice dripped from every word, analyzed the race in Virginia.
"I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia," she said. "But the rest of the state, 'real Virginia,' if you will, I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain's message."
Again, a toxic message...
The parts of the country that agree with Nancy Pfotenhauer... are real -- the others, not.
Ms. Pfotenhauer, why not go the distance on this one?
It was Senator McCain's own brother who called that part of Virginia nearest Washington "communist country."
Cut to the chase, Madam.
No matter the intended comic hyperbole of Joe McCain...
This is the point -- isn't it?
Leave out the real meaning of "Communism," Madam -- Joe McCain reduced it to a buzz-word; it has no more true definition right now than does "Socialism," or the phrase "a man who sees America like you and I see America."
It's about us... and them.
The pro-... and the anti.
Never mind, Madam, that the bi-secting of this country you would happily inspire, means taking a tiny crack in a dam and not repairing it but burrowing into it.
It is not enough that Senator McCain and Senator Obama might differ.
One must be real and the other false.
One must be pro-America and the other anti.
Go back and -- as your boss Rick Davis said today -- "re-think," Mr. McCain's insistence not to drag the sorry bones of Jeremiah Wright into this campaign.
And whatever you do, Ms. Pfotenhauer, allow no one enough time to think... about the widening crack in the dam.
And now all of this comes together to attack Colin Powell.
"Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race," writes Rush Limbaugh... the grand wizard of this school of reactionary non-thought.
"OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with."
It is not conceivable that Powell might reject McCain for the politics of hate and character assassination, or just for policy.
In the closed, sweaty world of the blind allegiances of Limbaugh -- one of "us" who endorses one of "them," must be doing so for some other blind allegiance, like the color of skin.
The answer to this primordial muck, must be addressed to one man only.
Senator McCain -- where are you?
I disagree with you on virtually every major point of policy and practice.
And yet I do not think you "anti-America." I would not hesitate to join you in time of crisis in defense of this country.
Fortunately you did not echo this chorus of base hatred.
But neither have you repudiated it.
What is "pro-America", Senator?
Is it pro-America to call a man a racist because he endorses a different candidate?
Senator, you have based your campaign on many premises, but the foremost (and the most nearly admirable) of all of them, have been the pitches about "reaching across the aisle," and putting, as your ubiquitous banners reed, "country first."
So when Colin Powell endorses your opponent, you say nothing as your supporters and proxies paint him in this "Anti-America" frame and place him in Governor Palin's un-real America.
Senator McCain -- did not General Powell just "reach across the aisle?" Did he not, in his own mind at least, "put country first?"
Is it not your responsibility, Senator, to, if not applaud, then at least quiet those in your half of our fractured political equation?
Is it not your responsibility, Senator, to say "enough" to Republican smears without end?
Is it not your responsibility, Senator, to insist that, win or lose, you will not be party to a campaign that devolves into hatred and prejudice and divisiveness?
And Senator McCain, if it is not your responsibility... whose is it?

McCain, suspend your campaign

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:00:44 -0400

And Number One: The John McCain Phony Umbrage Threat Level is Back To Red. McCain supporters shout hateful, violent threats and incitements, at McCain events -- if you missed it, it happened before a Palin speech in Pennsylvania today -- and as usual, she said nothing to stop the fire. And this is where the satire ends and the Special Comment begins. Because this is not even remotely funny.
1:25 PM Eastern Time, today, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. During the warm-up act by a Red Meat Congressional Candidate aptly named Chris Hackett, Hackett mentions Obama and a Palin audience member shouts "Kill Him."
And Governor Palin, as usual, does nothing about it says nothing to these thugs and psychos. She may not have heard this one. It is impossible to believe that by now she has not heard about the other ones. Her silence is deafening. Just as, Senator McCain, you have done nothing when violence has been asserted. Correction. You have done one thing.
Asked why in real time you do not repudiate this hatefulness you act as if you are the victim. Speaking today to our NBC Station in Washington.
McCain : "Sure and I repudiated it as I have on several occasions. Unfortunately, Congressman John Lewis is an American hero who I admire who made the worst, most unacceptable statement a couple days ago that I have ever heard. He accused me and Sarah Palin of being involved in segregation, George Wallace and even made reference to a church bombing where children were killed. Senator Obama has not repudiated that statement. Senator Obama should do so immediately. Its the most outrageous thing that I have heard since in politics�it is disgraceful."
Disgraceful?
Obviously, Senator, you haven't heard your own speeches, and Governor Palin's, and what people shout during them. And you haven't heard your state GOP Chair in Virginia, Jeffrey Frederick, giving talking points to 30 of your field-operatives heading out to canvass voters in Gainesville, Virginia.With a reporter present... telling them to try to forge a connection between Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden to emphasize bombings and terrorism. And you haven't heard those volunteers, your volunteers Senator McCain, shout back "and he won't salute the flag" and "we don't even know where Senator Obama was really born."
Senator McCain -- these... people... are... speaking... for... you! And how dare you try to claim Congressman Lewis was linking you to Governor George Wallace's segregation. He was linking you, aptly, to Governor George Wallace's lynch-mob mentality.
"As public figures with the power to influence and persuade," said Congressman Lewis, "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all."
Senator McCain, your supporters, at your events, are calling Obama a terrorist and traitor and are calling for him to be killed. And yet you keep bringing back these same rabid Right Wing nuts to deliberately stir these crowds into frenzies. And then you take offense when somebody who remembers the violence in our political past, calls you on it. You, sir, are responsible for a phalanx of individuals who are shouting fire in a crowded theatre. There are some things to respect and honor about you, Senator McCain. But on this, you're not only a fraud, Senator but you are tacitly inciting lunatics to violence. If you want to again grand-stand and suspend your campaign here's your big chance. Suspend your campaign now, until you, or somebody else, gets some control over it and it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.

Hockey Moms in Glass Houses...

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:33:26 -0400

"The Governor of Alaska wants to start calling people terrorists -- and insisting of Senator Obama that quote "this is not a man who sees America like you and I see America" -- and whose rhetoric like that and the "pallin' around with terrorists" line were rightly described by the Associated Press yesterday as a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing kind of way of slipping racism into the equation because it's a nifty trick to remind the white folk that (psst) Obama is black.
But overriding this sleaziness -- and dog-gone it, the Governor of Alaska has got to be the sleaziest politician working the stage at the moment -- there is the sheer blessed stupidity of letting herself become the bomb-thrower when her own life is full of domestic terrorists.
Governor -- Bill Ayres? Your hubby was in this secessionist hate group for which you recorded a video.
Governor -- Jeremiah Wright? That pastor you credit with helping you become Governor, is either a con man or a psycho who believes he can tell which woman in the village is the witch and which is the governor."
Full transcript below the fold:
And finally tonight as promised a Special Comment about the campaign remarks made this weekend and today by the Governor of Alaska.
Last Wednesday, Sheriff's deputies arrived at the home of a woman in Akron, Ohio named Addie Polk, in order to evict her.
After 38 years in that house, Ms. Polk had fallen behind on paying the mortgage.
It was so bad that the company that held that mortgage, Fannie Mae, had foreclosed.
In fact, it was far worse than anybody knew.
Addie Polk couldn't bear it any more.
So, rather than be evicted, she... shot herself in the chest.
Evidently she will survive. And, after Congressman Dennis Kucinich brought her plight to the floor of the House, Fannie Mae -- the mortgage giant you and I and all the rest of us pretty much own now - agreed it would forgive Addie Polk's debt and, when she gets out of the hospital, let her go back and live in her home again.
That this is already a gothic horror story, you'll agree.
But I left out one detail.
Addie Polk... is 90 years old.
In the self-pronounced area of expertise of the Governor of Alaska -- energy -- the real experts of both parties are at a loss to figure out any way, even 'drill, baby, drill', that might lower gas prices before 2018.
We are at war in two countries -- and a lame duck President with no reason to check his own imbalance... still has dreams of one more.
And a 90-year old woman, trapped in the middle of a financial meltdown, shoots herself -- and she's still in better shape than the economy.
Yet the Governor of Alaska wants to talk about somebody Barack Obama doesn't know very well, and what this somebody Barack Obama doesn't know very well, did� during the year Obama was eight... and the Governor of Alaska was in pre-Kindergarten.
And she wants to talk about Reverend Jeremiah Wright...
And she doesn't object to being introduced with a reference to Barack Obama's middle name.
Well, this is my suggestion.
In much the same way we, America -- in the corporate persona of Fannie Mae -- have forgiven poor Addie Polk of Akron, Ohio...
We, America, also need to forgive� poor Sarah Palin of Wasilla, Alaska.
They are both in situations that are beyond their ability to cope.
They are both stuck in a crucible caused by forces they cannot comprehend.
They are both unable to understand... what they are doing.
After stumbling through a clumsier version of it at Englewood, Colorado...
The Governor of Alaska said Saturday at Carson, California... quote:
"Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country." She later defended the remark by adding this was an "association that has been known but hasn't been talked about."
Governor, Conservative groups have thus far spent ten million dollars this year trying to make something -- anything -- out of the brief interaction on a charity board between Senator Obama, and a rehabilitated former domestic radical from the '60s - and not even Conservatives have been stupid enough to buy the snake oil, that this was either a close relationship or a nefarious one.
But of course, you know better, Governor.
You're smarter than the rest of us.
A reporter asks you a horrible gotcha question like 'which newspapers do you read' and it takes you four days to come up with an answer, and somehow -- it's the reporter's fault.
The reporter asks you to name one Supreme Court ruling with which you disagree other than Roe-v-Wade and even though you'd commented on just such a case -- from Alaska no less -- not three months ago -- your eyes turn into a big neon sign reading "Vacancy" -- and you insist it's because that evil media asked the wrong question.
So you're the genius Governor, and it's your supporters and the undecided voters who are the dopes who are now going to believe the same mickey-mouse crap that Senator Clinton couldn't get to stick, and Sean Hannity couldn't get to stick, just because it's you adding that word "terrorist" and that phrase "palling around" and dropping the "g" in pal-ling.
And of course, Governor, those same dopes, and we media morons, we are not smart enough to ask about that pesky Alaskan Independence Party, and why you recorded a speech for its convention last March, and why your husband remained a registered member of it until 2002, even though it was founded by a man named Joe Vogler who wanted Alaska to secede from the United States..
The way the South seceded, precipitating the Civil War.
The same Joe Vogler who once said:
"The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government, and I won't be buried under their damn flag."
And who also said:
"I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."
Shoot, Governor, them's strong words, hah?
Did he wink as he said 'em?
You betcha!
So� where does Joe Vogler rank on the scales of "terrorists who would target their own country"?
Your opponent's guy Ayers wound up on a volunteer anti-poverty committee in Chicago.
But your guy Vogler wound up founding a group that wanted to rip one of the stars off the American flag!
Well, ok, Governor -- Vogler's more your husband's guy.
So it's your husband who's been "palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."But I'm assuming you've been "palling around" with your husband.
But, gee willikers, Governor, you know what's best.
You're not one of these Washington insiders who would notice that though that's a straight line connecting you, your husband, and this Alaskan secessionist, you're standing under a banner with the campaign slogan "Country First" and if somebody out there puts two and two together they might just ask, "which Country didja mean? The Country of Alaska?"
"The heels are on," you said with another smile. "The gloves are off." Well, if you're telling William Kristol you want to talk about Jeremiah Wright... fer sure!
So, Governor... you don't mind addressing whether this Pastor Muthee is a terrorist? Do you?
We've told you before about Pastor Thomas Muthee.
He's the preacher who visited the Wasilla Assembly of God church a couple of times while the Governor was there -- ironically enough, just about as many times as Bill Ayres has met Barack Obama -- and, see, there was this one time where Pastor Muthee actually laid hands on the Governor.
And I'm sure that sounds like just some crazy anecdote, except there's videotape.
And of course the Governor talked about this moment -- the laying on of hands -- just last summer.
It was in October, 2005, as the video indicates, when Muthee put his hands on Sarah Palin's back and said, "make a way for Sarah, even in the political arena. Make a way, my God. Bring finances her way, even if for the campaign in the name of Jesus... "Every form of witchcraft, it will be rebuked in the name of Jesus. Father, make her way now. "And the Governor said that "bold" approach of Pastor Muthee was one of the reasons she became Governor� and she gives him just oodles of credit for puttin' her on the path.
The problem for the governor is... that in 1999 The Christian Science Monitor reported that Pastor Muthee had gotten his start a decade earlier in Kenya, in the Nairobi suburb of Kiambu�
Kimabu was crime-ridden...
So this character Muthee showed up, and announced it was the fault of this woman in town who he had decided was a witch.
And Muthee gave the witch a choice: either be saved, or get out of town.
And the woman initially chose none of the above, but this became less than a viable option when Muthee got 200 of the townspeople together and they decided, heck, you know, Muthee's right, she probably is a witch, and the next thing you know the police are raiding her house and reportedly shooting her snake because if she was a witch, the snake had to be a demon, and then the woman left town and everybody said crime went down and most of the bars closed and this is not only how Pastor Muthee got started -- but he's proud of it and he tells the story in his testimonial videotapes and people in that church in Wasilla where he laid hands on the Governor knew all about it.
And they think it was just a... Joe-Six-Pack, Hockey Mom kinda thing to do, to let a guy who branded some woman in Kenya a witch, demand that God make some different woman... the Governor... of... Alaska!!!
Governor, what would you call someone who arrives in a suburb, blames a resident for the local crime, organizes a mob to threaten the woman, convinces the authorities to go and raid her home, and then chases her out of the suburb?
C'mon Governor, just give us one answer that has something to do with the question you were just asked.
That's right... you'd call him... a terrorist.
And since it was in his own country, that would make him, Hamm?�. Yes, very good� a domestic terrorist.
So, you, Governor, you've been "palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."Say it ain't so, Gov!
Say it ain't so!
Of course... it is.
The Governor of Alaska ignores Addie Polk and the American tragedy that is a 90-year old woman shooting herself out of shame and panic and who knows what else. Over the mortgage!
Instead the Governor of Alaska wants to start calling people terrorists... -- and insisting of Senator Obama that quote "this is not a man who sees America like you and I see America" -- and whose rhetoric like that, and the "pallin' around with terrorists" line were rightly described by the Associated Press yesterday as a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing kind of way of slipping racism into the equation, because it's a nifty trick to remind the white folk that (psst) Obama is black.
But overriding this sleaziness -- and dog-gone it, the Governor of Alaska has got to be the sleaziest politician working the stage at the moment -- there is the sheer blessed stupidity of letting herself become the bomb-thrower when her own life is full of domestic terrorists.
- Bill Ayres?
Your hubby was in this secessionist hate group for which you recorded a video.
Governor? -- Jeremiah Wright?
That pastor you credit with helping you become Governor, is either a con man or a psycho who believes he can tell which woman in the village is the witch, and which woman is the governor.
And Governor, there's also "The U.S. Council On World Freedom." You should ask Senator McCain about that outfit and why he had to scat away from it 22 years ago.
Or, ask him why yesterday his own brother Joe referred to Northern Virginia as quote, "communist country."
Or you could ask him about Pastors John Hagee and Rod Parsley.
Or about why Senator McCain said about introducing Jeremiah Wright into this campaign, quote, "there's no place for that kind of campaigning, the American people don't want it, period."
Or -- don't ask. You know best. You're the one selling the patent medicine. Those of us out here, we're just the suckers pulling out our greenbacks.
Go on talking about this man Ayers and trying to link Obama to that word "terrorist."
But be prepared for others to ask you about your pastor... and terrorism.
And for still others to ask you about the First Dude.... and terrorism.
But -- not me, Governor.
I forgive you. You are about as guilty here as poor Ms. Addie Polk in Akron.
And I hope that after what you've done to yourself, you recover as well as she seems to be doing, and that you too get to go back and live in your own home again.
Because if you think the terrorism con, and the racism sting are going to do anything but bury you and Senator McCain, you need to pick up one of those how-many-ever newspapers you reed and check the headlines to find out what people are really worried about right now.
Otherwise, when you said "the heels are on, the gloves are off," you got as close to telling the truth as you've ever gotten, and without really knowing it.
Because, for you and Senator McCain, Governor, it's not the gloves that just came off.
Obviously -- it's the wheels.
That's Countdown for this, the One Thousand, 986th day since the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

GOP�s Trademarking of September 11

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:39:51 -0400

This is supposed to be a day of remembrance. Remembrance of the attack, remembrance of the national unity which followed it.
Most important of all, remembrance of the dead.
But 9/11 has become�… a brand name.
A Republican campaign slogan.
Propaganda of the lowest form.
9/11 has become� 9/11 **with a trademark logo.**
9/11 (**TM**) has sustained a president who long ago should have been dismissed, or impeached. It has kept him and his gang of financial and constitutional **crooks** in office without - literally - any visible means of support.
9/11 (**TM**) has made possible the greatest sleight-of-hand in our nation’s history.
The political party in office at the time of the attacks, at the local, state and national levels, the party which **uniformly** ignored the warnings — and the presidential administration already through twenty percent of its first term and no longer wet behind the ears — have not only thus far escaped any **blame** for the malfeasance and criminal neglect that allowed the attacks to occur, but that presidency and that party, have managed to make it seem as if the **other** political party would be solely and irredeemably responsible for any similar catastrophe in the future.
Thus, Senator McCain, were you able to accomplish a further inversion of reality at your party’s nominating convention last week.
There was the former Mayor of the City of New York — the one who took **no counter-terrorism measure** in his seven years in office between the first attack on the World Trade Center, and the second attack.
Nothing, except to insist — despite all advice and warning - that his Emergency Command Center be moved directly **into** the World Trade Center.
Yet there was this man, Sir - Rudolph Giuliani — quite succinctly dismissed as “A Noun, a Verb, and 9/11,” and repudiated even by Republican **voters** — transformed into the keynote speaker, Senator McCain — at **your** convention.
And his childish, squealing, braying, Tourette’s-like repetition of 9/11 (**TM**), was greeted not as conclusive evidence that he is consumed by massive guilt - hard-earned guilt, in fact - but rather as some kind of political tour-de-force, an endorsement of your Vice Presidential nominee, a rookie governor — a facile and slick con artist.
The blind endorsing the bland, to a chorus of 9/11 (**TM**), 9/11 (**TM**), 9/11 (**TM.**)
Your ringing mindless cheer of “We’ve Kept You Safe Since Then”…
While nobody asks “doesn’t **then** count?”
All of this, sadistically disrespecting the dead of New York, and Washington, and Shanksville�
**Endorsed**, Senator McCain�
**Exploited**, Senator McCain�
**Trademarked,** Senator McCain� by **you.**
And yet of course **the** exact moment in which Senator McCain’s Republicans showed the nation exactly how far they have fallen from the Better Angels of Mr. **Lincoln’s** Nature, came the **next** night.
The television networks were told that the Convention would pause, early in the evening, when **children** could still be watching, for a 9/11 **Tribute**, and they were encouraged to broadcast it.
What we got was not a tribute to the **dead** of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt.
The Republicans gave us sociological pornography� a virtual **snuff film**.
Years ago, responsible television networks, to the applause of the nation, and the relief of its mental health authorities, voluntarily stopped showing the most graphic of the images of the World Trade Center, except with the strongest of warnings.
And yet, the Republicans, at their convention, having virtually seized control of the cable news operations, showed… the worst of it.
This is **all** anyone with a conscience can show you of what the Republicans showed you.
The actual collapse of the smoking towers.
A fleeting image of what might have been a victim leaping to his death from a thousand feet up.
And something new.
From this angle, ground-level, perfectly framed, images — of the fireball created when the second plane hit the second tower.
It was terrifying.
After all its object **was**� to **terrify.**
Not to commemorate, not to call for unity, not to remember the dead.
But to terrify.
To open again the horrible wounds, to brand the skin of this nation with the message — as hateful as the terrorists’ own — that you must vote Republican or this will happen again and you will die�
And just in case that was **not** enough, to also dishonestly and profanely **conflate** 9/11 with the 1979 **Irahn** Hostage Crisis — to stoke the flames of paranoia about **another** Middle Eastern Nation.
This **was** a 9/11 Tribute.
Not to the dead, nor to the unity.
But a tribute to how valuable 9/11 has been as a political tool for the Republican Party.
9/11… (**TM.**)
Senator McCain, you had promised us a **clean** campaign.
You could be Snow-White the rest of the way, Sir, yet that manipulative videotape from **your** convention should tar you always in the minds of decent Americans.
And still, as this seventh 9/11�(**TM**)� approaches — that, Sir, is not the worst of your contributions to the utter politicizing of a day that should be sacrosanct to all of us.
Hard to believe, but the Senator has done worse with 9/11 and the evil behind it.
We heard it last week in Minnesota� we’ve heard it off and on since January�
But Senator McCain said it most **concisely** in June.
“Look,” he said. “I know the area, I’ve been there, I know wars, I know how to win wars, and I know how to improve our capabilities so that we will capture Osama bin Laden — or put it this way, bring him to justice. We will do it. I know how to do it.”
Senator McCain seems to be quite serious — that he and he alone — not the CIA, nor the U-S Military, nor the current President — can capture Bin Laden.
Thus we must take him at his word, that this is no mere ludicrous campaign boast.
We must assume Senator McCain truly believes he is capable of doing this, and has **been** capable of doing this, since last January.
“We will capture Osama bin Laden� we will do it. I know how to do it.”
Well then, Senator… you’d better go and **do it**… **hadn’t** you?
Because, Sir, if a man or woman in this nation, Democrat or Republican, had a clear and effective means of capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden�
If that person had been advertising his claim, Senator� for **eight** months�
But if that person not only refused to go to responsible authorities in government and **advise** them of this plan to catch Bin Laden, but further announced he would not even begin to **enact** this secret plan to corral the world’s most hated man� until the end of **next** January�
What would be **your** description of such an individual, Senator?
Charlatan?
**Do-nothing**?
**Opportunist**?
Senator McCain, if you have — if you have **had** — a means of capturing Osama Bin Laden, and you do not immediately **inform** some responsible authority of the full scope of that plan, you are to some degree great or small� **aiding and abetting** Osama Bin Laden.
If you could assist in **capturing** him now, Senator McCain, but you have chosen not to� you, Sir, have helped… Osama Bin Laden… stay **free.**
**Free** to inspire and supervise the terrorists.
**Free** to plan or execute attacks here.
**You**, Sir, are **blackmailing** some portion of the American electorate into voting for your party, by promising to help in the capture of Bin Laden� **only** if you are made president!
I’d rather win an election than catch Bin Laden!
No more cynical calculation has ever been made in this nation’s history, Sir.
If you **lose** the election, Senator, are you **not** going to tell the President-Elect?
Are you intending to keep this a **secret** until the next election and your party’s next nominee?
Senator, as you and your Republicans shed your phony, crocodile, opportunistic tears tomorrow on 9/11 **TM**, in front of the utterly disingenuous banner “Country First”�.
The **fact** is, you have shown that it is **John McCain** first, and the country **last.**
The **fact** is, Sir, by **holding out** on your secret plan to catch Bin Laden…
By searing those images into our collective wounded American psyche at your nomination last week…
Terrorists are not what you, John McCain, **fight**.
Terrorists… are what you, John McCain, **use.**
Good night, and good luck.

Senator McCain, Grow Up!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:00:44 -0400
>Now as promised a Special Comment on the remarks of the Senior Senator from Arizona about Senator Obama at the VFW Convention, and about NBC News and MSNBC.
Four times in just two days, Senator McCain’s campaign managers have, simply, hung him out to dry.
First, trying to scapegoat the media, in the exact way that has spelled doom for other presidential candidates already watching from the sidelines.
Second, doing so with a petulant statement so full of holes that it virtually **confirms** that which was reported, and which set off this pointless temper tantrum in the first place.
Third, sending the candidate out to speak before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, even as the millstones of a series of disastrous, anti-veteran votes, still figuratively dangled from around his neck.
And fourth, encouraging Senator McCain, while there, to address his opponent in the language of unseemly contempt, undignified calumny, and holier-than-thou persiflage unsupported by reality… near-nonsensical bluster that — at best — makes the speaker look like a dyspeptic grouchy neighbor shouting “Hey you kids, get out of my yard.”
Transcript below the fold.

“Though victory in Iraq is finally in sight,” you told the V-F-W today, Senator McCain, “a great deal still depends on the decisions and good judgment of the next president. The hard-won gains of our troops hang in the balance. The lasting advantage of a peaceful and democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East could still be squandered by hasty withdrawal and arbitrary timelines. And this is one of many problems in the shifting positions of my opponent, Senator Obama.”
The shifting positions of Senator **Obama**?
Senator McCain — on the 22nd of May, 2003.. you said, of Iraq, **on** the Senate floor, quote:
“We won a massive victory in a few weeks, and we did so with very limited loss of American and allied lives. We were able to end aggression with minimum overall loss of life, and we were even able to greatly reduce the civilian casualties of Afghani and Iraqi citizens.
Senator — you declared victory in Iraq, **five years and nearly three months ago**.
**Today** you say: “victory in Iraq is finally in sight”?
The victory you already proclaimed five years ago?
Are we going back in **time** Sir?
If that had not been enough, in **June** of 2003, with even **Fox News** noting “many argue the conflict (in Iraq) isn’t over,” you answered:
“Well, then why was there a banner that said ‘Mission Accomplished’ on the aircraft carrier? Look, the — I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict — the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it’s very appropriate.”
In 2003, your war was won, because somebody was putting up a… banner.
In 2008, your war might finally **be** won, because **you** are putting up… a campaign based on the mirage that Iraq **is** winnable.
And yet it is **Obama** shifting positions on Iraq?
Even if this country were to forget, Senator, the victory lap you and President Bush took five years ago — just on their face, your remarks today at the V-F-W, Senator, are nonsensical.
“Senator Obama commits the greater error of insisting that even in hindsight, he would oppose the surge. Even in retrospect, he would choose the path of retreat and failure for America over the path of success and victory.”
This construction, Senator, is extremely simple.
If your surge worked, the troops would be home from Iraq.
Or **most** of them, would be.
Or all of them who **were** surged, would be.
Or at least we’d have the same number of troops in Iraq now, as we did then.
Or… maybe one or two guys would be out of harm’s way.
Please, Senator McCain, stop!
This is **embarrassing**.
Whether on his own impetus or an advisor’s…
The Senator also foolishly invoked his **opponent** in that speech today.
Previous political **careers** have foundered on the rocks of the V-F-W Convention:
The Republican majority in Congress and the Senate — the very viability of Secretary of Defense **Rumsfeld** — began to unravel at this convention two years ago — that was the venue for the first of Rumsfeld’s two references to Bush critics as Nazi Appeasers.
Prudence and judgement, demanded that Senator McCain tred lightly.
Instead he told the convention, quote:
“I suppose from my opponent’s vantage point, veterans concerns are just one more issue to be spun or worked to advantage. This would explain why he has also taken liberties with my position on the GI Bill…. As a political proposition, it would have much easier for me to have just signed on to what I considered flawed legislation. But the people of Arizona, and of all America, expect more from their representatives than that, and instead I sought a better bill. I’m proud to say that the result is a law that better serves our military, better serves military families, and better serves the interests of our country.”
Senator McCain spoke out **against** that very bill last May — on the asinine premise that the rewards to our heroes were so good that it didn’t encourage them to stay in the service.
Or perhaps **force** them.
More over, Senator McCain missed 10 of the 14 Senate votes on Iraq up to the middle of last year.
This year, he has missed them **all** — including one to honor the sacrifice of the fallen.
He has voted to table or oppose:
20 million dollars for veteran’s health care facilities.
322 million dollars for safety equipment for our troops in Iraq.
430 million dollars for veterans outpatient care.
One billion dollars in new equipment for the National Guard.
And, in separate votes: One billion, 500 million dollars in additional Veterans’ medical care, to be created by closing tax loopholes.
And one billion, **800** million dollars in additional Veterans’ medical care, to be created by closing tax loopholes.
And yet, Sir, you have the audacity to stand in front of the very Veterans you repeatedly and consistently **sell out**, and claim it is your **opponent** who has put politics first, and country second.
“Behind all of these claims and positions by Senator Obama lies the ambition to be president,” you said — with a straight face — today. “What’s less apparent is the judgment to be commander in chief. And in matters of national security, good judgment will be at a premium in the term of the next president — as we were all reminded ten days ago by events in the nation of Georgia.”
Senator, three points:
One — is your increasingly extremist and reactionary language towards Senator Obama **really** the method by which you want to try to achieve the Presidency — or perhaps split the country if you succeed?
Two — criticizing a man for having quote “the ambition to be president”? Seriously? You **do** realize you are **currently** running for president, as well, right? That either you also have “ambition to be president” or, what?, somebody’s **blackmailing** you into it?
And three — you might want to ask somebody — somebody other than say, your Foreign Policy Advisor, Randy Scheunemann — whether or not you are making a jackass out of yourself every time you bring up the conflict between Georgia and Russia.
The Georgians have paid Mr. Scheunemann and his companies 800-thousand dollars over the last several years to **lobby** for them.
It’s pretty clear the Georgians have **bought** Mr. Scheunemann.
And, Senator McCain, it sure as hell looks like the Georgians thought they had bought **you**.
When you had the tastelessness to paraphrase the rallying cry of 9/11 and say that we are now all Georgians, that nation’s President **called you out**…
He said that your words were very nice, but he needed action — not a verbal receipt from a lobbyist and his pet Senator!
Going back to the beginning of this sad 48 hours of paranoia from the McCain Campaign…
We have manager Rick Davis’s unfortunate letter to NBC News, about Andrea Mitchell’s reporting on the possibility that Senator McCain violated the so-called “Cone of Silence” for the Rick Warren Presidential Forum over the weekend.
The coverage of this detail, and that forum in general, is, to start with, overwrought.
But Mr. Davis has elevated them to the ridiculous.
As Nate Silver at the website ‘Five-Thirty-Eight-dot-com’ noted, Andrea’s reporting — reporting of what the Obama camp claimed — included two essential observations:
“McCain may not have been in the cone of silence”… and that he
“May have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama”.
Rick Davis writes to NBC: “The fact is that during Senator Obama’s segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed.”
As Silver astutely notes, for roughly the first half of Obama’s participation, his own campaign manager places McCain in a **car** — where he could have been made aware of the questions to Senator Obama. “In a motor vehicle,” Silver writes, “one may use the radio, a cellphone, a Blackberry, Bluetooth Wireless, a Slingbox, and perhaps a satellite TV feed. Whether McCain actually used any of those devices, we have no idea. But he absolutely had the ability to use them, which is all that Mitchell had reported.”
Silver also tripped over Mr. Davis’s strange observation that for roughly the second half of Obama’s participation, his own campaign places McCain, quote, “in a green room with no broadcast feed.”
Not a green room without cell service or internet, nor without a closed-circuit feed, nor, for that matter, without a guy running back from the audience with notes, written in crayon.
Rick Davis’s argument is, in short, illegitimate.
It is an attempt to pick a fight with the media, over the journalistic equivalent of chewing gum in class.
“This is irresponsible journalism and sadly, indicative of the level of objectivity we have witnessed at NBC News this election cycle,” he writes.
“We are concerned that your News Division is following MSNBC’s lead in abandoning non-partisan coverage of the Presidential race. We would like to request a meeting with you as soon as possible to discuss our deep concerns about the news standards and level of objectivity at NBC.”
What Davis is **really** saying here, of course, is that he wants **no** level of objectivity, that the only campaign he wants questioned is Obama, and that “partisan coverage” consists of questioning whether McCain or his campaign support the stage whispers branding Obama as somehow ‘foreign,’ or whether McCain is to be inoculated from all criticism by dint of his military service.
Senator McCain — did you pay **any** attention to the **Democratic** primaries?
Did you notice the hair-pulling frenzy of some of Senator Clinton’s supporters who could not face the possibility that her loss might have been **her** fault — or **theirs** — and thus it must be **ours**?
Do you remember the apoplexy of a washed up Republican operative named Ed Gillespie, writing a furious letter to NBC on behalf of President Bush?
Mr. Bush’s support has since dropped.
And **Senator Clinton’s** supporters have now relocated to such a degree that her “eighteen million voices” first re-counted themselves as “two million” and were then unable to get even 250 people to show up at a meeting.
The public sees through this nonsense, Senator — they see through it quickly.
NBC and MSNBC do not have the power to seriously impact an election.
If we **did** — Senator Pat Buchanan would already be serving **with** you.
Besides which, Senator, who in your camp thought it was a good idea to take a shot at NBC and MSNBC… **during the Olympics **on** NBC and MSNBC?!?
**During** the Olympics, Senator McCain, on which you have already run millions of dollars’ worth of McCain Campaign **commercials**… on NBC and MSNBC!?!
Senator, let me wrap this up.
You — and your campaign — need a serious and immediate attitude adjustment.
Despite what you may think, Senator McCain, this is not a coronation.
Despite how you have acted, Senator McCain, you have no automatic excuse to politicize anything you want.
Despite how you have whined, Senator McCain, you have no entitlement to only sycophantic, deceptive, **air-brushed** coverage in the media.
And despite how you have strutted, Senator McCain, you have no God-given right to the Presidency.
Let’s have an adult campaign here, in other words — and I am embarrassed to have to say this to a man who turns 72 at the end of this month — Senator, grow up!
Good night, and good luck.

Olbermann Challenges Obama To Do The Right Thing On FISA

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:19:37 -0400

Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on FISA and the Junior Senator from Illinois.
The Democratic leadership in the Senate, Republican knuckle-dragging in the same chamber, and the mediocre skills of whoever wrote the final version of the FISA bill, have combined to give Senator Barack Obama a second chance to make a first impression.
And he damned well better take it.
The Senate vote on this tortured and reckless piece of legislation has now been postponed until after the 4th of July break.
The Democrats, completing their FISA experience (a collective impression of Homer Simpson falling off a cliff and hitting every bramble on the way down), didn’t exactly plan this fortuitous delay.
Last week, the vote on their cave-in was imminent.
But, while arguing over a piece of housing legislation, about how many mortgage lenders can dance on the head of a pin, Republicans dithered so long about protecting their constituents — the banks — that the Senate calendar got backed up.
This, in turn, gave Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid some time to think.
There was one among his group, chosen to run for President, who had loudly assailed the idea of handing a get-out-of-jail-free card to corporations who had approached definitional fascism by breaking the law in concert with the Bush Administration.
But this Senator had suddenly realized, that to the large group of voters who operate with an information base that would make Cliffs Notes look like the encyclopedia, if, in the final vote, he stood against FISA, he would hand them a rock with which they could hit him over the head, a rock wrapped up in a piece of paper reading:
“Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror stop.”
Thus, Senator Obama, was born your first second chance.
Senator Reid was kind enough to help you out by composing an amendment that would keep FISA — which you rightly endorse — but strips out the telecom immunity, which you rightly oppose.
It’s a protest — a decidedly lame one — but in our daily world of political transactions, voting for the amendment when it has no chance of passing and has been in essence constructed as pure Obama CYA — that is a petty crime.
Whether it will do more to harm your premise of “new politics” than to your credibility as an immunity-opponent, is for you, Senator, to assess. And live with.
It would be sweet to have a pure, politics-free president, but the last of those retired from office in 1797.
And while we’ve all quoted the farewell address of “The Father Of Our Nation” for 211 years now, nobody seems to want to remember that its point was to urge his children that: whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t form political parties — some day they will kill you.
Anyway, Senator, your problem here isn’t the backlash about telecom immunity, and it isn’t really about your political fluidity on the FISA bill.
Your problem is what happens even if this plays out according to plan next week:
1) You vote for the anti-immunity amendment.
2) The anti-immunity amendment fails.
3) You vote for the FISA legislation.
And 4) The FISA legislation passes.
Oh, and, 5) Senator: The Republicans still run against you with the ‘elections-for-dummies ‘ message: “Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop.”
Because, inside the obscenity that was Charlie Black’s comment about how a terrorist attack in this country would be good — good for his boy McCain’s chances for election…Inside the inhuman calculation that Benazhir Bhutto did not die in vain — she helped McCain in the New Hampshire primary…There is a sad and cynical reality.
The Republicans can scare some of the people all of the time, and they can scare all of the people some of the time.
This is all they are right now.
Nobody ever said it better than did Aaron Sorkin in his script for the movie “The American President”:
“Whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson (and for Bob Rumson, read “John McCain”) is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it.”
Republicans, with almost no exceptions, have no true credibility on counter-terrorism, no track record of prevention or amelioration, and their president can’t even remember the name of the skyscraper he claims to have saved in Los Angeles.
And yet, somehow, the Republicans have managed to convince the public that it doesn’t matter that Mr. Bush had already completed 22 percent of his first term, when he, his administration, and his party, failed so catastrophically on 9/11.
The President and party who were at fault, were magically transformed into the President and party who would never let it happen again.
An unjust… repellant… nefarious, trick. But, politically, rather a neat trick.
Senator, the Republicans are going to paint you as soft on terror no matter how you vote on FISA. Or how you vote on the Telecom Immunity Amendment. Or on the next farm bill.
Last week it was Grover Norquist calling you “John Kerry with a tan.” By November 1st, it’ll be Dick Cheney calling you “Osama Bin Laden with a tan.”
When you announced your support of this latest FISA bill (with or without the telecom immunity), the Republicans actually raced to get out a press release accusing you of flip-flopping.
You shared the exact same position, on which they are running their entire campaign and they criticized you anyway!
So, Senator, from their point of view, they think they’ve got you boxed in.
Vote for FISA and you’ve contradicted yourself.
Vote against FISA and it’s “Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop.”
Vote for FISA and against immunity, and it’s political expediency, and Democrats soft on terror, and “Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop.”
This is a problem, Senator.
Because, flatly, of all the measures that can be taken to aid our damaged nation, and our de-valued Constitution, the first, if not the foremost, is not blocking telecom immunity, but making sure no Republican is in the White House past noon next January 20th.
Of all the remedial efforts against the Bush administration’s high crimes and misdemeanors, and of all the prophylactic steps against further inroads against the freedoms of the citizens of this nation and the rights of everyone else, the primary step must still come to us through the prism of politics.
Would that it were otherwise. But it ain’t.
Frankly, Senator, this political tight-rope act you’ve tried on FISA the last two weeks, which from the outside seems to have been intended to increase the chances of your election, probably hasn’t helped that chance in the slightest.
There is, fortunately, a possible — a most unexpected — solution.
Your second second chance.
Since the final version of the FISA bill was passed down from on high, John Dean has been reading it, and re-reading it, and cross-referencing it with other relevant law, and thinking.
Something bothered him about it.
Or, more correctly, something didn’t bother him about it.
Turns out lawyers at the ACLU have been doing the same thing for the last ten days.
John compared notes with them, and will be devoting his column at “Find Law” this week, to this unlikely conclusion:
The Republicans who wrote most of this bill at Mr. Bush’s urging, managed to immunize the telecoms from civil suits.
But not from criminal prosecution.
Senator, here is John Dean’s summary of his findings, which he sent me this morning.
“It is clear not only from the language of the bill (which must be read in the context of other, related statutes to be clearly understood), but also from the legislative history, that there is absolutely no criminal immunity for anyone in these FISA amendments.”
Moreover, Senator, it seems as if a lot of people have known this, for a long time.
During the January 24th, 2008 debate in the Senate, Senator Brownback noted, “The immunity provisions would not apply to the Government or Government officials. Cases against the Government regarding the alleged programs would continue. And the provisions would apply only to civil and not criminal cases.”
In fact, Senator, just last week, Attorney General Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence McConnell sent a letter, for the record, to House Speaker Pelosi emphasizing that the liability protection, quote, “does not immunize any criminal conduct.”
And if you ask, Senator, about the President responding to all this by belching out a series of pardons or a blanket pardon to those who broke the law on his behalf, Dean has you covered here, too…
It… “would require acceptance by them of the fact that they had broken the law, and thus be an admission of guilt.
“And a blanket pardon would be an admission by Bush that his war on terror has been a lawless undertaking, operating beyond the bounds of the Constitution and statutes that check the powers of the president and the executive branch.
“It would be an admission by Bush, too, of his own criminal culpability (which is why Nixon refused to grant his aides a pardon.)
Senator — sometimes it is better to be lucky, than good.
Keep your eye on the wording of the legislation to make sure the Republicans don’t realize its flaws.
Then vote for the amendment to strip telecom immunity out of the FISA bill.
Then after that fails, vote for the FISA bill, if that’s your final answer.
Then the minute the president has signed the FISA bill, you announce that you voted for it because it renews FISA and because it permits a bigger prize than just civil suits; that it allows for criminal prosecution of past illegal eavesdropping.
Say, loudly, that your understanding of this bill is such, that if you are elected, your Attorney General will begin a full-scale criminal investigation of the telecom companies who collaborated with President Bush in eavesdropping on Americans.
And mention — oh by the way — that your Attorney General will subpoena such records, notes, e-mail, data, and testimony, from any and all Bush Administration officials, FBI or CIA personnel, or any members of the Executive Branch, who may have as much as breathed in the general direction of these nefarious acts of domestic spying at Mr. Bush’s behest.
Wait — you say there’s a political hit waiting for you there too? Another “Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop.”?
Actually, Senator, you’ve already gone down this road, when you spoke to my colleague, Will Bunch, of the Philadelphia Daily News, on April 14th of this year.
He asked about the possibility of criminal investigations of the 43rd President and his henchmen.
“What I would want to do,” you told him, “is have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out, are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that, because we don’t have access to all the material right now.”
“You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”
“Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in cover-ups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is: nobody above the law. And I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.”
Make this clear, Senator.
You’ve already taken the political hit from the Right, for saying you’d seek to strip out, or rescind immunity. You’ve already taken the political hit from the Left, for saying you’d vote for the FISA bill even with the immunity. You’ve paid the political price in advance.
Now buy yourself — and those who have most ardently supported you — something worth more than just class action suits against Verizon.
Explain that you are standing aside on civil immunity, not just for political expediency, but for a greater and more tangible good — the holding to account, of the most-corrupt, the most dangerous, and the most anti-democracy presidential administration in our long history.
Of course, if you disagree with this interpretation — if you think the FISA bill doesn’t have the giant loophole, or if you don’t think you, as president, would be ready to support criminal prosecution of… well, criminals — then your duty is clear.
Vote against the FISA bill, if it still carries that immunity.
The Republicans are going to call you the names any which way, Senator.
They’re going to cry regardless, Senator.
And as the old line goes: give them something to cry about.
Good night, and good luck.

The Unimportance of Being John McCain

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:00:52 -0400

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on Senator John McCain�s conclusion that it�s �not too important� when American forces come home from Iraq.
Thoughts, offered more in sorrow, than in anger.
For two full days now, the Senator and his supporters have been outraged at what they see as the subtraction of context from this extraordinary remark.
This is, sadly, the excuse of our time, for everything.
Still. If the Senator claims truncation, we will correct that, first.
�A lot of people,� Matt Lauer began, �now say the surge is working.�
�Anybody who knows the facts on the ground say that,� the Senator interjected.
�If it�s now working, Senator,� Matt continued, �do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?�
�No,� answered McCain. �But that�s not too important. What�s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany.
�That�s all fine. American casualties and the ability to withdraw. We will be able to withdraw. General Petraeus is going to tell us in July when he thinks we are. But the key to it is we don�t want any more Americans in harm�s way.
�And that way they will be safe, and serve our country, and come home with honor and victory - not in defeat, which is what Senator Obama�s proposal would have done. And I�m proud of them, and they�re doing a great job. And we are succeeding. And it�s fascinating that Senator Obama still doesn�t realize it.�
And there is the context of what Senator McCain said.
Well� not quite, Senator.
The full context is that the Iraq you see is a figment of your imagination.
This is not a war about �honor and victory,� sir.
This is a war you, and the President you support and seek to succeed, conned this nation into.
Yes, sir.
You.
Of the prospect of war in Iraq, you said, quote,
�I believe that success will be fairly easy.�
John McCain� September 24th, 2002.
�I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time.�
John McCain� September 29th, 2002.
Of the ouster of Saddam and the Baathists:
�There�s no doubt in my mind that once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators.�
John McCain� March 24th, 2003.
Asked, about a long-term commitment in Iraq, quote, �are you talking about something in terms of South Korea, for instance, where you would expect U.S. troops to be in Iraq for decades?�
�No,� you answered. �I don�t think decades, but I think years. A little straight talk, I think years. And I hope that we can gradually reduce that presence.�
John McCain� March 18th, 2004.
You were asked about the troops, and the future.
�I would hope that we could bring them all home. I would hope that we would probably, leave, some military advisers, as we have in other countries, to help them with their training and equipment and that kind of stuff.
��I think one of our big problems has been the fact that many Iraqis resent American military presence. And I don�t pretend to know exactly Iraqi public opinion. But as soon as we can reduce our visibility as much as possible, the better I think it is going to be.�
John McCain� January 31st. 2005
When a speaker at your town hall, five months ago, referenced the President�s forecast that we might stay in Iraq for 50 years, you cut him off.
�Make it a hundred! We�ve been in Japan for 60 years. We�ve been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That�s fine by me��
John McCain� January 3rd, 2008.
And your forecast of your hypothetical first term.
�By January, 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq war has been won.�
John McCain� May 15th, 2008.
That, Senator McCain, is context.
You have attested to: a fairly easy success; an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time; in which we would be welcomed as liberators; which you assured us would not require our troops stay for decades but merely for years; from which we could bring them all home, since you noted many Iraqis resent American military presence; in which all those troops coming home will also stay there, not being injured, for a hundred years; but most will be back by 2013; and the timing of their return, is� not� that� important.
That, Senator McCain, is context.
And that, Senator McCain, is madness.
The Government Accountability Office just released a study Tuesday that concludes that one out of every ten soldiers sent to Iraq, takes with them medical problems �severe enough to significantly limit their ability to fight.�
In five years, we have now sent 43,000 of them to war even though they were already wounded.
And when they come home, Is. Not. That. Important.
Jalal al Din al Sagir, a member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, and Ali al Adeeb, of the rival Dawa Political Party, gave a series of interviews last week about the particulars of this country�s demand for a �Status of Forces� agreement with Iraq � a treaty which Mr. Bush does not intend to show Congress before he signs it.
The Iraqi politicians say the treaty demands Iraq�s consent to the establishment of nearly double the number of U-S military bases in Iraq � from about 30, to 58, and from temporary, to permanent.
Those will be American men and women who must, of necessity, staff these bases - staff them, in Mr. McCain�s MC Escher dream world in which our people can all come home while they stay there for a hundred years but they�ll be back by 2013.
And when they come home, Is. Not. That. Important.
Last year, a 20-year old soldier from the Bronx, on the day of his re-deployment to a second tour in Iraq, said he just couldn�t face the smell of burning flesh again. So, Jonathan Aponte paid a hit man 500 dollars� to shoot him in the knee.
Mount Sinai Hospital in New York reported treating a patient identifying himself as another Iraq-bound soldier, who claimed he had accidentally swallowed a pen at the bus station. No one doubted his story until examinations proved there was a second pen in his stomach bearing the logo of Greyhound Bus Lines.
In 2006, says his sister, a 24-year old Army Specialist from Washington State, on the eve of his second deployment, strapped a pack full of tools to his back, and then jumped off the roof of his house, injuring his spine.
And when they come home � or more correctly, all those like them who did not risk death or disability to avoid going back � when they come home, Is. Not. That. Important.
You�ve sold them all out, Senator.
You.
You, whose sacrifice for this country was as all-encompassing and as horrible as the rest of us can only imagine in our darkest moments.
You, who survived, so that you could make America a better place where young men did not have to go and die in pointless wars or be maimed or be held prisoner or have to hire hit-men to shoot them in the knee because that couldn�t be worse.
You, who should know better.
Where, Senator, is the man who once said �veterans hate war more than anyone else, because veterans know, because veterans know these brave Americans, and others, know, that there is nothing more painful than the loss of a comrade. Where is he, sir?
Where is the man who described that ineffable truth?
Oh, so long ago you touched the essence of the reality of Iraq. Your comments about your lost comrades, yesterday.
The men and women in Iraq, today, Senator � they are your comrades, too.
And you are condemning them to die.
To die, for your misdirections, for Mr. Bush�s lies � for whoever makes the money off building 58 permanent American bases and all the weapons and all the bullets and all the wiring so costly and so slip-shod that it electrocutes our comrades as they step, not to fight freedom�s enemies, but into the shower at the base.
That, Senator, that is context.
It is an easy thing to dismiss Senator McCain as a sad and befuddled figure, already challenging for some kind of campaign record for malaprops.
Just yesterday in Philadelphia he answered Senator Obama, not by defending or explaining his own �not that important� remark, but by seizing upon Obama�s �bitter� remark - or trying to.
Obama had foolishly said that some, in despair, in small towns, cling to their religion and their guns.
Senator McCain vowed he�d go to those towns and tell them, �I don�t agree with Senator Obama that they cling to their religion and the Constitution because they�re bitter.�
It was hard not to dismiss with a laugh, Senator McCain, or any Republican, for even accidentally implying that he�s clung to the Constitution � not after the last seven years.
It was hard, the day before, not to become almost bemused when the Senator tried to say he would veto every single bill with earmarks, but wound up, instead, vowing �I will veto every single beer.�
It was hard, this week, not to laugh at how Senator McCain could offer any serious defense against the accusation that he is running for President Bush�s third term, when a 2006 interview suddenly surfaced in which McCain said he would consider Dick Cheney for a position in a McCain administration.
�I don�t know if I would want him as Vice President. He and I have the same strengths. But to serve in other capacities? Hell, yeah.�
These are all very funny, in a macabre yet unthreatening way.
And then one remembers Senator McCain�s inability to separate Sunni and Shia, or his insistence that Iran is training Al-Qaeda for service in Iraq, and then being corrected about it, and then saying the same thing again anyway.
And then one is, inevitably, drawn back again to the overlooked substance of yesterday�s remark�
�If (the surge) is now working, Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?�
�No.�
No?
The surge is working and even that still tells Senator McCain nothing about when we can ransom our soldiers?
Wasn�t that the ultimate purpose of the surge? To get them out?
If we cannot tell � if McCain cannot even guess � doesn�t that, by definition, mean� the surge isn�t working?
And ultimately we are drawn back to the �not� too� important� remark, in its full context:
The context of the kaleidoscope of confused rhetoric, and endless non sequiturs, and mutually exclusive conclusions � and what they add up to: a veritable tragedy, a microcosm of the American tragedy that is Iraq, a tragedy of a man who himself will never understand �the context.�
Your tragedy, Senator McCain?
No. I�m sorry.
This tragedy is of Justin Mixon of Bogalusa, Louisiana.
And it�s of Christopher McCarthy of Virginia Beach.
It�s of Quincy Green of El Paso, and Joshua Waltenbaugh of Ford City, PA.
The tragedy is of Shane Duffy of Taunton, Mass, and Jonathan Emard of Mesquite, Texas.
It�s of Cody Legg of Escondido in California, and David Hurst of Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
The tragedy is of Thomas Duncan, III, of Rowlett, Texas, and Tyler Pickett of Saratoga, Wyoming.
And who are they, Senator?
They are ten Americans who have died in Iraq since the first of this month. There are four more. The Defense Department has not yet identified the others.
And while you, Senator, may ask for all the context you can get, those ten men will never know any of it.
Because the true context here, is that if you could ask those American war heroes, or the family and the friends that loved them, if they have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq�
They could rightly say, �No. But that�s. Not. That. Important.�
Good night, and good luck.

Clinton, you invoked a political nightmare

Fri, 23 May 2008 23:18:11 -0400
>
Asked if her continuing fight for the nomination against Senator Obama hurts the Democratic party, Sen. Hillary Clinton replied, "I don't. Because again, I've been around long enough. You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just don't understand it. You know, there's lots of speculation about why it is. �
The comments were recorded and we showed them to you earlier and they are online as we speak.
She actually said those words.
Those words, Senator?
You actually invoked the nightmare of political assassination.
You actually invoked the specter of an inspirational leader, at the seeming moment of triumph, for himself and a battered nation yearning to breathe free, silenced forever.
You actually used the word "assassination" in the middle of a campaign with a loud undertone of racial hatred - and gender hatred - and political hatred.
You actually used the word "assassination" in a time when there is a fear, unspoken but vivid and terrible, that our again-troubled land and fractured political landscape might target a black man running for president.
Or a white man.
Or a white woman!
You actually used those words, in this America, Senator, while running against an African-American against whom the death threats started the moment he declared his campaign?
You actually used those words, in this America, Senator, while running to break your "greatest glass ceiling" and claiming there are people who would do anything to stop you?
You!
Senator - never mind the implications of using the word "assassination" in any connection to Senator Obama...
What about you?
You cannot say this!
The references, said her spokesperson, were not, in any way, weighted.
The allusions, said Mo Uh-leathee, are, "...historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer and any reading into it beyond that would be inaccurate and outrageous."
I'm sorry.
There is no inaccuracy.
Not for a moment does any rational person believe Senator Clinton is actually hoping for the worst of all political calamities.
Yet the outrage belongs, not to Senator Clinton or her supporters, but to every other American.
Firstly, she has previously bordered on the remarks she made today...
Then swerved back from them and the awful skid they represented.
She said, in an off-camera interview with Time on March 6, "Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June, also in California. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual. We will see how it unfolds as we go forward over the next three to four months."
In retrospect, we failed her when we did not call her out, for that remark, dry and only disturbing, in a magazine's pages. But somebody obviously warned her of the danger of that rhetoric:
After the Indiana primary, on May 7, she told supporters at a Washington hotel:
"Sometimes you gotta calm people down a little bit. But if you look at successful presidential campaigns, my husband did not get the nomination until June of 1992. I remember tragically when Senator Kennedy won California near the end of that process."
And at Shepherdstown, West Virginia, on the same day, she referenced it again:
"You know, I remember very well what happened in the California primary in 1968 as, you know, Senator Kennedy won that primary."
On March 6th she had said "assassinated."
By May 7 she had avoided it. Today... she went back to an awful well. There is no good time to recall the awful events of June 5th, 1968, of Senator Bobby Kennedy, happy and alive - perhaps, for the first time since his own brother's death in Dallas in 1963... Galvanized to try to lead this nation back from one of its darkest eras... Only to fall victim to the same surge that took that brother, and Martin Luther King... There is no good time to recall this. But certainly to invoke it, two weeks before the exact 40th anniversary of the assassination, is an insensitive and heartless thing.
And certainly to invoke it, three days after the awful diagnosis, and heart-breaking prognosis, for Senator Ted Kennedy, is just as insensitive, and just as heartless. And both actions, open a door wide into the soul of somebody who seeks the highest office in this country, and through that door shows something not merely troubling, but frightening. And politically inexplicable.
What, Senator, do you suppose would happen if you withdrew from the campaign, and Senator Obama formally became the presumptive nominee, and then suddenly left the scene? It doesn't even have to be the �dark curse upon the land� you mentioned today, Senator. Nor even an issue of health. He could simply change his mind... Or there could unfold that perfect-storm scandal your people have often referenced, even predicted. Maybe he could get a better offer from some other, wiser, country. What happens then, Senator? You are not allowed back into the race? Your delegates and your support vanish? The Democrats don't run anybody for President?
What happens, of course, is what happened when the Democrats' vice presidential choice, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had to withdraw from the ticket, in 1972 after it proved he had not been forthcoming about previous mental health treatments. George McGovern simply got another vice president.
Senator, as late as the late summer of 1864 the Republicans were talking about having a second convention, to withdraw Abraham Lincoln's re-nomination and choose somebody else because until Sherman took Atlanta in September it looked like Lincoln was going to lose to George McClellan.
You could theoretically suspend your campaign, Senator.
There's plenty of time and plenty of historical precedent, Senator, in case you want to come back in, if something bad should happen to Senator Obama. Nothing serious, mind you.
It's just like you said, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."
Since those awful words in Sioux Falls, and after the condescending, buck-passing statement from her spokesperson, Senator Clinton has made something akin to an apology, without any evident recognition of the true trauma she has inflicted.
"I was discussing the Democratic primary history, and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged California in June in 1992 and 1968," she said in Brandon, South Dakota. "I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That's a historic fact.
"The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy. I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive, I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever."
"My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to and I'm honored to hold Senator Kennedy's seat in the United States Senate in the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family. Thanks. Not a word about the inappropriateness of referencing assassination.
Not a word about the inappropriateness of implying - whether it was intended or not - that she was hanging around waiting for somebody to try something terrible.
Not a word about Senator Obama.
Not a word about Senator McCain.
Not: I'm sorry...
Not: I apologize...
Not: I blew it...
Not: please forgive me.
God knows, Senator, in this campaign, this nation has had to forgive you, early and often...
And despite your now traditional position of the offended victim, the nation has forgiven you.
We have forgiven you your insistence that there have been widespread calls for you to end your campaign, when such calls had been few. We have forgiven you your misspeaking about Martin Luther King's relative importance to the Civil Rights movement.
We have forgiven you your misspeaking about your under-fire landing in Bosnia.
We have forgiven you insisting Michigan's vote wouldn't count and then claiming those who would not count it were Un-Democratic.
We have forgiven you pledging to not campaign in Florida and thus disenfranchise voters there, and then claim those who stuck to those rules were as wrong as those who defended slavery or denied women the vote.
We have forgiven you the photos of Osama Bin Laden in an anti-Obama ad...
We have forgiven you fawning over the fairness of Fox News while they were still calling you a murderer.
We have forgiven you accepting Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement and then laughing as you described his "deathbed conversion."
We have forgiven you quoting the electoral predictions of Boss Karl Rove.
We have forgiven you the 3 a.m. Phone Call commercial.
We have forgiven you President Clinton's disparaging comparison of the Obama candidacy to Jesse Jackson's.
We have forgiven you Geraldine Ferraro's national radio interview suggesting Obama would not still be in the race had he been a white man.
We have forgiven you the dozen changing metrics and the endless self-contradictions of your insistence that your nomination is mathematically probable rather than a statistical impossibility.
We have forgiven you your declaration of some primary states as counting and some as not.
We have forgiven you exploiting Jeremiah Wright in front of the editorial board of the lunatic-fringe Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
We have forgiven you exploiting William Ayers in front of the debate on ABC.
We have forgiven you for boasting of your "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"...
We have even forgiven you repeatedly praising Senator McCain at Senator Obama's expense, and your own expense, and the Democratic ticket's expense.
But Senator, we cannot forgive you this.
"You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."
We cannot forgive you this -- not because it is crass and low and unfeeling and brutal.
This is unforgivable, because this nation's deepest shame, its most enduring horror, its most terrifying legacy, is political assassination.
Lincoln.
Garfield.
McKinley.
Kennedy.
Martin Luther King.
Robert Kennedy.
And, but for the grace of the universe or the luck of the draw, Reagan, Ford, Truman, Nixon, Andrew Jackson, both Roosevelts, even George Wallace.
The politics of this nation is steeped enough in blood, Senator Clinton, you cannot and must not invoke that imagery! Anywhere! At any time!
And to not appreciate, immediately - to still not appreciate tonight - just what you have done... is to reveal an incomprehension of the America you seek to lead.
This, Senator, is too much.
Because a senator - a politician - a person - who can let hang in mid-air the prospect that she might just be sticking around in part, just in case the other guy gets shot - has no business being, and no capacity to be, the President of the United States.
Good night and good luck.

Shut the hell up

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:46:34 -0400
In an astoundingly ignorant interview with The Politico�s Mike Allen Tuesday, President Bush insinuated that electing a Democrat in November would lead to another attack on America, and revealed that he made the ultimate sacrifice by giving up golf shortly after the start of the Iraq War � the timing of which he lied about. Naturally, Keith ripped into him tonight � with all the anger and passion you�ve come to expect from a Special Comment � for continuing this despicable fear-mongering, and for failing to understand what true sacrifice is.

�Download�|�Play �Download�|�Play

Do your part in telling President Bush to �shut the hell up�: Digg It!

�Mr. President,� he was asked, �you haven�t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?

�Yes,� began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans � on our history.

�It really is. I don�t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as � to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.�

Golf, Sir?

Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq?

Do you think these families, Mr. Bush - their lives blighted forever � care about you playing golf?

Do you think, Sir, they care about you?

You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed.

Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you gave up golf?

Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you didn�t give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war.

Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you didn�t even give up talking about Iraq - a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?

Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn�t give up� your

4,000 dead Americans and your response� was to stop playing golf!

Golf.

Not �gulf� - golf.

Sen. Clinton, This is not a campaign strategy. This is a suicide pact.

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:00:52 -0400

Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on the presidential campaign of the Junior Senator from New York.
By way of necessary preface, President and Senator Clinton — and the Senator’s mother, and the Senator’s brother — were of immeasurable support to me at the moments when these very commentaries were the focus of the most surprise, the most uncertainty, and the most anger. My gratitude to them is abiding.
Also, I am not here endorsing Senator Obama’s nomination, nor suggesting it is inevitable.
Thus I have fought with myself over whether or not to say anything.
Senator, as it has reached its apex in their tone-deaf, arrogant, and insensitive reaction to the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro… your own advisors are slowly killing your chances to become President.
Senator, their words, and your own, are now slowly killing the chances for any Democrat to become President.
In your tepid response to this Ferraro disaster, you may sincerely think you are disenthralling an enchanted media, and righting an unfair advance bestowed on Senator Obama.
You may think the matter has closed with Representative Ferraro’s bitter, almost threatening resignation.
But in fact, Senator, you are now campaigning, as if Barack Obama were the Democrat, and you� were the Republican.
As Shakespeare wrote, Senator — that way� madness� lies.
You have missed a critical opportunity to do… what was right.
No matter what Ms. Ferraro now claims, no one took her comments out of context.
She had made them on at least three separate occasions, then twice more on television this morning.
Just hours ago, on NBC Nightly News, she denied she had made the remarks in an interview — only at a paid political speech.
In fact, the first time she spoke them, was ten days before the California newspaper published them… not in a speech, but in a radio interview.
On February 26th, quoting…
“If Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this, as a potential real problem for Hillary? If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position that he’s in? Absolutely not.”
The context was inescapable.
Two minutes earlier, a member of Senator Clinton’s Finance Committee, one of her “Hill-Raisers,” had bemoaned the change in allegiance by super-delegate John Lewis from Clinton to Obama, and the endorsement of Obama by Senator Dodd.
“I look at these guys doing it,” she had said, “and I have to tell you, it’s the guys sticking together.”
A minute after the “color” remarks, she was describing herself as having been chosen for the 1984 Democratic ticket, purely as a woman politician, purely to make history.
She was, in turn, making a blind accusation of sexism — and dismissing Senator Obama’s candidacy as nothing more than an Equal Opportunity stunt.
The next day she repeated her comments to a reporter from the newspaper in Torrance, California.
“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
And when this despicable statement — ugly in its overtones, laughable in its weak grip of facts, and moronic in the historical context — when it floats outward from the Clinton campaign like a poison cloud, what do the advisors have their candidate do?
Do they have Senator Clinton herself compare the remark to Al Campanis talking on Nightline… on Jackie Robinson Day… about how blacks lacked the necessities to become baseball executives, while she points out that Barack Obama has not gotten his 1600 delegates as part of some kind of Affirmative Action plan?
Do they have Senator Clinton note that her own brief period in elected office, is as irrelevant to the issue of judgment as is Senator Obama’s�
�while she points out that FDR had served only six years as a governor and state Senator before he became President?
Or that Teddy Roosevelt had four-and-a-half years before the White House?
Or that Woodrow Wilson had two years and six weeks?
Or Richard Nixon� fourteen… and Calvin Coolidge 25?
Do these advisors have Senator Clinton invoke Samantha Power — gone by sunrise after she used the word “monster” — and have Senator Clinton say, “this is how I police my campaign and this is what I stand for,” while she fires former Congresswoman Ferraro from any role the campaign?
No.
Somebody tells her that simply disagreeing with and rejecting the remarks is sufficient.
And she should then call, “regrettable”, words that should make any Democrat retch.
And that she should then try to twist them, first into some pox-on-both-your-houses plea to ’stick to the issues,’ and then to let her campaign manager try to bend them beyond all recognition, into Senator Obama’s fault.
And thus these advisers give Congresswoman Ferraro nearly a week in which to send Senator Clinton’s campaign back into the vocabulary… of David Duke.
“Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world, you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up.
“Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white.
“How’s that?”
How’s that?
Apart from sounding exactly like Rush Limbaugh attacking the black football quarterback Donovan McNabb?
Apart from sounding exactly like what Ms. Ferraro said about another campaign, nearly twenty years ago?
Quote:
“President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people don’t ask Jackson tough questions because of his race. And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his “radical” views, “if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.”
So… apart from sounding like insidious racism that is at least two decades old?
Apart from rendering ridiculous, Senator Clinton’s shell-game about choosing Obama as Vice President?
Apart from this evening’s resignation letter?
“I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign.
“The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you.”
Apart from all that?
Well. It sounds as if those advisors want their campaign to be associated with those words, and the cheap� ignorant� vile� racism that underlies every syllable…
And that Geraldine Ferraro has just gone free-lance.
Senator Clinton:
This is not a campaign strategy.
This is a suicide pact.
This week alone, your so-called strategists have declared that Senator Obama has not yet crossed the “commander-in-chief threshold”�
But — he might be your choice to be Vice President, even though a quarter of the previous sixteen Vice Presidents have become commander-in-chief during the greatest kind of crisis this nation can face: a mid-term succession.
But you’d only pick him if he crosses that threshold by the time of the convention.
But if he does cross that threshold by the time of the convention, he will only have done so sufficiently enough to become Vice President, not President.
Senator, if the serpentine logic of your so-called advisors were not bad enough, now, thanks to Geraldine Ferraro, and your campaign’s initial refusal to break with her, and your new relationship with her — now more disturbing still with her claim that she can now “speak for herself” about her vision of Senator Obama as some kind of embodiment of a quota…
If you were to seek Obama as a Vice President, it would be, to Ms. Ferraro, some kind of social engineering gesture, some kind of racial make-good.
Do you not see, Senator?
To Senator Clinton’s supporters, to her admirers, to her friends for whom she is first choice, and her friends for whom she is second choice, she is still letting herself be perceived as standing next to, and standing by, racial divisiveness and blindness�
And worst yet, after what President Clinton said during the South Carolina primary, comparing the Obama and Jesse Jackson campaigns — a disturbing, but only borderline remark, after what some in the black community have perceived as a racial undertone to the “3 A-M” ad… a disturbing — but only borderline interpretation…
And after that moment’s hesitation in her own answer on 60 Minutes about Obama’s religion — a disturbing, but only borderline vagueness…
After those precedents, there are those who see a pattern… false, or true.
After those precedents, there are those who see an intent… false, or true.
After those precedents, there are those who see the Clinton campaign’s anything-but-benign neglect of this Ferraro catastrophe — falsely or truly — as a desire to hear the kind of casual prejudice which still haunts this society voiced… and to not distance the campaign from it.
To not distance you from it, Senator!
To not distance you… from that which you as a woman, and Senator Obama as an African-American, should both know and feel with the deepest of personal pain!
Which you should both fight with all you have!
Which you should both insure, has no place in this contest!
This, Senator Clinton, is your campaign, and it is your name.
Grab the reins back from whoever has led you to this precipice, before it is too late.
Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth.
Your only reaction has been to disagree, reject, and to call it regrettable.
Her only reaction has been to brand herself as the victim, resign from your committee, and insist she will continue to speak.
Unless you say something definitive, Senator, the former Congresswoman is speaking with your approval.
You must remedy this.
And you must… reject… and denounce… Geraldine Ferraro.
Good night, and good luck.

President Bush Is A Liar And A Fascist

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:40:05 -0500

Democrats in the House of Representatives are closing the shop down tonight, until a week from Monday… leaving President Bush twisting slowly in a wind of his own creation.
Our third story on the Countdown: the FISA bill — and the retroactive immunity for the telecom giants that helped Mr. Bush illegally eavesdrop on Americans — will thus just sit there, unacted upon, not even a temporary extension which the Republicans and Mr. Bush refused, despite the President’s threats that if the bill isn’t passed by Saturday, there’d be a breakdown in counter-terrorism surveillance and plagues of locusts and stuff.
A Special Comment, in a moment.
First the details.
House Democrats, in essence, calling the Republicans’ bluff.
They staged a walkout at mid-day… led by John Boehner, who in one act managed the cheesy political theater, and managed to get out just as Representatives were to vote on Contempt of Congress citations against Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten.
That the Republicans just happened to walk to a stand-full of microphones… pure coincidence.
The President had started all this, with his now-daily message of fear, with what he apparently sees as a threat, to postpone his scheduled trip to Africa.
The House should not leave Washington without passing the Senate bill. I am scheduled to leave tomorrow for a long-planned trip to five African nations. Moments ago, my staff informed the House leadership that I’m prepared to delay my departure, and stay in Washington with them, if it will help them complete their work on this critical bill. The lives of countless Americans depend on our ability to monitor terrorist communications.
Having lost, he now says he’s going to Africa — another threat, or promise, unfulfilled.
Now, as promised, a Special Comment.
A part of what I will say, was said here on January 31st.
Unfortunately it is both sadder and truer now, than it was, then.
“Who’s to blame?” Mr. Bush also said this afternoon, “Look, these folks in Congress passed a good bill late last summer… The problem is, they let the bill expire. My attitude is: if the bill was good enough then, why not pass the bill again?”
You know, like The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Or Executive Order 90-66.
Or The Alien and Sedition Acts.
Or Slavery.
Mr. Bush, you say that our ability to track terrorist threats will be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger.
Yet you have weakened that ability!
You have subjected us, your citizens, to that greater danger!
This, Mr. Bush, is simple enough even for you to understand.
For the moment, at least, thanks to some true patriots in the House, and your own stubbornness, you have tabled telecom immunity, and the FISA act.
You.
By your own terms and your definitions — you have just sided with the terrorists.
You got to have this law or we’re all going to die.
But practically speaking, you vetoed this law.
It is bad enough, sir, that you were demanding an Ex Post Facto law, which could still clear the AT&Ts and the Verizons from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.
But when you demanded it again during the State of the Union address, you wouldn’t even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared.
“The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.” Believed?
Don’t you know?
Don’t you even have the guts Dick Cheney showed in admitting they did collaborate with you?
Does this endless presidency of loopholes and fine print extend even here?
If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business — come out and say it!
There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend.
You’re a fascist — get them to print you a t-shirt with “fascist” on it!
What else is this but fascism?
Did you see Mark Klein on this newscast last November?
Mark Klein was the AT&T Whistleblower, the one who explained in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood I-T desk, how he personally attached all AT&T circuits — everything — carrying every one of your phone calls, every one of your e-mails, every bit of your web browsing into a secure room, room number 641-A at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it.
Not some of it, not just the international part of it, certainly not just the stuff some spy — a spy both patriotic and telepathic — might able to divine had been sent or spoken by — or to — a terrorist.
Everything!
Every time you looked at a naked picture.
Every time you bid on eBay.
Every time you phoned in a donation to a Democrat.
“My thought was,” Mr. Klein told us last November, “George Orwell’s 1984. And here I am, forced to connect the big brother machine.”
And if there’s one thing we know about Big Brother, Mr. Bush, is that he is — you are — a liar.
“This Saturday at midnight,” you said today, “legislation authorizing intelligence professionals to quickly and effectively monitor terrorist communications will expire. If Congress does not act by that time, our ability to find out who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying, and what they are planning, will be compromised…You said that “the lives of countless Americans depend” on you getting your way.
This is crap.
And you sling it, with an audacity and a speed unrivaled even by the greatest political felons of our history.
Richard Clarke — you might remember him, sir, he was one of the counter-terror pro’s you inherited from President Clinton, before you ran the professionals out of government in favor of your unreality-based reality — Richard Clarke wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Let me be clear: Our ability to track and monitor terrorists overseas would not cease should the Protect America Act expire. If this were true, the president would not threaten to terminate any temporary extension with his veto pen. All surveillance currently occurring would continue even after legislative provisions lapsed because authorizations issued under the act are in effect up to a full year.”
You are a liar, Mr. Bush, and after showing some skill at it, you have ceased to even be a very good liar.
And your minions like John Boehner — your Republican congressional crash dummies who just happen to decide to walk out of Congress when a podium-full of microphones await them — they should just keep walking, out of Congress and if possible, out of the country.
For they — and you, sir — have no place in a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
The lot of you, are the symbolic descendants of the despotic middle managers of some banana republic, to whom “Freedom” is an ironic brand name, a word you reach for, when you want to get away with its opposite.
Thus, Mr. Bush, your panoramic invasion of privacy is dressed up as “protecting America.”
Thus, Mr. Bush, your indiscriminate domestic spying becomes the focused monitoring, only of “terrorist communications.”
Thus, Mr. Bush, what you and the telecom giants have done, isn’t unlawful, it’s just the kind of perfectly legal, passionately patriotic thing for which you happen to need immunity!
Richard Clarke is on the money, as usual.
That the President was willing to veto this eavesdropping, means there is no threat to the legitimate counter-terror efforts underway.
As Senator Kennedy reminded us in December:
“The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retroactive immunity.
No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he’s willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.”
And that literally cannot be.
Even Mr. Bush could not overtly take a step that actually aids the terrorists.
I am not talking about ethics here.
I am talking about blame.
If the President seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it means we can safely conclude… there is no baby.
Because if there were, sir, now that you have vetoed an extension of this eavesdropping, if some terrorist attack were to follow…
You would not merely be guilty of siding with the terrorists…
You would not merely be guilty of prioritizing the telecoms over the people…
You would not merely be guilty of stupidity…
You would not merely be guilty of treason, sir…
You would be personally, and eternally, responsible.
And if there is one thing we know about you, Mr. Bush, one thing that you have proved time and time again… it is that you are never responsible.
As recently ago as 2006, we spoke words like these with trepidation.
The idea that even the most cynical and untrustworthy of politicians in our history — George W. Bush — would use the literal form of terrorism against his own people — was dangerous territory. It seemed to tempt fate, to heighten fear.
We will not fear any longer.
We will not fear the international terrorists — we will thwart them.
We will not fear the recognition of the manipulation of our yearning for safety — we will call it what it is: terrorism.
We will not fear identifying the vulgar hypocrites in our government — we will name them.
And we will not fear George W. Bush.
Nor will we fear because George W. Bush wants us to fear.

On FISA and Telecom Immunity

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:00:45 -0500

And finally, as promised, a Special Comment — of FISA and the telecoms.
In a presidency of hypocrisy — an administration of exploitation — a labyrinth of leadership — in which every vital fact is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma hidden under a claim of executive privilege supervised by an idiot — this one… is surprisingly easy.
President Bush has put protecting the telecom giants from the laws… ahead of protecting you from the terrorists.
He has demanded an extension of the FISA law — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — but only an extension that includes retroactive immunity for the telecoms who helped him spy on you.
Congress has given him, and he has today signed a fifteen-day extension which simply kicks the time bomb down the field, and has changed nothing of his insipid rhetoric, in which he portrays the Democrats as ’soft on terror’ and getting in the way of his superhuman efforts to protect the nation… when, in fact, and with bitter irony, if anybody is ’soft on terror’ here… it is Mr. Bush.
In the State of the Union Address, sir, you told Congress, “if you do not act by Friday, our ability to track terrorist threats would be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger.”
Yet you are willing to weaken that ability!
You will subject us, your citizens, to that greater danger.
This, Mr. Bush, is simple enough even for you to understand: If Congress approves a new FISA act without telecom immunity and sends it to your desk and you veto it — you, by your own terms and your own definitions, you will have just sided with the terrorists.
Ya gotta have this law, or we’re all gonna die. But you might veto this law!
It’s bad enough, sir, that you are demanding an ex post facto law which would clear the phone giants from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans, under the flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.
But when you then demanded again, during the State of the Union address, that Congress retroactively clear the Verizons and the AT&T’s, you wouldn’t even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared!
“The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.”
Believed?
Don’t you know?
Does the endless hair-splitting of your presidential fine print, extend even here?
If you, sir, are asking Congress, and us, to join you in this shameless, breathless, literal, textbook example of fascism — the merged efforts of government and corporations who answer to no government — you still don’t have the guts to even say the telecom companies did assist you, in your efforts?
Will you and the equivocators who surround you like a cocoon never go on the record about anything?
Even the stuff you claim to believe in?
Silly me.
Of course Mr. Bush is going to say “believed.”
Yes, it sounds dumber than if he had referred to himself as “the alleged president,” or had said today was “reportedly Thursday,” or had claimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.
But the moment he says anything else, any doubt that the telecoms knowingly broke the law, is out the window, and with it, any chance that even the Republicans who are fighting this like they were trying to fend off terrorists using nothing but broken beer bottles and swear words couldn’t consent to retroactively immunize corporate criminals.
Which is why the Vice President probably shouldn’t have phoned in to the Rush Limbaugh Propaganda-Festival yesterday.
Sixth sentence out of Mr. Cheney’s mouth: The FISA bill is about, quote, “retroactive liability protection for the companies that have worked with us and helped us prevent further attacks against the United States.”
Oops.
Mr. Cheney is something of a loose cannon, of course.
But he kind of let the wrong cat out of the bag there.
Because Mr. Bush — and the corporations he values more than people — didn’t want anybody to verify what Mark Klein says.
Mark Klein is the AT&T whistleblower who appeared on this newscast last November, who explained, in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood I-T desk, how he personally attached all of AT&T’s circuits — everything carrying every phone call, every e-mail, every bit of web browsing — into a secure room…
…Room Number 641-A, at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco — where it was all copied so the government could look at it.
Not some of it; not just the international part of it; certainly not just the stuff some truly patriotic and telepathic spy might be able to divine had been sent or spoken by or to a terrorist.
Everything.
Every time you looked at a naked picture, every time you bid on eBay, every time you phoned-in a donation to a Democrat.
“My thought was ‘George Orwell’s 1984,’” Mr. Klein told me, reflecting back, “and here I am, being forced to… connect the Big Brother machine.”
You know, Mr. Bush, if Mr. Klein’s “Big Brother Machine” — the one the Vice President conveniently just confirmed for us — if it was of any damn use at all at actually finding anything, you could probably program it to find out who started that slanderous e-mail about Barack Obama.
Use Room 641-A to identify that E–assassin, sir, and I’ll stand up and applaud you.
Yeah, I’m holding my breath on that one, too.
But of course, sir, this isn’t about finding that kind of needle in a haystack. This isn’t even about finding a haystack. This is about scooping up every piece of hay there ever was, and laying the groundwork for the next little job which you have to outsource to AT&T and Verizon.
It was your Director of National Intelligence, Mr. McConnell, letting this one out of the same bag.
The need for Homeland Security to stave off cyber-attacks against the government’s computer networks.
And how do they do that, sir?
By constantly monitoring the internet — the whole internet.
And who actually, physically, does that, Mr. Bush?
Right. The same telecom giants for whom you want immunity — Quickly. So quickly, you wouldn’t believe it.
Because this previous domestic spying, and this upcoming policing of the internet — they may be completely evil, indiscriminate, unlawful. So you have to dress it up, as something just the opposite.
It isn’t evil… it’s “to protect America.”
It isn’t indiscriminate… it’s “the ability to monitor terrorist communications.”
It isn’t unlawful… it’s just the kind of perfectly legal thing, for which you happen to need immunity!
There’s yet another level to this, and here we move from Big Brother… to Sleazy Son.
Mr. Bush’s new Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey, the one who has already taken four different positions on water-boarding, and who may yet tie that record on this subject of telecom immunity — he has a very personal stake in this.
There happens to be a partner in the law firm of Bracewell and Giuliani, named Marc Mukasey. And Bracewell and Giuliani and the Attorney General’s son Marc, just happen to represent… Verizon.
You know, Verizon - Telecom Giant.
And all of a sudden this is no longer just a farce in which “protecting the telecoms” is dressed up for us as, ‘protecting us from terrorist conference calls.’
Now it begins to look like the bureaucrats of the Third Reich trying to protect the Krupp Family industrial giants by literally re-writing the laws for their benefit.
And we know how that turned out: Alfried Krupp and eleven of his directors were convicted of War Crimes at Nuremburg.
Nevertheless.
For those of us watching a President demanding this very specific law (the one the Germans had was called the “Lex Krupp”) there is one surprising bit of comfort in all this:
Clearly, Mr. Bush is at his hyperbolic worst here.
Consider how his former chief of staff Andy Card came on and scolded Chris Matthews and me after the State of the Union address.
“The President’s address tonight was very important,” Card said, “because it really was a sobering call to reality for us.
“And the reality is, we have an enemy who wants to hurt us. The primary job of the president to protect us.
“He talked about protecting us. He talked about the needs to have the tools to protect us.”
Indeed, Mr. Bush.
The primary job of any president is to protect us.
Not just those of us who own Internet and Telephone companies — All of us.
And even you, sir, with your intermittent grasp of reality… even with your ego greater than a 100-percent approval rating… even with your messianic petulance — even you could not truly choose to protect the corporations instead of the people.
I am not talking about ethics here. I am talking about blame.
Even if it’s you throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Mr. Bush, it still means we can safely conclude… there is no baby!
This is not a choice of protecting the telecoms from prosecution, or protecting the people from terrorists, sir.
It is a choice of protecting the telecoms from prosecution, or pretending to protect the people from terrorists.
Sorry, Mr. Bush. The eavesdropping provisions of FISA have obviously had no impact on counter-terrorism, and there is no current or perceived terrorist threat, the thwarting of which could hinge on an e-mail or a phone call going through room 641-A at AT&T in San Francisco next week or next month.
Because if there were, Mr. Bush, and you were to, by your own hand, veto an extension of this eavesdropping, and some terrorist attack were to follow, you would not merely be guilty of siding with the terrorists, you would not merely be guilty of prioritizing the telecoms over the people, you would not merely be guilty of stupidity, you would not merely be guilty of treason… but you would be personally, and eternally, responsible.
And if there is one thing we know about you, Mr. Bush, one thing that you have proved time and time again under any and all circumstances, it is that you are never responsible.

The NIE Reflects An �Unhinged, Irrational Chicken Little Of A President�

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:00:12 -0500
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 now.
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 III, 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 this 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 the 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 have become 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, robbing you 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 as functions only 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 term suspending is 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 must have realized 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 all 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 III.”
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 and convicted by your own deliberate lies…
You, sir, have no business being president.
Good night, and good luck.

George Bush�s Criminal Conspiracy of Torture

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:00:58 -0500

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the meaning of the story of former U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin.
It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed:
The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.
All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity;
All the invocations of World War Three, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists�
All of it is now � after one revelation last week � transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating Attorney General � and the others � from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.
�Waterboarding is torture,� Daniel Levin was to write.
Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protestor.
He was no troublemaking politician.
He was no table-pounding commentator.
Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American, and a brave man.
Brave not just with words or with stances � even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared � or bought � off.
Charged � as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday � with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora�s box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism �Enhanced Interrogation,� Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them� was to have them enacted upon himself.
Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be water-boarded.
Mr. Bush � ever done anything that personally courageous?
Perhaps when you�ve gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?
Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you�ve spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you � whether they were your own Generals, or� Max Cleland, or� Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame� or Daniel Levin?
Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.
Instead, he was forced out as Acting Assistant Attorney General, nearly three years ago, because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn�t do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.
And they water-boarded him and he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die � still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us � the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love � he could not convince his being� that he wasn�t drowning.
Water-boarding, he said, is torture.
Legally, it is torture!
Practically, it is torture!
Ethically, it is torture!
And he wrote it down.
Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country�s 43rd President: �The United States of America does not torture.�
Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.
Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.
Water-boarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about � except, Sir, for the one detail you�d forgotten � that there are rules, and even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we�re Americans, sir, and we�re better than that.
We�re better than you.
And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not water-boarding was torture, had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight-suit and helmet.
He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.
So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn�t black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines�
And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded �too independent� and �someone who could (not) be counted on.�
In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn�t count on to lie for you.
So, Levin was fired.
Because if it ever got out what he�d concluded, and the lengths to which he went, to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned water-boarding, and who-knows-what-else� anybody � you yourself, sir � you would have been screwed.
And screwed you are.
It can�t be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest Attorney General Nominee.
Another patriot somewhere, listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he�d never heard of water-boarding, and refuse to answer in words that which Daniel Levin answered on a water-board somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.
And this someone also heard George Bush say �The United States of America does not torture� and realized either he was lying or this wasn�t the United States of America any more, and either way, he needed to do something about it.
Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.
We have United States Senators who need to do something about it, too.
Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said �enough.�
Senator Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system and he has failed.
What Senator Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.
It is obvious that both those Senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey�s confirmation.
And they should look into their own committee�s history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon, a guarantee of a Special Prosecutor (ultimately a Special Prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new Attorney General, Elliott Richardson.
If they could get that out of Nixon, you � before you confirm the President�s latest human echo tomorrow � you better be able to get a �yes� or a �no� out of Michael Mukasey.
Ideally, you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed � or fifty of them � but I�m not holding my breath. The �yes� or the �no� on water-boarding will have to suffice.
Because, remember if you can�t get it, or you won�t with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the water-boards � symbolic and otherwise � of George W. Bush.
Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn�t who approved the water-boarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.
It is: why were they water-boarded?
Study after study for generation after generation, sir, has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.
Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn�t a problem if you don�t care if the terrorist plots they tell you about, are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.
If, say, a President simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared�
If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn�t interrupt�
If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a President pillage the Constitution�
Well, heck, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you� than an actual terrorist?
He�ll tell you every thing he ever fantasized doing, in his most horrific of daydreams � his equivalent of the day you �flew� onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you�d won in Iraq.
Now if that�s what this is all about � you tortured not because you�re so stupid you think torture produces confession � but you tortured because you�re smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction � well, then you�re going to need all the lawyers you can find because that crime wouldn�t just mean impeachment, would it, sir?
That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.
Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.
Daniel Levin�s eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish � and him, with it.
Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning, to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.
Thus Dick Cheney, has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique, would somehow help the terrorists.
Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of water-boarding as torture.
Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed from its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever, of the lives and safety of the American people into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country�s history.
And, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930�s and re-make a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining, that the fascism would be nearly invisible.
But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.
And ultimately, sir, these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people.
Good night, and good luck.

The President Of Hypocrisy

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:00:50 -0400

So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we’d all interrupted him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the substantive issues like the Israeli raid on Syria in condescending and infuriating fashion, produced a big-wow political finish that indicates, certainly, that if it wasn’t already — the annual Republican witch-hunting season is underway.
“I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military.
“And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad.
“And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Move-On-Dot-Org — or **more** afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States military.”
“That was a sorry deal.”
First off, it’s “Democrat-ic” party, sir.
You keep pretending you’re not a politician, so stop using words your party made up. Show a little respect.
Secondly, you could say this seriously after the advertising/mugging of Senator Max Cleland? After the swift-boating of John Kerry?
But most importantly… making that the last question?
So that there was no chance at a follow-up?
So nobody could point out — as Chris Matthews so incisively did, a week ago tonight — that you were the one who inappropriately interjected General Petraeus into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!
Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, you shanghaied a military man as your personal spokesman — and now you’re complaining about the outcome, and then running away from the microphone?
Eleven months ago the President’s own party — the Republican National Committee — introduced this very different kind of advertisement, just nineteen days before the mid-term elections.
Bin Laden.
And Zawahiri’s rumored quote of six years ago about having bought “suitcase bombs.”
All set against a ticking clock, and finally a blinding explosion… and the dire announcement:
“These are the stakes - vote, November 7th.”

That one was ok, Mr. Bush?
Terrorizing your own people in hopes of getting them to vote for your own party has never brought as much as a public comment from you?
The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleeland and lying about Lieutenant John Kerry met with your approval?
But a shot at General Petraeus — about whom you conveniently ignore it is you who reduced him from four-star hero to a political hack — that merits this pissy juvenile blast at the Democrats on national television?
Your hypocrisy is so vast, sir, that if we could somehow use it to fill the ranks in Iraq you could realize your dream — and keep us fighting there until the year 3000.
The line between the military and the civilian government is not to be crossed.
When Douglas MacArthur attempted to make policy for the United States in Korea half a century ago, President Truman moved quickly to fire him, even though Truman knew it meant his own political suicide, and the deification of a General who history suggests had begun to lose his mind.
When George McClellan tried to make policy for the Union in the Civil War, President Lincoln finally fired his chief General, even though he knew McClellan could galvanize political opposition - as he did… when McClellan ran as Lincoln’s presidential opponent in 1864 and nearly defeated our greatest president.
Even when the conduit flowed the other way and Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to smear the Army because it wouldn’t defer the service of one of McCarthy’s staff aides, the entire civilian and Defense Department structures — after four years of fearful servitude — rose up against McCarthy and said “enough” and buried him.
The list is not endless — but it is instructive.
Air Force General LeMay — who broke with Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis — and was retired.
Army General Edwin Anderson Walker — who started passing out John Birch Society leaflets to his soldiers.
Marine General Smedley Butler — who revealed to Congress the makings of a plot to remove FDR as President — and for merely being approached by the plotters, was phased out of the military hierarchy.
These careers were ended because the line between the military and the civilian is… not… to… be… crossed!
Mr. Bush, you had no right to order General Petraeus to become your front man.
And he obviously should have refused that order and resigned rather than ruin his military career.
The upshot is — and contrary it is, to the MoveOn advertisement — he betrayed himself more than he did us.
But there has been in his actions a sort of reflexive courage, some twisted vision of duty at a time of crisis. That the man doesn’t understand that serving officers cannot double as serving political ops, is not so much his fault as it is your good, exploitable, fortune.
But Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.
That, sir, is not only un-American — it is dictatorial.
And in pimping General David Petraeus, sir, in violation of everything this country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and the political, and to portray your party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.
You did it again today, sir, and you need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.
It is a line — thankfully only the first of a series — that makes the military political, and the political, military.
It is a line which history shows is always the first one crossed when a democratic government in some other country has started down the long, slippery, suicidal slope towards a military junta.
Get back behind that line, Mr. Bush, before some of your supporters mistake your dangerous transgression, for a call to further politicize our military.
—
Good night, and good luck.

You have no remaining credibility about Iraq, sir.

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:06:26 -0400
Finally tonight, a Special Comment about Mr. Bush’s trip, and his startling admission of the true motive for this war, which was revealed in his absence.
And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was.
But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.
As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying — is lying… will be lying — about Iraq.
He presumably did not know, that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper’s book “Dead Certain.”
“I’m playing for October-November,” Mr. Bush said to Draper.
That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan.
Which is, to quote him: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates, will be comfortable about sustaining a presence.”
Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay longer.”
And there it is, sir. We’ve caught you.
Your goal is not to bring some troops home — maybe — if we let you have your way now;
Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal;
You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.
Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal — perpetuating this war indefinitely.
War today, war tomorrow, war forever!
And you are playing at it!
Playing!
A man with any self-respect, having inadvertently revealed such an evil secret, would have already resigned and fled the country!
You have no remaining credibility about Iraq, sir.
And yet, yesterday at Al-Asad, Mr. Bush kept playing — and this time, using the second of his two faces.
The President told reporters, “They, (General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker) “tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”
And so, Mr. Bush got his fraudulent headlines today: “Bush May Bring Some Troops Home.”
While the reality is, we know from what he told Draper, that the President’s true hope is that they will not come home; but that they will stay there, because he is keeping them there now, in hope that those from his political party fighting to succeed him, will prolong this unendurable disaster into the next decade.
But, to a country dying of thirst, the President seemed to vaguely promise a drink from a full canteen — a promise predicated on the assumption that he is not lying.
Yet you are lying, Mr. Bush. Again. But now, we know why.
You gave away more of yourself than you knew in the Draper book
And you gave away more still, on the arduous trip back out of Iraq — hours in the air, without so much as a single vacation.
“If you look at my comments over the past eight months,” you told reporters, “it’s gone from a security situation — in the sense that we’re either going to get out and there will be chaos, or, more troops. Now, the situation has changed, where I’m able to speculate on the hypothetical.”
Mr. Bush, the only “hypothetical” here is that you are not now holding our troops hostage.
You have no intention of withdrawing them.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t pretend you’re thinking about it, does it?
That is your genius, sir — as you see it, anyway.
You can deduce what we want — we, the people, remember us? — and then use it against us.
You can hold that canteen up and promise it to the parched nation.
And the untold number of Americans whose lives have not been directly blighted by Iraq — or who do not realize that their safety has been reduced and not increased by Iraq — they will get the bullet points: ‘Bush is thinking about bringing some troops home. Bush even went to Iraq.’
You can fool some of the people all of the time, can’t you, Mr. Bush?
You are playing us!
And as for the most immediate victims of the President’s perfidy and shameless manipulation — those troops, yesterday sweating literally as he spoke at Al-Asad Air Base…
Tonight, again sweating figuratively in The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death…
The President saved, for them, the most egregious “playing” in the entire trip.
“I want to tell you this about the decision, about my decision about troop levels. Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground — not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media.”
One must compliment Mr. Bush’s writer.
That, perhaps, was the mostly perfectly crafted phrase of his Presidency.
For depraved indifference to Democracy, for the craven projection of political motives onto those trying to save lives and save a nation, for a dismissal of the value of the polls and the importance of the media… for a summary of all he does not hold dear about this nation or its people — nothing… could top that.
As if, sir, you listened to all the “calm assessments” of our military commanders –rather than firing the ones who dared say The Emperor Has No Clothes, and The President, No Judgment;
As if, sir, your entire presidency was not a “nervous reaction”, and you yourself, nothing but a Washington politician;
As if, sir, “the media” does not largely divide into those parts your minions are playing, and those others who unthinkingly and uncritically serve as your echo chamber, at a time when the nation’s future may depend on the airing of dissent.
And as if, sir, those polls were not so overwhelming, and not so clearly reflective of the nation’s agony and the nation’s insistence.
But this President has ceased to listen.
This President has decided that night is day, and death is life, and enraging the world against us, is safety.
And this laziest of Presidents, actually interrupted his precious time off to fly to Iraq to play at a photo opportunity with soldiers, some of whom will — on his orders — be killed before the year, maybe the month, is out.
Just over 500 days remain in this Presidency.
Consider the dead who have piled up on the battlefield in these last 500 days.
Consider the singular fraudulence of this President’s trip to Iraq yesterday, and the singular fraudulence of the selling of the Petraeus Report in these last 500 days.
Consider how this President has torn away at the fabric of this nation in a manner of which terrorists can only dream in these last 500 days.
And consider again how this President has spoken to that biographer: that he is “playing for October-November.” The goal in Iraq is “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence” and consider how this revelation contradicts every other rationale he has offered in these last 500 days.
In the context of all that… now, consider… these next 500 days.
Mr. Bush, our presence in Iraq must end.
Even if it means your resignation.
Even if it means your impeachment.
Even if it means a different Republican to serve out your term.
Even if it means a Democratic Congress — and those true Patriots among the Republicans — standing up and denying you another penny for Iraq, other than for the safety and the safe conduct home of our troops.
This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country in the next 500 days…
Not while you, sir… are playing.

You ceased to be the President of the United States

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:00:53 -0400

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on what is, in everything but name, George Bush’s pardon of Scooter Libby.
“I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”
That — on this eve of the 4th of July — is the essence of this democracy, in seventeen words.
And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The man who said those seventeen words — improbably enough — was the actor John Wayne.
And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them, when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon in 1960.
“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”
The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier. But there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne’s voice.
The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgement that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our Commander-in-Chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others.
We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president’s partisanship. Not that we may “prosper” as a nation, not that we may “achieve”, not that we may “lead the world” — but merely that we may “function.”
But just as essential to the seventeen words of John Wayne is an implicit trust — a sacred trust:That the president for whom so many did not vote, can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire Republic.
Our generation’s willingness to state “we didn’t vote for him, but he’s our president, and we hope he does a good job,” was tested in the crucible of history, and far earlier than most. And in circumstances more tragic and threatening.
And we did that with which history tasked us.
We enveloped “our” President in 2001.
And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed, those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.
And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and sharpened it to a razor-sharp point, and stabbed this nation in the back with it.
Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.
Did so even before the appeals process was complete…
Did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice…
Did so despite what James Madison –at the Constitutional Convention — said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president…
Did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder:
To what degree was Mr. Libby told: break the law however you wish — the President will keep you out of prison?
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens — the ones who did not cast votes for you.
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States.
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the President… of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.
And this is too important a time, sir, to have a Commander-in-Chief who puts party over nation.
This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this Administration. Few of its decisions have escaped the stain of politics.
The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of “a permanent Republican majority,” as if such a thing — or a permanent Democratic majority — is not antithetical to that upon which rests: our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms.
Yet our democracy has survived shrewder men than Karl Rove.
And it has survived the frequent stain of politics upon the fabric of government.
But this administration, with ever-increasing insistence and almost theocratic zealotry, has turned that stain… into a massive oil spill.
The protection of the environment is turned over to those of one political party, who will financially benefit from the rape of the environment.
The protections of the Constitution are turned over to those of one political party, who believe those protections unnecessary and extravagant and “quaint.”
The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party, who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws.
The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party, who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.
And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor…
When just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable “fairness” of government is rejected by an impartial judge…
When just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice…
This President decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.
I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.
I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.
I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.
I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but instead to stifle dissent.
I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.
I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.
I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.
And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of you becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.
When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Mr. Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously:
“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men, is now for Congress, and ultimately, the American people.”
President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people.
It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters; and the labyrinthine effort to cover-up that break-in and the related crimes.
But in one night, Nixon transformed it.
Watergate — instantaneously — became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law. Of insisting — in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood — that he was the law.
Not the Constitution.
Not the Congress.
Not the Courts.
Just him.
Just - Mr. Bush - as you did, yesterday.
The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy… these are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.
But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush — and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal — the average citizen understands that, sir.
It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one — and it stinks. And they know it.
Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency.
And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment.
It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of non-partisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history.
Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign
Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush.
And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney.
You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday.
Which one of you chose the route, no longer matters.
Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant.
But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.
It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.
We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history:
Pressure, negotiate, impeach — get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.
And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task.
You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed.
Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.
Resign.
And give us someone — anyone – about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”
Good night, and good luck.

The only things truly �compromised� are the trust of the voters�

Wed, 23 May 2007 21:00:38 -0400

This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.
Few men or women elected in our history-whether executive or legislative, state or national-have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear: Get us out of Iraq.
Yet after six months of preparation and execution-half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:
*    The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president-if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history-who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats "give the troops their money";
*    The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
*    The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
* The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.
You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions-Stop The War-have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.
You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the "beginning of the end" of Mr. Bush's "carte blanche" in Iraq, about how this is a "first step."
Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning… is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.
Because this "first step"… is a step right off a cliff.
And this President!
How shameful it would be to watch an adult hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.
But how horrifying it is to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm's way, are bled white.
You lead this country, sir?
You claim to defend it?
And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness–your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs–you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don't give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.
How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.
Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally-first, last and always-that the troops would not suffer.
A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing brigades into a ‘second surge,' but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe-even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.
Well, any true President would have done that, sir.
You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.
Not that these Democrats, who had this country's support and sympathy up until 48 hours ago, have not since earned all the blame they can carry home.
"We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame," Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. "My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…"
That's what this is for the Democrats, isn't it?
Their "Neville Chamberlain moment" before the Second World War. All that's missing is the landing at the airport, with the blinkered leader waving a piece of paper which he naively thought would guarantee "peace in our time," but which his opponent would ignore with deceit.
The Democrats have merely streamlined the process.
Their piece of paper already says Mr. Bush can ignore it, with impugnity.
And where are the Democratic presidential hopefuls this evening? See they not, that to which the Senate and House leadership has blinded itself?
Judging these candidates based on how they voted on the original Iraq authorization, or waiting for apologies for those votes, is ancient history now.
The Democratic nomination is likely to be decided… tomorrow.
The talk of practical politics, the buying into of the President's dishonest construction "fund-the-troops-or-they-will-be-in-jeopardy," the promise of tougher action in September, is falling not on deaf ears, but rather falling on Americans who already told you what to do, and now perceive your ears as closed to practical politics.
Those who seek the Democratic nomination need to-for their own political futures and, with a thousand times more solemnity and importance, for the individual futures of our troops-denounce this betrayal, vote against it, and, if need be, unseat Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi if they continue down this path of guilty, fatal acquiescence to the tragically misguided will of a monomaniacal president.
For, ultimately, at this hour, the entire government has failed us.
*     Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats… have failed us. They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible.
*    Mr. Bush and his government… have failed us. They have behaved venomously and without dignity-of course.
That is all at which Mr. Bush is gifted.
We are the ones providing any element of surprise or shock here.
With the exception of Senator Dodd and Senator Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidates have (so far at least) failed us.
They must now speak, and make plain how they view what has been given away to Mr. Bush, and what is yet to be given away tomorrow, and in the thousand tomorrows to come.
Because for the next fourteen months, the Democratic nominating process–indeed the whole of our political discourse until further notice–has, with the stroke of a cursed pen, become about one thing, and one thing alone.
The electorate figured this out, six months ago.
The President and the Republicans have not-doubtless will not.
The Democrats will figure it out, during the Memorial Day recess, when they go home and many of those who elected them will politely suggest they stay there-and permanently.
Because, on the subject of Iraq the people have been ahead of the media….
Ahead of the government…
Ahead of the politicians…
For the last year, or two years, or maybe three.
Our politics… is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.
Mr. Bush has failed.
Mr. Warner has failed.
Mr. Reid has failed.
So. Who among us will stop this war-this War of Lies? To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.
To all the others-presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party-there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.

Giuliani�s Fearmongering: How Dare You, Sir?

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:09:38 -0400

Finally tonight, a Special Comment about Rudolf Giuliani's remarks at a Lincoln Day Dinner in New Hampshire last night.
Since some indeterminable hour between the final dousing of the pyre at The World Trade Center, and the breaking of what Senator Obama has aptly termed "9/11 Fever," it has been profoundly and disturbingly evident that we are at the center of one of history's great ironies.
Only in this America of the early 21st Century could it be true, that the man who was president during the worst attack on our nation, and the man who was the mayor of the city in which that attack principally unfolded, would not only be absolved of any and all blame for the unreadiness of their own governments, but, more over, would thereafter be branded heroes of those attacks.
And now, that Mayor - whose most profound municipal act in the wake of that nightmare was to suggest the postponement of the election to select his own successor - has gone even a step beyond these M.C. Escher constructions of history.
"If any Republican is elected president - and I think obviously I would be best at this - we will remain on offense and will anticipate what (the terrorists) will do and try to stop them before they do it. "
Insisting that the election of any Democrat would mean the country was "back� on defense," Mr. Giuliani continued:
"But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have. If we are on defense, we will have more losses and it will go on longer."
He said this with no sense of irony, no sense of any personal shortcomings, no sense whatsoever.
And if you somehow missed what he was really saying, somehow didn't hear the none-too-subtle subtext of 'vote Democratic and die,' Mr. Giuliani then stripped away any barrier of courtesy, telling Roger Simon of Politico.Com, quote�
"America will be safer with a Republican president."
At least that Republican President under which we have not been safer� has, even at his worst, maintained some microscopic distance between himself, and a campaign platform that blithely threatened the American people with "casualties" if they, next year, elect a Democratic president - or, inferring from Mr. Giuliani's flights of grandeur in New Hampshire - even if they elect a different Republican.
How dare you, sir?

"How many casualties will we have?" - this is the language of Bin Laden.
Yours, Mr. Giuliani, is the same chilling nonchalance of the madman, of the proselytizer who has moved even from some crude framework of politics and society, into a virtual Roman Colosseum of carnage, and a conceit over your own ability � and worthiness � to decide, who lives and who dies.
Rather than a reasoned discussion � rather than a political campaign advocating your own causes and extolling your own qualifications � you have bypassed all the intermediate steps, and moved directly to trying to terrorize the electorate into viewing a vote for a Democrat, not as a reasonable alternative and an inalienable right� but as an act of suicide.
This is not the mere politicizing of Iraq, nor the vague mumbled epithets about Democratic 'softness' from a delusional Vice President.
This is casualties on a partisan basis � of the naked assertion that Mr. Giuliani's party knows all and will save those who have voted for it � and to hell with everybody else.
And that he, with no foreign policy experience whatsoever, is somehow the Messiah-of-the-moment.
Even to grant that that formula - whether posed by Republican or Democrat - is somehow not the most base, the most indefensible, the most Un-American electioneering in our history - even if it is somehow acceptable to assign "casualties" to one party and 'safety' to the other - even if we have become so profane in our thinking that it is part of our political vocabulary to view counter-terror as one party's property and the other's liability� on what imaginary track record does Mr. Giuliani base his boast?
Which party held the presidency on September 11th, 2001, Mr. Giuliani?
Which party held the mayoralty of New York on that date, Mr. Giuliani?
Which party assured New Yorkers that the air was safe, and the remains of the dead, recovered - and not being used to fill pot-holes, Mr. Giuliani?
Which party wanted what the terrorists wanted - the postponement elections - and to whose personal advantage would that have redounded, Mr. Giuliani?
Which mayor of New York was elected eight months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, yet did not emphasize counter-terror in the same city for the next eight years, Mr. Giuliani?
Which party had proposed to turn over the Department of Homeland Security to Bernard Kerik, Mr. Giuliani?
Who wanted to ignore and hide Kerik's Organized Crime allegations, Mr. Giuliani?
Who personally argued to the White House that Kerik need not be vetted, Mr. Giuliani?
Which party rode roughshod over Americans' rights while braying that it was actually protecting them, Mr. Giuliani?
Which party took this country into the most utterly backwards, utterly counter-productive, utterly ruinous war in our history, Mr. Giuliani?
Which party has been in office as more Americans were killed in the pointless fields of Iraq, than were killed in the consuming nightmare of 9/11, Mr. Giuliani?
Drop this argument, sir.� You will lose it.
"The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us," Mr. Giuliani continued to the Rockingham County Lincoln Day Dinner last night. "Never, ever again will this country be on defense waiting for (terrorists) to attack us, if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake, the Democrats want to put us back on defense."
There is no room for this.
This is terrorism itself, dressed up as counter-terrorism.
It is not warning, but bullying - substituted for the political discourse now absolutely essential to this country's survival and the freedom of its people.
No Democrat has said words like these. None has ever campaigned on the Republicans' flat-footedness of September 11th, 2001. None has the requisite, irresponsible, all-consuming, ambition. None is willing to say "I Accuse," rather than recognize that, to some degree, all of us share responsibility for our collective stupor.
And if it is somehow insufficient, that this is morally, spiritually, and politically wrong, to screech as Mr. Giuliani has screeched� there is also this: that gaping hole in Mr. Giuliani's argument of 'Republicans equal life; Democrats equal death.'
Not only have the Republicans not lived up to their babbling on this subject, but last fall the electorate called them on it.
As doubtless they would call you on it, Mr. Giuliani.
Repeat, go beyond� Mr. Bush's rhetorical calamities of 2006.
Call attention to the casualties on your watch, and your long, waking slumber in the years between the two attacks on the World Trade Center.
Become the candidate who runs on the Vote-For-Me-Or-Die platform.
Do a Joe McCarthy, a Lyndon Johnson, a Robespierre.
Only, if you choose so to do, do not come back surprised nor remorseful if the voters remind you that "terror" is not just a matter of "casualties." It is, just as surely, a matter of the promulgation of fear.
Claim a difference between the parties on the voters' chances of survival � and you do Osama Bin Laden's work for him.
And we � Democrats and Republicans alike, and every variation in between � We � Americans! � are sick to death, of you and the other terror-mongers, trying to frighten us into submission, into the surrender of our rights and our reason, into this betrayal of that for which this country has always stood.
Franklin Roosevelt's words ring true again tonight.
And, clarified and amplified, they are just as current now, as they were when first he spoke them, 74 years ago.
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself" � and those who would exploit our fear, for power, and for their own personal, selfish, cynical, gain.
Good night, and good luck.

Tom Delay�s Delusion of Grandeur

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:00:58 -0400
Tonight as our fourth story on the Countdown, this brief Special Comment.

The quote with the context sucked out from around it is astonishing.

In a new book, former Republican leader of the House Tom DeLay writes "liberals have finally joined the ranks of scoundrels like Hitler."

But, restore the context, as with anything else, and you change the meaning of any quote.

In this case, you make it worse.

Mr. DeLay is comparing how he's been treated, to how the world was treated, by Hitler and the Nazis.

The book is called "No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight."

It has been officially out for nearly two weeks and it has not cracked the New York Times Top 30�

So the fact of this one quotation, first noted, only last week, by "The Jewish Daily Forward," could have easily slipped through the cracks.

But even though nobody seems to be reeding his book, Mr. DeLay is nonetheless referring to what he calls a lie � the accusation that he violated campaign-finance laws in Texas, for which he was indicted.

And on page 156 he writes:

"I believe it was Adolf Hitler who first acknowledged that the big lie�"

Look, stop right there, Mr. DeLay.

If you're going to throw around Hitler's name, research the reference, huh?

As suggested on the Huffington Post, we have many useful Internet search engines now.

If you type in "Big Lie, Hitler" into the one called "Google," you get 1,320,000 results.

I believe it was Adolf Hitler who first acknowledged that the big lie is more effective than the little lie, because the big lie is so audacious, such an astonishing immorality, that people have a hard time believing anyone would say it if it wasn't true.

You know, the big lie � like the Holocaust never happened or dark-skinned people are less intelligent than light-skinned people. Well, by charging this big lie about money laundering, liberals have finally joined the ranks of scoundrels like Hitler."

OK, where do we start here?

Let's try the gentlest interpretation.

Mr. DeLay believes that the accusation that he violated Texas campaign finance laws is on some kind of par with claims that light-skinned people are more intelligent than dark-skinned people.

Now that's the gentlest one. The somewhat less kind interpretation?

He's equating anybody, charging him � just him � with anything, even if it were a lie, with the Nazis.

Just by going after Tom DeLay, you are like that old "scoundrel" Hitler.

So Tom DeLay is as important as � what? � Democracy in 1930's Germany?

Poland in 1939?

The Jewish people?

So Mr. DeLay, go back to your Google and type in the name "Tom DeLay" and the phrase "Delusions of Grandeur"�

And you get 11,500 results.

Secretary Rice, Get Your Facts Straight!

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 15:18:01 -0500
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on the remarks yesterday by Secretary of State Rice.

We already know about her suggestion that the President could just ignore whatever Congressional Democrats do about Iraq.

Just ignore Congress.

We know how that game always turns out. Ask President Nixon. Ask President Andrew Johnson.

Or ask Vice President Cheney, who utterly contradicted Secretary Rice today, when he warned Mr. Musharraf of Pakistan about what those mean Congressional Democrats could do to his foreign aid.

All of this, par for the course.

But about what the Secretary said regarding the prospect of Congress, revising or repealing the 2002 authorization of the war in Iraq:

Here we go again!

From springs spent trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, to summers of cynically manipulated intelligence through autumns of false patriotism, to winters of war, we have had more than four years of every cheap trick and every degree of calculated cynicism from this Administration, filled with three-card monte players.

But the longer Dr. Rice and these other pickpockets of a nation's goodness have walked among us, waving flags and slandering opponents and making true enemies � foreign and domestic � all hat and no cattle all the while, the overriding truth of their occupancy of our highest offices of state, has only gradually become clear.

As they asked in that Avis Commercial: "Ever get the feeling some people just stopped trying?"

Secretary Rumsfeld thought he could equate those who doubted him, with Nazi appeasers, without reminding anybody that the actual, historical Nazi appeasers in this country in the 1930's, were the Republicans.

Vice President Cheney thought he could talk as if he and he alone knew the 'truth' about Iraq and 9/11, without anyone ever noticing that even the rest of the Administration officially disagreed with him.

But Secretary of State Rice may have now taken the cake.

On the Sunday Morning Interview Show of Broken-Record on Fox, Dr. Rice spoke a paragraph, which if it had been included in a remedial history paper at the weakest high school in the nation, would've gotten the writer an "F" - maybe an expulsion.

If Congress were now to revise the Iraq authorization, she said, out loud, with an adult present, "�It would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown."

The Secretary's resume reads that she has a Masters' Degree and a Ph.D in Political Science. The interviewer should have demanded to see them, on the spot.

Dr. Rice spoke 42 words.

She may have made more mistakes in them, than did the President in his State of the Union Address in 2003.

There is, obviously, no mistaking Saddam Hussein for a human being.

But nor is there any mistaking him for Adolf Hitler.

Invoking the German dictator who subjugated Europe; who tried to exterminate the Jews; who sought to overtake the world � is not just in the poorest of taste but in its hyperbole, it insults not merely the victims of the Third Reich, but those in this country who fought it. And defeated it.

Saddam Hussein was not Adolf Hitler.

And George W. Bush is not Franklin D. Roosevelt � nor Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He isn't even George H.W. Bush, who fought in that war.

However, even through the clouds of deliberately-spread fear, and even under the weight of a thousand exaggerations of the five years past, one can just barely make out how a battle against international terrorism in 2007 could be compared � by some � to the Second World War.

The analogy is weak, and it instantly begs the question of why those of "The Greatest Generation" focused on Hitler and Hirohito but our leaders seem to have ignored their vague parallels of today to instead concentrate on the Mussolinis of modern terrorism.

But in some, small, "you didn't fail, Junior, but you may need to go to summer school" kind of way, you can just make out that comparison.

But Secretary Rice, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was akin to overthrowing Adolf Hitler?

Are you kidding?

Did you want to provoke the world's laughter?

And, please, Madame Secretary, if you are going to make that most implausible, subjective, dubious, ridiculous comparison�

If you want to be as far off the mark about the Second World War as, say, the pathetic Holocaust-denier from Iran, Ahmadinejad�

At least get the easily verifiable facts right � the facts whose home through history lie in your own department.

"The resolution that allowed the United States to" overthrow Hitler?

On the 11th of December, 1941, at 8 o'clock in the morning, two of Hitler's diplomats walked up to the State Department � your office, Secretary Rice � and ninety minutes later they were handing a declaration of war to the Chief of the Department's European Division. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor four days earlier and the Germans simply piled on.

Your predecessors, Dr. Rice, didn't spend a year making up phony evidence and mistaking German balloon-inflating trucks for mobile germ warfare labs.

They didn't pretend the world was ending because a tin-pot tyrant couldn't hand over the chemical weapons, it turned out he'd destroyed a decade earlier.

The Germans walked up to the front door of our State Department and said "we're at war."

It was in all the papers!

And when that war ended, more than three horrible years later, our troops, and the Russians, were in Berlin. And we stayed, as an occupying force, well in the 1950's.

As an occupying force, Madam Secretary!

If you want to compare what we did to Hitler and in Germany, to what we did to Saddam and in Iraq, I'm afraid you're going to have to buy the whole analogy.

We were an occupying force in Germany, Dr. Rice, and by your logic, we're now an occupying force in Iraq.

And if that's the way you see it, you damn well better come out and tell the American people so. (Save your breath telling it to the Iraqis � most of them already buy that part of the comparison).

"It would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown." We already have a subjectively false comparison between Hitler and Saddam.

We already have a historically false comparison between Germany and Iraq.

We already have blissful ignorance by our Secretary of State about how this country got into the war against Hitler.

But then there's this part about changing "the resolution" about Iraq, that it would be as ridiculous in the Secretary's eyes, as saying that after Hitler was defeated, we needed to go back to Congress to "deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown."

Oh, good grief, Secretary Rice, that's exactly what we did do!

We went back to Congress to deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after Hitler was overthrown!

It was called the Marshall Plan.

Marshall!

General George Catlett Marshall!

Secretary of State!

The job you have now!

C'mon!

Twelve billion, 400 thousand dollars to stabilize all of Europe economically � to keep the next enemies of freedom, the Russians, out, and democracy, in!

And how do you suppose that happened? The President of the United States went back to Congress, and asked it for a new authorization, and for the money.

And do you have any idea, Madame Secretary, who opposed him when he did that?

The Republicans!

'We've spent enough money in Europe,' said Senator Taft of Ohio.

'We've spent enough of our resources,' said former President Hoover.

It's time to pull out of there!

As they stand up, we'll stand down!

This administration has long thought otherwise, but you can't cherry-pick life � whether life in 2007, or life in the history page marked 1945.

You can't keep the facts that fit your prejudices, and throw out the ones that destroy your theories.

And if you're going to try to do that; if you still want to fool some people into thinking that Saddam was Hitler, and once we gave FDR that blank check in Germany he was no longer subject to the laws of Congress or gravity or physics, at least, stop humiliating us.

Get your facts straight.

Use�.. the Google!

You've been on Fox News Sunday, Secretary Rice.

That network has got another show premiering tomorrow night.

You could go on that one, too.

It might be a better fit.

It's called "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?"

Fact Checking the President

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:00:00 -0500
And finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment, on presidents and terrorism�

And on the seemingly trivial fact that West Yorkshire in England, has a new Chief Police Constable.

Upon his appointment, Sir Norman Bettison made one of the strangest comments of the year: "The threat of terrorism," he says, "is lurking out there like Jaws 2."

Sir Norman did not exactly mine the richest ore for his analogy of warning. A critic once said of the flopping sequel to the classic film: "You're gonna need a better screenplay."

But this obscure British police official has reminded us, that terrorism is still being sold to the public in that country � and in this � as if it were a thrilling horror movie, and we were the naughty teenagers about to be its victims.

And it underscores the fact that President Bush took this tack, exactly a week ago tonight, in his terror-related passage in the State of the Union�

A passage that was almost lost amid all the talk about Iraq and health care and bi-partisanship and the fellow who saved the stranger from an oncoming subway train in New York City.

But a passage � ludicrous and deceitful�

Frightening in its hollow conviction�

Frightening, in that the President who spoke it tried for "Jaws" but got "Jaws 2."

I am indebted to David Swanson, press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 Presidential campaign, who has blogged about the dubious 96 words in Mr. Bush's address this year and who has concluded that of the four counter-terror claims the President made, he went 0 for 4.

"We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented," Mr. Bush noted, "but here is some of what we do know: we stopped an Al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast."

This would, of course, sir, be the purported plot to knock down the 73-story building in Los Angeles, the one once known as the Library Tower � the one you personally revealed so breathlessly, a year ago next month.

It was embarrassing enough that you mistakenly referred to the structure as the Liberty Tower. But within hours, it was also revealed, that authorities in Los Angeles had had no idea you were going to make any of the details � whether serious or fanciful � public.

Who terrorized Southern California that day, Mr. Bush?

A year ago next month, the Los Angeles Times quoted a source � identified only by the labyrinthine description "a U-S official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism" � who insisted that the purported "Library Tower plot" was one of many Al-Qaeda operations that had not gotten very far past the conceptual stage.

The former staff director of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council � now NBC and MSNBC News Analyst Roger Cressey � puts it a little more bluntly.

In our conversation, he classified the "Library Tower story" into a category he called the "What-Ifs" � as in the old Saturday Night Live sketches that tested the range of comic absurdity:

� What If� Superman Had Worked For The Nazis?

� What if� Spartacus Had A Piper Cub, during the battle against the Romans in 70 B-C?

More ominously, the L.A. Times source who debunked the Library Tower story said that those who could correctly measure the flimsiness of the scheme, quote, "feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the President."

But Mr. Bush, you're the decider.

And you decided that the Library Story should be scored as one for you.

And you continued with a second dubious claim of counter-terror success. "We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States," you said.

Well, sir, you've apparently stumped the intelligence community completely with this one.

In his article, Mr. Swanson suggests that in the last week there has been no reporting � even hinting � at what exactly you were talking about.

He hypothesizes that either you were claiming credit for a ring broken up in 1995, or that this was just the Library Tower story, quote, "by another name."

Another CIA source suggests to NBC News that since the Southeast Asian cell dreamed of a series of attacks on the same day, you declared the Library Tower one threat thwarted, and all their other ideas, a second threat thwarted.

Our colleague Mr. Cressey sums it up: this "Southeast Asian cell" was indeed the tale of the Library Tower, simply repeated.

Repeated, Mr. Bush, in consecutive sentences in the State of the Union, in your constitutionally mandated status report on the condition and safety of the nation.

You showed us the same baby twice, and claimed it was twins.

And then you said, that was two for you.

Your third claim, sir, read thusly: "We uncovered an al-Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America." Again, the professionals in counter-intelligence were startled to hear about this.

Last fall, two Washington Post articles cited sources in the FBI and other governmental agencies who said that hopes by foreign terrorists to use anthrax in this country were fanciful at best, farcical at worst.

And every effort to link the 2001 anthrax mailings in this country to foreign sources has also struck out. The entire investigation is barely still active.

Mr. Cressey goes a little further. Anything that might even resemble an Al-Qaeda cell "developing Anthrax," he says, was in the "dreaming" stages. He used as a parallel those pathetic arrests outside Miami last year, in which a few men wound up getting charged as terrorists, because they couldn't tell the difference between an Al-Qaeda operative and an FBI informant.

Their "ring-leader" seemed to be much more interested in getting his 'terrorist masters' to buy him a new car than in actually terrorizing anybody.

That's three for you, Mr. Bush.

"And just last August," you concluded, "British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean."

In a series of dramatic raids, 24 men were arrested.

Turned out, sir, a few of them actually had gone on the internets to check out some flight schedules.

Turned out, sir, only a few of them actually had the passports needed to even get on the planes.

The plot to which President Bush referred, was a plot without bombs.

It was a plot, without any indication that the essence of the operation � the in-flight mixing of volatile chemicals carried on board in sports drink bottles � was even doable by amateurs or professional chemists.

It was a plot even without sufficient probable cause.

A third of the 24 arrested that day � exactly 90 days before the American mid-term elections � have since been released.

The British had been watching those men for a year.

Before the week was out, their first statement, that the plot was "ready to go, in days," had been rendered inoperative.

British officials told NBC News of the lack of passports and plans; told us that they had wanted to keep the suspects under surveillance for at least another week.

Even an American official confirmed to NBC's investigative unit that there was "disagreement over the timing."

The British then went further. Sources inside their government told the English newspaper the Guardian, that the raids had occurred only because the Pakistanis had arrested a man named Rasheed Raouf. That Raouf had only been arrested by Pakistan because we had threatened to do it for them.

That the British had acted only because our government was willing � to quote that newspaper "The Guardian" � to "ride roughshod" over the plans of British Intelligence.

Oh by the way, Mr. Bush, an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan reduced the charges against Mr. Raouf, to possession of bomb-making materials, and being there without proper documents.

Still, sir, evidently that's close enough.

Score four for you!

Your totally black-and-white conclusions in the State of the Union were based on one gray area, and on three pallets on which the experts can't even see smudge let alone gray.

It would all be laughable, Mr. Bush, were you not the President of the United States.

It would all be political hyperbole, Mr. Bush, if you had not, on this kind of "intelligence," taken us to war, now sought to escalate that war, and are threatening new war in Iran and maybe even elsewhere.

What you gave us a week ago tonight, sir, was not intelligence, but rather a walk-through, of how speculation and innuendo, guess-work and paranoia, day-dreaming and fear-mongering, combine in your mind and the minds of your government, into proof of your derring-do and your success against the terrorists.

The ones who didn't have anthrax.

The ones who didn't have plane tickets or passports.

The ones who didn't have any clue, let alone any plots.

But they go now into our history books as the four terror schemes you've interrupted since 9/11.

They go into the collective consciousness as firm evidence of your diligence, of the necessity of your ham-handed treatment of our liberties, of the unavoidability of the 3,075 Americans dead in Iraq.

Congratulations, sir.

You are the hero of "Jaws 2." You have kept the Piper Cub out of the hands of Spartacus.

�

Good night, and good luck.

President�s Address: Surge

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 03:00:50 -0500
And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment about the President's address last night.

Only this President, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even Messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.

Only this President, could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say "where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me" � only to follow that, by proposing to repeat the identical mistake in Iran.

Only this President could extol the "thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group," and then take its most far-sighted recommendation � "engage Syria and Iran" - and transform it into "threaten Syria and Iran" � when Al-Qaeda would like nothing better than for us to threaten Syria, and when President Ahmmadinejad would like nothing better than to be threatened by us.

This is diplomacy by skimming; it is internationalism by drawing pictures of Superman in the margins of the text books; it is a presidency of Cliff Notes.

And to Iran and Syria � and, yes, also to the insurgents in Iraq � we must look like a country, run by the equivalent of the drunken pest, who gets battered to the floor of the saloon by one punch, then staggers to his feet, and shouts at the other guy's friends, "ok, which one of you is next?"

Mr. Bush, the question is no longer "what are you thinking?," but rather "are you thinking at all?"

"I have made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended," you said last night.

And yet � without any authorization from the public who spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November's elections; without any consultation with a Congress (in which key members of your own party like Senator Brownback and Senator Coleman and Senator Hagel are fleeing for higher ground); without any awareness that you are doing exactly the opposite of what Baker-Hamilton urged you to do, you seem to be ready to make an open-ended commitment (on America's behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran.

Our military, Mr. Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq, that even a majority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissatisfied with your prosecution of the war.

It is so weary, that many of the troops you have just consigned to Iraq, will be on their second tours, or their third tours, or their fourth tours � and now you're going to make them take on Iran and Syria as well?

Who is left to go and fight, sir?

Who are you going to send to "interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria"? Laura and Barney?

The line is from the movie "Chinatown" and I quote it often. "Middle of a drought," the mortician chuckles, "and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.!"

'Middle of a debate over the lives and deaths of another 21,500 of our citizens in Iraq� and the President wants to saddle up against Iran and Syria.'

Maybe that's the point: to shift the attention away from just how absurd and childish, is this latest war strategy (strategy, that is, for the war already under way, and not the one, on deck).

We are to put 17,500 more troops into Baghdad and 4,000 more into Anbar Province to give the Iraqi government "breathing space."

In and of itself, that is an awful and insulting term.

The lives of 21,500 more Americans endangered, to give "breathing space" to a government that just turned the first and perhaps the most sober act of any Democracy � the capitol punishment of an ousted dictator � into a vengeance lynching so barbaric, and so lacking in the solemnities necessary for credible authority, that it might have offended the Ku Klux Klan of the 19th Century.

And what will our men and women in Iraq do?

The ones who will truly live � and die � during what Mr. Bush said last night will be a "year ahead" which "will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve"?

They will try to seal up Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad, in which the civil war is worst.

Mr. Bush did not mention that while our people are trying to do that, the factions in the civil war will no longer have to focus on killing each other but rather, they can focus anew on killing our people.

Because last night the President foolishly all but announced that we will be sending these 21,500 poor souls over � but, no more after that � and if the whole thing fizzles out, we're going home.

The plan fails militarily.

The plan fails symbolically.

The plan fails politically.

Most importantly, perhaps, Mr. Bush, the plan fails because it still depends on your credibility.

You speak of mistakes, and of the responsibility "resting" with you. But you do not admit to making those mistakes.

And you offer us nothing to justify this clenched fist towards Iran and Syria.

In fact, when you briefed news correspondents off-the-record before the speech, they were told, once again, "if you knew what we knew� if you saw what we saw�"

"If you knew what we knew," was how we got into this morass in Iraq, in the first place.

The problem arose, when it turned out that the question wasn't whether or not we knew what you knew but whether you knew what you knew.

You, sir, have become the President who cried wolf.

All that you say about Iraq now, could be gospel. All that you say about Iran and Syria now, could be prescient and essential.

We no longer have a clue, sir. We have heard too many stories.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the Director of National Intelligence over to the State Department, because he thought you were wrong about Iran.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly useful in an air war next door in Iran.

Your assurances, sir, and your demands that we trust you, have lost all shape and texture.

They are now merely fertilizer for conspiracy theories.

They are now fertilizer indeed.

The pile has been built slowly and with seeming care.

I read this list last night, before the President's speech, and it bears repetition, because its shape and texture are perceptible only in such a context.

Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said nation-building was wrong for America. Now he says it is vital.

He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control. Last night he promised to embed them, in Iraqi units.

He told us about WMD. Mobile labs. Secret sources. Aluminum tubes. Yellow-cake.

He has told us the war is necessary because Saddam was a material threat. Because of 9/11. Because of Osama Bin Laden. Al-Qaeda. Terrorism in General. To liberate Iraq. To spread freedom. To spread Democracy. To prevent terrorism by gas price increases. Because this was a guy who tried to kill his Dad.

Because 439 words in to the speech last night, he trotted out 9/11 again.

In advocating and prosecuting this war he passed on a chance to get Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. To get Muqtada Al-Sadr.

To get Bin Laden.

He sent in fewer troops than the Generals told him to.

He ordered the Iraqi army disbanded and the Iraqi government "De-Baathified."

He short-changed Iraqi training. He neglected to plan for widespread looting. He did not anticipate sectarian violence.

He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. Gave jobs to foreign contractors, and not Iraqis. He staffed U.S. positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.

He and his government told us "America had prevailed", "Mission Accomplished", the resistance was in its "last throes".

He has insisted more troops were not necessary. He has now insisted more troops are necessary.

He has insisted it's up to the generals, and then removed some of the generals who said more troops would not be necessary.

He has trumpeted the turning points: The fall of Baghdad; the death of Uday and Qusay; the capture of Saddam; A provisional government; a charter; a constitution; the trial of Saddam; elections; purple fingers; another government; the death of Saddam.

He has assured us: we would be greeted as liberators with flowers; as they stood up, we would stand down. We would stay the course; we were never about "stay the course." We would never have to go door-to-door in Baghdad. And last night, that to gain Iraqis' trust, we would go door-to-door in Baghdad.

He told us the enemy was Al-Qaeda, foreign fighters, terrorists, Baathists, and now Iran and Syria.

The war would pay for itself. It would cost 1.7 billion dollars. 100 billion. 400 billion. Half a trillion. Last night's speech alone cost another six billion.

And after all of that, now it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Democrats, Republicans, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people.

Oh, and one more to add, tonight: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Mr. Bush, this is madness.

You have lost the military.

You have lost the Congress to the Democrats.

You have lost most of the Iraqis.

You have lost many of the Republicans.

You have lost our Allies.

You are losing the credibility, not just of your Presidency, but more importantly of the office itself.

And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones. You are guaranteeing it!

This becomes your legacy, sir: How many of those you addressed last night as your "fellow citizens" you just sent to their deaths?

And for what, Mr. Bush?

So the next President has to pull the survivors out of Iraq instead of you?

Good night and good luck.

Sacrifice

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:00:10 -0500
Finally tonight, a Special Comment about "Sacrifice."

If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?

Would you at least protest?

What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them?

What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them � and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?

This is where we stand tonight with the BBC report of President Bush's "new Iraq strategy" and his impending speech to the nation, which it quotes a senior American official, will be about troop increases and "sacrifice."

The President has delayed, dawdled, and deferred for the month since the release of the Iraq Study Group.

He has seemingly heard out everybody� and listened to none of them.

If the BBC is right � and we can only pray it is not � he has settled on the only solution all the true experts agree, cannot possibly work: more American personnel in Iraq, not as trainers for Iraqi troops, but as part of some flabby plan for "sacrifice."

Sacrifice!

More American servicemen and women will have their lives risked.

More American servicemen and women will have their lives ended.

More American families will have to bear the unbearable, and rationalize the unforgivable � "sacrifice" � sacrifice now, sacrifice tomorrow, sacrifice forever.

And more Americans � more even than the two-thirds who already believe we need fewer troops in Iraq, not more � will have to conclude the President does not have any idea what he's doing - and that other Americans will have to die for that reason.

It must now be branded as propaganda � for even the President cannot truly feel that very many people still believe him to be competent in this area, let alone "the decider."

But from our impeccable reporter at the Pentagon, Jim Miklaszewski, tonight comes confirmation of something called "surge and accelerate" � as many as 20-thousand additional troops � for "political purposes"�

This, in line with what we had previously heard, that this will be proclaimed a short-term measure, for the stated purpose of increasing security in and around Baghdad, and giving an Iraqi government a chance to establish some kind of order.

This is palpable nonsense, Mr. Bush.

If this is your intention � if the centerpiece of your announcement next week will be "sacrifice" � sacrifice your intention, not more American lives!

As Senator Biden has pointed out, the new troops might improve the ratio our forces, face relative to those living in Baghdad (friend and foe), from 200 to 1, to just 100 to 1.

"Sacrifice?"

No.

A drop in the bucket.

The additional men and women you have sentenced to go there, sir, will serve only as targets.

They will not be there "short-term," Mr. Bush; for many it will mean a year or more in death's shadow.

This is not temporary, Mr. Bush.

For the Americans who will die because of you� it will be as permanent as it gets.

The various rationales for what Mr. Bush will reportedly re-christen "sacrifice," constitute a very thin gruel, indeed.

The former Labor Secretary, Robert Ryke, says Senator McCain told him that the "surge" would help the "morale" of the troops already in Iraq.

If Mr. McCain truly said that, and truly believes it, he has either forgotten completely his own experience in Vietnam� or he is unaware of the recent Military Times poll indicating only 38 percent of our active military want to see more troops sent� or Mr. McCain has departed from reality.

Then there is the argument that to take any steps towards reducing troop numbers would show weakness to the enemy in Iraq, or to the terrorists around the world.

This simplistic logic ignores the inescapable fact that we have indeed already showed weakness to the enemy, and to the terrorists.

We have shown them that we will let our own people be killed, for no good reason.

We have now shown them that we will continue to do so.

We have shown them our stupidity.

Mr. Bush, your judgment about Iraq � and now about "sacrifice" � is at variance with your people's, to the point of delusion.

Your most respected generals see no value in a "surge" � they could not possibly see it in this madness of "sacrifice."

The Iraq Study Group told you it would be a mistake.

Perhaps dozens more have told you it would be a mistake.

And you threw their wisdom back, until you finally heard what you wanted to hear, like some child drawing straws and then saying "best two out of three� best three out of five� Hundredth one counts."

Your citizens, the people for whom you work, have told you they do not want this, and more over, they do not want you to do this.

Yet once again, sir, you have ignored all of us.

Mr. Bush, you do not own this country!

To those Republicans who have not broken free from the slavery of partisanship � those bonded still, to this President and this Administration � and now bonded to this "sacrifice" � proceed at your own peril.

John McCain may still hear the applause of small crowds � he has somehow inured himself to the hypocrisy, and the tragedy, of a man who considers himself the ultimate realist, courting the votes of those who support the government telling visitors to the Grand Canyon that it was caused by the Great Flood.

That Mr. McCain is selling himself off to the irrational Right, parcel by parcel, like some great landowner facing bankruptcy, seems to be obvious to everybody but himself.

Or, maybe it is obvious to him � and he simply no longer cares.

But to the rest of you in the Republican Party.

We need you to speak up, right now, in defense of your country's most precious assets � the lives of its citizens who are in harm's way.

If you do not, you are not serving this nation's interests � nor your own.

Last November should have told you this.

The opening of the new Congress tomorrow and Thursday, should tell you this.

Next time, those missing Republicans, will be you.

And to the Democrats now yoked to the helm of this sinking ship, you proceed at your own peril, as well.

President Bush may not be very good at reality, but he and Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rove are still gifted at letting American troops be killed, and then turning their deaths to their own political advantage.

The equation is simple. This country does not want more troops in Iraq.

It wants fewer.

Go and make it happen, or go and look for other work.

Yet you Democrats must assume that even if you take the most obvious of courses, and cut off funding for the war� Mr. Bush will ignore you as long as possible, or will find the money elsewhere, or will spend the money meant to protect the troops, and re-purpose it to keep as many troops there as long as he can keep them there.

Because that's what this is all about, is it not, Mr. Bush?

That is what this "sacrifice" has been for.

To continue this senseless, endless war.

You have dressed it up in the clothing, first of a hunt for weapons of mass destruction, then of liberation� then of regional imperative� then of oil prices� and now in these new terms of "sacrifice" � it's like a damned game of Colorforms, isn't it, sir?

This senseless, endless war.

But it has not been senseless in two ways.

It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It has gotten many of us, used to the idea � the virtual "white noise" � of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague "sacrifice" for some fluid cause, too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important sounding, but ultimately meaningless phrase, "the war on terror."

And the war's second accomplishment � your second accomplishment, sir - is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.

Because if you sell the Army a thousand Humvees, you can't sell them any more, until the first thousand have been destroyed.

The service men and women are ancillary to the equation.

This is about the planned obsolescence of ordnance, isn't, Mr. Bush? And the building of detention centers? And the design of a 125-million dollar courtroom complex at Gitmo complete with restaurants.

At least the war profiteers have made their money, sir.

And we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

You have insisted, Mr. Bush, that we must not lose in Iraq, that if we don't fight them there we will fight them here � as if the corollary were somehow true, that if by fighting them there we will not have to fight them here.

And yet you have re-made our country, and not re-made it for the better, on the premise that we need to be ready to "fight them here," anyway, and always.

In point of fact even if the Civil War in Iraq somehow ended tomorrow, and the risk to Americans there ended with it, we would have already suffered a defeat � not fatal, not world-changing, not, but for the lives lost, of enduring consequence.

But this country has already lost in Iraq, sir.

Your policy in Iraq has already had its crushing impact on our safety here.

You have already fomented new terrorism and new terrorists.

You have already stoked paranoia.

You have already pitted Americans, one against the other.

We� will have to live with it.

We� will have to live with what � of the fabric of our nation � you have already "sacrificed."

The only object still admissible in this debate, is the quickest and safest exit for our people there.

But you � and soon, Mr. Bush, it will be you and you alone � still insist otherwise.

And our sons and daughters and fathers and mothers will be sacrificed there tonight, Sir, so that you can say you did not "lose in Iraq."

Our policy in Iraq has been criticized for being indescribable, for being inscrutable, for being ineffable.

But it is all too easily understood now.

First, we sent Americans to their deaths for your lie, Mr. Bush.

Now we are sending them to their deaths for your ego.

If what is reported is true � if your decision is made and the "sacrifice" is ordered � take a page instead from the man at whose funeral you so eloquently spoke this morning � Gerald Ford: Put pragmatism and the healing of a nation, ahead of some kind of misguided vision.

Atone.

Sacrifice, Mr. Bush?

No, sir, this is not "sacrifice." This has now become "human sacrifice."

And it must stop.

And you can stop it.

Next week, make us all look wrong.

Our meaningless sacrifice in Iraq must stop.

And you must stop it.

We fight for liberty by having more liberty and not less

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 03:00:10 -0500
And finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about free speech, failed speakers, and the delusion of grandeur.

"This is a serious long term war," the man at the podium cried, "and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country."

Some, in the audience, must have thought they were hearing an arsonist give the keynote address at a convention of firefighters.

This was the annual Loeb First Amendment Dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire � a public cherishing of Freedom of Speech � in the state with the two-fisted motto "Live Free Or Die."

And the arsonist at the microphone, the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was insisting that we must attach an "on-off button" to Free Speech.

He offered the time-tested excuse trotted out by our demagogues, since even before the Republic was founded: widespread death, of Americans, in America, possibly at the hands of Americans.

But updated, now, to include terrorists� using the internet for recruitment� end result, quote "losing a city."

The Colonial English defended their repression with words like these.

And so did the Slave States.

And so did the policemen who shot strikers.

And so did Lindbergh's America-First crowd.

And so did those who interned Japanese-Americans.

And so did those behind the Red Scare.

And so did Nixon's Plumbers.

The genuine proportion of the threat is always irrelevant.

The fear the threat is exploited to create� becomes the only reality.

"We will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find," Mr. Gingrich continued about terrorists formerly Communists formerly Hippies formerly Fifth Columnists formerly Anarchists formerly Redcoats.

"�.to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech."

Mr. Gingrich, the British 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1770's.

The pro-slavery leaders 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1850's.

The FBI and CIA 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1960's.

It is in those groups where you would have found your kindred spirits, Mr. Gingrich.

Those who had no faith in freedom, no faith in this country, and, ultimately, no faith even in the strength of their own ideas, to stand up on their own legs, without having the playing-field tilted entirely to their benefit.

"It will lead us to learn," Gingrich continued, "how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear and biological weapons."

That we have always had 'a very severe approach' to these people is insufficient for Mr. Gingrich's ends.

He wants to somehow ban the idea.

Even though everyone who has ever protested a movie or a piece of music or a book has learned the same lesson:

Try to suppress it, and you only validate it.

Make it illegal, and you make it the subject of curiosity.

Say it cannot be said - and it will instead be screamed.

�

And on top of the thundering danger in his eagerness to sell out freedom of speech, there is a sadder sound, still � the tinny crash of a garbage can lid on a sidewalk.

Whatever dreams of internet-censorship float like a miasma in Mr. Gingrich's personal swamp, whatever hopes he has of an Iron Firewall, the simple fact is � technically, they won't work.

As of tomorrow they will have been defeated by� a free computer download.

Mere hours after Gingrich's speech in New Hampshire, the University of Toronto announced it had come up with a program called "Psiphon" to liberate those, in countries in which the internet is regulated�

Places like China, and Irahn, where political ideas are so barren, and political leaders so desperate, that they put up computer firewalls to keep thought and freedom out.

The "Psiphon" device is a relay of sorts that can surreptitiously link a computer user in an imprisoned country to another in a free one.

The Chinese think the wall works, yet the ideas � good ideas, bad ideas, indifferent ideas, pass through anyway.

The same way the Soviet Bloc, was defeated by the images of Western Material Bounty.

If your hopes of thought-control can be defeated, Mr. Gingrich, merely by one computer whiz staying up an extra half hour and devising a new "firewall hop," what is all this apocalyptic hyperbole for?

"I further think," you said in Manchester, "We should propose a Geneva convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules, that allow us, to protect civilization by defeating barbarism�"

Well, Mr. Gingrich, what is more 'massively destructive' than trying to get us, to give you our freedom?

And what is someone seeking to hamstring the First Amendment doing, if not "fighting outside the rules of law"?

And what is the suppression of knowledge and freedom, if not "barbarism"?

The explanation, of course, is in one last quote from Mr. Gingrich from New Hampshire� and another, from last week.

"I want to suggest to you," he said about these internet restrictions, "that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of the threat."

And who should those "impaneled" people, be?

Funny I should ask, isn't it, Mr. Gingrich?

"I am not 'running' for president," you told a reporter from Fortune Magazine. "I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen."

�

Newt Gingrich sees, in terrorism, not something to be exterminated, but something to be exploited.

It's his golden opportunity, isn't it?

'Rallying a nation,' you might say, 'to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make Martial Law seem like anarchy.'

That's from the original version of the movie "The Manchurian Candidate" - the chilling words of Angela Lansbury's character, as she first promises to sell her country to the Chinese and Russians, then reveals she'll double-cross them, and keep all the power herself, waving the flag every time she subjugates another freedom.

Within the frame of our experience as a free and freely argumentative people, it is almost impossible to conceive that there are those among us, who might approach the kind of animal-wildness of fiction like that � those who would willingly transform our beloved country into something false and terrible.

Who among us can look to our own histories, or those of our ancestors who struggled to get here, or who struggled to get freedom after they were forced here, and not teer up when we reed Frederick Douglass's words from a century-and-a-half ago: "Freedom must take the day"?

And who among us can look to our collective history, and not see its turning points � like the Civil War, like Watergate, like the Revolution itself � in which the right idea defeated the wrong idea on the battlefield that is the marketplace of ideas?

But apparently there are some of us who cannot see, that the only future for America is one that cherishes the freedoms won in the past, one in which we vanquish bad ideas with better ones, and in which we fight for liberty by having more liberty, not less.

"I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen."

What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the way to save America, is to destroy America.

I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you in that dark place.

And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it.

And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea it represents � and what a cynical mind.

And that you are entitled to do all that, thanks to the very freedoms, you seek to suffocate.

�

Good night, and good luck.

Educating Bush on Vietnam

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 03:00:33 -0500
"It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again"

This country was founded to prevent anybody from making it up as they went along.

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 02:59:04 -0500
And so we look at the verdict in the trial of Saddam Hussein yesterday, and, with the very phrase 'October, or November, Surprise' now a part of our vernacular, and the chest-thumping coming from so many of the Republican campaigners today, each of us must wonder about the convenience of the timing of his conviction and sentencing. "

Transcript below the fold

And finally tonight, a Special Comment about tomorrow's elections.

We are, as every generation, inseparable from our own time.

Thus is our perspective, inevitably that of the explorer looking into the wrong end of the telescope.

But even accounting for our myopia, it's hard to imagine there have been many elections more important than this one, certainly not in Non-Presidential years.

And so we look at the verdict in the trial of Saddam Hussein yesterday, and, with the very phrase "October, or November, Surprise" now a part of our vernacular, and the chest-thumping coming from so many of the Republican campaigners today, each of us must wonder about the convenience of the timing of his conviction and sentencing.

But let us give history and coincidence the benefit of the doubt � let's say it's just "happened" that way � and for a moment not look into the wrong end of the telescope.

Let's perceive instead the bigger picture:

Saddam Hussein, found guilty in an Iraqi court.

Who can argue against that?

He is officially, what the world always knew he was: a war criminal.

Mr. Bush, was this imprimatur, worth the cost of 2,832 American lives, and thousands more American lives yet to be lost?

Is the conviction of Saddam Hussein the reason you went to war in Iraq?

Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that did not exist?

Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda that did not exist?

Or did you go to war in Iraq to break the bonds of tyranny there � while installing the mechanisms of tyranny here?

Or did you go to war in Iraq because you felt the need to wreak vengeance against somebody � anybody?

Or did you go to war in Iraq to contain a rogue state which, months earlier, your own administration had declared had been fully contained by sanctions?

Or did you go to war in Iraq� to keep gas prices down?

How startling it was, Sir, to hear you introduce oil to your stump speeches over the weekend.

Not four years removed from the most dismissive, the most condescending, the most ridiculing denials of the very hint at, as Mr. Rumsfeld put it, this "nonsense"�

There you were, campaigning in Colorado, in Nebraska, in Florida, in Kansas � suddenly turning this 'unpatriotic idea'� into a platform plank.

"You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources," you told us. "And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following."

Having frightened us, having bullied us, having lied to us, having ignored and re-written the constitution under our noses, having stayed the course, having denied you've stayed the course, having belittled us about "timelines" but instead extolled "benchmarks"�

You've now resorted, Sir, to this?

We must stay in Iraq to save the two-dollar gallon of gas?

�

Mr. President, there is no other conclusion we can draw as we go to the polls tomorrow.

Sir� you have been making this up as you went along.

This country was founded to prevent anybody from making it up as they went along.

Those vaunted founding fathers of ours have been so quoted-up, that they appear as marble statues: like the chiseled guards of China, or the faces on Mount Rushmore.

But in fact they were practical people and the thing they obviously feared most, was a government of men and not laws.

They provided the checks and balances for a reason.

No one man could run the government the way he saw fit � unless he, at the least, took into consideration what those he governed saw.

A House of Representatives would be the people's eyes.

A Senate would be the corrective force on that House.

An Executive would do the work� and hold the Constitution to his chest like his child.

A Supreme Court would oversee it all.

Checks and balances.

Where did that go, Mr. Bush?

And what price did we pay because we have let it go?

Saddam Hussein will get out of Iraq the same way 2,832 Americans have, and thousands more.

He'll get out faster than we will.

And if nothing changes tomorrow, you, Sir, will be out of the White House long before the rest of us can say� we are out of Iraq.

And whose fault is this?

Not truly yours. You took advantage of those of us who were afraid, and those of us who believed unity and nation took precedence over all else.

But we let you take that advantage.

And so we let you go to war in Iraq. To� oust Saddam. Or find non-existant Weapons. Or avenge 9/11. Or fight terrorists who only got there after we did. Or as cover to change the fabric of our Constitution. Or for lower prices at The Texaco. Or� ?

There are still a few hours left, before the polls open, sir, there are many rationalizations still untried.

And whatever your motives of the moment, we the people have, in true good faith and with the genuine patriotism of self-sacrifice (of which you have shown you know nothing)� we have let you go on�

Making it up.

As you went along.

Un-checked� and un-balanced.

Vote.

There is no line this President has not crossed

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 02:59:37 -0500

And finally tonight, a Special Comment.
On the 22nd of May, 1856, as the deteriorating American political system veered towards the edge of the cliff, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, shuffled into the Senate of this nation, his leg stiff from an old dueling injury, supported by a cane. And he looked for the familiar figure of the prominent Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.
Brooks found Sumner at his desk, mailing out copies of a speech he had delivered three days earlier � a speech against slavery.
The Congressman matter-of-factly raised his walking stick in mid-air, and smashed its metal point, across the Senator's head.
Congressman Brooks hit his victim repeatedly. Senator Sumner somehow got to his feet and tried to flee. Brooks chased him, and delivered untold blows to Sumner's head. Even though Sumner lay unconscious and bleeding, on the Senate floor, Brooks finally stopped beating him, only because his cane finally broke.
Others will cite John Brown's attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry as the exact point after which the Civil War became inevitable.
In point of fact, it might have been the moment � not when Brooks broke his cane over the prostrate body of Senator Sumner - but when voters in Brooks's district started sending him new canes.
Tonight, we almost wonder to whom President Bush will send the next new cane.
There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.
There is no line this President has not crossed � nor will not cross � to keep one political party, in power.
He has spread any and every fear among us, in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears � some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.
And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him, whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people, is subtle and nuanced � or laughably transparent.
Senator John Kerry called him out Monday.
He did it two years too late.
He had been too cordial � just as Vice President Gore had been too cordial in 2000 � just as millions of us, have been too cordial ever since.
Senator Kerry, as you well know, spoke at a college in Southern California. With bitter humor, he told the students that he had been in Texas the day before, that President Bush used to live in that state, but that now he lives in the state of denial.
He said the trip had reminded him about the value of education � that quote "if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you can get stuck in Iraq."
The Senator, in essence, called Mr. Bush stupid.
The context was unmistakable: Texas;the state of denial;stuck in Iraq. No interpretation required.
And Mr. Bush and his minions responded, by appearing to be too stupid to realize that they had been called stupid.
They demanded Kerry apologize � to the troops in Iraq.
And so he now has.
That phrase "appearing to be too stupid" is used deliberately, Mr. Bush.
Because there are only three possibilities here:
One, sir, is that you are far more stupid than the worst of your critics have suggested; that you could not follow the construction of a simple sentence; that you could not recognize your own life story when it was deftly summarized; that you could not perceive it was the sad ledger of your presidency that was being recounted.
This, of course, compliments you, Mr. Bush, because even those who do not "make the most of it," who do not "study hard," who do not "do their homework," and who do not "make an effort to be smart" might still just be stupid � but honest.
No; the first option, sir, is, at best, improbable. You are not honest.
The second option is that you and those who work for you deliberately twisted what Senator Kerry said to fit your political template. That you decided to take advantage of it, to once again pretend that the attacks, solely about your own incompetence, were in fact attacks on the troops � or even on the nation itself.
The third possibility is, obviously, the nightmare scenario; that the first two options are in some way conflated.
That it is both politically convenient for you, and personally satisfying to you, to confuse yourself with the country for which, sir, you work.
A brief reminder, Mr. Bush: You are not the United States of America.
You are merely a politician whose entire legacy will have been a willingness to make anything political � to have, in this case, refused to acknowledge that the insult wasn't about the troops, and that the insult was not even truly about you either � that the insult, in fact, is you.
So now John Kerry has apologized to the troops; apologized for the Republicans' deliberate distortions.
Thus the President will now begin the apologies he owes our troops, right?
This President must apologize to the troops � for having suggested, six weeks ago, that the chaos in Iraq, the death and the carnage, the slaughtered Iraqi civilians and the dead American service personnel, will, to history, quote "look like just a comma."
This President must apologize to the troops � because the intelligence he claims led us into Iraq proved to be undeniably and irredeemably wrong.
This President must apologize to the troops � for having laughed about the failure of that intelligence, at a banquet, while our troops were in harm's way.
This President must apologize to the troops � because the streets of Iraq were not strewn with flowers and its residents did not greet them as liberators.
This President must apologize to the troops � because his administration ran out of "plan" after barely two months.
This President must apologize to the troops � for getting 2,815 of them killed.
This President must apologize to the troops � for getting this country into a war without a clue.
And Mr. Bush owes us an apology� for this destructive and omnivorous presidency.
�
We will not receive them, of course.
This President never apologizes.
Not to the troops.
Not to the people.
Nor will those henchmen who have echoed him.
In calling him a "stuffed suit," Senator Kerry was wrong about the Press Secretary.
Mr. Snow's words and conduct � falsely earnest and earnestly false � suggest he is not "stuffed" - he is inflated.
And in leaving him out of the equation, Senator Kerry gave an unwarranted pass to his old friend Senator McCain, who should be ashamed of himself tonight.
He rolled over and pretended Kerry had said what he obviously had not.
Only, the symbolic stick he broke over Kerry's head came in a context, even more disturbing: Mr. McCain demanded the apology, while electioneering for a Republican congressional candidate in Illinois.
He was speaking of how often he had been to Walter Reed Hospital to see the wounded Iraq veterans, of how, quote "many of the have lost limbs." He said all this while demanding that the voters of Illinois reject a candidate who is not only a wounded Iraq veteran, but who lost two limbs there: Tammy Duckworth.
Support some of the wounded veterans. But bad-mouth the Democratic one.
And exploit all the veterans, and all the still-serving personnel, in a cheap and tawdry political trick, to try to bury the truth: that John Kerry said the President had been stupid.
And to continue this slander as late as this morning � as biased, or gullible, or lazy newscasters, nodded in sleep-walking assent.
Senator McCain became a front man in a collective lie to break sticks over the heads of Democrats � one of them his friend; another his fellow veteran, leg-less, for whom he should weep and applaud, or at minimum about whom, he should stay quiet.
That was beneath the Senator from Arizona.
And it was all because of an imaginary insult to the troops that his party cynically manufactured � out of a desperation, and a futility, as deep as that of Congressman Brooks, when he went hunting for Senator Sumner.
This, is our beloved country now, as you have re-defined it, Mr. Bush.
Get a tortured Vietnam veteran to attack a decorated Vietnam veteran, in defense of military personnel, whom that decorated veteran did not insult.
Or, get your henchmen to take advantage of the evil lingering dregs of the fear of miscegenation in Tennessee, in your party's advertisements against Harold Ford.
Or, get the satellites who orbit around you, like Rush Limbaugh, to exploit the illness � and the bi-partisanship � of Michael J. Fox � yes, get someone to make fun of the cripple.
Oh, and sir, don't forget to drag your own wife into it.
"It's always easy," she said of Mr. Fox's commercials � and she used this phrase twice � "to manipulate people's feelings."
Where on earth might the First Lady have gotten that idea, Mr. President?
From your endless manipulation of people's feelings about terrorism?
"How ever they put it," you said Monday of the Democrats, on the subject of Iraq , "their approach comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses."
No manipulation of feelings there.
No manipulation of the charlatans of your administration into the only truth-tellers.
No shocked outrage at the Kerry insult that wasn't; no subtle smile as the First Lady silently sticks the knife in Michael J. Fox's back; no attempt on the campaign trail to bury the reality that you have already assured that the terrorists are winning.
Winning in Iraq, sir.
Winning in America, sir.
There, we have chaos: joint U.S./Iraqi checkpoints at Sadr City, the base of the radical Shiite militias � and the Americans have been ordered out by the Prime Minister of Iraq� and our Secretary of Defense doesn't even know about it!
And here � we have deliberate, systematic, institutionalized lying and smearing and terrorizing � a code of deceit, that somehow permits a President to say, quote, "If you listen carefully for a Democrat plan for success, they don't have one."
Permits him to say this while his plan in Iraq has amounted to a twisted version of the advice once offered to Lyndon Johnson about his Iraq, called Vietnam.
Instead of "declare victory � and get out"� we now have "declare victory � and stay, indefinitely."
And also here, we have institutionalized the terrorizing of the opposition. True domestic terror:
� Critics of your administration in the media receive letters filled with fake anthrax.
� Braying newspapers applaud, or laugh, or reveal details the FBI wished kept quiet, and thus impede or ruin the investigation.
� A series of reactionary columnists encourages treason charges against a newspaper that published "national security information" � that was openly available on the internet.
� One radio critic receives a letter, threatening the revelation of as much personal information about her as can be obtained � and expressing the hope that someone will then shoot her with an AK-47 machine gun.
� And finally, a critic of an incumbent Republican Senator, a critic armed with nothing but words, is attacked by the Senator's supporters, and thrown to the floor, in full view of television cameras, as if someone really did want to re-enact the intent and the rage of the day Preston Brooks found Senator Charles Sumner.
Of course, Mr. President, you did none of these things.
You instructed no one to mail the fake anthrax. Nor undermine the FBI's case. Nor call for the execution of the editors of the New York Times. Nor threaten to assassinate Stephanie Miller. Nor beat up a man yelling at Senator Allen. Nor have the first lady knife Michael J. Fox. Nor tell John McCain to lie about John Kerry.
No, you did not.
And the genius of the thing, is the same, as in King Henry's rhetorical question about Archbishop Thomas Becket: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
All you have to do, sir� is hand out enough new canes.

GOP Fearmongering

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 02:00:12 -0400
And lastly, tonight, a Special Comment on the advertising of terrorism.

The commercial, you have already seen, it is a distillation of everything this administration and the party in power have tried to do these last five years and six weeks.

It is from the Republican National Committee, it shows images of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.� It offers quotes from them, all as a clock ticks ominously in the background. It concludes with what Zawahiri may or may not have said to a Pakistani journalist as long ago as 2001, his dubious claim that he had purchased suitcase bombs.� The quotation is followed by sheer coincidence, no doubt, by an image of a massive explosion. "These are the stakes" appears on the screen, quoting exactly from Lyndon Johnson's infamous nuclear scare commercial from 1964, "Vote November 7th".

There is a cheap Texas Chainsaw Massacre quality to the whole thing. It also serves to immediately call to mind the occasions when President Bush dismissed Osama bin Laden as somebody he didn't think about, except, obviously, when elections were near.� Frankly, a lot of people seeing that commercial for the first time have laughed out loud, but not everyone.� And therein lies the true threat to this country.

The dictionary definition of the word �terrorize' is simple and not open to misinterpretation: "To fill or overpower with terror; terrify; coerce by intimidation or fear."� Note please that the words �violence' and �death' are missing from that definition.� For the key to terrorism is not the act-but the fear of the act.� That is why bin Laden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting together videotape statements and releasing virtual infomercials with dire threats and heart-stopping warnings.

But why is the Republican Party imitating them? Bin Laden puts out what amounts to a commercial of fear; the Republicans put out what is unmistakable as a commercial of fear.

The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and the others broadcast into your home!� Only the Republicans have a bigger bankroll.

When last week, the CNN network ran video of an insurgent in Iraq evidently stalking and killing an American soldier, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Mr. Hunter, Republican of California, branded that channel quote "the publicist for an enemy propaganda film," and added that CNN used it to sell commercials.� Another California Republican, Representative Brian Bilbray, called the video quote "nothing short of a terrorist snuff film."

If so, Mr. Bilbray, then what in the hell is your party's new advertisement? And Mr. Hunter? CNN using the film to sell commercials?� Commercials?� You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee.�

�To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear'

By this definition, the people who put these videos together: first, the terrorists and then, the administration, whose shared goal is to scare you into panicking instead of thinking, they are the ones terrorizing you.

By this definition, the leading terrorist group in this world right now is al Qaeda, but the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party.

Eleven presidents ago, the chief executive reassured us that �we have nothing to fear, but fear itself.'� His distant successor has wasted his administration, insisting there is nothing we can have but fear itself.

The Vice President, as recently as this month, was caught campaigning again with the phrase "mass death in the United States".� Four years ago, it was the now Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, rationalizing Iraq with quote, "we don't want to be�the smoking gun to be the mushroom cloud."� Days later, Mr. Bush himself told an audience that quote "we cannot wait the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

And now we have this cheesy commercial, complete with images of a faked mushroom cloud and implications of mass death in America.�

This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror.� It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and only you can save them. Lyndon Johnson used it to bury Barry Goldwater.� Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back.� And now the legacy has come to President George W. Bush.

Of course, the gruel of fear is getting thinner and thinner, is it not, Mr. President?� And thus, more and more of it needs to be made out of less and less actual terror.� After last week's embarrassing internet hoax about dirty bombs in footballs stadiums, the one your Department of Homeland Security immediately disseminated to the public, a self-described former CIA operative named Wayne Simmons cited the fiasco as quote "The, and I mean, the perfect example of the President's Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the NSA Terrorist Eavesdropping Program-how vital they are."�

Frank Gaffney, once a respected Assistant Secretary of Defense and now the president of something called The Center for Security Policy added "one of the things that I hope Americans take away from this is not only that they're gunning for us.� Not just in a place like Iraq, but truly worldwide."

Of course, the "they" to which Mr. Gaffney referred, turned out to be a lone 20-year-old grocery bagger from Wisconsin named Jake.� A kid trying to one-up some loser in an internet game of �chicken.'� His threat referenced seven football stadiums, at which dirty bombs were to be exploded yesterday.� It began with the one in New York City, even though there isn't one in New York City and though the attacks were supposed to be simultaneous, four of the games were scheduled to start at 1:00 pm Eastern time and the others at 4:00 pm Eastern time.� Moreover, the kid said that he had posted the identical message on forty websites since September.� We caught him in merely about six weeks, even though the only way he could be less subtle, less stealthy and less of a threat was if he bought an advertisement on the Superbowl telecast.

Mr. Bush, this is the what�100th plot your people have revealed that turned out to be some nonsensical misunderstanding or the fabrications of somebody hoping to talk his way off a waterboard in Eastern Europe? If, Mr. President, this is the kind of crack work your new ad implies that only you, and not the Democrats, can do, you, sir, need to pull over and ask for directions.� The real question, of course, Mr. Bush, is why did your Department of Homeland Security even release that information in the first place?� It was never a serious threat.� Even the first news accounts quoted a Homeland spokesman as admitting strong skepticism.� The kind of strong skepticism which most government agencies address before telling the public, not afterwards.

So that leaves two options, Mr. President: the first option, you and your Department of Homeland Security don't have the slightest idea what you're doing here. Thus, contrary to your flip-flopping between saying, "we're safe" and saying, "but we're not safe enough", and contrary to the Vice President's swaggering pronouncements about the lack of another attack since 9/11, the last five years HAS been just an accident.

Or there's the second option: your political operatives leaked this nonsense for the same reason your political operatives put out that commercial.� To scare the gullible.�

Obviously, the correct answer, Mr. Bush, is: all of the above.��

There are some of us who could forgive you, for trying to run your candidates on the coattails of the Grim Reaper, for reducing your party's existence to "Death and the Tax Us."� It's cynical and barbaric, but after all, it may be merely the extension of the gutter politics to which you have subscribed since you sidled over from baseball and the business world of other people's money.

But to forgive you for terrorizing us, we would have to believe that you somehow competent in keeping others from terrorizing us.� Yet last week, construction workers repairing a subway line in New York City were cleaning out an abandoned manhole on the edge of the WTC site, when they stumbled on the horrific and impossible: human remains from 9/11.� Bones and fragments, eighty of them.� Some as much as a foot long.� The victims had been lying literally in the gutter for five years and five weeks.� The families and friends of each of the 2,749 dead, who had been grimly told in May 2002, that there were no more remains to be found, were struck anew as if the terrorism of that day had just happened all over again.

And over this weekend, they have found still more remains.� And now this week will be spent looking in places that should have already been looked at a thousand times, five years ago.

For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush, the living and the dead, it is a touch of 9/11 all over again.� And the mayor of this city, who called off this search four and a half years ago is a Republican. The governor, with whom he conferred, is a Republican.� The House of Representatives, Republican.� The Senate, Republican.� The President, Republican.�� And yet you can claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?

You can't even recover our dead from the battlefield.� The battlefield in an American city. When we've given you five years and unlimited funds to do so.

While citing a Military Commissions Act so monstrous that it has now been criticized by even the John Birch Society, you told us, Mr. Bush, quote, "there is nothing we can do to bring back the men and women lost on September 11th, 2001, yet we'll always honor their memory and we will never forget the way they were taken from us."�� Except of course, for the ones that have been lying under a manhole cover for five years.�

Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat itself on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America, just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government in time of crisis in this country's history.

These are the stakes indeed, Mr. President.� You do not know what you are doing.� And the commercial, the one about which Zawahiri might say, "hey, pretty good, we love your choice of font style," all that further needs to be said about that is to add three words to Shakespeare.� Mr. President, you and that advertisement of terror are full of sound and fury, signifying�and competent at�nothing.

Death of Habeas Corpus: �Your words are lies, Sir.�

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:50:00 -0400

Olbermann: And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.
We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived… as people in fear.
And now — our rights and our freedoms in peril — we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy. For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived… as people in fear.
And now — our rights and our freedoms in peril — we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.
We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9-0-6-6 was necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110-thousand Americans…
While his man-in-charge…
General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen — he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did — but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and…
…one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900-thousand votes… though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely… from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States, to the citizens of the United States, whose lives it ruined.
The most vital… the most urgent… the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been, only human.
We have let Roosevelt's "fear of fear itself" overtake us.
We have listened to the little voice inside that has said "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass."
We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute… the Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always… wrong.
"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.
Sadly — of course — the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously… was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital… the most urgent… the most inescapable of reasons.
And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere — anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" — exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?
"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."
'Presumed innocent,' Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
'Access to an attorney,' Mr. Bush?
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
'Hearing all the evidence,' Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies, that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," …you told us yesterday… "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America."
That terrorist, sir, could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas Corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush… they would be "the beginning of the end of America."
And did it even occur to you once sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 — that with only a little further shift in this world we now know — just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died —
Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" for… and convene a Military Commission to try… not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, sir, all of them — as always — wrong.

Tempting Faith Part II: Christian Conservatives Duped by BushCo.

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 06:15:54 -0400
transcript:

Eight words, attributed to Karl Rove, by author and former Special Assistant to the President David Kuo, that could by themselves very well decide those mid-terms.Our fifth story on the Countdown: part two of our look inside Mr. Kuo's extraordinary new book, "Tempting Faith" � written from his earlier vantage point as the number two man in Bush's Office Of Faith-Based Initiatives�And though it's a very large tip � the Rove quote is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.As we reported last night, Kuo is making several explosive claims.Among them, that�behind their backs�the nation's top evangelical Christians were regarded with routine mockery and contempt by White House staffers � called 'nuts' and 'ridiculous'.We also told you that Kuo writes that the Faith-Based Office was so starved for support from the Oval Office that it was forced to transform itself into a political arm of Republican campaign efforts.David Kuo is himself a self-described conservative Christian. His personal, and his religious assessment of Mr. Bush, is nowhere near the most newsworthy of Kuo's revelations in our report tonight.But it might be a valuable key to understanding this president.To this day, Kuo says he believes Mr. Bush loves Jesus; that he is a good man. However, Kuo says many Christians assume from his belief in Jesus Christ that he won't do what other politicians do: break their word, hide their mistakes, or spin the truth. And that those assumptions are wrong.In Kuo's eyes, today's national Christian leaders were being used. They didn't have the same shrewdness Billy Graham had in the '70s, to question whether Nixon was using him for his appeal to religious voters.In fact, Christians who voted for Mr. Bush based on his religion, may have ended up hurting the very people Jesus sought to help: the poor.[video] Bush � "I urge the Senate to pass the faith-based initiative for the good of America.But when Senator Chuck Grassley tried to rewrite Mr. Bush's 1.7 trillion dollar tax cut to include six billion in tax credits for groups helping the poor � tax credits that Mr. Bush himself had publicly proposed � Kuo says Bush's assistant told Grassley to drop the charity tax credits. The White House had no interest.The cuts Mr. Bush did want made things worse for charities.Kuo claims that the estate tax cuts discouraged charitable giving, costing charities an estimated 5 billion dollars.Eight words, attributed to Karl Rove, by author and former Special Assistant to the President David Kuo, that could by themselves very well decide those mid-terms.

Our fifth story on the Countdown: part two of our look inside Mr. Kuo's extraordinary new book, "Tempting Faith" � written from his earlier vantage point as the number two man in Bush's Office Of Faith-Based Initiatives�

And though it's a very large tip � the Rove quote is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

As we reported last night, Kuo is making several explosive claims.

Among them, that�behind their backs�the nation's top evangelical Christians were regarded with routine mockery and contempt by White House staffers � called 'nuts' and 'ridiculous'.

We also told you that Kuo writes that the Faith-Based Office was so starved for support from the Oval Office that it was forced to transform itself into a political arm of Republican campaign efforts.

David Kuo is himself a self-described conservative Christian. His personal, and his religious assessment of Mr. Bush, is nowhere near the most newsworthy of Kuo's revelations in our report tonight.

But it might be a valuable key to understanding this president.

To this day, Kuo says he believes Mr. Bush loves Jesus; that he is a good man. However, Kuo says many Christians assume from his belief in Jesus Christ that he won't do what other politicians do: break their word, hide their mistakes, or spin the truth. And that those assumptions are wrong.

In Kuo's eyes, today's national Christian leaders were being used. They didn't have the same shrewdness Billy Graham had in the '70s, to question whether Nixon was using him for his appeal to religious voters.

In fact, Christians who voted for Mr. Bush based on his religion, may have ended up hurting the very people Jesus sought to help: the poor.

� [video] Bush � "I urge the Senate to pass the faith-based initiative for the good of America.

But when Senator Chuck Grassley tried to rewrite Mr. Bush's 1.7 trillion dollar tax cut to include six billion in tax credits for groups helping the poor � tax credits that Mr. Bush himself had publicly proposed � Kuo says Bush's assistant told Grassley to drop the charity tax credits. The White House had no interest.

The cuts Mr. Bush did want made things worse for charities.

Kuo claims that the estate tax cuts discouraged charitable giving, costing charities an estimated 5 billion dollars.

The ultimate impact of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, he says, was to brutalize the very charities Mr. Bush once identified as his top priorities.� After only a year, charitable donations were down dramatically, and some charities had shut down.

Kuo says the White House was more concerned with the appearance of doing something.

He says the Faith-Based office wasn't even set up during the 2001 transition until Mr. Bush took office and Karl Rove gave a transition volunteer less than one week to roll out the entire Faith-Based Initiative.

The volunteer asked how he should do that, without staff, without an office, or without even a plan.

According to Kuo, "Rove looked at him, took a deep breath, and said, "I don't know. Just get me a f�ing faith-based thing. Got it?"

After that, it was easier to push faith-based legislation, rather than faith-based funding, because legislation was a cheaper way to show the president was supposedly doing something.

Bush assistant Margaret Spellings, now the Education Secretary, asked Kuo for legislation and said she didn't care what kind, any kind of faith bill would do, he writes.

When the office got a substantive bill � a bill backed by every senator from Santorum to Clinton, the only hold-up was a green light from Josh Bolten or Andy Card.

They didn't get the green light.

What kind of bill did get such a�support?

Kuo says the White House liked the issue of religious hiring� not because it was a real issue affecting real charities, but because it was divisive and that made good politics.

"Tempting Faith" also suggests that the Bush White House would use anything for politics.

Anything.

[video of Jerry Falwell after 9/11]

After those comments, Kuo asked whether Karl Rove still wanted to let Falwell attend the National Service.�

Even while Ground Zero was still burning, politics still mattered.

Rove let Falwell attend, as long as he stayed off-camera.� While others wept, Kuo says, Falwell laughed about something with another conservative leader. Spotting Barbara Bush, Falwell remarked on how "frumpy" she looked.

Even choosing the new faith-based director, Jim Towey, was an issue of politics.

Rove put out the word that for Towey to get the job, he had to get as many cardinals as he could to vouch for him.

He did and he got the job.�

Kuo freely admits he, too, is no stranger to the politics of conservative compassion.� He writes he spent much of the '90s lobbying for it.

But at the time, he says the top Republican donors had no interest in fighting poverty. They had other enemies in mind, and told Kuo they would provide lavish funding if the target was not poverty but instead, the Clintons.

And Kuo would know about this. By the early '90s, he was already a conservative insider, part of Jack Kemp's think tank, "Empower America."

To help bring about the 1994 Republican revolution, Kuo writes that he and his team taught more than 600 candidates how to run for office: By blaming President Clinton for the nation's sad state of affairs at the time.� Kuo writes they tried to ignore the fact that Clinton had only just started in office after 12 years of teh administrations of Reagan and Bush.

Together with fellow Christian Mike Gerson-now Bush's top speechwriter-Kuo writes he wrote political speeches to appeal to religious audiences, even when the speakers did not want to give those speeches.

Jack Kemp removed religious "values" language from a speech he was to give to the Southern Baptist Convention. So, instead, Gerson and Kuo snuck in a few phrases that evangelicals would recognize, but lay people would not.� Kuo calls it a �code� that would continue to be used in speeches over the years by politicians including John Ashcroft, Ralph Reed, Bob Dole� and George W. Bush.verty. They had other enemies in mind, and told Kuo they would provide lavish funding if the target was not poverty but instead, the Clintons.And Kuo would know about this. By the early '90s, he was already a conservative insider, part of Jack Kemp's think tank, "Empower America."To help bring about the 1994 Republican revolution, Kuo writes that he and his team taught more than 600 candidates how to run for office: By blaming President Clinton for the nation's sad state of affairs at the time. Kuo writes they tried to ignore the fact that Clinton had only just started in office after 12 years of teh administrations of Reagan and Bush.Together with fellow Christian Mike Gerson-now Bush's top speechwriter-Kuo writes he wrote political speeches to appeal to religious audiences, even when the speakers did not want to give those speeches.Jack Kemp removed religious "values" language from a speech he was to give to the Southern Baptist Convention. So, instead, Gerson and Kuo snuck in a few phrases that evangelicals would recognize, but lay people would not. Kuo calls it a �code� that would continue to be used in speeches over the years by politicians including John Ashcroft, Ralph Reed, Bob Dole� and George W. Bush.

Tempting Faith

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:39:06 -0400

Olbermann Exclusive:

When President Bush touched on Iraq at his news conference this morning, he may have been revealing more than he knew.

[video] BUSH:� The stakes couldn't be any higher, as I said earlier, in the world in which we live. There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives.

He was talking about religious extremists in Iraq. But an hour later, Mr. Bush posed with officials from the Southern Baptist Convention.

It is described as the largest, most influential evangelical denomination in a new book by the former number-two man in Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

The book, "Tempting Faith,"� not out until Monday, but in our third story tonight, a Countdown exclusive we've obtained a copy and it is devastating work.

Author David Kuo's conservative Christian credentials are impeccable; his resume sprinkled with names like Bennett and Ashcroft.� Now, as the Foley cover-up has many evangelical Christians wondering whether the G.O.P. is really in sync with their values, "Tempting Faith" provides the answer: No way.

Kuo, citing one example after another of a White House that repeatedly uses evangelical Christians for their votes � while consistently giving them nothing in return;

A White House which routinely speaks of the nation's most famous evangelical leaders behind their backs, with contempt and derision.

Furthermore, Faith-Based Initiatives were not only stiffed on one public promise after another by Mr. Bush � the office itself was eventually forced to answer a higher calling: Electing Republican politicians.

Kuo's bottom line: the Bush White House is playing millions of American Christians for suckers.

According to Kuo, Karl Rove's office referred to evangelical leaders as 'the nuts.'

Kuo says, 'National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous,' 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy.' "

So how does the Bush White House keep 'the nuts' turning out at the polls?

One way, regular conference calls with groups led by Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Ted Haggard, and radio hosts like Michael Reagan.

Kuo says, "Participants were asked to talk to their people about whatever issue was pending.� Advice was solicited [but] that advice rarely went much further than the conference call. [T]he true purpose of these calls was to keep prominent social conservatives and their groups or audiences happy."

They do get some things from the Bush White House, like the National Day of Prayer, �another one of the eye-rolling Christian events,� Kuo says.

And �passes to be in the crowd greeting the president when he arrived on Air Force One or tickets for a speech he was giving in their hometown. Little trinkets like cufflinks or pens or pads of paper were passed out like business cards. Christian leaders could give them to their congregations or donors or friends to show just how influential they were. Making politically active Christians personally happy meant having to worry far less about the Christian political agenda.��

When cufflinks weren't enough, the White House played the Jesus card, reminding Christian leaders that, quote, �they knew the president's faith� and begging for patience.

And the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives?

According to Kuo, �White House staff didn't want to have anything to do with the Faith-Based Initiative because they didn't understand it any more than did congressional Republicans . They didn't lie awake at night trying to kill it. They simply didn 't care."

Kuo relates one faith-based promise after another � billions of dollars in funding and tax credits � that goes unfulfilled year after promise after year.

He recounts one specific funding exchange with Mr. Bush:

Bush: "Eight billion in new dollars?"

Kuo: "No sir. Eight billion in existing dollars for which groups will find it technically easier to apply. But faith-based groups have been getting that money for years."

Bush:� "Eight billion. That's what we'll tell them. Eight billion in new funds for faith-based groups."

Why bother lying?

Kuo says, "The faith-based initiative had the potential to successfully evangelize more voters than any other."

According to Kuo, the Office spent much of its time on two missions:

One�Trying�and failing�to prove Mr. Bush's claim of regulatory bias against religious charities hiring who they wanted. Quote:� "Finding these examples became a huge priority. �[but] religious groups had encountered very few instances of actual problems with their hiring practices." "It really wasn't that bad at all."

Another mission: lobbying the President to make good on his own promises.

How?

Kuo says they tried to prove their political value by turning the once-bipartisan faith-based initiatives into a political operation.

It wasn't just discrimination against non-Christian charities. (One official who rated grant applications told Kuo, " when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero�a lot of us did. ")

The Office was also, literally, a taxpayer-funded part of the Republican campaign machinery.

In 2002, Kuo says the office decided to "hold roundtable events for threatened incumbents with faith and community leaders � using the aura of our White House power to get a diverse group of faith and community leaders to a 'nonpartisan' event discussing how best to help poor people in their area."

White House Political Affairs director Ken Mehlman "loved the idea and gave us our marching orders. There were twenty targets." Including Saxby Chambliss in Georgia and John Shimkus in Illinois.

Mehlman devised a cover-up for the operation. He told Kuo, "It can't come from the campaigns. That would make it look too political. It needs to come from the congressional offices. We'll take care of that by having our guys call the office to request the visit."

Kuo explains, "this approach inoculated us against accusations that we were using religion and religious leaders to promote specific candidates."

Those roundtables were a hit.� Republicans won 19 of those 20 races. 76 percent of religious conservatives voted for Chambliss over decorated war hero Max Cleland.

And Bush's 2004 victory in Ohio? That "was at least partially tied to the conferences [they] had launched [there] two years before."

By that time, Kuo had left the White House, concluding that "it was mocking the millions of faithful Christians who had put their trust and hope in the President and his administration. Bush knew his so-called compassion agenda was languishing and had no problem with that."

If you would question Mr. Kuo's credibility, you should know his former boss also quit the White House complaining in his one public interview that politics drove absolutely everything in the Bush administration. There is more, much more revealed in Tempting Faith� how Jack Kemp was tricked into sounding like a religious conservative without even knowing it; Jerry Falwell's astonishing behavior at the 9/11 Day of Remembrance and considerably more as our Countdown exclusive of Tempting Faith continues here tomorrow night.

Why does habeas corpus hate America

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 03:21:09 -0400

Another Great Investigative Report

Transcript:

Because the Mark Foley story began to break the night of September 28th, exploding the following day, many people may not have noticed a bill passed by the Senate that night.

Our third story on the Countdown tonight, the Military Commissions Act of 2006� and what it does to something called "habeas corpus."

And before we reduce the very term "habeas corpus" to something vaguely recalled as sounding kinda like the cornerstone of freedom, or maybe kinda like a character from "Harry Potter"� we thought a Countdown Special Investigation was in order.

Congress passed The Military Commissions Act, to give Mr. Bush the power to deal effectively with America's enemies � those who seek to harm this country.

And he has been very clear about who that is:

"for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America."

So the president said it was urgent that Congress send him this bill as quickly as possible, not for the politics of next month's elections, but for America.

"The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."

Because time was of the essence� and to ensure that the 9/11 families would wait no longer, as soon as he got the bill, President Bush whipped out his pen and immediately signed�

a statement saying he looks forward to signing the actual law�eventually.

He hasn't signed it yet, almost two weeks later, because he has been swamped by a series of campaign swings at which he has made up quotes from unnamed Democratic leaders, and because when he is actually at work, he's been signing so many other important bills�

Such as� the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act�.the Third Higher Education Extension Act�.Ratification requests for extradition treaties with Malta� Estonia� and Latvia�his proclamation of German-American Day�.the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Act�.And his proclamation of Leif Erikson Day

Still, getting the Military Commissions Act to the president so he could immediately mull it over for two weeks was so important, some members of Congress didn't even read the bill before voting on it.

Thus, has some of its minutiae, escaped scrutiny.

One bit of trivia that caught our eye was the elimination of� habeas corpus� which apparently used to be the right of anyone who's tossed in prison, to appear in court and say, "Hey, why am I in prison?"

Why does habeas corpus hate America�and how is it so bad for us?

Mr. Bush says it gets in the way of him doing his job.

Bush "And this legislation passed in the House yesterday is a part of making sure that we do have the capacity to protect you. Our most solemn job is the security of this country."

It may be solemn�

Bush: "I do solemnly swear�"

But is that really his job? In this rarely seen footage, Mr. Bush seems to be describing a different job.

�to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States..

Countdown has obtained a copy of this "Constitution of the United States."

And sources tell us it was originally snuck through the Constitutional Convention and state ratification in order to establish America's fundamental legal principles.

But this so-called Constitution is frustratingly vague about the right to trial. In fact, there's only one reference to habeas corpus at all. Quote:

"The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

But even Democrats who voted against the Military Commissions Act concede that it doesn't actually suspend habeas corpus.

Leahy: The bill before the Senate would not merely suspend the great writ, the great writ of habeas corpus, it would eliminate it permanently.

And there is considerable debate whether the conditions for suspending habeas corpus, rebellion or invasion, have been met.

Leahy: conditions for suspending habeas corpus have not been met.

Specter: We do not have a rebellion or an invasion.

Kerry: We're not in a rebellion, nor are we being invaded.

Countdown has learned that habeas corpus actually predates the "Constitution," meaning it's not just pre-September 11 thinking, it's also pre-July Four thinking.

In those days, no one imagined that enemy combatants might one day attack Americans on native soil.

In fact, Countdown has obtained a partially redacted copy of a colonial "declaration" indicating that back then, "depriving us of Trial by Jury" was actually considered sufficient cause to start a War of Independence, based on the then-fashionable idea that "liberty" was an unalienable right.

Today, thanks to modern, post-9/11 thinking, those rights are now fully alienable for your protection.

The reality is, without habeas corpus, a lot of other rights lose their meaning.

But if you look at the actual Bill of Rights � the first ten amendments to that pesky Constitution � you'll see just how many remain.

-Well, ok, Number One's Gone. If you're detained without trial, you lose your freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly. And you can't petition the government for anything.

-Number Two? While you're in prison, your right to keep and bear arms just may be infringed upon. Even if you're in the NRA.

-Three? No forced sleepovers by soldiers at your house. OK. Three is alright.

-Four? You're definitely not secure against searches and seizures, with or without probable cause - and in prison this isn't even limited to the guards.

-Five� Grand juries and due process are obviously out.

-Six. So are trials, let alone the right to counsel. Speedy trials? You want it when?

-Seven. Hmmmm. I thought we covered "trials" and "juries" earlier.

-Eight � So bail's kind of a moot point�

-Nine: "Other" rights retained by the people. Well, if you can name them during your water-boarding, we'll consider them.

-And Ten � powers not delegated to the United States federal government� seem to have ended up there, anyway.

So as you can see, even without habeas corpus, at least one tenth of the Bill of Rights, I guess that's the Bill of "Right" now� remains virtually intact.

And we can rest easy knowing we will never, ever have to quarter soldiers in our homes� as long as the Third Amendment still stands strong.

The President can take care of that� with a Signing Statement.

It is not the Democrats whose inaction in the face of the enemy you fear

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 02:00:06 -0400
Transcript (courtesy of crooksandliars.com):

Olbermann: And lastly tonight, a Special Comment, about � lying. While the leadership in Congress has self-destructed over the revelations of an unmatched, and unrelieved, march through a cesspool� While the leadership inside the White House has self-destructed over the revelations of a book with a glowing red cover�
The President of the United States � unbowed, undeterred, and unconnected to reality � has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: The Democrats.

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona Congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, "177 of the opposition party said 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists."
The hell they did.
177 Democrats opposed the President's seizure of another part of the Constitution*.
Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn't be listening to the conversations of terrorists.
President Bush hears� what he wants.
Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said "Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we're attacked again before we respond."
Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.
And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind-reader.
"If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party," the President said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, "it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is � wait until we're attacked again."
The President doesn't just hear what he wants. He hears things, that only he can hear.
It defies belief that this President and his administration could continue to find new unexplored political gutters into which they could wallow.
Yet they do.
It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any President of this nation.
Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders; Democrats; the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies � of treason.
But it is the context that truly makes the head spin.
Just 25 days ago, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this same man spoke to this nation and insisted, quote, "we must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us."
Mr. Bush, this is a test you have already failed.
If your commitment to "put aside differences and work together" is replaced in the span of just three weeks by claiming your political opponents prefer to wait to see this country attacked again, and by spewing fabrications about what they've said, then the questions your critics need to be asking, are no longer about your policies.
They are, instead � solemn and even terrible questions, about your fitness to fulfill the responsibilities of your office.
No Democrat, sir, has ever said anything approaching the suggestion that the best means of self-defense is to "wait until we're attacked again."
No critic, no commentator, no reluctant Republican in the Senate, has ever said anything that any responsible person could even have exaggerated into the slander you spoke in Nevada on Monday night, nor the slander you spoke in California on Tuesday, nor the slander you spoke in Arizona on Wednesday� nor whatever is next.
You have dishonored your party, sir � you have dishonored your supporters � you have dishonored yourself.
But tonight the stark question we must face is - why?
Why has the ferocity of your venom against the Democrats, now exceeded the ferocity of your venom against the terrorists?
Why have you chosen to go down in history as the President who made things up?
In less than one month you have gone from a flawed call to unity, to this clarion call to hatred of Americans, by Americans.
If this is not simply the most shameless example of the rhetoric of political hackery, then it would have to be the cry of a leader crumbling under the weight of his own lies.
We have, of course, survived all manner of political hackery, of every shape, size, and party.
We will have to suffer it, for as long as the Republic stands.
But the premise of a President who comes across as a compulsive liar � is nothing less than terrifying.
A President who since 9/11 will not listen, is not listening � and thanks to Bob Woodward's most recent account � evidently has never listened.

All The President's Lies

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 05:32:00 -0400

Another Great Investigative Report

Transcript (courtesy of crooksandliars.com):

Olbermann: The political debate still raging over Mr. Clinton�s remarks in a Fox News interview Sunday has overshadowed the debate Mr. Clinton suggested the nation ought to have� a discussion of what steps the Bush administration took to get Osama bin Laden or destroy al Qaeda before September 11th.
Yesterday, Mr. Bush declined to address Mr. Clinton�s remarks, saying we�ve already had the "look-back this" and "look-back that."
But if we are to look forward with any clarity, it is important to know the facts about where we have been, and how we got where we are.
Mr. Clinton is not in office.
Mr. Bush is.
His policies determine how the U.S. fights al Qaeda, so it is important that we understand how he has done so in the past.
Comparing the two presidents is valid, and necessary�to illuminate the capacities of the office.
Mr. Clinton said it plainly � he failed to get bin Laden.
Mr. Bush has acknowledged no failures.
But while it has become conventional wisdom, although debunked by the 9/11 Report, that Mr. Clinton dropped an offer from Sudan to hand over bin Laden� it is rare to hear anyone discuss whether similar� but real feelers were extended to Mr. Bush.
And it is, we suspect, even more rare, to see this tape, of the Bush White House addressing reports of such feelers in February, 2001, after we knew al Qaeda had attacked the Cole:
Q: The Taliban in Afghanistan, they have offered that they are ready to hand over Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia if the United States would drop its sanctions, and they have a kind of deal that they want to make with the United States. Do you have any comments?
MR. FLEISCHER: Let me take that and get back to you on that.
There is no record of any subsequent discussion on the matter.
In a recent interview, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded to Mr. Clinton by defending the Bush record, and saying, quote,
�� "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda."
Our goal in this report is to rise to Mr. Clinton�s challenge, and assess the record of Mr. Bush�s efforts against al Qaeda in his first eight months in office. We begin with Rice�s denial of a comprehensive Clinton strategy to fight al Qaeda.
On January 25th, five days after Mr. Bush took office, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke sent Rice a memo, attaching to it a document entitled "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat� of al Qaeda." It was, Clarke wrote, "developed by the last Administration to give to you�[incorporating] diplomatic, economic, military, public diplomacy and intelligence tools."
Clarke�s memo requested a follow-up, cabinet-level meeting to address time-sensitive questions about al Qaeda. But Mr. Bush downgraded counterterrorism from a cabinet-level job, so Clarke now dealt with **deputy** secretaries, instead.
�� Clarke: "It slowed down enormously, by months. First of all, the deputies committee didn�t meet urgently in January or February.
Why the delay? Rice later explained:
Rice : (4/8/04) "America�s al Qaeda policy wasn�t working because our Afghanistan policy wasn�t working. And our Afghanistan policy wasn�t working because our Pakistan policy wasn�t working. We recognized that America�s counterterrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies and to our overall foreign policy."
That, although Clarke�s January 25th memo specifically warned,� "�al Qaeda is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy. � By proceeding with separate policy reviews on Central Asia� et cetera, we would deal inadequately with the need for a comprehensive multi-regional policy on al Qaeda."
Clarke�s deputies meeting came in April when, he says, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted the real terrorism threat was not al Qaeda� but Iraq. By July 16, the deputies had a proposal for dealing with al Qaeda� a proposal Clarke says was essentially the same plan he gave Rice five months before. And it still had to go to the principals, the cabinet secretaries.
Clarke: "But the principals� calendar was full and then they went on vacation, many of them, in August. So we couldn�t meet in August, and therefore, the principals met in September.
Although the principals had already met on other issues, their first meeting on al Qaeda wasn�t until after Labor Day � September 4th.
But what were Mr. Bush and his top advisers doing during this time?
Mr. Bush was personally briefed about al Qaeda even before the election in November, 2000.
During the transition, President Clinton and his National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, say they told Bush and his team of the urgency in getting al Qaeda.
Three days before Mr. Bush took office, Berger spoke at a "passing the baton" event that Rice attended.
Berger (1/17/01): "Sitting at the Norfolk Base with survivors from the USS Cole only reinforced the reality that America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-western jihadists. Nothing less than a war, I think, is a fair way to describe this."
Eight days later, Clarke sent Rice the strategy Clinton developed for retaliating, in the event al Qaeda was found to be behind October�s attack on the USS Cole.
The next day, the FBI conclusively pinned the Cole attack on al Qaeda.
Mr. Bush ordered no military strike, no escalation of existing Clinton measures. Instead, he repeated Clinton�s previous diplomatic efforts, writing a letter to Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in February, and another on August 4th.
Until September 11th, even when Mr. Bush was asked about the Cole, an attack carried out on water, by men in a boat, he offered a consistent prescription for keeping America safe, one he reiterated upon taking office.
Bush (2/27/01): "To protect our own people, our allies and friends, we must develop and we must deploy effective missile defenses."
Democrats, who controlled the Senate, warned that his focus was misplaced.
Levin� (6/22/01): "I�m also concerned that we may not be putting enough emphasis on countering the most likely threats to our national security and to the security of our forces deployed around the world, those asymmetric threats, like terrorist attacks on the USS Cole, on our barracks and our embassies around the world, on the World Trade Center."
He was not alone.
The executive director of the Hart-Rudman Commission�s request to brief Bush and Cheney on the terror threats they had studied was denied.
On February 26, 2001, Paul Bremer said of the administration, quote, "What they will do is stagger along until there�s a major incident and then suddenly say, �Oh my God, shouldn�t we be organized to deal with this?"
According to the 9/11 report, even bin Laden expected Bush to respond militarily to the Cole bombing. Quote, "In February, 2001�according to [a] source, Bin Ladin wanted the United States to attack, and if it did not he would launch something bigger."
The most famous warning came in the August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing, reporting "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
The 9/11 report:
"[Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so."
"We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. �Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period."
"Domestic agencies did not know what to do, and no one gave them direction."
"The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI�s efforts. The public was not warned."
Explanations after the fact suggested a lack of familiarity with the recent history of terrorism.
Rice (5/17/02): "I don�t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile - a hijacked airplane as a missile."
Cheney (9/7/04): "[There] wasn�t any way then we could have anticipated what was about to happen, of course, on 9/11."
Bush (1/26/02): "They struck in a way that was unimaginable."
1994 - France disrupts plot to fly a jet into Eiffel Tower.
1995 - Philippines uncovers plot to fly planes into Pentagon and WTC.
September, 1999 - Federal study warns al Qaeda might crash planes into Pentagon.
Spring, 2001 - Testimony at U.S. embassy bombing trial in New York that bin Laden sending agents for pilot training and to acquire planes
July, 2001 - FBI told of Zacarias Moussaoui�s interest in flying jumbo jets.
September, 2001 - FBI memo warns Moussaoui is the type who could "fly something into the World Trade Center."
On September 10th, 2001, Senator Dianne Feinstein requests a meeting with Vice President Cheney to press the case for aggressive counterterrorism measures. She is told Mr. Cheney will need six months to prepare first.
That same day, the N-S-A intercepts a communique from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia stating "tomorrow is zero hour."
It is translated into English on September 12th.

Are YOURS the actions of a true American?

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 04:45:00 -0400
Olbermann's Special Comment From Sep 25, 2006
Transcript (courtesy of crooksandliars.com):

And finally tonight, a Special Comment about President Clinton�s interview. The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.

It is not important that the current President�s "portable public chorus" has described his predecessor�s tone as "crazed."

Our tone should be crazed. The nation�s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as Al-Qaeda; the nation�s "marketplace of ideas" is being poisoned, by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would�ve quit. Nonetheless.

The headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done, in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

"At least I tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. "That�s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried."

Thus in his supposed emeritus years, has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by anyone, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama Bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."

The Bush Administration� did� not� try.�

Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest "pass" for incompetence and malfeasance, in American history!

President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs � some of them, 17 years old � before Pearl Harbor.

President Hoover was correctly blamed for � if not the Great Depression itself � then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash.

Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War � though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But not this President.

To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11th, 2001 � or the nearly eight months that preceded it.

That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the Executive.

But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.

Except� for this:

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts � that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton�s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News, Friday afternoon.

Consider the timing: The very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is � not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it!

The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.

It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired � but a propagandist, promoted:

Promise to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless.

And don�t even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for "e-mailing" you the question.

Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen.

He told the great truth un-told� about this administration�s negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about Bin Laden.

He was brave.

Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I � in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist � and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.

The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon.

Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to 9/11."

Of that company�s crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush�s new and improved history.

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it � who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews � have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for Bin Laden in 1998 because of the Lewinsky nonsense � why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed Bin Laden�s camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20th of that year? For mentioning Bin Laden by name as he did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The Dog."

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton�s judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri � the future Attorney General � echoed Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been "distracted" by the Lewinsky witch-hunt � who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt? Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

Who corrupted the political media?

Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?

Who preempted them� in order to strangle us with the trivia that was� "All Monica All The Time"?

Who� distracted whom?

This is, of course, where � as is inevitable � Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are.

The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four.

But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it�s all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.

The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton� but by the same people who got you� elected President.

Thus instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it� we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently redd the Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us "safe" ever since � a statement that might range anywhere from Zero, to One Hundred Percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush � you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles� wrong.

Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be the textbook definition� Sir, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair � writing as George Orwell � gave us in the novel "1984."

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power�

"Power is not a means; it is an end.

"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

"The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power� is power."

Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln�s State of the Union address from 1862.

"We must disenthrall ourselves."

Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln�s sentence. He might well have.

"We must disenthrall ourselves � and then� we shall save our country."

And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date� to save� our� country.

�

The "free pass" has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush�

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done, to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us � then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture � which doesn�t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.And there it is, sir:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

�The President of the United States owes this country an apology�

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:17:00 -0400
Olbermann's Special Comment From Sep 18, 2006
Full Transcript:

Finally tonight, a Special Comment about the Rose Garden news conference last Friday. The President of the United States owes this country an apology.There are now none around him who would tell him - or could. The last of them, it appears, was the very man whose letter provoked the President into the conduct, for which the apology is essential. An apology is this President�s only hope of regaining the slightest measure of confidence, of what has been, for nearly two years, a clear majority of his people.
Rough transcript below the fold.
Finally tonight, a Special Comment about the Rose Garden news conference last Friday.
The President of the United States owes this country an apology. It will not be offered, of course. He does not realize its necessity.
There are now none around him who would tell him - or could. The last of them, it appears, was the very man whose letter provoked the President into the conduct, for which the apology is essential. An apology is this President�s only hope of regaining the slightest measure of confidence, of what has been, for nearly two years, a clear majority of his people.
Not "confidence" in his policies nor in his designs nor even in something as narrowly focused as which vision of torture shall prevail � his, or that of the man who has sent him into apoplexy, Colin Powell. In a larger sense, the President needs to regain our confidence, that he has some basic understanding of what this country represents � of what it must maintain if we are to defeat not only terrorists, but if we are also to defeat what is ever more increasingly apparent, as an attempt to re-define the way we live here, and what we mean, when we say the word "freedom."
Because it is evident now that, if not its architect, this President intends to be the contractor, for this narrowing of the definition of freedom. The President revealed this last Friday, as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury�
�directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once been an ambassador from the military to its critics. The former Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."
This President�s response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one�s breath, but � within � it contained one particularly chilling phrase. Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don�t you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you�re following a flawed strategy? BUSH: If there�s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it�s flawed logic. It�s just � I simply can�t accept that. It�s unacceptable to think that there�s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.
Of course** it�s acceptable to think that there�s "any kind of comparison." And in this particular debate, it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary. Some will think that our actions at Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo, or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, are all too comparable to the actions of the extremists. Some will think that there is no similarity, or, if there is one, it is to the slightest and most unavoidable of degrees.
What all of us will agree on, is that we have the right � we have the duty � to think about the comparison. And, most importantly, that the other guy, whose opinion about this we cannot fathom, has exactly the same right as we do: to think � and say � what his mind and his heart and his conscience tell him, is right.
All of us agree about that.
Except, it seems, this President.
With increasing rage, he and his administration have begun to tell us, we are not permitted to disagree with them, that we cannot be right. That Colin Powell cannot be right.And then there was that one, most awful phrase.
In four simple words last Friday, the President brought into sharp focus what has been only vaguely clear these past five-and-a-half years - the way the terrain at night is perceptible only during an angry flash of lightning, and then, a second later, all again is dark.
"It�s unacceptable to think�" he said. It is never unacceptable� to think.
And when a President says thinking is unacceptable, even on one topic, even in the heat of the moment, even in the turning of a phrase extracted from its context� he takes us toward a new and fearful path � one heretofore the realm of science fiction authors and apocalyptic visionaries.
That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think. hus the lightning flash reveals not merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a monopoly on current truth.
It now shows us a President who has decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever� he, alone, has had the knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights. This is a frightening, and a dangerous, delusion, Mr. President.
If Mr. Powell�s letter - cautionary, concerned, predominantly supportive � can induce from you such wrath and such intolerance � what would you say were this statement to be shouted to you by a reporter, or written to you by a colleague?
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government�"
Those incendiary thoughts came, of course, from a prior holder of your job, Mr. Bush. They were the words of Thomas Jefferson.
He put them in the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Bush, what would you say to something that annti-thetical to the status quo just now? Would you call it "unacceptable" for Jefferson to think such things, or to write them?
Between your confidence in your infallibility, sir, and your demonizing of dissent, and now these rages better suited to a thwarted three-year old, you have left the unnerving sense of a White House coming unglued - a chilling suspicion that perhaps we have not seen the peak of the anger; that we can no longer forecast what next will be said to, or about, anyone� who disagrees.
Or what will next be done to them.� On this newscast last Friday night, Constitiutional law Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, suggested that at some point in the near future�some of the "detainees" transferred from secret CIA cells to Guantanamo, will finally get to tell the Red Cross that they have indeed been tortured.
Thus the debate over the Geneva Conventions, might not be about further interrogations of detainees, but about those already conducted, and the possible liability of the administration, for them.�That, certainly, could explain Mr. Bush�s fury.
That, at this point, is speculative. But at least it provides an alternative possibility as to why the President�s words were at such variance from the entire history of this country. For, there needs to be some other explanation, Mr. Bush, than that you truly believe we should live in a United States of America in which a thought is unacceptable.
There needs to be a delegation of responsible leaders � Republicans or otherwise � who can sit you down as Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott once sat Richard Nixon down - and explain the **reality** of the situation you have created.
There needs to be� an apology from the President of the United States.
And more than one.
But, Mr. Bush, the others � for warnings unheeded five years ago, for war unjustified four years ago, for battle unprepared three years ago � they are not weighted with the urgency and necessity of this one. We must know that, to you�thought with which you disagree � and even voice with which you disagree - and even action with which you disagree � are still sacrosanct to you.
The philosopher Voltaire once insisted to another author, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." Since the nation�s birth, Mr. Bush, we have misquoted and even embellished that statement, but we have served ourselves well, by subscribing to its essence.
Oddly, there are other words of Voltaire�s that are more pertinent still, just now. "Think for yourselves," he wrote, "and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."� Apologize, sir, for even hinting at an America where a few have that privilege to think � and the rest of us get yelled at by the President.
Anything else, Mr. Bush, is truly� unacceptable.

Who has left this hole in the ground?

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:01:00 -0400
Keith Olbermann 9/11 Comment
Full Transcript:

Andlastly tonight a Special Comment on why we are here. Half alifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space.
Andfor 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, tryingto make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as areporter.
And all the time, I knew that the very air Ibreathed contained the remains of thousands of people,including four of my friends, two in the planes and � as Idiscovered from those "missing posters" seared still into mysoul � two more in the Towers.
And I knew too,that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemenand firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen ormore, as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasizethat, for me� this was, and is, and always shall be,personal.
And anyone who claims that I and otherslike me are "soft", or have "forgotten" the lessons of whathappened here � is at best a grasping, opportunistic,dilettante � and at worst, an idiot � whether he is acommentator, or a Vice President, or a President.
However. Of all the things those of us who were here fiveyears ago could have forecast � of all the nightmares thatunfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded onlyin our minds� none of us could have predicted� this.
Five years later this space� is still empty.
Fiveyears later there is no Memorial to the dead. Fiveyears later there is no building rising to show with prouddefiance that we would not have our America wrung from us,by cowards and criminals.
Five years later thiscountry�s wound is still open.
Five years� laterthis country�s mass grave is still unmarked.
Fiveyears later� this is still� just a background for aphoto-op.
It is beyondshameful.
************
At thededication of the Gettysburg Memorial � barely four monthsafter the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvaniafield, Mr. Lincoln said "we can not dedicate - we can notconsecrate � we can not hallow � this ground. The bravemen, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecratedit, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.
Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalizetheir reprehensible inaction. "We can nto dedicate � wecan not consecrate � we can not hallow � this ground."So we won�t.
Instead they bicker and buck-pass.They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit forinitiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money onirrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, andbuying off columnists to write how good a job they�redoing � instead of doing any job at all.
Fiveyears later, Mr. Bush� we are still fighting theterrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir � onthese 16 empty acres, the terrorists� are clearly, stillwinning.
And, in a crime against every victim hereand every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact,you have done nothing aboutit.
************
And there issomething worse still than this vast gaping hole in thiscity, and in the fabric of our nation.
There is, itssymbolism � of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath,reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followedit� was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout thecountry. The government, the President in particular, wasgiven every possible measure of support.
Those whodid not belong to his party � tabled that.
Thosewho doubted the mechanics of his election � ignoredthat.
Those who wondered of his qualifications �forgot that.
History teaches us that nearlyunanimous support of a government cannot be taken away fromthat government, by its critics.
It can only besquandered by those who use it not to heal a nation�swounds, but to take political advantage.
Terroristsdid not come and steal our newly-regained sense of beingAmerican first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did theDemocrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President � and those around him � did that.
They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them,"bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and therest would have to follow, or be branded, withever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectuallyconfused; as appeasers; as those who, in the VicePresident�s words yesterday, "validate the strategy of theterrorists."
They promised protection, and thenshowed that to them "protection" meant going to war againsta despot whose hand they had once shaken� a despot who wenow learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hatedAl-Qaeda as much as we did.
The polite phrase forhow so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on thefalse premise that it had �something to do� with 9/11,is "lying by implication."
The impolite phrase, is"impeachable offense."
Not once in now five yearshas this President ever offered to assume responsibility forthe failures that led to this empty space� and to this,the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.
Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle ofrespect and fairness: even his most virulent critics havenever suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blamefor 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this Presidenthas been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even tobe the man most responsible � for anything � in his ownadministration.
Yet what is happening this verynight?
A mini-series, created, influenced �possibly financed by � the most radical and cold ofdomestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televisedinto our homes.
The documented truths of the lastfifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talkingpoints of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry storyblurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seemvacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem likethe only option.
How dare you, Mr. President, aftertaking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, andtransmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death�after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicionand turning that fear into the campaign slogan of threeelections� how dare you or those around you� ever "spin"9/11.
************
Just as theterrorists have succeeded � are still succeeding � aslong as there is no memorial and no construction here atGround Zero�
So too have they succeeded, and arestill succeeding � as long as this government uses 9/11 asa wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This isan odd point to cite a television program, especially onefrom March of 1960. But as Disney�s continuing sell-out ofthe truth (and this country) suggests, even televisionprograms can be powerful things.
And long ago, aseries called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a rivetingepisode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion byextra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goesout. A neighbor pleads for calm.
Suddenly his car� and only his car � starts. Someone suggests he must bethe alien. Then another man�s lights go on.
Ascharges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, gunsare inevitably produced.
An "alien" is shot � buthe turns out to be just another neighbor, returning fromgoing for help.
The camera pulls back to a near-byhill, where two extra-terrestrials areseen, manipulating asmall device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells hisnovice that there�s no need to actually attack, that youjust turn off a few of the human machines and then, "theypick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it�sthemselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest pieceof writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkableprescience, given where we find ourselves tonight.
"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombsand explosions and fallout. There are weapons that aresimply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only inthe minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices cankill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless,frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own� for the children, and the children yetunborn."
************
When thosewho dissent are told time and time again � as we will be,if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by hisportable public chorus � that he is preserving ourfreedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehowun-American�
When we are scolded, that if wemerely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"�look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanshipupon which this administration also did not build, and tellme:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgiveyou.

'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 21:43:35 -0400
Olbermann's Special Comment From Sep 5, 2006
Transcript of Olbermann's special comment below:

"It is to our deep national shame�and ultimately it will be to the President�s deep personal regret�that he has followed his Secretary of Defense down the path of trying to tie those loyal Americans who disagree with his policies�or even question their effectiveness or execution�to the Nazis of the past, and the al Qaeda of the present.
Today, in the same subtle terms in which Mr. Bush and his colleagues muddied the clear line separating Iraq and 9/11 -- without ever actually saying so�the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, 'a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.'
Make no mistake here�the intent of that is to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist, with that familiar bogeyman of the right, the �media.�
The President and the Vice President and others have often attacked freedom of speech, and freedom of dissent, and freedom of the press.
Now, Mr. Bush has signaled that his unparalleled and unprincipled attack on reporting has a new and venomous side angle:
The attempt to link, by the simple expediency of one word��media��the honest, patriotic, and indeed vital questions and questioning from American reporters, with the evil of Al-Qaeda propaganda.
That linkage is more than just indefensible. It is un-American.
Mr. Bush and his colleagues have led us before to such waters.
We will not drink again.
And the President�s re-writing and sanitizing of history, so it fits the expediencies of domestic politics, is just as false, and just as scurrilous.
'In the 1920�s a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews,' President Bush said today, 'the world ignored Hitler�s words, and paid a terrible price.'
Whatever the true nature of al Qaeda and other international terrorist threats, to ceaselessly compare them to the Nazi State of Germany serves only to embolden them.
More over, Mr. Bush, you are accomplishing in part what Osama Bin Laden and others seek�a fearful American populace, easily manipulated, and willing to throw away any measure of restraint, any loyalty to our own ideals and freedoms, for the comforting illusion of safety.
It thus becomes necessary to remind the President that his administration�s recent Nazi 'kick' is an awful and cynical thing.
And it becomes necessary to reach back into our history, for yet another quote, from yet another time and to ask it of Mr. Bush:
'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'

Olbermann's Comment On Rumsfeld

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:49:25 -0400
Olbermann's Special Comment From August 30, 2006

Transcript of Olbermann's special comment:
Keith Olbermann delivers an absolutely incredible commentary about Donald Rumsfeld � this comes after Rumsfeld said disagreeing with the president was like aiding the Nazis. Big thanks to Gnomic for passing this along.
Here�s the transcript:
The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.
Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.
We end the countdown where we began our #1 story with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld�s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis � and the sober contemplation � of every American.
For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence � indeed, the loyalty � of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land; worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants � our employees � with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration�s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.
Dissent and disagreement with government is the life�s blood of human freedom; And not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as �his� troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.
It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile� it is right � and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld�s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril � with a growing evil � powerful and remorseless.
That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld�s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld�s � questioning their intellect and their morality.
That government was England�s, in the 1930s. It �knew� Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone to England.
It �knew� Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.
It �knew� that the hard evidence it had received, which contradicted it�s own policies, it�s own conclusions � it�s own omniscience � needed to be dismissed.
The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.
Most relevant of all � it �knew� that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile � at best morally or intellectually confused.
That critic�s name was Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.
History � and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England � had taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty � and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.
Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy, excepting the fact that he has the battery plugged in backwards.
His government, absolute and exclusive in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis. It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.
But back to today�s Omniscient Ones.
That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count � not just his. Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience, about Osama Bin Laden�s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein�s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina�s impact one year ago, we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.
But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire �Fog of Fear� which continues to envelope this nation � he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have � inadvertently or intentionally � profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.
And yet he can stand up in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor�s new clothes.
In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight?
With what country has he confused the United States of America?
The confusion we � as its citizens � must now address, is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag.
Note, with hope in your heart, that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light and we can too.
The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this Administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.
And about Mr. Rumsfeld�s other main assertion, that this country faces a �new type of fascism.�
As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that � though probably not in the way he thought he meant it. This country faces a new type of fascism � indeed.
Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute� I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.
But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed, �confused� or �immoral.�
Thus forgive me for reading Murrow in full:
�We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,� he said, in 1954.
�We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.
We will not walk in fear � one, of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of un-reason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men � not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were � for the moment � unpopular.�
And so, good night, and good luck.