Dick Cheney, menace

From Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times about Dick Cheney:

"[Cheney and Rumsfeld] turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power. As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of Information Act. For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The Times's Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by Halliburton on what to do with Iraq's oil industry - a plan it wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.)..."

[And she quotes Cheney:] "'I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy,' he intoned. Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.

"Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they're all so 20th century."

[Later she ends with these words:] "Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace."

The year of the neo-fascist president

Here are just two paragraphs from a powerful article by James Carroll in today's Boston Globe:

Again and again, in the year now ending, the American people have been told by their leaders that strategies based on a new ''repugnant philosophy" are required if the nation is to survive the challenge facing it. Forbidden incendiary weapons must be used in urban settings. Prisoners of war must be deprived of Geneva protections. Aggressive interrogations of enemies must approach torture. Commitments to provide US combat forces with adequate protective gear must be forsworn. Extrajudicial kidnapping of bad people must be justified. Allies must be pressured into joining secret networks of detention camps.

Human rights standards must be jettisoned. Traditional obligations to the United Nations must be ignored. Treaties that limit action can be cast aside. Distinctions between foreign and domestic espionage must be left behind, with US citizens subject to unmonitored surveillance by military agencies. Public libraries must be regarded as government peepholes. The lawyer-client privilege must no longer be regarded as sacrosanct. The press must be recruited into the project of information management. Dissent must be labeled as treason.

Is impeachment finally on the horizon?

Salon has just posted an internet article that begins with these words:

"Yes, the president committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans, say constitutional scholars, former intelligence officers and politicians. What's missing is the political will to impeach him."

I believe impeachment became a moral imperative on March 19, 2003. But probably very few people have paid attention to or even known about the groups that for a long time have been calling for George W. Bush's impeachment. This may be changing; it is interesting how in the last couple of days the ever-super-cautious corporate media have been talking about the "I word."

Perhaps the majority that has been asleep for the last five years is now slowly waking up and will become alert and wise enough to produce the "political will to impeach him."

The lesser evil in Iraq?

The young woman in Baghdad known as "River" has just written about the sad choice her country has to make between religious fundamentalists and US puppets. Toward the end of the blog, she writes:

"More people are going to elect this time around- not because Iraqis suddenly believe in American-imposed democracy under occupation, but because the situation this last year has been intolerable. Hakim and Ja’affari and their minions have managed to botch things up so badly, Allawi is actually looking acceptable in the eyes of many. I still can't stand him. (Note: She is talking here about the 'Unified Iraqi Coalition': Hakim, Ja’affari and various other pro-Iran fundamentalists, in addition to Sadrists.)

"Allawi is still an American puppet. His campaign posters, and the horrors of the last year, haven’t changed that. People haven’t forgotten his culpability in the whole Fallujah debacle. For some Iraqis, however, he’s preferable to Hakim and Ja’affari after a year of detentions, abductions, assassinations and secret torture prisons.

"There’s a saying in Iraq which people are using right and left lately, and that I've used before in the blog, “Ili ishuf il mout, yirdha bil iskhuna.” He who sees death, is content with a fever. Allawi et al. seem to be the fever these days…"


Source:  http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

The jig is up, George

Here is just one paragraph from Frank Rich's blistering report on the White House propaganda mill in today's New York Times:

"Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president's latest Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and Mosul - still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking."

More Republican-engendered rot

How deep can the rot penetrate into this nation's heart?

On Dec. 4, Robyn E. Blumner wrote a mind-shocking article in the St. Petersburg Times called "The Republicans' Millionaire Relief Act." He explains how the large majority of Republicans in the House have aimed a double-barrel shotgun at 99% of the country. With a few weeks of padding between votes, their plan was to pass a $50 billion deficit reduction package that clobbers education, health and the poor, and then give out another $56 billion in tax cuts, 51% of which would go to the richest Americans, i.e., the top 1%. (14 Republicans joined all the Democrats to vote against stage one, but they lost out 217-215.)

So much for Bushworld Year Five. But don't retch yet. Blumner goes on to write:

"From the founding of this nation to the year George W. Bush was elected president, we amassed a debt of $5.6-trillion. Bush is on track to nearly double it by the time he leaves office in 2009."

Now let's all throw up. 99% of us, that is.

America gone mindless

Just two paragraphs from William Rivers Pitt's article at Truthout.org yesterday, after Wolf Blitzer's scolding of Iraqis for not being grateful:

"Let's see. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed during this occupation. 70% of the population is unemployed. Long gas lines are the rule of the day. Hospitals don't work. Electricity is intermittent. Potable water is hard to come by. Bombs go off every day, slaying civilians, police and soldiers indiscriminately. Iraqis disappear into torture chambers. Religious factions growl at each other like dogs in a fighting pit. Even the children throw rocks...

"Since January 2001, we have lost faith in the idea that our votes matter, we have lost two towers in New York, we have lost an entire city in Louisiana, we have lost two thousand one hundred and twenty nine soldiers to Iraq, somewhere along the way we lost a whole pile of weapons of mass destruction those soldiers died trying to find, we have lost a substantial portion of our children's future by spending hundreds of billions of dollars so those soldiers could die far from home, we have lost our standing with the international community, and a good portion of the planet looks long and hard at us, wondering if we have also lost our minds."

Sickest "joke" of the year

"When it comes to human rights, there is no greater leader than the United States of America, and we show that by holding people accountable when they break the law or violate human rights."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan
Friday, Dec. 2, 2005
In the midst of global pressure over torture and "extraordinary rendition"

Molly, nausea & prayer breakfasts

As Molly Ivins, my favorite Texan, has just written:

Rep. Tom DeLay, who is under indictment in Texas, is another fine parser of the Lord's intent. According to Mother Jones magazine, DeLay appeared at a prayer breakfast just after the tsunami that killed 240,000 people. "DeLay read a passage from Matthew about a nonbeliever: '... a fool who built his house on sand: the rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house, and it collapsed and was completely ruined.' Then, without comment, he righteously sat down."

Some Christians seem to me inclined to lose track of love, compassion and mercy. I don't think I have any special brief to go around judging them, but when the stink of hypocrisy becomes so foul in the nostrils it makes you start to puke it becomes necessary to point out there is one more good reason to observe the separation of church and state: If God keeps hanging out with politicians, it's gonna hurt his reputation....

So here we sit, watching a great, stinking skein of corruption being fished to the surface of Washington, while the town is simultaneously filled with a great babble about God, prayer and morality. Corruption trails head off in all directions — lobbyists, wives, jobs, perverting intelligence, outing agents for petty revenge — all this and a prayer breakfast every day.