What is that odor?

The skunks continue to come out of the woods.

Former CIA director George Tenet, who had the gall to accept the Medal Of Freedom from George W. Bush, has now written a book--At the Center of the Storm--in which he admits he knew that Bush and Cheney were faking their vaunted reasons for attacking Iraq. He kept his mouth shut when he could have spoken out and put the brakes on the White House madness that already has killed 3,337 US troops and possibly one million Iraqis.

So yesterday's silence has turned into today's book, and Tenet has received a $4 million advance on it.

He's not the only source of those gagging odors in the air either. Colin Powell could have stepped on the brakes too. And now Senator Dick Durbin tells us that he and his colleagues on the Intelligence Committee had information different from what Bush and Cheney were disbursing. He says they did not speak out because they were sworn to secrecy. What?

If ever we needed strong winds to blow through the land...

Two big voices talk turkey

I think there is new hope on the horizon when leaders as diverse as Pope Benedict XVI and Lee Iacocca hit the nails on the head like this:

Benedict, in his new book Jesus Of Nazareth says, "Confronted with the abuse of economic power, with the cruelty of capitalism that degrades man into merchandise, we have begun to see more clearly the dangers of wealth and we understand in a new way what Jesus intended in warning us about wealth." The pope writes that rich nations have "plundered and sacked" Africa and other poor regions of the world, and even cites (approvingly) Karl Marx's analysis of contemporary man as a victim of alienation.

Iacocca, in his new book Where Have All The Leaders Gone?" writes: "Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course.' Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! ... I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions."

Deadly Distractions

Who can look at the photos of the Virginia Tech victims--from those bright young faces to (astoundingly) a professor who had survived the Holocaust--and not feel real pain deep inside?

But then you learn about Cho Seung-hui's frightening history going back to at least November 2005. One of his professors thought him so dangerous that she repeatedly told university authorities about him. Students spoke of his "crazy behavior" and his obsession with violence. There was police involvement. Cho was taken to a mental health facility in late 2005. The General District Court reported: "(Cho is) mentally ill and in need of hospitalization, and presents an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for self, and is incapable of volunteering or unwilling to volunteer for treatment."

So how was Cho able to wander around for at least a year and a half (even to a gun store, twice) while his paranoid schizophrenia was so well known and thoroughly reported? Is our professional world that totally distracted?

And think about this: As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann reported last night, in the ten days prior to the 32 Virginia Tech murders, exactly the same number of US soldiers were killed in Iraq. But how much media coverage was there about those 32 deaths? And even if there had been lots of coverage, how many Americans would have really pondered the meaning of those deaths? Are we seriously pondering the deaths of 3,312 young American soldiers killed in Iraq as of tonight--and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths? Maybe distraction is the national plague. And maybe it is already killing our nation.

Counting the deaths in Iraq

Horrible enough that the number of US troops killed in the Bush cabal's mad war in Iraq reached 3,308 yesterday.

Then there are those "other deaths"--equally the deaths of beloved family members and friends. Here is what John Pilger wrote last Friday in the UK's Guardian:

"Last October, the Lancet published research led by Johns Hopkins University in the US that calculated the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street acolytes derided the study as 'flawed'. They were lying. They knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as 'robust' and 'close to best practice', and that other government officials had secretly approved the 'tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones'. The figure of Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million."

Close to one million. By any measure of history, that is colossal crime.

Impeach this wretched president

Millions saw through George W. Bush well before March 19, 2003. (Remember, that was 3,292 American military lives ago--and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives ago.) Not long after Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech--on May 1, 2003, 3,153 American military lives ago--more and more Americans, along with most of the connected world, came to recognize the trail of lies about weapons of mass destruction, Al Qaeda in Iraq and all the rest of the imperial mandacity cranked out by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. But the arrogance in the White House only continued to mestastasize.

Then came the Democrats in November. And then came the national polls that showed the favorable rating of The-President-Who-Would-Be-King slipping and sliding and crumbling. But there is perhaps no more immoveable a mulishness than that of a Pretender King, and so we are now in this wretched state that we are.

Congress has promised yet more war money to Bush if he will agree to a timetable for leaving the battleground of a thoroughly insane civil war. But Bush continues to deny there even is a civil war in Iraq. And he swears by his new "surge," even as the atrocities go up instead of down.

The uncovering of all those warmongering lies, the neglect of troops in the field and in the veterans' hospitals, the merciless extensions of troop stints in Iraq, the sheer waste of billions of dollars in collusion with the likes of Halliburton, nothing seems able to change the mind of the American Emperor.

But there is a way of hope. They used to call it dethronement. Today we call it impeachment. Congress should stop stalling.

McCain's Phoney Baloney

Why on earth is anybody paying any attention to Senator John McCain any more?

McCain wants so badly to be president that he's gone into the circus business. When he decided to tell all the world that things were turning just dandy in Baghdad, he sent out the jugglers and contortionists to announce a lovely April 1 shopping trip with his fellow clown Lindsay Graham.. What McCain did not announce included the following:

* The Shorja market area--located about three minutes from the super-fortified Green Zone--underwent a thorough security sweep beforehand.

* When the happy shoppers ventured forth (whether with shopping bag in hand, I know not, but McCain wore a bulletproof vest), they were protected by at least 100 U.S. soldiers, some of them snipers posted on rooftops. Overhead protection was supplied by three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships. No Iraqi soldiers or police were utilized. (Who would want to take that chance?)

The next day, according to merchants, the usual Sunni snipers were back to the market area. They kill an average of one person a day.