The Blog From Another Dimension: Reasons to Not Vote for Bush Archives

Bush-Kerry Timelines

If you would like to see what Bush and Kerry were both doing throughout their lives and compare them side by side, visit this site. They've done a pretty good job, and it is not hard to see where Kerry is the far more competent, honorable, and accomplished man.

I have my own Bush Record page, visited 559 times in October despite the fact that I don't advertise it--at least, not until now. People just found it. It takes you through a lot of Bush's history up to his being elected president.

While Kerry, in the Naval Reserves, is regarded a "top-notch officer in every measurable trait," Bush gets a 25% on his pilot aptitude test and yet is accepted into a champaign unit of the National Guard; while Kerry earns his rank of Lieutenant and goes off to the Mekong Delta where he earns a Silver Star, Bush is promoted without merit and stays at home. While Bush goes AWOL and then is given an easy early out from the guard, Kerry, back at home, is district attorney putting organized crime figures behind bars. Meanwhile, Bush gets arrested for drunk driving. As Bush drives his first family-money-backed business into the ground and begins his second failed business with Saudis funding him, Kerry gets elected to the Senate without even using PAC money.

While Kerry gets appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supports deficit reduction and stops a Dick-Cheney sponsored oil tax, Bush gets involved in a variety of insider trading and other questionable activities; this is also about when he drunkenly explodes in a hail of obscenities and threats against newspaper editor Al Hunt, his wife and their four-year-old child. Kerry, meanwhile, is on the job rooting out corruption as he chairs the Senate subcommittee on the Iran-Contra hearings. The same year Kerry saved the life of Republican Senator Jacob "Chic" Hecht by using the Heimlich maneuver, Bush buys the Texas Rangers in a sweetheart deal and trades away Sammy Sosa. Bush violates the law at least three times in insider trading, tax law violations, and other financial scandals, but as the son of the President is not investigated by the SEC. Soon afterward, Kerry works closely with John McCain to investigate US soldiers still missing in Vietnam, eventually working to normalize relations with Vietnam.

Bush gets elected Governor of Texas and immediately gets a new driver license number to wipe the public records of his criminal past. He accepts a call to jury duty and leaves the legal forms referring to his criminal record blank; he soon has his staff finagle him out of jury duty when he gets assigned to a drunk driving case and will be asked under oath if he was ever arrested on that charge. Kerry, meanwhile, co-sponsors the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Bill, and fights for better pay and benefits for soldiers, veterans, police, and teachers. Bush, on the other hand, gets involved in a corporate scandal and lies under oath to get out of having to testify.

This is just a partial list. Read the two pages and get a better idea of how the two men spent their lives. An alcoholic, draft-dodging three-time-loser in business with an abusive character and a criminal record, versus a decorated Vietnam War vet with a conscience, spending his life putting bad guys behind bars and rooting out corruption.

Not really much of a challenge to pick the better man.

Because Bush Wants to Say It But Is Too Chicken

From the AP, in the SC State:

A new videotape of Osama bin Laden was meant to help elect Sen. John Kerry president, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson says.
...
"There's no question in my mind, and I think to anybody who knows how close this election is," Thompson later told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an interview. "Osama bin Laden would not give out a video report 72 hours before the election unless he wanted to influence it."

The rest of the article shows the depth in which Thompson discusses his belief. The inappropriateness of such a bald declaration by an administration official is staggering; if, say, John Edwards or any Kerry campaign official had said that bin Laden wants Bush elected, we'd be hearing Bush decry the act as "shameful" all the way to election day.

The fact is, Bush has played into bin Laden's plans--and vice versa--almost so seamlessly that one can hardly fault the conspiracy theorists that believe they are in cahoots. Bin Laden gave a failing Bush presidency a gigantic boost, allowing Bush to get almost every political agenda point he could wish for rammed through Congress, and to this day provides Bush with his strongest rallying point; if Bush wins the election, it will be because of bin Laden. Conversely, Bush has provided bin Laden with exactly what he wanted: an administration with its eye off the ball so that the 9/11 attacks could be carried out (unlike Clinton, who foiled the Millennium attacks), propelling bin Laden and al Qaeda to stratospheric fame; Bush then alienated the U.S. from a sympathetic world, deprived his own people of their freedoms, and let bin Laden escape while they invaded Iraq, an action which drove tens of thousands of new recruits into the waiting arms of al Qaeda, whilst the Bush administration only succeeded in capturing a few dozen noted members of the terrorist organization. In short, both Bush and bin Laden have gotten exactly what they wanted through each others' actions.

Bin Laden does not want Bush re-elected because he quakes in his boots at the idea of a Kerry presidency; rather, he wants Bush re-elected because Bush's policies are what bin Laden wants: an isolated America, focused on a fracturing Middle East war that fuels terrorism while it does little to attack al Qaeda directly. Kerry, on the other hand, would bring America back into the world fold, strengthening its ability to fight terror, and would be more sympathetic in the eyes of the people of the Middle East--forming alliances and winning hearts and minds instead of invading nations and turning millions against him. The only way Kerry stands more of a chance to get bin Laden than Bush is in that Kerry will not put all his energy into Iraq or whatever next Big War Bush will get us into. But the whole point is not really to catch bin Laden, but rather to fight al Qaeda. And that's what Kerry will do better, and that's what bin Laden would prefer not happen. See this post for a longer explanation of why bin Laden prefers Bush stay in office.

There. I can say that, because I'm not an senior official in either campaign. Thompson is, which is what makes his statement reprehensible and worthy of note and attack by the Democratic side.

There Goes All Doubt

Remember those soldiers that Bush claimed didn't find any explosives? He was talking about these soldiers:

These soldiers, who are on this video, at al Qaqaa, finding rooms full of explosives:

But hey, those could be any explosives, right? Maybe those are different explosives than the ones that the IAEA was talking about.

Oops.

According to the reports, the troops found "bunker after bunker" full of the explosives, having to break the IAEA seals to get into the buildings, the facilities left behind unsealed and unguarded because not enough troops were available, and with Iraqi civilians freely going in and out of the facility.

Meanwhile, Republicans are sinking to new lows to try to shift blame. After RNC chairman Ed Gillespie and George W. Bush himself falsely claimed that Kerry was blaming and denigrating the troops, GOP footsoldier Rudy Giuliani went on the NBC "Today" show and said the following:

''No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?''

Enough said.

In Good Company

A few posts back I pointed out how Bush, his people, and his supporters all are using the troops and other honorable people as straw-man scapegoats, falsely suggesting that when Kerry blames Bush, he is actually blaming someone else, like the troops. In effect, Bush is being a gutless coward by deflecting blame onto honorable people just to save his own sorry butt. Well, Bush is at it again:

Now the Senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy advisor admits "we don't know the facts." End quote. Think about that. The Senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts.

As explained before, Kerry never attacked the troops or the generals, he clearly and singularly attacked Bush. Bush's lie on the matter echoes RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie's rather blatant out-of-context misquote of Kerry to the same effect.

Fortunately, I am not the only person to make this observation; I am in good company with the former chief of staff of the Air Force:

Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak said in a statement that Bush seems to believe that Kerry should not be criticizing him "since the president thinks he has never made a mistake."

McPeak continued: "Let's be perfectly clear: it is the President who dropped the ball. Senator Kerry is being critical of George Bush, not the troops. By embarking on the line of attack, George Bush is deflecting blame from him over to the military. This is beneath contempt."

Edwards is also sounding the same note:

"Why did George Bush (news - web sites) take three days to finally say something about 380 tons of missing explosives?" Kerry said. "They did nothing, nothing to secure them and now they're gone. And we don't know who has them. It's possible terrorists have them."

"And, what did George Bush have to say about this? He said that John Kerry doesn't support the troops."

In a dubious voice and shaking his head, Edwards asked from his platform in the middle of supporters in a gymnasium: "Aren't we sick and tired of George Bush and Dick Cheney using our troops as shields to protect their own jobs?"

Kerry also referred to this, citing Bush's willingness to blame anyone and everyone but himself. I am, to say the least, extremely pleased and gratified that people are calling Bush out on this spineless practice.

By the way, it's great to be ahead of the curve on this kind of thing--in this case, a full year ahead!

Top Iraqi Official: Explosives "Could Not Have Been Taken" Before US Invasion

This from Yahoo News:

A top Iraqi science official said it was impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year.

...

"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," said Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and previously worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam.

"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

Sharaa also warned that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered.

"The Al-Milad Company in Iskandariyah and the Yarmouk and Hateen facilities contained explosive materials that could have also been taken out," the official told AFP in an interview.

In other words, the Bush administration knows full well that the explosives were plundered on their watch, were taken because they didn't think to put enough soldiers on the ground to watch all the places that needed to be watched. And a week before the election, with things so close, they are scared silly to admit the truth, so they have been lying their hineys off.

The al Qaqaa debacle is, at the right time, so perfectly representative of all the debacles the Bush administration has been responsible for; it would be difficult to think of a better story to exemplify the incompetence of this administration, and why we need new governance.

The Political Art of Shifting Blame

I have written before about the political art of shifting blame to others: when you've made a colossal blunder and it threatens your political career or agenda, if reporters ask you if you made an error, then twist the question to make it appear like they are blaming an honorable group of people. Reagan did this when the Marine barracks were blown up in Lebanon, making it appear that any accusation of wrongdoing was equal to dishonoring the soldiers who died, saying their deaths were in vain. In my prior article on the subject, I noted that a FOX reporter tried the same thing on Wesley Clark, implying that if Clark said that Iraq was a sideshow and Bush was missing the real target in Afghanistan, that was equal to belittling the troops in Iraq.

The Bush campaign is in full-gear blame-shifting mode this week. First was the criticism that Bush outsourced the hunt for bin Laden to the local warlords, who let bin Laden escape. Searching for a way to dismiss this cogent and damaging criticism, Bush said:

Now my opponent is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001, and that our military passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field. This is the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

In other words, if there was a blunder made, it wasn't me, it was the generals. And how dare he criticize the generals!

But they didn't stop there. Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the RNC, sent out a mass email to millions of people, claiming that the ultra-super-liberal media was at it yet again, daring to report that the explosives in Iraq were looted after the invasion, when in fact American troops found the cache had been looted already, on Saddam Hussein's watch, and that an NBC News crew had confirmed it, therefore making Kerry's criticism and the press coverage of it a howling outrage.

Of course, he was wrong: the troops only stayed at al Qaqaa for the night, they did not look for the weapons (and would not have been qualified to make that determination anyway), and the NBC crew in fact contradicted the claim that the explosives had been found already missing. CNN's report of the NBC team and the soldiers finding the weapons gone was not even based on an NBC report, it was in fact based on a Matt Drudge story, and we all know how reliable he can be. Josh Marshall is all over the story.

But the point in this entry is that Gillespie used this blame-shifting technique; note carefully the words in bold, as well as Gillespie's careful use of quotation marks:

John Kerry seized on the New York Times headline to launch a political attack on President Bush, saying U.S. troops "failed to guard those stockpiles" and that is "one of the great blunders" of the war.

Senator Kerry and the New York Times leave the impression that these weapons went missing recently and U.S. troops were derilict in their duty to guard the stockpile — neither of which is true.

Not only does this shift the blame to the troops instead of the president, but it also carefully misquotes Kerry, whose original quote was:

After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this president failed to guard those stockpiles. ... Now we know our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics, this is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration. The incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be.

Notice Gillespie's careful and intentional editing of Kerry's quote, cutting it off just so he can take the blame Kerry puts squarely on Bush, and make it appear like Kerry is criticizing the troops. When in fact, Kerry not once said it was the fault of the troops, and quite clearly blamed the Bush administration, not once but repeatedly--kind of hard for Gillespie to miss.

We know these people are lying bastards, folks... but it's hard not to use even stronger language when you see such blatant lies such as these--not to mention cowardly attempts to hide behind honorable people in order to save your own sorry political ass.

Looted Explosives (350 tons) in Iraq Covered Up by Bush Administration

Talking Points Memo is covering it in detail, after the story was broken by the Nelson Report, a private newsletter (no web site) reporting on Asia. Apparently, 350 tons of high explosive was looted early on in the U.S. occupation of Iraq--you remember, the looting which Rumsfeld pooh-poohed as insignificant, looting caused by a lack of sufficient troops which the administration tried to say wasn't important--and, as Kerry pointed out in the debates, is now being used against our own people every day in Iraq. Explosives which may have killed hundreds of our troops, in the hands of the insurgents because Bush did not do the job right. Apparently this type of explosive could also be used to trigger a nuclear device.

What's more, it was covered up: it seems that the Bush administration and the DoD did not report this to the IAEA or other bodies that it should be telling, and told the Iraqi government not to inform anyone either. Not to mention that it withheld this information from the American people. Considering the potential political implications of the story, this could be big. Expect it to break in the mainstream press soon. And keep in mind that Kerry was talking about this weeks ago.

Update: The New York Times is now carrying the story. And it seems to be 380 tons, not 350.

Large-Scale GOP Voter-Intimidation Drive Planned in Ohio

No, I'm not kidding:

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

In the meantime, Democrats recruited 3,600 people to protect those same voters from Republican intimidation. The Republican intimidation drive and the Democratic defense against it are taking place primarily in "heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities." This is not a two-sided attempt by both parties to intimidate voters on the other side--this is purely offensive on the part of the GOP, hoping to scare off as many Democratic voters as possible.

This is reprehensible. But not unexpected. The GOP is now running scared, and is evidently willing to stop at nothing to win this one by hook or crook.

Scare Tactics

From Reuters, October 19:

"Instead of articulating a vision or a positive agenda for the future, the senator is relying on a litany of complaints and old style scare tactics," Bush told a rally in New Port Richey.

From ABC News, October 22:

Bush suggested his Democratic rival "does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to keep America secure." His campaign reinforced that theme with a new television ad with chilling imagery of prowling wolves in a dense forest. "Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm," an announcer says.

He Didn't But Says He Did

From the Des Moines Register, October 21:

President Bush touted himself as a man of his word Wednesday, reminding a crowd of 4,000 supporters about promises he made four years ago when campaigning in Iowa, and maintaining he's fulfilled them.

"I kept my word," Bush said repeatedly at a morning rally held at the North Iowa Fairgrounds in Mason City.

From Knight-Ridder, October 20:

President Bush will end his four-year term having fulfilled about 46 percent of the [178] promises he made during the 2000 presidential campaign, according to an analysis by Knight Ridder. ... A similar Knight Ridder analysis found that, during his first term, President Clinton had fulfilled about 66 percent of the 160 commitments that he made during his first presidential campaign.

This Reality Distortion Field Bush puts up is not a mistake; he very much wants people to believe things that are patently untrue--and it's working. According to PIPA, most Bush supporters have a completely mistaken idea of what Bush stands for. A slight majority are correct on his standing on defense spending (increase), and 70% know that he wants the U.S. to do nation-building in Iraq. But fewer than half know his standing on missile defense, the international court and even (unbelievably) the Kyoto accords--and fewer than 25% know that he opposes nuclear weapons testing bans or the land mine treaty. Only 13% know that he opposes labor and environmental conditions in trade agreements.

Kerry supporters, on the other hand, know their man much better. On only one topic--defense spending--do a minority understand his position, and that's 43%. On all the other above-mentioned topics, a majority of his supporters know where he stands: International court, 65%; Missile defense, 68%; Kyoto accords, 74%; Nuclear test bans, 77%; Land mine treaty, 79%; Role in rebuilding Iraq, 80%; and Labor/environment in trade agreements, 81%.

In short, people who support Kerry do so because they know that Kerry stands with them on the issues, while Bush has hoodwinked his own supporters into voting for him by making them think that he stands with them on the issues when he really doesn't.

Bush: I Will Nominate a Supreme Court Justice Who Will Criminalize Abortion

He didn't say it directly, but he did use all the code words:

BUSH: I really don't have -- haven't picked anybody yet. Plus, I want them all voting for me.

I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn't pick. I wouldn't pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn't be said in a school because it had the words "under God" in it. I think that's an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America.

And so, I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We've got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.

And I suspect one of us will have a pick at the end of next year -- the next four years. And that's the kind of judge I'm going to put on there. No litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution.

The first code word is "strict constructionists," whose basic ideology is that the Constitution only applies to matters that it directly and specifically addresses, and that any interpretation beyond that is not within the court's power; to these people, there is no such thing as "intent of the founders," and they would judge no new law from the original intent or principles derived from the constitution. Any new law is acceptable so long as it is not directly addressed in the constitution.

As such, Bush's remark that he wants "strict constructionists" and that the "judges interpret the Constitution" are not exactly consistent.

The right wing found strict constructionism as their legal philosophy while trying to find a way to fight Roe v. Wade; traditionally, it has been a Libertarian point of view. If one applies strict constructionism, Roe. v. Wade would be struck down, as would many other issues concerning civil rights and probably separation of church and state. This goes along with the current Republican agenda to remove power from the judicial so that conservatives in the legislative branch can pass whatever laws they wish with no challenge on their constitutionality.

Another code word from Bush's rhetoric was the Dred Scott decision, which, for those of you who forgot about it since high school, was a rather infamous Supreme Court decision which ruled that blacks were not citizens and were constitutionally the property of the slaveholders. Dred Scott is a famously popular case held up by pro-life groups as an example of how an entire class of people can be regarded as property to be dealt with without concern for their rights. The argument is that fetuses today are like blacks at the time of Dred Scott.

Bush's reference, therefore (as first pointed out by Paperweight), is little more than a code word meaning that he will have Roe stricken just as Dred Scott was.

Other comments on Bush's remarks: his joke about how he would "want them [Supreme Court justices] all voting for me" was borderline at best; few have forgotten how the politically partisan 5-4 vote on Bush v. Gore--considered by many as an illegal decision at least, and a coup d'état at most--handed Bush the presidency in 2000. It's a ballsy thing to joke about.

He also called the courts' ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance a "personal opinion," which is fiction, of course, but then on these matters, such fiction is standard fare for Republican politicians. The core issue of the pledge, of course, is the First Amendment and its protection that prevents the state--in this case public schools--from requiring any American citizen--in this case, schoolchildren--to make a religious pledge, and to prevent that government agency from endorsing any one belief system. It is a core constitutional matter on civil rights with very little real ambiguity (the only lack of clarity is in the GOP fiction), which is why the GOP is trying so hard to pass a law that would prevent the courts from ruling on "Pledge protection" laws without having to amend the Constitution to achieve that.

Finally, on the litmus test, Bush says that he would have "no litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution." However, since what he defines as "interpreting the Constitution" covers almost every major issue before the courts, he is essentially saying that he will choose a judge based upon a wide range of litmus tests, especially Roe v. Wade.

September Jobs Report Out

And it's not good for Bush. What he'll tout as the Greatest Thing Since Buttered Bread will be the unemployment rate, which held stead at 5.4% for the second straight month. While that's far from stellar (Clinton had a 3.9% rate in the late 90's), it is better than almost any other time in Bush's term. However, it does not really mean that fewer people are unemployed, it just means that fewer people are counted as unemployed, which is why the rate is deceptive. It leaves out people who have been unemployed longer than their benefits run and are not currently reported as seeking a job. Which means that millions of unemployed Americans are not even on that list.

But the big news is the number of jobs gained: 96,000, well below expectations, well below the 150,000 jobs needed each month just to tread water, to provide for population growth. In other words, there's a net loss of about fifty thousand jobs there. "Anemic" would be about right as far as describing it. This number plays up the fallacy of believing everything is OK because of the illusory unemployment numbers. And while July's numbers were adjusted upwards by a small 12,000 (August was revised down by a tiny 1,600), it is nowhere close to the upward revisions the Bush people were claiming would be seen.

It will be Kerry's challenge to make sure that he can best Bush at establishing which number is more indicative of the present economy. A few numbers that will help him do this is that in September, 18,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, while government bureaucracies swelled by 37,000 workers--Bush's version of "smaller government," apparently.

Daily News

Michael J. Fox has made a new ad supporting John Kerry, citing his support for stem-cell research. In the video, available on Kerry's site, Fox states, "I say lives are at stake and it’s time for leadership. That’s why I support John Kerry for president." Right to the point--though those saved by stem cell research will only be a few whose lives would be saved by a Kerry presidency.

The economic figures are coming out very soon, and it's anybody's guess as to what they'll say. But there's little chance that they'll be anywhere near good enough to wipe out the past four years of mismanagement by Bush and the GOP, whose massive overspending has disgusted many even in the Republican party. In case you're not aware of it--and you should be before the next debate--you can find Kerry's plan for the economy here. The bullet points:

• Strengthen the Middle Class
  
• Stand Up for Workers Rights
  
• Create Good-Paying Jobs
  
• Restoring Fiscal Responsibility
  
• Opportunity for Small Business
  
• Free & Fair Trade
  
• Balance Work & Family

Kerry would keep tax cuts for the middle class and add targeted cuts (like those Gore proposed four years ago), while getting rid of tax cuts for those earning over $200,000; he would work to stop the overspending, and if he gets even one house of Congress controlled by Democrats, he'll have a far easier time of accomplishing that. He'll focus on creating jobs that pay well through direct incentives, not just throwing cash at rich people and hoping that it somehow makes its way into middle-class pockets; and he'll really invest in energy-independency, an effort which will lead to many good jobs in and of itself. That and a lot more, including detailed plans; read the page on his site.

And going in to the debate, Kerry has scored a 4-point lead in an AP/Ipsos poll, leading Bush 50-46.

Meanwhile, Bush is beginning to sound desperate--and that's not my headline, it's Howard FIneman's, not exactly a flaming liberal. FIneman describes how Iraq could be Bush's undoing. Some have opined, however, that Fineman is just trying to lower expectations for Bush for the debate Friday night.

He's certainly looking desperate to many: he suddenly announced a "significant speech" that he planned to make, stirring up all kinds of expectations, and it turns out that he had nothing new, he just wanted to trick the networks into carrying his stump speech live on TV. That is desperate, when you risk pissing off the networks so close to an election.

Other things not going well for Bush: oil prices hit $53 a barrel, an unprecedented high. Watch the gas prices continue to soar, while the man who said he'd be able to control those prices sits by and does nothing.

And to top it off, a new report came out from Charles Duelfer. Duelfer was hired by Bush when David Kay came out with a report that said Saddam had no WMD and was not a threat to us. This is rather typical Bush fashion: you don't like the facts, try to find someone who will give you different ones. Well, now Duelfer's report is due out, and the results are: Saddam had no WMD and was not a threat to us. In fact, Duelfer's report said that Hussein was a diminishing threat, not a "grave and gathering" one.

Cheney's reaction: the report justifies the administration's case to go to war. I kid you not. He's in full reality-denial mode now, folks. He's now resorted to using Iraqi abuses of the fuel-for-food program as justification for going to war.

That doesn't sound desperate, does it?

The Case Against Bush

What is needed at this time is a portable yet comprehensive list detailing why Bush should not be re-elected. Here's my shot at it:

Taxes: Gave trillion-dollar tax cut to the wealthy while giving token sum to middle class; in so doing, shifted the tax burden from wealthier Americans onto the middle class. What little the middle class got out of it was quickly nullified by higher oil prices, slashed public services, and a greater burden put on states, leading to higher property and other state & local taxes.

Jobs: Presided over the greatest loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover. What few jobs have been gained pay far less than before, with a hemorrhage of manufacturing jobs going overseas with Bush trying to give them tax breaks for doing so. The Bush administration's solution to the loss of valuable jobs: try to get burger flippers reclassified as manufacturers.

Deficit and Debt: Inherited a historic, rare budget surplus. Immediately handed a gigantic tax cut to wealthy people as the economy was floundering, and allowed a Republican-controlled Congress to massively overspend on pork, while spending hundreds of billions on a war in Iraq that did not need to be fought. The result: massive, record-breaking deficits. The damage: the interest on the national debt alone is now costing us $375 billion per year, and more than $4 trillion over the next ten years. A Democrat would have stayed Clinton's course and would have been paying down the debt right now instead of massively adding to it. Bush's budgets have grown twice as fast as Bill Clinton's.

Medicare: Lied to Congress about how much his Medicare plan would cost. Locked seniors into plans that healthcare providers could change at any time. Forbade the government from negotiating for lower prices from pharmaceutical corporations, and blocked state plans to import drugs from other countries like Canada. Illegally used government funds to create fake news reports which were little more than Bush campaign commercials.

Social Security: after doing little to nothing on the issue, Bush still wants to privatize social security, which could have catastrophic effects on seniors while handing a trillion-dollar windfall to financial service industries. It would also strand millions of seniors whenever the economy goes south just as they retire, and we will be forced to pay benefits to them anyway or let them starve.

Education: Failed miserably in reforming Texas educational system, instead corrupting the system and encouraging fraud and the abandonment of lower-performing students. Backs standardized testing which leads to a disastrous test-centered educational system. Massively underfunded education, most of all the "No Child Left Behind" system. Wants vouchers for private schools which cannot possibly work at the large scale; instead it will only limit quality education for wealthier families who already access private schools, while huge numbers of poorer children will see their own educational system crumble.

Foreign Policy: Alienated most of the world, after almost all countries felt an incredible level of sympathy for us. Abrogated several treaties, ridiculed and condescended to some of our strongest allies. Lied to the international community about Iraq intelligence, and met unheard-of opposition from other countries in his single-minded drive into Iraq. Has made the United States an international pariah.

National Security: Underfunded border and import control, local police, fire and emergency services. The invasion of Iraq has stretched our military forces to the breaking point, rendering us unnecessarily unable to fight any war that may need to be fought. Bungled the intelligence before 9/11, ignoring intelligence that pointed to the attack because it would have been inconvenient to focus on terrorism while pushing for a missile defense system. Admits that al Qaeda operates within the United States while having no clue as to who or where they are or what they may be doing. Abandoned any serious hunt for bin Laden or al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Military: Cut pay and benefits for soldiers, slashed veterans' benefits, and chintzed on supplies for soldiers while handing billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to big firms, most of all Vice President Cheney's firm, Halliburton. Created havoc in the military with the invasion of Iraq, a quagmire that is sapping our military strength. Is lengthening soldiers' (including guardsmen and reservists) tours ridiculously long while draining forces from military bases around the world, discouraging re-enlistment and recruitment. America is now unable to take on any additional military tasks, and can barely handle what Bush is pushing on it.

Environment: Cut clean-air and -water regulations, cut funding for environmental protection, pushed for oil drilling in wildlife sanctuaries, allowed corporations to avoid clean-up costs, opened up public lands to logging, among countless other environmental failings. Subverted and distorted science to fit his policies, appointed pro-business and anti-environmental officials to key posts. Opposes the Kyoto treaty.

Energy: Among the main points of the very long list of malfeasance: allowed big oil, coal and nuclear industries to secretly write the nation's energy policy, and refuses to this day to let you know the details. Mouths support for clean energy but does not fund them anywhere close to the point where they could actually produce anything. Oil prices under Bush have shot up to record levels, making Americans even more dependent on foreign oil, not less.

A Divider, Not a Uniter: Has polarized the American public to an unheard-of degree. Has played extreme partisan politics since day one.

Character: The only president in history with a criminal record. Arrested for drunk driving. Well-known for belittling people, putting them down. Once cruelly mocked a woman on death row who had become a born-again Christian and was doing good works. There is so much more... see here, here and here for a fuller accounting of the depth of this man's petty character.

Lies: Lied about his criminal record. Lied about his relationship to Ken Lay. Lied about his intentions upon becoming president. Lied about the state of Iraq's weapons programs, and our reasons for going into Iraq. Lied about who kept inspectors from doing their job in Iraq. Lied about the state of affairs in Iraq. Lied about wanting to find out about intelligence failures that led to 9/11, opposed the 9/11 commission. Lied about his tax cuts. Lied about the size and permanence of budget deficit. Lied about his Medicare program. Lied about countless other issues, large and small.

Corruption and Lawbreaking: As governor of Texas, lied under oath in a criminal case. Had Ken Lay as his biggest contributor, then denied knowing him. Had long-term relations with Saudis and other oil interests in the Middle East, then covered for them by censoring a report that identified them as supporting terrorists. Allowed energy corporations to write national energy policy. Subverted antiterrorism policy in favor of pushing pet policies like missile defense, leading to the open door the terrorists walked through on 9/11 and before. Fought tooth and nail to prevent the 9/11 commission from being formed, fought against it when it needed time and resources, and has failed to implement its recommendations. Lied to Congress about his Medicare plan costs, then illegally used public funds to make fake news reports which were thinly veiled campaign commercials. People in his administration committed a felony when they revealed the identity of a CIA operative as payback for her husband's exposing Bush's lie on Iraq's nuclear program. Republican operatives for Bush purged mostly-Democratic and legally eligible voters from voter rolls in Florida (in 2000 and 2004), and then in 2000 led a massive campaign of fraud in Florida to stop recounts, aided by election fraud consisting of tampering with absentee ballots in two counties and suppressing the minority vote; without even one of these illegal actions, Bush would not have won. And the list goes on and on, from the man who claimed to bring "honor and dignity back to the White House. More here, here, and here (just recent stuff), and here and here and on countless other sites on the net, just do a Google and see the huge numbers pop up.

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And remember: all of the above is the short list.

Another Bullet List: What We Must Do

In his most recent speech at Temple University in Philadelphia, Kerry outlined specifics in how Bush badly mismanaged the fight against al Qaeda:

• Instead of using U.S. forces to capture Osama bin Laden, Bush outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who let bin Laden slip away.
• Instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan, Bush rushed to a new war in Iraq.
• Instead of listening to the military, State Department, leaders in Congress, and outside experts about how to win the peace in Iraq,Bush listened only to nearsighted ideologues who pitched a pipe dream about being welcomed.
• Instead of responding to the greatest intelligence failure in our history, Bush dragged his feet and actually resisted reform. After opposing the 9/11 Commission, after trying to block its extension, and after finally agreeing to testify, Bush still refuses to fully implement the Commission’s recommendations.
• Instead of proposing a Department of Homeland Security, Bush actually opposed it – and then exploited it for political purposes.
• Instead of expanding programs to keep weapons of mass destruction in Russia out of terrorist hands, Bush first tried to cut the programs.
• Instead of facing the urgent nuclear dangers in North Korea and Iran, Bush allowed these dangers to mount.
• Instead of speaking forcefully to the Saudis and others about terrorist financing, Bush has said little and done less.
• Instead of providing our police and firefighters with vital equipment, instead of protecting ports, trains, subway lines and highways, instead of defending nuclear plants and chemical factories, Bush has under-funded homeland security.
• Instead of bringing the world together against the terrorists, Bush alienated the countries whose help we need to defeat them.

And Bush says he wants to "stay the course." Spiffy. Kerry, in contrast, outlined his own ideas about how we should do things differently:

Kerry will build military and intelligence capability:

• implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations
• increase the number of troops by 40,000
• increase special forces
• develop new technologies for collecting intelligence on terrorists
• strengthen the intel community
• make Afghanistan a priority again
• get NATO to provide more troops to Afghanistan

Kerry will move to deny the terrorists weapons:

• secure all nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union within four years (as opposed to Bush’s 13 years)
• seek a verifiable global ban on the production of materials for nuclear weapons (Bush abrogated nuclear treaties)
• lead an international effort to impose tough sanctions on North Korea if they do not stop developing nuclear weapons (Bush has virtually ignored Korea, which has shared weapons with terrorists where Hussein did not)
• work with U.S. allies to get the six party talks with North Korea back on track

Kerry will wage a war on terrorist finances:

• trace terrorist funds to their sources and freeze the assets of anyone financing terrorism
• hold the Saudis accountable
• shut down the financial pipeline that keeps terrorism alive
• make the U.S. energy-independent of Mid East oil

Kerry will make homeland security a true priority, backing it with actual resources:

• prevent terrorists from entering our country (Bush has underfunded border patrol and cargo inspections)
• give border inspectors access to the terrorist watch lists
• seaports must be protected (Bush spends more in Iraq in 4 days than in the U.S. in 3 years)
• improve the way the terror aviation list is structured to keep terrorists from entering the country
• screen air cargo just like baggage is screened
• make sure our police, firefighters, and ambulance drivers have the latest equipment and emergency operation centers they need to respond effectively in a crisis
• cancel the $100 billion missile defense system which won't work anyway, technically or strategically
• protect chemical plants and other high-priority terrorist targets (which Bush has neglected)
• reinstate the program to put 100,000 new police officers on the street (which Bush has scrapped)
• invest more than $2 billion to safeguard railroads and subways

Kerry will focus on the long-term anti-terror goals, denying them recruits and safe havens:

• show that America uses its economic power for the common good
• assist the world’s poorest countries
• lead the international community to cancel the debt of the most vulnerable nations
• enable children in poor countries to get a quality basic education
• work to pre-empt the radical schools teaching hatred of America throughout the Middle East

Kerry says that he will promote the development of free and democratic societies throughout the Arab and Muslim world:

• make clear to repressive governments in the region that we expect to see them change
• improve our outreach to the Muslim world
• train a new generation of American scholars, diplomats, and military officers who understand the region
• convene a summit with our European partners and leaders from the Muslim world

And finally, Kerry made absolutely clear that we will be stronger if we work with our allies.

That is a very strong case, and would be difficult to argue against--I invite conservative guests here to try, so long as you provide evidence to back it up and show how, in equal detail to the above, how Bush has done better than this. I don't think there will be any takers, though, and certainly none who can prove such a point. In all areas Bush has been lacking. He has sapped the strength of the military to the point where we can no longer fight a new war without dropping all other balls, and he has had more than enough time with full control of Congress to get exactly that done--no more excuses about how it was the last guy's fault.

Bush has done nothing to deny terrorists weapons: Iraq had none, and countries where such weapons are coming from are untouched and even more out of control than before. On finances, I would like to hear exactly what Bush has done--I certainly know of no achievements in that area. As for homeland security, it is a joke--used more often to infringe on non-terrorist Americans' rights, and sometimes even as a political weapon (both in terms of publicity and as a physical resource). But the borders are porous, law enforcement underfunded and under-equipped, and our infrastructure, power plants, factories and transportation open to attack. But at least we've got John Ashcroft telling us what color we should be afraid of, right?

And if one thing is certain, it is that Bush has done an abysmal job of winning the hearts and minds of the people of the Arab world.

There are no easy answers, no snap solutions. After four years of Bush, Kerry will have his hands full just with damage control over the havoc Bush has wrought. But Kerry has better ideas and better plans, and we simply cannot afford four more years of Bush. This is not just mere partisanship; the way so many people who see what Bush is doing, and I myself, genuinely fear what might happen under Bush. It's not just distaste for the man, it is a palpable fear and trepidation of what he will do over that much time.

We do not just need a change. Change is overwhelmingly essential to the well-being of our country and to the world, and to lose that opportunity to a well-oiled PR and dirty-trick campaign would be a disaster. And yes, I know how over-the-top that sounds. But I would be less than honest if I said that it was anything less than what I firmly believe.

An Important Message to Hear (Kerry's NYU Speech, Part II)

To continue on John Kerry's speech at NYU earlier this week:

The centerpiece of the speech was Iraq, with Kerry pointing out, in detail, exactly how Bush had gone wrong before and after the invasion. One aspect of that is the fact the Bush diverted resources away from Afghanistan--where the real fight against al Qaeda was centered--and instead focused them on Iraq, where there was no terrorist threat. As a result, Bush alienated our allies and sowed discord in the Middle East, while sabotaging the real war against terrorists. As Kerry himself summarized:

The President’s policy in Iraq has not strengthened our national security. It has weakened it.

And it is here where Kerry further clarifies his stand on the vote to authorize the president with war powers: that it was to give Bush the ability to play a strong hand so he could accomplish the desired goal of getting arms inspectors in. Instead, Bush abused the authority and rushed to war, flushing out the inspectors who Bush later outrageously claimed were thrown out by Hussein. Kerry pointed out how Bush violated his promises:

Bush promised to let inspectors do their work--instead, he drove them out of Iraq even though progress was being made;

Bush promised he would take "every precaution" and would "plan carefully"--he did neither;

And Bush promised he would only go to war with an international coalition, "allies at our side"--when in fact he went in with Great Britain only, all other members of the "coalition" playing only token roles.

Many people criticize Kerry for not providing a "magic bullet" for solving the Iraq problem, that his proposals are only marginally better than Bush's--but the criticism is weak. There is no magic solution to the Iraq problem, and that's the point: Bush got us into a mess that is now impossible to get out of cleanly, and as more time passes, the prognosis becomes worse and worse, so that even Republicans in an election year are criticizing Bush. It is less about the inevitable painful endgame in Iraq, and more about judgment: do we want to give Bush another four years so he can make many more fatal errors? Kerry has it right when he says what he would have done:

I would have concentrated our power and resources on defeating global terrorism and capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. I would have tightened the noose and continued to pressure and isolate Saddam Hussein – who was weak and getting weaker -- so that he would pose no threat to the region or America.

And in Iraq, Kerry's ideas are better than Bush's.

First, an expanded international role could bring the benefits of true legitimacy to the forces working there--people would know it would less about the oil, the business, and the bases for America, and more about putting Iraq on its feet. Bush could never rally that support having alienated the world, but Kerry could achieve it. There is no denying Kerry's advantage there.

Second, a large contingent of Iraqi soldiers must be fully trained, not the pathetic handful Bush achieved, and then later lied about their numbers.

Third, the reconstruction plan must be aimed at helping the people of Iraq; Bush has failed to spend what he was authorized to accomplish this goal, and has left the vastly unemployed Iraqi labor force out of it (so that Halliburton can overcharge us to obscene extremes). Push through "high-visibility, quick-impact projects" to encourage the people.

And fourth, bring about real elections as soon as possible, not the sham without even giving people in huge swaths of the country the chance to vote.

I will be the first to agree that these goals don't stand a great chance of succeeding to the point where we can painlessly withdraw, but I cannot imagine a better plan considering what damage Bush has done--and Kerry would certainly be more able and credible in the effort than Bush could ever hope to be. Half a chance is better than none.

Kerry pointed out what anyone with an objective, informed view already knows: Bush misled us, committed gross errors in judgment, failed to plan properly, and bungled the post-invasion occupation. As a result, our people are being cut down with no hope in sight. I know people personally who have family members in the military who are scared to death at what they believe to be their loved ones' inevitable assignment to Iraq. The soldiers are game, they want to perform their duty. But we owe it to them not to subject them to this.

Bush's strategies in Iraq have failed miserably. A change is essential. Bush's credibility is nil. Only Kerry can bring the right credentials to the table. Bush has done little more than fail and than lie about it. Kerry could not help but do far, far better.

Kerry ended on this important note:

I believe the invasion of Iraq has made us less secure and weaker in the war against terrorism. I have a plan to fight a smarter, more effective war on terror – and make us safer.

Today, because of George Bush’s policy in Iraq, the world is a more dangerous place for America and Americans.

If you share my conviction that we can not go on as we are …that we can make America stronger and safer than it is… then November 2 is your chance to speak... and to be heard. It is not a question of staying the course, but of changing the course.

I’m convinced that with the right leadership, we can create a fresh start and move more effectively to accomplish our goals. Our troops have served with extraordinary courage and commitment. For their sake, and America’s sake, we must get this right. We must do everything in our power to complete the mission and make America stronger at home and respected again in the world.

Kerry's New York Speech

John Kerry is back on track. He's often been known as a strong finisher, and it seems like that's what we're beginning to see here. His speech at NYU is now considered a turning point, seen as strong, decisive, and capable of steering the issues in this campaign.

He started with a compelling vow on fighting terrorism, noting that he now has the official endorsement of the "Jersey Girls," the widows of 9/11 victims now famous for dragging Bush, kicking and screaming, into allowing the 9/11 Commission to be formed. Kerry is backing its recommendations (which Bush has been dragging his feet on as well).

In the speech, Kerry focused on his strengths: the potential to form international alliances (in contrast with Bush's ability to alienate the world against us), necessary if we want to fight effectively. In the wake of 9/11, there is no doubt that Kerry would have cultivated the sympathy and support of the world and used it soundly to implement a profoundly better offensive against al Qaeda, instead of pissing it away and insulting the world while letting a personal war sap our ability to focus on the real and dangerous enemy. Kerry has made it clear (to those who read or hear his entire quotes) that he would not have invaded Iraq. He would only have done so if inspections had shown that Hussein was a threat, and they wouldn't have. But I digress--back to the speech.

Kerry outlined his ideas for fighting terrorism: strong alliances (vital!), a powerful military (not one sapped by a needless quagmire which has made America unable to fight another war elsewhere), diplomacy, and a true application of American values in the Islamic world (not the abortive attempts by the Bush administration to make a few lame videos and then give up). Bush has failed in all four of these areas, but it is clear that they are invaluable to our security. Kerry can make them happen.

But the cornerstone of Kerry's speech, and to a great degree what made it so notable--in the media, finally--was his focus on Iraq. Kerry points out what should be obvious, but needs to be pointed out:

• Iraq was not related to terrorism, and diverted our focus away from al Qaeda;
• the Iraq war threatens to be a war with no end in sight;
• we have sacrificed the lives of too many good American soldiers;
• Bush failed to create anything close to a true coalition;
• Iraq is not headed towards freedom or democracy, it is deteriorating into chaos;
• American dead and wounded are rising to record numbers as violent attacks by insurgents soar;
• Bush has ceded large areas to the insurgents, "no go zones";
• conditions for Iraqis grow worse and worse, with fewer jobs and a destroyed infrastructure;
• Iraqis are not coming to our side, they resent us.

Furthermore, Bush has made "a series of catastrophic decisions" in Iraq:

• Bush lied about why we went to war (he gave 23 different rationales);
• his main rationales (WMD & al Qaeda ties) have been proven false;
• he lied about what it would cost us;
• he lied about what kind of commitment was involved (taking years, hundreds of billions of dollars);
• he lied about forming a true coalition;
• he lied about our chances of success.

Kerry pointed out Bush's devastating mismanagement of our image in the world, and our current lack of credibility; how our allies used to trust us implicitly (an excellent example in de Gaulle's trust in Kennedy's word), and how few would trust Bush today.

Kerry pointed out that seeing the errors Bush made in Iraq is not hindsight, but that all were seen in advance of the war. That's where he used the now-famous phrase, "colossal failures of judgment." Among them:

• We'd be greeted as liberators;
• looting would not be a problem;
• Iraq's infrastructure would not be a problem;
• we had enough troops to handle the aftermath of the invasion;
• we could rely on people like Chalabi;
• the Iraqi police, army, and civil service would be able to take over security functions and run the country.

Kerry goes on to describe how things have deteriorated under Bush:

"Nuclear dangers have mounted across the globe. The international terrorist club has expanded. Radicalism in the Middle East is on the rise. We have divided our friends and united our enemies. And our standing in the world is at an all time low."

North Korea is building nukes, as is Iran; Russian WMD are not secure; Afghanistan is destabilizing. Osama bin Laden is more popular in most places in the Middle East than America is.

And while Osama got away, Bush diverted resources away from fighting al Qaeda so we could invade a country which had not attacked us and posed no real threat.

That's just the beginning of the speech. I'm not finished here, I'll be back tomorrow. But I would urge you to read the speech in its entirety--you'll see why some called it a campaign masterpiece, and you'll see why the media had little choice but to pick this one up and run with it. It's got the Kerry campaign energized.

Bush the Flip-Flopper

Bush has been accusing Kerry of flip-flopping, primarily based upon gross distortions of Kerry's voting record in Congress. When these accusations are looked at closely, they do not hold up at all--but Bush is on record as one of the biggest flip-floppers of all time. One prominent example is his position on the Iraq war and WMD:

First Bush claimed that he did not need Congressional approval to go to war with Iraq. Then he flip-flopped and decided he did need their approval. Then Bush decided he would not go to the U.N. for a resolution on the matter, and then he flip-flopped and decided he would go. But soon after, he flopped on his flip-flop and decided that he didn't need the U.N. after all.

Then there was his ever-flipping position on WMD. At first he was consistent: in November 2002, before he invaded, he said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that's why we had to invade. Then after the invasion, in May 2003, he said that he had actually found weapons of mass destruction. But then he had to flip-flop and admit we hadn't found actual weapons yet, really.

But then he switch-flopped in June and said that Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction program, and that was why we went into Iraq. But then he had to admit that there was no evidence that Hussein had such a program since a decade ago. And by the State of the Union speech last January, he flip-flopped again with a backwards twist and a triple gainer, this time claiming we had found "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." Finally, when he had no choice but to face the facts, he admitted that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and upon doing so, did a huge, monolithic, record-breaking warp-speed flip-flop and claimed that the reason we went into Iraq was for humanitarian reasons.

An then let's not forget one of his most gigantic flip-flops, so sudden and absolute that Bush must have gotten whiplash:

December 13, 2001: We will get Osama bin Laden, no matter how long it takes, "dead or alive — either way. It doesn't matter to me."

March 13, 2002 (exactly three months later): "I don't know where [Osama bin Laden] is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important." And on the same day: "I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

It's hard to get more flip-floppy than that. But Bush has a long record of flip flops. The major ones are covered in many places, like here, here, here, and a long list here.

Depressing News from Iraq

Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq continues to spin out of control. American casualties have been steadily increasing for four months now. At this rate, September will become at least the third deadliest month of the war with a hundred or more U.S. soldiers killed.

And now more and more analysts are beginning to come out and say it outright: we are losing the war in Iraq. Or, more specifically, Bush is losing the war in Iraq. The soldiers fight on, doing their best, but all a soldier can do is just that--their best. If their commander-in-chief chooses the wrong battle or mishandles his strategy, then there's little that any soldier can do.

Before the war started, the Arab league predicted that if Bush invaded, it would "open the gates of hell in the Middle East," and now they're saying that the gates of hell are indeed open; some analysts see the was as already lost; and this writer notes that the correspondence between Bush's rosy assessments and the reality on the ground are becoming more and more dissonant.

The question now is, will the realization of Bush's horrific blunder sink in with the populace in time to do something about it, or will a jingoistic, crowd-pleasing, gung-ho "if you diss me then you diss the soldiers" song-and-dance routine by Dubya sway voters enough to lock us into four more years in Iraq? If Bush gets voted in, then we're in Iraq for good, because his inability to admit to error will force him to drive us into the ground there.

The war was a mistake from the start, and many of us saw it before the whole thing started:

Contrary to the rosy the-Arabs-will-love-us-for-saving-them pipe dream that Cheney has been hawking, the Arab people do not and never have reacted kindly to U.S. intervention, even when their governments allow it; should we go in with everyone opposing us, tempers will flare further still. Cheney argued that "extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad." Is he truly so utterly naive? An unsupported attack by America on an Arab nation would generate such fear and hostility in so many people that extremists would be swamped with volunteers willing to die for their cause. It would fire the call for a greater jihad, not frighten the extremists into impotency. Conflict is the friend of the terrorist.

That's from a pre-Movable-Type blog entry of mine from August 27th, 2002. I was hardly batting 1000 in the entirety of the post, but a lot of what I predicted came to pass, and a lot of other people were closer to the truth than I was. It's not like it was really that hard to see coming. But Bush and his handlers were either blind to it or didn't even care.

The sad thing is, it may already be too late. Bush has ceded huge swaths of territory to the insurgents (like he did in Afghanistan when he depleted forces there to fight in Iraq), who now know that a victory is possible. A great deal of that was made possible by things like the prison torture fiasco, turning hearts and minds against us.

The solution would have been for America to go to the United Nations and work out a real coalition, with strong cooperation by Arab nations, to send in a multinational force under U.N. control. Had that been implemented a year ago perhaps, it might have worked. But now Bush has wrecked the Iraq car, totaling it beyond any hope of repair, and we are probably left with the unsavory and yet very real choice of either leaving Iraq to the insurgents and letting it descend into hell, or staying there and still have it descend into hell. The way Bush has taken us in, there is not painless way out. In fact, there is no way out that is not going to be excruciatingly painful.

Bush will inevitably talk about where to go from here, and that is indeed relevant. But even more relevant in deciding the next president is this: what kind of decisions has Bush made, and where have they taken us--because if he gets re-elected, we will be in for more and more decisions just like it.

A Famine Where Abundance Lies

Some days it's just hard to write. You see clearly what is going on, but stand in almost despair as others look the other way. You see a man who had everything paid for and handed to him, everything taken care of for him all his life, who drank, almost certainly used drugs; a man who broke the law many times, though arrested only three times that we know of; a man who has spoken outright lies too many to count; who evaded service while admonishing his peers not to do the same--engaging in hypocrisy, cowardice, and then lying about it. A man who displayed cruelty to many people, including a woman about to be put to death on his own watch.

And yet, despite all of these facts, millions of people who see character, dignity, and honor as critical somehow are able to see this man as strong in character. You wonder in disbelief how they can possibly think that.

You see a man who started a war that didn't need to be fought, sent a thousand young men and women to die and Lord knows how many thousands more to be maimed and cut up, all based on lies about how dangerous the other country was, lies proven wrong beyond any doubt whatsoever; a man who still forwards many of these same bald-faced lies. A man who hides behind the honor of fallen soldiers. A man who did all of this at the cost of fighting an effective war on terror, when from the very start he began to draw resources away from the hunt for those who had actually attacked our people. A man who has allowed and even caused by his words and actions the enemy numbers to swell, while still refusing to adequately fund real defense at home.

And yet, to so many patriotic Americans who see their children's lives as sacred and the security of our nation as paramount, this same man is somehow seen as a strong, decisive leader who is our only chance for peace and safety.

You see a man who has treated the people with disdain, stealing away their rights in the dead of night, and yet to many who cherish our freedoms and liberties, this man is somehow a protector.

You see a man who has taken a massive surplus and turned it into an unheard-of deficit, a man whose spending has gone far beyond control, and yet among people to whom small government and financial responsibility is essential, somehow this man is seen as a trustworthy manager of the treasury.

You see a man who has presided of massive job losses, over the lowering of uncounted jobs to minimal pay, who has done nothing for education or health care, and yet so many people seem to think he is the best man to accomplish these things and raise our standards of living, tasks which he has proven he cannot accomplish.

And then we turn and see the other man. A man also born to wealth and privilege, and yet he chose to serve, and did serve in combat, with such stature and bravery that a band of his comrades have given up a year of their lives to follow him and declare to anyone who will listen that they owe their lives to him, that he is a man who will lead with honor and dignity. And yet many people who respect military service and honor bravery would sooner listen to political hacks funded by wealthy partisan donors who attack this man with easily punctured lies and thinly veiled hypocrisy--and yet believe them instead. You see the first man attack not just the second, but many others (think of McCain and Cleland) who served and sacrificed with honor, attacking them with bitter lies and calling these patriots traitors, and somehow many people believe the coward who never fought, and disbelieve the men who offered their lives for their country.

You see the other man come forward with workable, sensible and fair plans where the first man has nothing but failures. You see the other man spell out his plans for education in detail, for health care that benefits the people and not the pharmaceutical corporations, a man who would tax fairly, use taxes fairly, and who would reduce the deficit, build better jobs and turn us around from four years of economic failure. But you see that nobody hears of any of this because though the man is speaking of these plans often, the cameras and the journalists do not pass them on as they are supposed to; they instead focus on what the first man is saying without questioning his veracity, and then only how the other man responds to that, and little else. You see the other man trying to tell a country how he can help, how he wishes to serve, but you only read stories and see reports buried low on the page and far into the broadcast, and even then more often than not focusing on how he's being berated or not being angry enough.

Just today, two of the top half dozen major media sites don't even mention Kerry's name on their main pages, though they all name Bush; two more of that number do not mention him until near the bottom of the page. And yet we are less than two months away from an election.

You may or may not share my views or judgments, and I am far from being without bias. There are other things to be said that oppose what I have written above, to be certain. But even taking all that into account, I still cannot fathom how so many can dismiss so much which is vital in a leader and accept a man such as Bush; I cannot believe how a man like Kerry, who, for all his faults, fought for his nation and fights for it still, a man of ambition and yet still of conscience, can be so beaten in the media and disbelieved and unheard by so many who value the things that he has accomplished and promises to do.

You look at the papers and read the news and listen to the broadcasts, and sometimes it hurts to see how the truth is being played with by veterans of spin, how you know what is right and yet also see how millions will see it as wrong, or wrong as right.

This does not mean that I am giving up, however. It does not mean I have abandoned hope, far from it. My hope is that those who fear what will come from another four years, and those who hope for what a new administration could bring, will be galvanized by the blind eye of much of the country and the jaded eye of the media. My hope still remains in my mantra now quite long in speaking: turnout, turnout, turnout.

I fear for my country, but above all I hope for it.

...And He Lied Back Then As Well

You might or might not be aware the George W. Bush once ran for Congress. It was 1978, and after winning the primary race, he lost to Democrat Kent Hance. What is interesting is that in his campaign materials, Bush claimed to have served in the Air Force as well as in the Texas Air National Guard.

Of course, this is nothing new. In his 1999 biography, he stated that after June 1970, "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years," which is now known to be false. In 1999 and 2000, Bush lied--twice--about his drunk driving arrest. And then there was the time that Bush, as Governor of Texas in 1999, lied under oath (isn't that an impeachable offense now?) in a criminal investigation.

Ah, but those were five years ago, and so were just youthful indiscretions. After all, he wouldn't ever lie as president, would he?

Last Nails in the Bush National Guard Coffin

Not that diehard Bush supporters will care, but the evidence has now mounted to prove that Bush (a) got into the guard through family influence, not merit, and did so in order to avoid serving in Vietnam; (b) he did not fulfill his service; and (c) he received special treatment in the guard and escaped punishment because of who he was.

The story is often confusing because it is often told in a disjointed way, often just focusing on a few specifics and rarely told in full. A fully-detailed telling of the story could probably fill a book, but here are the highlights:

When Bush applied for the Texas Air National Guard (TANG), there was a long waiting list--usually one and a half years long--and absolutely no guarantee of a spot. Bush checked "do not volunteer" for overseas assignment on the application forms. Bush admits to having called Colonel Walter Staudt, commander of the TANG, to ask about getting into the Guard.

Sid Adger, oilman and Bush family friend, asked then-Lt. Governor Ben Barnes to get young Bush into the TANG. Barnes contacted General James Rose, head of the TANG, and asked him to take Bush in. Barnes just recently recounted that story on 60 Minutes.

Bush joined the TANG just 12 days before his college deferment ran out. Col. Staudt immediately became Bush's mentor and guardian. Staudt held a special ceremony to swear Bush in, complete with photographers--even though Bush had already been sworn in. Staudt held another ceremony for the cameras when Bush was made an officer, with the Elder Bush in attendance.

Bush was made a Lieutenant despite not having accomplished any of the requirements for the rank; Bush was made a jet pilot despite getting only a 25% score--the lowest possible without failing--in his aptitude test. Bush was elevated into the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron over the heads of far more qualified pilots. Col. Staudt insisted that there was no favoritism. Bush was assigned to an F-102, which was being phased out and would never be called to Vietnam. (additional source)

The above rather clearly proves that Bush used connections and family influence to get into the Guard, and once he was in, he was rather blatantly guided into a position of status, safety, and comfort.

The next stage of the whole affair comes in 1972, when Bush is still a few years away from completing his comfy service in Texas:

In the spring of 1972, George H. W. Bush, then the U.S. Ambassador the to U.N., directly called Jimmy Allison, Bush family political guru and manager of the Blount campaign in Alabama. The elder Bush asked Allison to take young George under his wing, and get him to work on the Blount campaign. Said Allison's widow in a recent interview, "The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing."

In April 1972, all overseas and stateside military services started instituting drug testing.

A new document, just released, shows that on May 4, 1972, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, then Bush's commanding officer, gave Bush a direct order to have his annual physical exam no later than May 14. It was previously assumed that Bush was due for his exam in August. The question is, why was he ordered to have his exam two to three months earlier than normal? This memo also shows that the Bush camp lied when they claimed Bush did not take the exam because Bush was in Alabama and his family physician was in Texas--Bush was in Texas when ordered to take the exam.

Another new document shows that on May 19, Bush called Killian to see if he could get out of performing his duties and go to Alabama. Killian noted that Bush had not taken his physical, and reminded Bush of the $1 million investment the TANG had made in training him. Killian wrote that he suspected Bush was "talking to someone upstairs."

On May 24, Bush put in a request to be transfered to an inactive postal Reserve unit in the Alabama Guard; Killian recommends the transfer for Bush. One week later, his request was turned down by the National Guard Bureau headquarters. Bush remained in Alabama, however, and did not return to Texas as was required. Doing so could be considered going AWOL (it is desertion if it is more than 30 days).

Bush 'campaigns' for Blount in Alabama; according to the widow of Jimmy Allison, Bush constantly showed up late, shirked regular work, bragged about his heavy drinking, and that the only work he did during that time was "contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support." Allison also had no idea Bush was in the Guard and never saw or heard of Bush attending drills.

On August 1st, Killian suspends Bush for not taking his physical exam. A mandatory report by a Flight Inquiry Board detailing Bush's situation is still missing from the documents released from the Bush administration.

On August 18, Killian wrote a memo titled "CYA," almost certainly standing for "Cover Your Ass." This is one of the most damning memos; in it, Killian notes that Bush's superior officers (Lt. Cols. William D. Harris Jr. and Bobby Hodges) are being pressured by Staudt to go easy on Bush and "sugar-coat" his reviews. Killian writes that he'll falsify the date of a report on Bush but will not rate him better than he deserves. Staudt was clearly going to a great deal of trouble to get Bush off the hook for his failure to follow orders or even show up for duty.

On September 5, 1972, Bush was ordered to start service in an active but non-flying Alabama Guard unit, but it is doubtful that he ever served there at all. Of all the people on the base, only one man, James "Bill" Calhoun, ever claimed to have seen Bush there--but Calhoun's story was shown to be a lie when records showed that Calhoun claimed to have seen Bush on dates when Bush was not even assigned to the unit. Other witnesses (the base commander Lt. Col. William Turnipseed and then-Lt. Bob Mintz) state definitely that Bush would have stood out like a sore thumb, and yet they never saw him, despite having looked. The only evidence Bush even went to the base is a dental exam--which only proves that he got free medical treatment, not that he served.

Bush's absence at this time violates a ''statement of understanding" which he signed in which he swore to achieve ''satisfactory participation" which "included attendance at 24 days of annual weekend duty -- usually involving two weekend days each month -- and 15 days of annual active duty." (source)

In November 1972, Bush finally returned to Houston Texas, but did not report for duty with his home squadron.

In December 1972, Bush inexplicably began working as a counselor with black youngsters in Houston, in a community service stint--often a punishment for offenders who are let off easy. His public criminal record for that period was wiped clean when Bush became governor of Texas and had his driver's license number changed. (Rumors suggest that Bush was either caught with cocaine or for a second drunk driving offense.)

In May 1973, Bush was ordered to serve "nine certain duty days" in person at Ellington Air Force Base in Montgomery between May 22 and June 7; he never showed up. In fact, Bush never returned to duty in Texas; Lt. Col. Hodges said that "If he had come back to Houston, I would have kept him flying the 102 until he got out, but I don't remember him coming back at all."

On July 30, 1973, when he was cleared to go to Harvard, Bush signed a document reading, "It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position [in Massachusetts]. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months..." Bush never did so, and therefore disobeyed a direct command and failed to serve duties he swore to uphold.

Upon leaving the Guard in the summer of 1973, Bush was awarded 35 "gratuitous" inactive Air Force Reserve points, which means that he did not attend his duties but was credited with serving anyway. This was not normal, and went directly against the rules at that time. In essence, Bush did not complete his duties, so higher-ups simply gave him credit for the service so he could receive an honorable discharge.

October 1, 1973: Bush is honorably discharged eight months before his duty is scheduled to end.

(extra sources: 60 Minutes, Bush's TANG Timeline, and this BlogD post)

The White House has been trying to explain this away, mostly by simply lying--claiming Bush served when not only do they have no proof, but when there is substantial evidence showing Bush did not complete his duties. White House spokesman Bartlett summed it up thusly: "The bottom line is, is that President Bush would not have received the honorable discharge that he was granted when he returned from Alabama if he had not met his requirements."

However, the new evidence, in addition to a great deal of prior evidence, clearly shows that Bush was being given special treatment, that his superiors were being pressured to falsify records, and that he was given far more breaks, promotions, positions and credits than he deserved. All of this proves without question that he very well could have received the honorable discharge without fulfilling his duties, and--as detailed above--he did in fact NOT fulfill his duties on many separate occasions.

Bush has lied about this. His people have lied constantly about this. Which begs the question, what else are they holding back? There are still a great many documents that should exist but which the Bush administration has not yet revealed.

What does all this mean? What relevance does it have? It means that Bush is and was dishonest; that his character is and was unacceptable; and that he cannot be trusted to carry out his responsibilities. If honesty, character, and reliability are important in a president, then all of this is of great importance for voters considering whom to elect to the nation's highest office.

Count Slowly

The milestone was reached and passed while I slept. Here is the editorial from the Seattle PI.

Count to 1,000, slowly

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

We probably won't know which American was the thousandth to die in the war on Iraq or precisely when or where he or she fell, nor do we need to know. The grisly milestone was reached yesterday, according to records compiled by The Associated Press.

In a news conference earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared to downplay the looming tick in the death tally. He contended that terrorism's death toll was already well over 1,000 by counting the roughly 3,000 who were lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It was a cynical attempt to renew the discredited connection between terrorism and Iraq. Indeed, Rumsfeld said, our 1,000 dead in Iraq fell to "a combination of terrorists, former regime elements and criminals."

It's no time to engage in the ghoulish calculus of how many American deaths are too many. Even one life lost in an errant cause is one too many. The validity of their sacrifice can never be questioned, but the wisdom of those who called them to make that sacrifice must be.

This is a war whose cost has been borne by so few, waged by a nation that has cut taxes for the wealthy and in which a spike in gas prices is as close as most of us have come to sacrifice. So, for today, it's essential to stop and stand quietly beside this milepost on the road of war -- and count to one thousand, slowly.

I find it incomprehensible, what Rumsfeld was trying to say. Comparing the soldiers lost to those lost in 9/11? Furthering the lie that Iraq was somehow connected to that terrorist attack? And comparing our people lost--how is that supposed to tie in? What, is he trying to match the number? Or to say that 1,000 is not so many, so we shouldn't grieve so much?

Incomprehensible.

Bad News Bush

More news out:

Remember the Congressional Report on 9/11 which the Bush White House ripped 27 pages out of? We always knew that the redacted pages were about Saudi Arabia, but we probably assumed that it just talked out secondary relationships between the terrorists and that country.

Not quite. According to Florida Senator Bob Graham, part of the 27 pages censored by Bush spoke of two 9/11 hijackers who got support from Saudi agents--and the Bush administration blocked an investigation into the matter. Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassan worked for the Saudi government when they gave substantial financial support to Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhdar (hijackers on AA Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon), and found them apartments in San Diego when they began flight training there.

When the staff tried to conduct interviews in that investigation, and with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who also helped the eventual hijackers, they were blocked by the FBI and the administration, Graham wrote.

The administration and CIA also insisted that the details about the Saudi support network that benefited two hijackers be left out of the final congressional report, Graham complained.

Bush had concluded that "a nation-state that had aided the terrorists should not be held publicly to account," Graham wrote. "It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety."

Bush's statement about nations that aide terrorists is completely opposite to Bush's post-9/11 policy which he used to justify invading Afghanistan.

Graham also reveals that, according to General Tommy Franks, the Bush administration started shifting resources out of Afghanistan and into a position to be used against Iraq as early as February 2002, just four months after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and more than a year before the invasion of Iraq--not to mention long before Bush had congressional authority to do anything of that nature. Franks told Graham at one point, "Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan."

All of this gives even more credence to the case made in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, in which the extensive ties between the Bushes and the Saudis is outlined; far more detail is given in the Craig Unger book, House of Bush, House of Saud. The short story is, Bush is covering up the Saudi connection, perhaps even illegally so, committing obstruction of justice.

What odds you want that the mainstream press ignores the story?

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Fighting in Iraq has surged, bringing the 1000th death of an American soldier close to reality frighteningly faster than expected. 12 fatalities in the past 36 hours have brought the toll to 998. It is sad that only this milestone may bring even a little attention to how badly things are going for our people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 7,000 more have been wounded, many losing limbs or otherwise becoming handicapped. And still, they're being short-changed and left in the cold (make that heat) in regards to everything from bottled water to body armor, while looking at Bush administration VA funding cuts of almost a billion dollars. These among a host of issues plaguing the troops. We say we support them, but few seem willing to focus on these vital issues. To know more about what's happening straight from the source, visit Operation Truth, a web site by soldiers in Iraq.

Was Saddam Hussein worth the lives of 1,000 Americans?

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Concern has been growing over the quick-and-dirty post-convention polls from TIME and Newsweek which show Bush enjoyed a double-digit bounce. Not so fast, though; Rasmussen polls, tracking the numbers day by day, see only a 4 to 5 point lead over Kerry, which is backed up by reports of internal poll numbers from both campaigns. Rasmussen attributes the discrepancy between TIME & Newsweek and the new numbers to the news magazines' giving more weight to Republicans' responses in the polling data; the L.A. Times, apparently, made the same mistake by counting too many Democrats when the paper reported a huge Kerry lead earlier in the year.

A new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll shows an even smaller bounce: according to this poll, Bush got no more than a 2% increase in the poll numbers relative to before the convention. If true, this would equal the bounce Kerry got after the Democratic convention.

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More dirt on Bush?

Well, it looks like it. More and more people have been noticing the long-known fact that the Bush National Guard document dump may have had lots of pages, but it left out key documents, such as the mandatory report detailing why Bush missed his physical exam. The White House response? Texas Air National Guardsmen were sloppy record-keepers. Really, that's what they're saying. This as Ben Barnes' 60 Minutes interview is getting ready to air.

And now Kitty Kelley, author of the Nancy Reagan Bio, is publishing a book on the Bushes, in which she reports witnesses who say that Bush used cocaine at Camp David when his father was president, and that he and Laura Bush both smoked marijuana. The 700-page book titled "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty" is reported to contain "five bombshells," including the drug information and apparently new information on Bush and the National Guard.

Bush has still not answered the cocaine issue save to say that he didn't use illegal narcotics after 1974; frankly, it is rather obvious he did use cocaine, else the clumsy obfuscation he attempted in 2000 about how he would clear background checks in former white house administrations makes absolutely no sense at all.

New allegations of cocaine use won't really affect those already voting against Bush much, but it could hurt his support among his base, fundamentalist voters who might be less inclined to go to the polls in November if this gets enough coverage in the press.

A Look at Two Convention Speeches: Part Two

And finally, on to Bush's convention speech.

Naturally, he opens with references to the bravery of others, on 9/11 and in the invasion of Iraq; in essence, he is saying, if you honor them, then you honor me. An easy sell, but dishonest as well; their honor is not his, their actions are divorced from his, not representative.

But then, he lapses into a strange metaphor of hills and valleys. 9/11 was a hill? And how is now a valley? Not exactly "morning in America" or even "the shining city on the hill." Anyway, he goes on to praise Dick Cheney, his wife, his father, and then name-drops Ronald Reagan. But he quickly ventured into policy; according to some observers, the idea was that if anyone happened to flip through and momentarily watch the speech, they'd hear at least a few policy point.

In education, he claims progress--but there is no evidence that progress is being made. Bush continues to massively underfund NCLB, and those students who do attend Bush's "magic bullet" charter schools have scored worse than students at public schools (probably exactly because Bush has failed to fund them). And instead of trying to fix the system, Bush is simply getting his Department of Education to stop collecting information on charter schools so no one will be the wiser, and instead hopes people will simply buy his unsupported line about how education is "improving."

He then spoke of strengthening Medicare, but he has only done a spectacular job of destroying it. He lied to Congress and the people about the costs of the program he pushed through Congress. He illegally used government funds to create a Bush campaign commercial under the guise of "educating the public" about his plan. He cornered seniors into committing to a single plan for buying drugs, which the pharmaceutical companies can renegotiate whenever they like; he blocked the government from negotiating better prices for drugs, like many countries do to great affect; and now, we find out that Bush's medicare prices are jumping by 17%, the greatest rise in premiums ever for medicare. In short, he's done an abysmal job, and yet crows about how he's some kind of Medicare Savior.

He goes on about his tax cuts, claiming that it benefitted "America's workers, entrepreneurs, farmers, and ranchers." Bull. He only shifted the tax burden onto the middle class while dangling a plastic carrot "tax cut" for the middle class that was nothing more than a tax hike in disguise, while slashing taxes for the rich. "Farmers and ranchers" are a suggestion that his plan to eliminate the estate tax saves farms, when nothing of the sort is true--the individual farmer and rancher already have protections; the Bush changes only benefit the wealthy. And after three years, his magic solution to the weak economy is still ineffectual; the economy is still anemic, and the job market is destitute.

He recycles "compassionate conservatism," with the term being just as ambiguous and without real meaning as it was four years ago. He claims that "government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives," while at the same time spending money like a madman, tearing down our civil liberties, forcing fundamentalist religious policy into national laws, while refusing to be accountable to the people, veiling his administration in secrecy, thus giving Americans less power over government and our lives than ever before. He lied about Iraq to get Americans to agree to go to war, and now we find we've been suckered, and our young men are killed every day. That's putting us in control of what happens to us? And yet he has the gall to speak of "expanding liberty," whilst giving no clue as to what that supposedly means.

He even spoke of today's economic woes of having multiple jobs and being laid off frequently as "a time of great opportunity for all Americans." Incredible. He uses this as a prelude about how he wants to change government systems to "take the side" of the American people, when he has shown every intention of doing the opposite. Is stiffing seniors while giving huge benefits to pharmaceutical corporations "taking your side"? Is stiffing you at the gas pump while letting Big Oil write the nation's energy policy "taking your side"? I don't think so.

After four years of horrifically bad performance in jobs--the worst since Hoover and the Great Depression--he claims that his policies will get you more and better jobs. His performance so far, with the freedom to do practically anything he wants with minimal opposition, has resulted not only in massive losses of jobs, but also has resulted in what jobs we do have being worse than ever before, with salaries low, workload high, and very little job security--except for those at the top of the ladder, Bush protects them. But for you? Remember, this is the administration that wanted to redefine "manufacturing jobs" to include burger-flipping.

But Bush claims that his plan will "encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation, and making tax relief permanent." Good lord. "Restraining federal spending"? Bush has been on an unprecedented four-year spending spree. "Reducing regulation"? Where has he done that, except to allow for oil drilling in national parks or to remove roadblocks to corporate corruption? And making "tax relief" permanent? We've had this "relief" for close to four years now, and it's only driven us deeper into the hole.

He goes on to say that he "will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy." Really? How? What's he done so far? He's given good lip service, but the only way he's tried to act to accomplish this goal is to drill in ANWAR, which, even if successful, will hardly solve any energy dependency problems--it would be 10 years before the oil would really start running, and would hardly be enough to make us oil-independent. Hey, maybe if he told Dick Cheney to let the public see how the Gas, Oil and Coal lobbies wrote our nation's energy policies, maybe we'd get a better idea then!

Oy vey. That's enough for tonight. And I'm not even halfway through the speech yet. In short, practically everything in the speech was either an outright lie, or had major elements of untruth, exaggeration, misdirection and other shades of dishonesty.

But Bush knows the drill: claim something is true long enough, strongly enough, and the American people will believe it to be true, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 70% believed that Saddam was in on 9/11. How many believe Bush's current load of bull?

The Assault on the Middle Class Continues

In their continued attack against the middle class, the GOP and President Bush ponder how they will institute a national sales tax, probably at around 25%. The anti-progressive tax would, in theory, replace the federal income tax, and would represent the greatest tax cut for the wealthy imaginable, a veritable Death Star for tax cuts for the rich. It would shift the tax burden squarely on the middle class and the poor.

Bush and the GOP are already spinning like mad, giving the new plan the name "Fair Tax" and claiming that it would make the middle class "invisible" to taxes. Invisible?? When you pay 25% extra on everything you buy? In addition to whatever state sales taxes you might pay?

The GOP stance is an absolute fraud, pure and simple. Wealthy people would be paying a miniscule proportion of their income for the tax--and would likely be rewarded immediately with big-ticket exemptions (under the guise of aiming those exemptions at the middle class, of course--SOP). The poor would find their tax burden skyrocketing, as just about everything they purchase would become about 25 % more expensive--including food, which for obvious reasons has always been exempt from state sales taxes. Everyone in the middle class would suffer similarly.

The idea has been so unpopular that Bush almost immediately flip-flopped on the issue, saying he didn't want people to think he was raising taxes. No, we've got to get those tax hikes through in stealth mode.

This is a seriously bad idea--not just for the above reasons, but because it will target taxes at purchases, which will hurt sales and be poison to the economy. Japan instituted a 3% federal consumption tax back in 1989, and hiked it to 5% in 1997--and both times, their economy dragged, contributing to a decade-long recession.

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On another front, the Bush administration, after losing four congressional votes on the issue, decided to use strict executive authority to enact their overtime overhaul. Republicans are trying to paint it as something that will just take overtime away from a few thousand wealthy people earning over $100,000 a year, and that a lot of other people will get more overtime. Few people getting overtime now believe this, however.

One thing is for certain: it's not what the Bush administration wants you to think. First of all, how many people who make over $100,000 a year get time-and-a-half? Like the law that says that rich people have the right to sleep under bridges, one can only suspect that this is a false-front way of making it look like a burden only on the wealthy.

Workers earning less than $24,000 will be exempt, but that leaves a huge hole between $24K and $100K, occupied mostly by the middle class. Who in that hole will lose overtime? That's the problem: the rules are torturously labyrinthine in that area, and even experts say they're unclear. Some examples of people getting their overtime pay cut include "pharmacists, funeral directors, embalmers, journalists, financial services industry workers, insurance claims adjusters, human resource managers, management consultants, executive and administrative assistants, purchasing agents, registered or certified medical technologists, dental hygienists, physician assistants, accountants, chefs, athletic trainers with degrees or specialized training, computer system analysts, programmers and software engineers." See the pattern? No? What, are you blind? Obviously the pay cut is aimed at.. er,... uh, whah?

And what if your job is not on that list? Does your pay get cut, or not? You'll probably find out when your employer cuts your pay--the rules are so unclear that they say employers should determine who gets the cuts on a "case-by-case basis."

Now, the claim is that this is intended to cut down on lawsuits concerning overtime pay, but this is doubtful: the vague and seemingly random targeting of the pay cuts will, in all likelihood, create countless more disputes and spark a tidal wave of suits. The real aim of the law, it would seem, will be to cut down on the chances of employees actually winning the overtime claims so many businesses despise.

The fact is, the rules confuse a great many people, but many distrust the new regs on the basis of its source--the anti-labor administration--and its backers, the people who pay the wages:

Monday's change is the culmination of decades of lobbying by business groups representing retailers, restaurants, insurance companies, banks and others that have been hammered by workers' overtime lawsuits, many of them successful.

I can relate to that. When I worked at a movie theater in college, my own employers withheld overtime pay, claiming they just didn't have the money for it (businesses never 'have the money' to pay employees), and promising future redresses that of course never materialized. I sued them in small claims court, and won.

I would be willing to bet good money that far, far more than the 107,000 workers will lose overtime, and apart from savaging middle-class wage earner's income, this stands as the first step of many to do away with overtime completely.

Add to this the refusal of conservatives to allow for even a mild increase in the minimum wage, and their incessant drive to give more, more, and even more tax cuts to the wealthy, and it becomes all too evident that the GOP is the friend of the wealthy only, and has nothing but contempt and abusive intent towards the poor and middle class.

Ten Words

"There it is. That's the ten-word answer my staff's been looking for for two weeks. There it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They're the tip of the sword. Here's my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we going to do it? Give me ten after that, I'll drop out of the race right now. Every once in a while... every once in a while, there's a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren't very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten words."

--President Bartlet, in the West Wing episode "Game On"

In the game of "Ten Words," Bush has been winning the game.

Last September, after several weeks of claiming that he could invade Iraq without the permission of Congress (his staff even put together a list of legal justifications for doing so), Bush flip-flopped and put before the Senate a request to grant him war powers. Kerry agonized over whether or not to grant those powers; as other Democrats such as Barbara Boxer were saying that we should not trust the president, Kerry finally decided to back the resolution, but not without conditions or reservations:

"Let there be no doubt or confusion," Kerry said. "I will support a multilateral effort to disarm [Hussein] by force, if we ever exhaust those other options as the president has promised. But I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible."

There was nothing in the resolution that guaranteed those conditions would be met. Nonetheless, he was one of 29 Democrats to vote for the resolution, which passed 77 to 23.

In his Senate speech, Kerry had said, "I will be among the first to speak out" if Bush failed to seek international support and go to war as a last resort.

It is important to remember that these were words Kerry spoke on the floor of the Senate last October, not this summer; it is important to remember that Bush had promised to exhaust all diplomatic options, to allow the weapons inspectors to finish their work, to build a true coalition and to get the full backing of the U.N. And it is important to remember that Bush broke those promises, and that he appears to have never intended to keep them at all; in this sense, Bush was a flip-flopper at least, and an outright dishonest liar at worst.

But that isn't stopping Bush from trying to make Kerry look like the flip-flopper instead of himself. The first criticism he laid on Kerry was, if going into Iraq was wrong, then why did you vote for it? That answer was easy enough for Kerry to answer: because you promised to go only as a last resort (ten words exactly!). So now Bush has formulated a different ten-word attack: Knowing what you know now, would you still vote for it?

"Kerry has always had this vulnerability of looking flip-floppy on the issue and Bush is using this very shrewdly," said Walter Russell Mead, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added "Being silent on the question makes him look evasive, and saying something, anything, gets him in trouble with one side of his party or another." (NYT)

Kerry answered that he would have done so, but again, only if Bush had kept the same promise he had made before--to use force only as a last resort, and only with a true coalition and the backing of the U.N.

Unfortunately, that was not only just a little bit too long for ten words, but it also contained a conditional, which is a seeming contradiction in this context, if one does not examine beyond the ten-word limit. And Bush has been using the tip of that sword to skewer Kerry. And it is true, a lot of Democrats don't like Kerry's answer; I myself feel that even with what we knew before we found there were no WMD, that we shouldn't have gone to war--but I am comfortable with Kerry's conditions about what should be done first.

The problem is, Bush's great skill with the ten-word sword and the perception of Kerry unconditionally approving of what Bush did have been wounding Kerry in the media and in public perception recently.

Sometimes it is painful to know that your guy is right and the other guy is not only wrong, but also a lying, deceptive bastard, and yet you can still clearly understand how people can see it the other way around.

As Then, Is Now--He Just Learned How to Hide it Better

The photo at right kind of says it all, doesn't it? In a way, that is--there's more to it than just the punch. Bob Harris, over at the This Modern World blog site, explains how:

Incidentally, while rugby is a contact sport, every player knows that tackling above the shoulders is a foul. So is leaving your feet during a tackle. Either of these is serious enough that the other team is immediately awarded a penalty kick, often directly resulting in points for the other team.

So even without throwing a punch, Bush is already well outside fair play.

Grasping an opponent by the back of the head and punching him in the face is beyond the pale -- I've watched rugby avidly for years, and I've never seen it during an open-field tackle like this, honest -- and will typically result in a player being immediately sent off.

Of course, this is in line with a lot of other stuff Bush did in college. Arrested twice (once for stealing a holiday wreath from a department store, again for rushing another college's football field and tearing down the goal posts), interviewed in the national press defending the branding (with a red-hot coat-hanger) fraternity pledges, admonishing classmates for wanting to avoid going to Vietnam and then using family connections to do exactly that--lots of stuff of this nature. Gary Trudeau, writer of Doonesbury, was at Yale with Bush and describes him as being cruel back then: "He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable. He was very good at all the tools for survival that people developed in prep school -- sarcasm, and the giving of nicknames. He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation."

Bush apologists say that these were "youthful indiscretions," but they do show character; people change a great deal, but many fundamental characteristics will last a lifetime, and Bush has carried some of these principles into his later life, as governor of Texas and as president. For example, while governing Texas, he refused to use his power to grant clemency, particularly in the case of Carla Faye Tucker, who was born-again and was doing good works, and pleaded to Bush for her life. Bush's response? To cruelly mock her in a purse-lipped, falsetto voice, mimicking her saying "Please don't kill me!" Not a youthful indiscretion--this guy is, in truth, fundamentally cruel. Look at a rundown of Bush's pre-presidential record, and see the category, "Bush and Character."

Kerry Talks to Real Crowds, Bush Talks to Fake Ones

Remember a report recently where Kerry and Edwards traded shots with hecklers? It doesn't matter which one, it's happened so often (here's just one example--Google to find dozens more). Have you noticed that this happens to Kerry, even his wife, very frequently, and that this rarely happens to Bush? That's not a coincidence.

When John or Teresa Kerry and John Edwards speak to audiences, they're speaking to real crowds, mostly Democrats as that's the crowd they draw, but also to moderates and Republicans, for whom it is simple to get in. They pay the price for that--they get heckled constantly, Republicans coordinate to disrupt their events, we start hearing about groups chanting "Four More Years!" for Bush, and so on. It's a hassle, but at least Kerry and Edwards are honest in whom they talk to--it's no PR stunt meant for the local TV station, it's the real deal, so to speak. And the advantage is not only to be seen as authentic; they also get to speak to more swing voters in person this way.

Bush, on the other hand, seems terrified of speaking in front of a crowd that isn't 100% full of gung-ho supporters--even in the military, which is strongly Republican. Remember his secret flight to Baghdad so he could serve up plastic turkey? The GI's who got to enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner were there only because they had answered a written questionnaire in which they supported the president a hundred percent--and those who answered less heartily were sent to their barracks to eat MREs. True story.

And it's no less true on the campaign trail. Bush has been doing videotaped "town-hall" meetings, and wouldn't you know, the crowds are all enthusiastically supportive of the president, the questions are softballs and there is not a dissenting or truly challenging voice to be heard. Some people don't even ask questions; they simply stand up, spout out effusive praise of Bush, and then sit down to thunderous applause. Bush spokespeople claim that these are not staged, that they never know what people will say. Riiiiigghht.

Cheney is making his rounds of the speech-and-town-hall circuit as well, and with him as well, they're not letting in anyone but the party faithful--it's invitation only, to which members of the public are wondering, "Since when does a town hall meeting feature 'invitation only' participants?"

But Bush and Cheney's standards for who gets in can be severely draconian. Nowadays, to get into one of their appearances, you actually have to sign a loyalty oath, pledging to back the president and vote for him in November before you can be given tickets. Bush people claim that they foiled organized attempts to disrupt their rallies, which is baloney--if all you have to do is sign a loyalty oath, determined protesters aren't going to stop at signing them. But the GOP goes farther than that, requiring identification as a registered Republican or other credentials which will guarantee that you will do nothing but cheer heartily once you're inside.

This fake popularity, exercised predominantly by the GOP, has its advantages--when Bush and Cheney appear on television and in news reports, they come across as wildly popular. One can only guess that this is all that Bush's people care about, and if you have to insult and piss off a whole lot of people to do it, well, the TV audience is bigger than the crowd that didn't get in.

But as the GOP continues to dismiss Michael Moore for using his craft to create false impressions, this Bush policy makes it very clear that the GOP is far more adept at creating false impressions--or as Moore would say, creating a "fictitious president."

Were Bush or Cheney to make an appearance before a real crowd of Americans, not stacked, not hand-picked, not just the party faithful, but a group of true-blue, everyday Americans, they would surely falter under the lack of enthusiasm and sometimes outrage that they have generated. The cheers would be more realistically scattered, the silence of much or the crowd thick in the air, the dissatisfaction palpable.

Which, of course, is exactly why they stack the crowds.

On July "Volatility"

One of the Bush apologists coming to comment on this site, remarking on the dismal May-July job numbers, tried to fob off the slump to the idea that July is a "volatile" month; specifically, he wrote: "HINT: July is typically a very volitile month for employment numbers."

This is what comes from believing everything you hear from the Bush administration and right-wing econopundits. The idea that we are gaining more and more jobs, and it's just that July is traditionally volatile, so we'll jump back up in August--it's a pipe dream, no more and no less. First, volatility goes both ways: it might get you numbers lower than are real, but it also might get you numbers higher than are real. Second, whether or not a month is often volatile is no guarantee that the numbers for this July were actually volatile. In other words, it's all just blowing smoke.

Let's take a look, shall we?

I went to the web site of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found a page with all the job data since 1994. I then copied that into Excel, translated the table to columnar form, and then started banging out charts. Here's the first, and most relevant to the topic at hand--job growth figures for 2004:

What's the first thing you see? It's glaringly obvious: a spike in March, which then declines in a nice, steady curve up through July. That ain't no blip you see in July, and it's not volatility--it is a smooth, regular trend. In fact, if you see this as a straight-line trend rather than a curving one, then July's numbers should have been lower, suggesting that volatility made the July numbers appear higher than they should have been. It is possible that with next month's report, we may see July's numbers revised downward.

So much for the Bush jobs surge, and so much for Bush-favoring "volatility."

I figured that I had done all this work to get the chart made, let's look at a few others. Here's one that shows job growth during the entire Bush presidency:

Here's where we see the overall job loss during the Bush Jr. years. Note how the numbers seem to have been trying to go up in mid-2002? See how they sputtered and began falling again? That's where the job recovery should have been. And that's where it would have been, had Bush not done everything wrong. And if you add all those positive and (mostly) negative numbers together, you'll see where those 1.1 million jobs disappeared to.

But to get a real feel for how Bush anemia has stacked up against the Clinton job juggernaut, look at this chart:

Blue is total number of jobs under Clinton, red is total number of jobs under Bush. There's really no contest at all, is there?

You want jobs? Good jobs? Well-paying jobs? Or heck, even any job at all?

Vote for Kerry.

July Job Numbers a Dismal 32,000; May and June Numbers Revised Downward

After a few months of tepid job growth, the Bush administration tried to paint the economy as "recovering"--in fact, they tried to say that it was great, never better. In June, the number of new jobs dropped to 112,000, way below what anyone would consider "strong," and in fact, was below the 150,000 new jobs required simply to keep up with population growth. Republicans countered that this was only a blip, that June was artificially low, and that July numbers would prove the recovery was truly back. Nevertheless, they only projected 220,000 jobs for July, as high as possible to make things seem rosy, as few as possible so as not to look bad if numbers were not really too high. But some hopeful estimates were for as many as 300,000 new jobs.

Well, the July numbers are now out. How many new jobs?

32,000.

Not only that, but revised estimates for May and June revealed that those months actually added 61,000 fewer jobs than was previously estimated. Therefore, relative to job numbers assumed true last month, there was negative job growth of 29,000. It turns out that May increased by 208,000 jobs (as opposed to 242,000), and June by only 78,000 (as opposed to 112,000).

This means that total job growth over the past three months has been, on average, only 106,000 per month, a great deal lower than what is necessary to cancel out population growth--and it is most definitely on a downward trend.

It will be extraordinarily hard to support any statement that claims we are in a "recovery."

This is what the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy has wrought. And please don't try to tell me about any tax cuts for the middle class, there haven't been any; after skyrocketing fuel costs, lower and lower wages and salaries, rising local taxes and the cutting of services, in addition to all the other costs due to Bush policies, whatever money you got back from the government has long since been sucked right back out of your pocket--and as a result, the economy remains stagnant. This is not the way to go.

What we need is to have a president who will not throw hundreds of billions of dollars (as well as a thousand soldier's lives) into an unnecessary war, who will allow corporate greed and job exportation to go unchecked, who will continue to take money from the poor and funnel it to the rich. We need someone who will provide for good health care instead of sacrificing it so that drug companies can make even more obscene profits. We need someone who will not throw boatloads of cash at energy companies who are already flush at the expense paid by the average Joe, but instead have energy policy written for the people, not the energy corps. We need a president who will give tax breaks to people who need them, and who will roll back welfare-for-the-wealthy and use those billions and trillions to pay for good education (the best-payment investment for the future!) and good health care. We need a president who will give companies tax breaks for keeping good jobs here, instead of giving tax breaks to corporations that send them overseas. And we need a president who does not encourage or even allow corporations to make a huge profit and then pay no taxes by having a P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands.

Four more years of Bush will not only prolong this recession, it will also depress whatever natural recovery comes along, a recovery that even just without any action would have been here in truth already.

The only way to really recover is to get Kerry into office, evident not only by his clear-cut and rational plans (or download their book, "Our Plan for America," a 1.36 MB PDF file), but also by the historical fact that Democratic presidents always deliver the jobs.

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Quick Update: Hugh over at DAJ commented that if you want a new job nowadays, try out for prison guard: 2 million Americans are now in jail, and despite losing so many manufacturing jobs, Bush created at least 206,000 new prison guard positions--probably more, since that last number was a 2002 stat.

Using Fear as a Political Tool

A few days ago, as you are almost certainly aware, the terror alert was raised to "orange" the the D.C. and NYC areas because the Bush Administration told the public that from a raid in Pakistan it had just uncovered a plot to attack the stock exchange and The Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington and Prudential Financial Inc.'s headquarters in Newark, N.J. Police shut down streets, banned trucks from driving anywhere near those buildings, started searching vehicles and asking people for documentation. A police presence can strongly be felt around these areas, and it is clear that very large amounts of money and other resources are being spent on this alert. Bush told the country that "What we're talking about here is a very serious matter based on solid intelligence."

Well, now it turns out that although the information was just uncovered this week in Pakistan, the information itself was three to four years old--pre-9/11.

So why did we immediately jump to high alert and put massive resources into protecting these buildings as if the attack were coming tomorrow? There's no good reason. You act suddenly if you find information that is current--but not just because you currently found information which is old. The dated evidence would indeed explain why the Bush people said that they knew "where" the attacks would be, but "not when." And Bush & Co. claim that their sudden panic response is justified because they are hearing chatter that an attack will take place sometime before the election--despite the fact that there is absolutely no connection between the aged Pakistan data and the current chatter data.

It's like you find an old newspaper from a few years ago that carried a warning that a tornado could strike somewhere in the U.S.--and so you panic and immediately hide in the southwest corner of your basement. Everyone else would think you to be a fool, and after a few hours, even you begin to wonder exactly how long you should stay down there. The Bush reaction to this data is similar: the information is years out of date, and in that time any number of factors could have changed. There's no reason to believe that these plans are the current ones by al Qaeda, or anywhere close to being the only plans--there could be far more targets easily switched to, or any number of other terrorist plans that we know nothing about. And how long will millions of dollars and countless man-hours of resources be spent? After three weeks and no action, will we still but shutting down the traffic around our financial centers and stopping everyone who goes there? And even assuming that the terrorists were, after 3 or 4 years, just now on the verge of carrying out such an attack, what would keep them from simply changing their target?

It comes as no surprise to me that CNN is downplaying this point to the extreme. Watching their coverage, they only obliquely refer to the aged data, and otherwise paint this as a strong, smart and effective response to critical data. This is simply one more reason why I am, in disgust, abandoning CNN as much as I can--even to the point of trying to get satellite TV instead of cable, since on my current cable plan CNN is all there is for news.

Many sectors of the media, especially television, are turning sharply against Kerry now, portraying him in a "losing" light, while showing Bush in a "strong president" light. The news agencies are covering Kerry only in the context of "where's the bounce?" even as they carry, in the immediate wake of the Democratic convention, nothing but stories on the hyped-up terror threat and how Bush is reacting to it, cheerleading the president all the way.

The fundamental point I'm leading up to on these events is the fact that the Bush administration is rather blatantly using fear as a political weapon, and the media is lapping it up. But how can the administration so easily wag the dog, so flagrantly play on people's fears, and not have people recognize it?

A lot of it has to do with the fact that people do not want to admit that they are afraid, and even more, do not want to admit that they allow their fears to dictate their actions. I suggested as much to one person I was debating with on the Internet, suggesting that fear was being used as a tool--and that person completely rejected the possibility, as if it were ludicrous to even suggest that it could be done.

But it is a classic political weapon, used down the ages. Make the people afraid, and then tell them you are the one who can save them.

Think about how it has affected you. I mean, really, seriously consider it. If you are on an airplane and you see a group of Arab-looking men, would you be at least nervous? After getting off the plane hours later, would you not be even a little more willing to support racial profiling in screening passengers for security threats? What if you worked at one of the buildings being watched in the current alert? Wouldn't this whole scare make you think twice about going to work, and would it not make you more eager to support actions to thwart the terrorists? If the answer to those questions, and others like them, is "yes," then congratulations: you have just had your political views adjusted by fear.

Fear is not only a weapon, it is perhaps the most powerful weapon that can be used in politics. And Bush is brandishing this weapon like no other, using it without concern of the consequences. He knows that people will respond to it; every terror alert he issues, no matter how flagrantly false, buys him votes. It's a win-win strategy: if there is an attack, he looks justified in warning us, no matter how misdirected that warning would be; if there is no attack, it looks like he prevented it. And as few who are fooled want to think they've been fooled, he can herd great portions of the public in his direction in the knowledge they will continue to flock toward the voting block.

Don't allow fear to influence your political decisions. Don't accept simply what you see and hear from the television media--the print and web media tends to have more information, better grounded--use Google News to help find your sources, not Fox or their wannabe-twin CNN. And vote based on the facts, not the hype.

I myself have a fear: that Bush and the GOP are just too damned good at lying, cheating, and stealing elections. But that's not what is driving my vote. It is, however, driving my determination to stop what I regard as the greatest threat to America since Joe McCarthy: Bush and Cheney.

The Great Divider

George W. Bush has claimed to be a uniter, not a divider, trying to follow the "big tent" concept that the Republican party has tried to engender for so long. Inclusiveness, bipartisanship, and unity. The problem is, as with so much that Bush has promised, he says one thing but does another.

But Bush has managed to split the nation more deeply than before. He made withering claims of bipartisanship, but soon after taking office with control of both houses of Congress, he dismissed not only the Democrats, but even the moderate wing of his own party. His policies and practices were so divisive that he even repelled one of his own Senators, Jim Jeffords, into leaving the party and temporarily placing the Democrats in control. After the contested 2000 election, the Democrats called for, and practiced, bipartisan unity; after 9/11, the Democrats again called for, and again practiced bipartisan unity. And both times Bush took advantage of that Democratic spirit of unity, ramrodded his highly partisan and often extreme agenda through Congress, and just as he squandered the sympathy and unity of the world, he drove most of half the nation far against him in anger and disgust.

Bush claimed that the Democrats have practiced "class warfare," but under Democrats everyone prospered--the rich got richer, and so did the poor. All boats rose with the Democratic tide. But under Bush and the Republicans, the rich are given the deepest tax cuts while the middle class has their modest cut negated by poorer wages, higher fuel costs, slashed services and benefits, higher local taxes, and a plethora of other hidden costs that cost them more than Bush bribed them with. Bush has been against a decent minimum wage and social welfare, yet for corporate welfare and letting the wealthy avoid paying their fair share. And to counter the outrage, he accuses anyone who points these truths out to be waging "class warfare."

Bush and the GOP have been trying to appeal to minorities to vote for their party, and put on a good show at their convention--but when you look carefully, you'll see the color on the stage, but almost no color at all in the audience. Bush went before the National Urban League (after shunning the NAACP), and lectured, "I know plenty of politicians assume they have your vote. But did they earn it, and, do they deserve it? ... Have the traditional solutions of the Democratic Party truly served the African-American people?" As if he has done anything for African Americans, as if he has even come close to earning their vote. The fact is, under Clinton, minorities did far better, with rising pay, falling crime, and better opportunities, while under Bush, the exact reverse has been true.

Even under Clinton, when the country divided, it was not because Clinton drove them there but because the Republicans knew they could gain power through divisiveness and so sought to turn as many in the nation against him. And even then, Clinton remained more popular than even Reagan had been, gaining more bipartisan support from the people, if not the Republican core.

We need to bring the country back together, and it has been made incredibly clear over the past four and twelve years that the GOP is not interested, whatever their claim might be. There is still the peril that, if John Kerry wins, even if the Democrats gain control of one or both houses in Congress, even with no more independent prosecutor law, the Republicans will fall back on their most effective way to gain power: to do everything within their abilities to divide, falsely accuse, and smear.

The Democrats gave Bush not one, but two major chances to embrace bipartisanship, offering cooperation and unity to the point where they angered their base, and remained cooperative until Bush threw it back in their face and abused their trust, later even using it as a weapon against them. When Kerry takes office, let's see if the Republicans can offer true bipartisanship and unity, even once, even for a small while. I doubt that will happen to the point of utter disbelief, but I can only hope it will happen nevertheless.

Why Do They Hate Us?

“Young male prisoners were filmed being sodomised by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to the journalist who first revealed the abuses there. ... [Journalist Seymour Hersh] said: ‘The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking.’”

--The Independent, July 16, 2004

“I found a moment without meetings and sat at my computer and began: ‘Who did this? Why do they hate us? How will we respond?’”

--George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

Democrats: The Party of Responsible Economics

The GOP has long held that it is the party that best handles the economy, and many American still believe that. It is, of course, completely false. The fact is, Democrats have a far better record.

The Clinton boom was longer and more prosperous than the Reagan boom, but try getting a Republican to admit that. And Clinton erased the deficit during his boom, while Reagan outrageously inflated the deficit during his--but again, don't try to convince a Republican. A Republican will tell you that the Reagan deficit was the fault of Democrats in Congress, no matter how much you try to point out that 7 of Reagan's 8 budgets asked for more money than the Democratic Congress finally voted into effect. A Republican will tell you that the elimination of the deficit under Clinton was really the work of the Republican Congress, despite the fact that the budget bill that got the deficit work done was passed without a single Republican vote.

Never mind that the GOP is wrong on all kinds of reasonable progressive issues, like minimum wage; every time the Democrats try to raise that rate to anywhere near a reasonable level, Republicans wail about how it will put small businesses out of business--and it never does. Minimum wage hikes are followed by a good economy as often as they are by a bad one, and usually are followed by a net increase in jobs.

Democrats believe in the same brand of economics that Henry Ford did when he decided to pay his workers well enough so that they could afford to buy his cars. Pay the people good, decent wages and they'll buy things, thus generating a good economy. Republicans believe in the elitist trickle-down theory, which essentially says that if you give enough money to people who are already rich, enough is bound to trickle down to poor people, like scraps falling from an overloaded table, who will then use those scraps to buy more goods. Republicans see investments by wealthy people as strong for our economy, despite the fact that these wealthy people see more profit in investing that money overseas, paying people there a fraction of what Americans need to get by. It may be good for businesses, but that brand of business is bad for Americans.

And Democrats are good for jobs, too. Just refer to the chart at right (from American Assembler) which shows the net job increases of all presidents for the past 80 years, since Coolidge. What a surprise that job increases have always been better under Democrats and worse under Republicans--that the worst performance by a Democrat is better than the best performance by a Republican.

You want a better job, better pay, better benefits and a sound economy overall?

Vote Democrat.

Criticize Bush, Go to Jail: The Obscenity of "Free Speech Zones"

Nicole Rank, a worker for FEMA, and her husband Jeff, attended a "presidential appearance" at the West Virginia capitol building. The appearance by Bush--not billed as a campaign rally--was on public property and was paid for using public funds--not paid for by the Bush campaign, but by the citizens of the state and the country.

The pair were wearing jackets when they entered, and during the rally took off the jackets to reveal T-shirts that had the name "BUSH" with a red line crossed through it on the front, and on the back, the words "Love America, Hate Bush" written on them.

According to the two page document given to attendees, T-shirts with messages were not prohibited. Many others at the rally had pro-Bush T-shirts, as well as buttons, pins, and signs.

But the Ranks were immediately told to remove themselves from the public event, and instructed to move to a "designated protest area," which was likely well-removed from the area (but not specified in any article I found).

When the couple refused, quite rightly and legally asserting their freedom of expression, they were promptly handcuffed and arrested for trespassing. On public property. During a public event, paid for with taxpayer dollars. Simply for wearing T-shirts critical of the president.

This is not the first time this has happened, stories like this are appearing everywhere you look. Frank Van Den Bosch was arrested for holding up an "FUGW" sign as the Bush motorcade passed by (by that time, he had reworded the sign to read "Free Us, GW"). Bill Neel was arrested for showing Bush a sign saying, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us." Three demonstrators, two of them grandmothers, were arrested in St. Petersburg, Florida, for holding up handwritten signs critical of the president during a public rally. The third protester, a 62-year old man, held a sign saying, "War is good business; Invest your sons." Brett Bursey of South Carolina was arrested for holding up a sign reading "No War for Oil." And the list goes on and on.

Bizarre excuses are given for the arrests. One secret service agent said on a radio show that "These individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or nonsupport that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route and be injured." The only other possible reason for the Secret Service to be engaged in this is for security reasons, preventing assassinations--but that would also be ludicrous, as the last thing a potential assassin would carry would be a protest sign.

Most of these people are told that they must take their contrarian views to designated "free speech zones." I first heard of "free speech zones" on college campuses, used as a way to remove protesters from in front of the student union building, and restrict them to out-of-the-way locations on campus where they would not be heard by anyone. But now, it seems, they are designated at every single event the president attends and every public route he travels. And such zones are enforced just under Bush, by the way--Clinton was never "protected" in this way (although prior Republican presidents have also been known to arrest protesters on various grounds).

"Free Speech Zones" are both an oxymoron and an obscenity. The zones are an oxymoron because free speech is, by definition, universal, so it cannot be restricted to a specified area. If speech is allowed only in restricted areas, then it is not free. Just a few moments of consideration will reveal to any honest thinker that if there is a free speech zone, then by definition, there is no free speech outside of that zone. In theory, according to the constitution, the entire country is supposed to be a "free speech zone."

These zones are an obscenity because they violate the ideals of freedom and equality that are central to the very concept of America, and make a cruel joke of the "freedom" that Bush himself so vehemently contends that he protects. So far as I know, this matter has not made its way to the Supreme Court, and one can only imagine that when it does, the "free speech zone" will be obliterated--unless Bush is elected in 2004 and gets to stack the court with 2 or 3 justices to finish the job that his father started.

Reporting from a free speech zone outside the United States... good morning.

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Update: The charges against the couple have been dismissed, as these kinds of charges often are. But the fact is that the couple were removed from the event, accomplishing the task of quashing their expression at the time. And if the same couple ever do the same thing at another Bush appearance, they would simply be removed again on the same charges, which again would be dismissed, but not after again quashing their free speech--with no penalty to those who abuse their authority to arrest people.

Additionally, Nicole Rank has been dismissed from her government job at FEMA because of the arrest. So, again, "Mission Accomplished" for the Bush administration. Criticize Bush, get falsely arrested, pay a lot of legal fees, and lose your job.

Another Bush Lie: Everyone Thought Iraq Had WMD

We have heard it many times from Bush and his people. I have heard it echoed by conservatives posting to this site and others.

Bush, Cheney and their administration said that Iraq had WMD. That's been proven false, so they have to defend their saying it. Their defense is yet another lie, a lie by insinuation: that Bush was not out of line about his Iraqi WMD claims because everyone, including Clinton and the U.N., also believed that Iraq had WMD.

That claim is a lie because it attempts to make equal Bush and Clinton and the U.N., when in fact they were as different as night and day.

Yes, Clinton and the U.N. believed that Iraq had WMD. The difference, however, is in degree.

Clinton and the U.N. believed that Hussein had some weapons of mass destruction, in the form of limited stockpiles of chemical and perhaps some biological weapons. But they did not believe them to be an immediate threat, and did not believe they would leave the country; they believed, in short, that Hussein was contained and could continue to be contained.

That is light-years away from what Bush was pushing:

1. Bush and his people claimed that Hussein had massive stockpiles of WMD (Bush: "This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions." Rumsfeld: "He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons"), far more than Clinton or the U.N. ever believed.

2. Furthermore, Bush and Cheney strenuously asserted that Hussein was six months away from completing a nuclear weapon, or possibly had developed one already. (Bush on a fictional 1998 IAEA report: "...a report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they [Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need." Cheney: "On the nuclear question, many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire such weapons fairly soon.") The fact is, neither Clinton nor the U.N. believed that Hussein had a nuclear program that was anywhere close to developing nukes, nor did they ever claim that Hussein was buying uranium or using aluminum tubes for his nuclear program.

3. Bush also claimed that Hussein had ties with al Qaeda (Cheney continues with that claim to this day), and that Hussein, who jealously guarded his resources and did not share with anyone, would readily hand over nukes to al Qaeda. (Bush: "Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," "Saddam Hussein . . . is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon," and "The regime . . . has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.") Neither Clinton nor the U.N. believed that Hussein was in league with al Qaeda, or that Hussein would share any of his weapons with them. They were aware that Hussein and al Qaeda were religiously and ideologically at odds, that they hated each other, and were not in alliance.

So, to say that Bush was not out of line to make his claims because Clinton and the U.N. believed the same is outrageous, a deliberate attempt to mislead. Don't believe a word.

(All non-attributed quotes were provided by Iraq on the Record.)

Playing Politics with Terror

This is reprehensible.

The Bush administration sees Kerry get a bounce from his announcement of Edwards and his newfound equal footing in the media, so what does he do? He fucks with our national security so that he can steal the news cycle away. I am listening to Tom Ridge, after repeating the old news that al Qaeda is up to something but we have no information--exactly the same as he and Ashcroft announced before--and now he's droning on about how cool their new communications equipment is. There is nothing new, no new data, and absolutely no reason for the announcement except as a political dirty trick.

The announcement was even scheduled to take place exactly as Kerry and Edwards appeared at a rally in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where the networks and news shows would have covered them; additionally, the conference was made early in the day, the better to control the news cycle.

This is blatantly political, there is no getting around that. He even began the broadcast with a rehash of the right-wing fiction that Spain's election was turned by the al Qaeda attack. That, however, is bullshit, had Aznar's government handled the investigation competently then he probably would have won the election--it was his skewing the reports of the investigation to his political advantage that angered the Spanish people and tipped the scales to lose him the election.

But Ridge, like so many other right-wingers, are deliberately skewing that fact for the dual purpose of attacking their political enemies overseas (i.e., the Spanish opposition which pulled their troops from Iraq), and of laying down the foundation of the belief that if al Qaeda attacks, it will be to throw the election to Kerry--which again, is complete bullshit, as an al Qaeda attack, most analysts believe, would rally support for Bush and cinch the election to him.

This is politics, and not just your standard vindictive, nasty, underhanded spit-in-your-eye dirty-tricks politics--this is far worse. This is the Bush administration taking advantage of our security apparatus to frighten the American people and derail a political opponent. National security is a sacred cow, you don't fuck with it--but to them, it's just another tool for party hacks.

Sorry for all the language, but I am seriously pissed off right now.

Update: the White House is reporting that they have no choice about this, that they are "damned if they do, damned if they don't" make these announcements--which is more bullshit. That's a classic either-or fallacy: they have other choices, like reporting this at the end of the week rather than the middle, or making the announcements only when there is new information, not just when they feel like it.

Don't believe a word. At best, this is cover-your-ass, making the announcement so they can say "we warned you" later on, but I would put every cent I have on the take that this is just as I have outlined before. Bush may have misstepped, as the news services are highlighting the political aspect of the story, but that notwithstanding, they are still talking 90% about terror now, and will be all day, instead of reporting on Kerry and Edwards--so that's a big "Mission Accomplished" for Bush and Cheney today.

July Surprise

New reports are suggesting that Bush administration officials are pressuring Pakistan to make significant al Qaeda captures or killings before the election this year, and to announce these "high value target" deliveries on the first three days of the Democratic convention at the end of July. According to The New Republic:

This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said.

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. "Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn't change because of an election," says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections." (These sources insisted on remaining anonymous. Under Pakistan's Official Secrets Act, an official leaking information to the press can be imprisoned for up to ten years.)

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

This is rather scandalous, even though completely expected. There was a great deal of suspicion and some circumstantial evidence that in 1980, Reagan's people visited Iran made deals that the hostages would not be released until Reagan took office, and lo, the hostages were released practically the very moment Reagan took the oath; a release before the election might have won the election for Carter, and a release before Reagan took office would have robbed him of a glowing start to his tenure. That Reagan was found to have been involved over many years in shady dealings with Iran was also supportive of this idea.

And now we see Bush doing something very similar: making deals with shady governments in the region to sway the election at home. While Bush says that he is promoting democracy in the region, it cannot be ignored that his biggest new ally, Pakistan, is a military dictatorship that gained power in a coup d'état over a democratically elected government, was developing weapons of mass destruction, and had practically invented the Taliban. That they agreed to help us in Afghanistan is less a measure of their friendship to us and more a sign that they saw an unstoppable military force coming their way and wisely decided not to get in its way; their alliance with us is questionable in light of massive internal support for al Qaeda and their reluctance to truly go after him, and Bush's weakness in dealing with them is apparent in how his administration did nothing whatsoever when they found Pakistan was giving nuclear secrets to other countries in the region--they allowed Pakistan to blame the whole operation on one man, who was then pardoned. (“It’s a quid pro quo: we’re going to get our troops inside Pakistan in return for not forcing Musharraf to deal with Khan.”)

Let us not forget that Reagan oversaw Saddam's rise and gave him massive support as a perceived necessity in dealing with Iran. Bush has not learned the lesson of history, and now cuddles up with Musharraf, letting him spread nuclear technology (while claiming to invade Iraq because it had nukes, when it did not) and give safe harbor to al Qaeda (while claiming to be going after that organization full boar).

But now Bush, after years of letting Pakistan host the al Qaeda "high-value targets," is getting "tough" with Pakistan: fork over some al Qaeda VIPs as sacrificial lambs during the Democratic convention, or the election might be lost--and then Kerry might not let you sell nukes to Iran and others, and might actually demand you fight al Qaeda for real.

Who'd like to place a bet that in 10-15 years Pakistan won't be the new Iraq, and that a Republican president won't be trying to scare us over the madman of Karachi?

Robot Bartender Joke

Here's a good Robot Bartender joke as told by Lauren Shannon on the DAJ mailing list:

A popular bar had a new robotic bartender installed. A fellow came in for a drink and the robot asked him, 'What's your IQ?'

The man replied, '150.'

So the robot proceeded to make conversation about Quantum physics, string
theory, atomic chemistry, and so on. The man listened intently and thought, 'This is really cool.'

The man decided to test the robot. He walked out the bar, turned around, and
came back in for another drink. Again, the robot asked him, 'What's your
IQ?'

The man responded, '100.' So the robot started talking about football,
baseball, and so on. The man thought to himself, 'Wow, this is amazing.'

The man went out and came back in a third time. As before, the robot asked
him, 'What's your IQ?' The man replied, '50.'

The robot then said, 'So, you gonna vote for Bush again?"

Kerry: Light-Years Ahead on Education

A lot of people are talking about Bush now and virtually ignoring Kerry, and I must say to my regret that I have been one of them. Kerry himself has not been rushing into the limelight, perhaps because Bush is doing such a great job of making himself appear to be the hopeless idiot he is. But Kerry needs to do more, and so do we. So here is the first of a series that will specifically focus on what Kerry plans to do as president, with Bush’s ineptitude serving only as background dressing. First up: Education—I am an educator myself, after all.

Kerry’s education plans are light-years ahead of Bush’s, more so because Bush doesn’t even follow up on his plans, leaving them unfunded and rife with corruption. Kerry understands the realities of education far better, and it shows.

Kerry has all the right priorities for education. First, he is serious about funding it. Second, he knows something Bush doesn't: that standardized tests are far from a magic wand, they are a disaster, and pledges focus on standards, not mere testing. And third, he wants to pay teachers what they’re worth, part of the worth of his higher standards idea.

The GOP has always whined that “you can't fix education by throwing money at it,” though they apparently believe that you can “fix” the economy by throwing billions at the super-wealthy, and throw money at corporations, military contractors and inane social engineering like $1.5 billion for encouraging marriage. But education, no, we shouldn’t throw money at that. And God forbid The GOP get anywhere close to a national voucher program—it would absolutely destroy education in this country were it widely applied—but I could go on for pages about that, so let’s return to our subject.

Kerry understands that you get what you pay for, and by just spending a small amount of the money given to the richest 1% in tax cuts, we could bring true improvement to the school system.

Kerry’s idea to fund schools is via a mandatory “National Education Trust Fund” which would make it illegal for the federal government to underfund educational mandates. He would also make sure that the “No Child Left Behind” program, which like Bush's AIDS assistance program in Africa has not seen the money it was promised, will get its full funding, $11.2 billion more than today, and fully fund special education as well.

Another legacy of Bush is that, like in the 80’s, attempts to cut federal spending starts by cutting support to the states. Kerry would spend $25 billion for state education aid to help keep them from gutting public education due to Bush’s shortchanging.

I can personally attest to the danger of overdependence on test scores. Here in Japan, test scores have traditionally been held as the way to gauge success. And so this is a nation full of people who received at least six years—often much more—of English language studies, but still cannot speak very well at all. Even where the education specializes—in grammar—performance is still very weak on average. But they’re great at passing tests given at their schools. That’s what they’ve learned—how to take tests. Not how to speak, comprehend, read or write.

Bush believes in tests scores. He pushed them in Texas, and when high scores were reported (jumping from 58% to 80%), he gloated before the nation in the 2000 election as to how great a job he did by making testing the new educational deity, calling himself the “Education President.” Of course, we all now know what a fraud that was. Special education test scores were exempted, artificially boosting score averages. More children with low scores were then shoved into this category so as to further inflate the grades, and then even more kids were held back a grade so that they didn’t take the test at all. In addition, teachers would drill incessantly on the tests to the detriment of process and skills, and on test days, students expected to not score well would be encouraged to stay home. As a result, the fraudulent schools got the better funding, while competent, dedicated and honest school administrators and teachers got short-changed.

Kerry, on the other hand, understands the danger of such half-baked feel-good schemes, especially those that directly tie funding to test scores. He will institute a more holistic measurement process to assess real progress and ensure that good teaching is rewarded, not numbers games or “teaching to the test.”

He also wants to make teachers the well-paid, professional educators they should be. As Bill Maher sloganed, “we call them heroes, but we pay them like chumps.” Kerry’s plan “will provide higher pay for teachers in exchange for implementing higher standards. In order to qualify for funding, school districts will have to submit a plan that includes strong professional development plan for the district’s teachers; an aggressive plan to ensure that every teacher is qualified in his/her subject area; and a plan for increasing the number of master teachers and teacher mentors in schools.” Kerry also plans to recruit competent school leaders to match better faculties.

Finally, Kerry wants to spend real money where it counts: making sure that kids are not being taught in virtual cesspools. He wants to spend $24.8 billion on school modernization and repair, fixing polluted drinking water and bad ventilation, renovating decrepit buildings, and providing badly needed new facilities for a growing educational population.

In short, Kerry wants to spend money badly needed to give our kids a chance, not just mouth platitudes and then be a deadbeat president when it comes to funding. And money should be spent, even more than Kerry is suggesting; education is perhaps the greatest investment we can make—but because no big corporations get handouts and the payoff doesn’t come for 16 years or so, the GOP blind to its benefits. Kerry is not.

And I haven't even started on his plans for improving colleges...

Kenny Boy

Well it's about freakin' time.

A Good Question

Rob, an apparent Bushie commenting on a Michael Moore post on this blog, gave me a nice, big easy one right over the plate, and I wanted to share it at more than just the deep-comment level.

His question was, "WHO WOULD A TERRORIST VOTE FOR, BUSH OR KERRY?" The all-caps thing is his, by the way. And he obviously expected me to meekly admit that yes sirree George Bush has them terrorists on the run and they just tremble in their sandals when they hear his name, and would love nothing better than for Kerry to get elected, what was I thinking?

Yeah. Right.

Here's my reply:

---

Boy, are you a Kerry supporter or something? Because that question so obviously works against Bush, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Let's see....

Given that Bush's actions have sent a tidal wave of eager applicants to the doors of al Qaeda (whose ranks swelled to 18,000), that Bush has overseen a dramatic record-breaking surge in terrorist acts around the world, has opened up an entire country for terrorists to swarm to and kill Americans (837 and counting) without having to go far from home, and has gotten terrorists incredibly effective media coverage all over the world...

And on the American front, they get a president who has horribly underfunded local and state efforts to prevent and fight terrorism domestically so that it has become a macabre, ugly joke; who has a history of dropping the ball and ignoring his top intelligence and counter-terrorism officials when they warn of terrorists planning to attack--and they get a president who kindly obliges their wishes to frighten the American people and deprive them of their liberties, whilst making America a pariah around the world, after the entire world had boundless sympathy and friendship for the U.S. after 9/11. A president who takes the greatest advantage of the terrorist attack and pisses it away to the outrage of the world and plays right into the terrorists' hands.

Not to mention a president who approved of a policy of torture and humiliation which sent millions of Arabs ballistic, unspeakably furious that such a thing could happen even if the president had not known of it directly (as it now seems certain he did). Not to mention a president who is best buds with Saudi Arabia and is willing to cover for them while they remain one of the world's leading supporters of terrorism--and has abjectly failed to catch the one man held most responsible for 9/11, Osama bin Forgotten-by-Bush.

Al Qaeda is far better off now than it was the day after 9/11. There is no question whatsoever that these guys are hoping, fervently praying with every fiber of their being that Bush gets re-elected. That would be their greatest victory.

And Bush is probably hoping that Osama helps him out by pulling off a terror attack on U.S. soil within a month of the election--that way he could stoke up the people's fears even more, scare them into voting for him, but best of all for Bush, he could simply ignore Kerry and claim that it was an election between himself and al Qaeda--yes, if al Qaeda attacks, Bush will feel like giving Osama a big wet one right on the lips.

So, thanks Rob, good question.

Bush Foreign Policy to be Condemned by 26 Respected Former Officials

And mostly not Democrats, either; most were appointed during Republican administrations. They are coming out tomorrow to speak out and make Americans aware that despite the non-stop PR campaign to make Bush sound like a foreign policy genius, he is, in fact, the worst and most dangerous president in terms of foreign policy, perhaps the worst in American history. They will enunciate to the American people, whom they formed careers serving, that Bush's foreign policy has been an abysmal, miserable failure. "What has caused us to speak out in what could be seen as a partisan or political way is simply our deep, deep concern about the future security of the United States," one of the group already announced.

While most are not endorsing Kerry outright, the group, "Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change" are certainly telling people that they should absolutely not vote for someone with a record like Bush's. One member said:

"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. has built up alliances in order to amplify its own power. But now we have alienated many of our closest allies, we have alienated their populations. We've all been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered by the current administration in the method it has gone about things."

And this is coming from Reagan's appointee to the ambassadorship to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock, Jr. Finally, hopefully, there will be serious recognition of the massive blunders and trashing of foreign policy and America's standing in the world committed by the Bush 43 administration.

This is not the first time for something like this--52 former British diplomats and government officials criticized Blair for supporting Bush, saying his policies in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were "doomed to failure."

The list of American officials making their announcement tomorrow includes former ambassadors to the Soviet Union (two of them, both Reagan's), Israel (again, two), Britain, France, Greece, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Mexico, Nigeria (two), Bangladesh, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Republic of Congo, Czechoslovakia, Burundi, Pakistan, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Nations.

Former political, military or intelligence officials include those holding the rank of: director of the CIA, secretary of state, chairman of the joint chiefs, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, two former assistant secretaries of Defense, and the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee. There are also 5 assistant secretaries of State, 2 deputy assistant secretaries of State, and an undersecretary-general of the United Nations.

Bush's people are apparently waiting to see exactly what they say before the inevitable trashing of these guys, though some Republicans are already trying to dismiss this impressive arsenal of foreign policy expertise as not "sufficiently well-known." Let's see how well that plays.

Here is the list of signatories as provided by the L.A. Times:

Avis T. Bohlen — assistant secretary of State for arms control, 1999-2002; deputy assistant secretary of State for European affairs 1989-1991.

Retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. — chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee, 1993-94; ambassador to Britain, 1993-97; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1985-89.

Jeffrey S. Davidow — ambassador to Mexico, 1998-2002; assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, 1996

William A. DePree — ambassador to Bangladesh, 1987-1990.

Donald B. Easum — ambassador to Nigeria, 1975-79.

Charles W. Freeman Jr. — assistant secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs, 1993-94; ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1989-1992.

William C. Harrop — ambassador to Israel, 1991-93; ambassador to Zaire, 1987-1991.

Arthur A. Hartman — ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1981-87; ambassador to France, 1977-1981.

Retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar — commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, overseeing forces in the Middle East, 1991-94; deputy chief of staff, Marine Corps, 1990-94.

H. Allen Holmes — assistant secretary of Defense for special operations, 1993-99; assistant secretary of State for politico-military affairs, 1986-89.

Robert V. Keeley — ambassador to Greece, 1985-89; ambassador to Zimbabwe, 1980-84.

Samuel W. Lewis — director of State Department policy and planning, 1993-94; ambassador to Israel, 1977-1985.

Princeton N. Lyman — assistant secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, 1995-98; ambassador to South Africa, 1992-95.

Jack F. Matlock Jr. — ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987-1991; director for European and Soviet Affairs, National Security Council, 1983-86; ambassador to Czechoslovakia, 1981-83.

Donald F. McHenry — ambassador to the United Nations, 1979-1981.

Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill A. McPeak — chief of staff, U.S. Air Force, 1990-94.

George E. Moose — assistant secretary of State for African affairs, 1993-97; ambassador to Senegal, 1988-91.

David D. Newsom — acting secretary of State, 1980; undersecretary of State for political affairs, 1978-1981; ambassador to Indonesia, 1973-77

Phyllis E. Oakley — assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, 1997-99.

James Daniel Phillips — ambassador to the Republic of Congo, 1990-93; ambassador to Burundi, 1986-1990.

John E. Reinhardt — professor of political science, University of Vermont, 1987-91; ambassador to Nigeria, 1971-75.

Retired Air Force Gen. William Y. Smith — deputy commander in chief, U.S. European Command, 1981-83.

Ronald I. Spiers — undersecretary-general of the United Nations for Political Affairs, 1989-1992; ambassador to Pakistan, 1981-83.

Michael Sterner — deputy assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs, 1977-1981; ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, 1974-76.

Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner — director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1977-1981.

Alexander F. Watson — assistant secretary of State for Inter-American affairs, 1993-96; deputy permanent representative to the U.N., 1989-1993.

Reagan Jr.: Bush "Just Plain Corrupt"

There's an article you really should read, one printed in Salon about a year ago, in which Ron Reagan, Jr. absolutely tore into George Bush, Jr. A must-read for anyone who bought even a little into the fiction Bush and his people have been spinning about Bush Jr. carrying on Reagan's legacy. Some excerpts:

"The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he's in now," he said during a recent interview with Salon. "Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the '80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's -- these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people." ...

Reagan took a swipe at Bush during the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, which featured a tribute to his father, telling the Washington Post's Lloyd Grove, "The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is simply unqualified for the job... What's his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" Since then he's been quiet about the current occupant of the White House -- until now. ...

"Sure, he wasn't a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that's the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."

Ouch.

Playing Politics with Terror, Again

In April, the Bush administration reported good news: terrorist attacks around the globe were at their lowest in 34 years, and gave itself an "A" grade, attributing this to "unprecedented U.S. collaboration with foreign partners."

Great news! We're winning the War on Terror™!

Except for the fact that it's a lie!

Actually, they omitted a great deal of data that was pretty glaring--like all terrorist attacks in the last 50 days of the year (leaving out a major attack in Turkey and bombings at a bank and two synagogues), and all terrorist attacks in Russia carried out by the Chechens (13 attacks killing 244 people).

When asked why they failed to include any data after November 11, 2003 in the report--which was labeled as for the whole year of 2003--they claimed there was no time, as they had to submit the report by April 29, 2004. Essentially, that means that it takes them 170 days to get around to reading the damned newspaper.

The fact of the matter is, instead of terrorism falling to record lows, terrorism instead had risen more than 35% in the highest levels of terror activity in 20 years.

This is not just a "clerical error," as the administration is so laughably trying to sell to the public, but an outright, deliberate lie to avoid admitting abject failure during an election year. Bush is not winning the War on Terror™, he is losing it badly. He ignited terrorist activity in the Middle East with his Iraq invasion and sent floods of eager volunteers to the doors of al Qaeda, while at home he devastated our freedoms while at the same time underfunded local security, improving not at all our ability to stop terrorism within our borders.

Aussies to Bush: Butt Out, ya Dag

Just as it was in Spain, the political opposition to PM Howard in Oz wants to bring their nation's troops back by Christmas, and likely will if the can win a majority in the next election. Except this time if the opposition wins, it might not be due to the majority party's scandalous abuse of a terror attack.

Bush might have handed them the win they need.

After meeting with Howard the other day, Bush said, "It would be a disastrous decision for the leader of a great country like Australia to say that 'we're pulling out'. It would embolden the enemy. It would dispirit those who love freedom in Iraq. It would say that the Australian Government doesn't see the hope of a free and democratic society leading to a peaceful world."

That constitutes direct interference with an election in a foreign state. That has always been somewhat of a no-no (think about how the American right wing would react if foreign leaders started endorsing Kerry), particularly unhelpful to Howard since a majority of Australian voters now think it was a mistake to go into Iraq.

It may also be giving vital ammunition to the opposition Labor party, not to mention severely ticking off the Australian Greens and Democrats. "Australia is a sovereign nation, not some second-rate state in Bush's dream of an American empire," said Greens Senator Brown. "[Bush] talks about and freedom and democracy, but he doesn't understand the concept of equality. ... [Howard] should have made it clear that he wouldn't want the president interfering in a domestic political debate in Australia, particularly in the run to an election."

Democrat leader Andrew Bartlet said that the issue "should be something that Australians should sort out for ourselves." The Labor leader declined to comment, but reiterated the party stance of withdrawing troops from Iraq.

At this rate, we'll be lucky if even the Brits stay around. It all brings to mind an old "Get Smart" routine:

Bush: OK, you guys in Iraq, you better give up! Would you believe that this country has been surrounded by 1,400 Spanish troops?

Iraqis: Somehow I don't believe that.

Bush: Um, well, okay, how about if I told you that 850 Australian troops are out there, ready to charge in at a moment's notice?

Iraqis: I don't think I'd buy that, either.

Bush: Would you believe Two German Shepherds and a Polish truck driver?

Plame Flame Rising, Enron Burning

The grand jury investigation into the Valerie Plame affair came into the media spotlight today as we find that Bush is speaking with private counsel about what he should do if they want to 'sit down and talk' with him. This is most interesting in that it means the grand jury might be focusing on more than just Cheney's chief of staff, if only as far as looking into what the president knew and when did he know it.

Meanwhile, another Bush-related scandal has also shifted back into view: Enron, Bush's biggest Texas backers. We are now getting an earful of the traders cheerfully gabbing about screwing California over:

---

"He just f---s California. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million."

---

Shutting down power plants to drive up prices:

"If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?"

"Oh, it's not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let's put it that way,"

"Well, why don't you just go ahead and shut her down."

---

"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"

"Yeah, now she wants her f-----g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."

---

Enron traders hoping for Bush to win in 2000:

"It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy."

"When this election comes Bush will f------g whack this s--t, man. He won't play this price-cap b------t."

Which is exactly what Bush did. "We will not take any action that makes California's problems worse and that's why I oppose price caps," Bush said during the election. It is commonly believed that Bush fully supported not only Enron and its shady business practices, but also the rifling of California through usurious energy rates, so that Democrats in that particular Blue State would become unpopular, so that Republicans could take over. And guess what happened?

And as a massive fire scorched California, one trader made the quintessential Enron comment about California: "Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing."

Email Reveals Cheney Arranged Halliburton Contract

TIME Magazine will soon be reporting the existence of an email which incriminates Dick Cheney of being involved in the arrangement of Halliburton's billion-dollar no-bid contract for work in Iraq. If this is or can lead to a smoking gun, it would have serious ramifications for Cheney and for Bush, as Cheney was the former CEO of the company and still receives payments from the firm. In addition, when the obvious connection between Cheney and Halliburton was pointed out when Halliburton won the no-bid contract, Cheney denied through a spokesman that he was "involved in any way, shape or form in the contracting issue."

However, the March 5, 2003 "internal Pentagon email from an Army Corps of Engineers official to another Pentagon employee" states in part: "[the contract is] contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP's office."

Naturally, Cheney's people tried to weasel out of the mess, though surprisingly did not try to deny the email's veracity; instead, they attempted to spin the meaning of the note, claiming the coordination" mentioned in the email was "that of publicly announcing the contract decision that has already been made." Um, yeah, okay. Sorry, but that constitutes a "way shape or form," even if you believe Cheney's present claim.

The question is, will the media latch on to this one, or just let it wither away like the many other felonies and scandals in the wings?

Polling Trends and Politicizing Terror

After Andrew asked about an updated Bush approval polling chart, I went back to Pollkatz, and sure enough, they have an updated chart available (pictured at right, link here). Looking at this chart answered some concerns that I'd had.

Until just last week, I had been worried by the fact that Bush seemed to be unmovable at around 50%, despite all the crises, not to mention the fact that his numbers have always followed a steady downwards trend. So what was with the long hovering at 50%?

The Pollkatz chart, an amalgam of 14 different polls, shows something that I'd been missing: the telescoping of time, and the disorientation of seeing different polls at unpredictable times. The Pollkatz chart demonstrates that Bush's "hover" was less a hover and more of an early drop and steadiness, and that the three or so months Bush hovered do not really break the trends so clearly demonstrated on the chart. Save a major event between now and November, Bush's trend should take him below 40%--though he might get a fair bump at convention time; question is, how much, and will it do him any good?

The next question is, as Bush and his people are no doubt painfully aware of these numbers and Bush's usual trend, what will they try to do in order to get Bush's numbers up? There are a number of October surprise scenarios, but they seem to be off to an early start with a tried and true strategy: scare the sh*t out of the American people.

Ashcroft--excuse me, "federal officials" have leaked news that al Qaeda is planning some kind of major attack on U.S. soil between now and September. What kind of attack? We don't know, apparently. But there's "chatter" out there again.

Why is this most likely a political move rather than one of national security? First, Ashcroft is not raising the alert level. Why not? This is one of the strongest warnings of terrorist action in the past few years, and we've gone to "Orange" or "Burnt Umber," or whatever it is, over less than this in the past. The lack of alert level change seems to belie the seriousness of the warning.

Second, the time span--between now and the election. Bush's people know full well that Bush's highest numbers are in his dealings with terrorism--though even they are falling. But playing to this strength would be an obvious move for them to make. Which ties into point number three: how they're phrasing this. "They saw that an attack of that nature can have economic and political consequences and have some impact on the electoral process," said a Bush administration official.

The translation: if there is an al Qaeda attack, it is because, like in Spain, they will be trying to make Bush lose. If this impression is successfully implanted into the American psyche, then Bush would automatically benefit from such an attack rather than be blamed for it--after all, if the terrorists are trying to affect the elections to make Bush lose, that would be great publicity for Bush--he could run against al Qaeda rather than John Kerry.

The claim is bogus, of course; if al Qaeda attacks, history seems to show that Bush would be the obvious beneficiary--he has always gotten a boost in popularity in times of crisis (see the above graph for the obvious proof), and the Spain election did not go to the Socialists because the people were shaken by the attack--quite the contrary, they were brought together by it and emboldened--the election was lost by the ruling party because they screwed around with the bombing investigation, lying by saying it was Basque separatists instead of al Qaeda, and they were caught red-handed. They lost the election because the people were ticked off by that improper manipulation of the attack for political purposes.

But by making this terror warning, Bush & Co. are covering their bets: if there is no attack, they benefit by people being afraid and believing that Bush is better at fighting terror; if al Qaeda does strike, then they can say that they tried to warn everyone and did the best they did, and then they can campaign as if the choices are Bush vs. al Qaeda.

Restricted

Doubt the claim that Bush events are carefully screened so that only fervent Bush backers get in, and no one else is allowed to see the president? Check out this article, with a number of eyewitness accounts of organizers tossing out people who want to see the president speak if they even look like they might not support him--even if they have valid tickets to the event.

Do not doubt for a moment why the president is always greeted by cheering, adoring crowds: no one but the most fervent true believers are allowed within miles of the president, even when driving by in a motorcade.

Down and Down He Goes, Where He'll Stop....

Bush is now at a record low of 41%, according to a CBS News poll. This follows a recent trend--other polls put him at 46%, 44%, 46%, 44%, 42%, 42% and 41%, in time order starting from the first week of the month. But two other polls just out (Washington Post/ABC and CNN/Gallup/USA Today) put him at 47%, so it is hard to say.

And so Bush goes on TV tonight to try to sell us on how rosy things are. This is a campaign speech coming up, folks, centering on what will be a key issue in the elections. Watch for Bush to try to make it sound like (a) he's pulling our forces out of Iraq as we hand over power, and (b) U.N. forces will be coming in to share the burden. The irony is that this is Kerry's strategy, and of course Bush will do no such thing. He'll talk about the handover of power (he might even have decided to whom the power will be given) and make it sound like our troops will be leaving, but he's planned for them to stay there for a decade at least, and with things going so badly--and with troops being taken from other posts around the world and sent to Iraq--don't count on July to be a time when we reduce the number of troops by any real number.

And as far as U.N. involvement goes, don't count on that too much, either. Even "coalition" countries are pulling out troops or threatening to do so; and with Bush unwilling to be humble, to allow any substantial foreign influence or command, or to give up any of the control over oil or juicy contracts for rebuilding, don't buy into the fiction that U.N. troops will be pouring in anytime soon.

Expect smoke-and-mirrors, folks. Expect nice-sounding words. But count your change, and believe nothing until it actually materializes. Remember that Africa is still waiting for Bush's AIDS assistance, and your kids are still waiting for funding for the No Child Left Behind scam.

Clueless in Michigan

Campaigning in Michigan, Bush told crowds of carefully filtered and vouched-for Republicans that "Peace and freedom depend upon this election. Prosperity for the people depend (sic) upon this election."

In other words, Bush claimed that if Kerry becomes president, we will go to war, lose our freedoms, and have economic bad times.

Do I really need to spell out the burning irony here?

A Talk with Joseph Wilson

Salon.com has an excellent piece by Joe Conason about former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, entitled "I Accuse," upon the release of Wilson's new book, "The Politics of Truth." The article, as with the book, deals with Wilson's revealing the Bush administration's willful untruthfulness regarding the "16 Words," in effect, Bush's lie to the American people about the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium hoax--and the following smear campaign against Wilson, in which his wife was outed by the Bush administration as a CIA operative. Which, of course, is a federal felony.

Wilson reports on having been provided with a great deal of information by many people close to power, working out a timeline of when the Bush administration planned to attack him. Interestingly, it goes back before he wrote his now famous July 8th New York Times piece which signaled the greater public outrage against Bush. Earlier, on March 8th, he had said on CNN, "I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday." That apparently prompted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, to start investigating Wilson so they could be ready to smear him when the time came:

Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most plausible scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from different sources, has been that there was a meeting in the middle of March 2003, chaired by either Scooter or the vice president -- but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter -- at which a decision was made to get a "work-up" on me. That meant getting as much information about me as they could: about my past, about my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is abominable. Then that information was passed at the appropriate time to the White House Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go ahead and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York Times.

That smear campaign included the more-than-willing cooperation of well-known right-wing pundits and publications, for example Robert Novak and The Washington Times. If you look at the Washington Times article I just linked to, you'll see how many of the smears were aimed at painting Wilson as a rabid left-wing Democrat with a partisan grudge--a common tactic used against most Republicans who formerly worked for Bush but later came out to tell the truth about him. But as with others in that group, such as Richard Clarke, the accusations of liberal affiliations are ludicrous--Wilson was a life-long Republican, from a long line of Republicans; Conason remarks on how Former Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, Wilson's superior in the Reagan administration, was "shocked" that Wilson was being painted as a leftist.

But just as the current Bush administration pushed Jim Jeffords out of the party, it--as well as Congressional Republicans--has made Joe Wilson doubt his party:

If you're fiscally responsible, this is not your party. If you believe in a moderate foreign policy characterized by alliances, free trade and the ability to operate in an international environment, this is not your party. If you believe in limited federal government, this is not your party. If you believe that the government should stay out of your bedroom, this is very definitely not your party. In fact, I would argue that unless you believe in the American imperium, imposed on the world by force, or unless you believe in the literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations, this is not your party.

Even at that, Wilson still does not harbor that great a grudge against Bush himself--rather he faults the people surrounding him. After all, Bush did say during the 2000 election that he would surround himself with people who would tell him what to do; Bush got into office with few if any Americans knowing any of the people who would truly be leading the country. And it has been evident from many sources of information that Bush is commonly led around by the nose by his senior staff, one example being his initial reaction to giving a third major tax giveaway to the wealthy: "Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again."

The only thing I can suggest is that this is a different crowd that surrounds this president. As most people know, the president is a captive of his team. People whom his father didn't employ, or kept far away from the center of power, are now right at the center of power -- including, of course, one of his father's great rivals, Don Rumsfeld.

Another problem, of course, is the lapdog media. What isn't right-wing and eagerly willing to help Bush, is apparently intimidated:

By and large the press, in reporting on this case, felt a genuine fear about this White House.

"Guantánamo" is now a metaphor for being cut off completely from access and sources. I've had any number of reporters who have talked to me about how even the most minor criticism of the administration led to phone calls to their editors from senior officials in the government. I think that's a clear pattern of intimidation.

Overall, a very interesting interview, and a reminder that people very high up in the administration are not much more than immoral felons. The Plame affair may or may not come out before the election--it should, of course, as the administration should be judged by its actions, all of them. But it is also a reminder that Bush is not the only one wielding power in this administration; he is chiefly responsible, of course, but it is the people who surround him--Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice, Card, Rove, and their top staff who would also be "re-elected" in November. You vote for Bush, you vote for them as well.

Kerry Takes the High Road; Bush Weasels

Hardly a surprise, is it? But that's what happened yesterday, according to this article. Kerry spoke at Westminster College, about a week after Dick Cheney appeared; Kerry, as you will remember, was invited to speak after Cheney gave a speech filled with partisan, election year attacks on Kerry despite his promise to give a major foreign policy address.

And Kerry's speech was by far the better, leaving out campaign rhetoric, and instead focusing on the issues--and saying pretty much what I said in my last post, that we have to hand over real control of Iraq to the U.N.:

Mr. Kerry urged the appointment of a United Nations high commissioner to oversee Iraq's reconstruction and political transformation. He said such a high commissioner, modeled on the role of the United Nations representative deployed to Bosnia, would be authorized by the Security Council to organize elections, draft a constitution and work with both Iraq's interim government and the United States ambassador.

Kerry went on to point out that "This may be our last chance to get this right. We need to put pride aside to build a stable Iraq." This could be an unpopular idea with many Americans, but it is the right and necessary tack to take.

My feeling is that he didn't go quite as far as I did, but he is absolutely in the right direction. This is a feeling that many Democrats have in regard to Kerry's public positions--many of us feel he should be taking a much bolder stance--but it also must be understood that this election could stand on the edge of a knife, and as distasteful as it might be sometimes, candidates cannot always go too far out on a limb.

Of course, there is a difference between going out on a limb and being a complete weenie. Which, naturally, Bush was up to today. It was the one-year anniversary of Bush's aircraft carrier PR stunt. They wanted to get him out there in a jet so he could wear the suit and look like he was a military man. They made the claim that the carrier was too far out for the helicopter to reach, and even turned the carrier around so that none of the media's cameras would be able to see the San Diego skyline close by. They also claimed that another reason Bush went by plane was because they did not want to "wait until the ship was in helicopter range to avoid delaying the troops' homecoming," which is not only the opposite of the truth--Bush delayed their homecoming by turning the ship--but doesn't even make any sense, when you look at the statement carefully. And then there was the "Mission Accomplished" banner, which Bush later tried to blame the carrier's sailors for, but later had to fess up was his own people's work.

Well, those were the lies of a year ago. Today, he tried to smooth things over with a whole new batch of lies and obfuscations. "A year ago," he said, "I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we had accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein." Um, yeah, right. Actually, what he said was, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." But I guess he has no choice but to lie about it, with more Americans dying now at a much faster rate than before. But perhaps we can cut him some slack on that one, as he might not have foreseen how horribly he would botch the occupation so as to create an even greater combat situation than was experienced in the actual invasion.

Bush went on: "As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or mass graves or rape rooms in Iraq." Holy moley, George, can you not go ten seconds without putting your foot in your mouth? Bush made this statement even as the top story was how American soldiers had run torture chambers and rape rooms in Iraq! He may be right about "mass graves," but is it really so much better that we bury them individually instead?

Correction: There are mass graves. My mistake.

Inhumanity in an Inhuman Endeavor

It's hard to decide whether and how much to blog about the photos exposed on 60 Minutes II about the Iraqi prisoners humiliated and tortured by U.S. troops guarding them. The reason not to would be the fact that the actions taken by the soldiers involved do not reflect on the conduct or behavior of the vast majority of our troops there, and if presented the wrong way, would make people believe that it is representative.

However, the reasons for passing on this information are even more important, the most relevant reasons being the effect the war is having on our troops, and the effect that images like this will have on Iraqis. Not to mention, of course, the moral high ground we may or may not have to be there at all.

First, some of the details of how the prisoners were treated:

Some pictures show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners. There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other.

According to the Army, one Iraqi prisoner was told to stand on a box with his head covered, wires attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.

Another picture shows a detainee with wires attached to his genitals. Another shows a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner. There is also a picture of an Iraqi man who appears to be dead — and badly beaten. In most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.

That's part of the report--the full story is here.

Despite the fact that far greater harm has been done to far greater people in the past year in Iraq, the details of this report may be more damaging to the American occupation of Iraq than anything else so far. The U.S. and British governments are fiercely denouncing the actions, but that may not matter at all in the end. The Arab world is seeing these images, and though there are few reports so far, the expected reaction would be one of outrage. Consider, for example, that "one photo is of a female US soldier standing by a naked prisoner, also hooded. The soldier is pointing at his genitals and grinning at the camera." That, to put it lightly, will not play well in the Middle East.

The soldiers accused of the crimes seem now to be pointing the finger at the military establishment, blaming it for not training the soldiers how to treat prisoners. Now, I'd be the first to blame the current administration for not seeing to the necessary details, and to stand up for soldiers I thought were being unfairly accused. But on this one, I cannot--I simply can't accept the idea that the people involved didn't know, with or without training, that what they were doing was unacceptable.

Nevertheless, there may be one mitigating factor: the war itself, and what effect it has on people. Witness this video aired on CNN of a wounded Iraqi crawling away from American forces, only to have the soldiers patiently take aim and kill the man--at which point the marines cheer. Not exactly the clean fight we usually imagine, nor the behavior we expect from our people fighting there. But then again, we have to remember that these people are living in a world of death, as evidenced by these photos (warning--some are highly graphic and disturbing) posted by an American soldier in Iraq. When this is your daily routine, the word "desensitized" doesn't seem to do the effect justice. The atmosphere of war thus contributes to the inhumanity. The only reason we see so much more of this is because of the advent of digital photography--cheap and easy to publish--in the hands of the troops there. I'll give you good odds that by the next war there will be new military regs forbidding soldiers from possessing unauthorized cameras in a war zone.

But the effect is still real, and it is not helping the effort in Iraq. It makes any American attempt to pacify the region into a situation where we take one step forward and two steps back.

Finally, there is the damage to the moral high ground we have occupied only tenuously. And I say this not as one who claimed we had it, but simply as an objective report of what the Bush administration claimed. After all, Saddam tortured all those people for his enjoyment, and that's what made him bad, right? But now Americans have been doing the same thing--kinda hard to point the finger quite so vociferously.

It's getting messier. At this time, 143 coalition soldiers (138 American) have been killed in Iraq in April, making this month the bloodiest for Americans in the entire war so far. Nearly five Americans are being killed daily. That number only stands to rise. As time goes by, it becomes more and more clear that the current effort simply cannot work.

What needs to be done, the only action that has even the slightest hope of bringing some order to Iraq, is to start from scratch. We need to be able to go to the U.N. and tell them, "this isn't working." We have to work out a plan that can be agreed upon by many nations, especially Arab nations, Egypt and Jordan to be sure, but others as well. And then the majority of U.S. troops need to be pulled out and replaced with a broad--and non-fictional--coalition of forces from dozens of countries. And the U.S. and England must stand back and take only a secondary role at best. I doubt that the Iraqis will ever accept anything else.

It is time for Americans to stop listening to the stream of bullshit that has been coming out of Bush and Cheney, to let go of the lucrative oil industry and reconstruction contracts which we so covetously deny to countries we currently do not like, admit to the failure that is the present in Iraq, and let the world community give its aura of legitimacy to the new Iraq. The fake and pathetic attempts to pretend we are doing this are not fooling anyone. To do this for real is the only chance we have of salvaging the situation.

And we all know that Bush and Cheney would sooner have Iraq burn than to do this. Which, of course, leaves us with only one recourse.

Oh, Come On

How much ludicrous lying on the part of Bush & Co. is needed before people start getting tired of being taken for fools?

Remember how the Bush people insisted that they did not get notice that bin Laden was a big threat--and then we find out that Berger and Clarke warned them in the strongest possible terms? And then they claimed that they had no intel about how bin Laden might be using airplanes, and then we hear about the August 6th PDB that not only shows how Bush and Rice knew bin Laden was a huge threat, but that planes were mentioned as well?

Well, they're still lying. In recent days, they've been downplaying how much of a threat bin Laden seemed to be, how he wasn't really worthy of too much notice. Certainly Rice didn't think he was a menace as she wasn't going to include him in a major security address at John Hopkins on 9/11--and during her testimony, she played down the 8/6 PDB as a "historical document" (she must have been crazy to think we weren't going to see that).

Guess what? New information has come out about the titles of other PDBs in April and May of that year. they include:

"Bin Laden planning multiple operations"
"Bin Laden network's plans advancing"
"Bin Laden threats are real"

And that's not including the oldie but goodie, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." For crying out loud, what else will we find out next? A September 1st memo entitled, "bin Laden planning to use jet liners to crash into WTC and Pentagon"? In complete honesty, it would not really surprise me much at this point.

I mean, come on. They knew far more than they needed to. They screwed up!

Bush Press Conference, 4/13/2004: Questions Part II

When asked by White House correspondent John King about the dismally small number of foreign troops and how calling them an "international coalition" is more fiction and window dressing than truth, Bush took a page out of the book using dead soldiers' honor to protect himself: "I don't think people ought to demean the contributions of our friends into Iraq." Same thing he sometimes says when people claim his war in Iraq is not justified, how dare you suggest that those soldiers died in vain--something I first heard from Reagan about the marines in Lebanon and his blunder in sending them there.

Bush actually did take this line with the soldiers in Iraq as well, saying "One of the things that's very important ... is to never allow our youngsters to die in vain. And I made that pledge to their parents. Withdrawing from the battlefield of Iraq would be just that, and it's not going to happen under my watch." In saying so, tying the soldiers' sacrifice to his own political agenda. As I've written before, this cowardly, slimy and opportunistic perversion of using the honor of those who have served and given their lives, just to protect a politician's hide and further his agenda--it makes me physically ill.

Bush also likened what is happening in Iraq to what happened in Japan after WWII--he wondered what things would have been like if we had "blown the peace" with them, and not brought Japan back in line as a responsible world citizen. Of course, three problems there: first, Iraq now is not Japan then, the two are worlds apart and the on-the-ground situations in both places are hardly comparable; second, Japan was far more necessary to attack, far more a threat to world peace, than Iraq ever was; and third, Bush is currently helping Japanese right-wingers deconstruct the post-WWII nation that we built, tearing down one of the single most important postwar imperatives, that Japan's military be oriented toward self-defense only.

Reporters tried to ask questions without Bush calling on them first; Bush smirked and said, "I've got some must-calls, I'm sorry." It did not appear that Bush had any spontaneous calls during the press conference--as it was a year ago, he likely called only from his list this time again.

When asked about whether he waited too long to confront terrorism and went too quickly into Iraq, Bush again retreated to the "we weren't on a war footing" excuse, that there was nothing we could do about al Qaeda before 9/11 changed the world--but on preemptively striking Iraq, Bush brought up Libya, which stands out as a phenomenal crock. He acted, as most conservatives do, as if Libya were intransigent and aggressive until Bush invaded Iraq, then their knees turned to jelly and they shot up the white flag in fear that Bush might catch them, too. What a pile of manure that is. Libya wanted to stop U.N. sanctions and get back into the international community, and he started with Clinton, long before Iraq was invaded. Libya offering up its paltry WMD program was simply them taking advantage of the Iraq war to make it look like they were taking giant strides to atone for past behavior and so win points that would help them out. But give up WMD because they feared Bush? That's a joke, and a bad one. Libya knows just like everyone else that America is now over-extended and cannot just go romping into Northern Africa--and we weren't even much on their case in terms of WMD. Bush's claim is a lie and a scam, pure and simple.

Then he had the gall to bring up A. Q. Khan's leaking of nuclear secrets to Iran and other countries as if that were a great example of us winning the war on terror. Beg pardon? We caught Pakistan doing this--far too late, unfortunately--and let them blame it all on one guy, and then we let them pardon the one guy. that's a victory in the war on terror? No, it's not--it's another bad joke.

This is where Bush was asked about his greatest mistake, and Bush wormed around, trying to have it both ways--both admitting to having made mistakes, but not telling what any of them were. "I hope - I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't - you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one." Yeah. Sure. Amidst a list of things he went on about that he felt were not mistakes, Bush alluded to the WMD--and again justified his claims in any way he could, again bringing forth this Charlie Duelfer guy as if he were the final word in WMD, and the tired claims that somehow WMD were in there and the Iraqi people are still so terrified of Saddam Hussein that they just can't bring themselves to tell us where they are. By the end of the question, Bush had turned his answer into one for a question about how evil Hussein was and how there really are WMD just waiting for us to find them.

In his answer to Ann Compton of ABC News about intelligence reform, Bush turned and pivoted until he was saying this:

I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world.

And as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. We have an obligation to help feed the hungry. I think the American people find it interesting that we're providing food for the North Korea people who starve.

We have an obligation to lead the fight on AIDS, on Africa. And we have an obligation to work toward a more free world. That's our obligation. That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned.

Okay, first, with this thing about God talking to him again, it may work with some but it's starting to get a lot of people worried, those at least who heard the relatively suppressed news report that Bush once stated that God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

Then there's the idea that Bush was responsible for feeding people in North Korea--that was a program started under Clinton that Republicans have attacked him for, as being too friendly and appeasing; Bush has let the North Korean situation degrade so far that a few days ago, North Korea publicly announced that Bush is "driving the military situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war." And AIDS in Africa is something that Bush promised but has not followed through on. How duplicitous can this guy be and still get away with it like he does?

Finally, he called on Don Gonyea of NPR, who asked Bush if he failed as a communicator, failed to make his case. To which, Bush said we'd have to wait to see what voters say in November--and then went straight into what was obviously a well-rehearsed ending statement to wrap things up. "I hope today you've got a sense of my conviction ... the course this administration is taking will make America more secure and the world more free ... It's a conviction that's deep in my soul."

He even managed to take a swipe at Kerry, implying that a vote for him was one for leadership, and a vote for Kerry was one to shirk responsibility. Cute.

Two points I'd like to make. First: reporters are spineless. I remember a day when reporters used to respond to a president's statement with the words, "But Mr. President," and then take on the president about a misstatement or obvious obfuscation he'd made. Bush told a long string of whoppers here, and the reporters just let them slide by.

Second, the media analysis after the press conference. I had to ask myself if these people had really watched the same press conference I had. Everyone was glowing about how Bush handled himself so well, made his case so well on Iraq and national defense. My father put it in a more understandable light, pointing out that the bar has been set so low (Bush did call himself the master of lowered expectations), and Bush's more outrageous lies were on things that won't necessarily come back to bite him--for example, he could lie about North Korea, AIDS in Africa, the claims about details in WMD, or what exactly the 9/11 warnings were in terms of hijackings or using planes--that most of the public is not well enough versed to catch on to stuff like that. I agree to a point, but frankly, that's supposed to be the job of the press--to inform people on such things--and it is clear that the mainstream press is just as content to stay at the same removed, uneducated level of analysis and criticism that most Americans seem to have nowadays.

That needs to change, and I would be just as happy if that changed at the start of a new Kerry administration--so long as it continues into the next Republican administration as well. But I'm not holding my breath.

Bush Press Conference, 4/13/2004: Questions Part I

Okay, Bush clearly was looking at and calling reporters from a list, right up until the end. However, the reporters he called on did not seem like the usual right-wing bevy, at least. And there were some tough questions.

One theme, found in many questions, was to see if Bush would take up the tone of Richard Clarke and apologize, take some responsibility for what happened, and admit to mistakes. Bush steadfastly refused to do so. He didn't come right out and say "I'm not sorry for anything," but he came close. When directly questioned on whether he'd made any mistakes, he said he was sure he'd made some, but none came to mind--"I'm sure that something will pop into my head," he told correspondent John F. Robertson, in the pressure of the press conference.

It was amazingly clear how Bush wandered into and out of his scripted, practiced lines--he would be speaking eloquently one moment, but then seem flustered, lost and fumbling for words the next. It made those scripted parts sound as artificial as they really were.

He started off with some softballs, clearly lined up--question about comparing Iraq with Vietnam ("I think the analogy is false"), and for more troops to be sent (he put all the onus and responsibility on the shoulders of General Abizaid; "if that's what he wants, that's what he gets ... If he wants to keep troops there to help, I'm more than willing to say, yes, General Abizaid").

Terry Moran of ABC then asked about how Bush reconciles what we know today with his claims that "U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators with sweets and flowers; that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of the reconstruction; and that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction." Bush's first response--"He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. He was a threat because he coddled terrorists. He was a threat because he funded suiciders. He was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States"--was essentially a boiled-down list, the dry sediment of the many, many accusations that Bush has made before, but limited to the few precipitated accusations that can still even distantly be called true, knowing what we know today. Of course, they're full of deception--we gave him the chemical weapons to use on his own people and Reagan did nothing about it at the time, as Hussein was our friend; the terrorists he "coddled" were few, and it is unclear if any of them were a real threat to us; and I have never heard any report that Hussein actually paid his promised bounty to the families of suicide bombers in Palestine. Saddam was not much of a threat to anybody at the time, much less the U.S.

Bush then went on about how Saddam refused to disarm--well, disarm what? This seems to be an extension or variation of Bush's past claim that we wanted inspectors, but Saddam wouldn't let them in--a Bush claim that was complete fiction. The best Bush could provide in the way of evidence was a guy named Charlie Duelfer, and how this guy found the Iraqis to have been deceptive in some vague way. Bush said that Duelfer "confirmed that Saddam had the ability to produce biological and chemical weapons." A lie, of course--how did he confirm that? Even in front of a mass of reporters, Bush has the gall to make up fiction like that. We never confirmed that Hussein could do that, except in the broad sense that anyone with access to the Internet could whip up primitive chemical weapons like mustard gas in his garage.

The next question, from Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, really put Bush into a tailspin. She asked, "do you feel any sense of personal responsibility for September 11th?"

Now, to understand how badly Bush fell apart at this time, you really have to see it for yourself. I'll see if I can capture this part and put it up for view. Bush's transcript goes like this:

Let me put that -- quote to Woodward in context, because he had asked me if I was -- something about killing bin Laden. That's what the question was.

And I said, you know, compared to how I felt at the time, after the attack, I didn't have that -- and I also went on to say, my blood wasn't boiling, I think is what the quote said.

I didn't see -- I mean, I didn't have that great sense of outrage that I felt on September the 11th. I was, huh -- on that day, I was angry and sad. Angry that -- al-Qaida -- I thought at the time al-Qaida, found out shortly thereafter it was al-Qaida -- had unleashed this attack. Sad for those who lost their life.

Umm... Your question, do I feel -- yes?

Bush then fell into an easier, though disengaged and choppy scripted mode, and wandered from topic to topic, of course never admitting to any responsibility, or to any error. But his overall response to this question was uncoordinated and flustered, to be generous. (Betcha they don't play that back very often on TV.) He stuck in bits and pieces of stuff he'd obviously been primed to spit out at some point: the Patriot Act is an important change, we weren't on a war footing, we were kind of stovepiped, there were gathering threats, we must do everything in our power to find these killers and bring them to justice before they hurt us again. Nothing in real response to the question, just hitting the highlights of his political agenda. The "war footing" idea he pounded home, 3 or 4 times in his speaking tonight, as an excuse as to why they didn't successfully prevent 9/11.

His fumbling continued when David Gregory followed up on the previous questions, noting that Bush never admits a mistake. Bush hemmed and hawed, brought up "war footing" again, and, of course, did not admit to any mistakes. "But there was nobody in our government," he pointed out, "that could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." Well, no one there must have ever read Tom Clancy. It also avoids the point that Edwin Chen of the L.A. Times brought up next, that the reports did talk about hijacking--so why didn't Bush or others do anything about airplane security? Bush first dissembled that the air threat mentioned was referring to the Genoa G8 Conference (where there were anti-aircraft batteries and Bush slept on an aircraft carrier to avoid airplane terrorism). This is wrong, because it refers to FBI information about hijackings in the U.S.

He also tried to slough off blame to the CIA, saying that Tenet was his information source, blaming the FBI, saying that their report made it seem like they were doing their job--after which, a Fox News reporter lobbed the softball that the FBI misreported the number of field investigations, to which Bush glommed on: "of course I expect to get valid information. I can't make good decisions unless I get valid information." In the previous question, Bush also parroted Rice's "move heaven and earth" quote, if only they had been told exactly when, where and how the attack was going to take place. I've commented on that red herring before.

Bush then again sidestepped a question from John Roberts of CBS about whether he'd apologize, expressing sympathy, but claiming the responsibility was Osama bin Laden's, and not the least bit his own. My own take on this is that bin Laden is like a mad dog--he'll hurt you, of course, but the dogcatcher is responsible for getting him off the streets before he bites your children. If the dogcatcher is asleep on the job, he can't go whining about how the dog was responsible for everything.

To be continued...

If This Is "Under Control"...

... then I'd hate to see what "out of control" looks like. In the first twelve days of April, 73 Americans (the number increased as I wrote this) and 2 other coalition soldiers were killed in fighting. That makes this month the deadliest for Americans, even more so than when the fighting was at its worst in the initial invasion. 65 Americans died in 12 days of fighting when the invasion started in March 2003.

Think about it: we've been in Iraq for a year now. And yet American soldiers are dying more today than they were when Saddam Hussein was in control, and we were invading from the outside. How can it be that we have Iraq "under control" now?

The Iraqi people, even those who welcomed Americans at first, are now feeling humiliated, threatened and angry. They see more and more Iraqis, all too often innocent "collateral damage" victims, all too often children. They are an occupied country, and despite the machinations of the Bush press offices in Washington D.C. and Baghdad, things for them are not better than they were under Saddam. They see a foreign force installing a puppet government and establishing more than a dozen permanent military bases, and do not much wonder where the oil profits are going to. The religious factions of Sunni and Shiite are actually united, but not to form Bush's desired government, rather to fight the coalition. Al Sadr has become a new national hero. No wonder more and more Iraqis are deciding to fight.

Then there are the points about our sources. Already tired, demoralized, and upset about being in a place they never thought they would have to go to for a far longer time than they thought they would ever be required to be, the hot, dry summer is coming and fewer and fewer trained soldiers will be replacing them--non-active, lesser-trained reserves will be the bulk of the replacements. Then there are the lost jobs, lost marriages, and suicides, the Veterans' benefits weakened by the GOP, and the prospect of being called back as our men and women will be there in numbers at 14 permanent bases for at least 10 years. And then there's the explosion of violence and conflict. Rumsfeld said last week that if the American generals in Iraq want more troops, all they have to do is ask. Well, they're asking. Rumsfeld is still silent.

And now there is the Iraqi army, which was supposed to pick up some of the slack from the coalition forces, telling the American command en masse that they will not be going into Fallujah, thank you very much, because they did not sign up to roll in and kill other Iraqis.

I was interrupted for about an hour and a half and came back to this. In that time, another soldier was reported killed. 74 for 12 days in April, perhaps more by the end of day.

This is "under control"?

2 + 2 = 9/11

Before I mention too many new developments, I very much want to reiterate one solid point: while the Bush administration did not get telegraphed the exact time, date, location and method of the 9/11, they did in fact receive more than enough information to put them on a higher alert, so that they should have asked for and seen the clearer warnings of 9/11 that never got passed up far enough for them to see--and they could have easily prevented 9/11 had they done so. I reiterate this because I see so many excuses from Bush & Co. getting far too much credence in recent days. Here's the equation:

From the beginning of the year, they were warned by Clinton administration officials that al Qaeda cells were in fact in the country. On July 6th, the CIA warned of a terrorist attack that would be "catastrophic," and that would be quantitatively different from anything that had been done to date. In late July, during the Genoa conference, they were made acutely aware of al Qaeda's plans to use aircraft as weapons. And in the now-infamous August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing (PDF file), it was made clear that there was a great deal of al Qaeda activity in the U.S., and there were hints that they were planning to hijack aircraft.

None of that equals 9/11, as Bush is desperate to point out, but here is what it does equal: they knew that al Qaeda was here, they were up to something, and it would be very bad. That much is not in question, is not challenged. So, their reaction should have been this: shake the trees. Something bad is coming guys, and we want anything and everything even remotely concerned with al Qaeda given top priority. Bush's people claim they did this, but it is incredibly obvious they did not. If they had, then two key pieces of intelligence would have fallen from the trees, namely: the Phoenix Memo of July 10, sent from Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams, which reported that individuals connected to Osama bin Laden were studying at flight schools in the area, and there was "the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges," and "[t]he individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets." And then, there was the August 15th arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota, a man with jihadist connections who was training to fly commercial jets, but with no prior flying experience and no explanation of how he got his funding or why he was in the U.S. And it's not like the agents involved weren't stressing the intel enough.

That's what Rice would have seen: two reports within one month of potential terrorists attending flight schools in the U.S., with reports elsewhere that bin Laden was (a) thinking of using airplanes, and (b) planning a "catastrophic" attack on the U.S.

That would have been more than enough for Rice to look at and say, "hmmm, let's maybe send some FBI agents out to all the other flight schools around the country and see if there are any suspicious, Middle-Eastern flight school students with possible terrorist links." From there, it would have taken only a few days to find the majority of the suspects, go to high alert, investigate the suspects, give warnings to airports and law enforcement agencies nationwide, and well before 9/11, slap their asses in jail. No 9/11.

This method was proved in the millennium terror attempts, and the perfect job that Clinton's people did in preventing all of the al Qaeda attacks in Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston and New York. Sure, the one Seattle customs agent Rice pointed to got lucky, but (a) only because she was warned and directed to look for something in a way that Rice never warned FBI agents to do, and (b) that was only one of many attacks that were foiled by the tree-shaking which Richard Clarke described.

"But we didn't have enough time to get things set up," the Bush people whine, "233 days wasn't enough time!" Bull. A few weeks would be all that it took. A massive reorganization of the intelligence community would have been nice (though Bush & Co. were against homeland security and were cutting counter-terrorism funding), but that wasn't enough to keep the government from working--as Clinton's people showed us in the millennium terrorist roll-up. The FBI was in place, Clinton's experienced counter-terrorism people were still there, trying to tell the Bushies to do what they should have done, and the Bush people were in place. Time is not what killed the making of the connection. It was the lack of will to focus on terrorism, the plain dearth of common sense. There was more than enough time.

"But we never got warnings in the form of giant, flashing neon signs that told us the time, date, flight numbers and methods of the hijackings!" the Bush people cry desperately (and repeatedly). Well, if that's what you need to stop a terrorist attack, then we are in deep shit, because you never get that kind of detailed information in the real world. This excuse is the worst of all, because it is so ridiculous, so pathetic beneath the false formica veneer of its surface, that there is no doubt whatsoever that Rice and Bush know that they are misleading the people, desperate enough to use such a lame excuse because it's all they've got. As I have laid out above, there was more than enough warning. All the pieces were there. It would not have been hard at all to put them together without the benefit of hindsight; all it would have taken was basic competence to put 2 plus 2 together. But because Bush & Co. were do damned focused on missile defense, because terrorism was antithetical to that agenda, and because they were so keen to diss anything even smelling of Clinton, they failed to do what they needed in order to get that second "2" of the equation, and so they failed to add the pieces together. As a result, the terrorists walked right past the otherwise-engaged Bush administration, right onto the airplanes and committed their atrocious act.

There is no excuse folks, and don't let any of the Bushies tell you otherwise.

We Were Warned

As I mentioned before, one thing that was clear in Rice's testimony was that she wanted to bring the point home on a set of talking points, repeating them several times so that they were certain to make the sound-bite reel. Ones that stood out included that Bush met with CIA chief and other principles almost every day; there was no "silver bullet" that would have stopped 9/11; there were "structural problems" that were the real cause of the problem (she mentioned this a few dozen times); the August 6th PDB was "historical" in nature, not a warning; that Clarke was responsible for a lot (implying that he was more to blame), and the like.

But the one point that stuck out to me was the idea that the Bush administration was not at fault because there was no specific warning about 9/11, that we did not get the specific date, time, location and method of the attack. Commission member James R. Thompson (R) repeated that, saying that we didn't know "when where and how" the attacks would come. The attacks were too vague, Rice pounded home.

I mean, come on. If we can only stop attacks if we have the exact plans telegraphed to us, then we are in huge trouble. It's a shameless red herring, saying that we didn't have good enough intel.

Let's review what we did know.

• On January 25th, Clarke told Rice that there were al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S., and gave warnings that al Qaeda was the greatest terrorist threat facing the U.S.


• In the summer of 2001, the FBI uncovered the fact that al Qaeda operatives were in the U.S., and were planning an attack using airplanes, according to Sibel Edmonds.


• On July 6th, the CIA warned of a terrorist attack that would be "catastrophic," and that would be quantitatively different from anything that had been done to date.


• On July 10th, Phoenix, AZ FBI agent Kenneth Williams reported that individuals connected to Osama bin Laden were studying at flight schools in the area, and there was "the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges," and "[t]he individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets." [this point added in edit]


• On July 20-22, Rice and Bush were both at an economic summit in Genoa, Italy, where there was specific intelligence about bin Laden using jet liners to attack the summit; the threat was taken so seriously that there were anti-aircraft batteries deployed in the city, and Bush spent the night on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.


• On August 6th, the PDB was titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."


• On August 16th, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota on immigration charges, a man who had jihadist connections, who had been in a flight school in Minnesota trying to learn how to fly a commercial jetliner despite having no prior training, had no explanation for the funds in his bank account, and no explanation for why he was in the United States. The Minnesota FBI was trying to pursue the matter, pushing a reluctant Washington FBI bureau.


• And on September 4, Richard Clarke sent Rice a memo warning Rice "to imagine a day after hundreds of Americans lay dead at home and abroad after a terrorist attack."

And that's just the warnings that we've been told about. Clearly, there could be and probably are warnings that are still classified and hidden by the Bush administration (like the August 6th PDB, the title of which was classified until yesterday).

Knowing all of this, it becomes all but impossible to imagine that the September 11 attacks were not preventable. It is a fact that from the start, the Bush administration did not take the terrorism threat very seriously, the put major emphasis on missile defense, and just before 9/11 they cut counter-terrorism funding.

However, if Rice and Bush had taken the threat seriously from the start, alerts could have been put out to intelligence agencies to be alert for anything possibly related to this (as commission member Gorelick pointed out, they were not given any such warnings or instructions). In July, Rice had sufficient warnings that something was coming along, such that if she had "shaken the tree" in earnest, if she had told the FBI and CIA to go on high alert and pass on all warnings, they would have learned about the Edmonds tapes, and would have known something big was coming--and then Zacarias Moussaoui would have stuck out like a gigantic sore thumb. With him, they would have had a potential terrorist training for jet piloting; that would have led them to check pilot training schools across the U.S. for others like him, they would have found most of the other hijackers, and could have rolled up the entire operation with weeks to spare.

This is not pie-in-the-sky or pure hindsight, this is real information that could have been passed on, and probably would have been under Gore because he would have carried on with Clinton policies that called for this kind of thing.

We were warned. We did have information specific enough to lead us to find the terrorists. This was not an inevitable attack. Rice screwed up. Bush blew it. It's as simple as that.

The Outrage List Continues: Part III

It is hard to see just a few days go by without another set of lies and scams perpetrated by the Bush people, and remember, people, these are just the ones we find out about--there are without doubt many more.

The first one is all too public, the failing of the Bush administration to manage postwar Iraq. Their failure to have a coherent postwar strategy, their arrogant posturing and just plain stupidity making a far more respectable U.N. force to keep the peace, and Bush's desperate rush to hand over power so he can pretend that U.S. troops aren't there (while they will really be there for at least another decade), have all led to this carnage we see today.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed now number 15 for the month of April (one other foreign soldier died as well), for an average of 3.2 Coalition troops killed per day--which is a startling number. That's just slightly behind the 3.6 per day killed in November, and that was when helicopters full of soldiers got shot down--this month our people are getting killed one by one, by bombs and in combat. And if you go past last November, this month so far has been bloodier for our troops than any month since the invasion began last March.

And that is before the summer heat starts up, and before a major turnover of troops will make a majority of troops reservists, minimally trained, the first time practically untrained soldiers have outnumbered active-duty troops. That, along with growing resentment of American troops in Iraq by the Iraqis, promises to make this quagmire bloodier and bloodier still.

But at least we have the comfort of knowing that the sacrifice of our young fighting forces will not be allowed to work against the election campaign of George W. Bush. Why? Because he's stacked the Iraq press office with a very large number of GOP staffers whose job it is to spin the Iraq news to benefit Bush's election run. "One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern."

And Bush's corruption of public information to help him get elected doesn't stop in Baghdad. Remember the 9/11 commission? Remember how Bush, through Dennis Hastert, did everything possible to stop the 9/11 commission from getting a 2-month extension because they were terrified of the investigation report coming out too close to the November elections? Well, problem solved. You won't get a chance to see the 9/11 commission report before the election, if Bush gets his way. They are saying that they will have to put the report through a "vetting" process, and they may not get finished with it until after the election.

But with luck, we'll get a look at what they've found through leaks, and that is the fact (which I've blogged on recently) that the 9/11 attack "were probably preventable." Any wonder the Bush White House--who before were incredibly anxious to get the report out asap and tried to block a 2-month extension the commission called for--is now saying that it'll take so much time they won't be able to say anything before the election. What a surprise.

And then we have piece of evidence #26 that Bush was planning to invade Iraq from early on: a former British ambassador reported that just nine days after 9/11, Bush told Blair that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq." Remember how the Bush people blasted Paul O'Neill, smearing him as some kind of psychotic, greedy liar because he claimed Bush was focused on invading Iraq from long before 9/11? Same for Richard Clarke? What will they say about this former British ambassador? Will they call him a raving loony? How many more ultimately respectable, intelligent and formidable men and women will Bush's people have to smear before people get wise to the lies?

And while we're talking about how Bush's people are smearing those who dare criticize them, look at the list of people who served the Bush administration that they are now attacking: Paul O'Neill, Joseph Smith, Lawrence Lindsay, Anthony Zinni, Eric Shinseki, Richard Foster, John DiIulio, Scott Ritter, and Richard Clarke. That's a lot of people, and that's just the A-list, but my point is this: if so many people who used to work for Bush are all liars, profiteers, child molesters, psychotics and so on--what does this say about the quality of people working for the Bush administration? These are the smart, honorable and dignified people Bush promised to surround himself with? No, the fact is, these are the honorable people about which none of the Bush smears are true, which is why they all had to leave--there's no place for people of such integrity in Bush's White House.

And closing for today before I overload once again (too late!), now we also find out that Bush's people sent out an email to the troops telling them to lie about the environment whenever asked about it, to wit: "global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better', the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people.'" The source of these claims? A research institute funded by Mobil Oil. A Republican strategist behind most of this is reported to have said, "There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." Which is the hallmark of Bush's scientific policy: fight the science. Make sure the ideology wins out. Science proves Bush wrong? Rewrite the report. It's as simple as that!

Oy. Yet more Outrage Overload. How much longer can this go on?

More Overload

Here are some more points of outrage, just part of the massive waves of dirty dealing, scandal and incompetence that has become apparent over recent weeks and months. To punctuate this, I would like to point out that if Clinton had done any of this, Republicans would be calling for his head. It is useful to imagine the name Clinton wherever you see Bush in this post and the last one, and you'll have a slightly better ability to imagine the massive Republican outrage should that have been the case--and the total double standard that now exists, with the right wing claiming that we're tired of scandal (until the next Democrat comes into office), and making weak attempts to rationalize, excuse, or much more often obfuscate Bush's malfeasance.

One of those points is honesty. Remember how Bush was supposed to bring "honor and dignity" back to the White house? How they claimed that Clinton lied so much, and painted Gore as a liar even more so? And then it turns out Bush was lying through his teeth all along. He lied about not wanting to do nation-building, lied about his criminal record (I still can't believe we elected, if you can call it that, a man with a criminal record, with a DUI, and a VP with two DUIs!); they lied about willingness to delve into deficit spending; they lied about the vandalism at the White House, about how the Clinton team ripped out the "W"s on the keyboards. And that was just the beginning. There were the unending lies about Iraq and Saddam Hussein and WMD. Now we have Bush lying to Congress about Medicare, Rice lying to everybody about everything, and even the formerly statesmanlike Colin Powell admitting that is "ironclad" evidence was, in retrospect, not so "solid" after all. Gee whiz, ya think?

Another lie being propagated right now is that Bush did everything possible to catch bin Laden--no, wait, he didn't, but they were going after al Qaeda--no, no, that's not right either, but they were all over the terrorism problem--well, actually not. But at least we can take heart in the reassurance that Bush & Co. couldn't really have done anything to prevent 9/11. After all, the Clinton administration were such slackers, the election thing meant they had to get off to a late start, and by the time it was humanly possible to act, the terrorists were already in place and nothing could be done. Right? BZZZT. Nope. That's wrong too. They were occupying their offices from early on, they were warned from the outset, vividly, about al Qaeda, a plan of action (let's not quibble over words, Clinton's people had a set of actions to take and it was thoroughly transmitted to Bush's people), and Clarke was there trying and trying to push them into action--but they were too caught up in Star Wars missile defense, and terrorism played badly in that scenario, and they just gave it no credence. But most importantly, Clarke painted a very clear picture of how 9/11 could have been prevented, just as the Clinton WHite House prevented massive attacks planned by al Qaeda on American soil for the millennium celebrations:

CLARKE: Well, we'll never know. But let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda attacks. President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks. And every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.

Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney general had gone back day after day to their department to the White House, what would they have shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that two of the hijackers had entered the United States. Now, if that information had been able to be shaken loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in response to daily meetings with the White House, if we had known that those two -- if the attorney general had known, if the FBI director had known, that those two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we could have caught those two.

Now with Sibel Edmonds coming forward and saying that the information not only existed but was passed up to the administration, this suggestion has even more merit to it. There is an extremely high probability that had Gore been elected, then the information would have gotten through, and 9/11 would never have happened. Under Bush, though, the terrorists walked right in, because Bush & Co. were far too busy looking for missiles in the sky.

Then there is the business side, the money scandals. Has Ken Lay, Bush's biggest contributor since 1994, been charged, let alone punished, for his massive fraud that so damaged the economy and stole the life savings of so many Americans? He never acted when Enron and other oil companies ripped Californians off to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Cheney included all the oil companies, including Enron, to write the nation's energy policy, and then tried like crazy to keep all of that a secret (it is now before the Supreme Court, where it will be ruled on by Cheney's best bud, Antonin Scalia--gee, I wonder what he'll decide on the matter?). And let's not even get started on Halliburton.

What fewer people know is that Bush has long-time relations with the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family. Bush Sr. as well as Jr. were getting massive funding and investment out of these people since the late 1970's, the current Bush's involvement beginning with his first business, Arbusto ("Bush" in Spanish), which Bush promptly bankrupted. But the relationship continues to this day, and was most clearly evidenced by Bush's redacting a few dozen pages from an important terrorism report, pages which would have shown the Saudis as being very much behind Islamic terrorist groups; it was demonstrated strongly also in the few days following 9/11, when Bush had the entire bin Laden clan resident in the U.S. airlifted out, even as Americans were not allowed to fly.

On Al Franken's new radio show, Michael Moore was a guest and they discussed a very applicable analogy to this situation. Imagine the following: after the Oklahoma bombing of the Murrah building by Timothy McVeigh, the FBI suspects McVeigh is the bomber and wants to talk to his family members. Clinton, however, gets the entire McVeigh family together, loads them on a plane, refuses to let the FBI question them in full, and instead carts the whole lot off to Paris, outside U.S. jurisdiction. And then we learn later that Clinton had substantial financial relationships with the McVeighs over the past two decades or more.

If that had ever happened, the right wing would have gone nuclear. Impeachment hearings would have started within minutes, and conservatives everywhere would be blasting Clinton from here to doomsday--and the Democrats probably would have been with them. But when the exact same scenario is played out by Bush, airlifting the entire bin Laden family from the U.S. while no U.S. citizen was allowed to fly, not letting the FBI question them thoroughly--and now we know that the bin ladens were financing Bush for many, many years... it defies belief that Bush can get away with this and no one seems to think that it is worthy of much attention.

For further information, I would direct you to buy House of Bush, House of Saud, and wait for Michael Moore's new movie, Farenheit 911, slated for release this summer, before the election. It is absolutely unforgivable how slimy these associations Bush has and how he has unabashedly given massive favors to Halliburton, Enron execs, the bin Laden family and the Saudis in return for their long financial support for Bush and Cheney. You can say this about Bush: he is loyal, and is a politician that, when bought, stay bought.

And how about outright criminal activity? You know that Republicans were systematically stealing Democratic Senators' files for a year and a half, leaking them to Fox News and conservative columnists, in violation of law. And even if you don't consider lying to Congress about Medicare, or spending millions of federal dollars on fake Medicare ads that were thinly disguised campaign commercials, as crimes, then how about the Plame affair? First, Bush lies to Congress, the people and the world about Saddam building nukes, saying the he knew it was true because of British intel that said Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger--when in fact, his own intel people told him the claim was fake. Then former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had the courage to come forth and tell the truth about that, in response to which, the vicious Bush attack dogs made public the fact that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative, a federal felony punishable with prison time, and a crime that ruined the career of Wilson's wife, and could have placed her and those she'd recruited in danger of being killed. The investigation into that now spans from Karl Rove's office to Dick Cheney's chief of staff and others in his office.

Truly, this administration's staff has a vicious, bloodthirsty vindictive streak a mile and a half long. You speak out against them, and they will lie, cheat, steal, and commit federal crimes to dirty your name, ruin your career and drive you into hiding. And yet so many people--Paul O'Neill, Joseph Smith, Lawrence Lindsay, Anthony Zinni, Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, Richard Foster, the Medicare actuary, John DiIulio, and Richard Clarke--all viciously smeared by Bush & Co., and that's just the people who used to work in the Bush administration!

Again, this is just too much, I'm getting overloaded by all of this. And again, there is so much more.

People, we have to talk about this! get these facts down, print these posts, email them to friends, get people talking and aware of all this, because the conservative media is hiding so much of it. I don't know how many times I have spoken about facts like these with family and friends, and have gotten the reaction, "when did that happen?" because the news shows they watch and newspapers they read don't report on them much at all. And yet, these are all documented facts, people. Talk! Let people know! Don't wait, do it now!

Outrage Overload

Man, I gotta tell ya. There is just almost too much out there to be outraged about, it is hard to blog about it all, it feels just overwhelming. Let me see if I can't list some of the stuff that has been coming out, being brief so that the overload factor doesn't click in too fast.

Condoleezza Rice not testifying, until public criticism and pressure got so strong that Bush couldn't keep up the fake pretense that there was some principle involved. So many lies here. The precedence? A joke--they had many options to get around that, including the one they eventually chose, to agree while specifically stating that this would not set a precedence. You see? Easy. Another lie: Condi wanted to testify, she just oh so much prayed she could testify, if only she was able to publicly talk about this under oath, it was her most treasured dream... God, please. She has lied so often, lies which are shown up not just by opponents and independents, but by her own people. Yeah, I'm absolutely sure she had a real jones for coming back and testifying under oath after all that.

And what is with this garbage about the 9/11 commission being a congressional body? It is nothing of the sort! Bush himself hand-picked the commission, it is an executive body--and Bush did that for the express purpose of preventing Congress from doing it, forming an investigation that might not go the way he wanted--not that this commission has been as submissive as Bush would have hoped. But make no mistake--it is not a congressional body, and therefore there is no conflict with having Rice or anyone else testifying.

Then there's Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who was fired by the FBI in 2002 after she publicly criticized the FBI for incompetence. Edmonds called Rice's claim that neither she nor other in the Bush administration got warning about 9/11, "an outrageous lie." Rice said, "Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles... ". Edmonds says that such intelligence was provided to administration officials. "We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available," she told Salon. Furthermore, "If you put this information [I saw] with other stuff they had from the Phoenix memo [about suspects taking flying lessons] and stuff coming in from field offices about flight schools, there is no way they can say they did not know. An idiot could work it out." Edmonds testified about this to the commission, giving them "details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily." Her story has reportedly been corroborated by other sources within the FBI.

But we may not hear any more from Edmonds, she's being muzzled. She's been under a gag order from the Justice Department since 2002, and the Bush White House has been seeking to quiet her further under the rarely used "state secrets privilege." How the hell is this a state secret other than to make secret the fact that the Bush administration was warned, ignored the warnings, and now is trying to cover that up and lie about it to the people and the Congress. (Again, Condi is dying to testify under oath about that?)

Additionally, Many others, including Richard Clarke, Gary Hart, and other players within and without the administration have told of their warnings to the Bush administration about 9/11. Condi Rice was scheduled to give a speech on threats to American security on 9/11 (yes, in 2001), and it focused on missile defense, but also mentioned a plethora of other items--but not one mention about al Qaeda. This at a time when the Bush administration is now insisting they were intently focused on al Qaeda!

There's another story out that you may have missed because the White House did an expert job of slipping it in underneath other news more focused on by people. When they released the big news that they had flip-flopped and Rice would testify publicly under oath, they also released, in a by-the-way kind of manner, that Bush and Cheney would give their testimony together. In addition to the standing conditions that Bush and Cheney not testify under oath, or publicly, or to the whole commission, or for very long, they will now appear at the same time, which will not only further cut down the time they spend testifying, and further this would allow Cheney to shield Bush--who would likely come across as foolish were he to be there all by himself. When you investigate something, you don't interview people together, you do it separately so you can compare the stories. This new unilateral demand has been glossed over by the media, but it should not be--it is a big deal. Just like it is a big deal that they refuse to testify under oath; after all, the main reason you refuse to testify under oath is because you want to lie about something and not be held accountable for it.

We're seeing issue after issue, witness after witness, evidence and more evidence being hidden, unreleased, and classified (unless they want to use it to smear someone, then there's no limit to what you can declassify), and the latest thing to be hidden by the White House is, believe it or not, 8,000 documents from the Clinton administration. The White House is now blocking the 9/11 commission from seeing those thousands of documents from the Clinton administration regarding security and 9/11. According to the New York Times, "Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said some Clinton administration documents had been withheld because they were 'duplicative or unrelated,' while others were withheld because they were 'highly sensitive' and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways." Yeah, I'll bet. The commission has been cleared for highly sensitive documents, and they can sift through the documents themselves--this is just yet another way the administration controls the information that will eventually become public; you can bet that if those documents incriminated the Clinton administration, not only would they not keep them from the 9/11 commission, they would actively leak them to Fox News.

Then there was the entire Medicare scandal, where the Bush administration knowingly lied to Congress about the cost of Bush's Medicare plan. The plan itself was bad enough for Democrats, of course, but it was actually so bad the there were Republicans who would never agree to it, saying that if it cost anything more than $400 billion. Bush & Co. then said, surprise surprise, that it would only cost $395 billion, a very convenient number right where the Republicans wanted it. But what they did not say was that it would actually cost $534 billion--and Congress passed the bill with the lying estimate, by five votes. Then a brave actuary, a guy named Rick Foster, realized that the number they were reporting was wrong, and told his bosses about it--who promptly threatened to fire him if he dared to speak a word of it publicly, or to Congress. And if that's not enough, the White House additionally tried to lie to the American people, producing fake news story videos which amounted to nothing more than campaign commercials for president Bush, trying to get news programs to carry the commercials as real, with no disclaimers, no mention of the real source, no statement to the effect that the "reporters" and "real people" in the video were paid actors.

More on the issue side and less on the outrageous criminal acts side, there is the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which is nothing other than an attempt to slowly chip away at Roe v. Wade, trying in yet another way to laterally categorize a fetus as a person. This is in concert with the attack on fictional "partial birth abortion," a painfully mangled, twisted and wholly exaggerated misrepresentation of a medical procedure which, while ugly (as nature often is), is absolutely necessary in a rare number of cases. If a fetus is non-viable (for example, if it developed with no brain) and any attempt to bear the child naturally or do a C-section would likely result in injury or death to the mother, the procedure is used. But to hear the religious right tell it, the procedure is used all the time to abort perfectly healthy babies as they are being born. Yet that atrocity of a piece of legislation was passed, laying yet another illegitimate brick in the wall to block reproductive rights.

Believe it or not, I am just getting started. There is a lot more. But I have been at this for a few hours and I have other things to do. But there will be more coming soon. It is just hard to try to get this all out without being overwhelmed.

One thing to do today: make a contribution to John Kerry. Man, oh man, do we ever need him right now. I will blog on that later.

Talk Big but Carry Little Funding

This country needs a national goal for broadband technology, for the spread of broadband technology. We ought to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier. See, the more choices there are, the more the price will go down. And the more the price goes down, the more users there will be. And the more users there will be, the more likely it is America will stay on the competitive edge of world trade.

--President Bush, March 26, 2004, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Well, goodie for him. Three years after the DSL market started to stagnate, he finally gets around to saying that we need cheap, universal broadband. And his only comment on how? Make sure there are plenty of choices. And he later added, we must not tax access (which I'm sure lots of people would have suggested as a way to make broadband cheaper).

Well, problem solved.

Yeah, right. There are quite a few problems that need to be solved, and I don't really see Bush solving any of them. Japan surged ahead with their "e-Japan" strategy, and now 40 Mbps DSL is available to a very large percent of the population here, with 100 Mbps fiber optic also available to many, and other options like vDSL on their way. This was accomplished at least in part by government action, subsidizing loans for the construction of broadband infrastructure to the tune of a few billion dollars, something Bush does not have us doing yet. American efforts are less orchestrated and more scattershot; a national plan has not yet been established. In Japan, the "e-Japan" initiative aims for universal access of 30- to 100 Mbps by 2005. And since the tech bubble collapse in 2000, the quality of broadband in the U.S. for most has actually fallen, with prices remaining high. It is also arguable as to whether what is provided to Americans today can be called "broadband." The FCC defines that as a 200 kilobit connection. That's about 1/100th of what in Japan today is considered low-end DSL. And penetration in Japan is deeper, too; in 2001, the U.S. had more broadband penetration than Japan by at least a factor of two, but in 2003, Japan swept past the U.S., with more than double the connections, and that trend has likely continued or even accelerated in 2004, with most ISPs offering 40 Mbps+ DSL.

And that's not even getting into problems more pervasive in the U.S., including "last-mile" costs for rural areas, and regulation concerns. If the U.S. is going to get universal broadband, much less cheap broadband, any time soon, Bush will have to get up off his butt and actually do something, as opposed to just making stirring references in speeches to homeowners in New Mexico. But don't count on it--in areas such as education ("No Child Left Behind"), space exploration (the Mars mission), and fighting AIDS in Africa, Bush has talked big but in fact delivered next to nothing. He is the champion of the unfunded mandate. Expect his action on broadband to be the same.

Bush Administration Faked News Videos

I don't know how I missed this story until now. It is related to yesterday's post on the Medicare bill, the cost of which Bush's people lied about in order to get it passed.

But now it seems that while one hand of the Bush administration was busy deceiving Congress, the other was busy deceiving the people, in the shape of fake news video segments. In the videos, "reporters" named "Karen Ryan" and "Alberto Garcia" appear as journalists who praise Bush's Medicare plan. Problem is, they're actors. In one video, actors playing a pharmacist and a customer discuss how great Bush's Medicare plan is, saying that it "helps you better afford your medications." Bush is also shown receiving a standing ovation. These videos were then sent to news stations, with scripts for the anchors to use to introduce them. Many TV stations did exactly that, presenting these fictional reporters and stories as the real thing, with no indication that they were produced by the government. The videos aired more than 50 times across the country as of a month ago.

Now, you see press releases all the time which are designed to look like they came from a media outlet when they really came straight from an interested party. But this goes way over the line. Calling actors "reporters," faking videotaped scenes with actors pretending to be pharmacists and patients, failing to identify them as coming from the government, selling them as real--and just as disturbing, making all of them with federal money, when they are little more than thinly disguised political commercials for Bush.

The Bush administration says this is somehow OK because when they pitched it to the TV stations, they didn't hide the fact they they were working for the government. But using federal money for what are effectively campaign commercials ("publicity or propaganda purposes" is the legal term used) is in violation of federal law. Yet another criminal offense on Bush's record, and like so many others, one that he will never be held accountable for.

Digging an Even Deeper Hole

Well, it's late and I should be going to bed, but I really do want to comment on this.

You may or may not have been following this, but it is wholly possible that President Bush is in deep doo-doo. It has to do with his National Guard records. You see, it has long been known that there is something funny about his service; he was asked about it in 1994, when he ran for Governor of Texas, and in 2000 during the presidential campaign. I guess the Texas election was not important enough to bring enough scrutiny about it, and in 2000 the press and media in general were too busy adoring Bush to pay attention to little things, like did he lie to everyone and act generally like a lout in the past.

But now the atmosphere has changed. With the WMD brouhaha starting to bubble, with the FBI crawling up on several Cheney staffers on the Valerie Plame affair, with the massive spending and staggering deficits, with Bush acting the pro-military hawk and sending our people into Iraq to die and to kill, and with John Kerry being a Vietnam War hero and all--Bush seems more vulnerable in general, but more importantly, his gung-ho pro-war swagger and his new opposition make Bush's National Guard "service" much more relevant.

Bush is trying to bury the National Guard question, but he's not doing too good a job of it. For some bizarre reason, he agreed to be interviewed by Tim Russert. I thought that he and his people had a plan, but apparently they were just stupid. Bush always screws up when facing an unscripted interview, and he did it in that one. He lied several times (such as when he claimed that discretionary spending under his watch is down compared to Clinton, or that he had released "all" of his records about the National Guard in prior campaigns), and came across so badly that even staunch Republicans like Peggy Noonan and Bill O'Reilly are critical of him.

And that statement that he would release "everything" that could show what he was doing during '72 and '73 is what has gotten him into trouble. Apparently he choked and forgot to evade that question, and now an embarrassed administration is trying to backpedal on that after releasing practically illegible documents out of Colorado that see to say that Bush was paid for part of his time there but not all--and the documents still do not show where he served. Nor do they even prove that he served at all--they just show that he was paid for some days of service, but there are large gaps, months long. Not to mention that the records contradict each other in some parts (showing Bush serving during a month on one record, and not on another), and contradict past records in other parts (showing Bush attending drills while he was in Texas though past documents say he was not observed on base for the entire year).

The press has been going relatively easy on him so far, accepting the completely false claim that the records "prove" his service (they only prove that he got paid, and many were paid while dodging service). However, that may not last long: many reporters, smelling blood and fear, are rushing out to see if they can find anything else on the story. For example, while Kerry travels regularly with his "Band of Brothers," not a single Alabama guardsman has stepped forward to say that he even saw Bush. And there may be something to give lie to the released records: Bush is recorded as attending drills just nine days before the election he had come to Alabama for, serving as deputy campaign manager for the Republican candidate. Did Bush really spend that critical weekend of the campaign attending drills? You can bet that reporters are going to check the records on that one.

And to top this all off, Bush still is refusing to sign the necessary documents to release all of his records as he so clearly promised.

So things just keeps getting more intense and mysterious, as Bush and his now-panicking company try vainly to claim that "we've answered the questions! We've dealt with that! Look over there! Pay attention to something else!"

Want to keep informed? Then be a regular visitor to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, and Kevin Drum's CalPundit, where they keep up with the latest and don't shy away from calling Bush out when he so blatantly lies.

This ride may just be beginning folks... Hang on!

A.W.O.L.

Conservatives, it seems, are indignant nowadays because people are actually paying attention to discussion about President Bush's rather inglorious military record. Didn't we dismiss that four years ago, they wonder? No, it might have been dismissed by conservatives, but the question was never answered to satisfaction, and the press pretty much ignored it. That is not, by any measure, a justification for saying that it is irrelevant today. In fact, with Bronze- and Silver Star winner John Kerry looking to be the candidate for the Democratic ticket, Bush's record seems all the more relevant.

While John Kerry, like George W. Bush, was the son of a prominent East Coast family and a Yale graduate, Kerry decided to go to Vietnam the honest way--while Bush, who admonished others to do their duty, got his daddy to pull strings so he could join a celebrity unit of the National Guard, guaranteed never to see combat anywhere. At an age when John Kerry was commanding a fifty-foot gunboat and taking on a Viet Cong soldier, about to fire a rocket at his crew, in personal combat, George W. Bush was sniffing cocaine and then bugging out of service for an entire year or more when they started drug testing in the Guard.

So you can see why, just maybe, Bush's "war" record is fair game again. The question was not resolved, and all the evidence points directly at the conclusion that Bush did indeed go AWOL.

Here are just a few of the facts.

• Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard just 12 days before his student deferment ran out and he would have been eligible for the draft.


• The Guard unit Bush got into was a "celebrity" unit, with sons of two other senators (Bentsen and Towers), sons of oil magnates, and 7 sons of Dallas Cowboys players, among other offspring of powerful and influential people.


• At the time Bush applied, there were 100,000 young men or more on the waiting lists for the National Guard. The wait was usually one and a half years. Bush was accepted into the Texas Guard the very same day he applied.


• Texas Speaker of the House Ben Barnes admitted to receiving a request from a Bush family friend to get Bush into the Guard, and contacted Brig. Gen. James Rose, head of the Texas Air National Guard, to accomplish this.


• Col. Walter Staudt was so eager to take Bush in that he held a special ceremony in which he was photographed swearing Bush in, even though Bush had been sworn in earlier by a captain.


• Bush was accepted for Air Force officer and pilot training despite (a) having no flying experience whatsoever, and (b) scoring an abysmal 25% (the lowest possible passing score) on the pilot aptitude test.


• Bush specifically checked "do not volunteer" for overseas assignment.


• Bush was commissioned as a second lieutenant by "special appointment" by the unit's C.O., despite having no ROTC in college nor having taken the 18 months' of military service or training school--required for any commission except for surgeons.


• Was elevated into the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron over a waiting list of far more highly qualified and deserving pilots.


• Bush "volunteered" for action in Vietnam flying the F-102, but was unsurprisingly turned down because he had only 300 hours of flying time, whereas only volunteers with 1,000 hours flying time or more were accepted.


• The plane Bush was trained in, the F-102, was soon thereafter excluded from any active service, something that had been decided before Bush started training in them.

And then:

• In April 1972, all overseas and stateside military services started instituting drug testing.


• In May, Bush put in a request to be transfered to an inactive postal Reserve unit in the Alabama Guard. One week later, his request was turned down. Bush remained in Alabama, however, and did not return to Texas as was required.


• In August 1972, Bush was grounded from flying for "failure to accomplish annual medical examination." It is not entirely clear exactly what happened--whether he simply did not attend the exam, or if he attended and failed; Bush's service records are still sealed.


• Usually a Flight Inquiry Board is convened when a pilot is suspended, but none was for Bush, suggesting family connections put the kibosh on an investigation.


• In September 1972, Bush was ordered to start service in an active but non-flying Alabama Guard unit. While Bush and his people swear up and down that he served there, no records can be found of this service, and the base's C.O. at the time, now retired Gen. William Turnipseed said, "To my knowledge, he never showed up... I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered."


• In November 1972, Bush finally returned to Houston Texas, but did not report for duty with his home squadron.


• In December 1972, Bush inexplicably began working as a counselor with black youngsters in Houston, in a community service stint--often a punishment for offenders who are let off easy. His public criminal record for that period was wiped clean when Bush became governor of Texas and had his driver's license number changed. (Rumors suggest that Bush was either caught with cocaine or for a second drunk driving offense.)


• In May 1973, Bush was ordered to serve "nine certain duty days" in person at Ellington Air Force Base in Montgomery; he never showed up.


• In summer 1973, Bush was awarded 35 "gratuitous" inactive Air Force Reserve points, which means that he did not attend his duties but was credited with serving anyway.


• Bush applies for admission into the University of Texas law school, and is turned down.


• In October 1973, Bush applies for Harvard law school, and is accepted.


• Bush is granted early discharge from the National Guard so he can attend Harvard.

This is the type of service George W. Bush offered his nation. It is a viable issue not just because it pales abysmally compared to Kerry's record, but because (a) Bush favored the Vietnam War and admonished schoolmates who suggested they would avoid service, (b) Bush harped on his military service in selling himself as a candidate, (c) Bush has been sending tens of thousands of young men and women into battle, where more than 500 American soldiers have died, and (d) Bush still campaigns like he was some kind of top-gun war hero, with the carrier appearance in his flight suit and the surprise fake-turkey visit in Iraq, bringing up both as recently as a few weeks ago in his State of the Union speech as examples of how connected he is with servicemen and -women.

The truth which is revealed in a look at the facts listed above shows that he was far from distinguished in his "service"--that in fact, he was a chickenhawk hypocrite who used family connections to sit out the war and then deserted even that safe and comfy post. It is also of note that Bush scored exactly 25%, the lowest passing score, on his pilot's aptitude test--which seems to suggest that he scored even lower, but was bumped up to the minimum so he could be scooted through. While this is conjecture, Bush's record (both in the Guard and out) is full of suggestive coincidences like this one. In any case--

Bush has no authority--zero, none--to speak as a veteran or for veterans, or to use any such image for his public persona.

I was both surprised, and in a way, not surprised, when I learned today that a co-worker of mine, a Democrat and a very intelligent person, had not even heard that Bush had had any problems in his Vietnam "service." The press covered for Bush in the last election and virtually buried the story. The facts must come out, they must become widely known. Please feel free to re-use and/or reprint this information and distribute it widely. Americans need to know who it is that they're voting for, and who they should most definitely vote against this year.