BUSH: GOLFING WHILE SOLDIERS DIE

Well, our faux "President" is back from his 35 days of R & R while soldiers he sent to Iraq continued to die. Nice work if you can steal it. With the "summer holidays" almost officially over, we begin again to keep you informed about the unbelievably evil doings of America's most corrupt and cynical administration ever--the Bushite junta.

First, we'd like to explain that the Hammer was forced to take an unexpected hiatus for the past ten days or so. But now we are back, and you can expect us to keep you up to date on the Bushista corporate takeover of America.

Today we begin with Dick Cheney's criminal lying to Congress. It turns out that the final report of the General Accounting Office on Cheney's "Energy Task Force" in the opening days of the Bushite takeover--which was really only an excuse for energy corporations turning in their wish-lists to Cheney--shows that Cheney lied to Congress when he told them repeatedly that he had handed in all required information to the GAO, as the law stipulates. Here is the link that shows the case against Cheney:

John Dean: Cheney Lied to Congress

Now lying to Congress is an impeachable offense for an elected official--especially for the official who is the presiding officer of the Senate.

But we don't expect that anyone will blink twice over this affront. Why not? Because the Republican party--the party that stands for unbridled greed, corruption, and abuse of power--controls both houses of Congress, so that no investigation of any Bushite can even be broached; and because corporate conservatives control the media to such an extent that such stories only appear when enough people get the information from the alternative media and demand to see it on the corporate media; and because the ruthless Bushites have scared the crap out of everyone on the inside who might even consider blowing the whistle on their innumerable attacks on democracy by revealing that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson--the diplomat who reported that Bush lied about the Niger-Iraq connection in last January's State of the Union speech--was a CIA agent, thus destroying all the cases she was working on and endangering her life. (If you haven't heard about this story, see this link: Bushites Threaten All Whistleblowers.)

This is the real face of Bushism: not the hypocritical smiles and bald-faced lies they play for the cameras, but the utterly vicious self-interested tyranny that ruins people's lives just to make a point.

The election of 2000 was not just a hiccough in our nation's history. It was the seizure of our democracy by its sworn enemies, who will stop at nothing to hold and maintain power until they have eliminated all the democratic institutions that prevent them from pursuing their megalomaniacal designs for world domination. It was the seizure of power from its legitimate possessors--the people--by the oligarchs, corporazis, and wacko fundamentalists who have transformed government from a flawed instrument to protect the public good into a highly efficient tool of private interest.

Do not be fooled on this point: having grasped the power that they were not given by the majority of the people, they have no intention of giving it back.

Our next post will show how they intend to keep it.

ONE LESS ZEALOT and BAD NEWS FOR BUSH

Our topic of two days ago has particular relevance on this Sunday, since it has to do with religion.

It seems like Alabama blowhard Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has been provoking outrage among right-wing religious zealots for years by arrogantly defying the principle of separation between church and state, has crumbled like a stale saltine. Moore has been puffing himself up for years about his steadfast adherence to the beliefs of nutbag Christian fundamentalism. As recently as Thursday--even after he had been slapped hard by the courts all the way up to the Supreme Court for his outrageous stunt of personally placing a monument to the Ten Commandments in a public area of the Alabama Judicial Building--good ol' boy Roy was still whipping up the troops with his defiance. He intended to go to the Supreme Court again, he was saying, and he would never shrink in defense of Alabama's right to inject mindless supernaturalism into secular life.

But all that was before he understood that he could lose his job.

It turn out, you see, that there is a commission in Alabama that can investigate judges and terminate them for improper behavior. And that commission moved very fast to suspend Judge Roy (albeit with pay) until they can decide whether his defiance of the law and of the legal system warrants his removal from the bench.

Once that happened, good ol' Roy flinched pretty hard. Here is the link to the story:

No More Moore

And here is the opening of the story:

After defying a federal court order and drawing hundreds of cheering Christian activists to this capital city, Alabama's crusading chief justice conceded today and said that he will not try to block the removal of his 2-ton Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Supreme Court building.

"He will not interfere," Stephen Melchior, the lead attorney for Chief Justice Roy S. Moore, said in an interview.

Moore's concession was not enough, however, to stop the Alabama Judiciary Inquiry Commission from suspending him with pay for violating the federal court order. The commission referred a complaint about Moore to the Alabama Court of the Judiciary, which can hold hearings and discipline or remove judges.

So it turns out that all Moore's bluster and defiance was predicated on his ignorant belief that no one could touch him, that he was safe in his position of power and could do what he wished with impunity. Once he understood that he was not invulnerable, however, he tucked his tail under and caved in.

This is typical of conservative "crusaders." They are not really committed to the causes they espouse. They need group-think and social acceptance to maintain their zealotry. They attach themselves to already existing power structures or try to create new ones using money to create propaganda to dupe the weak-willed and uncritical masses to support their ideological ends, even when those ends are diametrically opposed to the good of the very people they dupe. But the crumbling of a "leader" like Moore just underscores the hollowness of their "principles."

The right-wing agitprop machine has been indoctrinating the credulous masses for thirty years with garbage history, garbage political science, garbage religion, garbage economics, and garbage social policy. Little kids will tell you with a straight face that "the Ten Commandments are the basis of our Constitution." Where did they get that from--Lynne Cheney's conservative "history" books for children? Anyone who has read the original documents and the records of the debates leading up to the signing of the Constitution knows that this is not true. If the Bible is a fundamental text for our democracy, it is certainly no more so than many other texts that also informed the thinking of the founders. Indeed, since they were intelligent enough to keep politics and religion separate in their thinking, the critical reader can easily see that the influence of secular authors far outweighs any reliance on "Christian" doctine in the deliberations of the founders. The works of Locke and Rousseau, for instance, are of far more theoretical importance for the founders than their passing references to divine Providence.

But letting the facts molest their prejudices is not the conservative way. Despite their braggadocio and their proclaimed reliance on the Almighty, the only force they conservatives really understand, as Judge Roy demonstrated this past week is power.

And so it is a small victory for sanity and freedom that the power of the Justice system has finally landed on Judge Roy and revealed him to be the empty demogogue that he is.

Now we need to bring the power of decent, intelligent people to bear on Judge Roy's ideological brothers holding the reigns of power in Washington. We the people, who own the offices they have stolen from us, must oust them from their usurped seats of power, and replace them with officials who actually have some concern for the public good.

A small sign of hope on that front too: Newsweek has just published a poll that show a majority of voters against Bush in the next election. By 49% to 43%, more people would like to see someone other than Bush in the Oval Office after the next election. Here is a link:

Voter's Don't Want Bush Anymore

This sign of hope is tainted by the certain knowledge that the Bushites will do anything to "win." Their entire track record testifies to their completely power-centric view of politics. So we fully expect this bad news in the polls to be met by an outrageous attempt to sway the public back to their side.

We, of course, have no idea what it will be. No decent person could even begin to imagine what such thoroughly amoral people will do to save their butts. But it will be something spectacular and utterly evil. and having trained their lapdogs in the press to treat their trashing of law and the Constitution as mere issues of "disagreement" between Republicans and Democrats, the Bushites can be fairly certain that ANYTHING they do, no matter how outrageous, will be minimized by the press, and fobbed off on the people as a reasonable action.

That assumes, of course, that they have decided to conduct their counterattack in the open, using typical conservative mind-control methods. But if, as they so often do, they go underground, expect horrendous and treasonous activities that would make the Nixon crimes look like party games. These people know no law higher than their own self-interest.

CRAZY CONSERVATIVES

For those of you who haven't heard about this loony story yet, let us give you a preview: Right-wing crazy and Alabama judge Roy Moore has been trying to keep the Ten Commandments prominent around the Alabama judicial system for years. Some time ago he caused to be erected a huge granite monument inscribed with the Commandments at the Alabama Judicial Building.

Of course, Judge Moore, like so many conservative religious zealots, does not recognize the separation between church and state (a termed coined by Thomas Jefferson, who sure knew a lot more about the founding of this nation than right-wing lunatics do). So when he was ordered to get rid of this monument to ignorance, he fought it up the chain of the legal system all the way to the highest appeals court in DC, which naturally turned his ignorant butt down and ordered the monument removed by midnight last night. Moore then took his case to the Supreme Court, which yesterday refused to hear it.

Undaunted, Moore refuses to obey the court order. Here is the link to the story:

Alabama Wacko Judge Defies Supreme Court

We heard a defender of Judge Moore's--another religious fanatic with the IQ of a mosquito--trumpeting his support on the radio yesterday. According to this man, the Ten Commandments represent all of morality, and without morality, he said, this nation will crumble, this nation will fall.

This is the same foolish argument made by many anti-federalists at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. Then, as now, the religious fanatics believed--despite all the evidence of history and of daily life--that a show of adherence to "Christianity," however vague or unenlightened that concept might be, is the sole safeguard against wrongdoing in this world. (By the way, most right-wing causes are merely vestigial traces of original anti-federalist objections to the Constitution. That is why so much of conservatism is actually hostile to the Constiution--because today's conservatives are the ideological descendants of those who opposed the Constitution to begin with.)

But the Founders did not believe that religion per se--especially not organized religion--was any safeguard against wrongdoing in society. Here, for example, is a passage from The Federalist, No. 10 that shows how little faith the Founders put in religion as a source for regulation of conduct. Discussing why majority factions cannot be trusted to treat the minority fairly if the opportunity for abuse exists, James Madison says:

If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know, that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combind together; that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.

Years later, in 1829, William Rawle, a prominent judicial scholar of the day, made the following observation on the establishment clause of the First Amendment:

The first amendment prohibits congress from passing any law respecting an establishment of religion, or preventing the free exercise of it. It would be difficult to conceive on what possible construction of the Constitution such a power could ever be claimed by congress. The time has long passed by when enlightened men in this country entertained the opinion that the general welfare of a nation could be promoted by religious intolerance...

Apparently, Mr. Rawle was mistaken. Or perhaps not. He does, after all, speak of "enlightened men," and Judge Moore and his ilk are certainly not enlightened.

But the poor "Christian" zealots regard themselves are being victimized by not being allowed to place their preferred religious doctrines in the seats of power. They pretend that being directed to refrain from imposing their religious beliefs on government is some particular violation of their rights--though the fact is that ALL religious groups are subject to exactly the same restriction. What makes them so special that they shouldn't have to abide by the same rules as everyone else?

We saw a letter to the editor in a local newspaper the other day. It was one of those cookie-cutter letters that conservative groups provide to their less-than-literate constituents in order to bombard the media and create the impression that the conservative contingent is larger than it actually is. The drift of the letter was that the poor "Christian" writer felt oppressed by the fact that some regressive conservative initiative she was supporting (we don't even remember which of the thousands of them it was, since all these letters are so similar--perhaps it was recriminalizing abortion or maybe it was this Ten Comandments thing) had been criticized in some op-ed piece. She complained that "believing Christians" had to endure such criticism simply for living out the dictates of their "faith."

What none of these people seem to understand is the difference between speech and action. No one cares what you think or believe as long as it doesn't affect anyone else. You can sit around and decry abortion, or taxes, or atheism, or anything else as much as you like. BUT WHEN YOU TRY TO FORCE YOUR BELIEFS AND YOUR DOCTRINES ON THE REST OF US, YOU OPEN YOURSELF UP TO RESISTANCE, CRITICISM, AND REJECTION.

The right-wing religious nuts deny that they are intolerant. Of course they do! What else would you expect them to say? But their denial hardly makes it so. Since they intend to subject everyone else to their "morality," they obviously hope to prevent other people from doing anything that they consider "immoral." This seems reasonable to them, because they think that they are just trying to stop bad behavior. But in order for that to actually be the case, THEY WOULD ACTUALLY HAVE TO BE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING THEY BELIEVE, so that they can assuredly discern bad behavior from good behavior. It is only because they believe that they (or the religious belief-systems they have signed onto) are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT that they can imagine themselves not to be intolerant.

And this is the essence of right-wing bigotry and intolerance: the right and its religious allies regard themselves as being absolutely right. Only from such a position could they launch such relentless, vicious, unstinting, unquestioning, uncompromising, and uncompassionate attacks on everyone who stands in their way.

We guess they were never forced to read The Scarlet Letter in high school.

One final thought for today. We think that the reason for the affinity betwee the conservative political right and the conservative religious zealots that has fueled the rise of radical conservatism for the past 30 years is simply this: Conservatism requires uncritical, unswerving followers who will stand in line without asking questions of their leaders, and who will do what they are told so long as they are told what they want to hear. Where better to get such people than from among the ranks of organized religions, where all the members of the congregations are already inclined toward implicit trust in their "spiritual leaders"?

Conservatism needed followers in the 1970's. It had virtually none, since the numbers of people who were willing to "trust" government or political leaders after the disastrous lies of the Johnson administration and the actual crimes of the Nixon administration. So it turned to the sheeplike hordes crowding around the "churchmen," and it found ready made "followers" just waiting to take their marching orders.

But this is the beginning of whole book on the constitution of modern American conservativsm, which is the story of how a few wealthy and powerful would-be tyrants duped a none-too-bright but idealistic has-been actor from California into becoming the figurehead for a so-called "conservative renewal" that was actually nothing but a reestablisment of the government-by-robber-barons that was beaten back in the early 20th century.

But that, as we said, is another story.

BUSH: QUAGMIRE? WHAT QUAGMIRE?

So now we see what W and his handlers have gotten us into in Iraq. American soldiers dying at the rate of one or two a day. Car bombs blowing up UN installations. Military escorts and civilian businessmen shot at and killed. Continuous sabotaging of critical infrastructure.

Are we having fun yet?

But in talking with people on the street, we find that most of them don't have the slightest idea what is going on in Iraq. Perhaps some of our readers do not either. So here are two articles from ABC news today on recent debacles in Iraq:

April 20: Four Soldiers Wounded by Bomb

April 20: Contractor Killed, Soldiers Wounded

And here are two op eds from the New York Times describing the extraordinary success the Bushites have had in turning Iraq into a haven for terrorists--which it WAS NOT before the US invaded:

Stern: America Created a Terrorist Haven

Dowd: Bush Turns Iraq into a Magnet for Evil

Get informed people! You need to go looking for the information, because the lapdog US press will not present the truth on this issue. Everything is going just fine in Iraq if you listen to them. Oh, sure, there are a few regrettable deaths here and there; but these are just minor difficulties. And of course we always knew this would be hard...

What the Bushites have gotten us into in Iraq is another Vietnam situation. Now that the soldiers are there (let's overlook the fact that they were put there by arrogant disregard of international law), we have to do everything we can to protect them. So eventually, just as happened in Vietnam, Rumsfeld will start backing off his utterly cocky estimates of getting Iraq done with almost no forces. He will have to capitulate to putting more soldiers in to protect those already there, because the alternative would be to pull out, which would be an admission of failure--something ol' Rummy would never countenance.

Of course, given the track record of this "administration," they will probably start putting more soldiers in without telling anybody, in an effort to save face through lying. How would we ever know, since the press only report what they are told?

(A sidelight that casts the lapdog nature of the press in relief: The hullaballoo about the "16 words" in W's State of the Union speech only happened because ARI FLEISCHER TOLD THE PRESS THAT THE STATEMENT WAS NOT ACCURATE. Had he not let that slip, the summer news blackout would have begun almost a month earlier than the Bushist schedule. [You know, of course, that the Bushites go off to "the ranch" during August in order to pull the cone of silence even tighter around them than they keep in Washington. In their "press-free zone" in Crawford, they plot their evilest plots out of all contact with anyone who might tip the American people off to what they are doing. Last summer they hatched their plot about how to lie most spectacularly in order to get Americans to sign on to their outrageous war against Iraq. God know what Satanic machinations they are devising to roll out for the September surprise this year!])

But back to the quagmire in Iraq. This morning on NBC's Today show, Thomas Friedman, the much ballyhooed Middle East expert and columnist for the New York Times, who has been a proponent of the Iraq misadventure from the start because he naively bought the Bushite line about "bringing democracy to Iraq," described a recent attack on his convoy from Baghdad to Lebanon along the only road out of the country. It seems his caravan of vehicles was descended upon by a troop of brigands. Friedman and his colleauges were relieved of their money and possessions, although no one was harmed. When Friedman asked American soldiers why they can't do anything about this sort of thing, the reply was "We don't have enough troops."

Friedman went on to say that he doesn't understand what the Pentagon is up to. As far as he can tell, it's some kind of bizarre experiment in trying to determine how much nation-building we can get out of the fewest number of troops.

As usual, Friedman is far too naive in his estimation of the Bushite tyranny. Anyone who suspects any of the Bushites of having the slightest concern for the good of anyone but themselves is sadly, sadly mistaken. This is no "experiment." The Bushistas have no interest at all in nation-building in Iraq. All they care about is getting a military foothold there, from which they can launch further attacks on the surrounding areas. As soon as they think they can get away with trashing their former estimates about doing Iraq on the cheap, they will start sending in massive amounts of troops and armaments, turning all of Iraq into a massive American military staging base for the domination of the Middle East.

Perhaps that's what they're up to in their blacked-out planning sessions down in the bowels of Texas: figuring out how to engineer the excuse they need to go back on their predictions of a cheap-and-easy regime change in Iraq. Don't be surprised if the fall brings some new "massive threat" to our military in Iraq that makes all previous Bushite statements about Iraq "inoperative."

And if W's poll numbers keep dropping, don't be surprised if there is another "terrorist" attack here at home. Nothing like a few thousand deaths on American soil to stoke up support for the Bush tyranny all over again!

CONSERVTIVE MIND-CONTROL

Yesterday's Washington Post carries the following article describing the Republican governor of Alabama, who is now campaigning to RAISE taxes in his state:

Conservative Governor of Alabama Sees the Error of His Ways

The article leads off with a befuddled Alabamian who cannot wrap his mind around a conservative governor who says taxes are not high enough:

Amid suburban sprawl that has obliterated farms and timber stands and even a hideout where the Ku Klux Klan plotted the infamous Birmingham church bombing, Alabama Republican Party Chairman Marty Connors paused on a recent day over hash browns and eggs in a local Cracker Barrel, struggling to make sense of the latest turn in Alabama politics.

"We've got a conservative, evangelical Christian,Republican governor," he said, enunciating each word as if to get his head around the details, "trying to get a massive turnout of black voters to pass a tax increase so he can raise taxes on Republican constituents."

In a stunning subplot to the fiscal crises roiling the states, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley (R) -- who for three terms in Congress boasted that he never voted for a tax increase and was elected governor on a promise not to raise taxes -- is proposing to raise state taxes by a record $1.2 billion, eight times the largest previous increase and almost twice what is needed to close a $675 million budget deficit.

Seizing Alabama's crisis as an opportunity to right historic wrongs, he says the state should act to improve schools funded at the nation's lowest level per child and to lift the tax burden from poor people, who pay income taxes starting at $4,600 a year for a family of four while out-of-state timber companies pay $1.25 an acre in property taxes. The changes would move Alabama from 50th to 44th in total state and local taxes per capita, he says.

"I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad and last in things that are good," an impassioned Riley told a Rotary Club in Prattville the other day as he traveled the state, sleeves rolled up, hawking what he calls Alabama's "Foundation for Greatness."

The reason for Mr. Connor's bewilderment is simple: he has been thoroughly brainwashed by conservative mind-control. Conservatism has all the earmarks of a cult, and its victims are so completely indoctrinated that they literally cannot perceive reality. Instead, they see only the parts of reality that fit into their preconceived notions, and they censor ou or reinterpret the other pats to eliminate the shock of having to grasp the severe limitations of their worldview.

In this case, what does not compute for Mr. Connor is the possibility that a conservative might experience something that could break his mental conditioning. Clearly Gov. Riley has broken through his conditioning and seen at least some of the truth about conservatism, namely, that it is utterly incompatible with a decent life in democratic society. The fundatmental tenets of conservatism simply cannot suppport a good life for a democratic society. But this is beyond the understanding of Mr. Connor, whose conservative-controlled thoughts cannot manage to process the real consequences of conservative beliefs.

Mr. Connor's emphasis on the words "conservative," "evangelical Christian," and "Republican" reveal a mind that does not grasp the negative components of those terms. He cannot see that the deep-seated selfishness of conservatism leads to endless warring between those who currently have property and privileges and those who do not; he cannot see that the xenophobic exclusivism of fundamentalist Christianity leads to distrust and mutual hatred among different religious and cultural groups; and he cannot see that the winner-take-all mentality of Republicans generates a brutish, indecent, and immoral atmosphere in the political life of our nation.

Mr. Riley, on the other hand, seems to have broken through his conditioning. Being governor has brought him face to face with the facts that contradict conservative ideology. Alabama has long been a bastion of conservative programming: from the most died-in-the-wool racial prejudice, to the mindless myth of the American rugged individual, to the most narrow conceivable notion of self-interest, to the lunatic mania for guns, Alabama has a long history of giving itself over entirely to conservative propaganda.

The result has been a state very slow to enter into the spirit of racial equality, unable to bring its citizens together to work on the common good, unable to raise taxes to provide the sort of services that can and ought to be available to citizens of the most prosperous nation in the world, and unable to stem the tide of violence in its cities.

Gov. Riley has simply put two and two together and come up with four: Alabama's rock-bottom ranking in all categories is simply the inevitable result of its conservative beliefs. In order to change the results, the beliefs are going to have to change first. And more power to him, he is taking his clear and simple conclusions to his people. This takes a lot of courage, because he is launching a campaign among mind-controlled conservative zombies who are more likely to take his head off than to realize their own complicity in the mess he is trying to address.

We wish him well. If he can succeed with a benighted state like Alabama, then there is hope that conservatism can be routed everywhere--which is just what must happen if the world is ever to extricate itself from the ancient evils spawned and nourished by conservative ideology.

The ONLY worldview compatible with modern democracy at the current stage of human development is moderate progressivism; that is, a political mindset that looks toward equalizing opportunity and conditions for all the world's people, that seeks out new and innovative ways to break down the control of resources by the wealthy and the privileged, while at the same time recognizing that there is much in the past that can and should be retained as we go forward into a new paradigm where power and privilege are no longer the driving forces of society.

Only this worldview works with modern democracy. That is why all the intelligent industrialized nations have already adopted it.

Perhaps America will adopt it someday too. But only once we have eliminated the morons and conservatives.

BUSH: ANY LIE THAT FILLS THE BILL

We cannot say it enough times: W and his handlers are consummate LIARS. The breadth and depth and quantity of lies they have told and continue to tell, day in and day out, hour after hour, is staggering.

And yet W still has the reputation of an honest man.

HELLO? IS ANYONE AWAKE OUT THERE? DOES ANYONE PAY ANY ATTENTION TO WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING RATHER THAN TO WHAT THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA WANTS YOU TO THINK IS HAPPENING?

Here is a fine article on the seeming paradox of W--that the most corrupt, mendacious, vicious, ignorant, and immoral character EVER TO ATTAIN THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT continues to enjoy the image of a man of integrity:

Rotten Fruit from a Rotten Bush

And here are few salient morsels from the article:

That's Entertainment

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

It's all marketing, image, and entertainment to the Bush Cartel.

Like an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, the Bush Cartel doesn't see any need for the truth to enter into the equation. The question they ask when "rolling out a new product" is how can "we entertain, distract, lie and frighten the American public to allow us to achieve our self-serving goals?" Their goal is really the title of one of Schwarzenegger's more popular films: "True Lies."

Except that there are no "true lies" that can explain the death of a soldier to his/her grieving family and friends. They are just cynically crafted lies that end up in deaths: 260 American soldiers dead in Iraq since the war started, with more than 1,000 wounded (estimate).

And lies may be a form of entertainment on the big screen, but, as a matter of national governmental policy, they are the centerpieces of a morally corrupt executive branch.

Everyone who has half a brain left in America needs to be repeating over and over again to anyone who will listen that W is a liar. There are more than enough web sites out there that will give you sources for that fact. Hell, even the daily news holds hundreds of stories about his numerous prevarications, if you will just look past the front pages, which almost invariably paint him with the colors of honesty.

Just keep telling people that he misled us all about Iraq, or about global warming, or about the California energy crisis, or about the economy. The only way to break through the media hypnotism is to spread the truth mouth-to-mouth.

Maybe then America will be able to wake up from this conservative-inspired nightmare that is killing everything that was once good about this country.

BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED

Today's Washington Post has a huge article detailing the exaggerations, fabrications, and lies told by W and his handlers in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Here is the link (a free subscription to the newspaper may be required to view it):

Bushites Lied to Start War

Here is the brief executive summary of this very long article, which includes a detailed timeline showing how the Bushistas ran a months-long campaign of overhype and distortion to scare the American people into their unnecessary war:

This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal documents and technical evidence not previously made public.

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:

• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.

• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.

• Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.

• In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket."

• The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.

Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term nuclear potential.

"I never cared about the 'imminent threat,' " said one of the policymakers, with directly relevant responsibilities. "The threat was there in [Hussein's] presence in office. To me, just knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a lot of equipment. You can stare at the yellowcake [uranium ore] all you want. You need to convert it to gas and enrich it. That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the people who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and effort involved in producing the nuclear material and the physics package."

No White House, Pentagon or State Department policymaker agreed to speak on the record for this report about the administration's nuclear case.

Will the irrational prejudice to "trust" W--engendered by the conservative-controlled press systematically downplaying the innumerable enormous evils flowing from the hands of the Bushites--begin to bend under the massive weight of evidence demonstrating his ill will, his ignorance, and his cocksure willingness to get Americans killed for nothing?

The current resident of the White House and his puppeteers are not even decent human beings, let alone decent leaders. Their mendacity, their self-interested arrogance, and their utter lack of concern for the public good make them at best caricatures of leaders, and at worst prospective tyrants. If America does not turn against W and his handlers, it will prove thereby that it no longer has the wit or the spirit to retain the inheritance of freedom and justice that was bequeathed to it by its wise and intelligent founders.

BUSH AND THE EVILS OF CONSERVATISM

Today's post will begin by noting yet another treasonous (yes TREASONOUS!) action by the Bushite occupants of the executive branch; then it will comment on the degenerate sort of person that the Bushies are only too happy to have working for them; and finally it will note two articles that reinforce our long-held belief that the conservative media are abjectly disgusting in their mindless adherence to the base ideology they serve.

First out of the box: The Justice Department (i.e., John "Bobo the Enforcer" Ashcroft) has refused to comply with a Congressional directive to provide statistical evidence realting to possible Saudi funding of terrorists. Here is the link:

Ashcroft Spits on Congress

Since the buddy-buddy relationship between the Bushites and the Saudis is now starting to register as yet another scandal for the Bush junta--along with their stonewalling and censoring of the 9/11 report and their lies about pre-war Iraq intelligence--it is beginning to dawn on some of the less than astute politicians who run our country that they are not dealing with an executive branch that has the interests of the nation at heart, but with a group of power-hungry tyrants who will stop at NOTHING to further their aim of world hegemony.

Even some Republicans are starting to come to this conclusion. Here is a link to a story about a Republican Senator who is outraged at Ashcroft's stiffing of Congress:

Collins (R-ME): Justice Department's Behavior "Inexcusable"

It is a mystery to us why so many people continue to be surprised at the Bushites utter disregard for the national interest, for the good of the poeple, for the law, and for the Constitution. The list of their transgressions would be longer than the Bible.

And the kind of person they habitually employ to carry out their dirty work is the lowest sort of character imaginable. Remember the "Terrorist Future's Market" fiasco of last week and the "Total Information Awareness" program of last year that was going to mine internet data and set up secret files on every American that could be detected on the internet? Both of those disgusting if not illegal ideas were hatched in the warped and sociopathic mind of John Poindexter--a great favorite of the Bushies, who was brougt out of retirement just to help them with their agenda of destroying everything good about America.

In case you don't recall, Poindexter was one of the few people to actually be convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal. (There would have been a lot more if Poppy Bush hadn't let everyone off the hook with pardons and such--and Poppy himself might be in the hotseat right now if little Georgie hadn't ILLEGALLY NIXED A LAW that would have automatically opened the papers of the Reagan administration, papers that no doubt show Reagan's and Poppy's thick complicity in the illegal and deadly shenanigans of the Iran-Contra affair.)

This same Pointdexter who is so beloved by the Bushillas is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in South America. Here is a link that explains it all:

Poindexter is Just the Kind of Killer Bush Loves

With this sort of character being typical in the Bush junta, why is anyone surprised that the worst possible evil seems to percolate up from the Bush personnel pile?

The only way that people could continue to find it surprising is that the press has been completely negligent in reporting the horrid record of the Bushites since day one of their occupation of the White House. The lickspittle press corps has abrogated their responsibility to discover and report on the inner workings of the executive branch and has instead kissed up to the Bushites, bowing and scraping for any tidbit of information the tryannical junta deigns to cast at their feet, no matter how mendacious.

As we have long maintained, this toadying attitude is nothing more than the submissive posture of cowering employees fearing for their jobs. Reporters know that their bosses are conservative and that repeatedly handing in stories critical of this ultra-conservative regime will not be looked on kindly by the bosses--even if, as happens to be the case, the Bushites never do anything that isn't harmful to the nation.

Well here is a study that shows just how much the conservative press twists and skews its approach toward their favored politicians. Here is the link (this is a PDF file; you must have Adobe Reader to access it):

Michael Tomasy: Conservative Press Much More Partisan than Liberal Press

Here is the executive summary of the conclusions of the study:

WHISPERS AND SCREAMS: THE PARTISAN NATURES OF EDITORIAL PAGES
By Michael Tomasky
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This study of the partisan intensity of the nation's agenda-setting liberal and conservative editorial pages finds that while the pages are more or less equally partisan when it comes to supporting or opposing a given presidential administration's policy pronouncements, the conservative pages are more partisan-often far more partisan-with regard to the intensity with which they criticize the other side. Also, the paper finds, conservative editorial pages are far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than liberal pages are willing to take issue with a Democratic administration.

This paper looks at the editorial stances during the Clinton and Bush II adminstrations of The New York Times and The Washington Post (the liberal papers) on the one hand and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times (the conservative papers) on the other. It identifies ten issue areas confronted by each administration that are "roughly comparable"-for example, the controversy surrounding Bill Clinton's nomination of Zoe Baird to be attorney general, and the similar controversy surrounding George W. Bush's nomination of Linda Chavez to be his labor secretary. Editorial comment from all four newspapers on this and nine other similarly comparable topics was collected; editorials were given a "score" of being either positive, mixed, or negative; numbers were tallied with regard to how often each of the four papers supported or opposed Clinton and how often they backed or opposed Bush. Finally, certain conclusions about the papers' differing views of partisanship, as expressed on the page, were drawn. In all, some 510 editorials covering a decade were included in the study.

The body of this paper (pages 10-50) will walk the reader through what each newspaper had to say about each of the ten issue areas under study. Appendices at the end will provide the raw numbers. But here is a quick sample of this study's findings:

*The liberal papers criticized the Clinton administration 30 percent of the time. By contrast, the conservative papers criticized the Bush administration just 7 percent of the time.

*The liberal papers praised the Clinton administration only 36 percent of the time (the balance were mixed). The conservative papers, on the other hand, praised the Bush administration 77 percent of the time.

*The liberal papers criticized Bush 67 percent of the time. The conservative papers criticized Clinton 89 percent of the time.

The study finds that there was often a striking difference in tone between the two sides as well. The Clinton adminstration had barely unpacked its bags when The Wall Street Journal referred administration figures as "pod people from a 'Star Trek' episode...genetically bred to inhabit the public sector." That sort of language does not appear on the liberal pages. In sum, the two sides define partisanship quite differently and envision the roles they play as political actors very differently as well.

What can be done to remedy this appalling lack of integrity on the part of conservative newspapers? Take a look at this article from the Columbia Journalism Review:

Center for Journalistic Integrity Needed

Here are two paragraphs that sum it all up:

Beyond aberrations of the [Jason] Blair sort are journalistic excesses with far greater consequences for the body politic. Think Wen Ho Lee. Think Travelgate and Filegate and, for my money, think Whitewater itself, and all the frenzied energy the American press expended on them. Those kinds of excesses, too, also happen when truth can’t speak forcefully enough to power.

From all I’ve read, and heard from Times friends, such speaking was harder than ever there under Howell Raines. But I hope the Siegal committee and the publisher and the next editor will conclude that the problem is not solely a function of personality, and that the structure of the newsroom has put too much power at the top. And that it may be time to swing back the pendulum, creating some entity that has no turf to protect beyond standards and credibility.

Yes, we do need some "entity" that can put a stop to such journalistic excesses as are churned up by the conservative hate-machine. But no such entity will be able to curt that conservative machine as long as conservativism continues to be treated as a legitimate school of thought in American politics. What really needs to happen is that Americans need to wake up to the fact that conservatism is NOT a legitimate political force, but a thorougly vicious, self-centered ideology that aims at nothing less than the destruction of civil society, even though most people infected with the conservative virus are too selfish to see what they are really doing to the body politic.

Integrity will begin to return to American political life when conservatism is extinguished as a political force, and not before.

BUSH: MAKE THEM AN OFFER THEY CAN'T REFUSE

Just thought we'd let you know that your "government" never sleeps when it comes to intimidating anyone who might shed light on its nefarious actions.

It seems that the Bushistas have put the heavy hand on Niger to stop making waves about W's lie in the State of the Union speech about Saddam buying uranium from Niger.

Last week a Niger official denied that his nation had ever conversed with Iraq about uranium, and demanded that the US and the UK reveal their "intelligence" to the contrary.

Shortly thereafter, a US official made it clear to Niger that further such "unhelpful" remarks would not be appreciated.

It seems that Niger will cooperate; it's the world's second poorest nation and stands to lose significant amounts of aid if it crosses "the allies."

Here is the link:

US Continues Intimidation

That's the kind of "leaders" now holding the highest offices in the land: threaten people with destruction if they try to get at the truth.

Real "moral" guy, those Bushites.

MEANNESS AND CONSERVATISM

We know that conservatives hate it when others call them mean. After all, everyone wants to think of themselves as a decent person. But it is very hard for people who are not decent to pass themselves off as decent, except to those who share their indecency and also want to think of themselves as decent.

That is the dilemma of conservatives, whose fundamental orientation in the world centers on selfishness. Now selfishness, as we all know, leads to all sorts of anti-social behaviors. And anti-social people are not well liked by well-intentioned, compassionate members of civil society. That is why conservatives always feel like they are being picked on: their fundamental beliefs are just too anti-social for decent people to accept.

This one fact about conservatives explains the entire past thirty years of conservative politics. Sensing that they would never be accepted into the community of decent citizens, conservatives had to start banding together with others like themselves. They established thousands of small groups of regressive, selfish, embattled, hate-filled, anti-social people. They all tried to pass themselves off as decent; some tried to pass themselves off as MORE decent than anyone else. Some succeeded at evangelizing others; indeed the corruption of youth to the selfish beliefs of these groups is probably unprecedented in the history of our nation. Some of those groups grew and amassed great wealth, because the wealthy are always ready to bankroll any groups that will fight the powers of decency--which is the force used by common people to reign in the might of the well-positioned. This led to further consolidation, further interconnection, and further influence in all aspects of American life.

But now the arrogance, the indecency, the selfishness, and the hatred of these twisted personalities is finally beginning to become too much for the average person to bear. The sight of George W. Bush running this past week's so-called "press conference" was so sickening that the average person is starting to rebel, even if the pundit corps continues to lavish praises on the faux president for treating the press corp like a bunch of lackeys and barraging them with ignorant but blustering non-answers that they grovel to collect.

Here is a report on what swing voters think about our disgusting chief executive and his reprehensible "administration." (Please note: this is a PDF file. You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open it.)

Swing Voters Hate Bush

Here is a salient point from that report:

Overall swing voters are more critical of Bush’s handling of Iraq than is the general population. While the general public leans toward giving him positive ratings overall (49% positive, 33% negative) swing voters lean toward giving him negative ratings (38% positive, 46% negative).

And this:

Among swing voters 52% said the US government was being misleading and just as many—
53%--said President Bush was being misleading when they “presented the evidence to justify going to war with Iraq.” Among the general public 42% said the US government was being
misleading and only 36% said this was true of President Bush.

And this:

Swing voters were far more likely to say that the president knowingly presented evidence that
Iraq has sought to buy uranium from an African country he was knowingly presenting false
evidence. While 27% of the general public said he was knowingly presenting false evidence 43%
of the swing voters felt that way.

A majority of swing voters (52%) said that “the fact that the president presented information that was in fact false” lowered their confidence in the president some (34%) or a lot (18%). Only 40% of the general public felt this way.
Asked, “How do you think the process of rebuilding Iraq is going” 72% of swing voters said that
the operation is going not very well (49%) or not at all well (23%). This is sharply more negative than the 57% of the general public said that the operation is going not very well (44%) or not at all well (13%).

So the all-important swing voters are turning away from W because they see through the hypocrisy and the self-serving macho gesturing. The anti-social hatred and contempt of conservativsm is just getting to thick for the decent majority.

Here is a link to an average person who has had it with the deep mean streak in conservatism. The author is trying to explain to conservatives why, despite their protestations about being moral and upstanding, they are in fact mean and ignorant of that fact.

Is God as Mean as Republicans?

We particularly like the following passage:

You’re mean because lately you particularly hate anyone who doesn’t agree with you and has the nerve to say so. That hatred, I have to tell you, is downright scary, I’m sorry but when I have to be that afraid to talk about how I feel about current world events, then I am starting to wonder what kind of nation you want the United States to be. Wait a minute, I know…..Mean.

So now we are spreading our meanness around the world and you are all out there cheering it on. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said "Kick Their Ass,Take Their Gas." I don’t have to wonder too hard whether the driver was a Republican or Democrat. He didn’t bother to research and try to find the truth about our involvement with Iraq or he would realize that the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9-11. But he was too mean to care. (He also wasn’t very smart; He is not going to "take" their gas. He’s going to pay a very smart price for it to Halliburton and the like at the gas pump.)

So, yes, I’ve come to the conclusion that your Republican party is the party of mean people. I’ve been talking with my friends about this and they admit that they have the same thoughts about you. In case you haven’t noticed, most of the rest of the world harbors similar thoughts about you as well but you’re too mean to wonder if the rest of the entire world might have a point to consider and actually try to figure out why the world feels this way.

It’s better to just be more mean so they’ll be afraid to say what they think.

I use to have faith that Americans were really good people down inside, but with dismay I see that recently the mean-ness is spreading. It’s become downright cool to be mean. The Democrats actually have a stigma of not being mean enough! The real irony is that the Republican Party continuously insinuates that they have some sort of monopoly on Jesus, the least mean person who ever lived.

It is a sad commentary on our times that conservatives are no longer relegated to the shadows where bigotry, hatred, anti-social behavior, parochialism, small-mindedness, hypocrisy, and indecency belong. But perhaps the tide is going out. Perhaps their very success will do conservatives in. One thing is certain: the more meanness they show, the more decent people will turn against them. The only question remaining is: Are there still more decent people than there are conservatives?

BUSH: STILL KILLING THE ECONOMY

Yesterday, the media were reporting the slight decline in the jobless rate as something wonderful for the US and for the Bushista regime. The Bushistas certainly encouraged that spin.

But, as usual with the Bushites, it was not true. The decline was due to people being so discouraged that they stopped looking for work. That's not good.

Untypically, however, the media today were being more sober and reporting both the decline in the rate and the reason for it. Here is the Washington Post story:

Unemployment Rate Drops, Even as Payrolls Fall

And here is the Yahoo News story:

Jobless Rate Dips; 470,000 Stop Searches

The following passage from the Yahoo article shows why the new rate is actually bad news for the country:

The economy lost 44,000 jobs in July. While that's an improvement from the 72,000 shed in June, economists were hoping that positions would actually be added. They were forecasting payrolls to go up by around 10,000.

The jobless rate dipped to a two-month low of 6.2 percent from a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June. The civilian workforce dropped by 556,000 during the month. Some 470,000 discouraged people abandoned job searches because they believed no jobs were available.

And we heard a report this past weekend from two business watchers on the radio saying that investors should not be taken in by the rosy scenarios being painted by the government regarding the great benefits to be gained shortly due to the massive tax cuts. In their opinion, the infusion of money through tax cuts is a complete misguided attempt to get the economy restarted. It is the classic conservatives' ideological response: don't look at the real problem, just do what you would selfishly want under ANY circumstance. In this case, they are treating the problem as though it were caused by a domestic SUPPLY problem: they are pumping money at the corporations and investors to try to get industry to produce more. But, these two said, the real problem is a DEMAND shortage, especially from abroad (where, we note, everybody hates us now and doesn't want our products, due to the outrageous arrogance of the Bushistas). So the infusion of money from tax cuts is going to produce exactly nothing, while the mounting deficit is going to have all the predictable consequences of the same economic disaster brought on by Reagan's and Poppy Bush's massive deficits.

Ahh...isn't it great to live in a country that has its head firmly planted in its colon?