Outside the Spectrum

   So the government of Cairo crushed dissent this week, a reminder of the pervasiveness of crooked governments around the world. President Mubarak was a contemporary of Ronald Reagan. He may call himself a president, but I can’t remember the last time we saw an honest election in Egypt. International observers are not welcome in Egypt, and this guy’s been in power longer than most of our soldiers have been alive.

   I might point out similar efforts to suppress dissent in Belarus. I feel obligated, sometimes, to mention the numerous examples of despotisms around the world when the US rattles its sabre at one or the other for political reasons. Hugo Chavez stuffing the courts in Venezuela with supporters is nothing compared to what dictators like Hosni Mubarak have been doing for a generation.

   Poor Chavez. The guy plays with the laws in Venezuela to allow himself to be eligible for another term, or to appoint supporters to the bench, and all of a suddenly he’s mentioned is the same breath as Iran. Egypt, ever since it recognized Israel, has been a frequent ally of the United States in the Middle East. We host the despots of China in frequent meetings essentially devoid of those pesky human rights issues. We were willing to cozy up to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan when the War on Terror demanded it.

   But woes betide the foolish nation that opposes US economic issues. Saudi Arabia learned long ago that the US was utterly unconcerned with corruption and despotism as long as the victims are your own people. Start opposing US policy in South America, however, and the hate propaganda will begin.

   I especially enjoy the arguments from columnists in The Atlantic and the New Republic who argue that Chavez, in instituting social programs, is just tossing money into “unsustainable” programs. Just wasting his country’s resources.

   This is a statement that reveals the ugly corporatist heart of the “centrist” critics. Programs to help the poor are a “waste.” Even arguing that literacy programs and social medicine amount to investing in human capital fall on deaf ears.

   Perhaps, if the government of the United States was more benevolent, we might approach Chavez and offer financial aid in exchange for control over the direction in which the aid is invested: i.e., into more “sustainable” areas like infrastructure.

   I doubt US investors will bother to do anything more than demonize a man who has thrown a wrench in investor’s attempts to control Central and South American markets. I also cynically wonder how hard it would be for international investors to buy off Chavez. He may be a truly populist leader, but power has a way of corrupting even the most idealistic leaders. If Chavez wants to emulate Fidel Castro and maintain a deathgrip on political power by suppressing dissent how much of a moral backbone can he have to resist the lure of billions of dollars in investments?

   And if Chavez really is some idealistic leader of Venezuela how could he turn down genuine offers to invest in his country with few strings attached?

   I suspect there will be no genuine offers. Easy enough for corporatists to send capital to Vietnam or Saudi Arabia or China. In the meantime their Pravda press can lob rhetorical missiles at Chavez.

   Which raises an ugly question: is it really easier for imperialist elements of our society to wage war on a recalcitrant leader than to woo him or even bribe him? Or is this saber rattling a bluff to set up negotiations?

   I doubt the latter. Cuba really was invaded by a proxy mercenary army, as was Nicaragua twenty years later. US military interventions in this hemisphere are as frequent as the rising and setting of the sun. In fact, there have been 16 of them in the last fifty years.

   I suspect the risk (for the investors) is, and always has been, that capital sunk into a country might be nationalized by a government. But loans can’t be “seized.” Which raises another question: exactly what terms are US investors expecting when they agree to invest in a country?

   It is hard to take the accusations of imperialists seriously when they write polemics about human rights. Nor is it easy to take them seriously when they discuss freedom of the press or of the courts. It is rare to hear the Wall Street Journal stoop so low as to criticize the freedom of the judiciary in a foreign nation. I have yet to see them criticize the rotten governments of Vietnam and Indonesia, two nations in which investors have been deeply involved for years. The volume of the criticism, in any case, has been inaudible compared to that directed against Chavez.

   It is difficult to fault Chavez for threatening to shut down media outlets in Venezuela for producing “treasonous” content. The CIA has funneled massive amounts of money into foreign press outlets in order to help destabilize the regime: the CIA spent more money in Chile during the Vietnam War financing anti-Allende propaganda than both US presidential candidates combined in the 1964 election. The CIA has regularly funded anti-government media outlets throughout Central and South America. Chavez would be a fool not to suspect the same activity in Venezuela today, and to guard against it.

   His manipulation of the courts is harder to excuse. Nor should any excuse be made. But such abuses of democracy are commonplace in the world, even in our own country. Chavez has a ways to go before he deserves to be compared to the ugliest dictators in the world. Our selective perception of this phenomenon serves only the international companies who stand to profit from a pliant government in Venezuela.

   This kind of pliant government is what the US was looking for in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was the kind of dictator we couldn’t work with. Forget about WMDs: that crap was kool aid for the masses, like voodoo economics and The War on Terror.

   The War on Terror that never was, as I and many others have said in the past. The State Department released a report recently. Guess what? Iraq is now a safe haven and a conduit for terrorists, following in the footsteps of Afghanistan, where we have very few troops, where poppy production is up to pre-war levels and where the government in Kabul controls a fraction of the country.

   In domestic news legislators of both parties are falling all over themselves to get in front of the record gas prices and offer solutions about a decade too late. To give democrats some credit, they did propose a lot of these solutions last year, but were blocked by a party-line vote.

   Alternative fuels are not some pie-in-the-sky solution: some of them are based on technology that has been around for a generation. As of right now, Brazil is energy independent, largely because they use fuel mixes that contain 90% ethanol. Brazil, ladies and gentlemen, not exactly a world leader in technology. As Batman’s evil mentor said, “strength is nothing compared to the will to act.”

   But politicians for decades have made only token efforts to reduce our dependence on oil, even though scientists have been saying for years that world oil supply is peaking but demand will continue to explode over the next 40 years. This is, as Thomas Friedman said in today’s New York Times, an iceberg that we have seen coming for miles, but that no one has done anything about.

   This is because the world’s oil companies have no interest in encouraging alternatives to their product. They donate heavily to both political parties. They’ve lobbied governments for years for tax breaks and permission to drill on government land. They bankroll the careers of politicians who promise only small efforts at developing alternative fuels. Judged by market capitalization, Exxon is the biggest company in America. It is joined by three other oil companies in the top ten biggest companies in America. If you don’t think they have a profound impact on US policy you are sadly ignorant.

   Oil companies might be gouging people at the pump, but even if they weren’t the price of gasoline would still be huge. Oil is simply an increasingly scarce resource.

   I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Al Gore, Mr. Environment, had been elected in 2000. It’s impossible to say how much more we would be prepared to handle $70 a barrel oil, but it’s also ridiculous to assert we would be as poorly prepared as we are today after more than five years of the Bush presidency. Our gasoline crisis has been exacerbated, not helped, by our current president. This is what you get when you elect a failed oilman to the presidency.

   As I and many others have written before, the United States needs an Apollo Program for energy independence. We will continue to need this kind of a program when gas prices hit $4 dollars a gallon this summer. We will continue to need this when gas prices reach $5 a gallon in the coming years.

   What we don’t need are more stop-gap solutions and band-aids. What we don’t need is a $100 gas rebate from the federal government, which amounts to two tanks of gas, which will last us one week. What we don’t need to do is drill in ANWR, which, at peak production (many years from now) will only reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 2%. What we don’t need are more refineries: oil companies stopped building them 30 years ago, not because the all-powerful lobby of Greenpeace stopped them, but because they figured it would be most cost effective to simply expand their existing refineries, which they did.

   We need a program to encourage automakers to make cars that can run on ethanol-gasoline fuel mixes that can simply eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. We need to invest in the infrastructure of ethanol refineries and distributors. We need to develop solar power into a technology that can lead to the development of power plants that run cleanly and productively.

   These aren’t far-fetched goals: Brazil’s cars already run on ethanol. The vast majority of our power plants run on coal: it wouldn’t be that hard to replace some power plants that run on oil with solar power.

   This is not the solution of the corporate establishment or their shills in congress. Their solution is laughably simple: drill harder, deeper, and longer. Lift the 19-cent federal tax on gasoline. Throw a Benjamin Franklin at everybody.

   This is basically the oil industry proposing solutions to the problem it created through its proxies. Shame on us for letting it get this far.

   So the party of homeland security caved to industry pressure and rejected a bill to scan all cargo entering the United States.

   This should come as no surprise. Both political parties have been beholden to industry for generations, but only the GOP has completely abandoned all pretense of being a party interested in democracy or the welfare of the country. Bush and the GOP-controlled congress have resisted protecting our borders, ports, and railways for years since 9/11. This story is only the latest chapter of what has happened on a monthly basis for four years.

   I simply shake my head at the sad ignorance of the majority of conservative voters and the rabid blindness of the others. While their party lied to the country, led the nation into an illegal and disastrous war, and then bullied the media and smeared critics they deliberately abandoned any efforts to protect the people of the country from terrorist attack.

   This is treason, not the caustic words of administration critics rightfully lambasting the most brutal and dishonest administration in history. If the honest voters of America knew what was going on, and what was needed, they would purge the Republican Party from existence. They would strip it down to its broken bolts and then unearth the foundation.

   This is a political party rotten to its core, down to its roots, down to the level of staffers for state representatives. If the honest voters of America did what was needed we would not stop until we had torched their houses, shot their dogs, and sent their children off to reeducation centers. We would send librarians into libraries and public records and erase all mention of the Republican Party from history.

   Disgrace is too mild a word to describe the Republican Party over the last thirty five years.

   Remember Ken Starr’s investigations that leaked like a New Orleans levee? Fitzgerald’s investigation is turning in Karl Rove’s direction, but no one knows if he’ll be indicted, because competent prosecutors don’t leak their findings.

   It’s funny how when government is working well it is quiet and unobtrusive.

   But when it’s run by a misshapen mob of festering, scabrous political whores it oozes constantly into the limelight with pork-laden bills, scandals, bungled responses to natural disasters, odious wars, and the opprobrium of the world.

   Take a long look at Human Rights Watch’s lead story, as of today: 600 implicated in the abuse and sometimes murder of 460 detainees, and only 40 have been sentenced to prison time. That’s quite a few “bad apples.”

   If a prosecutor, under normal circumstances, had a conviction rate of under 10% he would lose his job without any further discussion or review. In the U.S. chain of command, however, a 7% conviction rate is okey dokey. Just keep it quiet, boys, despite the fact that the entire world is looking, and is utterly disgusted. This, of course, is not encouraging terrorists at all, either, nor has the indefinite detention of thousands of Iraqis on no specific charges whatsoever, or the 100,000 of them we have killed, or the ruin we have made of their country.

   European Union officials have concluded that over 1,000 flights took place over EU airspace involving rendering terror suspects to client governments for torture in a program that rivals Operation Condor for the scope of its activities.

   There’s a funny post over at Huffington about Tony Snow (BTW, Orifice and O’Liar weren’t offered the job because they are actually major radio and TV polemicists. Snow’s radio show has suffered from mediocre ratings for years). The FOX News/Bush presidency connection is too good to pass up. Check out another good stab at it here.

   Also, more news slips into the mainstream about that whole lied-a-country-into-war thing. At this point in the degeneracy of the United States, however, more evidence from a highly-ranked CIA guy that points out the bottomless depravity of the administration is just not worthy of a headline.

   A little story on the stagnation of the president’s administration.

  

   So Drinky is at a 32% approval rating, putting his popularity with the American people somewhere in the vicinity of the Ebola virus and liquid nuclear waste.

   What really startled me, though, was this stuff from Josh Bolten: “His wall collection of Bush photos, typical throughout the White House complex, is unique. The pictures focus exclusively on Bush's hands at key moments in his presidency. Not a single photo of Bush's face can be found.”

   RED FLAG, wingnuts. RED FUCKING FLAG. First, what is the deal with the cult of personality “wall collection of Bush photos, typical throughout the White House complex.” Secondly…

   You know what, fuck “secondly.” If this doesn’t send chills up your spine your central nervous system has completely shut down.

   What kind of demented childhood do you have to have to think like this? I mean, how many times did your uncle touch you and then cover your sobbing mouth with his calloused hand, holding you close and then gently shushing you as he reassured you that he only touched you because he loved you?

   What boss mounts pictures of himself around the workplace? What spongoid employees mount pictures of their boss in their office? What transdimensionally demented employees just take it to the next level and mount pictures of their boss’s hands “in historic moments” in a wall collection in the office?
     

   Glenn Greenwald has the best series of stories on the Mary McCarthy story, as usual. I won’t rewrite what he covers so well. I must say, however, that I especially enjoy his stab at conservatives like Michael Ledeen who defended Larry Franklin, amusingly enough. I’d like to send a big shout-out to Michael Ledeen.
  
   Porter Goss, Pat Roberts, and the heads of the Bush Administration consider secrecy one of their highest priorities. John Dean wrote an excellent book about it, Worse Than Watergate, though you shouldn’t need his perceptiveness at this point to already know about it.

   I take an extraordinarily dim view of supporters of state torture and other dirty little state secrets. Porter Goss and Pat Roberts are fast headed past the peak of their long and ugly careers, although, as Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond taught us, there will always be ugly little corners of this country that will be willing to send bad senators to congress term after term in the disgusting twilight of their career.

   Rick Santorum is sittin’ pretty at a 39% approval rating. Congratulations, you born-again psycho!

   A great article about history at Huffingtonpost.com. “Deferring to history's judgement is postmodern wussiness at its most perverse.” Choice stuff.

   And another at Alternet. This one is rhetorically shallow and unintellectual—but satisfying nonetheless.

  
  

   The Times says that Tony Snow is in negotiations to become the next new press secretary. It is fitting that a FOX News propagandist of the lowest order will be the Press Secretary in the last, ugliest days of the administration. My only regret is that Brit Hume didn’t take the job.

   Now we might get to see this polemicist on a regular basis. Tony will not do well as the Press Secretary if his entire life preceding this point is any indication. He is a clumsy liar and a shameless smear merchant. By the end of the first month David Gregory will be choking him to death while Helen Thomas claws his eyes out.

   Human Rights Watch has an interesting story telling us we should already pretty much know by now: Don Rumsfeld is criminally culpable in the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, among others.

  Tyler Drumheller, the CIA officer mentioned in James Risen’s latest book, has come forward to say the White House ignored conflicting intelligence in the pre-war period because they already had their minds made up.

   Cheney falls asleep during President Hu’s press conference. A truly amusing photo. There was a time when this would have been considered a big deal. At this point in the degeneration of the US government, however, this little story is just a footnote.

   Slate has a great story about the corporate windfall of many large companies under the American Jobs Creation Act. In this dark chapter in our nation’s history we must be careful of the Orwellian Language of government, especially when the GOP is in charge. “Jobs” is always code for “Profits,” as surely as “states’ rights” is and was code for “segregation and bigotry.”

    Speaking of segregation, Omaha is winding back the clock. Regular readers of this blog will remember my deep and abiding hatred for Nebraska and other plains states. Note that I don’t make these stories up. Nebraska just keeps giving me new reasons to hate their desolate little disgrace to the nation. Read the Guardian article, which is more concise than the NYT article.

   I might argue with the proponents of the latest bill to resegregate the school districts, but their arguments are too obviously tied in knots with red herring defenses of segregation. Our country suffered through enough of those in the 1950s and 1960s. It is far too late to dust off these long-dead reasons for apartheid.

   Speaking of Apartheid, he was on CNN recently and was given a chance to explain his recent assertion that whistleblowers and journalists who write their stories should be jailed.

   Of course, Apatheid’s arguments all beg the question of the legality of the CIA prisons. The prisons are unambiguously illegal and clear violations of several treaties the United States is a signatory to. It is the legal and moral responsibility of all Americans to blow the whistle when they see illegal activities being performed by US government agencies and individuals.

    Nevertheless, Apartheid’s wishes are being carried out. The CIA agent who leaked information to Dana Priest (the Washington Post writer who recently won a Pulitzer for writing about the secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe) was fired by the CIA and the matter has been referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal indictment.

   These actions by the government are necessary, at the very least politically, for an administration that insists that its actions are legal. I wonder how eager the administration is to see these issues get their day in court. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are very good at insisting that their actions are legal. Their track record in the courts is not so stellar, especially regarding detainees in Guantanamo and the detention of Padilla.
  
  

      When Thomas Friedman abandons your cause, you’re in trouble. Friedman today roasted the administration for its insistence on keeping the military option open with regards to Iran. He also criticized the president for keeping Don Rumsfeld in his post.

   The Weekly Standard and the National Review may be publishing articles in support of military intervention in Iran, but that’s about it. When Friedman unleashes a howitzer attack on the administration it serves as more than a red flag: it’s a sign that the administration has already lost the support of the center of the country, the entire center of the country, the center of the country that has been sympathetic in the past.

   This is free-market/globalization champion Thomas Friedman we’re talking about. A guy who, a year or two ago, seemed like a shill for neocons.

   Some of his criticizisms are truly choice: “…the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran…I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers.” He goes on, “If ours were a parliamentary democracy, the entire Bush team would be out of office by now, and deservedly so.”

   He insists that “at a minimum” Rumsfeld should be removed to provide more competent leadership in the Department of Defense to allow the US to have a good option with regards to military force.

   Of course, that isn’t going to happen, which he acknowledges. He maintains this is because of the administration’s refusal to remove people who make mistakes, but I and many others take a darker view. This administration argued that it needed the option to torture detainees. That was no “mistake.” The lack of control of Iraq that helped the insurgency might have been a mistake, but it was a mistake shared by all the top members of the administration. The president is the Commander-in-Chief of the military, not Don Rumsfeld. If Bush was really suddenly concerned with taking responsibility for his actions and holding others accountable also (for the first time in his life) he would fire half of his cabinet and then resign.

   It is no “mistake” that this administration’s priority from day one has been to minimize mistakes, lie about the facts on the ground, and hold on to power and get re-elected. Firing Rumsfeld, at this point, would be an effort to throw a subordinate under the bus to preserve the existing power structure mostly intact.

   Despite superficial changes in the White House the main players all remain. Even calls to fire the worst Secretary of Defense in living memory fall on deaf ears.

   This is one of the hallmarks of this presidency. When Jimmy Carter was facing public opprobrium like Bush is now he asked for the resignation of his entire cabinet. When the Iran-Contra Affair damaged Reagan’s presidency he fired his National Security Advisor implicated and several other White House officials. The Secretary of Defense resigned shortly thereafter. The Bush administration will make no such concessions, even if only to save face.

   It shouldn’t be a surprise, at this point in history. Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld have been at the epicenter of the ugliest parts of this presidency, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was the guy behind relaxing torture standards, mismanaging the military occupation, and doctoring intelligence, most of which goes through the Department of Defense, not the CIA. Rumsfeld’s pentagon was the institution that gave a voice to the lying expatriates of Iraq before the war, after they had been discredited and dismissed by the CIA.

   It is fitting that he should stay on to the bitter end. It will not be pretty one, either.

   This administration’s criminality is slowly becoming part of historical record, despite the violent thrashing of right wing blogs and periodicals. Conservatives are abandoning the administration. Journalists are winning Pulitzer Prizes for writing exposés about illegal government programs like the NSA wiretapping scandal. Rolling Stone’s cover asks if Drinky is the worst president ever. Harper’s recent cover advocated impeaching Bush. The New York Times editorial page flagellates the Bush administration like no other I have ever seen. Lawsuits against the scandal continue in the courts, and democrats are threatening to take control of the House in November and gain control of the investigatory powers of the House Judiciary Committee.

   Justice is slow in coming, however, due to the stonewalling, criminal complicity, and obstruction of justice of the Republican Party.

   And just to give Drinky a kick in the ass on my way out, here are a few quotes from history teachers and professors about Drinky’s aptitude:

I've taught U.S. History for 21 years and this clown puts Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, and Warren G. Harding to shame. At least they had the wisdom to do NOTHING (other than humiliate themselves).
In 2004, George Mason University polled 415 presidential historians and found 80 per cent considered Bush's first term a failure. More than half considered it the worst presidency since the Great Depression. More than a third called it the worst in 100 years. Eleven per cent said it was the worst ever. Robert McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College in Mississippi, says scores would likely be worse if the poll were repeated today. "When I filled out that survey I said Bush was the worst since Buchanan [1857-61], but things have gotten worse and now I'd have to consider him the worst ever," McElvaine says. "If you look at the situation he inherited, and the situation following 9/11, he had great opportunities and he basically squandered them. He has put the future of the country in a much more precarious position than it was when he became president."

   Bill Bennett was bloviating again recently, as covered by Glenn Greenwald.  

   One thing that always touches me about Greenwald is that this guy never stops reading the ugliest right-wing blogs, like Powerline, and carefully refuting their arguments step by step. I don’t bother except when I hear Powerline’s opinions echoed in more widespread media, because to refute every obviously disgusting and ridiculous argument of theirs would be a full-time job.

   Bennett is truly as vile a commentator as they come, one of the seemingly infinite political vermin that were spawned in the bowels of the Reagan presidency and set loose to scuttle across the political landscape and dig a new burrow in the radio market.

   If the FCC were to actually start punishing broadcasters for lying on air Bennett would be among the first to be marched to jail.

   Another Palestinian suicide bomber struck yesterday, killing 9 and injuring many more in Tel Aviv.

   It made the front pages of USA Today and The New York Times, of course. As before, I question if the Israeli reprisal will.

   Israel is a nation of 6 million people. My own city of Chicago has three million people. The murder rate in Chicago has remained relatively stable for many years: about 600 victims of murder die in Chicago every year. In the last intifada 1,000 Israelis perished, compared to about 3,000 Palestinians. The intifada lasted for several years.

   Extrapolate the City of Chicago to six million people and you will get 1,200 murders a year, or 3,600 over three years.

   I think you understand where I’m going with this argument.

   Israeli’s murder problem gets a lot of press in the United States. Israel has said for many years that it will not return the lands it conquered in 1967 until suicide bombing stops.

   Of course, Israel’s governments have always said, for forty years now, that they will never return all of the land they took.

   But even beyond that there have been many years over the last fifteen or so in which Israel both has been recognized by the Arab and Palestinian governments and in which suicide bombs have been very rare, years in which there was no active intifada. Israel still hasn’t ceded the land.

   Not that any of that is relevant. Arguing that because your opponents are behaving lawlessly you have the right to behave lawlessly is a pathetic Tu Quoque argument that I tire of even having to refute. It’s like vigilante police arguing in court that because they’re fighting criminals, they have the right to beat up suspects in interrogation rooms.

   But Israel doesn’t need to use good arguments because she has more guns than her neighbors, courtesy of the United States. Israel hasn’t moved off the land in 40 years, all the while making one bad argument after another. The arguments have never sold in the UN or in the international community. The guns have made a difference.

   Israel has long been an American military base in the middle of Arab lands. Her lobby in this country is impressive, but it takes more than a single lobby to control the US government. The US defends Israel because it is in our national interests to do so. Of course, our “national interests” have been defined by successive presidents who saw geopolitical power as more important than human rights, common decency, or international law. These presidents thought Vietnam was a war worth fighting. These presidents thought the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was worth supporting, as was the Hassan II monarchy in Morocco, as was Suharto in Indonesia.

   If the people of the United States could actually hold presidents and congresses accountable to make them actually respond to the will of the people and our real national interests Israel would cease to be so brave in the face of the condemnation of the world.

   This prospect, though unlikely for decades, is very possible. As long as Americans remain ignorant to the situation in the Middle East our politicians will continue to “Behave like wolves,” as our founding fathers said of political leaders who rule over ignorant people.

   Americans, sadly enough, have never taken the time to care. Even when terrorism put Israel at the heart of the press attention of the western world on a regular basis in the 1970s and 1980s America still didn’t reexamine its relationship.

   It might change American opinion if newspapers covered IDF strikes as assiduously as they cover the victims of suicide bombers. It might help if honest editorials were written. I can’t think of any city outside of New York where a newspaper honestly has to pander to regional interests in covering suicide attacks and ignoring reprisals to sell newspapers.

   US governments have shown in the past that they will behave horribly in a very public way right up until people in the United States start demanding change. The Vietnam War was one example of that. So was segregation. Further back in our history, women’s right to vote was another. These positive changes didn’t come from far-sighted and mysteriously beneficent leaders making changes: these changes came from pressure from the bottom up, from protest, from votes, from letters.

   Unfortunately, Israel is a different case. Those previous examples were about people living in the United States protesting conditions they had to live under, things that directly affected their lives, like the immigrant protests recently: the foreign policy of a foreign government is not one of those things.

   At least, it wasn’t until September 11th. Instead of shedding our troublesome alliance with Israel and the despotisms of the Middle East the United States invaded two countries and is now rattling its sabre at a third. This is not responsible foreign policy.

  

    

   So now there are five. Five generals have called for Rumsfeld’s resignation.

   Lt. General Greg Newbold, former director of operations at the Pentagon’s joint staff; Paul Eaton, a Major General who was in charge of training the Iraqi army in 2003 and 2004; General Anthony Zinni, former commander of CENTCOM; and Maj. General John Batiste, former commander of the 1st infantry division in Iraq.

   John Bastiste’s story is especially amazing. The Washington Post states Batiste's comments resonate especially within the Army: It is widely known there that he was offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No. 2 U.S. military officer there but he declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld.”

   Ouch. Jesus God, when your potential top commanders are turning down major promotions to be the No. 2 ranking officer in Iraq you have a problem with your military.

   These are high-ranking generals who were intimately involved with the war planning. With regards to Batiste, the Post says that “Also, before going to Iraq, he worked at the highest level of the Pentagon, serving as the senior military assistant to Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense.”

   Zinni is a four-star general. You just don’t get any higher than that. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, voiced his disagreements about the number of troops we were using very publicly, in front of congress. Shinseki was rewarded by having his successor named over a year before he retired, undercutting his authority and ushering him out the door. That would be the Chief of Staff of the Army, in case you missed it the first time. The highest-ranking army officer in the United States. He was right, as we all know now.

   Another Major General, Riggs, has added his voice to the chorus.

   Rumsfeld defended himself by saying that he serves “at the pleasure of the president” and asserting that there are “thousands” of retired generals and admirals out there so that “two or three or four” (try five) calling for his resignation is no biggie.

   Rumsfeld does indeed serve at the pleasure of the president. It is true that being the SECDEF is not a popularity contest. The first part of his assertion is true.

   The second part is flatly false. These men aren’t brigadier generals in charge of a little base in Germany, for God’s sake: these are the highest-ranking generals in the Army and Marines who were at the epicenter of the decision-making process, with the exception of Zinni, who retired in September 2000.

   I mean, Newbold was a Lt. General, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s bigtime. He retired in October 2002, “in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy.”

   No other Secretary of Defense in history has had to deal with the level of discontent among his most senior officers. Even Macnamara didn’t.

   Rumsfeld has said that he has offered his resignation to the president several times. It should be accepted. While changing Rumsfeld by itself will be a superficial change, he is one of several who simply must go. He has been at the epicenter of the decisions to manipulate intelligence, to invade Iraq with too few soldiers, detain suspected militants indefinitely without charges, and use “forceful interrogation techniques” against detainees.

   This is a disastrous and criminal record.

   In other news, good story at Gilliard about bad reporting on Iran’s nukes…  

   The history of Israel’s reemergence, while long enough to fill volumes, can be summarized this way:
  
   Romans crushed the final Jewish revolt in 135 CE. The Jewish population was reduced to a fraction of its former total and Israel ceased to exist as a political entity.

   For centuries and centuries the region was controlled by the Romans, Byzantines, and finally Muslims in the 7th century. By 1517 Ottomans conquered the area. Around 1800 Napoleon conquered Egypt and gave control of the region to Egypt, but Egypt returned control of the region to the Ottomans in 1840.

   The first Zionist settlement was established in 1882. Britain seized control of the region in WWI under the campaigns of Lawrence of Arabia. With the Balfour declaration of 1917 Britain indicated that it intended to support a national Jewish homeland in Palestine. Britain took control of Palestine in 1918.

   Jews began to migrate to the region in large numbers. Hitler’s persecution of Jews in Europe greatly increased this migration in the 1930s and 1940s. Relations between the Arabs and the new Jewish immigrants in the area deteriorated.

   The UN voted to partition Palestine in 1947.

   The population of Israel has now grown to 6 million people as of today, 2006.

   Arabs see the state of Israel as a legacy of colonialism. Muslims have controlled the area for 1400 years. Ottomans kept the region of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan as one nation for 400 years.

   Then, Zionist settlers began to migrate in as of 1882. For 35 years, from 1882 to 1917, their population grew steadily. Then a colonial power (Britain) took control of the region and greatly increased the number of Zionist settlers that would be allowed to immigrate to the region, to the consternation of the Arabs. For 31 more years immigrants flooded the region, and then Israel declared it independence with the support of the West but without the support of any of the nations in the region.

   The strife that has ensued is very understandable in the light of history. A people who had controlled the region under one culture for 1400 years and one government for 400 years was suddenly faced with the actions of the West. For three generations, a heartbeat from a cultural and historical standpoint, Zionist immigrants flooded the area. And then it declared its independence from the region.

   Arabs see the state of Israel as a product of colonialism. Their borders, drawn up by colonial powers in the twentieth century, are artificial borders that have never made any sense from a cultural perspective. The borders were placed where they were simply to denote different zones of control by western powers.

   Today Arabs in the Middle East live in nations whose borders were drawn by western powers. The people of the region have shared a common language and religion for over 1000 years.

   The Zionist migration to the region and subsequent independence looked like a crusade to a people who have largely considered themselves one community. It would be like Mexican immigrants concentrating in southern California and suddenly declaring themselves an independent nation. America wouldn’t tolerate it, even if a score of nations in Central and South America recognized the new state.

   The Jews of Israel are a castoff of European and Middle Eastern nations as surely as the Palestinians are a castoff of Arab nations. The West was happy to shed its Jewish population and then advocate for their homeland in a far-off region.

   It doesn’t help that the Zionist’s holy land that they seized happened to also be a place revered by Muslims.

   Israel asserted it right to exist in subsequent wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, and won all the wars with massive military and financial aid from the West. The US has given nuclear arms to Israel, the only nation in history to receive a gift of nuclear weapons from another, and a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

   In it conflict with its neighbors Israel has been condemned hundreds of times by the UN, the most of any nation in history. Israel has repeatedly violated the sovereignty of its neighbors. Israel started the 1956 and 1967 war, invaded Lebanon in 1982 and 2002, bombed Iraq in 1981 and Tunis in 1985.

   Palestinians have resorted to acts of indiscriminant anger and utter desperation, including suicide bombs and airline hijacking, neither of which have proven effective at altering Israeli policy. Several times more Palestinians have died in Israeli reprisals than Israeli citizens have died from Palestinian terrorism.

   Arab nations have come to terms with Israel as a nation. This would have averted the 1948 war. Unfortunately, Israeli has moved the goalposts. Now Arabs not only have to deal with Israel sitting on their holy sites but also the fact that Israel has settled land it conquered in 1967 and has refused to return about half of it for forty years.

   I suppose I must mention that seizing land in the course of a war you start is illegal under international law. Israel has defiantly stood atop conquered land for 40 years.

   Israel is a little frankenstinian monster spawned in the laboratory of the British Empire. The Arabs don’t have the strength to defeat Israel in war. Perhaps that 3 billion a year we give them has something to do with it.

   It is long past the time when Israel needs to be called to the carpet. Britain and the United States need to address the Israeli Prime Minister very simply and say, “Ehud, we need you to get off of the land your nation seized in 1967. You’ve been in standing on other people’s land for 40 years. We’ll give you a generous timetable, but if you stall, bicker, or balk we will send the U.S. army to escort you off the land. That means East Jerusalem, too.”

  

  

   I recently came across some anti-Israeli language from Michael Scheuer, excoriated by some hack at the Weekly Standard, a publication that really should be dead to me.

   No other nation on Earth has received as much money from the United States over the last fifty years.

   This simple fact is not hard to understand.

   So why is the most powerfully funded U.S. ally on Earth a nation in violation of more UN sanctions than any other nation on Earth?

   If you’ve read my posts you already know the answer. Geopolitical politics. Oil. The world’s energy supply. Israel is in the middle of it. When push comes to shove Saudi Arabia isn’t going to stick with the US in its Middle East policy. Israel will.

   So let’s take a look at the nation in violation of more UN resolutions than any other, shall we? Let’s take a look at the number one reason Arab terrorists target the US.

   Ariel Sharon was the Prime Minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006. When he was a young man in the early days of Israel’s existence he headed Unit 101, a military unit that conducted reprisals against Palestinians including the Qibya massacre.

   I have already written of my distaste for Ariel Sharon. He was a terrorist.

   Yitzhak Shamir was Prime Minister of Israel from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992. He was born in Poland in 1915 but emigrated to British-controlled Palestine as a young man. He joined the Irgun, an organization of Jews dedicated to the liberation of their people from the British Mandate. When the Irgun split in 1940 he joined the most militant faction, which he called “Lehi.” He was one of its three leaders.

   Lehi was responsible for the 1944 assassination of Britain’s minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne; an assassination attempt against the High Commissioner of the Mandate in the same year; and, in 1948, the assassination of the UN representative in the Middle East.

   Shamir, thus, was a terrorist. This terrorist became the leader of Israel.

   Lehi was incorporated into the IDF when Israel was formed.

   Shamir was preceded in the Prime Minister’s post by Menachem Begin, who was Prime Minister of Israel from 1977-1983. Begin joined the Irgun in 1942 and was its leader by 1947. He was a member of the Irgun when it planned the assassination of Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary. In April of 1948, when Begin was its leader, Irgun was the primary participant in the Deir Yassin massacre. Begin founded what would later become the Likud party in Israel.  

   So Begin was a terrorist.

   It is amazing how skewed histories of the Middle East are in this country, how Palestinian terror attacks are covered in exquisite detail while the sordid history of Israel is covered...well, not at all.

   I’ll keep this post short, but just remember the way that Israelis behaved when they were an oppressed minority. Many among them chose the same dark path that many Palestinians choose. Israel should be thankful the British were kinder taskmasters than they would become.

  

   So Iran made a big deal about the fact it has enriched uranium.

   Literally and figuratively, this was theater. They enriched uranium to 3.5 percent, not the 80 percent they would need for weapons-grade stuff. They also have only enriched small amounts of uranium in a lab. They will need to manufacture it in massive quantities to make a single weapon.

   Iran is still years away from a weapon. I’ve heard 10 years thrown around as an estimate.

   I suspect this theater was Iran’s government figuratively thumbing its nose at the West while simultaneously boasting to the people of Iran about its accomplishment. Iran is not significantly closer to having nuclear power or a nuclear bomb than it was last week, as a European diplomat who monitors Iran’s nuclear program said to the New York Times.

   Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which means that it can legally produce nuclear reactor fuel, build reactors, and receive technological assistance for doing so in exchange for forgoing the development of nuclear weapons.

   Few people on Earth actually believe Iran has no intentions of making a bomb. Many signatories to that treaty have violated it, including India, Pakistan, and North Korea. The United States itself has violated the treaty by providing Israel with nuclear weapons. I would be shocked if Iran, suddenly, became one of the most restrained nations on Earth and decided to abide by the treaty.

   The language of the Bush administration today regarding Iran is eerily similar to its language regarding Iraq in 2002. “All options are on the table.” “We’re seeking a diplomatic solution.”

   I think, by now, we all know just how patient the Bush administration is with diplomacy.

   Nevertheless, newspapers and periodicals across the country have printed articles virtually unanimously dismissing military strikes as a good option. I’ve read these articles in periodicals like the American Conservative and the Atlantic, in newspapers like the New York Times.

   But journalists don’t work at the Pentagon, and Bush doesn’t listen to journalists or world opinion. Seymour Hersh reported that his sources tell him that planning military strikes against Iran has moved past the preliminary and contingency stages into the “operational” stage. Hersh is the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who first broke the Abu Ghraib scandal.

   The military planners who thought they could hold Iraq with 140,000 troops now think they can handle the blowback from military strikes against Iran.

   Time and time again US leaders have adopted a belligerent foreign policy that has made US interests more endangered around the world. We know from declassified KGB documents that the abortive Bay of Pigs fiasco enraged the KGB and led directly to them redoubling their efforts at subverting US interests in the western hemisphere, including giving aid to Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua and coordinating an assassination of a US diplomat in Canada with separatists in Quebec. When the US decided to try its hand in Asia China checked the advance of US forces in Korea and then Vietnam, at a great and bloody cost to our country.

   A century of supporting autocratic regimes and helping suppress dissent in Central America, South America, and the Middle East has left the majority of the people in those regions with little but hatred for the United States. I doubt the Vietnamese or Indonesians have many fond memories of US involvement in their country. This is why many of these people cheered on September 11th.

   The ill will of the world has manifested and will manifest itself in very concrete ways. September 11th was one of those ways.

   Iran’s reaction to Israel bombing Iraq’s Osirak Reactor in 1981 was to ensure that its nuclear program was dispersed into dozens of sites around the country, many of them buried, so they would be extremely resistant to bombing. Three years after the US launched a pre-emptive war against Iraq, and Iran is now making their nuclear program very public and a very high priority for their government. North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons.

   It is not “wild speculation” to suggest that these nations have suddenly put a high priority on acquiring a nuclear weapon as a deterrence to a US invasion. It is the opinion of many if not most diplomats and foreign policy experts.

   It is also not “wild speculation” to suggest that one big reason countries in this hemisphere have cracked down on free speech is because the CIA has repeatedly subverted media outlets in their countries to help subvert their government. Hugo Chavez has made it a crime for media to broadcast “treasonous” content, which may sound like media intimidation until you realize that many media outlets participated in his temporary overthrow in 2002. The CIA has pumped money into media outlets around the world. These actions were a precursor to the CIA tossing the democratically-elected Allende government in Chile in 1973.

   President Bush has already asked congress for something like 86 million dollars to “encourage” dissent in Iran. That would buy you a few radio stations in a country that was foolish enough to sell them to you, but I don’t think the mullahs are that stupid. That money will worm its way into Iran in more subtle ways.

  

   This is what you get when you’re a criminal.

   Make no mistake, I’m not gloating. I’m not happy when an administration has sunk so low in the public eye that the vice president is booed vociferously when he throws out the first pitch at a baseball game.

   It is clear that when members of the administration venture out of their bubble world the reception is not polite. America is not a fan of Dick Cheney, and they’re not too keen on his boss, either.

   I’m familiar with some low-brow political pundits on the right who would gloat is the situation was reversed, and a democratic vice president was jeered at a baseball game. I recall their crowing from 2004, when “the people” had spoken, and as Rousseau said, Vox Populi is Vox Dei. We’re in the majority, thus we’re right. We “won.” “Get over it.”

   Majorities change, and you certainly never “won.” We all lost. Our world is more dangerous, we are a poorer nation, and we are reviled around the world. That is the result of the Bush presidency. I don’t see many “winners.”

   There is an amusing bumper sticker out there: “There are only two kinds of Bush supporters: millionaires and fools.” How true.

   It is, unfortunately, becoming less and less true. Even the millionaires are living in a country and a world that is more dangerous than before. I’m not sure even they would say their tax cuts have been worth it.

  The simple truth is that our world is becoming more dangerous, and we are becoming a more attractive target because of the foreign policy of this administration. Terrorist attacks in Iraq and around the world have increased steadily since 2000, as I have previously written. The US invasion of Iraq, the torture and indefinite detention of militants, and the bellicose foreign policy of the administration have enraged not only Arabs but even our traditional allies in Europe.

   It is foolhardy to ignore the clear warning signs all around the world.

   Neocons and their ill-informed offspring love to point out that 9/11 happened before we became so offensive. That’s true, and I fault Clinton and Bush for not seeing the danger signs before the attack. Clinton let CIA assets in Iraq dwindle down to next to nothing, an unforgivable lapse of intelligence strategy. Michael Scheuer and Paul Pillar, two famous former CIA analysts, have been quick to point this out, as has Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar. Bush ignored intelligence briefs on this subject, and he was not helped by an FBI that had clear intelligence on this matter but let it get lost in beaurocracy.

   The problem since then has been that our foreign policy has exacerbated the problem. If you don’t think that rage on the Arab Street will lead to more terrorist attacks, you are delusional. London and Madrid have already suffered because of this myopic worldview.

   This worldview is not based in reality, but instead on wishful thinking. By asserting that terrorists are going to attack us anyway, militants can justify horrible foreign policy.

   An offshoot of this stupid thinking is the assertion that terrorists simply hate us for who we are. They hate our very existence. This is a very convenient worldview, as it justifies a foreign policy that takes no account of its negative impact on the rest of the world.

   Viewing terrorism outside of its social and historical context is simply insanity. It’s true that poverty doesn’t cause crime, but it certainly is correlated with crime. Nations with a colonial foreign policy are victims of terrorism. When was the last time Norway was targeted by terrorists? How about Switzerland?

   Terrorists don’t hate westerners for “who we are.” They, in fact, are happy to give their reasons for their hatred. Bin Laden cites US support for Israel and Arab autocratic governments like Saudi Arabia. He also cites the presence of US troops on Arab soil as evidence of US colonial ambitions.

   How does one set of people hate another group with a murderous rage for no other reason than a licentious culture that is too permissive of things like nudity, capitalism, and vulgarity? Are there any American terrorist groups that are driven to a frothing rage at the thought of Amsterdam?

   It doesn’t make any sense because it’s not true. Our foreign policy has made us a target, and it is making us a bigger target every day.

   This is something that successive US governments have never cared about. For generations, our leaders just didn’t care about democracy or what people in the Middle East thought about our foreign policy. We overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953 and then trained the Shah’s SAVAK secret police as they crushed dissent in Iran. We have maintained friendly relations with the corrupt monarchy in Saudi Arabia for generations, selling them arms in exchange for oil. We have pumped billions of dollars every year into Israel despite the fact that it is in violation of more UN resolutions than any government on Earth. We have made an ally of successive military governments in Turkey despite their human rights abuses and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Kurds. We supported Saddam Hussein, too, even when the world knew he was a despot, until he became too aggressive and dangerous even for us. We continue to maintain friendly relations with smaller despotisms in the Middle East like the U.A.E., just as we have for years and years.

   This has never changed, despite a variety of presidents in the White House. Even Jimmy Carter reserved his criticisms of the Shah for private meetings.

   We have a responsibility to fundamentally change our foreign policy, not for the benefit of terrorists, but because it is the right thing to do. We have a long and ugly history of praising democracy at home and exporting imperialism abroad. I no longer have an interest in the justifications of supporting dictatorships for “stability,” as George H.W. Bush justified his support of Saddam Hussein right before the Gulf War. Let the despotisms be overthrown. When they have been overthrown, as in Nicaragua in 1980, what replaces them is always better. With help from the west these nascent governments will develop into decent central governments. More importantly, we won’t have blood on our hands.

    And in other news…

    Knight-Ridder has an article that echoes my claim the other day about the coercive effects of selectively leaking classified intelligence to the media.

    Scotty McClellan has degenerated to contradicting himself within nine minutes of making a statement.

    Rumors of Scotty’s departure abound. I guess no one in America really cares that the president has to get a new Press Secretary every three years because even the supine corporate press simply get sick of being lied to so obviously. I can’t remember when a press secretary has been as regularly excoriated by the press while continuing to stonewall inconvenient questions and misrepresent the truth.

    Regarding leaking information, Larry Johnson rakes the administration over the coals about the selective leaking of classified intelligence to reporters.

    This is related to his assertion, backed up by Murray Waas, that Bush was given information about the dissent in the Intelligence community regarding WMDs in Iraq but he simply ignored it when he gave his speeches saying there was “no doubt” Iraq had WMDs and when he cited the aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium “evidence.”

    It really shouldn’t take the reporting of Murray Waas to tell us that Bush was aware of the fundamental flaws in the intelligence he cited to bring a nation to war. You’d think he would study up on that subject.

    This is just Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra all over again. Oliver North defended himself by saying that he was “a pawn in a game played by giants.” How many of those giants ever spent time in jail? None. Even Ollie got a slap on the wrist, followed by a dismissal of the charges due to do his congressional testimony. So much for accountability.

    When the “giants” learn that they can get away with lawbreaking they will do it over and over again, using the same tactics: throw the NSC staffers under the bus and have the leaders claim ignorance of their own policies.

    So now, according to conservatives like Pat Roberts and John McCain, the WMD debacle was the result of a “massive intelligence failure.” Blame the CIA.

    Poor Tenet. He had to play politics and make concessions endlessly to keep his job when Bush took office, and then he had to bow to interdepartmental bullying from Don Rumsfeld, who was trying to take operations away from the CIA and put them in the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense. And then, on his way out, he got a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a kick in the ass as his organization was blamed for the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history.

    Never mind that the Bush Administration pressured the CIA. Never mind that the Bush administration circumvented the CIA with the Office of Special Plans. Never mind that the Bush administration circumvented the CIA with the efforts of State Department people like John Bolton who shucked his CIA advisor and stovepiped intelligence right into the White House. Never mind that the Bush administration circumvented the CIA by having Iraqi defectors deal directly with people in the Pentagon after those same defectors, like Chalabi, were discredited by the CIA.

    Never mind that the Department of Defense has jurisdiction over 80% of the intelligence community through organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency and the satellite imaging agency.

    Don Rumsfeld was at the head of these efforts. You know, Don Rumsfeld, the guy who signed that PNAC letter in 1998 saying that we should invade Iraq, regardless of WMD issues, to set up a friendly government and “stabilize” the region. The neocon who had already decided that Iraq had to go before he took office.

    He was hardly alone. Dick Cheney was another signatory to that letter. The Downing Street Memos and other memo leaks from Britain attest to the fact that this administration had already made up its mind to invade Iraq. This corroborates the statements of the Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke, Bush’s first treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, and the testimony of CIA and State Department people who have spoken anonymously with journalists like Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, James Risen, and many others. It corroborates the testimony of Paul Pillar, the intelligence officer at the CIA in charge of all intelligence regarding the Middle East until he left the CIA in 2005.

    The writing is on the wall, for God’s sake. There was no intelligence failure. This administration already had its mind made up to invade Iraq the day it took office.

    It is no secret that Bush and his advisors edited the intelligence estimates they got from the CIA before they presented them to congress and the American people, removing qualifications in the estimates. It is no secret that the administration repeatedly and specifically cited the testimony of defectors who had been discredited by the CIA and German intelligence at the time. I have already written about this specifically, but it seems we need to be reminded of the obvious over and over again.

    So now there is some kind of question as to who exactly authorized the leak of Valerie Plame’s name, an act of political retribution that Nixon would have quailed at.

    Speaking of quail, Dick Cheney seems to be involved, as does the president, as does Karl Rove.

    When analyzing the vile election strategy of the Bush administration in South Carolina in 2000 and with the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004, one commentator said that “all low roads lead to Karl Rove.” Karl has a long history of dirty political tricks. It wouldn’t surprise me if Plame’s betrayal was one of them.

    After all this, however, does it really matter who in the White House came up with this disgusting idea? Bush has refused to simply call his staff to the carpet and demand to know who leaked the name, and then relay that information to the public. He’s decided that rather than do that, he’ll let a prosecutor figure it out, taking years of investigations and acrimonious legal battles and millions of taxpayer’s dollars. Maybe he’s worried that someone in the administration will lie and take the blame for another, but the willing testimony of anyone would help. Maybe he authorized it himself.

    Bush’s crimes are so numerous that his lesser moral failures don’t get any time in the spotlight. His critics just take them for granted and his supporters simply refuse to address them. Underfunding the Veteran’s Administration just doesn’t get any play time when war and blatant lies dominate the airwaves.

      So there's a lot of news in the past couple of days.

      First, what you expect: the new head of the EPA is just as bad as the preceding one.

      I really tire of having to point out the obvious to prove points to people. I remember in 2000 when I thought it was pointing out the obvious that George W. Bush was a ridiculously bad candidate for the presidency.

      This country need to be reminded of the obvious over and over and over again. This is one thing you must never forget: firing the help doesn’t change the leader. He just hires replacements that are as bad the people replaced, and he’s still the one making the big decisions anyway.

      Seymour Hersh has a major scoop, and that is that Bush “is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-busting nuclear bombs.”

      While most newspapers in this country dismiss airstrikes against Iran as a last resort, many journalists have been maintaining that the possibility of U.S. military action against Iran is hardly a distant one. Hersh is simply the most prestigious and recent one.

      Hersh has won a Pulitzer and five Polk awards. His most recent book, Chain of Command, is an excellent history of the U.S. “war on terror.” Hersh has been one of the top five journalists in the country over the last few years on reporting about international affairs and the war. When he writes something it’s no longer rumor, it’s official.

      Disaster. This presidency, this war, our foreign relations, our country: disaster. Utter ruin. Humiliation, bankruptcy, mutilation, death, hatred, protest, utter lawlessness.

      I am reduced to sentence fragment in describing this ongoing disaster of a presidency that is simply out of control like no other presidency has ever been. After the wonderful outcome in Iraq, our Executive Branch has decided that another war is a great idea.

      This is why Bush must be impeached, moderates, and I’m talking to you, Molly Ivins: every month he is left in office is literally a month of potential irreversible damage he will do to our democracy. Let him finish out his term and you can expect presidential pardons for Scooter and every other criminal under indictment in this administration.

      Beginning to dimly realize that his legacy will be one of lies, environmental destruction, deficits, tax relief for millionaires, war, torture, civilian casualties, and ruin, our president has decided on one more shot at glory, “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

      The diseased infrastructure in this White House includes war hawks and reprobates from the Reagan Administration: “William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration…Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security,” all signers of a panel’s report that nuclear weapons should be used “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.”

      In other words nukes should be a regular part of our arsenal, used whenever there’s a really important target we want to hit. Drop a dozen of them on Iran. No biggie.

      Reread that last statement. Our administration and the hawks in Israel put a lot of weight on the words of the head of Iran. Try weighing the above words with a similar weight. This is it, ladies and gentlemen. This is the kind of thinking that gets you involved in Vietnam and Iraq. This is the diseased worldview that sees the planet as a giant Risk board on which to play a military-political game to take over the world. In this demented world nuclear weapons are just another tool in your toolbox, war is just another tool in your toolbox, the truth is just another tool in your toolbox. Use one or all of them if you feel like it, you know, whatever’s convenient. Whatever serves your goals of rearranging sections of the world to your liking, installing friendly governments, opening up markets for economic exploitation, etc.

      What disturbs me is how casual these dimwits are about playing the war card, how casual they are about popping open that can of worms. What disturbs me is how ready to go off these guys are, how they frame their goals casually, like “the leader of Iran is crazy, he’s said some crazy things, he’s at the head of a dangerous faction in Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, we have to use war, diplomacy never works, etc.”

      These guys are myopic in the extreme, and dishonest even to themselves. I have yet to hear talk of invading North Korea. Oh, I forgot, North Korea isn’t at the heart of the world’s energy supply. I didn’t hear talks of the danger of weapons of mass destruction when the Pinochet regime was pursuing biological and chemical weapons. Oh, I forgot, fascist, despotic regimes with weapons of mass destruction are only an immoral danger when they aren’t allied to us.

      These guys are very willing to start another illegal pre-emptive war over nothing but Iranian nuclear ambitions and some loose talk from Tehran. Would that they had the same perspective in examining our actions in the world.

      There isn’t even a whisper of whether or not this is moral. There isn’t any consideration of what the blowback might be from bombing Iran, including Hezbollah terrorist attacks on American soil, southern/Shiite Iraq going up in flames, oil prices quadrupling and leading to world-wide recession, and the inevitable international condemnation, increase in terrorist attacks, and polarization of opinion in the Middle East that might lead to war involving Israel. There isn’t any consideration of world opinion, international law, or possible civilian casualties.

    So Libby is producing documents detailing part of his defense, a defense we originally got wind of in February, as I recall. If you need a refresher timeline of the story, check it out.

    Libby’s defense is reminiscent of Oliver North’s defense, as the National Journal writes, and Libby has retained one of North’s attorneys, John D. Cline.

In the North case, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was forced to dismiss many of the central charges against North, including the most serious ones-that North defrauded taxpayers by diverting proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras-because intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration refused to declassify documents necessary for a trial on those charges.

   So now, according to Libby, we know what we learned in February: the President authorized some senior officials, including Cheney and Libby, to leak classified information to the press to help justify the war.

    Legally, the cant is that the president and authorized officers can’t “leak” information: if they have the power to declassify information, by definition it isn’t a “leak.”

    It is still simply dishonest and coercive. If they choose to selectively leak classified information to the press to justify their side on an argument, without “leaking” dissenting opinions from CIA or DIA or State Department analysts, they’re doing exactly what the president did before the war, only in a more obvious fashion.

    This puts the full force of the United States intelligence community behind the tendentious reporting of administration supporters by giving those journalists all of the intelligence gleaned to support their case and none of the intelligence that refuted it.

    This is why we say this administration is ripping the floorboards out of the house of democracy. Why don’t Bush and Cheney simply funnel taxpayer funds into bribing journalists to write stories that support their positions?

    Oh yeah. They have.

    Oh yeah. They did it in Iraq, too.

    Oh, yeah, and don’t forget Jeff Gannon, and the slaughter of al-Jazeera journalists in Iraq who gave their location to the military, and the President’s ill-advised idea to deliberately bomb al-Jazeera, and the staged Potemkin Town Hall Meetings, and the captive military audiences, and the disinformation piped hot and steaming into the American media world by FOX News and right wing radio.

    No administration in history has assaulted the media like this one (at times, literally). Spirew Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” is a joke compared to the Bush Administration’s and the right wing’s constant criticism of the press, their planted stories, their fake reporters, and their murderous anger at foreign press outfits. This administration simply continues to forge new ground in their quest to crush dissent and subvert public opinion.

    This junta wants what all fascists need: control of the media. Mussolini required media outlets to be certified, and of course that certification was revoked very quickly when the outlet failed to toe the party line. This administration already has an ally in a mainstream media that is already corporate-owned and corporation-friendly. I might suggest that to co-opt the media all you have to do is co-opt the seven companies that dominate the media market today.

    The system is already ripe for exploitation. Like all companies, the major media companies are hierarchical, pyramidal, top-down structures: suborn seven corporate presidents and the rest will follow. You don’t need to control every little journalist in every little newspaper: as long as you control most of the media in the country you will control most of the thought in the country. You only really need a majority in a democracy.

    The junta has another plan. Part one is ignore the media. This president set a modern record for fewest press conferences in his first term, and I see no logic in comparing his openness to presidents who lived in the days of horses and wooden navies.

    Part two is suborn the media, the evidence of which litters the pages of newspapers over the past few years.

    This movement lies blatantly and unambiguously, virtually daring journalists and knowledgeable citizens to do something about it. Their brazenness is stunning. I wonder what it was like in Italy in 1922, watching Mussolini and his rise to power. Wikipedia describes the time in sadly familiar terms:

Fascism was a product of a general feeling of anxiety and fear among the middle-class of postwar Italy… public discourse took on an inflammatory tone on all sides… Mussolini was able to exploit fears… fascism evolved into a new political and economic system that combined corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-Communism in a state designed to bind all classes together under a capitalist system… Most of his time was spent on propaganda

    The bluntness of the deceptions and the amazing brazenness of the administration were on full display in the last few months, with the revelations of the NSA wiretapping scandal and the State of the Union Address earlier this year. It reminds me of a certain post by Tom Gilroy…

    It also reminds me of January 3, 1925, when Mussolini, with monolithic brazenness, took credit for the murders and intimidation of the fascist para-military groups and the assassination of the opposition leader in parliament and simply declared Italy a dictatorship under his leadership.

    Though it may be hard to believe that a guy named "Scooter" is ripping up the floorboards of democracy, biding time until his presidential pardon, it is actually happening as we speak. Iran-Contra should serve as a lesson, a lesson that we apparently didn't learn after Watergate: lawlessness in the highest levels of the presidency must be punished with impeachment and criminal prosecution. A slap on the wrist for those involved would be a sad, quiet admission that the justice system of the United States has collapsed.