Saturday, April 22, 2006
News Roundup
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.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 11:59 AM 
