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Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 16:46:09
With the publication of Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, we see yet another rat, another Bush supporter jumping off the sinking ship. After publishing 2 books on the glories of the Bush administration, Woodward suddenly does an about face and writes
"President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war."Anyone who ever had a crappy job can probably identify with this little nugget from Woodward's book.
“It was only one example of a visitor to the Oval Office not telling the president the whole story or the truth. Likewise, in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news and a good time had by all.” Were the war in Iraq not a real war that has resulted in more than 2,700 American military casualties and more than 56,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the picture of the Bush administration that emerges from this book might resemble a farce. It’s like something out of “The Daily Show” or a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, with Freudian Bush family dramas and high-school-like rivalries between cabinet members who refuse to look at one another at meetings being played out on the world stage.""There’s the president, who once said, “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy,” deciding that he’s going to remake the Middle East and alter the course of American foreign policy. There’s his father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush (who went to war against the same country a decade ago), worrying about the wisdom of another war but reluctant to offer his opinions to his son because he believes in the principle of “let him be himself.” There’s the president’s national security adviser whining to him that the defense secretary won’t return her phone calls. And there’s the president and Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, trading fart jokes.And he suggests that President Bush chose Mr. Rumsfeld as his defense secretary, in part, because he knew his father mistrusted Mr. Rumsfeld, and the younger Bush wanted to prove his father wrong."Woodward goes on to repeat this passage, which is bone chilling if you stop and think about it.
"he quotes Mr. Armitage as telling former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that he’s baffled by President Bush’s reluctance to make adjustments in his conduct of the war.
“Has he thought this through?” Mr. Armitage asks. “What the president says in effect is, We’ve got to press on in honor of the memory of those who have fallen. Another way to say that is we’ve got to have more men fall to honor the memories of those who have already fallen.”
I propose since Bob Woodward, one of my personal heroes since Watergate, gave us 2 books full of false information, lies and untruths about the worst administration in US history, that this time he and his publisher GIVE his new book away to the public. Random House and James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces have agreed to refund the purchase price for all those who bought Frey's book believing his fiction was fact. Why shouldn't Bob Woodward either refund the money for his 2 previous books or simply give this new book away, since only now is he giving us the real facts of the Bush administration.
I'm glad Bob Woodward has come to his senses.....but really Bob, it's a little to late to let you off the hook and if I was you, I'd feel like some of the blood of those 2710 dead US troops was on my hands. Let's give the world a great Christmas present and march every torture loving , teenage boy loving member of the Bush administration to prison by December 25th of 2006. Maybe we should issue a recall for everyone currently in office and start over.
Friday, September 29, 2006 - 01:49:28
It isn't my intention to turn my blog into a cut and paste world of other people's ideas. But the Torture bill that just passed has opened a floodgate of ideas that should be considered. And rather than steal or plagiarize, passing on something written far better than I could ever manage seems like the right thing to do.
September 28, 2006: Another Karl Rove campaign kicks off.
OK, now that it's established that the GOP's only real function is enriching Halliburton, Bechtel and the Parsons Group and keeping the right wing punditocracy employed, I have to admit to some curiosity as to what possible reason you all would still have to vote for virtually anyone in the Republican Party.
I mean, I may be jaded and cynical but I’m not stupid. Unlike the majority of your ilk, I’m smart enough not to bet on WWE matches neither do I swallow what Frank Sinatra said about his mob connections. Some things are self-evident and you have to grant me the right to start hurling breakables at the nearest wall whenever I come across someone who can’t see the obvious.
The obvious is that the Republican Party is in it for itself. They are all for staying in power, enriching their base, enriching Republican-friendly conglomerates and never, ever accepting blame for even one fuck-up. At least the Democrats have been coming out and saying, “OK, OK, we fucked up and voted for the war. True, we were voting based on cherry-picked and fabricated intelligence but now we realize the USA PATRIOT Act and the war in Iraq has quickly turned into a fucking boondoggle. So how can we fix it?”
The Republicans, meanwhile, are saying, in essence, “Not only are all our initiatives working according to plan, comrades, but we have over fulfilled our quota for the Five Year Plan and will begin a Ten Year Plan!”
To paraphrase Sponge in “
Plowed”, their only chance is to connect with a dream because their best laid plans sure ain’t doing shit.
Your “President” is in over his head like a toddler stranded in the middle of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the guy with his hand up his ass, Dick Cheney, is still clinging to the old “The insurgency is in its last throes” assertions even as virtually every day brings news of dozens more tortured bodies being unearthed in Baghdad. The GOP-run Congress has decided for the umpteenth time that it’s more important to let the Idiot Boy-King have his way than to do what’s right (read SadButTrue’s take on the nightmare fuel of a detainee bill just above this).
They had blamed the victims of Hurricane Katrina for not being solvent or smart enough to leave the city before the storm made landfall then finally slouched toward New Orleans after waiting a week, thereby proving what would happen to Blanche DuBois if she had to rely on the kindness of Republican strangers.
They’ve waged war on science and learning, have essentially turned our two party system into a paranoid monopolitical police state, have, in proud Republican fashion, rolled up one enormous deficit after another and have widened an already enormous trade imbalance with China.
The Republicans have denied you the right to file for bankruptcy, denied the Democrats votes on their amendments to said bill, have made having a national ID card with a microchip embedded in it mandatory, used No Child Left Behind as a vast data-gathering apparatus for the Pentagon, have sent your children, husbands, wives, your loved ones into a meat grinder more infamously known as Iraq while denying them armor and cutting their VA benefits.
Every intelligence agency under the American sky insists that we’re in more danger from terrorist attacks now than we ever have been, which only makes the PATRIOT Act and this detainee bill, weapons in the GWOT, look even more like the colossal, wasteful, shameless fascistic shams that they are.
Oh, yeah, your party of personal responsibility, when they’re forced to admit that fuckuppery has been committed, continually blame Bill Clinton, the Family Circus “Not Me” spirit of the GOP.
I could possibly enumerate their every evil since January 2001 but I’d like to think that I’ve made my case. If I haven’t, then I might as well be talking to Terri Schiavo. So, my question to you all is: What’s the attraction? What could possibly be in it for you to keep these ass weasels in power?
Is it the increasingly foolish and pathetic delusion that you’re getting in on the ground floor of something that history will once proudly call The Party of Bush? Or maybe by continuing to wage war on learning, on homosexuals, on immigration, on universal health care and on every progressive agenda under the sun that you’ll be given a ringside side to the Rapture so the Devil can hand out ponchos like at a Gallagher gig just before he splatters you with the brains of said liberals for daring to impose humanitarianism on humanity?
As Election Day draws near, I keep thinking more and more to the final words of a d r i f t g l a s s post entitled “
Fat Karl” that ended with the words, ““Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican Party?”
When the current GOP, with its stubborn and insane insistence on ramming into the iceberg time and time and time and time again even as the ship is sinking, lands on the shit pile of history and we’re able to look at these times with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I think that when people mention the Party of Bush, they will say so in hushed tones not in the spirit of reverence but of fear, as if saying “Bush” three times will somehow bring the Evil Old Idiot back to life. Schoolchildren will whisper “Party of Bush” in the same way that the children of Elm Street whisper Freddy Krueger’s name.
It will be a cautionary tale, the Party of Bush, warning us of what happens when unmitigated evil and stupidity are allowed to run its course unchecked, much like the Nazi Party, much like the Communist party, much like the ancient Roman oligarchy taught us these lessons.
What was it that George Santayana said about that?
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Jurassicpork.
This was posted on Kos and deserves a good thinking about. If the following is 100% true and comes to pass, it still does not excuse Mark Pryor and the other 11 torture loving pretend Democrats who voted to help cover Bush's war criminal arse. Read and think.
All this bill is, is an utterly MEANINGLESS piece of kabuki theater.
It serves only two purposes: a) a desperate attempt by Bush to try to legally cover his own ass; and b) a desperate attempt designed to distract from the unrelentingly horrible news on Iraq. On Afghanistan. On Pakistan. On healthcare. On the economy the rest of us live in.
And again, this bill doesn't accomplish SHIT. Let's look at a few points, one by one, shall we?
1) Congress has NO authority to decide if these things are legal or not. That's up to the COURTS to decide.
It's up to the COURTS to decide how the Geneva Conventions--which are American Law--are construed. It's up to the COURTS to decide whether habeas corpus does or does apply to all persons (as it so clearly states in the Constitution).
Every piece of this Unconstitutional bill is beyond the scope of the Congress to legislate. It's dead on the courthouse door--and doesn't change anything in the meantime.
Which brings me to point #2:
2) The torture is happening the same, regardless of whether this bill passes or not. We've already BEEN waterboarding detainees. We've already BEEN subjecting them to cold rooms. We've already BEEN doing all these horrible things. Habeas corpus is ALREADY being suspended.
All this stupid bill does is attempt to make it OK to do these things. Which it CANNOT DO, because it's not up to Brownback, Reid, Schumer, or Santorum to decide whether it's ok or not.
The only reason it even exists is to try to provide legislative cover for Bush against possible trials for war crimes--which it also cannot do. Which brings me to point #3.
3) Bush cannot claim retroactive immunity based on Unconstitutional law. Suspending habeas corpus is Unconstitutional. Torture is UnConstitutional. And any future trial of Bush will be based on how his actions play out with regard to the CONSTITUTION--not with regard to some stupid laws passed by his lap-dog rubber-stamp Congress. Which brings us to point #4:
4) A Democratic congress will easily reverse this bill. When the subpoenas start coming and Bush is on the hotseat for his crimes, there will be a MAJOR tailwind and drive to remove even the pretense of this horrible legislation. Bush is the Emperor without Clothes--and this butt-cover will blow right off when the winds kick up.
Of course, without a Democratic congress we won't have that. And if you hand-wringers refuse to support Democrats, or some other drivel, on the basis of their reaction to this legislation in the face of political pressure, we won't get a Democratic congress.
In other words: this bill doesn't give them ANY powers they aren't ALREADY using (and have been using for years); and when the time comes to call them to account for it, it WON'T save their asses--if it hasn't already been repealed.
--------------------------------
Meanwhile, every day that we obsess over this meaningless kabuki bullshit farce, we lose another day that we can spend talking about shit that doesn't go right over the heads of the American people at best, or make us look like terrorist enablers at worst.
Shit like Iraq. Afghanistan. What Bush did to stop 9/11. Cronyism. Corruption. Healthcare. The economy the rest of us live in.
So please, PLEASE CALM DOWN!!! America isn't dead. The Constitution isn't dead. Nothing has changed.
There's a REASON they're doing this so close to the election. There's no big torture emergency out there: they just want a good distraction, and Bush wants to try some lame attempt at covering his ass in case there's a stiff-spined Democratic congress at his heels in 2007.
So get over it. Let the Republicans have their meaningless political theater. It changes absolutely nothing, and it will be struck down by the first, second and third courts that get their hands on it.
And then send some REAL Americans--the ones with (D)s after their names--to Congress. Because that's what REALLY matters here.
Chill.
Thursday, September 28, 2006 - 09:08:56
Sadly mag over on the main blog is right. With the Senate vote on torture expected to pass today, civilization takes another step backwards. The executive branch takes on another job that should belong to our weak Congress.
This bill will pass if every Democrat in the Senate votes against it. The only hope is that there are enough Republicans in the Senate that love their country more than they love Bush-Cheney, and that's not expected to be the case.
Historians will one day list all the laws, rules and traditions that Bush-Cheney have destroyed these last 6 years and future generations will wonder why America slept while an evil cabal of neo-cons took over the country without firing a shot. Maybe by then they'll have an explanation for this era, I can't for the life of me dream one up.
Unlike December 7th, 1941 which galvanized the American people into a people of one mind and one purpose, September 11th, 2001 caused widespread schizophrenia in our country and caused an incompetent administration to morph into the most dangerous dog pack of torturers in the world.
Bush-Cheney took a rare moment of world compassion and stuck it in their ear. America became the little old lady helped across the intersection by the boy scout who turned and mugged her helper in broad daylight. Our country is hated now in near universal proportions. Those countries in the world who align with us do so out of fear, not love.
The passage of this bill today will truly make us the United States of Atrocities. On some sad day in the future our own government will torture us or our children and grandchildren and some bright person not even born yet will trace the origins back to the vote today. Be especially nice to your children today, their future just got dimmer and more dangerous.
AP , HOUSTON, TEXAS
Thursday, Sep 28, 2006,Page 10
 |
Former Enron executive Andrew Fastow leaves the federal courthouse in Houston, Texas, in chains on Tuesday after being sentenced to six years in prison.
PHOTO: AP
|
The mastermind behind financial schemes that doomed Enron Corp, Andrew Fastow, was sentenced to six years in prison -- four years less than he had agreed to in a plea bargain -- by a judge who felt he deserved leniency.
Enron, once the nation's seventh-largest company, crumbled into bankruptcy in December 2001. The collapse wiped out thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in market value and more than $2 billion in pension plans.
Let me get this straight. Andrew Fastow who directly caused the 7th largest company in the US to fall apart, killing thousands of jobs and causing thousands of people to lose their pensions and life savings, gets 6 years in prison!
Yet a Greenwood school teacher who gave a 14 year old boy a blowjob that he'll remember the rest of his life, gets 12 years in prison?
I was reading the other day where in certain parts of Malaysia you can buy a human for about 19,000 US dollars. I assume most purchases involve buying young girls, but who knows, maybe gay men shop there too? So, if one takes the 2 billion lost in Enron pensions alone, and travels to Malaysia for the same amount of money you could buy 105, 263.158 Malaysian people, keep them in your basement and do whatever the hell you want with them.
Now I can't prove it right this moment, but I'm sure there is some fine logic in all this math and I'm sure.....if anyone could understand the logic they would see why it is criminal that Mr. Fastow gets 6 years for all that taking while Ms Bobo gets 12 years for all that giving.
Seriously, we've got our priorities all mess up in this country.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 19:41:05
Fox Chief: Clinton Response an 'Assault'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 27, 2006
Filed at 8:17 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- Fox News chief Roger Ailes says former President Clinton's response to Chris Wallace's question about going after Osama bin Laden represents ''an assault on all journalists.''
Ailes said Clinton had a ''wild overreaction'' in the interview, broadcast on ''Fox News Sunday.'' Hundreds of thousands of people subsequently watched clips over the Internet, with Fox foes rallying behind Clinton.
Saint Roger Ailes, the same man who cooked up the whole Willie Horton campaign against Dukakis in 1988, the man who put the FU in Fox News is now playing Mr. Nice Guy and pretending that mean old Clinton scared him. I think he might be partly right, I can see where you could call Clinton's words to be an "assault on all BAD journalists."
Right-wingers hate it when you use facts to beat them over the head. And who can blame Bill Clinton after the whole ABC thing, making out that the blood of 3000 people are on his hands. Then snippy little Chris slides him that Don't cha think you could have done more to catch Osama stuff. This from the mouth-piece of the neo-cons who have had 5 years to kill Osama and can't.
Stephen Colbert coined the word "truthiness" in recent months. The Republicans learned from the master Rove to be experts of "truthiness", the ability to sound like your telling the truth when you aren't. It's "truthiness" when Condi and Satan Cheney ignore the Senate subcommittee report that stated in no uncertain terms that there was no connection between Sadam and Iraq and Osama and 9-11. Both Condi and Satan spoke"truthiness" the next weekend and said indeed there was a connection. It was "truthiness" when Condi said Clinton was lying, yes sir, the Bush-Cheney team was all over Osama between the inauguration and the day of 9-11. While Clinton offers up facts to back up his statement, Condi Douche-Rice offers none. Bush is putting out "truthiness" when he says we do not torture. Anyone who has paid any attention to the news the last 3 years has seen with their own eyes that we do indeed torture.
Saint Roger Ailes is being "truthy" when he uses Clinton justifiable anger as a sign that Democrats have launched a jihad against journalists. What crap! I guess saying Hitler was bad is an assault against all German journalists? It is the job of every good Democrat to put "truthiness" to bed until after the elections. After Democrats sweep across America maybe they can go to work next year to remove"truthiness" from our government entirely. We should all hate both Democrat and Republican lies equally. "Truthiness" has put chicken hawks in charge of our military. "Truthiness" put Bush's cronies in charge of national security and killed a ton of people in the Gulf after Katrina moved through."Truthiness" says we're winning in Iraq. "Truthiness" gave us stories of WMDs in Iraq, gave us fake newsmen-gay-hooker-party-boys in the White House, gave us Kerek, Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Conrad Burns, Lyndie England, Ken Lay, Heck of a Job Brownie, the silly Gang of 14, secret black site prisons, journalists that are paid by the White House, fake news stories, NSA wiretaps on Americans.............the list is endless even when pixels are free.
Every good American should take Bill Clinton's lead and refuse to let "truthiness" slip by unpunished. Not in Washington DC, not in Little Rock, Arkansas, not in your home or place of business or your church. When someone puts out "truthiness", take a big breath and let them know they're wrong and should be ashamed. It's the only thing we can do on a local level that might help save our country. Times up! The Serious Season has started, take no prisoners! Death to Truthy!
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 - 01:33:26
By: Nicole Belle on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 6:30 PM - PDT
Keith pulled no punches and launched another smack down on Bush and FOX News…
Video - WMV Video - QT
And finally tonight, a Special Comment about President Clinton’s interview. The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.
It is not important that the current President’s "portable public chorus" has described his predecessor’s tone as "crazed."
Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as Al-Qaeda; the nation’s "marketplace of ideas" is being poisoned, by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit. Nonetheless.
The headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done, in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.
"At least I tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. "That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried."
Thus in his supposed emeritus years, has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by anyone, in these last five long years.
The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama Bin Laden before 9/11.
The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.
The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."
The Bush Administration… did… not… try.—
Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest "pass" for incompetence and malfeasance, in American history!
President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs — some of them, 17 years old — before Pearl Harbor.
President Hoover was correctly blamed for — if not the Great Depression itself — then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash.
Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War — though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.
But not this President.
To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11th, 2001 — or the nearly eight months that preceded it.
That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the Executive.
But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.
Except… for this:
After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts — that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.
Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.
As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.
Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News, Friday afternoon.
Consider the timing: The very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is — not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it!
The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.
It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired — but a propagandist, promoted:
Promise to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless.
And don’t even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for "e-mailing" you the question.
Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen.
He told the great truth un-told… about this administration’s negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about Bin Laden.
He was brave.
Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I — in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist — and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.
The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon.
Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to 9/11."
Of that company’s crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush’s new and improved history.
The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.
The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it — who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews — have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw.
Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for Bin Laden in 1998 because of the Lewinsky nonsense — why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20th of that year? For mentioning Bin Laden by name as he did so?
That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The Dog."
Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s judgment.
Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri — the future Attorney General — echoed Coats.
Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.
And of course, were it true Clinton had been "distracted" by the Lewinsky witch-hunt — who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt? Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?
Who corrupted the political media?
Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?
Who preempted them… in order to strangle us with the trivia that was… "All Monica All The Time"?
Who… distracted whom?
This is, of course, where — as is inevitable — Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are.
The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four.
But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it’s all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.
The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton… but by the same people who got you… elected President.
Thus instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it… we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently redd the Orwell playbook too quickly.
Thus instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us "safe" ever since — a statement that might range anywhere from Zero, to One Hundred Percent, true.
We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.
And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush — you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles… wrong.
Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:
You did not try.
You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.
You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.
Then, you blamed your predecessor.
That would be the textbook definition… Sir, of cowardice.
To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.
That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair — writing as George Orwell — gave us in the novel "1984."
The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power…
"Power is not a means; it is an end.
"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
"The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power… is power."
Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln’s State of the Union address from 1862.
"We must disenthrall ourselves."
Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln’s sentence. He might well have.
"We must disenthrall ourselves — and then… we shall save our country."
And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date… to save… our… country.
—
The "free pass" has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush…
You did not act to prevent 9/11.
We do not know what you have done, to prevent another 9/11.
You have failed us — then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.
You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.
And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.
And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture — which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.And there it is, sir:
Are yours the actions of a true American?
I’m K.O., good night, and good luck.
