skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Corruption is "Norm" Within Iraqi GovernmentThe report depicts the Iraqi government as riddled with corruption and criminals-and beyond the reach of anticorruption investigators. It also maintains that the extensive corruption within the Iraqi government has strategic consequences by decreasing public support for the U.S.-backed government and by providing a source of funding for Iraqi insurgents and militias.
Melanie Morgan named "Worst Person" for attacks on VoteVets.org's Soltz
During the August 15 edition of MSNBC's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann named right-wing radio host Melanie Morgan the "winner" of his nightly "Worst Person in the World" segment for asserting that Jon Soltz, co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, violated military law by engaging in political activism while serving in the Army Reserve, as Media Matters for America documented. Olbermann stated that Morgan's claim "will come as something of a surprise to active reservist Lindsey Graham and active reservist Stephen Buyer." Olbermann continued: "Though, like Jon Soltz, they are in the reserves, they seem to be engaged in some politics. Reservist Graham is the Republican senator from South Carolina, and reservist Buyer is the Republican congressman from Indiana." Olbermann added: "And according to Melanie Morgan, they'd both better quit their offices before the reserves find out they're breaking the law. A law, of course, that exists only in the empty head of Melanie Morgan."
ABC News' Wright Gets the Obama story wrong During an ABC News report on Sen. Barack Obama, David Wright clipped a recent statement by Obama in order to assert that he "seemed to criticize the performance of U.S. troops" there. But Wright left out the rest of Obama's sentence, which makes clear that Obama was criticizing the troop shortage in Afghanistan, rather than the troops' conduct.
Wright went on to report: "Civilian casualties are a huge issue in Afghanistan. Last week at Camp David, the Afghan president raised the issue directly with President Bush," but presumably," Wright added, "Hamid Karzai used language that was more diplomatic, more presidential." In fact, U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan -- and accounts of resulting civilian casualties -- have been widely reported in the media.
Reinventing The Huns The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
And if you're wondering what that means for the philosophy at the heart of both the war in Iraq and the warmongering with Iran, Pope has a very simple answer.
TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush's policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them here.
RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.
Bush's tangled arms deal - Playing Puppet master
When it comes to dealing with countries in the Middle East, the Bush administration knows only two approaches. It either tries to blow them up or bribe them. God forbid that Washington should try to find out what the people in the region actually want -- or what might actually work.
The Economist - Republicans screwed up big timeIn fact, the Republican Party in Congress is just as responsible as Mr Bush for most of the recent troubles. The Republican majority routinely appropriated more spending than the president asked for. It also larded spending bills with as much extra pork as possible. The number of congressional "earmarks" for projects in members' districts increased from 1,300 in 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress, to 14,000 in 2005.
The Republican majority also cheered Mr Bush all the way to Baghdad. Add to this the corruption of congressmen like Tom DeLay, a conservative hero, and the semi-corrupt institutional relationship that the Republicans formed with lobbyists, and you see that Mr Bush was only part of a much bigger problem.
Nor can conservatives claim that Mr Bush is a country-club Republican like his father. He has devoted his energies to giving "the movement" what it wants: the invasion of Iraq for the neoconservatives (who had championed it long before September 11th); tax cuts for business and the small-government conservatives; restricting federal funding for stem-cell research for the social conservatives; and conservative judges to please every faction.
This desire to pander to the conservative movement is partly to blame for the administration's practical incompetence. Mr Bush outdid previous Republican presidents in recruiting his personnel from the conservative counter-establishment. But this often meant choosing people for their ideological purity rather than their competence or intelligence. Some 150 Bush administration officials were graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University, including Monica Goodling, who put on such a lamentable performance before a House inquiry into the firing of nine US attorneys. A more pragmatic president would surely have sacked many of the neoconservative ideologues who have made a hash of American foreign policy.
Grown-up Needed To Clean Up After Pres. Bam BamThe damage our nation has suffered these past 6½ years is so great that I am neither Democrat nor Republican in the coming election. I am an American.
Both parties have been betrayed, and both should produce candidates willing to look at the vast wreckage President Bam Bam has wrought and say, "My job is to fix this mess."
I will vote for the candidate who says that. And I want my candidate to say these things, too:
"I will fight a real fight against the terrorists without creating a rallying point for extremists."
"I will forbid torture, and I will not secretly send prisoners to countries that allow it."
"I will honor the Constitution, not subvert it."
"I will not give a damn whether gay people get married, nor conjure up similarly dumb non-issues to distract Americans from the real problems we face."
"I will say things of substance and send the vapid slogans packing with this vapid president."
"I will not spy on Americans without taking the steps required by law - and then only when it is in the interest of national security."
Fred Kagan and the delusional conservative mentalityWhen he proposed the escalation strategy in January 2007, Kagan claimed that all other competing plans would fail, including the ones suggested by the Iraq Study Group. In his presentation to the House Committee of Foreign Affairs, Kagan said that his strategy might fail too, but that it is too early to judge it or project probable results. It would be "a very grave error indeed to rush now to abandon the first strategy that offers some real prospect for success."
One is hard pressed to find anyone other than the administration and its cheerleading team who thinks Kagan's strategy has shown "some real prospect for success." Attacks in Iraq during June 2007 reached the highest daily average seen since the end of "major hostilities" in May 2003. According to Petraeus's latest latest projections, "sustainable security" won't be established in Iraq until summer of 2009, and the 2009 target date may be overly optimistic. Outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace recently suggested that we may want to increase troop levels in Iraq even further. That would be in keeping with that fine military tradition that says if we can't prove that what we're doing is working, we should try doing more of it.
Which brings us back to Fred Kagan. How much longer should we give his "Plan for Victory" a chance to prove it won't fail? How long do we wait until it's "beyond question" that we once again "pursued a flawed approach? -- more at link.
President Cannot Ignore an ImpeachmentAfter months of revelations about his ham-handed attempts to politicize investigations and prosecutions by U.S. Attorneys and sections of the Department of Justice he heads, after his repeated refusals to cooperate with Congress and his deliberate attempts to deceive the House and Senate judiciary committees, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has invited impeachment to an extent rarely seen in the long and sordid history of executive assaults on the rule of law.
And Congressman Jay Inslee is answering the invitation.
The Washington Democrat moved Tuesday to introduce a resolution that directs the House Judiciary Committee to investigate whether Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Inslee's initiative is a serious one, and he is in many senses precisely the right member of the House to be making this push.
As a former prosecutor, he is well acquainted with the requirements of the oath that all House members swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic." He is, as well, a member of the Democratic establishment in the House, a relatively moderate representative who is on good terms with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But, most significantly, he is a representative from a state with an active impeachment movement.
For more than a year, the Washington for Impeachment campaign has demanded that Congress act to hold members of the Bush-Cheney administration to account for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Inslee has heard those demands, loud and clear, and he recognizes their broad appeal. Thus, his move to open an impeachment inquiry is proceeding on the precise lines that the founders intended.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason and their compatriots believed that impeachment should be an organic process, driven by public outrage over executive excess. They intended that the people would raise the call for accountability and that the federal legislators closest to the grassroots, members of the House, would take it up.
Bush's tangled arms deal - Playing Puppet master
