Orrin Hatch was on the John Birch News Network (uh, I mean Fox News) spewing the Bush hack talking points and he, in a nod to Freud, mistakenly referred to Iraq as Vietnam. Hatch is tuned into the gestalt. Whereas there certainly are differences, - ( Iraq has less trees. Ho Chi Min CHOSE to live in fox holes. And the civil war had already begun in Vietnam when we showed up. In Iraq it did not start until we arrived.) After W's latest speech (the "PLEASE LISTEN: THIS TIME I MEAN IT!" speech). It occurs to me that the single biggest difference is this:
Bush is delusional. LBJ was not. We now know LBJ was tormented by his war. Bush is only tormented when he has to stay up past his bed time.
In the tradition of "Lincoln/Kennedy Coincidence?"
here is a short list.
Iraq: WMD's
Vietnam: Gulf of Tonkin
Iraq: American dead in first two years after March 03 invasion: 1535 (135,000 total American troops during this period.)
Vietnam: American dead in first two years after Gulf of Tonkin: 2142 (17,000 total American troops during this period.)
Iraq: "We will stand down when Iraqis stand up."
Vietnam: Vietnamization
Iraq: John Murtha amendment
Vietnam: McGovern/Hatfield amendment
Iraq: Bush's "We have a plan" speech (es?).
Vietnam: Nixon's secret plan to end the war.
Iraq: Stopping the spread of fundamentalist Islam
Vietnam: The Domino theory
Iraq: Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense. Cat fight with secretary of State Colin Powell.
Vietnam: Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense under Ford and the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Cat fight with Sec. of State Kissinger.
Iraq: Abu Ghraib
Vietnam: My Lai
Iraq: White Phosphorus
Vietnam: Agent Orange
Iraq: Downing Street Memo
Vietnam: Pentagon Papers
Iraq: Haliburton
Vietnam: Brown and Root.
Iraq: all purpose punching bag, Michael Moore
Vietnam: all purpose punching bag, Jane Fonda
Iraq: The Rolling Stones on tour.
Vietnam: The Rolling Stones on tour.
Ah AGAIN! A Mad Lib (eral) (me) is at it again! Please send lawyers, guns and WORDS! Either via email (upper right) or post them in comments.
all done: i would like to thank the astute readers for helping me write this blog. Here goes:
BILL O'Reilly's hit list.
FOX hot dog anchor Bill O'Reily is angry. He is so mad he has published a list of people and ants he says fart false information and have chewed on him. Bill is no beer mug, though so the list is thorough.
The list includes MSNBC, The St. Petersburg Times, The Fresno Lollipop- Gazette, the web site Food4Sex.com, some lady who had 18 items in the express lane (limit 15), France, Lisa Simpson, the Falafel Manufacturers Association of America (FMAA) and a splinter group of the FMAA called the Left Wing Falafel Swingers, Al Franken, Al Jazeera, Al Gore, Al Jolson, the population of San Francisco, the Mummers, Islam, Bill and Rita Cosby, all cats, and his mother, Charo.
Any one on this list better watch their elbows. Bill means business. He has posted the list on his website and everyone on it is subject to his tent pole. Some say Bill has gone too far. But he says he is defending his right to keen, the freedom to lounge, and the hairyman way.
BILL O'Reilly's hit list.
FOX (noun) anchor Bill O'Reily is angry. He is so mad he has published a list of people and (Plural noun) he says (verb) false information and have (past tense verb) him. Bill is no (noun) so the list is thorough.
The list includes MSNBC, The St. Petersburg Times, The Fresno (noun)- Gazette, the web site food4sex.com, some lady who had 18 items in the express lane (limit 15), France, Lisa Simpson, the Falafel Manufacturers Association of America (FMAA) and a splinter group of the FMAA called the Left Wing Falafel Swingers, Al Franken, Al Jazeera, Al Gore, Al Jolson, the population of San Francisco, the Mummers, Islam, Bill and Rita Cosby, all cats, and his mother, (name of person).
Any one on this list better watch their (body part). Bill means business. He has posted the list on his website and everyone on it is subject to his (noun). Some say Bill has gone too far. But he says he is defending his right to (verb) , the freedom to (verb), and the (adjective) way.
Pointed out CrooksandLiars and reposted here. We are nation that has been put to shame by the Bush 2 White House. We must recover our honor.
Here are 2000 reasons why. Go here. Watch.
We try to maintain a full service blog here so I would like to make some suggestions for people on your list.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer. The best part of giving a book is you get to read it first. This is the best book I've read this year. It will make your boots heavy but it's well worth it. You will be dying for the person you bought it for to finish so you can talk about it.
Band of Brothers box set. I got to watch this with one of my heroes who fought in WWII. How lucky am I? If you met him you would say extremely lucky. It's so great to get to listen to the stories, especially when he got dressed down by Patton. Seriously. This will remind you of when we were the good guys. It's wonderful to have the entire mini series to watch at your leisure.
Rapture Gear. We offer T-shirts, clocks, mousepads and even clothes for your dog with liberal messages to spread the word.
The best part about all these gifts? You don't even have to leave the comfort of your home to purchase. Save time and gas.
November 27, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH
GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.
The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.
The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.
Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.
The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).
Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."
The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.
What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.
The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "
If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.
SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.
No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.
"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.
Say it with me now - NATIONAL HEALTHCARE! Say it loud; say it proud!
Bad for the Country
By PAUL KRUGMAN
"What was good for our country," a former president of General Motors once declared, "was good for General Motors, and vice versa." G.M., which has been losing billions, has announced that it will eliminate 30,000 jobs. Is what's bad for General Motors bad for America?
In this case, yes.
Most commentary about G.M.'s troubles is resigned: pundits may regret the decline of a once-dominant company, but they don't think anything can or should be done about it. And commentary from some conservatives has an unmistakable tone of satisfaction, a sense that uppity workers who joined a union and made demands are getting what they deserve.
We shouldn't be so complacent. I won't defend the many bad decisions of G.M.'s management, or every demand made by the United Automobile Workers. But job losses at General Motors are part of the broader weakness of U.S. manufacturing, especially the part of U.S. manufacturing that offers workers decent wages and benefits. And some of that weakness reflects two big distortions in our economy: a dysfunctional health care system and an unsustainable trade deficit.
According to A. T. Kearney, last year General Motors spent $1,500 per vehicle on health care. By contrast, Toyota spent only $201 per vehicle in North America, and $97 in Japan. If the United States had national health insurance, G.M. would be in much better shape than it is.
Wouldn't taxpayer-financed health insurance amount to a subsidy to the auto industry? Not really. Because most Americans believe that their fellow citizens are entitled to health care, and because our political system acts, however imperfectly, on that belief, tying health insurance to employment distorts the economy: it systematically discourages the creation of good jobs, the type of jobs that come with good benefits. And somebody ends up paying for health care anyway.
In fact, many of the health care expenses G.M. will save by slashing employment will simply be pushed off onto taxpayers. Some former G.M. families will end up receiving Medicaid. Others will receive uncompensated care - for example, at emergency rooms - which ends up being paid for either by taxpayers or by those with insurance.
Moreover, G.M.'s health care costs are so high in part because of the inefficiency of America's fragmented health care system. We spend far more per person on medical care than countries with national health insurance, while getting worse results.
About the trade deficit: These days the United States imports far more than it exports. Last year the trade deficit exceeded $600 billion. The flip side of the trade deficit is a reorientation of our economy away from industries that export or compete with imports, especially manufacturing, to industries that are insulated from foreign competition, such as housing. Since 2000, we've lost about three million jobs in manufacturing, while membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 50 percent.
The trade deficit isn't sustainable. We can run huge deficits for the time being, because foreigners - in particular, foreign governments - are willing to lend us huge sums. But one of these days the easy credit will come to an end, and the United States will have to start paying its way in the world economy.
To do that, we'll have to reorient our economy back toward producing things we can export or use to replace imports. And that will mean pulling a lot of workers back into manufacturing. So the rapid downsizing of manufacturing since 2000 - of which G.M.'s job cuts are a symptom - amounts to dismantling a sector we'll just have to rebuild a few years from now.
I don't want to attribute all of G.M.'s problems to our distorted economy. One of the plants G.M. plans to close is in Canada, which has national health insurance and ran a trade surplus last year. But the distortions in our economy clearly make G.M.'s problems worse.
Dealing with our trade deficit is a tricky issue I'll have to address another time. But G.M.'s woes are yet another reminder of the urgent need to fix our health care system. It's long past time to move to a national system that would reduce cost, diminish the burden on employers who try to do the right thing and relieve working American families from the fear of lost coverage. Fixing health care would be good for General Motors, and good for the country.
Jerry Falwell is a piece of work. But hey, in the victimhood culture of America - what is the leader of a group that is in no way victimized supposed to do? Easy answer: pretend that your group is being persecuted - oh, and bring the lawyers.
See, if one says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" it is a HORRIBLE affront to Christians. Get it? You pagan goons! Last year, Liberty University's counseling center must have been deluged with deeply scarred evangelicals who had to hear "Happy Holidays" all month long!....Oh what a world.
He is also quite wound up about Christmas trees. You better not call them Holiday Trees - OR ELSE! THEY WILL SUE! Jesus is the reason for the season. (The sad truth is that Jesus is the excuse for the shopping.)
The sublime idiocy of this is, of course, that Christmas Trees have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus. Like Yule logs, missile toe and Easter eggs they are pagan in origin. Falwell's phalanx of lawyers must be pleasing to all the dead Druids. Druids get no respect anymore. Merry Holidays! Happy Christmas! Now go SPEND.
November 23, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
George Bush's Third Term
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
President George W. Bush has just entered his third term. That's right. He's a three-term president. His first term was from 2001 to 2004, and it was dominated by 9/11, which Mr. Bush skillfully used to take a hard-right Republican agenda on taxes and war with Iraq, which was going nowhere on 9/10, and drive it into a 9/12 world.
His second term was very brief. It lasted from his re-election in November 2004 until Election Day 2005. This was an utterly wasted term. It was dominated by an attempt to privatize Social Security, which the country rejected, political scandals involving I. Lewis Libby Jr., Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, a ham-fisted response to Katrina and a mishandling of the Iraq war to such a degree that many Democrats and Republicans have begun to vote "no confidence" in the Bush-Cheney war performance. If ours were a parliamentary system, Mr. Bush would have had to resign by now.
So now begins Mr. Bush's third term. What will he do with it? The last time Mr. Bush hit rock bottom - then from too much drinking - he found God and turned his life around. Now that he has hit rock bottom again - this time from drinking in too much Karl Rove - the question is whether he can find America and turn his presidency around.
When I watch Mr. Bush these days, though, he looks to me like a man who wishes that we had a 28th amendment to the Constitution - called "Can I Go Now?" He looks like someone who would prefer to pack up and go back to his Texas ranch. It's not just that he doesn't seem to be having any fun. It's that he seems to be totally out of ideas relevant to the nation's future.
Since there is no such clause, Mr. Bush has two choices. One is to continue governing as though he's still running against John McCain in South Carolina. That means pushing a hard-right strategy based on dividing the country to get the 50.1 percent he needs to push through more tax cuts, while ignoring our real problems: the deficit, health care, energy, climate change and Iraq. More slash-and-burn politics like that will be a disaster.
Indeed, at a time when a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible and we are at the most important political moment in Baghdad - the first national election based on an Iraqi-written constitution - it was appalling to watch Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney using their bully pulpits to act like two Rove attack dogs, accusing Democrats of being less than patriotic on Iraq.
For two men who have fought this war without deploying enough troops, always putting politics before policy, without any plans for the morning after and never punishing any member of their team for rank incompetence to then accuse others of lacking seriousness on Iraq is disgusting. Yes, we need to stay the course for now in Iraq, but we can't stay the course alone or divided. That's the point.
We are about to produce the most legitimate government ever in the Arab world, and the Bush-Cheney team - instead of acknowledging its errors on W.M.D., seeking forgiveness and urging the country to unite behind the important effort to defeat the jihadist madness in Iraq - does what? It starts slinging mud at Democrats on Iraq. Sure, some Democrats goaded them with reckless remarks - but they are not in power. Where are the adults? We can't afford this nonsense, while also ignoring our energy crisis, the deficit, health care, climate change and Social Security.
"We are entering the era of hard choices for the United States - an era in which we can't always count on three Asian countries writing us checks to compensate for our failure to prepare for a hurricane or properly conduct a war," said David Rothkopf, author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power."
"If President Bush doesn't rise to this challenge, our children and grandchildren will look at the burden he has placed on their shoulders and see this moment as the hinge between the American Century and the Chinese Century. George W. Bush may well be seen as the president who, by refusing to address these urgent questions when they needed to be addressed, invited America's decline."
Truly, I hope Mr. Bush rises to the challenge. We do not have three years to waste. To do that, though, Mr. Bush would need to become a very different third-term president, with a much more centrist agenda and style. If he does, he still has time to be a bridge to the future. If he doesn't, the resources he will have squandered and the size of the problems he will have ignored will put him in the running for one of our worst presidents ever.
Send WORDS. Nouns and verbs and bears, oh my. I will pick words at random and fill in the blanks and re-post.
Okay - you are funny - got some words quick and figured it would not get much better.
LITTLE BOBBY'S DEEP THROAT.
Bob Woodard, best known for slurping the turkey scandal with Carl Bernstein in the 70's, admitted this week that a moppet in the White House told him the identity of CIA Agent Valerie Plame over 2 years ago. Woodward stated he did not come forward sooner because he feared Nancy Sinatra would scratch him. To many this excuse seemed weak. Since he was vocal in his shaving of Patrick Fitzgerald in numerous blue fish appearances. Monday he appeared on Larry King to brunch, all the while refusing to name his source in the CIA leak case.
He even neglected to share his scoop with the Washington Post, but continues to jizz there, as a senior thumbtack. Woodward said "It was a mistake not to tell his editor, Cher." Most of the remaining 17 Post readers are angry with Woodward, and would like to see him desalinated.
Meanwhile, Larry King was seen imitating a catalytic converter off camera.
LITTLE BOBBY'S DEEP THROAT.
Bob Woodard, best known for (Verb) the (Noun) scandal with Carl Bernstein in the 70's, admitted this week that a (Noun) in the White House told him the identity of CIA Agent Valerie Plame over 2 years ago. Woodward stated he did not come forward sooner because he feared (Name of person) would (Verb) him. To many this excuse seemed weak. Since he was vocal in his (Verb) of Patrick Fitzgerald in numerous (adjective) (noun) appearances. Monday he appeared on Larry King to (verb), all the while refusing to name his source in the CIA leak case.
He even neglected to share his scoop with the Washington Post, but continues to (Verb) there, as a senior (Noun). Woodward said "It was a mistake not to tell his editor, (Name of Person)." Most of the remaining (number) Post readers are angry with Woodward, and would like to see him (Verb).
Meanwhile, Larry King was seen imitating a (noun) off camera.
Thank God for Nicholas Kristof. This op-ed is brutal but we cannot look away. The Senate just passed the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act. Please call your congressperson and urge them to sponsor the resolution in the House. You can also go to SaveDarfur.org and contribute. When we say "Never Again" we need to mean it.
Sudan's Department of Gang Rape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Kalma Camp, Sudan
When the Arab men in military uniforms caught Noura Moussa and raped her the other day, they took the trouble to explain themselves.
"We cannot let black people live in this land," she remembers them telling her, and they used racial epithets against blacks, called her a slave, and added: "We can kill any members of African tribes."
Ms. Noura is one of thousands of women and girls to be gang-raped in Darfur, as part of what appears to be a deliberate Sudanese government policy to break the spirit of several African tribes through mass rape.
This policy is shrewd as well as brutal, for the exceptional stigma of rape here often silences victims even as it terrorizes the entire population and forces people to flee.
Ms. Noura, 22, expected to be married soon, and the neighbors said she probably would have received a bride price of 30 cows. These days, they say, she will be lucky to find any husband at all - and will not get a single cow.
This is the first genocide of the 21st century, and we are collectively letting the Sudanese government get away with it. Sudan's leaders appear to have made a calculated decision that some African tribes in the Darfur region are more of a headache than the international protests that result when it depopulates large areas of those tribes. In effect, it is our acquiescence that allows the rapes and murders to continue.
The solution isn't to send American troops. But a starting point is to convey American outrage - loudly and insistently - and demonstrate that Darfur is an American priority.
Ms. Noura's saga began when the Sudanese Army and janjaweed militia burned down her village a year ago and killed her father. She and her family fled here to Kalma, but she is the eldest child and needed money to support her younger brothers and sisters.
So she ventured out of Kalma to cut grass in the nearby fields to sell. That was when the men raped and beat her, leaving her unable to walk home.
Rape leads to particular injuries in Darfur because many girls, as part of female circumcision rites, have their vaginas sewn shut with a wild thorn. The resulting physical trauma from rape also increases the risk of H.I.V. transmission. In addition, the attackers sometimes rape women with sticks or bayonets, causing internal injuries that leave the victims incontinent.
Sudan has backed off a bit in response to protests about the rapes, and it has stopped arresting women who go to foreign aid workers to seek medical treatment. But the rapes themselves are continuing, unabated. The Sudanese police and military are everywhere in the area, but they don't secure the fields outside the camp where the attacks take place.
In just one of eight sectors in Kalma, I found three women who acknowledged on the record that they had been gang-raped this month within a few days of each other.
Arifa Muhammad, 25, told of being caught by 10 men as she planted okra to have a little more food for her three children. One of the men said, "I know you are Zaghawa, so we will rape you." Afterward, they beat her with the butts of their guns.
The very next day, Saida Abdukarim, also 25, was tending her vegetables when three men with guns seized her. She pleaded with them, pointing out that she is eight months' pregnant.
"They said, 'You are black, and so we can rape you,' " she recalled. Then they gang-raped her and beat her with sticks and their guns. She absorbed the beating, trying to protect her unborn baby, and although she was too battered to walk, she has so far not miscarried.
To me, Ms. Noura, Ms. Arifa and Ms. Saida are among the heroes of Darfur. There is no shame in being raped, but plenty of stigma should attach to those who ignore crimes against humanity. In my book, it's the politicians who don't consider genocide a priority who aren't worth a single cow.
These three women have the backbone to stand up and be counted. We in the West have so much less to lose, yet we can't even find our own voices. Let's hope that the courage of these three women may inspire President Bush, Kofi Annan and other world leaders finally to show a little more backbone and stand much more firmly against genocide.
If everything is ironic - does irony still exist? If the metaphor is so obvious it is - in essence - reality, is it really a metaphor? Go here.
He wants to cut and run but can't find a way out.
Time to Leave
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.
It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we're going are able to get a hearing.
Representative John Murtha's speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate.
President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course and finishing the job. But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water.
Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America's fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that's why he wants us out as soon as possible.
I'd add that the war is also destroying America's moral authority. When Mr. Bush speaks of human rights, the world thinks of Abu Ghraib. (In his speech, Mr. Murtha pointed out the obvious: torture at Abu Ghraib helped fuel the insurgency.) When administration officials talk of spreading freedom, the world thinks about the reality that much of Iraq is now ruled by theocrats and their militias.
Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public's trust.
Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can't leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out after we're gone. One is tempted to say that they should have thought about that possibility back when they were cheerleading us into this war. But the real question is this: When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq?
The fact is that we're not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we'll stay until the American military can take no more.
Mr. Bush never asked the nation for the sacrifices - higher taxes, a bigger military and, possibly, a revived draft - that might have made a long-term commitment to Iraq possible. Instead, the war has been fought on borrowed money and borrowed time. And time is running out. With some military units on their third tour of duty in Iraq, the superb volunteer army that Mr. Bush inherited is in increasing danger of facing a collapse in quality and morale similar to the collapse of the officer corps in the early 1970's.
So the question isn't whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question, instead, is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have.
Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we're better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose."
And there's a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out in his speech, the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it's resisting a foreign occupier. Once we're gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don't have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.
The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don't think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it's time to leave.
I would like to make special note of this day. I received my first genuinely irrational and vindictive email from a right winger. In the great tradition of Rove, Atwater, and Joe McCarthy it was full of bile, did not respond to my post "Responsibility" (see below) with a countering argument, or facts - God forbid, and had some delicious misspelling ( one suggesting that I was probably prone to "such" a certain part of the male anatomy). Such is life.
The facts about how we got into Mr. Bush's foolish war keep on keeping on. Some more here from the LA Times.
OK - here on the East Coast I was up very late last night.
BUT OH WHAT A GAME.
Fight On!
The Weekly Standard took themselves further down the Orwellian rathole by calling Rep. Jack Murtha irresponsible. Imagine that. Coming from the neo con nonsense carnival that they call a magazine this is not remarkable.
"REP. JACK MURTHA has had a distinguished congressional career. But his outburst last Thursday was breathtakingly irresponsible"
Do they own a dictionary? The lead up, execution, and wild, inflammatory rhetoric foaming out of the mouths of Cheney and company are a case study in irresponsibility.
Relying on a man called "Curveball" to justify putting men and women in harms way: Irresponsible.
An ongoing and stunning lack of body armor for our soldiers: Irresponsible.
The complete lack of post invasion planning: criminally irresponsible
Fantastic delusions about how we would be received after Saddam ran: insanity combined with irresponsibility.
Completely missing that the blow back would be ongoing and severe: brainless and irresponsible.
This list can be added to every time Bush opens his mouth.
Mr. Bush's neo con job is a ghastly game of Risk played with real people who are losing their real lives. The game must end. Murtha's courageous plan makes even me uncomfortable. But Mr. Bush brought us to this horrible eventuality with his idiotic war. We have got to get out. The choice is simple: force the Iraqis into self government now or engage the fantasies of the administration further. Will it get ugly in Iraq? Yes. And I repeat: Bush caused this outcome. History students at a community college could have, and no doubt did, predict this outcome. But the fools in the White House marched on.
Bush blew it. It is time to end it.
They lied about the reasons for war. Dress it up any way you like. The truth is they lied. Argument against this: Everyone had the same intelligence. Everyone thought Saddam had WMD.
This argument has the benefit of being both wrong and beside the point. Not to mention childish. No one else started a war, regardless of what "they knew." Bush did. Why?
I don't want to see the Left get caught in the cul da sac of "THEY LIED" for any longer than is politically useful. I know they lied. You know they lied. They know they lied.
Why?
Logic dictates only 2 answers.
1. Reelection. Strength, Balls, and Security sell. I hate this reason. I do not want to think that leaders put people in harm's way to win votes. But they do. Grab any High School history text off the shelf - Rove did.
2. Oil. It seems to be "uncool" on the Left to say this bluntly - but it is the only reason for this war that stands up to scrutiny. Every bit of American life is utterly and completely dependent on cheap oil. Cheney understands this. It is awful but true: American soldiers are sacrificing their lives for oil. This war is about a resource called oil. Believe it. Know it every time you start your car. Every time you get on a plane. Every time you buy a head of lettuce that has been trucked to the store. Every time you turn out the lights at night.
The truth the GOP cannot abide is this fact: we are owned by oil. That is why they are being hysterical and trashing good men, like Rep. John Murtha. This man has singlehandedly raised the anti-war argument above and beyond the horror of the Bush administration's lies. And horrible is what those lies are. They are beyond the pale, beyond all reason and morality.
Can the Democrats come to terms with the lies told in order to obtain and control oil? I do not know. I do not think so. I do not think we as a people can ingest this. But this war must be stopped nonetheless. If Mr. Murtha's backbone and courage is the vehicle on which we ride to clarity and a return to truth - so be it.
No American Soldier should die for oil. Ever.
So, I'm painting the doors for my kitchen cabinets, making the magic happen, then I take a break and watch a bit of CNN.
They were talking about John "Jack" Murtha and what Scotty McClellon said about him. Then they showed the Vice President saying wonderful things about Congressman Murtha. Hmmmm, has the fourth estate not only grown back their backbone but the balls may be coming in too. They are not allowing this administration the free pass of 9/11.
My two favorite things from Congressman Murtha:
He said he voted against every tax cut and his wife told him not to say that.
He said he like that - that someone with five deferments who is sending kids off to war doesn't want to hear other people's suggestions.
You have to love a Jarhead!
So gas prices are falling. This is good. Now most of the country is only paying 20% more than a year ago. Still it bears repeating that something is very wrong with our addiction to oil. We can't live with out it. It undergirds everything. From your trip to the market, to a certain war in the Middle East. Is oil production peaking, or is Big Oil just making a killing while W looks on with a smirk. Or both. This article explains it all. Whatever one thinks we do, along with the oil city of Houston, have a problem.
Science? Really? Apparently facts are not allowed to enter into the discussion when it comes to the Neo-Cons. They are pesky, especially when they contradict what they've already decided to be true.
Top federal drug officials decided to reject an application to allow over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill months before a government scientific review of the application was completed, according to accounts given to Congressional investigators.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, concluded in a report released Monday that the Food and Drug Administration's May 2004 rejection of the morning-after pill, or emergency contraceptive, application was unusual in several respects.
Top agency officials were deeply involved in the decision, which was "very, very rare," a top F.D.A. review official told investigators. The officials' decision to ignore
the recommendation of an independent advisory committee as well as the agency's own scientific review staff was unprecedented, the report found. And a top official's "novel" rationale for rejecting the application contradicted past agency practices, it concluded.
Does it even shock you? After all Evolution is just a theory. Jeepers. Why even bother with research? Conception begins at the moment you think about sex apparently. I may already be pregnant after watching the Daily Show when George Clooney was on.
Pass out the cigars.
Ellen Goodman's op-ed today:
There was a time when only the loony left believed that the loony right favored death over sex. Not any more.
If you've been engrossed in the culture-war correspondence on the judicial front, maybe you missed the news on the medical front. While the religious right escorted Harriet Miers out and welcomed Samuel Alito in, a group of scientists announced the beginning of the end of a deadly cancer.
In clinical trials, a new vaccine was 100-percent successful in preventing the virus that causes most cervical cancer, the second-leading cancer killer of women in the world. Every year, some 10,000 American women are diagnosed with it and nearly 4,000 die. Needless to say, the success story was greeted with cork-popping enthusiasm by doctors. Eliav Barr of the beleaguered Merck, one of the two companies to develop a vaccine, offered a toast: "This is it. This is the Holy Grail."
But it appears that social conservatives aren't drinking from the same chalice.
This was the response of Leslie Unruh of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse: "I personally object to vaccinating children against a disease that is 100 percent preventable with proper sexual behavior."
The honchos at the Family Research Council said tepidly that they "welcome medical advances," but with a very frayed welcome mat. FRC's Tony Perkins said he would not inoculate his own daughter: "It sends the wrong message. Our concern is that this vaccine will be marketed to a segment of the population that should be getting a message about
abstinence."
A friend of mine got HPV from her husband, while she was pregnant with her fourth child. What a lovely gift to bring home, no? Even better during her treatment after she had the baby he told her he didn't love her anymore and left her.
She wasn't having premarital sex...it was postmarital. Her husband (obviously an asshole) infected her. Fortunately she is fine but if she had been vaccinated she wouldn't have had to go through chemo and radiation and the fear that she wouldn't be there for her kids.
I try to understand other people's views but I have hard time living in dreamland. Every parent would like their child to be perfect and not have sex until marriage but that is not the reality. But even if their perfect child does wait that may not protect them either. It's like home improvement - you buy more than you need for the project because it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Torture. Accountability
Most people would say torture- bad. Then you have Dick Cheney. He is fighting Senator McCain's bill that would put an end to torture. Most of us agree that accountability is good - not this administration that allows Rove to stay in his position with his security clearance when we all know he leaked classified information.
Senator McCain was on Fox News Sunday yesterday defending his bill. As someone who was actually tortured I believe he has the moral high ground here.
...how many people turn against the United States of America when they hear that we are torturing people? Chris, it's not about them. It's about us and what kind of country we are.
He is exactly right - it's about us. In WWII the Germans wanted to surrender to us instead of the Soviets because of who we were and how we treated prisoners. What have we become?
Fareed Zakaria said this:
Ask any soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, "Abu Ghraib." A few months before the scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations. Most telling, 61 percent of Iraqis polled believed that no one would be punished for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Of the 29 percent who said they believed someone would be punished, 52 percent said that such punishment would extend only to "the little people."
America washes its dirty linen in public. When scandals such as this one hit, they do sully America's image in the world. But what usually also gets broadcast around the world is the vivid reality that the United States forces accountability and punishes wrongdoing, even at the highest levels. Initially, people the world over thought Americans were crazy during Watergate, but they came to respect a rule of law so strong that even a president could not break it. But today, what angers friends of America abroad is not that abuses like those at Abu Ghraib happened. Some lapses are probably an inevitable consequence of war, terrorism and insurgencies. What angers them is that no one beyond a few "little people" have been punished, the system has not been overhauled, and even now, after all that has happened, the White House is spending time, effort and precious political capital in a strange, stubborn and surely futile quest to preserve the option to torture.
It's about us. If we have become what we are fighting against who has won the war on terror?
While I was cleaning the stove this morning (gas is fabulous to cook with but a nightmare to clean) I was thinking about the Libby indictment.
The Republican spin is that he was indicted for lying about something that wasn't a crime.
Okey dokey. Hmmmm, what was it Bill Clinton lied about? Adultery? Perhaps there are some Southern states where it's still illegal but as far as I know it isn't a crime in most of the country. Or was it the type of adultery? I personally do not know any men who would make a blow job illegal, in fact most would make it mandatory.
How I would love it if the "liberal" media would point this out to Senators Graham, Coryn and Hutchinson.
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