90% of the attacks on Hillary from the Left are sexist. And most of the adulation of Obama from the Left is based on his looks. That there is the ugly truth. Look closely at what is said about both - much of it is encoded "bitch" and "sex" talk. (She is divisive and cold. He is charismatic and fresh. ) Even this lie: "She is too divisive to win" is sexist. I would suggest that in 2004 the most divisive leader in our history was re-elected. But his "divisiveness" was usually called "decisive". Because he is a he.
Conventional wisdom about Senator Clinton should be called "but we want to attack Hillary because we have unconscious jealousy and anger toward powerful women " wisdom. The numb nut "intelligentsia" on the Left - the David Geffen wing of the Democratic Party - has all its reasoning wrong. An "apology" for the war vote is unwarranted on both moral and political grounds. "I WAS MISLEAD" is the truthful answer. The majority knows it and will vote FOR Clinton because of this statement. Not against her. We were all mislead.
Further -more proof the Hillary Bashing brigade on the Left has it wrong and the Clinton "political machine" has it right - WAPO Poll: The Post-ABC News poll found that 52 percent of Democrats said her vote was the right thing to do at the time, while 47 percent said it was a mistake. Of those who called it a mistake, however, 31 percent said she should apologize. Among Democrats who called the war the most important issue in deciding their 2008 candidate preference, Clinton led Obama 40 to 26 percent. That would be about 25% of Democrats who think she should apologize. I promise you it is lower among Independents, and lower still among GOPs. The bullshit that the war vote will be the decisive factor in the General or even primary elections is being propagated by the RESENTMENT WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. It simply is not true. The war will be decisive. The vote to authorize will not.
Many of those who resent Hillary do so because she is a strong female. What does the Right and the Left do in these cases? Turns the female object of scorn into a "bitch." The Right just happens to do it consciously. Even the Bitchification of Hillary may not matter. After the mess that has been created by Bush and his merry band of greedy morons - a bitch may be just what the majority will want.
 The true reason for the Iraq War is posted here. Please note the opening line: By 2010 we will need [a further] 50 million barrels a day. The Middle East, with two-thirds of the oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize lies. - US Vice President Dick Cheney, then Halliburton chief executive officer, London, autumn 1999
A brief refresher on why Cheney's pals felt we needed to invade here. The last bit is instructive:
Flat production is flat production. Despite the very high prices and widespread demand destruction, especially in poorer countries, oil producers have not brought more supply on-stream. That's just bizarre, unless the oil producers can't bring more supply on-stream. Some of the biggest producers - Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and the North Sea - are past their production peaks and declining inexorably. The smaller producers can barely replace those declines, let alone produce a net increase. Are we really to believe that OPEC simply cut their production because they like pricing their customers out of the market?
 Here in Los Angeles we move from one season to another during the Oscar/Pilot solstice tonight. (The four seasons in Los Angeles being : Awards season, Pilot season, Awards Campaign Season, Summer.) During Awards season staying indoors is recommended during the frequent smug alerts and I have had time to reflect. Let's reflect on my reflection time right now.
(pause here for reflection effect)
Okay - good. moving on. My take away from my moment of reflection is - Al Gore should run for President!!! I realize this is a shocking and utterly original idea. I urge everyone in the audience tonight at the Kodak theater in beautiful downtown Hollywood to yell/chant "Run, Al Run" if An Inconvenient Truth wins the Oscar for best Doco. This will be both fun and piss Dick Cheney off. (BTW - is "dick" a first name or a modifier?)
Where Were You That Summer of 2001?
By FRANK RICH
"UNITED 93," Hollywood's highly praised but indifferently attended 9/11 docudrama, will be only a blip on tonight's Oscar telecast. The ratings rise of "24" has stalled as audiences defect from the downer of terrorists to the supernatural uplift of "Heroes." Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole's decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week's terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American "intelligence and counterterrorism officials" leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda's comeback, and ask yourself: Haven't we been here before?
If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and shark attacks. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week's Times, culminating in the President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." The system "was blinking red," as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.
The White House doesn't want to hear it now, either. That's why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, "are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States" (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on "24"). Al Qaeda is "on the march" rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces - it's "not ready for transition," according to the Pentagon's last report - but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
This is why the entire debate about the Iraq "surge" is as much a sideshow as Britney's scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what's going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war's critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?
The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it's revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on "Meet the Press" that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was "pretty well confirmed," he said (though it was not), that bin Laden's operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.
In the Scooter Libby trial, Mr. Cheney's former communications aide, Catherine Martin, said that delivering a message on "Meet the Press" was "a tactic we often used." No kidding. That mention of the nonexistent Prague meeting was the first of five times that the vice president would imply an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration on that NBC show before the war began in March 2003. This bogus innuendo was an essential tool for selling the war precisely because we had lost bin Laden in Afghanistan. If we could fight Al Qaeda by going to war in Iraq instead, the administration could claim it didn't matter where bin Laden was. (Mr. Bush pointedly stopped mentioning him altogether in public.)
The president now says his government never hyped any 9/11-Iraq links. "Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq," he said last August after finally conceding that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact everyone in the administration insinuated it constantly, including him. Mr. Bush told of "high-level" Iraq-Qaeda contacts "that go back a decade" in the same notorious October 2002 speech that gave us Saddam's imminent mushroom clouds. So effective was this propaganda that by 2003 some 44 percent of Americans believed (incorrectly) that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis; only 3 percent had seen an Iraq link right after 9/11.
Though the nonexistent connection was even more specious than the nonexistent nuclear W.M.D., Mr. Bush still leans on it today even while denying that he does so. He has to. His litanies that we are "on the offense" by pursuing the war in Iraq and "fighting terrorists over there, so that we don't have to fight them here" depend on the premise that we went into that country in the first place to vanquish Al Qaeda and that it is still the "central front" in the war on terror. In January's State of the Union address hawking the so-called surge, Mr. Bush did it again, warning that to leave Iraq "would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy."
But now more than ever, the opposite is true. It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn't used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: "Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is." It's typical of Mr. Bush's self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.
That mistake - dropping the ball on Al Qaeda - was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had negotiated a "truce" with the Taliban in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House denied any of this was happening. "This deal is not at all with the Taliban," the president said, claiming that "this is against the Taliban, actually." When Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson of The Washington Post reported that same month that the bin Laden trail was "stone cold" and had been since Mr. Bush diverted special operations troops from that hunt to Iraq in 2003, the White House branded the story flat wrong. "We're on the hunt," Mr. Bush said. "We'll get him."
Far from getting him or any of his top operatives dead or alive, the president has sat idly by, showering praise on General Musharraf while Taliban attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan have increased threefold. As The Times reported last week, now both bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be "steadily building an operations hub" in North Waziristan. We know that last year's London plot to bomb airliners, like the bus-and-subway bombings of 2005, was not just the work of home-grown jihadists in Britain, but also of Qaeda operatives. Some of the would-be bombers were trained in Qaeda's Pakistan camps much as their 9/11 predecessors had been trained in Afghanistan.
All of this was already going on when Mr. Bush said just before the election that "absolutely, we're winning" and that "Al Qaeda is on the run." What's changed in the few months since his lie is that even more American troops are tied down in Iraq, that even more lethal weapons are being used against them, that even more of the coalition of the unwilling are fleeing, and that even more Americans are tuning out both the administration and the war they voted down in November to savor a referendum that at least offers tangible results, "American Idol."
Yet Mr. Bush still denies reality. Ten days ago he told the American Enterprise Institute that "the Taliban have been driven from power" and proposed that America help stabilize the Pakistan border by setting up "Reconstruction Opportunity Zones" (remember that "Gulf Opportunity Zone" he promised after Katrina?) to "give residents the chance to export locally made products to the United States, duty-free." In other words, let's fight terrorism not by shifting America's focus from Iraq to the central front, but by shopping for Taliban souvenirs!
Five years after 9/11, the terrorists would seem to have us just where they want us - asleep - even as the system is blinking red once again.
WHY IS THE HUFFINGTON POST BASHING CLINTON FOR SPORT? WHY IS THE UTTERLY UNTESTED OBAMA GETTING A PASS?
Some stupidity from the Huffington Post:
"I met them (Dems who dislike Clinton) on the long road trip I took after the '04 presidential election."
This is already suspect. 2004 is light years from 2008. Clinton is polling ahead of all other democrats. And even with McCain and Rudy G. No it is not name recognition alone. If she is so polarizing name recognition would hurt, not help. People choose her because they want to choose her. How much of McCain's support is by choice? Half of those who want him are because they don't want her. I admit. But this is good news. She is even with the best the GOP has running a year and a half out. How did this become "can't win" in David Geffen's tiny mind?
"What this totally unscientific opposite of a poll of exactly 234 randomly chosen women sitting around talking convinced me they want Hillary to hear is: Please, no."
This is bullshit. Sexist bullshit too. The "geffen" rant that everyone repeats is based on sexist bias. Yes. I said it. IT IS TRUE. There is a dislike of her because she is intelligent and capable- or rather if she where a man she would be called those things - so people call her "strident" and "divisive". What galls me is those on the alleged Left can't stop compulsive Hillary bashing. And they cann0t see that - if she were a he - they would be calling her a capable, talented politician.
Obama is not gonna win. Period. Obama is peaking NOW for christ's sake. Even if David Geffen is mad at Bill Clinton Davey Geffen can't make Obama win. And no other Democrat has a prayer. You see with all this blah blah blah about how "she can't win" no one ever asks "who can beat her?" The chatter that comes out of people's mouth's about Hillary will largely go away when it is a choice between her and a 72 year old man who wants more troops in Iraq. And frankly, here are your real choices unless Gore gets in : Hillary Clinton or John McCain. Hillary Clinton or that New York mayor on his 3rd wife? or some right wing nut jobs... Or or or or. Hilary is gonna look just fine then.
STOP TRYING TO DESTROY HILLARY NOW! Clinton bashing is a sport for the GOP. The Clintons are the only ones who have won since 1976. WAKE UP!!!
NO ONE ELSE IN THE FIELD CAN WIN. Obama would lose to McCain BIG TIME. WATCH THE HAROLD FORD ADS, for christ sake. People who don't like Hillary but can not get it up for McCain will stay home rather than vote. THOSE SAME - PEOPLE - WILL SHOW UP TO VOTE AGAINST OBAMA.
And if not her then who? Plenty of people want Hillary. In SCIENTIFIC POLLS she does just fine, and has yet to really begin campaigning. How do you explain this??? I repeat "name recognition" should be a drag on her numbers since she is so "divisive". Many, many people think she is a strong, intelligent person who would made a damn good President.
People who believe we need a Democrat in the White house before the courts are gone for 50 years, and abortion rights go away for good in some places. And something other than the Pentagon gets money HAD BETTER GET OVER THEIR UNCONSCIOUS BIAS AGAINST HILARY OR AT LEAST SHUT UP.
I love Hillary. And I love Bill C. more. But if Obama keeps talking like this I may take a mistress.
Rock on Barack...
 I want to rebut some nonsense that is floating around about Tony Blair. NEWSWEEK spent too much dead tree space on Blair being a "true believer" about Iraq. As if being a "true believer" in some way mitigates the colossal arrogance, stupidity, pointless destruction, death, maiming, and waste of resources in an unnecessary, illegal, immoral war. Goebbels was a "true believer". That didn't make it right. What has happened in Iraq is exactly what liberals, some moderates, and many true conservatives said would happen all along. It is time we took liberals seriously BEFORE THE DISASTER.
And John McCain saying Blair has "sacrificed his career" - and McCain might be sacrificing his too - by supporting the war is just plain offensive. It's also bullshit. Blair has to leave office early. so saaaad for Tone.....boo hoo. McCain will sacrifice his AMBITION to be President. Not his career.
Tell the boys who lost limbs how sad it is that you and joe lie ber man are so put upon.
The Iraq war is and was unneeded and disastrous. It is and was about securing oil fields and enriching a very small group of already very rich people. It has achieved the latter. The Cheney/Rummy brigade was too lazy, stupid, and arrogant to accomplish the former...for now.
Regardless of what party Lieberman says he is in he should be recalled. impeached. removed. whatever. He is a chicken hawk war mongering prick. Someone figure out how to do this. This nutter should not have so much power.
Keeping with today's rat theme, Joe Lieberman has announced he will join with the Republicans if it comes to funding the war.
Yes, Connecticutians, you have elected a rat fink. Thanks a lot.
My this is funny. Only because i gave up fast food this year. Yum Brands is in trouble to today. Yum brands. I kid you not.
 David Geffen needs to shut his foul mouth, and go back to laying and lying by the pool with his "hired hands". Until Obama proves he is worthy of the Presidency he remains the flavor of the month. Even Howard Dean had the good sense not to peak until December.
Go Hillary: Mrs. Clinton, asked Wednesday afternoon if Mr. Obama should denounce the Geffen remarks, declined to join in the hand-to-hand combat, but expressed general disapproval with the remarks while also defending her husband, which drew huge cheers from the audience of union members she was addressing. “I want to run a very positive campaign, and I sure don’t want Democrats or the supporters of Democrats to be engaging in the politics of personal destruction,” she said at the forum of Democratic presidential candidates in Carson City, Nev. “I think we should stay focused on what we’re going to do for America. And, you know, I believe Bill Clinton was a good president, and I’m very proud of the record of his two terms.”
Bill Maher said something very wise on his last show. He said all of the attention about the 2008 Presidential race is because we need to know that Bush is almost over. That we will be done with him soon. Even though it's not soon enough discussing Clinton/Obama McCain/Guilianni is proof that our long Bush nightmare will end.
John is right - Hillary can win. Without a doubt if things don't change in Iraq whoever is the Democratic nomenee will be the next President.
And as an aside does anyone else think that fact that Prince Harry is going to Iraq is one of the reasons Blair is pulling back to a "support" position?
David Geffen should stick to what he is very good at - making money - and shut up about politics. He is WRONG. The Libby trial is a window into to the circle jerk of Washington politicians and "journalists". Geffen railing against Clinton through Dowd of the NY Times is emblematic of why politicians treat L.A. like an A.T.M. Liberals in Hollywood should be treated like A.T.M.'s That is what they are good for.
Hollywood cash cows, like Geffen, certainly should not be given dead tree space in the New York Times for political rants. Especially with the Hollywood track record. Since 1960 "Hollywood" has picked exactly one winner - Bill Clinton.
A random list of Hollywood's choices:
Howard Dean,
Gary Hart,
George McGovern....I could go on...but why? oh, Dukakis...and Jerry Brown...someone should write a song. "Hollywood picks a loser...or two..."
Why Geffen is wrong:
1. This bullshit that Senator Clinton should "apologize" for a vote that 70% percent of the country supported at the time is childish and stupid. Why should she apologize? To make David Geffen feel better? To give all us liberals who knew all along the war was wrong A HIT OFF THE SMUG CRACK PIPE? I love the smug pipe, too. It is what we fall back on - like conservatives fall back on fantasies and anger. But it has not, does not, and will not win elections. Geffen does not want her to apologize for BEING wrong. He wants her to apologize to feel superior. Yes, David - you, me, and a lot of other people were correct all along about Iraq. Clinton saying "ooops, sorry" proves nothing - except she would then lose in 08 and you would feel smug about it. Believe me Brit Hume is aching to intone "Will she apologize to the Iranians NEXT? CAN we afford a 'women are from Venus Presidency!!!???"
In reality land - where the majority of people who vote live - here is a truth: The first woman with a real shot at becoming a U.S. President cannot make the first major talking point of her campaign an apology. This is politics 101. Politics is the art of the possible. A purely anti-war candidate is simply not going to win in 2008 like it or not. It would be grand if it happened, but it won't.
Geffen is wrong part2:
2. The GOP thinks Clinton is the easiest candidate to beat. HOLY CHRIST I AM SICK OF HEARING THIS PIECE OF HORSESHIT REPEATED AS IF
A. IT IS TRUE.
AND
B. IT IS EVEN BASED IN REALITY.
It is neither. Repeating like a mantra "Clinton can't win" is exactly what the far right wants us to do.
Facts on the ground: a. She has won two elections handily. b. Her husband is the best politician of his generation and more popular than ever. c. She can raise gobs of money. d. She polls even or ahead of her major G.O.P. opponents NOW - and we already know all her crap. She would beat McCain and MAYOR Rudy G. is a house of cards.
Romney/ Mormon. Nuff said. (that is unfair, unpleasant, but true.) The Right wing is quite clear that Clinton is the candidate to beat. Unlike Hollywood liberals these people have learned to spend their money wisely - and they are not spending millions right now cooking up ways to defeat Obama. They know better. They are after Senator Clinton, because they know a real threat when they see one.
Unless a better crop of GOPs get in the race, Clinton will be President. I would love Obama to be President. I would vote for him with joy if he gets the nomination. He could. But I doubt it. Potential is not going to trump experience in 2008. David Geffen is wrong.
Let's Start a War, One We Can Win
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
AFETA, Ethiopia
They were two old men, one arriving by motorcade with bodyguards and the other groping blindly as he shuffled on a footpath with a stick, but for a moment the orbits of Jimmy Carter and Mekonnen Leka intersected on this remote battlefield in southern Ethiopia.
Mr. Mekonnen, who thinks he may be 78, is a patient in Mr. Carter's war on river blindness. He is so blind that he rarely leaves the house any more, but on this occasion he staggered to the village clinic to get a treatment for the worms inside him.
His skin is mottled because the worms cause ferocious itching, especially when they become more active at night. He and other victims scratch until they are bloodied and their skin is partly worn away. Ultimately the worms travel to the eye, where they often destroy the victim's sight.
Ethiopia has the largest proportion of blind people in the world, 1.2 percent, because of the combined effects of river blindness and trachoma. As in many African countries, the wrenching emblem of poverty is a tiny child leading a blind beggar by a stick.
As Mr. Mekonnen waited on a bench by the clinic, there was a flurry of activity, and an Ethiopian announced in the Amharic language that "a great elder" had arrived. Then Mr. Mekonnen heard voices speaking a foreign language and a clicking of cameras, and finally the whirlwind around Mr. Carter moved on.
"Do you know who that was?" I asked Mr. Mekonnen.
"I couldn't see," he replied.
"Have you ever heard of Jimmy Carter?"
"No."
Yet in remote places like this, former President Carter, at 82, is leading a private war on disease that should inspire and shame President Bush and other world leaders into joining. It's not just that Mr. Carter's wars have been more successful than Mr. Bush's; Mr. Carter is also rehabilitating the image of the U.S. abroad and transforming the lives of the world's most wretched peoples.
On the previous night, Mr. Mekonnen had slept under a mosquito net for the first time in his life, as part of a Carter initiative to wipe out malaria and elephantiasis in this region. And Mr. Mekonnen now uses an outhouse as a result of a Carter Center initiative to build 350,000 outhouses in rural Ethiopia to defeat blindness from trachoma.
Mr. Carter has almost managed to wipe out one horrific ailment - Guinea worm - and is making great strides against others, including river blindness and elephantiasis. In this area, people are taking an annual dose of a medicine called Mectizan - donated by Merck, which deserves huge credit - that prevents itching and blindness.
Mectizan also gets rid of intestinal worms, leaving Ethiopian villagers stronger and more able to work or attend school. Among adults, the deworming revives sex drive, so some people have named their children Mectizan.
Mr. Carter's private campaign against the diseases of poverty, put together with pennies and duct tape, is a model of what our government could do. Imagine if the U.S. resolved that it would wipe out malaria and elephantiasis (both are spread by mosquitoes, so a combined campaign makes sense). What if we celebrated science not by trying to go to Mars but by extinguishing malaria? What if we tried to burnish America's image abroad not only with press releases and propaganda broadcasts, but also with a bold campaign against disease?
So I wish that President Bush could visit villages like this and see what Mr. Carter has accomplished as a private individual. Mr. Bush, to his great credit, has financed a major campaign against AIDS that will save nine million lives, and he is also increasing spending against malaria - but not nearly as energetically as he is increasing the number of troops in Iraq. So I asked Mr. Carter whether President Bush should be pushing not for a possible war with Iran, but for a war on malaria.
"That would certainly be my preference," he said. "I thought the war in Iraq was one of the worst mistakes our country ever made, and we're possibly about to make an even worse mistake by precipitating a war with Iran. But I would like to see us shift away from war being a high priority, to diplomacy and benevolent causes."
So, President Bush, how about if we as a nation join Mr. Carter's war on diseases that afflict the world's poorest peoples - and are one reason they are so poor. That's a war that would unite Americans, not divide them. Come on, Mr. Bush, sound the trumpets!
With affection and reverence for Bill Maher - here is a new rule which Lynne put perfectly in the post below - "If you will not outfit the troops properly you cannot send them." This should be the one and only Democratic talking point for a week. Let's shove this sentence right up Brit Hume's crusty ass. NO BODY ARMOUR - NO SURGE!
Also: if you still don't think this war is about oil -read this.
Jack Murtha has a new proposal. One that insures that any troops sent into harm's way are actually given the equipment and training they need.
In addition to training and equipment standards, Mr. Murtha's proposal calls for units to get at least one year at home between tours overseas, no deployments lasting more than a year and an end to the "stop-loss" program that lets the military recall troops who have completed their enlistment commitments. According to the right this is blasphemy. He's trying to shut down the President in a sly way.
Oh, sly, indeed. Trying to force the President to do what should have been done from the onset, what is reasonable is sly.
Sorry. What is sly is sending troops off to war without body armor and then accusing others of not supporting the troops. What is blasphemy is saying that Iran is killing our soldiers with their sophisticated IED's when we are not providing the armored vehicles that would protect our solders from the IED's.
We need to keep stating the obvious and the truth. If you will not outfit the troops properly you can't send them. If you want to cut funding for veteran's benefits you do not support the troops.
Mr. Murtha speaks for the military and everyone needs to listen.
Oh What a Malleable War
By FRANK RICH
MAYBE the Bush White House can't conduct a war, but no one has ever impugned its ability to lie about its conduct of a war. Now even that well-earned reputation for flawless fictionalizing is coming undone. Watching the administration try to get its story straight about Iran's role in Iraq last week was like watching third graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.
Surely these guys can do better than this. No sooner did unnamed military officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the whole charade. General Pace said he didn't know about the briefing and couldn't endorse its contention that the Iranian government's highest echelons were complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq. Public-relations pandemonium ensued as Tony Snow, the State Department and finally the president tried to revise the story line on the fly. Back when Karl Rove ruled, everyone read verbatim from the same script. Last week's frantic improvisations were vintage Scooter Libby, at best the ur-text for a future perjury trial.
Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.
In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that "U.S. forces intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American vehicles." Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs currently called E.F.P.'s (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Timing is everything in propaganda, as in all showmanship. So why would the White House pick this particular moment to mount such an extravagant rerun of old news, complete with photos and props reminiscent of Colin Powell's infamous presentation of prewar intelligence? Yes, the death toll from these bombs is rising, but it has been rising for some time. (Also rising, and more dramatically, is the death toll from attacks on American helicopters.)
After General Pace rendered inoperative the first official rationale for last Sunday's E.F.P. briefing, President Bush had to find a new explanation for his sudden focus on the Iranian explosives. That's why he said at Wednesday's news conference that it no longer mattered whether the Iranian government (as opposed to black marketeers or freelance thugs) had supplied these weapons to Iraqi killers. "What matters is, is that they're there," he said. The real point of hyping this inexact intelligence was to justify why he had to take urgent action now, no matter what the E.F.P.'s provenance: "My job is to protect our troops. And when we find devices that are in that country that are hurting our troops, we're going to do something about it, pure and simple."
Darn right! But if the administration has warned about these weapons twice in the past 18 months (and had known "that they're there," we now know, since 2003), why is Mr. Bush just stepping up to that job at this late date? Embarrassingly enough, The Washington Post reported on its front page last Monday - the same front page with news of the Baghdad E.F.P. briefing - that there is now a shortfall of "thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs." Worse, the full armor upgrade "is not scheduled to be completed until this summer." So Mr. Bush's idea of doing something about it, "pure and simple" is itself a lie, since he is doing something about it only after he has knowingly sent a new round of underarmored American troops into battle.
To those who are most suspicious of this White House, the "something" that Mr. Bush really wants to do has little to do with armor in any case. His real aim is to provoke war with Iran, no matter how overstretched and ill-equipped our armed forces may be for that added burden. By this line of thinking, the run-up to the war in Iraq is now repeating itself exactly and Mr. Bush will seize any handy casus belli he can to ignite a conflagration in Iran.
Iran is an unquestionable menace with an Israel-hating fanatic as its president. It is also four times the size of Iraq and a far more dangerous adversary than was Saddam's regime. Perhaps Mr. Bush is as reckless as his harshest critics claim and will double down on catastrophe. But for those who don't hold quite so pitch-black a view of his intentions, there's a less apocalyptic motive to be considered as well.
Let's not forget that the White House's stunt of repackaging old, fear-inducing news for public consumption has a long track record. Its reason for doing so is always the same: to distract the public from reality that runs counter to the White House's political interests. When the Democrats were gaining campaign traction in 2004, John Ashcroft held an urgent news conference to display photos of seven suspected terrorists on the loose. He didn't bother to explain that six of them had been announced previously, one at a news conference he had held 28 months earlier. Mr. Bush played the same trick last February as newly declassified statistics at a Senate hearing revealed a steady three-year growth in insurgent attacks: he breathlessly announced a thwarted Qaeda plot against the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles that had already been revealed by the administration four months before.
We know what Mr. Bush wants to distract us from this time: Congressional votes against his war policy, the Libby trial, the Pentagon inspector general's report deploring Douglas Feith's fictional prewar intelligence, and the new and dire National Intelligence Estimate saying that America is sending troops into the cross-fire of a multifaceted sectarian cataclysm.
That same intelligence estimate also says that Iran is "not likely to be a major driver of violence" in Iraq, but no matter. If the president can now whip up a Feith-style smoke screen of innuendo to imply that Iran is the root of all our woes in the war - and give "the enemy" a single recognizable face (Ahmadinejad as the new Saddam) - then, ipso facto, he is not guilty of sending troops into the middle of a shadowy Sunni-Shiite bloodbath after all.
Oh what a malleable war Iraq has been. First it was waged to vanquish Saddam's (nonexistent) nuclear arsenal and his (nonexistent) collaboration with Al Qaeda. Then it was going to spread (nonexistent) democracy throughout the Middle East. Now it is being rebranded as a fight against Tehran. Mr. Bush keeps saying that his saber rattling about Iran is not "a pretext for war." Maybe so, but at the very least it's a pretext for prolonging the disastrous war we already have.
What makes his spin brazen even by his standards is that Iran is in fact steadily extending its influence in Iraq - thanks to its alliance with the very Iraqi politicians that Mr. Bush himself has endorsed. In December the president welcomed a Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to the White House with great fanfare; just three weeks later American forces had to raid Mr. Hakim's Iraq compound to arrest Iranian operatives suspected of planning attacks against American military forces, possibly with E.F.P.'s. As if that weren't bad enough, Nuri al-Maliki's government promptly overruled the American arrests and ordered the operatives' release so they could escape to Iran. For all his bluster about doing something about it, Mr. Bush did nothing.
It gets worse. This month we learned that yet another Maliki supporter in the Iraqi Parliament, Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ebrahimi, was convicted more than two decades ago of planning the murderous 1983 attacks on the American and French Embassies in Kuwait. He's now in Iran, but before leaving, this terrorist served as a security adviser, no less, to the first Iraqi prime minister after the American invasion, Ibrahim al-Jafaari. Mr. Jafaari, hailed by Mr. Bush as "a strong partner for peace and freedom" during his own White House visit in 2005, could be found last week in Tehran, celebrating the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution and criticizing America's arrest of Iranian officials in Iraq.
Even if the White House still had its touch for spinning fiction, it's hard to imagine how it could create new lies brilliant enough to top the sorry truth. When you have a president making a big show of berating Iran while simultaneously empowering it, you've got another remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," this time played for keeps.
 So - this freak, Britney Spears. married and divorced twice - can legally marry again and again. and again. and again while flashing her twat and shaving her head - ditching her two young kids with some nanny. But the lesbian couple I know in Burbank that has been in a stable, monogamous relationship for 12 years - both of whom are hard working, upstanding members of the community - cannot legally marry each other. Even once. By the looks of this culture right now I'd say we ought to ban heterosexual marriage and only allow gay marriage.
Sincerely,
Brittany Anna Nichole Spears Paris Federline.
 Some people do not have televisions. Some people do not watch much television. This post is not for you. Most of us have T.V. and watch T.V. I have no intention of giving it up. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip makes me happy. Heroes is great fun. Keith Olberman and Jon Stewart may have saved democracy by themselves in the last few years. USC football and March Madness and Vin Scully....House....my beloved Green
Acres/Simpsons/AbFab Tivo Trifecta...I watch and like television. But it has also become an indicator of our country's ill health. The coverage of Anna Nichole Smith's death is the latest example. We are fucked up.
My modest proposal: Choose one, two or three 24 hour blocks a week - TO GO ENTIRELY WITHOUT TELEVISION, OR IF YOU ARE REALLY BRAVE, GO WITHOUT ALL MEDIA. My stretched analogy: City dwellers take a trip to the country every so often to readjust, relax and breath the clean air. The noise of the media is mental chaos. Get away from it for a while every week. Set aside blocks of time. I am starting this practice in the week ahead. Not sure what day yet. And I am not giving up media entirely, nor do I have any intention of giving up media. However -
TAKE A MEDIA FREE DAY. OR TWO. Spread the word.
 John Amaechi's coming out and his clear and dignified response to Tim Hardaway's putrid remarks on Howard Stern's show has made him an instant hero in my eyes. This quote is particularly refreshing: "When people start talking about gay players being bold and stepping up, let's talk about straight players being bold and stepping up."
Amaechi's sites and book tour linked here, here, and here.
The guy rocks.
President Bush said yesterday that we need more forces in Afghanistan. Duh! So what's the plan?
Mr. Bush noted that he has already extended the tour of a 3,200-soldier American brigade and called on Congress to provide $11.8 billion more to pay for operations in Afghanistan over the next two years.
He's extending soldier's tours. Once again, who's supporting the troops? And didn't Mr. Bush's proposal for the troop surge in Iraq involve moving troops from Afghanistan to Iraq? Is the brigade he's now keeping in Afghanistan the one he was going to move? Is he robbing Peter to pay Paul? Does he have any idea what he is doing?
I'm going to go with, "NO."
Jack Murtha proposed yesterday that President Bush cannot send more troops until they have the neccessary equipment. How ridiculous is it that the President needs to have someone tell him that you can't send troops into harm's way without body armor and armored vehicles?
We need more than a non-binding resolution to stop this man from destroying our country.
We've been in Iraq four years and the debate on the floor of the House is the first. In four years. And the Republicans would like to have the debate without actually talking about Iraq. Perhaps a non-binding resolution stating that they prefer creamy peanut butter would be more to their liking.
Our Republican friends are blasting democrats for a. not having a plan for Iraq now that they are in the driver's seat; b. not supporting the troops by debating the Iraq war; c. it's non-binding so "toothless".
Let's rebut
A. You were in the "driver's seat" for four years and you never had a debate on Iraq at least we're doing something.
B. Claiming that someone else doesn't support the troops while you introduce a measure to cut funding for veteran's benefits seems somewhat, I don't know, hypocritical. I was going to go with the argument that everyone supports the troops but now I have to say YOU don't. You are willing to send them into harms way without adequate body armor, armored vehicles and you want to screw them when they come home.
C. It's toothless. Perhaps it is. But when your colleagues in the Senate wouldn't even allow a toothless measure to get to the floor (including the person who wrote the resolution) is it really toothless? Or is it a way to get the ball rolling? Which we need desperately since every day more of our troops die.
It's insulting that the Republicans just keep spinning instead of actually dealing with the "facts on the ground."
And the other lie that frosts me like a cake is that Iran is the problem in Iraq. Who is supporting the Sunnis? It's not Iran.
The troops that President Bush wants to surge now won't be getting their armored vehicles until the summer.
How do you explain to the thousands of American troops now being poured into Baghdad that they will have to wait until the summer for the protective armor that could easily mean the difference between life and death?
It's bad enough that these soldiers are being asked to risk their lives without President Bush demanding that Iraq’s leaders take any political risks that might give the military mission at least an outside chance of success. But according to an article in The Washington Post this week, at least some of the troops will be sent out in Humvees not yet equipped with FRAG Kit 5 armor. That's an advanced version designed to reduce deaths from roadside bombs, which now account for about 70 percent of United States casualties in Iraq.
More proof that Bush is not a leader at all. But a foolish buffoon in way over his head and fully deserving of the title "worst President ever". He made a deal with North Korea he could have made 5 years ago. Except now North Korea has actually detonated a nuke. Way to go, George! This administration is a mess.
As for Iraq - the Democrats need to say clearly and repeatedly: Continuing Bush's failed war policy is not supporting the troops. It is, in fact, disregarding the troops.
GOP policy hurts the troops. Period. We have 4 years of proof.
The domino theory dominated U.S. foreign policy for 30 years. The idea being that if one nation "fell" to the commies, then those nearby would "fall" and so on and so on. Therefore we had to nip the commie hordes in there commie buds. It did not work. Then again neither did communism. And here we are.
Here is my question: Is what Bush doing in Iraq a sort of domino theory in reverse? A preemptive domino theory.
It goes like this:
1. Without factual cause, invade a country that has something we want. Iraq. Oil. (As opposed to shoring up a corrupt regime that does our bidding. South Vietnam)
2. Botch the invasion in such a way that the society of the invaded land teeters on the brink of total collapse. Iraq. (As opposed to the society being neutralized and controlled so as to be exploited. Just about any nation you can think of - Vietnam, "Siam" , India, Central America, in general, Iraq before 1990.)
3. As the society of the invaded nation goes over the edge, its neighbor nations, concerned, with cause, for there own stability, covertly try to stop the invaders from further damaging the region. And seeing an opening do what they can to exert more influence.- not pleasant, but hardly unexpected.
4. This becomes the pretext for another attack, this time on the neighbor country. Which, in turn, creates social disruption through out the region. Which in turn opens the doors for military force against those we do not like and military support for those we do. And before you know it, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and anyone else who rubs us the wrong way is engulfed in flames and ripe for "regime enhancement" - by us.
The domino theory in reverse. Of course, it won't work. The societies Bush will disrupt with an attack on Iran will all be Western. But the arrested development of the neo-cons marches on...stability, common sense, history, and realism be damned.
This is from a story in my local paper this morning:
With all the debate about the increase of American troops in Iraq, Lila Harmon of Winter Haven has a surge of her own going on with a son, a daughter and a son-in-law all soldiers and all notified they will be going to Iraq.
Her son, Coy Bope, both an Army infantry soldier and truck driver, who left the Army in June 2005 after five years of active duty, was called up in January for a fourth tour in Iraq. He is temporarily back home in Winter Haven until he can have surgery at MacDill Air Force base and then will be sent over after he recovers.
Here's something we should be talking about:
In his five years in the Army, Bope had three deployments to Iraq and one to Kuwait where he was driving a truck into Iraq on a regular basis. Not all of his tours were for the standard 12-month deployments. Some were shorter.
Despite the fact that he and his wife, Brooke, are expecting their first child, he said he is willing to answer the call.
What he does mind, however, is the treatment of veterans when they are first called back to duty.
"We were called to Fort Benning to prepare for deployment. Every one of the 174 of us were combat veterans. Yet we were treated like basic training recruits, confined to base, not allowed to bring our wives or even to call them. We willingly showed up. Some who were called did not," he said.
"I don't think a lot of people know how they are treating the combat veterans who show up and are ready to serve again," he said.
We are treating our soldiers like detainees. We send them over without adequate equipment. And we have a Congress who cannot get it together to vote on a non-binding resolution. There's something very wrong here. If they wouldn't listen to what the people said in 2006 because we didn't get rid of enough Republicans it's time to take to the streets. And to vote all of them out in 2008. The red herring of not supporting the troops needs to be thrown right back in their faces.
I wonder if Dana Rohrabacher understands the irony. The always idiotic Dana said global warming may have been caused in the past by "Dinosaur flatulence". They don't listen to reason, anyone who disagrees with them, or themselves.
Speaking of listening - when is it okay to simply stop taking people like Rohrabacher, Jonah Goldberg, and William Kristol seriously? Their judgement is clearly impaired. They have been wrong about almost everything. Conservatives, neo-conservatives, whatever they call themselves are simply WRONG almost all the time. We all know this. It is not hard to see. THERE ARE PLENTY OF WRITERS ON THE LEFT WHO WERE CORRECT ABOUT THE WAR ALL ALONG AND STILL ARE NOT SEEN ANYWHERE ON T.V. EXCEPT KEITH. Why do those on the "Right" continue to be taken seriously about anything? At what point do reasonable people simply say "look these types have been wrong with catastrophic results so often now we simply cannot trust their judgement."
Even after 6 years of the disaster that is Bush I am still surprised at just how amoral the Republican Party is. These are the people who impeached a popular president because he lied about a blow job. But an entire administration lied this country into a foolish and illegal war, and is about to lie us into another and the asswipes in the GOP are bitching about Pelosi's plane.
The Republican Party is now controlled by unethical, immoral, amoral, unAmerican, dangerous, lying, money grubbing, pseudo fascist, scumbags.
Republicans lie. Americans die.
Fox News Lies. Americans die.
3115 Americans have been killed in an illegal, unnecessary war created by overt lies. 1 woman famous for being famous collapses at a casino in Florida.
Her death is sad. But...
In Ancient Rome to keep the public in line you had to ensure they had 2 things: bread and circuses.
OK - so Cantor is an asshole but here's a little tidbit about my representative.
Republican leaders complained this week it would be unfair for Democrats to prohibit amendments to a resolution condemning President Bush's plan to add troops to Iraq, as they expect. They called the whole exercise a political game. They accused Democrats of stifling a real debate about the war.
And one member of the GOP leadership told reporters that just because Republicans were guilty of doing all of that during their own reign -- despite similar outrage among Democrats -- that doesn't make it right.
"They were right," admitted Rep. Adam Putnam of Florida, the third-ranking Republican in the House, when asked the difference between what Democrats are doing and the tactics used by the previous Republican majority to undercut criticism of the war.
Isn't that nice - it was fine when they were in the majority to hose the minority but they don't like it when it happens to them. "Yeah, we screwed you over but it's not fair for you to do it to us!" Whaaaaaaa. I wonder if Mr. Putnam will agree to not do the same thing again if the Republicans regain the majority? I'll call and ask him tomorrow.
What a dick.
If you swear to defend the Constitution, shouldn't you have to read it?
Representative Eric Cantor was on Hardball this evening (he's the Deputy Minority Whip). He said that the Commander in Chief declares war. Chris Matthews asked him then why did the President go to Congress for authorization for the Iraq war. Congressman Cantor said that Bush's lawyers recommended that he should.
Let's just check with the Constitution, shall we?
Article I; Section 8: The Congress shall have power
to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;
To establish post offices and post roads;
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
It goes on.
If you happen to live in Richmond call this jerk and tell him he might want to read the document he's sworn to protect. OR you can email him using the zip code 23221-1118. Let him know what you think.
They were for the debate on the war, before they voted against it, and afterward they wrote a letter supporting debate on the war. The debate now is whether the letter about the debate is a binding letter or a nonbinding missive, junk mail, or a note passed in homeroom.
Or simply a signal to the terrorists - as we know they are listening. And bored stiff.
Does anybody know when the mass civil disobedience begins? It is now apparent that nothing is going to change in Washington,D.C. The Democrats in the Senate are useless. Levin was "bi-partisan" with Warner and got his ass handed to him. Hagel pulled a McCain. Harry Reid is every bit as ineffective in the majority as he was in the minority.
There are solutions to the Bush's Iraq mess other than war without end. Baker, Biden, Murtha...etc etc etc. But nothing will be done about it from the top. WAR WITHOUT END IS UNACCEPTABLE.
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHEN THE MASS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE BEGINS?
So, Chuck, don't bother running as an Independent for President because apparently you put your party above your country.
Thanks a lot for that. I'm sure the troops thank you, too. You know the troops that don't have armor or ammo. You voted against a debate on the war when you said last week that every senator needed to be on the record or go home and sell shoes.
I'm a size 8 1/2 and do you have it in black?
Meanwhile, Warner, who co-sponsored the resolution, voted against debating it.
Yeah, that's what I call leadership.
I don't know if all of these guys missed the significance of the 2006 election but we had better remind them.
Ralph Nader is an asshole of epic size and scale. Why didn't he ever run for Governor of Vermont, or Mayor of Berkeley, or or city council in San Francisco OR ANYTHING HE COULD ACTUALLY WIN ? He doesn't want to win. He wants to swing elections to Republicans with the Code Pink Ninnie Vote. He is an arrogant, evil, little buffoon.
An Unreasonable Man: The long interview with Nader that is dispersed throughout the film suggests that he became, in later years, a thoughtless man who believes only in himself...
Duh. All the prick had to do was tell his pot head code pink ninnies to vote for Gore in ONE STATE. That Whore Nader must have taken money from the Bush's. Ralph Nader is WORSE THAN BUSH.
AND The Far Left's bashing of Hillary Clinton is unconscious sexism. Period. What ever else they say it is about...the bashing of Hillary is about one thing: She is a woman. The Code Pink Ninnies cannot abide that a moderate woman may actually win the Presidency. They hate that a powerful woman has actually been muddled about the war. GUESS WHAT, CODE PINK NINNIES - 80% OF THE POPULATION HAS BEEN MUDDLED ABOUT THE WAR. Do you want a Democrat to win or do you want John McCain? Grow the fuck up.
Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
By FRANK RICH
IN the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation's armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of "enormous successes" in Iraq and barked "hogwash" at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago. The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.
The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney's former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House's current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.
Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as "a tempest in a teapot," as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago. When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great," Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson's identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" are "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people." Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson's identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring. It's entirely possible that the White House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.) The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn't make that accusation in the first place.)
But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else. According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what he didn't find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president's men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson's modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration's W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq's purchase of uranium in Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines at frankrich.com/timeline.htm.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in January 2003, the same month as the president's State of the Union address, when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally that the claim was baseless. Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful "uranium from Africa" in his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.
If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration's deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared -some five months after the State of the Union and two months after "Mission Accomplished" - there was something terribly wrong with the White House's triumphal picture. More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of "major combat operations" by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren't even able to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was "unacceptable."
It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson's revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial boondoggle arranged by his wife. The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of the Union speech.
What we are learning from Mr. Libby's trial is just what a herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson's article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby's lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was - and still is - a stooge for the vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being retrofitted to expand and extend it.
In a replay of the run-up to the original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his surge. Even the declassified passages released on Friday - the grim takes on the weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence - foretell that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases bad news on Fridays because "fewer people pay attention when it's reported on Saturday.")
A Pentagon inspector general's report, uncovered by Business Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops lack the guns and ammunition to "effectively complete their missions." Army and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that "five brigades of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky."
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell's notorious W.M.D. pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving the same script to rev up the war's escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections. In his Jan. 10 prime-time speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying "advanced weaponry and training to our enemies," even though the evidence suggests that Iran is actually in bed with our "friends" in Iraq, the Maliki government. The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls "a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration's case."
Call it a coincidence - though there are no coincidences - but it's only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later. Still, we can't push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country can't wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood.
If you don't care about the superbowl, or need something to do on Saturday go see Children of Men. I saw it twice this week. It is haunting. It matters.
unlike almost everything else in the multiplex in the past 10 years.
Dodd is right. After 6 years of mindless cowardly acquiescence the U.S. Senate is now taking weeks to come up with a non binding resolution with hurricane force irrelevancy.
OK - Keith reported on this last night - the actual number for the "augmentation" of troops is between 32,000 and 48,000 because Mr. Bush didn't include support troops.
President Bush and his new military chiefs have been saying for nearly a month that they would "surge" an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, in a last, grand push to quell the violence in Baghdad and in Anbar Province. But a new study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000 -- more than double the number the President initially said. Bush, being Bush, may send less support troops in because he "supports" the troops so why would they need someone to transport gas, tend to their wounds, cook, act as MP's when they have him? Don't forget that it's already been reported that the surge troops won't have the proper equipment to protect then such as armored vehicles.
He is a liar.
The Gov. of Florida is a gay republican - a breed I find morally repellent. Gay and Republican is a sick combination of self hate and hypocracy. Out the sons of bitches.
However, Florida is ditching touch screen voting machines. Right on, Gov. Crist. How in God's name did this ever become an issue to begin with? Of course, these touch screen machines cannot and should not be trusted. We must have a paper trail. Democracy demands it.
It the 5 minutes it took me to write this entry 1 million dollars was borrowed from our grand kids for an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq. I think we can afford voting machines that produce a tiny piece of paper.
A 29 year old sex offender enrolled and attended school for 4 months as a 7th grader in a town called SURPRISE, Arizona.
I swear. Ya can't make this stuff up.
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