Emerging picture of Bush's politicization of the federal government isn't pretty

Teepen

Cox News Service
Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Bit by bit, as odd scraps of information surface, the hidden history of George W. Bush's presidency is emerging, like a jigsaw puzzle coming together.

With complaints becoming public, the Justice Department has announced it will remove political appointees as screeners for hiring interns and young attorneys. That's the sort of bureaucratic bric-a-brac shuffling that usually goes unremarked and, if reported at all, is sensibly ignored by anyone with something better to do, which would be just about anything.

But in a nifty piece of enterprise, a Washington Post report makes it clear why this little in-house dance shouldn't be sloughed off. The tale adds importantly to the disturbing story of the Bush administration's program to politicize every nook and cranny of the federal government.

The department's well-regarded Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program have been reduced under Bush and his go-fer attorneys general, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, to partisan hiring halls. The Honors Program, a creation of the Eisenhower administration, had in the past been conducted by Justice's senior career attorneys.

With Bush political appointees in charge, applicants found themselves in interviews that suggested less a professional assessment than an ideological vetting. There has been a sudden influx from doctrinally conservative law schools and from the Federalist Society, created to nurture activist conservative lawyers. (The society is a major source, as well, of Bush judicial appointees.)

Ideological influence has left the Justice Department's civil rights division basically inert and has reached high into the department's top ranks. Monica Goodling, counselor to Gonzales, has threatened to take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination if subpoenaed to testify to Congress about the political purge of U.S. attorneys. She came to Justice's leadership from Messiah College and Regent University Law School, a Pat Robertson spin-off.

The U. S. attorneys' removal for obviously ideological and partisan reasons and Justice's politicization of traditionally professional positions make a snug fit with other Bush practices.

From its first days, this White House has outfitted federal departments with political minders, usually installed in management and policy positions that are influential but typically below public radar.

Under Edwin Foulke, a Republican Party operative, OSHA, responsible for worker safety, has shifted from enforcement to taking industries' word that they will play nice. Perhaps not coincidentally, the three largest fields regulated by OSHA — agribusiness, construction and transportation — have off-loaded $630 million into GOP coffers during Bush's run so far.

The Bushified Environmental Protection Agency ignores science — or even brazenly rewrites it — to act out the right's conviction that environmental concerns rank somewhere between mistaken and nutty. Political appointees override the agency's professionals at will, the case repeatedly in this administration.

The White House sent a political operative to General Service Administration offices to brief the administration's political appointees on the Republican Party's 2008 priority congressional and Senate races. Why, if not to suggest that big-money GSA contracts to those districts and states could bolster Republican candidates? GSA is one of the government's largest contracting agencies.

No government is ever innocent of politics, but the relentlessness and reach of Bush's drive to turn the traditionally professional departments of the government into a chain of party proprietaries are unexampled in modern times, and it is unlikely we have heard the last of these tales.

TOM TEEPEN

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.

Another Economic Disconnect: PAUL KRUGMAN - Profit Gusher

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Another Economic Disconnect

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 30, 2007

In the Bush years high profits haven’t led to high investment, and rising productivity hasn’t led to rising wages.

Last fall Edward Lazear, the Bush administration’s top economist, explained that what’s good for corporations is good for America. “Profits,” he declared, “provide the incentive for physical capital investment, and physical capital growth contributes to productivity growth. Thus profits are important not only for investors but also for the workers who benefit from the growth in productivity.”

In other words, ask not for whom the closing bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Unfortunately, these days none of what Mr. Lazear said seems to be true. In the Bush years high profits haven’t led to high investment, and rising productivity hasn’t led to rising wages.

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Diplomacy at Its Worst: NICHOLAS KRISTOF

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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 29, 2007

A document shows that there was a real hope for peace with Iran; now there is a real danger of war.

In May 2003, Iran sent a secret proposal to the U.S. for settling our mutual disputes in a “grand bargain.”

It is an astonishing document, for it tries to address a range of U.S. concerns about nuclear weapons, terrorism and Iraq. I’ve placed it and related documents (including multiple drafts of it) on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

Hard-liners in the Bush administration killed discussions of a deal, and interviews with key players suggest that was an appalling mistake. There was a real hope for peace; now there is a real danger of war.

Scattered reports of the Iranian proposal have emerged previously, but if you read the full documentary record you’ll see that what the hard-liners killed wasn’t just one faxed Iranian proposal but an entire peace process. The record indicates that officials from the repressive, duplicitous government of Iran pursued peace more energetically and diplomatically than senior Bush administration officials — which makes me ache for my country.

The process began with Afghanistan in 2001-2. Iran and the U.S., both opponents of the Taliban, cooperated closely in stabilizing Afghanistan and providing aid, and unofficial “track two” processes grew to explore opportunities for improved relations.

On the U.S. side, track two involved well-connected former U.S. ambassadors, including Thomas Pickering, Frank Wisner and Nicholas Platt. The Iranian ambassador to the U.N., Javad Zarif, was a central player, as was an Iranian-American professor at Rutgers, Hooshang Amirahmadi, who heads a friendship group called the American Iranian Council.

At a dinner the council sponsored for its board at Ambassador Zarif’s home in September 2002, the group met Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi. According to the notes of Professor Amirahmadi, the foreign minister told the group, “Yes, we are ready to normalize relations,” provided the U.S. made the first move.

This was shaping into a historic opportunity to heal U.S.-Iranian relations, and the track two participants discussed further steps, including joint U.S.-Iranian cooperation against Saddam Hussein. The State Department and National Security Council were fully briefed, and in 2003 Ambassador Zarif met with two U.S. officials, Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalilzad, in a series of meetings in Paris and Geneva.

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All the President’s Press: FRANK RICH - The Press’s Failures

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All the President’s Press

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 29, 2007

The White House correspondents’ dinner has become a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era.

SOMEHOW it’s hard to imagine David Halberstam yukking it up with Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded “American Idol” contestants at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Before there was a Woodward and Bernstein, there was Halberstam, still not yet 30 in the early 1960s, calling those in power to account for lying about our “progress” in Vietnam. He did so even though J.F.K. told the publisher of The Times, “I wish like hell that you’d get Halberstam out of there.” He did so despite public ridicule from the dean of that era’s Georgetown punditocracy, the now forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader) Joseph Alsop.

It was Alsop’s spirit, not Halberstam’s, that could be seen in C-Span’s live broadcast of the correspondents’ dinner last Saturday, two days before Halberstam’s death in a car crash in California. This fete is a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era: it illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows. Such is literally the case at the annual dinner, where journalists serve as a supporting cast, but it has been figuratively true year-round. The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of imminent “mushroom clouds” to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished,” whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday. For all the recrimination, self-flagellation and reforms that followed these journalistic failures, it’s far from clear that the entire profession yet understands why it has lost the public’s faith.

That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents’ dinner last year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, “fell flat,” as The Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the astonishment of those in attendance, a funny thing happened outside the Beltway the morning after: the video of Mr. Colbert’s performance became a national sensation. (Last week it was still No. 2 among audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington wisdom had it that Mr. Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president. His real sin was to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured as stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find the joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the press’s failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq, laughed until it hurt.

You’d think that l’affaire Colbert would have led to a little circumspection, but last Saturday’s dinner was another humiliation. And not just because this year’s entertainer, an apolitical nightclub has-been (Rich Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More appalling — and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s star turn at the event.

It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.

But the revelers in the ballroom last Saturday could not raise that discrepancy and challenge Mr. Bush’s hypocrisy; they could only clap. And so they served as captive dress extras in a propaganda stunt, lending their credibility to the president’s sanctimonious exploitation of the Virginia Tech tragedy for his own political self-aggrandizement on national television. Meanwhile the war was kept as tightly under wraps as the troops’ coffins.

By coincidence, this year’s dinner occurred just before a Congressional hearing filled in some new blanks in the still incomplete story of a more egregious White House propaganda extravaganza: the Pat Tillman hoax. As it turns out, the correspondents’ dinner played an embarrassing cameo role in it, too.

What the hearing underscored was the likelihood that the White House also knew very early on what the Army knew and covered up: the football star’s supposed death in battle in Afghanistan, vividly described in a Pentagon press release awarding him a Silver Star, was a complete fabrication, told to the world (and Tillman’s parents) even though top officers already suspected he had died by friendly fire. The White House apparently decided to join the Pentagon in maintaining that lie so that it could be milked for P.R. purposes on two television shows, the correspondents’ dinner on May 1, 2004, and a memorial service for Tillman two days later.

The timeline of events in the week or so leading up to that dinner is startling. Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. By the next day top officers knew he had not been killed by enemy fire. On April 29, a top special operations commander sent a memo to John Abizaid, among other generals, suggesting that the White House be warned off making specific public claims about how Tillman died. Simultaneously, according to an e-mail that surfaced last week, a White House speechwriter contacted the Pentagon to gather information about Tillman for use at the correspondents’ dinner.

When President Bush spoke at the dinner at week’s end, he followed his jokes with a eulogy about Tillman’s sacrifice. But he kept the circumstances of Tillman’s death vague, no doubt because the White House did indeed get the message that the Pentagon’s press release about Tillman’s losing his life in battle was fiction. Yet it would be four more weeks before Pat Tillman’s own family was let in on the truth.

To see why the administration wanted to keep the myth going, just look at other events happening in the week before that correspondents’ dinner. On April 28, 2004, CBS broadcast the first photographs from Abu Ghraib; on April 29 a poll on The Times’s front page found the president’s approval rating on the war was plummeting; on April 30 Ted Koppel challenged the administration’s efforts to keep the war dead hidden by reading the names of the fallen on “Nightline.” Tillman could be useful to help drown out all this bad news, and to an extent he was. The Washington press corps that applauded the president at the correspondents’ dinner is the same press corps that was slow to recognize the importance of Abu Ghraib that weekend and, as documented by a new study, “When the Press Fails” (University of Chicago Press), even slower to label the crimes as torture.

In his PBS report last week about the journalism breakdown before the war, Bill Moyers said that “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses.” That’s not universally true; a number of news organizations have owned up to their disasters and tried to learn from them. Yet old habits die hard: for too long the full weight of the scandal in the Gonzales Justice Department eluded some of the Washington media pack, just as Abu Ghraib and the C.I.A. leak case did.

After last weekend’s correspondents’ dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events. But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as “Mission Accomplished” and get a free pass.

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More Like an Air Ball: MAUREEN DOWD - Tenet

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More Like an Air Ball

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: April 28, 2007

Slam-Dunk, a k a George Tenet, shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by “remote” Condi.

Poor Slam-Dunk.

Not since Madame Butterfly has anyone been so cruelly misunderstood and misused. Slam-Dunk says that when he pantingly told the president that fetching information on Saddam’s W.M.D. would be a cinch, he did not mean let’s go to war.

No matter how eager Slam-Dunk was to tell W. what he wanted to hear while polishing W.’s shoes, that intelligence they craved did not exist. “Let me say it again: C.I.A. found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11,” the ex-Head Spook writes in his new book, self-effacingly titled “At the Center of the Storm.” Besides, Junior and Darth had already decided to go to war to show the Arabs their moxie.

The president and vice president wanted Slam-Dunk to help them dramatize the phony case. Everyone had to pitch in! That Saturday session in December 2002 in the Oval Office was “essentially a marketing meeting,” Slam-Dunk writes, just for “sharpening the arguments.”

Hey, I feel better.

Slam-Dunk always presented himself as the ultimate guy’s guy, a cigar-chomping spymaster who swapped jokes with the president. But now he shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by “remote” Condi. . .

. . . If you worry about your own survival more than your country’s, you might end up as the whiny fall guy.

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More Like an Air Ball: MAUREEN DOWD - Tenet

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More Like an Air Ball

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: April 28, 2007

Slam-Dunk, a k a George Tenet, shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by “remote” Condi.

Poor Slam-Dunk.

Not since Madame Butterfly has anyone been so cruelly misunderstood and misused. Slam-Dunk says that when he pantingly told the president that fetching information on Saddam’s W.M.D. would be a cinch, he did not mean let’s go to war.

No matter how eager Slam-Dunk was to tell W. what he wanted to hear while polishing W.’s shoes, that intelligence they craved did not exist. “Let me say it again: C.I.A. found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11,” the ex-Head Spook writes in his new book, self-effacingly titled “At the Center of the Storm.” Besides, Junior and Darth had already decided to go to war to show the Arabs their moxie.

The president and vice president wanted Slam-Dunk to help them dramatize the phony case. Everyone had to pitch in! That Saturday session in December 2002 in the Oval Office was “essentially a marketing meeting,” Slam-Dunk writes, just for “sharpening the arguments.”

Hey, I feel better.

Slam-Dunk always presented himself as the ultimate guy’s guy, a cigar-chomping spymaster who swapped jokes with the president. But now he shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by “remote” Condi. . .

. . . If you worry about your own survival more than your country’s, you might end up as the whiny fall guy.

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Gilded Once More: PAUL KRUGMAN

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Gilded Once More

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 27, 2007

We’ve gone back to levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s.

One of the distinctive features of the modern American right has been nostalgia for the late 19th century, with its minimal taxation, absence of regulation and reliance on faith-based charity rather than government social programs. Conservatives from Milton Friedman to Grover Norquist have portrayed the Gilded Age as a golden age, dismissing talk of the era’s injustice and cruelty as a left-wing myth.

Well, in at least one respect, everything old is new again. Income inequality — which began rising at the same time that modern conservatism began gaining political power — is now fully back to Gilded Age levels.

Consider a head-to-head comparison. We know what John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in Gilded Age America, made in 1894, because in 1895 he had to pay income taxes. (The next year, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional.) His return declared an income of $1.25 million, almost 7,000 times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.

But that makes him a mere piker by modern standards. Last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, James Simons, a hedge fund manager, took home $1.7 billion, more than 38,000 times the average income. Two other hedge fund managers also made more than $1 billion, and the top 25 combined made $14 billion.

How much is $14 billion? It’s more than it would cost to provide health care for a year to eight million children — the number of children in America who, unlike children in any other advanced country, don’t have health insurance.

The hedge fund billionaires are simply extreme examples of a much bigger phenomenon: every available measure of income concentration shows that we’ve gone back to levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s.

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John Walker Lindh’s Buyer’s Remorse: ADAM LIPTAK

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John Walker Lindh’s Buyer’s Remorse

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: April 23, 2007

Serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison after agreeing to a plea deal, John Walker Lindh has a powerful case of buyer’s remorse.

At the time, a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, it looked like John Walker Lindh had made a pretty good deal.

Mr. Lindh, a 21-year-old from Marin County, Calif., who had served as a Taliban soldier in Afghanistan, faced charges that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. In a plea deal, though, the government dropped its most serious accusations, including charges that Mr. Lindh had engaged in terrorism and conspired to kill Americans.

Mr. Lindh instead acknowledged only that he had aided the Taliban and carried weapons. He was sentenced to 20 years, and people congratulated his lawyers for their triumph.

Times change. Passions cool. Other cases offer telling contrasts. And Mr. Lindh now has a powerful and understandable case of buyer’s remorse.

“He was a victim of a hysterical atmosphere post-9/11,” Frank R. Lindh said about his son. “Much like the country has reassessed the premises for the Iraq war, it should re-examine the premises for this sentence.”

To hear Frank Lindh tell it, his son was an earnest and confused student of Islam who took up arms in a civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. “A very substantial number of people in America believe John fought Americans or committed terrorism or supported terrorism,” Frank Lindh said. “That’s just not true.”

But John Walker Lindh is not serving time for terrorism or treason.

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A Hostage Situation: PAUL KRUGMAN - Iraq Funding

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A Hostage Situation

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 23, 2007

In response to a confrontation over financing for the Iraq surge, President Bush is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders.

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq.

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.

What’s at stake right now is the latest Iraq “supplemental.” Since the beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: “Whoops! Whaddya know, we’re running out of money. Give us another $87 billion.”

At one level, this is like the behavior of an irresponsible adolescent who repeatedly runs through his allowance, each time calling his parents to tell them he’s broke and needs extra cash.

...

...Mr. Bush’s refusal to face up to the failure of his Iraq adventure, his apparent determination to spend the rest of his term in denial, has become a clear and present danger to national security.

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Cupid and Cupidity: MAUREEN DOWD - Wolfie and Shaha

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Cupid and Cupidity

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: April 18, 2007

Never has a star-crossed romance so perfectly illuminated a star-crossed conflict as the unfolding saga of Wolfie and Shaha.

There have been many tender love stories in war.

Ike and Kay. Pamela Harriman and Edward R. Murrow. Aeneas and Dido. Achilles and his tent temptation, Patroclus.

But my favorite is the unfolding saga of Wolfie and Shaha. Never has a star-crossed romance so perfectly illuminated a star-crossed conflict.

The weekend meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were consumed with the question of how the bank chief could fight corruption while indulging in cronyism. Who could focus on a weak yen when you had a weak Wolfie with a strong yen for Shaha?

In addition to the story about Paul Wolfowitz’s giving his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, a promotion and a $60,000 raise because he felt guilty that she had to be transferred from the World Bank to the State Department when he took over, The Times reported yesterday on more imperialist hanky-panky.

Steven Weisman and David Sanger wrote that in 2003, when Wolfie was No. 2 at the Pentagon, the office of his consigliere, Douglas Feith, directed a private contractor to hire Ms. Riza, then at the World Bank, to spend a month traveling in Iraq to study ways to set up the new government.

(It was simple to get the contractor, the Science Applications International Corporation, to play along. As Vanity Fair reported, the Pentagon awarded SAIC seven contracts valued at more than $100 million before the war, without competitive bidding. Mr. Feith’s deputy was Christopher Henry, a former SAIC senior vice president.)

Wolfie and Shaha did not let a little thing like World Bank rules — which barred the bank from providing economic assistance to an area under military occupation — keep them from pushing the neocon delusions.

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Way Off Base: PAUL KRUGMAN

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Way Off Base

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 16, 2007

On key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.

But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

Iraq is the most dramatic example. Strange as it may seem, Democratic strategists were initially reluctant to make Iraq a central issue in the midterm election. Even after their stunning victory, which demonstrated that the G.O.P.’s smear-and-fear tactics have stopped working, they were afraid that any attempt to rein in the Bush administration’s expansion of the war would be successfully portrayed as a betrayal of the troops and/or a treasonous undermining of the commander in chief.

Beltway insiders, who still don’t seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush, fed that fear. For example, as Democrats began, nervously, to confront the administration over Iraq war funding, David Broder declared that Mr. Bush was “poised for a political comeback.”

It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base — which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline — to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn’t mean to suggest that the president be given “carte blanche.”)

But the public hates this war, no longer has any trust in Mr. Bush’s leadership and doesn’t believe anything the administration says. Iraq was a big factor in the Democrats’ midterm victory. And far from being a risky political move, the confrontation over funding has overwhelming popular support: according to a new CBS News poll, only 29 percent of voters believe Congress should allow war funding without a time limit, while 67 percent either want to cut off funding or impose a time limit.

***

The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians. Or, to coin a phrase, the only thing Democrats have to fear is fear itself.

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More Con Than Neo: MAUREEN DOWD - Wolfowitz

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More Con Than Neo

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: April 14, 2007

Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.

Usually, spring in Washington finds us caught up in the cherry blossoms and the ursine courtship rituals of the pandas.

But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq.

You will not be surprised to learn, gentle readers, that Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.

Proving he is more con than neo, he confessed that he had not been candid with his staff at the World Bank. While he was acting holier than thou, demanding incorruptibility from poor countries desperate for loans, he was enriching his girlfriend with tax-free ducats.

He has yet to admit any real mistakes with the hellish war that claimed five more American soldiers yesterday, as stunned Baghdad residents dealt with bombings of the Iraqi Parliament, where body parts flew, and of a bridge over the Tigris, where cars sank.

But he admitted Thursday that he’d made a mistake when he got his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who shares his passion for democratizing the Middle East, a raise to $193,590 — more than the taxpaying (and taxing) Condi Rice makes. No doubt it seemed like small change compared with the money pit of remaking Iraq — a task he once prophesied would be paid for with Iraqi oil money. Maybe he should have remunerated his girlfriend with Iraqi oil revenues, instead of ripping off the bank to advance his romantic agenda.

No one is satisfied with his apology. Not the World Bank employees who booed Wolfie and yelled, “Resign! Resign!” in the bank lobby. Not Alison Cave, the chairwoman of the bank’s staff association, who said that Mr. Wolfowitz must “act honorably and resign.”

Not his girlfriend, who says she’s the suffering victim, forced by Wolfie’s arrival to be sent to the State Department (where, in a festival of nepotism, she reported to Liz Cheney).

And not his critics, who say Wolfie has been cherry-picking again, this time with his anticorruption crusade. They say he has used it to turn the bank into a tool for his unrealistic democracy campaign, which foundered in Baghdad, and for punishing countries that defy the United States.

***

...retired Marine Gen. Jack Sheehan...“The very fundamental issue is, they[White House] don’t know where the hell they’re going.”

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Stop conflating anti-Zionism and anti-semitism

Our politicians are using semantics to outlaw criticism of US and British foreign policy.

April 12, 2007 12:30 PM

Tony Greenstein

When the incitement to religious hatred bill was laid before parliament two years ago, numerous figures from the media and entertainment industries, as well as the human rights, humanist and civil liberties lobbies, condemned the legislation as an attack on free speech. In the words of the actor Stephen Fry, the legislation was "a sop to the Muslim community", whose problems really centred around race, not religion.

Yet barely a murmur has greeted the report of the all parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism, chaired by the rightwing Labour MP Denis MacShane, who in a previous life as a junior Foreign Office minister greeted the CIA coup that temporarily overthrew Hugo Chávez of Venezuela by denouncing the latter as "a ranting, populist demagogue" (Hugh O'Shaughnessy, March 12 2007).

The committee itself had no status when it drew up the report. It was self-selecting, and not one of the 14 members of the inquiry voted against the war in Iraq on March 18 2003. In other words, they came to the question of anti-semitism from a rightwing political perspective.

Yet the report on anti-semitism, which the government has accepted by upgrading the committee's status to that of a select committee (Jewish Chronicle, March 30 2007: "Police told to focus on hate crime"), is deeply disturbing in its cavalier approach to the definition of anti-semitism, which it conflates throughout with anti-Zionism.

Even the basis for the report itself is hyped and unconvincing. By the reports own' admission (paragraph 29), the year 2005 saw a fall of 14% in recorded anti-semitic incidents compared with the previous year. Of course each and every incident is to be condemned, but where, one might ask, is the all-parliamentary committee on incidents of anti-Muslim abuse; and what, one wonders, would be the level of recorded incidents?

What is more worrying is how anti-semitic incidents are defined. In Brighton and Hove there were two demonstrations against the Lebanon war last summer. Police from Sussex and Surrey swamped the second demonstration, alleging a "serious racial incident" had occurred.

The incident concerned a motorist who had yelled "terrorist" at an Arab demonstrator on the previous march and got into a verbal altercation as a result. Despite a number of eyewitnesses, the police made no attempt to investigate the alleged crime. Instead, it was used as a pretext for some of the heaviest policing of a demonstration, including the use of racial profiling against Arabs, that I have ever seen. It has taken a six-month campaign for Brighton police to accept that the right to demonstrate is not a privilege handed down from on high.

In the course of a conversation I secretly recorded, Brighton's chief of police, Kevin Moore, admitted that before the demonstration, "We made contact with the local Jewish community leaders within the synagogues." In other words, it was the police who made the association between the bombing of Lebanon and the local Jewish community. And in an equally revealing remark, Moore let slip that the police had received a single complaint about the march and, because a "racially motivated incident is one which is declared by any person to be racially motivated", had therefore classified the march as anti-semitic!

The inquiry report is part of a continuum that began with the creation of an offence of "glorifying" terrorism and is continuing with the suggestion that anti-Zionism - that is, opposition to the Israeli state and the movement it created - is anti-semitic. Ironically, it is repeating one of the oldest anti-semitic myths: adopting the EU's working definition of anti-semitism, the report states that anti-semitism includes "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour".

Yet it has long been an article of faith among anti-semites that Jews, wherever they lived and whatever they did, formed a nation separate from those they lived among. The major difference between modern and feudal anti-semitism was that the Jews were seen not as a religion but as a race or nation. It is one of the hallmarks of New Labour that contested political arguments are now being resolved by the criminal law.

And then there is the suggestion that to criticise the nature of the Israeli state, which is unique in defining itself as a state not of its own citizens but of Jews worldwide, is to apply "double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation". This is the argument that supporters of apartheid in South Africa used to make. States that accord privileges based on racial/ethnic criteria are indeed unique.

It is argued that "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" is in itself anti-semitic. Now, it might arguably be offensive, but why anti-semitic? In her book The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz reports that it was the position of the SS that "the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position, and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state". Is it anti-semitic to point out that "ethnic cleansing" and the transfer or forced migration of civilian populations was also Nazi policy; or that only in Israel and Nazi Germany were Jews barred from marrying non-Jews?

And it is supporters of the Israeli state itself who have regularly made comparisons between the Palestinians and the Nazis. Who can forget when in 1982 the Israeli premier Menachem Begin compared Arafat in the siege of Beirut to Hitler in his bunker? How many times has the Holocaust been used to justify the Israeli state?

The report defines anti-semitism as "holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel". Agreed. But is it any wonder that there are some misguided people who criticise the Board of Deputies of British Jews when it holds rallies in the name of the Jewish community in support of Israel's bombing of Lebanon?

This report has nothing to do with anti-semitism and everything to do with creating a rightwing political agenda whereby opposition to British and US foreign policy is deemed anti-semitic. If Israel is the west's principal strategic partner in the Middle East and you question the whole basis of that partnership, then you will inevitably be criticised as anti-semitic. In the United States, it has even been argued that if you oppose the majority positions of the Jewish community in favour of the Iraq war, that makes you anti-semitic.

The all-party parliamentary inquiry made no attempt to interview a broad cross-section of Jews, including anti-Zionists; it played softball with the Jewish establishment. Nor did it seek the views of Jews who have been active in the fight against the BNP and National Front apart from those of the pro-Zionist Searchlight magazine. Instead what it has done is produce a report whose only purpose is to try and criminalise political debate in the name of "anti-semitism".

Tony Greenstein is a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a member of Jews Against Zionism.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

The prolific author best known for his novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" has died at age 84.

Reuters Photo: Author Kurt Vonnegut is shown in this undated publicity photograph from Random House Publishers.

Slideshow: Writer Kurt Vonnegut dies

Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer 33 minutes ago

In books such as "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle," and "Hocus Pocus," Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound.

Vonnegut, regarded by many critics as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died Wednesday at 84. He had suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

Vonnegut's more than a dozen books, short stories, essays and plays contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography.

"He was sort of like nobody else," said fellow author Gore Vidal. "Kurt was never dull."

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.

He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

"He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.

Some of Vonnegut's books were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.

Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

"I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial," he told The Associated Press in 2005. "It's as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We're just about to run out of petroleum and there's nothing to replace it."

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the city.

"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

The novel that emerged, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

After World War II, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.

He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told the AP.

"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

___

Associated Press writers Michael Warren, Hillel Italie and Chelsea Carter contributed to this report.

(Corrects name of first wife to Jane Marie Cox)

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Related

Political writing
mparent7777+Kurt-Vonnegut

6-Year-Olds Under Arrest: BOB HERBERT

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES

OP-ED COLUMNIST
By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 9, 2007

An outlandish trend of criminalizing very young children has spread to many school districts and law enforcement agencies across the country.

Avon Park, Fla.

When 6-year-old Desre’e Watson threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class a couple of weeks ago she could not have known that the full force of the law would be brought down on her and that she would be carted off by the police as a felon.

But that’s what happened in this small, backward city in central Florida. According to the authorities, there were no other options.

“The student became violent,” said Frank Mercurio, the no-nonsense chief of the Avon Park police. “She was yelling, screaming — just being uncontrollable. Defiant.”

“But she was 6,” I said.

The chief’s reply came faster than a speeding bullet: “Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we’ve arrested?”

--MORE--

Sweet Little Lies: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Sweet Little Lies

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 9, 2007

Before 9/11, the right-wing noise machine mainly relied on little lies. And now it has returned to its roots.

Four years into a war fought to eliminate a nonexistent threat, we all have renewed appreciation for the power of the Big Lie: people tend to believe false official claims about big issues, because they can’t picture their leaders being dishonest about such things.

But there’s another political lesson I don’t think has sunk in: the power of the Little Lie — the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren’t meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.

For a long time, basically from 9/11 until the last remnants of President Bush’s credibility drowned in New Orleans, the Bush administration was able to go big on its deceptions. Most people found it inconceivable that an American president would, for example, assert without evidence that Saddam and Al Qaeda were allies. Mr. Bush won the 2004 election because a quorum of voters still couldn’t believe he would grossly mislead them on matters of national security.

Before 9/11, however, the right-wing noise machine mainly relied on little lies. And now it has returned to its roots.

--MORE--

Sunday in the Market With McCain: FRANK RICH - COMPLETE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Sunday in the Market With McCain

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 8, 2007

If defending the indefensible can reduce even a politician of John McCain’s heroic stature to that of Dukakis-in-the-tank, the Iraq war die-hards have nowhere to go but down.

John McCain's April Fools' Day stroll through Baghdad's Shorja market last weekend was instantly acclaimed as a classic political pratfall. Protected by more than a hundred American soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters, two Apache gunships and a bulletproof vest, the senator extolled the "progress" and "good news" in Iraq. Befitting this loopy brand of comedy - reminiscent of "Wedding Crashers," in which Mr. McCain gamely made a cameo appearance - the star had a crackerjack cast of supporting buffoons: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who told reporters "I bought five rugs for five bucks!," and Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who likened the scene to "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime."

Five rugs for five bucks: boy, we've really got that Iraq economy up and running now! No wonder the McCain show was quickly dubbed "McCain's Mission Accomplished" and "McCain's Dukakis-in-the-Tank Photo Op." But at a certain point the laughter curdled. Reporters rudely pointed out there were 60-plus casualties in this market from one February attack alone and that six Americans were killed in the Baghdad environs on the day of his visit. "Your heart goes out to just the typical Iraqi because they can't have that kind of entourage," said Kyra Phillips of CNN. The day after Mr. McCain's stroll, The Times of London reported that 21 of the Shorja market's merchants and workers were ambushed and murdered.

The political press has stepped up its sotto voce deathwatch on the McCain presidential campaign ever since, a drumbeat enhanced by last week's announcement of Mr. McCain's third-place finish in the Republican field's fund-raising sweepstakes. (He is scheduled to restate his commitment to the race on "60 Minutes" tonight.) But his campaign was sagging well before he went to Baghdad. In retrospect, his disastrous trip may be less significant as yet another downturn in a faltering presidential candidacy than as a turning point in hastening the inevitable American exit from Iraq.

--More--

In this mission impossible, politics kills soldiers

Carole Whelan

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - Bangor Daily News

The Maine Chapter of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) has been providing DVDs and articles to members of Congress to help them understand our increasing concerns about the safety and mission of our soldiers.

Two of the articles are by Gen. William Odom: "Why America Must Get out of Iraq Now" and "Victory is not an Option." Gen. Odom was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. Everyone who wants to understand what is at risk should read these articles.

The present commander in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, recently said there is no military solution in Iraq. A political solution may someday be possible, but it is too late for what he says is the primary task of any counter-insurgency: Ensuring the security and well-being of the civilian population. The most recent poll showed 78 percent of Iraqis want the U.S. out and are in favor of targeting U.S. troops, who are seen as occupiers. Two million Iraqis are refugees, and almost that many are displaced within Iraq.

The president promised almost two years ago that "when the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," but the Iraq Study Group reported that, in spite of the billions spent, there was never any provision to adequately fund training an Iraqi army. More recently, it has been revealed that Saudi Arabia, home of Osama Bin Laden, is funneling funds to terrorists — fellow Sunnis — to increase ethnic violence against Shiites, and that the U.S. administration promoted this!

The recycling of troops back into combat, the high rate of post traumatic stress disorder, serious combat injuries, and the neglect in treating them, demonstrate that the needs of our military personnel are not being properly considered before, during or after their service. The military has reached the breaking point in manpower and equipment. Add to this the growing revelations of mismanagement, fraud and war profiteering and it is easy to understand that the supplemental funding does not "support the troops".

The funding has most benefited the weapons industry, whose CEO income has skyrocketed to an average of over $7 million per year! The value of Cheney’s Halliburton stock options has not merely doubled or tripled but multiplied by a factor of 32! We ask Congress, and every American, why should anyone get rich off the blood of our soldiers?

A U.S. Marine Corps maxim is "Never reinforce failure." It is a betrayal of our military to demand further sacrifice while condemning them to planned failure! So why is Congress still funding this disaster instead of showing leadership?

Rep. Tom Allen announced his intention to approve more war funding, once again failing to back up his claim to be "against the war." The funding issues a blank check, with no accountability. More ominously, an amendment requiring the president to consult Congress before making war against Iran was removed.

Democrats call it "Bush’s war", but it never could have happened without the consent of Congress, and they will own it lock, stock and gun barrel with the passage of another funding bill. Both Republicans and Democrats have shown higher loyalty to their parties than anything else, and so, it is politics that kills our soldiers! It’s past time for Congress to show some of the courage they blithely demand of our troops.

Gen. Odom says it is already too late for some 2008 presidential candidate to retrieve the situation. "If Congress cannot act, it, too, will live in infamy. Will they continue to fund the occupation and profiteering instead of the safe withdrawal of our troops? We urge our senators to truly support our troops by refusing to fund a mission that has never been defined, never been justified and so, cannot be accomplished.

Not one more day, not one more dollar. Bring them home now and take care of them.

Carole Whelan is the Maine state coordinator of the Maine Chapter of Military Families Speak Out

By BDN Staff

Unravelling The US Political-Military Paradox

March 29, 2007

By Jim Kirwan

What got us into this nightmare was a lengthy string of mega-lies that originated within the twisted plans of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, back in the 1970’s. The U.S. presidents that have come and gone since then, have each played their part, in bringing us kicking and screaming to this decision point. There are several major parallax-views that have led the public to misunderstand and misinterpret the political events and military actions in the Middle-East: Actions that have kept our invasions going, and that now threaten to up-end the world—if these lies are allowed to serve, yet again; for another cover-story that can only end in chaos!

The November elections set the stage for this final confrontation between the desires of the public and the needs of the Outlaws: when it comes to funding and perpetuating our illegal and unilateral military responses to circumstances and to the control of those powers and resources that have become the global stance which has always underpinned the players in their intrigues in the Middle-East. Many nations now are involved to the point of self-extermination in the literal outcomes of how our continued presence there is handled.

It has taken almost forty years to get to the point where the United States government could be reduced from a single government consisting of three branches—to a cabal that has absolute power and that speaks for not only the other two branches, but who is totally opposed to the preferences and the well-being of the people of the United States as well!

One indication of this paradox is the recent behavior of Nancy Pelosi, in her capacity as the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. If George W. Bush launches a pre-emptive war on Iran, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will bear full moral responsibility for that war; and her hands will always have the bloodstains of millions of lives upon them – so long as she lives!

“For it was Pelosi who quietly agreed to strip out of the $100 billion funding bill for Iraq a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before launching any new war on Iran. "'It would take away perhaps the most important tool the U.S. has when it comes to Iran,' she said of the now-abandoned provision.

"'I don't think it was a very wise idea to take things off the table if you're trying to get people to modify their behavior and normalize in a civilized way,' said Gary Ackerman of New York." According to John Nichols of The Nation, Pelosi's decision to strip the provision barring Bush from attacking Iran without Congress' approval "sends the worst possible signal to the White House."

"The speaker has erred dangerously and dramatically," writes Nichols. Her "disastrous misstep could haunt her and the Congress for years to come." Nichols does not exaggerate.

If Bush now launches war on Iran, he can credibly say Congress and the Democrats gave him a green light. For Pelosi, by removing a provision saying Bush does not have the authority, de facto concedes he does have the authority. Bush and Cheney need now not worry about Congress. They have been flashed the go-sign for war on Iran.

Nothing in the provision would have prevented Bush, as commander in chief, from responding to an Iranian attack or engaging in hot pursuit of an enemy found in Iraq. Nor would the provision have prevented Bush from threatening Iran. It would simply have required him to come to Congress -- before launching all-out war. Now Pelosi has, in effect, ceded Bush carte blanche to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. It's all up to him and Cheney.” (1)

The Second Indication that something is dangerously amiss – are the numbers in the surge. The original demand was for 21,000. That number has since been added to, twice; and now it looks more like 40,000 total. There was never any attempt to comply with the wishes of the electorate or the congress, because the Decider acted immediately upon the announcement of his stated decision – as though no approval was required, from either the people or the congress: This, despite the fact that the public, the congress, and the world had all registered strong disapproval for his plans from the moment he announced them. If The Decider is determined to ‘act as a president and not a Dictator—he has a direct obligation to respond to obvious opposition, with something besides contempt!

But that’s only a sideshow: The real point is how these ‘surged’ troops will now be used. The Decider says they will be assigned to Baghdad. But it’s far more likely that these are the same troops that a Russian Satellite has just spotted, massing along the Iran border with Iraq—troops that will now be used to pre-emptively invade Iran. (2) Bush is lying to the world one more time, to create yet another WAR-Without-Reason: except of course to keep him, his friends, and his supporters out of jail and still in office—until he can disappear into Paraguay, without a backward glance. He’s lied to the world so many times before, what’s one-more-LIE, when the world has apparently swallowed so many of his lies already?

The Third Indication is the immediate reactions by those in the area, to what is obviously about to be. There were supposed to be US war games taking place yesterday and today in the Gulf: last night the media had “film at eleven” of two US aircraft carriers conducting war-games just beyond the territorial limits of Iran, in the Gulf. An Iranian Admiral has just denied that any such actions ever happened. (3) The Brits are also making warlike noises over the detention of 15 British Sailors and Marines, captured by Iran, in what Iran claims were Iranian waters. Tony Blair says otherwise and is demanding their release. So now there are two clay pigeons sitting outside or inside Iran either or both of which can be used as the next “Tonkin Gulf incident” for Iran.

The Fourth Paradox is perhaps the most complex and dangerous element: yet in an ironic twist of potentials, this one may just offer a possible way out, if it doesn’t become the actual reason to launch this operation—for in the twisted minds of the rabid American and Israeli war-mongers they absolutely want these new wars to happen!

“DUBAI, United Arab Emirates: The president of the United Arab Emirates forbade the U.S. military from using bases in his country to attack or spy on Iran as mammoth U.S. Navy maneuvers in the Gulf entered their second day. Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who leads this key U.S. ally, said Tuesday that the Emirates had assured Iran that it was not siding with Washington in its dispute over Tehran's nuclear program.

Leaders of Arab nations around the Gulf have grown increasingly uneasy with the tough U.S. stance toward Iran, believing any outbreak of war would bring Iranian retaliation on their own soil, which lies in easy reach of Iranian missiles. On Wednesday, the U.S. Navy continued its largest show of force in the Gulf since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with 15 ships, 125 aircraft and 13,000 sailors taking part in an exercise that veered within a few dozen miles of Iran's coast.” (4) However it should be noted that Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, along with a host of other states would also be drawn, one way or another, into any new war on Iran.

“The Russians and the Chinese for their part are also concerned, beyond their strictly commercial interests in that nation. “Russia's Foreign Ministry has sharply criticized the United States for what it called over-reliance on force and warned Washington against military action against Iran, The Associated Press reported. Russia criticized what it called "the creeping American strategy of dragging the global community into a large-scale crisis around Iran," saying that Tehran helps maintain stability in Afghanistan and Central Asia.” In an already scrubbed report, Russian and China had also warned the US that Washington must sit down at the table with Iran and solve this dilemma diplomatically. Simultaneously they also told Iran that they needed to back down from their hard line position on developing nuclear facilities. It would appear that these two major nuclear powers want this stand-off defanged, so that the world can return to that time before the USA began to behave like the Hulk-of-all-Superpowers that has become overly enchanted with their own purely-macho approach to international affairs.

This is the totality of what’s on the table now, and thanks to Nancy Pelosi, there is no congressional way to stop the Bushwhackers from shattering the Middle-East—like the proverbial Piñata that floats above the banquet-table of the war-mongers—drooling over the ‘possibilities’ that await their next and perhaps final move to empower Israel, and to capture the entire Middle-East, for the Corporatocracy and the Oil, in a bold and savage move.

The only final Paradox that remains, is that in all of this American Military planners have failed to account for what they may actually face with this new attack—exactly as they did when Rummy ran his dog & pony show into Baghdad in 2003. No matter how many times the lies of this administration are repeated—it does not make them true! As the intensity of the bloodlust in their greed does not insure success; so too the half-hearted assessments of the defense of Iran, will not change the outcomes of the trajectories of Iranian missiles one iota. If this misguided and criminal attack gets underway—at any time—the world will suffer for this crime: for decades to come if any of us survive at all. Congress is now irrelevant—again—but the rest of the planet is apparently awakening to the reality that now threatened people everywhere. Why not add your voice to those of the other peoples that oppose this Nightmare NOW! (6)

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) The AIPAC Girl, Nancy Pelosi Leaves Iran War in Bush/Cheney Hands

http://www.postchronicle.com:80/commentary/article_21270952.shtml

2) Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070327/62697703.html

3) Iran Admiral – US War Games Claims – False

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=4137&sectionid=3510101

4) Gulf Arabs distance themselves from U.S. Treats against Iran

http://www.iht.com:80/articles/ap/2007/03/28/africa/ME-GEN-Arabs-US-Iran.php

5) Easter Surprise Attack on Iran, new 9/11. . . Or Worse

http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com:80/node/1052

6) Accept Peace or Face War, Israel told

http://mparent7777.blogspot.com/2007/03/accept-peace-plan-or-face-war-israel.html

Internet Politics and the “MSM”

Posted: 3/26/07

Complaint about the mainstream media is a staple of the blogosphere and, in the world of campaign finance, the clash became more legal, less rhetorical, when editorial pages urged the FEC to be wary of according full, protected “press” status to blogs. Advocates for blogs wanted just this recognition, in part to make the point that their legal protections should not be less than that provided to the establishment press. Internet outlets were prepared to submit to regulation, to some extent, as long as they were treated just like the established, institutional media. In the end, the FEC granted this wish.

The MSM can’t overcome their reservations about this new world. In the last week, well respected commentators have jumped on the opportunity presented by the “l984” ad flap to warn of the rough times ahead for politics and for political campaigns in the age of the New Media.

For Howard Kurtz and Jose Antonio Vargas, the danger is “skullduggery.” Operatives or activists can disguise themselves as ordinary citizens and post material, for all the world to see or read, that is uncharitable to candidates. This is solid cause for worry, we are told; but we are assured also that the same technology that enables the skulduggery can also be used to expose it.

Howard Fineman notes that candidates cannot hope to control their campaigns as before, in part because any one person with a laptop, commitment and aptitude can shape the political dialogue of the moment. Hence, as his title indicates, campaigns are “out of control.” Fineman writes: “The candidates don’t really control [campaigning] anymore. It is not something they do; it is something that is done to them.”

Done “to” them? This is the suggestion of a pundit and reporter, made about the anxieties of a campaign deprived of “control”; and yet candidates for years have believed that control was imperiled more by the established press than by any other independent force “doing” something “to” them. Campaigns have devoted much effort and ingenuity to the task of preserving control from the daily efforts of reporters to wrest it from them. Not much sympathy came the candidates’ way: their attempts to control message or keep secrets were treated as maneuvers to deprive the public of what it was entitled to know.

Now the MSM is losing control—by no means entirely but to some significant degree—and a larger community of critics, prognosticators and pundits has sprung up to include virtually anyone with the wish to become a member. Now, and only now, has “control” become an issue for the MSM. Critique of Internet political speech breaks out roughly in the ways illustrated by the Kurtz-Vargas/Fineman pieces.

The case against “skullduggery”: it holds that cyberpolitics presents special dangers that candidates will escape responsibility for their behavior. In some way, actively or by the “wink or nod,” campaigns will have the benefit of negative, irresponsible speech without accountability for it. Another term for this is “dirty tricks,” which is the all-purpose category that includes any behavior by one candidate that another candidate, or critic, finds objectionable.

Of course, the MSM has been a standard avenue for “skullduggery” by candidates eager to maintain some cover for their claims and accusations. News media are the repository and outlets for information that candidates will not put out themselves but are happy to entrust to reporters for public dissemination. This route is in a class by itself: an attack becomes “news” or “news commentary”: the nasty stuff is made entirely respectable, the very sustenance of an informed public. At the extremes, if main section news treatment would go too far, there are more gossipy, “soft” parts where the blow can be landed.

The main difference between this “skullduggery” and another is that media organizations decide which to countenance. They want, in a word, “control,” and their justification is the exercise of editorial or news judgment in the public interest. Some, but not everyone, may be impressed that this makes all the difference in the world.

The case against loss of "control" puts less emphasis on wrongful or questionable behavior, and more on how campaigns can’t control their message—that orderly political competition will degenerate into chaos. Here again, candidates have long had this to fear from the MSM. Reporters and editorialists imagine, however, that this was in the right and natural order of things, because a vibrant and sometimes disruptive press helped to police the dialogue and forced campaigns to an honest accounting of their positions and problems.

In other words, just as the critics of skullduggery make an exception for the kind they turn into news coverage, so alarmists on the subject of “control” over campaigns are arguing, really, that it should be exercised only by the MSM.

These arguments about “control” can’t change much anymore. There was a time when they might have: when the FEC might have been persuaded, as it was not, that Internet political speech should be closely regulated. With the passing of that moment, MSM critics have only their criticism to offer and their warnings to issue but these should be evaluated like any other political speech—skeptically, with close attention to the unmistakable evidence of self-interest. And of self-regard.

Bob Bauer