May 31, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
What George Forgot
By GAIL COLLINS

“DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE,” wrote Bernard Kerik in an e-mail that he was circulating around this week. Kerik, you may remember, was the former New York City police commissioner who George W. Bush once tried to make chief of Homeland Security. This was during Kerik’s happier, preindictment era.

Kerik’s outrage was directed at Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary whose much-discussed memoir, “What Happened,” reveals that the Bush White House put politics ahead of truth and openness with the American people.

I know it’s a shock, but try to be brave.

The administration’s defenders have not really attacked the book’s thesis — really, what could you say? But they’ve been frothing at the mouth over McClellan’s lack of loyalty. “This will stand as the epitome, the ultimate breach of that code of honor,” said Mary Matalin.

We’ve heard a lot about loyalty this year...

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Scott McClellan might have better served the American people by speaking out about the mistakes and blunders he witnessed in the Bush White House as they happened, rather than waiting several years and then turning a profit with a tell-all book.

But that would have required McClellan, who press secretary for George Bush, the US president, to resign, and honorable resignation is no longer part of the American political tradition.

Alas, the most recent resignation for the sake of honour by a high-level American official was back in April, 1980.

That is when Cyrus Vance, Jimmy Carter's secretary of state, quit to protest the botched hostage rescue attempt in Iran.

And let us not forget the principled Michigan newsman Jerald terHorst, who quit as Gerald Ford's press secretary the day Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

Scott McClellan could have used a bit of terHorst's testicular fortitude.

In recent years, it seems, US officials prefer to stay on the payroll, follow orders, implement criminally stupid policies, and then only much later tattle on their bosses for money.

Bitter Bob Dole, the Republican's 1996 presidential nominee, emerged from whatever dark place he lurks in and lashed out at McClellan with characteristic vitriol.

"There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don't have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues," Dole wrote in an open letter to McClellan...

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Read more at al jazeera — toolittletoolate

War based on a lie, says Rudd

Phillip Coorey Chief Political Correspondent
June 3, 2008

THE withdrawal of Australian combat troops from Iraq reopened old wounds yesterday, when Kevin Rudd accused the Coalition of taking the nation to war based on a lie.

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Gus: old wounds? The only pain the warmongers feel is that of being caught out — full light shone on their giant deception. Our problem is that the mob of "old wounded Liberals" would do the same trick should the occasion occur again. Our duty is to make sure they never do.

And there are many Iraqi who feel their "old" wounds are still hurting bad...

And I have my suspicion that the price of oil has shot through the roof to make everyone around the world pay for "that" little stupid war... We're all wounded by it.

Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control

Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors

By Patrick Cockburn [The Independent]
Thursday, 5 June 2008

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

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Like many hopefully enlightened people on this planet we've been harping for yonks, (even since 2002, before the war started), about the 'deal" and the secret bases that the US under Georgie Bushy wanted to do with Iraq. In fact it's not a deal it's a foregone conclusion, despite not being signed yet by the Iraqis, who find themselves in a snookered position: should they sign the deal, the US stays to prevent bloodshed, should they not sign the deal, the US stays to prevent bloodshed... The US want to control the oil in Iraq. Full stop. Including have permanent bases, some built in Iraq since 2003 (contrary to what the administration has bullshitted about) to specifications to last 1000 years — and we've gone blue in the face here telling the world about this con-trick... The deal will be done (has been done) so that if Obama tries to get the troops out of Iraq he will end up with more than egg on his face...

The deceiver in chief has had his cronies working overtime on the mega-steal while he did his moronic ingenue routine of a clown without a circus to distract the crowd of morons. Impeach!.

Citing History, Bush Suggests His Policies Will One Day Be Vindicated

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 9, 2008; A03

Meet George W. Bush, time traveler.

He's in Poland in 1939 as Nazi tanks advance on Warsaw, then flying with his Navy-pilot father to battle imperial Japan. He's alongside Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, William McKinley on his deathbed and Franklin D. Roosevelt on D-Day. He lingers with Harry S. Truman, another U.S. president deeply unpopular in his time.

President Bush leaps forward as well, envisioning a distant future in which Iraq is a tranquil democracy, Palestinians live peaceably alongside Israelis and terrorism is a tactic of the past.

"Imagine if a president had stood before the first graduating class of this academy five decades ago and told the Cadet Wing that by the end of the 20th century, the Soviet Union would be no more, communism would stand discredited and the vast majority of the world's nations would be democracies," Bush urged graduates at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago.

As the door begins to close on his tenure, Bush is increasingly drawing on selected events of the past to argue that history will vindicate him on Iraq, terrorism, trade and other controversial issues.

Historical analogies have become a staple of Bush speeches and interviews this year, whether he is addressing regional leaders in Egypt or talking to workers at an office park in suburban St. Louis. Bush will continue this historical focus in a visit to Europe this week, where he will commemorate the Berlin Airlift in Germany and deliver a speech in Paris marking the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan.

White House aides say Bush, who majored in history at Yale, likes to emphasize historical comparisons because they are easy for the public to understand and illustrate in dramatic fashion how differently future generations may come to view him.

Unfortunately for the president, many historians have already reached a conclusion. In an informal survey of scholars this spring, just two out of 109 historians said Bush would be judged a success; a majority deemed him the "worst president ever."

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Gus: Napoleon Bush, in the plains of Waterloo wondered... "What if..." While Adolph Bush, in his crumbling bunker still though of himself as the Subprime Master of the master race. History can be a woman raped by the victors ... But even in the case of Bonsai Bush being a victorious "mishun accumplisher", his disregard for humanity has already put him in the same bag as Nero, Ghengis Khan, Attila-the-Hun, Caligula, Stalin and many more unsavory "mishun accumplisher" the history of the Earth could have done without.

And Bushit puts the knife into the Ruskies at any unopportunities... Putin reads him like a book.

Peep at the toon at top 

'Bush Lied'? If Only It Were That Simple.

By Fred Hiatt
Monday, June 9, 2008; A17

Search the Internet for "Bush Lied" products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic "Bush Lied, People Died" bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.

...

But the phony "Bush lied" story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

For the next president, it may be Iran's nuclear program, or al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, or, more likely, some potential horror that today no one even imagines. When that time comes, there will be plenty of warnings to heed from the Iraq experience, without the need to fictionalize more.

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Gus: For those of us who were reading the European press (and got accidental access to some of the most sensitive European government "intelligence" information) pre-war time, the intelligence on which Little Yankee Georgee relied to make his claims about Saddam, were either fabricated (by the CIA) or at best unreliable. The European had the "same" source of information (in order to make some of ithe disinformation more credible, some of the CIA "informers" were caught in Europe, especially Germany). One does not go to war on such bad quality of information. The Europeans had other sources that were more reliable that showed them that Saddam had NO WMDs. Hans Blix (weapons inspector) was sent on wild goose chases by the CIA disinformation bureau, sometimes with inaccurate CIA maps where north pointed south — when the 175 spy satellites could pinpoint a shoe in the desert and its location with extreme accuracy.

Furthermore, for me, I have always claimed that to attack Iraq, the US generals had to know in advance that there was no weapons of mass destruction anywhere hidden or being moved about in Iraq. Otherwise they would not have attacked the way they did. Not knowing where the WMDs were, had there been any WMDs, the US army would have sustained heavy casualties beyond the acceptable to both the public and the army chiefs (about 50,000 troops dead and injured).

I visited some Jewish friends one morning of the invasion and they were watching live coverage of the discovery of a WMDs factory somewhere... My friends said "See, we knew Saddam had these all along..." to which I replied: "do you?... how do you know this "live" report is acccurate?"... They bagged me, we stood our respective positions, but by end of day, the "discovery" of this WMD factory was shown to have been an attack on a sly beer warehouse... That's the US army for you: seeing evil anywhere they can imagine it from, until they realise they shot people — under the "rules of engagement" — making sly booze. "Oops sorry..."

Bush lied, John Howard lied, Blair lied. and most of the top army commanders knew it. They HAD TO KNOW.

If you can put your hand on the "double-cross" book by J. C. Masterman Chair of the Double-Cross Committee during WWII and the book "axis of deceit" by our own Andrew Wilkie (what a brave man), you would know what I mean.

Bush lied, people died. It's as simple as that.