Looking Back, Bush and Cheney Reveal Different Views

WASHINGTON — President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been unusually talkative in recent weeks, sharing candid thoughts in a string of exit interviews. But after eight years of a tight partnership that gave Mr. Cheney powerful influence inside the White House, the two are sounding strikingly different notes as they leave office, especially on one of the most fundamental issues of their tenure: their aggressive response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Mr. Bush defends his decisions as necessary to keep the nation safe, yet sounds reflective, even chastened. He has expressed regrets about not passing immigration reform and not changing the partisan tone in Washington. And the man who famously got tangled up in a question about whether he had made any mistakes — he could not come up with one in 2004 — recently told ABC News that he was “unprepared for war,” and that “the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq.”

Mr. Cheney, by contrast, is unbowed, defiant to the end. He called the Supreme Court “wrong” for overturning Bush policies on military detainees; criticized his successor, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.; and defended water-boarding, a controversial interrogation technique that critics call torture.

“I feel very good about what we did,” the vice president told The Washington Times, adding, “If I was faced with those circumstances again, I’d do exactly the same thing.”

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Gus: But Cheney won't be faced again with the same bizo again, won't he?...

Mind you he and Bush have another 25 days to go before the new mob takes charge... Not a hawk and a dove, those two, but a pair of dangerous dodos... May we have mercy on them on this one great day of Christian forgiveness, then may the shoe of history boot their butts into oblivion... Then we can flog ourselves for having elected them...

Hark!!!!!

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.' 

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity.

'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.'

There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch. 

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer. 

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11239.htm

From Frank Rich

...

The one indisputable ability of his White House was to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is also empty. In what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq's improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn't grasp the finality of their defection.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery.

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Gus: From the day Junior came on the scene, intelligent people knew we were going to have trouble and porkies, served daily with stupidity and a sour cherry. The tragedy is that we knew the way the stuff would unfold but our cries were not heard, drowned by the cheering crowds, indulged in substance abuse.

The majority of the electorate was drugged by a propaganda machine helped by the major media organisations, in the US, in the UK and in Australia. To have elected Bushit ONCE in dubious circumstances in 2000 was careless. But to re-elect him four years later was highly criminal... The media barons must have been taking the same pills they were dishing out to the masses, with double the dose. Without the mass media fully on board, the Bush administration would have sunk in just a few months. So who was the smart guy who managed the spin, sold the con tricks, hypnotized the press, the TV owners, and made us look like fools for not embracing Il Bushit, as a leader of whatever? Karl Rove? Mr Murdoch? Mr Snow? Or was there hidden in the offices of the White House a band of writers who — like writers for sitcoms, mostly bad comedy — were writing a script to the biggest show on earth that was nothing more than puff and trite, yet unfortunately leading the world in a bad TV soap that soaked the intelligent brain of viewers, in order to sell them more washing powder, nappies and bug spray — and stuff they did not need. The Bush White House, knowingly a bad obsolete defective product, was sold to the largest common denominator using all the trickery of advertising in the book, including frothed up religious fervor.

Ernest Theodore Gundlach would turn in his grave...

see toon at top and all over... Not funny. Sad.

The News That Didn’t Make the News

www.projectcensored.org

CENSORED 2009 Books Will be on Sale at this Event

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009
§     #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
§     # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
§     # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
§     # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
§     # 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
§     # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
§     # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
§     # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
§     # 9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
§     # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
§     # 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
§     # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
§     # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
§     # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
§     # 15 Worldwide Slavery
§     # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
§     # 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
§     # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
§     # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
§     # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
§     # 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
§     # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
§     # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
§     # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
§     # 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

About PROJECT CENSORED
Founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, Project Censored is a media research program working in cooperation with numerous independent media groups in the US. Project Censored’s principle objective is training of SSU students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States.  Project Censored has trained over 1,500 students in investigative research in the past three decades.

Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community, Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media. Each year, Project Censored publishes a ranking of the top 25 most censored nationally important news stories in the yearbook, Censored: Media Democracy in Action, which is released in September. Recent Censored books have been published in Spanish, Italian and Arabic.

The Project works in cooperation with SSU academic classes Sociology of Media and Sociology of Censorship, where students earn credit for their research and participate in writing the annual yearbook. Additionally, Project Censored sponsors and supervises over 60 student interns a year who do in depth investigative research, sponsor campus events and speakers, and organize an annual national Media Accountability Conference. Students also participate in writing the Project Censored quarterly newsletter (circulation 9,000) and assist with maintaining the Project Censored website www.projectcensored.org, which receives over a million views a month from all over the world.

Between 700 and 1000 stories are submitted to Project Censored each year from journalists, scholars, librarians, and concerned citizens around the world. With the help of more than 200 Sonoma State University faculty, students, and community members, Project Censored reviews the story submissions for coverage, content, reliability of sources and national significance. The university community selects 25 stories to submit to the Project Censored panel of judges who then rank them in order of importance. Current or previous national judges include: Noam Chomsky, Susan Faludi, George Gerbner, Sut Jhally, Frances Moore Lappe, Michael Parenti, Herbert I. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Erna Smith, Mike Wallace and Howard Zinn. All 25 stories are featured in the yearbook, Censored: The News That Didn’t Make the News.

Project Censored is administered through the SSU Sociology Department with financial support from the SSU Instructionally Related Activity Fund, School of Social Science, Media Freedom Foundation Inc. and donations from thousands of supporters around the country.

“Project censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcast outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism."
— Walter Cronkite

DALLAS – Joined by an all-star cast from his days in the White House, former President George W. Bush plunged a shovel into dirt on Tuesday and kicked off construction of his presidential library.

As former Vice President Dick Cheney put it, “this may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

Mr. Cheney’s attendance was a rare public appearance since his long hospital stay for heart trouble earlier this year. He appeared much thinner and more hesitant in his gait, and he used a cane to walk, although he put it aside when it came time to approach the lectern. After the speeches and ceremonial dirt turning, he quickly departed, while other luminaries lingered and chatted.

The groundbreaking on the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University here culminated an elaborately orchestrated return to the public stage for the nation’s 43rd president, who released his memoir, “Decision Points,” last week and gave a flurry of television and print interviews offering his take on his tumultuous eight years in office.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/bush-and-cheney-reunite-at-library-groundbreaking/?hp

We know the former President can write porkies, but can he read?... And what about the ghost of Cheney still wisecracking? Those clowns should be charged with war crimes... see toon at top.