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In an interview with the Washington Post, Bush said the following: “Had we had to do it over again we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day." The man has no shame. According to Bush it was the great success that led to the great problems after the great success. The Bushies were so excellent in planning the war that the failure afterwards was a consequence that just couldn’t be anticipated and so couldn’t possibly be a failure. John Edwards said in "I don't think it's relevant. I'm just
functioning as a columnist with a point of view, and a strong point of
view," he added. So said Robert Novak the syndicated conservative
columnist for the Chicago Sun Times when asked why he hadn’t disclosed that his
son Alex Novak is director of marketing for Regnery Publishing the folks who
have published the Swift Boat Liars book. The NYT reports that on CNN’s
Crossfire the elder Novak has lauded the book and one of its authors John
O’Neill as a true patriot. The nepotism in By the by we notice that the Department of Defense and the NYT are suggesting that the fellow who passed secrets to our friends the Israelis is just a low level functionary who no one at the top seems to have known or ever associated with for more than 2 seconds. On this point: from http://americablog.blogspot.com/ The new Washington
Monthly article "Iran-Contra II?" sheds new light on a few facts
that have been previously dismissed by Rummy and others. Who's buying the
"chance encounter" nonsense story? These people have zero credibility
left. ...the FBI is looking with renewed
interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and
advisers in Feith's office, which more-senior CNBC is showing the kickoff the Republican National Convention and focusing on the three ethnic folks attending as Republicans. That of course is hyperbole, but not very much hyperbole. TIME BUSH A Time magazine reporter asks the question, Laura
Bush answers and the reporter just goes on to the next question without asking
further obvious questions. And so journalism as practiced by the
obsequious continues in Several weeks ago we ran a post about margin of error http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004536.php and what it means in polling. Unfortunately many reporters never studied the science of statistics and don’t know that the margin of error refers to the percentage reliability of the poll rather than adding and subtracting the margin of error to say that either candidate can be the winner. There is an article on Buzzflash today that expands on this idea. http://www.americanpolitics.com/20040829Baker.html The AP reports that Karen Hughes said that during
a meeting with speech writers on last Friday who were working on his convention
acceptance speech Dubya, who hasn’t been able to string two multi-syllable
words back to back since he started drinking in the 1960's stated that he want the
speech to accentuate the "transformational
power of liberty." The Prairie Populist is taking the rest of the week off so that we can ignore politics during the Republican convention. We really don’t want to have to listen to or comment on the gibberish that will be spoken in NYC. We’ll be back on Tuesday September 7
30 August 2004 Bush’s words on the Swift Boat ads may be good politics although we wonder. Bush says Kerry should be proud of his service and that all 527s should be disbanded. Of course after the election he knows that won’t happen. And notice how careful Bush is not to say that he, Bush, believes that Kerry’s service was commendable. Herbert and Krugman are spot on in the NYT Friday morning. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/opinion/27herbert.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/opinion/27krugman.html?hp 45 million Americans do not have health insurance. TheWSJ headline on the WSJ/NBC poll was that Swift boat attacks have pushed Kerry’s negatives to 40%. The headline made no mention that Bush’s negatives on the same question were 43%. In the main the numbers we saw were positive for Kerry. We also learned on CNBC last night on the Olberman Show that Zogby has Kerry winning 286 electoral votes as of this time. As we all learned in 2000 the electoral vote is the one that counts. As of Friday
August 27, 2004 ---970 Americans had been killed, coalition troops other than
Americans killed were over 100. 6200 Americans have been wounded and about
12,000 Iraqis have been killed. We know there have been more Americans killed
and injured/sickened from smoking or driving on American highways during the
since the beginning of the war but folks who don’t see the difference don’t
want to. We just saw a headline on Salon that read “Paris Hilton to Publish 198 page Memoir”. The headline “George Bush to Publish 15 page Memoir” came immediately to mind. Amy Sullivan has a great article at www.washingtonmonthly.com and because the link will be old by the time you read this we are printing it below. The above site is a must visit site for us every day. Hypocrisy Reigns....Shouldn't
it matter that conservatives don't get exercised at all over pro-choice
Republican Catholics in high-profile positions? Sure, from time to time they
take on PCRCs (we'll use the shorthand for
simplicity's sake) like Look at the line-up for
next week's Republican Convention . On three out of the four evenings, the
primetime programming stars a high-profile Republican Catholic who also happens
to be pro-choice. Between The dirty
little secret about these groups is that they don't demand that Catholic
politicians -- who, according to church teaching, should be held to a higher
standard because of their visible status -- conform to all church positions on
issues like the death penalty or war or immigration reform or combatting poverty. And they don't really care if PCRCs stray from church teaching on abortion (sounds like
you need to read Evangelium Vitae a bit more carefully, guys...) What they do
care about is defeating Democrats. Some of them don't even try to gloss over
that fact. Deal
Hudson (the now-disgraced and resigned former head of Catholic outreach for
the Bush/Cheney campaign) told the So they're
hypocrites, you say. Thanks for the newsflash, brainiac.
So what? The so what
is that, for whatever reason, journalists listen to these guys. Remember last
spring, when John Kerry couldn't take a step without some reporter trying to
examine his molars for evidence of unswallowed
communion host? The issue of whether or not Kerry should, as a pro-choice
Catholic, take communion was pressed by conservative Catholics with a partisan
agenda and it was wholeheartedly accepted as a relevant story by most major
news outlets. How many
reporters do you think are going to ask Rudy Giuliani or George Pataki or The silence
coming out of the Catholic League regarding the prominence of a bunch of
heretical babykillers at the GOP Convention is simply
deafening. Perhaps they're still busy defending Hudson, who -- according to a
press release issued by the group last week -- has been unfairly maligned when
all he did was have sex with a "drunk" who was clearly asking for it.
Nice. Next time
reporters are tempted to let these guys drive the story, they should think
twice. And while they're at it, they might want to turn the tables and write
about the partisan involvement of supposedly neutral religious figures. Until
then, we'll keep our ears perked for a hypocrisy watch next week. I'm sure the
protests by angry pro-life Catholics just haven't been announced yet... On a quiet news Friday in August when no one was listening Alan Greenspan called for the reduction of Social Security and Medicare benefits for future retiring “baby boomers” in order to help fight the deficit that he is responsible for creating. Moreover, back in the 1980s he was a prime mover for the Social Security taxing structure that built in permanent and continuing raises in FICA taxes and the amount of earnings subject to FICA that automatically increases every year so that Congress never has to revisit the subject and be accused of raising Social Security taxes. The man is a charlatan. According to news reports the speakers at the Republican convention are
going to spotlight John Kerry’s Senate record as and example of a do nothing
Senator. The Republicans always try to score points by concentrating on the
minutiae. Say it loud enough and any fact seems important. For example, after
having been proved wrong on every assertion except one which no one can prove
the Swift Boat Liars and their Cable Conspirators now concentrate on whether John
Kerry was in And in regards to Kerry’s Senate record, most of what a Senator does is to serve constituents. We think this is a great opening for Kerry. The DNC should do a commercial comparing what Kerry was doing from 1974 to 1988. Kerry would be shown as law student, States Attorney, Lt Governor and Senator. Bush would be a drunken frat boy losing his father’s friends money. Campaigning to be the Senator from Illinois Alan Keyes gave a speech at the
Lincoln Memorial in There is a good discussion of the “spying for Israel in the DOD” scandal at http://www.juancole.com/ . Find the April
29 post. Also here http://talkingpointsmemo.com/
. Finally we have a joke making its way around the internet. Don’t know who told it. >There are fewer
than three months until the election, an election that The United States Olympic Committee has asked President George W. Bush's re-election campaign to pull a television ad that mentions the Olympics. Poor George, he has a lot of folks who don’t like his ads. And the one the Olympic Committee is asking him to pull is one of his soft cuddly ads. This spot written by the Columbia Journalism Review offers a good discussion of how a small ad in three states took on a life of its own. http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/000851.asp NOTE MoveOn.Org—the bête noie of the Republicans is in fact a PAC, funded by millions of small donors, not a 527—despite the no doubt deliberately misleading term "independent" or "outside groups," they are not to be confused with the SBVF[cough]T.
The Bush campaign and the White House have said
they have nothing to do with the
Swift Boat group or the ads. But
the group received some of its funding from long-time Bush supporters and its
new commercial features one veteran, Ken Cordier, who was on a Bush campaign
committee until last week when he was forced to step down. It was further disclosed late Tuesday that the Bush campaign's chief outside counsel, Ben Ginsberg, has also been giving legal advice to the Swift Boat group. The AP reported that Ben quit the Bush campaign yesterday morning with great sadness for having become a distraction to the critical issues of the campaign. Now he can devote full time to the Disgruntled Vets Lying Campaign. In Seattle 1700 nurses and other health care workers at Group Health Cooperative, one of the nations oldest HMOs are striking over the cost of their health care benefits. Group Health is a not-for- profit consumer owned HMO. They want to institute deductibles and larger co-pays. The sad thing about this is that both sides are probably good guys and gals. In http://www.kfor.com/Global/story.asp?S=2213103
25 August 2004 Hullabaloo at http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/ has
an interesting take on the dynamics of how Kerry has been responding to the
attacks on his Digby writes: President Bush said on Monday that political advertisements run by a broad swath of independent groups should be stopped, including a television advertisement attacking Senator John Kerry's war record. But the White House quickly moved to insist that Mr. Bush had not meant in any way to single out the advertisement run by veterans opposed to Mr. Kerry.
OLBERMANN: Let‘s talk response
tactics, first. One of his crew mates from The General has a
wonderful letter today which we present below. It is from General’s blogspot at : http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/
“Maybe Rev. Falwell
doesn't hate homosexuals enough
24 August 2004 This is the connection to the website where the National Catholic
Reporter story on Deal Hudson, the publisher of Crisis, and former lead man on
the Bushies “get the Catholic vote” is located: http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/update/bn081904.htm.
Slate has an interesting article about the folks who were right in
their predictions about what would happen in http://slate.msn.com/id/2105434/ Buzzflash has an interview with Thomas Frank the author of “What’s the
Matter with The Chicago Sun Times reports that rising Milk prices are forcing school districts to raise the money that kids have to contribute to the purchase price. This need for kids to bring money to school leads to more schoolyard shakedowns for the kids’ money and also gives the lie to the Labor Department’s inflation figures as represented by the CPI. http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-milk23.html Finally, remember 23 August 2004 This is lengthy but fluid, evocative and prescient. Please take the time to read it. Think hard about what he is saying.
WITH TREMBLING FINGERS
Hal Crowther is a former writer for Time and Newsweek, the Buffalo News and the North Carolina Spectator before parking his column at the weekly Independent in Durham, N.C., and The Progressive Populist, among others.
I used to take a drink on occasion with a network newsman famed for his impenetrable calm -- his apparent pulse rate that of a large mammal in deep hibernation -- and in an avuncular moment he advised me that I'd do all right, in the long run, if I could only avoid the kind of journalism committed to the keyboard "with trembling fingers." I recognized the wisdom of this advice and endeavored over the years to write as little as possible when my blood pressure was soaring and my face was streaked with tears. The lava flows of indignation ebb predictably with age and hardening arteries, and nearing three-score I thought I'd never have to take another tranquilizer -- or a double bourbon -- to keep my fingers steady on the keys. I never imagined 2004. It would be sophomoric to say that there was never a worse year to be an American. My own memory preserves the dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the consequences of 1941 and 1929, and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived through all those dark years, might have added 1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great War in France that each failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back another generation or two and we encounter 1861. But if this is not the worst year yet to be an American, it's the worst year by far to be one of those hag-ridden wretches who comment on the American scene. The columnist who trades in snide one-liners flounders like a stupid comic with a tired audience; TV comedians and talk-show hosts who try to treat 2004 like any zany election year have become grotesque, almost loathsome. Our most serious, responsible newspaper columnists are so stunned by the disaster in Iraq that they've begun to quote poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. They lower their voices; they sound like Army chaplains delivering eulogies over ranks of flag-draped coffins, under a hard rain from an iron sky. Yeats' "blood-dimmed tide is loosed." The war news has already deteriorated from bad to tragic to pre-apocalyptic, which leaves no suitable category for these excruciating reports on the sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners. Fingers, be still. In less than a year, the morale of the occupying forces has sunk so low that murder, suicide, rape and sexual harassment have become alarming statistics, and now the warriors of democracy -- the emissaries of civilization -- stand accused of every crime this side of cannibalism. Osama bin Laden has always anathematized America's culture, as well as its geopolitical influence. To him these atrocities are a sign of Allah's certain favor, a great moral victory, a vindication of his deepest anger and darkest crimes. Where does it go from here? The nightmare misadventure in Iraq is over, beyond the reach of any reasonable argument, though many more body bags will be filled. In Washington, chicken hawks will still be squawking about "digging in" and winning, but Vietnam proved conclusively that no modern war of occupation will ever be won. (Vietnam clip) Every occupation is doomed. The only way you "win" a war of occupation is the old-fashioned way, the way Rome finally defeated the Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave everyone else, raze the cities and sow the fields with salt. Otherwise the occupied people will fight you to the last peasant, and why shouldn't they? If our presidential election fails to dislodge the crazy bastards who annexed Baghdad, many of us in this country would welcome regime change by any intervention, human or divine. But if, say, the Chinese came in to rescue us -- Operation American Freedom -- how long would any of us, left-wing or right, put up with an occupying army teaching us Chinese-style democracy? A guerrilla who opposes an invading army on his own soil is not a terrorist, he's a resistance fighter. In Iraq we're not fighting enemies but making enemies. As Richard Clarke and others have observed, every dollar, bullet and American life that we spend in Iraq is one that's not being spent in the war on terrorism. Every Iraqi, every Muslim we kill or torture or humiliate is a precious shot of adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda. The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent civilians, and in every other action apparent innocents kill our soldiers -- and there's never any way to sort them out. And now these acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais. Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of the banner that read "Mission Accomplished," the shaming truth is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as many of us predicted it would go wrong -- if anything, more hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is an epic train wreck, and there's not a single American citizen who's going to walk away unscathed. The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so much deceit exposed, would have brought on mass resignations or votes of no confidence in any free country in the world. In Japan not long ago, there would have been ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling themselves with samurai swords. Yet up to this point -- at least to the point where we see grinning soldiers taking pictures of each other over piles of naked Iraqis -- neither the president, the vice president nor any of the individuals who urged and designed this debacle have resigned or been terminated -- or even apologized. They have betrayed no familiarity with the concept of shame. Thousands of young Americans are dead, maimed or mutilated, XXX billions of dollars have been wasted and all we've gained is a billion new enemies and a mouthful of dust -- of sand. Chaos reigns, but in the midst of it we have this presidential election. George Bush has defined himself as a war president, and it's fitting that the war should be his undoing. But even now the damned polls don't guarantee, or even indicate, his demise. Conventional wisdom says that an incumbent president with a $200 million war chest cannot be defeated, and that one who commands a live, bleeding, suffering army in the field is doubly invincible. By this logic, the most destructively incompetent president since Andrew Johnson will be rewarded with a second term. That would probably mean a military draft and more wars in the oil countries, and, under visionaries like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, a chance for the USA to emulate 19th-century Paraguay, which simultaneously declared war on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and fought ferociously until 90% of the male population was dead. What hope then? Impeachment is impossible when the president's party controls both houses of Congress, though Watergate conspirator John Dean, who ought to know, claims in his new book that there are compelling legal arguments for a half dozen bills of impeachment against George W. Bush. Peer pressure? At the White House, world opinion gets no more respect than FBI memos or uncomfortable facts. Many Americans seem unaware that scarcely anyone on the planet Earth supported the Iraq adventure, no one anywhere except the 40-50 million Republican loyalists who voted for George Bush in 2000. Among significant world leaders he recruited only Great Britain's Tony Blair -- whose career may be ruined because most Britons disagree with him -- and the abominable Ariel Sharon, that vile tub of blood and corruption who recently used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate a paraplegic in a wheelchair at the door of his mosque. (Palestinians quickly squandered any sympathy or moral advantage they gained from this atrocity by strapping a retarded 16-year-old into a suicide bomber's kit. Such is the condition of the human race in the Middle East, variously known as the Holy Land or the Cradle of Civilization.) Says Sharon, oleaginously, of Bush: "Something in his soul committed him to act with great courage against world terror." The rest of the known world, along with the United Nations, has been dead set against us from the start. But they carry no weight. Thanks to our tax dollars and the well-fed, strong but not bulletproof bodies of our children -- though mostly children from lower-income families -- George Bush and his lethal team of oil pirates, Cold Warriors and Likudists commands the most formidable military machine on earth. No nation, with the possible exception of China, would ever dare to oppose them directly. But the Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one can stop these people except you and me, and the other 100 million or so American citizens who may vote in the November election. This isn't your conventional election, the usual dim-witted, media-managed Mister America contest where candidates vie for charm and style points and hire image coaches to help them act more confident and presidential. This is a referendum on what is arguably the most dismal performance by any incumbent president -- and inarguably the biggest mistake. This is a referendum on George W. Bush, arguably the worst thing that has happened to the United States of America since the invention of the cathode ray tube. One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush is much too strong. Just to spell it out is to sound like a bitter partisan. I sit here on the 67th birthday of Saddam Hussein facing a haystack of incriminating evidence that comes almost to my armpit. What matters most, what signifies? Journalists used to look for the smoking gun, but this time we have the cannons of Waterloo, we have Gettysburg and Sevastopol, we have enough gunsmoke to cause asthma in heaven. I'm overwhelmed. Maybe I should light a match to this mountain of paper and immolate myself. On the near side of my haystack, among hundreds of quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one thing leaped out at me. A quote I had underlined was from the testimony of Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, not long before Hitler's vice-fuhrer poisoned himself in his jail cell: "... It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." Goering's dark wisdom gained weight when a friend called me and reported that Vice President Cheney was so violently partisan in his commencement speech at Westminster College in Missouri -- so rabid in his attacks on John Kerry as a anti-American peace-marching crypto-communist -- that the college president felt obliged to send the student body an email apologizing for Cheney's coarseness. If you think it's exceptionally shameless for a man who dodged Vietnam to play the patriot card against a decorated veteran, remember that Georgia Republicans played the same card, successfully, against Sen. Max Cleland, who suffered multiple amputations in Vietnam. In 2001 and 2002, George Bush and his Machiavelli, Karl Rove, approved political attack ads that showed the faces of Tom Daschle and other Democratic senators alongside the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And somewhere in hell, Goering and Goebbels toasted each other with a schnapps. Am I polarized? I've never been a registered Democrat, I'm sick of this two-party straitjacket, I wish to God it didn't take Yale and a major American fortune to create a presidential candidate. The only current Democratic leaders who show me any courage are Nancy Pelosi and old Bob Byrd -- Hillary Clinton has been especially cagy and gutless on this war -- and John Kerry himself may leave a lot to be desired. He deserves your vote not because of anything he ever did or promises to do, but simply because he did not make this sick mess in Iraq and owes no allegiance to the sinister characters who designed it. And because his own "place in history," so important to the kind of men who run for president, would now rest entirely on his success in getting us out of it. Kerry made a courageous choice at least once in his life, when he came home with his ribbons and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But Sen. Kerry could turn out to be a stiff, a punk, an alcoholic, and he'd still be a colossal improvement over the man who turned Paul Wolfowitz loose in the Middle East. The myth that there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans, which I once considered seriously and which Ralph Nader rode to national disaster four years ago, was shattered forever the day George Bush announced his cabinet and his appointments for the Department of Defense. I'm aware that there are voters -- 40 million? -- who don't see it this way. I come from a family of veterans and commissioned officers; I understand patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing "Hail to the Chief." President Bush cultivated his patriots by spending $46 million on media in the month of March alone. Somehow I'm on his mailing list. (Is that because my late father, with the same name, was a registered Republican, or can Bush afford to mail his picture to every American with an established address?) Twice a week I open an appeal for cash to crush John Kerry and the quisling liberal conspiracy, and now I own six gorgeous color photographs of the president and his wife. I'm sure some of my neighbors frame the president's color photographs and fill those little blue envelopes he sends us with their hard-earned dollars. I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans are conceptually challenged. I want to reason with my neighbors; I want to engage these lost Americans. What makes you angry, neighbor? What arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this administration made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 catastrophe, then exploited it to justify the pre-planned destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al Qaeda? All this is no longer conjecture, but direct reportage from cabinet-level meetings by the turncoat insiders Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill. If the Pentagon ever thought Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction," it was only because the Pentagon gave them to him. As Kevin Phillips recounts in American Dynasty, officials of the Reagan and first Bush administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with arms while he was using chemical weapons on the Kurds. They twice sent Donald Rumsfeld to court Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the dictator was in the glorious prime of his monsterhood. This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was briefly called "Iraqgate," and, yes, among the names of those officials implicated you'll find most of the engineers of our current foreign policy. (They also signaled their fractious client, Saddam, that it might be all right to overrun part of Kuwait; you remember what happened when he tried to swallow it all.) Does any of this trouble you? Does it worry you that Dick Cheney, as president of the nefarious Halliburton Corporation, sold Iraq $73 million in oilfield services between 1997 and 2000, even as he plotted with the Wolfowitz faction to whack Saddam? Or that Halliburton, with its CEO's seat still warm from Cheney's butt, was awarded unbid contracts worth up to $15 billion for the Iraq invasion, and currently earns a billion dollars a month from this bloody disaster? Not to mention its $27.4 billion overcharge for our soldiers' food. These are facts, not partisan rhetoric. Do any of them even make you restless? The cynical game these shape-shifters have been playing in the Middle East is too Byzantine to unravel in 1,000 pages of text. But the hypocrisy of the White House is palpable, and beggars belief. If there's one American who actually believes that Operation Iraqi Freedom was about democracy for the poor Iraqis, then you, my friend, are too dangerously stupid to be allowed near a voting booth. Does it bother you even a little that the personal fortunes of all four Bush brothers, including the president and the governor, were acquired about a half step ahead of the district attorney, and that the royal family of Saudi Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and other Bush family enterprises? Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that it's much easier to establish links between the Bush and bin Laden families than any between the bin Ladens and Saddam Hussein. Do you know about Ahmad Chalabi, the administration's favorite Iraqi and current agent in Baghdad, whose personal fortune was established when he embezzled several hundred million from his own bank in Jordan and fled to London to avoid 22 years at hard labor? That's just a sampling from my haystack. Maybe I can reach you as an environmentalist, one who resents the gutting of key provisions in the Clean Air Act? My own Orange County, N.C., chiefly a rural area, was recently added to a national register of counties with dangerously polluted air. You say you vote for the president because you're a conservative. Are you sure? I thought conservatives believed in civil liberties, a weak federal executive, an inviolable Constitution, a balanced budget and an isolationist foreign policy. George Bush has an attorney general who drives the ACLU apoplectic and a vice president who demands more executive privilege (for his energy séances )) than any elected official has ever received. The president wants a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage from homosexuals, of all things. Between tax cuts for his high-end supporters and three years playing God and Caesar in the Middle East, George Bush has simply emptied America's wallet with a $480 billion federal deficit projected for 2004 and the tab on Iraq well over $100 billion and running. "A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word means," Barry Goldwater said in 1994, when the current cult of right-wing radicals and "neocons" had begun to define and assert themselves. Goldwater was my first political hero, before I was old enough to read his flaws. But his was the conservatism of the wolf -- the lone wolf -- and this is the conservatism of sheep. All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at "liberals" and maybe a name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke, whom most of them have never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous but not harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college fraternity prank" (and who once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog" -- you don't have to worry about shame when you have no brain). I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most sophisticated political campaign in human history will be out trolling for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you. Prairie Populist 20 August 2004 The FBI yesterday warned that there will be violent demonstrations in NYC during the Republican Convention. It has been time for the FBI to begin infiltrating the ACLU and NAACP and American Friends since they haven’t had any luck infiltrating real terrorists’ organizations. The warning is part of a series of A-Warning-A-Day keeps Karl Rove happy and the American populace afraid. What ever happened to “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?” Of course then we had a real President elected by popular vote and a real war. David Kay was not making nice to
Condi Rice Wednesday in his testimony on the 9/11 report. Kay is the fellow who
was Bush’s WMD finder in Our take is that as usual Bush is
letting others take the fall for the mistakes made by Rove and his political
crew that he happily acquiesced to for the chance to run as the conquering war
president. Anyone who has seen the seven minute tape of his facial expressions
in the classroom in Florida when informed of the 9/11 attacks knows that he is
not up to the task and is lost without someone to tell him what to do. That is
the commercial for October. To view the tapes go to this website: http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/08/edi04057.html#video
. The NYT is reporting today that
Deal Hudson the publisher of Crisis, a conservative Catholic Monthly Magazine
has resigned as an advisor to the Bush Campaign. It seems that in his younger
days when he was a professor at Fordham he had a “?” relationship with a female
student. Deal is quoted: “No one regrets
my past mistakes more than I do.” He announced his resignation on the online
version of National Review. He went on to say “"At the time, I dealt with
this in an upright manner, and the matter was satisfactorily resolved long
ago." We wonder if the student can say the same. Read the story at http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4935870.html
and “the General” has a consoling letter
for Mr. Deal http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/
. In that same vein, when we were channel surfing the other night we happened on a Biography story on Mary Kay LeTorneau, the school teacher who went to prison for having an affair with her 13 year old male pupil with whom she has had two children. We have seen the passing headlines on the “story” but never really followed it because it was in our mind in the category of all the other media hyped personal tragedy stories. We decided to watch for a while when the promo mentioned that she came from a conservative Catholic family. We had never seen or read of that fact. Well, Oprah fans, we wonder where
Rush and Sean and all the other media right wingers have been on this story.
Mary Kay is the poster child for repressive childhoods also know as Republican
Family Values. It seems her father, a fellow named Smitz, was a far right wing California
State Assembly member. He also ran and won a seat in the U.S. Congress as a
conservative family values fellow back in the late 1960s. He ran for President
of the Kerry to Bush on http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KERRY_WAR_CRITIC And in Go to http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/8/19/123539/130 . Go to this website and scroll down to the third story on August 19 for a very interesting article on the margin of error in polling data. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ Prairie Populist 19 August 2004 And in the what else is new department the U.S. is not accepting the Chavez victory without and argument and further investigation. Jimmy Carter’s word is not enough. It’s nice to have friends in high places. The NYT reports today that the Army has decided for the second time this year to pay Halliburton the 15% of billings that the Army had refused to pay until Halliburton could provide the paperwork justifying the claims. The Saudis sure must hate the U.S. invasion of Iraq with oil at $47 per barrel. 43 has surely taken care of his dad’s good friends. Bush reaffirmed his support for the anti ballistic missile system in front of a bunch a cheering Boeing workers today. Since the missile system means jobs for the folks cheering we can understand their support. But Bush justified the missile system by saying: "I think those who oppose this ballistic missile system don't understand the threats of the 21st century". Who’s he kidding? In our reading we came across the following and it resurrected memories of earlier years when we first discovered the Greek philosophers, most of which information we no longer have verbatim in our memory bank but use every day in our decision making process. Aristotle thought there were four kinds of causality:
Prairie Populist 18 August 2004 8:32am and the NYT reports that a quietly released report by the Bushies shows that fourth graders in Charter schools are performing about one half year behind students in regular schools. The story is at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/education/17charter.html?hp 8:30am and the Washington Post reviewed some of Bush’s
malapropisms and below are a few of the best from http://americablog.blogspot.com/ . 1. "We actually misnamed the
war on terror," he said. "It ought to be the Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free
Societies Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon to Try to Shake the Conscience
of the Free World." 8:45am and We found this gem on http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/ for all the recovering Catholics in the crowd the story at http://www.ktvu.com/family/3651369/detail.html should bring back memories of camels and needles eyes and patent leather shoes. The AP is reporting that an 8 year old girl’s first communion has been revoked by the Diocese of Trenton because she received communion with a wafer that did not contain any wheat. She is allergic to wheat and could become very sick from eating any. But the Church in its own way ruled that communion without a wheat wafer is no communion since Christ at the Last Supper ate bread made from wheat. We thought we knew all the rules but that one got us. Prairie Populist 17
August 2004 9:02am and Senator Tom Harkin minced no words about Darth Vader over the week-end: Harkin also shot back at Cheney,
who said in a visit to He noted that Cheney had several student deferments that allowed him to skip serving in Vietnam. "When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil," Harkin said. "Those of us who served and those of us who went in the military don't like it when someone like a Dick Cheney comes out and he wants to be tough. Yeah, he'll be tough. He'll be tough with somebody else's blood, somebody else's kids. But not when it was his turn to go." 9:15am and we learn that Jerry Falwell has not been invited to give a prayer at the Republican Convention. Bob Herbert has an interesting
column on voter suppression and intimidation in 12:02pm and even though we like to say that folks who worry about ‘Big Brother’ and Asscroft and the FBI overstepping their authority are crying wolf every few weeks a story appears in the mainstream press that is chilling in its reminders of times past in other countries. The story in today’s NYT about the FBI visiting dissidents is scary. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/politics/campaign/16fbi.html?pagewanted=all&position
Happy Friday the 13th. Prairie Populist 13 August 2004 8:45am and we were bemused and
nodded when we read this post. Our daughter lives in Sorry -- this isn't the typical posting but I just have to
do this. The year is 2004 but the
attitudes are 1960s. by the way 9:02am and Michael Moore is every where as the following article displays. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Congressman Porter Goss, President Bush’s nominee for CIA director, could be his own worst enemy when it comes to making the case that he deserves to lead the U.S. intelligence agency. "I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified," the Florida Republican told documentary-maker Michael Moore's production company during the filming of the anti-Bush movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." A day after Bush picked Goss for the top "I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background probably," Goss is quoted in an interview transcript. "And I certainly don't have the technical skills, uh, as my children remind me every day: 'Dad you got to get better on your computer.' Uh, so, the things that you need to have, I don't have." Goss, who served with the CIA clandestine
services in The White House dismissed the "Porter Goss has very strong support from
Republicans, and Democrats including Sen. Bob Graham of "No one's really questioning his qualifications. Even people who say he's too political for the job say he has qualifications for the job," Duffy added. Goss appears in "You'd think the person who was the head of
the intelligence committee would ask a few more questions," said "The reality is that Porter Goss was in
charge of the oversight of the CIA during a time when the CIA didn't do its
job, which in part resulted in the loss of lives of 3,000 people," he said
via telephone from Goss is expected to appear at confirmation hearings before the Senate intelligence committee next month. President Bush said on Tuesday that abolishing
the "It's an interesting idea," Bush told an "Ask President Bush" campaign forum here. "You know, I'm not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it's the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." Administration officials on Wednesday denied that President Bush is considering a national sales tax, a day after the Republican incumbent created a stir by calling such a tax "an interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." As far as flip flops are concerned, this one wins the grand prize. 11:50pm and we are posting the
quotes below because “Kerry only served four months” has become a Republican
Talking Point and we wish to show how the mainstream press along with cable and
even NPR pick up RNC talking points without doing any checking. The info blow
is from http://atrios.blogspot.com/ .
For the record Kerry served one full tour of one year in
HANNITY ( So let me ask you this. One thing we do know is John Kerry admitted that, quote, “I committed atrocities.” And the actual quote: KERRY (videotape, 1971): I personally
didn't see personal atrocities in the sense that I saw somebody cut a head
off or something like that. However, I did take part in free fire zones. I did
take part in harassment and interdiction fire. I did take part in search and
destroy missions, in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the
ground. And all of these, I find out later on, these acts are contrary to the
Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense,
anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Prairie Populist 12 August 2004 9:01am and the appointment of Porter Goss as CIA Director is in the words of retired Admiral Stansfield Turner who is a former CIA Director: "This is the worst appointment that's ever been made to the office of director of central intelligence because that's an office that needs to be kept above partisan politics." The Dems seem afraid to speak against this appointment because the Bushies will accuse them of undermining the war against terror. Same old same old. Goss is a hack and someday it would be nice if the Dems got some gumption. Not in our lifetime. 12:02pm and we are busy on the stock side today so we haven’t much to say. We do wonder whether God is sending a message to the Bushies about Florida, what with two hurricanes bearing down on it for a Friday the 13th landfall. 3:03pm and those Vietnam Vets attacking Kerry’s service create all sorts of negative feelings in us. We are of that generation and we know the courage it took to volunteer to serve in Viet Nam and the courage it took upon his return to speak out against the war. It is too bad and very sad that Bush and Cheney, two folks who supported that war but avoided it as was their right, don’t now have the understanding of right and wrong that would cause them to tell those Swift Veterans to back off. Of course we know that Bush and Cheney are happy that the brouhaha is occurring. It is the same method that was used to go after McCain and Max Cleland. And that is what make the White Houses non comment on the situation especially disheartening. Prairie Populist 11 August 2004 8:32am and Bush speaking in Virginia yesterday according to the Daily Post of Hampton Roads: Bush also said high taxes on the rich are a failed strategy because "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway." Asked about that comment, Jonathan Beeton, spokesman for Kerry's campaign in Virginia, said "George Bush can speak with authority about really rich people. ... That's his base, so I'm sure he knows what he's talking about. But that doesn't make it right." 9:05am and the AP reports that when the Justice Department obtained two videos suggesting that terrorists were casing Las Vegas Casinos they did not warn the public. Rather they worried about how such news would affect tourism. And there was no Presidential election within the next few months to try and scare folks into voting for Bush. We’ve seen strange folks taking pictures around Soldiers Grove also. We wonder if the Justice Department is holding back because they don’t want to ruin the tourist business in the Kickapoo Valley? Prairie Populist 9 August 2004 7:11am and these are Bush’s words at a signing ceremony for a $417 billion military spending bill, the president said: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." 8:47am and Greg Mankiw, the White House economist has the reason for U.S. economic problems. Clinton. Higher oil prices? Clinton. The answer, more tax cuts. Same old same old. 8:50am and on Sunday Condi Rice threatened Iran with punitive action if it doesn’t get in line. Unfortunately Condi forgot that we don’t have any troops to back up our threat. On Sunday Condi also implied that she didn’t know that the supposed Al Qeda computer expert that was trumped as a wonderful catch happened to be a double agent working for the Pakistanis which is probably why the Pakistanis were able to find him so quickly and why the found files were all in English. Anyway by revealing his name future operations were supposedly compromised. The whole affair is much too confusing to understand except to demonstrate that as usual the Bushies don’t really know how to play the game. Prairie Populist 6 August 2004 7:15am and if you are interested in the Cheney/Halliburton/SEC story this website has an excellent exposition on its August 4 post: http://billmon.org/ . 8:35am and Bruce Springsteen’s op/ed in yesterday’s NYT is a classic statement of liberal values. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/opinion/05bruce.html . 9:26am and we read on http://corrente.blogspot.com/ which is named Liberal Blog that the NYT mentions that a senior official said the files that were found that triggered the terror alert on Sunday were written in “perfect English’. So these guys and gals who were stalking American buildings wrote reports in perfect English to convey information back to Al Qeda headquarters where how many folks speak perfect English? The story is getting stranger and stranger, just like the WMD story. 9:48am and a few words from Alan Keyes
who lives in Maryland and is considering accepting the Republican spot in the
Senate race in Illinois: Sent: Subject: Resume This individual seeks an executive position. He will
be available next January, and is willing to relocate. The following is
his resume: Prairie Populist 5 August 2004 8:20am and we get e-mails: Bud, I watched the Bill O'Reilly interview with the First Lady last night and she said everyday at 5:30 she and GW wake up and he gets them coffee and the morning newspapers and they spend the next hour in bed reading the papers and discussing the day's events. I was under the impression that W never reads the papers. Maybe Laura reads them to him??? Phil We respond: Phil, He reads the funnies and sports section in that order. 9:30am and after the NYT and Washington
Post ran stories that the information that caused the Sunday terror alerts was
four years old, Tom Mix Ridge flew to NYC to meet with the heads of the
financial institutions that are supposedly under threat. In NYC Ridge said that
the terrorist files had been “updated” as late as January of this year. The
mindless media dutifully reported that info. And on CNN the reporters spent a
good half hour of the What was interesting about last night’s CNN coverage of Ridge’s press conference was that Aaron Brown, the head anchor of that program was invited by the Bushies to speak at the re-opening of the Statue of Liberty yesterday. Yes folks, the Statue of Liberty was re-opened one day after the terrorism warning level had been raised from yellow to orange. Brown spent about ten minutes on the Statue of Liberty story. The Republicans are great at co-opting reporters. We have two observations. The
first is that immediately after declaring a terrorist plot opening Statue of
Liberty after it had been closed since Secondly, Ridge’s press conference did not clearly spell out what the new data in January was. It could have been that the computer was turned on and the files transferred which would give a January 2004 date on the computer. The terror alert warnings are a political ploy but the Dems can’t speak out against them because there may be an attack somewhere sometime that will be blamed on those who attack the administration announcements as political which they obviously are. And unidentified Senior Official
also said new information recently became available but unlike the old info the
new info can’t be revealed. That new info is probably filed with Richard Nixon’s
1968 plan to end the War in If the terrorists are as smart as
we are led to believe we presume they will blow up Finally, if this research was
done before 9/11 was there any info on the “We don't do politics in the
Department of Homeland Security," On Sunday Tom
Mix Ridge said: "But we must understand that the kind of information
available to us today is the result of the President's leadership in the war
against terror. The reports that have led to this alert are the result of
offensive intelligence and military operations overseas, as well as strong
partnerships with our allies around the world, such as 10:25am and if the following had been done for Chelsea Clinton back then what would the reaction be? Heck if it were done for Clinton’s or Kerry’s daughters now what would the reaction be? US
Airways confirmed Tuesday that a scheduled flight between Boston and
Washington, D.C., was diverted (to Albany, NY) Saturday so some stranded
passengers -- including President George W. Bush's twin daughters -- could get
on the plane... 11:35am and Republicans in
Illinois are going to support Alan Keyes, the black conservative who lives in
Maryland, to run for the Senate in Illinois against Barack Obama. And Republicans
are always accusing Dems of playing the race card. According to the
constitution Keyes doesn’t have to move to AP
reports that guerrillas killed four Accomplishments:
That is sort of like invading 3:02pm and the government as the result of a decision by NIH will not force Abbott to lower the price of an AIDS drug that it raised from $1.65 to over $7 per pill last year. Abbott used government money (about $3.5 million) to develop the pill. Abbott claims that the pill which has earned over $1 billion cost $300 million to develop and they need the extra revenue to continue developing other drugs. It is a complicated story but we remember that our business partner Don Yarling who died of AIDS in 1994 had a special antipathy towards Abbott because they had this AIDS drug in development and they wouldn’t release it for study until they were indemnified from suit. Don felt from his readings and studying that that drug would have prolonged his life. Prairie Populist 4 August 2004 From the Jesus’ General website: Jerry Falwell has been tapped to give the opening prayer at the
Republican Convention. As the following quotes demonstrate, there is no other
pastor in this country who better embodies the values of Our Leader, the
Anointed One. The quotes follow: 1. “The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” 2. “If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.” 3.
“It appears that 4. “The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.” 5. “Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.” 6. “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” 7. “AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” 8.
“God continues to lift the curtain and allow the
enemies of 9. “The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this [terrorist attacks].” 10. “And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this [terrorist attacks] happen." 11. “I sincerely believe that the collective efforts of many secularists during the past generation, resulting in the expulsion from our schools and from the public square, has left us vulnerable.” posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot And the Republicans go bonkers over Al Sharpton. Prairie Populist 3 August 2004 So much has been made of the Dean comment about the Bushies using the terror warnings to upstage Kerry that we thought we should present the interview with Howard Dean where the discussion took place. We would comment that since it turns out the info that caused the heightened alert was at least three years old that one might question the need to rush out on a Sunday morning to push this news. Also the tone of Wolf Blitzer seems to suggest that Dean is really going out on a limb to question that the Bushies might be doing something for political reasons. He sounds like Ralph Reed or one of the other Republican shills. But that is the way the media has become. We do think Kerry in the context of the campaign had to disavow what Dean said although we presume the Kerry folks are happy Dean had the guts and freedom to say it. This info is from the site: http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/ . Info on Possible Attacks Pre-dates 9/11The information on which the Bush Administration raised the terror level Sunday in New York, New Jersey, and Washington, DC pre-dates 9/11, according to The Washington Post and other media services. That means that the surveillance of the target buildings occurred before 2001 and there is no evidence it continues. Most of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial
institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older. "There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that." Well, I’m betting that the rest of us know why: I am concerned that every time something happens that's not
good for President Bush he plays this trump card, which is terrorism. His whole
campaign is based on the notion that "I can keep you safe, therefore at
times of difficulty for - Howard Dean, speaking on Sunday Yes, Howard, you nailed it. Posted by Chuck Currie at 12:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Defense: Homeland Security
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