Day: August 21, 2005

War in Iraq ‘Has Broken the Back of Our Counterterrorism Effort’

Jon Ponder

“The war in Iraq has broken the back of our counterterrorism effort. I‘m not an expert on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but the invasion of Iraq has made sure this war will last decades ahead and it has transferred bin Laden and al Qaeda from being man and an organization into being a philosophy and a movement. We‘ve really made sure that the war against us is going to be a long and very bloody one. Iraq was an absolutely disastrous decision.”

— Mike Scheuer, retired CIA counterterrorism officer, author of “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror” and “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.”

The Advantage of Being Spineless

Jon Ponder

“One advantage to being spineless is that you can easily bend over backwards… It is, unfortunately, not surprising that a media too spineless to ask the tough questions prior to the invasion of Iraq continues that grand tradition by bending over backwards to accommodate people on the far edge of American political life who yell ‘liberal’ with the same gusto that Nurembergers shouted ‘Jew!’ in 1936?”

— Charles Jaco

U.S. Attorney in Bribery Probe Seeks Seizure of Duke Cunningham’s Home

Jon Ponder

Washington Post:

The U.S. attorney in San Diego is trying to seize Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s California home, asserting in a sealed civil suit that it was purchased with proceeds from a violation of the bribery statute.

The reference to the federal bribery law in a forfeiture claim filed in court and with San Diego County is the first official indication of the direction of a probe of the California Republican’s relationship with a Washington defense contractor.

A federal grand jury has been investigating Cunningham since the San Diego Union-Tribune reported in June that the contractor, Mitchell J. Wade, had purchased the congressman’s home in late 2003 for $1.675 million and resold it several months later at a $700,000 loss. Cunningham soon bought a larger house in Rancho Santa Fe for $2.55 million.

Cunningham also lived rent free while in Washington on Wade’s 42-foot yacht, the Duke-Stir.

Senate Dems Demand White House Action on Gas Prices

Jon Ponder

Washington Post:

U.S. Senate Democrats turned up the heat on the White House on Friday to act in the face of record-high U.S gasoline pump prices.

The same day, the Senate Energy Committee set a September 8 hearing on what’s behind the prices, which hit a record $2.55 a gallon this week…

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on Friday said the Bush administration should require U.S. oil companies to disclose their fuel pricing policies and production costs.

In a letter to the White House, Reid also said the Federal Trade Commission should investigate instances where a state’s retail prices rise 20 percent in any given week “to determine if the price of gasoline is being artificially manipulated.”

GOP Scandals Transform Ohio From Purple to Blue

Jon Ponder

Last week, GOP Gov. Bob Taft, the great-grandson of President William Howard Taft, was sentenced for not reporting political contributions, a signature moment in a series of on-going Republican political scandals that are rocking the Buckeye State.

Taft was fined $1,000 for each of four misdemeanor counts and was forced to send an email to state employees apologizing for his misdeeds and to all Ohoians via a statement in the media.

Sounds like a slap on the wrist to us.

[…]

Frank Rich: ‘Swiftboating’ of Cindy May Not Work

Jon Ponder

“True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a “crackpot” by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan’s ‘story is nothing more than forged documents – there’s nothing about it that’s real.’

“But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer’s collapse of political support for the Iraq war.

“When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke’s character, then we stop talking about the administration’s pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the “liberal media,” we forget the Pentagon’s abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson’s wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D.’s.

“The hope this time was that we’d change the subject to Cindy Sheehan’s ‘wacko’ rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.”

— Frank Rich in the New York Times