Category: News & Comment

Arlie Hochschild – who wrote an article titled “Let Them Eat War” in 2003 accurately predicting that President Bush would use fear of terrorism to manipulate blue collar voters into voting for him, against their own best interests, in the 2004 presidential elections – says in the current Mother Jones:

I’m continually appalled by the Bush administration. But I’m also an optimist. The whole mess we’re in — the trade of butter for guns, clear skies for soot, good will for Abu Ghraib, an open society for a closed one, live soldiers for dead ones — this whole mess could be reversed. It would only take a change of heart among just a few percent of blue-collar voters the next time around. But the change of heart depends on understanding and exposing a certain underlying logic of our present situation — that Bush is manipulating feelings of anguish, fear, anger (especially among those faced with job loss and lower wages) with one hand, while pursuing policies that exacerbate exactly those situations with the other. In my next piece, I’ll be continuing to chip away at that underlying logic, the one I first tried to lay out in “Let Them Eat War” with a modest faith that, at the end of the day, reason will win out.

Here is a story published last fall that offers yet more evidence that President Bush and his team had planned to invade Iraq even before the 2000 presidential campaign was fully underway:

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker…”

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches…”

Yesterday we had a story about an exchange between ABC News White House reporter Terry Moran and Bush spokesman Scott McClelland in which Moran agressively questioned Scottie about Vice President Cheney’s recent assertions that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes.” That was encouraging.

But now comes evidence that the MSM has sadly slipped back into its coma. Writing in the Washington Post, former White House reporter, enabler and sometimes stenographer Dana Milbank gave a scathing and derisive account of a hearing held by Democrats on the Downing Street documents.

In his Post article, Milbank completely ignored the seriousness of these allegations and treated the forum and its chairperson, Rep. John Conyers, the Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee with dripping sarcasm.

In response, Rep. Conyers sent a letter objecting to the rightwing bias of the coverage to the Post’s omsbudsman.

I write to express my profound disappointment with Dana Milbank’s June 17 [article] which purports to describe a Democratic hearing I chaired in the Capitol yesterday. In sum, the piece cherry-picks some facts, manufactures others out of whole cloth, and does a disservice to some 30 members of Congress who persevered under difficult circumstances, not of our own making, to examine a very serious subject: whether the American people were deliberately misled in the lead up to war. The fact that this was the Post’s only coverage of this event makes the journalistic shortcomings in this piece even more egregious…

The article begins with an especially mean and nasty tone, claiming that House Democrats “pretended” a small conference was the Judiciary Committee hearing room and deriding the decor of the room. Milbank fails to share with his readers one essential fact: the reason the hearing was held in that room… Despite the fact that a number of other suitable rooms were available in the Capitol and House office buildings, Republicans declined my request for each and every one of them. Milbank could have written about the perseverance of many of my colleagues in the face of such adverse circumstances, but declined to do so. Milbank also ignores the critical fact picked up by the AP, CNN and other newsletters that at the very moment the hearing was scheduled to begin, the Republican Leadership scheduled an almost unprecedented number of 11 consecutive floor votes, making it next to impossible for most Members to participate in the first hour and one half of the hearing…

The fact that I and my fellow Democrats had to stuff a hearing into a room the size of a large closet to hold a hearing on an important issue shouldn’t make us the object of ridicule. In my opinion, the ridicule should be placed in two places: first, at the feet of Republicans who are so afraid to discuss ideas and facts that they try to sabotage our efforts to do so; and second, on Dana Milbank and the Washington Post, who do not feel the need to give serious coverage on a serious hearing about a serious matter-whether more than 1700 Americans have died because of a deliberate lie. Milbank may disagree, but the Post certainly owed its readers some coverage of that viewpoint.

I happened to catch the last half of the hearings at 2AM Pacific time on C-Span last week. It was sad to see proceedings like these being held in a small crowded room. The hearings conducted by these same Republicans not so long ago into President Clinton’s sex life were televised live and given no-expense-barred, full Congressional trappings. Now, hearings into a Republican president’s lies and incomptent war planning are held in windowless conference room.

Why are the Republicans averse to holding hearings on the contents of the Downing Street documents? The childish attempts to stop the truth from being told underscore the concern among the GOP’s leadership that the documents offer incontrovertible evidence that the Bush Administration deliberately misled the American public, the Congress and the world about the reasons they took the country to war in Iraq.

The Bush Administration could never have succeeding in duping the American public without the willing and able assistance of conservative tools like Milbank, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These propagandists have blood on their hands, just as surely as do President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

From “Without a Doubt,” an October 2004 New York Times Magazine article about the Bush administration written by Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It is interesting that this statement was made just a few months after the secret Downing Street memos and minutes were written.

The documents provide evidence that the Bush Administration, in collusion with the British, conspired to incite public support for forcible regime change in Iraq by creating a reality in which Saddam Hussein represented a dire and direct threat to the United States.

The smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud.

The new CBS Poll gives President Bush an astoundingly high 42 percent. He is hands down the luckiest man ever to serve as president. No other U.S. president has lied, cheated and then lied about lying as much as this one and gotten away with it this long.

And no other president’s lies have caused the deaths of so many U.S. service personnel and innocent civilians.

Why do President Bush’s poll numbers remain so high? The central and best orchestrated fabrication created by the President and his team is that they are protecting America from terrorism, and that America can fight a “war” on terror. Belief in this elaborate fantasy by millions of Americans is a key factor in keeping Bush’s overall approval rating in the 40’s.

A slim majority of those polled – 52 percent – approved of Bush’s handling of terrorism. Only 40 percent disapproved.

Absent the successful campaign to create an environment of fear, President Bush’s popularity would be around 30 percent, which is roughly the number of Bush-worshipping ditto heads who make up the base of the Republican Party.

If you don’t live in Florida (aren’t you the clever one?), you might not have heard the latest about Jeb and the Schiavo case. The autopsy report showed Terri really was beyond hope, and also showed no evidence that abuse caused her collapse to begin with, nor evidence there was any abuse in the 15 years she was in a persistent vegitative state. So you might expect Jeb to say, “Whoops, my bad” for using his office to harass and intimidate Michael Schiavo.

You might, but this is Jeb we’re talking about.

And so the news comes today that Jeb wants to launch an investigation into how long it took Michael Schiavo to call an ambulance when Terri collapsed in 1990. I’m not making this up.

Miami Herald:

One day after an exhaustive autopsy sought to end much of the controversy over Terri Schiavo’s life, and eventual death, Gov. Jeb Bush said he plans to ask prosecutors to investigate whether her husband took too long to call for help on the night she collapsed in 1990…

Bush said he had tried unsuccessfully to reach Pinellas-Pasco County State Attorney Bernie McCabe, who is apparently on vacation, to talk to him about whether law enforcement authorities should look into Michael Schiavo’s actions 15 years ago.

Somebody make it stop!

Too late. They’re going ahead.

St. Petersburg Times:

“We are going to look into the circumstances surrounding the times,” said [McCabe’s chief assistant Bruce] Bartlett, who declined to label the review an investigation. “The governor has expressed concern over that aspect of the case.”

…Bush said he decided to seek the investigation after talking with Dr. Jon Thogmartin, the Pinellas-Pasco medical examiner who spent nearly 11 weeks preparing Schiavo’s autopsy report, and learning that the doctor could not determine what led Schiavo to collapse in 1990.

Thogmartin met with the governor the day before the autopsy report was released publicly.

Meanwhile, a scorching and dead-on column by the Tampa Tribune’s Daniel Ruth calls to task the Jebs and Docktor Frists of the world, along with the talk radio and cable screamers, for publicly tarring and feathering Michael Schiavo.

It is more than understandable Terri Schiavo’s parents Bob and Mary Schindler and her siblings were in a parallel universe of denial over the true state of their daughter’s dire medical condition. They loved her…

But in the service of ratings points, audience share, ambition, ego and hubris, the likes of Glenn Beck, the Madame Defarge of Talk Radio, and his Posse Comitatus of prevarication were more than willing to engage in drive time vigilantism against Michael Schiavo, whose only crime was trying to honor his wife’s end-of-life wishes…

Now at long last, Michael Schiavo has been vindicated by the truth, a foreign concept to all those phony so-called Christians, talk show thugs and politicians looking for a cheap sound bite who were more than ready to treat a brain-dead woman as their own personal “Weekend At Bernie’s” of the Bible.

ABC’s Terry Moran questioned White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan yesterday about Vice President Cheney’s recent assertion that the insurgency in Iraq is in its last throes. Via Editor & Publisher:

Q Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its ‘last throes’?

McCLELLAN: Terry, you have a desperate group of terrorists in Iraq that are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to democracy. The Iraqi people have made it clear that they want a free and democratic and peaceful future. And that’s why we’re doing everything we can, along with other countries, to support the Iraqi people as they move forward….

Q: But the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: The Vice President talked about that the other day — you have a desperate group of terrorists who recognize how high the stakes are in Iraq. A free Iraq will be a significant blow to their ambitions.

Q: But they’re killing more Americans, they’re killing more Iraqis. That’s the last throes?

McCLELLAN: Innocent — I say innocent civilians. And it doesn’t take a lot of people to cause mass damage when you’re willing to strap a bomb onto yourself, get in a car and go and attack innocent civilians. That’s the kind of people that we’re dealing with. That’s what I say when we’re talking about a determined enemy.

Q: Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics.

Q: What’s the evidence on the ground that it’s being extinguished?

McCLELLAN: Terry, we’re making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You’re seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in addressing the security threats that they face. They’re working side by side with our coalition forces. They’re working on their own. There are a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode.

Q: Well, I’m just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.

McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President’s remarks. I think he talked about it.

Q: Yes. Is there any idea how long a ‘last throe’ lasts for?

McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve….

ABC News reports that Democrats in the U.S. Senate fended off a move by the Republican majority yesterday to move forward the nomination of Bush political operative John Bolton to become ambassador to the United Nations:

“All over the news the last few days has been concerns about weapons of mass destruction by virtue of the memo that was discovered,” [said Minority Leader Harry Reid], referring to the so-called “Downing Street memo.”

The July 2002 memo, prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said President Bush had already decided to invade Iraq and intelligence was being made to fit that policy.

“Concerns about this administration hyping intelligence and Great Britain hyping intelligence cannot be dismissed lightly,” Reid said, adding that it “is no small matter for us to learn whether Mr. Bolton was a party to other efforts to hype intelligence.”

Bush and his aides, including Bolton, justified the invasion by saying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the United States, but no such weapons have been found.

Bolton met at the Capitol with top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who told him he “needs to convince Vice President (Dick) Cheney to provide the information” they sought on preparations for testimony Bolton gave Congress on Syria’s weapons and on classified National Security Agency intercepts, according to a statement from Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.