Year: 2005

Washington Blade

With bright red shirts and blaring religious music, Christian protesters mingled with attendees of the Charlotte Pride festival Saturday, the Charlotte Observer reported. “We don’t enjoy getting cussed out,” said one conservative activist , Shanna Carlan of Matthews. After a pause, she added, “Our flesh doesn’t enjoy that, but for the cause of Jesus, it’s worth it.” Those attending the festival sometimes debated and other times just ignored the protesters, according to the Observer. “Do something constructive with your time instead of telling us we’re going to hell,” Sherry Welpe of Charlotte told the protesters.

Southern Voice:

The push for gay marriage was not to blame for President George W. Bush’s re-election, top Democratic political strategist James Carville told those attending the 18th annual Atlanta Human Rights Campaign last weekend.

“I understand you feel frustrated. And some blame you,” Carville told the mostly gay audience at the May 7 dinner at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta.

“You’ve got a good campaign — you’re asking for equal rights. Don’t let what happened frustrate you. It was not you. Understand that,” he said. [It] was simply poor Democratic campaigning that put Bush back in the White House.

“Bush thought the country was re-electing him. Actually, it just wasn’t comfortable electing John Kerry,” Carville said to cheers.

President Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 because he fired his own cabinet member, Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton. President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998-1999 because he lied under oath about an extramarital affair.

And yet today the conventional wisdom says that the fact that President George W. Bush, in a concerted effort with his top aides and government officials, including the Vice President, engaged in a conspiracy to deceive the American people in order to engender public support for going to war to remove Saddam Hussein from power does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

If a conspiracy to lie about the reasons for taking the country to war – at a cost of thousands of dead and wounded American military personnel and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi babies, children, grandmothers and grandfathers, fathers and mothers, not to mention hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars – is not a high crime or misdemeanor, then what is?

The other SCLM take on Bush’s campaign of lies in the run-up to war is that whatever he did in 2002 was nullified by the elections in November 2004. But Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996 in a landslide (49%-40%) compared with Bush’s 51%-48% margin over John Kerry. And Clinton’s re-election came after millions of dollars had spent investigating him and his associates. However, this virtual referendum of support Clinton received from 47 million voters did not stop the Republicans from proceeding to try to destroy his presidency over personal issues.

The Downing Street Memo offers a glimpse into the reality behind the Bush campaign to take the country to war under false pretenses. It says that the Bush Administration’s justification for war was “thin,” therefore ” the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” This may not be the smoking gun that proves Bush & Co lied about the war but it unquestionably emits the odor of a freshly fired bullet. And now no one can say that the evidence Bush lied simply doesn’t exist.

The fact is, the Republicans who control the Congress are just as corrupt as the ones who run the Administration. They have stood in the way of George Bush being held accountable for the blood on his hands – and will likely to continue to do so. But remember it was the Republicans in Congress who forced Republican president Richard Nixon to resign rather than face impeachment in 1974.

Every patriotic American ought to be outraged about the conspiracy by George W. Bush and his supporters to take this country to war under false pretenses. The rest of the world knows what the American rightwing and its supine media lackeys will not admit – Bush’s lies about Iraq have destroyed America’s credibility in the world.

History shows that military might alone is not sufficient to sustain an empire – or a superpower. Our strength comes from our integrity, and it is based on a moral view that dictates fairness and justice. Even if Iraq becomes a shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East – and that is a huge “if” – its path to freedom will be stained by these lies and this treason and by the lives of the brave and the innocent that were lost because a group in the White House decided that the political advantages of going to war outweighed the costs in blood and treasure to their own country.

This matter will not get a full airing unless the leaders of the House hear from you. Any member of the House can draft impeachment charges, so write your Representative and suggest that he or she do so. Otherwise there are two committees that principally deal with matters related to impeachment, the House Judiciary Committee and the House Government Reform Committtee. I’m writing letters to the chairmen and ranking members of both these committees to encourage them to look at this matter, not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans.

House Judiciary Committee:

House Judiciary Committee Email Form

Honorable F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (Republican)
Chairman, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary
2449 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5101
sensenbrenner@mail.house.gov

Honorable John Conyers, Jr. (Democrat)
Ranking Member, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov

House Committee on Government Reform:

Committee on Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
By Phone:
(202) 225-5074
By Fax:
(202) 225-3974

Honorable Tom Davis
Chairman, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform
2348 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-4611
Phone: (202) 225-1492
Fax: (202) 225-3071
(Chairmain Davis does not accept email.)

Honorable Henry Waxman
Ranking Member, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform
2204 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-3976 (phone)
(202) 225-4099 (fax)
Form to Send Message to Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee

There is also a very good site up now about the memo – The Downing Street Memo – that also provides a resources page on taking action.

I’m scratching my head over a report in the St. Petersburg Times about a crackdown on sexually explicit email at Florida government agencies. Fourteen employees in four departments were fired, while many more were suspended and reprimanded.

The fired employees seem to be overwhelmingly female, judging by the names printed. That’s odd enough but what I’m really wondering about is the contents of the email.

Some of the e-mails included nude photos of men and women and some included videos, profanity and suggestive remarks. One animation portrayed former President Bill Clinton at his desk with Monica Lewinsky and another included Barney, the purple dinosaur, and children dancing to profane and violent gangsta rap.

If you’re like me your Outrage Alert Level has been bouncing from orange to red over the past five years, so it is hard to become even more outraged than normal. However, the treatment in the U.S. press of the contents of a recently released secret British government memo that proves that Bush and Blair were conniving to go to war in Iraq long before Bush & Co started “marketing” the war to the American public has finally done it for me.

What is outrageous is not so much that the memo offers unrefuted proof that Bush lied to the American public time and time again during the run up to the war – or that the announcement of the war was timed to influence the U.S. Congressional elections in 2002. I knew all that.

What is outrageous is that the revelations in this memo – which was released on May 2, 2005 – have caused barely a blip on the radar screens of the So-Called Liberal Media.

Finally, today a story about the memo appeared discreetly at the bottom of page 3 in today’s Los Angeles Times, but the focus of the story is not on the President’s veracity – imagine if this were Bill Clinton – but rather on how lack of coverage of the story has sparked outrage among Bush’s critics. And while CNN International has a piece on it their website, there hasn’t been a peep about it otherwise on cable news.

Here’s how the Times set it up:

Reports in the British press this month based on documents indicating that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear to have blown over quickly in Britain.

But in the United States, where the reports at first received scant attention, there has been growing indignation among critics of the Bush White House, who say the documents help prove that the leaders made a secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.

Political Gateway has the full contents of the British memo, along with a letter from a couple dozen Democratic members of the House of Representatives demanding an explanation from George Bush.

Alternatively, I have pulled the choicer quotes from the memo and posted them after the jump.

JUMP: Read the rest of the article.

This is not a joke. Worshippers of George W. Bush can actually order this fridge magnet.

The product is called “Bush Fish” and is available at bushfish.org.

Fabulous Borowitz Report today about the grenade thrown at Bush in the former Soviet state of Georgia.

But after authorities were able to examine both the grenade and the president more closely, it was determined that they were both completely fake.

“The grenade posed no real threat at all,” said a top Georgian security official. “Much like Iraq in March of 2003.”

The White House issued no official comment on the phony grenade, but said that the president would make a false statement later in the day.

Sometimes he’s even better than The Onion.

Chan Chandler, right, the western N.C. preacher who expelled members of his church who objected to the incessant rightwing politicizing in his sermons – and who has since lied repeatedly about kicking them out, now says his detractors may have manipulated tape recordings of his sermons.

“The church has the tapes,” he said, adding that, if such a tape does reveal he made an overt political endorsement, then such a tape “would have been doctored” or the endorsement was “completely unintentional.”

If the tapes have not been tampered with and Chandler is on the record shilling for the GOP from the pulpit, the church’s non-profit status could be in jeopardy.

There was more paranoia and craziness at the business meeting last night where he surprised his supporters by resigning.

JUMP: Read the rest of the article.