Thursday, September 18, 2003

Bill Maher asked... BM: “I’m just wondering… of all the people who have the credentials to say “liberal” is not a bad word, I’m wondering if I could get you to say that?”   “Well I’ll say it right now”   BM: “Good for you”   “We live in a liberal democracy”   BM: “right”   “That’s what we created in this country” <applause>   BM: “That’s right, thank you”   “That’s in our Constitution. <continued applause> Let me follow on this, OK? I think we should be very clear on this. You know, our Constitution was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment.”   BM: “Right”   “It was the idea that people could talk, reason, have dialogue, discuss the issues. It wasn’t founded on the idea that someone would get struck by divine inspiration and know everything right from wrong. I mean, people who founded this country had religion, they had strong beliefs, but they believed in reason, in dialogue, in civil discourse. We can’t lose that in this country. We’ve got to get it back.” <applause>   “Who was that masked man” you ask?   Gen. Wes Clark, Democrat for President   Read his 100 year vision here and see what you think…   Don’t wait for the pundits (and the GOP smear campaign) to think for you.   10:11:19 PM

Cheney: Liar Even the press is starting to catch on… are they wising up or have they just got tired of eating shit and having to act like it’s ice cream?   Copy this one and send it to your “conservative” friends…   Editorial: Truth / Too little of it on Iraq   Published September 17, 2003 ED17   Dick Cheney is not a public relations man for the Bush administration, not a spinmeister nor a political operative. He's the vice president of the United States, and when he speaks in public, which he rarely does, he owes the American public the truth.   In his appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday, Cheney fell woefully short of truth. On the subject of Iraq, the same can be said for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But Cheney is the latest example of administration mendacity, and therefore a good place to start in holding the administration accountable. The list:   • Cheney repeated the mantra that the nation ignored the terrorism threat before Sept. 11. In fact, President Bill Clinton and his counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, took the threat very seriously, especially after the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. By December, Clarke had prepared plans for a military operation to attack Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, go after terrorist financing and work with police officials around the world to take down the terrorist network.   Because Clinton was to leave office in a few weeks, he decided against handing Bush a war in progress as he worked to put a new administration together.   Instead, Clarke briefed national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney and others. He emphasized that time was short and action was urgent. The Bush administration sat on the report for months and months. The first high-level discussion took place on Sept. 4, 2001, just a week before the attacks. The actions taken by the Bush administration following Sept. 11 closely parallel actions recommended in Clarke's nine-month-old plan. Who ignored the threat?   • Cheney said that "we don't know" if there is a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. He's right only in the sense that "we don't know" if the sun will come up tomorrow. But all the evidence available says it will -- and that Iraq was not involved in Sept. 11.   Cheney offered stuff, but it wasn't evidence. He said that one of those involved in planning the attack, an Iraqi-American, had returned to Iraq after the attack and had been protected, perhaps even supported, by Saddam Hussein. That proves exactly nothing about Iraq's links to the attack itself.   Cheney also cited a supposed meeting in Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer -- but the FBI concluded that Atta was in Florida at the time of the supposed meeting. The CIA always doubted the story. And according to a New York Times article on Oct. 21, 2002, Czech President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports" of such a meeting.   Moreover, the United States now has in custody the agent accused of meeting with Atta. Even though he must know how much he would benefit by simply saying, "Yes, I met Atta in Prague," there has been no announcement by the administration trumpeting that vindication of its belief in an Iraq-Sept. 11 link.   • In trying to make that link, Cheney baldly asserted that Iraq is the "geographic base" for those who struck the United States on Sept. 11. No, that would be Afghanistan.   • On weapons of mass destruction, Cheney made a number of statements that were misleading or simply false. For example, he said the United States knew Iraq had "500 tons of uranium." Well, yes, and so did the U.N. inspectors. What Cheney didn't say is that the uranium was low-grade waste from nuclear energy plants, and could not have been useful for weapons without sophisticated processing that Iraq was incapable of performing.   Cheney also said, "To suggest that there is no evidence [in Iraq] that [Saddam] had aspirations to acquire nuclear weapons, I don't think is valid." It's probably not valid; Saddam wanted nuclear weapons. But Cheney is changing the subject: The argument before the war wasn't Saddam's aspirations; it was Saddam's active program to build nuclear weapons.   Cheney also said "a gentleman" has come forward "with full designs for a process centrifuge system to enrich uranium and the key parts that you need to build such a system." That would be scientist Mahdi Obeidi, who had buried the centrifuge pieces in his back yard -- in 1991. Obeidi insisted that Iraq hadn't restarted its nuclear weapons program after the end of the first Gulf War. The centrifuge pieces might have signaled a potential future threat, but they actually disprove Cheney's prewar assertion that Iraq had, indeed, "reconstituted" its nuclear-weapons program.   Cheney also said he put great store in the ongoing search for Saddam's WMD program: "We've got a very good man now in charge of the operation, David Kay, who used to run UNSCOM [the U.N. inspection effort]." In fact, Kay did not run UNSCOM; for one year he was the chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency's team in Iraq.   But it's funny Cheney should mention Kay. Last summer, the leader of the 1,400-person team searching for WMD expressed great confidence that they would find what they were looking for. He said he wouldn't publicize discoveries piecemeal but would submit a comprehensive report in mid-September. Apparently he has submitted the report to George Tenet at the CIA. The question now is whether it will ever be made public; several reports in the press have suggested that Kay has come up way short. In five months, 1,400 experts haven't found the WMD locations that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the war were well-known to the United States.   Cheney also said that an investigation by the British had "revalidated the British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa -- what was in the State of the Union speech." The British investigation did nothing of the kind. A parliamentary investigative committee said the documents on the uranium are being reinvestigated, but that, based on the existence of those documents, the Blair government made a "reasonable" assertion and had not tried to deliberately mislead the British people.   To explore every phony statement in the vice president's "Meet the Press" interview would take far more space than is available. This merely points out some of the most egregious examples. Opponents of the war are fond of saying that "Bush lied and our soldiers died." In fact, they'd have reason to assert that "Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz lied and our soldiers died." It's past time the principals behind this mismanaged war were called to account for their deliberate misstatements.   For information supporting the points made in this editorial, go to http://www.startribune.com/2cents   9:22:38 PM

The words and wisdom of a Vietnam Vet: …Unfortunately, the people who drove the engine to get into the war in Iraq never served in Vietnam. Not the president. Not the vice president. Not the secretary of defense. Not the deputy secretary of defense. Too bad. They could have learned some lessons:   • Don't underestimate the enemy. The enemy always has one option you cannot control. He always has the option to die. This is especially true if you are dealing with true believers and guerillas fighting for their version of reality, whether political or religious. They are what Tom Friedman of The New York Times calls the "non-deterrables." If those non-deterrables are already in their country, they will be able to wait you out until you go home.   • If the enemy adopts a "hit-and-run" strategy designed to inflict maximum casualties on you, you may win every battle, but (as Walter Lippman once said about Vietnam) you can't win the war.   • If you adopt a strategy of not just pre-emptive strike but also pre-emptive war, you own the aftermath. You better plan for it. You better have an exit strategy because you cannot stay there indefinitely unless you make it the 51st state.   • If you do stay an extended period of time, you then become an occupier, not a liberator. That feeds the enemy against you.   • If you adopt the strategy of pre-emptive war, your intelligence must be not just "darn good," as the president has said; it must be "bulletproof," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed the administration's was against Saddam Hussein. Anything short of that saps credibility.   • If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the troops on the ground, not the policy-makers in Washington.   • In a democracy, instead of truth being the first casualty in war, it should be the first cause of war. It is the only way the Congress and the American people can cope with getting through it. As credibility is strained, support for the war and support for the troops go downhill. Continued loss of credibility drains troop morale, the media become more suspicious, the public becomes more incredulous and Congress is reduced to hearings and investigations.   Instead of learning the lessons of Vietnam, where all of the above happened, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense have gotten this country into a disaster in the desert.…   Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.   Read the whole article here.   Thanks to Atrios 8:58:27 PM

Dogpile on Tom Friedman Courtesy of Atrios… right here.   Read these and see if you don’t agree that Friedman is the most overrated pundit around. After reading a few of his columns you have to wonder if he makes this stuff up while sitting on the can. He is a caricature of the “worldly” tourist who loves to drop names and winge on about where he’s been but still doesn’t understand why other people see, do or experience things differently than he does, locked safely away in his own provincial little mind set.   And Friedman can’t even be bothered to remain consistent within the restricted space of his small columns. First, the French are so crafty that they actually have decided to manipulate the Iraq situation to create a quagmire; yet a few sentences later, they have given no thought to the implications of Iraq policy …?   Yet what remains unanswered by Friedman, indeed even unquestioned, is why France should sacrifice lives and tax dollars to bail us out of a situation of our own making?   Indeed, they even tried to warn us, but it only served to get them the “kill the messenger” treatment that Bush and his thin-skinned group-think cronies are so famous for. So other than helping out Bush, what’s in it for them, or for the Iraqis for that matter (don’t even get me started on the difference between helping the Iraqi people and helping Bush)? 8:43:19 PM

If only it were all just a big joke... “Well, we're all excited because President Bush has started his 35-day vacation. He's down there in Crawford, Texas and on the first day of his vacation he went fishing. He didn't find any fish, he didn't find any lakes, but he believes they're there and that his intelligence is accurate.” --David Letterman 8:15:03 PM

Telling it like it is… It’s about time someone started calling things by their proper names… now more folks need to do the right thing and stand up for their country against the lies, lies, lies:   BOSTON - The case for going to war against Iraq was a fraud "made up in Texas" to give Republicans a political boost, Sen. Edward Kennedy said Thursday.   In an interview with The Associated Press, Kennedy also said the Bush administration has failed to account for nearly half of the $4 billion the war is costing each month. He said he believes much of the unaccounted-for money is being used to bribe foreign leaders to send in troops.   He called the Bush administration's current Iraq policy "adrift."   The White House declined to comment Thursday.   The Massachusetts Democrat also expressed doubts about how serious a threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States in its battle against terrorism. He said administration officials relied on "distortion, misrepresentation, a selection of intelligence" to justify their case for war.   "There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud," Kennedy said.   Kennedy said a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office showed that only about $2.5 billion of the $4 billion being spent monthly on the war can be accounted for by the Bush administration.   "My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," he said.   Of the $87 billion in new money requested by President Bush for the war, Kennedy said the administration should be required to report back to the Congress to account for the spending.   "We want to support our troops because they didn't make the decision to go there ... but I don't think it should be open-ended. We ought to have a benchmark where the administration has to come back and give us a report," he added.   Kennedy said the focus on Iraq has drawn the nation's attention away from more direct threats, including al-Qaida, instability in Afghanistan or the nuclear ambitions of North Korea.   "I think all of those pose a threat to the security of the people of Massachusetts much more than the threat from Iraq," Kennedy said. "Terror has been put on the sidelines for the last 12 months."   Kennedy was one of 23 senators who voted last October against authorizing Bush to use military force to disarm Iraq.   Earlier this year, he supported a Democratic amendment that would have delayed most of the president's proposed tax cuts, and most spending increases, until the administration provided cost estimates for the Iraq war. The amendment failed. 8:13:57 PM