Coming to a Bumper Near You

Spotted: Bumper sticker you're likely to see in increasing numbers:

 

 

NO ONE DIED WHEN CLINTON LIED

 

 

Posted 2:26:53 PM   Send comment

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Just Click It

These Weapons of Mass Destruction Cannot Be Displayed

 

Posted 2:14:15 PM   Send comment

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It's Still the Economy, Stupid

Like father, like son. Now let's hope that this 66% of Americans stay awake long enough to vote Democrat in 2004:

 

Bush Getting Blamed For Weak Job Market By 2 Of 3 Americans. Two out of three (66%) of those polled say Bush is at least partly to blame for the weak job market. One out of five (19%) say Bush is "very responsible." About one in five respondents say someone in their immediate family lost a job in the past year. Three out of four say finding a job is hard in their area. Americans split evenly on whether Bush's policies would help: 50% say yes, 48% no. That's within the poll's 4.1% margin of error for the 600 people polled. [Investor's Business Daily]

 

Posted 2:09:57 PM   Send comment

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NY Times Letter Writers Savvier Than Average Joe

Don't Ignore Congo War. Ironically, last week President Bush inscribed "never forget" in the Auschwitz guest book while continuing to ignore a war that has cost the lives of millions. How many more innocents will have to be raped and murdered at the hands of thugs before President Bush opens his eyes to the horror of Congo?

 

Arrests After 9/11: Are We Safer? No one can be made safer by arresting the wrong people, just as no one was made safer in 1942 when more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent were, for that reason alone, arrested and detained. None of the 762 people rounded up and detained after Sept. 11 were charged with terrorism. Who was made safer by their detention?

 

Posted 2:07:21 PM   Send comment

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When Will Condi Resign to 'Spend More Time with Family'?

How long has it been since you've watched Condoleezza Rice perform her amazing Bobbleheaded Parrot Act?  It's been ages for me, as I A) seldom arise early enough to watch the Sunday-morning round of White House on Parade shows, and B) simply can't stand her.  She frowns a lot (even when she's singing), as if she has Excedrin Headache No. 101 (which she probably does, since it's hard to maintain the Glare of Death throughout all that uncontrollable head-bouncing) -- and the more harried she becomes, the more she sounds like a bad impression of Laurie Petrie -- Ohhhh, Ro-o-o-ob! -- or Mary Richards, if you prefer: -- Ohhhh, Mister Gra-a-a-a-nt!

 

In full-blown defense mode over the plethora of evidence that BushCo distorted nonexistent evidence and strongarmed intelligence agencies into doing the same in order to drag the U.S. into an unjust "war," Condi has been making the rounds, big-time; one acquaintance tells me she was on all the Sunday propaganda orgies this morning, but I couldn't abide by Tim Russert long enough to find out if she hit the soundstage boards on the once-respectable "Meet the Press."  So I stuck with the least-despicable host, on the least-infuriating show, from the the least-whorish broadcast network: ABC's "This Week."

 

Now, I can't say I'm a fan of George Stephanopoulos (in my book, he's an opportunistic backstabber -- and he's not half as precious as he fancies himself), but at least Steph, in between compulsive bouts of of boyish, Pepsodent-perfect grinning, sometimes puts the right questions to his guests... even if he fails to follow through long enough or hard enough to force a genuine answer.  Let's put it this way: Running out of steam in the last five lengths was an anomaly for Funny Cide, but it's common practice for Steph.  And, true to form, Steph obliged with an all-too-gentle pseudo-grilling of the National Security Advisor, giving her a free spin-pass on the issue of "weapons of mass destruction."

 

And, naturally, The Bouncing Head didn't say anything you wouldn't expect her to say; she skirted the issue and pointed to evidence of Iraqi WMD in 1991 (hey, Condi, we don't give a damn about 1991 -- we're talking about 2003), insisted that WMD would be found, but that the search would take more time (like all that time Dubya refused to afford U.N. inspectors?), shifted blame (U.S. intelligence told her boss that there were WMD -- but if there weren't, then intelligence was wrong -- but still, they weren't wrong), dismissed the September intelligence report (from the Pentagon, mind you) that said there was no reliable evidence of WMD by accusing doubters of writing "revisionist history" (what's "revisionist" about revealing that the Pentagon disagreed with everything Bush & Rumsfeld were saying while pitching their bogus war to the American people?), and on and on and on, bobbing and twitching like an eight-year-old with some sort of nervous condition that gets worse every time she's caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

 

I might have been amused by Rice's near-hysteria were I not aware of the fact that half the brain-dead populace will believe her, no matter how bad an actress she is.

 

But thinking people don't buy it and never did, for even one nanosecond (which, incidentally, is about the length of the average American's attention span); we dismiss Condi's whining, and (with ever-diminishing success) try to temper our schadenfreude at the sight of Dubya's damage-controller extraordinaire coming completely apart at the seams.

 

That's not, of course, because we choose to dismiss what we do not want to hear (that's best left to those masters of denial, Republicans), but because we will not allow ourselves to be distracted from the meat of the matter: The people (Americans and, by default, the British and the Australians) were hoodwinked.

 

Which brings us to today's batch of WMD articles and op/eds I urge you to read, digest, and forward to soon-to-be-ex-friends and stubbornly conservative relatives you are about to disown because they simply refuse to get it:

 

Was the Intelligence Cooked? The latest vogue in Washington is the proposition that it really doesn't matter whether Saddam Hussein maintained an arsenal of unconventional weapons in recent years. We are as pleased as anyone to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but the United States cannot now simply erase from the record the Bush administration's dire warnings about the Iraqi weapons threat. The issue goes to the heart of American leadership. [New York Times]

 

Truth Is the First Casualty. Is Credibility the Second? Public opinion surveys suggest that the failure to find these weapons may have little effect on the support Americans have given to Mr. Bush and his conduct of the war... Still, if such weapons are not found, some historians, politicians and others worry about what might happen if Mr. Bush or a successor tried to rally American or international backing for another war — say, with Iran or North Korea — using disputed evidence to buttress the case. Said John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of military history at Yale, "it has an impact on our credibility — the next time there is a crisis, our credibility is going to be questioned, just as it was for Lyndon Baines Johnson at the Gulf of Tonkin." [New York Times]

 

Failure to find arms undercuts Bush doctrine. First-strike policy tested in Iraq will be harder to sell now, experts say; 'We played that card'; Furor shines spotlight on interpretation of weapons intelligence. [Baltimore Sun]

 

Intelligence Historian Says CIA 'Buckled' on Iraq. The CIA bowed to Bush administration pressure to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, a leading national security historian concluded in a detailed study of the spy agency's public pronouncements. "What is clear from intelligence reporting is that until about 1998 the CIA was fairly comfortable with its assessments on Iraq," John Prados wrote in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. [Reuters]

 

Weapons of Mass Distraction. No one has found the “weapons of mass destruction” that George Bush and Tony Blair used to scare the bejeezus out of their citizens and launch an unprecedented pre-emptive war on Iraq. What we are discovering, however, is the shameful depth to which both Congress and the mainstream press have been deceived by the Bush administration and its military propagandists. [George Ochenski, Missoula Independent]

 

Meanwhile, the WMD doody is really hitting the fan in Britain. Perhaps a vote of no confidence across the pond will set the stage for the American equivalent:

 

Spies threaten Blair with 'smoking gun' over Iraq. Intelligence officers are holding a "smoking gun" which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Tony Blair's staff in the run-up to the Iraq war. The intelligence services were so concerned about demands made by Downing Street for evidence to use against Iraq that extensive files have been built up detailing communications with Mr Blair's staff. "A smoking gun may well exist over WMDs, but it may not be to the Government's liking," said one senior source. [The Independent]

 

Partner in Cherie law firm seeks judicial review of 'illegal' invasion. Rabinder Singh QC, a leading international and human rights barrister at Matrix chambers, is calling for a judicial review on the ground that no weapons of mass destruction have been found. In a legal opinion seen by The Observer, Singh argues that the original view of the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, that the war was legal is no longer valid because it was based on the need to disarm Saddam. Singh, one of the pre-eminent human rights lawyers in the country and a close colleague of Cherie Blair, was asked to prepare a legal opinion for the CND and other peace groups opposed to the war. [The Observer]

 

Revealed: the secret cabal which spun for Blair. Britain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down. [Sunday Herald]

 

Blow to Blair over 'mobile labs': Saddam's trucks were for balloons, not germs. Tony Blair faces a fresh crisis over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, as evidence emerges that two vehicles that he has repeatedly claimed to be Iraqi mobile biological warfare production units are nothing of the sort. [The Observer]

 

Labour loyalists turn against Blair over war. Satwant Gill has always voted Labour. Like most of her fashionable London friends, she was jubilant when Tony Blair replaced John Major. But claims that intelligence was manipulated to make the case for war against Iraq have raised serious doubts over the sincerity of the Prime Minister. [The Independent]

 

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