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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (177778)	12/12/2005 2:41:47 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Respond to of 281500

BigOil, and the Saudis as well, are making huge profits. The oil states (like the Saudis) are also not spending their windfall profits this time. They're saving most all of it. They know very well that their oil is running dry, despite the lies they tell the Chimp. And they know very well that the dollar is propped up on rotten toothpicks. They're looking ahead, too bad we're saddled with a born again recovered alcoholic who is incapable of rational thinking. Several future generations of Americans are going to suffer the consequences of this sorry administration's recklessness.

To: geode00 who wrote (177778)	12/12/2005 2:08:47 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

The Man Who Sold the War npr.org

To: geode00 who wrote (177778)	12/12/2005 3:42:37 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

President Bush: Blowing the Job _______________________________________________________ by Susan Lenfestey* / Published on Monday, December 12, 2005 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Minnesota) As this administration bungles from one disaster to another, our president urges us not to look back at how we were bamboozled into this holy hell of a war, but to look ahead to the plan for victory -- as if there were one. And we are urged to be more moderate in our criticism, more civil in our discourse. But that presumes that we have a moderate and civil government, and anyone with one eye open knows we don't. Consider just some of the news of recent days: • In the Dec. 5 issue of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, the most tenacious war reporter of our generation, writes about the little-covered air war in Iraq. Unlike the Vietnam War, in which the military gave daily accounts of the air strikes, there is no such reporting in this war. In the 2004 siege of Fallujah, for instance, bombing raids were conducted day and night for three weeks. At that time the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance on Iraq since the start of the war. "In recent months," Hersh writes, "the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased." More alarming, Hersh reports on the administration's plan for drawing down American troops by backing up the barely functional Iraqi Army with American air strikes. According to Hersh, military commanders oppose this scenario because it leaves the Iraqi ground forces able to call in sophisticated laser-guided bombs to targets that the pilots can't verify. With old feuds to be settled and the likelihood of a civil war, American bombs, they say, will hit increasingly indiscriminate targets. • The story broke that the U.S. military had been paying "journalists" -- in fact military operatives and an American public relations firm -- to write articles favorable to the U.S. mission in Iraq and place them in Iraqi newspapers as if they were independent news stories. Let's see, secret American gulags in countries known for their squishy laws on, um -- interrogation, the disgrace of Abu Ghraib and our administration's refusal to disavow torture, and now this mockery of a free press. No wonder President Bush can't seem to wipe the smirk off his face when he says he's bringing democracy to Iraq. • A memo leaked to the Washington Post revealed the heavy-handed politicizing of the Justice Department under Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. Although Justice Department lawyers and staff unanimously concluded that the Tom DeLay-inspired 2003 Texas redistricting plan, which diluted black and Hispanic votes to assure a Republican majority in the Texas congressional delegation, violated the Voting Rights Act, they were overruled. High-ranking Justice Department officials ordered them not to discuss the case and quashed the release of the recently leaked 73-page memo. The same officials then approved the plan, and Texas picked up five Republican congressional seats in the 2004 election. • Members of the former 9/11 Commission issued a report card that gave the Bush administration and Congress a string of F's for their efforts to protect the nation from another terror attack. "Many obvious steps that the American people assume have been completed have not been," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chair and Republican former governor of New Jersey. "Our leadership is distracted." Politics and pork have trumped national security, leaving chemical plants unsecured and first-responders unable to communicate with each other but police dogs wearing Kevlar vests. The primary responsibility of government is to protect its people. In 2004 Bush managed to convey enough of a tough-guy image to convince a slim majority of Americans that he was the best man for the job. But he has failed at every turn and now seems incapable of grasping the enormity of the crisis he's brought down on our country. He should be declared a disaster, but that would bring in FEMA. While it's true that the Democratic leadership should remain civil and do a better job of spelling out a constructive agenda, the rest of us, especially the media, cannot afford to be moderate, or polite. _______________________ *Susan Lenfestey is a Minneapolis writer. commondreams.org