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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (75282)	8/8/2007 3:25:58 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Respond to of 89467

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL It's become a bit of a cliché to compare the rise of Cheney-Bush fascism to the ascendancy of the Third Reich, but the analogy does reveal a fundamental truth about power and politics. Fascists or Bolsheviks (just look at the short-lived Alexander Kerensky republic in Russia that fell to the Soviets in 1917) proceed on a premise that liberals are ambivalent about asserting power -- and take full advantage of that weakness. Bush may be a tin horn cowboy propped up by Rove and Cheney, but almost all of his power at this time is derived by the unprecedented unitary authority granted to him by a Democratic Congress. In short, an utterly failed president guilty of illegal activity, whose poll numbers are in the dust, is able to make enough Democrats fearful that they give him power when they should be aggressively taking it away from him. In the narrative of "toughness" that Rove has created for Bush -- and that Cheney has backed up with Franco-like substance -- Bush emerges as a "strong" figure, ironically, only because the timid Democratic leadership is so weak. We are in a moment of history, when the Democrats should be controlling the debate and have Bush, Cheney, Rove and Gonzales cornered. Instead of impeaching Gonzales, they -- due to a lack of party discipline -- just gave him the power to legally spy on Americans without any real accountability, even after he has confessed to at least two programs of illegal spying. The right wing depends upon a fundamental weakness in the character of "liberals" to achieve its authoritarian goals. At this point in time, after having failed to protect us from 9/11 -- despite being warned of terrorist acts by bin Laden about to happen in the U.S. -- and years of a failed war against terrorism that has consumed the financial resources of our nation and all too many lives, the Democrats should be making Bush quiver in his boots about the next terrorist attack and how his ineptitude has allowed it to potentially happen. Instead, the Democrats fear a guy who spent the first ten minutes after 9/11 reading a story about a pet goat with grade school students until his handlers could figure out what to do with him -- and then he went AWOL, just as he did in terms of avoiding service in Vietnam. The Weimar Republic fell because the advocates of democracy in Germany were too timid to fight back against the thuggish tactics of Hitler's storm troopers. They passed the "enabling act" after the Reichstag fire (read terrorist act) that gave him virtually omnipotent power to "protect the homeland." The right wing is right about one thing: the Democrats in Congress don't have the will or the wherewithal to put up a fight for the Constitution. Bullying works against a caucus without a backbone. Hitler's power was legally granted to him by those who thought that the "homeland" faced grave threats. The gravest threat, of course, that the German homeland faced, was Hitler himself. That is an analogy to Congress's abject surrender to Bush that is, indeed, worth repeating. A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

To: American Spirit who wrote (75282)	8/8/2007 10:07:20 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Hey General Petraeus, Wake Me When September Ends By Larry C Johnson Wait until September has been the watchword. As Green Day has sung, Wake Me Up When September Ends. Someone also should smack General David Petraeus upside the head and wake his ass. youtube.com It is truly astonishing that Petraeus is being given the hero treatment when his record is neither distinguished nor honorable. I was reminded of this last week during a conversation with an active duty Army officer who was at Fort Leavenworth Kansas last year when Petraeus was supposedly thinking great thoughts about counterinsurgency ops. According to this officer, Petraeus declined to dig into the details of the manual he supposedly authored. Truth is he ignored the substance and scholarship that went into drafting the counterinsurgency manual for the Army. Pat Lang, a retired U.S. Army Colonel who taught at West Point in the seventies, said Petraeus as a student was considered the kind of sycophant who would marry the Superintendent’s daughter just to get a leg up. Guess who Petraeus married? That’s right, the Superintendent’s daughter. So how did Dave do during his second tour in Iraq (June 2004 - September 2005). Have you seen Frontline’s program, The Gangs of Iraq? Check it out. It seems that it was under the watchful eye of General Petraeus that the Iraqi Interior Ministry started its campaign of death squads, torture, and murder. Martin Smith’s interview of Petraeus is especially telling: Let me jump ahead. Just after you leave, we have the bunker incident. We find the structure has been infiltrated, or has devolved into militia groups; that the police within them have formed militias. Now clearly, you must have seen this coming. Editor’s Note: Two months after Petraeus rotated out of Iraq, a U.S. general found a ministry building, called the Jadiriyah bunker, containing 169 prisoners and evidence of torture; almost all of the detainees were Sunnis. I did not. I did not see militia groups in the special police during the time that I was there. Now, first of all, we brought in militia members as a matter of Iraqi policy. … It was actual [policy] to, in fact, recruit and bring into the army and the police militia members who met the qualification for those respective services, so there’s no question but that there were militia members in these organizations. The objective was to spread them out, not to have, for example, an entire battalion or company to be from one militia. Our belief was, at that time, that that had not taken place. Certainly Gen. Adnan Thabit and Minister Naqib, during their watch, felt that that was not the case. There was a shift, of course, in the ministry in the late spring of 2004 from a Sunni Arab to a Shi’a Arab minister. [When] Minister [Bayan] Jabr took over, there were concerns raised. … We addressed this with the new minister right away, in fact, because Minister Naqib and others said: “Hey, watch out. This is happening; that could happen.” Petraeus did not authorize or approve the actions of the death squads. But the key point is that he failed to put in place a system to ensure that there would not be those kinds of abuses. That lack of attention to detail was not, in my opinion, an aberration. Besides whacking folks the Iraqi security forces also had trouble hanging on to their weapons. Back in October 2006 there was this account: MORE noquarterusa.net