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Posted by Harkavy at 4:21 PM, May 2, 2008
The word is "recession," whether or not Bush will say the word, and we're in it.
George W. Bush's press conference the other day on the economy was really a hoot — his presence never promised us a Rose Garden performance that wouldn't be.
But for a change, this performance on April 29 was more notable for what Bush didn't — and wouldn't — say.
Here's one of the exchanges with a nameless reporter:
Reporter: Americans believe we are in a recession. What will it take for you to say those words, that we are in a recession?
Bush: Yes, thank you. I've answered the question on the words and terminologies. I will tell you that these are very difficult economic times — very difficult. And we'll let the economists define it for what it is. I would hope that those who worry about recession, slowdown, whatever you want to call it, make the tax cuts permanent as a way of helping to address this issue — because if you're somebody out there trying to plan your future and you're worried about the future and you think your taxes are going to go up, it's going to cause different behavioral patterns.
Bush managed to call the recession a "slow economy" and "difficult times," a "sour time," "tough for the American people."
The U.S. press is having the same problem coming to terms with the term. For years now, a civil war has been raging in Iraq and most of the U.S. press refused to call it that. Now we're in a recession, and the papers won't call it that. What are they waiting for? Walter Cronkite's pronouncement?
Overseas, there's no such namby-pambiness. AS an April 30 story in the Scotsman said:
Britain could follow America into a full-blown recession unless there is an urgent and aggressive cut in interest rates, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee warned.
Peter MacMahon's piece went on to quote the guy, economist David Blanchflower, as saying:
"There has been no decoupling of the two economies: contagion is in the air. The US sneezed and the UK is rapidly catching a cold."
You'd better hope it just a cold.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:58 AM, April 4, 2008
Not content with trying to stop abortions, Bush regime flunkies have banished the word "abortion."
Type the word in the search engine for Popline, the huge database that the federal government bills as "your connection to the world's reproductive health issues."
You get zero hits.
It's not a glitch. It's intentional.
Read about it on Maud Newton's excellent blog, and see the story that Wired posted a few hours ago.
Popline is funded by USAID, the highly politicized government agency that spreads money throughout the world, particularly in "developing" countries.
The Popline search engine considers "abortion" a "stop word," like the articles "a," "an," and so on. Maud Newton notes that stop words are "terms automatically omitted from searches under the assumption that they don’t add value or meaning."
After users of Popline noticed the sudden, unannounced change late last week, they queried Johns Hopkins people about it (the university runs the database). They professed ignorance until, as Newton notes, Debbie Dickson of Popline replied to a medical librarian with this:
Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. This is the broader term to our ‘Abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding ‘unwanted w2 pregnancy’ in place of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy.
I hope this helps.
It doesn't.
Dickson's response was on April Fool's Day, but this is no joke.
However, you can still search the words "1984" and "Orwell" on Popline and get hits. I guess those words still "add value or meaning."
Posted by Harkavy at 11:58 AM, March 31, 2008
In D.C., a new baseball stadium opens amid the same old staggering poverty and inequality
Oh, they're so happy over on ESPN because of the Washington Nationals' new baseball stadium, which opened last night when George W. Bush threw up the first pitch.
The doofus POTUS was wild with his throw to Nats' manager Manny Acta. Strange, isn't it, that Bush's battery mate was Acta instead of the Nats' catcher, Paul Lo Duca. But the ex-Met is ensnared in the steroids scandal, so his PR quotient is below the Mendoza Line.
Funnier still was during the game itself, when Bush showed up in the broadcast booth to say of the steroids scandal, "I hope the players fix it." He didn't say "the commissioner" or "the owners." Only "the players."
The broadcast crew noted that Bush is a former baseball owner. But that's only technically true. Before he was even Texas governor, Bush was trotted out before the public as the "owner" of the Texas Rangers. But Tom Hicks was the real owner; Bush put up a minuscule amount of money but was only the front man for Hicks and the rest of the real ownership group so they could get a stadium and other parts of a sweet deal with Arlington, the home of the team. When the Rangers were later sold, Bush cashed in for a lot of dough.
Years later, Bush became Dick Cheney's front man, where he's been even more dangerous.
Too bad D.C. isn't making out as well as Bush. The new stadium was a point of contention when D.C. didn't even have a team and its luxury boxes were only a dream in the minds of politicians and lobbyists.
Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post kicked ass on that story in 2004, pointing out D.C. residents' terrible plight when the decision was finally made by Major League Baseball to put a team back in the U.S. capital.
As I noted at the time in "Playing Ball in D.C." [October 25, 2004]:
Baseball's execs have spread some money around, and they've probably quelled forever all threats from Congress to repeal baseball's fortunate exemption from antitrust laws now that they've placed a team in D.C., the former Montreal Expos. Just another toy for the congressmen to play with, starting next year. Think of their being entertained by corporations and their lobbyists in the new D.C. stadium's skyboxes.
Way down below them will be the average D.C. resident. The U.S. leads the world in wealth inequality, and the gap is continually widening. And income inequality in the District of Columbia is wider than in any other major U.S. city.
Yes, way down below them, if they could afford tickets in the cheap seats, will be the average D.C. resident. Bleacher bums? No. Just bums.
Since 2000, the gap between rich and poor has widened throughout the country. But D.C. was in terrible shape even during the Clinton years. From an analysis of census data by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute before Bush even took office:
The study found that the average income of the top fifth of DC’s households equaled $186,830 in 1999. This was 31 times higher than the average income of the bottom fifth of households—$6,126.
While Atlanta and Miami have income gaps similar to DC’s, income inequality is much less pronounced in most other cities. In the typical city in the analysis—which includes central cities of the nation’s 40 largest metro areas—the income of the top fifth of households is 18 times the income of the bottom fifth.
Well, maybe things are better since Bush became president. Yeah, right. Here's what the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute had to say last October:
Despite dramatic improvements in the District’s economy over the past decade, economic conditions have actually worsened for many residents, according to a new report by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
The study, entitled DC’s Two Economies: Many Residents Are Falling Behind Despite the City’s Revitalization — examines trends in employment, wages, income, and poverty. One of its most striking findings is that while the number of jobs in the District has grown every year since 1998, the percentage of African Americans who are employed has actually fallen, as has the employment rate among residents with no more than a high school diploma. For both groups, employment rates are near 30-year lows.
"It is surprising — and deeply troubling — that large numbers of DC residents are falling behind when so many of the city’s economic indicators are at their best levels in decades,” said Ed Lazere, executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. “The District’s well-known economic disparities are getting even worse."
And how about that earning gap between rich and poor?
The earnings gap between DC’s highest (top 20 percent) and lowest (bottom 20 percent) earners is at its widest level since 1979. Inflation-adjusted earnings have increased just 6 percent for low-wage workers in that period, while jumping 40 percent for workers at the top.
Trying to stem the out-of-control crime in poverty-stricken D.C., district officials enacted a strict gun law that the Supreme Court just got finished hearing arguments on. (See this L.A. Times editorial that lays out the arguments.)
Guns aren't the only problem of course. There's also butter. Only the pols and lobbyists can afford the high-priced spreads.
Meanwhile, even the baseball owners called the plan to finance the bonds for D.C.'s new stadium the sweetest sweetheart deal they'd ever seen.
The baseball owners and Congress were the ones playing ball. As of last night, the luxury boxes are now occupied by lobbyists and their lackey pols, while D.C.'s poor continue their everyday drudgery.
Wonder if there's a Larry Craig Memorial Bathroom in the joint?
Posted by Harkavy at 11:44 AM, March 19, 2008
White House releases beta version of Iraq 5.0.
After five long years, the United States has finally secured victory in the War on Terror, George W. Bush declared today.
I'm as surprised as you are. This is what the president said this morning at the Pentagon:
"The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around — it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror."
The announcement comes 5.0 years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and 4.9 years after Bush declared, "Mission accomplished!"
In this morning's speech, Bush also said:
"In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama Bin Laden. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated."
The BBC's report on the speech notes:
Meanwhile in Iraq, a female suicide bomber killed six people at a bus station in Balad Ruz in Diyala province, according to Iraqi police.
And near the northern city of Kirkuk, US troops shot dead three Iraqi policemen by mistake, an incident officials described as "a tragic accident, which was sincerely regretted".
Don't let that spoil your celebration.
Posted by Harkavy at 1:10 PM, February 8, 2008
Same goes for the Mafia.
Big deal that the government has just rounded up a huge number of 20th century goombahs named "Fat Tony" or the like. We're still waiting for the roundup of the government's own 21st century gangsters, George "Dubya" Bush and Richard "Dick" Cheney.
Even before we're getting them out of our system, Bush and Cheney are getting it out of their system. Both of them let it all hang out this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Cheney yesterday and Bush today. Defiant to the last, Bush even used the word "philosophy" and Cheney invoked a "Damn right."
We already knew what they really thought. While we're waiting for these two to finally leave, let's take a look at the alleged mob figures indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Manhattan. Actually, all we have to do is look at the monikers of these goombahs. Here they are, from the first four pages of the indictment:
"Elmo"
"Jerry"
"Tommy Sneakers"
"Charlie Canig"
"Joe Rackets"
"Lanza"
"Italian Dom"
"Dominic"
"Dom from 18th Avenue"
"The Greaseball"
"Joe Marco Polo"
"JoJo"
"Miserable"
"Nicky"
"Little Nicky"
"The Doctor"
"The Little Guy"
"Seymour"
"Grandpa"
"Grandfather"
"Jackie the Nose"
"Jackie"
"Vinny Hot"
"Lenny"
"L"
"The Conductor"
"Nike"
"Uncle"
"Fatso"
"Vinny"
"Skinny"
"Mike"
"Mikey"
"Marbles"
"Bobby the Jew"
"One Eye"
"Dead Eye"
"Russ"
"Joe Gag"
"Han"
"Buckwheat"
"Ernie"
"Eyes"
"Baldy"
"Stevie I"
"John"
"Simon"
"Herman"
"Alan"
"Cheeks"
"Anthony Firehawk"
"Anthony Nighthawk"
"Nighthawk"
"Firehawk"
"Tony O"
"Big Guy"
"Tall Guy"
"Treetop"
"Top"
"Jamesie"
"Bob"
"Vinny Basile"
"Johnny Red Rose"
"Gino"
"Fat Richie"
"Big Richie"
"Joe"
"Richie"
"Rich"
"John Reeg"
"Reeg"
"Ang"
"Little Ang"
"Junior"
"Gus"
"Gus Boy"
"Billy"
"Big Billy"
"Eddie"
"Mike the Electrician"
"Frankie"
"Big Tara"
Posted by Harkavy at 8:53 AM, November 29, 2007
The missing link in the reporting of Bush's Middle East dog-and-pony show
It's understandable if you suddenly feel a bit of warmth about George W. Bush. After all, the New York Times headlines its report this morning on the regime's widely publicized peace talks with Israeli and Palestinians with this:
Bush Promotes Middle East Peace Dialogue
Please. Nowhere in the story, by Steven Lee Myers and Steven Erlanger, is there any mention of the huge credibility problems Bush has in promoting peace in the Middle East. Our actions speak louder than words, of course, but just blindly stab at any past statements about Bush on Israel, and you'll find context that's missing from the Times story. More importantly, Bush has no credibility with Arabs when it comes to promoting peace.
For example, here was Bush speaking at the Naval War College on June 28:
Our success in Iraq must not be measured by the enemy's ability to get a car bombing into the evening news. No matter how good the security, terrorists will always be able to explode a bomb on a crowded street. In places like Israel, terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in similar attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy that is not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq: the rise of a government that can protect its people, deliver basic services for all its citizens, and function as a democracy even amid violence.
Just put yourself in the shoes of a Palestinian living in and around Israel. The last thing Arabs want to hear from Bush is the incessant refrain that Israel is a functioning democracy while Israel is continually building new settlements in the West Bank and is exchanging terrorist attacks with Arabs — not to mention Israel's seemingly permanent economic blockade against the Palestinian Authority.
Or, if you're not a Palestinian, think about how Bush made the aforementioned foolish statement at a Navy school while he and Pentagon have continued to foolishly disregard the analyses of another Navy educational institution, the Naval Postgraduate School, whose Strategic Insights essays predicted before our invasion of Iraq just what is happening now.
Go back to my May 2005 item "Shattered Illusions: Iraq's developing civil war couldn't have surprised the Pentagon" for more on that.
It doesn't help matters that the U.S. press's most unjustifiably prestigious paper continues to leave out important context from its reporting on Bush's latest "peace initiative."
Posted by Harkavy at 9:00 AM, November 20, 2007
The grimmest scenario from the WEF.
The U.S. launches a military strike on Iran's nuclear plants in 2009. Iran's counterattack on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf countries ruins the oil bidness and causes a global recession. Oh, and terrorist attacks step up around the rest of the globe.
I'm not the only one imagining pre-emptive attacks on Iran by the U.S. or Israel or both.
That's the "Sandstorm" scenario for the so-called Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE). Such grim scenarios are emerging from behind the scenes at World Economic Forum headquarters.
Bomb a nuclear plant or two and you'll see what mass destruction looks like. We'll all be tuned in to the Weather Channel to track the radioactive cloud drifting around the planet.
Don't pay attention to what's said at the forum's gatherings of bigwigs (the next main one is in late January in Switzerland), but read the reports (HTML, PDF), which of course are grossly underplayed in the Western press.
These aren't the reports manufactured by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who may yet go down in history — if there are any historians left on Earth to write about them — as Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy.
Colin Powell was being a good soldier for the Bush-Cheney regime in February 2003 when he spread the administration's lies at the U.N. about Iraq's WMD.
Now that he's out of the administration, he's just being a good soldier by telling what he really thinks is the truth about the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.
At least we hope so, because Powell is dismissing the idea that Iran is a nuclear threat. The AP, reporting Sunday from a Kuwait confab:
"I think Iran is a long way from having anything that could be anything like a nuclear weapon," Powell told a gathering of bankers, businessmen and diplomats.
Tehran rejects claims by the United States and some European Union countries that its nuclear program is aimed at secretly producing weapons and insists it is for peaceful purposes only.
"I think the Iranians are being very foolish," Powell said. "When I look at Iran, I see the needs they have. They have not globalized, they have not come up in the international economic community. They are faced with 40 percent unemployment."
Lucky for us that all of our domestic problems are in good enough shape for us to launch another war.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:45 AM, October 17, 2007
Today's scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.
Bush's new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.
That's a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.
In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he's won several pizza prizes since Bush's operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.
This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize "for his consistent resistance to the use of violence."
Meanwhile, China is pissed, as the L.A. Times notes this morning:
"We solemnly demand that the U.S. cancel the extremely wrong arrangements," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told reporters before the meeting. "It seriously violates the norm of international relations and seriously wounded the feelings of the Chinese people and interfered with China's internal affairs."
Too bad that Hunter S. Thompson, the Dalai Lama's deceased twin, isn't around to write about this absurd face-to-face between two spiritual leaders whose approaches to violence are so different.
Will the peace-loving Buddhist leader have any impact on Bush? It's too late for that. The best we can hope for is that, instead of gonzo pol Karl Rove whispering into Bush's ear, "Stick to principle, stick to principle," this Gyatso pol will whisper, "Stay in the moment, stay in the moment."
It would be nice if he also told Bush, "Don't stay in Iraq, don't stay in Iraq."
Posted by Harkavy at 8:37 AM, September 28, 2007
Cuba's not a dead issue in the nutty debate over health care for poor kids.
Americans owe thanks this morning to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi for clarifying how different our health-care system is from Cuba's.
During heated debate in the Senate yesterday, Enzi zoomed in on a crucial point of George W. Bush's threatened veto of funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal-state partnership that provides coverage to about 6 million poor children.
The Senate passed a pretty good compromise to help out those kids. Bush, while asking for an increase of more than $40 billion for the Iraq war, has said he won't spend more than $30 billion on this children's health program. The Senate disagreed — even some of its rock-hard conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch and Pat Roberts — and passed a bill. Roberts, a hardline Kansas conservative, pointed out that Bush is misinformed. You think?
But Mike Enzi is tagging right along with Bush, telling his fellow senators:
"We shouldn't create a new federal entitlement and we shouldn't be laying the foundation for Castro-style healthcare, which Americans don't want."
Our kids should be so lucky — rather, our babies should live so long. Enzi and the other senators didn't bring this up, so I will:
Cuba's infant-mortality rate is lower than the U.S.'s, according to widely accepted stats from the UN's World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision.
The number of infant deaths per thousand live births in the period 2000 to 2005 was 6.1 in Cuba. It was 6.8 in the U.S. In deaths under the age of 5, Cuba's rate is 7.7, and the U.S.'s rate is 8.4
When it comes to overall death rates, Americans have it even worse.
The CIA's World Factbook reveals that the estimated overall death rate in the U.S. in 2007, per thousand people, is 8.26. Cuba's death rate is 7.14.
African kids have it worse than anyone else on the planet. But the U.S. is an anomaly among other developed nations. It has a higher overall death rate than the rates of most of those countries, like France, Sweden, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. overall death rate is higher than the rates in the following countries (this is a partial list):
Cambodia, Bangladesh, Kiribati, Yemen, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Maldives, Paulu, Nauru, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Iran.
Yes, according to the CIA, the U.S. death rate is higher than the death rates in Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.
If you really want to understand this current problem of health care for poor kids in the U.S., go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where you can read a readable analysis of the bill and a breakdown of Bush's wrong analysis of the issue.
As for Enzi, a 63-year-old former Eagle Scout, shoe salesman and accountant, let's just say that his personal financial disclosure for 2006 shows that he ranks only 82nd in the Senate in net worth: His is $190,039 to $853,000. But 94 percent of his investments are in oil and gas, plus he does have at least $50,000 in his Senate credit union account — and the time to spend that cash: His tardiness rate is twice as high as the average senator's.
More to the point, he got no campaign money from Cuba, but the health-care industry poured $259,591 into Enzi's campaign coffers last year, second only to the support he got from big finance. And the health-care industry hates federal health care programs unless the money goes directly to the industry.
Enzi's PAC, Making Business Excel — get it? Michael B. Enzi, Making Business Excel? MBE, MBE? — raked in an additional $646,567 last year.
And no surprise here: Enzi gets more campaign money from D.C.-area operatives than he gets from the home folks in Wyoming.
Who cares about death rates when our political system is running so smoothly?
Posted by Harkavy at 2:49 PM, September 19, 2007
Still secret: Corruption in the White House.
Over at Secrecy News, the indefatigable Steven Aftergood has posted a heretofore secret study of Iraqi government corruption.
Even though the Nation's David Corn already wrote about the study, I can't say it would be much of a surprise anyway: The investigating agency, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, knows a lot about corruption.
Anyway, the report notes:
The Prime Minister’s Office has demonstrated an open hostility to the concept of an independent agency to investigate or prosecute corruption cases.
Sounds like the White House. U.S. congressmen and various public-interest groups got nowhere when they tried to probe Dick Cheney's "energy task force" early in the Bush regime.
And the White House has continually tried to call a halt to the excellent investigative work by Stuart Bowen on corruption in Iraq.
It took a British NGO, Christian Aid, to break the news a few years ago that Jerry Bremer, the Barney Fife of Baghdad, couldn't explain why $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue was missing.
Besides that oil-for-slush scandal, we're still waiting to see those millions of White House e-mails the regime is withholding that relate to various scandals. Then there are the missing-weapons scandal and the various KBR scandals — you get the picture.
In any case, this new report on corruption inside Iraq's puppet government is still worth reading. It turns out that we really have planted a seed of our own form of democracy over there.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:49 AM, September 12, 2007
Osama wants Americans to convert, but many of us are already religious fanatics.
Who the cap fit, let him wear it.
Sounding like a presidential candidate, Osama bin Laden sympathized with our "insane taxes and real estate mortgages," according to Al Qaeda's tape, brilliantly dissected by Anne Applebaum in Slate.
Bin Laden's solution for beleaguered Americans? Convert to his brand of hardline Islam.
That wouldn't be much of a leap for many Americans, because 12.6 percent of us are "traditional evangelical" Christians, according to a 2004 survey by the political science prof John Green at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
And what do traditional evangelical Christians believe in? Evangelizing, by definition, which is what bin Laden was doing on that tape.
And here's a reminder: Most evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture, as beliefnet.org's Deborah Caldwell noted in an excellent 2002 article. For you who are unaware, this is how religioustolerance.org explains the Rapture:
Most Evangelical Christians believe that the Rapture … will happen precisely as described [in the Bible], sometime in the near future. All previously saved Christians, totaling perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the world's population, will suddenly have their bodies converted into a different form that they will wear for all eternity in Heaven. They will rise vertically into the air. Many believe that they will pass right through ceilings, roofs of cars, etc. to meet Jesus Christ in the sky. Although the vast majority of humans will be left behind, there will be much devastation as planes, trains and automobiles as their pilots, engineers and drivers suddenly disappear and the vehicles crash.
And Americans make fun of Islamic fanatics' beliefs about meeting virgins in Heaven?
Bin Laden's a violent creep, but his brand of religious fanaticism would be a pretty good fit for evangelical George W. Bush.
Reporters for Frontline's The Jesus Factor (2004) talked with top Southern Baptist official Richard Land — whose denomination is the biggest in the U.S. — about Bush's inauguration for his second term as Texas governor:
"The day he was inaugurated there were several of us who met with him at the governor's mansion," says Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "And among the things he said to us was, 'I believe that God wants me to be president.' "
OK, I'm convinced: God is vengeful.
(Land, by the way, wears presidential-seal cuff links; see my September 2004 item "The Christocrats.")
I guess that those of you who voted for Bush — Twice! For Christ's sake! — are off the hook, in both senses of the phrase.
Judging by the results of the 2004 religious survey, the turban of conservative Muslim bin Laden would wear well on quite a few other Americans, as much as they rightly detest him.
Hardliners of one religion have more in common with hardliners of another religion than with the rest of us. They all believe in conservative, patriarchal "family values" and they give us the same fiery message: Convert, or burn in hell — and we'll light the match.
You still think there's no comparison between bin Laden's homicidal brand of Islam and the beliefs of America's Rock-of-Ages-rigid traditional Christian evangelicals? Here's the grim FAQ about the future of us unbelievers, according to the killer logic of raptureready.com:
What do most countries do with those who commit treason? The governments either incarcerate the traitors for the rest of their lives or they execute them.
Rejection of God is surely treason because mankind originates from Him: the DNA to form our bodies, the gravity to keep it intact, air to keep us breathing, food and water resources to sustain our bodies, materials for shelter, materials for clothing, and all the other good things about life that we take for granted everyday.
What, then, does a human being deserve when he dismisses God, disregards His law (that is written on our hearts), then even goes so far as to say He does not exist and that evolution is our creator?
Let this be a warning.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:24 AM, September 5, 2007
Times blows the Bremer-Bush dustup story. Rumsfeld, Cheney roles ignored in 2003 blunder.
The New York Times pulled out of Iraq coverage even before the war started when it sent in Judy Miller to beat the WMD war drums.
But five years later, it still hasn't re-entered the battle, judging by its inept handling of the Bush-Bremer dustup over who was responsible for disbanding the Iraq Army back in 2003.
Ignoring explosive material published a year ago in the British press and played up practically everywhere in the world but in the major American papers, the Times downplayed SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's role in the tragic blunder of dismantling the army and police, and the paper didn't even mention Dick Cheney.
Over the weekend, Robert Draper, peddling his book Dead Certain, said Bush had been taken aback by the tragic decision announced by Bush regime czar Jerry Bremer to disband Iraq's army in the spring of 2003.
That was in a September 2 Times story by Jim Rutenberg, who apparently hadn't talked to Bremer about Bush's comments. (Rutenberg's story was just a hack job titled "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy.") Bremer rushed over to the Times and dropped off a bundle of letters that, he claims, show that Bush knew of the plan and liked what Bremer was doing.
Here's how Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews handled the gift from Bremer in the September 4 story:
A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to "dissolve Saddam's military and intelligence structures," a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.
Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been "to keep the army intact" but that it "didn't happen."
The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush's comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.
The Andrews story makes it sound as if Bremer was briefing Rumsfeld about this plan, that the plan was something that Bush and Bremer were hammering out. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In October 2006, David Blunkett, Britain's Home Secretary during the crucial pre-invasion and immediate post-invasion period, told all in an interview with the Guardian (U.K.) and the serialization of his diaries from that time. Unlike Bremer's book published earlier this year, Blunkett was candid about his screw-ups and about what he did — and didn't do. More importantly, he reveals just who was making the big decisions for the U.S. Here's a hint: It wasn't Bremer and it wasn't Bush. From the Guardian story by Patrick Wintour and Julian Glover:
A member of the war cabinet, [Blunkett] reveals that Britain battled with the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, not to press ahead with dismantling "the whole of the security, policing, administrative and local government system on the basis of the de-Ba'athification of Iraq.
"The issue was: 'What the hell do you do about it?' All we could do as a nation of 60 million off the coast of mainland Europe was to seek to influence the most powerful nation in the world. We did seek to influence them, but we were not in charge, so you cannot say that if only the government recognised what needed to be done, it would all have been different. The government did recognise the problem."
He admits: "We dismantled the structure of a functioning state," adding that the British view was: "Change them by all means, decapitate them even, but very quickly get the arms and legs moving."
This 2006 story wasn't totally ignored in the U.S. press. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum summed it up well on October 8, 2006:
DE-BAATHIFICATION....Former British Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose diary will begin serialization in the Guardian on Monday, says that it wasn't Paul Bremer who favored dismantling the Iraqi military after the invasion. …
I don't suppose this is really surprising news or anything — did we ever really think Bremer made this decision on his own? — but it's nice to see confirmation. Yet another disastrous miscalculation from the dynamic duo of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Have these guys ever gotten anything right?
Drum's right. It wasn't surprising in 2003 that the decision was being made by Rumsfeld and Cheney, not Bremer, and it certainly wasn't surprising in 2006. So why was the Times story so clueless?
This isn't the first time Times reporter Andrews has mishandled a big story. Back in 2004, Andrews blew a vital news angle about corporate tax breaks. Read my October 12, 2004, post, in which I wrote:
Regarding the corporate tax bill, the Times's Andrews naively writes that George W. Bush "has indicated he will sign the measure despite White House concerns that it is overloaded with special-interest provisions." That's malarkey about White House "concerns." The Bush regime, which includes leaders of the GOP-controlled Congress, knew that senators of both parties would waddle over to the trough and slurp up the bill's "surplus" so they could excrete it as a steaming pile of pork-barrel projects. The structure of this session's two major tax bills is all part of the White House's shrewd strategy to reward corporations at our expense.
If you want something beyond my immature screed, read this October 2004 measured analysis of the corporate tax cuts, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Joel Friedman.
Regarding the Bremer-Bush dustup and the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, the New Yorker's George Packer parses it and takes the long view. Packer also shrewdly notes that it's not wise to give the Bush regime too much credit for being orderly enough to make decisions. Bush's White House and Pentagon were, and are, a dysfunctional family. Writing about the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, Packer notes:
No one has ever been able to explain the history of that crucial decision, which countless Iraqis have told me was the biggest mistake of the American occupation and a huge factor in the growth of the insurgency. When I was researching The Assassins' Gate I learned that, just before Bremer went to Iraq, in early May, 2003, he had discussed the issue at the Pentagon with Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Walt Slocombe (who became Bremer's adviser on Iraqi security forces in Baghdad), and then he cleared the decision with Donald Rumsfeld. This account was later borne out in Bremer's book. Did Condi Rice know? Dick Cheney? Bush himself? It's been impossible to be sure, and a former Administration official once told me that this fact alone shows what a dysfunctional policymaking process it was.
A history-changing decision, upending a previous policy, was made on the fly by a handful of officials at the Pentagon who consulted with no one else in Washington, let alone in Iraq. (In The Assassins' Gate, I describe the disbelief of a U.S. Army colonel, Paul Hughes, who at the time was knee-deep in the effort to organize and pay soldiers of the defeated Iraqi army; his outrage is the high point of the powerful new film No End in Sight.) Bremer's letter to Bush proves that the President was told at the last minute and gave the O.K. — but that's it. He had nothing to do with the decision either way and seemed barely aware of it.
Meanwhile, the exchange between the two of them — which took place when Iraq was already slipping away — reminds me of Lear talking to his fawning daughters at the opening of the play. "As I have moved around, there has been an almost universal expression of thanks to the US and to you in particular for freeing Iraq from Saddam's tyranny," Bremer assures his boss. "The dissolution of his chosen instrument of political domination, the Baath Party, has been very well received." The President answers in kind: "Your leadership is apparent. You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence."
Unless hard drives are destroyed and archives sealed, one day we'll be able to read thousands more such documents of the war. The details will be damning.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:53 AM, August 30, 2007
This may hurt.
Harkavy
A new GAO report stops the White House spin on Iraq in its tracks. Golly, why couldn't the Washington Post wait until the White House massages General David Petraeus's info into a suitable "progress report" to be released on 9/11?
Iraq is still unreasonably hot, and the White House is still blustery. I know, you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, but getting your hands on a GAO report draft helps. Here's this morning's story by Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks:
Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.
The strikingly negative GAO draft, which will be delivered to Congress in final form on Tuesday, comes as the White House prepares to deliver its own new benchmark report in the second week of September, along with congressional testimony from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. They are expected to describe significant security improvements and offer at least some promise for political reconciliation in Iraq.
And how's that "surge" working for you?
The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. "While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."
The best news is that the number of whistleblowers in D.C. is increasing. That may slow the Bush regime's spin enough that we can see what's actually going on in Iraq. The story notes:
A GAO spokesman declined to comment on the report before it is released. The 69-page draft, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is still undergoing review at the Defense Department, which may ask that parts of it be classified or request changes in its conclusions. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, normally submits its draft reports to relevant agencies for comment but makes its own final judgments. The office has published more than 100 assessments of various aspects of the U.S. effort in Iraq since May 2003.
The person who provided the draft report to The Post said it was being conveyed from a government official who feared that its pessimistic conclusions would be watered down in the final version — as some officials have said happened with security judgments in this month's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Congress requested the GAO report, along with an assessment of the Iraqi security forces by an independent commission headed by retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, to provide a basis for comparison with the administration's scorecard. The Jones report is also scheduled for delivery next week.
Get ready for a mid-August rain of propaganda.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:23 AM, August 30, 2007
Poor Analysis
Bush is "pleased with lower poverty rate." Here on our planet, the situation is different.
Wednesday was a good day at the beleaguered White House, a chance to finally spring some good news on Americans. "President Bush Pleased With Lowered Poverty Rate" was the headline cranked out by the press office:
Census Bureau data released today confirms that more of our citizens are doing better in this economy, with continued rising incomes and more Americans pulling themselves out of poverty.
Only slightly marring this great development:
The Census data also shows that challenges remain in reducing the number of uninsured Americans.
"Challenges remain in reducing the number"? That's a clever lie, denying the truth that the number of uninsured Americans is in fact increasing and that the "rising incomes" are illusory. From the hardworking Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a mainstream centrist think tank, comes this analysis:
New Census data show that in 2006, both the number and the percentage of Americans who are uninsured hit their highest levels since 1999 …
Today’s figures also show that while the overall poverty rate declined slightly (from 12.6 percent to 12.3 percent) between 2005 and 2006, the decline was largely concentrated among the elderly. The poverty rates for children and for working age adults remained statistically unchanged as compared to 2005, and well above their levels in 2001, when the last recession hit bottom.
Now let's get realistic. The federal poverty level is $20,000 annual income for a family of four. You try raising a family on that.
Social-service pros routinely measure "low-income families" as those whose annual income is 200 percent of the official poverty rate. The National Center for Children in Poverty breaks it down in language that even Bush, whose handlers are busy building his library, could understand, if he bothered to read anything:
There are 73 million children in the United States.
• 39 percent — 28.4 million — live in low-income families.
Yes, there are always poor people, but there are more and more of them you. And while Bush trumpets the "progress" in the Census figures, his regime is actually taking action that will guarantee worsening future numbers. As the CBPP's Robert Greenstein points out:
Perhaps of greatest concern, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 2.2 million in 2006, and the number of uninsured children jumped by more than 600,000. The steady progress of recent years in reducing the number of uninsured children stalled in 2005 and began to reverse in 2006, in part because funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) grew scarcer.
This is particularly noteworthy because the President has vowed to veto legislation that the House and Senate passed (in different versions) that would resume progress in this area and shrink the number of uninsured children by 3 to 4 million. In addition, on August 17, the Administration unveiled a controversial new policy that would force many states to cut back their SCHIP programs, forcing up to several hundred thousand more children into the ranks of the uninsured. Today’s sobering data on the rising number of uninsured children should prompt the President to rethink his positions on children’s health insurance.
That policy is the real news coming out of the White House.
Posted by Harkavy at 2:29 PM, August 29, 2007
The Bush library architect is selected, but it's not too late to suggest epigraphs for his and the building's facades.
George W. Bush's grandest reinforced-concrete legacy — except for the billion-dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdead being built by shanghaied Filipinos — finally has an architect.
No surprise that it's a New York City firm hired to design Bush's presidential library and museum. The name behind Robert A.M. Stern Architects is Yale's architecture dean, and it's a hoity-toity firm. Besides, Bush's New York chum Roland Betts was on the selection committee.
As much as the POTUS library handlers are trying to burnish diffident reader Bush's image for future generations, the president's only certain legacy so far is the one he used to get into Yale because his daddy went there.
The George W. Bush Presidential Libary, however, will be a monument in 3-D, and it's not too late to suggest that its name and a suitable epigraph from Bush's own words be carved on its front facade. I'm thinking of Bush's August 5, 2004, speech as he signed that year's defense bill:
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
For that bone mot, go to this White House page for the transcript, video, and audio.
That quotation probably won't pass muster with Bush's crew. But it has to be something memorable and/or important, like this August 4, 1822, quotation by James Madison, which is inscribed on the Library of Congress building bearing his name and which was dedicated by Ronald Reagan:
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
In the alternative, here's a modern-day quotation that seems apropos:
Who has the strength these days to remember the beginning, the root of the matter, the circumstances, the fact that what we have here is occupation and oppression, reaction and counter-reaction, a vicious circle and a bloody circle, two peoples that are becoming corrupt, violent and crazy with despair, a death trap in which we are suffocating more with every passing day?
No, that's not about Iraq; it's from a January 6, 2002, essay by Israeli novelist David Grossman, concerning the Arab-Jew death dance. Don't expect to see that quote in either the Israel or Iraq wings of the Bush Libary, though historians will remember the disastrous road to death in Israel as one of Bush's legacies.
You could pick just about anything from Martin Luther King Jr., but here's a morsel from King's 1967 anti-war speech at Riverside Church in New York City. Taken out of context, it's also perfectly in context, in a Vietraq sort of way, as a description of Bush:
… some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war …
Maybe carving an epigraph like that into a building is just too old-fashioned for the computer age, and the Bush Libary simply needs something for people to click on, like this:
All you have to do is click. It's a Windows command, so it should work perfectly.
Posted by Harkavy at 6:22 AM, August 27, 2007
Harkavy/White House
While George W. Bush's handlers are busy writing General David Petraeus's September 11 "progress report" on Iraq — check out the facts they'll be trying to spin — they're not ignoring other health issues.
Just last week, Bush proclaimed National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month *. (It starts in just a few days, so check out this American Cancer Society info too.)
For those Iraqi men who haven't been among the millions fleeing the country, that shows that our government cares.
More good news, again connected to Iraqi men's health: Fewer Iraqi children are likely to die in coming years. The reason? There's a sharp increase in sterility among Iraqi men. As the U.N. news service IRIN reports:
According to Dr Muhammad Bashier, manager of the family planning clinic in Karada Hospital, Baghdad, the number of sterile men in Iraq has increased dramatically over the past four years as a result of stress, depression and exposure to radiation and possibly chemicals.
"Before 2002, the number of men seeking our services and advice were fewer than four a day, while we had 20 to 30 women every day. But today we have a minimum of 60 patients a day with men representing half this number," Bashier said.
"In our research, we have discovered that most of the men who are completely sterile are from areas where radiation and chemicals from war have been present in higher proportions — especially in the south of the country and in the outskirts of Baghdad," he added.
But that just means more danger to Iraqi doctors, as Bashier explains:
"It is very hard to tell an Iraqi man that he is sterile. We even had a doctor who was killed less than two years ago by a patient after giving him the news."
Don't think that women are being ignored. October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month over here, and it's likely that fewer Iraqi women will be in danger of contracting the disease. IRIN reports that women’s rights activists are increasingly targeted by militants:
Haifaa Nour, 33-year-old president of the Women’s Freedom Organisation (WFO), one of the few women’s rights organisations in Iraq, said the threatening letters she had recently been receiving would not deter her from her job, even if it cost her her life. However, she acknowledged that for a woman activist the risks of doing humanitarian work were increasing daily.
"After the US-led invasion in 2003, women’s rights were well recognised … but unfortunately in the past two years our situation has deteriorated and the targeting of activists and women aid workers has increased, forcing dozens to give up their jobs," Haifaa said.
"I know my life is under threat and I might be killed at any time especially for refusing to wear a veil or other traditional clothes, but if I do so, I will just be abetting the extremists," she said.
Courageous women like Haifaa Nour will now have fewer worries because she and everyone else will be less able to leave their homes: There's already a curfew in Baghdad from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., but now tighter restrictions have been imposed in advance of a huge annual Shi'ite pilgrimage. As the BBC reported Saturday:
The Iraqi government has imposed a partial travel ban in Baghdad and the outskirts of the capital ahead of a major Shia festival next week. Two-wheelers and hand carts, but not cars, will be banned in Baghdad and its outskirts … , an army official said.
The curfew aims to curb insurgent attacks against up to two million Shia pilgrims expected to head to Karbala. Earlier, a car bomb in northern Baghdad killed at least seven in a Shia area.
"An indefinite curfew has been imposed on two-wheelers and hand carts, but not on other vehicles such as cars," Brig Gen Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Iraqi military in Baghdad, told the AFP news agency.
Well, that's good that people will have to stay inside, but the temperatures during the day are still triple-digit, and Baghdad residents have only about three hours of electricity every 24 hours. Whew. No wonder people are on edge.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:12 AM, August 24, 2007
Tête-à-tête offensive: Bush and Maliki circle the burning station wagons, while our soldiers go nuts from the war.
George W. Bush wasn't crazy Wednesday when he compared the Iraq Debacle to the Vietnam War to the cheers of a VFW crowd in Kansas City.
Thousands of shell-shocked U.S. soldiers wound up untreated, drifting the streets of America after the Vietnam War. The same thing is happening now with Iraq veterans — at least with those who haven't already committed suicide. From an August 17 AP story:
Ninety-nine soldiers killed themselves last year, the highest suicide rate in the Army in 26 years of record-keeping, a new report says.
Nearly a third of the soldiers committed suicide while in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to a report released Thursday, which said 27 deaths were in Iraq and 3 in Afghanistan.
The report said that the 99 confirmed suicides by active-duty soldiers compared with 87 in 2005 and that it was the highest raw number since 102 suicides were reported in 1991, the year of the Persian Gulf War.
My colleague Michael Feingold, a theater critic who knows a tragedy when he sees one, tipped me off to that wire story. Unfortunately, we'll never know the exact number of crazed veterans — and they'll probably go untreated — because the military is diagnosing many Iraq vets as suffering from a "personality disorder" instead of post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by the war. That way the government can discharge them, claiming that these soldiers were flawed to begin with, and wash its hands of the problem.
This disgraceful action on the home front will only cause more problems in the long run because the insanity in Iraq in the short term is increasing. Yesterday, gunmen attacked villages in Diyala province where Sunni militiamen who recently joined — supposedly — the U.S. "surge" lived. As Carol J. Williams of the L.A. Times reports this morning:
About 200 gunmen stormed two villages in Diyala province Thursday, killing at least 22 members of a Sunni Arab tribe and taking 15 women and children hostage in an attack thought to be retaliation for their renunciation of Al Qaeda-linked militants.
Sounds like Vietnam, just as the crumbling regime of Nouri al-Maliki sounds like the South Vietnamese government of 40 years ago. The updated National Intelligence Estimate is nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will add even more pressure to Maliki's shaky rule. From Reuters, via SwissInfo:
With just weeks to go before U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker and military commander General David Petraeus are to report to the U.S. Congress on progress in Iraq, intelligence agencies released a grim forecast of violence and stalemate.
Wait, wait, wait. Once again the press fails to note that the White House will actually write the report. That's nuts, too. Anyway, back to the Reuters story:
"Levels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high and the Iraqi government will continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation and improved governance," declassified findings of the National Intelligence Estimate said.
The report said there had been "measurable but uneven improvements" in Iraqi security since January under the troop increase, but that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government would become more precarious over the next 6 to 12 months."
At least the cabinet members' boycott of Maliki's government appears to be ending. Well, maybe that's not such good news:
In a sign of the political deadlock, the secularist bloc of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi announced that its ministers, who had been boycotting cabinet meetings, would quit the government altogether.
Crazy, huh? Not as crazy as the treatment of our own soldiers returning home shell-shocked. The Christian Science Monitor recently noted:
In relabeling cases of PTSD as 'personality disorder,' the US military avoids paying for treatment.
But this scandal emerged months ago; here's a story published last Christmas Eve that must have driven some soldiers' families crazy:
Soldiers suffering from the stress of combat in Iraq are being misdiagnosed by military doctors as having a personality disorder, lawyers and psychologists say, which allows them to be quickly and honorably discharged but stigmatizes them with a label that is hard to dislodge and can hurt them financially.
Though accurate for some, experts say, the personality disorder label has been used as a catch-all diagnosis to discharge personnel who may no longer meet military standards, are engaging in problematic behavior or suffer from more serious mental disorders. For returning veterans, the diagnosis can make it harder to obtain adequate mental health treatment if they must first show they have another problem, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
"It's an absolute disgrace to military medicine," said Bridgette Wilson, a former Army medic who is now an attorney in San Diego serving mainly military clients. "I see it over and over again, the dramatic misuse of personality disorder diagnosis. It's a fairly slick and efficient way to move some bodies through."
Military records show that since 2003, 4,092 Army soldiers and another 11,296 men and women in other branches of the armed services have been discharged after being diagnosed with the disorder.
A government worker at Fort Carson in Colorado who has access to personnel records and who spoke on condition on anonymity for fear of losing his job said Army psychologists there have diagnosed some soldiers with a personality disorder after a single evaluation lasting 10 minutes to 20 minutes.
By the way, Steven D. Green, the GI accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdering her and her family (with the help of others in his rape crew), was diagnosed with "anti-social personality disorder" and shipped home shortly after that March 2006 massacre — before the story of the murders fully came out, charges were brought, and he was arrested as a civilian.
That, too, is crazy.
Was Green so screwed-up before he went to Iraq? His tour in that nightmare desert couldn't have helped. As the AP reported last summer:
[Green] was sent to patrol the so-called "Triangle of Death," an area southwest of Baghdad known for its frequent roadside bombings. Military officials say more than 40 percent of the nearly 1,000 soldiers in the region have been treated for mental or emotional anxiety.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:32 AM, August 23, 2007
Hell, no, we won't go.
Phuoc Vinh and the Diyala River Valley, 40 years apart.
Speaking to veterans sure not to boo the president, George W. Bush's handlers have launched a new offensive in the Vietnam War, which has been over for 30 years.
Offensive is right. In essence, if you take a look at our soldiers patrolling in Phuoc Vinh, Vietnam, in 1967-68 and in Iraq's Diyala River Valley in August 2007, Bush is telling 21st century America: "Phuoc you."
It's now the Vietraq War. Forty years ago, we were telling a president, "Hell, no, we won't go!" Now we have a president telling us, "Hell, no, we won't go!" Even though Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who really has no choice if he wants to keep his job and his life, is telling us, "Go."
Over here, we'd better run for cover, because we're likely to hear this rat-a-tat-tat from Bush for awhile. Dick Cheney's regime launched this new war Wednesday in Kansas City at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, having Bush say:
Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see it differently.
Bush's handlers plan more of the same next week at the American Legion gathering in Reno. As Maura Reynolds and James Gerstenzang reported this morning in the L.A. Times:
Aides said the president felt it was necessary to revamp his message in the weeks before Army Gen. David H. Petraeus delivers a progress report that Congress mandated.
White House counselor Ed Gillespie and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove worked with the president on the speech. There was a sense in the White House that the president's rhetoric on Iraq, though consistent, was also becoming somewhat repetitive.
"The repetition is necessary and by design," White House communications director Kevin Sullivan said in an interview, adding that the language is usually fresh to every new audience. "However, the president was aware of wanting to set the table for the upcoming report and the discussion that will follow it in a new way that was both compelling and illustrative. We've done this work before, and it was beneficial to the American people."
Both speeches were planned for veterans groups, guaranteeing that audiences would respond enthusiastically to the president's calls to support the troops. On Wednesday, VFW members repeatedly interrupted Bush's speech with applause and standing ovations.
Rove, whose name (as I've pointed out) doesn't rhyme with "dove," will go hunting for real doves when he leaves the White House at the end of the month. But he's still on patrol in the West Wing, and we're his pigeons.
All the propaganda isn't coming from the White House. We already knew that, but here's fresh proof. While the excellent McClatchy D.C. Bureau (formerly the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau), headlined its story "Bush Steps up Sales Push to Sustain His Surge in Iraq" (accurately depicting Bush as the regime's salesman), the L.A. Times story carries the softer headline "Bush Has a New Angle on Iraq Debate" (not really accurate because it's his handlers' angle). And the POTUS-pushers didn't write the L.A. Times's sub-headline:
In anticipation of progress report, the president is addressing veterans groups and setting up new effort to cast war in historical light.
Even the White House's Kevin Sullivan didn't use the adjective "progress." But newspapers and TV are already calling the upcoming Petraeus report, which will be written by the White House, a "progress report." Considering the debacle that is Iraq, how about just calling it a "report" and mentioning that it will be written by the White House?
Instead we'll be inundated in the next couple of weeks — before the report is released on super-jingoistic 9/11 Day — with the words "progress" and "Vietnam." Those words never did quite fit together when JFK, LBJ, and Nixon used them.
Posted by Harkavy at 4:59 PM, August 22, 2007
Oh, by the way, the White House will be writing Petraeus's report.
"Words convey ideas," the late, great John Bremner told me once and as | |
