HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE
DARTH CHENEY AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR
Darth Cheney emerged from his crypt and, amazingly, didn't burst into flame when exposed to sunlight. Cheney wants to give us a revised history of the deplorable Bush administration and he wants to defend the policies he and Bush inflicted on the country and the world. The media have become mostly stenographers, repeating whatever powerful politicians say, but without any analysis or background. So we don't hear torture called torture, but "enhanced interrogation" techniques. We're told the Bush administration kept us safe, but it was their dereliction of duty that allowed 9/11 to occur in the first place. And attacks have continued around the world. The unnecessary and immoral war in Iraq has drained our resources, cost innocent lives, and magnified the terrorist threat by making us more hated around the world. Frank Rich talks about Darth Cheney and gasbags like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh in this column linked at www.commondreams.org:
Cheney's "no middle ground" speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama's planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery - graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. "daisy" ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama's watch. "No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do," Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama's "half measures" were leaving Americans "half exposed." The new president, he said, is unraveling "the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11." In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama's fault. A new ad shouting "We told you so!" awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party - Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney - have variously cemented the G.O.P.'s brand as a whites-only men's club by revoking Colin Powell's membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a "reverse racist." Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama's. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Monday, May 25, 2009
HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE
CALIFORNIA: STATE OF CONTRADICTIONS
My family moved to California in the 1960's and back then California truly was the Golden State. We had wonderful infrastructure, a great economy, and good schools. That was in the era of Governor Pat Brown. Since then, we've had a number of bad Republican governors starting with Ronald Reagan on up to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We had the passage of Proposition 13, a right-wing initiative that has made it almost impossible to do anything fiscally responsible. The right-wing Republican minority is able to block almost anything it wants to block. So much for democracy.
California is where we have liberal San Francisco and the push for gay rights. It's also the home of the John Birch Society. California had the hippies in the 1960's, but Sacramento is where Rush Limbaugh got his start. California, derided by gasbags like Limbaugh as the "Left Coast," sent right-wingers like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House. California, a leader in high tech industries, has also depended heavily on poor farm workers, often illegal immigrants, to maintain the agricultural industry In this column Paul Krugman talks about the horror of the federal government copying California in letting reactionary minorities derail meaningful change. The column is at www.nytimes.com:
What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.
Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.
The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.
CALIFORNIA: STATE OF CONTRADICTIONS
My family moved to California in the 1960's and back then California truly was the Golden State. We had wonderful infrastructure, a great economy, and good schools. That was in the era of Governor Pat Brown. Since then, we've had a number of bad Republican governors starting with Ronald Reagan on up to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We had the passage of Proposition 13, a right-wing initiative that has made it almost impossible to do anything fiscally responsible. The right-wing Republican minority is able to block almost anything it wants to block. So much for democracy.
California is where we have liberal San Francisco and the push for gay rights. It's also the home of the John Birch Society. California had the hippies in the 1960's, but Sacramento is where Rush Limbaugh got his start. California, derided by gasbags like Limbaugh as the "Left Coast," sent right-wingers like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House. California, a leader in high tech industries, has also depended heavily on poor farm workers, often illegal immigrants, to maintain the agricultural industry In this column Paul Krugman talks about the horror of the federal government copying California in letting reactionary minorities derail meaningful change. The column is at www.nytimes.com:
What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.
Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.
The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE
GOP'S DISTRACTIONS ON TORTURE
The method magicians use to perform their tricks is to distract. You focus on something the magician wants you to focus on so he can create his illusion. And so it is with the right wing's distractions on torture. From what you hear in the media, you would think Nancy Pelosi orchestrated this entire reprehensible program. If Nancy Pelosi knew about torture and did nothing to stop it, that is disgusting. But the people who conceived using torture and put torture into operation are far more disgusting and far more legally liable. This commentary by Gregg Levine is at www.firedoglake.com:
Because before you get to Pelosi, or to Graham, or Jane Harman, or a host of other congressional leaders who in good time should be held accountable for their action or inaction during the Bush years—before you get to any of that—one thing had to happen. . . .
Someone had to order the torture. Someone had to sign off on the program in its design phase, someone had to render a group of detainees, hold them outside the reach of US law, and someone had to give the order to have them tortured.
I could, at this point, throw out the name George W. Bush—he was president at the time, after all—but we now have pretty good evidence that the real authority for waterboarding (to name but the most talked about of many illegally brutal “techniques”), the real orders to “do that,” and “do that again,” came from the vice president. The order to torture came from Dick Cheney.
Let me say that again: Dick Cheney ordered torture.
Not Nancy Pelosi; Dick Cheney.
Before there were any briefings of any Democrats, there was the torture—a violation in-and-of itself—and that torture was ordered by Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.
And to take it one step further, that torture wasn’t ordered up to save us from some imagined “ticking bomb” scenario (not that torture would even solve that particular problem, and not that, even if it did, it could be justified), it was ordered to make detainees produce a specific, desired piece of information (or disinformation). Dick Cheney wanted a connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein, and so Cheney told interrogators contractors to torture detainees until they stated that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
GOP'S DISTRACTIONS ON TORTURE
The method magicians use to perform their tricks is to distract. You focus on something the magician wants you to focus on so he can create his illusion. And so it is with the right wing's distractions on torture. From what you hear in the media, you would think Nancy Pelosi orchestrated this entire reprehensible program. If Nancy Pelosi knew about torture and did nothing to stop it, that is disgusting. But the people who conceived using torture and put torture into operation are far more disgusting and far more legally liable. This commentary by Gregg Levine is at www.firedoglake.com:
Because before you get to Pelosi, or to Graham, or Jane Harman, or a host of other congressional leaders who in good time should be held accountable for their action or inaction during the Bush years—before you get to any of that—one thing had to happen. . . .
Someone had to order the torture. Someone had to sign off on the program in its design phase, someone had to render a group of detainees, hold them outside the reach of US law, and someone had to give the order to have them tortured.
I could, at this point, throw out the name George W. Bush—he was president at the time, after all—but we now have pretty good evidence that the real authority for waterboarding (to name but the most talked about of many illegally brutal “techniques”), the real orders to “do that,” and “do that again,” came from the vice president. The order to torture came from Dick Cheney.
Let me say that again: Dick Cheney ordered torture.
Not Nancy Pelosi; Dick Cheney.
Before there were any briefings of any Democrats, there was the torture—a violation in-and-of itself—and that torture was ordered by Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.
And to take it one step further, that torture wasn’t ordered up to save us from some imagined “ticking bomb” scenario (not that torture would even solve that particular problem, and not that, even if it did, it could be justified), it was ordered to make detainees produce a specific, desired piece of information (or disinformation). Dick Cheney wanted a connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein, and so Cheney told interrogators contractors to torture detainees until they stated that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE
GOP: DISGUSTING AND OUT OF TOUCH
Right-wingers like to talk about "principles." Using the words "principle" and "Republican" in the same sentence is enough to make you gag. Now Republicans are suddenly deficit hawks, although they gave George W. Bush free reign to bankrupt the country. People who brayed about the "rule of law" during the Clinton administration had no problem with the Bush administration consistently breaking the law by authorizing the repugnant torture of detainees in the "War on Terror." People who are supposedly "strict constructionists" on the Constitution supported a guy who called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper" as he illegally spied on Americans and deprived people of their rights. Their economic policies would be a total joke if not for the absolute disaster they've created. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.nytimes.com:
The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.
The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.
GOP: DISGUSTING AND OUT OF TOUCH
Right-wingers like to talk about "principles." Using the words "principle" and "Republican" in the same sentence is enough to make you gag. Now Republicans are suddenly deficit hawks, although they gave George W. Bush free reign to bankrupt the country. People who brayed about the "rule of law" during the Clinton administration had no problem with the Bush administration consistently breaking the law by authorizing the repugnant torture of detainees in the "War on Terror." People who are supposedly "strict constructionists" on the Constitution supported a guy who called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper" as he illegally spied on Americans and deprived people of their rights. Their economic policies would be a total joke if not for the absolute disaster they've created. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.nytimes.com:
The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.
The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)