April 28, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


TENET BOOK BLASTS ADMINISTRATION

Former CIA Director George Tenet joins other former administration insiders like Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke in showing how the Bush administration rushed pell mell into the Iraq war regardless of the consequences. We've heard a variety of rationales for starting this war. Initially, it was the big lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or was going to acquire weapons. Then there were phony claims of connections between Hussein and terrorists. We also heard the claim about "bad intelligence." We haven't heard the real explanation: arrogance and the desire to control the region. This article by Scott Lindlaw is at www.chicagotribune.com:

The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the United States could face a thicket of bad consequences, starting with "anarchy and the territorial breakup" of the country, former CIA Director George Tenet writes in a new book.

Agency analysts wrote the warning at the start of August 2002 and inserted it into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush's national security team at Camp David, Tenet writes.

The CIA analysis painted what Tenet calls additional "worst-case" scenarios: "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States"; "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states"; and "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance."

THE CORROSIVE ACID OF CONSERVATISM

The last few years have been a lesson in Conservative Government 101. Just when you think things can't get worse they do. Conservative politics is mostly about a big military and big inequality. They like to cut and cut taxes for the rich and dump the expense of running the country on the middle class. That's going to become more difficult, of course, because they're destroying the middle class. They deregulate industries, leaving us to the dog-eat-dog antics of the free market. You got tainted food and got sick or died? Tough! That's the free market. You got shafted on your mortgage deal? It's your own fault! You make lousy wages because investors get all the goodies and the workers get nothing? Too bad! The "risk takers" deserve all the goodies. You're worried about pollution and global warming? Don't you know global warming is just a myth, or if it's not a myth it's a conspiracy to destroy the U. S. economy! These people should never be in power. In this article Rick Perlstein looks at some items in USA Today and the corrosive impact of conservative government across the nation. The article is at www.tompaine.com:

OK. So we know what conservative government has destroyed—a nation in which we can count on our reservoirs holding and our streets not swallowing up our cars, one where budgeting is based on something other than fantasies about the magic of tax cuts for the rich. But what has it built?

Come with me, dear reader, to Vermont, where USA Today's "Across the USA" page for April 25 takes us to the state's flagship college campus:

VERMONT: Burlington - A dozen University of Vermont students are staging a hunger strike to seek higher wages for the university's lowest paid employees. Based on year-old figures, 256 UVM employees were paid less than $12.28 an hour, the amount considered a livable wage in Burlington. The students, who began the hunger strike Monday, are promising to consume only water and fruit juices. UVM President Dan Fogel says the school offers some of the best wages and benefits in Vermont.

Don't you just love the flacking? Some people at the university get good wages, so that negates the fact that others receive so little they can't survive. It's hard to write about how badly conservative governance has degraded us as a nation because, well, it has so degraded us as a nation: They have managed to make us forget once-sturdy pillars of our national morality. University presidents used to be high-minded civic leaders. Now they've become flacks like everyone else, all in service to a fatter bottom line.