February 18, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

GETTING THE LIES STRAIGHT

George W. Bush and his administration have lied about anything and everything. The latest lie campaign is about the danger Iran presents to the United States. We're getting similar propaganda to what preceded the war against Iraq. But as Frank Rich points out, the administration is losing its "mojo." There are so many lies they can't keep them straight anymore. This column is linked at roziusunbound.blogspot.com:

Maybe the Bush White House can't conduct a war, but no one has ever impugned its ability to lie about its conduct of a war. Now even that well-earned reputation for flawless fictionalizing is coming undone. Watching the administration try to get its story straight about Iran's role in Iraq last week was like watching third graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.

Surely these guys can do better than this. No sooner did unnamed military officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the whole charade. General Pace said he didn't know about the briefing and couldn't endorse its contention that the Iranian government's highest echelons were complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq. Public-relations pandemonium ensued as Tony Snow, the State Department and finally the president tried to revise the story line on the fly. Back when Karl Rove ruled, everyone read verbatim from the same script. Last week's frantic improvisations were vintage Scooter Libby, at best the ur-text for a future perjury trial.

Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.

A LOT MORE DANGEROUS A FEW YEARS AGO

Today's Fresno Bee has a letter from a local Republican operative for whom I have absolutely no respect. Our neofascist was sneering at the Democrats in Congress for allegedly being like the United Nations, and suggested that the Democratic majority would be helpless to act if the United States were attacked again.

I have little doubt that the Democratic majority would act as necessary if that unfortunate event occurred. A Democratic administration and Congress won World War II in less time than we have spent in Iraq. Our neofascist would probably prefer a dictatorship because democracy is sometimes messy and inefficient, but by far the best system of government devised by humans. This article by Paul Kennedy takes us back to a far more dangerous time during the Cold War. Yes, terrorists are bad guys, but by no means the threat we faced with thousands of nuclear missiles poised to land on us. This article is linked at www.latimes.com:

We seem to have forgotten that our right-wing hawks argued passionately for "nuking" communist China during the Korean War and again during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954. We also have apparently forgotten — although newly released archival evidence overwhelmingly confirms this — how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Likewise, we've forgotten the shock of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which prompted then-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to ask, "Is this the new Sarajevo?" a reference to the outbreak of World War I. And who still remembers 1984-85, when we were riveted by Jonathan Schell's argument in the New Yorker that even a few nuclear explosions would trigger such dust storms as to produce a "nuclear winter"?

Those were really scary times, and much more dangerous than our present circumstance because the potential damage that could be inflicted during an East-West conflagration was far, far greater than anything that Al Qaeda can do to us now. No one has the exact totals, but we probably had 20,000 missiles pointed at each other, often on high alert. And the threat of an accidental discharge was high.

None of today's college-age students were born in 1945, 1979 or maybe even 1984. None lived with those triangular signs proclaiming their schools to be nuclear bomb shelters.