January 07, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

RIGHT WING PUNDITS REVISE THEIR RECORD

It reminds you of the way Big Brother worked in 1984. When things don't go your way you just go back and change the record. See, you were right all along! That is the tactic many right-wing pundits are using now. They were cheerleading Bush's war in Iraq until it became the disaster we see now. Now the same pundits are claiming they never supported this war, or they try to blame the Iraqis for the failure. This article by Glenn Greenwald is at www.amconmag.com:

Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.

Michael Ledeen, a Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to National Review, chose the boldest option. In response to a Vanity Fair article about the swarms of neoconservatives abandoning the administration and the war as both become increasingly unpopular, Ledeen emphatically denied that he backed the invasion in the first place. Writing on National Review’s blog, The Corner, Ledeen claimed, “I do not feel ‘remorseful,’ since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.”

It is difficult to overstate the audacity—and the mendacity—of Ledeen’s claim. In August 2002, he wrote a scathing article in National Review following an appearance by Brent Scowcroft on “Face the Nation,” in which the former national security adviser argued against the invasion. Ledeen devoted his entire column to mocking Scowcroft’s concerns:

ANOTHER BIG BROTHER PROPOSAL

The federal government supposedly wants to track down child sex predators and stop child pornography on the Internet. So, naturally, they want Internet service providers to keep records of every website we visit. This is part of the pattern this administration has shown in snooping into our personal lives. They want to listen to our phone calls, open our mail, and track our Internet activity. How long before we have a video screen in our homes that can be monitored by some government bureaucrat? This article by John Reinan is at www.grandhaventribune.com:

"I don't think it's realistic to think that we would create this enormous honeypot of information and then say to the FBI, 'You can only use it for this narrow purpose,'" said Leslie Harris, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based group that promotes free speech and privacy in communication.

"We have an environment in which we're collecting more and more information on the personal lives of Americans, and our laws are completely inadequate to protect us."

So far, no concrete proposal has emerged, but U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has made it clear that he'd like to see quick action.

In September testimony before a Senate committee, Gonzales painted a graphic and disturbing picture of child pornography on the Web, which he called an urgent threat to children. The production and consumption of child pornography has exploded as the Internet makes it easier to exchange images, Gonzales said.