December 30, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

SADDAM CREATED BY U.S.

Poet John Donne famously wrote that the "death of any man diminishes me." I do not mourn the late Saddam Hussein. Like so many dictators, he was guilty of monstrous and brutal crimes. But it should have been the Iraqi people who overthrew Saddam. The trial should have been a real trial, not a kangaroo court. And the people who allowed Saddam to commit his crimes should also face justice. But presidents and prime ministers of "developed" countries don't go to trial. They don't go to the gallows. They build libraries and get eulogized when they die. This article by Robert Fisk is at news.independent.co.uk:

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

THE D. C. SNOBOCRACY

From their perches on high the D. C. pundit class tells us about the world. We have the likes of Cokie Roberts or David Broder dictating what is right and wrong. Unfortunately, the D. C. pundits aren't much aware of the real world outside the Beltway. In fact, they consider those outside the Beltway to be beneath contempt. This article by Ernest Partridge is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Read closely both on and between the lines of Washington (so-called) "journalism," and you will find evidence of an unelected "shadow-government"of comfortable, self-appointed and self-satisfied DC elites, composed of lobbyists, pundits, publishers, diplomats, military, and, of course, politicians. This is the Washington "snobocracy." It decides, through its "establishment" media, what news, information and opinion are worthy of the public's attention. And it determines if a politician's life in the nation's Capital will be comfortable and productive or an unremitting misery, as Bill and Hillary Clinton were to discover.

The snobocrats share a bond of community that is unperturbed by such mundane concerns as partisanship. This non-partisan conviviality is typified by the ownership of a Washington steakhouse, "The Caucus Room," which opened in August, 2000: