Gingrich Carries Fearmongering Opportunism To The Next Level

The Newt's recent remarks about the need to curtail freedom of expression in the interest of somehow thereby forestalling terror have attracted a great deal of attention recently, and rightly so.

Let's take a moment to dispel the idea that 'the terrorists' are coming for you and everyone you know RIGHT NOW! Modern Americans are among the safest people in history. The USSR had nuclear weapons for decades and was quite prepared to use them. World War Two saw Western democracy under organized attack by advanced nations with the will and the very real ability to conquer the world for fascism. Having survived that, we will not - or should not - surrender that democracy or those values to a small pack of extremists with box-cutters. Or to a washed-up gin-soaked morally bankrupt former Congressman contemplating a Presidential bid ten years after his fall from relevance. But one quote did especially stand out:

"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich

Oh, really?!


Curse you, First Amendment!

Happy Birthday

... to the Little Dragon.

Bruce Lee would have been 66 today.

...in 1959 a short, skinny, bespectacled 18-year-old kid from Hong Kong traveled to America and declared himself to be John Wayne, James Dean, Charles Atlas and the guy who kicked your butt in junior high.

The "I" Word

Eternal Hope takes the administration to task on 14 seperate impeachable crimes, from falsifying evidence about Iraq's WMD capabilities to the use of white phosphorous in Fallujah. Real crimes that led to tens of thousands of deaths.

Criminality and unconstitutional activity must not be allowed to be set as a precident for future administrations. As amazing as the idea that everything will be okay again if the 'opposition party' takes the White House in 2008 - as if all the last six years's misdeeds could be so easily swept beneath the rug - is the idea that Americans have 'scandal fatigue'. Any talk of impeachment inevitably draws comparisons to the Clinton impeachment - which was, of course, a debacle for the then-Republican Congress, being a transparent and petty witch-hunt. Linda Milazzo draws the obvious distinctions:

America, the nation, will regain some of the moral authority diminished by Bush and Cheney. The rest of the world will know that America can distinguish between insignificant and substantial. Clinton was impeached for matters insignificant to his leadership of the nation. Bush will be impeached for matters so substantial that they caused the deaths of thousands and endangered the whole world.


Let's Impeach The President

Tags: Impeachment

Rummy's Week Gets Even Worse

Now that he's no longer under the White House's protective wing, Rummy is finding himself vulnerable to all sorts of consequences! A lawsuit's been brought in a German civil court, by some of his former victims from Gitmo and Abu Ghraib:

As TIME first reported in June 2005, Qahtani underwent a "special interrogation plan," personally approved by Rumsfeld ... Qahtani was subjected to forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation and other controversial interrogation techniques.

Of course, only riff-raff, America-haters and undesirable brown people could take such ideas seriously, right?

...former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq ... has issued a written statement to accompany the legal filing, which says, in part: "It was clear the knowledge and responsibility [for what happened at Abu Ghraib] goes all the way to the top of the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ."

Well, I'll be. It's mostly a showboat proceeding in a foreign court, so it's not really accountability - but it is something, and perhaps it's a start.

Tags: Donald Rumsfield, Torture

Meet The New Boss

The timing of Rummie's marching orders would seem to have ruffled a few feathers in the lame duck-elect's party! Especially given that it was planned for such a very long time before the election - the White House knew that their Iraq strategy was not tenable, but kept it going and Rummy in place, to the detriment to American security and at the cost of American soldiers's lives, for months after the decision was made.

Still, our new Secretary of Defense represents a real improvement - despite his past employment by e-voting lobbyists, and despite being yet another Iran-Contra figure in the administration. After all, in his long career as a CIA Soviet analyst, he did such a superlative job of understanding and pre-empting the threat from the USSR!

... oh, wait.

Mr. President, Robert Gates is a career Soviet analyst and former Deputy Director of the CIA who was wrong about what CIA analyst Harold Ford described as `the central analytic target of the past few years: the probable fortunes of the USSR and the Soviet European bloc.' And I believe that the committee report points out one possible reason why the CIA failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to testimony, Mr. Gates was busy pursuing hypotheses and making unsubstantiated arguments attempting to show Soviet expansion in the Third World, instead of looking for or paying attention to facts that pointed in the opposite direction. Why? Why, as Mentor Moynihan has pointed out, was the CIA able to tell Presidents everything about the Soviet Union except the fact that it was falling apart?

Well, his intelligence estimates may be flawed, but perhaps he won't be so quick to falsify them outright!

... perhaps.

According to Robert Parry, a reporter who has closely tracked this period in the CIA'’s history, during this time the Reagan administration was "pressing the CIA to adopt an analysis that accepted right-wing media reports pinning European terrorism on the Soviets. The CIA analysts knew that these charges were false, in part because they were based on '‘black'’ or false propaganda that the CIA itself had been planting in the European media. But the '‘politicization'’ tide was strong."”

Another neo-con ideologue, with a proven capacity to suborn reason and endanger American interests for political and personal gain? His kung fu seems weak!



Go back there and practice, Rummy. With some luck, the rest of this corrupt pack will be joining you in 2008.

Tags: Donald Rumsfield, Robert Gates, Dancing Finger Style

The Times, They Are A-Changing

What are we to think when the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times are all calling for your head on a stake?

What do you say, Rummy?


"I don't do quagmires."

I guess that means he's leaving, then!

Tags: Donald Rumsfield