Three Days To Go. . .

Everything Is On Its Way Up In America. . .
by The Old Hippie, Because Knowledge Of Reality - Is Its Own Freedom

The number of Americans that don't get enough food, up again - The number without any health insurance, up again - The number without jobs, up again - The number not counted because they "gave up," up again - The number below the poverty line, up again - The number of men put into

(Doonesbury)

prison, up again - The number dead in a profit taking war, up again - The number of dead since "Mission Accomplished," up again - The number of "dirty-tricks" to suppress the vote by republicans, up again, The number of women put into prison, up again, - The number of known corporate environmental "escapes," up again - The number of corporations with off shore tax dodging headquarters, up again - The number of those given federal no-bid contracts, up again - The number of innocent civilians killed for our war, up again - The number of jobs with less pay and less benefits and less security, up again - The number of "Christians" that "believe" that the Separation of Church and State should be done away with, up again - The number of terrorists in the world directly because of the Iraq war, up

again - The number of radical born-again Evangelican Americans that "know" the gay-marriage issue is more important than all of the above listed "up agains," and "know" that creationism is a science, and that the "Rapture" must be "made" to happen, up again. . .

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WAKE THE FUCK UP!

Three days to go people - -

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Four Days To Go. . .

70% of Americans Don't Believe Evolution is Reality,
46% of the American Electorate believe Creationism is Science,
Almost All of Which Vote Wedge Issues Concerning Their Beliefs,
Almost All of Which Vote The Candidates Professed Beliefs,
Not The Much More Important Domestic or Foreign Policy Issues,
From a Radical Corporatist's Point of View, That is Opportunity Defined.
And That Defines This Surreal Presidential Election.
by The Old Hippie, Because Knowledge Is Its Own Freedom

Just a few items to stimulate the sound-bite abused cells of our political minds.  Interviews, videos, Opinions, Articles, and animations that I have been able to discover during my travels inside what

Bush referred to as the "internets."  I've endeavored to avoid the overly intellectualized, and unfairly biased items as best as I could.  That is not to say that some of the items are not obviously biased, but I hope biased toward reality, and not political propaganda. I've also attempted to include items that are interesting, important, and have an unexpected "eye-opening" perspective.  Especially during this historic period of bombarding electoral bombast. These are strange times people. As Garcia said, "What a long strange trip it's been."  I sincerely hope these items help in your own research of our political reality. . .

(From Doonesbury)

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Concerning the 377-Tons of Missing Explosives
by (KSTP) 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS (an Embedded ABC affiliate in Minnesota)

Maybe you should read and view this news broadcast concerning this story.  They were there - April 18, 2003 - After the invasion.  Click on the "Video" link at the top to watch their broadcast.

Link To This Story & Video Here

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The Road to Abu Ghraib
by Phillip Carter, Washington Monthly, November 2004 Issue

A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq.  On that date, "CBS News" broadcast the first ugly photographs of abuses by American soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.

Link To This Bit Of Reality

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Promises to Keep
by William Rivers Pitt, truthout | Perspective, Oct. 27, 2004.

The Presidential election of 2004 is finally upon us.  After a thousand days of fear, doubt, anger and set-jawed patriotism in the face of everything we as a nation have been forced to deal with, we are down to a single week in which to consider our place and position, a single week to decide where we go from here, a single week to remember where we have been.

Link To This Excellent Perspective Editorial

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Eminem's "Mosh" Music Video
by Eminem

Not my style of music, but for those that it is, the message is not trivial - And they do hear it.

"In the video, Eminem leads a mob fired up and politicized by four years of outrage and anger at the Bush administration.  Clad in black hoodies, fists raised, the angry young men and women descend on a state building... to vote."
-- From an article by Alternet.org concerning this video.

Link To RealPlayer or Windows Media Versions of The Video

Link To Quicktime Version of The Video

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I Want to Shout
by David Corn, Alternet.org, Oct. 27, 2004

All in one setting: the victims of George Bush and Bush's lieutenants – there to discuss calmly and reasonably the war in Iraq and the upcoming U.S. election.  I wanted to scream.

Link To This Real Eye-Opening Article

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Ugly, Tasteless, Terrifying and Wild... Count Me In!
by Hunter S. Thompson, Independent/UK, Oct. 28, 2004

He's been America's most unorthodox political commentator for more than 30 years.  But for Dr. Hunter S. Thompson the Bush presidency is evil beyond belief - and judgment is nigh. . .

Link To Classical Gonzo Piece

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Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
by Glenn Scherer, Grist Magazine, Oct. 27, 2004

James Watt let the cat out of the bag when he said that when the last tree falls, Christ will return.
Tom DeLay sees the war between America and Iraq as the gateway to the Apocalypse.  James Inhofe suppresses climate science, takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from big oil, and says he trusts God with his legislative goals.  These folks are cutting a path for Armageddon—and they may just get what they want.

Link To This Scary Reality

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The Politics Of Piety
by Amy Sullivan, Sojourners Magazine, Nov. 2004 Issue

While their agenda may be Armageddon, the right covers itself in a cloak of piety to look respectable.  In a battle for the church-going suburbs, Dems have turned to Christian social teaching as a counterweight.  The two parties have thus entered a great theological debate, weakening the separation of church and state our founders so prized.

Link To This Surreal Reality

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Six Days To Go. . .

Perspective "Should Reads" That Provoke Critical Thinking
by The Old Hippie, Because Knowledge Is Its Own Freedom

Just a few items to stimulate the sound-bite abused cells of our political minds.  Interviews, videos, Opinions, Articles, and animations that I have been able to discover during my travels inside what

(Doonesbury)

Bush referred to as the "internets."  None of these items are of the sound-bite type, and I have also endeavored to avoid the overly intellectualized, and unfairly biased items as best as I could.  That is not to say that some of the items are not obviously biased, but I hope biased toward reality, and not political propaganda. I have also attempted to include such items that are interesting, important, and have an unexpected eye-opening perspective quality - Especially during this historic period of bombarding bombast. These are strange times people, and determining reality within the corporate media of America today is not easy.  I sincerely hope these items help. . .

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Seymour Hersh: Man On Fire
by Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet, Oct. 27, 2004.

In an astonishingly candid and far-ranging interview, the journalist who exposed major stories from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib scandal, proves that his voice is every bit as powerful as his pen.

Link To This Excellent Interview Here

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Recess Appointment?
by Amy Sullivan, Washington Monthly, Oct. 16, 2004.

....Just when you thought the various post-election legal nightmare scenarios couldn't get worse. U.S. News & World Report is emailing around some reporting that indicates the Bush White House may be considering a recess appointment (requiring no Senate approval, remember) to replace Chief Justice Rehnquist if he steps down for health reasons:

Link To This Bit Of Reality

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Frank Luntz
by Bill Berkowitz, MediaTransparency.org, Oct. 11, 2004.

Some call it spinning, some call it massaging the message, some have even dubbed it LuntzSpeak, but none dare call what Frank Luntz has been peddling the truth. . .

Link To The Reality Of Who This Man Is

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Animations & Videos Galore
by Eric Blumrich, bushflash.com

Some are incredible, some just excellent, some are blatantly silly, and some blatantly biased.
But well worth the viewing.  Enjoy.

Link To A Lot Of Animations & Videos

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Behind Closed Doors
by Jeremy Leaming & Rob Boston, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Who Is The Council For National Policy And What Are They Up To?
And Why Don’t They Want You To Know?

Link To This Real Eye-Opening Article

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One Week To Go. . .

Gilded Theocratic Corporate Empire -or- Constitutional Democracy?
by The Old Hippie, Seeking The Reality-Based Perceptions of Reality

This historic election is about nothing less.  All of the references to, justifications for, allegories, metaphors, similes, and reasonings concerning this current administration's direction toward, and similarity to past histories of nationalistic, fascist, imperial, "gilded robber-baron," and/or radical theocratic corporate empires have been exposed in detail - for all to see, watch, read, understand and absorb - Yet, it seems that at least 1/2 of us Americans actually want this "new" America, or at least seem to - believe - that this obvious theocratic corporate empire would be better than our 228 year old constitutional democracy.

If you believe it is about anything less - You have been living under a rock.

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Purposeful destruction of the Separation of Church and State.

Collisional cooperative corporate state controlled consolidated media.

Obvious purposeful destruction of the financial security of the middle class.

Tax cuts for the $200,000+ citizens - During a war.

Corporate privatization of as much of our government/society as possible.

"Free-Speech Zones"

"Loyalty Oaths" to see public speeches by the president.

Open corporate-favored dismantling of over 50 years of environmental progress.

The complete and total loss of "respect" from even our allies.

A military budget that exceeds the total of all other nations combined.

Clear suppression and demonization of any dissent by the people.

Incredible tax-code-law changes favoring corporations over the nation's needs.

Job security, and poverty levels, at their worst since the Great Depression.

The largest federal deficit in our nation's history.

The only first-world nation without health care for all of its citizens.

Over 45-million without any health care at all.

Families earning less than $100,000/yr. with sub-standard health insurance.

Public schools turned into "drill & test" without any critical-thinking teaching.

A nationalistic and iron-fisted-theocratic one-party ruled government - America.

Private Corporations now control state voter lists and voting machines.

We, the people, have no right to "know" their software.

A war of, not last-resort, not liberation, but a war of aggression and occupation.

A war of historic profits to corrupt corporate "friends," and for no other reason.

Every single "stated justification" for the war proven a lie, a "mistake," whatever.

The sanity of national science reality marginalized by insane Evangelical ideology.

Corporate elite earning more than 500 times what their workers earn.

Real and ongoing attempts to do away with the 8-hour work day.

Real and ongoing attempts to do away with the 40-hour work week.

Real and ongoing attempts to do away with the overtime pay.

American workers work more hours, with less time off, than any other 1st or 2nd world nation.

Corporations that pollute no longer having to pay into the "Superfund" clean up costs.

Military-Industrial corporations being "exempted" from any environmental regulations.

America is the only nation not to support the Kyoto Protocol.

Now only 8% of American workers have union protections from corporate abuses.

The rest now have "Wal-Mart" job benefits, and it is getting worse.

American workers by the thousands, forced to train their replacements, then laid off.

Prescription drugs, that come from the exact same factories, in the exact same containers,
can't be bought from another country, not for "safety," but because it loses profits.

This is the "new" America - It is not the America I want.

Seven days to go people. . .

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Must Reads for Oct. 25, 2004

The Old Hip's Must Reads
by The Old Hippie, Important Reads, For The Knowledge

A listing of recent, and current, articles of importance, and interest beyond "just politics."  News, information, and informed opinion with a reality-based perspective. All of which were selected for the over-all impact of the information/opinion each present - and the fact that they are damn hard to find in the American corporate media, if at all, and when found there, they're usually buried, or twisted by the wants of political theater and profit, over the needs of the public interest. All selections are clearly linked to their sources. I have strived to make sure all of the selections are fair, balanced, and reality-based.  Not the biased partisan propaganda pretending to be news, which has reached such a level as to be a real danger to the continuing existence of our democracy. Enjoy. . .

(by The Propaganda Remix Project)

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The George W. Bush Hynosis File
by Russell M. Drake, Alternative Press Review, Oct. 24, 2004

"Among modern era statesmen, only Adolf Hitler comes close to George W. Bush’s skill level as operator of the public consciousness.

Consider: After three years of terror and death at the hands of a terrorist band run by two guys hiding in caves, after a bloody, failed invasion of the wrong country in search of who knows what, after a jobs market crash matched only by the Herbert Hoover Administration, and after misman-
aging huge national budget surpluses into over-the-cliff national deficits – all supported by the most outlandish lies – Bush still holds a firm grip on the minds of more than half of the people who say they’re going to vote.

The hypnosis has been so effective that it has enabled Bush to survive repeated blunders that might well have led to another man’s impeachment and removal from office, even by members
of his own party."

Full Article Link

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Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
From the Freedom of Information Action Faction

The Full Movie - Download - Free - Legal - QuickTime Format

"IT'S A MOVIE MUCH LIKE ITS SUBJECT:
passionate but deliberate, avoiding sensation but
DETERMINED TO TELL THE FULL, TRUE STORY."
--Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

Full Movie Download Site Link

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Beyond the Call of Duty
by Adam Zagorin & Timothy J. Burger, Time Magazine, Oct. 24, 2004

"In February 2003, less than a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Bunnatine (Bunny) Green-
house walked into a Pentagon meeting and with a quiet comment started what could be the end
of her career.  On the agenda was the awarding of an up to $7 billion deal to a subsidiary of Houston-based conglomerate Halliburton to restore Iraq's oil facilities.  On hand were senior officials from the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and aides to retired Lt. General Jay Garner, who would soon become the first U.S. administrator in Iraq.

Then several representatives from Halliburton entered. Greenhouse, a top contracting specialist for the Army Corps of Engineers, grew increasingly concerned that they were privy to internal discussions of the contract's terms, so she whispered to the presiding general, insisting that he
ask the Halliburton employees to leave the room."

Full Article Link

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Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
by Andrew Gumbel, Independent/UK, Oct. 24, 2004

"No need to wonder if this year's US presidential election is headed for another meltdown: the meltdown has already started. The voting machines have already begun to break down, accu-
sations of systematic voter suppression and fraud are rampant, and lawyers fully armed and
ready with an intimate knowledge of the nation's byzantine election laws have flocked to court
to cry foul in half a dozen states."

Full Article Link

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US Rejects World Calls to Join Russia in Ratifying Kyoto Pact
by Agence France Presse, Oct. 23, 2004

WASHINGTON - The United States, flying in the face of snowballing world opinion, said it would not follow Russia's lead and ratify the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

"We have no intention of signing or ratifying it. We have not changed our views," a defiant
deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said after the European Union and environ-
mentalists across the globe hailed Moscow's decision and urged Washington to follow suit.

Full Article Link

[ Note: A strong majority of Bush supporters believe, for example that the president supports
a range of international treaties and institutions that the White House has vocally and publicly opposed.  source link ]

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Loyal Opposition Republicans. . .

In The American Conservative Magazine Comes Out Against Bush!
By Scott McConnell, The American Conservative, Nov. 8, 2004 Issue

In their article, "Kerry’s the One," they do not endorse Kerry, but they are definitely, and openly endorsing that Bush not be re-elected.  These are real Republicans speaking with a rational, and

(from The American Conservative)

sane, understanding of reality.  They are true "loyal-opposition" Americans speaking to the true American Republican base, not the dangerously zealot neo-cons and dangerously insane radical Evangelicals, that currently are running, and ruining, our govern- ment, that opportunistically call themselves "Republicans." This is The American Conservative Magazine, not the "liberal media," not left-wing, nor even left-of-center connected in the slightest way. (One of its three editors is Pat Buchanan!) To you Bush supporters out there who are still in denial of the fact that your support of this Bush administration is the real danger to our American Democracy, and not the terrorists. . . I strongly suggest that you read the words of true conservative Republicans, and maybe, just maybe, you will finally begin to see the reality around you. . .

Kerry’s The One
By Scott McConnell, The American Conservative, Nov. 8, 2004 Issue

There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to conservatives.  The flip-flopper charge—the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry—seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up.  (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.)  But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage.  In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.

But this election is not about John Kerry.  If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term.  He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress.  Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq.  He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.

It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush.  To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century.  Because he is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become the Left’s perfect foil—its dream candidate.  The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets.  Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations.  The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy.  Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal—Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it—and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world.  Of course there has always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “anti-imperialist” cause that came along.  In South America, defiance of “the Yanqui” always draws a crowd.  But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them.  In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals.  Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office.  The poll numbers are shocking.  In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace.  In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States.  It’s the same throughout the Middle East.

Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened.  It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe.  If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods?  It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before.  It is not something that “good” countries do.  It is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security.

These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire.  More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces.  The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists—indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge.  Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation.  Making yourself into the world’s most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.

I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein.  Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy.  So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?

The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory.  Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency—and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.

But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders.  The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ.  These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency—and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term.  With Colin Powell’s departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.

If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward.  But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.  A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong.  And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past—and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.

George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism.  His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies—a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft.  His immigration policies—temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election—are just as extreme.  A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.

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Wake The Fuck Up! (#2)

To Those Americans Still In Denial. . .
by The Old Hippie, Because It's Driving Me Crazy.

What More Will It Take To Prove It To You?

Every single "bad thing" happening within our national body politic, points directly to dangerously radical insane born-again Evangelicals, and dangerously radical Neo-Con zealots, that refer to themselves as "Republicans," (Whom are in reality not the true loyal-opposition Republicans at all.)  Every single one.  Here's the list, research any of them yourself, if you are still in denial about any of them I list here. . .

 1.  Every single reported, and/or alleged "dirty trick" to suppress voters, all across the
      nation, points directly to the them.

 2.  Every single "bad for the environment, good for business" law change, or regulatory
      change, points directly to them.

 3.  Every single "wedge issue" created, to divert your attention from the issues of true
      importance, almost all of which are religiously, and ideologically based creations, with
      opportunistic neo-con corporatist supported propaganda, (i.e. Gay marriage, abortion,
      faith-based government policy changes in social programs, education, the integrity of
      governmental science programs and science education, etc.,) points directly to them.

 4.  Every single "reason and/or justification" for this war in Iraq, that has been definitively
      proven to be a lie - misrepresentation - mistake, points directly to them.

 5.  Every single bad and/or wrong economic decision, economic law change, economic
      tax code change, that has taken our federal treasury from a record surplus, to a record
      deficit, and every single piece of propaganda reporting that this is a good thing for our
      American economy, points directly to them.

 6.  Every single suppression of civil rights, freedom of speech, the creation of the so-called
      "free-speech-zones," suppression of the Freedom of Information Act, the creation of
      the Patriot Acts, having to sign "loyalty oaths" to be able to attend a public speech by
      the president, the invasion of private medical records, forcing librarians et al to expose
      private individuals records - to government agents without any notice - without court
      review - without checks and balances on the abuse of those records, not to mention
      the secret infiltration of social and political and labor groups without a court reviewed
      "just cause," all of it - points directly to them.

 7.  Every single suppression and/or decrease of benefits, and income, to the troops, and
      their families, plus the proven inability and/or outright refusal to give them the supplies
      and protection they need, and are dieing from because of these decisions, and let's not
      forget the corporate privatization of the feeding and housing them in the field, proven to
      be an economic boon for the corporations, (i.e. Halliburton, et al,) but a disaster for the
      troops themselves, to the point that families back home are having to "supply" them,
      again points directly to them.

This is just a partial list - You whom are in denial, like those of us whom are more able to grasp, and deal with the reality, know that it - and much more is true.  Your denial is a real and present danger to our way of life, to our democracy.  Your denial, and the manufactured ill-place fears you have, are much more dangerous to our nation than any conceived, or even any real threat from the "terrorists" out there.  So. . .

Please - Wake the fuck up - Before it is too late for us all.

"President who had 9-11 happen on his watch warns against electing Kerry
because something like 9-11 might happen on Kerry's watch."
-- From: P.O.A.C.

Think about it.

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What Reality-Based People Face -

The World According To A Bush Voter. . .
by Jim Lobe, AlterNet - October 21, 2004.

Note #1:  All red emphasis are mine, not the author's.
Note #2:  All red words in brackets, [...], are mine, not the author's.

A new survey reveals that Bush supporters choose to keep faith in their leader than face reality.

Do the supporters of President Bush really know their man or the policies of his administration?

Three out of 4 self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them.  Ac-
cording to a new survey published Thursday, the same number also believes that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein provided "substantial support" to al Qaeda.  [ 74%! ]

But here is the truly astonishing part: as many or more Bush supporters hold those beliefs today than they did several months ago.  In other words, more people believe the claims today –--
after the publication of a series of well-publicized official government reports that debunked
both notions.

These are among the most striking findings of a survey conducted in mid-October by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm.

The survey polled the views of nearly 900 randomly chosen respondents equally divided between Bush supporters and those intending to vote for Democratic Sen. John Kerry.  It found a yawning gap in the perceptions of the facts between the two groups, particularly with regards to President Bush's claims about pre-war Iraq.

According to the accompanying analysis offered by PIPA:

      It is normal during elections for supporters of presidential candidates to
      have fundamental disagreements about values or strategies.  The current
      election is unique in that Bush supporters and Kerry supporters have pro-
      foundly different perceptions of reality.  In the face of a stream of high-
      level assessments about pre-war Iraq, Bush supporters cling to the refuted
      beliefs that Iraq had WMD or supported al Qaeda.

The survey probed each respondent's views at three separate levels: One, their personal belief about the two issues; two, their perception of what "most experts" had concluded about the same; and three, their knowledge of the Bush administration's claims on either WMDs or al Qaeda.

The survey found that 72 percent of Bush supporters believe either that Iraq had actual WMD (47 percent) or a major program for producing them (25 percent).  This despite the widespread media coverage in early October of the CIA's "Duelfer Report" – the final word on the subject
by the one billion dollar, 15-month investigation by the Iraq Survey Group – which concluded that Hussein had dismantled all of his WMD programmes shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and never tried to reconstitute them.

Nonetheless, 56 percent of Bush supporters are under the impression that the expert consensus
is exactly the opposite – that Iraq had actual WMD.  Another 57 percent think that the Duelfer Report itself concluded that Iraq either had WMD (19 percent) or a major WMD program (38 percent).

Only 26 percent of Kerry supporters, by contrast, believe that pre-war Iraq had either actual WMD or a WMD program, and only 18 percent said "most experts" agreed on the same.
[ That is 1/4 of even Kerry's supporters!  With Bush's 75% - That is 1/2 of all voters! ]

Results on Hussein's alleged support for al Qaeda are similar.  The contention – which has been most persistently asserted by Vice President Dick Cheney – was thoroughly debunked by the final report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission earlier this summer.

Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters said they believed that Iraq was providing "substantial" support to al Qaeda, with 20 percent asserting that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.  Sixty-three percent of Bush supporters even believe that clear evidence of such support has actually been found, and 60 percent believe that "most experts" have reached the same conclusion.

By contrast, only 30 percent of Kerry supporters said they believe that such a link existed or that most experts have concluded that it did.  [ Again, both together add up to about 1/2 of all voters! ]

Ironically, the only issue on which the survey found broad agreement between the two sets of voters was the role of the Bush administration in actively promoting the claims about Iraq's WMD and connections to al Qaeda.

"One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these (erroneous) beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them," notes Steven Kull, PIPA's director.  "Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree."

In regard to WMD, those majorities have actually grown since last summer, according to PIPA.

On WMD, 82 percent of Bush supporters and 84 percent of Kerry supporters believe that the ad-
ministration claims that Iraq either had WMD or major WMD programs.  On ties with al Qaeda, 75 percent of Bush supporters and 74 percent of Kerry supporters believe that the administration claims that Iraq provided substantial support to the terrorist group.

Remarkably, when asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war without evidence of a WMD program or support to al Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said no.  Moreover, 61 percent said they assumed that Bush would also not have gone to war under those circumstances.  [ ! ]

"To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assump-
tions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress aware-
ness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq," Kull says.

He added that this "cognitive dissonance" could also help explain other remarkable findings in the survey.  The poll also found a major gap between Bush's stated positions on a number of inter-
national issues and what his supporters believe Bush's position to be.  A strong majority of Bush supporters believe, for example that the president supports a range of international treaties and institutions that the White House has vocally and publicly opposed.

In particular, majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assume that he supports multilateral ap-
proaches to various international issues, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (69 percent), the land mine treaty (72 percent), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (51 percent).

In August, two-thirds of Bush supporters also believed that Bush supported the International Criminal Court (ICC).  Although that figure dropped to a 53 percent majority in the PIPA poll,
it's not much of a drop considering that Bush explicitly denounced the ICC in the first, most
widely watched presidential debate in late September.

In all of these cases, majorities of Bush supporters said they favored the positions that they im-
puted, incorrectly, to Bush.  Large majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand, showed
they knew both their candidate's and Bush's positions on the same issues.

Bush supporters also have deeply erroneous views regarding the extent of international support for the president and his policies.  Despite a steady flow over the past year of official statements by foreign governments and public-opinion polls showing strong opposition to the Iraq war, less than one-third of Bush supporters believe that most people in foreign countries oppose the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.  Two-thirds believe that foreign views are either evenly divided on the war (42 percent) or that the majority of foreigners actually favors the war (26 percent).

Three of every four Kerry supporters, on the other hand, said it was their understanding that the most of the rest of the world oppose the war.

Similarly, polls conducted during the summer in 35 major countries around the world found that majorities or pluralities in 30 of them favored Kerry for president over Bush by an average of margin of greater than two to one.  Yet 57 percent of Bush supporters believe that a majority
of people outside the U.S. favor Bush's re-election, while 33 percent think that foreign opinion
is evenly divided.

On the other hand, two-thirds of Kerry supporters think that their candidate is favored overseas; only one percent think that most people abroad preferred Bush.

Kull, who has been analyzing U.S. public opinion on foreign-policy issues for two decades, says that this reality gap reveals, if anything, the hold that the president has over his loyalists:

      The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information very likely lie in
      the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leader-
      ship that President Bush showed in its immediate wake.  This appears to have
      created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters – and an idealized
      image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that
      he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opin-
      ion would be critical of his policies or that the president could hold foreign pol-
      icy positions that are at odds with his supporters.

In other words, Bush supporters choose to keep faith in their leader than face the truth either about their president or the world as it is.

Jim Lobe writes on international affairs for Inter Press Service, Oneworld.net, Foreign Policy in Focus and AlterNet.org.

[ Now - Think about the following. . . ]

By Russell M. Drake, Alternative Press Review

"Call him hypnotist-in-chief. He earned it.

Among modern era statesmen, only Adolf Hitler comes close to George W. Bush's skill level as operator of the public consciousness.

Consider: After three years of terror and death at the hands of a terrorist band run by two guys hiding in caves, after a bloody, failed invasion of the wrong country in search of who knows what, after a jobs market crash matched only by the Herbert Hoover Administration, and after misman-
aging huge national budget surpluses into over-the-cliff national deficits - all supported by the most outlandish lies - Bush still holds a firm grip on the minds of more than half of the people who say they're going to vote.

The hypnosis has been so effective that it has enabled Bush to survive repeated blunders that might well have led to another man's impeachment and removal from office, even by members of his own party."

Full Link To This Article Here

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This Kind of Covers It. . .

Where Humans Got Their Sense of Humor.


(Editorial Cartoon by Tony Auth)

Pat Robertson, (who swears God speaks to him,) and
George W. Bush, (who swears God speaks to him,)
[there is a lot of cross-over between the two's supporters]
are saying two completely opposite things.  Is God a flip-flopper?
Nope... Pat Robertson is a liar!  (According to Cheney and the White House.)

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From: Bob Harris. . .

Senate Armed Services Staff Report:
Feith Named (Again) In The Saddam/Al-Qaeda Lies
as read by Bob Harris - Oct. 21, 2004

"The record is clearer every day.  The Bushies didn't misunderstand.  They weren't misinformed.
They lied.  And all the claims saying anything else... are just more lies."

Tomorrow's NYT [names inserted for clarity]:

A Democratic U.S. Senator [Carl Levin, D-MI] on Thursday accused a senior Pentagon official [Doug Feith] of distorting intelligence information to back claims of links between Iraq and al Qaeda in the run-up to last year's U.S.-led invasion...

The 46-page report argued that Pentagon assertions of a link between al Qaeda and Iraq's President Saddam Hussein were not supported by intelligence reports on which they were purportedly based.

To refresh your memory, Doug Feith ran the Rumsfeld pet invention (not a traditional Pentagon agency, but a new office, imposed on the existing intelligence structure), the "Office of Special Plans."  This is the dishonest rationalize-the-invasion lie factory that Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski sacrificed her whole career to blow the whistle on.

It looks like now they've documented Feith saying his bullshit had been vetted by the CIA, when it wasn't.

Naturally, the Republicans on the committee have done their best to cover up and spin the report.

The record is clearer every day.  The Bushies didn't misunderstand.  They weren't misinformed.
They lied.  And all the claims saying anything else... are just more lies.

The IHT has a longer, more-detailed story on the same material (credited to the NYT but oddly not on their site) here.

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Do Not Miss This Interview Of. . .

Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!
with Amy Goodman - Oct. 21, 2004

"There are serious problems here.  One problem is almost a total disillusion, disappearance of
the basis for a democratic society.  I mean, if we compare, say, this election with elections in,

(by Democracy Now!)

say, the second biggest country in the hemisphere, Brazil.  We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.  They have actual elections where there are issues and where they can elect some mass popular organizations. They can elect, as presidents, one from their own ranks, a man whose background is a peasant, steelworker, union organizer, no higher edu- cation, very impressive figure.  Against far higher barriers than exist here.  I mean, here, we have a thing called an election, which is a choice between two men, both born to great wealth and political influ- ence, and went to the same fancy private schools, same elite univer- sity, joined the same secret society where you train people to be mem- bers of the ruling class.  They can run because they're funded by pretty

much the same concentrations for private power.  Both understand that the election is supposed to keep away from issues."

Full access to the video and transcript of the interview. . .  Linked Here

Full Transcript Reproduced From The Original At The Democracy Now! Web Site:

AMY GOODMAN:  Last week I went to Cambridge to speak with Professor Noam Chomsky.
I went to his offices at the Massachusetts institute of technology.

NOAM CHOMSKY:  There are serious problems here.  One problem is almost a total disillusion, disappearance of the basis for a democratic society.  I mean, if we compare, say, this election with elections in, say, the second biggest country in the hemisphere, Brazil.  We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.  They have actual elections where there are issues and where they can elect some mass popular organizations.  They can elect, as presidents, one from their own ranks, a man whose background is a peasant, steelworker, union organizer, no higher education, very impressive figure.  Against far higher barriers than exist here.  I mean, here, we have a thing called an election, which is a choice between two men, both born to great wealth and political influence, and went to the same fancy private schools, same elite university, joined the same secret society where you train people to be members of the ruling class.  They can run because they're funded by pretty much the same concentrations for private power.  Both understand that the election is supposed to keep away from issues.  That's -- they are run by the PR industry, and in a way designed to keep the public out of it.  They focus on what they call qualities.  He - Is he a leader, a nice guy?  Does he sigh, that kind of a thing.  That's what the campaign is.  Very few people know where they stand.  In fact, there was a Gallup poll about a week ago where voters were asked why they're voting for Bush or Kerry.  I thought it was quite striking.  I mean, one of the choices of the many choices was their stand on the issues.  You know, their agenda, policies.
It was around 10%.  If you had asked the people, they wouldn't have known.  That's the way it's supposed to be.  This is a symbol of something extremely serious.  In fact, on issue after issue -- this is a very well polled country.  We know a lot of about people's attitudes and opinions.
They're mostly off the agenda.  They are not discussed; they are radically different from the elite consensus.  They just don't enter into the political system.  That's a major problem.  The attitude is not bad.  There's lots of -- also alongside of this, there's a very high level of activism, maybe higher than ever.  It's disorganized.  It's the way this country is, everything is broken up, disorganized, nobody knows what's happening on the other side of town.  But there’s plenty going on, way more than in the past.

AMY GOODMAN:  Yet you say these two candidates represent very little that is different from each other.

NOAM CHOMSKY:  The population has been very carefully excluded from the political arena, and the general culture, the general dominant culture.  That's not by accident.  An enormous amount of work went into this.  Elites were terrified by the sixties, this outbust of popular participation in democracy and so on.  And there's a huge counter campaign to drive it back.  It shows up in all kinds of ways.  From what's called neo-liberalism -- opening up the financial system to freeing financial flows which is well understood as a weapon against allowing governments to make choices, a weapon against democracy.  From that, to the huge explosion of the lobbyists in Washington, to the right wing think tanks.  Everything you can think of, across the board, has been an effort to drive that danger of democracy back into the hole where it belongs.

AMY GOODMAN:  Yet the person who points that out, Ralph Nader, you and Howard Zinn, and others, to many people's surprise signed a letter and said “Don’t vote for him.”

NOAM CHOMSKY:  We didn’t say that.  Actually I’m a little surprised by the surprise.  I took exactly the position I took in 2000, namely, the election is a marginal affair, it should not distract us from the serious work of changing the society, and the culture and the institutions, creating a democratic culture.  That’s what you work on.  You can’t ignore the election.  It’s there.  But it’s designed as a method of essentially marginalizing the population.  There’s a huge propaganda campaign to get people to focus on these personalized extravaganzas, and make them think ‘That’s politics.” Well, it isn’t.  That’s a marginal part of politics, and here, a very marginal part.
So the main thing is keep on with your work.  You can’t ignore it.  You should spend five minutes, maybe, thinking about what you should do.  In that five minute, you should recognize there is some difference between the two groups contending for power, and one of them happens to be really extremist, and very dangerous, and it's already caused plenty of trouble and could cause plenty more.  The other is bad, but less extremist and less dangerous.  So in that five minutes that you devote to the topic, you should come to the rational conclusion, if it's a swing state, keep the worst guys out.  If it's another state, do what you feel like.  It’s the same thing I said in 2000 during the five minutes of time I spent on it.

AMY GOODMAN:  Ralph Nader said at least a demand should have been attached to this.

NOAM CHOMSKY:  To what?  To who?  A demand to who?  I mean, I don't address George Bush.  I don't make demands of him.  Donald Rumsfeld is not my audience.  I don't talk to Sandy Berger.

AMY GOODMAN:  To John Kerry, if you were throwing your support –

NOAM CHOMSKY:  I don’t talk to John Kerry.  I mean, he is not my audience, or your audience, or our audience.  We can't make demands on them.  Some people can, like Pat Robertson recently said that unless they take an even more extreme position supporting the Israeli expansion, he will set up a third party -- that's a real threat.  He could draw tens of millions of evangelical Christians out of the Republican Party.  Okay.  He could make a demand.  So, they’ll say thank you, throw him a little red meat, and then go on doing what they were doing.  But we don't have that constituency.  We can't make demands.  I mean, the demands -- this is meaningless.  It's a misunderstanding of the way politics works.  We should create a situation in which popular organizations will be able to make demands.  Not me, not you.  But popular organizations.  They’ll be able to make demands and press them.  That's what we should be working on.  Not pretending we're talking to John Kerry.  We're not.

AMY GOODMAN:  What is the extremism that you think George Bush represents?

NOAM CHOMSKY:  They happen to be a both domestically and internationally a very extremist group of radical reactionary nationalists.  I mean, domestically, they are very publicly committed to dismantling and destroying whatever there is of progressive legislation and social welfare, and so on, the achievements have been won, and they're not zero, by popular struggles over the past century.  They want to get rid of them, and they virtually say so.  It’s not a secret.
Internationally, they are calling for dominating the world by military force.  Some of the things that are less talked about are more dangerous.  They're carrying out what’s called transformation of the military forces, vast escalation of offensive military power.  The militarization of space is a major part of it.  These are designed explicitly the give the US -- them, that means -- the power to attack and destroy any part of the world without warning, unannounced.  Now, maybe they don't talk about it here, but they do elsewhere.  That has led predictably to a vast increase, maybe a tripling of Russian offensive military capacity, with new missile systems aimed at the United States, put on automated control which is like asking for disaster to happen.  China, which has so far been reluctant to respond, is now responding by working to develop its own high-tech offensive military capacity.  They haven't had one.  They’ve just tripled the number of missiles, and they’re going to go on.  It increases the threat of terror.  These are all extreme, these are dangers to survival.  These are not jokes.  Now, they didn't invent the policies.  Like Clinton was also preventing the UN Disarmament Commission from functioning by insisting that the US would move towards militarizing space.  This is a sharp escalation.  Those differences matter.  They matter all over the place.  You can say that the positions are similar and based on the same principles, and then I have written about it, I spent a long time writing about it, it's true.  Basic principles and institutions go way back, but that doesn't mean there aren't differences.  The differences can have a huge effect.

AMY GOODMAN:  Most important ones?

NOAM CHOMSKY:  Domestically it may institutionalize the destruction of the progressive achievements of struggles of the past century, which is not a small thing.  Once its institutionalized, it's hard to reconstruct.  Internationally, they may blow up the world.  Maybe they won't, but they will get other people to do it in reaction.

AMY GOODMAN:  The resolution to Iraq right now?

NOAM CHOMSKY:  Well, you know, the resolution to Iraq is to quickly do -- in fact it's to do what the majority of the American population wants.  For about a year, the majority of the population has felt that the UN ought to take the lead, not the United States, in security issue, and in economic reconstruction, and transition to whatever political system will happen.  And that the UN should join as part of whatever is decided by the international community, and the Iraqis.
Now that makes sense.  That would mean publicly and explicitly abandoning every single war aim, including permanent military bases in Iraq, economic programs which turn Iraq into a paradise for US investors, formal democratic system which is going to be a fiction.  Abandoning all of that going much further into other global policies and doing what an occupying army ought to do, figure out how to get out as soon as the people tell you to get out.

AMY GOODMAN:  Do you think that the Israel-Palestine conflict is fueling a lot of this?

NOAM CHOMSKY:  It’s undoubtedly fueling, as it has for years, the anger and the fear of the United States throughout the world, and in particular, in the Muslim countries, and it's creating a reservoir for bin Laden.  Actually, you can read it even in the tepid words of the 9/11 Commission.  They say that bin Laden gains an audience from US actions in Iraq, Israel-Palestine, and support of repressive regimes.  We’ve known that, anybody who’s had their eyes open knew that for decades.  It's nice that they said it, but that's the core of the problem of what we call terrorism, the terrorism, the bad guys.  As long as they have an audience and we help bin laden and others mobilize it, it's going to increase the threat of terror, just as the war in Iraq did, predictably.

AMY GOODMAN:  So what do you think needs to happen with Israel and Palestine?

NOAM CHOMSKY:  Israel and Palestine?  The US should join the overwhelming international consensus, which it’s been blocking for 30 years, and tell Israel it’s got to get out of the territories.
There has to be a settlement on the international border, some adjustment this and that way.  And then, I would hope, go on from there, if the cycle of violence gets reduced, to closer to closer integration, but that's in the longer term.  That's a first step, it's feasible, and the majority of the American population is in favor of it and has been for a long time.  There's almost no opposition to it in the world outside of the US and Israel.  And yeah, it could be done.  It's not perfect, it's not wonderful.  There are plans on the table which come close, and could be fixed.  What's blocking them is our refusal to do it, not the population again.  The voice of the population is out of this discussion.  You know what percentage of the American population thinks we should lean towards support of Israel, instead of taking a neutral position?  The latest polls about a week ago, 17%.  Now, a majority of the population thinks that we ought to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, and we should deny aid to either one that refuses negotiations, which would entail denying it to Israel.  That's the majority of the population.  Those results are so unacceptable, the press won't report them.

AMY GOODMAN:  What do you say to those who call you anti-Semitic?

NOAM CHOMSKY:  Depend who they are.  If they're people like the -- with a nice Jewish education like I had, I tell them to read the Bible, where the concept is invented.  It was used by King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible that calls the prophet Elijah -- Elijah was what we would nowadays call a dissident intellectual, like most of the prophets were, giving geo-political analysis, calling for moral behavior.  He calls for Elijah, he said why you are a hater of Israel?
What does that mean?  You are criticizing me.  I'm the king.  I'm Israel.  And therefore you're a hater of Israel.  And that's what the concept means.  If you identify the country, the people, the culture with the rulers, accept the totalitarian doctrine, then yeah, it's anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli policy, and anti-American to criticize the American policy, and it was anti-Soviet when the dissidents criticized Russian policy.  You have to accept deeply totalitarian assumptions not to laugh at this.  If an Italian criticized Berlusconi and he was called anti-Italian, the people would crack up with laughter, because there’s some kind of democratic culture.  The fact we don't crack up with ridicule, that notion is anti-American or anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, it tells us something about ourselves.

AMY GOODMAN:  Finally, what gives you hope right now, in the world as it is today?

NOAM CHOMSKY:  First of all, it doesn't matter whether I have hope or not, because you do the same things anyway.  But it's in fact better than it was.  I mean, I mentioned the Vietnam War.  There was no protest for years, and the place was practically destroyed before there was any protest.  The Iraq War was the first time in the history of the West, Europe and the United States, that there was massive protest against a war before it was officially launched.  That's a huge change.  There are many other changes.  If we had time, we could talk about them, but we all know the fact that you are doing this program, for example.  It wouldn't have happened 40 years ago or 20 years ago.

AMY GOODMAN:  Noam Chomsky, thank you very much.

NOAM CHOMSKY:  Thanks.

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New: From "This Modern World"

(From: This Modern World)

His blog is excellent also. . .  Take a visit.

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Must Reads for Oct. 21, 2004

The Old Hip's Must Reads
by The Old Hippie, Important Reads, For The Knowledge

A listing of recent, and current, articles of importance, and interest beyond "just politics."  News, information, and informed opinion with a reality-based perspective. All of which were selected for the over-all impact of the information/opinion each present - and the fact that they are damn hard to find in the American corporate media, if at all, and when found there, they're usually buried, or twisted by the wants of political theater and profit, over the needs of the public interest. All selections are clearly linked to their sources. I have strived to make sure all of the selections are fair, balanced, and reality-based.  Not the biased partisan propaganda pretending to be news, which has reached such a level as to be a real danger to the continuing existence of our democracy. Enjoy. . .

(by The Propaganda Remix Project)

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Former US Senator Marlow Cook (R-KY) says he's voting for John Kerry
'Frightened to death' of Bush

"I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican.  But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions.  I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts."

I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

First, let's talk about George Bush's moral standards."

Full Article Link

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Amphibian Obituary

"Amphibians are one of nature's best indicators of overall environmental health," said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International (CI).  "Their catastrophic decline serves
as a warning that we are in a period of significant environmental degradation."

Full Article Link

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Environmental Hogwash

But the EPA isn't ready to stanch this stench anytime soon.  According to documents obtained
by the Sierra Club through a Freedom of Information Act request, the EPA has developed a voluntary air monitoring program in close collaboration with animal-industry groups such as the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and the US Poultry and Egg Association.  (The cattle industry chose not to participate.)

Full Article Link

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Votergate

Set aside the 15 minutes you'll need to watch this compelling documentary about electronic
voting machines.  (Quicktime video)  Using interviews and demos with hackers and computer
scientists, "Votergate" presents a picture of the myriad ways machines could change the
election outcome.  And if you have the choice, make sure to choose a paper ballot on Nov. 2.

View The Film

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The Un-American Sinclair

The Sinclair Broadcasting Group is trying to influence a presidential election by airing a scurrilous smear against John Kerry.

It's that simple.

I don't really give a damn how they dress it up, it's about corporate influence and greed, intended to override a public election.  They can dress George Bush in a flight suit, but that doesn't make him a warrior pilot - just the toy soldier of corporate political corruption.

Full Article Link

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Letter: New York Comptroller Questions Sinclair

It is my understanding that this film deals with issues related to the Vietnam War and Sen. John Kerry's actions during and after that war.  The film is very controversial and, according to press reports, has been called by some "an anti-Kerry attack masquerading as a documentary."

Full Article Link

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Has Bush lost his reason?

". . .Bush now lives in a positively Nixonian cocoon.  He does not read newspapers; he sees television only to watch football; he makes election speeches exclusively at ticket-only events,
and his courtiers consciously avoid giving him bad news.  When he met John Kerry for their first
bout on the debating platform, it was almost a new experience for the President to hear the voice of dissent.  A senior Republican, experienced and wise in the ways of Washington, told me last Friday that he does not necessarily accept that Bush is unstable, but what is clear, he added, is that he is now manifestly unfit to be President."

Full Article Link

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Up In Smoke

Unless industrialized nations cut their carbon emissions drastically, the greenhouse effect could reverse human progress, says a new report by The Working Group on Climate Change and Development.

Full Report Link

Full Article Link

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Freethinkers  A History of American Secularism

At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason.

Full Book Excerpt Link

Full Book Site Link

Read the Rest of this Posting    →  Below The Fold  ←                  (Permanent Link Here)

Inside the American Bubble. . .

Aboard the good ship USS State of Denial
by Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch.com, Oct. 18, 2004


Cartoon by Bruce Plante

Sunday, October 17, 2004 - Ron Suskind in the NY Times wrote. . .

"The [senior advisor to Bush] aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."  I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.  He cut me off.  "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued.
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.  And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.  We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
-- by By Ron Suskind - The NYTimes - Oct. 17, 2004 - "Without A Doubt"

Yesterday, Monday, October 18, 2004 - Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com, the author of
the actual article this posting is concerned with, wrote. . .

"'I feel we're going to be here for years and years and years,' said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J.  ‘I don't think anything is going to get better; I think it's going to get a lot worse.  It's going to be like a Palestinian-type deal.  We're going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . .  We're always going to be here.  We're never going to leave.'" (From a member of a Marine platoon stationed in Iskandariyah, 30 miles southwest of Baghdad, whose regiment has taken almost 10% casualties, including 4 dead -- Steve Fainaru, For Marines, a Frustrating Fight, the Washington Post)

That wasn't the week that was

So we've entered the final run to the November 2 election and, remarkably enough, we're still inside the American bubble, with much of the grimmer news of Bushworld largely happening offshore of American consciousness.  On Sunday, for instance, accounts of the mistreatment of prisoners in our black hole of injustice in Guantanamo, Cuba, finally made the front page of my hometown paper, but only described as "harsh tactics" or "harsh and coercive treatment."  You had to read deep into the piece (Broad Use of Harsh Tactics Is Described at Cuba Base) to find the word "torture," and then just in a quote from a Clinton-era senior State Department human rights official.

Similarly, if you read almost to the end of a Los Angeles Times report on 28 American soldiers (a number of whom ended up with the military intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) implicated in the December 2002 torture and beating deaths of two Afghan prisoners, you found a description of American interrogation techniques in Afghanistan which, even in 2003, were said to include "repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks and prisoners being hanged upside down and…" -- here's a special bit of horrific detail -- "…having their toenails torn off."
The word "torture" was naturally never mentioned and the "spate of detainee abuse cases" in Afghanistan was, according to unnamed "Army officials" (who would want to be named saying this?), mainly attributed to a "shortage of trained intelligence officials and interrogators."  (Oh, and, by the way, that was Abu what?  Abu where?)

What are we to make of a world where reality cannot be called by its many names?  What are we to make of a world in which terrible things can be done by our representatives in our names, but we -- the American public -- are considered too fragile to have those things called what they are, or often even told to us directly on the front pages of our papers?  It's true, of course, that if you're a news junkie with time on your hands, somewhere on-line or in a news account printed someplace in this country, you'll be able to find much of what you should know about the ways in which our world is at present misfiring.  But for most Americans this is not an option and so the gap between how they see the world and how others see it (and us) is -- like that old "credibility gap" of Vietnam days -- yawning ever wider.

On Friday, for instance, the price of a barrel of crude oil hit $55 for the first time and I don't think the news made it off the business pages.  (On the TV news, the price of oil is treated like the Dow Jones Average, as just another fluctuating figure to be mentioned in passing.) Prices at the gas pump have risen more slowly in recent months than prices at the source, undoubtedly tamping down reaction to the issue here -- and that's just one of those pre-election facts that you can make of what you wish, but don't expect it to last after November second.  And oil -- ain't it strange -- wasn't even mentioned in the Presidential debates.  Oops, let me correct that, before the flood of e-letters begins.

In the first presidential debate, John Kerry said: "When you guard the oil ministry [in Baghdad], but you don't guard the nuclear facilities, the message to a lot of people is maybe, ‘Wow, maybe they're interested in our oil.'" In the second debate, Kerry said: "The president sides with the power companies, the oil companies, the drug companies" and mentioned in a phrase the need to free ourselves from Middle East oil dependency.  In the third debate John Kerry spoke of "$43 billion of [corporate] giveaways" and added parenthetically, "including favors to the oil and gas industry and the people importing ceiling fans from China."  The word "oil" never passed the President's lips.  So in four and a half hours of TV time in the presence of 50-60 million Americans, oil got perhaps 15 seconds of mention and Chinese ceiling fans perhaps 3 seconds.
Coverage of oil in our media has hardly been better.  The question is: What's wrong with this picture as a description of the world?

Oh, last week you could read in the foreign press -- the news was considered unremarkable and only modestly covered here -- that, Israel and Russia excepted, a planet-wide 10-newspaper poll showed Bush-loathing reaching new heights.  At the same time, the elder Bush's former National Security Advisor, close companion-in-arms, and co-author Brent Scowcroft excoriated young George for being "mesmerized" by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ("Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger") and characterized recent administration gestures toward the UN and NATO as "a desperate move to ‘rescue a failing venture.'" Oh yes, that was a scoop not for the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune but for the British Financial Times.

As for Iraq, as our presidential election approaches, there was the first small mutiny by a unit of American soldiers in Iraq.  (I swear the word "Vietnam" will never cross my lips.) What put it on front pages was something new in our world -- ubiquitous access to the cell phone.  Soldiers in trouble, like ET, called home.

And so that story -- of under-equipped American reservists who refused a "suicide mission" --
did make it to the top of the news here after first being printed up in the Jackson Mississippi Clarion-Ledger.  (A number of the soldiers had been based in the Jackson area.) But with American reporters largely locked in their hotels in Baghdad, the intensity of the bad news that is American-occupied Iraq -- as well as our increasing use of air power to bomb heavily populated civilian areas, certainly a war crime -- made it only intermittently to our shores.  In fact, thanks to a controversy over a private e-letter (released without permission onto the Web) in which Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi described Baghdad as a near prison for Western journalists, the first accounts by journalists of their constricted lives are finally making it into print, though only in Sunday opinion sections.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section:

     "I… had become a prisoner in my home -- the inhospitable Ishtar Sheraton Hotel --
     unable to roam a country I had grown to love, forced to call people I once used to
     visit.  My folding road map, dog-eared from repeated excursions last year, had
     grown dusty on my bookshelf.  By this summer, every road leading out of Baghdad
     had become too dangerous to travel… all had turned into ‘red routes' in the parlance
     of security specialists… The capital itself was a patchwork of red (no-go) and yellow
     (proceed with extreme caution) zones, surrounding the American-controlled Green
     zone.  Neighborhoods where I had visited Iraqi friends for lunch were now too
     insecure to enter.  And even if I was willing to chance it, my Iraqi friends didn't
     want to risk being seen allowing a foreigner into their house."

Patrick Cockburn in a piece (not available on line) in the London Review of Books recently pointed out the irony of the news lock-down in Iraq and the kidnappers who have helped to cause it:

     "The effect of the increased danger to journalists has been to give the impression,
     at least in the US, that the crisis in Iraq, while bad, is getting no worse, because
     US network television correspondents rarely leave their heavily fortified compounds.
     This is understandable, given that an American journalist stands a minimal chance
     of surviving if taken hostage.  But it also meant that during the three-week battle
     for Najaf, most American correspondents covered it as embedded journalists with
     the US army.  The kidnappers, for all their verbose anti-Americanism, ensure that
     there is less coverage of Iraq in the US media as the violence escalates, and so help
     Bush win re-election…  It is strange to sit in Baghdad watching George W. Bush's
     stump speech about freedom being on the march in Iraq despite continuing troubles.
     it is a lot worse than that.  Iyad Allawi and the interim government rule parts of
     Baghdad and some other cities.  But there could be uprisings by the Shia in Basra
     or the Sunni in Mosul at any time.  The government, probably with American
     prompting, has told the Ministry of Health to stop issuing figures for the number of
     Iraqi civilians killed and wounded every day.  The government recruits more and
     more policemen, but in much of the country they stay alive by co-operating with the
     resistance.  In Mosul province they even contribute a portion of their salary to the
     insurgents.  The resistance gets more powerful each month but it is also increasingly
     split between the nationalists and the Islamic militants."

Meanwhile, 40 American soldiers and 4 private American security men have died in Iraq in just the first half of October and many more were wounded; Baghdad's super-secure Green Zone was penetrated by two suicide bombers; two helicopters went down this weekend while in operation over Baghdad; the Iraqi census that was to have preceded the January elections was "postponed"; and some actual WMD news finally came out of the country -- though there were no screaming headlines here.  Missing-in-action, it seems, was dual-use, potentially nuclear- related equipment like milling machines and electron beam welders, stolen from Iraq's former nuclear facilities which were not locked down by the Americans after the invasion.  According to diplomats, some of the machinery was removed not by spur-of-the-moment looters but "by experts working systematically over an extended period."

No one knows where this machinery has gone, but potentially this could prove the President right (in a self-fulfilling prophesy sort of way).  Some of the equipment may already be showing up in black markets where it could indeed end up in the hands of terrorists or "rogue states" -- and all because Pentagon planners, ostensibly sending American troops into Iraq to prevent the use of, or handing off of, Iraq's supposed WMD to terrorists, neither made plans to guard well-known Iraqi nuclear facilities, nor were willing to allow International Atomic Energy Commission inspectors to return to Iraq and look after the facilities.

And then let's not forget our "wired" President last week, or was he, as in debate two, simply over-caffeinated?  Or his chief political strategist Karl Rove who found himself testifying before a grand jury in the Plame name-leak case.  Or the FBI which in London, on unknown grounds, moved against some Indymedia websites and managed to close them down temporarily.  Or how about the "thieves" who just happened to hit Democratic political headquarters in Toledo, Ohio?
Or the Republican-hired company that may have destroyed Democratic voter registration forms in Nevada, or how about… but why continue when New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has already described the dirty-tricks and voting-plots situation so much more eloquently than I ever could.

Aboard the good ship USS State of Denial

Oh, and speaking of weapons of mass destruction news, last week it turned out that, for the second year in a row, carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas par excellence, had entered the atmosphere in unprecedented quantities, baffling scientists.  While two years does not make a trend, the fear is that this may reflect our planet's increasing inability to absorb CO2 and so may
in turn heighten the possibility of runaway global warming.  Global what, you say?  You could have caught this in headlines in the British press and it was news, as it should have been, from India to Australia, just not in the United States (despite the fact that the key CO2 measurements were made in Hawaii).

In the meanwhile, Science magazine reported last week on the first global census of amphibians, which indicated that, thanks to climate change, habitat loss, and disease, about a third of the world's frog, toad, newt, and salamander species are now in some danger of extinction.  Up to 122 species seem to have disappeared since 1980 in what is already a mini-extinction cascade and another 1,800 are considered in peril.  "'What happens to amphibians now could well be a prophecy of what happens to other species, maybe even ourselves,' [a report author Simon N.] Stuart said.  ‘They serve as an early warning system.''' But hey, don't worry your brain about the potential for galloping global warming or amphibian extinction cascades.  After all, rumor has it that toads cause warts.  Certainly, the presidential and vice-presidential candidates weren't eager to clog our heads with this sort of thing.  The few minutes the presidential candidates devoted to the environment in the second presidential debate -- mostly George Bush touting himself as "a good steward of the land" -- were pathetic in the extreme and coverage of the subject in our press has been little better.

And oh yes, in the last week-plus, George Bush's case for invading Saddam Hussein's Iraq fell into a rat hole -- or was it a spider-hole -- for the umpteenth time since the early spring of 2003.
The chief US weapons inspector in Iraq and head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, Charles A. Duelfer ("Wait until Charlie gets back with the final report," the President said in June in response to journalists' questions), issued his final report on Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction.
While offering the President a mouse-hole-sized out -- Saddam would have liked to reconstitute his WMD program someday, Duelfer claimed, though to threaten Iran, not the U.S. -- he indicated not only that Saddam had no nuclear, biological, or chemical WMD, but that he hadn't had any for years, had no significant capacity to reconstitute them, had no plans on the boards to do so, and was in compliance with UN resolutions, more so than the Bush administration whose case has proved a shameful pack of canards.  (Duelfer also offered evidence that Saddam may actually have out-planned our President when it came to the post-war occupation -- not, I suppose, a terribly difficult feat.)

Deulfer's report also managed to dismantle just about every prewar statement the President, Vice-President, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice or anyone else in this administration had made about Hussein's ability to "threaten" the United States.  In the same week, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld denied that any hard evidence of an al-Qaeda-Saddam link existed; one CIA leak indicated that Saddam had never given Abu Musab al-Zarqawi "safe haven," while another made clear that the administration had indeed been informed before the war that a strong anti-American insurgency might ensue; L. Paul Bremer, the former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, gave a speech to an insurance convention in which he stated that the administration had thoroughly misplanned its troop strength in Iraq; former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix declared the world less safe thanks to the President's invasion; and the New York Times finally did a thorough investigation of the 60,000 aluminum tubes Saddam's regime had bought in 2001 and which were offered by the administration as its main proof of Saddam's desire to reconstitute his nuclear program (How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence).

The article concluded that an improbable idea, "first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A.," was picked up and run with by top administration officials, despite expert intelligence to the contrary, and that the tubes weren't intended for centrifuges in a nuclear program but for the making of small artillery rockets.  The Times editorialists then composed a lead editorial in which they found themselves shocked, shocked at the results: "It's shocking that with all this information readily available, Secretary of State Colin Powell still went before the United Nations to repeat the bogus claims, an appearance that gravely damaged his reputation."
But they didn't profess themselves shocked that this information, largely available to the Times before the war (since it was also available to people like me), hadn't lead the paper to a different position and a different kind of reporting in those pre-war months.  But oh well, that's how it goes, doesn't it?

Here's the curious thing, though: The administration's case was always extreme and absurd -- from the "mobile bio-weapons labs" that turned out to be for the inflation of artillery balloons to the nonexistent Niger "yellowcake" to the Iraqi UAVs (unmanned airborne vehicles) that our President announced Iraq could release off our coast to spray anthrax or botulinus toxins far inland (an argument that, unbelievably enough, convinced at least Senator Bill Nelson of Florida to vote for the war resolution).  The UAVs, of course, turned out to be observation planes, largely made out of Popsicle sticks; but the truth was you didn't need an intelligence agency behind you, just a modicum of intelligence, or simple commonsense, to know that this was a ludicrous idea (and I wrote exactly that before the Iraq War was launched).  After all, how were these deadly planes to get from Iraq to the East coast of the United States in order to become an imminent danger?  On tramp steamers, I suppose.

And there were people saying or writing all of this before and soon after the invasion, if only anyone of significance in the media had been willing to pay attention.  Former U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, for example, claimed at least as early as September 2002 that Saddam almost surely no longer had WMD and insisted that UN inspectors, if allowed back into the country and given time, would establish just that -- something he never stopped saying.  And let's remember that this was a man of whom Paul Wolfowitz, in Congressional testimony in 1998, had said: "It is an honor to appear as part of a hearing in which Scott Ritter testifies.  Scott Ritter is a public servant of exceptional integrity and moral courage, one of those individuals who is not afraid to speak the truth."  The American press, however, just laughed him offstage and, though he continues to write for places like the Guardian in England, he has not been rehabilitated here.

Jack Shafer of Slate repeatedly and convincingly went after many aspects of the administration's case for war (and the New York Times reporting that seemed to give it credence), including stories about those aluminum tubes and the mobile bio-weapons labs.  Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett, and Gaby Hinsliff of the British Observer began a piece in June 2003 thusly: "An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist."  The problem was -- no one here was listening to them.

Or take those notorious aluminum tubes: Physicist David Albright, a respected expert and President of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington D.C., essentially debunked the story of the tubes in a detailed account in March 2003, the month the war began, also throwing into doubt the existence of an Iraqi nuclear program.  Remarkably little has been added to his case since.  He wrote in part:

     "With such weak evidence [of a nuclear program], the administration clings to the
     aluminum tubes.  The tubes were featured in President George W. Bush's State
     of the Union address in late January and Secretary Colin Powell's Security Council
     address in early February.

     "Yet, the administration has offered few public details about its case or the tubes.
     It typically restates its views, never answering any technical criticisms of its claims.
     But publics and other governments need to know the truth, in particular the technical
     evidence underpinning the administration's conclusion.  A critical question is whether
     the Bush Administration has deliberately misled the public and other governments
     in playing a 'nuclear card' that it knew would strengthen public support for war.

     "For over a year and a half, an analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum
     tube story, despite consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in the United
     States and abroad…"

In June 2003, in a striking summary of Bush administration lies, Christopher Scheer of the Alternet.org website wrote of the tubes in particular:

     "LIE #1: ‘The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons
     program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other
     equipment neededfor gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear
     weapons.' -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

     "FACT: This story, leaked to and breathlessly reported by Judith Miller in the New
     York Times,has turned out to be complete baloney.  Department of Energy officials,
     who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium.
     One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The
     New Republic: ‘You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the
     only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges.  She said that on television.
     And that's just a lie.'"

Of course, at the time just about no one in the mainstream media was paying the slightest attention to anything that only appeared on a website on the Internet.  But you could even find examples of such reporting in the mainstream (with Albright among others was quoted) -- lone articles, hesitantly questioning the administration line and usually tucked deep away on the inside pages of papers like the Washington Post.  On February 20, 2003, for example, in a piece in which he reported that UN inspectors in Iraq had privately told him American intelligence "tips" were proving to be "garbage," CBS correspondent Mark Phillips added:

     "Example: Interviews with scientists about the aluminum tubes the U.S. says Iraq
     has imported for enriching uranium, but which the Iraqis say are for making rockets.
     Given the size and specification of the tubes, the U.N. calls the ‘Iraqi alibi air tight.'"

Or to take but one more instance, on March 17, 2003, on the eve of war, Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman wrote a public letter to the President challenging his claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking enrichable uranium ("yellowcake") from the African country of Niger for his future bomb.  Waxman, who posted the letter at his website, termed the claim a "hoax" and convincingly laid out evidence for this (months before former Ambassador Joseph Wilson would make the same point and cause a now-famous stir in a New York Times op-ed).
This letter, which I posted at Tomdispatch several days later, went singularly unattended in the mainstream press, though Waxman is not exactly an unknown figure in Washington.

Floating off the coast of reality

What's the point of quoting more?  You get the idea.  In any case, even the most recent media dismantling of the administration's various explanations for war seems to have affected the President's supporters and the administration itself only marginally.  No matter how many times these explanations have been torpedoed and sent to the bottom, they (or their cousins) just pop up again like so many Schmoos.  The President now claims that Saddam was a threat because he "retained the knowledge, the materials, the means, and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction," a category that, given the present state of our "knowledge," must include about half the planet and most of its rulers.

But undoubtedly the explanations are unsinkable because, in a sense, they had no weight, no heft, in the first place.  While they may have been the public face of the war to come, they were never the essence of the matter, and I suspect people sense that.  Paul Wolfowitz famously admitted as much when he discussed WMD as an explanation for the war with a sympathetic reporter for Vanity Fair magazine.  According to a Pentagon transcript of the interview, he said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."

Undoubtedly, administration officials right up to the President did believe that, once they got into Iraq, they would find something or other WMD-ish that would retrospectively justify their effort in the eyes of the American public and the world.  (After all, Saddam had had the stuff once upon a time.) But their eyes were roaming elsewhere, which was why they planned to guard the Oil Ministry on taking Baghdad but not most other administrative buildings; which was why they never bothered to lock down those now-looted nuclear research facilities.  They weren't just thinking oil; they were thinking empire -- a word you don't hear as frequently these days as you did before the war when even liberals like Michael Ignatieff were urging us to take up the imperial "burden."

To control the oil taps of the world, to place pre-planned permanent bases or "enduring camps" right in the middle of Iraq was part of a policy that they believed would protect a Sharonista Israel forever (most of them were, after all, committed Likudniks), lead to the long-wished-for collapse of the hated Syrian and Iranian regimes, and ensure domination over the globe's key resource region (call it "the spread of democracy") for generations.

As historian Juan Cole put the matter recently at his Informed Comment website:

     "The US under Bush will likely be a permanent Persian Gulf Power, succeeding the
     Portuguese, Safavid, Ottoman, and British Empires in that role.  At the moment, the
     US lacks a big permanent land base in the region, though it has a de facto naval
     base in Bahrain and an air base in Qatar.  These are small countries that can host
     only small facilities.  With 12 enduring bases in Iraq, the US posture in the Gulf
     becomes dominant for perhaps the entire twenty-first century.  Being an Iraq power
     would bring the US into permanent and active diplomatic and military contact with
     Iraq's neighbors, including Syria and Iran.  In all likelihood, the Bush path of Iraq
     bases leads inexorably toward further US military conflict in the region."

The administration's top officials came up with many explanations for their plan.  (Yes, Virginia, they were capable of planning; they just happened to be inside-the-Beltway utopian planners, unprepared for the real world.) But in a nutshell what they looked forward to was taking a drive through the soft underbelly of the Middle East -- Saddam's notoriously weakened army and ravaged land -- where they had no doubt they would be greeted as liberators on their way elsewhere.  In their view, Iraq was to be but a way-station and a future U.S. military staging ground.  After all, they had larger fish to fry.  And had they been right in their overconfident guesses about Iraq, no one in the mainstream media today, and probably not that many Americans, would be reconsidering the welter of often ridiculous public explanations they offered to hustle a fearful public and Congress into support for their imperial plans (which, in a second Bush administration, might gain new life).

Remember, these were men who actually believed they were fighting "World War IV."  Former CIA director and all-around-mad-neocon James Woolsey said so then and Donald Rumsfeld more or less repeated this point on his most recent visit to Iraq, comparing the on-going war there (which he referred to as "ground zero" in the "struggle against fanaticism, extremism and terrorism") to the Cold War against the Soviet Union and speaking of the overall war against terrorism as a "task for a generation."

What's wrong with this picture?  Well, as a start, Islamist fanatics, though their numbers are undoubtedly growing (in no small part thanks to the policies of George Bush & Co.), are not the equivalent of even a lesser superpower.  They are not the Soviet Union.  They are not Nazi Germany.  They are small, loosely organized, stateless groups of true believers, surrounded by somewhat larger groups of supporters or sympathizers.  The regime most fully linked to them, that of the extremist Taliban of Afghanistan, was a rickety failed state built on the rubble of two decades of endless civil war.  The Islamist fanatics of al-Qaeda are indeed horrible, but not the essential horror, which is the weaponry that sooner or later, if we continue as we are, will indeed fall into their hands and so turn them into, in terms of the power to destroy, something else entirely.  In other words, if you think about it, the greatest horrors of our world are those weapons of mass destruction -- the vast nuclear arsenals that have spread from the superpowers and various European powers to lesser regional powers (Pakistan, India, Israel) and possibly now to North Korea, a lesser power pure and simple, and are still headed downward; but also the biological and chemical weaponry that came out of the Cold War weapons labs of the United States and the Soviet Union.  (Think the strangely forgotten Anthrax killer here.)

In other words, a genuine attempt to de-proliferate (and that means the weaponry still in what was once the Soviet orbit and in our own as well) should be the first order of business.  What we in the last standing superpower are getting instead is yet madder, military-oriented research meant to create yet more generations of superweaponry.

Genuine de-proliferation is really the "task" of a generation, and a desperately urgent one.  It would be one part of the way to turn al-Qaeda and its various look-alikes and groupies back into the fringe movements they actually are.  But on this subject, as on a number of the others I've mentioned above, we have a president and administration in total denial, along with much of the media, and a large hunk of the country.  We want to be "safe" and "secure," but taking oil lands, pursuing "proliferation wars," and producing new superweapons is hardly the way to go about it.
The question is: How do you speak sense to a people floating offshore from reality in the seas of denial?  Tom

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