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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
 Thu Jan 15, 2004 8:48 pm
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Go Kennedy!
washingtonpost.com
Kennedy Hits Bush On War
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A14
President Bush marketed the war on Iraq as a "political product" to influence the 2002 elections and is doing so again this year, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) charged yesterday in a scathing speech accusing Bush of putting politics ahead of national security.
In a speech to the liberal Center for American Progress, Kennedy said the war has increased hatred for the United States abroad, diverted attention from the broader war against terrorism and put the country more "at risk" than it was before.
Kennedy, a leading Democratic liberal who was among the small minority of lawmakers to vote against the congressional authorization for war in 2002, has been criticizing Bush on Iraq for months, but rarely in such a sweeping fashion. He accused the administration of distorting intelligence and pursuing an ideological agenda in building the case for war.
"No president of the United States should employ misguided ideology and distortion of the truth to take the nation to war," he said. "In doing so, the president broke the basic bond of trust between the government and the people. If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America would never have gone to war."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) denounced the speech, calling it a "hateful attack against the commander in chief." He said Kennedy "insulted the president's patriotism, accused the Republican Party of treason, and resurrected the weak and indecisive foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis."
Kennedy referred approvingly to an assertion by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill in a new book that Bush began planning for war against Iraq shortly after taking office in 2001. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has denied the assertion, but Kennedy indicated he believes it, praising O'Neill's "integrity, intelligence and vision" and saying the book has "now revealed what many of us have long suspected."
Kennedy said "the steamroller of war was moving into high gear" by fall of 2002. "The administration insisted that Congress vote to authorize the war before it adjourned for the November elections. Why? Because the debate in Congress would distract attention from the troubled economy and the troubled effort to capture [al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden. The strategy was to focus on Iraq and do so in a way that would divide the Congress. And it worked."
Now, Kennedy said, "there is little doubt as well that the administration's plan to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people by this summer -- and the pressure to hold elections in Afghanistan at that time -- are intended to build momentum for the November elections in this country." The war, he said, "could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Thu Jan 15, 2004 10:14 pm
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And I've always loved Huffington!
When Paul O’Neill Sounds Like Tip O’Neill
Filed January 14, 2004
Struggling to reconcile the ever-widening gulf between what the Bush administration claims to be true and what is actually true is getting harder by the day. Fortunately, Paul O'Neill has a timely, if disturbing, diagnosis, backed up by some 19,000 pages of lab results: the country is being governed not by the genial figurehead now running toward the center in hopes of re-election but by a band of out and out fanatics.
On the administration's two defining issues, Iraq and taxes, the former Treasury Secretary paints a scathing portrait of a cabal of closed-minded zealots steadfastly refusing to allow anything as piddling as fact, evidence, or truth to get in the way of their unshakable beliefs and forgone conclusions.
According to O'Neill, invading Iraq was a Bush goal before he had even learned where the Oval office supply closet was. It came up just ten days after the inauguration, at the new president’s first National Security Council meeting. "It was all about finding a way to do it," he says. "That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'"
Of course, All the President's Men (and Condi, too!) did just that, gathering a collection of dubious facts, half-truths, quarter-truths, and--the House Specialty--no-truths (what "unpatriotic" people would call lies) to match the desired outcome. A slice of Nigerian yellowcake, anyone?
But hey, why let a little thing like the truth get in the way of a perfectly good war?
The picture of a White House teeming with fanatics gets even clearer with O'Neill's depiction of the Bush brain trust's dogged devotion to cutting taxes for the wealthy.
And, before I go any further, one word of advice to the White House attack dogs now unleashed on O'Neill: If you want to belittle his bona fides, you've got to come up with something better than saying "We didn't listen to him when he was here. Why should we now?" Let's get real. Is there anyone more central to developing economic policy than the Treasury Secretary? To be any more inside, O'Neill would have to have been George Bush's proctologist.
Now, of course, they're painting him out to be a cross between Jerry Garcia, Karl Marx and the disgruntled former employee who just shot up your local post office. Yeah, what an anti-establishment wackjob: Former CEO of Alcoa, and a friend of Don Rumsfeld's since the sixties.
Anyway, whether or not the cabinet choir of the church of tax cuts listened to him, O'Neill certainly listened to them, and now he's doing what this administration makes a fetish of not doing: telling the American people what their government is really up to. To hear O'Neill tell it, the true believers surrounding the president, headed by Karl Rove and O'Neill's one-time patron Dick Cheney, are all devout disciples of the first commandment of Bush Republicans: thou shalt cut taxes for the wealthy, no matter what the cost to the greater good. They have all drunk the supply-side Kool-Aid -- and simply don't care to hear any debate on this subject. Or on any other for that matter. According to O'Neill, "That store is closed". To disagree with the Bush clan is according to their vast, self-serving post 9/11 definition of patriotism, to hate America.
What's more, in classic fanatical fashion, the inner circle in the Oval Office displays an utter intolerance of dissent.
When O'Neill, who had the gall to be concerned about the looming fiscal crisis triggered by the growing budget deficit, argued against a second round of tax cuts, he was quickly put in his place by Cheney. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," growled the Vice President, blithely ignoring the nearly 20 years it took to undo the fiscal damage Reagan's budget-busting had wrought. Besides, added Cheney, sounding less like the most powerful #2 in history than a kid cajoling his parents into giving him ice cream because he has cleaned his plate, "We won the mid-term elections, this is our due." An over-stuffed gift bag for the president’s prosperous donor corps is our due? Is it actually possible to so badly misread what this country--or, indeed, democracy--is about?
It's a measure of how effectively the GOP radicals have framed the political debate, with taxes as the root of all evil, that Paul O’Neill, a bedrock-ribbed establishment Republican, comes across like Tip O’Neill.
Hell, it turns out even President Bush had his doubts about the virtue of following his first round of serve-the-rich tax cuts with a heaping second helping. "Haven't we already given money to rich people?" Bush asks at a 2002 meeting of his economic team. "Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?"
This momentary bout of presidential scruples was quickly cured by Karl Rove. "Stick to principle. Stick to principle. Don't waver," he urged Bush repeatedly. The principle, I suppose, being: "If we wanna win in 2004 we gotta keep our Pioneers and Rangers happy!" Boy Genius, indeed.
The most alarming thing that emerges from O'Neill's revelations is the total lack of leadership on Bush's part. Just as the president was finally outgrowing the long-standing rumors that he was a cheerful pawn in a game he was too dumb to understand, O’Neill applies the paddles to the “Bush as clown” image, turns on the juice, and yells, “Clear!”
At the very moment that Rove and the Bush re-election team are gearing up to sell us the president as the macho, heroic cowboy from Crawford who is going to keep us all safe from terrorists, despots, and Mad Cow meat, here comes his former Treasury Secretary with his devastating assessment of Bush as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people".
Will this be the wakeup call that finally opens the American public's eyes to the deadly consequences of being governed by a disengaged dolt in the hands of a gang of brazen fanatics?
http://www.bushwhacked.com |
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Thu Jan 15, 2004 10:48 pm
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Nice wrap up!
So far!
EDITORIAL
Selling of a war
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"INTELLIGENCE gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said President Bush in a national address on March 17, 2003.
A majority of Americans believed him. In fact, more than half the public thought that Saddam Hussein not only had close links with al Qaeda terrorist networks, but had a role in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But it was not true. The Bush administration used innuendo and exaggerated evidence to persuade the American people that a pre-emptive war against Iraq was necessary to protect the nation from terrorism.
Now, the use of that distorted evidence is coming back to haunt the Bush administration. Consider:
-- An extensive study by the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented" intelligence assessments to the American people.
-- The U.S. Army's premier academic institution, the War College, issued a scathing report, criticizing the Bush administration for pursuing an "unnecessary" war in Iraq that has left the Army "near the breaking point." Authored by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, the report argued that Iraq was "a war-of- choice distraction from the war of necessity'' against al Qaeda.
-- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, fired by Bush for opposing a second round of tax cuts, now says that shortly after taking office, senior Bush administration officials began to plan for regime change in Iraq. In "The Price of Loyalty," written by former Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer prize-winner Ron Suskind, O'Neill argues that neither Bush nor his senior officials questioned why a war against Iraq was necessary; instead, they discussed how to make it happen.
-- Kenneth Pollack, a former national security official in the Clinton administration and author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," wrote in Atlantic magazine that estimates of Iraq's capabilities to build weapons of mass destruction were hugely exaggerated.
-- Barton Gellman, who interviewed key Iraqi scientists and members of American weapons search teams, reported in the Washington Post that sanctions and arms embargoes had ended Iraq's efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.
These recent reports and revelations are clearly unsettling to people who have trusted their president. But they do support the many defense analysts and experts who, before the war, argued that Iraq did not represent an imminent danger to the United States.
We support the Carnegie report's call for an independent commission to investigate the administration's alleged misuse of intelligence evidence. If this really was a "war of choice," the American people have a right to hold their government accountable.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/13/EDG0C47J1D1.DTL
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JerseyBluEyz
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Posts: 1257
Location: Northeast |
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Mon Feb 09, 2004 1:21 am
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Whoa! At this site there are samples of the 19,000 files that Paul O’Neill acquired. I haven’t read them all, but some of them sure opened my eyes and made my mouth drop open! Woo Hoo!
http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com/thebushfiles/
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Mon Feb 09, 2004 7:38 am
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Cool! I'll definately read some!
Great find!
WHOA!
bc |
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