Thanks, we'll pass.

Bush Sr. Wants Jeb To Run For President

You have got to be kidding me.

There's no way. No way at all Jeb! Bush can run for President. One of the original signers of the PNAC? A Neocon through and through? A BUSH?

Are they fucking serious? The rubble hasn't even finished smoking from the last idiot son of Poppy and Bar, and they're talking about JEB!???

Just remember. Jeb! has the same DNA as this guy:



Update: John Aravosis of AMERICAblog doesn't know if Jeb Bush was a child molester and asks for a definition.

crossposted at American Street

Eliminate! Eliminate!

I didn't John Bolton of the Walrus Mustache of Hate was a Dalek...



But he sure sounds like one...




The Los Angeles Times prints Bolton's cry for Regime Change! Not diplomacy! Regime Change!

To date at least, the Obama administration's answer remains a resounding no. Obama wants negotiations with Tehran, not regime change. Given that the Revolutionary Guard and the hard-line mullahs -- and not the people -- are increasingly likely to be the short-term winners of the current Battle for Iran, supporters of regime change must now make longer-term plans.

We have missed a huge opportunity because of Obama's error (and that of his predecessors), but the continuing threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and support for international terrorism make the imperative of regime change no less compelling. The Iranian people will continue their opposition no matter how inconvenient it is for Obama's hoped-for negotiations. We should support them, and not just by rhetoric.

um... Mr. Bolton? With what? Support them with what? You and your Neocon buddies in the Bush administration broke the military. You now want to bomb and invade Iran too? Haven't you Neocons done enough damage, caused enough wreckage, destroyed enough lives and property to content you? Is that all you guys can think of? The world will worship in shock and awe the US because we're the biggest baddest bullies nuked up and willing to use them?

Well, invading Afghanistan AND Iraq kinda blew a hole in your plans for world domination, didn't it? Things looked really good on paper: kick Saddam out, pop Chalabi in, and then you're wedged in tight right in the middle of the biggest oil fields of them all. Then you could threaten and harass Iran and maybe even bomb them into submission, right?

But Afghanistan did what it always does when invaded, changed hats to the invaders colors and waited to see what promises were kept. Which turned out to be very little, because you guys were in such a hurry to invade Iraq. Strangely, Iraq didn't like being invaded and getting rid of Saddam started a veritable bloodbath of epic proportions.

The wreckage you have caused in these two countries will never be fixed. You have stained the ground with blood, depleted uranium, destroyed infrastructure, lies, and broken promises. No one will trust the US ever again. And we owe this all to you.

Just why are you being given print space anyway?

Rewriting history as fast as they can scribble

No, not Democrats. Republicans caused the financial collapse.

Strangely, the Bush/Cheney era didn't happen. Nothing to see here. If they could just get Dick to shut up.

The resurrection of the neocon agenda was faster than I thought. The neocons didn't even go to ground, they just changed the name of their manifesto from the PNAC to the FPI (or the PNAD). We need better wooden stakes and fresh garlic.

And teleprompters are bad because they make the president seem too careful? Are you kidding me?....

Now come the denials

It wasn't me, I wasn't there, it must have been somebody else...

In real life, Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack. But at yesterday's forum of foreign policy intellectuals, he created a fantastic world in which:

1. Perle is not a neoconservative.

2. Neoconservatives do not exist.

3. Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn't be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years.

"There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy," Perle informed the gathering, hosted by National Interest magazine. "It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy."

So what about the 1996 report he co-authored that is widely seen as the cornerstone of neoconservative foreign policy? "My name was on it because I signed up for the study group," Perle explained. "I didn't approve it. I didn't read it."

The last eight years never happened....

Where do we sign up for court cases?

We know some people who need to be on it...

PARIS — More than six years after opening its doors, the International Criminal Court in The Hague began its first trial on Monday, as Thomas Lubanga, a former Congolese warlord, took his seat in the dock facing a crowded court and public gallery.

We have a little list. Won't take long, really. Just go the PNAC site and copy the names.

But the clock is ticking!

So obviously you must torture, right? Right?

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) could not fathom that an Attorney General would reject a practice that both is unlawful and endangers Americans. He tried to get Holder to back off his anti-torture stance by presenting an absurd “ticking time bomb” hypothetical in which thousands of American lives are at stake. “You would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques?” Cornyn asked. When Holder replied that waterboarding is not the only interrogation method, Cornyn insisted, “Assume that it was”:

HOLDER: I think your hypothetical assumes a premise that I’m not willing to concede.

CORNYN: I know you don’t like my hypothetical.

HOLDER: No, the hypothetical’s fine; the premise that underlies it I’m not willing to accept, and that is that waterboarding is the only way that I could get that information from those people.

CORNYN: Assume that it was.

HOLDER: [Laughs] Given the knowledge that I have about other techniques and what I’ve heard from retired admirals and generals and FBI agents, there are other ways in a timely fashion that you can get information out of people that is accurate and will produce useable intelligence. And so it’s hard for me to accept or to answer your hypothetical without accepting your premise. And in fact, I don’t think I can do that.

Longer Cornyn:

If we stop torturing that means that torture doesn't work and even though we've been told by the FBI and the CIA and lots of interrogators torture doesn't work and ruins the morale of the military, the citizenry, and the world attitude towards the US, we must keep torturing because the tv series 24 shows us we need to and besides if we stop torturing that means that the PNAC neocons and Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were wrong and we can't have that!!!

We knew the neocons were going to blame Bush

For fucking up their wonderful and brilliant Project of the New American Century. So let the smearfest begin:

But Norquist did have harsh parting words for President George W. Bush who, by any political measure, has left the conservative movement in a more perilous situation than when he came to office.

Arguing that every president has a certain amount of "bandwidth" with which to work, the head of American's for Tax Reform chastised Bush for "deciding to take five years to be the mayor of Baghdad instead of the United States."

"The idea that you are Winston Churchill because you picked a fight with a country with 25 million people in it, come on," said Norquist. "Ronald Reagan would do that before breakfast and then go have lunch. Ronald Reagan was smart enough to realize quickly that he would not go and manage the next Lebanese civil war for the next 20 years."

Norquist's forte is in areas of spending and taxes. And on the first of these fronts, Bush has taken a lot of heat. But in an discussion with the Huffington Post, Norquist was far more critical of Bush's foreign policy ventures, which he said simply decimated the capital and time the administration had for domestic priorities.

"How were you going to get stuff done if your time, your focus, your energy -- however useful -- is spent setting up Baghdad's infrastructure and not on the FCC," he asked. "If you are sitting there deciding who should be viceroy of Iraq rather than head of FEMA?"

So... Bush and Cheney's neocon agenda would have worked in drowning the rest of our government in the bathtub but Iraq got in the way?

We knew they were thinking it

And even fondly remembering what happened the first time. We just didn't know they actually said it out loud:

An ongoing exploration of the documents related to the Pentagon's "message force multipliers" program has unearthed a clip of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggesting that America, having voted the Democrats back into Congressional power, could benefit from suffering another terrorist attack, and doing so in the presence of the very same military analysts who went on to provide commentary and analysis of the Iraq War.

[snip]

But by far the most extraordinary part of this luncheon is the antipathy the gathered members exhibit toward the American people for having the temerity to vote the Democrats back into power. When Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans the lack of "sympathetic ears" on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld offers that the American people lack "the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats." What's to be done? According to Rumsfeld, "The correction for that, I suppose, is [another] attack."

Ah, the good old days when they used a national tragedy to further their attempts at an imperial land and oil grab....

Update:



crossposted at American Street

What ever happened to Rumsfeld's six week war?

The plans for a power grab in Iraq and popping Chalabi in place so the neocons could attack Iran looked so good....

In February 2003, Gen. Eric Shinseki famously predicted that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed for post-war hostilities in Iraq. According to documents recently released by the Pentagon in response to The New York Times’s expose on its propaganda program, however, Donald Rumsfeld claimed in a 2006 briefing that the reason why he did not support a larger invasion force was because commanders did not request it

Uh huh. Riiiiight. Let the finger-pointing and the blame game begin!



crossposted at SteveAudio

Bush's Legacy: Letting Cheney and Rumsfeld loose upon the world

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq writes for Asia Online about Cheney and Rumsfeld and why they attacked Iraq: (my bold)

According to some commentators, when it came to the American ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House were Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the distant Ford administration. Some argue that they - and their neo-con poodle and second-in-command at the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well assorted neo-cons once linked to the Likud party in Israel and the Christian right in the US - were the true framers of a Bush empire.

To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New American Century and no doubt had ideas - or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading as ideas - about a more aggressive use of American military strength throughout the world. Cheney's former position as chief executive officer of Halliburton and his connections with large corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural resources for the American imperium.

Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand US influence and resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld's utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what happened there ("events" which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq - or success in that country - was indeed important but mainly to the extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.

For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, "war" would mean the loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything - which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC's self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts - both personal and political - to settle.

"Foreign policy," in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the vice president and secretary of defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.

If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren't the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays - the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency - perhaps because those organizations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world.

Just as Bush "kicked ass" in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to "kick ass" among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the intelligence community. (Consider Cheney's treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration's claim about Saddam's search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.)

In toppling Iraq, the "imperial" aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy "experts" and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual US national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.

To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was, just recall the secretary of defense's self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging neo-con Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it.

Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq - any more than it did when Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his "mission accomplished" moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was - for a while - the rest of the outside world.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The US, he wrote, made "foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein."

In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Cheney and Rumsfeld, beyond Bush's national security "homeland". That may be the president's ultimate legacy.

A fantasy of empowerment

Tom Engelhardt has written for the Asia Times a powerful article that addresses the Bush administration's obsession for torture and attempts to explain it. Something all of us could see was horribly perverted and wrong but had no way of challenging it. These people get off on torture and think it makes them powerful. As we can see, it is the coward's way of ruling.

Torture, along with repetitious, pretzled "legal" justifications for doing so, were bones that administration officials - from the president, vice president and secretary of defense on down - just couldn't resist gnawing on again and again. So, what we're dealing with is an obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly irrational in its intensity, that's gripped this administration. None of the predictable we're shocked! we're shocked! editorial responses to the Times latest revelations begin to account for this.
[snip]
In a sense, the Bush administration has confronted a strange policy conundrum. Its compulsive urge to possess the power to detain without oversight and to wield torture as a tool of interrogation has led it, however unexpectedly, into what can only be called a confessional stance. The result has been what it feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not exhaustive, public record of the criminal inner thinking of the most secretive administration in our history.

Let's recall that, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration's top officials had an overpowering urge to "take the gloves off" (instructions sent from secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to the Afghan battlefield), to "unshackle" the CIA. They were in a rush to release a commander-in-chief "unitary executive", untrammeled by the restrictions they associated with the fall of president Richard Nixon and with the Watergate era.

They wanted to abrogate the Geneva Conventions (parts of which Alberto Gonzales, then White House Council and companion-in-arms to the president, declared "quaint" and "obsolete" in 2002). They were eager to develop their own categories of imprisonment that freed them from all legal constraints, as well as their own secret, offshore prison system in which their power would be total. All of this went to the heart of their sense of entitlement, their belief that such powers were their political birthright. The last thing they wanted to do was have this all happen in secret and with full deniability. Thus, Guantanamo.

The article is only three pages but is powerful, and tells us something we already knew:

...how about the strange situation of an American president, who has, in so many backhanded ways, admitted to being deeply involved in the issues of detainment and torture - as, for instance, in a February 7, 2002, memorandum to his top officials in which he signed off on his power to "suspend [the] Geneva [Conventions] as between the United States and Afghanistan" (which he then declined to do "at this time") and his right to wipe out the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War when it came to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That document began with the following: "Our recent extensive discussions regarding the status of al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees confirm ..."

"Our recent extensive discussions ..." You won't find that often in previous presidential documents about the abrogation of international and domestic law.
[snip]
But American presidents didn't then see the bragging rights in such acts, any more than a previous American president would have sent his vice president to Capitol Hill to lobby openly for torture (however labeled). Past presidents held on to the considerable benefits of deniability (and perhaps the psychological benefits of not knowing too much themselves). They didn't regularly and repeatedly commit to paper their "extensive discussions" on distasteful and illegal subjects.

Nor did they get up in public, against all news, all reason (but based on the fantastic redefinitions of torture created to fulfill a presidential desire to use "harsh interrogation techniques") to deny repeatedly that their administrations ever tortured. Here is an exchange on the subject from Bush's most recent press conference:

Questioner: What's your definition of the word "torture"?

The president: Of what?

Questioner: The word "torture". What's your definition?

The president: That's defined in US law, and we don't torture.

Questioner: Can you give me your version of it, sir?

The president: Whatever the law says.

After a while, this, too, becomes a form of confession - that, among other things, the president has never rejected John Yoo's definition of torture in that 2002 memorandum. Combine that with the admission of "extensive discussions" on detention matters and, minimally, you have a president who has proven himself deeply engaged in such subjects. A president who makes such no-torture claims repeatedly cannot also claim to be in the dark on the subject. In other words, you're already moving from the Clintonesque parsing of definitions ("It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' ") into unfathomable realms of presidential definitional darkness.

Update: General says Bush and Rumsfeld were closely involved:

Drawing almost exclusively from the documents, the authors say there is a stark contrast between the public statements of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the policies those and others in the administration were advocating behind the scenes.

President Bush gave "marching orders" to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo, the general claims in documents reported in the book.

The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women's underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks.

“It is imperative that senior officials who authorized, endorsed, or tolerated the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable," Jaffer and Singh write, "not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again.”

We could have saved so many lives and so much money

If we had just bought Saddam off for one billion dollars. But then Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld wouldn't have realized their glorious PNAC wet dream of owning all of Iraq's oil.

Nicole Belle of Crooks and Liars:

On March 17, 2003 President Bush issued the warning: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing ,” yet now thanks to a transcript leaked to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, we learn that more than three weeks prior to that Bush had told former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar that “The Egyptians are speaking to Saddam Hussein. It seems he’s indicated he would be prepared to go into exile if he’s allowed to take $1 billion …” When confronted about the leaked transcript yesterday, Whitehouse spokeswoman Dana Perino did not dispute its accuracy.

Just last week we learned from former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan that the real reason behind the war in Iraq was oil , and now we are finding out that the entire war could have been averted for letting him get away with $1 billion. That’s just than one tenth of 1% of what this insane invasion and occupation of Iraq, that continues claim the lives of our country’s bravest men and women, has now been forcast to cost. Think about that just for a second. Every single death, Iraqi and American coalition alike, could have been saved and Bush could have had Saddam’s oil, but apparently he didn’t even seriously consider it. Topping that, he then lied in public to the entire world about it just so he could have his war regardless. How’s that for compassionate conservatism?

I don't think this was covered in the PNAC manual

On how to keep the United States an unchallenged superpower:

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States stood tall - militarily invincible, economically unrivaled, diplomatically uncontestable. and the dominating force on information channels worldwide. The next century was to be the true "American century", with the rest of the world molding itself in the image of the sole superpower.

Yet with not even a decade of this century behind us, we are already witnessing the rise of a multipolar world in which new powers are challenging different aspects of US supremacy - Russia and China in the forefront, with regional powers Venezuela and Iran forming the second rank. These emergent powers are primed to erode US hegemony, not confront it, singly or jointly.

How and why has the world evolved in this way so soon? The George W Bush administration's debacle in Iraq is certainly a major factor in this transformation, a classic example of an imperialist power, brimming with hubris, overextending itself. To the relief of many - in the US and elsewhere - the Iraq fiasco has demonstrated the striking limitations of power for the globe's highest-tech, most destructive military machine. In Iraq, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to two US presidents, concedes in a recent op-ed, the US is "being wrestled to a draw by opponents who are not even an organized state adversary".

The invasion and subsequent disastrous occupation of Iraq and the mismanaged military campaign in Afghanistan have crippled the credibility of the United States. The scandals at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, along with the widely publicized murders of Iraqi civilians in Haditha, have badly tarnished America's moral self-image. In the latest opinion poll in Turkey, a secular state and member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, only 9% of Turks have a "favorable view" of the US (down from 52% just five years ago).

Yet there are other explanations - unrelated to Washington's glaring misadventures - for the current transformation in international affairs. These include, above all, the tightening market in oil and natural gas, which has enhanced the power of hydrocarbon-rich nations as never before; the rapid economic expansion of the mega-nations China and India; the transformation of China into the globe's leading manufacturing base; and the end of the Anglo-American duopoly in international television news.

[snip]

This disparate challenge to US global primacy stems as much from sharpening conflicts over natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas, as from ideological differences over democracy, US-style, or human rights, as conceived and promoted by Western policymakers. Perceptions about national (and imperial) identity and history are at stake as well.

It is noteworthy that Russian officials applauding the swift rise of post-Soviet Russia refer fondly to the pre-Bolshevik Revolution era when, according to them, czarist Russia was a great power. Equally, Chinese leaders remain proud of their country's long imperial past as unique among nations.

When viewed globally and in the great stretch of history, the notion of US exceptionalism that drove the neo-conservatives to proclaim the Project for the New American Century in the late 20th century - adopted so wholeheartedly by the Bush administration in this one - is nothing new. Other superpowers have been there before, and they too have witnessed the loss of their prime position to rising powers.

No superpower in modern times has maintained its supremacy for more than several generations. And however exceptional its leaders may have thought themselves, the United States, already clearly past its zenith, has no chance of becoming an exception to this age-old pattern of history.

Thanks, Bush. This is what you get when you scrape by with a barely passing grade in history.

Come home

Via Athenae at First Draft, Liberty at Corrente Wire:

Come home America, come home.

It is time to come home from distant wars against fictions and phantoms. It is time to come home to your wives how miss you, to your children who need you, to your families that feel the pain of missing souls.

It is time to come home America, home to the cities that have been flooded, the forests left untended, the fields left untilled. It is time to come home America, to the work left undone, the minds left unschooled. It is time to come America, to the home you did not leave behind, because no home ever lasts if left unrepaired.

It is time to come home America, and when you do, you will ask how you ever let that home be put into hands such as the ones that now have it. You will wonder at how they ever seemed to be giants, and on the back of which ant the cameras were mounted to make them look that way.

It is time America to come home. Home to the words which we written on parchment, printed on paper, but engraved on hearts and minds, with stylus of firearms, and ink mixed of blood and gunpowder: “when it becomes destructive to these ends… to alter or abolish it.”

There is more. What a plea to bring our soldiers home from this useless PNAC vanity war, to tend to our neglected country ravaged by this poisonously indifferent administration.

Come home.

We are in Iraq to give the Iraqi government time to take charge

Um... WHAT Iraqi government?

AJ in DC at AmericaBlog:

This idea that we need to train forces to support the central government is based on a complete fallacy. There is no functioning central government; the "national unity government" hailed by war supporters in early 2006, which never really existed in the first place, is a demonstrated failure. The only think keeping Maliki in power is the complete lack of alternative candidates who could unite enough parliament members to form a ruling coalition, and in the meantime, no progress occurs.

How that parliament working out? (my bold):

WASHINGTON, July 5 Iraq's oil minister says a Saddam-era oil deal with China has not been finalized and no oil deals will be until an oil law is passed by Parliament.

[snip]

That deal, along with those signed with Vietnamese, Indian and Indonesian firms, and those the Kurdistan Regional Government has signed since 2003, must be brought in line with the pending federal oil law before they are legit, said Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, who was in the China delegation.

"No oil deal, regardless, specifically those that are signed in the Kurdish region, will be valid until they are approved by the federal council (on oil and gas) after the oil and gas law is passed and the federal council is formed," Shahristani told UPI from Baghdad during a telephone interview.

"There is an article in the law that specifically states that all contracts that were made under the previous regime and by the KRG have to be reviewed in the light of the new oil and gas law by the federal council," he said.

Progress was made on the federal law lately, though its success in the Parliament is unsure. The council of ministers approved it suddenly Tuesday, but numerous parties have boycotted the council and the Parliament -- threatening quorum -- and are against the law. The Kurds, the law's biggest proponents, said they may be against changes that were made to it in the council.

The Iraqi parliament has one job... to deliver their country's oil wealth into the clutching hands of Dick Cheney and George Bush. Oddly, the Iraqis are balking at such a thing. I'm sure the idea their lives would be immediately forfeit doesn't occur to the PNAC crowd.

A reminder:
Michael Schwartz of the Asia Times:

Since the invasion of Iraq, US officials have melded economic and military policy into a single fatal brew, driven by dreams of controlling the country's fabulous potential oil wealth. The key "benchmark", therefore, that the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki must pass is passage of a new oil law forced on it by the Bush administration. Widespread opposition to the law, though, could result in escalating conflict that leaves the oil out of the United States' reach.

This excellent adventure of Bush and Cheney's could all be for naught....

We aren't the good guys anymore

We're the bad guys. And it isn't American. It may be Dick Cheney's new world vision, but it isn't ours.

From Glenn at Pax Americana:

We start wars now. We torture people. We suspend the rule of law. We do all the terrible things we once accused the Soviet Union of doing years ago. Back then is was the Soviets who would snatch people off the streets and imprison them in gulags without legal representation, without charges, without even notifying their families.

Now we're the nation that does that. We have, on so many fronts, become bad guys. Good guys don't do what Mr. Greenwald's article chronicles. Good guys don't do what Gen. Anthony Taguba documented in his report on the Abu Graib prison. That report was the subject of an arctile by Sy Hersh in this week's New Yorker. We have snatched people, put them in gulags, and tortured them — despite George Bush's denials to the contrary. Gen. Taguba's report — and Hersh's article — lift the veil that had been hiding what we were doing and who knew we were doing it prior to the publishing of those awful photos from the Iraqi prison.

We need to claim what was true about us again before it is lost forever.

Look who is representing us abroad as the voice of America?

The neocons who are planning to 'fix' Bush's messes. Why does this not fill me with confidence?

Neo-cons take spin to US-backed airwaves

By Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON - As the administration of US President George W Bush struggles through its last two years in office, it appears that the agenda of neo-conservative ideologues has finally lost its appeal among strategic parts of the US foreign-policy apparatus.

But as their influence has waned at the Pentagon and State Department, neo-conservative hawks have taken charge on the battlefield of public diplomacy.

Intent on fixing what American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Joshua Muravchik termed President Bush's "public diplomacy mess", right-wing hawks have gained control of the weapons in the "war of ideas" - US government-funded and supported media outlets such as Voice of America (VOA), Al-Hurra, and Radio Farda, which broadcast to the Middle East and aim to offer an alternative view of the news.

The recent appointment of Jeffrey Gedmin, a veteran neo-conservative polemicist, as the director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE), and a smear campaign that led to the recent resignation of Larry Register, Al-Hurra's former news director, appears to herald a turn toward more ideologically rigid programming.

As a result, viewers and listeners of US-supported media in the Middle East are being exposed to a tougher ideological line that endorses the hallmarks of the neo-conservative agenda - regime change and interventionist policies in the region.

Lovely. The neocons and their beloved PNAC need to be dragged out into the sunlight and dosed with bleach. There needs to be a public discussion as to why the neoconservative agenda is not American, or else we will be dealing with yet another hijacking of our government in thirty years or so.

Circling the drain

The neocon agenda, their glorious thousand year reich, their wonderful and eternal war on terror, their power grab, their theocracy, their money.....

It looks like the American citizens have finally awakened from their stupor.

Vanity Press has the line up.

Remember, folks!