Killing for Christ, War Was a "Crusade"

Update: A quick read of CommonDreams presents well the problem Obama faces if he continues down the Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld road. See Changing Obama's Mindset (Howard Zinn), The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War (Joy-Ann Reid), These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban (Patrick Cockburn), The NYT Sums up Obama's Civil Liberties Record in One Paragraph (Glenn Greenwald). As our Cheney once advised: Stick to principle.

Frank Rich in his Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush column points to a must-read by Robert Draper in GQ Magazine on Donald Rumsfeld.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

This is the same Rumsfeld who spoke of the "humanity' with which we invaded Iraq, and along with Cheney ordered that people be tortured to speak of the non-existent Saddam-Al Qaeda connection.

Writes Draper:

Onward Christian Soldiers!
These never-before-seen documents from the Rumsfeld Pentagon mixed religion and war.

In the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, cover sheets—like the ones in this exclusive GQ.com slideshow—began adorning the top-secret intelligence briefings produced by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The sheets juxtaposed war images with inspirational Bible quotes and were delivered by Rumsfeld himself to the White House, where they were read by the man who, just after September 11, referred to America's war on terror [sic] as a 'crusade.'

Let's hope each revelation leads to Obama reversing the wars and crimes against humanity that Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld committed with impunity.

Watching the GQ.com slideshow, a reader laughs, scoffs, and sadly ruminates on the degree to which these depraved lies are going to continue under Obama's administration.

Here's ... Condi

Update: Post reports on 4th-Grader Questioning Rice on Waterboarding, she said it's legal.

Pathetic.

Said Condi last week at Stanford (April 27): Trust us; and the president says it's legal, then it's legal; and "We did not torture anyone" at Git-mo. No reason to doubt her integrity.

Here's the video of Condi answering questions at Stanford:

Bush and Falk

Listening to Bush last night [Bush's goodbye is a festival of self-pity and delusion] is
like listening to Kathleen Falk defend her administration' 911 center work during the murder of Brittany Zimmermann.

Bush and Falk both did well on their own scorecards.

Sunlight

The Inauguration of Barack Obama on Jan. 20 marks the end of the single worst presidency in American history, truly our bleakest days.

Never has an administration been so duplicitous and hostile to the cause of liberty as that of George W. Bush.

Looking forward, we see Jan. 20 as a day that has some 20 minutes more daylight than December 20. The long winter is dying down.

Politically, is it possible to have a president whom we believe is dedicated to the oath he to prepared to swear? Yes.

For those who struggle with long winters and this authoritarian, reckless administration, the answer is not to hang on and endure but rather to get busy, work out and see that a lesson of the Bush administration is this: If you let a president, he can ruin a country and the Andrew Sullivans, David Broders and other such cowardly souls will be there to cheer on the carnage.

For the rest of us, we are ready to move forward like our futures depend on it.

Dems Get What They Can from Bush for Auto Industry

Update: Obama Pledges Public Works on a Vast Scale

Democrats Set to Offer Loans for Carmakers reads the headline from this morning's NYT.

Faced with staggering new unemployment figures, Democratic Congressional leaders said on Friday that they were ready to provide a short-term rescue plan for American automakers, and that they expected to hold a vote on the legislation in a special session next week.
- David M. Herszenhorn and Bill Vlasic

The fact is George W. Bush would throw the country into a near depression if he thought that he could get back at the United Auto Workers (UAW) for not supporting his war on the working class and not being one of his crony Iraq War contractors for whom the myth of the free market and competitive innovation remain not very funny jokes.

For now, Democrats will get what they can for the Big Three and next year show the Republicans the meaning of the terms: jobs creation, stimulus and economic rescue for domestic industries as Bush fades off like a prolonged and terrible nightmare for which one gets very busy, very early during the morning to get to work and forget the passing nightmare ever happened.

Lies and Obstruction

It’s no surprise that Bush, Cheney and their supporters are so intent on controlling the images and impressions coming out of their Iraq War catastrophe.

These are the same people who went to war with the swaggering casualness of a young teenager playing a cool video-game system, though teenagers are typically more candid about their rationales and objectives.

Blocking their actions from examination is a full-time job for this administration and its paid liars, who even today are selling the Iraq War alternately as a mistake/unfortunate imperative, and not a colossal lie.

Michael Kamber and Tim Arango’s piece in this morning’s New York Times on the “growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war” makes a reader wonder if somehow all this destruction in Iraq could have been prevented by candid discussion in this democracy of what war is during the 2002-03 roll-out of Bush's Iraq propaganda.

Write Kamber and Arango:

“(O)pponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see — in whatever medium — the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.”

Good to see the New York Times news columns covering a trusim that has been abundantly obvious to any thinking person from the very beginning of this bullshit war.

The American public was not calling for a war with Iraq in 2002-03 or for that matter never was too keen on the idea, but the truth is they/we let it happen, and the war's continuation today, sustained by ever-changing lies, is as tragic now as it was five years ago.

Bush on the Economy

From Slate's Jacob Weisberg who collects Bushisms:

"The economy is growing, productivity is high, trade is up, people are working. It's not as good as we'd like, but—and to the extent that we find weakness, we'll move."—Washington, D.C., July 15, 2008

Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 7:55.

Political Psychopaths

Cannot recommend too strongly THE WRECKING CREW (sub. needed) How a Gang of Right-Wing Con Men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing by Thomas Frank.

Of the Jack Abramhoff, Grover Norquist, Bush-Cheney regime, Frank Writes:

They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Vet: VA Psych Ward 'Worse Than Hell'

More incompetence under the Bush administration, literally abusing veterans.

From the Dallas Morning News via Military.com

The voices in Jack Edenburn's head began soon after he returned from Vietnam. They told him to end it all.

He ignored them for almost 40 years, until the day he stood at the railroad tracks near his Lancaster home, fantasizing about stepping in front of a train.

That's the day he went to Dallas VA Medical Center. And some days, he says, he regrets that decision.

"Imagine hell," he said of his five days in the psychiatric unit, "then think worse."

Patients soiled with feces and soaked in urine wandered aimlessly, screaming, rolling delirious on the floor. One woman, he said, removed ceiling tiles and crawled into the space above the day room.

"I was more traumatized after five days in the VA than I was when I was admitted," said Edenburn, who works in the mail room of an insurance office. "And remember, I was suicidal when I went there." ...

Anniversary of Lies Leading to the Iraq War

It took a lot of lies to sell this war.

One lie in a civil deposition about consensual sex caused the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton.

Nine-hundred and thirty-five Bush administration lies leading the nation to a terrible war shattering the lives of millions have not even merited a Congressional investigation.

I was disgusted some weeks back when talking head Michel Martin said on the Bill Maher show: "But how do you – why – why is it so invested in the idea that (the Iraq War was based on) a lie, as opposed to a mistake? I guess what I’m just curious about is why."

In truth, there have been ample sources factually contradicting the massive PR campaign that the administration launched to enable its obscenity in Iraq, while the Arab League, Europe, and virtually the rest of the world explicitly denied an Iraqi threat, or watched in silence as the Bush administration began its assualt against humanity.

Martin's statement and those like it are ludicrous.

Simply stated, Bush, Cheney, Rice and the whole sorry bunch of them are liars who set off a catastrophe that Iraqi and American families will be paying for the rest of their lives.

In January the Center for Public Integrity released The War Card, Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, chronicling 935 separate lies by eight top administration officials, including President Bush.

Give the Center for Public Integrity's site (above) a look; the group (with Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith) deserve high praise for doing the job that the U.S. Congress has failed to do.