Fascism as American as Apple Pie

Our Vietnam War Marine veteran friend has another typically fascinating piece out at Veterans Today, Background to Tyranny: Bush Family Terror Ties Decades-Old.

The roots of American authoritarianism are long and deep. From Gordon Duff:

Does the following sound crazy? It's not crazy. Just history that is impolitic to report.

In 1934, the Bush family helped organize a military attack on Washington in order to install a Nazi government. Sound outlandish? It is American history. It is call 'the Business Plot (BBC).'

Conservative 'think tanks' still spend millions to edit this from our history books. Sites are taken off the internet and Wikipedia is still erased, even decades later.

Would two rigged elections, a mysterious 9/11 attack, torture and totalitarian rule be surprising if Americans were allowed to know their own history?

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.

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.

CCR on Civil Liberties

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

On Saturday, July 19th 2008, at the NetRoots Nation conference in Austin, Texas, Jen Nessel (CCR) moderated a panel of speakers including Vince Warren (CCR), Jameel Jaffer (ACLU), Jeremy Scahill (DemocracyNow), and Dahlia Lithwick (Slate.com) who spoke and answered questions about Constitutional Rights.

Considering the fact that the Bush administration has worked systematically over the last seven years to violate U.S. and international law, and that legal advocates and journalists have uncovered the facts and identified those responsible, this panel explored what accountability should now look like. Additionally they discussed what the courts and the next administration must do in its first 100 days to make things right.

Salon: Surveillance State Huge, Investigation May Be Finally Coming

Those longing for an accounting of Bush's historic abuse of power may get their wish.

In Salon, Tim Shorrock has uncovered new modes of state surveillance of Americans, and documents contemplating "a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate."

Breaking new ground on the government's programs monitoring Americans to be used in a declared national emergency, Shorrock reports on programs "designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law."

Some excerpts:

The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s. ...

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.

The Outlaw Presidency

Dan Froomkin's The Outlaw Presidency, discussing Jane Meyer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, points to a significant fact of the American political culture.

Finally, it is now conventional wisdom that the Bush-Cheney regime is the most lawless and immoral administration in American history, though I still recommend that elitist Harper's magazine. See Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How a Gang of Right-wing Con men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing.

Human Rights

Bush does torture.

- AP: Exams prove abuse, torture in Iraq, Gitmo

- General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

- The U.S. isn't likely to try Bush administration officials for war crimes-but it's likely that a European country will.

- Torture from the Top Down

- CIA Played Larger Role in Advising Pentagon Torture

Human Rights Groups and Documents

- United States Constitution
- Fourth Geneva Convention (full text)
- Human Rights First
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights

US-gagged FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds Sings in Dallas

Breaking - Philip Giraldi: What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation. Edmonds was gagged and censored


About time this story broke.

State of the Union Tripe

Tonight's final State of the Union address by George W. Bush can be expected to be revealing not of Bush, but of the corporate media.

How credulous is the media?

Will the media greet each assertion and rhetorical flash skeptically, to be put in the context of the lies and broken promises of the most dishonest and political administration in American history?

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Democracy Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

The National Journal is a political junkie's fix. And the Journal has broken much new ground the last few years in exposing the Bush administration's corruption.

But its cover story this week, State Of Disorder, by James Kitfield, reveals again the imperialistic mindset of the establishment American political culture on foreign policy as it relates to the desired social arrangement citizens of other countries have about their own societies.

Kitfield is imbued with a staggering inability to conceive that democratic results that create administrations in South America dedicated to directing their natural resources to their own people is not our problem. It is not our problem when the Sandinistas did it in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and it not our problem that President Hugo Chavez in now doing it in Venezuela.

But Kitfield frets that "new crises erupt with frightening regularity" around the world, and notes "a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America."

To Kitfield, it is axiomatic that this state of affairs, this state of disorder, must be dealt with, though he bemoans the fact that Bush is leaving the problem to the next American president to solve.

"Anti-Americanism everywhere you look," notes Kitfield, equating the mild redistribution of South American wealth to South American human beings with "devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists," "violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan," among other American challenges.

Kitfield (and Bush and Condi Rice) and the American foreign policy establishment apparently do not contemplate that the establishment of social arrangement through democratic processes that increase the material wealth of a given country's citizens is not destabilizing.

This dynamic is the achievement of "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

And that's a good thing.

See also PARAG KHANNA's Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

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The Looting of America

With zero focus on the public good, the Bush band of lying, corrupt Mayberry Machiavellians have left this country with a mess of historic proportions.

See some of the highlights, from the Democratic Caucus.

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Banana Republic DOJ

Scott Horton at Harper's has a great column on DOJ corruption.

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NYT Year-end Editorial on America under Bush

Bush is an illegitimate president who has brought our country to democratic ruin. An excellent editorial below:

NYT Year-end Editorial on America under Bush

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer. ...

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

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Pakistan and Bush's Blundering and Deadly Stupidity

The Democratic presidential candidates and the mainstream press are blasting Bush's foreign policy for diverting resources to the deadly (for us) and corrupt client oil state-building project in Iraq, a defect leading to problems and chaos in Pakistan and elsewhere, and a hard political lesson for the Bush administration at home.

From the Times:

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday left in ruins the delicate diplomatic effort the Bush administration had pursued in the past year to reconcile Pakistan’s deeply divided political factions. Now it is scrambling to sort through ever more limited options, as American influence on Pakistan’s internal affairs continues to decline.

The lesson that propping up dictatorships, illegally invading countries, and killing millions of human beings, unfortunately, appears to be a mission yet again lost in the corporate American political culture and broadcast media.

And the seeming endless droning on about Bush's delicate diplomatic efforts and our allies in the war on terror are still propagated in the corporate press with no hint of irony or Monty Python absurdity, though the ruin of Bush' blunders are too blatant to be ignored, still portrayed as serious efforts to restore democracy.

The U.S.-supported nuclear dictatorship in Pakistan and Bhutto (comparatively democratic-leaning) are described differently elsewhere.

The Independent: "With (Bhutto) died the fragile hope that Pakistan might drag itself from the grip of the military and the jihadists and find its feet once again as a functioning democracy."

From CounterPunch: For the past three decades, Pakistan has been turned into a "Jihad factory' under the guidance of the US and other Western powers. After 9/11 when Pakistan launched a war on its own people in the name of "War on terror', it was not uncanny to predict that the Jihadis who were nourished previously will turn against their old allies -- the politicians and the military and the innocent people of Pakistan will get caught and entangled as a collateral. ...
During her tenure as twice Prime Minister of her country, she stifled the growth of democracy and undermined the democratic institutions. She not only concentrated in herself the absolute power of the country, but also assumed the title of chairperson for life of her political party -- Pakistan People's Party (PPP). ...

Listening to Bush babble on today, one wishes just one major network anchor would point out the facts that Bush supported a dictator in Pakistan, enabled nuclear proliferation, maintains an illegal war of aggression in Iraq, has both abroad and domestically subverted democratic and human rights, and engaged in militarism around the globe making the United States the greatest purveyor of violence in the world as that defeatocrat Martin Luther King Jr. used to say before King was assassinated.

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The Neocons Meet Their Match in Musharraf the Con Man and Dictator

From Horton at Harper's:

... American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered up year-end remarks in which she congratulates herself on her foreign policy successes in 2007. Rice, of course, hopes that no one examines that claim too closely. In fact the year has marked a series of stunning reversals for her foreign policy stewardship. Nowhere are those set-backs more dramatic than in Pakistan—one country where Rice urged, and the White House rather belatedly adopted, a shift designed finally to try to nudge the country’s leadership out of the grave they’ve been digging themselves. It was, however, a classic case of too little, too late. ...

In sum, the Bush Administration’s Neoconservative team met their match for confidence artistry in a military man named Pervez Musharraf. He presented himself as the only game in town, the man they had to come to love—or else. And in this way, Musharraf was able to get his way on just about everything—picking their pockets as he went along.

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Bush Stonewalls CIA Torture Tapes Destruction

Do we have a right to know what George W. Bush's role was in the destruction of the CIA torture tapes?

Apparently not.

From the Times:

President Bush deflected questions on Thursday about the destruction of C.I.A. interrogation tapes, saying that he will withhold comment until investigations into the affair are complete.

When the investigations are over, Bush will say: Time to move on.

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Today the Presidency Was Stolen from the American People: The Supreme Court Coup

Bush and his cronies could never win a free and open election in a democracy, so they stole the election in 2000 (and 2004).

Today marks the anniversary of that betrayal of the American people.

Via BuzzFlash:

"About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush by a 5–4 vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. Seven of the nine justices cited differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount, both of which, they ruled, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution."

Can anyone imagine the Supreme Court in 2000 using the Equal Protection Clause to install a Democrat in the White House had Al Gore offered up the argument?

From: Judith E. Schaeffer, Legal Director, People For the American Way

Re: Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court and the 2008 Election Season

Seven years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore. By stopping the contested vote count in Florida on December 12, 2000, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court effectively gave the presidency to George W. Bush and took the decision away from the voters.

Less than one year from now, the voters will decide the future of the Supreme Court. The next appointments to the Court will almost certainly be made by the President elected in November 2008, and confirmed by a Senate with new members elected in the same cycle. It’s crucial that voters understand that their votes will help determine the shape of the Court for many years to come, and the anniversary of Bush v. Gore is a timely opportunity to raise the issue for your readers.

Bush v. Gore demonstrated all too clearly that the Supreme Court has a profound and lasting effect on the daily lives of all Americans, who look to the Supreme Court as a fair arbiter of the law and our nation’s highest values.

Since that decision, President Bush’s lifetime appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have pushed the Court even farther to the right. The two men are likely to serve for many decades, ensuring that President Bush’s influence will extend long past the end of his term. Their nominations and confirmations to the Court illustrate the grave importance election results have on shaping the Court.

On issues ranging from reproductive choice to school integration to fair pay for equal work, the Roberts Court has started to reverse years of progress that most Americans accept as moderate, fair and wise. In the coming years, we can expect more and more rulings outside the mainstream.

It’s no coincidence that the Supreme Court has been a major electoral issue for the Religious Right for the last several election cycles. In order to roll back constitutional protections on privacy rights and church-state separation, the leaders of the movement have been whipping their followers into a fury for years, demanding that candidates pledge to appoint and confirm ultraconservative justices. The result has been a decades-long push by the far right to fill the federal courts with jurists who place a narrow ideological agenda above the rule of law and the Constitution.

The Republican candidates for President have been only too happy to oblige. John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee have all pledged to appoint justices in the mold of ultraconservative justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – even when such an appointment would conflict with their own stated positions, such as Guiliani’s professed "pro-choice" stand.

Replacing another moderate justice with a hard-right conservative would be a devastating blow to the principles of fairness and equality that the vast majority of Americans embrace. Another right wing justice added to the ultra-conservative voting bloc of Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas could help reverse decades of precedents, threatening legal rights that Americans take for granted.

It’s time for progressives and moderates to make the same stand at the ballot box, and demand a Supreme Court that reflects mainstream American values: Equality, regardless of race or religion. Fair pay for women and minorities in the workplace. The rights of families to make private medical decisions without government interference. And much, much more.

Mainstream Americans must demand appointments of justices to the court who reflect their values, justices who will apply the law fairly, not ideologically. That will require a fair-minded president, and a Senate majority large enough to confirm progressive nominees.

People For the American Way will be working from now until Election Day to educate voters in key states about the importance of the courts, and how their votes for Senate and President could affect the Court and the nation for decades to come. To kick off our campaign, we’ll be placing a billboard in Manchester, New Hampshire from December 10th until primary day to highlight the Bush v. Gore anniversary and draw attention to the importance of the courts.

The anniversary of Bush v. Gore is a reminder that courts matter, something that voters should bear in mind throughout the coming election season. The outcome of the next election day may depend on it.
From People for the American Way.
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U.S. Set to Deport Gay Iranian

Bush and his gay-hating pigs can always be counted on to if not lead, at least emulate, the worst of the world's bigotries.

from Doug Ireland at Z-Net:

President George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not agree on much, but tragically they may find common ground about the disposability of Hassan Parhizkar's life.

Since November 7, a mild-mannered 40-year-old gay Iranian businessman from Rockville, Maryland has been sitting in jail in the Frederick County, Maryland Detention Center, housed with common criminals, in the living hell of limbo between the freedom he has known since he came to the United States as a young man 17 years ago and the certain persecution, imprisonment, or worse that will be his fate as a gay man if he is sent back to Iran.

A deportation order to send him back to Iran has been issued, and any day he could be put on a plane back to Tehran, where he was born.

"I am very afraid, and so very frustrated," Hassan Parhizkar told me in a truncated, collect telephone call from jail.

"My asylum request has never been before an immigration judge. I just don't know what to do, I just don't know what to do..." he added in a voice choked with tears.

See more at Doug Ireland at Z-Net.

Now would be a good time for Bush to bash Iran's anti-gay idiocies, grant Mr. Parhizkar asylum, and tell the world that deep-down, Bush is a loving humanist.
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American Rights During the Time of Bush

Stupid Iraqis, don't they realize their oil is our oil to use as we wish?

Stupid Iranians, don't they realize we can bomb whom we want for any or no reason? And that applies to the world too!

And stupid Americans, don't they realize the above?

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Sidney Blumenthal: Bush's Mess Requires Tenacious and Savvy Cleaner

Looks like one of my favorite writers is going to work for Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Sidney Blumenthal writes today in his Salon column:

Readers know of my background in the Clinton White House.(See "The Clinton Wars.") They are familiar with my long friendship with Sen. Hillary Clinton. When she recently asked me to join her campaign as senior advisor I felt I must accept, though not out of obligation but, rather, wholeheartedly.

Too bad, Blumenthal's writing, like that of Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, among others, literally sustained me during the reign of Bush and his regime.

So deeply has this regime driven America into a depraved and dirty hole that any description of America as a shining light on a hill is simply cruel irony.

Writes Blumenthal:

Nov. 15, 2007 Under crisis conditions of an extraordinary magnitude political leadership of the highest level will be required in the next presidency. The damage is broad, deep and spreading, apparent not only in international disorder and violence, the unprecedented decline of U.S. prestige, and the flouting of our security and economic interests but also in the hollowing out of the federal government's departments and agencies, and their growing incapacity to fulfill their functions, from FEMA to the Department of Justice.

The more rigid the current president is in responding to the chaos he has fostered, the more the Republicans still supporting him rally around him as a pillar of strength. His flat learning curve, refusal to admit error and redoubling of mistakes are regarded as tests of his strong character. Whatever his low poll ratings of the moment, his stubborn adherence to failure is admired as evidence of his potency.

The patently perverse notion that weakness is strength is the basis of Bush's remaining credibility within his party. His abuse of presidential power is seen as his great asset rather than understood as his enduring weakness. But when the president assumes all the responsibility, he also receives all the blame, which becomes unitary and unilateral. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson stated the constitutional principle in the 1952 Youngstown Steel case: "When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb. Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system."

In his waning year, Bush is pointedly indifferent to the predictable consequences of his collapse. According to those who have met with him recently, he envisions himself as a noble idealist having made moral decisions that will vindicate him generations from now.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of his policies, he has startlingly succeeded in reshaping the executive into an unaccountable imperial presidency. And Bush's presidency is now accepted as the only acceptable version for major Republican candidates who aspire to succeed him. All of them have pledged to extend its arbitrary powers. Their embrace of the imperial presidency makes the 2008 election a turning point in constitutional government.

This campaign pits two parties running on diametrically opposite ideas of the presidency and the Constitution. There has not been such a sharp divergence on the foundation of the federal system since perhaps the election of 1860.
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