Obama Acts Against War as GOP Screams: 'We Want War'

Support President Obama and the world and voice your support to your US senators in approving the Iran Nuke agreement

Stop Republican madness. Sign the leading anti-war coalition petition and tell Congress: Defend the Iran Nuke deal and stop Republicans from starting a war with Iran.

"The international agreement to ensure that Iran’s nuclear energy program stays peaceful is not just a victory for non-proliferation but part of a more realistic realignment of U.S. policy toward the Mideast, finally recognizing the bloody futility of 'full-spectrum dominance.'"

So reads ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller's piece in ConsortiumNews supporting peace and security and rejecting war.

The Republican Party wants war with Iran and has become a rogue political force in international affairs, aligning itself with the most destructive, lawless parties of Israel.

The Republican Party is perfecting willing to send American troops and Marines to die and destabilize, even now refusing to acknowledge the catastrophe their Iraq War lies inflicted onto the our country and the world.

The Obama administration deserves our support against the 'Three Amigos' idiocy of Sens. McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and kill-the-public-healthcare-option Joe Lieberman making the rounds calling for rejection of the World v. Israel and the Republican Party deal (Benen, MSNBC).

Support President Obama and the world and voice your support to your US senators in approving the Iran Nuke agreement.

Remember Scott Walker, a typical if more corrupt-than-usual Republican, said U.S. war with Iran on Inaugural Day, should Walker become president, is "very possible." (Nichols, The Nation)

This is madness. Sign the leading anti-war coalition petition and tell Congress: Defend the deal and stop Republicans from starting a war with Iran.

Hey Scott Walker, You're Lying Again—as Bad as Bush-Cheney

Scott Walker finds utility of neocon lies as he evades law
enforcement probe back home in Wisconsin, one of
numerous scandals and corruptions of Gov. Scott Walker

Updated - Fresh from his PR jaunt to Israel blacked-out from the press (Sommer, Hareetz, Schreckinger, the Politco), Scott Walker comes home and shoots out the story he would not have invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 (Rubin, Washington Post, Sommerhauser, Wisconsin State Journal) knowing what Bush and Cheney knew.

Walker's nonsense comes with a wink to the neocons in the U.S. and the even more war-mongering rightist and militaristic racists in Israel lusting for a US-led war with Iran (this time), should another Republican occupy the White House.

Of course Bush and Cheney knew. But the oh-we-didn't-know-there-were-no-WMDS is the neocon line of the day, and Scott Walker is ever the good solider for lies, no matter the consequences.

One tactical problem with Walker's latest lie is Bush-Cheney's White House Iraq Group's (the Iraq War propaganda group) 2002-03 mission to lie, spin and con America into war with Iraq, and the strutting Bush and assorted chickenhawks created a disaster, arguably the most atrocious human rights crime of the 21st century.

Another problem for Scott Walker is Walker is dumber (and less informed) than Bush, hence media blackouts and press rope lines that come with Walker's public appearances now-a-days, and still not one question-and-answer session with voters.

Walker's—more likely a different GOP nominee for the presidency—lies for an invasion with Iran this next time out won't wash with the American public still recovering from the Bush-Cheney disaster to the world economy, and not so hot on more neocon wars.

For those with short memories, perhaps the best text of Bush-Cheney-neocon lies selling the Iraq invasion is David Corn and Michael Isikoff's Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown Publishers, 2006). (See review, (Heilbrunn, NYT)

Notes David Corn two years ago, "Our book ... was the first cut at an important topic: how a president had swindled the nation into war with a deliberate effort to hype the threat." (Corn, MotherJones)

For those contemplating what the neocons did and what the Republicans want to do again, see "Hubris" (Full Film) Iraq War Documentary - The Rachel Maddow Show (02-18-2013).

Fort Hood Terror v. Neocon Arizona Terror

When news of the 2009 Fort Hood Massacre broke, the most tenuous evidence was used to paint the killing as the work of Al Qaeda and other Islamic groups. (Fox)

"The murders at Ft. Hood are about the radicalization of individuals by an extremist ideology -- jihadism -- which fuels acts of terror," writes Walid Phares at FoxNews.com's Fox Forum.

But suggestions that Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck-Michele Bachmann-gun-toting Tea Partiers-Jesse Kelly's "shoot a fully automatic M16" to "get on target for victory" might constitute a "radicalization of individuals by an extremist ideology" evoke expressed shock and outrage by the neocons.

At the Weekly Standard, for example, are columns on "The Left's McCarthyism," "The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel," and on and on.

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol was on C-SPAN over the weekend comparing criticism of neocon, eliminationist rhetoric to what Kristol says is the absurd suggestion that George W. Bush lied about WMDS. These guys are a laugh a minute.

Paul Krugman puts things into perspective:

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence. ...

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Even now, not one GOP-Tea Party extremist will issue even a tame tone-down-the-rhetoric statement. That should tell you rather clearly that they intend to engage in more of the same. But accepting responsibility for the harvest is a different story.

The neocons are going to lose this political battle of terror speech and they know it; but calling for an end to eliminationist rhetoric would be making it a rout.

Sarah Palin Draws Raves from David Broder

Just when you thought American politics could not possibly sink to lower depths of self parody, Sarah Palin's address to the Tea Party-whack set is belatedly endorsed today by the Dean of American Journalism, the neocon of neocons, the Washington Post's David Broder.

Broder was an cheerleader for the Bush-Cheney regime, heaping praise on Bush's grand design for democracy as evidenced by ... Bush's speeches. He writes that Palin's address "was not the first time that Palin has impressed me."

His column is gushing inanity, devoid of policy and substance [befitting the modern Dean] and concluding, "Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand. The lady is good."

Here's some political ammo: Sarah Palin is an ignoramus without the slightest understanding of major policy spheres. Sarah Palin is an Evangelical Zionist clown, catering to the right-wingers in Israel who want America to engage in war without end in the region known as the Middle-East. Sarah Palin is anti-choice and a statist reactionary.

An ignorant, militaristic clown is the perfect Broder candidate.

Glenn Greenwald has some fun at Salon:

I was fairly certain that Washington Press Corps Dean David Broder's career would end with his last memorably humiliating moment (of many) being this February, 2007, column, when he giddily announced that ‘President Bush is poised for a political comeback,’ that ‘Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts,’ and that ‘he is demonstrating political smarts that even his critics have to acknowledge’ -- only for Bush's approval ratings to continue to plummet until he finally left office as one of the most despised Americans politicians of the last 100 years. I was wrong.

Today, Broder pens a gushing love letterto Sarah Palin -- decreeing that we must ‘Take Sarah Palin seriously,’ admiring her ‘pitch-perfect recital of the populist message,’ and warning that she will be difficult to stop as a major political force -- on the very same day that his own newspaper published a poll reportingthat Palin's ‘political standing has deteriorated significantly’; that ‘fifty-five percent of Americans have unfavorable views of her, while the percentage holding favorable views has dipped to 37, a new low in Post-ABC polling’; that ‘there is a growing sense that the former Alaska governor is not qualified to serve as president, with more than seven in 10 Americans now saying she is unqualified, up from 60 percent in a November survey’; that ‘even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House’; and even that ‘Palin has lost ground among conservative Republicans,’ as ‘forty-five percent of conservatives now consider her as qualified for the presidency, down sharply from 66 percent who said so last fall.’ Could Man of the Regular Folk David Broder possibly be any more out of touch with the Regular Folk?

Is that all a candidate has to do for neocon favor: Accalaim one's loyality to Israel? And repeat talking points without any apparent understanding of what is being said? No more qualifications necessary.

Obama Should Reject Neocon Lies on Iran

Few think that President Obama will actually carry through on his posturing on Iran and support an Israeli attack.

The repercussions could be devastating, to us.

For some sanity on the Iran situation, see:

- More Lies, More Deceptions

- Should any Iraq lessons be applied to Iran?

Dick Cheney Stays on Point

Update: Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP

Dick Cheney is competing with Rush and Newt as the leader of the new GOP.

We wish him luck.

Maureen Dowd and Juan Cole analyse Cheney's macabre machinations that apparently will not stop ever. From Cole:

This week's news is about the grand old pit bull's struggle to continue to define his own party. Cheney emerged last Friday to warn on a North Dakota radio program that it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to moderate its message. (Does that mean it is now radical?) Then on Sunday Cheney told Bob Schieffer of 'Face the Nation' that it was a mistake to stop using waterboarding and other forms of extreme interrogation, and that they did not constitute torture. He also poked fun at Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican and expressing a preference for the waspish Limbaugh as the party's leader.

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:

Does Iran Have Right to Self-Defense

Update: Robert Dreyfuss: We aren't going to war with Tehran.

Iran is an authoritarian nightmare, like many of America's other allies in the region. But is a country developing weapons to protect itself against aggressors really that outrageous?

The neocons used to believe that is was not so outrageous.

From Norman Finkelstein:

In 2000, leading neoconservatives Robert Kagan and William Kristol edited a volume of foreign policy analyses titled Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter Books). The chapter on Iran was written by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst on the Middle East. Here’s what he said:

"Tehran certainly wants nuclear weapons; and its reasoning is not illogical. Iran was gassed into surrender in the first Persian Gulf War; Pakistan, Iran’s ever more radicalized Sunni neighbor to the southeast, has nuclear weapons; Saddam Hussein, with his Scuds and his weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions, is next door; Saudi Arabia, Iran’s most ardent and reviled religious rival, has long-range missiles; Russia, historically one of Iran’s most feared neighbors, is once again trying to reassert its dominions I the neighboring Caucasus; and Israel could, of course blow the Islamic Republic to bits. Having been vanquished by a technologically superior Iraq at a cost of at least a half-million men, Iran knows very well the consequences of having insufficient deterrence. And the Iranians possess the essential factor to make deterrence work: sanity. Tehran or Isfahan in ashes would destroy the Persian soul, about which even the most hard-line cleric cares deeply. As long as the Iranians belie that either the U.S. or Israel or somebody else in the region might retaliate with nuclear weapons, they won’t do something stupid.

"A nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would of course check, if not checkmate, the United States’ maneuvering room in the Persian Gulf. We would no doubt think several times about responding to Iranian terrorism or military action if Tehran had the bomb and a missile to deliver it. During the lead-up to the second Gulf War, ruling clerical circles in Tehran and Qom were abuzz with the debate about nuclear weapons. The mullahs…agreed: if Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons, the Americans would not have challenged him. For the “left” and the “right,” this weaponry is the ultimate guarantee of Iran’s defense, its revolution, and its independence as a regional great power. (pp. 138-39)"

Clinton Supporter and DNC Delegate Debra Bartoshevich: Morinic McCain Supporter

Update: See Traitor, tool or token trick? Questionable former Clinton delegate Debra Bartoshevich prefers identity politics to issues by Meg White

Update: At the state Democratic Party convention, party members, including Clinton supporters, unanimously passed a resolution asking the national party not to seat Bartoshevich at the Denver convention. (Wisconsin Democratic Chair) Wineke spoke in favor of the resolution.

Caught this beauty in Blogging Blue:

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

... (D)isaffected Hillary Clinton supporter Debra Bartoshevich - a delegate to the DNC National Convention - is planning on voting for Senator John McCain in November:

She said she planned to vote for Clinton at the convention, but in an Obama-McCain match-up in November. ['I will not be voting for Obama. I will cast my vote for John McCain,' said Bartoshevich: 'I just feel you need to have somebody who has experience with foreign matters.']

Hey Debra, why not write in George W. Bush? He's had eight years of "experience with foreign matters." Ahhhhhhhhh.

Debra Bartoshevich. Who is this new McCain supporter? And how does someone this idiotic get to be a delegate?

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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The Forward's Fein: Huffington Post Is Anti-Semitic for Criticizing Joe Lieberman’s Endorsement of John McCain

Joe Lieberman is a lying, militaristic Neocon who campaigned in 2006 on a pledge to endorse a Democrat for president in 2008.

[See Lieberman: "I want to elect a Democratic president in 2008."]

That kind of talk makes one an anti-Semite in the mind of The Forward's Leonard Fein. Writes Fein:

Trust me on this. Do not, even in idle curiosity, look at the postings on The Huffington Post regarding Joseph Lieberman’s endorsement of John McCain. Or, if you disregard my very sober advice and do have a look, bear in mind that all the antisemitism and anti-Israelism you will see expressed there is all there is. Every raging antisemite in the nation has now had his or her say, all the Israel-bashing has been spent, and we can go on. ...

Fein and Lieberman are whacks, no need to trust or put your faith in anyone or anything on this assessment, just your reason.

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Iran Strike Coming?

Colin Powell: Iran Far From Having Nuke

Only in Bush's America (including the many depraved Democrats who lie down as an obscene foreign policy is loosed upon the world) does a debate occur pondering whether we launch another assault on yet another country, Iran. [USS Eisenhower, pictured at right, in the Persian Gulf last year]

What are the defense planners in Iran pondering? I suggest this:

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any attack launched from Israel or the United States against any target in Iran as an attack by Israel and the United States on the Iranian people, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Israeli and American targets.

That means World War III.

The above speculated Iranian ruminations are a paraphrase of one point of Kennedy's address announcing the quarantine against Cuba, October 22, 1962.

What's frightening is that this time, the American administration is clearly the aggressor nation, destabilizing and threatening the world.

As American citizens, we ought not just resist this administration's war plans at home (and let's hope that they are aborted), but wish for a comprehensive world response against the aggressive plans of this authoritarian Bush regime.

One wishes that the obvious costs of an Israeli/American strike against Iran would preclude such aggressive and reckless action. But rational actors are in short supply in the Bush administration.

Scott Horton at Harper's weighs some key points in his piece. Here's an excerpt from Horton's 1,300-word piece:

Still, my sense this week is that the roll-out for attacks on Iran has, to the great distraction of its sponsors, not gained the sort of traction that they envisaged for it. I am therefore pulling back on the prospects for the Cheney air war on Iran before the end of the Bush presidency, putting this again at a break-even proposition. Here are some of the points for the pushback.

I disagree with Horton that lack of traction, little political support among foreign policy elites, and hostility from the military brass are sufficient to dissuade Bush and Cheney, if they have already decided that surrogate Israel or American military strikes are in the offing.

And the predictable economic and political dislocations do not figure into the machinations of these people; the loonies are in charge.

The fact is we have a radical, dangerous regime running the U.S., and the barriers and constraints that would have precluded, say, the disaster of Iraq do not have the normal force of reason on this radical, statist, out-of-control regime.

Really, as citizens, we can only hope.

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War with Iran

Rational Americans look on with concern like passengers on the Titanic as a hare-brained, messianic president enmeshed in a neocon ideological bubble sends signals of a coming strike against Iran.

A ex-military source working in a Midwest industry in a position to observe qualitative changes in military traffic on American rails and highways notes an increase in military-related traffic like that that has preceded military excursions into Iraq twice.

The source believes a strike against Iran is coming.

But as many have noted, such a strike is lunacy.

As Joseph L. Galloway writes in McClatchy (Inexorable March Toward War With Iran?):

The more thoughtful military and civilian advisers can rattle off a dozen reasons why an American attack on Iran at this juncture would be foolish in the extreme and risk setting the Middle East afire.

Just some of those reasons would include:

- Shutting down not only Iran's oil production but Iraq's as well, and possibly triggering Iranian retaliation against the oil production and shipping in other nations around the Persian Gulf. Are we ready for $300 a barrel oil?

- Putting 160,000 American troops and another 125,000 American and foreign contractors in Iraq at much greater risk, as neighboring Iran signals Shiite allies there to begin all-out war against us and sends in its own well-armed guerrillas to lead the attack.

-Our 250-mile main supply lines in Iraq run through the heart of Shiite-controlled southern Iraq, and they would be cut. If we think we have troubles now with the shaky Iraq national government in Baghdad, which has already snuggled up to Tehran, what would war with Iran bring?

- Risking confrontation with the newly oil-rich and energized Russian Federation and President Bush's ex-KGB soul-mate Vladimir Putin. Since Putin has his hand on the natural gas and oil pipelines that keep our presumed allies in Europe from freezing to death, it is wise to assume that any support for an American attack on his ally Iran would be slim to none.

Assuming that any U.S. air war against Iran would not be enough by itself - and such air campaigns seldom are definitive in modern history - where would we find the ground forces capable of doing the really hard part?

Our Army and Marine Corps are stretched to the breaking point maintaining the force level in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have no strategic reserves available to help secure our allies in the Persian Gulf, much less to mount any offensive inside Iran.

When you add it all up, you have your answer: No one in their right mind would believe that attacking Iran now makes any sense at all.

But that doesn't mean that Bush and Cheney won't do it.

There were a lot of reasons why a pre-emptive strike into Iraq based on flimsy and bogus intelligence and far too few troops made no sense, yet they did it anyway, with trademark arrogance and ignorance.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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