Month: November 2005

Laura Rozen lays into Dick Cheney, and it isn’t pretty:

“The guy supports torture. He hides out in bunkers. He conspires with big oil to deceive the Congress. His chief of staff has been indicted for covering up that office’s role in outing a CIA officer to the media as political revenge. He bought sci fi Iraq intelligence from whoever was selling. He obstructed a Senate Intelligence investigation of pre-war intelligence. Basically, I don’t think the Dems are going to have any problem continuing to let the public know about Cheney, whose popularity rating stands about as high as Saddam’s in Iraq, right? Only in Cheney’s Anbar province, Wyoming and Utah, does his approval rating break 50% …”

Ouch!

If the Republicans want to survive as a party, there’s just one course for the rational amongst them to take. As I put it last month: “Earth to Bush: Ditch Cheney.”

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), in a November 15 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, in Washington, D.C.

“The Iraq war should not be debated in the United States on a partisan political platform. This debases our country, trivializes the seriousness of war and cheapens the service and sacrifices of our men and women in uniform. War is not a Republican or Democrat issue. The casualties of war are from both parties. The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years.”

He also said: “I believe the United States should begin drawing down forces in Iraq next year” — essentially the same position as the bipartisan “Homeward Bound” resolution, which would begin withdrawing U.S. troops “no later than October 1, 2006.”

As antiwar momentum builds, we are beginning to see the reappearance of a species we all thought was extinct: the rational Republicans.

This headline has got to be the stupidest ever: “Bush, Schwarzenegger Flee to World’s Biggest Red State“! So who is ridiculous enough to be red-baiting (albeit semi-humorously) the nation’s two top Republicans? Who else but Arianna Huffington? She’s plastered it in big red letters at the top of her “Huffington Post” website — at a moment when the really big news is that that both parties are readying resolutions setting the stage for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The really funny part is that, when you click on the headline you’re greeted by an Associated Press story that says: Schwarzenegger Promotes Trade in China. Aha! Obviously it’s all a Commie plot — why, those traders!

The “Huffington Post” was meant to be a left-wing version of the Drudge Report, but it is no such thing. Matt Drudge, whatever his faults, at least has a nose for news: the losers over at Huffpuff wouldn’t know a real news story it grabbed them by the hair, threw them down on the bed, and … well, you get the picture.

Ms. Huffington and her crew are so wrapped up in their California Dreamland of partisan ideology that they have lost whatever connection to reality they once had. Arianna can be a perceptive writer, but as an editor she lacks judgement, i.e. she hasn’t any at all. And I suspect her underlings are worse.

“World’s Biggest Red State” — indeed!

Hollywood actor Bruce Willis, expressing far more displeasure with the Bush administration’s prosecution of the “War on Terror” than he cares to admit, has stepped up to the plate and offered a million dollars for information leading to the capture of al Qaeda leaders such as bin Laden. That’s damned generous of him. Perhaps, if this works, John McClane himself will offer to lead the occupation forces in Iraq in their heroic attempt to crush all resistance to Washington DC.
Wishful thinking. I seriously doubt that the type of fanatic who would fly an airplane into a building is looking for material rewards. Besides, pampered rich-boys like Willis and public war-hawk intellectuals seem perfectly willing to allow someone else to do the killin’ and the dyin’.
Willis, a neocon-ish Republican and Bush supporter, also offered criticism of the press for not reporting “really good things happening in Iraq.” What a shock. Does anyone, anywhere in the world, think the press is doing a good job? Here’s something you never read: “My, my, my, my, my, is the press ever doing a spiffy job reporting on [insert issue here]. And they’re certainly not demonstrating any bias against my point of view, are they?”
Perhaps Willis could elicit the kind of reporting he approves of if he offered a million bucks for it.

The new Evil Empire spreads its tentacles over the world:

“…Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

“The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE’s teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantanamo went “up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques” for “high-profile, high-value” detainees. General Hill had sent this list – which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees’ phobias – to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Hat tip, Laura Rozen.

Gee, no wonder the Iraqi Communist Party is so enthusiastic about the American occupation — and was even appointed by former viceroy Paul Bremer to the Governing Council. As I wrote two years ago:

“The Communists, like the Americans, believe that the way to transform society and achieve the transition to true democracy is by establishing an ‘interim’ dictatorship: in the case of the former, it’s the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” while the Americans call their dictatorship the ‘Iraqi Interim Authority.’ But that’s just semantics. Both want to forcibly modernize and secularize a deeply religious, consciously conservative society, and seek to ‘liberate’ women: both commies and neocons see themselves as “progressive,” on the right side of history, and both have force at the core of their methods.

“There is really nothing all that odd about the Commie-neocon axis of ‘liberation’: it represents the reunion of the Bolsheviks with their long-lost Menshevik brothers.”

The conservative philosopher Claes Ryn calls the neocons who are running America into the ground “neo-Jacobins,” and surely their methods — including torture — recall the reign of Robespierre in “revolutionary” France. As Professor Ryn puts it:

“But 9/11 changed everything, the neo-Jacobins cry. Well, not quite everything. The human condition has not changed. Terrible events do not cancel the need for those personal qualities and social and political structures without which the will to power becomes arbitrary and tyrannical. Unfortunately, 9/11 gave the imperialistic personality another pretext for throwing off restraint.”

Will this era in America’s story go down in history as the Bushevik Terror? Remember, though, what happened to the Jacobin leaders in the end …

Arthur Silber on the warblogger pile-on to the scurrilous attack on Jimmy Massey’s credibility by St. Louis Post Dispatch reporter Ron “Embedded” Harris. (and welcome back Arthur, you were missed.)

From the AWC blog archives, here’s Scott Horton on his interview with Massey at Camp Casey in Crawford last August. (Scott and Jimmy photo to the left) And, here’s Scott’s interview with Jimmy Massey and Tim Goodrich from October 15, 2005.

Funny how the warblogs, so enamored of screaming BIAS! at the “MSM” were so keen to buy this story.