America: "Peace Through Strength"?

In August 2007, Family Security Matters (get it?) published and then wisely removed an article by contributing editor Philip Atkinson entitled "Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy." Here Atkinson proposes that Bush become "President for Life." I'm not kidding:

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.
If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.
He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.
President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become 'President-for-Life' Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

Atkinson also proposed that Bush would have been wiser simply to nuke Iraq out of existence:

When faced with the possible threat that the Iraqis might be amassing terrible weapons that could be used to slay millions of citizens of Western Civilization, President Bush took the only action prudence demanded and the electorate allowed: he conquered Iraq with an army.
This dangerous and expensive act did destroy the Iraqi regime, but left an American army without any clear purpose in a hostile country and subject to attack. If the Army merely returns to its home, then the threat it ended would simply return.
The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life.

If you had any questions about how President for Life Bush would "end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court," that's probably a big clue.

We could probably dismiss Atkinson and his modest proposal utterly, except, according to SourceWatch, Family Security Matters is a project of the Center for Security Policy, which is a project of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and numerous other senior administration officials, senators, and arms manufacturers.

Dick Cheney, Vice President of the U.S. under George W. Bush, was an early member of Center's Board of Advisors (which is now called the National Security Advisory Council).
'[T]wenty-two CSP advisers -- including additional Reagan-era remnants like Elliott Abrams, Ken deGraffenreid, Paula Dobriansky, Sven Kraemer, Robert Joseph, Robert Andrews and J.D. Crouch -- have reoccupied key positions in the national security establishment, as have other true believers of more recent vintage.'
'...While CSP boasts an impressive advisory list of hawkish luminaries, its star is Frank Gaffney, its founder, president and CEO.'
'...Gaffney and CSP's prescriptions for national security have been fairly simple: Gut all arms control treaties, push ahead with weapons systems virtually everyone agrees should be killed, give no quarter to the Palestinians and, most important, go full steam ahead on just about every national missile defense program.'
'...Looking at the center's affiliates, it's not hard to see why: Not only are makers of the Osprey (Boeing) well represented on the CSP's board of advisers but so too is Lockheed Martin (by vice president for space and strategic missiles Charles Kupperman and director of defense systems Douglas Graham). Former TRW executive Amoretta Hoeber is also a CSP adviser, as is former Congressman and Raytheon lobbyist Robert Livingston. Ball Aerospace & Technologies -- a major manufacturer of NASA and Pentagon satellites -- is represented by former Navy Secretary John Lehman, while missile-defense computer systems maker Hewlett-Packard is represented by George Keyworth, who is on its board of directors. And the Congressional Missile Defense Caucus and Osprey (or "tilt rotor") caucus are represented by Representative Curt Weldon and Senator Jon Kyl.'[3]

It's a stretch to say that Atkinson represents the official foreign policy of the US under Bush. But the fact that Family Security Matters published the article suggests strongly that whatever virulent insanity afflicts Atkinson also afflicts its higher-ups or else the article would have been spiked and never have seen the light of day.

So much can be inferred, legitimately, from this constellation of policy and people relationships. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Matthews and Russert

Chris Matthews seems in a clumsy way to indict Tim Russert for helping to sell the Iraq war:

It's a fair criticism, albeit delivered in Matthews' inimitable man-crush style. What he's saying seems to be that Russert, as Everyman, was as susceptible to administration lies as the rest of us average guys.

That's all well and good, but Russert wasn't paid to be an average guy, was he. He was paid, I hope, to look even harder when his "average patriot" button was pushed. He did just the opposite.

(It has been noticed that the transcript of this comment has "disappeared" from Matthews' site. Unfortunately the YouTube version has not.)

What Goes Around Comes Around

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

So wrote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., prophetically. We tend to think of "prophetic" in the sense of foretelling the future, and sure enough, when something is innate in the human condition like our interconnectedness, speaking of it as King does here would of course be foretelling the future as much as describing the present.

But in the biblical tradition out of which King was speaking, "prophetic" had another even more important meaning. It meant and it means speaking truth to power.

That's pretty clear when you think of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. And speaking truth to power is what Dr. Jeremiah Wright did when he spoke of God's damning America for its horrendous affronts to the poor and destitute. It tells me a lot about the state of integrity in this country and the condition of its national security when we want to stone our prophets!

If it's not clear what King meant, nothing better illustrates it today than the immigration atrocity. Let me give you some examples.

Here in Phoenix, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has so terrorized the immigrant community by targeting Brown people that Hispanic people are afraid to go out. This means, among other things, that sick kids aren't being taken to the doctor's for fear of deportation. When those kids are sick with something contagious and they aren't treated, what do you think happens to their communities? We're all in this together.

And there's this, according to Man Egee over at Latino Politico:

CLARKS SUMMIT, Pa. (AP) — Saying the nation's immigration system is broken, Pennsylvania's largest grower of fresh-to-market tomatoes announced Monday he will no longer produce the crop because he can't find enough workers to harvest it.

Keith Eckel, 61, a fourth-generation farmer and the owner of Fred W. Eckel Sons Farms Inc., said he saw a dramatic decline last summer in the number of migrant workers who showed up to pick tomatoes at his 2,000-acre farm in northeastern Pennsylvania.

He said Congress' failure to approve comprehensive immigration reform had hindered his ability to hire enough workers to get his crop to the market. Most of Eckel's workers came from Mexico.

"There are a number of workers hesitant to travel, legal or illegal, because of the scrutiny they are now under," said Eckel, whose tomatoes have been shipped to supermarkets and restaurants throughout the eastern United States. "So there are less workers crossing state lines."

Eckel, who planted 2.2 million tomato plants last year, said he also will stop growing pumpkins and will plant half as much sweet corn as usual, resulting in a loss of nearly 175 jobs.

So now in our zeal to rid ourselves of the Brown Peril, we are sending our own food prices through the roof nationwide. And that's not all. In the communities where the crops are grown, jobs are disappearing and farms, soon enough, will go into foreclosure because, guess what? It takes pickers to get the produce to market, and it takes selling the produce to pay the farm mortgage. We're all in this together.

And speaking of mortgages? Did you think all those foreclosures and empty rentals are coming just from native-born white folks? Well, guess what? All those hoardes of undocumented workers--and their fed-up, pissed-off, terrified documented relatives who are leaving with them--all had to live somewhere, didn't they? We're all in this together.

And baby, what goes around comes around. Progressives figured that out a long time ago. It's why we offer the policies we do. A rising tide floats all boats. But conservatives still labor under the mutually devastating illusion that they are self-made men.

If the present multiple-Bush-engineered crises don't get the fallacy of this across, nothing will. Like, do you really think your $4 gas has nothing to do with Iraq? Duh!

Questions They Won't Ask McBush

Because the nation desperately needs three more weeks of the same old same old relative to Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton, the following questions will not be asked of McCain and his answers will not be repeated on endless news cycles for months to come. I'm sure you have other questions that will not be asked or answered. Please advise.


How will "we" (by which I mean us and our children) pay for your war?

Explain how being indebted to China for the cost of this war secures America.

What will "we" (ditto) have to do without here at home in order to pay for your war?

The Shi'ites and Sunnis have been warring for centuries. Why will a delay in our leaving change that?

If we don't give Iraq notice, why on earth should they "step up"? We're doing the dirty work and providing billions in slush funds. Isn't that exactly the wrong incentive?

Are you afraid to stop the war because war profiteering is the only thing driving what's left of this economy?

Do you intend to ask the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation into the fraud and abuse that have cost US taxpayers billions in this war, and to seek compensation? If not, why not? After allm, that fraud dwarfs the cost of earmarks.

What will you do to clean up fraud and waste in the Pentagon, and to seek restoration of overcharges from US corporations?

What was your role in forcing the sale of Navajo tribal lands on Black Mesa to outside coal companies?

Drumbeats?

Admiral Fallon's resignation over alleged differences with Bush over Iran, and today's CNN story about the potential that Hezbollah will use cyberattacks if the US attacks Iran's nuclear plants are worrisome. They sound very much to me like Bush and Cheney may be laying groundwork for a pre-election attack on Iran.

I don't think Iran has ever fallen off Bush's war agenda. It was simply stalled a while by public disclosures questioning its capability and intentions. So I think attacking Iran--at a minimum, destroying its nuclear plants--is still possible. If it is to take place, it will have to take place before the January inauguration. that being the case, if it takes place, it will take place before the election in order for the GOP to make the case that the country can't afford to change horses in mid-stream.

The very possibility of an attack on Iran ought to bring us all to our feet. If the obvious lessons of Iraq in Iraq haven't persuaded us of its stupidity, then maybe pausing a moment to think about how we're going to pay for a third war can.

The reason the price of gasoline, grocery, durable goods, and other products is sharply spiking is the war in Iraq. The reason the dollar is tanking is the war in Iraq. We don't have the money to pay for it, so we are borrowing so heavily that we've managed to devalue our own currency and trigger inflation at the same time that the GOP's free market (anti-regulatory) policies have laid open the home-buying public to the predations of the low-life slime balls in the subprime market. Great management, eh?

The point is that war has consequences for every single one of us. Our nation is already teetering on the edge of disaster. The last thing we need is this cowboy in the White House firing off another loose round.

Survival of the Cutest, or The Difference Between "Gut" and "Smart"

Has anyone done a study of candidate faces and voter appeal? I know we've done the Alpha Male thing, and apparently, judging by the person now in the White House, it's a real thing. (Can you believe it?)

I'm thinking that at least 87% of the animosity directed at Hillary and Al Gore has to do with their faces.

Now wait. Before you go all hooty on me, remember that the nation is as one on the principle that no president shall ever resemble Dennis Kucinich, Ross Perot, or Ron Paul. These things matter in the arcane process of selecting candidates for national orifice--er, office.

Allow me to begin.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Gore has a prissy mouth. To me (and I like Gore; I'm from Tennessee, and before the crust formed on the earth, I worked for his father's re-election, much to my Republican father's outrage), to me, Gore's face looks most appallingly, regrettably Victorian in a particularly parsonish kind of way. The long, thin nose points inexorably to the thin, parsimonious lips, and I recoil, expecting Rector Gore's long, thin fingers to whip out the table of contents of my own personal book of sins. We don't have time for that.

Whether he's actually like Vicar Gore doesn't matter. I suspect he isn't like that at all, or he'd never have been elected to public office, by Democrats, at least, in the first place.

What matters is what we think we see there. His odd vocal cadence, nasal tonality, arching eyebrows, and, oh yeah, formidable intellect, move him even farther from our reach. Gore looks the patrician part, has the heritage, the wealth, and the access, and by all logic ought to be a Repubican. That he is not perhaps sets up an irreconcilable dissonance between who he is and the values he espouses. Indeed, if Gore had those values, if Gore were a Rightwing Republican, with all that those sad words imply, he'd probably have a marble monument on the Mall.

All this, then, makes for essentially the same set of questions that besets Hillary, except that she has the added complication of being female. If there's anything we hate more than persnickety, withhholding Protestant parsons, it's Women Like Hillary. We just know that she eats mountain oysters for breakfast.

Let me own now that, despite my unassailable standards for good judgment and rationality (hork!), I, too, am vulnerable to these perceptions. Consequently, I don't particularly LIKE either Gore or Hillary as individuals, though I do love Gore's policy constellation and respect his intellectual powers and intellectual integrity enormously, with a caveat related to his about-face on choice. Also, I like most of what Hillary stands for, if not her penchant for obviously playing it safe. I hate that.

That said, there's something about Hillary's face that also inspires less than affection. Eyes, cheeks, and mouth, I think. Come on, admit it. She looks like she's got something up her sleeve, like she's oozing sarcasm. I don't really believe she is. Everyone who's met her says she's very nice, and if she were as sarcastic and nasty as, say, Mean Jean, I don't think Democrats would like or elect or respect her as they do.

Again, it's what her face seems to say. Those cheeks invoke Pinnocchio. They conspire with that mouth to suggest that just possibly, her nose is growing, and in any case, if we knew the half of what she knows. . . . Only, who likes to feel left out of the joke? On this score alone, you just know that Hillary is the beneficiary of 300 million unresolved high school vendettas.

But there is the tedious fact that after $80 million or so, the Republicans were never able to turn up a damn thing on Hill and Bill. When she says she's been vetted, baby, she means vetted. We're not talking Skull and Bones here.
So maybe there's no joke at all.

Still, this isn't rational stuff. This is pure gut. And the one thing Bush has contributed to American political discourse is that there is a huge difference between gut and smart.

I know where we wouldn't be if Gore had been sworn in, as he should have been. We wouldn't be up to our eyeballs in Iraq, in debt, in spies, and inflation.

Maybe we ought to reconsider how we respond to Hillary and Al. This ain't a beauty contest.

What've We Got to Lose?

Ever feel like you're going to spontaneously combust?

Nazification. Global warming. Water shortage. Housing values. "Free" trade. Wage suppression. Job outsourcing. Pension erosion. Healthcare implosion. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Shaky stockmarket. National debt. Trade imbalance. Nuclear proliferation. War on women, gays, and immigrants. War on Iran. Occupation of Iraq. Blackwater. Christianists. Vote fraud. Freeper Nation. The Shock Doctrine. New Orleans.

So why's everybody on the Left so afraid to fight back? It's not like we've got anything to lose!

But that's not enough to keep me awake at night, so I was wondering: How does someone brought up in the USA decide that his sole purpose in life is to strip all his fellow citizens and their offspring of financial security, environmental safety, and their constitutional heritage?

I mean, how does that work? How do you get there from sixth-grade civics? I can see that being Barbara Bush's baby might be a big factor, but that can't be the only thing; it also happened to Dick.

Are they aliens? They're sure goddamned illegal.

Stop Calling it a "War." It's a Mercenary Occupation

The difference between World War II and the Occupation of Iraq is that WWII was a war against an unequivocal evil and the occupation of Iraq is an unprovoked act of aggression for the purpose of colonizing a country and its resources. It's a mercenary occupation that just so happens also to include actual mercenaries in larger numbers than actual accountable military soldiers and officers. WWII was necessary and morally defensible up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I’m of two minds about that. The Occupation of Iraq was and is neither. It's an everlasting shame, and I don't want to hear any more, ever, about how the US isn't imperialist.

Jane Smiley has written a trenchant essay about this for HuffPo. It’s a must-read, not least because it includes a brief analysis of one of the seeds of the GOP’s ultimate, inevitable destruction: Lee Atwater, a name that will live in infamy for the damage he and his direct heirs – Terry Dolan, Karl Rove, et al. – have done to politics--in fact, to competitions of all kinds in the US.

Out of Iraq Now. Now. Now. Not Another Minute. Out.

Iraqi officials have declared that they have no intention of reconciling. The whole point of the surge was to provide sufficient security for them to effect a reconciliation.

Because the Iraqis have no intention of stepping up, we need to step down and out the door. Right now. There's not only no reason to stay; staying in these circumstances is enabling a purposeless waste of life and limb and the fraudulent distribution of treasure to a legion of corrupt Bush friends and allies.

This has gone from being an appalling, horrific, criminal disaster to being an obscene travesty AND an appalling, horrific, criminal disaster. And if the Iraqis have their way, apparently they're waiting in the wings to create a bigger horror.

Impeach and get these hopelessly incompetent, catastrophic, corrupt sociopaths into prison. And then hang the lot, including Rumsfeld. Now. Before they get us into Iran. Jeeebus. Does it get any clearer?

A Truly Great Rant

America Used To Be Really Goddamn Awesome
Posted September 28, 2007 | 04:57 PM (EST) Bob Cesca, The Huffington Post

I've been captivated by Ken Burns' The War this week and it struck me how awesome America used to be.

The prevailing attitude of the ladies and gentlemen featured in Burns' film, and by proxy all Americans of that era, was that if we had to fight a war, we had better do it right. Clearly and with little dissent, we had to fight that war, and without fail, Americans rallied together to do it really damn well.

People from every corner of the nation selflessly pooled their resources for the great cause of World War II, and I'm not sure about this one, but I don't think President Roosevelt ever once asked the country to sacrifice by going to the mall. And I'm pretty sure he didn't outsource the construction of tanks, Flying Fortresses, Hellcats and Thunderbolts to Mexico and China. That's a hell of a thing by today's standards, isn't it? More here

The Bremer Edicts

If you're interested in the edicts of former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremmer, they can be found at the website of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Two assessments of interest:

Do the Bremer edicts limit Iraq's sovereignty?
To a degree. Two in particular impose significant restrictions, says Nathan Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and the author of a recent article on Bremer’s rulings. Order 17 grants immunity from Iraqi law to all members of the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq, as well as to foreign contractors and diplomats. Order 57 establishes independent inspectors general in every Iraqi ministry who are authorized to conduct investigations, audits, evaluations, and other reviews. The Bremer-appointed inspectors serve five-year terms.

What is the process for changing the Bremer rules?
Allawi and his Council of Ministers propose a change that legally supercedes one of Bremer’s edicts and win the unanimous approval of the Presidential Council. However, a 100-member Iraqi National Council, due to be formed in July, can veto any Allawi decision if two-thirds of the council oppose it. Once an elected government is in place after January 2005, law-making authority will shift to a 275-member transitional assembly.

Order 17 is the one that appears to let Blackwater and everybody else off the hook for any and everything they do, including all US contractors, for any and every dollar they steal. Order 17 should be named the "Heads I Win/Tails You Lose" order.

But I'm sure it's an immense relief to the Iraqis to know that Bremmer apppointees are keeping watch over their dinars and their oil.

"The Second Coming"

The drumbeats are quickening about a pending US attack on Iran and a recent, mysterious Israeli attack on Syria. All that I'm fit to think, Yeats said best many years ago:

"The Second Coming"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Stop Calling Bush "Delusional"

He may be pathological, but whatever he is, he's a traitor, a liar, and a thief. He has raped the Constitution he swore to uphold, protect, and defend. He has repeatedly lied, and lied, and lied, to us and to the world. And the sole purpose of the war and his domestic policy is to enrich himself and his cronies.

If, after the last six years and all the accumulated evidence readily available to you, you still have doubts, then let me say this, as nicely as I can: There are smelts who are smarter than you.

Start calling him, his administration, and the party that enables him what they are: traitors, liars, and thieves. War profiteers, shock-doctrine storm troopers, neo-Nazi racists, thugs, and mass-murderers. War criminals, defrauders of the American people and the commonwealth, global environmental toxins, and world rapers.

Pray for peace at this weekend's Washington protest. Pray for guidance on how to end this march of travesty. Pray for courage and clarity and the will to restore our values, our country, and our planet.

Iraq: Truth and Consequences

This is, indeed, in the President’s opening words, “a moment that decides the direction of a country and reveals the character of its people.”

In its way, the speech was moving. An American could hardly help but thrill to the prospects it outlined.

If only it had been true!

From the mysterious 36 nations, to the assertion of oil revenue-sharing, to the “real improvements in Iraqi daily life,” to our being asked to stay but by a government we installed, to the assertion that “this is a way forward we can all agree on” – this was a fiction delivered by a man who is used to lying without footprints, without challenge.

It was, indeed, bizarre.

The test of our national character is whether we will permit the lies to stand. Will we, as a nation, be complicit in the panicked fantasy of a man whose sole objective is not to be the President who loses this war?

First, two facts.

One, this war was lost the day this President ordered it, and a body of commentary from the Left and from moderates exists to prove that the outcome was predicted time and time again by people who live in the real world.

Two, our kids must not be asked to sacrifice life, limb, happiness, and sanity in order to protect a man and a party from the just consequences of a disastrous willed policy.

If we fail to draw that sacred line, the delusion and the train of lies and losses it will necessitate, become our own.

Bush looked like Alfred E. Neuman tonight, too small for his desk, eyes riveted on a script. He looked the part of a shoe salesman hiding behind a general -- an ambitious and duplicitous general, but a general nonetheless. He looked the part of a man with a small mission bought at a great price: to save himself at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and American lives.

This is indeed a moment that decides the direction of a nation. Will it be toward rooting out jihadists at home and abroad, or will it be toward perpetuating a catastrophe in order to perpetuate profiteering, corruption, and war?

This is indeed a moment that decides the character of a people? What do we stand for, America?

Pressure the Swing Voters in the Senate to Get Us Out of Iraq

From Essentially Contested America, these words of wisdom:

The right question, perhaps the only critical question--one ECA has asked several times in the past year--is when will Republicans Senators depart from their perfunctory support of Mr. Bush's catastrophically failed war policy. And which Republicans will have the courage to do so. Check out the following piece exploring this issue. Check out the entire piece, but here's the challenge: "That's the question that these 12 GOP Senators must be faced with repeatedly--will you keep us in Iraq for at least 10 more years and send over the next generation of our kids? Or will you vote with Democrats to end the destabilizing occupation?" According to the piece here are the likely Republican Senators who will finally substitute reason for madness: Alexander (Tenn.), Coleman (Minn.), Domenici (N.M., Lugar, (Ind.), McConnell (KY.), Murkowski (Alaska, Sessions (Ala.), Specter (Penn.), Sununu (N.H.), Warner (VA.), Voinivich (Ohio), and possibly Dole (N.C.). Profiles in courage? Probably not.

These, therefore, are the enablers, the swingvote-Senators to pressure. NOW.

US to Have Permanent Presence in Iraq? Not "No," HELL NO!

Sources on the Left have been saying for YEARS that Bush's intention was to establish a permanent presence in Iraq. It's about the oil, disaster capitalism, war profiteering, and neo-imperialism.

The only surprise is that King George is telling us about it--now, six years late.

Chris Matthews, cut the wide-eyed, chin-dropping BS. Who the hell didn't know this? The only surprise is that King George is telling us about it--now, six years late.

We've known about permament air bases and the world's largest embassy installation for ages. The latter was a public story a year ago:

Updated: 2:45 p.m. MT April 14, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq’s turbulent future.

The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in Rome.

“We can’t talk about it. Security reasons,” Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embassy, said when asked for information about the project.

If you didn't see this coming, you've been asleep.

Where we stand: IF Congress has any guts at all, we are in a constitutional crisis. The President does not have unilateral authority to commit this country to a Korea-like marriage without the consent of Congress. If Congress does not draw the line in the sand now, we have a monarchy. It's one or the other.

This sure ups the ante for the September 15 march in Washington.

Time to call Pelosi and Reid. This is about the Democratic leadership in Congress, first, and then it's about pressuring the swing vote in the GOP. Get on the horn, people.

"I don't know, actually. . . ."

This was our commanding general's answer today at a Senate hearing when Sen. John Warner (R-VA) asked Gen. Petraeus whether the course he is proposing we continue in Iraq "will make America safer." [Emphasis in original]

Obviously if the general thinks the answer is "yes," he would have said so.

Instead, he said, "I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted out in my mind. . . ."

He should have, three years ago, or resigned. And he's not alone. Maybe if our generals had had integrity, they could have stopped this president, who has none either.

This is a shameful day in a long series of shameful days leading to and continuing the slaughter in Iraq. First, we were told we had to invade Iraq to make America safer, because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. When it turned out he didn't, we were told it was necessary to remain in Iraq to make America safer, because Al Qaeda was there. We know now Al Qaeda was NOT in Iraq until after we invaded Iraq. Next we were told that we have to remain in Iraq to make it a democracy, because if it isn't a democracy, it will threaten America. Now we are told we have to stay in Iraq because if we leave it will threaten America. But we don't know for sure.

Our commanding general can't say for sure. The very most he can say is. "I don't know, actually. . . . I haven't sat down and sorted it out in my own mind. . . ."

The only position of integrity for a general who can't support his troops' mission is resignation. The only position of integrity for a Congress confronted with this history is to impeach the administration responsible for our being here.

The "Drawdown"

"Petraeus offered his long-awaited assessment of the U.S. strategy in Iraq, saying security was improving in the country. He said troop levels could be reduced to about 130,000 troops, or 15 brigades, by the summer of 2008."

Isn't it a huge deception to imply that a drawdown that is absolutely unavoidable because Bush has overtaxed our military might occur because the splurge, er surge, is so successful?

Poor "despicable" is worn out. Hold on while I grab my thesaurus.

Re: Petraeus and Crocker

Asking a military man and a political appointee to contradict the President is like asking a tuna for wool.

1. An election is forthcoming; there will be a well-timed drawdown.
2. “My best and honest assessment” means “I plan to have a well-financed retirement.”
3. We will be in Iraq forever, but I won’t tell you that.
4. We will soon be Iran as well, because the US economy just now depends on the war machine, and so do the President and Vice President’s personal wealth.
5. How we count fatalities is none of your business.
6. Progress is being made (somewhere in the world, on something).
7. A democratic Iraq is feasible and we can succeed. I said it: You believe it.
8. Our civilian contractors are honest, too.
9. Iraqis are coming to terms. I said it: You believe it.
10. It isn’t “re-Bathification”; it’s “de-Bathification reform.”


Note to Duncan Hunter: If you object to our questioning Petraeus' credibility, you might suggest that the next administration just stick to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Iraq War Coalition Fatalities

Check this out. (Once there, check or uncheck items in the list of options on the right. )