DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
The war in Iraq has gone so wrong that patriotic generals and intelligence officials are leaking ugly facts about it faster than the Administration can lie about them. A high-level intelligence report sent to the White House in April flatly declared that the war damaged the U.S. and simultaneously knocked our campaign against Al Qaeda off the rails. Generals complain they're being asked to send underequipped, undertrained combat brigades off to the slaughterhouse and to strip the last few working gears off the Natonal Guard and Reserves.
But only last week Cheney said he and his mystic pals did the right thing invading Iraq and if he had to do it all over again, he’d do it all the same way. The new, just-composed official White House response to the leaked intelligence report is that the White House knows better than the intelligence agencies. That’s a repeat of the same failed pathology that got us into Iraq in the first place. Give them a few more days and they'll fish another Curveball or Chalabi out of the sludge to tell it their way.
There’s nothing to argue about any more. The war has killed more than 2,600 Americans in uniform plus hundreds of American mercenaries fulfilling military functions. Dead Iraqis now number, according to best estimates, 135,000. (Best statistics on this, by the way, come from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher’s comic writers). This same ratio applied to the U.S., would give us 1.7 million dead Americans. Kind of makes it tough to win Iraq hearts and minds, particularly since surviving family members tend to be jobless and hungry, without medication, electricity, clean water, sewer lines or relief from mega-miserey. Not to mention they might be picked up at any moment by death squads. For Cheney to say that everything he did was correct is a deeply psychopathic statement. It’s not just devoid of human feelings. It’s Satanic.
If Cheney and all the people who work for him – Bush, Rummy, etc., really believe what they are saying, they’re raving lunatics. If they don’t believe what they’re saying, they’re raving lunatics. But don't expect their followers to be affected by the new revelations. They'll sing their marching songs down to the last corpse -- as long as it's somebody else's corpse.
And what are we to think of those pro-war Democrats like Hillary Clinton who say we can’t afford to quit Iraq, so we have to keep stuffing all these lives plus $6 billion a month in borrowed money into the wood chipper? Where have you gone Gene McCarthy? The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
EVANGELICAL TORTURE AND OTHER ODDITIES NO LONGER SEEN AS ODD
DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
We live in a peculiar age. There are so many peculiar news items we barely notice them.
Somebody by the name of Louis P. Sheldon, a minister and chairman of a group that calls itself the Traditional Values Coalition, told the L.A. Times that he disapproved of John McCain for opposing Bush’s proposed “new rules” on interrogation.
“This very definitely is going to put a chilling effect on the tremendous strides he has made in the conservative evangelical community,” Sheldon said. Did you get that? The pro-torture Christians -- and apparently they're numerous -- are going to be pissed. Absurdities pile upon absurdities like black plague corpses.
Over in Japan, they’re fixing to make Shinzo Abe the next prime minister. He thinks Japan, which tortured and murdered innocents and P.O.W.s all across Asia in the 1930's and '40's, is a self-flagellating wimp of a country and needs to stand up and be proud. What war crimes? Sweet Abe’s shaping up as another great ally, like that royal family in Saudi Arabia that sticks women in shrouds in 120-degree heat as a sign of respect.
Another 38 bodies were found sprinkled around Baghdad, most of them tortured. Two more dead U.S. soldiers. How many got their limbs, faces, guts, or nuts torn out we didn’t learn. What the hell. There’s no draft, so who really cares? Millions of demonstrators turned out to oppose Vietnam. Iraq gets groups of maybe 50 or 60 in cities like New York and Chicago where thousands of people can be found in a one-block stretch out doing their errands.
The Pope had to say he’s sorry for quoting a deceased theologian who dared notice that spreading itself by the sword is an integral part of Islamic doctrine.
South Africa’s health minister favors beets, lemons, and garlic to treat AIDS.
Willy Nelson got busted for weed and mushrooms on his tour bus. At last. Sanity.
By Ivan G. Goldman
We live in a peculiar age. There are so many peculiar news items we barely notice them.
Somebody by the name of Louis P. Sheldon, a minister and chairman of a group that calls itself the Traditional Values Coalition, told the L.A. Times that he disapproved of John McCain for opposing Bush’s proposed “new rules” on interrogation.
“This very definitely is going to put a chilling effect on the tremendous strides he has made in the conservative evangelical community,” Sheldon said. Did you get that? The pro-torture Christians -- and apparently they're numerous -- are going to be pissed. Absurdities pile upon absurdities like black plague corpses.
Over in Japan, they’re fixing to make Shinzo Abe the next prime minister. He thinks Japan, which tortured and murdered innocents and P.O.W.s all across Asia in the 1930's and '40's, is a self-flagellating wimp of a country and needs to stand up and be proud. What war crimes? Sweet Abe’s shaping up as another great ally, like that royal family in Saudi Arabia that sticks women in shrouds in 120-degree heat as a sign of respect.
Another 38 bodies were found sprinkled around Baghdad, most of them tortured. Two more dead U.S. soldiers. How many got their limbs, faces, guts, or nuts torn out we didn’t learn. What the hell. There’s no draft, so who really cares? Millions of demonstrators turned out to oppose Vietnam. Iraq gets groups of maybe 50 or 60 in cities like New York and Chicago where thousands of people can be found in a one-block stretch out doing their errands.
The Pope had to say he’s sorry for quoting a deceased theologian who dared notice that spreading itself by the sword is an integral part of Islamic doctrine.
South Africa’s health minister favors beets, lemons, and garlic to treat AIDS.
Willy Nelson got busted for weed and mushrooms on his tour bus. At last. Sanity.
Monday, September 11, 2006
MANY HEROES, ONE COWARD
DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
On the anniversary of the terrible events five years ago, it remains clear that we were in sore need of an FDR or a Lincoln that day. War veterans Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or JFK would have been fine. Even the flawed Richard Nixon would have analyzed the situation and reacted reasonably well, possibly even brilliantly.
Instead we had the man elected by our Supreme Court, George W. Bush, who spent the entire day running away. He was cowering in Air Force One, flying around like a drugged parrot in a big circle, landing place to place in his confusion and finally getting back to Washington when everything was over. Even today, five years later, most of us turn away from this ugly truth.
Much of what we did that day we did late. The order to scramble jets came late, the questions and response from the President came late. But the rescuers didn’t come late. They came immediately, running into burning buildings to do what they could for survivors. I wonder how many of them, were they alive to know about them, would agree with our President's actions that day?
But now this incompetent President whose Attorney General had ordered the anti-terrorism chief to stop telling him about Bin Laden continues to pose as a tough leader with moral clarity who knows what to do and when to do it. A person with moral clarity can be as stupid as Bush, but not as cowardly as Bush.
The media fixated on that theatrical scene days later, of resolute-sounding Bush standing in the World Trade Center ruins and vowing revenge. But a worthy Commander-in-Chief commands. If a buck sergeant’s squad were under attack and he ran away, leaving his squad members to fend for themselves for hours, he’d of course be arrested and court-martialed upon his return. Bush’s tendentious role as hero is a cataclysmic triumph of propaganda over truth.
In the coming congressional election this dangerous fool will once again pose as a moral leader with the gumption to fight the enemy. But he never even figured out the identity of the enemy and used the terrible events five years ago as an excuse to go out and attack the wrong people. We're now mired in a war he entered as a hobbyist. History will not be kind to us for keeping this smirking fake in the White House.
By Ivan G. Goldman
On the anniversary of the terrible events five years ago, it remains clear that we were in sore need of an FDR or a Lincoln that day. War veterans Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or JFK would have been fine. Even the flawed Richard Nixon would have analyzed the situation and reacted reasonably well, possibly even brilliantly.
Instead we had the man elected by our Supreme Court, George W. Bush, who spent the entire day running away. He was cowering in Air Force One, flying around like a drugged parrot in a big circle, landing place to place in his confusion and finally getting back to Washington when everything was over. Even today, five years later, most of us turn away from this ugly truth.
Much of what we did that day we did late. The order to scramble jets came late, the questions and response from the President came late. But the rescuers didn’t come late. They came immediately, running into burning buildings to do what they could for survivors. I wonder how many of them, were they alive to know about them, would agree with our President's actions that day?
But now this incompetent President whose Attorney General had ordered the anti-terrorism chief to stop telling him about Bin Laden continues to pose as a tough leader with moral clarity who knows what to do and when to do it. A person with moral clarity can be as stupid as Bush, but not as cowardly as Bush.
The media fixated on that theatrical scene days later, of resolute-sounding Bush standing in the World Trade Center ruins and vowing revenge. But a worthy Commander-in-Chief commands. If a buck sergeant’s squad were under attack and he ran away, leaving his squad members to fend for themselves for hours, he’d of course be arrested and court-martialed upon his return. Bush’s tendentious role as hero is a cataclysmic triumph of propaganda over truth.
In the coming congressional election this dangerous fool will once again pose as a moral leader with the gumption to fight the enemy. But he never even figured out the identity of the enemy and used the terrible events five years ago as an excuse to go out and attack the wrong people. We're now mired in a war he entered as a hobbyist. History will not be kind to us for keeping this smirking fake in the White House.
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