GIVE OBAMAS CREDIT FOR PICKING UP THEIR OWN CHECKS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
It’s getting less and less likely that big-time news media will notice or point out information we ought to have. For example, when’s the last time you saw any of them try to get an honest accounting of how politicians spend their campaign contributions? A good three-fourths of our congresspeople hold ultra-safe, gerrymandered seats, yet they spend approximately half their workday raising millions and millions they don’t need to run campaigns they can’t lose. Something's fishy. But I’ve already digressed from my topic, which is to point out something telling about Barack Obama that I haven't seen pointed out.
For their well-earned pre-inaugural vacation the Obama family rented an estate in Hawaii. Just about no one noticed the significance at play. Liberal columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, for example, tried to make a point but missed entirely. Krugman actually castigated Barack for taking an ostentatious vacation. But he failed to notice that the Obamas paid for it themselves.
The Bushes, though they loved getting away from the White House, don’t enjoy travel, so they mostly went back to their own place in Texas, (a "ranch" that raises nothing) stayed with Daddy in Kennebunkport, or went to the presidential compound at Camp David. None of that was unethical. We can only speculate how Junior would have behaved if he were intelligent and curious enough to take more venturesome vacations. But let’s skip that topic and go back a notch to the president before him, namely Bill Clinton.
Bill and Hillary would walk a mile to avoid picking up a check of any kind. The Clintons enjoy travel – real travel. They just hate paying for it. The media never honed in on all the vacation freebies the Clintons grabbed – and still grab in their post-White House phase. We always get the destinations, but no one hones in on the particulars that count.
When the Clintons go to Martha’s Vineyard, they stay at the Robert S. McNamara mansion. When they hanker for the Dominican Republic, they take over the estate of Oscar De La Renta. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming they lodge in the elaborate digs of industrialist and financier Max C. Chapman. See a pattern here? The Clintons paid not one cent for any of this. They are confirmed, out-of-the-closet schnorers. That’s a Yiddish word that’s usually translated as “beggars.” But the word means more than that. A schnorer is fifty percent con-artist, fifty percent-beggar, and one hundred percent pain in the ass. A moocher, a parasite, a freeloader. A schnorer is the guy who’s always trying to get something for free, even if he doesn’t want it that much. The pursuit of making someone else pay is his chief delight.
When the Obamas looked for a place to vacation they didn’t pull down the list of ultra-rich jerks always looking for favors and willing to pay for them. (You could argue it's the taxpayers who actually do the paying, since their interests are sacrificed in order to pay off the hosts) The Obamas opened the Yellow Pages and rented the place, fair and square, just like anyone else would do. That’s a strong indicator of the changes we’re witnessing in this White House. The people at the top of this administration must adhere to the strongest anti-influence-peddling code we’ve seen in the modern age, and aides have their salaries frozen. Ethics. What a concept.
So no, the Obamas don’t stay at Motel 6, but hey, they actually earned their money. Most of it comes from Obama’s books, which he wrote himself. No ghost writers. That’s another form of integrity that nowadays is positively unique among public figures.
I won’t try to list all the other admirable things the Obamas are doing at this point. I just wanted to point out that they aren’t schnorers, and for this they deserve credit.

BUSH, CHENEY VERSUS IRAQ FACTS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
As they make ready to slink out of Washington, Cheney, Bush, and the rest of their duplicitous band of blunderers and criminals are burning their documents and preparing the foundations for the fantasy memoirs that their ghost writers will create for them. And in a series of pre-departure interviews they’re giving us their latest talking points on the centerpiece of their disastrous rule -- the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Their preposterous claims can be disproved just by looking at the facts, but oddly, the journalists interviewing them never do that. Asking all the wrong questions, they just sit at the feet of these lying fools wagging their tails like spaniels.
Cheney, for example, says everything worked out fine, including the policy of torture, and Bush blames everything on bad intelligence. Neither is challenged by the TV “journalist” across from him.
This makes it all the more important to look at the facts now while they're still warm. When General Eisenhower's troops came across the Nazi death camps he immediately understood that the perpetrators and their apologists would later try to deny the facts and alter history. So within hours of the discovery he ordered his troops to shoot film, gather evidence, and seek out those responsible.
We need to do the same about the Iraq War. So let’s look at the record, which, by the way, gives some absolution to those members of Congress who originally authorized the invasion.
"A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is (sic) a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration," Bush told Charles Gibson.” (ABC's Gibson is the same phony imbecile who decided Barack Obama's nonexistent link to the Weatherman radicals of the 1970s was the central question of the 2008 election and devoted much of a Democratic debate to mucking through this delusion) Bush also told tail-wagging Gibson, "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." He also no doubt wishes the facts were different. Here they are.
Congress authorized the attack on October 11, 2002. The administration claimed at the time it needed to show its teeth in order to get inspectors in there. The joint resolution, the Bushies told Congress, was necessary in order to avoid war. On November 8, the U.N. imposed tough new arms inspections on Iraq. Now here’s the really interesting part. Ten days later, weapons inspectors dispatched by the U.N. returned to Saddam-land for the first time in almost four years. Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney passed the word to the Pentagon to prepare for an invasion, and by March 2003, had 200,000 troops surrounding Saddam.
But the inspectors led by the experienced Hans Blix couldn’t find anything. Saddam, growing more frightened, steadily gave way to Blix’s demands. U.N. inspectors could travel anywhere they liked without giving advance notice, and they could do it in helicopters so there could be no phony traffic jams to impede them.
Blix still couldn’t find anything. Increasingly skeptical and verbally attacked day in and day out by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their flunkies, Blix publicly asked the Bush administration to share its intelligence so he could dig up these phantom weapons of mass destruction. No response. Something was very fishy.
On March 14, Bush and Tony Blair gave up on securing enough Security Council votes to invade. Bush told the inspectors to leave so they wouldn’t get in the way of the invasion. Blix and his able crew left under protest, and March 17, Bush gave Saddam 48 hours to leave the country. The invasion commenced.
For years afterward the Bush-o-crats claimed they had to invade because Saddam wouldn’t let in inspectors. And the mainstream news media failed to challenge them. It felt like we were living in the old Soviet Union, where news was bent so drastically by the country's media that it was a running joke. Now Bush, buttressed by this crazy reporting he's grown so used to, blames faulty intelligence. But how could “intelligence” filtered through his propaganda machine trump inspectors who were there on the ground? Had he let the inspectors continue their work, many hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed might instead be living the lives they had a right to.
In 2005, the Downing Street Memo came to light, the smoking gun that revealed Bush and Blair had already decided to invade Iraq sometime before the memo date of July 23, 2002, using WMD as an excuse. The case was “thin,” but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This ultra-secret memo was never contested by Blair.
Why did Bush really invade? Alan Greenspan, an expert on global privateering and a booster of same, conceded the war had always been about oil. Bush talked about invading Iraq ten days after inauguration, at his very first meeting of the National Security Council. That was eight months before the Nine-Eleven attack he liked to blame on Saddam. Most of the time he used stylized sentences written for him by his handlers that implied the accusation without quite uttering it.
All the above is hard fact, not supposition, and of course should be the basis of interviews with the seedy, lying psychopaths at the center of this demented, wrecking ball of a war that turned out to be a snipe hunt.
What follows is mostly theory, but with plenty of evidence to back it up ---
The war decision had much to do with the November 2004 elections. Bush Junior desperately wanted to show up his Daddy, who’d invaded Iraq but left Saddam in place. Also, Junior, who harbors a hard-core Oedipal love-loathing for his father, was conscious that the murderous Saddam had once plotted to assassinate Bush Senior.
Bush Junior liked to brag he was “a wartime president” and assumed he would score a great victory (even though there had been virtually no planning for post-Saddam Iraq) and cement his place in history at least above Daddy and possibly alongside Lincoln and Washington. Junior also seemed to really believe that it was his duty to attack America's enemies. Though a history major at Yale, evidently he'd remained uninformed about the Cold War of nearly fifty years that never led to an all-out hot war between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.
There’s more than enough evidence to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rice et al for their crimes so no future administration will try to repeat them anywhere at any time. And in the future, any "journalist" who even touches on this subject should use the facts or be fired because such gruesome media incompetence is as indefensible as the crimes themselves.