AMERICAN POW'S IN IRAQ DESERVE MORE THAN THE USUAL 15 MINUTES

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Apparently insurgents have taken three more Americans soldiers prisoners in an ambush south of Baghdad. First order of business: How do we get our missing soldiers back? Keep reading.

For starters, let's see if this time we can prevent the administration from waiting out the fifteen minutes and sending these victims into the purgatory of the forgotten.

The new prisoners were part of a weekend patrol of seven soldiers and one Iraqi translator, five of whom were killed. Anyone who’s been following this blog knows two other U.S. soldiers were already believed held by Iraqis. Army Reservist Ahmed Qusai al-Taie, 42, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was abducted October 23, 2006, and PFC (since promoted to Sergeant) Keith Maupin, 23, of Batavia, Ohio, disappeared in April 2004 after his convoy was attacked near Baghdad International Airport. Al-Jazeera later showed a videotape of Maupin held captive by insurgents. Few Americans are aware of these POWs because the Bush Administration, not eager to advertise the costs of its crimes and misdemeanors, never includes them in the casualty lists, even though in all previous wars the U.S. listed dead, wounded and missing. The mass media, either purposefully or through ignorance, have cooperated in the subterfuge. In a world with the attention span of a mosquito, it's no difficult trick.
Regarding the latest tragic incident, one might ask why so small a contingent was out patrolling hostile territory in the dead of night? But conditions in Iraq are so egregious that only two days earlier U.S. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon flatly told the press he doesn’t have enough soldiers in his sector to do the job they’ve been assigned. These kinds of candid statements are becoming more and more frequent from our military commanders. They’re a cry for help, a declaration that lunatics, fools, or a combination of the two are calling the shots.

SQUAD SHORT TWO MEN
Rifle squads consist of nine soldiers, so even if one agrees the job called for only one squad, this patrol was short two men. That’s the way it is throughout the war theater, and it costs lives. Commanders are so short-handed that they send their troops out day after day, sometimes two patrols a day. This steals sleep and alertness, causing mistakes, casualties, and more frequent and severe battle fatigue. But chicken hawks like Prince George and Shotgun Cheney don’t know or care about such details. They have their own agenda. By announcing their refusal to abide by the Geneva Accords on prisoners they’ve made it impossible for the U.S. to stand on the moral high ground. They've also earned the world’s revulsion and made our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan infinitely less safe.
Of course we can hope the five men now missing and presumed captured will return home soon alive and well. But hope isn’t enough. We need to start talking to intermediaries such as Iran and Syria to get our prisoners back. Our uniquely inhuman leaders George and Dick, living in splendorous bubbles of leisure, show their courage by not even worrying about casualties or POWs. It’s worth wondering how their courage would measure up if they had to switch places with al-Taie or Maupin.
This administration will never get back our soldiers or call a halt to their pointless war. Our best hope of freeing our troops is to remove Bush and Cheney from office so our government can go back to caring about Americans like them. Free ourselves so we can free them.

WOULD FOUNDING FATHERS ACCEPT TYRANNY OF NEVER-ENDING WAR?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

During the Vietnam War. G.I.s safely walked the streets of Saigon without sidearms. Their biggest worry was getting short-changed by a bartender. But after four years of war in Iraq, the capital city of Baghdad remains so dangerous that our diplomats must wear body armor inside the embassy compound, even though it’s a compound within the compound of the Green Zone.
Meanwhile Prince George and Shotgun Cheney build a hush-hush network of “enduring” military bases there so that the U.S. can hang on to their fanciful oil gains for generations to come. Will the next president accept the gift? We can’t say for sure, but when Daddy Bush built similar bases in Saudi Arabia, his successor Bill Clinton made no move to dismantle them.

BUSH JUNIOR EXPORTS ANARCHY, ADMIRES HANDIWORK

Ironically, it was Bush Junior who pulled us out of Saudi territory in favor of moving into Iraq behind the smokescreen of a cock-and-bull story about WMD and Saddam links to Bin Laden. At the same time The Decider built up our force in Kuwait.
The U.S. has behaved like an armed psychotic child in Iraq, tearing down Saddam's despotic structure and replacing it with an anarchy of warlords and bandits, including some American corporations and their private armies. All around there is death, torture, pillage, driving nearly 2 million of the 25 million Iraqis to other countries. Most were members of a middle class that was already too small.

Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland reported on AlterNet this week that more than half the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation, with 144 lawmakers signing a legislative petition calling on the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawal. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/51624/ The petition was sponsored by the majority Shias and of course ignored by the Bush Administration, which calls timetables a recipe for defeat. The administration also ignored polls in Iraq showing most Iraqis consider it a righteous act to kill U.S. troops. Big U.S. media paid no attention to the recent legislative action, but that wasn't necessarily by design. Iraq is so dangerous, getting the facts is a death-defying business.
While the occupation steadily deteriorates, our administration tells us, after four years of failure, that everything is spanking new so we must give it a chance to work. New strategy, new general, new troop level, same old bullshit -- all designed to keep this thing going so the architects of disaster can blame whichever future president shows the good sense to get us out of there.
Meanwhile our troops, flesh-and-blood chess pieces moved about by fools and lunatics in Washington, live in gray defensive bubbles that, thanks to the new offensive strategy of General Patraeus, grow more porous, placing them in greater danger and promising to raise the casualty rate. Read between the lines of Patraeus’ recent statements to Congress and you see he’s telling them the truth about it, but diplomatically.

BLUNT TRUTH FROM GENERAL LYNCH
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, made the same forecast even more forthrightly over the weekend. U.S. deaths now number 3,381, according to the reliable http://www.icasualties.org/.
What should we do about all this? The Founding Fathers would already have taken their muskets off the wall. But we dwell on Paris Hilton and American Idol contestants while our government continues killing people we really don't want killed and wasting the lives of our troops in the process. Because after all, these are more civilized times.

BIG MEDIA RIDICULE IMPEACHMENT JUST AS THEY RIDICULED ANYONE DARING TO EXAMINE RUSH TO WAR

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Mainstream media are at it again. First they refused to scrutinize Bush’s rush to invade Iraq. Four years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, leading figures within these media have, to some degree, admitted their error.
But now they’re doing the same thing all over again. This time the subject is impeachment of Bush and Cheney. The big broadcast networks and print media (the latter led by the “liberal” Washington Post and New York Times) became ad hoc arms of the administration leading up to the terrible disaster in Iraq. Disregarding the weight of conflicting intelligence, they even even failed to ask why, if the “coalition of the willing” was really interested in finding WMD, did it order U.N. inspectors who'd proved their competence a hundred times over to leave?

KUCINICH TOO SHORT TO IMPEACH?
A movement to impeach Bush and Cheney, both of whom have admitted performing unconstitutional acts, has been building for years, but it’s done so quietly because the media refuse to pay attention, making the mission infinitely more difficult than it ought to be. When they do pay attention, they treat would-be impeachers such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson as flakes. The Washington Post assigned some kind of attack dog to Kucinich who, rather than examine his case, chided him about his lack of -- get this -- height.
Politicians have been told in as many ways as you can tell them, that if they pursue impeachment it’s open season. They’ll get treated with the similar mindless but effective ridicule. Nancy Pelosi got the message fast. Shortly after taking over as House Speaker she announced she would not follow a course of impeachment, and that's before any evidence was subpoenaed. Perhaps she was worried because she’s even shorter than Kucinich.
When Rep. John Murtha raised the specter of impeachment, the media treated him like a kind of eccentric uncle. Good ole John. What’ll he think of next? Rep. John Conyers prepared a lengthy dossier of impeachment evidence, but apparently warned off by Pelosi, he backed off from the process.

ADMISSIONS OF CRIMINAL ACTS
But the facts are indisputable – doctored intelligence, illegal wiretapping and reading our mail without warrants, the suspension of habeas corpus. All these acts are punishable felonies and there’s ample evidence, including their own admissions, tying the tin cans of criminality to the tails of Bush and Cheney.
Corporate media took about three years to concede some of their errors on the war, though they never quite owned up to their active complicity. The same slow-burning truth fuse is burning on impeachment. But while it takes its time, people are dying. Our troops, if I may paraphrase Bill Moyers, are being sacrificed on the altar of Bush’s ego. And thanks to U.S. escalation, our casualty rate has been rising and will continue to rise even though the last election and the blue-ribbon commission on Iraq called for the White House to take an opposite course.
Don’t let anyone get away with telling you the pro-impeachment movement can’t be taken seriously. Removing Bush and Cheney for their high crimes and misdemeanors is the logical, patriotic recourse to the most felonious, incompetent administration in U.S. history.

DON'T EXPECT DECENT GOVERNING FROM PEOPLE WHO DESPISE GOVERNMENT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Our government is being gnawed by rats. And the rats are paid well for it. Allow me to explain:
I got a first-hand look at Bush governance several weeks ago when I applied for passport renewal. Like millions of other Americans in this fix, I got the same treatment as Franz Kafka’s poor schnooks in The Trial and his lesser known but even better allegory, The Castle. I was told to expect my new passport in maybe ten weeks or so, give or take a while, and meanwhile of course the State Department confiscated my old one. So in terms of international travel, I’m a man without a country – stuck, unable to leave our shores.
Thousands of Americans around the country are learning too late that under the Bush Administration this patch of bureaucracy has been allowed to rot into something beneath the dignity of a Third World country. This problem is, of course, trivial when compared to what residents along the Gulf Coast learned when Katrina struck, but it’s a chip off the same felled tree of government. The ultra-right wingers at the top of this regime despise government and emplaced political supervisors throughout the system who for the last six years have been gnawing at all the cables like the crazed rats I previously mentioned.
OSHA doesn’t protect workers, the EPA loathes the environment, the Food and Drug Administration assists the production and distribution of poisonous substances, the Agriculture Department puts the stamp of approval on cattle too weakened by disease to stand, the United Nations mission has, until earlier this year, been run by a walrus-like loon who ridiculed diplomacy, and the Justice Department is directed by a daffy but dangerous serial perjurer.
Just this week USA Today discovered all those family pets sickened by tainted cat and dog food were victimized by an FDA that was too disorganized and understaffed to prevent it even though it received ample warning.
While the country sinks under the weight of the AttaBoy Brownies Bush has placed throughout its supervisory ranks, his pals – oil cronies in Texas and Saudi Arabia, corporate buddies at Halliburton and equally corrupt business entities – all thrive at our expense.
To entrust the Defense Department to this band of malicious, criminal kooks is the mark of a nation that, to quote our esteemed vice president, could be “in its last throes.” While Bush complains Congress is trying to micro-manage the war politically, he in fact, combed through the military services to pass over everyone who told him the truth – that we can’t control Iraq with the military and must use diplomacy to extricate ourselves.
But of course this regime doesn’t really believe in diplomacy beyond the kind that tosses doggy treats to the British prime minister for throwing his country’s troops into a pointless, murderous conflict whose strategy was incongruent with logic or reality.
This Cheney-Bush-Rove axis follows a government theory, if you want to call it that, that was never grounded in reality. It wants Star Wars, eternal war, billions in favors for its country-club buddies, and no taxes. It wants to cripple government while inserting it into every level of our lives, even following us into bedrooms so it can sit on the end of the bed and frown on condoms. It dismisses and even hates the fact that our government defeated the Axis powers, educated veterans, pulled Europe from the ruins, devised pensions, fed the hungry, ultimately invited all races under the banner of liberty and equality.

Part of Kafka’s genius was to place his protagonists in nightmares that from time to time drew blood. The poor, dazed schlemiel in Metamorphosis woke and discovered he was an insect. It’s unlikely Bush could define the word “Kafkaesque” without a literary coach, but his talent is to make sure the rest of us can.

WATERGATE-ERA SLEUTH GIVES LOWDOWN ON GONZALEZ’S CURIOUS STAYING POWER (GUEST COLUMNIST)

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-holtzman1may01,0,3365495.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

From The Los Angeles Times

May 1, 2007
By Elizabeth Holtzman
NO MATTER how many members of Congress lose confidence in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush is unlikely to let him go. If Gonzales resigns, the vacancy must be filled by a new presidential nominee, and the last thing the White House wants is a confirmation hearing.

Already, the Senate is outlining conditions for confirming a Gonzales successor. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has said that his panel would not hold confirmation hearings unless Karl Rove and other White House aides testify about the firing of U.S. attorneys to clarify whether "the White House has interfered with prosecution."

All this is reminiscent of the Watergate scandal. In 1973, as the coverup was unraveling, the Senate imposed a condition on the confirmation of President Nixon's nominee for attorney general, Elliot Richardson. Richardson's predecessor had resigned because of Watergate troubles. Concerned that the Justice Department would not get at the truth, the Senate insisted that Richardson would name a special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Richardson duly appointed Archibald Cox.

The rest is history. Cox's aggressive investigations led to the prosecution of top administration officials and the naming of Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the coverup. When Cox sought White House tapes of Nixon's conversations with his staff, the president had him fired, unleashing a firestorm of protests. Americans demanded that a previously reluctant Congress start impeachment proceedings against Nixon. Congress complied; the House Judiciary Committee, of which I was a member, voted for impeachment, and Nixon resigned.

Aspects of this history could easily repeat themselves. The Senate could demand, as it did in 1973, that a new attorney general appoint a special prosecutor, and this could again have dire consequences for the White House.

A new special prosecutor would have many questions to investigate.

For starters, were any of the firings of U.S. attorneys federal crimes — such as obstruction of justice, designed to stymie investigations or to retaliate for prosecutions of Republicans? If so, who is responsible and how high up does that responsibility go? Did Deputy Atty. Gen. Paul J. McNulty, who gave inaccurate testimony to Congress about the firings, commit any crime in doing so? Were those who briefed him for that testimony complicit?

And what happened to the missing e-mail messages from Rove and others? Did these apparent violations of the Presidential Records Act — failure to keep copies of the exchanges — constitute federal crimes?

So there is ample work for a special prosecutor. The Senate could call for appointing one without waiting for Gonzales to resign. But in that case, Gonzales or McNulty would be making the appointment, and the integrity of the choice would be highly questionable.

That leaves Senate confirmation hearings of a new attorney general nominee as the main leverage for Congress to secure an independent criminal investigation of the U.S. attorney firings.

Moreover, the Senate might use such hearings to do more than secure testimony from White House aides about the firings, as Leahy indicated. It also might use the opportunity to probe the Justice Department's role in mistreatment of detainees, four years of flouting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other serious matters.

Rather than face such scrutiny, the White House may prefer keeping a drastically weakened Gonzales in place. But doing so exacts a high price for the Justice Department and the nation. It damages department morale and credibility, undermines its ability to recruit and could affect perceptions of federal prosecutors, jeopardizing important cases. By retaining Gonzales to preempt Senate action, the president has signaled that this is a price he is willing to make the nation pay.

ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN, a former Democratic congresswoman from New York, is the coauthor of "The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens."

IRAQ COMMANDER'S FORECAST FOR U.S. CASUALTIES? HIGHER

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

We’re so tired and disgusted with lies about Iraq that we sometimes pay insufficient attention to what people in government tell us about it. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander there, has recently divulged hugely significant changes in strategy that will, he’s conceded, result in a higher U.S. casualty rate.
Patraeus, an intellectual soldier who literally and truly wrote the book on counterinsurgency fighting, is repositioning troops, placing them in forward patrol bases like the one in Diyala Province where nine U.S. paratroopers were killed and approximately 20 wounded in two horrific, coordinated suicide bombings on April 23. The repositioning allows U.S. troops to interact on a daily basis with Iraqi civilians while they aggressively patrol their new neighborhoods.
But with our troops spread out in these smaller enclaves, they stay in positions that can’t be defended as easily. Engineers placed formidable concrete barriers and other defensive structures around the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) that had been the typical headquarters area for ground troops. But those structures aren’t in place around the kind of small base used by those soldiers of the famed 82nd Airborne Division who were killed April 23. Patraeus, who said the new strategy is already bringing some progress, told military personnel at a Pentagon briefing:
“Our achievements have not come without sacrifice. Our increase in operational tempo, location of our forces in the populations they are securing and conduct of operations in areas where we previously had no presence, as well as the enemy's greater use of certain types of explosive devices, have led to an increase in our losses."
Also, in an interview on NPR last week, Patraeus was the first commander of any rank to admit that troop levels are well beyond the announced 160,000. Without citing figures, the forthright general officer pointed out private contractors carry out everyday missions such as guarding the Baghdad airport that would ordinarily be performed by military units, and so these non-uniformed fighters must be included in the force level. Other sources number the mercenary contingent at 112,000. These civilians performing soldier functions for as much as $30,000 a month have been The Great Invader’s stealth method of raising force levels without alarming the public by calling for a draft. They’ve also allowed him to hand out lucrative, no-bid contracts to business pals who accept the casualty rate of their work force as a cost of business.
Patraeus, asked to devise a strategy that could vanquish the many enemies that make up the insurgency, put one together, but in addition to resulting in the killing and maiming of more U.S. troops, it will take years to yield significant results. Patraeus has been telling us this, but no one’s listening. Also, he's not talking about training Iraqis to take our place because he recognizes that strategy has, after four years of failure, proved useless.
The Great Invader has, without asking us, signed America on for a ten-year war at least. Get used to it, or get out in the street and make the government step back from placing all these resources into a war that couldn’t possibly be worth all the lives and treasure it expends in our name.

PUBLIC MUST PAY ALLOWANCE TO WOLFY'S GIRLFRIEND BUT RICE'S DEPUTY CAN'T PAY HOOKERS FROM HIS OWN POCKET?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Can somebody explain why Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias was fired for paying hookers out of his own pocket while Paul Wolfowitz, who paid millions to his main squeeze out of taxpayer pockets gets to skate? In fact, our Little Prince said he still has “the fullest confidence” in Wolfy. I mean what gives here?
It’s as though The Great Invader had all the wrong answers nailed deeply into his skull in some long-ago secret ceremony, and they just dribble out of him at a measured, consistent pace. There’s just nothing this guy gets right.
The Tobias departure also makes you wonder a little more about the scenario surrounding Porter Goss, another Administration higher-up who was forced to resign in the middle of the night. We never got to the bottom of that (an amazing circumstance when you think about it. The guy was the CIA director, after all).
Prince George gave Tobias and Goss the same choices as that band leader. You remember. Luca Brazi held a gun to his head while he decided between getting his blood or his ink on the Godfather’s contract.
Meanwhle Wolfy, a chief architect of the worst foreign-policy disaster in American history, is free to romp about the World Bank committing malfeasance, misfeasance, and every other kind of feasance. He’s in a class with torture-mongering Attorney General Pinnochio Gonzalez, who, according to Prince George, did a bang-up job in front of the Senate Judiciary Panel when he couldn’t recall anything about all those lies he told in his previous appearance.
Bush makes such baffling personnel decisions it’s virtually impossible to gauge the severity of his underlings' misdeeds by his reactions to them. So who knows whether Goss got himself into something more serious than the crimes of Wolfy or Pinocchio?
Our major news organizations would have ferreted out the inside dope on Goss' mysterious disappearance except they were too busy chasing the inside stories on Nicole Smith and all those American Idol contestants.
The specific nature of a crime means nothing to an administration which uses war and pestilence as dynamite excuses to put pals on the payroll. Evidently fornication (presumably Tobias’ crime, though he claims he received only massages from his call girls) is a far more serious infraction than causing death and destruction at astronomically biblical levels.
Normally I’d feel sorry for Tobias, who was fired for apparently engaging in harmless activities with other consenting adults – except for the fact that as the AIDS czar he caused slow death to who knows how many thousands when he withheld funds to distribute condoms in the Third World. Instead he used our tax dollars to emphasize abstinence and faithfulness. Wish I were kidding about that.
Watching this White House crew gambol through the world like Bigfoot on speedballs would be entertaining if they’d just stop raining death and destruction.

LOWDOWN ON INTOLERANCE OF SEEMINGLY PROGRESSIVE HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Sweetly liberal Huffingtonpost.com has an ugly underside. Sometimes readers are puzzled why this famous, well-funded blogsite that provides columns from top-drawer people like novelist and thinker Jane Smiley also gives us muddled thoughts of Hollywood types like Alec Baldwin, a man who apparently can think a little, but just can’t put the results into a coherent piece. Read him sometime and you’ll see what I mean.
Huffingtonpost plays grateful, kow-towing host to great bunches of these Hollywood voices eager to ramble, and in our celebrity-crazed, dumbed-down society, it works, sort of. But it is to Paul Krugman or Bob Herbert as Britney Spears is to Miles Davis. Crichton to Dostoevsky. You get the picture. Some of the Hollywooders acquit themselves okay. Others show why they need someone else to write the scripts.
Anyway, my underground sources confirm that from time to time readers have posted complaints about the site’s choice of celebrity over cerebellum. Because, after all, it’s supposed to be a progressive site, they figure their voices will be heard. What happens is they are henceforth banned from future posting. That’s right, this self-appointed paragon of liberal thought is, Internet style, a book-burner.
Ariana Huffington has hired a squad of cyberspace vigilantes that punishes even the mildest of questions about the way they run things over there. You don’t have to point out, for example something as crass as the history of calculating Ariana Stassinopoulos who married gay Republican California heir Michael Huffington (with full knowledge of his sexual preferences, he says) and subsequently walked off with an undisclosed but apparently huge settlement, thereby creating the jet-setting, born-again liberal talking head Ariana we know today. The celebrity slant of her site is representative of her name-dropping, star-chasing self.
Light queries about how she runs that cyber-shop earn the posting enquirer a ban that will follow his/her name and computer into, apparently, the next life. They’ve got some heavy-duty software over there. Maybe it’s the same stuff the Chinese regime uses to trace dissidents. After I was tipped off to their banishments, I tried a little light basting myself and – you guessed it – I’m outa there.
I find it perfectly acceptable that Ariana has switched her politics from far right to comfy left. Converts are welcome. Trouble is she seems to have taken some of those nasty, illiberal habits from the right and brought them over to what’s supposed to be a forum for progressive, tolerant thought.

I'd advise the next President to at least think it over before making her Minister of Information.

WHO'S 'PLAYING POLITICS?' THOSE WHO PERPETUATE IRAQ DISASTER

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

When Shotgun Cheney and his Little Prince accuse the Democrats in Congress of playing politics with the war in Iraq, they’re behaving like bug-eyed lunatics who set fire to a bungalow and then finger its residents for arson.

We can’t say with absolute certainty why these impossibly vicious and vacuous dolts started the war in the first place because their various lies about it are buried so deep in piles of extraordinary stupidity and contradictions that until we can subpoena documents and witnesses there’s just no discernible trail to follow. We know they lied us into the war, but ferreting out the reason is like trying to make sense out of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. If justice reigns, a special prosecutor will reveal the truth of it during the trials for their high crimes and misdemeanors.

Their most likely motive – beyond an instinctive, atavistic lust for oil and Bush’s sick Freudian need to show up Daddy – was in fact, precisely what they charge the Democrats with – politics. The plan was to whip citizens into a patriotic war frenzy while frightening the be-jeezus out of them, then win big at the polls. Beyond that, as was pointed out quite specifically in the famous Downing Street Memo, they had no plan for Iraq, other than to enjoy hallucinatory visions of American troops parading down boulevards lined with cheering, cheerful, flower-strewing, kite-flying Iraqis.

They figured the Decider-in-Chief’s new exalted status as a The Great Invader would allow them to get away with pretty much doing anything they wanted on the domestic front. That meant making the rich richer at everyone else’s expense while rewarding their political foot soldiers with jobs and contracts. They also took giant steps to institutionalize these regressive alterations so generations of Americans would be ruled by greedheads and church crazies who see worker safety, conservation, food and drug oversight, reproductive liberty, an energy plan, health care, and programs to fight global warming as the work of the devil.

Now at last congressional Democrats are passing legislation that timidly suggests it’s time to stop rewarding our enemies and punishing ourselves with this idiotic war to nowhere. Nancy Pelosi called this long overdue oversight of the fiasco a matter of ethics – which it is. But it’s also a matter of intelligence. When you’re methodically hitting yourself and innocent bystanders in the head with a hammer, the intelligent, ethical thing to do is stop.

After Bush vetoes the funding bill with its weak, easy-to-evade timetables Shotgun Cheney and our Preposterous Prince will probably get their funding from our easily frightened, corrupt Congress and continue the carnage. George McGovern believes that by the end of next year the twin tyrants' crimes will have caught up to them and they'll have to resign. In the meantime, victims will continue being sacrificed for the sake of their deluded visions.

NOVELIST & GUEST BLOGGER JANE SMILEY ON WHY WE MUST 'INVESTIGATE, IMPEACH, INDICT & IMPRISON' BUSH (ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON HUFFINGTON POST)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/the-unforgiven_b_46729.html

GUEST COLUMN FROM GEORGE McGOVERN ON DICK CHENEY (FROM LOS ANGELES TIMES]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mcgovern24apr24,0,4084076.story?coll=la-opinion-center

BUSH COUNTDOWN: 21 MONTHS, THOUSANDS MORE LIVES

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Thanks to his small mind and sociopathic instincts, this president figures he can evade responsibility for his monstrous Iraq debacle by extending its duration through the end of his administration. Then he’ll blame everything on any future President – either his immediate successor or someone else down the line -- whoever succumbs to reality and brings the troops home from their pointless mission.

This purely personal agenda figures to cost us, among other things, the lives of another couple thousand or so American troops. But if the number were ten times that, Bush would still sleep well at night, even while thousands of Iraq veterans suffer nightmares from horrors that fail to reach their decider-in-chief intellectually or emotionally.

Already Bush and his handlers are blaming failure on members of Congress who dare to say out loud what everyone can see – that there’s nothing for us to gain in Iraq, and if there were, this bungling President has already lost it anyway.

Those timetables built into the House and Senate bills are terribly mild and full of exceptions that would allow him to ignore them anyway. But he looks forward to using his veto, to actually denying supplies to troops in the field so he can pour more lies on the fire, blaming his atrocious non-strategy on the Democrats even before his term ends. It’s quite easy for Bush to play chicken on war funding because he’s shown over and over in so many ways that the lives of those troops mean nothing to him anyway.

A vacuous monster like this could arise only from a broken political system – a system that not only makes access to funding the overwhelming criterion come election time, but also allows political strategists like Karl Rove to build a campaign that hides his vicious little scion behind a wall of advertising fiction. Bush is a man of few accomplishments and basically no abilities who lived his entire life being gently inserted into prepared situations by his Daddy and his powerful friends.

The country is a horse ridden by a spoiled sadist without conscience. The steed is much stronger than its tormentor, but just rides on, bit between its teeth, over an endless path of hot coals.

NBC ENDORSES KILLER'S MARKETING STRATEGY

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

When someone commits random murders in order to be heard, the media have no obligation to help the murderer. In fact, they're obliged to do exactly the opposite. If the Virginia Tech killer were virtually certain no one would see his video manifestos, perhaps he’d have made different plans, maybe even seen a counselor.

But NBC, which received the package, went in the direction that, oddly enough, guaranteed NBC (a subsidiary of General Electric) bigger profits, and gave the murderer precisely what he craved. This killer wasn’t the first to commit crimes in order to be heard. In fact, quite a number of sick murderers in recent history have been failed writers who committed atrocities to get what their limited talents couldn’t get for them – a voice in the mass media.

In 1995 The Washington Post and New York Times published the rants of The Unabomber, who in fact was not just a hermit but also a failed academic no one paid attention to until he started blowing up people through the mail.

Diaries of the three demented lone gunmen who shot George Wallace, John Lennon, and Ronald Reagan were published in full. The shooters made absolutely sure they could be found after the deed, just in case they didn't survive (All three did). The shootings were part of their marketing strategy. Awful songs written by Charles Manson were recorded for mass distribution. Laws are now on the books to prevent these geeks from obtaining financial rewards for their deeds, but most of them aren’t looking for money anyway. It’s fame they’re after.

Lots of corporate media dig deeply into the lives of the shooters, claiming they want to know more about them so we can all prevent repeat instances. Actually they’re just pandering to the lowest common denominator while giving the criminals exactly the fame they craved. If these media were so determined to help society, why, for example, didn't they pay any attention to the hump on Bush's back while he debated Kerry? The New York Times had nailed down the facts behind Bush's cheating heart, necessitated by his undersized intelligence, but failed to print them. To this day no accredited White House reporter has ever raised the issue with Bush, even though a NASA scientist in charge of photographic imagery got to the bottom of the case. But I digress.

When you give twisted people exactly what they want, you’re going to get more twisted people committing more crimes so they can obtain exactly what they want. It's like paying for the return of hostages. You may get them back, but you'll also create more hostages. GE-NBC executives knew all that when they showed those videos, though you’ll never get them to admit it. Notice that I don’t publish the names of any of these pathetic failed writers-turned-killers. That’s precisely how to treat them.

We can’t ignore their crimes, but we can erase their names and messages even before they appear. We can promise to give them precisely the anonymity which sparked their ugly acts.
I’d promise to boycott NBC, except I don’t watch any of its crap anyway. What about you?

WHITE HOUSE DISINTEGRATING; ANYONE RUNNING THIS SHOW?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

This White House is coming apart like a Yugo in a wind tunnel. How is it coming apart? Let us count the ways.

Alberto Gonazalez: This man does terrible work in his two jobs as clown and liar. He's so astonishingly brainless he’s incapable of separating in his mind those lies he might be able to get away with and those that will be specifically disproved for certain by others’ testimony and documentary evidence. Even the most partisan Republicans on the Judiciary Committee now treat him like a typhoid carrier. The man appears baffled that he can’t wriggle out of precisely proved falsehoods by blabbing general denials. Worst Attorney General since . . . well, since the last one. And the White House just lets this runaway train roll on.

Shotgun Cheney: As late as last week he was raving about Saddam ties to Al Qaeda that have been disproved and/or disbelieved by virtually every intelligence agency and investigating committee that examined these false claims. His mind is a trash dump. He now directs comments only to the lowest grade fools and those few raving wraths who are as loony as he is.

Paul Wolfowitz: A World Bank president so damnably caught with his corrupt rat paws in the cookie jar that his own troops booed him in the lobby. Like Gonzalez, he answers questions about specific misdeeds with generalities or more lies. This nincompoop -- a key designer of our Iraq invasion and the non-strategy that followed -- tried hunkering down by – get this – not showing up for work. Sure, that’l fool ‘em.

War Czar: Not only will no one accept the post, the generals turning it down insult the Bush Administration both publicly and privately while they do it. When's the last time you heard someone reject a White House job by blasting the would-be employer in a Washington Post op-ed page piece? That's what retired Marine General John Sheehan did. These are uniquely powerful signals the ship's headed straight for an iceberg..

What’s Bush say about all this? Well, he pronounced Gonzalez’s testimony a hit. His spokeswoman (now there’s an ugly job) Dana Perino told reporters Gonzalez "has done a fantastic job in the Department of Justice." In other words, the policy is to follow the lead of goofball Gonzalez’s hopeless, hapless attempt to refute hard evidence with moronic platitudes and general denials. It’s like being caught by twelve cameras, 6,000 witnesses, and 400 pieces of physical evidence in a murder by strangulation and then claiming you were never near the scene and if you were you don’t recall it anyway.

Chief Bush-o-Ramus also pronounced his confidence in Wolfowitz and that sinking surge and continues, like his deputies, to answer facts with slogans and lies. Maybe he could help his people dig up a war czar among one of those “chicken pluckers” he talked about Thursday as he weirdly babbled on about a variety of subjects he can’t discuss in English sentences. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070419/bush-musings

It looks like no one's in control. Whoever was calling the shots the first few years appears to have retired from the field and left the job to scavengers.

SOMETIMES WE DISCOVER TOO LATE THAT OUR 'PROTECTORS' ARE KEYSTONE COPS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Officials and campus police at Virginia Tech showed the judgment of parakeets yesterday morning. They had two bodies at a dormitory, both of them shooting victims, they’d recovered no weapons at the scene, so clearly an armed gunman or gunmen was at large, yet they waited two hours to issue an alert.

Instead they followed a blind lead, heading out to question the boyfriend of one of the victims. When asked why no alert was sounded, university president Charles Steger explained authorities were still gathering information.

According to his reckoning, one doesn’t notify the public about a crime until it’s solved. Evidently authorities made a mistake when they precipitously informed the community about the Manson murders, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and that New England Brink’s heist. Too bad they didn’t have Steger to advise them.

The first two murders were kept in-house with campus security. No other police organizations were called in to close off the campus and hunt down the killer. The campus community wasn't instructed to lock up and hunker down. Small minds under such circumstances are prone to cover up because it all looks so bad, thereby making things worse.

This morning reporters at the campus press conference focused on the psychological profile of the shooter, a known stalker, but the organizational atrocity here was in the panicked response to the first two murders, which made the other 30 possible in the classrooms across campus.

It’s terrible when we discover that people paid to protect us can be more prone to panic than your average customer sitting on a Denny’s stool. When Columbine High School was shot up eight years ago by two demented teens, the Sheriff’s Department waited two hours to enter the building because, they explained later, they feared there were booby traps inside. At least one person bled to death while they stood around with their thumbs up their ass. They also prevented anyone else from going in. Frantic parents had to stand there with them. The photo above is from the Columbine massacre. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In battle, infantrymen go forward all the time knowing the enemy's somewhere up ahead with explosives, automatic weapons, and who knows what else. They do it because it’s what they signed to do, just as the firemen and cops who poured into the World Trade Center died trying to fulfill their pledge to keep people safe.

Then of course we have a commander-in-chief who read The Pet Goat for seven minutes after being informed the nation was under attack. Eventually he rose, raced to Air Force One, and flew around in a wide circle, from Florida to Nebraska, and finally Washington. He spent the entire day running away. As an ex-soldier, I can tell you an infantry squad leader who ran off and left his attacked squad to fend for itself would be court-martialed, stripped of rank, dishonorably discharged, and imprisoned. A president leaves an entire country defenseless and no one even asks him about it.

Nothing happened to those panicked Colorado authorities, but something did happen to Bush. He got re-elected. It’s too soon to tell what will happen to Steger and his Keystone Cops.

VIRGINIA TECH, IRAQ DEATHS PART OF SAME BLOODY TAPESTRY

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Periodic slaughters by our well-equipped lone gunmen have become so common that everybody knows what to do and say afterward -- survivors, journalists, relatives, politicians, the people who set up those same sad, makeshift shrines to the dead. We're engulfed by rage, grief, sadness, then we go back to our lives to wait for the next psycho.

So we were well-rehearsed for the tragedy that landed on Virginia Tech yesterday. We know all about those fearful, twisted beings who in this country have access to semi-automatic weapons. Organized, fearful, twisted beings in the National Rifle Association pay politicians to make sure they have that access.

People kill people, yes, but they kill them much more easily when they own such weapons. We're the only industrialized democracy on Earth that protects the rights of lunatics to buy them. They don’t have to prove sanity or even rudimentary knowledge of gun safety.

Meanwhile, the day took its usual toll of killed and maimed U.S. troops in Iraq. The counts always lag, but there we suffer an average of three American deaths a day, plus many more maimed -- all this in behalf of a pointless exercise that weakens us, has stolen our moral standing, makes our enemies stronger, and has unleashed mindless homicidal fury against an entire nation.

America's big tent unfortunately makes room for the mad policies of an administration that panders to a twisted few who wrongfully claim the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights specifically protects the gun rights of homicidal maniacs. It simultaneously pursues a war on the fly, restating its aims as it continues playing its deadly, ad libbed charade. Those of us who see flaws in these policies -- and we are the majority -- proceed with our melancholy, curious acceptance.

Bush-o-ramusses tell themselves their Iraq doings are a necessary cost of business, but that's only so they don't have to face the truth of their sick, irrational longings. We get less oil out of Iraq than we did before the war. If we were to rebuild and properly protect its oil infrastructure, an accounting of the true cost would be in the thousands per barrel. Meanwhile we're a nation without a conservation policy. People still purchase 7,000-pound SUVs. Madness.

Virginia Tech and Iraq are all part of the same bloody tapestry of a nation that lets fanatics sit atop the political system – fanatics attached to a world view that finds Virginia Tech and Iraq unremarkable and necessary.

BUSH, FOR FIRST TIME, LINKED DIRECTLY TO JUSTICE DEPT. SCANDAL -- HOW COME THERE'S NEVER A COP WHEN YOU NEED ONE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Many of us who were around as Nixon slowly sank, one fact at a time, toward his political demise, considered it, if truth be told, a rewarding experience to see that lying, criminal bastard flailing about, his misdeeds pulling him inexorably toward justice's reward.
Now we’re seeing a repeat, with Bush as the new criminal, but it’s not rewarding -- not even a little bit. The problem here is, while the dummy twists slowly, slowly in the wind (yes, I'm mixing metaphors), people are dying in his vile, wholly impossible attempt to be vindicated by the blood of others.

My friend Tom Dowretzky, a former news desk colleague, sent me this link: http://www.abqjournal.com/news/special/554986nm04-15-07.htm. Tom pointed out that the lead is buried, because beneath the first paragraph we learn Domenici took his campaign to fire the U.S. Attorney who was tormenting him directly to Bush, and the man, David Iglesias, was subsequently fired. It leaves lots of questions. Did Bush take some kind of direct action in Domenici’s behalf after the phone call? Common sense tells us he did. Bush certainly didn’t do anything to call off the dogs. Since he had sworn an oath to the Constitution, it was his duty to admonish Domenici and report his behavior. No evidence of that, either. Circumstantial evidence tells us he ordered Iglesias fired. The investigation rolls on -- torpidly.

By January 2009, when Bush is scheduled to step down, odds are the Democratically-controlled Congress will have uncovered an enormous tonnage of impeachable offenses. But in the meantime in Iraq, three U.S. troops die every day, on average, and many more are permanently disabled.

Bush, avidly persuing his place in hell, said over the weekend that the Democrats in Congress must listen to the generals and continue funding his despicable war. But the generals told him long ago to seek a political solution and get out. So he kept replacing generals until he found some who would go along. Meanwhile, clearly planning to make Iraq a colony into perpetuity, he builds an enormous network of U.S. military bases there euphemistically called "enduring" bases. Congress in 2002 gave him the right to dig out the phantom WMDs. Everything else he did and continues to do there is the work of a despot.

Yet there’s no serious impeachment attempt in Congress. And Bush has even admitted violating the law – revoking habeas corpus and reading mail, intercepting phone calls, etc., without a warrant.

IRAQ BILLS WEAK

The two Iraq funding bills that supposedly stand up to Bush are weak. Military Families Speak out calls them totally unacceptable. The House has a withdrawal deadline of August 31, 2008. That, points out MFSO, “would mean the deaths of over 1,000 more US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi children, women, and men.” The Senate version suggests withdrawal by March 2008. Both bills are loaded with language allowing Bush to ignore them.

As justice for this tyrant moves at the speed of a glacier, more troops head for Iraq on 15-month deployments . . .

'THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S SOULS'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The way the Iraq war is structured, very few Americans are conscious of what it’s doing to them. Unlike the scattered families whose children come home in coffins that, by White House edict, can’t be photographed, or like the Iraqis who go to the market for a leg of lamb and return minus a leg of their own, most middle-class Americans just go on about their business.

They pay their taxes, go to work, go out to dinner, make love, chuckle over The Daily Show, buy crappy Chinese stuff at discount stores rung up by desperately poor people obeying edicts to smile without health insurance, they fume at this crappy government, but consider themselves mostly untouched.
Meanwhile the horrors deepen. The planet bakes, the fundamentalist churches siphon tax funds to raise more Creationist zombies, the vets come home broken and untreated, there’s no energy policy, Bush lies and lies some more, borrows and borrows some more, allocating the funds to programs that make everything worse and to heck-of-a-job Brownies he's placed throughout the government. He cripples food safety, worker safety, science, education, and access to education, dumbing everything down to his level.

Congressional members enjoy their free gym memberships and members-only elevators while the cauldron boils and we count down the days and hope our twisted electoral process will give us something better next time. But those boxes keep coming home.

MARIO SAVIO
The late Mario Savio (pictured above), facing circumstances far less onerous than today's -- when we suffer under an Orwellian regime that despises its own people -- said to a crowd of Berkeley students in 1964,

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Now there’s an idea.

Imus lost his job. Excellent, but let's stop patting ourselves on the back. Bush and Cheney still have theirs.

VONNEGUT KNEW BETTER THAN TO HAND THE WAR MACHINE TO VILE NITWITS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Kurt Vonnegut had a great run. And in his final book, the nonfiction A Man Without a Country, he got off some profound, clever shots against our present President. Imagine that.
Even as we mourn Vonnegut's loss we see Dick Cheney, his metal heart and test-tube blood refreshed daily by the Transylvanian earth on his coffin floor, wake each evening suited up and ready for another round of lies, mayhem, and feeding enriched batches of evil into the overloaded mind of the pathetic little nitwit sitting in the Oval Office in his Top Gun costume.
This country not only sells guns to its maniacs, it even installs them as President and places them in charge of the biggest, most lethal collection of war-making machinery in history. Had we known just how vile and demented this guy was, we’d have understood that our passive acceptance was making us co-conspirators in our own self-destruction.

BUSH BIDED HIS TIME

But if a candidate has enough money, he can hide behind an election process that fails to ferret out character and can even camouflage astoudingly low levels of ability and intelligence. So Bush bided his time for awhile cutting taxes for the rich, walking away from the Kyoto Treaty, planting heck-of-a-job Brownies all across the top of government agencies, making sure there was no energy policy to conflict with the goals of Exxon-Mobil and Saudi Arabia, and, curiously, impaling counter-terrorism strategies set in place by the previous administration, which he replaced with nothing at all.
But soon enough he mounted his toy steed and dispatched American forces down the mountain for oil, glory, and to scratch the itch of his homicidal pathology. Now his new man at Defense, Robert Gates, who’d signed off on the bipartisan Baker commission’s report, has extended Iraq tours to 15 months. That highly touted panel, remember, said we must begin using diplomacy to extricate ourselves. But after waiting two weeks for everyone to forget the report, Bush threw in more, rather than less, and Gates oversees this mad race toward the abyss.
The war is killing us, and the “surge” is doing it quicker. Congress must hold fast against war funding and impeach these bastards. It’s doubtful it will do even half of that, but we have to stay after its members and make them fear the next election more than they love their corporate paymasters.

FIRE IMUS & TAKE RADIO REPTILES STERN, LIMBAUGH DOWN WITH HIM

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Radio snake Don Imus, who may or may not survive his having referred to student athletes as “nappy-headed ho’s” on the air, could be legitimately fired for each and every moronic episode of his show – as should perverted Howard Stern, dope-addled Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of their ilk.
These radio personalities represent the dumbing down of America to absurd levels no one could have imagined just a few years ago. They're vicious clowns of no redeeming social value who have no allegiance to truth, fairness, or any sort of moral code west of Taliban country.

America suffers from dumbed down elections, music, TV, education, morality, logic, newspapers, weekly magazines, 24-hour news, you name it. And nowhere is it more evident than talk radio, where vocal reptiles like Imus race to the noxioius bottom of the listeners’ barrel to scoop up fame and profit from an alarming deterioration of standards and taste.

Imus is the guy who once told a series of terrible jokes based on Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affairs at a black-tie dinner attended by Bill and Hillary. He got what he wanted – publicity. Where I grew up a guy like that would have been instantly dragged out to the nearest alley for justice. Such a solution is neither terribly intelligent nor always fair, because the ability to pound lumps in a guy’s head is not always in synch with the justness of the pounder’s cause. But seeing it would have been a guilty pleasure.

In that particular case a dumbed-down radio personality was relying on dumbed-down politics to increase the audience of his dumbed-down show. No low-life could have insulted Harry Truman like that because he’d have turned it all around on the perpetrator. But Imus knew his man. He knew the Clintons, who are fuzzy on morals and can’t make a serious move without a focus group to guide them, would sit there and take it, and Imus would get the headlines he so desperately craved.

Years ago friends tried to persuade me there’s actually substance to Howard Stern, that I should try him out. The second time I heard his show he and his ghastly crew of ass-kissers superimposed their own catcalls and laughter over a 911 tape of tearful Joaquin Phoenix’s call to police as his brother River died of a drug overdose on the Sunset Strip. If there was something funny to say about the death of a 23-year-old kid, these fools didn’t find it. I’ve despised Stern ever since.

Limbaugh is a scumbag who styles himself as a kind of political analyst until you catch him telling a flat-out lie, in which case he pleads he’s merely an entertainer. The ascendance of Imus, Limbaugh, Stern, and their clones was aided by the fact that most of their listeners are alone in their vehicles where they feel safer indulging in a moral decay they find appealing.

Fire Imus? Of course. But not just because of his latest racist remarks. Fire him because of what he does every day to make dumbed-down America dumber – and viler.