joe
Sleep well. We'll wake you when the nightmare is over.
Joe -- You've probably seen this stuff, but just in case...:
A government document [ http://awol.gq.nu/4dawol.htm] describing Bush's service record, obtained by Martin Heldt under the Freedom of Information Act, the "MILITARY BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE WALKER BUSH" from the Headquarters Air Reserve Personnel center in Denver, Colorado, indicates that Bush finished his active duty and his military service by serving in Denver, Colorado, between 2 Oct. '73 and 21 Nov. '74. Bush attended Harvard Business School full-time between the Fall of '73 and the Spring of '75, and nothing has ever been said or written about Bush taking trips to Denver during this period. Heldt concludes that, based on the relevant documents, "it would appear that the way Bush fulfilled his duty was not by attending the obligated number of drills, but by having his name added to the roster of a paper unit at the ARPC (ORS) Denver Colorado for an extra six months."
http://www.bushwatch.com/bushgate2.htm
Thank you to diligent researchers and posters. Interesting stuff recently.
I can't stand intolerance. And hypocrisy. George, the warrior chief, personifies these.
McT
Lebanon rebuffs Powell:
"Lebanon refuses to take dictation from America," Hezbollah deputy leader Sheik Naim Kassem said Sunday.
Lebanon has rejected U.S. and United Nations demands to send a major military force to secure the area, saying it will not safeguard Israel while no peace deal exists between Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
Meanwhile, the Lebanon-based representative of the militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad group discounted Powell's assertion that neighboring Syria had begun closing offices of groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas, classified by Washington as terrorist organizations.
"The Americans are trying to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority by giving the impression that Syria has started to take measures against the resistance movements," Abu Imad Rifai told The Associated Press on Sunday.
What a prudish country we have become .... sex will get you impeached ...... murder a few thousand innocent people and you are a hero .... go figure.
The unthinkable is being normalised. The American essayist Edward Herman wrote: "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals ... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.''
Click me
http://slate.msn.com/id/2082499/
Those Bushites are such marvelous verbalists.
Adept contortionist too .....
Somewhere, in one of today's papers, I read that the carrier was 30 miles from port, and they had to turn around and steam further out in order to accomodate the little puppet's latest arranged news bite.
I wonder how many are really, truly buying all this stuff now? I've looked at a lot of the current polls, and what else do you ansswer to a question about how well Bush has led this war? He's never even come close to it.
Tonight 60 Minutes did a piece on Afghanistan today. Frightening. The Taliban are back in greater numbers, and the very warlords that were talked about (and armed and supported by the US in order to have their help in searching out the Taliba, who now are members of their groups) seem to have taken over. And watching the video part, I was struck by how many of the warlords' armies are marching around in US camoflage and other uniforms. The poor president said that they had been promised help by the U.S., and gotten none. Afghanistan appears a lawless, fearful place, very unlike Rumsfeld's descriptions. And how interesting that CBS aired this, with all the implied criticism of what's happened and not happened there. On the same show.....they have a usually boring exchange between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton (and Dole should get new contacts, unless he's started staring). Tonight Dole gave kind of a half-hearted thing about reality shows and the democrats (the reference was a little unclear). And Clinton came back with a sharp remark about Fox and reality shows. Is some of the media beginning to get a little courage here?
Bush
Brew a fesh pot, this will take a while.
James Jennings, president of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid organization that has worked in Iraq since 1991: "The evidence that Iraq gassed its own people is also not about a current event, but one that happened fourteen years ago. If that did not constitute a good enough reason for going to war with Iraq in 1988 (which the U.S. did not even contemplate at the time), it certainly is not a good enough reason now."
http://www.accuracy.org/bush/
The media follow, don't lead -- their purpose is to rake in the dough. So I take their increasing interest in opposing opinions to be a latter-day conversion, based on their perception that the market's looking for opposition.
Has anyone seen this? I think it's interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/weekinreview/04ATLA.html
I've posted this link to another thread, but I thought it apropos here as well.
Thanks, Lola, excellent article. It just reeks of the hubris of this bunch.
Hubris in spades, VNN. Though of course they think of themselves as guides for the rest of us unthinking people...
Lola -- The Atlas article was fascinating to read, as was the earlier stuff from France. I've blathered on elsewhere about having known some of these people. The ambitions of the followers of Strauss were already present in the Harvard I knew back in the late 50's, early '60's, where those very ambitions were creating the fissures and resentments and personal animosities which have driven these people as much as the intellectual concepts and hunger for political power have. It's hellaciously ironic that all this has come together publicly in the presidency of a fundamentalist Christian, a dodo like W.
Our local transmitter for conspiracy radio has gone public this week under the name of Radio Free [name of town]. Was thinking about how to describe this outfit (a national network, increasingly prosperous and successful) to y'all while driving home just now. Truth for truth, glimmering of wisdom for glimmering of wisdom, these guys are way more reliable than Fox or CNN, and I'm not just trying to be cute here. The commentator on the air was remarking on the very much increased use of military uniforms, military venues, and military trappings in the visuals we are getting from the Bush administration. He feels that this is no longer just funny and ironic (given the draft dodging maneuvers of most of the administration) but ominous. I don't think he's far wrong.
Driving through town and observing the American flags on people's houses, I noticed one which had been sewn into a frame of red fabric and the letters L-I-B-E-R-T-Y sewn into the frame. Set me to thinking about how each of us associates democracy with one or another concept slightly above the others. Mine would be E-Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y. I pondered, Whose democracy works the best? America's? Another country's? I settled on Denmark. Is America really a democratic country? Or a country which is trying to be democratic? Or a country which pretends to be democratic?
Good ponderings, Tartarin.
The Atlas article was the one I patched into this thread on Sunday. I am looking forward to a discussion amongst this crowd about the Strauss philosophy and how he has been interpreted by the Leo-cons.
So...do we command the world and take out every rogue country or dictator to ensure that Democracy (our interpretation of it) rules? Must we do a Crusade for democracy and, one by one, take over undemocratic countries in the name of America? Who will oppose us? No one can oppose us in power. What about ideas? How will we deal with Islam and the idea of a religious state? There was an article on the front page of the NYTimes today about how fearful are some women in Iraq that a religious order will be reinstated.
I watched a film yesterday, Rabbit-Proof Fence. The Brits thought they were doing the best thing for society in the '30s, when they imposed their ideas on Australia. Are we doing the same thing today?
You and I were probably watching that film at the same time, Kara. Loved it. Watched the DVD and therefore got the follow-up on how it was made -- did you see that? Quite apart from being a terrific film, yes, I think it has great relevance to our attitudes. After all, the Australian settlers really thought they were doing the right thing (and getting all that cheap labor, too, just as we do with our contorted immigration non-policies).
Strauss -- Hubris is the apt word and applies also to his followers, as VNN pointed out.
Should/can a misguided leader of a super power be considered a WMD?
From a Scottish newspaper
Quote:Sunday Herald - 04 May 2003
US: 'Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction'
By Neil Mackay
The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.
Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.
According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.
Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.
Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.'
The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq --
which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.
The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam's scientists -- which he labelled
the 'nuclear mujahidin' -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed.
This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine's central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged
against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security.
Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons.
