The censorship of Iraq-war images by the Bush administration, beginning early on with bans against photography of flag-draped coffins, continues to this day as embedded reporters and photographers are kicked out of their units when pictures of casualties are published, and increasingly-impossible restrictions are placed upon the images that are approved for release.  The picture, above, taken by Stefan Zaklin, then with the European Pressphoto Agency, was widely published in Europe and was in a group of casualty photos recently published in a Web slide show by the New York Times.  Publishing of such photos is not motivated by any sort of sensationalism, but rather because there is nothing like such graphic images that can relate the bare truth, invoking thought of the consequences of war and an assessment of the worth of the costs, whatever the level of casualties, under whatever circumstances, surge or otherwise.  In Vietnam, where there were few restrictions on photographers, the graphic photos of casualties helped to arouse the massive, public outcries that eventually forced that illegitimate war to an end.  Is America, as Bush and his Republicans claim, really any more secure for the life this young soldier, and his family, had taken from them?

Be sure to watch for re-runs of the Iraq-invasion 5th-anniversary Frontline presentation of Bush’s War for the whole story of the Bush/Cheney constitutional and political abuse, which originally aired Monday, March 24 on PBS stations.  Then, contact your congressional representatives and DEMAND the ONLY recourse that can forever separate America from the criminal actions and immoral legacy of this administration:  the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Thesis Statement | Academic Argument | Central Idea

The Bush-Cheney administration is a corrupt, criminal, and treasonist facilitator for the capitalist extreme that has not only used people as parts of the machinery of profit, but also the national heritage, lifeblood, and future.

What follows is not, in the strict sense, structured to comply with the norms of academia.  It is best categorized as “editorial journalism,” wherein facts are checked, fiction avoided, sources usually provided in some form, and wherein, through the Bush first term, as exposed in Spring of the Dying Roses, to the here and now, the abuse and utter waste of the Bush-Cheney Republican governance is called into question and condemnation, and to account, with apologies to McCarthy, as the greatest plague ever to shroud the light of freedom and democracy in America.

The Bush library should be built on a barge with a framework of Twin Towers steel, the smoke from which obscured the Bush-Cheney subterfuge of the Iraq invasion and occupation, towed to deep water and dumped to sink into the abyss and lie there among the ruin they desecrated, where they and their Republican Congress dedicated themselves to anchor America.

But there may be hope that there will be no Bush library, because finally, only a few days after former press secretary Scott McClellan’s book was released, confirming numerous Bush-administration transgressions from an insider perspective, Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) 35-count impeachment resolution was read into the record of the House of Representatives, by numerous clerks, over a near five-hour period, and later voted to be referred to the judiciary committee.  In the face of the facts outlined in the 35 counts, and the baseless charges under which President Clinton’s impeachment charges were voted to trial in the Senate, it is difficult to imagine that Democratic leaders, particularly House Speaker Pelosi, could continue to justify stonewalling impeachment proceedings on the basis of a fear to rock the boat and derail whatever Republican support for Democratic programs may remain after the next election, because as a metaphor for the Ship of State or a train, under Bush, Cheney, and their rubberstamp, Republican majority in Congress, the ship has already sunk and the train is already off the tracks.  Impeachment of the pair would accomplish the important and necessary task of forever separating America from sanction of their abuses and crimes.

A month later, at Friday’s July 25, 2008 House Committee on the Judiciary hearing into the Imperial Presidency of George W. Bush,a.k.a. “Executive Power and the Bush Administration,” after nearly six, non-stop hours focused on Kucinich’s resolution, administration crimes and abuses, ranging from deception in the push for war, to the power no one man has to make war, to torture and illegal wiretaps, ended as an overwhelming indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration which, at least, put the stamp of official shame upon the Bush administration and into the public record, and it laid a substantial groundwork for a further hearing to consider recommending impeachment to the full House which, even if time would not permit to be concluded, would at least force the administration, under pain of impeachment, to produce witnesses and answer questions to provide the truths, ending the continuing Bush obstruction and contempt of Congress in executing its constitutional-oversight responsibilities.  The legal and legislative experts who testified on the public-record evidence of administration-admitted transgressions made clear the failures of Congress that in large part allowed the Bush-Cheney abuses and crimes to happen, and they also crystalized the obligation of Congress to prosecute accountability, and the paths available to it to meet that obligation, so much so that if the committee fails to open hearings to consider impeachment, it could only be viewed as being as derelict in its responsibility to its governmental branch, to the Constitution, to the people, and to American democracy as the Republican-controlled, rubber-stamp Congress that preceded it and facilitated the Bush-Cheney abomination.

Republicans repeatedly tried to defend the Bush claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction by reading out-of-context quotes from elected officials of both parties, and other officials, some of which were made after they had already been pulled in by the Bush-Cheney deception that lead to the congressional resolution approving the invasion of Iraq.  Perhaps the most important point of the hearing was the answer to the Republican attempt to defend the deception, when it was emphasized, despite the strong interruption and objection of Republican committee member King (Iowa), who saw where the witness answer was leading, that even if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and even if there was no deception about them, that weapons were not the issue, that the deception, much more difficult to defend, and which intelligence documents have already nullified, was the assertion that Iraq was able, prepared, and intending to act in a way posing an imminent threat to American security.  The existence of that imminent threat to American security would have been the only justifiable basis for invasion, not the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction, even if they had existed.  Neither existed or exists today, with or without an American occupation force, except the threat to global U.S. forces and its mission against America’s real enemies, fostered by the Iraqi occupation.

Also important, the questions by members of the committee foreshadowed that corrective, legislative measures to neutralize many executive, unconstitutional abuses, especially signing statements, may finally be enacted, and the repeated comments by some expert witnesses raised the hopeful specter of accountability for Bush and Cheney for the most heinous of their crimes, criminal accountability, existing to haunt them beyond their terms in office; a satisfying proposition to hear spoken in such proceedings, even if finally realized as only wishful thinking.

The panel of experts, and many of the Democratic members of the committee, made clear in their statements that they recognize the great danger of allowing the tilt of power that has resulted from the corruptive abuse of power by the Bush administration to remain unchallenged as the new administration moves in and removes the stains from the White House carpets, and it was made clear that the ceding of power by not confronting its abuse cannot remain as the legacy of the previous, Republican Congress and the Bush administration.  If this is true, the next chapter of this hearing can only be a retort of strongest measure to the most recent Bush contempt, and an equally strong slate of legislation reenforcing the constitutional separation of powers and executive limits of power that Bush has mishandled with equal contempt and unequaled ignorance.

Speaking of unequaled ignorance, or the usual Bush delusions, did anyone hear what Bush said to Bob Costas during an interview on the first day of Olympic competition?  “America doesn’t have problems.”  Someone should have replaced Costas with a mirror.  That was the day after Bush’s “good friend,” Vladimir Putin, sent Russian troops into Georgia.

McCain’s fear-mongering, false visions, promises
and truths—seeks to justify a bad end built on lies.

Barack Obama is failing to assure that he will really stand up for the Constitution or for the majority of citizens that have been abused by Republican administrations over the last decade.  He is failing to take a firm stand to:

immediately remove all troops from Iraq and obtain restitution from Iraq’s multi-billion oil-surplus fund to, at least, repay amounts lost due to Iraqi fraud, corruption, and abuse,

bring down the Washington system of influence and the money-based election machine, which includes ending earmarks and political districting,

reaffirm that the Constitution does not allow for presidential signing statements,

reaffirm that the Constitution prohibits the executive from raising or maintaining private armies,

reaffirm that only Congress constitutionally determines where and when troops are deployed in non-defensive circumstances,

reaffirm that Congress constitutionally must ratify all international agreements relating to deployment or use of force and trade,

rein in the out-of-control, wild-west, Wall-Street investment/banking operations,

end or reverse the bailouts the Republican-controlled administration and Treasury Department are showering upon financial firms responsible for the current economic climate,

increase Department of Justice resources, now completely inadequate, to investigate and prosecute rampant corporate crime,

hold accountable executives of financial firms being bailed out, who are still on the job, making their millions, who caused the economic failure now bleeding middle- and lower-class Americans,

repeal laws shielding criminal corporate executives from civil suits, and put in place regulatory requirements for corporations to allow shareholders to approve salary packages of top executives and permit employee choice in retirement-fund investment options,

block corporations guilty of fraud and theft from participating in government-contract processes,

bring to a final, unsquirming end all credit-industry practices attacking those afflicted by poverty, including ending all interest and penalties associated with medical debts,

end all speculation in oil and food commodities and medical services/products,

reverse the flood of illegal immigration and green-card abuse costing American jobs, job standards, and community heritage, and commit to strictly enforce and actively partner with states to enforce immigration law.

Still, even given these disappointing failures, it is absolutely true to say that Obama will do far less harm in office than Bush yes-man John McCain (believe what McCain’s done and said before he started saying what he says to get elected).  Ralph Nader would actually be the best president to mercilessly halt abuses of the privileged and greed-motivated and return America to its more noble, constitutional, moral center.  But, it is unfortunate that any vote for Nader translates to a vote for McCain and another four years of Republican policies destructive to the vast majority of Americans.

Presidential Candidate John McCain’s politics are intertwined with the Abramoff scandal network.  Jack A. Abramoff was an American political lobbyist, a far-right, conservative-Republican, political activist, and a corrupt businessman, who is sitting in jail for crimes centered on a series of Washington’s highest-profile political scandals, central to Republican abuse and contempt for democratic-government process.  Key among those associated with the scandals was Ralph Reed, a former director of Pat Robertson’s religious organization, who left to take those connections into political consulting, where he was in the middle of the Abramoff money stream, using the Christian-right, and about whom, Abramoff said, “He is a bad version of us.”

Reed was once a part of the Abramoff/Tom Delay-corrupted lobbying/influence system, which, through paid-off government abuse, among many other sordid things, facilitated the largest U.S. system of sweat shops, many owned by China, shielded from U.S. labor laws by Republican conservatives, headed by Karl Rove, through contacts with Abramoff associate Grover Norquist, who facilitated a kind of money laundering for Abramoff, in return receiving donations to his non-profit organization, Americans for Tax Reform.  Along with those involved conservative Republicans who have yet to be convicted of crimes, Reed remains in politics today, despite that these conservative Republicans promoted the Northern Mariana Islands sweat-shops to American business, environments of human abuse and misery, as a sort of off-shore, labor-law shelter, making their operations a “free capitalism” conservative cause.  They remain in politics today, despite that they funneled money and influence for Russian oil oligarchs, getting bail-outs for them through the World Monetary Fund, using American taxpayer money.  And, despite all this, Ralph Reed, whose capacity for avarice raised hairs on the neck of one of America’s most notorious political felons, is today associated with John McCain’s campaign.

There is enough smoke around McCain’s actions and statements, relating to the Abramoff/Delay, Republican corruption, that there is likelihood of a fire.  At least, the history points to a McCain who shielded the crony system and money networks that have taken a stranglehold on the American election and government processes.  As chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee (Abramoff’s major source of funds were Indian-nation casino operators), McCain, under pressure from other senators whose relationships with Abramoff could come to view, said of his committee’s investigations, “It’s not our responsibility in any way to involve ourselves in the ethics process [of Senators],” which contradicts his high-sounding campaign statements on ethics, and he held back from public disclosure the vast majority of evidence obtained because of the effect it would have likely had on the Bush administration, the Republican Congress, where Tom Delay (R-TX) was king, and Republican-election outcomes, and most of those documents remain sequestered.  McCain has demonstrated that he has no claim on ethics, and that a McCain election clearly means a continuation of the Republican system of machine politics, monied influence, and bought elections, which all must end, and all of the old horses, including John McCain (R-AZ), George Voinovich (R-OH), and Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who allowed it to grow its roots into the foundation of government around them for so long, even if they never were directly involved, must also be removed from the American political system if that system is ever to be constrained within the framework of constitutional values and the people’s interests.

“Success breeds success, and failure breeds failure.  I know how to win wars.”  This was John McCain’s latest defense of his support of Bush and the unconstitutional war and occupation of Iraq, and his response to Barack Obama’s affirmation that failure against those who attacked America, in Afghanistan, is because of the Bush obsession in Iraq.  McCain, who has supported Bush in every bloody step in Iraq, has been a steadfast partner in failure, and yes, his election would breed more of the same kind of deadly failure and sustain a bleak future for America that, with McCain and his Bush-Republicans in charge, would impose a 100-year presence of troops in Iraq, or anywhere else that he might seek to invade.

McCain and the remaining Bush Republicans say withdrawal must be based upon the “situation on the ground” in Iraq, which, for them, would leave America there for a generation, at least.  It should be remembered that the situation on the ground is that American troops have, behind the smokescreen of the 911 attacks, been committed to a capitalist-derived, nation-building occupation by a Republican president and his rubber-stamp Congress to serve industrial special interests, who are the only ones to have profited from the war, and not to serve America’s interests, and regardless of the “politically derived” situation of violence on the ground in Iraq, America does not belong there in the middle of it, should never have invaded there, and must withdraw from there to restore its legitimacy and its focus upon the threats to America and its enemies who attacked New York and Washington, and upon the domestic economic, infrastructure, and energy challenges, and the global environmental crisis, all of which pose greater danger for America’s prosperity than anything in Iraq.

Presidential candidate Senator Obama and others who said the “surge” would not work were not wrong.  McCain, rather, is wrong to say it has worked.  That is a deception.  Deaths of U.S. soldiers have yet to drop significantly lower than any point after the invasion (see chart below), and the insurgents and Iraqi factions are simply saving themselves in anticipation of a post-election draw-down and eventual removal of occupation troops, ending a costly, damaging travesty that should have never been permitted to happen, a crime that will only be made right by ending it, once and for all.  If American voters are ignorant enough to elect yet another Bush-supporting Republican into the White House, then the conflict in Iraq will escalate to a level of violence yet to be seen, and the death toll of U.S. soldiers will reach new and extended highs as the factions opposed to the U.S. occupation, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, will put their all into inflicting as much punishment and interference as possible, on an extended basis, and it will then, too late for America, be clear that the apparent calming effect of the surge, which has not resulted in the political and Iraq military gains promised, is only a coincidence of timing and politics.  The election of McCain, and the consequent flip-side of the surge, will mark the beginning of the darkest chapter in the ongoing Iraq nightmare, set upon Americans by the Bush-Cheney, McCain-Lieberman, McConnell/Voinovich/Chabot Republicans.  And, yes, Lieberman should be perceived as a Republican, and it would be no surprise if he winds up as McCain’s running mate, as the Republicans try to suck in Obama-disaffected Independent and Democratic voters.

Saturn 5 / Apollo on the pad.

The desperation and frustration over the lack of solutions for the jump-start rise in oil prices to stratospheric levels has prompted many pundits, newscasters, and moderators to raise the parallel of President John Kennedy’s beyond-stratospheric, 1961 mandate, “to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of the decade,” as the kind of commitment that would provide a like-successful result if only leaders would pick up that kind of deadline with regard to solving the energy problem.  The kink, of course, of which none who pose the question address or seem aware, is that Kennedy had a big advantage backing up his bold mandate:  he had a plan, a program, and an apparatus in place (NASA) to carry it out.  The same kind of bold mandate for energy is not possible, except as political window dressing, where there is no plan, no program, and no apparatus capable of achieving the end-game, as is the case when McCain claims he will solve the problem by simply naming the needed components, without having any way to create them.  Here, then, is the challenge for Senator Obama after he becomes president:  to set the goal, put the minds and industries together to develop the plan, design the program, and build the apparatus to take on the mission to carry out that plan to a successful conclusion.  How to do this is the only realistic campaign promise that can be made with respect to the energy crisis.

And yes, America must take control of its own energy future, as McCain says, and as Obama agrees, but not at the cost of radiated cities and counties, ruined shorelines and damaged fisheries, as Bush and McCain would have it, with the electric and oil companies quickly let loose to repeat their past disasters.  Could it be that the sudden and steep rise of oil prices, coinciding with the end of the oil-men Bush/Cheney White House term, is a manipulated backdrop to the Bush push, as a last gift to his favorite industrial constituency, for Congress to drop the offshore-drilling ban?  Could that have been the purpose of the visit Bush recently made to his hand-holding, cheek-kissing Saudi family, rather than to push for lower prices and increased production?  It is highly advantageous for the Saudis and other oil producers to have the price precipitously rise before small output increases are made, as has just been announced, since the producers can keep the new, higher prices in place no matter if America taps its reserves to drastically reduce imported demand, because the Saudis know their reserves are not endless and would prefer that the export pressure ease at the higher prices so the return on the reserves, at the higher prices, will be extended.  But, regardless, before nuclear power and domestic oil reserves can be tapped, which would not significantly impact fuel prices (eliminate speculative trading for that), there must be in place strict controls, oversight, and adequate funding and preparations to prevent and then contain and clean-up the disasters that will come, regardless of how comprehensive and broad the protections put in place, to include community reparations—a good purpose for energy windfall-profit taxes.  Obama will see to it that the table is set before the repast the energy companies crave is served, and that is what this election is all about, reining in the public-interest stomping profit-stampede of the Bush/McCain-Republican special interests and replacing it with the people’s welfare and interests first.  Only then, with the people in control, is it possible for America to be the master of its own fate.

Smoglympics likely to set no records except for asthmatics, civil and press harassment.

Ex-secretaries of State James Baker III and Warren Christopher, who headed a bipartisan commission looking into war powers, have released the National War Powers Commission Report, which announced a determination that the War Powers Resolution (Act) of 1973, which sought to reenforce the restraints placed upon the executive by the Constitution (and as such, from a legal standpoint, was unnecessary) should be replaced.  But as a tool to reassert the authority of Congress and, after the unnecessary loss of 58,000 lives in Vietnam, to remind of the limitations placed upon the executive by the Constitution, it was a necessity, and with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the creation of a civilian army in Iraq by Bush (a congressional-only power), it still points to the increasing imperative that Congress assert its authority over the executive with respect to war.

Baker, speaking as a presidentialist, calls the War Powers Act “a bad law,” saying that it “undermines and damages the rule of law” because it is so questioned or ignored, and that it is not efficient or a convenient means of exercising constraint on executive authority.  But that is a continued failure of Congress, not the Act or the Constitution, and his commission’s proposed replacement would not, as he claims, preserve any constitutional balance, but would serve to loosen the restraints imposed by the 1973 resolution, which, though unconstitutional, would also be a very bad evolution because the War Powers Commission proposal, at minimum, implies that there is a prerogative for the executive to initiate military actions independently, it would provide no requirement for congressional consent, and it would dilute the absolute authority of Congress by subjugating it to executive-veto power and by limiting its actionable authority to funding alone.  The Supreme Court spoke, indirectly, to this issue in 1983, when it ruled, six to three, in INS v. Chadha, that the procedural safeguards of the Constitution cannot be sidestepped by either house of Congress or the president.  Justice Burger delivered the ruling, excerpted below:

“The bicameral requirement, the Presentment Clauses, the President’s veto, and Congress’ power to override a veto were intended to erect enduring checks on each Branch and to protect the people from the improvident exercise of power by mandating certain prescribed steps.  To preserve those checks, and maintain the separation of powers, the carefully defined limits on the power of each Branch must not be eroded.  To accomplish what has been attempted by one House of Congress in this case requires action in conformity with the express procedures of the Constitution’s prescription for legislative action: passage by a majority of both Houses and presentment to the President.

“The veto authorized by 244(c)(2) doubtless has been in many respects a convenient shortcut; the “sharing” with the Executive by Congress of its authority... is, on its face, an appealing compromise.  In purely practical terms, it is obviously easier for action to be taken by one House without submission to the President; but it is crystal clear from the records of the Convention, contemporaneous writings and debates, that the Framers ranked other values higher than efficiency...

“The choices we discern as having been made in the Constitutional Convention impose burdens on governmental processes that often seem clumsy, inefficient, even unworkable, but those hard choices were consciously made by men who had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.  There is no support in the Constitution or decisions of this Court for the proposition that the cumbersomeness and delays often encountered in complying with explicit constitutional standards may be avoided, either by the Congress or by the President.  With all the obvious flaws of delay, untidiness, and potential for abuse, we have not yet found a better way to preserve freedom than by making the exercise of power subject to the carefully crafted restraints spelled out in the Constitution.”

Yet, Baker says, “...polls show this [executive-leaning replacement of the War Powers Resolution] is what Americans want to see.”  That would be a poll he has interpreted wrongly, because to the contrary, Americans, fearing power abused, like the Founding Fathers, want to see that no president has sole authority to commit troops to battle, but rather, only that authority bestowed by Congress, according to the Constitution.  The past abuses of the executive have all been grounded in an inappropriate expanding of the defining role of Commander in Chief, invoking upon that “title” powers that are totally within the constitutional context of the congressional authority to “declare war,” when, in fact, the Constitution is merely designating the executive as the facilitator of congressional intent with respect to the goals and authority it receives for engaging in military conflicts.

The proposal of the commission seeks to amend the Constitution by proxy, as opposed to the War Powers Resolution, or the recent Senate resolution to prohibit unilateral actions against Iran, which sought to reenforce the Constitution, and no law is constitutional that would alter the power of Congress to decide when and where America’s blood will be spilled.  Only an amendment to the Constitution can accomplish that end, which Baker says “isn't going to happen,” and so, as Republican administrations have guided Japan’s government in ignoring its constitution’s Article 9, absolute prohibition against creating a military, Baker’s commission report seeks to end-run the U.S. Constitution’s delegation of war power to Congress, at what would be the loss of more soldiers’ lives in conflicts either premature to diplomacy or unrelated to America’s defense or security.  Of merit, however, is the joint House and Senate committee the commission proposes, to oversee military activities after authorizations are granted, because this committee, as proposed, would be a responsive tool for oversight of congressional authority with immediate potential to curb any expansion beyond the intent of Congress in exercising the authority it provides to the executive.  As to Baker’s justification that the proposed law would clarify who in Congress the president should consult, with respect to war, it is a shallow front for another attempt to imply or plant the seed that consultation is a sole requirement for what would then be unconstitutional, unilateral executive action without the formal authority of Congress required by the Constitution.  Any high school or college student who has studied government would know that, in any issue, the president should consult with the designated leaders of each party in each house, and the chairs of House and Senate committees affected by the issue.

In the end, only the voice of the American people, expressed through contact with their representatives, can affect an initiative for Congress to properly exercise and oversee its authority over the executive and ensure that America’s military will be a tool for defense of liberty and not that of any president’s whim, acting as a king or dictator, without regard or obligation to the will of the people, as Bush, walking over the Constitution and a prostate Congress, has endowed upon himself as “The Great Decider.”  That travesty is intended to be prevented in war matters by the Constitution’s provisions of congressional authority over the executive.  The election of a president does not bestow upon that person such power or authority, and it never has.

Aside from the discarded constitutional imperatives and historical guidance which are at the core of such a wrong move, as Iraq, and the wrong motives for invading, No End in Sight documents how, after all the basic wrongs, the wrong deed is also wrongly executed by America’s wrong choice for a Republican president.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the [authoritarian] state.

— Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s Chief of Propaganda

Scott McClellan, former Bush “Propaganda Chief” stonewalling the press.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s labeling, in his new book memoir, What Happened:  Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, of the Bush justification for invading Iraq as “propaganda and deception,” is a kindly version of a darker truth, for which there is no defense McClellan or the Bush administration (or the press) can mount, and McClellan should donate every cent he nets on his book to the immediate families of soldiers killed in Iraq, where government insurance is unconscionably inadequate.  Secretary of State Rice is nearly equally complicit with Bush and Cheney in the Iraq deception and so can do nothing except try to condemn McClellan’s attempt to rectify his contribution to the lie.  By calling the war and occupation in Iraq “necessary,” she is also defending herself against the indefensible wasting of more than 4,100 American lives and so much more death, injury, and anguish, for which the rest of her days spent in the darkened, basement-janitor’s closet of her favorite department store would not begin to atone.

Click to join the petition to end the Bush colonial occupation of Iraq.

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Meet the Bastards
The abusive Burmese military junta (above left) and its boss, Senior Gen. Than Shwe (above right).

Burma’s military “government” is committing nature-assisted genocide on its country’s people.  The military generals of that abusive regime sit in isolated splendor and refuse post-typhoon aid at what will be the cost of thousands of additional lost lives, contorting a natural disaster into a man-made affront to humanity.  No ruling structure such as theirs should be permitted to exist anywhere in the world.

If Bush had stopped, in Iraq, at the removal of Saddam, instead of pursuing his special-interest, nation-building agenda, a simple warning to the Burmese ruling criminals would likely have been sufficient to force an alteration of their pattern of greed and corrupted power toward their people.  Bush and Cheney, in throwing out the “might for right” mantle that was in America’s grasp after 9/11, by their abuse of power in Iraq, are also responsible for the lives lost at the hand of the Burmese junta, which they otherwise may have stayed.  The isolated Burmese regime’s compound should be invaded, the rulers who are not killed should be extradited for trial by the World Court to answer for the dead they have caused, and a more humanely-oriented military officer, with approval of the remaining echelon of the military command, should be designated to lead the country, with notice that if the relationship of the government to its people and the world remains unchanged, that the new leadership will also be removed.  And so would end another abomination in the life of the world.

Bush, at the 2008 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, conducting
what can only be a dirge mourning the dead masses and a tattered Constitution.

The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, in the Bush-Cheney administration, has become a beacon upon the failure of the press to meet its obligation to democracy.  Why would the association hold a dinner and invite Bush and Cheney to attend in their final term?  A “do not attend” notice is what should have been delivered to the pair, and if that would be too blunt for the social sensibilities of a press corp that has been treated as so much sticky stuff on the soles of administration shoes, then the event should have simply been cancelled, which would have sent an even more powerful message.  It is, after all, Bush and Cheney who have used and abused the press through two terms in office, who have embarrassed the press through the sheer magnitude of propagandized dung they have dropped as they walked all over the press as though it was a carpet of straw in the Bush ranch stable.  The New York Times recognized this when they questioned attending the event in 2007 and withdrew for the final Bush-Cheney-attended trough-fest.

If the Congress refuses to impeach the pair for their multiple crimes in office, then at least, Americans (journalists and celebrities) of conscience (where the hundreds of thousands who will never be seen again are more important than a chance to be seen) should have followed the NY Times’ lead and impeached them by withdrawing their participation in the event which, with the attendance of the criminals, overlooks the torture, the illegal wiretaps, the lies, the tilt of the system against the most needy, the more than 4,100 dead soldiers in an illicit war, and which by attending, lends to the criminals an impression that what they have done to America and the dead and maimed is acceptable.  Honorees should refuse to accept presentations from the pair, coverage of the event should have been shunned, though the comedic host, Craig Ferguson (who properly managed to visit a few uncomfortable moments upon the criminals there, and the pliant press), reminds that coverage was practically shunned by TV, and those who did attend should question their priorities and the message they sent by showing up without a protest sign, the message that they send by attending any such event that appears to sanction or turn a blind eye to the devastation wrought by the two White House criminals and their accomplices.

A conscience is a terrible thing to lose, and there was no conscience in sharing a press event with the perpetrators of the most horrific and unconscionable American acts the hosts have ever been better used to effect a failure of bringing to account.

The Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. is not anti-American.  He speaks for the American conscience, from the perspective of the whole of America’s history, the good and the bad of it.  His seeming repetitive remarks, “God damn America,” were not the angry and vindictive words of a violent spirit, as those who isolated those words from their context intended they be so perceived.  Rather, they were an explanation for a real part of the reasons America now faces real anger and violence, a partial answer to the question, “why?”  And it is not an answer that is easy to accept when the American myth is put behind the whole and sometimes-ugly truth of America’s history and growth.

Wright has been criticized, not only wrongly for the false images his words paint, taken out of context, but, perhaps, rightly, because of the severity with which he presents his arguments and the hard truths.  But the fact is that the issues of which he spoke, when he tagged each with the repeated phrase, “God damn America,” are severe, each and every one he cited, from the mass murder and displacement of the Native American nations, “God damn America,” to the kidnapping and enslavement of African American forebearers, “God damn America,” to the bombing of civilians in Granada, Panama, Libya, and Africa, “God damn America,” to the internment of Japanese Americans, and more, “God damn America.”  Perhaps, on the other hand, he is right to try, through his angry rhetoric, to evoke the emotional level of feeling those acts of brutality and, as he also put it, “terror” demand, so that they will be better perceived and understood, and to have Americans look at America through the eyes of the people of the rest of the world, and true history, where, spin aside, there are consequences and America is also guilty of that which it disdains.  Yet, even so, he was not calling for anyone to damn America with his words, but, instead, as was clear when the whole context of his sermon is heard, he was saying that God is supreme, not nations, which disappoint and do wrong, and he was speaking of that which God sanctions, and that which God does not, and that for those acts of fear, hatred, and violence he cited against America’s governments, God would not bless America.  And there are numerous other instances of American offense against other cultures and nations he could have cited, like the taking of the Texas territories from Mexico, Blackwater mercenary murders, the imposition of cultural mores viewed as immoral upon other societies, exploitation of foreign resources without consideration of the impacted local needs or economies, all of which are also a part of what Wright described as a metaphor for 911, where [along with illegal immigration by Mexico] “the chickens have come home to roost.”

Wright has also been criticized for supporting Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, but again, when he defines his statements, he says that he supports the good works that Farrakhan has done for the people of his church, in helping to provide relief, and that the good works on the ground are what matter more than what Farrakhan says.

Ronald Kessler, writing for NewsMax, twists a Wright background of good schools and a good home with working parents, as the basis for calling Obama’s defense of some of Wrights’s positions, based on first-hand experience of the hardships of the early years of the black-rights movement, as a lie.  By Kessler’s reasoning, because one doesn’t personally live in the gutter, one can’t be strongly moved, sympathetic, and supportive of those who do. Where would that place Kennedy, Johnson, Kerry, or any of a host of millionaires who, in government and industry, have helped to bring about greater equality for blacks?  This false claim of an Obama lie places Kessler’s “journalism” in the gutter where it should receive no sympathy, and it also reveals Kessler to be biased and highly motivated to stain Obama in any way possible.  Perhaps a mirror would be an appropriate night-stand accessory when Kessler reads of Wright’s recounting of the wrongs of the white man?

Wright condemns the WWII dropping of the atomic bombs, weapons of mass destruction, on Japanese cities, not because he would wish, instead, to see thousands more soldiers die in the taking of the main island, but because one of the bombs could just as easily have been dropped down the crater of Mt. Fuji to demonstrate the destruction further resistance would incur, saving at least one city and its population from the terror that was inflicted.  Or, a remnant Japanese fleet could have been made to completely vanish in a single stroke.  The justification that the entire Japanese populace were soldiers just doesn’t wash, and the point is that there were other options that could have been taken instead of the outright destruction of two cities and a resultant quarter-million civilian casualties—men, women, and children.  And there is, in any case, significant opinion that the government wanted to obtain evidence of the effect of the new weapon upon a city and its population.  These were acts precipitated by white men upon what was, then, openly referred to as an inferior race, much as were the black slaves perceived, as blacks still are, in a society where such opinion is, for the most part, driven underground, not that, had there been black equality and qualified blacks in place, they, too, would not have been party to the developments and decisions made.  Just as there are monsters, hidden within each soul in every nation’s populace, they so exist and exert their will in governments, which is more to Wright’s point.  The current evidence of such monstrous motivation is written in the blood, despair, ash, and smoke of Iraq, and within the darkened homes of its victim’s families.

As to the exaggerations about Wright’s claim the U.S. infected blacks with AIDS, it is ludicrous, and it is not what Wright said.  Wright said that he believes the government... the government, which is not the American people, and which is not God, which does do wrong, which has done great wrongs, which invaded Iraq, where the killing in uncountable, that he believes that government could do anything, including introducing HIV, not that it did, and he said that based on Tuskegee, and based on the revelations of other government activities in Leonard Horowitz’s book Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional? and Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.  Is there really any reason to assume that there is a limit to what governments, unchecked and unbalanced will do, today vs. the past?  All protections have failed with Bush/Cheney.  The expected benefit gained for the blooded names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall, an end to unjustified wars, has vanished as a lesson never learned, with no enforcement of constitutional restraints to prevent the continued terror that is Iraq.

Rev. Wright has also been attributed with anti-Semite remarks, but how would that claim stand against his constant support of the right of Israel to exist, or what he has said is his core belief, that the prophetic tradition of the black church goes back to the Hebrews?

“I take and trace the theology of the black church back to the prophets in the Hebrew bible and to its last prophet, in my tradition, the one we call Jesus of Nazareth.  The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive.  The prophetic theology of the black church is not only a theology of liberation; it is also a theology of transformation, which is also rooted in Isaiah 61, the text from which Jesus preached in his inaugural message as recorded by Luke.  When you read the entire passage from either Isaiah 61 or Luke 4... what you see is God’s desire for a radical change in a social order that has gone sour.  God’s desire is for transformation, changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders and changed hearts in a changed world.

“These two foci of liberation and transformation have been at the very core of the United Church of Christ since its predecessor denomination, the Congregational Church of New England came to the moral defense and paid for the legal defense of the Mende people aboard the slave ship Amistad... [and] as it has fought against racism in the United States of America ever since the union which formed the United Church of Christ in 1957.”

With a self-image of one who is historically ordained to throw off the shackles of repressive authority and reform the status quo, it is no surprise that his rhetoric is scathing, forceful, and unforgiving of past atrocities.  But look beyond the segregated media clips and the at-arms vindicta angelus persona of the pulpit, and the Rev. Wright will be found to be intelligent, soft-spoken, and motivated by the same values and aspirations as any other American religious leader, teaching the same path of peace and love that any American church aspires for its congregations and the lives of people throughout the world.  It is quite a departure from the picture of a black radical, preaching violence against white America that the media clips, pushed for political gain by Sen. Clinton (“you pick your church”), by racists, Republican neo-cons and religious-rightists, and facilitated by the corporate-establishment media, would have you believe.

Sen. Obama chose to avoid the minefield of trying to defend Wright’s isolated words within the context they were spoken, and it seems unlikely Obama would ever turn his back on such a man of teaching and peaceful intent.  Instead, Obama chose to speak through a political megaphone and simply condemn the words, as they were hurled at him, apart from their true intent, and not the man, until more misunderstood rhetoric from Wright’s self-defense made less-stringent replies impossible, because no candidate can campaign as an educator and interpreter of any faith, particularly one so aggresively flamboyant, and because an expanded condemnation would be the most immediate, and the most understood path of response to Wright for those multitudes who understand the least.  The media lynching of Rev. Wright, and by association, Sen. Obama, using a frayed and fragmented rope of Wright’s words, suspended from a sensationalist limb of the tree of consolidated media, is nothing more than a fabrication, spun by multiple factions in an attempt to fear-monger votes away from America’s first presidential candidate of Black heritage, and it will not stand up to the basest form of scrutiny.

Wishful remembrance vs. the ABC Presidential “tent-revival” debate (?)

Thanks to the lying, murdering, tobacco-industry executives, who feed their greed with the lives of those who matter so much to so many, as the moderators of the April 16, 2008, ABC circus (or tent revival) debate(? — one of the most abused words on TV news), there were George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson, who are NOT real journalists, who do not know what it means to represent the people when confronting authority or would-be authority, and so there was little hope of anything except a vent on trivial, late-night-talk-show minutia which, combined with the ad-revenue, bottom-line priority of ABC, left only a commercial-ridden, ineptly conceived and executed waste of time and opportunity, squandered by a production in service to the glib interests of a self-interested, establishment media, which it would be safe to say caused Peter Jennings (and the Founders) to turn in their graves to another channel, and a presentation which seems to have been in line with the interests and realizations of the masses who elected George Bush, Tricky-Dick Cheney, and a gang of Republican congressional rubber-stampers to repeated terms in office.

The religious right, on the other hand, are no doubt delighted at the level to which constitutional, religious autonomy and equality were gang-raped and mutilated during the proceeding.

Thanks to the likes of Republicans (above) Sen. Mitch McConnell, Rep. Steve Chabot, and Sen. George Voinovich
Columbia astronauts’ deaths are turned into a big payday for wealthy landowners.

An Exposé report on the PBS broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal, Cash Cows and Cowboy Starter Kits exposed how well-organized agro-business lobbies have bought Congress and its agriculture-committee members with $80 million in lobbying.  The result is manipulative farm subsidies that pay from tens of thousands to ten-million dollars to each of the organized, wealthy landowners who have gross incomes, separate from subsidies, of from $125,000 to several $million, living in mansions, on farm land where no crops are grown, just because their counties have been declared a disaster area for some reason, including for recovery of destroyed space-shuttle parts, despite that they, the privileged beneficiaries of America’s widening wealthy-poor economic gap, suffered no losses.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has towed the Bush corporate-wealthy line throughout his Senate career, who was elected by and is supposed to represent citizens in one of the nation’s poorest states, leads the placement and support for this kind of immoral abuse in a farm-subsidy system that pays wealthy land owners instead of helping poor farmers who really need the help.  And into the current farm bill, which contains further unwarranted increases, and which is now being debated for passage, this term, with no consideration by leaders on either side for reductions in wasteful abuse, McConnell has extended his taxpayer handouts to the wealthy with his subsidized steeple chase, which will benefit the owners of race horses.  The Republican government of Bush-Cheney, in concert with rubber-stamp, elected officials like McConnell, the Ohio delegation’s Republican Senator Voinovich and Republican Representative Steve Chabot, have converted the deaths of the seven Columbia astronauts into a Livestock-Compensation-Program-payment windfall of $5 million to their wealthy contributors, through their facilitation, since 2001, of more than $15 billion in abusive, unwarranted farm-subsidy payments, one-sixth of the national farm-subsidy total during that period.  And there will be no chance for honest, representative government, free of greed-based, blood-sucking influence peddling until they and their ilk are thrown out office for good.

A critical mass of Bush-Cheney “defining moments.”

The surge-shaking offensive, described by Bush as “one of many defining moments,” that has been launched against Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehidi militia is all about the writing on the wall.  If it is to be believed that the Bush-Cheney gang did not authorize it or know of it, then it is Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who is reading the wall, where it is written that he will not be able to count on the presence of U.S. troops to keep him in power after the elections, and that he had best use American blood now, while he can, to ensure the elimination of his greatest adversary’s means to challenge his authority.  For al-Maliki to strike out against al-Sadr, making himself a larger target, seems a more courageous act than he has previously demonstrated the metal to initiate, and to do it without the consult or approval of his Bush-administration supporters seems even more against his grain.

Aggressive acts are, on the other hand, commonplace for the Bush administration:  aggression against other nations, aggression against the concept of co-equal branches of his own government, i.e. aggression against the Constitution, and aggression against the courts and the people.  The transgressions of the Bush-Cheney administration have left their marks upon all of these, and upon the families of more than 4,100 dead American soldiers, and rising, and untold hundreds of thousands of others.  So it is much easier to believe that Bush and Cheney are reading the writing and planned the offensive in hopes of eliminating, before elections, the greatest threat to their planted Iraqi government’s survival, thereby providing a chance that the commercial foothold established for their industrial base will have a chance to survive beyond the end of their term.  And it is far easier to believe that Bush pressured al-Maliki to begin the offensive, guaranteeing him the lives of as many American solders as it would take for him to succeed.  And according to reports, the bottom line on the strife, and on the lost American lives that will be claimed, will be to settle an Iraqi squabble over control of oil and electrical resources.

In any case, the Shia-on-Shia offensive, regardless of who started it and why, has proven that the alleged “success” of the surge is just another euphemism for an ephemeral spin device which is out of U.S. control and, from the Bush perspective on judgement, is what passes to the nation as the dire truth upon which all “defining moments” are constructed and acted upon.

The answer to southwest and western states providing college-educational assistance to mostly Mexican illegal immigrants, or for any state, or to any nationality, especially if they are exceptional academicians, is to send them back to Mexico, or to whatever nation they belong, because their countries and the futures of their countries need them more than America, which cannot afford them and has more demand from citizen students than can be addressed.  The only acceptable solution, other than deportation, is for their countries to pay for their educations, where enrollments are available without denying citizen applicants, on the assurance that after graduating in America the students will return to their countries to work and help them become better places for all of their citizens.  These outstanding illegal-immigrant students are leaders who can help improve conditions in their countries, reducing the trend to immigrate illegally, but who, if they remain, only diminish opportunity for American students and graduates, and it is both as wrong and as much a disservice to both America and their home nations for American states to fund them or to allow employers to exploit their post-education talents as it is to diminish citizen-student opportunity to educate them in competition against citizens in a climate of increasing cost and diminishing college-application acceptances.

Sen. Barack Obama and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden

It was published here first.  But would Biden take the heartbeat slot?

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden and Barack Obama would be a perfect match, with Biden filling in and rounding out the ticket with maturity, undisputed top-level foreign-relations skills and contacts, and with the wide respect of national officials on both sides of the aisle and of international leaders, he would be an impossible target for baseless Republican attacks.  He is informed on science and environmental issues, is an expert and professor on constitutional law, all of which will be important aspects of the next president’s term, and the usual duties of the vice president, from presiding over the Senate, to executive stand-in and emissary, to national ambassador, all are uniquely matched to Biden’s strengths.  Both men will compliment one another, will play well off of each other, and Biden will appeal to most Americans and all who are concerned about experience.

Nebulous warnings of impending homeland terrorist attacks are, coincidentally, increasing from various quarters of the Bush administration since Bush’s endorsement of John McCain as the candidate for the nation’s next Republican war lord and Constitution shredder.  In line with all past efforts to achieve their expansionist aims, be it expanding Republican presence in office or administration nation/empire-building goals in Iraq, Bush and the Republicans continue to stress what they allege to be the greater Republican security capability by use of fear mongering, which began the newest phase with Bush’s endorsement speech, which was loaded with more threats of violence than have been heard from Bush and Cheney’s al Qaeda opposites all year.  The sun was shining on the White House back patio for the endorsement press announcement, but the sight of the two Republicans trying to secure a grip on prospective voters was clouded by the ugliness of spewing fear and lies which have become as predictable from this gang as Old Faithful’s beautiful-but-foul sulfur discharges.

FEAR-MONGERING ALERT
Terrorist level still at permanent ORANGE since they’re ALWAYS trying to get us (from both sides).

At least all the Bush-Cheney fear mongering over the years has made American’s near deaf to the threat of violence, which is real, but which will remain no more or less so until the Wizard of Katrina Response is finally replaced, at which point, the Department of Homeland Security can only improve from the pitiful state (for which it has been stringently criticized by the OMB and others) in which Bush and its secretary, Michael Chertoff have constructed and operated it.  The Republican departure will afford America almost immediate increased safety from that avenue alone.  But as long as the Taliban, the system of tribal authorities and drug financing that dominate that region, and as long as the U.S. maintains a military presence with goals in economic self- or special-interest rather than defense-interest, and as long as the U.S. supports oligarchies and kingdoms with the foul politics of the past, there will be the war against the radical Muslims and their criminal allies.  The consequence will, inevitably, be a successful attack initiated by some U.S. based or infiltrated group, and eventually a serious one.  No party, no president can prevent it, and the chances increase as time goes by, leaving no administration open to claim success or failure.  And the threat will remain until the conditions that have been permitted to exist and expand, facilitated by U.S. influence, ignorance, and unbalanced self-interest, are ended.  Even a total withdrawal from Iraq followed with a like focus of offensive attention on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan will not secure a victory, unless the U.S. is willing to do the job on its own, utilizing the powerful “with us or against us” resolve to eliminate the source of mass attack on the U.S., resolve that the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq made into impotent, empty words and squandered.  Only that kind of resolve, to face down non-cooperative leaders in Pakistan and elsewhere, resolve to bring an end to the tribal system and the poppy fields by direct force of U.S. arms, not by deals with groups and alliances with sects that cannot be trusted and that will not form the basis of a new, more progressive order when the means and will to resist are decimated.  Without this kind of rekindled initiative, America will simply be trading two interminable wars for one, and the orange terror level will remain permanently lit, with occasional upgrades to red that will run into the streets.

Bush and Cheney have created and left for the next president and the American people as difficult a world and domestic stage to navigate as has ever confronted any new administration in America’s relatively short history, and the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress, who to this day continue to shirk their constitutional oversight responsibilities, will remain wholly responsible for every failure and consequence of tragedy that is traced to be a repercussion of their tainted regime.  Those repercussions could domino for decades, or longer, and whomever the Democratic president is, there will be cause for the finger pointed to the past, for which the sign over the door to any Bush library should remind:

The blame stops here.

Democratic presidential candidates overshadow Republicans
McCain’s fear-mongering, false vision, promises—more of the same, good for the few and bad for the rest.

“The American century is over,” is the phrase of a TV advertisement that recently played; its opposition:  the Obama conjecture of hope.  That ad concludes that the instrument of glorious enlightenment the Founders set upon the world when they cast off their shackles and lit the torch of freedom in the New World has been darkly turned upon itself in near-null accomplishment after more than two centuries of blood, sweat, and hope.  And, in fact, government and the election process has been bought by influence peddlers and turned against the people, not only because Republicans, acting in the interest of their greed-based, corporate/industrial and world-shaping theologies, gave away the American market, but because they also gave away the nuts and bolts holding together the engine driving that market.

Republican front-runner McCain, being confronted on his close involvement with lobbyists, defends them and refuses to further discuss his ties, saying that he will only address issues important to the nation and the people.  Among the Democrats, Clinton has also defended the system and is more entrenched into its machinery than Obama, in fact, only distancing herself in response to Obama’s continuing string of primary victories, casting doubt as to whether her words would translate into action if she were elected.  What McCain, Clinton, and all politicians who feed and are fed by the election and influence machines fail to grasp is that Americans are sick of their government being bartered and their interests residing in the darkened pockets of the powerful, through their lobbyists and contributions, and their grasp upon their elected officials.  These politicians, influence peddlers, and wealthy vote buyers, not China, N. Korea, Iran, or al Qaeda, are the greatest threat confronting democratic government and the American people.

Fearful, self-serving, herding voters, along with conspiring and rubber-stamp legislators let the politicians and influence peddlers rape them, again and again.  These Republicans, in the last seven years particularly, but also through the previous Bush and Reagan years, have, through their corrupted, special-interest-aimed goals and policies, closed the door on democratic principle because they found, with unrecognized shortsightedness, that it greased their bottom line to act with greater allegiance to the dollar and their new-world, market vision than to their nation and its heritage.  They have sewn such seed of discriminate growth that the fruit has waned for all but themselves, and yet, with callous regard for truth and need, they still spill forth lies to starving children, promises of milk, long soured, in desperate hope of grasping yet another turn at the table, their closed hands tight upon the jar of sweet, golden honey they have so stingily, wastefully harvested.

Mitt Romney’s promise of jobs in Michigan was one such case, which would only happen if the direction of revolution Republicans have set upon the world reverses its spin.  John McCain’s promise of victory in an immoral, criminal, unconstitutional war is another, that would only happen if all disaffected Muslims decided to answer their hatred and affront with resignation instead of determined confrontation and aggression.  Even if American families would give up their children in McCain’s 100-year search for the Republican Middle-East obsession, that day will not come to pass.  His most recent claim, initiated last month, is the comforting, flip-side of his and the Bush-Cheney al Qaeda fear-mongering coin, that (despite his 100-year affirmation) the occupation in Iraq is close to being over.  That is nothing more than a dreamy but ludicrous election sound byte intended to diminish the greatest obstacle he faces in attracting voters, designed and coordinated to be played in tandem with Iraqi PM al Maliki’s claim that Iraq is now stable, despite that hundreds of Iraqis continue to die every month; stable, despite that ethnic cleansing has moved major populations out of Baghdad and the country, the greatest factor in reduced capital violence, and Republicans still paint their rosy picture, tinted with blood, as the unending climb in the toll of American dead and wounded continues, unabated, and despite that al Qaeda in Iraq will remain as long as Americans are occupiers and nation builders there—a fact McCain tried to use against Obama while shrugging off responsibility for the Iraq-al Qaeda tragedy simply as a “that was then” triviality.

Both Obama and Clinton responded to a loaded hypothetical question posed by MSNBC’s Tim Russert during the 2008 Cleveland debate.  Russert asked if the candidates would send troops back into Iraq after removing them, if after troops were gone, al Qaeda set up a base there.  It was a loaded question because, for Clinton, a woman, her positive answer was necessary to show strength and willingness to use the military.  For Obama, the positive answer was necessary because of racist-based rumors and lies that have been spread regarding his political and religious background and upbringing, requiring him to demonstrate that he has no consideration for the Muslim extreme and would not hesitate to move against them.  The fact is that both Clinton and Obama gave the wrong answer to the question, and it is troubling, because the question opened the door for the candidates to address a legal issue and an abuse of power that has put America in its present quagmire.  The correct answer would have been something like this:

“Tim, if my top cabinet and military advisers and I agreed that there was such a presence, and that it posed a threat to the security of the United States, or to allies with whom we have defense treaties in place, then I would use all avenues available to convince Congress of the threat and the need to address it.  And if that threat was real, I’m sure Congress would be persuaded to also recognize it and then give the authority needed for me, as Commander in Chief, to order the military against that threat in Iraq, in conformity with the goals and limits, if any, they specify in their authorization.”

Of course, John McCain would never think to say anything like this, because he, like Bush and Cheney, believes that the president has the power of a Hitler, Stalin, or George III (who was in the minds of the Founders when they denied war power to the executive) when it comes to exercising military power, when in fact, despite McCain’s claim to the contrary, the Constitution provides the executive almost no authority at all in terms of initiating any kind of military action, reserving all war powers, save one, to Congress.  Most presidents, either party, are reluctant to concede anything that diminishes their authority or options, and the Founders understood that unfortunate inclination of those in power and determined to eliminate it in their new democratic government.  In their day, and still, by the word of the Constitution, it would not be possible for George Bush to thumb his nose at the people and Congress and declare himself to be the great decider of whether or not to end the bloodshed in Iraq.  It is only possible today because Congress allows it, with silence and 60-vote rules that dilute the Constitutional authority of the majority in Congress.

Obama’s campaign has hinged on change, and Clinton’s has picked up the word as she has been forced to run in the dust of its track through the race.  It would have been nice if either of them had given the correct answer to the question, because the abuse of war power, not only through use of the military, but also by the creation of quasi-military forces (Blackwater) to skirt Constitutional requirements for congressional funding and authority, are one of the old ways that needs most to be changed.

The military abuses of a Republican president and Republican-controlled Congress are the most severe of many that have clouded the sun from America’s future vision.  But, despite Republican promises, the sun will not begin to rise in the west, and the lion will neither starve nor lie with the lamb, except to dine upon it.  Both Republican candidates have been made irrelevant by the starkly tragic and costly era of arrogant, unenlightened, self-interested, and incompetent Republican governance they seek to extend.  Like failed Bush appointees left in the wake of resignation departures (the latest being over more Republican corruption with HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson), culpable Republicans and the thinning field of their supporters, still astray, do not see and will never acknowledge their failure.

Now Mitt Romney is where he was always headed, and where Huckabee and McCain will respectively follow:  out.  But Romney’s delusional, self-aggrandizing departure statement, that continuing his campaign would be “contributing to the surrender to terror,” is like Bill Clinton saying that his unbridled activism in his wife’s campaign can only land her in the Oval office.  Romney has revealed the character flaws of inability to admit failure or to talk straight, which he shares with McCain, and America has already endured two terms too many where those traits have dominated White House actions and inaction.  Goodbye, Mitt, and good riddance.    Next?

It’s not an easy choice, which Democratic candidate to choose.  They have grown closer and closer in their ideological divides and tone of promises as the campaign has moved from state to state.  But where will be the concrete action?  Obama does say he will not support tax breaks for companies that take jobs from Americans to give them to out-source foreigners, but that isn’t enough, and it doesn’t address illegals or green-card limits, a subject both he and Clinton wish to avoid because they pander to the Hispanic vote.  Obama says the illegals here should be allowed to stay after paying fines, learning English, and then going to the back of the line.  But, to the back of the line for what?  Citizenship?  Illegals should never have a path to citizenship and the vote.  That denial should be a part of the cost for choosing the advantage of any amnesty that allows them to remain.  Clinton’s position on illegal immigration is horrific, promoting bi-polar culture, saying “it wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” and that Americans should know two languages!  Whether they should or not, an illegally imposed culture is not an acceptable avenue for linguistic expansion, not even for those with the time to persue it.

With outsourced jobs, dictating who companies legally employ or where they produce is not the American way.  But employers must be made to confront a choice, employ citizens or pay a proportional penalty, manufacture in the States or pay duties on their imports, based not only upon value, comparative to other international products, but compounded by a factor to account for the national-citizen loss the foreign production represents.  Republicans have thrown the American worker and standard of living to the wolves by dropping all barriers that protected them.  They say it was done because the global economy is good for America.  What they mean is that it’s good for the owners, CEO’s, board members, and wealthy investors with large stakes in companies with international reach and scale.  The rest can be absorbed or die, along with the middle class and the American dream.  The Republican economics of scale favor the big, the wealthy, and the dollar above the people, the nation, and the common future.  This industrial-corporate-values base and goal set is why Republicans should not be in control of democratic government.  “Democratic” is not in the corporate manual.

The burning issues aside, Obama is at least as well suited as anyone on either side.  Experience doesn't matter.  Washington and Eisenhower had no political roots (and make no mistake, the Republican party of Lincoln and Eisenhower was not the Republican party of Nixon-Cheney, Reagan, Bush, or Bush-Cheney), Washington, along with Jefferson and others of the critical founding presidents had no experience or history to guide them.  McCain, at least, it can be said knows neither history or the Constitution, believing the president has unbridled war power, when in fact, the Constitution affords the executive almost none.  Military experience and the 3:00 call to arms don’t matter either, except in defense against an attack in progress, because the direction of the military is supposed to be within restraints and goals authorized by Congress, trusting the advice of men who do have experience and who are professionals to apply the resources available in the most effective manner to meet those goals.  Age doesn't matter, the constitutional requirements take that into account.  A pure heart, love of country, and the desire to make a better nation in trust of your family, neighbors, and your local and national community have no age constraints, or experience, and in this, all candidates are qualified in intent, though the means of all would not bring that outcome.  Middle school children have created trusts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to do good works for others to whom they have no tie other than nationality and for which they had no training or experience, but only the desire to help.  Obama’s career history points to motivations far more esoterically appreciated than fame and fortune because he has spent his developmental, post educational life in the muck and dirt trying to help others to whom he owed nothing and for which, until now, he received nearly the same.  Clinton did the same, though she didn’t wade quite as deeply or have nearly as far to rise.  Obama gained the trust and respect of his peers and superiors in education and law, and then in the Senate, through extended and close association, long before he was nationally known as an orator.  These sources are to be trusted or none can ever be, and Clinton has done much the same in her Senate term.

Either Democrat will be more than a match for the Republican, McCain, who attacks Obama’s rallies as “eloquent calls for change that promises nothing more than a vacation from history.”  After two terms of George Bush, a vacation from history is only scratching the surface of what’s needed to remove the memory of its stain.  And who can really believe McCain’s promises, which, the 100 years at war in Iraq aside, would amount to a Republican about-face?  A topsy-turvy realignment of Republican ideals and priorities?  None of it is believable.  Republicans call the alleged McCain plans “liberalism,” but they are really what McCain charges of Obama:  words, designed only to garner votes.  McCain’s record and the record of his Republican party speak the only truth of what can be expected if he and the Republicans are returned to office by the same gullible voters who put Bush back into the White House for another four years of social, economic, political, and human carnage.

On the face of the values and facts at hand, Obama’s relative lack of ties to influence groups, lobbyists, and the old machine ways of politics, and his promise to remove their grip on government, a stronger promise than made by any other, is a prescription that best meets what ails America after more than two decades of mostly Republican rule, and from the look of the primary record, it seems that many Americans have their glass of water rightly set to accompany the Obama script.

As was expected at the onset of the Bush administration’s announcement of the “surge,” as a facilitator of “clear, hold, and build,” it has unfolded to be an undeniable failure, pushing violence to new areas and inducing a selective pause by al Qaeda and insurgents that can outwait any plan, still with no end in sight at its evaluative state, at the end of August and September 2007, or at any subsequent date, and today, no victory, with casualties still level with the lowest ever before the surge, only serving to extend the nation-building plans of an insatiable president, with the sole return being that of escalated casualties, the blood of whom all will spill upon the Bush administration’s lies and demented objectives, pursued in blind and unknowing defiance of the best advice and warnings of America’s Founders.  Congress will owe the fallen and maimed patriots, the principal administration victims, unassuageable apology for its apathetic opposition to a criminal regime, for failing, despite its election to the majority, and consequently, for being as onerous in its vision and performance against the national interest as the administration it was tasked to rein in.

The sacrifice of soldiers and their families in Afghanistan is not forgotten, at least, not from this quarter, despite that the commitment of the volunteer military is more separated from that of the rest of the nation than any other global war in America’s history, a circumstance which speaks volumes between the lines.  Nonetheless, that front is the regrettable but necessary consequence of a just prosecution of America’s enemies:  those who repeatedly attacked the U.S., and those who aided and abetted the attacks, cumulating with the fall of the WTC towers.  But, even these deaths would have been reduced, had Bush put the resources and resolve into destroying the Islamic militancy that attacked the U.S., there, instead of into his special-interest war and occupation in Iraq.

This site emphasizes the unnecessary deaths of 4,100 Iraq-deployed, duty-bound soldiers, deaths no less honorable than any others, the misery of their families and families of the thousands of wounded, and the death and maiming of untold tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi, including women, children, and the elderly.  These are the sole consequence of a greed-based, premeditated, Bush-administration grab for resources and positioning to gain resources for necessary infrastructure services and provisions, worth billions upon billions of dollars, if not trillions, to the industries that hold the Bush administration’s first loyalty and interest, all the while, putting the war against the real U.S. embassy/Cole/WTC Islamic-radical perpetrators in Afghanistan, where there are no corporate-industrial riches to raid, on the back burner.

“Al Qaeda will fight us wherever we are,” was the only truth within the propaganda and speaking points Bush spread over the spring, 2007, grass of the White House lawn.  And that’s why a small part of the opposition in Iraq is al Qaeda:  because Bush is occupying Iraq to nation build.  If Congress pulls troops out of the cities in Iraq to secure, isolated, unapproachable, border staging areas, al Qaeda will then concentrate on Afghanistan and wherever else the West goes to fight against them and their supporting regimes.  Al Qaeda should not, nor should any other organization be exaggerated or fear-mongered into a cause that justifies and facilitates aggression, death, maiming, destruction, and exploitation on a grand scale, at the expense of an end to progressive social growth, in all of its many areas of need, in the most advanced nation in the world.  In addition, such abusive focus, and its cost, hampers confronting the changing climate, reduces the capability to be prepared for and recover from inevitable natural disasters, or benefit others in need of assistance, and it diverts from ending the outrages of dictatorships and oligarchical regimes that deal in death and foster crimes of genocide, rape, slavery, and terror, which, to bring to an end, are goals worthy of what, in Iraq, is an unwarranted and unwanted intrusion into violence and mayhem, which is only prolonged by the Bush policy of exploitation and control, and its inherent prerequisite for long-term occupation, with no assurance of an end.

Iraq is not, as Bush would have you believe, the lynchpin in the struggle of the 21st century, because if it were, a full commitment would have been made with wide public, legislative, military, and international concurrence, which, like the struggle against fascism in WWII, would not have diminished until, at any cost, the threat was put down.  And if Bush really had the advantage of righteous vision or support, Iraq would not now be a four-plus-year-long bloodbath.  If anything, Iraq is the latest in that long string of wars, recorded in every century of mankind’s history, that are justified, motivated, and/or prolonged by a religious argument.  The significant struggle of the 21st century, on a par with environmental preservation, is overcoming abusive and criminal administration of democratic government, not scrapping society’s resources on a tunnel-visioned, fear-mongered, false-fronted war against a drug-financed, cell-phone-and-internet-connected group of radical, religious revolutionaries who can best be dealt with using effective, cooperative law enforcement and intelligence, reserving the military to remove aiding-and-abetting governmental regimes, not to remain as police for occupation and corporate/industrial-motivated nation building.

Senator John Warner (R-VA) has proposed to attach appropriation penalties for construction funds as a consequence of a failure by the Iraqi regime to meet benchmarks, which would be attached to the war-funding bill.  This proposal, from a leader in the Senate Armed Services Committee, is a particularly harsh slap across the face of soldiers.  While Bush refuses a small pay increase for soldiers, Warner’s proposal, instead of ending or even reducing the exposure and risk of troops, places a lowly price on their lives by withholding what would be corruptly managed and ineffectual Iraqi aid dollars, for a failure that, with Bush’s lock-vision arrogance, and Warner’s proposal, would only extend their presence, the danger to which they are exposed, and their toll of dead and wounded, as increasingly more of them are deployed there, no matter what the Iraqi regime does or how it fails.

Bush has been allowed to define the attacks of an organized band of religious radicals into a global struggle of national life or death, where he is the knight, on horseback, in the center of the battle, with gleaming sword held high, leading the righteous nations of the world with deific blessing and unity, when, in fact, even without that charade, the same imperatives remain:  to develop and maintain comprehensive, coordinated, national and international law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, to not allow nuclear proliferation or commerce in weapons or delivery systems of mass destruction, or production and trafficking of drugs, or borders of unchecked transgress.  All of these need solutions and assured control, and in some specific, limited aspects, troops, regardless of whether there is an al Qaeda or not.

The surge, and the waste of $billions in non-military dollars continue, in a vain attempt to secure the special-interest goals of the Bush administration.  This outrage continues in defiance of the will of the people and a majority of their military professionals and elected representatives, in an occupation with no constitutional sanction, and which had no bearing on U.S. security when the invasion was deceptively justified and ordered, and which has swelled into a draining and deadly occupation which still has no such consequences, after more time than was sacrificed by solders who fought in the Second World War, and more than 4,100 deaths, with, from the objective of an opaque, congressional telescope, no end in sight