PHOTO: Netanyahu passes Baby Bush, descends to Rocky & Bullwinkle level of evidence

CONTEXT OF PHOTO


I thought nothing could be lamer than the Bush mobile chemical weapons lab drawings as an excuse for a war but Netanyahu did it at the UN, with an illustration that wouldn't be convincing in a Saturday morning cartoon.

This is more likely to insult his audiences intelligence than persuade them of anything.


I think he's trying to say that if we do not act now, the moose and squirrel are in existential danger.



Note how accurate his drawing of the bomb is!

100,000 troops to chase 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and 300 in Pakistan?

The Washington Post reported that there are 100 members of al Qaeda left in Afghanistan and about 300 in Pakistan. With Obama's troop increase to about 100,000, that will be 1,000 troops per terrorist in Afghanistan or 250 per terrorist in all of the ''AfPak'' theater.

I don't think Obama is stupid enough to believe Fox News that these guys are supermen who could punch through the concrete walls or eat the steel bars of a supermax prison like licorice or take over an airplane while handcuffed so they have to be blindfolded, stripped naked and sodomized during flights to keep them under control.

Does someone want to tell me with a straight face that we are occupying Afghanistan to prevent or punish terrorism? The Taliban are a bunch of illiterate hillbillies that have no capability to harm our troops if we don't go to them, and the rump of al Qaeda would probably need at most special forces and some predator drones to clean up--or simply tell the Saudis to stop giving them money and it won't matter how many are left. They wouldn't be able to buy a bus ticket, let alone a plane ticket to get over here.

Wouldn't it be nice if Obama told us the truth?

Afghanistan sits on a historic trade route from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean and the rest of the world. A few hundred years ago, that route carried spices, cloth, and opium. Today in addition to the income from heroin, oil and natural gas pipelines could flow through those same passes from the Caspian Sea basin as even Colin Powell's former chief of staff confirms. If we can pacify and stabilize Afghanistan, American and European companies could profit from that flow. Would the petroleum that went to the end of that pipeline end up in Europe and America? Maybe some. Most would go the emerging markets of China and India.

Would the income from those pipelines make it to the pockets of average Americans?

Sure. Didn't you get your thank you check from ExxonMobil for their new contracts in Iraq?

If we fail in Afghanistan, the oil & gas will still make it to market through a competing Iranian pipeline project which will end in Pakistan just like the US planned one through Afghanistan. Pakistan's initial agreement on the Iran pipeline is probably why we suddenly noticed terrorists there after years of ignoring their presence and their governments support of them, including Pakistan helping top al Qaeda leaders out of Tora Bora in 2001.

When Obama makes his pitch for more troops in Afghanistan, he could come clean with the American about why we are there, but if he doesn't it will be further proof that he doesn't work for us, but instead works for at least defers to the same handful of business interests that got our economy and foreign policy into its current mess.

Rolling Stones' Matt Taibbi's 9/11 truth smears

As I was rushing to get ready for work the other day, I caught a snippet of an interview of Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone on Pacifica Radio. He was slamming 9/11 truthers for their theories about controlled demolition, how they discount scores of witnesses for the official version of the story, but embraces the individuals, however few, who back them up, and said he trusted the debunking 9/11 truther websites by Popular Mechanics and 9/11 myths. That was irksome because as usual the debunkers focus on the few issues that sound wackiest and sidestep those too big to sweep under the carpet.

But what was more irritating was his analysis of WHY any 9/11 conspiracy was unlikely:

• 9/11 truthers are racists who don't think Arabs or Muslims are smart enough to plan and carry out an attack like 9/11.
  
• 
  
• Such a conspiracy would require too many people to keep their mouths shut--someone would have spilled the beans by now.

• Washington doesn't need a "New Pearl Harbor" to justify war. The American people are so sheepish, they would go along with any war, and even if they did protest, it would have no effect--like the Vietnam War protests had no effect.

• The powerful people on Wall Street are lazy golfers who just think about bribing politicians to change the rules to make it easier to make money.

The last is most annoying since Taibbi just wrote a long piece on how Goldman Sachs has been behind every bubble since the Great Depression, but let's look at these in order:

• 9/11 truthers are racists

That's ironic. I had a very un-racist reason wonder if the attacks were solely the work of crazed fundamentalists. Most human beings of any race or religion don't engage in behavior that doesn't have some hope of a positive outcome. What possible positive outcome could have resulted for al Qaeda or Muslims anywhere from 9/11? Anyone familiar with our foreign policy would have more or less predicted what we did: kill a lot of Muslims and/or Arabs who had nothing to do with the attacks. It seems that those who believe the official story think Muslims are too stupid to understand cause and effect.

Those who back the official explanation of 9/11 have often bought into profoundly racist excuses for continuing the war in Iraq: can the Iraqis defend and police themselves if we pullout or will there be chaos? Are they "ready" for democracy?

That was a discussion that could be heard ad nauseum on network and cable news talk shows, and makes them sound less like people and more like cavemen who have only recently descended from the trees, developed the power of speech, and shed their vestigial tail.

• Too many people to keep a secret

Taibbi probably heard of the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. Thousands of people worked on the project, but only a few knew what the whole project was about, and the general public didn't hear about it until we dropped the bomb. It's easy to see this being the case if 9/11 was more a matter of prodding some crazies here, and impeding some investigations there. And we did have whistleblowers come forward to say their significant warnings were ignored from FBI field officers like Colleen Rowley to White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke.

More significantly, what happened to those who did come forward either with information or to ask sharp questions were often reviled in the press or hounded out of their jobs. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney asked the right questions about our how any war games going on that day might have interfered with our air defenses that day and Don Rumsfeld refused to answer or provide the documentation she asked for. She was ridiculed in the press, not supported by the Democratic Party, and ultimately hounded from office and her party. The right wing media was less successful but just as vicious in attacking Richard Clarke and the Jersey Girls, a group of 9/11 widows who pressed for a 9/11 Commission. The right was successful in purging anchor Dan Rather from CBS, not for questioning 9/11 but for the lesser matter of Bush's own questionable record of military service. When Joe Wilson blew the whistle on one of the lies that led to the Iraq War, his wife was outed as a CIA covert operative, and both were attacked in the press. This would send a clear message to anyone with information that contradicted the official explanation of 9/11: keep your mouth shut or suffer severe consequences.

The clock on when we should expect to see 9/11 whistleblowers come forward should really start when Bush left office and Obama was inaugurated, and if I had that kind of information, I would be watching very carefully to see how Obama dealt with other misdeeds of Bush to see whether the chances of action being taken would outweigh possible retaliation. So far, if I was one of those people, I wouldn't have seen enough to make it worth the risk.

• Washington doesn't need a "New Pearl Harbor" to justify war.

This was true throughout the Cold War, but a funny thing happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union--for a while, Washington was embarrassed to claim that dirt-poor Third World countries were a security threat to the United States. So other excuses were trotted out.

Papa Bush suddenly noticed that his pal Manuel Noriega in Panama was dealing drugs. That military action was so quick, public reaction didn't have time to have an effect.

The first Gulf War was sold more honestly (at least at first) as being about control of the world's oil supply; we didn't want Saddam to have it (not said out loud was that was our job). When that proved too abstract for most Americans to grasp, they shifted away from geopolitics to comic book demonization--Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. This worked so well that when Bush decided at the end of the war to leave Saddam Hussein in power, the public still believed the propaganda instead of the realpolitik explanation. It cost Papa Bush in the polls and ultimately cost his presidency. That's a lesson politicians would remember--if you start with a big lie stick with it.

Papa Bush tried another approach with Somalia and Clinton inherited and stuck with it--it was a humanitarian intervention. The problem was, when our troops were killed there, the public soured on the mission and Clinton pulled our troops out.

That actually happened as far back as Reagan with "peacekeepers" in Lebanon. Once the Marine barracks was hit by a suicide bomber, Reagan had to pull out because the public didn't think a "humanitarian intervention" was worth so many deaths.

When the humanitarian excuse was used again for our intervention in the Balkans, Clinton bent over backwards to avoid the possibility of American casualties, which insured public apathy about the project.

The lesson for the DC establishment the last couple of decades has not been to ignore public opinion about going to war. They can only afford to do that if the war is quick like Grenada, Panama, or there were relatively few to no casualties as in the Balkans.

If they were going to start a prolonged war that will incur casualties along the way, they know they need a big excuse that has some staying power. Saddam's imaginary weapons of mass destruction and even more imaginary will to commit suicide by using them against the United States, who could retaliate hundreds of times over and burn Iraq off the map with our thousands of nukes, would have been a harder sell without the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center in the back of the public's mind.

• The lazy elite

This is true, but not in a way that excuses exonerates them from advocating and profiting from extreme acts of violence against innocent civilians.

Steven Kinzer of the New York Times wrote about how this plays out in foreign policy in his book Overthrow about the various coups and military interventions the US has sponsored to overthrow governments that weren't sufficiently compliant to American business interests. The most obvious example was Iran's secular, democratically elected president was ousted in a US backed coup because he wanted to keep more of the oil profits in Iran instead of giving them away to foreign big oil companies. He was replaced with a dictator, the Shah of Iran.

The same happened with the elected president of Guatamala, Jacobo Arbenz when he tried to enact land reform that enraged the United Fruit Company that considers Central America their private plantation. He was ousted in a US backed military coup.

It happened again when Chile elected a president a bit too socialist for the tastes (and profits of the American elite). Salvador Allende was replaced with the bloody dictator Augusto Pinochet.

In the current Iraq War, apart from the no bid contracts Bush gave to GOP cronies like Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater (now Xe), the business-first motive is most obvious in the decrees of Bush-appointed governor of Iraq Paul Bremer that privatized and allowed foreign ownership of Iraq government assets, and in the first draft of the Iraq Hydrocarbon Law, written by an American company hired by George W. Bush, which gave 88% of Iraq's oil income to foreign oil companies, a deal none of Iraq's oil rich neighbors would accept without a gun to their heads. Remarkably, though the Iraqi cabinet approved the law, the parliament continues to refuse to pass it, and American oil companies keep lowballing bids on Iraqi contracts, thinking the presence of our troops is going to force the Iraqis to take otherwise unacceptable terms.

And this is why Taibbi is right about the financial elite being lazy, country club lounging golfers, but wrong about the consequences. It would be far more work to negotiate creatively to make a profit from governments protecting their own people's interest than it is to simply pick up the phone and ask those politicians, that Taibbi acknowledges are bought, to incite a coup or even go to war.

The work of diplomats and CIA agents to undermine and even oust foreign governments, or the military to invade countries cost the sociopathic trust fund babies of Wall Street nothing in time or money (apart from the required campaign contributions and later jobs for bought pols when they leave office). It is the ultimate in socializing cost and privatizing profits.

And it is like an addictive drug. Why bother to negotiate creatively, when you can step away from the table, let someone kill the leader or country you were negotiating with, and you can simply come back later and pick up what you want without opposition?

The Wall Street types would not necessarily even have to ask for a 9/11 to get it.

It is not hard to imagine the oil execs who met with Cheney for his energy task force, telling Cheney to do what it takes to get Iraq's tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil reserves under their control, pipeline routes through Afghanistan, and possibly even control of Iran's oil, since that's about all it took in the past. They leave the details and the works to the public servants, and they come back later to pick up the pieces of the countries that were broken for them.

The kind of scheming that Taibbi described in his article on Goldman Sachs would require more work and planning on the part of Wall Street suits than ordering up a war or coup.

Government and the Wall Street interests have likewise shown no hesitation to harm Americans when it served some larger goal, as happened with above ground nuclear testing, MK-ULTRA drug and mind control experiments conducted on our troops and college students, allowing cocaine into the US as part of the Iran Contra deal, and setting up a health insurance system that makes more money when it denies care to its customers and lets them die.

What is most disturbing about Taibbi's dismissal of 9/11 truthers is that he sidestepped some legitimate issues like the failure to protect what should have been our most secure airspace for two hours and the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11's finding evidence of Saudi government involvement in the attacks, which the Bush administration immediately swept under the rug and most in the press never mentioned again. An FBI document later shed light on the Saudi agent who picked up two of the hijackers at LAX when they arrived in the US, set them up in an apartment, and funneled money to them from the Saudi ambassador's wife until 9/11. The agent also made multiple calls to the Saudi embassy before and during their stay in the US.

Does it make me a nut if I wonder what the meaning of that finding is? We were attacked by an ally, did nothing to that ally in return, but used the attack as an excuse to launch two wars and curb civil liberties at home. That is not a theory but a matter of public record, but Taibbi and others in the press won't put those indisputable dots together because they don't want to be called crazy by the rich and powerful, stop being invited to the best parties, or most importantly, fired.

War on Terror shift to Pakistan over Iran Pipeline

I was puzzled why, after years of doing our bidding in the War on Terror, Pakistan suddenly was recognized as a haven of terrorists that must be dealt with--even though the same extremist groups had been there all along, often acting with the blessing and support of Pakistani intelligence, and tacitly the US.

I had a fleeting hope that Obama was actually going to end the War on Terror by extinguishing the relatively small terrorist groups that might be motivated to launch 9/11 type attacks against us, dig up the body of bin Laden, do the DNA tests, declare him dead, and thereby end the remaining public support for the War on Terror.

I should have known that was too much to hope for since Obama never addressed the real reasons for our invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Iraq has tens of trillions of dollars worth of easy extracted oil, but no contracts with American companies before the war. One of our goals in the Iraq War was to force them to give up 88% of their oil income to oil companies as stated in a Bush sponsored Hydrocarbon Law. For comparison, the Saudis, only give up about half. Despite Bush and members of both parties in Washington strong-arming Iraqis to pass it, they could only get the Iraqi cabinet to pass it, never the whole parliament--even when the oil companies offered millions in bribes to each member.

Similarly, energy companies courted the Taliban for a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to take natural gas to India but gave up in frustration shortly before 9/11. In 2006, India was concerned about continuing the project until America gave assurances that we would protect the pipeline. Those assurances were repeated in 2008. (Thanks to chill_wind at DU, who provided another good background link on the pipeline)

The Pakistan link of the pipeline route seemed to be in place--until IRAN proposed an alternative to the Afghanistan route that ran from Iran to Pakistan to India instead. And Pakistan accepted the offer:

Perhaps the most convenient distraction of the entire War on Terror has been the fact that war makes privatization easier. Energy economist John Foster notes how the focus on national security masks a critical motive of the AfPak war: “Rivalry for pipeline routes and energy resources reflects competition for power and control in the region.”

One such route is the massive Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-India-Pakistan pipeline, which would transport 30 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year. Meanwhile, Iran is planning an alternative pipeline through Pakistan and India, to which Pakistan has agreed to in principle.

(from Vancouver, BC's Straight.com)

What is the US response to losing this game of geopolitical chess? Patrick Clawson, Deputy Director for Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said:

Washington fears the pipeline will reduce the West's economic leverage over Tehran - economic leverage that is necessary to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

(from Voice of America)

The only thing I disagree with in that quote is that Washington probably doesn't want the economic leverage to make Iran drop their nuclear program, but instead wants Iran to drop their nuclear program so that the US has the full range of options to coerce Iran to conform to our oil & gas companies business interests.

The real decision-makers in Washington have no concern about nuclear proliferation. If they did, they would bomb or invade North Korea every time they did a nuclear test or launched a missile over Japan.

The real decision-makers in Washington have no concern about terrorism. If they did, they would have gone after the country that the FBI found sent one of their intelligence agents to pick up two of the hijackers at the Los Angeles airport, set them up in an apartment, and then funneled money to them from the their ambassador's wife until 9/11. The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 also found this country same country involved in the attack: Saudi Arabia.

Business interests dictate foreign policy. If you want to find out how much, read the Pulitzer Prize winning history of oil, THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergin. When oil companies want something, they don't ask senators and presidents for favors, they give orders. You might also read OVERTHROW by Steven Kinzer on why the US overthrew various other countries governments, including the secular, democratically elected one in Iran in 1953.

Business uses our state department and military to coerce deals with other countries because it costs them next nothing. They make a tens of million dollars of political donations and reap hundreds of billions in profit when the politicians follow their orders and cook up a war. And we don't present them with a bill for the military action or get a cut of the profits from the oil or land we stole for them.

Worst of all though is that our elected leaders don't talk honestly about any of this with the public and instead misplace blame for events like 9/11 and make up embarrassingly juvenile fairy tales about an "Islamofascist" menace from countries that have no ability invade or hold territory in the United States, and no technology equal to ours unless we sell it to them. To the extent that we are not let in on the real debate, we do not have a real democracy.

what won't change even if Iran's government does

Americans and many others around the world are hoping for an outcome to Iranian election away from the religious hardliners like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but even if Mir-Hossein Mousavi takes power, several things are unlikely to change, and most of them are the points of tension between the US and Iran.

For example, while a new government might be less likely to call for Israel to be "wiped off the map" (or "disappear" from the map as many translators said was more accurate), they will still probably be sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, fellow Muslims who are undeniably being killed in far larger numbers than Israelis, and systematically forced off their land by Israeli settlers, a process we would call ethnic cleansing anywhere else.

Likewise, it's hard to see them forsaking Hezbollah in Lebanon, given the multiple invasions by Israel and the many Muslims (and Christians) killed there, first in "overkill" to drive the PLO out of the country, then in attempts to crush Hezbollah whose ranks were swelled with Lebanese angered by the first war that caused so much death and destruction beyond its supposed targets.

What is especially unlikely to change is a sense of national ownership of their oil reserves and the income derived from it. Iran has the second or third largest oil reserves in the world. One of our goals in the Iraq War was to force them to give up 88% of their oil income to oil companies as stated in a Bush sponsored Hydrocarbon Law. For comparison, the Saudis, only give up about half. Despite Bush and members of both parties in Washington strong-arming Iraqis to pass it, they could only get the Iraqi cabinet to pass it, never the whole parliament--even when the oil companies offered millions in bribes to each member. And in spite of a war and occupation that cost the lives of over a million Iraqis.

If Iraq won't surrender their oil after all that, the tools of the oil industry in Congress would be foolish to expect the Iranians to give up theirs after an election. The truth is, real democracy makes it harder for corporations to cheat countries out of their natural resources. The oil companies would have had an easier time simply trying to bribe the handful of mullahs who are the real power behind the throne in Iran, just as they did the Shah, the dictator we installed after we overthrew the last secular, democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. His sin was trying to nationalize his country's oil, which would have cut the big oil companies out of most of the profits. In the 1979 revolution in Iran, students were carrying signs with his photo on it. They had not forgotten who fought for their oil, and they wouldn't forgive someone who gave it away now.

Neither will Iran's antagonism with some of her neighbors diminish.

The Saudi conflict with Iran is likely based oil and who gets to decide how much is pumped and therefore the price as much as the Sunni-Shia rivalry.

Israel doesn't want any strong Muslim country in the region who might check their expansion or even criticize it, so they are unlikely to change much, even if the new government makes peace proposals that offer recognition in exchange for reasonable conditions on how Israel treats Palestinians.

And on the broader global stage, how the US treats a more secular, democratic Iran will depend almost entirely on how compliant they are to oil interests. After all, we overthrew Iran's secular prime minister in 1953, and have embraced the Sunni religious extremist Saudis for decades, even though they are far from democratic and Saudi Arabia supported the 9/11 hijackers who killed 3,000 Americans. Blood is thicker than water, but in Washington, oil is thicker than both (or at least the bribes oil companies give are).

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT LINKS

It's not just Republicans that need to repudiate Rush

I got this email from the DSCC about browbeating GOP senators to repudiate Rush Limbaugh, and on one level, it's gratifying to see Democrats finally learning one of the correct lessons from the GOP: hit your opponent's strength. Do to Rush what the right did to the word "liberal" in the 80's, so that Republicans will be embarrassed to say anything that sounds remotely like any of his talking points.

I've already noticed a version of this in my college classes. Whenever a student says something about global warming being a hoax or making batteries for electric cars makes more pollution than an internal combustion engine spits out in its lifetime, I ask them, ''Where'd you hear that--on Rush Limbaugh?"

The tone is not accusatory, but for some reason, they never say yes.

There is just one problem of this shaming of Republicans: I would like to know which of the GOP's ideas so-called ''moderate'' Democrats are going to repudiate as well.

Will they forsake:

• Only taxing the rich as much as they wish to be taxed and looking the other way when they hide money in off-shore accounts or use other book-keeping scams
  
  
• Trade deals like NAFTA that screw American workers
  
  
• H-1B visas that allow high tech companies to import engineers & IT workers and leave American college grads sitting on the bench
  
  
• Privatizing government functions, including education, even though the private versions are consistently more costly and of questionable effectiveness
  
  
• Letting corporations dictate the policies and regulations that effect them as Wall Street and banks still seem to be doing with the team of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, and Bernanke writing checks for trillions with no strings attached
  
  
• Sending a black kid who robbed a 7-11 of $50 to be raped in prison and sending a white trust fund baby who broke our economy a check for billions to party with his friends, and after seeing the party, sending another check.
  
  
• In the same vein, letting health insurance and drug companies have a seat at the table crafting health care reform when they should be roasted slowly on a spit to feed the people at the table
  
  
• Letting politicians leave office and go to work for corporations they did favors for while in office
  
  
• Using fear of terrorism and nuclear weapons as an excuse to intimidate and invade nations that don't do business on terms American oil companies and banks like as is the case with Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela (the Bushies went as far as to claim al Qaeda was in Venezuela)
  
  
• Almost blasphemously, claiming we are teaching other countries democracy when we invade them and kill their people, then questioning how ''mature'' their culture is when they dare to fight back
  
  
• Never dealing honestly with why we didn't punish the two countries that sponsored al Qaeda, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In the case of the latter, they sent an agent to pick up two of the 9/11 hijacker at the airport who set them up in an apartment and funneled checks to them from the Saudi ambassador's wife.
  
  
• Claiming other countries getting a handful of nukes is somehow a threat to us without adding that no country would be foolish enough to launch one at us or give them to terrorists to detonate here since everyone knows we have THOUSANDS and would not hesitate to burn their entire country off the map before one mushroom cloud cleared here. With the Soviets, there was MAD--mutually assured destruction. Today the would be OSHOSE--our side hurt, other side exterminated.
  
  
• Intentionally blurring military defense and empire and wars of aggression. China and Russia have a tenth the military spending we do, and no one is lining up to invade them. Similarly, if a medium-sized Iraq can give us, the world's sole superpower, a bad day trying to occupy them, it is unlikely anyone would get very far with trying to occupy us or even consider it. Most of our Defense apart from the troops themselves is welfare for defense contractors.

Moderate, blue dog, DLC, or whatever you want to call them have voted with the GOP on most or all of these issues.

I would look forward to Democrats clearly separating themselves from the GOP on these points, and not just being better graded on a curve.

From: info@dscc.org
Subject: What Rush doesn't know
Date: March 7, 2009 9:03:47 AM PST

Rush Limbaugh doesn't know what he's started. Tens of thousands of you have already signed onto the DSCC's urgent call for Republican Senate leaders to denounce his shameful rhetoric - and that's just the beginning.

The Republican response has been predictable: blame the media, blame the Democrats, and rally their base. They'll do anything except tell Rush Limbaugh he's wrong.

They're hoping this will all blow over and they can go back to pretending like Rush doesn't speak for them. It's not too late for you to add your voice so we can keep the pressure on. If you sign today, we'll send your comments right to the Republican Senate leadership.

Click here to demand that Senate Republicans reject Rush Limbaugh's hateful rhetoric - We'll send them your comments. When you're finished, please forward this message to your friends and family.

The response so far has been tremendous, but we all have to do our part to fight back against ultra-conservative extremism. Join us today.

- J.B.

Bush says NO WMD in Russia was reason for weak Georgia response

At a press conference yesterday, President George W. Bush said he did not send troops to back Georgia in their brief war with Russia because Russia had no WMD.

"Look, I'm concerned when nations cross the borders of other nations and bomb and kill innocent people, but the fact is, Russia has no weapons that can reach the United States and no WMD. They just aren't a threat to us."

When pressed further, Bush said he had his staff review the public statements of his vice president Dick Cheney, his secretary of defense, Condi Rice, and former secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld over the last seven years and found that only two or three countries in the world may have nuclear weapons and other "WMD."

"Look, we know for sure Saddam Hussein was seconds from getting a nukes which he could have used to blackmail the world, and now Iran is trying to do the same, but no one else has that kinda technology. Not even us."

Asked about North Korea he said, "They might have them, but it's not they got missiles that could fly over Japan or anything. Hell, I don't even think they got the Wii yet."

Reporters asked about the Cold War arms race, Russia's history of nuclear tests, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. After consulting his teleprompter and 3x5 cards for several seconds, touching his ear and saying, "Karen? Karl? You guys fall asleep in there?" He finally replied, "Look the Cold War was decades ago. That's ancient history. We can't let history effect how we act in the present. And we don't know that that conflict had anything to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Later, a senior official at the State Department speaking off the record in her shiny new Ferragamo shoes clarified the president's statement.

"I would like to respond to the unfair and frankly conspiracy theory inspired questions posed to th president about Russia nuclear weapons. First, the Cold War was primarily about ideology, defeating godless communism not any particular 'weapons system.'"

She said the photos of Soviet missiles that were frequently published in newspapers and still survive in textbooks were actually part of a robust space programs that launched thousands of weather and communications satellites. Some had to be stored in hardened bunkers and submarines because of Russia's harsh climate.

US satellite photos of alleged Soviet nuclear missile tests, seemingly confirmed by seismographic and radiation data were actually a wave of large meteors striking the Soviet Union, according to her. "As the world's largest land mass, it is only reasonable & logical that we would see more meteors hit that country than any other."

She said that the Cuban Missile Crisis was about Castro's attempt to develop nuclear weapons, which the United States should have invaded to prevent; however, once Soviet cargo ships and military vessels arrived, it was clear to President Kennedy that it was all a misunderstanding.

"We need to focus on real threats, not hypothetical ones," the source concluded. "If we expended our military resources chasing imaginary nuclear stockpiles we would break our military, bankrupt our country, and alienate all of our historical allies in fairly order."

Why Bush impeachment doesn't make front page of LA Times, NY Times, or Washington Post

Yesterday, Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush in the House of Representatives.

Click each image to see full front page:

He provided substantial evidence of criminal activity, evidence that included the president's own public statements that were prima facie confessions of criminal guilt, from admitting he ordered wiretaps and torture, admitting privately to ordering the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, to lying about the threat from Iraq and Iran in spite of overwhelming intelligence to the contrary, lying about available intelligence warning of the 9/11 attacks, to his forcing bureaucrats to lie about the cost of his Medicare drug bill and global warming, to the endemic cronyism from Iraq to Enron to Hurricane Katrina.

This did not merit front page coverage of the nation's top newspapers, the Washington Post, New York Times, or Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post had a small blurb on it their Washington news round up.


This all in spite of this being only the third time in American history a president was impeached, and the very first poll on impeaching Bush a few years back showed the same public support for it as there was for impeaching Nixon the day before he resigned and nearly double the peak support for impeaching Bill Clinton.

All of these papers equaly ignored Kucinich's articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney.

The newspapers do have one good excuse for not covering this: the Democratic leadership in Congress has said impeachment is "off the table," so Kucinich's resolution will likely go nowhere.

But that in itself is worthy of story. Nine years ago, we impeached a president for lying in a sexual harassment civil suit deposition. That could have prevented the plaintiff from getting a fair trial though the point is moot given that the judge threw out the case and Clinton had an ironclad alibi for his whereabouts at the time Paula Jones claimed the incident occurred.

By contrast, Bush's lies, imcompetence and corruption has cost the lives of thousands of our troops in an unnecessary war in Iraq, arguably thousands in a preventable terrorist attack, the lives of a million Iraqis and loss of much of the thin goodwill we enjoyed in the Middle East. It has also cost us our reputation as a model of respecting human rights and international law. And of course it has and will cost us trillions for his war, most of it going into the pockets of cronies who have a habit of doing poorly or not doing at all the no bid contracts we are given.

Apparently, Kucinich doesn't understand the difference between the seriousness of the offenses of Clinton and Bush.

Clinton's real offense was being competent and not completely subservient to the wishes of the wealthy and powerful (though he came close with NAFTA) compared to his Republican predecessor. Bush's offenses were merely against American taxpayers and voters, who matter only to the extent that they need to be snookered into ignoring government of, by, and for the wealthy, and against the powerless people of Iraq, who do not matter at all.