"Still No Mass Weapons, No Ties to 9/11, No Truth"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode L

A column by Derrick Z. Jackson at the Boston Globe, today (ellipsis in original).

Still no mass weapons, no ties to 9/11, no truth
By Derrick Z. Jackson, 12/17/2003

THE INVASION was still a lie. The capture of Saddam Hussein changes nothing about that. There were too many forked tongues in the road to his lair. The way we removed the dictator, we became a global dictatorship.

No major reason for the war has been proven. The deadly WMDs became weapons of mysterious disappearance. In August 2002, Vice President Cheney said: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

In the 48-hour warning to Saddam on March 17, 2003, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. . . . The terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other."

On March 30, a week and a half after the start of the invasion, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld boasted about the weapons of mass destruction, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat."

Nine months later, no chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction have been found.

There were the administration's attempts to tie Saddam to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. They worked so well that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam was "personally involved" in the attacks. On March 21, two days after announcing the invasion, Bush wrote a letter to congressional leaders in which he said: "The use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001."

By the fall, after Cheney revived a discredited claim that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent prior to the attacks, Bush was forced to admit, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in September the 11th."

Bush scared Americans with fears of an Iraq armed with nuclear weapons. In his State of the Union address last January, Bush said: "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." That claim had been discredited months earlier by many US intelligence sources. Bush used it anyway.

Bush was so successful in putting mortal fear into Americans that there never was a pause to wonder if this was carnage without cause. We could not wait for United Nations weapons inspectors to finish their job. We could not wait for diplomats to try a last appeal. As with the environment and arms control, there was no attempt to listen to the world at all. There is a thin line between arrogance and shame. Because we are the preeminent power in the world, we assumed that our arrogance would not shame us.

Bush told the world we were going to secure America and liberate Iraqis at the same time. With no weapons of mass destruction, with no nuclear weapons, and with no tie to 9/11, Saddam's capture could not possibly have been worth the lives of 455 US and 80 European soldiers. With no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons, and no tie to 9/11, it could not possibly been worth the lives of 7,600 to 45,000 Iraqi soldiers. With no rationale for the invasion, you could consider this a massacre.

As murderous as Saddam was, an invasion with no reason was not worth the killing of unknown thousands of Iraqi civilians. At the beginning of the war, Rumsfeld said: "To the Iraqi people, let me say that the day of your liberation will soon be at hand." Halliburton has been liberated to profit off Iraq, but I have yet to read a news report where a grieving Iraqi family clutches the body of an innocent loved one and hugs an American soldier in appreciation of their "liberation."

With no weapons, no ties, and no truth, the capture of Saddam was merely the most massive and irresponsible police raid in modern times. We broke in without a search warrant. Civilian deaths constituted justifiable homicide. America was again above the law. We have taught the next generation that many wrongs equal a right. In arrogance, we boasted, "We got him!" The shame is that we feel none for how we got him. The capture of this dictator, driven by the poison of lies, turned America itself into a dictator.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 12/17/03 07:39:45 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Political.

"U.S. Loves Bucks Over Backing"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode XLIX

A column by John Aloysius Farrell in the Denver Post, Dec. 14 (ellipses in original).

Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may have gotten off to a good December.

Thanks to us.

It was just a few weeks ago that President Bush seemed to score a coup by luring former secretary of state James A. Baker back into government harness.

Baker's assignment is to persuade nations such as Russia and France to forgive Iraq's crushing international debts. To do that, he will need to work at repairing America's ruptured relationship with the rest of the world.

"I have never seen in my lifetime the United States at such a low level of regard," another former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, told a group of reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor last week. "We are now viewed ... as a rogue state."

Why is that important? After all, as Mel Brooks says, it's good to be king. It's nice to be the world's economic and military superpower. But it's folly to forget how we got there: with the help of carefully crafted and nurtured alliances that allowed us to contain the Soviet Union, bleed the communists dry and triumph in the Cold War.

Those alliances are no less important in the age of terror. Recently, I got a chance to ask Tom Ridge, the homeland security chief, if our squabbling with nations such as Germany, France and Russia had cost us the cooperation, in the war on terror, of their police forces, spy agencies and bank inspectors.

Ridge paused, considered the question and said that, thankfully, the assistance that U.S. intelligence agencies are receiving from their counterparts overseas remains an invaluable, irreplaceable asset.

Terrorists kill for a reason: to disrupt the normal flow of commerce, to spread fear and instability, and, in al-Qaeda's case, to fight modernity by sowing division among the Western alliance and its Middle Eastern allies.

Nor is it an accident that Hussein's guerrillas have taken to targeting international organizations such as the United Nations and the Red Cross, and killing folks from those nations - Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Turkey - that are there to help us. The guerrillas' goal: to divide.

So why, just as Bush was preparing to phone foreign leaders to smooth the way for Baker's mission, did Defense Department officials decide it was time to reopen the wounds by announcing that only the United States and its coalition partners would be allowed to bid for the billions of dollars' worth of contracts to rebuild Iraq?

Loyalty is a valued quality in the Bush family, and the president loyally backed his defense team Thursday. "Friendly coalition folks risked their lives, and therefore the contracting is going to reflect that," he insisted. The White House said the contracts might yet be used as carrots for those who forgive Iraq's debt.

But the cause wasn't helped when, a few hours later, chagrined defense officials called reporters to the Pentagon to announce that a division of Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton Co., has been flagged for overbilling the U.S. government on some no-bid gasoline and supply contracts in Iraq. To the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

Aside from exacerbating the strains with our allies, the chain of events seemed sure to confirm the propaganda of bin Laden, Hussein and their loyalists: that the U.S. is in it only for the oil and money.

"It is hubris. We are trying to build international support for the reconstruction of Iraq ... yet we issue a memo saying most of the countries in the world need not apply," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from San Francisco. "I think the president should reverse that decision.

"Here is an opportunity for our country to reach out and involve others (and) bring our troops home safely and soon."

It sounds like a good deal to me: to throw some cellphone contracts and energy deals to the Canadians and Europeans in return for a few divisions of their troops, who would share the cost, in money and blood, being paid by our guys and gals in Iraq.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 12/17/03 07:21:31 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Political.

They're Bringing Out the "N" Word

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode XLVIII

That "N" word would be "Nixon", by the way.

Of all the blogs about Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode, this is my favorite so far. Here's an entry at The Left Right Christians.

What Is It About W?

I actually sat through the Bush press conference yesterday. The experience reminded me in some ways of that November night in 1972 when Richard Nixon's disfigured face appeared on the television to gloat about his trouncing of the honorable George McGovern.

Bush exhibited the same intense disdain for the press as he called reporters by their last names and facetiously accused David Gregory of "stealing" the White House silver. There was that same curious combination, exposed by tone of voice and body language, of a President who is both arrogant and insecure as he struggled twice to retrieve the word "commensurate" when his brain kept delivering "commiserate." When his mind failed him, he thought a weak bluff would suffice given the power bestowed upon him by his name, his office and augmented by the momentary boost provided by the capture of family enemy Saddam.

Yet Bush is anything but another Nixon. Nixon was shaped by the poverty of his family and his sheer physical unattractiveness so that he viewed the world, even when he became President, from the perspective of a fearful outsider. He believed that the power of his intellect and ruthless guile could compensate for his deficiencies and enable him to overcome the advantages wrought by wealth and beauty in American culture.

Bush represents all that Nixon struggled against. Where Nixon was always articulate when discussing even the most complex foreign or domestic issues, Bush ventures into uncharted territory when he dares to use words of more than two syllables. Where Nixon's every mistake threatened to cast him into outer darkness, Bush has failed over and over again in life only to be rescued by his powerful family and its friends. Where Nixon learned about the hardships of life in the pre-New Deal capitalist America, Bush has always enjoyed the advantages bestowed upon the born-rich.

Nixon's great nemesis was Jack Kennedy. Blinded by the bitterness born of his own outsider status, Nixon could only see JFK as the rich man's Harvard-educated son. He had no empathy for the disadvantages Kennedy overcame because he was an Irish Catholic.

George Bush suffers from no inherent disability with the likely exception of being significantly learning-disabled. He was born rich, white, Protestant and male. His family offered him the kind of cover that very few of us can even imagine, beginning with his legacy admission to Andover and Yale and continuing through his appointment as President ramrodded by James Baker and ratified by Bush 41's appointee, Clarence Thomas. Sadly, his obvious limitations have not produced any real compassion for others but only contempt for those more able than him whom he has now surpassed by means of family connections.

I had no use for Richard Nixon. His bitterness, ruthlessness and paranoia made him a terrible leader who helped put this country on a reverse course for more than a generation. I never thought I would see a worse President than Tricky Dick. My expectations have been exceeded -- negatively -- by George W. Bush. We are now led by a man whose cynicism and hubris combine to put at risk the future of the most powerful nation in history in a way that even Richard Nixon would never countenance.

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

A new twist on an old canard propagated by the immensely powerful Democratic Establishment: all Republican presidents are stupid, except for Richard Nixon; he was evil, so he didn't have to be portrayed as being stupid.

Bush is Beyond all That: unlike, say, Eisenhower who wasn't evil, and unlike Nixon who wasn't stupid, George W. Bush is both stupid and evil.

Priceless. :-)

And don't miss the comments: they're almost as precious as the blog entry.

(Thanks, Chris.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 12/17/03 07:11:01 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Political.

Vatican Cardinal Says Dentists Are Veterinarians

Or something like that.

Mind you, I blog this while never entirely trusting BBC, Reuters, or AP to faithfully report accurately what anybody (let alone a Catholic bishop) has said about anything.

Reuters reported yesterday on the strange sympathy of a Catholic bishop for one of most brutal, sadistic, murderous despots in the history of the world:

A top Vatican official said Tuesday he felt pity and compassion for Saddam Hussein and criticized the U.S. military for showing video footage of him being treated "like a cow."

Jan. 12, I'm going to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. Should I ask for verification of his D.V.M. degree?

Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Justice and Peace department and a former papal envoy to the United Nations, told a news conference it would be "illusory" to think the arrest of the former Iraqi president would heal all the damage caused by a war which the Holy See opposed.

"I felt pity to see this man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures," he said.

My God! O the humanity! We've seen pictures of the brutal, murderous despot getting an oral examination! Why O why didn't the horrible invaders spare us this torture?

The irony here is that Saddam is being treated this way because we respect his humanity. Which is incomparably more than his behavior ever was towards anybody else.

"Seeing him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him," he said in answer to questions about Saddam's arrest....

A bishop of the Catholic Church — alter Christus — has "compassion" for one of history's most monstrous destroyers of humanity. Why? Because he has repented? Because he has reformed his life? No: because he has been captured and examined by medical personnel.

Martino was one of the Vatican officials most strongly opposed to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Thanks, Reuters. That explains it. Martino has always had more compassion for Saddam Hussein than for the nation he tortured for decades.

"It's true that we should be happy that this (arrest) has come about because it is the watershed that was necessary... we hope that this will not have worse and other serious consequences," Martino said.

Every action, and every inaction, has consequences: that's the way of the universe. Sometimes, we can't know whether consequences will get better or get worse: that, too, is the way of the universe.

"But it is not the total solution to the problems of the Middle East," he said.

Who the &@*! suggested that it is?

Martino said the Vatican hoped the arrest of Saddam "can contribute to promoting peace and the democratization of Iraq."

He said that, after having firmly opposed any real action that could have actually brought Saddam to this situation.

He added: "But is seems to me to be illusory to hope that this will repair the dramas and the damage of the defeat for humanity that a war always brings about."

Really? Allow me to extend to you, on behalf of my country, our sincere apologies for our warfare of generations past by which so much damage and defeat for humanity was brought about by our victory over Hitler & the Nazis — and which helped towards the dramatic ouster of Mussolini & the Fascists. Please forgive us.

Seriously. I trust that Cardinal Martini thinks he is expressing Christian charity towards Saddam Hussein. Faugh! His misplaced sympathy is not Christian charity: it is insensibility so dense that it strikes me as almost inhuman. Maybe that's what comes of too much "note writing" and "long-range invective".

P.S. Don't miss Irish Elk.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 12/17/03 07:48:47 AM
Categorized as Religious.

Blog Stuff

Finally, Faithful Reader, you can search The Blog from the Core! Small search forms have been added to the right-hand column on the main page (one towards the top, one towards the bottom). The search is pretty basic right now, but quite useful. I'll eventually add more advanced features.

Also, the weekly, monthly, and category indexes have been tweaked to make them less ponderous: the entries are now grouped by day, including a link to the daily archive (in the weekly and monthly indexes).

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 12/17/03 06:34:29 AM
Categorized as Other.