19 posts tagged “bush”
The expression of the following opinion might be as little welcomed by some as was a 1959 telecast of author Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg. The TV program’s dredging up of slightly-old Nazi war crimes was in Mann’s words “considered a breach of good manners in polite society in America.”
A feeling of responsibility goads me to unmannerly suggest that more recently some officials may have perpetrated the crime of torture in our name. In determination of the facts and to salve a communal conscience, we might conduct our own judgment in Washington D.C.
Desmond Tutu could be brought in to advise on the enactment of our version of South Africa’s Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act and establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear and record testimony from perpetrators, victims and witnesses of torture, and grant full amnesty to all that came forward and testified truthfully and completely. Fess up, indicate you’re sorry and you go free to live in peace and comfort. If you don’t, you stand trial and face the possibility of being locked away forever.
Short of this, maybe we could all just watch the old movie version of Judgment at Nuremberg. Mann’s film deals with the push-come-to-shove morality of people under threat---the possible sacrifice of principle over security that President Obama rejected in his inaugural address: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
In the forward to his movie script, Mann discloses that by the late 1950s and star of his witting of Judgment at Nuremberg, “it was considered a breach of good manners in polite society in America as well as in most quarters in Europe to bring up the subject of German guilt or the victims of the Third Reich . . . .”
This sentiment developed into threats, cajolery and intrigue intended to prevent the 1959 airing of a television version of Judgment at Nuremberg. Tension in Germany between Soviet and allied forces over control of Berlin was stirring cold-war fears, but thanks more to momentum than to courage, Mann’s TV episode was broadcast.
A trailer to the 1959 TV drama and 1961 film version informed viewers: “On 14 July 1949, judgment was rendered in the last of the second Nuremberg trials. Of the ninety-nine sentenced to prison terms, not one is till serving his sentence.” This trailer had been scripted within the decade following the last trials in which life imprisonments had been decreed for some of the ninety-nine.
The telecast of Judgment at Nuremberg stirred an unprecedented public response. Most vividly remember by Mann was a letter from a veteran of World War II and Korean. It simply asked, “You mean to tell me those men you wrote about are walking around free? What’s the matter with us? What’s happening to us?”
Film director Stanley Kramer had also seen the TV drama, wondered what was happening to us, and contact Mann with an offer to register this concern in a movie on the judgment to be made at Nuremberg and all of Germany, America, and elsewhere. Mann agreed and was pleased to find out that the great film actor, Spencer Tracy, wanted to play Judge Dan Haywood.
It would be nice to say, and the rest is history, but it is not---to which Dick Cheney clearly testifies in a CNN interview:
http://www.truveo.com/Dick-Cheney-on-WaterBoarding-Torture-with-Wolf/id/3161118071
If Cheney had said this from the prisoner’s dock at the first trial at Nuremberg trial, in which Nazi second in command Herman Goering was sentenced to death, they would have hanged Cheney.
A sow’s ear is not going to be made into a silk purse and a tragically mistaken war in Iraq is not going to be fashioned into any kind of victory worth winning. It was a blunder to go into Iraq and it is more of one to stay there.
We need to turn the mess created by George W. Bush and his administration over to the people that live in that part of the world. We have created enough enemies in the area and staying there only creates more.
The contention that our leaving Iraq would cause it to become a haven for terrorists disregards the fact that it is a haven because we are there. Also, if in our absence groups like al-Qaeda were more likely to establish a safe haven, then they already have them in those nations in the area in which we do not have a military presence.
The overwhelming majority of people of nations in the Middle East have no more of a desire to be taken over by terrorists than do an overwhelming majority of people in our country. Our continued occupation of Iraq promotes a grave threat to our nation and the longer we stay there the closer we inch toward antagonizing and radicalizing some unknowns that are going to light the final fuse that will bring massive destruction and chaos into our own land.
Fight them there or fight them here? George W. Bush has repeatedly justified his mistaken venture into Iraq by saying, THERE. Thus he proclaims to nightly-news watchers throughout the world that he is going to use Iraq as a killing field. In this shooting gallery of his choice, Bush enrages people and makes of them enemies that are not fond of losing via collateral damage their loved ones, their homes, their neighbors, their cities, and their lives.
If we cannot work with the nations within the Middle East and the world in establishing and maintaining a stable situation for citizens in those lands, then our faith in common man has been misguide and it is but a fortuitous quirk that this Great Experiment of ours has blundered along for this extended period of time.
To continue to “GO IT ALONE,” is to continue down the dead-ended path to our own destruction, and Pogo will be proven to have been right, “We have met he enemy and he is us.”
A good deal of “scam science” comes out the propaganda mills in Washington and Washington that Karl Rove used to give us George W. Bush—these operations are rather ridiculously called “think tanks.”
These are “rent-a-mouthpiece” operations that make their members big bucks by telling the general public anything that will serve the religious, corporate and political interests of those that buy them. Thinks-tanks such as the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Discovery Institute will be happy find that privatization of Social Security is a wonderful idea, global warming is a scam, efforts to save the Florida Everglades are unnecessary, invading Iraq was a great idea, and Creationism-Intelligent Design only took God six days to do.
You too can start your own tax-exempt Think Tank. Just put some pages out of the web that attack something that is rational, include one or two nice pictures, list a bunch of folks as experts (either living or dead), and include an easy way for people to send you money—they call it getting involved.
If your think-tank cause is not supported by scientific research, just say that it is. If experts in the field have come to censuses about something that you do not like, just say that they have not.
And be sure to make it look like you are not someone out on a broken limb that is sawing it off—insist that there is a groundswell of opinion that is with you. This astorturfing should be supported by expert opinion from someone in or Forest Lawn Cemetery (oops, that cemetery is too close to Hollywood—list another one).
Remember, you are not trying to convince real thinking people that you know what you are talking about; you are just trying to get some fellow culturopaths to go along with you and send money or at least repeat your shtick.
“Appease” is used as a pejorative term of weakness by those that advocates violence or the threat of its use in the solution of various kinds of disagreements--particularly those that involve conflicting interest between people of different nations.
The propagandists that use this term would like to claim that the world’s troubles with Adolph Hitler were in large part due to Neville Chamberlain traveling to in Munich1938 and entering into the Munich Agreement.
Well before September 1938, Hitler had completely consolidated his dictatorial control over Germany, and had ridden into Austria and taken over as a returning and liberating hero.
The rise of Hitler is not a lesson in appeasement, but one of slipping into being a nation of men and not law.
By using fear and the threat of foreign devils (axis of evil and WMDs comes to mind), a continuous barrage of propaganda, intimidation of the press, and with the support of a small but willing pack of sycophantic followers and opportunists, Hitler subverted the existing rule of law and crushed any opposition by claiming that those that questioned were unpatriotic, not good Germans, traitors or foolish appeasers—extraordinary means were needed in extraordinary times (and what’s the matter with a little water boarding?).
How did this happen? In part, as Edmund Burke suggested, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”
But the forces that the good people of Germany faced were subtle and more sinister than they could ever imagine. The subversion of freedom was also so gradual that they never recognized a point of no return; by then anyone that did not go along was as much of an enemy as were the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners, and other evil doers.
After Hitler’s Germany came to an end, a majority of Germans could legitimately claim that they never really had seen it coming until it was too late and then there was nothing they could do. Too late, those that tried were the silent dead or missing.
As Justice William O.Douglas poetically cautioned, “As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
And what about the small number of Germans that were loyal to Hitler to the end and those that to this day would beyond all reason defend Hitler and trumpet his cause again? They identify with their Man of Steel—the warp and weave of his nature is that of their own and no one can readily think of themselves as being rotten to the core.
Another Bush and Cheney abuse of power and the public trust.
Though rough and tumble, American politics has served to broaden the reach of liberty. However George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign brought to life a freedom-killing variety that incubated in the White House and pathologically spread to extremist on the political and religious right.
It has grown into a mental malady that might be termed “culturopathy,” and though Sidney Blumenthal has not used this term, he well describes this strange affliction in his book “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.” Blumenthal quotes a “New York Times Magazine” piece in which Ron Suskind recounts a senior White House aide’s explanation of “faith-based” politics:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
In the culturopath’s empire, the words they utter can constitute a “truer” form of reality than anything revealed by the cause-and-effect perspective of Western Civilization. What has traditionally been consider a rational, plugged-in consideration of existence, life and all else that humans can become aware of, the culturopath can view as immaterial.
Decider in Chief Bush—the Typhoid Mary of culturopathy—can bring some new condition into existence by doing no more than just saying that it is so. If that proclaimed is not readily apparent and becomes broadly doubted—like democracy or progress in —he disregards his previous claim (mission accomplished) and just repeats it anew in different words.
If some highly systematized mode of discovery, like science, presents an unacceptably “inconvenient truth,” the culturopath discredits it by proclaiming an opposing “inconvenient truth” that pooh-poohs the first one—after all, one opinion is as good as another, and nothing truer than what the culturopath says is so.
Culturopaths exhibit a wanna-be deference to people of unearned wealth and power, an acceptance of comrades of like mind, and a tolerance for some who are subserviently dependent. Beyond this, they have a limited capacity for empathy, but are willing to establish for everyone what is good and morally permissible.
In defense of their grasp of “family values,” they willing devalue differing people, places and things with a barrage of innuendo and name-calling that paints others as un-American, un-Christian, unfit, unacceptable, or at least disappointing. Thus they loose a constant harangue against liberals, public education, undocumented workers, Muslims, a woman’s freedom of choice, atheists, homosexuals, global warming, teachers, taxes, French fries, the separation of church and state, welfare, activist judges, labor unions, evolution, Hollywood, universal health care, the UN, Social Security, Halloween, pacifists, the free press, stem cell research, and anything else that reflects some order that is not of their own god’s making—only they have been blessed with an ability to know what that is.
In the culturopathic thinking of the radical right, politics is just another form of war and they take no prisoners and will not hesitate to destroy anyone or anything that gets in their way.
By Sam Osborne
Why didn’t the folks responsible for providing for the medical needs of our wounded service men and women tell the White House that things were not going well? Because Bush does not want bad news; he does not know how to get anything done and does not want anyone letting the public know there are problems. Everything is absolutely perfect on the Deciders watch and it is always some else’s fault anyway.
A whole bunch of people have learned the hard way that no news is good news. Those that have opened their mouths anyway have been trashed for their candor—smeared have been Paul O’Neill, Richard Clark, General Anthony Zinni, Michael Brown, Hans Blix, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Joseph Wilson, Colin Powell, and French fries to name but a few.
Like at Abu Ghraib, the usual suspects have been rounded up—anyone distant from the White House—and offered as sacrificial lambs of blame for not telling Bush what he did not want to hear. After all, he’s the Decider and not the Listener.
Hey, we got trouble with a capital 'B' and that rhymes with 'P' and that stands for 'propaganda.' So businesses as usual: hear no evil, see no evil, do no good.
God bless this brave man and his family--his is the face of war--we owe him so much.
Bush’s end game for Iraq is as irrational as the lunacy in Vietnam where a village had to be destroyed to save it. Bush will have his “surge” and thus have more killing and dying to prevent more killing and dying. At least until he can declare “mission accomplished,” blame the Iraqis, and hand the lingering mess over to the next administration.
When destruction is salvation, there is little rational need to bother differentiating between failure and success. But the game played by the self-righteous right is to place the blame for their failures onto unworthy others. This is well reflected by one of Bush’s sideline cheerleaders in the words that compared the necessity of prevailing in Iraq to the outcome of the conflict in Vietnam
“Had we never gotten in, and the same sort of thing happened in the end, it would have been all Southeast Asia's problem. However, once we committed ourselves, we had a duty to ourselves and to them to conclude it successfully.”
For those that would rather revise than learn from history, it is apparently never too early to set about its rewriting. Right-wing hawks are already explaining away the error of making war in Iraq—as has been done with the one in Vietnam. Their revised version of the Iraqi quagmire shifts responsibility away from George W. Bush and his Republican enablers and onto those that understand the folly of it all. How so?
These right-wing ideologues are determined practitioners of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda technique of telling a lie over and over until it becomes an unchallenged version of history. Their portrayal of the Vietnam War as a cut-and-run disgrace is a good example. The revisionist’s telling and retelling starts with dissembling the reason for our entry in and withdrawal from Vietnam, and begs the question as to the lesson to be learned.
The confabulators insist that our exit from the Vietnam War was an avoidable defeat that damaged our nation’s long-term vital interests. They blame the loss on those that saw the war from its start to have been an unnecessary, life wasting, resource squandering, and reputation damaging blunder made worse by continued bullheadedness. Perchance it sounds familiar?
Though reason would suggest that victory or defeat in any war should be measured in terms of why it is launched, those that have revised the history of the Vietnam War avoid mentioning its purpose. Our entry into Vietnam was supposed to block the advance of communism as foretold by the Domino Theory. What is the latest explanation as to why President Bush took us into a preemptive war in Iraq?
The Domino Theory , that led us into Vietnam, contended that if a former Southeast Asian imperial possession were to become communist there would be a step-by-step advance of this doctrine across the South Pacific right to the shores of God only knew where. So when the French had their disaster at Dien Bien Phu and pulled out of Vietnam we went in to stop the dominoes from falling.
In portraying defeat as being at the heart of the Vietnam debacle, revisionists disregard the real and historic fact that we left and the dominoes never fell, an indication that we need not have gone into Vietnam in the first place. Thus, the mistake was not in getting out, but in ever getting in. Might we now be staying in Iraq to avoid getting out?
Just recently President Bush made a diplomatic invasion into Southeast Asia and says that while he and the First Lady were on a sightseeing ride through Hanoi, “Laura and I were talking about how amazing it is that we’re here in Vietnam.”
Even more amazing is the now-versus-then observation that Bush offered on this same historic visit to Vietnam: “the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately and it is hard work in Iraq.”
Hum, if “they” includes him and us, what should be made of someone’s willingness to launching a preemptive war that is taking longer and proving harder to stop than to start, and was to do one thing but now is to do another? And would the lesson from history suggest that it is better to end it sooner than later and maybe in the same way that Nixon did with the one in Vietnam?
In practical terms, Nixon declared victory and brought the brave troops home—neither seen as a hasty decision nor heard from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Following his 1969 election, President Nixon announced his Vietnamization program. It was to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese and start withdrawing American forces. By the early 1970s the troops were coming home at a rate of over 12,000 a month.
By early January of 1973, Nixon suspended American offensive action in North Vietnam and by the end of the month the Paris Peace Accords were signed by the governments of North Vietnam, South Veitnam, and the US. Nixon contended that our military purpose had been achieved.
Bush’s last ditch effort in Iraq looks like a mirrored image of the Vietnam misadventure: Iraqization with a surge in place of a withdrawal. Maybe it only looks confusing if one is on the outside trying to peer into this new looking-glass war. But rest assured that the Decider is getting well-targeted advice from the Mad Hatter, when he is not down in Texas hunting his friends.
But riddle the rest of us this Mad Hatter, if the dominoes that did not fall in Southeast Asia were to likewise not fall in the Middle East, will you and history’s revisionist make any noise about it?
The Iranians (Persians) are a remarkable people that acquired a democratic government in the early 1950s with the election of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Its significance was marked by Mossadegh being named Time Magazine's 1951 Man of the Year.
Mossadegh was passionately opposed to the colonial domination of his people by foreign oil interest and thus nationalized the Iranian oil industry that was being exploited by British and American business interests.
This did not set well with those that had been profiting at the expense of the Iranian people, so in 1953 British interests maneuvered the CIA into engineering the overthrow of Mossadegh. The operation of the Iranian oil industry passed into the hands of a Western oil consortium, and Shah Mohammad Reza stayed on the throne and acquired dictatorial control over internal affairs.
Up until the revolution of 1979, Iran remained in attune to the outside geopolitical interests of the West, and the Shah stayed in power by means of a brutal secret police, the SAVAK. It operated secret dungeons, tortured the uncooperative, assassinated challengers, and kept oil-friends abroad comfortable.
Hey, if you want to make a buck, you got to keep the oil flowing. Just ask Cheney’s old company about that. You know, Halliburton, the Texas based company that got all of those no-bid military contracts for the war in Iran.
The Halliburton theme song must be “Don’t fence me in.” At least they seem to know how to play on both sides of the fence. Though the US has sanctions against Iran, as of 2003 Halliburton was still doing oil-related business with Iran. I don’t think that the oil is for French fries, do you?
