W.F. Buckley, father of modern conservatism: "The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue."

"There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma"
- W.F. Buckley, National Review - 4/28/07

George W. Bush - the candidate that conservative Republicans worked so hard to elect twice to the presidency has proven to be the biggest political disaster for the GOP since Nixon. His incompetence, abuse of power, and culture of corruption has turned all but the most hard-core denialist wingnuts to loathing of the present political situation.

It's not like we didn't see it coming.

The realist and intellectual conservative, William F. Buckley 'called it.' In his 2/06 editorial in the National Review, he wrote "It Didn't Work," where he boldly stated:

"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. . .different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat. "

It seems there are two choices here for Republicans. If they want to salvage any shred of credibility for their party, they must not only turn away from Bush administration policies, they must endeavor to acknowledge the misdeeds and hold President Bush and members of his administration accountable. Probably an unrealistic expectation for most conservatives. But, the other choice is to go down with the ship, further dragging the GOP down.

W.F. Buckley so aptly points out this dilemma, in his 4/28/07 National Review editorial, "The Waning of the GOP":

"How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can’t see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? ... The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. ...There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma. "

In job approval, Dubya's been polling between 28 and 37% this year, but approval of his Iraq policy is just 24% in the latest poll. In his isolation, following the example of Nixon, Bush has reportedly adopted a 'bunker mentality.'

Bush ignored CIA warnings of potential Iraq quagmire. Generals say change course, Bush refuses. Pre-war lies substantiated by Tenet, Durbin.

"His strategy is failing and cannot be rescued."
- Ret. General William E. Odom, U.S. Army, former Director of the National Intelligence Agency, 4/28

In a radio address on Saturday, General Odom pointed out the grim reality:

"The war could never have served American interests. But it has served Iran's interest by revenging Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran in the 1980s and enhancing Iran's influence within Iraq. It has also served al Qaeda's interests, providing a much better training ground than did Afghanistan, allowing it to build its ranks far above the levels and competence that otherwise would have been possible. We cannot 'win' a war that serves our enemies interests and not our own. Thus continuing to pursue the illusion of victory in Iraq makes no sense. We can now see that it never did."

Read the entire statement, it bears a very strong recommendation to the President.

This all could've been prevented if Bush had listened to his own government warnings. Like the warnings of 9/11 that Bush ignored, George Tenet has revealed:

The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the U.S. could face in Iraq: "anarchy and the territorial breakup". . . "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States". . . "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states" . . . "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance."

CIA analysts wrote these warnings at the start of August 2002 and inserted them into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush's national security team at Camp David. Tenet also elaborates on the pre 9/11 warnings that were ignored by Rice and the Bush administration.

Secretary of State Condi Rice lied to the American people Sunday morning (4/29) when she said on CNN:

"We all thought — including U.N. inspectors — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. "

Senator Dick Durbin, who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the lead up to the war confirmed what George Tenet said and what the Downing Street Memos have shown:
Bush shrugged off any and all debate and evidence that was counter to his war justifications and invasion plans. Bush/Cheney misled the American people. Durbin and the rest of the committee members knew it, but were sworn to secrecy.

"The Intelligence Committee was meeting on a daily basis ... and the information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it! Members of this administration were in active heated debate whether aluminum tubes really meant that the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons, some within the administration saying 'of course not' ... at the same time members of the administration were telling the American people to be fearful of mushroom clouds." - Sen. Dick Durbin [D - IL] 4/27

"worst-case scenarios are the most likely thing to happen."
Washington Post:

As fighting in Iraq enters its fifth year, an increasing number of experts in foreign policy and national strategy are arguing that the biggest difference may be that the Iraq war will inflict greater damage to U.S. interests than Vietnam did.

And it continues to go very badly. I wish it weren't so.

Selling Bush's lies to the American people

How did it happen?

Bill Moyers tell us how. Watch the video.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

(Not surprising, Fox News has unleased a series of lies trying to discredit Moyers).
The aftermath of 9/11 created an environment of extreme patriotism and submission to the Bush administration's Iraq war plan. Skepticism was a rarity among journalists inside the Beltway. While almost all the claims would eventually prove to be false, the drumbeat of misinformation about WMDs went virtually unchallenged by the media - a perfect storm of media compliance with government propaganda. Since then, the Bush administration has attempted to cover up pre war intelligence reports.

In his book "At the Center of the Storm," to be released Monday, former CIA director George Tenet said the administration of President George W. Bush never undertook a "serious discussion" about the option of containing Iraq without resorting to an attack. He states:

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."
- G. Tenet

Watch Tenet's interview: 60 Minutes on CBS - this Sunday, April 29

Tenet lashes out against the Bush administration in an interview, accusing it of distorting his pre-Iraq War claim that the existence of weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk." Tenet called the administration's distortion "disingenuous and dishonorable."

Tenet was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush. His pre 9/11 warnings to the Bush administration about a pending al Qaeda attack on the US went unheeded. Tenet has been invited to testify before the the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform on May 10.

Now, the media gets it right:

Now that we know Bush was warned repeated and explicitly about an impending al Qaeda attack in the months prior to 9/11 . . .

Only in this America of the early 21st Century could it be true, that the man who was president during the worst attack on our nation, and the man who was the mayor of the city in which that attack principally unfolded, would not only be absolved of any and all blame for the unreadiness of their own governments, but, more over, would thereafter be branded heroes of those attacks.

-MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, 4/25/07

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A new NBC News/"Wall Street Journal" poll shows only 22 percent of Americans think the country is going in the right direction. Sixty-six percent say we're not. And the overriding issue in those poll numbers it the war in Iraq.

Isolated and almost alone in his determination to continue the insanity that is the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush clings to a 4-year-old failed policy that has cost this country its reputation, more than 3,000 of its finest young people and a half a trillion dollars of your tax money. Thousands of our soldiers have been crippled for life.

And, of course, finally, it's not working -- not on any level. There is no effective Iraqi government. There's no democracy. There's no political solution. Nothing. Just bloody day after bloody week after bloody month of violence, death, destruction.
-Jack Cafferty, CNN 4/25/07

Bush's Approval rating: 28%
lowest of his presidency in the Harris/WSJ Poll

Lies, corruption and investigations - your update on our failed Republican leadership

Just another day . . . trying to hold corrupt and lying Republicans accountable

* According to Congressional testimony, military and Bush administration officials lied about the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman and the capture of former Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract attention from setbacks in Iraq and the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

• * Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced Articles of Impeachment against VP Dick Cheney in Congress yesterday.



• Cheney continues to lie ... as usual.

• The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) has launched a broad investigation into Karl Rove and three brewing Bush Administration scandals: the firing of U.S. attorneys, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities. It has been suggested the investigation itself could be a Bush administration coverup since OSC head Scott Bloch, a Bush appointee, has been marred with scandal himself. The Washington Post reported Bloch is being investigated for alleged intimidation of career appointees, refusal to enforce a discrimination ban within his office, and accused of political bias.

• The Senate may soon give Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a vote of no confidence
  


• Corrupt Republican congressman Rick Renzi's (R-AZ) business was raided by the FBI and in a statement yesterday said that he’ll be resigning all his committee assignments. Renzi already resigned from his seat on the sensitive House Intelligence Committee last week.


• Less than a week after his home was searched by the FBI in connection with the Abramoff investigation, Republican congressman. John T. Doolittle (R-CA), has stepped down from the Appropriations Committee.


• A Republican Congressman sent out an "action alert" claiming that they've gotten word that Waxman will issue a subpoena to Secretary of State Rice this morning


• Mark Zachares, a former congressional aide to Republican congressman Don Young, [R-Alaska] pleaded guilty Tuesday to accepting tens of thousands of dollars in gifts from lobbyist Jack Abramoff in an influence-peddling scandal. He is 11th Republican to be convicted in the Abramoff Justice Department probe.


• An agency that oversees the World Bank is asking for the resignation of the bank's president, former deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

The Bush initiated Iraq quagmire worsens –

• This month marked the first time that the U.S. military suffered five straight months of 80 or more fatalities. The last 8 months have been the worst since the war began.
• The deadliest single attack since the war began occurred this month, a suicide truck bombing in Tal Afar that killed 152 people
• The deadliest attack yet inside the Green Zone also occurred this month, a suicide bombing in the Iraqi Parliament
• The Iraq government is in disarray - al-Maliki lacks the support in parliament to push through laws.
• The Air Force's top general expressed frustration on Tuesday with the reassignment of troops under his command to ground jobs for which they were not trained to make up for shortages in the US military.
  
• Bush advisor and architect of the Iraq escalation Frederick Kagan, lies and says things are going well in Iraq: "there is reason for wary optimism. … we seem to be turning a corner." April has been the worst month for US fatalities this year and the worst for UK soldiers in 4 years.

A Republican Senator talks to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius anonymously:

“This is the most incompetent White House I’ve seen since I came to Washington,” said one GOP senator. “The White House legislative liaison team is incompetent, pitiful, embarrassing. My colleagues can’t even tell you who the White House Senate liaison is. There is rank incompetence throughout the government. It’s the weakest Cabinet I’ve seen.”

...And remember, this is a Republican talking.

We mourn the 32 killed at VA Tech, but has anyone noticed the 250+ killed in Iraq the past 2 days?

Lest we forget the mess our President has gotten us into

A horrific series of blasts today in Baghdad has killed at least 170 people. Yesterday 85 people were killed or found dead across Iraq and our soldiers continue to die at the highest rate per day since the war began. Considering these numbers, what happened at VA Tech would be a daily occurrence in Iraq. Do we care? Iraqis are people too. Speaking of professors, 232 university professors were killed and 56 were reported missing in Iraq, while more than 3,000 others had left the country after the 2003 invasion. Speaking of Universities... in January, Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University suffered a double suicide bombing that killed at least 70 people, including students, faculty, and staff. A month later, another suicide bomber struck at Mustansiriya, killing 40.

As we mourn Va Tech, we should also remember the Iraq quagmire that Bush initiated where every day people are massacred. Over the past six months, American troops have died in Iraq at the highest rate since the war began - about 4 every day.

Bush's 'Surge' is not working -

From Thinkprogress: Center for American Progress senior fellow and former Reagan Pentagon official Lawrence Korb recently returned from a 10-day visit to Baghdad to “assist the government of Iraq’s efforts to strengthen public administration in its civilian ministries” and uncovered results that only affirm that “the surge is not working."

Korb noted that U.S. defense contractors, who have benefited heavily from the Iraq war, were curiously restrained in talking about the situation on the ground on the record. Major defense contractors, including those from Blackwater and Halliburton, were mum about the troop escalation only until Korb emphasized that he was not affiliated with the media:

"The long wait did allow me to speak to some of the contractors about the situation on the ground. When I assured them I was not a member of the press, they were unanimous that the surge was not working."

Cheney -"We will be welcomed as liberators" ... al-Sadr calls for attacks on U.S. troops

The renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr urged Iraqi forces to stop cooperating with the United States and told his guerrilla fighters to concentrate their attacks on American troops rather than Iraqis, according to a statement issued Sunday.

In the first 8 days of April, 34 US and UK troops have been killed in Iraq. That's 4.25 per day, the highest coalition death rate in more than 2 years.

Now that we learn that our troops in Iraq are not protecting America, and that our presence there is breaking the US military, some people still have this illusion that supporting the president means supporting the troops.... WTF! Our leaders keep lying. How can anyone still believe them? Things are just rosy in Iraq today.

After all... The Rev. Jerry Falwell and many evangelical christians totally support this war that is killing innocent Iraqi citizens and children. Falwell called it a "just war" ... telling us that the Prince of Peace is "Pro-War." How much more perverted can the religious right get?

Thanks for supporting our troops, and Happy Easter Dick and GW.

UPDATE: Welcomed as liberators? Thousands of anti-U.S. protesters marched in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

The funny papers - supporting the troops and national intelligence?

click to enlarge -
Bush supports the troops

Our National Intelligence:

The Tortured Truth

Military & terrorism experts say Bush exaggerates Iraq threat - Iraq terrorists pose little or no threat to US ... meanwhile, Cheney keeps lying too

How many times have we heard this line of bullshit? "Gotta fight 'em over there, so we don't have to fight 'em over here" - Bush's chief justification for creating a quagmire in Iraq, playing upon the fears of Americans. We heard it again just last week:

"If we were to leave before the job is done, the enemy would follow us here.”
-GW Bush, 4/4/07

Any thinking person understands that the war in Iraq is Sunni against Shia, and the ragtag bomb makers in Iraq are not a threat to us in the US. Even with Bush supplying terrorists the red carpet to enter the US from our southern border, we have yet to see a single IED or suicide bomber. If they were as hell-bent on "fighting us over here", surely they would have by now. But what do the experts say?

"The president is using a primitive, inarticulate argument that leaves him open to criticism and caricature, it’s a poor choice of words that doesn’t convey the essence of the problem.”
-James Jay Carafano, Homeland Security & Counterterrorism Expert -
Heritage Foundation, Conservative Policy Organization.

"The war in Iraq isn't preventing terrorist attacks on America, if anything, that - along with the way we've been treating terrorist suspects - may be inspiring more Muslims to think of us as the enemy."
- U.S. intelligence official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity

“There are very few foreign fighters who are going to be leaving the area because they don’t have the skills or languages that would give them access to the United States”
- Daniel Benjamin, National Security Council’s director for transnational threats

According to the Defense Intelligence Agency and a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Attacks by terrorist groups account for only a fraction of insurgent violence.” In essence, Bush is wasting and weakening our military in an Iraq civil war instead of defending the US.

Cheney Continues to Lie

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney continues to lie about the pre-war connection of Saddam and al Qaeda despite a Pentagon report released this week that says Cheney's dead wrong.

And you have wingnuts out there who continue to insist that Bush and Cheney have never told a lie. Sheeesh! They bear out the old Nazi propaganda philosophy:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

Iraq 'surge' Commander Gen. Petraeus: "No military solution..." Iran begins to take political control of Iraq

The Iraq Study Group said it, John Kerry said it, Chuck Hagel said it, John Murtha said it .... now the leader of the "new Iraq surge strategy", General Petraeus has said it, "There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq." Yet our leaders continue to send our young people to die.

In the madness of King George and his neocons worshippers, the main goal is to save face for a failed plan. So they desperately throw American lives and money at the problem instead of doing what Gen. Petraeus and every thinking person has stated from the beginning, pushing a political solution with Iraqis and countries in the region. But, in the words of cowboy diplomats, 'ya can't negotiate wid dem terrists'.

Iran understands this and now they are quietly taking control of Iraq through political means.

The Bush failure in Iraq is multifaceted. This is the price we pay for cowboy diplomacy. More than 3 US soldiers have been dying everyday, 24 killed the first week of March.

Sending Little Girls to Die

In this photo we see Cpl. Jennifer Parcell, a pretty and petite 20 year old from Bel Air, Maryland. Gosh, she looks so young - she could be 14. She was killed in Iraq by a bomber on February 7.



Does it bother you that our leaders who refused to serve in combat are sending little girls to fight and die in Iraq without proper equipment, support and a plan?

It bothers me, a lot.

Hundreds of TONS of cash - down the toilet

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did." - Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

In case you missed it... on Thursday, White House spokesman Tony Snow was asked, what went wrong in Iraq? His response: "I'm not sure anything went wrong." (Hmmm... reminds me of this book).

Imagine if you will, so much cash that it required forklifts to lift the giant pallets of bills weighing hundreds of tons onto military transport planes. These shipments, the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, were sent into Iraq with no system to account for it. About a third of the reconstruction budget for 2003 is unaccounted for: $12 billion, (... and that's just '03). The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State Department officials condoned & allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses, payments for shoddy work & work never done. More than one in six dollars charged by U.S. contractors were questionable or unsupported. So what did we get for our $ ?

An example, the $75 million Baghdad Police Academy was so poorly built that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks.

"This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure, the Baghdad police academy is a disaster."

-Stuart W. Bowen Jr., inspector general for Iraq reconstruction

Imagine the benefits to America that could have come from the half-trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war (...with no end in sight) !! For example: John Kerry's plan to provide American children with health insurance for a decade costs about half of what America has spent in Iraq... so far. 1 in 3 American kids go without health insurance and we are sending pallets of cash to Iraq with no way to account for it? Meanwhile, no-bid war contractors like GW Bush's Uncle Bucky are profiteering $millions from the Iraq war.

But... Tony Snow says he's not sure anything went wrong in Iraq.
Nice!