I should know better than to think it could not get any worse when it comes to the Bush administration.The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.
While this has been in and out of the press for the past few months, Bush had been reported to have resisted Cheney's overtures. According to this article, that seems to have changed.
I recall the first time I read the Project for the New American Century, my blood ran cold. As time went on, I thought surely the American people would never let any of this happen. Sadly, I was wrong. I didn't count on Americans not knowing or caring about the direction their government intended to go in. Nor do I think I realised just how deeply entrenched it's author's and proponent's actually were in DC.
So here we are again, with Cheney running the show and Bush happily panting behind him. While I cannot fathom how they could pull off a military mission, I'm no longer naive enough to think it impossible.
One of the most ironic statements out of the White House:
The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years....
Hmmm, I wonder what changed 6 years ago? Unbelievable.
25 comments:
And Cindy Sheahan wants to impeach Bush - if that happened Cheney would be president. The woman certainly isn't thinking clearly.
They've got to get rid of Cheney no later than yesterday - this guy is frightening.
Agreed, anon @5:18.
Sheahan has decided to run now hasn't she? Against, Pelosi?
To be honest, I don't think she has the understanding or background to do it, but, if nothing else, you have to admire her conviction.
That said, I don't understand the process well enough in the US to know whether or not you could oust Cheney, or how, but I'd never impeach Bush with Cheney there.
Do you know how another veep would be named if that were to happen?
They need to Agnew Chaney first, then pick off the boob on some technicality - like unable to function in english. However, just as quickly as Chaney silenced Scooter and then gave him his 'get outta jail before you're in it' card, he's got probably Skull and Bones insurance policy to protect him.
The guy is seriously dangerous.
Rockfish, you lost me on the Skull and Bones...but I'm with you on the rest.
I'll have to read more on the Agnew angle though.
Scooter, hmfff!
"Hmmm, I wonder what changed 6 years ago?"
You're not suggesting a co-relation are you? ;)
can I spelt?
correlation
KNB i know this is out of subject but why is it on your blog i can't paste any links only half the link
shows i have to only type
it by hand is there a reason that you know thanks.
John
No I don't know John.
Have you tried making it an actual link by using the following code:
(Note, in place of the [ ]brackets I've used in the example, use < > these.)
[a href = " paste your link here"]type the word you want highlighted[/a]
Thanks knb i'll try it the next time thanks.
John
KNB try this :
read! i hope it works
i'm having problems
John
Sorry knb i forgot to mention that when you go to the link in search type
Taliban behead civilians
then click on the heading
see if it works thanks.
John
Actually, impeach both at the same time since they are both complicit in the same "high crimes and misdemeanors" that they can be impeached for. Incidentally, there is a very simple reason why Pelosi is not leading an impeachment charge; if she was it could be too easily cast as her trying to become the next President since she is the next in line after the VP according to the line of succession in the American system. I suspect she does want to impeach, but wants to be seen as dragged to it by public demand to neutralize the political spin that she and the Dems are doing this for partisan revenge over Clinton and are trying to sneak a Dem President in despite the GOP President having "won" in 2004. (I do not believe that GWB was ever honestly/legitimately/fairly elected in 2000 or 2004, their voting systems were clearly manipulated in Florida and Ohio respectively so as to rig the outcome from all I have seen contemporaneously and since regarding this matter)
I know what you mean about the PNAC agenda, I remember when I first read it back in 1998, it horrified me and when I saw who was being put into various key positions by Cheney once Bush took power in 2001 and compared it to the PNAC membership I knew it was only a matter of time. Indeed, it is one of the reasons I am not convinced there was not leading up to 9/11/01 a deliberate weakening of the American government guarding against terrorist attacks because they knew they needed a "Pearl Harbor" type event to truly enact their agenda. That despite all the overstressing of the American military, especially ground forces, that they still would attack Iran before leaving office is sadly no surprise, and if done will make the mess Iraq has left in its wake look like nothing by comparison. Of course these are the same folks that believe they are already in a generational level conflict of ideologies so why not stir up the pot to make sure that is what happens, eh? That way their supporters and friends in the energy and defence sectors can continue to make monety hand over fist. I realize how cynical that sounds, but if there is one thing the Bush/Cheney Presidency have taught me is that one can *NEVER* be too cynical where their thinking/actions/policies are concerned.
John, with respect, I have no intention of reading an article about beheading.
I'm well aware of who the Taliban are and how they enforce their power.
I've said it here many times, as have many other posters, no one is pro Taliban, no one wants them to run the country again.
Scotian, what you say about Pelosi of course makes sense.
Do you think there will be enough pressure? I somehow doubt it. In spite of everything we have seen in that country, I see no great uprising there, no real sense of outrage, from any quarter to be honest. Perhaps a political fatigue has set in, which is remarkable when you think of it.
People you have to understand that the u.s. is a very conservative country. The democratic party is like the conservative here in Canada. The GOP is much more to the right. They don't have the liberal party type,or the ndp type parties to tell you
the truth if you lived in the u.s. i don't know what party you would vote for because dems. or cons =)
John
knb:
I don't know, but given that recent poll that gives a plurality to impeach Bush (mid to high 40s in favour of, low 40s opposed) and 54% to impeach Cheney I think there is a lot more pressure out there than is being reflected in the so called liberal biased/controlled American MSM. I honestly do not know whether it will happen, but I do know that if it has not started seriously by the end of this year then it will not given 2008 is a Presidential election year. Personally I think it is absolutely necessary if America is to have any hope of restoring any moral credibility/authority within the next generation/couple of decades, because until and unless the clearly illegal acts of the Bush Administration are categorically rejected and condemned in such a public manner then no one is going to trust America on anything.
The damage is also important to illustrate within the American populace given what we already know about how Bushco perverted the American legal, judicial, and prosecutorial systems under control of the Executive branch. Indeed, from everything available this President has politicized more of the Executive branch than any predecessor, including (especially) branches that were traditionally left non-partisan like federal prosecutors. Impeachment is also important because the one kind of pardon the President cannot issue is in relation to anyone impeached according to their Constitution, and if no one is held accountable for the sins of this Administration prior to its conclusion in Jan 2009 then it is entirely possible, probable even that the illegal conversions of the tools of State into becoming tools of the GOP will essentially stay in place and what that will mean for the USA is nothing good. At least not the USA as defined by its Constitution and the wishes of its Founders, a free, open, and governed first by the rule of law implemented/applied equally to all without fear or favour. That America has been kidnapped and is in danger of being murdered without such exposure and correction.
I truly weep for that America which I once respected even when disagreeing with some of their decisions and choices. This America though is not a free democracy anymore but has instead slipped into an authoritarian mindset by those that believe in an all-powerful Presidency which can ignore the laws duly passed by the Legislative branch and even signed by the Executive branch/President and has staffed career civil service positions at top and mid-levels with those whose loyalties are first to the GOP and not to the Constitution.
Look at the testimony last week by Sara Taylor who thought she had taken an oath to the President and that her first loyalties therefore are to him, when the reality is that all officials from the President on down swear an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the USA and not a specific office/officeholder. That shows more than anything else just how dangerously far this Presidency has gone down this road, and with the active complicity of the GOP controlled Congress through its first six years has managed to do more usurpation of the powers assigned to the respective branches of government than any American President in history. He even managed to make Nixon look like an amateur/farce in this respect, which given that he was the former yardstick for such abuses is truly scary.
John, though I've travelled extensively in the US, I wouldn't live there for love nor money.
Indeed, our politics are not comparable.
I hope you are right about the pressure going unnoticed. Left wing media, ha! I wonder what Murdoch bought today, :).
It's difficult to think of a bigger failure than the media in the US.
I don't think the presidential candidates are being strong enough in their language either. Elizabeth Edwards has stood up to the plate, to say what is what, but I don't hear enough of that.
I wonder what kind of support a candidate would get if they suggested impeachment? Obviously, they couldn't have voted for the war and get away with it. Perhaps they could simply list, as you did, the list of what he has done to the country to raise the pressure. Get their audiences examining the evidence and coming up with the obvious solution.
Look at the testimony last week by Sara Taylor who thought she had taken an oath to the President and that her first loyalties therefore are to him,
That both floored and sickened me to be honest. Kim Jong-il, could not have done a better job of demanding loyalty.
It's as if they have forgotten who they are, you're right.
I, (yes me, bleeding heart), have difficulty weeping for the America I knew. I'm stunned by the denial of the populace. I know they've been fed the pap, but you have to open your mouth and take it in, and too many seem eager to subsist on that diet. It's sad to be sure, but where did all the thinkers go?
I know that KNB i'm just
saying if you were born there and living there i don't meen moving there.
John
KNB about left wing media
the u.s. it's like in my opion. I'll give you an example Stephen Harper is
right wing we all know this
but if he were in the u.s.
he would be considered left
wing there. Just look at there top radio talk shows they are all right wing talk shows.
John
Ahhh, you'd be wrong on that count John. Harper subscribes to the Bush ideology. Obviously, Canada is too liberal, (small l), for him to govern that way, especially in a minority government, but that is who he is and what I think many in Canada fail to understand.
Most Canadians think of him as PC...not even close.
When I say Bush ideology, I mean Cheney, etal. I mean what I spoke to in this post. I don't mean, "oh he's just following Bush". No. He is of that ilk.
You're entitled to your opinion, but if you like Harper, then you like Bush and all that he has done. Remember, had Harper been PM, instead of Chretien, we'd have been in Iraq for years now...for what? Ideology.
As for radio in Canada...all talk radio is right and they sound more like Limbaugh every day. Sad.
KNB:
I truly trace this to the removal of the fairness doctrine in the late 80s in the waning years of the Reagan Administration. Prior to that there was far more balance in the political discussions from the various sides in all media forums. When the fairness doctrine was removed it enabled those wealthy (and generally politically conservative) folks to greatly increase the dominance of one side's political messaging over the others. It also increasingly choked off the access for the others as well as providing more and more venue space for conservative voices, causing those voices that a few decades ago were seen as outside fringe (Terry Jeffreys of Human Events strikes me as one example) to become seemingly increasingly mainstream.
While I agree to a point with John regarding the generally more conservative nature of the American populace, what John fails to recognize is that inherently America was a very liberal country in design and the infrastructure as defined by the Constitution. What we have seen movement conservativism do by intent is attack the very foundations of the American society because they fundamentally disagree with the inherent liberalism within the Constitution. Take the nonsense about how America was founded as a "Christian nation". This despite not only the writings of the Founding Fathers to the contrary, but also one of the very first treaties America signed explicitly stated that America was founded on a basis of no official religion and that religion played no role whatsoever in the State and therefore there could be no basis for religious based conflict with other States thereby making them truly neutral in such circumstances. Yet how much is it truly believed by American movement conservatives that America is truly a Christian founded State and has moved away from it? As you know it is believed in about as much as is the myth about the liberal media by these folks. Notice how this deliberately undercuts a foundational basis of the American Constitution and the nation it outlines within it and turns it into instead being some sort of perversion of the "true Christian State America" by those "godless liberal lefty commies" which needs radical revision to be returned to the "true" vision of the Founding Fathers according to the "strict constructionalist" interpretation of the Constitution.
This would not have been possible if the fairness doctrine had not been eliminated. When they took that away from the public airways (which all the networks are which is why they are under FCC regulation and make up the majority of the news American TV news provides in terms of number of Americans far outstripping the cable nets) they made it far harder to refute such nonsense. Combine that with the megafunding of the conservative think tanks over the past 30+ years to provide the patina of intellectual credibility to such positions and to provide talking heads for the conservative dominated MSM (whatever conservatives want to believe this has been the state of affairs for a good ten years, especially where the Washington inside the beltway media are concerned) and is it any wonder that until the internet the Dems and the political left of America have been so marginalized in the public discourse despite being almost the same number of voters in all the elections?
As for John's attempt to make Harper appear lefty in terms of American politics, that might have been saleable if it were not for the fact Harper is of the Calgary School and it's heavy Straussian influence (which as you know Leo Strauss being the core political philosopher for true neoconservativism shows that Harper is clear comfortable with neoconservative principles including things like the noble lie and the notion only the elites in society are qualified to govern) and his clear history of aligning with GOP/movement conservative policies and positions/principles. The culture war policy speech and paper of 2003 as LOO/CA leader being a classic recent example of this along with his hard core belief that we had to invade Iraq with America to the point of taking out an apology ad on behalf of Canada in the Wall Street Journal in the same year shows Harper is a rarity in Canadian politics, a Conservative who would actually fit in the American GOP/conservative party based on his positions and foundation principles.
As for my weeping for the America that was, I look at it this way. America during the post WWII period until the last few years was the dominant super-power of the world (the USSR was in military terms but not neither economic nor social) and the uncontested one once the USSR collapsed. Despite the many mistakes and horrors they were directly responsible for in fighting the Cold War they still were a far more responsible dominant power than we have seen in history, especially when you consider that the power of America was something unrivaled in recorded history thanks to the technological revolution WWII triggered. In the same way I look at Bill Gates in Microsoft. Yes, he is a hard nosed player where competition is concerned, but for him it truly is living out the dreams of the techie and not for the sake of the power it provides. Which when you consider the dominance of Microsoft as the operating system of choice for the past couple of decades globally is a good thing. While having power so concentrated like this is dangerous inherently, at least in these two examples they were far less abused then they could have been and would have been if others had the same power/position going by human history.
As for where all the thinkers have gone, they were effectively silenced in the media and made ridicule of within that media in the redoubts like universities and academic journals. They are still there, although I suspect there has been some emigration outwards because of the way the conservative dominance has left them less and less reason to believe they are welcome members of the society. Still though it underscores why I say one can never take the attitude of "it can't happen here" when one considers how a democracy can become an authoritarian aggressive State. It happened to Germany in the 1930s, and it happened in front of us this decade with the GWB/GOP controlled American government. It is something I pray has not gone beyond the point of recovery, but I cannot say that I believe that to be the case unless there is a very extensive shining of light onto the underhanded and illegal actions of the current Administration and those of its GOP lackeys from Congress who instead of providing the required oversight and guarding of the co-equal power of the Congress handed it all over to the Executive to create a near absolute monarch. Just look at how he answers to no one in anything from his Iraq policy to the commutation of Scooter Libby.
If he is not impeached before he leaves office the next President and Congress assuming they are Dem controlled (the Senate needing 60 Dems to have de facto control given the rules of that Chamber, which is why the Dems have the technical majority but not the ability to actually control that body unlike the simple majority rules as in the House of Reps) need to have a truth and reconciliation process to return the structure of American government back into a loyal to the Constitution first basis instead of loyal to a given party/leader first as has clearly occurred under Bushco. I saw this coming a quarter century ago with the rise of movement conservativism and I was laughed at as being clearly insane, that no such thing could ever happen to America. I am really Really REALLY tired of being a Cassandra in every sense of the word and not just in terms of accuracy of prediction but also in terms of disbelief by those around me until it is too late and obvious to all.
It is why I take the movement conservative influence into our political dynamics as such a serious threat to the basic integrity of our way of life. We do not have anywhere near as decentralized a power structure in how we govern ourselves which makes a take-over that much easier than in the American system. Indeed a majority term or two could affect everything except the Supreme Court to nearly the same degree as we saw under Bushco in terms of reorientating the underlying loyalties of the bureaucracy to a party first basis instead of a to the nation first basis. All in the name of course of claiming to have to reverse "Liberal" governments having done this already despite the lack of hard evidence to show such a widespread problem as this. Gee, sound similar to the myth about the Christian nation of America in approach doesn’t it.
*sigh*
It happened to America, and we are influenced by them by proximity and disparity in our power positions. We cannot afford to ignore the very real dangers presented by the clear encroachment of American political extremism such as movement conservativism into one of our main political parties, the CPC (Reform/CA really, but since that wing is the dominant and these days nearly all of the CPC it amounts to the same thing). It happened there and it can happen here, especially if we refuse to recognize the risk. For all the progressive nature of this nation it has a fairly xenophobic/racist history and the undercurrents are still there to be exploited. Given we are a far less unified national identity nation than our American cousins and our federal structures also differ accordingly it takes far less extremism and polarization to have serious destabilizing effects in the nation thereby putting its integrity at risk. I would hate to have survived the last two Quebec referendums just to see Harper and company toss it all away.
One last thing, the Sara Taylor testimony. I was both shocked and not shocked to hear her say this at the time. I was not shocked because this is exactly what I expected was the case despite my hopes to the contrary, yet I was still shocked because despite my belief this was the case this made it clear beyond all doubt. If the senior members of the Administration do not understand their oaths are to the Constitution and not the President it shows a pervasive destruction of that principle within that Administration, and it is far from alone in terms of evidence of this pattern, it only provides the capstone because of its nature, same as the Libby commutation proved beyond all doubt the double standards of the law under Bushco for he and his people versus everyone else.
Sorry about the rambling nature of this comment, not that I expect you minded. I am just grateful that movement conservativism started collapsing in the USA right before Harper managed to get into Office with this weak minority. If he had gotten a majority I shudder to think of what we would be seeing. That at least weakens their ability to replicate their control in this country (which the American movement conservatives really hate because of our proud liberal history and culture that shows things like SSM and gay rights do not cause the end of days and/or good government/stability) and that of their tools like Harper. I still find it horrific that we are having a PM who clearly does not like Canada as it is nor most Canadians’ principles/beliefs.
Hi
KNB "As for radio in Canada...all talk radio is right and they sound more like Limbaugh every day. Sad."
That's my point radio stations and network they try to put shows that sell ( Ratings ) that is.
This only proves to me 2 things that our country is more to the right then you would like it to be not as much as the U.S. of course.
Reason because the left would not listen to these shows on a daily basis,because they would find it to upsetting to do so.
If radio stations and networks managers
saw that people would want to listen to shows
on the left they would put those shows on.
The top 2 shows here
in Montreal the english
Tommy Schnurmacher on cjad.com 800 a.m. on the radio dial i do listen to him and 95% of the people that call him agree with him. On the french it is Gilles Proulx on 985fm.ca that is 98.5 f.m. on the radio dial.
My second point is that the right is more
motivated politicaly.
John
As for John's attempt to make Harper appear lefty in terms of American politics, that might have been saleable if it were not for the fact Harper is of the Calgary School and it's heavy Straussian influence
Indeed, this seems to be a fact that most Harper admirers simply cannot acknowledge.
I am just grateful that movement conservativism started collapsing in the USA right before Harper managed to get into Office with this weak minority.
It could be collapsing a little faster for my taste, but your point is well taken.
Sorry about the rambling nature of this comment, not that I expect you minded.
Not at all. As always and insightful comment. Thx
This only proves to me 2 things that our country is more to the right then you would like it to be not as much as the U.S. of course.
It proves to me that the majority of radio media is owned by the right.
One third of the population support the right, 66% are left of that. The country is not conservative.
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